The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Thirty-Three

This is how you go to the toilet on an explorer. You shut yourself in this tiny little compartment, basically like the storage lockers, only just about big enough for a person to stand in. The rest of it involves rubber funnels and tubes and none of it is particularly pleasant or easy and actually borders on almost impossible when it's the first time you've ever done it.

And if you're me you then spend this extra few minutes in there, bracing off the ceiling and peering into the little square of mirror that's on the back of the door, looking into your own eyes and wondering what you're thinking, trying not to ask yourself out loud. Then you look down at your body, laid out in this tight little space and suddenly it is so like a coffin that you nearly scream, and you can't stop wondering if you're dead already, or whether you're just way too close.

Back out in the cabin every axis has shifted. With no gravity it's just a case of aligning yourself, so the toilet unit is actually a door in the floor. When you're in there you feel like you're standing but you're actually lying along the bottom of the shuttle and when you come out you have to convince yourself of where up and down is all over again.

I am clinging to the back of my chair when Mariana turns to me.

'You OK?' she says, almost all out of voice and watching me nod.

'Yeah,' I say, with not much voice of my own.

'I have to go too,' she says, unclipping her seatbelt, and I help her clamber around the wall in a spiral on her way there.

I take hold of the back of Dom's seat in time to watch him yawn so hard it makes him shudder. When he opens his eyes and sees me he curls his arm around my shoulders while I watch the light from the screens play on his face.

'Let me do this for a bit – go get some sleep,' I tell him.

He shakes his head. 'Nah, I'm OK; I'm fine. Not sure I could, anyway, in this.' He waves his hand up at the strobing red light which has never yet given up, even though most of the other alarms have.

'I think Dom should go get some sleep,' I tell Ezra, who takes a moment to turn his head.

'Oh sure, let's just bed down, let's just chill out, everything's under control.' His voice is thick with sarcasm.

'I can take over,' I tell him.

After a beat he says, 'Go get some sleep, Suarez,' without looking up from the monitor he is checking.

Dom looks at him, then at me, then yawns again even though you can tell he's trying not to.

'OK, so . . . ' He blinks a little while he looks around the multicoloured consoles, dials and swipe screens around him. 'This one is the—'

'I'll tell her,' says Ezra. 'You just go.'

Dom looks at me again, makes a face while he's unclipping his belt and shifting on to the ceiling, kissing me upside down before he leaves.

Clipped into Dom's seat I sit and look around and realise I don't remember anything, not even the first thing from Basic Flight. But since the systems screen is in front of me I peer at it, swiping between the oxygen monitor, fuel tank, life support systems and speed. Then I gaze out of the front windscreen. Huxley-3 is football size at the moment, mostly blue; a blue you only dream of. Looking at her fills me with something I have to swallow down, something that threatens to break out of me.

I turn to Ezra then and he is eating a protein bar, studying the nav screen while he holds the steering control with one hand.

'Are you OK?' I ask him.