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  ‘He thinks it is our shit?’

  ‘No. That’s just an exclamation. It is to give force to what is said. In the World Ear you would have used colour or music, I think. He likes to say things the way they used to be said. He says “shit” and “damn” when he’s angry. He also says “God” but he doesn’t mean it. He even quotes scripture at me,’ she finished sourly. ‘Like to try the externals now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll report to Earth that you’ve declared yourself operational.’ She clicked the joystick again. ‘This goes out over the laser. Again you have a choice of type or voice. For a message to Earth, I usually type. It makes me think about what I’m saying.’ Her fingers flickered on the keys. TR1: 21:03:0437 Telmex operational.

  ‘TR1?’

  ‘Our call sign. “Telmex” is you – the telemetry executive. The numbers are the date-time group, which is Zulu-time on Earth. It means nothing here, but the systems insist on it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like to send?’ She offered him the joystick.

  He reached for it. Click. A group of laser pulses began a long journey through space.

  ‘They answer in – eight hours?’

  ‘Maybe a bit more. The satellite will fire it as soon as Earth’s over its horizon. And there’ll be an acknowledgement, yes. But if we ask for anything complicated it may take days for Earth to reply.’

  ‘Why so long?’ Paul asked sharply.

  ‘Does that bother you? I suppose it would. All that messaging – it may be very quick when you’re in it. But seen from out here it can take days for Earth to build up a response. Sorry, Munro. That’s the way it is.’

  She still had not looked at him – not once, since stepping into his chamber.

  Paul shifted. He frowned at the screen. He thought of the chamber beyond the wall, and the ones beyond that, and then …

  Four hours at light speed. He could never go back.

  He gripped his knees.

  ‘When we drink coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘When you like. I will not.’

  ‘With others.’

  ‘Oh – hours yet. You’ll be off watch when the others come back on. But you can join them if you want to.’

  Hours!

  ‘We send another,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Another message?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Who to?’

  Who? To anyone! To everyone he could! And receive back! Build a network – that was what he wanted to do. To give and receive as much as possible!

  ‘To … my partner,’ he said.

  Her eyes widened. And now, for the first time, she turned to face him.

  ‘Your partner?’ she repeated.

  ‘She can receive, I think.’

  ‘Yes. But—’ She stopped. She dropped her eyes, frowning.

  ‘I must not?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. She bit her lip. ‘Sure you can,’ she said. ‘If you want. But … it’s been eight years for her, hasn’t it? Will it feel the same to her as it does to you?’

  ‘No. I know that.’

  She looked at him again. He saw the swollen face, the narrow neck – every wound left by this gravity was there for his examination. Those marks were on him too.

  ‘Won’t she have someone else by now? Through the matching systems?’

  ‘Yes of course.’ On Earth there was no need to be alone if you did not want to be alone.

  But that was on Earth.

  ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘If you think it’s right. Classify it “Personal” and they’ll know what to do with it at the other end.’

  Paul faced the screen. He took the joystick and picked the laser. The screen, a pale, blue oval, waited for him. He looked at the keyboard. Then he remembered that he could speak his commands. ‘Message,’ he said.

  Instantly the screen responded: TR1: 21:03:0441 …

  ‘Personal,’ he said. ‘Romeo Echo Alfa Two Six Two Five Point Two One Eight’ – crazy, that he must spell out her reference like that! – ‘I have arrived. I am well …’

  He hesitated.

  ‘I want you …’

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Vandamme. ‘You don’t want her to be here. Not if you still love her.’

  He thought about it.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you are right.’

  And because the machine was receiving voice, the screen now read:

  TR1: 21:03:0441 Personal. REA2625.218 I have arrived. I am well. I want you. No you don’t. You don’t want her to be here. Not if you still love her. No you are right.

  Stupid! Clumsy!

  ‘You mean “I miss you”,’ sighed Vandamme.

  You mean I miss you appeared on the screen. Paul swallowed. He felt as if the little cold droplets from his wall had started to form inside his throat. Deliberately he controlled the joystick to remove the unnecessary words. He left I miss you. Then he sent the message. Click. It disappeared.

  The screen showed him nothing.

  And nothing.

  And nothing.

  Of course there would be no answer. Not yet. There couldn’t be.

  (Four hours – just to get there!)

  Vandamme was waiting for him.

  She was waiting for him with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the chamber wall. A moment ago he thought he had sensed a response from her, just the faintest sympathy, as he fired all his love and his loss over the vastness of space. But it was gone now. Now she was like an adult waiting for a child to finish some game – patient, but remote from what he was doing. To her it had been pointless.

  There were nine billion people in orbit around the Sun. None of them were responding to him. He could pour his words out over the lasers – I am lonely, I need help – in endless repetition. He could run out into the vacuum and die screaming it at the planet overhead. There would be no answer. And there was no answer, either, from the woman beside him. The screen still showed nothing.

  ‘Tell me about the problem,’ he said.

  ‘The problem?’

  ‘The radio.’

  ‘Oh, that. You want to get started right away?’

  ‘Yes!’

  She shrugged. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘So, it’s the radio systems. I guess you must have been briefed on the basics before you came. We have an intermittent loss of data on the radio transmissions to Earth.’

  Yes, they had told him. They had filled him with it – the patterns of loss, the small percentage of groups known to be corrupted, the far larger percentages of groups that were suspect because it was known that corruptions could occur. They had told him all of it. It was the whole reason why he had been sent. And now he was here, eight years later, with all that effort behind him. And the crew replied, ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘What …?’ he began painfully.

  ‘What causes it? We don’t know for sure. Most of the time everything’s fine. But about once an orbit, something goes wrong and we lose a few groups. It’s probably charging on the satellite, caused by the planet’s magnetic field.’

  Paul frowned. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  Vandamme turned to the controls. ‘Graph,’ she said. ‘Planetary readings. Current.’

  Jiggling lines appeared on the screen. Paul looked at them.

  ‘Low?’ he said.

  ‘At this point in the orbit, yes. But it fluctuates—’

  ‘No,’ said Paul.

  Of course the satellite could be picking up a charge as it followed the moon round and round on its journey through the magnetic field. And at some point that charge would be released, sending phantom signals through the satellite’s systems and maybe even damaging components. But the levels Paul was looking at were too low to worry him.

  Vandamme shrugged. ‘Not at the moment, no. But when we get round to the tail there’s a region that’s highly active. You know what a substorm is?’

  ‘Substorm?’

  ‘We get them in Earth’s field from time to time. The
solar wind distorts the planet’s magnetic field. It compresses it on the sunward side and pushes it out into a long tail on the dark side, like the tail of a comet, yes?’ She drew an imaginary shape in the air. ‘All right. So sometimes, in Earth’s field, this magnetic tail gets snapped in two – pinched out by the solar wind. Then the lines of force on the Earth side flow back violently towards the Earth. That’s what we call a substorm – like an eddy in a stream. In Earth’s field they happen in ones or twos and they’re not long-lived. Here, there’s a region with thousands of these eddies. We skim one edge of it every time we orbit the dark side of the planet. And the currents around these eddies whip up high levels of energy, like the winds around a hurricane …’

  Paul listened with growing horror.

  ‘… I can’t figure it out. Somehow it’s achieved a kind of stability. The outer eddies are not dispersing at once, so they have time to act on the inner systems, which then divide, replacing the outer ones when they are lost. But there must be something that keeps it going. It could be the solar wind – though that’s weak out here. Or it could be some property of the planetary core, which isn’t like Earth’s core at all. Anyway, these patterns just copy and copy themselves, boiling away in the wake of the planet. They’re unique. And they’re strong. Early observations missed the region altogether, so the satellite wasn’t designed for the charge that would build up—’

  ‘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.’

  VI

  The 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 th
at 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.