The Explorer (17 page)

‘It’s meant to have been there since the start,’ she says, ‘I just forgot to put it on. It’s the rules.’ I look at the bottle of pills I’ve been keeping in my pocket, and the five tablets that I’ve got left, and I listen as Emmy hits the button to start the ship. She doesn’t bother to tell us: we all just start drifting again.

In the lining, I dry swallow another pill. Four left.

Emmy calls us all to the main cabin, tells us that she’s forgotten to give us our psychological evaluations. She’s trying to find out which of us is most likely to have taken the pills. Now, this makes sense. Back then, I wrote it off as Emmy being slightly nervous, wanting to find something to do with her day.

‘It was part of my role,’ she says, ‘to make sure we’re all doing okay.’ She smiles, reassures us. ‘Look,
I
know we’re all fine, but rules are rules, okay? Especially after everything that’s happened.’ She’s talking to us as she stands in front of the bodies of Wanda and Arlen, forever suspended. At the time, I remember thinking how curious that was. I think I even said that to her when she asked me – or will say it, now. She speaks to me first, leading me down the corridor towards the changing room, where she and I float around as she readies herself. ‘I have to record these,’ she says, ‘because they need them at home. They’re private, between you and me and Doctor Golding – you remember Golding, from the inductions? – but they have to be sent.’ She presses record on the computer, clears her throat. I lean back against the wall, not having to watch because I remember this perfectly.

‘That’s fine,’ the me says.

‘Cormac, are you all right?’

‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘I miss . . . well, everything. You know.’

‘You’ve been quiet,’ she tells the me.

‘I’ve been working.’

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you can talk to me about anything. I’m trained. It’s partly why I’m here.’

‘Is that an order?’ I think I smiled at that point.

‘It’s a request. I’m here if you need to talk, that’s what I’m saying. It must be hard for you: with Arlen, and Wanda. With what’s happened to them.’ She says it conspiratorially, like she’s trying to get something out of the me. As if I’ll confess.

‘I just can’t fucking believe it.’ This is like listening to yourself on a radio, or a recording: hearing your voice coming back the same as it is inside your head only different, somehow more pinched, with none of the power and resonance that you imagine when you speak. ‘It seems . . . Cruel.’

‘That they died?’

‘That they’re just there, watching us. I don’t mean watching us, but that they’re there. That we have to see them.’

‘It’s the only way to preserve them. You understand that, right?’ She sounds clinical, because this is how she has to sound. She’s pure business with me. She feels the same, which I knew then, because I knew her; and I know now that I’m here again, because I am able to watch her looking at their bodies and wincing, squeezing her eyes shut and looking away like she’s some over-emphatic actress. ‘They deserve a burial.’

‘I know.’

‘And everything’s all right with the crew? No other problems?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You and Guy? You and Quinn?’ She doesn’t ask about me and her.

‘Everything’s fine.’ She makes eye contact then, which she’s been avoiding – sometimes glancing towards where I am, in the grate, like I’m a proxy – and speaks slightly quieter.

‘What about your health? Everything okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ I say. I shake my head, and she picks up on that.

‘What?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I just . . . Is everything okay with you?’

‘This isn’t about me, Cormac,’ she says. ‘Come and talk to me if anything happens, or if you need to vent, or if you just want to talk. About anything. You know where I am, right?’

‘You can’t exactly go far,’ I say. It’s a brief talk, but she seems satisfied, or as satisfied as she can be without running full bill of health tests – blood tests and the like – and we’re allowed to refuse those, which she knows. She calls Guy in, and he sighs as he enters the room, drifts around, pushes his hands against the ceiling to steady himself and waits there, almost aggressively. She doesn’t like Guy, and never did, and she doesn’t mask it. For his part, he revels in it, because it’s something I think he’s been used to.

‘How’s it going?’ she asks him, trying to be casual, and he laughs.

‘Further and further away from Earth, right? I mean, what a fucking question!’ He claps his hand against his knee. ‘Look, I’m fine. You worry about yourself and the mighty Quinn back there.’

Emmy blushes. ‘This isn’t about me.’

‘No? So tell me, Emmy: who’s going to do your psychological evaluation? Who’s going to say, Oh, sure, she’s fit for duty, because she’s fucked two of the crew who are still alive, and the only one she hasn’t . . . Well, she isn’t his type, or she would have probably fucking tried, I think.’ He laughs again. ‘I mean, that’s not a healthy crew situation, right?’ She doesn’t reply to him; she doesn’t look at him, but she’s gone red. We didn’t know that she was sleeping with Quinn at that point, or that she had, or whatever; and I didn’t know that my thing with Emmy – just that one night, but how ruinous it was, how dreadful – I didn’t know that it was common knowledge either. ‘Look, I’m fine, I’m functioning perfectly fucking normally, but I’ve got a job to do, and you’re jabbering away, interfering with that. So, let’s just say, yeah, I’m fine. Whatever.’ He pushes himself to the door, slides it open. ‘Quinn?’ he shouts. ‘Quinn, she’s ready for you now.’

She cries, and when Quinn comes in he holds her, and she whispers something to him that I can’t hear from where I am, but I think, maybe that’s for the best, because it was meant to be private.

Emmy flirted with me all the way to the airport. We were picked up in shuttle-buses and she shuffled behind me in the line, got in mine along with three other people that I’ve almost completely forgotten about now. (I try to remember them and their faces are blank templates, because all I looked at for the entire journey was Emmy.) She sat opposite me and our knees were touching, and she kept speaking about the night before in vaguely guarded ways, but not subtle, like she didn’t care who knew what happened.

‘We drank a lot, right?’ she asked, even though she knew the answer. ‘I woke up feeling ragged this morning.’ She smiled constantly at me; the other passengers laughed gently, because they weren’t involved in the drinking, weren’t even invited. ‘I’m shattered.’ She kept letting her knee drift and bounce slightly from side to side against mine, brushing against me. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘I’m okay,’ I told her. ‘Headache, but, you know.’

‘I know,’ she said. I had spent the rest of the night deciding that it was going to be the last time anything happened. Emmy was beautiful and strong and funny, but I loved Elena. I knew that, and I knew it wouldn’t change. I decided that I was going to tell Emmy on the plane, where she couldn’t make a scene, but I was sure that she wouldn’t actually care. It was all so casual, I was sure she wouldn’t mind.

We had seats next to each other, because of the order in which we checked in. Guy sat on the other side of me, and I was in the middle, and as soon as we took off Guy went to sleep, his head lolling onto my arm. Emmy found it hilarious and mimicked him, and then her arm slid around mine, her hand on the crook of my elbow, and she shut her eyes. I left her for a few minutes, until the stewardess offered us drinks, and then I shook her gently. She didn’t want anything.

‘Last night,’ I said, ‘was really special.’ She knew where this was going straight away. Guy stayed asleep – or pretended – and we whispered our conversation to each other. She barely said anything, but left her hand wrapped around my arm for longer than she needed to, until well after it was clear that we weren’t going anywhere.

And I kicked myself when she took it away, because of what I did. Because we were close before, and that would ruin it. Because part of me still wanted her – the part that was younger, that had more of his hair, less of a paunch, that still remembered what it was like to stay out until whenever, that wasn’t trying for a baby with his wife, that hadn’t already lost their first successful attempt, that didn’t want to keep her, to struggle with her through whatever it was that was going to come to us.

When we landed at JFK, Elena was waiting on the other side of the gate, suitcase in hand. She had only just arrived, but hadn’t told me she was coming. Emmy walked slowly and spoke to Quinn, who darted around saying goodbye to everybody, shaking their hands, and she didn’t watch as I kissed Elena hello, and put my arms across her shoulders, folded them around her back, and promised her that we would make everything work.

Three pills left, and I think I can sleep. I hope I can sleep. I shut my eyes but get nowhere, so I sneak out into the expanse of the ship again, pull myself along the corridors to the cabin. I check the cabinet – as if I didn’t see Emmy locking it, like, maybe she left the lock open – and I decide that I have to take risks. I open the main food cupboards, take Big Mac bars, dessert bars, Coca-Cola sachets. I sit at the computer and scroll through my photographs up close, and I look at Elena and myself, at my parents. I look at the folders of my writing, the blog entries I’ve been making ever since I got onto the ship. They detail everything in painstaking fashion, even down to conversations, time stamped, dated.

‘I don’t need these,’ I say, because I’ve seen it all before, like a director watching the rushes, seeing exactly how it actually looks when taken away from the script. I check the computers and sit in the cockpit seat, the main pilot’s seat, and I spin, because that’s what I did before, when I was all alone, after all of these people died. I move down through the ship towards the changing room, pull my clothes off, stuff them into the locker with my name on it. I still remember the combination – Elena’s birthday, my birthday – and I shower in the pod. The water is amazing, even though it’s cold and makes me flinch away from it at first, eventually settling in, and when I’m done I put the vacuum on, put the excess water back into the system. I shave in front of the mirror, and when I’m done – when the vague beard is gone, when my face is clean of all the dirt and grime I’ve picked up in the lining – I examine myself, pulling my skin, which seems loose. I’ve lost weight – a couple of stone, maybe two and a half, I’d guess, but maybe more – and the skin seems to have bunched around my eyes. I can pull the skin below them down, see the sting-red of my tired eyeballs. I clean my teeth, swilling water around my mouth, using my finger with toothpaste, feeling the sting where they’re sensitive. I’ll need fillings, I think. I look at my body in the mirror: my ribs.

I sit in Quinn’s seat in the cockpit, flick switches that I know don’t do anything, and I call up the computer screen to tell me how to turn the ship. The instructions must be in here, but there are thousands of files, manuals packed into PDFs, all of them interactive and searchable, but the search results turn up nothing. The ship seems to have failsafes, but we weren’t meant to know them – or, we weren’t meant to read about them on badly formatted online manuals. I think about sending a message back home, to ask them what we can do – to pretend that it’s on behalf of the ship itself, say that we have to turn around, that we’re all ill or something, that there’s an issue with, what, an engine? – but I won’t be awake by the time they reply, and it’ll be the crew that will get the message, and then they’ll know there’s an intruder. It might save their lives, but it won’t save mine. And which is more important?

I go back to the lining and take another pill, because I can’t deal with it. I can’t deal with knowing that I’m here with no purpose, and whatever purpose I can give myself – to save this ship, save this crew (or what’s left of them), to save myself (other version), to return the crew home . . . I don’t know if any of it’s right. In TV shows and movies and books, when somebody time travels – those words, like a death knell, a resounding echo in a box I’ll never climb out of – they’re given a mission, or they work it out, and they know what they have to do. They either have to get back to their time; or they have to change something (put it right or put it wrong, or fix what’s been broken by somebody else); or they have to learn to live with what’s happened. I have no markers, no clues. All I can do is what feels right: ride out my gut instinct. My instinct has told me not to speak to the rest of the crew, not to let them know that I’m here. My instinct has told me how to save myself, how to ride this out, to do everything I’m meant to have done. Because that’s another rule of time travel: it’s fixed, and if it’s not, it’s meant to be. It’s like a circuit, a closed circuit: in order to get electricity running, it needs to work at both ends. If it doesn’t, it won’t even start. It needs to be a closed circuit.

‘I think I’m going insane,’ I say to the darkness. I told Elena that once, when I had writer’s block, when I was struggling to get anything down on paper, to make sense of any of the words I was writing.

‘You’re just slightly broken,’ she had told me, ‘you’re broken, and you’ll have to work out how to fix yourself.’ I open my eyes and she’s there, for a second, smiling at me. She disappears as I blink away tears, and I remember where I am, where I’m going. Soon Guy will die, and then Quinn, and then Emmy, and then it will be me and him, I and me, and we’ll be alone, and I’ll have to do something drastic: save the day, become the hero. Bump my name up the credits list.

I spend the next day running through every aspect of my first time: going over every detail. I go through all the details, everything that’s happened to me this time, how it jibes with what happened my first time around. I woke up alone in the chamber just after we hit warp and I dragged myself around, and I killed Arlen and then I slept, but I woke up first and I tried to find somewhere to hide, and then I made a tent but it was a stupid idea, totally flawed, and then I found the lining and I slid myself in and I tried to keep it all together, and I took pills for my pain because I’m addicted to them – but how can I be addicted, I’ve barely taken them for days, only a couple of days before I blew the ship up, but maybe that’s enough time, maybe they’re just that strong, that potent – and I don’t have actual physical pain any more, just the pain left behind when I’m
not
taking one of the pills, and then I watched as Wanda killed herself, and then I started to work out what’s going on, because that’s the only way this can go, the only way it can, ultimately, end.