The Explorer (6 page)

I drag myself across the floor to the table, trying not to look at my leg, trying not to let it drag – or worse, snag on anything, the jutting bone facing outwards like a little hook looking for a catch – and hoist myself to the seats. The cupboard is above that table, and I manage to get it open without having to push myself up any higher than the seats themselves. From there, the scissors. My shaky hands don’t do justice to the fabric, tearing and ripping as best they can, until I can finally see the damage itself. With the pink of the blood, the yellow of my skin, it looks like coral. It looks – as with coral – almost aerated, fine holes, bubbles running throughout. This is my shin, pushed out and upwards and through the skin, a one-inch punch, as neat and delicate as my own surgery on the trouser leg.

In the kit there is a huge roll of bandages, some elastic strips, some plasters, a self-cleaning syringe with multiple doses of morphine in it, another with some sort of anaesthetic, another with antiseptic. There should be tens of bottles of painkillers, as well, but the tray is nearly empty, their slots sad and vacant, only one bottle left. I wonder which of the crew was using them; we were warned that they could be addictive, that the headaches, the sickness we might feel would pass, that the painkillers were strictly for emergency use. There’s a metal splint. I take the syringes and the splint and the bandages and shuffle backwards on the bench, pulling my leg by the thigh until it is flat – or as flat as I can get it – on the bench with me. The beeping persists from the computer. Fuck.

I use the base of my hand to hold my leg at the knee, pressing down to stem the blood, tying a bandage off around it, pulling my hand free. The blood is already darker, already congealing. I wonder if blood finds it harder to do its job in space? I wonder if bones heal the same? Technically, I suppose, it’s a surface wound. Two injections of antiseptic, two of anaesthetic, the morphine on the side for when I need it. I clean the area around the rupture, wipe it down, and then put one hand on my calf, the other on the nape of the bone, using the base of my palm. I brace myself, count to three, breathe, and then push down. The bone – seemingly my whole shin – shifts, sliding down, and there’s an almost satisfying click as it meets whatever it is that it slots into, like the clunk of a car door sliding shut. It doesn’t really feel like anything. I inject another antiseptic, wipe the area down, bandage it, and then extend the splint, rest it on the front of my leg and wrap the arms around my calf. Activating it makes it tug itself tighter, and I can feel the pressure on my bone, and then the pain starts to come back, just as the splint thinks it’s found the right level of tautness for my muscles, and it hisses as it shuts itself off. The pain crescendoes, and I take the morphine, inject it into my neck. Pain, or morphine, or something, makes me pass out.

I dream of space. At least, I think it’s a dream: otherwise, it’s just nothing.

I wake up to the beeping, still. My leg is swollen, but the pain has subsided slightly. I inject more anaesthetic into the puffed skin around the bandages and give myself a far smaller dose of morphine than I took last night and shuffle to the edge of the seat. It’s five metres to the control panels, maybe slightly more. In zero gravity, that’s two pushes, maybe. Here? I put my good leg onto the floor. It winces, but only slightly: the second injury was just a mild twist, I think, nothing fatal. (Ha! That I should worry about fatality! Here!) From there I push myself to standing, and from there grab part of the bulkhead and shuffle myself towards it. I grab the inside wall and pull myself along until I reach the chairs in the cockpit section, and sit down in the pilot’s chair. I have avoided this one until now: I’ve always used Quinn’s. I don’t know why.

The computer tells me that there’s an ALERT, and that the battery is down to 10%. It must be the gravity field. I had no idea it took that much power. I’ve just managed to lose a week of my life, all so that I could shatter my leg apart. Fuck it. I switch the engines back on. I start drifting upwards as the battery power percentage disappears to a corner where it displays a recharging symbol, and the 9% moves back to the centre of the screen. 9% of fuel, and the life support ticks down on cue, matching that number. 9%. My life, in single digits.

I sleep, but I don’t remember actually dropping off. I remember lying against the bed, the straps tugging slightly at my side, my leg hanging limp. The lack of gravity makes this wonderful, my leg floating free and easy behind me, swinging like a cat’s tail. I remember wondering why I couldn’t sleep, getting annoyed at the hum of the engines, the light from the monitors. I remember thinking about Elena, and then the computer beeped to 8%, and I decided to wake up. I’m not even tired any more.

I put on Wanda’s videos, and in them she is cleaning the front console. ‘This is the fun part of the job,’ she says, ‘this is where the action is.’ She seems so sad, like she doesn’t want to be here.

‘Do you have to be careful when cleaning this stuff?’ Video-me asks. She shakes her head and leans in towards the camera conspiratorially.

‘No,’ she says. ‘None of this actually does anything; it’s all smoke and mirrors.’

As the computer ticks down to the 7% mark I am sitting at the backup terminal, reading about the propulsion systems. There is a schematic showing me the sequence and code to enter into the computer to accelerate the engines, to take us to maximum power. We are using most of the power of the ship, apparently. The piezoelectric batteries have barely charged, certainly not enough to make it worth my while to use them. I don’t want to wait, not any more. I’m going to end this. There’s a self-destruct, like how all the best old films and stories had one, built in to stop American technology falling into the hands of our enemies. I don’t know why it’s here; all I know is that it is. It’s called something else; it’s labelled as a ‘Crash Assist’, in case we were headed back to Earth too quickly, and we needed to shed the craft and let the stasis pods float back to Earth on their own, with their own in-built parachutes. It makes the hull break up into pieces, like Lego, and leaves everything else to fall of its own accord. Everything shatters. It feels appropriate. It makes the engines accelerate briefly, just for a few seconds, far beyond their natural ability, to short them out; and then the ship opens itself, and here’s all the people. I have just enough energy to do it, according to the computer. Just enough.

The guidelines tell me that, in case of emergency, I am to jettison all unnecessary cargo. I seal the main hull off from the back of the ship and open the external rear doors and the food stockpiles, the external suits, the oxygen tanks, everything gets sucked out. It’s much faster than I imagined, a real ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment. I shut the doors and read the next guideline.
First, ensure the rest of the crew are safely in stasis
. (Ha! Emmy looks at me through the glass, safe and sound, tucked in.)
Next, prepare your stasis bed for yourself, and enter these instructions
.

I type the complicated string of numbers into the computer. Ensure that everything is secure – hatches, doors, the stasis beds – and then press the Enter key.
Caution! Upon pressing the key a countdown will initiate, and when finished, the engines will reach Maximum Efficiency. The countdown will last 30 seconds.
I take one last look around the ship. There’s nothing here for me. I pull myself to Arlen’s chair again, stare out of the view screen: It’s so peaceful. There’s nothing but blackness for as far as I can see. I strap myself in, and lean over to switch the gravity on again. If I’m going to do this, I want to feel it: I don’t want to be floating, airlessly. I want the stress. I want to know what it feels like. I want to see it, and I don’t want to have battery backup left to keep me here, all broken bones and torn limbs, lying in pain, waiting to die, before finally choking to death, suffocating without air. I think I am saying all of this aloud, to nobody. I think.

Gravity kicks in immediately, and the pain clambers back up my broken leg with the weight I’m suddenly putting on it. I hit Enter, and the countdown starts. 30, 29, 28. My life, the last few weeks, has been dictated by numbers. 27, 26. I go years without thinking about them, thinking instead about words. 25, 24, 23. Suddenly I find them the most important things in the world. 22, 21. Countdowns, percentages, time: they all matter. 20, 19. And the message, the numbers on the screen. 18, 17, 16. I’ll die, never knowing what they mean. 15, 14. They’ll be a MacGuffin, always eluding me. 13, 12, 11. Like everything else, they’ll just fade, I suppose, 10, as I move on, wherever it is that I’m going, 9, and nobody will ever know that I didn’t know what it was, 8, just another batch of trophies and 7 commiserations on somebody’s 6 shelf, and I hope she 5 misses me as much as I 4 want her to, because oh, God, Elen3a, I miss you so 2 much, so much 1 it hurts.

I can’t move. I can barely see. There’s water everywhere, it feels like, and I try to gulp in breaths through my mouth, but I can feel it twist and move, and never actually get the air that I want from it. I can make out the shapes of the numbers on the screen, but they aren’t important, not any more. This is it. I stare at the window in front of me, at the cracks that are starting to form in the plastic (another me would have asked why they don’t test this!) and at the space; there’s suddenly something in the distance, blacker than the rest of it, somehow. It’s more tranquil than everything else I can see, with no stars, just an expanse of pure, absolute night, so black that it almost looks solid, like I could just reach out and touch it. I’m focused on it when the crack directly in front of me splits like my leg, and it pulls the window out almost wholly. All the sound dulls away, and I feel the clasps attaching me to the chair being pulled at, tugged, yanked. As we reach the blackness of space I come free and I can suddenly hear that blackness, that somehow, here in the vacuum, it has noise, a roar, a filthy, gasping roar, like a whirlpool, a maelstrom, but I’m spinning out of the ship, and out of myself, and out here, in the deepest part of space that man has ever been, it feels like somebody is holding me, telling me that it will all be all right as I take one last breath of air, of actual air, the last one left on the ship, and I swallow it down and let it wash all over me, knowing that it will be the one that I take as I die, and then I regret this, because maybe I gave up too soon, and Elena wouldn’t be proud of me, giving up like this, because she always told me that I was the strong one, and I see the blackness, worse than space, worse than anything, utterly black, and it swallows me whole.

PART TWO

We live, as we dream –

Alone.

– Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

1

Elena’s voice; soft, eager. She asks me to wake up, so I do. I lean over to her, tell her that I’ve heard her say this before. She laughs.

‘Cormac,’ she says, ‘you have to save yourself. You have to wake up.’

I open my eyes, and it’s the same blackness for a second, so dark I can’t think, even, and I can feel it in my eyes, in every part of me; and then the roar of the ship’s engines, but with that noise behind them, like an echo, like a microphone that distorts your voice into the timbre of some horror-movie villain. Then the noise stops, but it’s still so cold I can barely see anything, and it suddenly hits me; the temperature, the noise. The ship tore itself apart; or I thought that it did. I try to pull myself to my feet, but then I realize that I’m not on the floor at all; the gravity is gone still. These are the rules of space travel. I can barely see anything, because the cold is making my eyes hurt, and I can’t hear anything, even myself when I try to shout, because the sound from the engines – it must still be the engines, although they should be gone, destroyed, sucked into the void – is like a howl, totally decimating the air, filling it with itself and nothing else, like white noise. I feel my way around, hitting every surface I brush against in slow motion, trying to work out where I am. It’s freezing cold, so cold that it hurts, that when I gulp for breath it almost burns my lungs to take it in. I am back on the
Ishiguro
, or I never left. Either way, this is my ship. I feel the rounded screen-door of one of the beds, find the handle, wrench it open. They’re all dead, and I’m not, but if I don’t get inside I will be. All of a sudden, here and now, I want to save myself. I wonder how much of what I felt before – what I saw, my drift into the darkness, the ship exploding – how much of it was real. Did I even do the self-destruct? Did I somehow imagine it all? The door hisses open, and I see his face, suddenly clear: Arlen. His already-dead body is worth far less than my survival; even though my bed is only feet away, I can feel the pull inside the ship’s atmosphere, threatening to tear me apart.

I unclip him, push him to one side and slide in in his place. I remember sleeping in these things from the first time I did it. It’s hazy, distant, but still there. You don’t forget something this important. There’s thirty seconds before you sleep, thirty defined seconds and then there’s nothing. I stare out of the glass of the pod and then I remember my leg, which now is healed, the blood only a tired stain on the clothes, faded almost completely, and I can move it, flex it, and I know that something – either the end, before, or this now – cannot be real.

The door to the bed opens and spits me out. This is how it was the first time, still totally familiar; the weirdest sensation, leaving you soaking wet, gasping for air, as if, almost, you’ve forgotten how to breathe. For that first second it’s so alien, so complicated, and there’s so much water dripping off you that it feels like you’re drowning, maybe. The water drips off me, and the ship sucks it into its vents, ready for reprocessing, for turning into drinking water, shower water. I’m dry in seconds.

My eyesight is still screwed up, so I rub at my eyes, blink wildly. I jam my foot against the corner of the room, steady myself. The whir of the ship – engines on, moving quickly, but nothing like the noise I heard before, when I woke – is nearly distracting, because it’s so quiet again, that same hum as it always was, engines working fine, ticking along. Then I see Arlen. I had forgotten. I’d forgotten what he looked like when we opened the bed, found him there. He looks the same; almost blue, flaking like an old wall.