WE (7 page)

‘No!'

He had almost screamed it at her. She froze.

‘What is the matter?'

‘It is not the field,' he said. ‘It is not.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because …' He concentrated.

He thought through all that he remembered of the briefings he had received on Earth. He had not tried to memorize them, because they would have been passed to the station's Knowledge Store. But the main direction had been clear to him – as clear as the huge thrust of effort that was to carry him out here. The station systems, their susceptibilities, the possibilities of subtle interference from one to another,
the habits of the crew – he knew where Earth expected him to look.

‘If it is the field,' he said, ‘I can do nothing.'

He could not reach into the orbits above the moon. He could not bolt more insulation onto the little relay station that swung through the sky. If it was the action of the field upon the satellite, Earth should have sent out a new and better-designed satellite.

If it was the field, they should not have sent a man at all.

‘Thorsten spent months looking,' Vandamme said quietly. ‘In the end he eliminated everything – except the field.'

‘Earth does not think it is the field,' Paul said.

‘Earth can't tell. Its data isn't complete—'

‘
Aarh!
' Paul screamed. He hit his knee with his fist.

‘Munro!'

He closed his eyes. He opened them. When he shifted in his seat, his body rose slightly in the low gravity. The screen was before him, blank.

‘I will find it,' he said.

And he added, ‘Thank you.'

She was waiting for him again. But there was no more to say.

‘You're done with me, are you?' she said. ‘You don't need me any more?'

‘Yes, thank you.'

‘Well,' she said. ‘If you're done with me, I'll go.'

Maybe she was offended again. Maybe she did not care. He could not tell from her voice.

And he did not care either. Not now. Not any more. He was consumed by the need to hunt the thing he had been sent here to find, so that he could prove to himself that there was a reason for him to be here after all. An emptiness was opening inside him. He felt it – a deep, cold gulf, with a voice inside it that was beginning to howl like an animal.

‘Munro,' she said softly from the door.

‘Yes?'

‘It is all right to cry.'

He looked up at her.

‘It is all right to cry,' she repeated, as if she were suggesting a series of tests he might run on the systems.

His jaw clenched. ‘We cry too much.'

‘You think so? “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.” That was exile. So is this. Why shouldn't we cry? We can cry because we're as God means us to be.'

She stopped and looked at the floor. He knew what she was doing. It was something he did himself, all the time now. She was hunting for words.

‘Why don't people on Earth cry?' she said. ‘It's not just those therapy routines that kick in the moment their pulse
rate starts rising. It's because all their lives their brains have been conditioned to being part of something – something far bigger than they are – and so the things that happen to
them
don't seem to matter so much. That's not what we're meant to be.'

‘Meant?'

She sighed. ‘You don't believe in God, do you?'

He had looked this up in the station Knowledge Store after their first meeting. The Knowledge Store had said that belief in a god had once been required for the propagation of accepted social and political behaviour. It was now obsolete.

He had also started to read the entries that she had recorded alongside this. She had written entry after entry. They were not facts or observations or conclusions. They were stories – things that other people had written and that she was writing again from memory. They were things that could not be true, but she believed them. She believed them because she believed in God.

That was what she did, watch in, watch out, when she was not sleeping or working. She went to her chamber and wrote things that could not be true.

‘No,' he said.

‘Then I'm sorry,' she said. ‘Because you have no one but yourself here. That is difficult. That is very difficult.'

T
he Sun was tiny. Seen from a distance of four and a half billion kilometres, the power that drove all life, all energy, all the orbits around it, was no more than a brilliant point like a star. And the star was setting.

Paul had called up the external view on his chamber display so that he could watch the eclipse. The crescent of the great planet above him had slimmed to the finest curved line, with the star touching on it like a tiny, brilliant diamond on a huge ring. The rest of the planet was solid black, the field it swam in was a misty black, and only the faintest traceries of reflected light showed where the blackness of planet and sky gave way to the sheltering cliffs around the station. The marker of Thorsten's grave shone dully, like a needle in firelight.

The star sank towards the planet. As it sank it carried with it, tucked away in the vast nothingness around it, all the world he had known. There went the humming life, the constant flickering busyness that he had felt every waking
hour. There went the rainforests, the blue oceans and skies – the things he had hardly ever looked at when he was among them. And She went with them too, in her little bubblehouse by the shore, sad but still living in the communities of the World Ear.

She had not replied to his message. He had sent another, with images of the station, and asking for images of herself and the boy. He had found that he desperately wanted to see what the child looked like. He needed to see that there was a copy of himself, planted in the rich warm soil of Earth where it could grow. It would have helped him. She must have had that message too by now. There had been no answer.

The last light was fading. The diamond was merging into the ring. The ring itself seemed to grow brighter for a few moments, and then to diminish. The spark was drowning in blackness. It was nearly gone.

Still it seemed to hesitate, on the brink of its death. The faint brightness clung to the rim of the black disc longer than Paul thought possible. And for a few moments he imagined that it was still there, even after it had gone. His eyes hunted for ghosts of the spark in the field that was entirely black. Black, black, and all those distances of kilometres and hundreds of thousands of kilometres and billions of kilometres were all melded into one flat blackness
that had no depth and no meaning. He had been looking at a point of light, no more.

Roughly he swung himself back to his work. On his wallscreen he had laid out the latest steps in his hunt for the fault – the time groups of the messages known to have been corrupted, the extent of the corruption, the firing patterns of the main and auxiliary radio transmitters, and the transmitter specifications. Some ten per cent of radio-to-Earth transmissions in his sample had been affected. Sometimes just a few groups had been lost, sometimes it was as much as fifty per cent of the transmission. He could find no radio messages from Earth that had been corrupted. But then Earth only used the radio for the automatic acknowledgements of radio messages from the station.

The corruptions peaked at approximately six-day intervals. The last had been about five days ago, shortly before his waking.

He prepared a test message to Earth.

TR1: 24:03:0802 Test. From Telmex. Repeat following groups by radio. UINK 2298 RPER 5159 TXRE 0198 …

He sent it, noted the time group and called up the log of energy use in the station – the transmitters, pressurizers, heating units, computers, sanitary units and kitchens. He
logged the state of the reactor. He did not try to guess whether any of the activity levels were unusual. He would repeat the exercise every eight hours. When Earth reported a corruption he would go back through his records and see if there was a spike from any of the station energy sources that might have caused the interference.

For completeness he logged the exterior temperature of the station. Thirty-six Kelvin. He did not think about what that meant.

He logged the atmospheric pressure (negligible).

Then he called up the magnetic field readings, meaning to project them in a line graph. The graph axes displayed themselves promptly. But there were no readings.

No readings?

He muttered to himself and clicked the manual control.
Back
. And
Graph
and
Planetary Readings, Current
again.

Nothing was showing – nothing at all.

It was on, all right. But it was displaying nothing.

Then something flicked in the top right-hand corner of the screen area. A yellow line, down and up.

A fault?

Or a reading of something much higher than the default was set to record?

Right up there? A
low
point on the reading?

He called up the numbers that underlay the graphics. When he saw them he grunted aloud.

They were high. They were far higher than he had expected – or wanted – to see. He stared at them helplessly. The numbers reeled away in impossible quantities.

Impossible?

Consult!

Lewis was on watch. He called up Lewis's chamber.

‘Lewis!'

‘Paul?' said Lewis's voice. ‘Yes, what is it?'

‘The field readings!'

‘What about them?'

‘They are … too big.'

‘Let's see what you're looking at.' There was a short silence as Lewis adjusted his workstation to let him see what was on Paul's.

‘I have changed the scale,' said Paul. ‘But …'

‘You should change it again,' said Lewis. ‘I find one point eight to minus one point two captures most of it.'

‘This is normal?'

‘We're traversing the tail of the planetary field. We observe these fluctuations every time. So yes, it's normal. But it's also unique. You don't get this structure anywhere else in the solar system – not stable, like this. Impressive, isn't it?'

The reading dropped sharply. It plunged past the horizontal axis and carried on down.

‘That flow has … changed!'

‘Reversed. Yes, it does. Keep watching and it will reverse again.'

‘It is harmful?'

‘Harmful?' Lewis seemed to think for a moment. ‘Eventually, yes. The field traps particles from the solar wind. It whips them up to high levels of energy, as you see. Prolonged exposure to that would certainly be harmful. It came as a shock to Earth when it finally understood just what levels we could experience in this region. Early observations of the tail had made it seem pretty quiet.'

‘If it was harmful, they would have aborted?'

‘Earth wasn't going to abort – not after it had got as far as it had. It put an extra gas layer onto the station to give us that bit more stopping distance. The in-place systems got some extra shielding and the station as a whole got some extra redundancy. The one thing it couldn't shield was the World Ear. There's no way a World Ear can interact with the nervous system through half a centimetre of metal, is there? So this station, alone of all the stations in the solar system, runs without it. And we run fine – except that every now and then it gets too much for the radio systems and our comms to Earth get interrupted—'

‘That is not the field,' said Paul.

‘I don't know what else it could be, Paul.'

‘Earth does not think it is the field!'

There was a pause.

‘You'd better come over,' said Lewis. ‘We need to talk.'

‘If it was the field, I would not have been sent.'

‘Paul … this is difficult. When you and I see something happen to someone, we look for a cause, and we expect that cause to make sense to us. Why not?
We
are still humans, after all. What we have to understand is that Earth looks at things very differently. Just because our loss happened to be the telemetry executive doesn't mean—'

‘Stop!' said Paul roughly.

Silence. He swallowed. ‘You say we are still human. You mean everyone else is not?'

Again Lewis paused.

‘That's exactly what I mean, Paul,' he said slowly. ‘We – the four of us here – are, or soon will be, the only humans left.'

Paul said nothing.

‘We are the only humans left,' Lewis repeated. ‘The billions on Earth are no longer
humans
. They are no longer rational beings who think for themselves. They have become joined into something much larger. They have become part of a single, gigantic consciousness. That is the World Ear.'

Silence, so thick that Paul could hear the faint hum of his wall-display. He heard Lewis draw breath over the intercom. He drew breath himself and held it.

‘I don't agree,' he said.

‘Then you'd better come over,' snapped Lewis. ‘
You
may not need eye contact for this, but I do!'

Lewis needed eye contact, Paul thought, because without it his words would only be words – easily considered and dismissed. But his eyes added to what he said. Paul felt them waiting for him even as he crossed the common room. Powerful and grey, circled in their rings of flesh, they met him as he entered Lewis's work-chamber. They pointed him towards the inflated seat. (‘Sit down,' said Lewis.) And when he had sunk into it, feeling hollow and a little tense, they rested upon him like hands placed lightly on his shoulders, as if they could lock with great strength and pin him down when he tried to rise. Paul looked away. He looked around the room.

He saw that the chamber was the same size and shape as every other work-chamber in the station. But every square metre of wall was set to display a different image. There were tall white buildings, shining in the sun against a blue sky. There were ships under sail on a wide sea. There was a man directing other men, who walked in rows and wore the same
old-fashioned clothes. There was a courtyard of an old brickbuilt house, with yellow-painted woodwork and the sunlight filtering down through dusty air and a woman sitting doing something that involved straw. From time to time one would change to another, unhurriedly, but with a lazy power that implied a million other images waiting to be shown, all things that had been done by people, great things and little things that the watching eye must never forget.