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THE NEXT MORNING AT nine, I sat on a gurney in the recesses of Dr Tomlinson’s surgery with my shoes off and my left shirt sleeve rolled up. He wore a light brown suit with an open necked shirt. His stomach lay on his thighs, temporarily hiding them. He swabbed my arm and filled a syringe with my blood.
“It’s my duty to try and prevent it happening,” he said. “Regardless of how I may personally feel. You can unclench your fist now.”
“How do you personally feel?” I asked.
“No idea.”
I stood up, removed the rubber band from above my elbow and rolled my sleeve down.
“We’ve probably all seemed unnecessarily hostile to you,” he said. “Even given that we thought you were journalists at one point. The truth is, I think we were envious of your youth. That’s probably why I turned on your wife the other day. My pathetic desperation to show I’ve seen The Seventh Seal, that’s all it was: an old man raging against his own perceived irrelevance.”
“Being young isn’t half of what it’s cracked up to be.”
“Of course it isn’t. You’re poor, you’re pimply and you’re necessarily immature. If you’re lucky, you’ve got your health and an attractive body. Most young people aren’t.”
I laughed and patted my scalp. “Some are even losing their hair.”
“The truth of the matter’s irrelevant, Hugo. The point is, there’s no communication across the generation gap any more, so us old people project our fantasies. And of course we’ve forgotten all the bad bits. Anyway, I apologise. And I’d like you to pass that on to Ashanta, if you would.”
“Will do, but I think she’s probably forgotten it.”
“Would you like a tour?” he said.
I looked around the surgery. It was barely bigger than my cabin. “Of what?”
He held open a door in the rear wall I’d assumed led to a cupboard. “Follow me.”
The room we walked into contained five work benches lined with equipment, some of which he named – flow cytometers, high throughput samplers, a fluidics cart, microscopes, Bunsen burners, assorted glassware - and six shelves of chemicals. We passed without stopping into another room that looked similar.
It turned out that what looked like an ordinary cabin resourced for the treatment of minor ailments concealed a series of six laboratories dedicated to identifying and curing the disease that supposedly held us in its grip. Tomlinson was no ordinary GP. Over the last six months, his investigations had led him back to the specialisms from which he’d retired when he accepted a post on the Aurora. Endocrinology, epidemiology, electrophysiology, hepatology, haematology, iamatology and osteology. He’d originally been a university professor somewhere in the North.
“I’ve seen the transformation on video,” he said. “We recorded it the second time it happened. I can show you if you like.”
“I believe you,” I said.
He sat down on a lab stool and motioned for me to pull up another. I did so and we faced each other across the worktop.
“I don’t suppose you’re interested in astronomy at all?” he said.
“It’s a hobby of mine. How did you know?”
His eyes lit up. “I didn’t. Have you – I mean, have you taken time out to look at the sky lately?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t see anything I recognised.”
He nodded as if it was a huge relief to find someone on the same frequency. “Do you want to know where we are?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You mean – in the universe?”
“The first time I looked at it, I couldn’t make head or tail of what had happened. It didn’t conform to anything I’d seen before. That was about six months ago. But over the course of a few nights, I realised that at least it was the same every night. So I drew a stellar map. Then I scanned it into my computer. It turns out that the specific conjunction out there is only visible from a position in what used to be the direction of Ursa Major, about eleven light years from Earth. What’s more, the match is almost exact.”
“I guess it must be some sort of cosmic refraction. Something we don’t know about yet. A wormhole, perhaps, projecting the view from that part of the universe into our sky. I don’t know.”
“Except that that would make headlines all over the world. Did anyone mention it to you, when you visited Port Stanley?”
“No. I’d have remembered.”
“Perhaps that’s because on this world no one sees it as anything out of the ordinary.”
“What do you mean, ‘on this world’?”
He sighed. “I don’t know in detail. But I know we’re not where we’re supposed to be. Repeat: look in the sky.”
He put a drop of my blood on a strip of glass, put a transparent wafer on it then looked at it under a microscope. Then he went to a keyboard and pressed ‘enter’. What was presumably a readout began to emerge from a printer two benches away.
“For a while,” he said, “I thought, ‘Maybe we’re all dead. Maybe we’ve died without realising and this is what’s happened to us.’ That’s why it was so odd, you mentioning Donnie Darko the other day.”
He tore off the readout and looked at it. “But then, I can’t see why we’d be here. We’ve nothing in common. It’s not like we’re notorious sinners or notable do-gooders. As far as I’m aware, we’re just ordinary people.”
“From what I’ve been told, you’ve all been on the Aurora a long time.”
“That occurred to me, I must admit. But what do you conclude from it? It’s a dead-end.”
“Maybe it hit an iceberg or something. Or it was sunk by Somali pirates.”
“You’ve heard about that, have you?”
“Russell Bittacy told me.”
“The ever-reliable Mr Bittacy. So presumably, you also know it wasn’t Somali pirates but Kenyan fishermen. At least, that’s the latest.”
“Is it true? I mean that you sank them on the basis of mistaken identity?”
“We never thought they were Somali pirates. We knew all along they were fishermen. And we didn’t sink them. But Bittacy knows all that.”
“What happened then?”
“We think they killed one of the bright fish, harpooned it or shot it. And the rest of the ... ‘shoal’ attacked. We just had to watch as they went down screaming. We couldn’t do anything about it.”
“None of them survived, is that right?”
“It was night time. We’re not equipped for a search and rescue operation. We radioed the coastguard to send help and moved on. The truth is, not one of us wasn’t glad they’d died. Even me, and I can’t explain that at all.” He trembled.
“You think Bittacy knows the truth?”
“We have it from his own mouth. He’s infected now, by the way, just like the rest of us. C&B recovered the remains of the fish the Kenyans killed. Now they want to know what we know. And the reason they’re keeping it quiet isn’t PR, it’s because they’re hoping to patent whatever scientific advances the post-mortem throws up.”
“Do they know about the infection?”
“I believe so. It’s why they haven’t torpedoed us.”
“Don’t you think their main priority will be to find a cure?”
Tomlinson gave a bitter smile. “Of course. Because that’s the chief concern of capitalists everywhere. Human welfare.” He looked at my readout. “HCT normal. WBC differential high. About normal for this stage of the disease. Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll see your white blood cells starting to transform.”
“Is it true what Ashanta said? That for all practical purposes, we’re all going to die?”
“Who knows?”
“You’re the doctor. If anyone knows, it’s you.”
He frowned. “We’re talking about human consciousness here. Don’t let anyone – philosopher, psychologist, doctor - fool you into thinking he or she knows what that is. Do you know anything about Buddhism?”
“Virtually nothing.”
“The Buddhists have a concept called ‘nirvana without remainder’. If you become fully enlightened then, when you die, your ‘self’ is completely extinguished. There’s nothing left of you at all. And yet they don’t believe there’s no life after death. On the contrary, they just think there’s just nothing that can be said about it.”
“So there may be no reason to be afraid.”
“As I’ve already said, I’m no more an expert than you are. If you ask Celia Soper, she’s fervently looking forward to it. If you ask Rita Patel and Paul Endersby, they’re dreading it. They’re in love, you see. Worldly attachment.”
“What’s the significance of the Tarot cards?”
“You’re probably best off asking Celia Soper that. I know Mason’s not keen on them. How many times have you seen her put them out?”
“Twice, I think.”
“Notice anything?”
“She managed to achieve exactly the same spread on both occasions.”
“Very observant. And presumably, you concluded it was some sort of trick. It isn’t.”
“It never seems to cheer anyone up much.”
“Why would it? It implies some sort of force at work of which we know nothing. When you look at the sky and you don’t recognise anything, does that cheer you up? It scares the hell out of me. And yet I keep looking.”
“Can I ask you to do something for me?”
His lips shrugged. “That depends what it is.”
“I’d like you to hypnotise me like you hypnotised Ashanta. I’d like those memories back so we can have a proper discussion about them.”
“How is she?”
“She seems to be taking it worse than me. She sees it as a death sentence.”
“It’s a transformation. ‘What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power’. At least that’s one possibility.”
“But not one you believe.”
“It is a transformation. We’ve got the evidence of material continuity on video.”
“But not mental continuity.”
He shrugged. “As I keep trying to tell you, I’m agnostic about that. All I know is, I’m a doctor. It’s my duty to help fight disease, not to raise purely speculative questions.”
“Realistically, do you think there’s any chance of your finding a cure? How close are you?”
“I don’t feel very close. But breakthroughs often occur in the unlikeliest places. It’s about lateral thinking. Captain Mason helped me set this up when we landed in St Helena, just after Rita’s husband transformed.”
“It didn’t take her long to find someone else.”
“She didn’t love him. He was thirty years older than her and he’d been senile for the last decade and a half. She met Paul Endersby when they were teenagers, apparently, and they were lovers then. Which only goes to show that some parents have a lot to answer for. And that it doesn’t always do to judge.”
I blushed. “Of course not. Sorry.”
“They’re a very sweet couple when you get to know them. Naturally, though, she’s scared rigid of meeting her husband on the other side.”
I looked at my watch. “I’d better be getting back to Ashanta. Thank you for answering my questions.”
“Shall I come with you? I believe you were anxious to recover your memories. It often helps if one of your loved ones is in the room while you’re succumbing to the old pocket watch.”
“Is it okay to ask you to call round later? I’d like to talk to her alone a little first.”
“As it happens, I probably need to run a few more tests on your blood right now. Say two hours?”
