The Explorer (28 page)

If you could, you might say it wasn’t my fault, but it was, and it is, and it always will be; and I will never see you again.

Instead he watches all the videos, but he’s barely watching them: they’re just there as company for him, voices in the quiet of the ship, something else to bounce off the walls. I go out and watch him as he sleeps, and picture myself putting my hand over his mouth and nose, bracing my weight against him as he wriggled away from it, stopping him: but that’s not how it happened. If I kill him, I’ll only end up here again. I might as well see it through to the end for once, if I can.

(That makes me laugh, again, another thing that I find funny in this fucked-up situation: that Guy would be proud of me. I’ll be the first Cormac to complete a loop of this particular section of his own life, and the only man in history to see the furthest point in space
twice
. I should get a medal.)

He moves on to videos of Quinn when he’s exhausted the trove of Emmy interviews he’s taken. There’s no malice in them: he watches them for company, occasionally chipping in as the videotaped version of him asks a question. He mirrors the question, vocalizing it aloud, and sometimes, once or twice, I catch myself doing the same: three of us, different times, all saying the same thing. We’re so predictable. Can a man change? Only with hindsight, and even then I’d be suspicious.

Eventually he starts the engines again, and he shouts, into the deep of the ship.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he says, not aiming it at anybody, but it’s my klaxon. I drag myself to my feet and count down to a hundred. He always found it easy to sleep. Tonight won’t be any different.

It’s as I’m staring at his face, thinking about how much of a stranger he is. I write something else to send home.

I can try to reconcile this, to make sense of it – to say, I wasn’t here the first time, and so I’m just trying to make it all work, but I was here the first time, because those things happened, and they can’t have been a coincidence. Which means I’ve always been here. Time is a straight line, and my life on it is a line, until I reach that explosion, until the first me, the original – or am I still the original? I don’t know – until the first me goes back to the explosion, and then he does it again, over and over, scratching over the timeline like a scribble. I don’t think that time is looping: it’s just me. Back home, they don’t have a clue. They’re just carrying on as before.

Don’t even get me started on why this is happening. I think about that for too long, I’m liable to go insane (if I’m not already there). If this is how it’s meant to happen, all I can do is see it through to the end. If I complete the loop and I come back next time, then, well, another plan. Something else. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

And if we don’t come to it, nobody will ever have read this, and none of it will matter.

When he wakes up, he’ll see that we’ve carried on losing fuel, because that’s what happened before, and he’ll panic, and none of that can change. All I can do is stay out of his way, now, and watch as he pushes us towards . . . whatever.

He wakes up and panics, as I knew that he would, and he grabs his suit.

‘If I go out there, I can maybe fix it,’ he says, but he can’t, and we both know it. Still, at least he’s trying. It’s the most admirable thing he’s done so far, the most proactive. I watch him change into the suit, step into the airlock and seal the door behind him, and then I watch as he disappears from my field of vision. I’ve got a few minutes so I sneak out, and it’s the first time I’ve been on the ship by myself. Sure, before – when I was still the first Cormac – I thought that I was, but I wasn’t. Now, here: this is me truly alone. The devilish part of me thinks that I should start the engines, fry him, drive off, the most expensive joyride in history. I don’t, of course. Instead I take more painkillers, drink clean water, and I look at the picture of Elena that he’s left on the screen, that he’s been staring at and reminiscing.

I can berate him for doing it as much as I like, but, truth be told, given the opportunity, it’s what I would be doing as well.

Outside, he can’t see anything wrong with the ship, because there isn’t. No pipes need fixing; no holes have appeared; nothing is leaking. This is how it’s meant to be, Cormac. This is just how it all happens.

Cormac turns the lights on and it blinds me, for a minute. He’s listless and lost and he flits from terminal to terminal, from action to action. He’s still watching the videos, accompanied by the faces of the dead as they tell us about themselves when they were alive – not who they really were, but who the public perception of them was. Quinn talks about his life as a pilot, but he was more than that. Emmy speaks about doctoring, about healing, but she never mentioned that in person. In person, she drank and she laughed and she joked and she flirted, and she never once mentioned that she was a doctor. It’s a different voice in the tapes, almost, a professional sheen that she never carried away from the training rooms. He’s given up. It’s so hard to watch him like this.

He finds the rest of the champagne. He gorges himself on food, eating dessert bars instead of a meal, and he laughs and laughs, and he tapes himself doing it, and then broadcasts it. He drinks the champagne and he sobs and sobs into the small flasks of it, as he drinks it through the straws. When he’s not quite finished he drifts around the cabin in a ball, and he convulses. He drinks more when he thinks that he’s ready, and then he’s sick, remembering to do it into a bag, and then he cries more, great heaving wheezes of tears, and he says Elena’s name over and over, over and over as he cries. When he passes out – floating in the air like some possessed child in a movie, his back arched, his arms and legs dangling, his head lolling back, tongue out, eyes twittering – I leave the lining and help him into his bed. He could catch me – and this could all be over – but he won’t. I put him into the bed and strap him down, and he doesn’t stir.

I take a champagne back to the lining with me, and a burger bar, and a cherry pie bar, and I sit and eat them and think about how little time is left.

I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn’t tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it’s a satisfaction all in itself.

From here, I can squeeze the pages, and I know there’s not long to go. I’ve been here before, but I don’t know the actual ending yet.

He recovers by vomiting, by holding his gut with both arms, holding as tight as he can. It’s worse in zero gravity, I remember that much: it feels like you can’t even get close to making your stomach settle. That sense of your insides swirling you get after being sick? That doesn’t leave. He heaves into bags and then puts them in the chute, and he clutches his gut and whimpers. He’s still drunk, so he swigs water until that makes him feel ill again. He sleeps and he cries as he sleeps, and he’s like a child.
Staying away is hard, but it’s how it has to be. I remember everything, almost, even though I was in that state. I remember that I was on my own. When he wakes up, he sits at the computer and he cries and cries: because he feels awful, sick and ruined; and because he misses Elena, and because of how she died, and how much guilt he’s storing, that he didn’t even go to her funeral; and because he’s alone. He knows he’s going to die, as well. He might not have admitted it, at the time, but he knows it. Watching this – watching the movie – everybody knows it. The only reason I’m sure of it is because I’ve seen this already.

Hangovers in space don’t work like on Earth: there’s nothing to ground you. When the room feels like it’s spinning, it’s because it is. Your blood pressure is already fucked up, so that sensation – the feeling of being drunk rather than the alcohol actually being in your bloodstream – that lasts far longer. We were warned by DARPA not to over-drink before we left.

‘The champagne is for celebration, for you all to share. Don’t drink it all at once: it’ll make you sick as dogs.’ I remember that, and Cormac remembers it now. I’m not sure that we did before we drank it. Or, maybe that was the point. He cowers and stares at the numbers – at his life-clock, ticking down – and then puts on Arlen’s videos, and watches the big, bearded, larger-than-life man laughing and joking his way through the very first video any of them recorded, before they even took off. He yammers as he waits for the camera crew to leave, to stop their panning shots, epic, widescreen, 3D shots; and for the injections to start before lift-off. He talks about the crew.

‘They’re good people,’ he says, ‘really good people. It helps; you have a good crew, this whole thing will go a lot quicker.’ Cormac cries, his standard reaction to almost everything, it seems. I’m well past it, by now.

Guy’s videos. Fuck. I don’t think that I can watch them. Cormac laps them up, because he thinks that they will contain the secrets of the universe. He trusted Guy implicitly, and these videos – these brief, utterly vacuous interviews – are probably nothing but lies. Guy smiles, and jokes, and tells Cormac not to touch anything. He’s lying about everything, and Cormac doesn’t have a clue. He tells the me in the video about what it means to be an explorer, proselytizing about how good the feeling will be to have done what we will do. When he’s done, Cormac writes a new blog post, about how Guy would have known what to do.

He could have fixed it all
, he writes.
He wouldn’t have been in this mess, and he would have made it home, and it – this – would all have been worth it, for him.

When Cormac has finally gone to sleep I rush out and alter his post.

Guy was a real fucking traitor
, I write,
and if you’re reading this, Ground Control, the rest of you are too. I hope you hate yourselves for what you did. I hope you feel guilty.

It feels good to write it, to put it down, to actually speak it. I send it.

When he wakes up, Cormac puts the Guy videos on again, as background noise. Guy talks about famous explorers.

‘They’ll remember you forever!’ he says.

‘Fuck you,’ I say out loud. Cormac doesn’t hear me.

The next day he reads the numbers, over and over, and he sees the numbers and he tries to work out what it means again, as if the systems encyclopedias might somehow have updated, and might magically give him the answers he desires. He types it into the computer and I watch him as he spends the day reading stuff he’s already read. He gets into a thread about aliens – we’re back here again, that thinking that something internal might be something, that something – a flight of fancy – can spiral into thoughts of invaders, of extraterrestrial life, of so much more than being stuck in a tin can until you die. He knows they don’t exist. He knows that, here, so close to the Earth, really, not even a tenth as far as some of our deep-space satellites and probes have travelled, there’s no chance of finding anything. He knows, but he hopes. I don’t. Not that I’ve given up: I just don’t know where we go from here.

‘Save me,’ he whimpers.

‘I would if I could,’ I say. I wait all day for him to sleep, but he doesn’t, and we’ve totally lost track of time again, because it’s like the Arctic here, no lack of daylight from the strip lighting. I take the painkillers in the lining and sleep, so lightly, barely even sleeping. I can’t remember when I last had a full night; what it’s like to put my head to a pillow, to feel that stillness of a bed, of drifting into proper sleep. I can’t remember what it’s like to actually dream: the things that I had before, the echoes of previous versions of me, they weren’t anything to do with me letting go. If anything, they were me clinging on. I wait for Cormac to sleep so that I can go out there, but he doesn’t, so I watch him.

I realize that I won’t get to sleep again before I die: at least, not in a bed, with a duvet, pillows, a mattress, the warmth of another person next to me, sharing my space.

‘I just want to get to say goodbye to Elena,’ he says. He’s looking at her photograph as the ship is full of the noise of the crew cheering, that first video home, where we lied and didn’t say anything about Arlen. The cheers seem to cling to everything Cormac says, rising and falling with a strange serendipity. ‘I miss her so, so much.’ He strokes her photograph on the screen, and then clutches himself, pulls himself tight, winces at whatever it is that he’s thinking. ‘This is so unfair.’

He reaches over and puts on the videos of Emmy again, to punish himself: because she’s as close to an admission of guilt as he can offer. He watches her talk about her training, smiling in her casual, semi-professional way, and he hammers the keyboard, writing letters to Elena, to his parents. He knows that they’ll never read them – that there’s no possible way that they ever could – but that doesn’t stop him. He cries as he writes them, finding it cathartic and powerful at first, because there’s real meaning there: and then he realizes that he’s done, that the people he’s writing to are even more dead than he is, and that there’s no going back from here. All he’s got left is to join them, and he’s always been an atheist, never believed in a higher power, especially not out here, where it’s so cold and dark and so absolutely full of nothingness.

Tomorrow he’ll break his leg. We’re nearly there, Cormac. We’ve nearly made it.

5

As the other Cormac gives us gravity, I brace myself against the lining, pushing back to stop from falling, and I don’t get to see him fall because of that: but I hear the crack of his leg as he lands oddly, such a small fall, but so vital. It makes me wince, and I take a painkiller like a gut reaction, a reflex. He howls, and by the time I’m on tiptoes back at the vent all I can see is the blood, soaking through his white uniform, the bend in the trouser leg like a right-angled pipe, where the bone is jutting through. My own leg starts hurting just to look at it, and I rub at the scar, ill-formed and only barely healed. In the cabin, he pulls out Emmy’s medicine cabinet, yanks the drawers to the floor, growling like a chained dog as he does it. He’s remarkably resilient, holding himself together through the pain far better than I thought he would: there aren’t tears, just howls of agony. He paws at the anaesthetic needles, jabs them into his own neck and presses the button, and I watch as he gets that glossy look in his eyes and the drugs run through him, taking the edge off. It’s not enough: he immediately sticks himself with another, and he tries to ignore the angle that his jutting bone is making, and the blood. If he concentrates on the blood, he’s likely to lose it. Antiseptic injections, to prevent infection, are next: he sticks himself like an old pro, desperate to save himself on some battlefield, and then he laughs, as he remembers that he’s going to die, that antiseptic won’t help that, that none of this – the pain, the bone, the risk of infection – will make the slightest bit of difference when he’s dead. He decides to bind and tie off his leg, because he needs his mobility. He isn’t just going to lie on the floor of the craft and wait to die.