The Explorer (27 page)

I inject him with the final dose of sedative and watch him slump when I put gravity back on. I suit up, tie myself a security line, take the spare tool with me. I cling to the outside of the ship, and I open the panel that controls the engines and stare at the wires. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I grab a thin blue wire and pull at it. It feels like enough. I know that when I go inside and start the engines again, the fuel will be burning faster; that the blue wire somehow controls the accelerant, or the speed with which the fuel is fed into the engines, and that the ship will gradually get faster and burn more and more of it as it goes.

I stay outside and watch space until the air in the capsule starts to run out. It’s still calm.

He notices that it’s going down faster than it ought to, that the fuel supply is ticking quickly. He watches out of the Bubble at the nothing, and he tries to discover what’s making it happen.

‘Are we going faster?’ he asks aloud, which we are, of course, because that’s how the fuel is going so quickly. ‘Holy shit.’ He keeps reading the manuals over and over, and searching the database, trying to find anything that can point the way for him. I feel sorry for him, because I remember how this felt, and now know why it’s happened. He sits and watches the numbers as they tick over, and he panics when the numbers and the beeping starts. It doesn’t herald the change in fuel content, but it seems related. Coincidence, he will start to fathom. He writes something, and leaves it on the screen, unfinished, it seems. It’s the first piece he hasn’t bothered to send.

That night, as he sleeps, I leave the lining to read it. It’s normal: an outpouring of emotions, self-pitying and terrifying to read. It’s my voice, but nothing like I remember it.

I’m trying to keep myself stable, and constant, and normal, but I’ve been here so long I can’t even remember what that feels like. In the daytime, I treat everything like I should: I keep my spirits up, and I look out of the Bubble, and I wonder where the stars have gone; and I try to fix this, to turn the ship around, but I know it’s all useless. I’m so far out there will be no getting home: maybe I could make it to the Moon before I choked and died from lack of oxygen, from the power giving way, from the fuel running out, but then, what’s the point? They’ll see something in their telescopes and find me months after I’ve died, drifting and rotting and boneless. What will a lack of oxygen do to the body? Will it preserve it? Will it make everything worse?

Maybe I’m better to be out here, alone, and drifting. Maybe I’m better off dying when my time comes. They’ll remember me at home, just like Guy said that they would. They’ll remember us all. I try to stay chipper in the days, because otherwise I should just end it all, here and now. But at night, before I sleep, it sounds like the ship is creaking, and it feels like I’m being watched, and the watching eyes are just thinking, End it, Cormac. End it.

He’s all talk.

I’d forgotten about being actually alone. For the last – how long has it been? – I’ve had the rest of the crew, and Cormac, all doing things I didn’t necessarily see the first time around, managing to surprise me, to confuse me. I’ve been alone but never lonely, not really. Now I am. Cormac isn’t real company. I know what he’s doing, just as the left arm knows where the right is. He doesn’t do what I want when I want. He sits at the computer and mopes, and watches the videos over and over. He focuses on that video of Emmy, talking to him, addressing him like they were strangers.

‘I did my training in Brisbane and Sydney,’ she says, to the camera, cool and delivered like we were taught during our training, preparing us for the media interviews we did before we left. They told us that they would book us more for when we returned, fill our calendars, put that training to good use. She reels it off to camera like she would for anybody, but Cormac reads it as something for him, personal insight. She’s repeated her story thousands of times before, in every interview – press or job – that she’s ever done. Cormac is blind to it; blind to her.

He switches all the lights off, all over the ship. Everything, room by room, goes dark, apart from the main cabin, lit by the neon coming from the computer screens and HUDs. He sits in Quinn’s chair and pretends to be pilot, but I have to strain to see him, even more now it’s so dark; and he talks himself through rescue attempts, speaking them aloud, reciting them. This much trauma – to have your wife die, then to see your friends die, one by one, not knowing that (you) Guy was to blame for it all, or near as damn it – this much trauma can only fuck with you. I thought I was totally holding it together. I thought – hindsight being a wonderful thing – that I was an exemplary example of a stranded astronaut. If they managed to retrieve the black box, it would stand testament to my skills and mental fortitude.

We both watch the numbers on the screen, although I can barely see them from here – a fuzz of red faux-LED, where the distinct shapes – 1s, 4s – make sense, but the rest require fathoming. We’re on 39% fuel, 94% piezoelectric. Nobody can ever claim to having felt déjà vu until they watched the same thing, the exact same thing, for the second time in their life, waiting for the exact same moment where the numbers tick down, 39 to 38. Cormac watches and waits, and it finally happens. He doesn’t look satisfied, or dismayed; he just looks blank. He opens a file on an adjacent screen, types something, brings up a stopwatch and sets it off; and he watches the numbers fly on that screen as well. He just sits and counts. I decide to sleep, so I strap myself down further towards the back of the ship – in case he hears me, if I snore, or cough, or anything. I dream about myself in space, the way it ended, spinning, alone, everything exploding, both the ship and myself, because that’s what happened in the pressure of that vacuum; and I dream of the thick blackness that engulfed me. In the dream, it swallows me over and over.

I wake shaking, sweating. I take another painkiller, dry swallowing it, gulping it down with saliva from my mouth, and I lie back and put my hand on my heart, because it’s racing, thudding like it wants to come out of my chest. Through my paltry flesh, it feels like it’s going to split my ribs.

‘Please,’ I say, because I don’t want to die, not now. ‘Please.’ Cormac is asleep, finally; draped over the captain’s chair, head lolled to the side. I leave the lining, still holding my chest, wrapping my right arm across to my left as if it will hold my body together. I don’t know what’s happening, but I pull myself to the medicine cabinet, open it as quietly as I can, and it isn’t until I’m standing over it, using my other arm to stop the contents drifting everywhere, that I realize the pain has gone, that I was just dreaming. I’m alive, still, and my heart is racing, but I’m fine.

Who am I kidding? I’m not fine.

In the bathroom, as Cormac’s head lolls backwards in the cockpit, I examine myself again. Another tooth, but that’s to be expected. I crick both my knees, having the room to extend, and listen as the bone in them grinds against itself. They told us that the cartilage would be the first thing to go. It’s a wonder I’m not in more pain. (Then I remember the painkillers, strong enough to dope a horse, and I’m no horse.) I look at the scar on my leg, the others on my back, and I wonder how long the bone in my leg took to heal here, where bones don’t work the way they should, where the body isn’t right? If I had to put pressure on it for any real amount of time, sans self-medication, would it hurt? Would it even work properly? I try to feel the bone through my skin, and it seems fine: but I can’t believe that it is.

I’m a fucking disaster. I don’t have any chance of getting home, no chance of putting right any of the shit that went wrong, no chance of doing anything to save myself. I’m expendable. Cormac out there, he’s the important thing. If I can get the circuit complete, maybe he’ll wake up and won’t have to do this again. Or, maybe he won’t wake up at all.

That’s the first time I realize what I think I have to do: to save Cormac, I have to kill myself – this later version of me.

Cormac is angry, furious, even. He screams at the computers, which will never answer back.

‘Why is the fuel going down quickly? This is going faster than it should.’ He finds our speed and writes it down, and then searches, and he can’t be sure, but he thinks it’s faster than it should be. It is. I know about Guy’s tampering, now; about trying to make it easier on us. In some ways, maybe we should have been grateful – or maybe I should have been, because I was all that was left.
Am
all that is left.

I’m having trouble with my tenses, sometimes. Is this now or then? It’s so easy to get them confused at times like this.

In the movie of this, assuming that anybody’s still watching, that anybody has stayed in their seats and dug in for more popcorn, this is the scene where I pace up and down a room, working through ideas, dismissing them or scrawling them on a giant blackboard. In reality, I lie down in the lining with my pen and paper and make tiny, almost illegible notes about nothing. I can’t change anything, because every time I do – or have, previous versions of me – everything resets, back to the point where, what, we entered hypersleep? We hit warp? To that point I can’t change it. I wonder if the loop ends when Cormac’s life does. Will I just wake up back at the start – or, another version of me – and have to do this over and over again, forever, until my body is so crippled that I can’t even open that door and kill Arlen at the beginning, so the loop resets as soon as it starts, and that’s it, hell, for me, forever? Maybe that’s the answer: this is hell. When I die, I start again, looping, somehow back alive, my body broken but going again. Maybe I’ll do this until I get into that loop, stuck in agony and going round and round, dying over and over and over again, the pain and the torment and the loop, and nothing else until the end of time.

Fuck.

Cormac has managed to work out how long it is between percentage points, which means he’s made a spreadsheet of sorts, telling him how long he’s got left. It won’t stay like that: something happens, and the fuel goes down faster. For now, at least, he’s got it down pat. He sits and counts down from ten using the stopwatch app until the numbers roll over.

‘Three . . . Two . . . One . . .’ He’s perfectly on. The fuel counter drips down to 33%. It’ll be about a week until it accelerates. What are we going to do with all that time?

The only thing stopping me from killing myself is the knowledge that I’ll probably wake up with my throat slit on the floor of the ship, and I’ll keep dying until I manage to, somehow, heal, and then I’ll keep reliving that pain, that agony, for the foreseeable. It’s got to be better to see this through. It has to be.

4

He sleeps so much. He sleeps, and then he wakes up and writes his fucking blog entries, and he reads the manuals for the ship cover to cover, the stuff that only Guy read. He searches on the computer for the meanings to some of the phrases, the equations, and he nods as if he understands them. He doesn’t. He’s fucking clueless, spiralling along like a patsy. He goes to the Bubble and he calls up overlays, and he makes notes, and in his blog entries he writes about the things that he’s seen, because if they do recover the broadcasts – they should reach Earth eventually, he knows, though they might be scrambled, and they might be late (and I know now, given DARPA’s intentions for us on this flight, they might be conveniently ignored, or buried, because who wants those ramblings becoming public? They aren’t heroic, aren’t intrepid, aren’t anything but one man and his head) – because if they do recover them, they’ll be the last things he’ll have ever written. In his delusions, he writes that he thinks they might be his own eulogy.

Who knows? I wanted to go for the Pulitzer, for a work of journalism that broke boundaries, that told humanity something new. Maybe, through these dying thoughts, I’ll have achieved that.

He speaks about things he knows nothing about, inserting the names of galaxies and nebulae and words of description that mean nothing to him, flowery language to somehow offer the punctuation of meaning, to imply knowledge that he doesn’t have. If Emmy were awake she would tell me that I was being narcissistic. She would point out that he’s me, and that I did all of this, and that I’m only seeing it this way now because I’m on the outside, because I can appreciate it for what it actually is. I would argue with her, and tell her that even first time round I knew this was fucking pathetic. Everybody needs an antagonist, I would say, and he is mine.

‘See? Classic narcissist,’ she would reply.

After days and days of sleep, I wake up when he presses the button and we stop. I almost shout, because I fall a foot or so, the straps slackening, and my back hits the floor, the exact same spot where it was cut, where it’s scabbed over. I already ache constantly: this is just another complaint. I try to not make noise, but I barely care. I don’t think he would notice if I did. He puts on that video of Emmy again, and he watches it on one screen. On the other he’s got his pictures of Elena, and he picks the one of her taken in Cromer, and zooms in, and he weeps. He watches them both and he sits there feeling guilty and he cries for himself. If you could only see yourself, I think, and that makes me laugh, because it was entirely accidental. Jesus Christ, Cormac. Pull yourself together.

With the lights off, it’s harder to keep track of him. I can see his shape in the cockpit and the lounge, but when he’s in the hallways he’s a ghost. He can see better than I can, I guess; and he’s got a little torch on his suit, the kind they have on life jackets, so I can see that when he shines it. He finds the food he wants: when I leave the lining, I’m left grabbing whatever bars I can find first, fumbling in the dark and trying to stay silent. Somehow, despite his self-pity and mourning, he’s the alpha male, and I’m left scrabbling for his scraps.

We spend two days there. Two full days, doing nothing, watching as the numbers on the piezoelectric counter tumble, as the air starts to thin. His shitty calculations are based on him being the only person who needs to breathe, and here in the lining, at the back of the vacuum pumps and air-dispensers, I’m suffering. I feel light-headed, and spend much of those days lying down. First time around, it felt – I remember it feeling – almost like an adventure. I remember trying to keep my spirits up, or, at least, that’s how I wrote the blogs. I read them now and they’re awful, mournful, dark as anything. He’s suffering and I hate him for it. He should have just killed himself. He should have had the nerve to end it like a man, in the bathroom, in the shower, a knife into his neck or his wrist, or put the gravity on and use the safety cord, tied off around something. I see him contemplate it, when he looks at the pictures of Elena: he looks at them and at something that he’s written, a file on the computers about her that I can only read a sentence of before I have to stop, because it’s still so fresh. Did I think I wasn’t still in mourning? I’ll
always
be in mourning.