WE Read online

  Her head was close to his. It filled his vision. He saw that it was in fact not quite as horrible as he had first thought when he had seen it so unnaturally balanced on top of her body. Yes, her skin was shockingly pale, her cheeks puffy with fluids, but her face-bones were delicate and her eyes had widened just a little in alarm – alarm for him. And she was small. She had to crane right back to look up at him. His mind jerked back to the woman he had left on Earth, who had held him and looked up at him just like this at their last parting. Who had buried her head on his chest and whose sadness had been pain for them both.

  The woman released him.

  ‘Take it carefully, yeah?’ she said. ‘If you push yourself off like that you’ll fly across the room. And your bones are much, much more brittle than they were. You don’t want to go smashing into anything. Secret is, don’t think about it. Your body should already know how to control itself. That’s what it’s been learning while you were asleep. Let it do the job for you. Try again – and don’t think.’

  Pushing aside the memory of that other face, he tried again.

  But he couldn’t help thinking about control. All his conscious effort was focused on it because he was doing it for the first time. His feet moved him in a long skip, floating through the air to the far wall. It was still too hard! He put out his hand to break the impact and felt the orangepulsing surface give slightly as he pressed against it.

  He paused to steady himself. The wall beneath his hand seemed thicker than any chamber wall on Earth would have been. There would be good reasons for that, he thought.

  He turned himself with his hands and took another step back, this time landing on the other foot.

  ‘Hey, better!’ said May, clapping. ‘You know, I think you’re almost perfect! When we got here we were all sick and frail. I’d have hospitalized the lot of us if it had been possible. But there’s a lot of cleverness back on Earth. And it’s learning all the time. You’ve been kept doing just the right amount while you were on your way here. Still, no risks, yeah? It’s going to be bed and rehab exercises only to begin with. And after I let you go I want you to come and see me every day so I can check on you. We’ll keep that up until I think it’s safe to stop. And if you start to feel at all uncomfortable, in any way, you must tell me at once. I can’t help you if you don’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m going to ban you from saying that, Paul. “Yes” and “No” all the time! If you want to say “Yes” or “No” you’ll have to say something else as well. If you don’t practise, you won’t improve. Now, are you ready to meet the others? Just for a short time. We’ve been jumping up and down to see you – I tell you, when we took you out of that capsule it was like unwrapping the biggest and best birthday present ever! It was very nearly Van’s birthday too. Will you be all right to do that?’

  He thought about it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Yes …?’

  There had to be other words, she had said. Of course she had been joking. But she was right.

  ‘Yes, May,’ he said. She smiled again. And he was pleased that she had done so. The smile changed her, a little.

  ‘Let’s get you dressed then,’ she said.

  The next chamber was much larger than the one in which he had woken. The light was dimmer: a dull glow from the curving walls. There was a circle of inflated seating in the middle of the room. There were two people there. They rose like ghosts as he approached.

  At first glance they were exactly like May, with limbs like long sticks and swollen faces that seemed to float above their dark overalls. They came and took his hand, first one, then the other, in a greeting that Paul thought old-fashioned but at least professional. One had dark skin and straight black hair cut to the shoulder. The other had very little hair; what there was of it was grey. Only when they spoke could he be sure that one was a woman and the other a man.

  He did not recognize their names at all: ‘Vandamme’ and ‘Lewis’. Names had not featured in his briefings. In that first meeting he saw them as the dark one and the grey one.

  They sat down on the inflated seats. May glided onto the seating beside the grey man, took his hand and curled up against him. She already knew everybody here. She was at ease with all of them. Paul did not know the others and they did not know him. May had said they were ‘jumping up and down’ to see him, but they were not. They sat upright, formal and stiff, and so did he. He waited for someone to begin.

  The man spoke to a point in the wall: ‘Record,’ he said. There was a faint click.

  ‘Lewis speaking. This is a most significant day in the history of our station. We have been joined by Paul Munro, telemetry executive. It is hard to exaggerate just how eager we have been for his arrival and how much we have been looking forward to him waking up and being with us. For the first time in nine years we are back to full strength.

  ‘Paul has completed his initial checks and appears to be in good health after his journey. He will undergo a short period of convalescence before assuming responsibility for all aspects of radio and laser communication between the station and Earth. At that point he will be able to begin investigating the irregularities in our signals that Earth has reported to us, to confirm the causes and propose solutions. Dr Vandamme and I will be released to concentrate fully on the duties originally assigned to us, but we will be available to support Paul whenever he needs our help. We will depend on him as he will on us. We wish him all success …

  ‘Anything anyone wants to add? May? Van?’

  ‘Just that we’re so thrilled he’s here,’ said May.

  ‘Quite. Paul, would you like to say something?’

  Paul had stopped listening. The man’s speech had gone on far longer than any communication should.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ repeated the man, surprised. ‘Surely …’

  ‘Don’t press him, Lewis,’ said May. ‘He’s doing really well.’

  ‘No? Very well then. End Record.’

  There was another faint click.

  ‘It’s sometimes hard to think what to say when you know it’s going to be fired across four and a half billion kilometres of space for Earth to pore over,’ said the man wryly. ‘But you’ll get used to it. Shall we have some coffee? Is it all right for Paul to have coffee, May?’

  ‘Well … a little one, maybe.’

  ‘Coffee, Paul?’

  Coffee?

  What did it mean?

  ‘It’s a stimulant,’ said the man, who must have read his face. ‘We drink it together as we talk. It’s a social ritual. It used to be very common on Earth. There are still parts of Earth where they do it, in fact.’

  ‘I’ll make it!’ said May, bouncing up from where she sat.

  ‘Let me,’ said the man.

  ‘Don’t be silly. You want to talk to Paul.’ And she skipped gently away across the chamber. The far wall parted and allowed her through.

  Paul sat cradling his spindly limbs in the inflated seat and looked at the two figures opposite him: these two people, with their heads propped on their long and brittle bodies, who would inhabit this place with him. They were sitting on the edge of their seats, watching him as if his presence had some enormous importance for them.

  ‘I expect you have some questions, Paul,’ said the man.

  Paul leaned forward. ‘You …’ he managed. ‘You – commander?’

  ‘I am the station manager. My first and last command here was that we should all be equals. We cooperate with one another, although we have authority in our own spheres. My sphere is the running of the station. May is the doctor. Between us, we cover the whole of ST1. Van does astronomical observation of the main target.’

  He looked at the dark woman, who said, ‘I also cover ST2.’

  ‘ST2’ was Standard Task 2: the search for life forms, evidence of extinct life forms, or failing either, for the conditions that could theoretically support life. It was a task se
t for all space missions, manned or otherwise, whatever their main target. It was as automatic as Standard Task 1 – to survive and continue to operate. Paul wondered why the grey man had omitted it.

  Then he thought what ST2 must mean out here.

  Here in the deep, bombarded cold at the edge of the solar system, where life was an accident that had happened four and a half billion kilometres away.

  Paul swallowed. He looked around.

  ‘Now I have a question for you, Paul,’ said the man.

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul.

  The man looked levelly at him. Ancient instincts in Paul’s brain at once whispered the word commander. Commander, even though the man had said he was not.

  His head was big and his flesh folded in deep creases on his forehead and beneath his eyes. His dark brows contrasted with the sparse greys of his scalp. His skin was pale but his cheeks and nose were patterned with so many capillaries that they seemed almost pink. His jaw was tight and powerful. There were no veils of figures over his sight, no images, no distractions, none of the thousand other thoughts and messages that would have been flitting all the time across a man’s vision on Earth. His eyes were a wintry grey, and made huge by the surrounding rings of flesh that sagged upon his cheeks like the dishes of radio telescopes that peered deep into the voids of space. The signal they emitted could carry a word into the darkest and most protected place of the heart.

  Paul thought that he had never, ever, seen anyone look at him as intently as this – eye to eye and straight into the brain.

  ‘You have been sent away from your home to a place where you can only survive if you remain within a space a few tens of metres square,’ said the Commander.

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul. His throat was dry.

  ‘You have lost eight years of your life while you slept on your way here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your body, like ours, has been distorted. Your bones are now brittle. In theory it would be possible for Earth to recover you and for you to be rehabilitated to an extent where you could spend your remaining years at home. In practice, the effort required to get you back would be enormous and the benefit from Earth’s point of view would be nil. You will remain here for the rest of your life – however long that may be. We still do not know what effect this gravity has on lifespan.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul. It was hard to concentrate on these long, slow messages. And it was hard to meet those eyes without looking away. The voice came in pulses, deep and resonant, like waves hitting a shore.

  ‘Before all this happened to you, you had to give up your World Ear.’

  Paul’s hand went up automatically to the soft hollow behind his right ear. He could feel nothing there. The tiny scar was long gone.

  ‘The unkindest cut of all. You were taken away from all the thousands of people you were connected with. On other stations in the solar system, the World Ear networks are maintained and can link, albeit with some loss of performance, with those on Earth. Here, because of certain local effects, that is not possible. For communication we must rely on speech. And your human acquaintance will from now on be limited to just us, your three colleagues.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My question, Paul, is this. Did you consent?’

  Consent? Paul thought.

  The first answer that jumped into his head was ‘Yes’. Positive feedback. He had expected all the things that the man had listed. He had accepted that they were going to happen to him. He opened his mouth to say it.

  Then he stopped. ‘Consent’ had a specific meaning. When one party on Earth proposed a course of action which a second had the means to prevent, positive feedback from the second party was necessary before the action could occur. That was ‘consent’. In his case, of course, no feedback had been required. Therefore …

  Therefore ‘No’ was the answer.

  But ‘No’ was not the answer. It implied rejection and resistance. That was wrong. That was not what had happened. Confused, he put his hand to his head.

  Then he covered his face.

  He must answer. May had said he must not just say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. He saw now why she had said that.

  If he had been on Earth it would have been simple! He could have shown it to them: the enormous effort of the project – the demands made on engineers, physicists, biologists, medics, therapists, telemetrists, astronomers; the organization of wealth and time; the dedication of that priceless astronomical window: the ramifications that went on and on in all directions, drawing power and expertise together into one great push focused on getting his body – his and his alone – to the farthest place that man had ever reached. That justified everything he had ever been. That was all the explanation that should have been needed!

  Consent? His lifetime was just one out of all the lifetimes’ worth that had been expended. He had the required qualifications. He had the resilience. His exceptionally low therapy usage was a matter of record. Even when he had shown the proposal to Her, and had shared her pain and understanding that all their plans were gone for good, he had not had to resort to the standard therapies accessible through his World Ear. She had, but he had not. Not then.

  Now he did not have them any more.

  ‘It … was best,’ he managed.

  ‘You saw that there was a need,’ said the man at once. ‘We had lost one of our number and you understood why the replacement should be you. But you had to pay a price. Did you consent?’

  ‘It was best,’ Paul repeated.

  ‘But did you consent?’

  ‘Is this necessary?’ said the woman’s voice.

  Paul could not see her. He had put his hand in front of his eyes again. He knew that if he removed his hand, he still would not be able to see.

  ‘Paul,’ said the man, ‘can you tell me?’

  His eyes were hot. His cheeks were wet. Something in him wanted to choke. He remembered this.

  ‘Stop!’ said the woman suddenly. ‘Stop it! He’s not ready!’

  He remembered this. He remembered a word spoken to him. ‘Normal,’ he gasped. ‘Normal.’

  ‘Oh, we know about tears,’ said the man softly.

  After a moment he added: ‘I’m sorry, Paul. But I’m not surprised. Not at all. I want you to remember that I asked if you had consented. And that you could not answer me.’

  ‘I’ve made the coffee,’ said May brightly. ‘How do you like it?’

  And then: ‘Is he all right?’

  IV

  The aim was to study the gas giant, the vast green-blue globe of hydrogen, helium and hydrocarbons over a core of hot dense fluids and molten rock that swung in the deep cold at the edge of the solar system. Nothing could be constructed on the planet itself, which had no solid surface and huge storm systems with windspeeds of over two thousand kilometres an hour.

  But among the clutter of rocks and satellites that circled the giant, at a distance of just over three hundred thousand kilometres from its gassy surface, was a single substantial moon. The moon had almost no atmosphere. Its period of rotation, at approximately six Earth days, coincided with its period of orbit, so that one face was turned permanently towards its parent. Its surface was composed of nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide, all frozen and scored with enormous canyons and narrow ridges. In a process close to that of volcanoes on Earth, liquid nitrogen and ammonia blew from vents in its crust to flow and freeze on the moon’s face. The ice reflected much of what meagre sunlight reached the little planet. The temperature on the surface averaged thirty-eight degrees above absolute zero.

  Thirty-eight degrees Kelvin. Minus two hundred and thirty-five degrees Celsius. Water freezes at zero Celsius, mercury at minus thirty-nine, nitrogen at minus two hundred and ten. In the coldest places on Earth molecules still dance with energy. At thirty-eight Kelvin they are almost lifeless, rigid. In certain materials electrical currents flow freely without any resistance at all.

  Here, it was deemed, was a suitable platform for a station that would observ
e the giant planet and its magnetic field. And for reasons that seemed good it was decided that the station should be manned. In that appalling cold, in that miserable crevice of gravity, a seed of life was planted.

  A site was chosen on the side of the moon that permanently faced the gas giant. It was in the bottom of a cliff-sided canyon, so that the station should have the best possible protection from impacts by debris careering around the huge planet. Here, long chains of artificial bubbles were laid by robot crawlers, in layer upon layer over the dead surface. The first layers contained nothing. They existed only for insulation. Then further layers were laid, to house equipment, including a small nuclear reactor which was the station’s seed-source of energy. Above these was the level habitable by humans – a tiny blob in comparison to the size of the whole station, consisting of only two common chambers, some smaller working and sleeping chambers for the crew, kitchens and the sanitary units, which were of course the smallest of all.

  Above this level were further layers of bubbles, thousands of bubbles, housing between them many hundred hectares of algae and lichens to balance the ecosystems which sustained the humans and to provide the basis of their food. They covered the habitable zone and poured out along the canyon floor. Over these were laid two much larger, transparent layers, filled with gases that were kept dense with the extreme cold. By varying the pressure in these layers it was possible to control the rate at which heat from the internal sources of the station was lost through conduction and so to maintain the living quarters at a constant, tolerable temperature. And throughout the station moved working robots, maintenance robots and surface crawlers, passing from bubble to bubble or travelling outwards, through one airlock after another, until at last they emerged beyond the very outer skin of spun fabric onto the desolation of the moon’s surface.

  Out there were the buried arrays that exploited the differences between the temperature of the surface and deeper layers of ice to suck in energy from a wide area to warm the station. There were enormous mirrors and solar panels, sited along the lip of the canyon to catch the meagre sunlight. Out there too were the instruments that measured the atmosphere and magnetic field of the gas giant, the patient, crawling probes that sounded and bored their way across the moon’s surface in their quest for signs of ancient life, and the radio antennae and lasers trained upwards to the small artificial satellite above the moon, which would bounce the station’s communications away on their four-hour journey towards the Earth.