The Explorer (29 page)

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that that was the moment that I decided to end it for myself, rather than ride it out. I watch as he passes out, just as I did, as he keeps coming to, his mind rolling around from consciousness to not. He splints his leg, because he thinks that he should. He keeps sleeping, and if I didn’t know better I would be worrying that he was dead, but he isn’t. I do know better. I’m tempted to head out there, see what I can do, but there’s nothing. This is sewn-in, hewed. I could change something, but then only a few seconds – half a minute? A minute? – later I would be right back at the start. I’ve made it this far: let’s see what it’s like to die.

He puts gravity back on when he wakes up again, starts the engines, watches as the 9% on the screen shouts at him, as the beeping of the 250480 tells him something he cannot understand. After a while he sleeps, in his bed, strapped in but with the door open so that his leg can drift. He leaves that part free and it swings around as he twitches in his sleep, like a cat’s tail. I manage to leave the lining for a few minutes, and I write a blog entry myself.

Acceptance: the final stage of grief, right? Is this all I’ve been working towards?

He coughs in his sleep, and I put myself back into the space between the walls. He doesn’t wake up, but I decide not to risk it. My daredevil days are over.

My first interview, after I got past the paper stage, the form sent in and stamped and approved, my name written down somewhere by somebody as a potential candidate. We were sent to a building in New York, unlabelled from the outside, like a secret. We waited in a nondescript waiting room, the magazines on the table reflecting nothing but the secretary’s tastes, and we leafed through them and tried to not make eye contact with each other. We didn’t know why the others were there – we didn’t know what field they were from, or even if they were here for the same thing. The building had so many offices, and any one of them might have been for a different DARPA project, and it wasn’t right to probe, so I didn’t. Nobody else did either. There was a part of me that wondered if it was a silent first test: can you make it through the first stage without getting excited, without spilling the beans? I passed, with flying colours.

When they finally called me through to the room, I sat in a comfortable chair, one of those expensive ones they fill fancy office spaces with, and faced a panel of three, two women and a man, all older. They told me their names and shook my hand, and asked me why I had applied.

‘Because I want to explore something,’ I said. ‘It’s all that I’ve ever wanted to do.’ They wrote that down. ‘May I ask why you want to know?’ It was cocky, bolshy, but that was who I was, who I used to be, as a journalist. Before Elena died, and my world fell apart.

‘It’s crucial,’ they said, ‘because some people do this for the glory, for the rewards, and that’s not something that we necessarily want to encourage.’

‘So my answer was the right one?’ I asked, and they smiled, but didn’t reply. They asked me other questions – about my health, about Elena, my parents – and then told me that they would be in touch. They stood and shook my hand, and they each shook it harder than the last, and I thanked them for the opportunity and left. When I got out, the same people were in the waiting room, and they were all biting their nails or checking their emails, and I wondered about every single one of them: about whether they wanted onto the trip because they were excited about the opportunity, or because it was something to put on their CV. I looked at every single one of them and hoped that it was the latter, that they didn’t get the job and I did, because, I thought, my intentions were pure. I deserved it.

Wanda’s videos fill the screens. She feigns excitement, and then leans in and whispers to me that the controls are fake, and then makes out that she’s joking. She’s not. She knows what’s going to happen. She knows everything, and she can’t deal with it, and she knows we’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of when.

The me sits at the computers and reads everything again, and then stumbles upon the bit about the Crash Assist, where the craft jettisons the cargo to lose weight, then fires the stasis pods towards Earth with their own parachutes, and the rest of the hull collapses and falls apart, to harmlessly tumble towards the ground, the people, the sea, whatever. It’s a eureka moment. He’s in agony, still, dumb and blinkered by the drugs he’s taken – aren’t we all? I think – and he reads how to do it, over and over, and then starts typing into the computer, commands that he doesn’t understand but that he’s been instructed to use. Only now do I wonder why it was there, that fail-safe we would never use, and I realize that it was only ever intended to be used if something happened during take-off, the cargo being jettisoned from the rear to allow it to safely hit the sea we launched over, allowing for recovery of the ship’s guts, and maybe us, if there were even parachutes in the first place. He presses the Enter key, and the main hull door seals, and I realize that I’m locked out – my entrance to him is through that door, back past the lining, past the cargo rooms.

He presses the button again, and the noise is awful, grinding and churning of doors that have never been opened before, and then the cold rushes to me – not actual cold, just the pull of the outside. There’s barely anything between me and space, nothing sealed, nothing airtight. I’ve got seconds, I reckon, until all the doors are open. I plough myself to the vent overlooking the changing room, kick at the vent as hard as I can, shoulder it, and it starts to give way, and then it does, and I’m into the room, pulling on a helmet as fast as I can manage, yanking my head into it as the air rushes out, slamming the visor down, breathing, fiddling with the dials to give myself some time, to get me breathing, and then the door to the changing room flies away from me, and I’ve got no time. I fix the bungee, because I’m suddenly afraid to die. This isn’t what I want.

The ship is suddenly still, all the air gone. Everything from the cargo rooms, the changing room, all the loose bits and bobs are suddenly floating. They drift, and I go with them, knowing that Cormac is about to initiate the countdown, and I float to the doorway between us, stare through the transparent window set into it. I have to stop him doing this. If I have a reason for being here, it has to be that, surely? It has to be to save him. I hammer on it, but I know he won’t hear me, so I hammer harder, because there’s nothing else to do. He presses the button, and the lights dim, and the numbers on the computer screens wipe away, replaced by that countdown.

30. He just sits in Arlen’s chair and watches it, 29, 28, 27. I in turn watch him, and then I can see it, out of the front window: that blackness, totally stark against the rest of the stars, like a puddle of oil; but slick, floating in front of us. I didn’t see it first time around: my eyes were too full of tears. 26. I get to the Bubble, 23, and look at it, and it gives me a reading straight away: ANOMALY, it says, ANOMALY 250480. I didn’t do this last time – the first time – because I didn’t see it, not until it was too late. What could a computer tell me about what was happening to me, or what was going to happen to me? Now it tells me everything: there’s something out here with us. With me.

This something was our secondary objective; or, maybe, our primary objective, and we just didn’t know it; the thing that Guy yammed on about and we ignored, because he was a scientist doing science. It was the thing that he was going to measure, that he acted off-hand about, off-the-cuff, almost. He was lying. He knew about this – about how vast it is, how massive, how it must mean something. Where it was: that it was further than we could reach. He knew how we
could
reach it, though. This was his life’s work, and he knew that it would kill him. That’s why it was throwing up the message on screen so much: it was a warning. We were meant to fly into the storm, but we were never going to tell home how strong it was, or tell them how to combat it, or what it was going to do. We were just meant to tell them where it was. Anyway, maybe it would turn out to be harmless, just a smudge on a window. Or, maybe it’s something more important, deadly to the human race, sliding across space to swallow us whole. I suppose I’ve been inside it for awhile: I suppose it’s why this is so dark. Why I’m doing this over and over. I’ll never really know, not now. Now, it doesn’t actually matter.

14 seconds left, and I read something on the screen about how much it’s grown, and then, based on that, projected growth, and I don’t know how big it’s going to get, or what that means, but I like to think that it means Guy was actually trying to save us all – like, maybe it’s going to get big enough to envelope the Earth, and maybe he was there all along, not the bad guy he ended his life as, but the one I made friends with, who seemed reasonable, who seemed penitent for what he had done. There’s a greater good.

3, 2, 1, and the ship cracks up, and the pods jettison, because I hear them roar past, and then everything is silent. This is how it should be. The front wall of the Bubble splinters and I’m suddenly floating, attached to a large lump of hull that looks like an airlock, still, a metal box, dragging backwards. Cormac is in front of me, twisting forwards, still strapped to his chair, heading towards the blackness of the anomaly. He’s going to hit it, and that’s what sends him back to the start, makes him do this again: I have to stop it, save him.

I push off the Bubble as fast as I can, blast CO2 for a boost, knowing that he’s only got seconds before this is pointless, before he’s done, and then I’m at his chair and pull him out of it, and the bungee goes taut but he’s still ahead of me. It’s attached to the helmet, so I yank it off, because I have to do something. The pressure makes me blind, and we were told to shut our eyes but I don’t, because this only ends one way. I have seconds, seconds, and then it hits me: this is what happened. I was here the very first time, because I have to have been for this all to happen, and I felt hands on me, because I was heading towards what is almost a wall of blackness, cloying and tangible, like thick ink, and I felt somebody – myself, this future version of me, the me from now – save me, pull me away from the blackness, and towards the nothingness behind us. It’s a paradox, a closed loop: I was here so this could all happen as it did. You can’t change time, because my gut tells me I can’t. I parse it: I can do exactly what happened the first time, grab him, push him into the blackness, because that’s what I’m meant to do. Every thought I have that doesn’t involve it makes me hurt. But, then, here and now, that pain means very little to me. Cormac is the definitive version; I’m just a later version of him, a version that never has to exist. I have seconds to change everything, seconds when this might become something different, and I have to let us both go. The blackness – whatever it is – will cause him (or me) to go back to the start, prolong our lives for however long, cursing us. Now, I have to have the courage to do what he couldn’t. I make the decision, and my gut screams at me, aches, burns, and it feels wrong, but I have to do it, because this might be the only chance I get. What if every other time I’ve been here I’ve thought I’m meant to make it happen as it did? What if I thought I was meant to make the circuit closed, make it perfect, complete? Save Cormac by pushing him into the anomaly, because that way leads to life?

Maybe this time I should try something different.

Before, I spun around and I was saved. Now: I open my fingers and he opens his eyes, and he sees me, and I tell him that it will be all right, but this time I’m lying. I clutch onto him and fire the CO2 again. I look back and see it push apart the blackness, like throwing a stone onto the surface of a lake, once so still, now broken and disturbed, and I clutch Cormac as we push away from the anomaly, going away from the still-exploding ship, away from the blackness, away from everything. All we’ve got is each other, he and I, I and he, and I did what I had to do. He coughs and chokes in my arms, and I don’t look as all those things they warned us about start happening to him. I can feel him going in my arms, and then I can feel it happening to me, because now my eyes have been open, and you can never survive this, no matter what you do, who you are. I opened my eyes to look at the blackness as it swallows the wreckage of the ship, the hungriest thing I’ve ever seen: the darkest part of space, swallowing everything in its path. I let go of Cormac, because he’s done, and so am I.

I wait and feel my lungs stop, and I open my eyes wide and stare forward at the nothingness, going onwards forever, it seems, on and on, with or without me there to see it, and my head feels like it’s about to burst. I’m not back on the ship. I don’t have my scars. I’ve not opened the door and killed Arlen, and I haven’t started this all again, confused and lost and alone but not alone. I haven’t done that. I wait to see if it’ll happen before I die, and if it does, if I’ll even remember this moment in the first place.

From here, space looks like it does from any garden, anywhere. It’s so still.

Acknowledgments

Thanks go first and foremost to Dr Robert Simpson, friend and astrophysicist. When I started writing
The Explorer
I threw ideas at him, over and over. A lot of the science (the stuff that’s right and logical) is probably down to him. The other stuff? Blame me for that.

Sam Copeland is my agent, and I couldn’t be more grateful for all of his hard work. He saw this novel in its earliest form and knew what it ultimately could be. He told me that I could make it that novel, so thank/blame him appropriately. Thanks too to everybody else at RCW.

Thanks to Amy McCulloch, whose suggestions for edits made the novel better with each press of the Delete key. Thanks also to my copyeditor, Joy Chamberlain, who said the nicest thing about my writing that I have ever heard. Thanks to all at Voyager Books /HarperCollins UK for everything that they do so very well.

And lastly, there are those classic creators of the SFF work that first drove me to write. Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Iain Banks, George Orwell, Harlan Ellison, John Wyndham, Alfred Bester . . . All wrote the stories that they wanted to tell, and never forgot that Story is the thing. You would do well to track down and read anything and everything that they’ve written.