The Explorer. James Smythe

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      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.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to him, ‘I had to get into the bed.’ I pick him up – he weighs nothing, like an over-full sack of dust – and put him back, strapping him down, tying him in. I hate to touch him, but I have to, so I’m careful. The ship is so dark still, and I’m suddenly not used to it. ‘Lights,’ I say, and they flick on one by one. Everything here is like it was. I look to the cockpit: I remember it being pulled off, cracks spreading across the view screen, then being torn out. It’s all so clean. I look around to see if Emmy is okay in her bed: she’s still strapped in, as if nothing ever happened. She looks utterly tranquil, peaceful. Her eyes are shut. I look at the rest of them: Arlen, so blue and chalky; Quinn, handsome and sharp-jawed, stony-faced; Guy, his face in a smirk, almost; Wanda, Dogsbody, but her eyes aren’t red any more, and her face is clean, which is odd. Then I get to the last bed, my bed, which should be empty; but there’s a body in there already, like all the others, and I take a second before I focus on the face, recounting, wondering if I’ve fucked up, and then I really look at him. It’s me, my face. He’s clean-shaven and pure and his cheeks are glossy and his hair parted and neat. He looks as I did weeks ago, when we left on this mission. He is in my bed, and he is breathing softly, the gentle rise of his chest, the puff of his cheeks, sleeping as I sleep, the exact same way.

      ‘Fuck,’ I say. I hit the glass front with my hand, wanting to stay where I am, let me focus on the face; I try to breathe, but it clogs in my throat, so I cough it out, force it out. I pull myself up, until we’re face to face, look through the glass. ‘This is a trick,’ I shout, ‘who’s fucking with me?’ but I know that it isn’t a trick, that I’m not being fucked with. I feel my guts roar, faster than I can control, and I taste it in my mouth, vomit, awful and bitter. I swallow it down on instinct, because I don’t want it floating around. Every part of me wants to open the bed, but I don’t. I can’t explain it. I don’t.

      Shaking – quivering – I hurl myself across the room towards the computers in the cockpit, look at the date on the computers, at the updates from Ground Control. The screen is emblazoned with the message that we had waiting for us when we woke up – Dear crew, it reads, Welcome to your new home for the foreseeable future! – and it’s time-stamped, marked as unread. I check the monitors, the gauges and dials and numbers that I know how to read. We’re on 93% fuel, which means we’re only hours out of warp, and that’s what it was when we woke up, one by one, popping out of the beds ready to be the explorers we were destined to be. Arlen was meant to be first up, first out of bed. When we got out of the sleeping pods, Arlen didn’t. He was meant to have been up hours before us, preparing the ship, turning the lights and heat on, checking that the life support systems were working. He died, and we assumed that the system malfunctioned. It was unexplainable, no matter how hard we tried: the diagnostic tests showed everything working perfectly. It hits me again: the system didn’t malfunction; I did. I opened his bed during warp, and I dragged him out and I squirrelled myself away in his place. I pull myself across to him and examine his body through the glass. This is what the scientists warned us could happen if we weren’t in stasis: rapid dehydration, massive decomposition of the flesh, incredible bone loss. I wish I had closed his eyes before I put him back in, because they look like they’re fake, like they’re made of paper, the pupils drawn on in dusty black pen.

      I killed СКАЧАТЬ