‘Like what?’ He was still licking the nozzle of his pouch, having squeezed every last morsel of the pie from it.
‘Anything you can think of. Rhubarb and raspberry, blueberry, peach, pumpkin — the list is endless.’
‘Wow. I would love to try all those.’
‘Maybe one day you will.’
Sally looked through the tiny porthole on the bottom of the service module, where a glimpse of Earth shone through.
‘When are they coming for us?’ Mikhail said, somehow echoing Sally’s own thoughts.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sighing. ‘I don’t know.’
The atmosphere became sombre. Sally and Mikhail did their chores together as usual, but they did them with a whole lot less laughing and joking. It was as though Mikhail was feeding off Sally’s sadness, her longing for home, reflecting her emotion back at her. She’d been okay the whole while she was alone, able to ignore her real feelings, but now she had someone whose company she enjoyed, the beckoning call of planet Earth seemed to tug harder at her heartstrings.
‘You miss Earth, don’t you?’ Mikhail said as Sally ran through the readings for the water reclamation tanks.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘What do you miss most about it?’
Sally stopped to think. There was so much she missed: silly little things, mostly. Seeing the leaves turn a beautiful burnt orange as winter rolled in. The smell of barbecued ribs coming from the neighbour’s garden. Laughing at TV re-runs of Frasier that she’d seen a thousand times before. ‘I guess I miss everything.’
Mikhail gave her a reassuring smile, and said nothing.
They didn’t talk again properly until the next day, while Sally was running through some gamma ray readings from a nearby star, Wolf 359.
‘Did you know it’s possible to create faster-than-light communication?’ Mikhail said, out of the blue. ‘I know that’s something you’re interested in, isn’t it?’
Sally stopped what she was doing. Had she heard him right? ‘Really? How?’
‘Not how,’ Mikhail said, ‘where.’
‘Okay — where?’
‘You’re limited by the speed of light within this universe, you know that much. But punch through to the next and you can move in infinite directions and speeds all at once.’
Sally shook her head, confused. ‘I don’t — I don’t know what you mean.’
Mikhail took her hands and cupped them into a ball. ‘You understand your universe to be like this,’ he said, ‘and so it takes time to travel from one side to the other.’ He indicated his meaning by tracing a line around the ball of Sally’s hands. He then spread her hands open so she held them flat together, as though she were praying. ‘This is how your universe really is, and it moves between the other universes like this.’ He placed his hands over the top of hers and slid them across. They were warm, soft. ‘You can leave this universe, enter another and return at any point in an instant.’ He released her hands and grinned. ‘Just like that.’
All at once, Sally felt something inside her, something she didn’t understand. It was a warm uncertainty, a feeling that, even though her future was indistinct, everything would be okay. She savoured the moment, and the lingering warmth on the backs of her hands. ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked.
Mikhail shrugged. ‘I just do. I have these thoughts and ideas that appear in my head. One minute they aren’t there; the next they are.’
Sally wondered who Mikhail really was. Was he still Mikhail? Was he still human? Or was he something else? She realised she didn’t care. She liked him just the way he was, whatever he was. They talked long into the night, sharing stories between them. Well, Sally told the stories while Mikhail smiled and laughed in the right places, frowned and shook his head with disbelief in the others. She poured herself out to him like she’d never done to anyone before, told him things that had been bottled up inside her for as long as she could remember. When she told him about the death of her mother, he leaned in towards her and held her for a few fleeting moments. She felt a tight knot in her shoulders that had gone unnoticed for weeks — maybe even years — unwind as if it were nothing.
‘You’ve been through a lot to get to where you are now,’ Mikhail said, holding his untouched carton of apple juice.
Sally smiled. She never saw herself as a martyr or a hero, or even a cause for sympathy, but it was nice to have her hardships recognised. She had fought with such defiance for so long to push through the barriers of gender and intelligence that contested her every move on Earth. It was a constant battle that never had any time for the weakness of emotion, so she had hardened herself without realising it, built up an armoured shell that was held in place by the twisted bindings of insecurity and stubbornness. But with Mikhail, that armour fell away, and she wasn’t afraid to leave her weaknesses exposed to him.
‘Do you remember anything else about where you came from?’ she asked him, to which he shuffled, looking uncomfortable.
‘I — I think I do. I can’t be sure. When I think too hard about it, I get these headaches’ — he rubbed his temples — ‘but they’re not that bad. It’s a strain to think, but the more I do, the more I remember, and with it comes knowledge I never even knew I had.’
‘Can you tell me what it’s like?’
Mikhail looked confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, can you tell me what it’s like to be — well, to be the first human to communicate with extra-terrestrial life?’
Mikhail grinned. ‘I’m not the first. And I won’t be the last. They’ve spoken to you, but at the moment you just can’t hear it. Give it time, and the words will come. Listen, and you will hear.’
Sally hoped beyond hope that he would continue talking. She was enthralled.
‘It’s like opening your eyes for the first time,’ Mikhail said, ‘when up to then you have merely been dreaming.’
‘Will my eyes ever be open?’
Mikhail stroked her hair, running his fingers down her face and under her chin. ‘Yes, they will. When you’re ready.’
In downtown Moscow, Detective Inspector Yefim Banin flicked through a file that had been dropped on his desk that morning. It annoyed him, partly because he was already rushed off his feet, and partly because he hadn’t done traffic incidents in nearly twenty years.
Reopened case, the post-it note stuck to the front said. Chief wants you on it. Get it done quick.
He took a sip of his watery tea and grimaced. As he read through the file, he built up the scene in his mind: Lev Ryumin, former RFSA Flight Director, got drunk and ran his car off the road and into a ditch, hitting a telegraph pole that collapsed the roof, killing him instantly. Bad luck.
But the forensics department had found traces of someone else’s skin on Ryumin’s body, and now the case file was on Banin’s desk. Why were forensics even looking at the body at this late hour? The case had been shut ages ago. What a waste of time.
He picked up the phone and dialled the Chief’s extension. It rang, and was answered by a young woman: the Chief’s secretary.
‘Chief Inspector Azurov’s office, how can I help?’
‘It’s Banin.’
‘Oh, hello — how are you?’
‘I’m okay. Actually I’m not okay. I’ve been assigned to some goddamn re-opened forensic bullshit case, and I’m already up to my eyeballs in dead bodies.’
‘Oh dear — I suppose you want to speak to the Chief Inspector, then?’
‘That would be wonderful.’
‘I’ll put you through. You mind yourself and don’t go getting into any trouble.’