James Smythe: The Explorer

Maybe this time I should try something different. Before, I spun around and I was saved. Now: I open my fingers and he opens his eyes, and he sees me, and I tell him that it will be all right, but this time I’m lying. I clutch onto him and fire the CO 2again. I look back and see it push apart the blackness, like throwing a stone onto the surface of a lake, once so still, now broken and disturbed, and I clutch Cormac as we push away from the anomaly, going away from the still-exploding ship, away from the blackness, away from everything. All we’ve got is each other, he and I, I and he, and I did what I had to do. He coughs and chokes in my arms, and I don’t look as all those things they warned us about start happening to him. I can feel him going in my arms, and then I can feel it happening to me, because now my eyes have been open, and you can never survive this, no matter what you do, who you are. I opened my eyes to look at the blackness as it swallows the wreckage of the ship, the hungriest thing I’ve ever seen: the darkest part of space, swallowing everything in its path. I let go of Cormac, because he’s done, and so am I.

I wait and feel my lungs stop, and I open my eyes wide and stare forward at the nothingness, going onwards forever, it seems, on and on, with or without me there to see it, and my head feels like it’s about to burst. I’m not back on the ship. I don’t have my scars. I’ve not opened the door and killed Arlen, and I haven’t started this all again, confused and lost and alone but not alone. I haven’t done that. I wait to see if it’ll happen before I die, and if it does, if I’ll even remember this moment in the first place.

From here, space looks like it does from any garden, anywhere. It’s so still.

Thanks go first and foremost to Dr Robert Simpson, friend and astrophysicist. When I started writing The Explorer I threw ideas at him, over and over. A lot of the science (the stuff that’s right and logical) is probably down to him. The other stuff? Blame me for that.

Sam Copeland is my agent, and I couldn’t be more grateful for all of his hard work. He saw this novel in its earliest form and knew what it ultimately could be. He told me that I could make it that novel, so thank/blame him appropriately. Thanks too to everybody else at RCW.

Thanks to Amy McCulloch, whose suggestions for edits made the novel better with each press of the Delete key. Thanks also to my copyeditor, Joy Chamberlain, who said the nicest thing about my writing that I have ever heard. Thanks to all at Voyager Books /HarperCollins UK for everything that they do so very well.

And lastly, there are those classic creators of the SFF work that first drove me to write. Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Iain Banks, George Orwell, Harlan Ellison, John Wyndham, Alfred Bester… All wrote the stories that they wanted to tell, and never forgot that Story is the thing. You would do well to track down and read anything and everything that they’ve written.

The Testimony

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Published by Harper Voyager

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Copyright © James Smythe 2013

James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 00 745675 8

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Set in Sabon LT Std by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

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