The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  I wake shaking, sweating. I take another painkiller, dry swallowing it, gulping it down with saliva from my mouth, and I lie back and put my hand on my heart, because it’s racing, thudding like it wants to come out of my chest. Through my paltry flesh, it feels like it’s going to split my ribs.

  ‘Please,’ I say, because I don’t want to die, not now. ‘Please.’ Cormac is asleep, finally; draped over the captain’s chair, head lolled to the side. I leave the lining, still holding my chest, wrapping my right arm across to my left as if it will hold my body together. I don’t know what’s happening, but I pull myself to the medicine cabinet, open it as quietly as I can, and it isn’t until I’m standing over it, using my other arm to stop the contents drifting everywhere, that I realize the pain has gone, that I was just dreaming. I’m alive, still, and my heart is racing, but I’m fine.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not fine.

  In the bathroom, as Cormac’s head lolls backwards in the cockpit, I examine myself again. Another tooth, but that’s to be expected. I crick both my knees, having the room to extend, and listen as the bone in them grinds against itself. They told us that the cartilage would be the first thing to go. It’s a wonder I’m not in more pain. (Then I remember the painkillers, strong enough to dope a horse, and I’m no horse.) I look at the scar on my leg, the others on my back, and I wonder how long the bone in my leg took to heal here, where bones don’t work the way they should, where the body isn’t right? If I had to put pressure on it for any real amount of time, sans self-medication, would it hurt? Would it even work properly? I try to feel the bone through my skin, and it seems fine: but I can’t believe that it is.

  I’m a fucking disaster. I don’t have any chance of getting home, no chance of putting right any of the shit that went wrong, no chance of doing anything to save myself. I’m expendable. Cormac out there, he’s the important thing. If I can get the circuit complete, maybe he’ll wake up and won’t have to do this again. Or, maybe he won’t wake up at all.

  That’s the first time I realize what I think I have to do: to save Cormac, I have to kill myself – this later version of me.

  Cormac is angry, furious, even. He screams at the computers, which will never answer back.

  ‘Why is the fuel going down quickly? This is going faster than it should.’ He finds our speed and writes it down, and then searches, and he can’t be sure, but he thinks it’s faster than it should be. It is. I know about Guy’s tampering, now; about trying to make it easier on us. In some ways, maybe we should have been grateful – or maybe I should have been, because I was all that was left. Am all that is left.

  I’m having trouble with my tenses, sometimes. Is this now or then? It’s so easy to get them confused at times like this.

  In the movie of this, assuming that anybody’s still watching, that anybody has stayed in their seats and dug in for more popcorn, this is the scene where I pace up and down a room, working through ideas, dismissing them or scrawling them on a giant blackboard. In reality, I lie down in the lining with my pen and paper and make tiny, almost illegible notes about nothing. I can’t change anything, because every time I do – or have, previous versions of me – everything resets, back to the point where, what, we entered hypersleep? We hit warp? To that point I can’t change it. I wonder if the loop ends when Cormac’s life does. Will I just wake up back at the start – or, another version of me – and have to do this over and over again, forever, until my body is so crippled that I can’t even open that door and kill Arlen at the beginning, so the loop resets as soon as it starts, and that’s it, hell, for me, forever? Maybe that’s the answer: this is hell. When I die, I start again, looping, somehow back alive, my body broken but going again. Maybe I’ll do this until I get into that loop, stuck in agony and going round and round, dying over and over and over again, the pain and the torment and the loop, and nothing else until the end of time.

  Fuck.

  Cormac has managed to work out how long it is between percentage points, which means he’s made a spreadsheet of sorts, telling him how long he’s got left. It won’t stay like that: something happens, and the fuel goes down faster. For now, at least, he’s got it down pat. He sits and counts down from ten using the stopwatch app until the numbers roll over.

  ‘Three… Two… One…’ He’s perfectly on. The fuel counter drips down to 33%. It’ll be about a week until it accelerates. What are we going to do with all that time?

  The only thing stopping me from killing myself is the knowledge that I’ll probably wake up with my throat slit on the floor of the ship, and I’ll keep dying until I manage to, somehow, heal, and then I’ll keep reliving that pain, that agony, for the foreseeable. It’s got to be better to see this through. It has to be.

  4

  He sleeps so much. He sleeps, and then he wakes up and writes his fucking blog entries, and he reads the manuals for the ship cover to cover, the stuff that only Guy read. He searches on the computer for the meanings to some of the phrases, the equations, and he nods as if he understands them. He doesn’t. He’s fucking clueless, spiralling along like a patsy. He goes to the Bubble and he calls up overlays, and he makes notes, and in his blog entries he writes about the things that he’s seen, because if they do recover the broadcasts – they should reach Earth eventually, he knows, though they might be scrambled, and they might be late (and I know now, given DARPA’s intentions for us on this flight, they might be conveniently ignored, or buried, because who wants those ramblings becoming public? They aren’t heroic, aren’t intrepid, aren’t anything but one man and his head) – because if they do recover them, they’ll be the last things he’ll have ever written. In his delusions, he writes that he thinks they might be his own eulogy.

  Who knows? I wanted to go for the Pulitzer, for a work of journalism that broke boundaries, that told humanity something new. Maybe, through these dying thoughts, I’ll have achieved that.

  He speaks about things he knows nothing about, inserting the names of galaxies and nebulae and words of description that mean nothing to him, flowery language to somehow offer the punctuation of meaning, to imply knowledge that he doesn’t have. If Emmy were awake she would tell me that I was being narcissistic. She would point out that he’s me, and that I did all of this, and that I’m only seeing it this way now because I’m on the outside, because I can appreciate it for what it actually is. I would argue with her, and tell her that even first time round I knew this was fucking pathetic. Everybody needs an antagonist, I would say, and he is mine.

  ‘See? Classic narcissist,’ she would reply.

  After days and days of sleep, I wake up when he presses the button and we stop. I almost shout, because I fall a foot or so, the straps slackening, and my back hits the floor, the exact same spot where it was cut, where it’s scabbed over. I already ache constantly: this is just another complaint. I try to not make noise, but I barely care. I don’t think he would notice if I did. He puts on that video of Emmy again, and he watches it on one screen. On the other he’s got his pictures of Elena, and he picks the one of her taken in Cromer, and zooms in, and he weeps. He watches them both and he sits there feeling guilty and he cries for himself. If you could only see yourself, I think, and that makes me laugh, because it was entirely accidental. Jesus Christ, Cormac. Pull yourself together.

  With the lights off, it’s harder to keep track of him. I can see his shape in the cockpit and the lounge, but when he’s in the hallways he’s a ghost. He can see better than I can, I guess; and he’s got a little torch on his suit, the kind they have on life jackets, so I can see that when he shines it. He finds the food he wants: when I leave the lining, I’m left grabbing whatever bars I can find first, fumbling in the dark and trying to stay silent. Somehow, despite his self-pity and mourning, he’s the alpha male, and I’m left scrabbling for his scraps.

  We spend two days there. Two full days, doing nothing, watching as the numbers on the piezoelectric counter tumble, as the air starts to thin. His shitty calcu
lations are based on him being the only person who needs to breathe, and here in the lining, at the back of the vacuum pumps and airdispensers, I’m suffering. I feel light-headed, and spend much of those days lying down. First time around, it felt – I remember it feeling – almost like an adventure. I remember trying to keep my spirits up, or, at least, that’s how I wrote the blogs. I read them now and they’re awful, mournful, dark as anything. He’s suffering and I hate him for it. He should have just killed himself. He should have had the nerve to end it like a man, in the bathroom, in the shower, a knife into his neck or his wrist, or put the gravity on and use the safety cord, tied off around something. I see him contemplate it, when he looks at the pictures of Elena: he looks at them and at something that he’s written, a file on the computers about her that I can only read a sentence of before I have to stop, because it’s still so fresh. Did I think I wasn’t still in mourning? I’ll always be in mourning.

  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 dr
unk, 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.