The Explorer (18 page)

The first time we – that is, the trainees, the final few (or as near as for the others to barely matter, because they would soon be sent back to their homes and left unable to speak about what happened thanks to NDAs that could cause them to lose everything they owned if broken) – caught wind that something might have been happening between Emmy and Quinn was during the final stretch of our training. We were spending full days in a to-scale simulation of the ship, putting ourselves to work as we would on the real thing. It was a week, solid and intense, and the DARPA people controlled everything – our light, engine noise, the amount of gravity we had to play with, our level of oxygen (which they fluctuated at whim, to see how we coped with the stress that a lack of the stuff brought on). We obeyed orders, but the whole thing was harmless. One thing that DARPA couldn’t stop was us recognizing how fake it all was: because outside the windows it was a grey box, a featureless space of corridors and different-sized basic rooms; and because there was nothing that could really go wrong. When DARPA triggered an alarm, and the sensors threw up that there was a crisis with one of the engines, Guy slowly led Quinn outside the fake ship and they drifted along and fake-fixed the fake problem. Upon their return we tried to clap them, but it seemed stupid to actually do it; like, the idea was nice, but the execution failed. It never felt real enough.

‘We get it,’ Quinn said, ‘I’m going to be the world’s biggest hero.’

‘Nope,’ Emmy said, ‘just ours.’ And that was it. That was all it took. The comment was totally innocuous, harmless. But she let the words linger in the air longer than they needed to, and Quinn didn’t joke after it. He soaked the praise up, even though we knew that it meant nothing at all, but he lingered on it. They didn’t hug or holds hands, and there wasn’t anything else to give it away, but that set us talking.

‘Oh, they’re smitten,’ Arlen said, ‘even if they don’t know it yet.’ When it had been me, nobody had even suspected. Now, with Quinn, only weeks after Emmy and I spent our night together, Emmy was suddenly gossip. We rode out the rest of the week being ourselves in that fake ship, trying not to laugh when something from the real world intruded – a pipe fell, or a computer booted to Windows, because the real OS we were going to be using wasn’t yet ready, so we were on a facsimile, a beaten-up version of Windows, skinned to be what we nearly needed. Quinn joked about eating all the food we had, every part of our supply.

‘If I just
gorge
myself, you reckon they’ll bring us a proper meal? I’d kill for a steak and fries.’

‘Pepper sauce,’ Emmy said.

‘Oh shit, yes,’ Quinn replied. We watched them riff off each other, and we all suspected, but they
knew
.

When the week was over we all went back to the hotel to sleep. We had a few days before the next round, and Elena had flown out again to meet me. She was already in the room when I got there: she had ordered dinner, room service, and a bottle of wine, and we sat at that funny little table that wasn’t quite large enough and ate from those plates that didn’t seem quite large enough.

‘Tell me all about it,’ she said, so I did, but I almost singularly left out Quinn and Emmy’s names, because I wasn’t sure what I would tell her if I even began to think about them too much.

In the ship, the original version of me writes almost constantly, or at least sits at the computer and thinks about writing. He puts his fingers on the home keys and nearly starts so often, over and over again. I remember that it became hard at this point: hard to constantly send something worth reading, hard to maintain that daily rapport with a readership that you didn’t know and couldn’t predict. Did they want to know more about the ship? About the passengers? About me? I wrote extended eulogies for those who died, and I fed some of Quinn’s measurements into the paragraphs of text – here’s where we are, here’s what we’ve seen. Sometimes I included pictures of things that we passed, looking totally different on that screen than they did with the naked eye. Photographs of objects so far away that they were barely perceptible are suddenly clear to the readers, close up and distinct. This isn’t what we saw, I remember writing one day, because out here it’s just black with specks and sparks, like it is from your gardens in the middle of the night. It’s no different, really, but here you don’t have the mugs of hot chocolate and the blanket wrapped around you and the home-made telescope. Here, you’ve got the white of the ship and the cold of the outside, and we’re not in control of when we stop watching because it’s all that there is.

I get to watch the back of the me as he hunches and doesn’t type, or occasionally does, and then clicks to send the work, first draft always, no chance to change anything once that button is pushed. I was never a first draft writer, but the occasion, the circumstances dictated that I adapt. The signal is bitten apart and spat out, across hundreds of thousands of miles, further than any information has ever been sent, and I don’t know when it will arrive – because of the lag, so it’ll get there in two days? Three days? – but that’s the nature of technology. I wonder if they’re sent before another version of me gets to rewrite them, alter them for my benefit. I hope so, or the stuff that’s published back on Earth will be a depressing insight into the mind of a complete madman.

I spend another night roaming the body of the ship. I clean my teeth first, feeling another one wiggle in its socket when I push it with the brush, so I use my tongue to hold it steady as I do them. When I spit out blood into the tube it’s not the thin bright red of gum disease; it’s thick and dark, and the tooth follows it, clattering into the reedy vacuum before disappearing forever. It was a canine, and the home is wide and sweet to the taste. I shit and I wash, because I feel like that’s what I need to do. In the mirror I stare at the scars across my back, like whip-marks, and I find another scar that I’ve never noticed before at the back of my head, just under my hairline. When I’m finished I dress in a clean uniform, and I shave again, using my own razor, and I cut my fingernails. I rifle through the cupboards for food, taking a Big Mac bar and eating it in the corridor, and I take my last painkiller with it, that single tablet being my starter and dessert rolled into one, changing everything after it hits me. The pain had been back; my leg had been numbing, but now I know that that pain isn’t even real. The pain is actually somewhere else entirely. I don’t need the pills: my wounds are completely healed. God knows how many I’ve had since I started this loop – or this pattern, maybe it makes more sense to call it a pattern, because it sounds less insane, more like something mathematical than fantastical – but it’s a lot. The scars speak to that. I’m not in pain: I’m addicted. The two feel so similar. I shake and shiver and think about how I’m not taking another pill. I can, I know, survive this.

I sit at the computer and look at how long is left of the trip, how much we’ve got to go. My estimations tell me that Guy’s going to die the day after tomorrow, which means we’re heading towards me being all alone, and then the point of no return. It’s so dark in the ship, and with the people here – still alive – it feels creepier than it did, as if I’m in a haunted house, waiting for something to jump out at me. From the beds, it feels as if their eyes are watching me, even though they’re closed. Back before, when I finished it, I felt totally alone. Now, I feel anything but.

I open files, trying to find any information that might not be in the ship’s database. I try to get into Guy’s folder, to see if there are any documents in there, but it’s got a password for some reason, so I try Quinn’s, and I read the titles of hundreds of banal files, bits of nothing. I see a file titled
Emmy
, and I think about opening it, reading, but I don’t, because I already know that it’ll be a letter or a picture of the two of them together, or something. Something that I’m not meant to see. I respect privacy. I have to.

Then, from behind me, a hiss, the noise of a bed opening in the darkness, and the thump in my gut that I should move as fast as possible. I hurl myself backwards, scrabbling down the corridor towards the storage rooms just in time to see Guy drift across the doorway.

‘Hello?’ he whisper-shouts, but I’m inside the storage room already, pulling myself into the lining. The door’s shut before he’s even halfway down the hallway, and I watch through the vents as he looks in every room. ‘Hello?’ he whispers again, and he shines a torch, but it only catches the corners of the rooms. There’s no trace of me, I realize – except for the files on the computer. I was in Quinn’s directory. I rush to the cabin and wait for Guy to return. He counts the bodies in the beds, making sure they’re all asleep, and then sits at the desk, straps himself in. He doesn’t even notice what files are up on screen: he backs out of the system, to the entrance screen. He’s focused, single-minded. He logs in as himself, opens a picture – an old man, an old woman, a very young boy that’s unmistakably Guy, only here he’s still Gerhardt, dressed in this ridiculous outfit, and I suppose these people must be his grandparents, or maybe his parents, but they’re very old – and he says something, very quietly, so quietly I can’t hear. I’ll never know what he said. He loads something onto one of the handhelds and then closes the screen, drifting from the console and down the corridor. I chase him until he’s in the changing room, where he latches himself to the bench and loads an app on the handheld. The program starts establishing contact with home base. Out here, this far, the bandwidth is next-to-nil. The quality is atrocious, the faces of the people in Ground Control little more than grey shapes against a background of static. He pulls an earphone from the device and I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can hear his side of the conversation, whispered and calm, but still audible.

‘Everything’s on schedule. We’re only a few days away from entering it. Maybe a week, at most. Everybodys fine here, even Cormac. We’ll send a final broadcast tomorrow. Okay. Gerhardt out.’

He closes the application and goes back to the main cabin. He gets back into bed, but I daren’t go out there again, because I shut my eyes and nearly sleep and I dream, and in my dream I see myself out there, and he sees me, and he screams and it’s all over, which means that, once, I tried to go out there and discovered his open eyes for myself.

6

Guy acts as if everything is normal, not telling any of the crew about his conversation. He doesn’t mention anything even related to it until after lunch, when he suggests that we send a broadcast home.

‘It’s just been a while, and the connection will be getting shakier this far out. Might be our last chance to do video, so let’s do it.’ It’s not a request, but we – the crew, there at the table with him, we merry four – don’t care. It’s something. Again, though, Guy’s lied: first about Wanda, now this message home. I wanted his lies to be to protect us, but there’s something else to them, something bitter. He knows exactly how bad the connection will be, and he doesn’t tell us: he hides it from us under the veil of his personal speculation. We gather around the table when we’ve finished, and Guy presses the full-stop button, and we all drift to the ground. Usually I set up the connection but this time Guy takes charge, like a photographer in the olden days, lining up the shot, standing behind the camera to make sure we all look good. ‘This will be the last time they see our faces for a good long while,’ he says, ‘you want to make sure you look your best for it. Smile. Look happy.’ We do. ‘Hey, remember what’s important,’ he says. ‘We’re
intrepid
, right?’ He says the word like it doesn’t fit into his mouth, into the repertoire of his language.

‘Hi, all!’ Emmy starts. She sounds happy, still, somehow. I stand next to Quinn, and Emmy is on his other side, and Guy slides into shot in front of us all, kneeling. I remember looking at the top of his head as we spoke, noticing the faint marks on the skin of his neck where there had once been a tattoo, but which was now removed. I remember thinking how little I knew about him; how I would never have guessed that he had once been a rebel. He seemed so straight-laced. ‘This is the crew of the
Ishiguro
. We’re about to head out of video broadcast range, so we wanted to just send a message with an update, let you know how much we miss you all.’ She doesn’t say names: she’s got nobody there to miss, despite what she says. ‘We’ve been up here for a few weeks, and we’re looking forward to the next part of the trip. In two days?’ She looks at Quinn for confirmation, and he nods. ‘In two days we’re going to have travelled further than anybody else has ever travelled, which is an amazing feeling.’ She’s like a TV presenter. ‘All that we’ve ever had out this far before is probes and satellites. We’re doing what man has never done before.’ We all thought she’d have a career as a personality when we got home. It was her destiny.

‘We’re all excited about it,’ Quinn says. ‘We’ll try and broadcast again when it happens, so you can celebrate with us.’ He puts his hand on Emmy’s back, squeezes the folds of her suit, pulls it tighter so that she knows he’s there, that he’s with her.

‘And then, not long after that we’ll be coming home,’ Emmy says. The me doesn’t say anything. Guy doesn’t say anything either, but when Quinn says that we should sign off he waves, shouts goodbye with the rest of us.

‘That was good,’ he says when we’ve severed the connection. That was, I remember, the last time we spoke to home.

Elena used to worry about how we would survive the gap between us, the ever-increasing distance.

‘You won’t be able to speak to me directly,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how I’ll survive.’ We had just been told that personal contact was a no-no; every single broadcast we did home cost millions, each blog post I made thousands. At least I would still have contact with her through those, I said.

‘You know that I’ll be thinking of you with each message I write,’ I told her. ‘Every one is a letter to you, think of them that way.’

‘It’s not the same, Cormac.’ I had been finding her hairs on the pillows of the hotel-room beds, thick and black and coiled like snakes, and now she bit her fingernails down past the line of flesh, towards what my mother used to call the quick. Her hands used to be pretty; I don’t tell her that. ‘It’s not the same. Because I’ll miss you so much, and this all seems so unfair.’