The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘Everything’s on schedule. We’re only a few days away from entering it. Maybe a week, at most. Everybodys fine here, even Cormac. We’ll send a final broadcast tomorrow. Okay. Gerhardt out.’

  He closes the application and goes back to the main cabin. He gets back into bed, but I daren’t go out there again, because I shut my eyes and nearly sleep and I dream, and in my dream I see myself out there, and he sees me, and he screams and it’s all over, which means that, once, I tried to go out there and discovered his open eyes for myself.

  6

  Guy acts as if everything is normal, not telling any of the crew about his conversation. He doesn’t mention anything even related to it until after lunch, when he suggests that we send a broadcast home.

  ‘It’s just been a while, and the connection will be getting shakier this far out. Might be our last chance to do video, so let’s do it.’ It’s not a request, but we – the crew, there at the table with him, we merry four – don’t care. It’s something. Again, though, Guy’s lied: first about Wanda, now this message home. I wanted his lies to be to protect us, but there’s something else to them, something bitter. He knows exactly how bad the connection will be, and he doesn’t tell us: he hides it from us under the veil of his personal speculation. We gather around the table when we’ve finished, and Guy presses the full-stop button, and we all drift to the ground. Usually I set up the connection but this time Guy takes charge, like a photographer in the olden days, lining up the shot, standing behind the camera to make sure we all look good. ‘This will be the last time they see our faces for a good long while,’ he says, ‘you want to make sure you look your best for it. Smile. Look happy.’ We do. ‘Hey, remember what’s important,’ he says. ‘We’re intrepid, right?’ He says the word like it doesn’t fit into his mouth, into the repertoire of his language.

  ‘Hi, all!’ Emmy starts. She sounds happy, still, somehow. I stand next to Quinn, and Emmy is on his other side, and Guy slides into shot in front of us all, kneeling. I remember looking at the top of his head as we spoke, noticing the faint marks on the skin of his neck where there had once been a tattoo, but which was now removed. I remember thinking how little I knew about him; how I would never have guessed that he had once been a rebel. He seemed so straight-laced. ‘This is the crew of the Ishiguro. We’re about to head out of video broadcast range, so we wanted to just send a message with an update, let you know how much we miss you all.’ She doesn’t say names: she’s got nobody there to miss, despite what she says. ‘We’ve been up here for a few weeks, and we’re looking forward to the next part of the trip. In two days?’ She looks at Quinn for confirmation, and he nods. ‘In two days we’re going to have travelled further than anybody else has ever travelled, which is an amazing feeling.’ She’s like a TV presenter. ‘All that we’ve ever had out this far before is probes and satellites. We’re doing what man has never done before.’ We all thought she’d have a career as a personality when we got home. It was her destiny.

  ‘We’re all excited about it,’ Quinn says. ‘We’ll try and broadcast again when it happens, so you can celebrate with us.’ He puts his hand on Emmy’s back, squeezes the folds of her suit, pulls it tighter so that she knows he’s there, that he’s with her.

  ‘And then, not long after that we’ll be coming home,’

  Emmy says. The me doesn’t say anything. Guy doesn’t say anything either, but when Quinn says that we should sign off he waves, shouts goodbye with the rest of us.

  ‘That was good,’ he says when we’ve severed the connection. That was, I remember, the last time we spoke to home.

  Elena used to worry about how we would survive the gap between us, the ever-increasing distance.

  ‘You won’t be able to speak to me directly,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how I’ll survive.’ We had just been told that personal contact was a no-no; every single broadcast we did home cost millions, each blog post I made thousands. At least I would still have contact with her through those, I said.

  ‘You know that I’ll be thinking of you with each message I write,’ I told her. ‘Every one is a letter to you, think of them that way.’

  ‘It’s not the same, Cormac.’ I had been finding her hairs on the pillows of the hotel-room beds, thick and black and coiled like snakes, and now she bit her fingernails down past the line of flesh, towards what my mother used to call the quick. Her hands used to be pretty; I don’t tell her that. ‘It’s not the same. Because I’ll miss you so much, and this all seems so unfair.’

  ‘But think about how important it is,’ I said. We had been on the cover of Time that week, in an article pre-empting the one that I would be writing, a lead-in that featured sound bites by almost anybody who mattered in pop culture and politics. They opened it with this quote, from Captain Cook – about how exploration was seeing how far it was possible to go, not about what you find when you get there, but the journey itself, the find – and they equated us to the greats. There wasn’t much about us as a crew, just a few details here and there, and a few details about the ship, the course we would be taking, the things that we might see. Mostly, the article – and the people interviewed – cared about what it meant. Elena didn’t understand that.

  ‘You shouldn’t go,’ she said.

  ‘I have to,’ I told her. ‘It’s so important.’ We had that same conversation over and over, like a loop, a single moment that she never let drop.

  ‘More important than me?’ she would ask, and I would tell her that I loved her, but that I had a chance to do something great. How many times did I say that phrase? How many times? ‘What am I to you?’ Elena asked.

  ‘You’re my wife.’

  ‘And does that even mean anything? How can you prove that I’m so important? That I’m most important?’ Every time she asked that I nearly told her about Emmy, but then didn’t. At that point, I wonder if she would have even cared. Space was the only other woman, not the pretty Australian girl.

  Guy lives the penultimate day of his life as a man unaware of his ticking clock. He sends facts about the ship back to Ground Control and eats with the rest of us, and stays quiet when we talk about things that he doesn’t care about. We used to be close, I think.

  He isn’t the fascination to me. I am, the me out there. I am so quiet, almost sullen. I remember myself as being full of life. Instead I watch everything as the outsider. What am I thinking of? Is it Elena? Is it Emmy? I don’t remember this: what thoughts went through my head as I geared myself up to write. I sit at the computer and type another entry, and I remember telling Elena that they were all for her. This one isn’t. I’m asking Guy for facts and figures about the trip to pepper the update with, and he reels them off, things that sound unimportant but probably mean the world to our continued movement, our survival.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll need your help tomorrow outside the ship. Another routine check, okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ the me says, but I remember that I didn’t go on that walk. I remember that I slept in, for some reason; missed my chance. When he got back we argued, and then…

  ‘We have to go early, so we’ll set the alarms, get up and do it. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I hear myself say. I didn’t get up. I didn’t go on that walk. Guy was a stickler for routine – if he said something he did it – which means that I’m being called up: the me, here and now, in the lining. We’re on my page of the script, and my stage directions are written in bold italics.

  An hour after they all go to sleep I prowl again. Emmy’s medicine cabinet is locked; I itch, the ache in my leg having spread to my belly. Everything aches, but that’s understandable. I want to smash it open, gobble at the drugs. I don’t. I can’t give myself away. I read up on walking again, reminding myself of how to do it, but even reading it seems second nature. When I’m done with that I take up the portable device that Guy used to contact home, turn it on, try to re-establish the last connection. It’s to base camp, and they fuzz through, their faces indistinct through the
static.

  ‘Gerhardt?’ they ask. ‘Why are you making contact? Is there a compromise?’ I switch it off, quickly, as quickly as I put it on, before they can see who’s called them, and I close the apparatus down, make sure the application isn’t running. It feels wrong: again, in my gut. My gut says, don’t speak to them. Instead, I silently drift towards the bed of the other me, tap on his alarm settings to turn them off, make sure we’re not interrupted; then I tap on Guy’s bed to wake him slightly earlier, to give us as much time as possible. I watch him through the glass: he’s sleeping soundly. He seems totally unconcerned.

  There’s another motive in time travel stories, of course: just to find out what’s going on. I go to the shaver and the shower, do what I can to make myself mimic the appearance of the original me – I will keep my mouth shut as much as possible, puff my cheeks to not look as gaunt as I do, keep the lights low to mask my thinness with shadows – and then I wait in the darkness of the lounge until Guy’s alarm trill and his bed hisses, and then I greet him, tell him that I couldn’t sleep.

  ‘Lights,’ he says, but I quickly snap that they should stay off, before he can turn around and see that I’m actually still asleep in my bed.

  ‘Let them sleep,’ I whisper, ‘they’ve had a rough few days.’

  ‘Right,’ he says, nodding. ‘Sure, whatever. Let’s get changed and get the fuck out there.’ In the changing room I face away from him and pray that he won’t notice the scars or how thin I am, but he doesn’t look at me, not even once. He focuses on the floor, and on his suit, and then on the security line, checking over and over that it’s tight enough, that nothing can possibly go wrong.

  It’s like riding a bike, or one of those other things that people say you never forget how to do. Breathing, that’s another one. It’s swimming, gentle and loose and graceful, even for me, in my state: so, so tired, tearing myself apart, almost collapsing. Out here, in the dark, it’s like night swimming, that sense of not knowing what’s below you because everything’s so dark, so filled with absolutely nothing. I glide around the ship in Guy’s wake. He tells me that we’re going to check the ship’s guidance systems again, then the communications system, then the life support.

  ‘You can just hold everything for me again, okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  ‘It’s all so fucking delicate, this stuff.’

  ‘You must miss Wanda,’ I say. He doesn’t reply. We pull

  ourselves over to the first panel and he lifts it off, delicate work, concentrating as he does it. ‘Why did you want me to help you?’ I ask him. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to have Quinn?’

  ‘Less fun, though,’ he replies. He turns, looks at me, smiles. ‘Besides, good to get you out, right? Get you out of that ship.’ He turns back to the panel; I can see his face reflected, his tongue sticking through his teeth, his eyes squinting to see what he’s doing. ‘Must be hard, seeing Emmy and Quinn like that, right?’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, but I know what he’s talking about. I want him to say it.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you know why. You know why, don’t be so fucking coy.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So nothing ever happened? Oh, okay, fine. Let’s pretend that you and she were like fucking strangers, right? That you never did her.’ He laughs.

  ‘You’re forgetting about Elena,’ I say. ‘Don’t talk about something you don’t know about.’ We didn’t tell a soul, Emmy and I. We didn’t tell a soul. All Guy can know, unless Emmy told him anything, is that we flirted, danced around each other; or maybe he was awake on that plane flight, maybe he was listening in.

  ‘I’m not forgetting,’ he says. ‘Maybe you are, though? Maybe?’ He seals up the first panel. ‘Fuck’s sake, there’s a problem. We’ll be out here a little longer. Okay?’ It’s not a question. We move to the propulsion panel and he unscrews it, hands me the tool.

  ‘I heard you messaging Ground Control yesterday,’ I say. He stops moving, puts his hands on either side of the panel.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us all?’ He doesn’t speak. His whole physical presence changes. I had worried, as the words came out of my mouth, that he’d be angry or bitter or violent, but he seems disappointed. He deflates. ‘What was such a secret that you couldn’t tell us?’ No, not disappointment. Relief. ‘Why was it such a secret?’

  ‘We’re not going home,’ he says. ‘They want us to stay out here.’ He doesn’t give me a chance to process it, to question him. He already knows what I’ll be asking, what I’ll want to know. ‘They want this mission to be a glorious failure; they want the world united in their search for us, in their desire to see what we’ve seen, to discover what happened to us. Where we ended up.’ He doesn’t move from the panel; doesn’t face me, doesn’t even think about turning around. I think he’s scared to see my face. ‘We’ll be heroes for eternity – the crew of the Ishiguro, lost in space! Adrift among the stars! – and they’ll rush-build another ship to search for us, this time with a bigger budget, co-funded by the governments, because how can they not? We’re everywhere. We’re on the cover of Time Magazine twice. We’re on the boxes of Happy Meals, on the sides of cans of Coke. DARPA won’t be on its own, and the ship they can send will be twice as big, twice as powerful. It will be able to see things we only dream of. And we’ve got a beacon in the ship, so when they find us we’ll be taken home, buried in the most glorious way, and the world will remember us. Don’t you get that?’

  ‘They’d remember us if we got home.’ I’m shaking. Inside my suit, I’m actually physically shaking.

  ‘For a while, sure. But what would we have actually done?’

  ‘We’d have gone further into space than anybody before us.’ I must sound desperate, pleading: it’s the anger.

  Guy laughs. ‘And you actually think that people care about that? Who do they remember? The guy who went quite far into the Antarctic? No, of course they don’t. They remember two people: Scott, who beat that fucking place, and Oates. I’m just going outside and may be some time, right? That’s what he said, and we remember that shit, because he tried, and he failed. Think about Amelia Earhart, right? She went missing, and she was fucking trying, Cormac. She was trying, just like we are. We can’t be Scott, Cormac. There’s nowhere to go from here. We’re done. So we’re Oates, right? We tried and we failed. But better than that, because maybe we didn’t! Maybe we didn’t! Nobody’s going to have a fucking clue, because when we drop off the grid they’ll just never hear from us again, and they’ll speculate for years about what happened to us: why we didn’t come home. Why we stayed out here. For all they’ll know, maybe we chose to.’

  ‘But how does this help?’ I gulp back tears inside the helmet. The reveal of motive should bring relief. It doesn’t. It terrifies me.

  ‘This way, maybe, the governments might get involved. Space travel’s bigger than it’s ever been, there’s more to discover, more to see. The technology is astounding. And we’re going to be sending back results from the deepest part of space, deeper than anybody else has ever travelled.’

  ‘We’ve already done that.’

  ‘Even deeper. Think about it: we’re not even halfway through our fuel. We’re going to keep going, and I’ll get to research things that we don’t even fucking know what they are! Anomalies we only dreamed of seeing! There are things out there, Cormac: things that are bigger than us, bigger than all of this. You know the anomaly we’re going to see? It’s like nothing else. We’ve never seen anything like it. Can you believe it? Something truly new. We can see it first hand, we can report on it. We can uncover the secrets of space. And you: you can write stories about us that will live forever.’ He’s begging, almost. ‘The governments will see what we’ve achieved, and they’ll put money back into this. It won’t be to rescue us: it’ll be to look at what we’ve found.’ His voice cracks under the stress, and he starts crying I think, but I don’t know if it’s fear, or pity, or pride. ‘We’re meant to
explore, Cormac. We lost the urge, but this will give it back to us. Think about when children get kidnapped, or when there are hostages, or rescue attempts to people lost at sea. It starts a new wave of human interest. Think about what this will do for humanity,’ he says. I look into his eyes: he really believes in this.

  ‘Who knows?’ I ask him.

  ‘Only me, now. Wanda knew. She hated it, but accepted it. She wanted to be remembered, just like everybody. She wanted to leave her mark.’ My hands shake inside the suit, and I have to keep reminding myself to cling on or God knows what will happen. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘You should never have found out, right? It would have been so much easier. You would have written your own obituary, the dying throes, your last hurrah, right? It would have been so important. Studied in schools around the globe forever: the document of our glorious failure.’ He slides towards me slightly. ‘You still can.’

  ‘Why us? Why this crew? Why bother training us, going through the fucking rigmarole of all that shit, those months of shit we went through. What was the fucking point?’ Even when you shout in these suits, your voice sounds like a whisper through the headsets.

  ‘It needed a crew, Cormac. This only works if it’s people that the world cares about.’

  ‘But why us? What made us so fucking special? What made them think we could be fucking sacrifices?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Guy says. ‘We’re all alone. Every one of us: no parents, no kids, no loved ones. Until you and Elena broke up, I don’t even think you were going to end up being picked for the mission. And then – ’

  ‘Elena,’ I say, and then everything goes black, and I’ve let go and I’m drifting, spiralling away from the ship slowly, facing the stars, thinking about my wife, relying on Guy to save me.