The Explorer (21 page)

I watch them suit up, and then I watch Emmy, alone, brutally affected. She is a shell. She sits and bites at the flesh around her fingernails, because her fingernails are perfect and manicured, cultivated over months; but that flesh will heal quickly. She doesn’t make it bleed. She only nibbles at the hard part, pressed up against the nail itself. She keeps looking at Guy, before eventually sitting in the seat in the cockpit, too far away for me to see her. I’m shaking, and I’m sweating, wet running up my back, making my top stick to me. This is the start of my cold turkey. Quinn and the me are outside, only they don’t know what they’re looking for. Neither of them saw what Guy destroyed. I did. If I’m meant to fix it, only I can, now.

Every part of me aches. Before this, I wouldn’t moan. It wasn’t in my DNA. Elena would take the piss out of me: she would say that I was willing to worry about everything else, but sickness . . . Sickness was something I liked to pretend I was impervious to.

‘It’s like you can’t even begin to admit defeat,’ she said. ‘You can’t accept that it’s okay to just let go.’ She would tease me, because I would plug on and make myself worse. I would have the flu and it would last weeks because I refused to take a sick day, to plant myself under the covers and eat soup and watch TV and stop. For me, the work was the important thing. Having a runny nose wouldn’t stop me writing. If it’s what you want, you persevere. ‘If you had even one day off you’d get better straight away,’ she would tell me, waving vitamins under my nose as she threw them into her mouth every morning. ‘A little vitamin C, you might stop getting these colds, and then you wouldn’t have to pretend that you felt okay all the time.’

‘I feel fine,’ I would say, when I didn’t. Now, though, I might be admitting defeat. It’s the shivers: they run through me completely, pushing me to the point where I can hear my own teeth rattling against each other at the back of my mouth, making my jaw grind in my ears; I can feel my elbows and knees on the metallic grating thing that I’m lying on; my clothes are drenched, like when I woke from the sleep pods for the first time, sodden, dripping, gasping for dry air; my head aches from the sheer pain of the vibrations coursing through me. It’s all too much. I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but even now I can barely get there. The rattle of my bones gets too loud inside my ears, and I pray that they’ll put the engines back on soon, just to drown it out, to maybe let me sleep again, or pretend to. They have to. And they’ll run out of air if they’re not careful. That’s the beauty of the ship: if it doesn’t move, the crew die. If it moves, the crew die. It’s a perfect, closed system, just like time itself.

Quinn marches back into the ship, throws his tool – the manual version of the tool that Guy hurled into the darkness, which is now probably a satellite, far out and orbiting something somewhere – and he shouts at nobody in particular. I remember being out there with him, struggling to open the holes, looking at the damage, not having a clue what to do. Or, rather, he knew what it should have looked like, but it didn’t, because Guy had made it so. In the ship, I watch as Quinn opens the comms app again.

‘We can try emergency frequencies,’ he says, ‘they should be monitoring them, so they’ll pick those up.’

‘We stay here?’ Emmy asks him from her vantage point in the cockpit.

‘We don’t move a fucking muscle.’ I can’t see the screen that says how much oxygen we’ve got left, but I remember that we were moving when Quinn died, so I know it can’t be long, because he’s on his penultimate day. As Guy died, so too comes the tragedy of Quinn’s impending death, because this is a constant and I can’t change it.

Quinn spends the rest of the day trying the emergency band, but there’s no answer there either. We don’t even have static on this system: if you don’t make contact it’s just silent, totally black. There are no frequencies to shift between, no manual toggle, no choice. There’s Ground Control and then there’s emergency, and there’s a button toggle for each. I can’t tell Quinn that it’s all in vain, whichever one he chooses, but as I watch him press alternating buttons and repeat the same message over and over – ‘Come in, Ground Control, anybody, this is the
Ishiguro
’ – I think he already knows. My telling him wouldn’t actually change a thing: he would still be there, hammering at the screen, trying to get it to suddenly understand what he wants it to do. Eventually Emmy and I go to other rooms – her to the changing room, the me to the corridors, where I walk up and down – just to get away from the noise of Quinn’s tapping. From the lining I watch him as he sits in front of the screen, sitting too close, focused, intent, driven, working.

They sleep with the gravity on, no longer drifting. I wonder how long it takes for the momentum to die out here; if we’re endlessly moving, no matter what we try to do. The speed we have behind us when the engines are on, I wouldn’t be surprised, even with the slight reverse thrust given when we go to full-stop. I wonder how long it takes us to reach terminal velocity; and when you reach it, if nothing presses against you to stop it, do you ever stop? What is the resistance of space?

I have to creep, because suddenly I have footfalls. I leave my boots in the lining and tiptoe through the house, wary of waking anybody. Every single noise in the ship makes me think that somebody’s watching me: that the ghosts of those who have died are here. Guy, Wanda, Arlen: they’re peering at me as I sneak. I feel another tooth move, and I scratch at my stubble, and I ache in every single one of my ribs. The tool that Quinn threw is on the floor; I take it, latch it onto my belt. Inside the changing room, I pull on a suit, and then I head to the airlock. I shut the outer door totally silently, or as silently as I can, and I free myself from the airlock with a press of the button. I’ve tied the safety line myself: I’m in control. I drift out onto the ship and cling on, clambering around the hull. My gut burns, telling me I shouldn’t do this. I do anyway. I haven’t changed anything yet. I move to both panels that Guy opened, open them again, and I look at what he did. I can’t see anything. There are wires inside the panels, and some of them are attached, some of them cut, some of them loose. I can’t tell what he did. I push the wires to one side, try to see if there’s a picture on the underside – like underneath the hood of a car, where the oil and water are marked with graphic representations – but there’s nothing. The wires are loose, and then I push them back, and they look different. One of them is looser, as well; a pink one, thick and taut like strawberry liquorice. It hangs loose, drifting, but looks like it’s meant to be a part of something, like it has a purpose. I think about plugging it in but my gut tells me not to. It’s the strongest feeling yet, from my head, my belly, telling me to leave it as it is. I don’t know what happens if I do plug it in. I don’t think I want to know. I don’t even know which plug it was attached to, so I can’t put it back, I tell myself. Anything would be futile. I shut the panel and move to the next. Again, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I was hoping for sparks, or for scratches, or badly cut wiring. There’s nothing. Whatever Guy did, it was meant to be done, or could be easily hidden. I can’t fix anything. I head back to the airlock, and the wheezing in my belly subsides, putting me back on track.

As I stand in the changing room and put the suit back where I found it, I wonder if I’ve missed my birthday; what happens to dates, things like that, when you’re time travelling.

Quinn is first up. He hammers on the frontage of the me’s bed, calls for me to get up. No answer. He shouts at me to get up.

‘What about Emmy?’ the me asks.

‘Let her sleep,’ he says. We sit in the living room together and he asks the me if I’ve got any ideas what Guy did. ‘Anything at all?’

‘Nothing,’ the me says. ‘Sorry.’ He’s going on a walk, he says, and I remind him that he shouldn’t go by himself, but he ignores me.

‘That’s what I’ll have to do,’ he says. ‘I need you to tell me if the computer changes. All you need to do is hit return every time I tell you? Okay?’ He patches his helmet microphone into the computer headset loop, which the me puts on, and he enters the airlock. We can’t hear anything inside here. Every so often the me reacts to him, presses the single key on the computer but nothing happens. Occasionally Quinn shouts into the microphone, swears, hammers on the hull. Sometimes I think we can nearly hear it. When he comes back in he’s frowning, and he heads to the engines. He shuts the doors after him; the me sits and types at his computer, and stares idly at space, at everything around us. He doesn’t have a clue. Half an hour later, Emmy wakes up. ‘Where’s Quinn?’ she asks the me, and he tells her. She sits down near him, asks what he’s doing.

‘He wanted to find a way to turn us around. Maybe he thinks there’s something in the engines that he can do.’

‘Oh,’ she says. I watch us not talk, and I wonder what happened between us, because I don’t remember how it got like this. I just don’t remember it being this bad between us. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks the me, and he/I turns and smiles at her.

‘Fine,’ he says. He shrugs, and she looks away.

‘I should find Quinn,’ she says, and then he reappears and waves to us, down the corridor. From here, I can see that he’s acting suspiciously.

Elena never stopped asking me to pull out of the programme, even when the names of the final choices leaked to the press – nothing to do with me, or any of us, and we speculated that it was in fact a strategic thing, a calculated leak – and the press seemed firmly behind me over Terri, the other journalist. We were the last two to be picked between. Emmy, Arlen, Guy and Quinn’s places were secured, and Wanda’s, and it was just myself and Terri vying for that final place. They interviewed everybody else, asking them who they would rather have on the trip.

‘Camaraderie is of utmost importance,’ they told the crew, and asked them to answer honestly. They all told me that they picked me, even Emmy, even though we had barely spoken since our night together. She pulled me aside and said that she hoped we could move past it.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘we got on really well, and this is just stupid. We should get over it, right? It happens all the time and other people deal with it, and I would far rather spend months in a tin can with you than her. So, what do you say?’ She held out her hand for me to shake, but I hugged her instead.

‘I missed you,’ I told her, and I meant it. She folded herself into me and put her head on my chest. It was still too familiar, but I didn’t say anything.

That evening I told Elena that I was down to the last two.

‘There’s only me and this woman, and she’s not much cop.’ She acted as if she wasn’t listening, pushed her food around her plate, into her mouth as I waited for her to reply. ‘The rest of the crew all want me to go, and they told the bosses that. Hopefully I’ll get to go,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine?’ I never said it, but I hoped she’d suddenly come around, tell me that she was proud of me, that she wanted me to go. She would tell me that she understood, but that it hurt, that she would miss me, that we would pick up where we left off when I returned because I mattered to her.

‘Don’t go,’ she said, which was all she managed before she collapsed. I took her away from the table, put her on her back, checked she was okay – breathing, which she was – and then carried her to the bedroom. When she woke up she told me that I was the worst person in the world, that if I loved her I would never go. The argument began, and grew. She threw something at me – a book? – and it hit my head, next to my ear. I didn’t throw anything back. She carried on, circling the bed like I was going to pounce for her, when all I wanted was for her to calm down.

‘Don’t do this,’ I said to her.

‘This is your fault,’ she said. ‘This is the worst thing that you could ever do. You would leave me when we’re so happy? Why would you do this to us?’

Then, because I wanted to hurt her, but I had no other weapons, nothing I could use, I told her about Emmy, and about our night in the hotel.

‘This is so fucking stupid,’ Quinn says. We’re eating lunch – which makes me, now, in the lining, hungry, because I’ve been so intent on watching, so intent on seeing this through, not missing a single second (in case it’s important, something that I need to pass on to a future version of me to help him complete this), and I haven’t eaten a thing in a while – and trying to work out what’s wrong with the ship. I could be the curtain drawing back, the reveal, dropping down from the vent and shouting about Guy’s misdeeds, about the rogues and vagabonds at DARPA who decided that we were arbitrary sacrifices in the name of human endeavour; but I don’t. I don’t need dreams (echoes?) to tell me that that won’t work, that I’ll be reset before I can finish my story, wildly spouting conspiracy theories to people too terrified to listen properly. Emmy asks if Guy might not have done something, and Quinn defends him, slightly.

‘He said there was a problem and he was trying to fix it,’ he says, but from here I can hear the doubt in his voice.

‘That’s what he said,’ Emmy replies. ‘Doesn’t mean it was true.’

‘What are we going to do?’ the me asks.

‘There’s other stuff we can work on,’ Quinn says, ‘but I’ll need to be writing code.’ He thinks for a second. ‘You could go out, do the stuff outside. You’ve seen the panels, right? Inside them?’

‘Yes,’ the me says, ‘once.’

‘Okay. I can tell you what to do, and you can do it, right?’ He’s all affirmation, enforcing my self-belief. My skills are up to this, he tells me with his words. You, Cormac, are capable. He stands up, heads to the computer, pulls up schematics, shows me the wires, how they should look. ‘Some of the connections seem to be severed,’ he says, ‘so they need to be reconnected, rejoined, but I don’t know which exact ones. So you go out there, try changing them around – you know how to strip a wire? Use the solder clips to attach it to another one? – and I can try running code here while you do it. You tell me every time you’ve done a different wire, I work on that code.’ He sees something in my face. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he says. ‘You’ll be on the safety cable, I’ll get out there if you have any problems, and you won’t be out there long. Hour at most.’ He tells me to go and suit up, and I do, walking down the corridor slowly.