The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  I grasp hold of the handles and I stare out at that dark nothing. But this time I let myself see. I let myself picture the framed and beautiful artistic impression of what lies beyond the planets on the periphery of our solar system that we had hanging behind our corner sofa: those coloured, speckled spheres. Green dots in the main belt, orange specks for those objects scattered, yellow and pink trojans, white centaurs. I look and I look and all I see is nothing. Not that it matters; I know that they’re there.

  I wake up in the dead of night – in the dead of what is night more than 3.57 billion miles away – to a realisation that is so obvious I can hardly believe that I’d never even thought of it before. I’m strapped into my seat at the living room table, so only my hands are free to move without hindrance. They creep over my mouth.

  At the press conference a few weeks before the launch, those boardroom suits made us out to be pioneers, explorers into the furthest reaches of our own solar system. We posed holding hands, wearing our astronaut suits and clutching our helmets under our arms while flashes went off all around us, and it never once occurred to me that I wasn’t what they said I was – not once. I’m not an astronaut. And neither is Rick, no matter what it says in his job description. I don’t know how much this expedition cost, how much it is still costing, but I know that it’s too much to rely on the few skills of candidates so far down a list that they were close to its bottom.

  My fingers pull at my lips, my gums. My fingernails glance against my teeth. We are not the astronauts, the pioneers. We don’t pilot; we don’t discover; we don’t interpret. We exist. We collect and collate physiological and biological and psychological data on our own body systems, we survive the onslaught of GCRs and SEPs and road test new systems of shielding, communication, junk food. We are guinea pigs, Rhesus monkeys. The domestiques for the true stars, the ones who might come after. All going well. And just like the lab macaques, once we’ve outlived our usefulness we’re expendable – but never without one last great hurrah. Nothing is used up; nothing goes to waste. I think of those astronauts in Biosphere 3. I think of Bill Flack’s arrogant swagger. Rick and I were always the ones who were going. I think of those parties in the desert, the faked camaraderie, the cocktails and backslaps. I look at the black beyond that aluminium silicate window. And now we’ll just keep going. On and on and on. Until we don’t.

  Rick barely speaks to me at all now. He eats and he drinks and he pees and he occasionally shits, and the rest of the time he sits at his computer next to the clearspan deck and he looks. More occasionally still, he types.

  I’ve stopped asking him where we are because I suspect that he no longer knows. I’ve stopped allowing myself to be afraid because it’s too much to bear every second of every day. I’ve stopped looking out of that aluminium silicate window, I’ve stopped making references to the Alien movies, I’ve stopped thinking or muttering Latin phrases in common usage. I’ve completely stopped sending back data via the med computer. It feels like the only weapon I have left. Instead, I type an endless stream of profanities and curses, and if the weight of their efficacy is measured in fury – in desire – then they should worry the suits with no faces far more than any lapse in proper communication.

  We still have dinner together; that seems to be the only habit that neither of us can break. I don’t know how much food is left. I don’t dwell too long upon which might be the worst death: starvation or suffocation, because I guess it hardly matters. We no longer fuck – we no longer fuck often – and Rick’s distant blank gaze no longer frightens me as much as it once did. I think he’s mad, but that’s okay. I’m nearly jealous, though I’m not so certain that I’m not far behind him.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about when we first met,’ I say to him one mealtime, as he’s bent over and furiously chewing. ‘Do you remember?’

  He shakes his head and keeps on chewing. The dark hair at his crown has started to thin. His hair was one of the first things that I noticed about him, that and his thick forearms, his sexy grin, his ludicrously Goodfellas accent. We met at an Astro Infinity Christmas dance, and when he bought me a caipirinha and told me that he was in the astronaut programme, I decided that if he asked me back to his I’d go. He did.

  ‘Why did you buy me a drink?’ I whisper. ‘Why did you ask me to dance?’ I know why. He’d said it was because I’d glowed under the white disco lights like no one else; he’d said it was because I’d turned away from another man and smiled at him across the clichéd crowded room and he’d known. In a smiled, glowing breath, he’d known.

  He looks up from his labours and flashes a grin that shows more teeth than it used to. His receding gums are red, pumped full of blood. ‘Because ya made my dick sing, baby doll.’

  There’s no longer any emotion in his words, no smiled intent. I shiver. I shiver again when his head snaps left, looking up at the crap-lined walls as though he’s heard something. He does that a lot now – like a cat who’s sensed something that you haven’t; that you can’t – but it never loses its power to freak me out. It’s just about the only thing left that does.

  He shakes his head as if convincing himself that he’s mistaken, that all is well. He unstraps himself from the table and plucks my half-eaten bar from my hand. I think: ‘we’re in the pipe, five by five,’ as he deposits the wrappers inside the disposal system.

  I’m suddenly seized with that need to do something again; that need to reassert a control that has all but vanished. ‘Rick – ’

  He turns back around to me slowly, rubbing at his flat crotch. ‘Just thinking about you gets me hard, baby.’

  This time, I don’t feel sick. This time, I don’t feel anything at all. Once, I might have believed him, but not now. Thinking about what might happen to us gets him hard. Thinking about going further than anyone has ever gone before gets him hard. Discovering the undiscovered. The fear, the power, the powerlessness. Starvation, suffocation, oblivion. That’s what gets him hard.

  And that’s when I know for sure. We won’t survive each other. We won’t.

  ‘Don’t speak to me anymore.’ I whisper it.

  He laughs as he heads for his cabin, but I don’t look at his eyes because I’m too afraid of what I might not see. This is Astro Infinity’s symbol of humanity; the Adam and Eve of a new era. This is what we’ve been reduced to.

  I flinch from Rick’s sudden scream – languid terror versus something far more immediate. And requiring a response. When I look left, towards him, his head is cocked again towards the storage hatch, the one that leads behind the water walls.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’ he screeches, but I don’t think that he’s asking me. When he pulls himself towards the ladder, I don’t unstrap myself; I don’t try to stop him with either words or deed. A cringing, hunkered down part of me flinches as he climbs the ladder, as he opens the hatch. When his torso and then legs disappear upwards into new space, I do unanchor myself, grabbing hold of the table’s edge as I try to get closer.

  I hear him curse, I hear him bang his body against the three metre wide storage space that surrounds our own. And then suddenly I’m grabbing onto any and all handholds, desperate to reach the ladder. I climb it with shaking limbs; I bash my left temple against the opened hatch as I crane inside.

  Rick is on all fours, already close to the turn towards the medical module. He spins slowly around, the skin on his face thin enough to expose the grey veins beneath its surface, his smile a frozen rictus. ‘Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear them?’ His eyes widen in almost ecstatic terror. ‘They’re in here!’

  I step down one rung and grab hold of the hatch. He sees me doing it, and then sees what it means. His scream is too late. His weightless scuttle back towards me is too late. I pull down the hatch and turn its wheel. I’ve already almost reached the bottom again when he begins pounding at it. When he begins screaming. But it’s too late for that too. I’ve already decided not to hear him.r />
  I can sleep in my own bed again. The novelty wears off within days, but while it prevails, it is wonderful. I sleep. I don’t dream. I’m not sore. I’m not desperate. I’m nothing at all.

  My days are spent listlessly drifting between cabin, living space and medical module. For the first few of these, I can still hear Rick banging against the storage corridor walls and hatch. I start feeling the insidious scratch of doubt behind my eyes, until I sit myself at his computer station and type in his password. I might not be able to understand most of the data, but I know that I’ll understand some of it – and despite everything, I still need to know. I need to know what – if anything – they’re going to do.

  It doesn’t work. Rick was never supposed to tell me his password, just as he never knew mine, but after an early blow job less than two weeks into our journey, he told me that it was the date of our wedding. It isn’t anymore. And that’s when I know what the me that locked the storage hatch already knew. Rick was part of it. Rick was always part of it. Rick and his stubborn, never satisfied hard-on. His endless need to be something other than what he was.

  I release myself from his station and drift towards the table. I look up at the white curved ceiling and the dimpled dents of the surrounding water walls. I scream. I finally scream.

  ‘Sweetcheeks, Baby doll, Rout, Erb, Aloo-minum, Moss-cow, Dick Wad!’ I stop, pulling myself up short against the viewing window, and my eyes follow the frantic scuttle that I’d been ignoring for days. ‘Eye-fucking-Rack!’

  The words are a better balm than Latin phrases or Alien movie references; they make my heart temporarily sing. Afterwards, I sleep without strapping myself down. I float.

  All the days and moments and thoughts – such as they are – morph into one another, until I can hardly tell what time has passed. I’ve turned off the monitors that blink time, the computers that tell me how much life support is left. I no longer eat.

  Instead, I stare out of the viewing window into black nothing. Sometimes I forget to blink. And now there really is an Alien – a thing – inside the walls. Using the capsule as a hamster wheel, I hear it. Banging. Scuttling. Shrieking. It doesn’t lose strength as I’d expected; it doesn’t grow quieter or any more resigned to its fate.

  And then finally – one day/one night – it happens. What I’ve been waiting so long for. I see something. Finally, through that blank vast window, I see something.

  My jaw slackens and my heart remembers what it’s for. I feel colours wash over me – not the greens and oranges and yellows and pinks of that framed picture behind our corner sofa – but real colours, real light. Real breath, real life, real horror, real joy. I understand Rick’s ecstatic terror a little better. I’m crying, but I can’t feel it. I’m shaking, but it doesn’t matter. I’m dying, but I don’t care.

  Finally, I know. I see. Finally.

  I remember the apple; I remember being young and stupid and reading aloud from behind an echoing lectern. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. It’s not true. It’s just more lies.

  I giggle and it hurts my raw throat. ‘Don’t ask me, man. I just work here.’

  I reluctantly turn from the window and pull myself into the medical module. There’s no need to enter my password because I never logged out. I type just two short sentences and I’m still crying, still shaking, still giggling as I do it.

  You will never see what I see. You will never know what I know.

  I shout them too. I shout them loud enough for the alien still beating its chitinous wings inside the walls to hear – and it does. I know it does because it screams back.

  And that’s okay. I smile and I close my swollen eyes against the brilliant, unending light.

  That’s okay.

  JIM HAWKINS

  Sky Leap – Earth Flame

  ‘Why is sky blue, Mariam?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask Victor.’

  ‘Can you touch it, Mariam?’

  The grass around the tanks kept itself a perfect green and at a perfect height of one point five centimetres. There were small hills, rocky outcrops, and sudden patches of sand. Over to the east there was a lake that stretched beyond the horizon, and sometimes she spotted a sailboat with white canvas taut in the breeze.

  Axon had given up asking her to walk on the water out to the sailboats, but Axon loved it when Mariam stood beside the lake and squeezed the warm mud between her toes. Or when she stripped off and swam in the clear water, diving sometimes to catch sight of a silver-green fish or the tentacles of an octopus peeping out from a reef crevice.

  There was no sensation – hot, cold, warm, rough, slippery, prickly, or smooth – that Axon would not take in and absorb. If Mariam cut herself, Axon was fascinated by the bleeding, the scab, and the scars.

  Mariam was twelve years old, with coal-black hair, dark eyebrows and a slim, athletic body. She liked to keep her hair tied back, but sometimes Axon wanted her to let it blow around her face, and mostly she did, unless she was in a mood, which was usually because Victor had told her she was stupid.

  Usually she was forbidden to go near the tanks, but today was Axon’s Layer Day and she was smart enough to know that they didn’t want her there for the fun of it. She walked down the slope over the perfect grass towards the white domes of the tanks, her flip-flops smacking against her heels and the light almost too bright to bear.

  ‘What will it be like, Mariam?’ asked the soft voice in her head.

  ‘I don’t know. I will be with you.’

  ‘Will it hurt?’

  ‘I don’t know. If it hurts you, it will hurt me.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Who taught you afraid?’

  ‘Victor.’

  ‘Is Victor afraid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Is there time for swimming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Are you afraid, Axon?’

  ‘I’m trying. I know it, but I can’t feel it.’

  The gate in the electric fence around the tanks opened, and Mariam walked in, head high, but very scared. Her twin, Victor, was already standing on the concourse beside the nearest of the mushroom-like buildings, shading his eyes from the intense light. Mariam was tanned and lithe. Victor was paler, heavier, disliked physical activity, but they were still clearly identical twins. Axon sometimes jokingly called them Exo and Endo – she was a child of the wind and the waves, and Victor was a more cerebral cave-dweller.

  ‘Hi,’ said Victor. This in itself was unusual. Normally they communicated through a private gateway they shared in the Axon interface. But today was different – very different. It was Layer Day.

  A door in the mushroom-dome’s sixty-foot stem slid open and their foster mother, Julia, beckoned them in.

  All the adults they knew were in the conference room, and several they had never seen before. Nobody was smiling as they took their seats. It felt as though they’d failed an exam or been caught stealing.

  ‘Don’t worry, Axon,’ she thought. Silence. She looked at Victor and thought ‘Can you get Axon?’ He shook his head.

  Director Somerton stood up and came to sit beside them.

  ‘During this phase we have to cut your link to Axon,’ he said. ‘This is just a precaution.’

  ‘Against what?’ Victor asked, in his belligerent way.

  Somerton ignored Victor’s tone, and went on ‘This is a critical stage. I will be honest with you – you’re both growing up fast and you have a right to know. There have sometimes been complications. It’s better for you if we play safe. So we’re going to put you in a light sleep for the next few hours and slowly bring back the link when we think it’s safe, which I’m sure it will be.’

  Victor started to say some
thing, but Mariam shushed him quiet.

  ‘I refuse,’ she said.

  Somerton was momentarily shocked, but then recovered and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mariam. I don’t quite understand you.’

  She was quivering, find it hard to breathe, but she forced the words out. ‘I will not be cut off from Axon. I will not be put to sleep.’

  ‘Why?’

  She stood up and ran out of the room. The outside doors slid aside and she kept on running until she reached the gate through the perimeter fence. It wouldn’t open. She stood there, staring out at the grass, with her hands on the grill, suddenly crying, until a hand stroked her back. Finally she turned, expecting to see Julia. Instead, it was Victor.

  ‘I suppose they sent you!’ she shouted.

  ‘No,’ said Victor. ‘I decided I agree.’

  Inside, Somerton paced around the room. ‘The culture is ready,’ he said. ‘We must proceed.’

  Normally, Julia was silent in meetings. She was tiny, beaky-nosed, like a small bird, but now she stood up and said, ‘No.’ She marched up to the much taller figure of the Director and faced him.

  ‘They’re like triplets. They’ve been in each other’s minds for twelve years. Are you surprised they don’t just go along with you chopping them off?’

  ‘They’re children.’

  ‘Those two are not just children, are they? They are nearly teenagers, and they have a right to be included. If they want to maintain the link, that’s their decision. Explain it to them. If they want to refuse an anaesthetic, then it’s their decision. They are NOT laboratory rats.’

  Somerton turned and faced the science team. ‘Well?’ he asked.