Читать книгу The Explorer - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 11

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 Arlen. It’s all I can think, and all I can see, and I’m so confused that I start crying, and I have no idea how I can stop.

Arlen had an hour before the rest of the crew were woken up, and now I have that hour, somehow. I swear into the space around me, and I cry so much and watch as the tears peel away from my face before they drip off, and I stare at Arlen, who watches me, letting me know how guilty I am. This is my fault.

I have to hide, I think. They can’t see me like this. The ship is just a huge fucking coffin, rigged to explode, dragging its crew into the furnace as it goes, and we exploded because I was there, and this – all of this, seeing myself, like a mirror, like a trick of the light, like a magician’s finest hour – all of this is wrong and unreal, because it has to be.

Only: it feels real. I gasp and feel the floor, and it feels real enough, and everything is how it was. I don’t know how, but I’m back on the Ishiguro, and it’s the start of the trip, and I’m not the me that I was.

I panic, because I don’t understand what’s happening, how I can be here, and pull myself through the rest of the ship, turning the lights on all the way down to the engine room, past the airlock and the changing room. There are rooms back here. We barely ever had cause to go into them, because they didn’t have anything that we needed. Two rooms near the back – the base – of the ship were exclusively for fuel cells and engine access panels, another exclusively for the battery; they had routine checks, mostly by Guy or Wanda, but the rest of us didn’t touch them. We weren’t trained to, and we didn’t want to. One of the storerooms was where most of the food supplies were kept, but that was too frequently used; and then the storage room for walk supplies, emergency power tools, that sort of thing. This is the one: I don’t remember ever going in here, because we so rarely needed anything from here. If you needed to hide somewhere, this would be the place. From where I’m floating, the ship is actually enormous, cavernous, far bigger than six people needed; so much space filled with nothing but fuel cells or enormous batteries or storage crates. This is where I’ll hide. I find a crate, full of spare parts for the ship, piping hose and sheet metal. It’s fastened to the grated floor with clips and carabiners, to keep it rigid in no-gravity. I loosen the straps, only slightly, just enough to leave a gap about a foot deep underneath it, and I slide under it. This will be fine as a hiding place, unless they put on the gravity and the box falls down to crush me. That won’t happen. Assuming that what I think has happened has actually happened – I am back here, at the start, and everything is going to happen the way that it originally did – the gravity won’t be put on for a short while yet.

I think about what I’ll do when the crew wake up. I’ll go to them, and tell them what’s happened, surprising them as they do their routine checks on the systems, as they run their diagnostics. When they find Arlen’s body, I’ll explain: they all died, and I was alone, and then I died as well, blowing up the ship because I didn’t want to die slowly and ingloriously, and now I’m here, and I killed Arlen, dragged his body out of sleep before I should have, left him in the coldness of the ship to choke to death, to freeze. Hello, I’ll say, take pity on me; even though I know that they won’t. They’ll hear my words as the ranting and raving of a madman, of an identikit stowaway. They’ll brandish their pitchforks and storm the castle, and demand that I’m killed for what I’ve done: or, at the very least, held accountable. They won’t listen. I know that the me that’ll be out there won’t listen, that’s for sure. He’ll stare at his hitherto-unknown twin as if he’s insane. He’ll want to know what’s happening, and he’ll be overly aggressive, to prove he’s not a part of the conspiracy, and they’ll want answers, proof that I’m me, that he’s me, or that one of us isn’t me.

‘Cormac,’ I’ll say, ‘here’s something that only you know,’ but he’ll deny knowing it, or accuse me of reading his old diaries. He’ll lead the charge against me. He’ll put me in the airlock and flush me into space, and they’ll watch as I scream and die, an alien, a clone, a gutless, brutal anomaly, and the guilt he’ll feel will be negligible. He’ll be desperately confused, sure, but he won’t feel guilt, because he’s the real me, and that’s how I would feel. I don’t know how I know this, but I can almost see it playing out in my mind, or like a gut feeling, like intuition. I have to stay here, or they’ll think I’m insane, or he is.

Is he? Am I?

I listen as the crew wake up, pulling themselves from their beds. I am crouched, hiding under the box, terrified, sobbing, biting my lip to keep from making noise. I can hear my own voice: it carries down the corridors more than any of the others, it seems. That’s probably just my mind playing tricks on me; I never thought that I spoke so loudly. Quinn was first up, and he found Arlen, woke Emmy, and they got his body out, tried to bring him back. As they were strapping him to the table – the medical table, the same place we ate our meals, everything with multiple purposes, wiped down after single tasks to prepare for the next emergency/meal – the rest of us woke up. I listen as Wanda cries, as Guy offers to examine his bed, as Emmy closes his eyes for him.

‘What a way to wake up,’ Quinn says, talking about Arlen but meaning himself.

‘Something must have happened to the air supply,’ I hear myself say, my voice like when you hear it on a recording: more nasal, not quite right, but definitely mine. ‘Or maybe there’s a crack?’

‘No cracks,’ Guy replies. ‘If they’ve got a crack, the door won’t lock. It’s a closed system: needs to make a circuit to shut properly.’

‘Maybe the seal itself?’

‘If the seal is torn, the door won’t lock either. It’ll be something else. These things can happen, fucking errors in the code or the wiring or the chips shorted out. Extremes of temperature, you know. These things can happen.’ We used to joke about his stereotype, about how he was German and so fucking efficient. It started before, when we were in training, but this was the first time we really noticed it. I remember it all. If I tried, I think I could exactly predict what I’m about to say: I mouth the words as they leave the other me’s mouth.

‘They can, but they shouldn’t.’ I can’t see it, but I remember what happened then: I hugged Wanda, told her that it would all be all right, even though I barely knew her. It was consoling. When Guy couldn’t hear us, we spoke about how he was too cold, too clinical. Quinn told us that he had to be, said that, if he wasn’t, who would be? And Wanda wouldn’t stop crying: I totally forgot that she had to be sedated that day, that Emmy had to take her to her bed, put her back. When we slept in them we just used the straps, closed the doors, but they weren’t locked or anything. I forgot that, for a while, it was like Wanda was dead as well.

I listen to the crew arguing as they try to revive Arlen, but they give up so quickly, because Emmy says that there’s no coming back when the body is in the state his is. She’s the one who tells them to stop, finally, and she calls the time of death as if this is a hospital. When she does it they all sigh, and Quinn shouts something in anger, and Guy doesn’t even pay attention, it seems, because there are things that need doing. This ship, he would have said if he had been asked, won’t run itself.

‘We should tell Ground Control,’ Quinn says. Nobody disagrees with him. The wait time at that point was only a few minutes, because of how close we still were to home, but I remember that it felt like forever, having to deliver that news. ‘This is the crew of the Ishiguro,’ Quinn says into the computer microphone, ‘and we’ve just come out of the pods, just checking in. Ship is stable, fuel reserves at 93%, which is in line with expectations. Captain Arlen Bester didn’t wake up after stasis, however; attempts to resuscitate him have been unsuccessful. Time of death was called at oh-seven-forty hours.’ He left out all of the details – about his blue skin, his chalky eyes – because there was no need to pass them on. We were warned, when we signed all of our disclaimers and NDAs, hundreds of pages of the things, that the beds could malfunction. It was one of the multitudinous ways that we could die, and DARPA couldn’t – wouldn’t – be held responsible. When Quinn’s finished, he suggests that we say something. We’re already standing around Arlen’s body as if it’s a proper funeral; all that’s missing are the clods of dirt to throw onto the coffin, the priest, the black suits. He turns to the other me, the original me, tells me that I should do it. ‘You’re good with words,’ he says. I remember my speech; I remember how it fell out of my mouth, like I was being sick in fits and bursts.

As the other me talks about Arlen’s beard, about what a cool guy he was, tells stories about stuff that happened in training, I hang onto the wall and wonder once again if I’m completely insane, and if any of this is real at all. I notice my leg, where I hurt it – where I remember the blood, the bone sticking through, so painful – and realize that, even though it still hurts, the wound isn’t sensitive. I wind up my trouser leg, expecting blood, a scab, a gash, but it’s healed. Along the line of my knee is a scar, like a sideways grimace, but it’s healed. I ball my hand to a fist and hit it, trying to see if it flinches with pain, and it does, but it’s only dull, like an echo, a memory of how sharp the pain used to be. As I keep listening to the crew it hurts more and more, until it’s aching again, creasing along the line where it feels slightly healed, where the scar is; until the pain starts creeping up my whole body.

I must have remembered it wrong. I must have. Despite how it looks, after a while it hurts so badly that I’m shaking slightly. The pain gets worse with each passing second. I have no idea how I’ll make it go away, and I shake and moan, because none of this makes any sense.

The crew are running diagnostics, sweeping the ship for anything that might not have been spotted. At the time – and again, now, as I listen to it for the second time in my life, word for word the same – Guy told us it was to make sure that we were safe.

‘Think of this thing as a rubber boat,’ he says. ‘You go for hours along a river that’s calm; it’s great, nothing wrong. You hit some rapids all of a sudden, and it gets a puncture, something tiny, barely even visible; you might not realize. But, you know, you made it through the rapids safe, and you’re alive, so you relax. When you’re then in the huge river, or the sea, in this instance, it doesn’t matter how still it is, how calm and relaxing: if you don’t find that puncture, that could be the thing that kills you.’ We had to search for the puncture, in case it existed. ‘This is nothing to do with Arlen’s death: it’s standard protocol. There’s nothing to worry about, it’s just something we have to do. Back to work, you know? Better to be safe than sorry,’ Guy said. Each member of the crew was assigned a room; each member scoured that room to check its integrity. I put myself behind the boxes, in between them; they’re curved, like a U in the room, a perfect human-sized space for me, and there’s space under them where they’ve been strapped down, where I can hide, like a criminal clinging to the undercarriage of a vehicle, praying he isn’t caught. I hide in there and wait as the door opens and somebody walks around the room. I don’t know who it is, because I don’t look, in case they hear me move. I know that it wasn’t me, because I was checking the main room: it was all I could be trusted with, because what else did I know? I wasn’t like the rest of them.

I first met Emmy months and months before the flight, along with the rest of the crew. There was a bank of seventeen astronauts and pilots that they were going to draw from, all of whom had been training, and all of whom were at various stages of that training; six doctors; four scientists. There were three of us journalists, and we had all done the physical checks, all the psychological profiling: days worth of questions about our lives, our hopes, our fears, our families. We had a week-long camp where we did physical exercises, pushed our bodies and our minds to the absolute limits; and then, at night, we socialized, but not too much. They let us out of our rooms every day for a few hours, kept us moving around the groups to see who we worked best with. There were no phone calls home, and they – a subdivision of DARPA, a government-sponsored conglomeration of companies that was privately funding the space trip – watched everything. It was like a television show, a reality one, where we waited for the viewers to vote us off. They had to make sure that we got along, or that we could work together. I told Elena afterwards that I think they wanted to check that there wasn’t any sexual tension amongst us all, or anything that might breed into aggression. Any emotion that wasn’t just friendly camaraderie was discouraged. They put us in training rooms in our underwear and made us work out; no secrets, no hiding our superficial scars or those slightly saggy love handles.

We would all watch Emmy from across the room, all of us men. I remember meeting Quinn early on – we bonded in that superficial way that men can when they’re slightly embarrassed, in social situations that they don’t know how to deal with. He was less nervous than I, less self-conscious – his body, his manner, they afforded him that privilege, because he was chiselled – and he bolstered me, gave me an extra shot of confidence. He was better looking than I was, but he was one of the cool kids, and my association alone lifted me up. He had the looks, the charm; and I could talk for myself. I was the perfect wingman. I pulled myself together so that, when I stood next to him, I didn’t feel quite as inadequate. We spoke about Arlen’s moustache – it was just that back then, a handlebar, like a stereotypical brigadier in a World War I film – and we spoke about Emmy, about the way that she carried herself.

‘Oh, she’s out of my league,’ I remember Quinn saying, which was a lie, and we both knew it. But he maintained it, I think, for the sake of staying amiable with me. Nobody likes a show-off. I didn’t speak to Emmy that entire week, apart from when we were put in exercises together. It wasn’t until the second week, when they whittled some of the group down, that we got to have a proper conversation.

Most of the crew sit down in the main room and eat. Wanda is showering, because she’s so upset after the death of Arlen that Emmy recommended she try to relax, try to calm down; and the rest are cooking, warming meal bars. I listen as they drink wine – we left with a few bottles, only enough to commemorate a few different occasions, and the champagne for the halfway point, of course – and then they make a film for back home, all crowded around. Ground Control, when they replied, asked us not to mention Arlen; they told us to look happy, to smile, to say cheers, to wish the world the best. We fought about it for a few minutes, but then Guy spoke up, trying to be a voice of reason.

‘It’s no good starting this off with tragedy,’ he said. ‘Think about what we’re meant to represent, okay? Fuck’s sake, think about something other than ourselves.’

‘This is a new age of discovery,’ Quinn said to everybody watching at home, to the millions – billions, if we were lucky – that would be crowded around their TV sets just to see how far we could get, what we could find out here. It was so cheesy, but that helped us believe it, I think. When the recording had stopped and been sent, we spent the evening talking about what we thought everybody at home would think about. I listen as they all talk about their families. We had all lost loved ones, near and dear to us.

‘Wonder if that’s what made us all want to be space cadets,’ Quinn jokes. I remember Emmy laughing especially fake-hard at the joke: she doesn’t let my memory down, and I hear her voice carry down the corridors, through the lining of the ship’s walls, a big laugh, as if barely a care in the world at that point. They talk more about Arlen. I don’t remember it being this miserable; but mourning always looks worse from the outside. Me? I barely remember Arlen now. The other me tells the story of Elena, leaving out key details – why she actually left me, what we said to each other, what happened before I left for the trip – because I don’t want anything to change the way that I’m painted. Guy laughs at me.