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  ‘This child – if it lives – will you tell it, all the time it grows, that there is hope? Will you tell it that it can run the machines, seal in the air, eat the lichens and go on living to have children of its own? And when you are gone, what will it think of you, as the systems fail one after another? When the bubbles are empty and everyone is gone, and it is the last thing there is? What do you think it will do? Go out into the outer chambers and take off its helmet like Thorsten? And as the air escapes, will it say, I’m sorry, Daddy, I’ve failed?’

  ‘God! Right, that’s enough! You have no idea, Paul! You just have no idea … It’s no use talking to you.’

  Lewis got up and stalked out of the common room.

  Paul clenched and unclenched his fists. He was trembling with rage. He was trembling at the things he himself had said. Death. Long, lingering failure. Madness … The crew moved in this pocket of air and never spoke about those things. They talked about coffee and magnetism, radio signals and God. They told each other that they must be like family and then they shrieked at each other and ran off to hide in their rooms. They never spoke about how close they lived to Death. Now he had called it into the room. Lewis had made him do it. Earth and Lewis between them.

  He looked at the printout again.

  Congratulations. Relevant updates will be transmitted to your files. Keep us informed.

  He heard himself say, ‘What updates?’

  ‘It will be medical data,’ said Vandamme quietly. ‘Lessons learned from the case on Mars. Studies. How to cheat our own biology, and achieve a live birth despite the odds.’

  Paul was still staring at the printout. The cold, unsurprised banality of it touched him like an icy finger. Oh, you are having a child then, are you? Someone’s risking their life for it, are they? Very good.

  Carry on and let us know how it goes. ‘So Earth wants this child too.’

  ‘For its own purposes, yes.’

  Once again he had been betrayed. This time it was Earth who had betrayed him.

  ‘It’s a dilemma,’ she mused. ‘Earth is a terrible thing. Evil. We should not deal with it at all. But we are not fully self-sufficient here. There has to be some resupply. So we cannot help it – we have to depend upon the beast. If the beast can help save a life here on the station, should we not ask for help? What will the price for that help be? They fear the answer. So do I. This is why they were angry with you. But if you had not done it, maybe in three months’ time they would have done it themselves.’

  Congratulations, whispered the printout.

  ‘And our observations here,’ she went on. ‘What about them? If God gave me a gift, it was my science. But what I do here is meaningless if I keep it to myself. I must send it to Earth. There is nowhere else for it to go. So I too am feeding the beast. I am making it stronger, even though it is the enemy of all of us. And if you press me on this, I may lose my temper just like he did. Because I too do not know the answer. And I’m afraid of what it might be.’

  Keep us informed.

  ‘What will you do now?’ she asked him.

  He opened his fingers and let the printout float gently away. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I think you will do something wrong. I wonder if I can persuade you not to.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘To them.’

  ‘I thought you did not like them.’

  She frowned at that, as if he had suggested some puzzle that was difficult but that ought to be soluble.

  ‘Some of the time I hate them,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen that. It isn’t just because I love science and I love prayer that I keep myself to myself here. Why do I hate them? I think it’s because they’re what God wanted. There – I’ve confessed it now! Maybe He will forgive me at last. They’re as He meant us to be – even though they don’t know Him. I am not. You are not. My God – did they really want us to be partners?’

  They looked at each other, in the quiet of the central chamber.

  ‘We’re opposites,’ she said. ‘You have come from the We. I am alone.’ She put her hand to her head. ‘I am a little mad, maybe. I sometimes think I am.’

  Paul nearly said: It is mad to believe in God. But he did not, because she was the last connection he had left. Instead he said, ‘It is mad to think a new generation could survive here.’

  Again she frowned. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It is obvious.’

  ‘Have you looked at that assessment he sent to Earth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was very clever when he wrote that. Everything he said was true. Yet he said the opposite of what he believed. Yes, the challenge is immense. If they want to do it without Earth’s help it is worse still. How can they? We’re far, far too few. We can’t make new machines, or new fuel or new seals. It would mean cannibalization of machinery, adaptation, rationing: years of gradual descent into a caveman-like existence …

  ‘But it suits him, you see,’ she added sourly. ‘It gives him everything he wants. He’s got his partner. He has a noble cause. And he has command. He calls it “cooperation”, but that’s only his style. In ten years not one of us ever stood up to him in the way you did just now. How can he not be heroic? It’s the sort of thing men dream of, isn’t it?’

  ‘I dream of Earth,’ said Paul. ‘And my child.’

  ‘But Earth is lost!’ she said. ‘The generations born there are lost before they can even open their eyes!’

  She sighed.

  ‘And yet … Look at this place! He’s going to conscript his child into carrying it on. Can you imagine a child here? Poor thing – peering out at all that ice! And after we’ve all gone, like you said, what will happen? You could hate them for what they’re doing.’

  ‘There doesn’t have to be one here,’ said Paul carefully.

  She looked at him.

  ‘There doesn’t have to be. If you help me. There will be a way.’

  She was still looking at him. Her lips moved. He thought she was tempted. He thought that she would ask, What way? And he would say that he did not know yet. But there would be one if the two of them were able to think of it together.

  She did not speak. Her eyes went to the table top. She put her hands out on it and looked at the backs of them together. She drew breath.

  ‘Oh God!’ she said. ‘And for a moment I was sorry for you! But the two of you – thumping your chests at each other like ape-men from a million years ago! And now you want to stifle his children! That’s how our race started. Is it how we’re going to finish?’

  ‘No!’ He jumped up. ‘I’m trying to save her life!’

  ‘You think so? Maybe you’re not like him then. At least he’s honest with himself. Maybe you’re like me after all. And that does make me sorry for you! But God sees into my heart. And He sees into yours! He sees that you want to punish them for being what you’re not! Can’t you hear what you’ve said?’

  They were both on their feet, eye to eye. In the silence the low hum of the station systems crept back into the air of the common room.

  ‘You are angry,’ said Paul, ‘because you want to agree with me.’

  She stared at him. Then she turned away. She took two long paces down the chamber. She looked back at him.

  ‘I know who you are now,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you were just a poor man. You’d had so much robbed from you, when they planted the World Ear and when they took it away again, that you were still finding out what it is to be human – what’s right and what’s wrong. But you’re not. You’re very, very clever. You’re the cleverest of all God’s creatures. And the worst.’

  Her words sank inside him, turning and turning like objects falling into deep water, bumping into nothing. Nothing would stop their descent until they rested on the muddy floor of his soul.

  ‘Why have you followed me here?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I should pray for you,’ she said. ‘I should try. But I don’t thin
k I can.’

  XII

  He had tried to kill the child.

  The thought stopped him in the middle of a coding sequence. He looked at the walls of his chamber. His fingers hovered but did not touch his keys.

  The wall-display showed the hard blue sky and the pale grasses of the Hunter’s savannah. He had chosen it after returning here from the crew meeting. He had chosen it because he too was hunting.

  He was recoding the lost groups from the last set of tail data for transmission by laser. He had not found any suitable translation program in the station’s resources and he had not sent for one from Earth because he did not want to risk alerting the others to what he was doing. Therefore he had to recode the radio signals for the laser by hand – keystroke after keystroke, tap, tap, tap, pausing every now and then to check for the errors that seemed to creep in, however careful he was.

  It was tedious. It was mind-numbing. Even after his mind had learned the routines and had passed the task on to those areas of the brain that would run them automatically, it was taking more than an hour to code a second’s worth of transmission. But time was one of the few resources he had. And as he worked, his thoughts drifted, like an unpiloted vessel through space, until they struck something.

  He had tried to kill the child.

  He had a child of his own, on Earth.

  The grasses waved silently. In the mid-distance the squat, misshapen trees shimmered in the imagined heat. He could not feel it. His senses were like his conscience. They noted that things existed but they could not persuade him that they were real.

  No! He had not wanted to kill the child. What he had wanted was that May should not have the child. That their plan should be upset. That their lie should be exposed. He had assumed that the child would die anyway. Why? May was ready to risk her life. Everyone else would let her do so. Even Earth had offered its distant congratulations as she steered for her passage with death.

  He had barely left his room since the meeting. He had not eaten at all that evening, or this morning either. He was lonely and bewildered, and consumed with a fear that he knew nothing at all. This sense of not knowing was terrible. He did not know who was interfering with the signals, or why. He did not know if May would live, or if her child would live, or how long any of them would live out here.

  A hunter must be alone. To want anything else was weakness.

  He had opened the microphone channel to the common room, on low volume, so that he would be warned of anyone approaching his door. So when May spoke out there, suddenly and in distress, he heard her.

  ‘Why did he say that?’ she cried. ‘Why?’

  A lower voice answered her. To his surprise Paul realized that it was not Lewis but Vandamme.

  ‘It’s not true!’ May exclaimed.

  Again the murmur of Vandamme’s voice.

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be!’ May was almost in tears. ‘ You could do something about that! You could!’

  Curious, Paul opened the video link to the common room and increased the volume. He was in time to see May disappearing through her chamber door. Lewis was standing in the common room with his hands on his hips. The top of Vandamme’s head was in the very corner of Paul’s screen.

  ‘That was unkind, Van,’ Lewis said.

  Vandamme’s head disappeared. She must have turned away from him.

  ‘Van!’ Lewis called.

  The only answer was the hiss of the airlock seal.

  ‘Hunter,’ said Paul.

  The grasses parted. The Hunter stood in the working area before him.

  ‘Find me the word evil, used about the World Ear.’

  Hunter looked at him for a second. Then the ape-like mouth moved. Vandamme’s voice spoke in the room. ‘I have finally understood the full evil of the We …’

  ‘That’s it. Show me.’

  It was an entry that she had added to the Knowledge Store.

  WS2: 20:03:1118 I have finally understood the full evil of the We. It means that the whole human race has lost its Free Will. Free Will is not just the ability to make a choice. Without Free Will no relationship with God is possible. All He has taught us has been lost and His sacrifice for us has proved to be in vain. The We is the last triumph of Satan.

  ‘It’s not about child killing,’ Paul murmured.

  ‘Do you wish me to search—’

  ‘No.’

  Paul studied Vandamme’s entry. It had been written the day she had met him. It had been in him that she had finally seen the evil that the We had done.

  But he did not understand what she meant. On Earth he had been making choices all the time. That was how it had seemed to him. It was just that on Earth, equipped with the World Ear, the choices had been far, far easier than they were here. All he had needed to do was consult until the answers became obvious.

  Linked to Vandamme’s entry was a short exchange between her and Lewis.

  WS1: 20:03:1334 So we should re-name our station ‘Eden’? Is that what you are saying, Van?

  WS2: 20:03:1357 Eden at thirty degrees Kelvin? ‘Ark’ might be better. And I shall set my display to a rainbow to remind me of God’s promise.

  WS1: 20:03:1540 I don’t recall that story in detail. But you prompt me to wonder whether the We itself might contract some kind of spiritual life – or at least start looking for a purpose. There’s a suggestion in the last download that it can imagine bringing about the next Big Bang. If so, it would have secured – at least in its own mind – its place as an indispensable aspect of the universe. The universe created it so that it can create the next universe. That’s purpose for you.

  WS2: 20:03:1712 You don’t ‘contract’ a spiritual life. You ‘contract’ diseases.

  WS1: 20:03:1726 My point entirely, Van. Although in the case of the We, it might be more of a genetic disorder.

  Vandamme appeared to have broken off the contact at that point. Her next entry sequentially read:

  WS2: 20:03:2100 Borehole achieved by Search Crawler 14 at 51.975’ N, 34.695’ W. No content.

  And the next was from May:

  WS3: 20:03: 2234

  Alpha, beta, gamma

  Particle and ray,

  The Sun has boiled the sea,

  The sky is stripped away.

  Naked in the dust.

  Infinity returns.

  And I will cradle you, my love,

  My love, my little love,

  While all creation burns.

  My love, my little love. That meant her child. Hers and Lewis’s. The one they said he had wanted to kill.

  He hadn’t meant …

  Useless to protest. They would decide what he had meant. For them, only that would be the truth.

  Paul gritted his teeth. He went to Vandamme’s entries about her god and searched them for the word ‘evil’. There were so many occurrences that he did not look at any of them. Instead he searched for the words she had said in the crawler, about quiet waters. He found them. He found other words around them, about paths and green pastures – and the shadow of death. He supposed they were what Vandamme had meant by ‘prayer’.

  After a little, he went back to the string of Vandamme/Lewis entries. He began to construct an entry of his own.

  A date-time group sprang up automatically. WS4: 03:04:1134.

  He looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and dragged the keyboard towards him. Frowning with concentration, he started to spell out what he wanted to say. About Lewis’s 20:03:1540. The plan on Earth is to …

  The words were not right. They did not capture how things worked in the scientific communities. The word ‘plan’ was too certain. He tried again.

  Some scientists have proposed …

  That was wrong too. That put the emphasis on individuals. It did not recognize the thousands of reactions that each proposal would have received, or the part they would have played. Feedback was at least half of anything that happened in the World Ear.

  Words were the problem. There were World Ea
r symbols for the thing he wanted to express but he could think of no exact translation. And then there was the keyboard – the damned, wretched, primitive keyboard! It slowed him down. It made his silent speech the more halting. He felt he had receded almost to the state in which he had first arrived at the station, capable of saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and little else.

  But it was better than coding. Anything was better than coding.

  The idea is … he tapped.

  That was as close as he could come to it in a few words. The Idea. A series of proposals, met by a storm of feedback from peer communities. An idea was something that might be – that could not be achieved yet, but that was retained in the consciousness as a possible future action, for when circumstances were right.

  The idea is that we …

  He hesitated over ‘we’. But he did not want to use ‘it’, or ‘the We’, as the others would have done.

  The idea is that we achieve the first Big Bang. We will be the creators of our own universe.

  ‘Paul?’

  He jumped. It was Lewis.

  It was Lewis, speaking over the intercom, but his voice had sounded so present that Paul had automatically blanked his screen.

  ‘Yes?’

  Lewis’s voice filtered coldly into the room.

  ‘I’m shuffling the watches. Will you stand in for Van at the next passage of the tail?’

  Paul thought.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you. And something else. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The interference was happening before Thorsten died. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how could it have been a plot to get you here – when we still had our telmex?’

  Paul did not answer.

  ‘It doesn’t work, Paul,’ said Lewis. ‘Think about it.’

  After that there was silence, so Paul decided he had gone. He flicked the screen back to the log entry he had written. He had been about to add more, but the interruption had broken his train of thought. Instead he called up transmission records of the station’s first year, before Thorsten had died. He found reports of the interference. He found requests from his predecessor to Earth for a translation program to circumvent the problem. None had been sent, it seemed. That was strange.