The Echo Read Online Free Page B

at some festival or other. I am the product of my mother’s loose virtues, and I am a scientist.
    The names were competition for us, as she didn’t change my brother’s name to something more impressive; so he had to prove himself. He was older, wiser, in theory, and he shrugged it off in what he said and how he acted. Not underneath. Underneath, as we raced each other through school – excelling in the logical subjects, with proper results reliant on knowledge and skill and being able to use your brain, and thus attain results that could be gauged, pitted against each other – then university, and doctorates, neck and neck the whole time, I was still the
mirakel
. I would still be there second but more perfect, and his face bore that scar the whole time. Not a scar, no, that’s unfair: in my darkest moments, as we fought, that’s what I would call it. It’s a mark. It singles him out. It allows people to tell us apart, as otherwise we would be identical, monozygotic. We are in our forties now, and tired. Both of us are tired. And this trip, this excursion, it’s our dream. When we stopped fighting, we joined forces. When we stop competing, we’re unstoppable.
    I’m the second to arrive at the gateway to the
Lära
. It was in our contract that we could name the ship, that Tomas and I would be able to choose what we would call it by ourselves. Her name is a word that means a theory, like a scientific supposition; and it was also our mother’s name. It seemed appropriate: taken from the centuries-old tradition of naming ships after women. Gods or women, that’s how you named a ship – never mind that the
Ishiguro
broke those traditions, celebrating the engineer who designed the engines.
    Wallace is already here. He’s leaning against the wall, and he looks weary. I can’t blame him. He looks at me and nods. He will have just said his goodbyes to his family, and I assume that he would like it to stay quiet for a while longer; I don’t have an issue with that. From the windows here, I can see the hull. I can see the panels, the bolts and fixtures holding them to each other. I know how they’re held in place, and what’s under each one. The design of this ship is entirely our own. We built this for practicality. There is a reason that spaceships look like they do. With the
Ishiguro
, that was just another in their colossal series of egomaniacal fuck-ups. They built a ship that looked like something from a film, that had no place being in space. It was built for its toyetic qualities, the design licensed out before they even took off; ours has been constructed to work perfectly, efficiently. To actually serve its purpose.
    From here, down the tunnel, is an airlock. The other side of it leads you to a changing room, outfitted with benches and suits for exterior walks. One room off that is the bathroom, of our own design. Nobody likes shitting into a suction tube, I told Tomas, but that’s what has to happen. Might as well make it as comfortable as possible. So it’s a pod, and there’s a seat, and there’s a vacuum seal around your ass made by the seat, which is of a jelly, almost, malleable. It fits to you. There is no hose or inverted gas mask. No good for urination, though, so that’s still into a funnel, but that’s easier to deal with. The shower uses a vacuum as well, pulling through a grate at the bottom, and the water is pressure-pushed from the top. In theory, on a good day, it’s like a waterfall or a car wash, fast and hard and maybe not very pleasant, but it’ll get you clean.
    Through from there is the bedroom, which has the beds set at a 40-degree angle off the floor, arranged around each other in a circle. We paid for a special darkening finish on the glass, which goes black on both sides, blocking light if you want, because it means that people can sleep while others work. No need to have lights out, or bedtime. This doubles as our sick bay as well, in case. Through from there is our living