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  But it might not be as it seemed. As station manager, Lewis had permissions to enter or amend any part of the system. The records Paul was looking at could have been planted for him to find. They could have been planted just moments before Lewis had called him.

  Grimly, he began to code again.

  Time passed. When he checked the external view, he saw that the shadow was creeping over the planet once more. The disc was narrowing to a downturned mouth. A great aurora glowed on the dark face, like a chain of nebulae in the blackness. Soon they would make the passage of the tail.

  He stole out to collect a long-overdue meal and ate it in his room. He slept for a short while and woke to begin coding again. In his breaks he thought about evil, and about going insane.

  He called up the station archive and looked for the biographies of the crew members: their photographs, their qualifications and their histories. He studied them carefully. None of them had any grounding in telemetry.

  In Lewis’s training record he found a minor degree in computer coding. Vandamme obviously had major degrees in dynamic meteorology, but prior to her assignment to the station only limited experience in radio astronomy. Her first name, the record reminded him, was Erin.

  He noticed that May had been in her mid-twenties when the mission had been launched. Not counting the eight years of flight, when all body processes would have slowed, she would be thirty-five now. That was old for a first child, even on Earth, but not impossible. Lewis was older. Of all of them, Paul was the youngest. If he was the youngest, there might also come a time when he was the last.

  He did not think so. He could imagine that future but he could not believe that it was real. The real future was the one in which the child lived and grew and became one of them. And that was a future he could not imagine, because he had no idea what the child would be like. Would he speak with it, perhaps even teach it things? How could he prepare it for its bleak life? Would it ever find out that he had argued against its birth? There was no knowing. It was pure potential, an unwritten record, a biography that did not exist.

  He called up another entry. 91/926.2 639: Thorsten Bondevik.

  It was a long, solemn face, the shape of an upside-down tear drop, with a little mouth and chin and pronounced lines across the brow. The ears were small but they stuck out prominently from the side of the head. Like Lewis, Thorsten had been nearly bald. The photograph did not show him smiling. Looking at it, Paul wondered if his predecessor had ever smiled. He could not remember smiling himself – not since arriving here.

  The entry said: Deceased 11:03:1331 2057. Cause of death: asphyxiation following decompression of pressure suit.

  He wondered if he could ever come to the point when he would go to the outer layers and decompress his suit. He tried to imagine himself looking at the displays. Ex: 0.3 Suit:1.0 Temp: 90K, and then he would bring his hand across to unlock his helmet. And the hiss of air and the sudden scream of pain in his ears as his tiny personal atmosphere exploded and was lost into the half-vacuum …

  Even in his mind, his fingers refused to find the buttons. He looked into the eyes of the dead man and wondered what had happened that day in Thorsten’s brain.

  It was time for his watch.

  He tapped in his entry codes immediately, so that Lewis would know he was on duty and would not be tempted to remind him. He tuned his monitor to the field readings. Then he adjusted the wall-display. The blue sky and yellow grasses vanished. All around him was darkness. In the dome over his head the tiny Sun was low over the crescent of the planet. He looked up at it.

  There, somewhere there, a mere one hundred and fifty million kilometres from that point of light, was the place that should have been his home. It was so close to the Sun that it might have been one and the same: a tiny fleck of rock, a little gravity well just strong enough to cloak itself in a protective atmosphere, at exactly the right distance from its star for water to run freely on its surface and so for life to begin. And after four billion years, a form of life had evolved that was sufficiently intelligent to speak, to perceive the universe, and to step off the life-bearing rock and into the empty vastness around it. To send one of its number across space, to sit on another little rock, cold and empty, copying out strings and strings of numbers while a tiny seed of life stirred close by.

  And now something else was happening back there. If he could view it not with his eye but with a radio telescope, he would see not one star but two. First with its primitive broadcasts and televisions, and latterly with its mobile networks and then the World Ear, the Earth had become a source of radio and microwave emissions almost as intense as the Sun itself. In the We, another new life had glowed into being. An infant yet, rising wobbly to its feet in the great dark room of space, looking around, beginning to wonder why it was alone.

  It knew it must die. Some day, it too must come to an end. Why?

  ‘I could feel sorry for you,’ he murmured to the diamond spark. ‘I could feel sorry. But you sent me here. You are my enemy, after all.’

  There was a lump in his throat. He had been aware of it for some time. His body wanted to weep. He could feel his lips drawn back. His face muscles were bunched. His eyes were hot and runny. He hit the console with his fist – his weak, flimsy fist that sprang from his insect-thin arm. He was a victim, an object, an experiment. What is it like, having the World Ear? Vandamme had asked. And his answer: You belong.

  He had been part of something much bigger. He had had purpose – something to which he could contribute. What purpose could an individual have by himself? A single I? Only to increase the We: the thing that was made of the millions of things called I. The I died for its tribe or nation. The parent lived and died for its child. The I must die. Only the We could live on.

  And he had died, now. Once they had cut him off and put him in the rocket, his life within the We had ended. Death was the absence of life, just as dark was the absence of light and vacuum the absence of matter. What life could live out here, in this unanchored immensity, forty degrees above absolute zero? Death lay all around him. It lay in the bitter temperatures beyond the sealed doors of the station. It lay in the wastes of ice, uncloaked by atmosphere, naked to the emptiness of space. It held the frozen remains of a man up there in the blue-grey dusk on the canyon lip. The remains would not have decayed. Decay was only another form of life. Here, there was not even decay.

  Now, in the darkness, he could believe what Lewis had said to him. Humanity was gone. For all those billions of human bodies, there was only one mind, callous, even oblivious of the individual cells that composed it. It had been there all the time. Perhaps it had been there even before the World Ear had let it leap to a new level of consciousness. It was a cold, stupid, animal brain. And it had dispensed with him. It had cast him out to where he could no longer belong. Why? Because it had been tricked by the crew? That did not work. For its own reproduction? That did not work either. There had been a man and two women here already. It must have had a reason and yet its reason was opaque. Its thoughts were slow. From the inside, in that swift and living stream of communications, he had never seen it. Only now, looking back from the very edge of the solar system, could he know that it was there.

  They were deep into the tail. On his screen the impossible readings reeled away. He watched them with loathing.

  The tail receded. The star hid itself beyond the canyon lip. The narrow crescent of the planet began to widen again, into a huge but ordinary half-moon. Paul completed coding the historical readings and sent them to the laser in the window that he would normally have used to transmit the passage data. At the same time he sent a dummy message over the radio, purporting to be the passage data but actually repeating readings that had been taken some days before on the Sun side. Then he slept, woke, slipped out of his room to pick up a meal from the kitchen and slipped back again before anyone saw him. He ate, waited, and then began to prepare the passage data for transmission. There was no hurry.

  In a
break he checked the Knowledge Store again. There were new entries.

  WS1: 07:04:0556 Van, have you seen Paul’s 03:04:1134?

  WS2: 07:04:0617 I don’t believe it! The We can’t do that, can it? Reverse the arrow of time?

  WS1: 07:04:0620 Why not? In time the We – or its successor – might be capable of anything.

  WS2: 07:04:0622 But that would mean everything was just one huge paradox. Everything that has ever been just goes back on itself.

  WS1: 07:04:0624 Strikingly egocentric, I agree. A symptom of loneliness, perhaps?

  Again Vandamme had broken off the exchange.

  Paul looked at the entries. He supposed they were contact of a sort. He saw that he could reply to them and let the others reply in turn. And at some point they might be able to talk to each other again – warily at first, perhaps, but then as if the argument had never happened.

  It was what he had wanted. But now he could see that contact was possible, he did not want it. Not yet. First he must solve the interference with the transmissions. He must know who was doing it and why. When he knew, and they knew that he knew, he would speak with them again.

  He waited.

  At 08:04:0000 there was a watch-change. He checked the new schedules. Lewis and May were off. Vandamme was now on with him.

  He waited a further hour and then sent the latest data from the tail out over the radio. He sent it with no preface, to minimize the possibility of anyone recognizing it for what it was.

  Towards the end of his watch his monitor alerted him to an incoming message. It was a response to the signals he had sent out the previous day.

  Your 07:04:1234 and 07:04:1238 received. No evident corruptions. But no apparent correlation. Query Observation DTGs. Also reference your 07:04:1234 query the following groups …

  Earth was confused. It had received his two earlier messages clearly, including in the laser message the first unadulterated observations from the tail that the station had ever produced. But it did not understand what they related to, because he had not explained what he was doing. And it did not believe some of what it was reading.

  Suddenly Paul grinned. It did not matter that Earth was confused. Earth was not the master here. He was. The nine-billion-celled brain was, for the moment, nothing more than his assistant. A servant, whose duty was to do just what it was told and whose questions did not matter. Is it corrupted, Earth, or is it not? You tell me it is not. Good. So I proceed …

  It was a moment of sheer power, sweet in his mind.

  Nevertheless he checked the groups Earth was querying and he did indeed find a few errors which had crept in despite his best attention. He signalled back his corrections, adding the dates and times at which the readings were taken so that Earth would at least know what it was he had sent, even if it did not yet know why. Then he went off watch.

  He lay on his couch but did not sleep. Thoughts chased inside his head. It was good that the laser message had not been corrupted. He had smuggled out of the station information that was not meant to go to Earth. The theory that the laser was immune to interference was looking stronger. So he could simply send to Earth for a translation program, and tail data could be transmitted to Earth by laser for ever more.

  But that was not what was important. If Earth had really wanted the tail data, the station would have had a translation program long ago. No program had been sent. To Earth, what was important was the corruption of the radio data. That was why Earth had sent him here – to have the best chance of finding out why it was happening. It was important to Paul too. The thought of a secret enemy was poison in his mind. Why had his radio message not been corrupted? Whatever the source of the interference, it was not triggered simply by the timing of the signal. Could it be capable of reading the message itself and seeing whether the content related to the tail? Would it detect the tail data that he had now sent out over the radio? Would it react to that? He needed it to react. Like a hunter crouched in the bush, he needed the beast to show itself.

  The message was waiting for him when he woke.

  Your 08:04:0102: Message corrupted. The following groups unreadable …

  … Investigate and report.

  ‘Got you!’ he said.

  XIII

  The heavy figure of the ape-man filled his screen. In one hand the creature held its pointed stick – a pale wand of sharpened wood. It was so slender in the hairy hand that Paul wondered how it could possibly be lethal. And yet it would have been.

  Behind the Hunter the grasses waved silently.

  ‘Search all routines that were running at zero eight: zero four: zero one zero two,’ said Paul. ‘Report anything that might have corrupted radio transmission to Earth.’

  The Hunter looked at him, unblinking.

  ‘There was nothing,’ it said.

  ‘Nothing? You are sure?’

  ‘I have searched three million one thousand six hundred and eighty-two routines. All were benign.’

  ‘A radio message containing data on the tail was sent to Earth at zero eight: zero four: zero one zero two,’ Paul insisted. ‘It was corrupted, like all radio transmissions concerning the tail before it. Was this an accident, was it natural, or was it deliberate?’

  ‘It is highly likely that it was deliberate.’

  Paul let out his breath.

  ‘I agree. But it was not done by an automatic routine?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are saying it was manual?’

  ‘It is highly likely.’

  Manual! So they – whoever it was – had done it by the oldest and most primitive way possible. They had watched or listened to what he was doing themselves. And then they had jammed his signal.

  They were watching him. Whoever it was, they were watching him and acting when he acted. Incredible! And how primitive, how prone to error! But it was not vulnerable to detection by Hunter.

  Or so they might think.

  ‘We will replicate the transmission. Monitor all active workstations in the station and be ready to display what you find.’

  He began to prepare a repeat of his signal. His fingers knew the commands and performed them automatically. His mind was alive with suspicions.

  Lewis? He might know how to clean the transmitter records afterwards, so that no sign of the jamming signal remained. Or Vandamme? She would be able to identify tail data at a glance. She would have the patience, the machinelike focus to watch for the signal and act on it when it came – whenever it came.

  Or was it May?

  Was it all of them, all working together?

  Shit!

  Where was the signal coming from, anyway?

  He got up and began to pace the room. He paced aimlessly. He muttered aloud. He went and fidgeted with his monitor. He left it again.

  Shit!

  He sat down. He checked the watch schedules. Vandamme and May were on. But if they were all in it, it didn’t matter who was on. Hunter would have to watch for all of them.

  ‘Show me all present workstation activity.’

  ‘There is a prohibition …’

  ‘Circumvent it.’

  His screen changed immediately. It showed him a view of the hangar. A suited figure was bending over a partly disassembled crawler. That was what his human eyes saw. But it was not what Hunter would have seen. Hunter was relaying to him what another workstation was doing.

  ‘Which workstation is that?’

  ‘Workstation Two.’ Vandamme’s.

  As if to confirm the thought, Vandamme’s voice spoke. ‘You’re over your three hours. Do you want to come in?’ And Lewis’s voice answered, ‘I’ll get it finished. It shouldn’t take much longer now.’

  So Vandamme was supervising Lewis out in the hangar. Lewis was working past the three-hour advisory limit for his pressure suit, to finish the repair he was working on.

  That only left May.

  ‘Workstation Three?’

  ‘Inactive.’

  An inactive monitor might m
ean that May was asleep. But she should be on watch now. Where was she?

  ‘It’s showing some wear on the rear drive, there,’ came Lewis’s voice from the hangar. ‘Maybe the wheel’s out of kilter.’

  Paul reverted to his own controls, called up the 08:04:0102 message and pressed Dispatch. Then he said, ‘Hunter, display all workstation activity.’ The screen flicked back to the hangar again.

  ‘… the weak point in this design,’ Lewis was saying. ‘Irritating, when you think how much we depend on it.’

  ‘Workstation Three, Hunter?’ said Paul.

  ‘Inactive.’

  ‘What about Workstation One?’ barked Paul. (Because May could be in Lewis’s room! Of course she could. He could be hiding there, watching Paul’s signal at this moment …)

  ‘Workstation One is inactive.’

  ‘Good,’ said Paul hoarsely. And he felt the prickle of sweat as his body reacted to the thought that he might have been outwitted. But he hadn’t been. The monitors were inactive.

  But he must think these thoughts. He must check everything. He must keep checking, obsessively. There was an enemy. A very, very clever enemy. He had to trap them. Are you ant or human, Paul? An ant goes insane.

  ‘Workstation One?’

  ‘Inactive,’ said the patient Hunter.

  ‘Workstation Three?’

  ‘Inactive.’

  He reviewed the progress of the message. It was still going out over the main transmitter. He checked the two auxiliary transmitters. They were silent.

  He could not stand still.

  ‘Continue to monitor all workstations,’ he said. He rose to his feet, left his chamber and glided through the common room and the airlock beyond. He stopped at a door.

  ‘Vandamme?’

  There was no answer. He entered at once.

  She had changed the wall displays. The desolation of the moon’s surface was gone. The predominant colour was a rich blue, grading from darker colours to light. But at one point on the wall a small shape in luminous gold stood out like a flame, brightening all the blues around it into whites and golds. It had a very calm, almost sleepy effect. Faint music was coming from somewhere. Paul was reminded of the lights of stained-glass windows and the interiors of those once-holy places on Earth where almost no one went any more.