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  The passenger saw none of this. He was asleep. And the people who accompanied him and received him did not see it either. They moved with the live displays flickering across their vision and barely glanced up at the thing that soared and disappeared above their heads.

  The cable was made of special carbon-based materials designed for this one purpose: to create a structure strong enough to reach into space without collapsing under its own weight. It was nearly forty thousand kilometres long – almost as long as the imaginary line of the equator itself. Its far end was anchored to a satellite in geostationary orbit. And there it hung, like some line of longitude come adrift from Earth: a ladder that men had built towards the stars.

  Clutching at its base, in a cocoon of red gantries, was a man-made insect the size of a small house. It was white, sprouting black solar panels like wings. But it was blind. It had no windows because it had no crew. Its operations were all automatic or controlled from the ground. It sat with its nose pointed up the first gentle curve of the cable, waiting for the man who lay unconscious in his capsule.

  The precious burden was lifted up the gantries and placed inside the giant white insect. Then more checks were performed: on the occupant; on the capsule with its life-supporting array of instruments and its reservoirs of supplies; and on the cable-vehicle itself, which had to pass a hundred routine tests before the start of each climb.

  Waiting. Results. Orders. A risk was noted. Permission was sought for a ten-day postponement.

  Permission was denied. The astronomical window was too small for any delay. The risk must be accepted.

  More orders. Codes were entered. Systems aboard the white insect woke. Gantries were withdrawn. The black wings trained themselves to the Sun. A gentle humming filled the site.

  More waiting.

  Then a signal, sent automatically from the white insect to its controllers. Ready.

  More codes were entered and acknowledged. The final one was repeated three times for confirmation.

  The hum deepened and increased. Gently the white insect began to rise along the cable, curving away upwards from the ground. Clinging to the impossible thread, it needed nothing like the acceleration required by rockets of past eras. The force of the Earth pulled on it but could not slow it. The detail of the launching site was lost in the enormous green-brown of the diminishing land. Up and up the insect sped, like a train hurrying into the sky. The solar panels angled to catch the Sun. The Earth turned but the cable turned with it, towed by the satellite at the far end. It turned four times on its axis. And still the insect hurried up and up and up out of the little, safe well of gravity that life inhabited, out to the rim of space.

  On the last stage of its journey it slowed. Here, one-tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, the anchoring satellite swung at the end of its line. It was almost a little moon itself, a near-Earth asteroid diverted to its current orbit, so that the cable’s outer end would be secured while the white insects scuttled to and fro. It had huge solar panels, and directional rockets to permit slight variations to its orbit should drifting debris threaten either it or the precious cable. It was Earth’s outer door to space.

  It was also its shipyard. Here, crews of remotely controlled robots moved along runners to assemble spacecraft that would have no need to fight their way up from the pit of Earth’s gravity. Along one gantry lay the skeleton of a craft five hundred metres long, the first of a non-recoverable fleet planned for the hundred-year project to make a habitable world from the hell of Venus. The robots slid patiently to and fro along their scaffolding, bearing components to the vessel, adding to it bit by bit like metal ants feeding a huge queen.

  Out here, beyond the atmosphere, there was no sound at all. But there was still vibration, dropping in pitch as the cable-vehicle slowed and slowed to dock at the inbound gantry. Then there was a pause. At workstations forty thousand kilometres away on Earth, routine checks were performed.

  Satisfactory.

  Commands were transmitted to the station. A hatch on the insect opened. Great arms reached down into it and fastened around the capsule inside.

  More checks. Secure.

  The arms lifted the capsule with its living, sleeping burden out of the cable-craft. Silently, passionlessly, they bore it along a gantry to a smaller spacecraft which had completed its assembly and tests some weeks before. This craft had two huge arms, folded in three sections along the gantry. At the end of each arm was a large globe. In one of these globes a hatch opened, revealing a small chamber surrounded by massive shielding. The capsule was placed inside. The hatch closed.

  Six hours passed. After more checks and conferences on Earth, final commands were given. Gently the spacecraft separated from the satellite and began its journey. At a safe distance the two arms unfolded. Locked in their extended position, they were each a kilometre long. Gently they began to turn in a giant cartwheel around the spacecraft, one globe acting as counter-weight to the other, to simulate the effect of a light gravity field pulling on the body in its capsule. Down on the surface, congratulations rippled around the command centres, universities, engineering concerns and surgeries that had been directly involved. There were images and comments on the news sites and among the wider population. None of it reached the sleeping man, riding in his tiny bubble through the vastness of space.

  Six months later there was another wave of interest on Earth, mostly among the space engineering community, as the craft made its passage past the Sun. Anxious eyes monitored the levels of radiation absorbed by the shielding on the passenger globe. Automatic messages from the vessel reported that systems aboard remained normal. The capsule detected no apparent damage to its occupant. At the closest point the rockets fired to kick the little spaceship onward. Swung by the enormous gravity of the star, it accelerated away into the void.

  There were more congratulations. Then interest faded as effort was switched to other things. But it did not die altogether. A rota of staff checked the regular reports that came back from the craft and the capsule within it, day in, day out. Occasional corrections were discussed and transmitted. So Earth settled down to watch as the tiny artificial mote diminished and diminished towards the outer edge of the solar system.

  It watched, patiently, for eight years.

  III

  Sleep held him close, like a membrane around a newborn thing. He was blind with it. He stirred feebly but it held him. In his darkness he could hear a voice saying something. It was a woman’s voice.

  There was something strange about the words. They were like nothing he had heard in his training classes. They were drawn out, and some of them changed in pitch as they were uttered. There was music in them. Of course he remembered music. There had been days when he had set it to run through his head continuously. He had not heard it made from a human throat before, because there were better and easier ways of doing it. But he knew it was possible. There was a word for it.

  The woman was ‘singing’.

  Was this a dream? He had not had a dream in so long. He could not remember how long. All this long sleep had been a blackness. He could barely imagine the other side of it.

  He was lying on something solid. He thought that there should have been a harness round him but there was not. If there ever had been one, it was gone.

  If he was asleep, he was not sure that he wanted to wake. He thought that if he did he might be sick. There was something wrong with his head, as if there was too much fluid in it. There was something wrong in his throat too. He could not breathe through his nose.

  The singing had stopped. He heard a movement.

  ‘Are you awake yet?’ said the woman’s voice.

  After a moment he felt a touch on his wrist. Fingers that were not his covered his pulse. They were warm. He did not think this could be a dream.

  ‘Oh, come on! Wake up and talk to me,’ said the voice. ‘I’m getting nervous!’

  His hand was put gently back where it had been lying. He heard her
move away. There was an irregular clicking sound. He did not recognize it. He would not have dreamed of sounds he did not recognize.

  The singing began again. He would not have dreamed that either.

  He opened his eyes.

  The first thing he saw was a bright surface curving over his head. The light it emitted rippled with little wavelets of orange. He knew exactly what it was. It was the wall of a modern bubble-chamber: active, so that occupants could set it to project whatever images, colours and light-levels they chose. He had not thought there would be one out here.

  Out here, meaning …

  He lifted his head.

  The chamber was small. There was just room in it for the bed on which he lay, for the workstation and for the woman who sat there, humming as her fingers played up and down on a peculiar array of mechanical keys.

  He looked at the woman. And he knew at once that he was indeed out here.

  It was as if some child had drawn her. Her proportions were all wrong. Her head was big, her face puffy and swollen. Her skin was so pale that it was almost white. Her body was shapeless in her dark overalls. Her arms and legs and neck were dreadfully thin. There seemed to be no muscle on them. They could be little more than bone, so delicate that they could not possibly carry her. She was like a giant mantis, distorted and horrible to look at.

  But she did not seem to be suffering in her condition. She sat poised at her workstation with her delicate fingers nibbling at the mechanical keyboard and her eyes on figures that danced on a wall-screen before her. She was frowning as she worked, as if she was having to think about what she was doing and did not really enjoy this kind of mental activity. There was a rich, ruddy sheen to her hair, which was tied back from her face. And when she looked round at him, her pony-tail floated as if she were suspended in water. She saw him watching her.

  ‘Hey, that’s better!’ she said. Her voice was light, clipped and a little dry. ‘I was beginning to worry. How do you feel?’

  He had to think about it.

  His head ached. There seemed to be something wrong with his throat. His nose was blocked. He felt sick. And of course he was weak – weaker than he had ever been in his life.

  Experimentally, he sat up. Despite his own frailty his body seemed to flow upwards from the couch. The blanket that had been over him slipped away and drifted gently to the floor, rippling slowly as it fell.

  Gravity here was less than one-tenth of that on Earth.

  He looked down at himself. He saw that he was naked. And his body was not his any more.

  He was looking at limbs that were as spindly as hers. The great muscles of calf and thigh had wasted almost to nothing. All the meat of them had gone. The knees stood out like knobbly balls at the joints of sticks. His arms sprouted from the corners of his undiminished torso, looking feeble and ridiculous. If he had not recognized a small mole, clinging obstinately in the crook of his elbow, he would have thought they belonged to someone else. Gingerly he lifted one arm and flexed it. Only the smallest, pathetic bulging showed where his biceps had been. His skin was dead white. No sun had touched it for eight years.

  And for eight years, while he had slept, his body had been exposed to a programme of artificial gravity and exercise designed to adapt him for his existence here. His mass had reduced. His muscles had wasted. The calcium in his bones had diminished, leaving them feeble and brittle. If he stood on the Earth now he would collapse at once. His skeleton would splinter under his weight. He would lie in agony, helpless as a stranded jellyfish. Here …

  He was like her, as deformed as she was.

  He looked at himself – at the limbs that might have belonged to someone else. And he felt a kind of horror, but so dimly and quietly that this too might have been the horror of someone else. Memory tapped from the far side of his long, black sleep, telling him that there had been a time when he had known that this would happen to him. He had known and accepted the changes that were coming. There was no need for weight-bearing muscles now. There never would be. And from now on the fluids in his body would always rise to his head, blocking his nose and making his face puffy like hers. He would live for the rest of his life with this insect’s body and a permanent head cold. Because that was how things were, out here.

  He said nothing. After a little he frowned and shifted himself along the bed to try the easy gravity. He reached down to pick up the blanket and draw it around his waist. It floated and settled slowly over his bony thighs. The woman rose and stepped towards him. He saw her cross the short distance between them in one flowing skip, seeming to move in slow motion. Her limbs, though frail, carried her easily.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she repeated.

  He thought about it. Then he said: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’ She looked puzzled. ‘Do you mean that you feel well?’

  He frowned again. She was talking far more quickly than his speech tutors had done, back before his eight-year night. And although he could understand her well enough, he could not hope to speak as she did.

  But the answer was easy, after all. Positive feedback. It should be ‘Yes’ again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure? How’s your sight? Can you see clearly? Or are you getting double vision, for example? Headache? Sickness? What can you tell me?’

  He thought. It was an effort, trying to deal in words. But he was going to have to get used to it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Yes, he could see clearly.

  ‘No,’ he said, meaning that he did not have double vision.

  And ‘Yes,’ again. He did have a headache.

  Then he stopped, because he saw that she thought something was wrong.

  ‘Can you tell me your name?’ she asked.

  Name?

  He knew what a name was. It was used like a reference number, in speech. Of course it was inferior to a reference number because there was no guarantee that a name would be unique. In any population of a thousand or more, confusion could arise.

  But out here, the entire population, including himself, was just four. Names were easier to say than numbers. So here the balance of advantage did favour names.

  And of course he had a name. He knew it quite well, even though he could not remember when he had last had to use it.

  So he said: ‘Yes.’

  He saw her face change. For some reason his answer had worried her even more. Why was positive feedback worrying? What was he doing wrong?

  He was nervous. Of course he was nervous. It was all difficult. He had known it would be difficult but that did not help. Picking words (so slow!), looking at what had happened to his body, trying to adjust to this new place – he knew that he had expected it all, somewhere back in his past. He had been trained for all of it. And yet it was still difficult. Now he was doing something wrong and he couldn’t think what it was. Panic was beginning to stir.

  She looked more closely at him. He could sense her anxiety even before she spoke.

  ‘Please tell me your name,’ she said.

  ‘Mun … Munro.’ He was not used to saying it. But it came out right the second time.

  She let out her breath. Her face cleared. ‘That’s all right. Though mostly we just use first names here. So I’m May and you’re Paul – unless you want us to call you something else. Do you mind being called Paul?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Paul, then. And you’re not confused, are you, Paul? For a moment I thought you must be. But it’s just that you’re not used to speaking, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes!’ he said emphatically.

  She laughed. ‘Yes, no, yes, no … Have they stopped speaking altogether back home? No – don’t you answer that,’ she added as she saw him beginning to think again. ‘I’m supposed to be checking you. That’s what we’re doing. First tell me – how’s the throat? Does it hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not painful but a bit stiff perhaps?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No surprise there. Your larynx w
as all one huge sore when we got you into the station. You’ve been eight years on ventilation, breathing through a tube down your throat. Even that clever little nozzle you were on was rubbing you to bits by the time you landed. I’ve kept some images of what the inside of your mouth looked like when I first got you, if you’re interested. Now’ – she reached down and put fingers that were like pale twigs on his shin – ‘could you try standing up for me, Paul? Carefully.’

  Obediently, clumsily, he stood. He felt her fingers testing his bone as it took the strain – the light strain of his diminished body in this gentle gravity field.

  ‘Very good!’ she said, releasing him.

  She took him briskly through the checks. Height: one metre eighty-four (slightly more than on departure). Weight: just under five kilograms, whatever that meant in this gravity. Blood pressure. Eyesight. Reactions.

  ‘Yeah, that’s good,’ she said. ‘Do you need a rest now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure? You’re going to tire quickly, though. So look out for that. All right then. Maybe you could try taking some steps for me?’

  He hesitated. Then he leaned forward. It seemed to him that he had to lean much too far and wait too long before he sensed himself beginning to fall and could push off with his foot. He flew.

  ‘Careful!’ she cried, catching him with an arm across his chest, so that instead of sailing across the room he spun slowly with her like a dancer and came to rest on his toes.