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  Paul heard himself say, ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘That thing! Can you imagine what it cost to put up? And it won’t make the life of a single human any better. It can’t. But with it, Earth can build ships far more massive than could ever be kicked up out of its gravity. Why must they be so massive? To shield our genetic material from the effects of the solar wind. I checked the specs of the craft that brought you here, Paul. You went waltzing with the Sun itself and I’ll bet you didn’t absorb a single particle. That elevator – it’s just a damned great dick. And with it the We is trying to fertilize the galaxy!’

  ‘But … we cannot breed here!’

  Lewis looked at him.

  ‘It is crazy!’ Paul protested. ‘In this place – the gravity … Crazy!’

  ‘That,’ said Lewis, turning away, ‘is what I have said to Earth.’

  He rested on his toes with his hands behind his back. He seemed to be watching an image on the wall, of a yellow stone building with ornate towers standing under a hard blue sky. A place where men had worshipped their god.

  ‘I received a query, about three years after we arrived here,’ said Lewis. ‘I think that was when I really started to understand what was going on. Anyway, I sent a reply assessing the environment, the risk factors, the constraints … Basically I told Earth to forget it. You were already on your way, of course, but since then Earth has rather lost interest in us. Frankly I can’t say I’m sorry. The least it can do for us now is leave us alone.’

  Paul looked at him looking at the image on the wall.

  ‘So here we are,’ said Lewis. ‘The four of us. The last humans. Maybe the last ever. What are we going to do about that, Paul?’

  Paul’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do you believe in God?’

  Lewis snorted. ‘God no! Why do you ask?’

  ‘Vandamme said I should. I thought you all did.’

  ‘And you think that if I believe in God then I will believe anything. I’ve paid a great price to recover my mind, Paul. The last thing I’m going to do is enslave it to something else. But … I can see why Van does. She has to believe in something. We all have to. If we didn’t, we would all go mad.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘The future, Paul. What else?’

  ‘The future – for us?’

  ‘There’s always a future! As long as we’re not alone. And I’m not. Neither are you, Paul.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?’

  Paul glared at him. ‘I believe in work,’ he said. And he left the chamber.

  VII

  He dreamed of an open window, with warm air flowing in. Outside the sun was bright, but softened to a kindly glow by the protecting veils of atmosphere. He could hear birdsong and the branches of trees moving. He heard it all very clearly, as he had rarely heard it in his waking mind. The world was full of colours.

  He could feel nothing through his World Ear. He did not have one. But soon he would. They were coming to fit him with it. They were coming to open his mind to all the minds around him again. Knowing that brought a glow like the sun. He would be safe, surrounded by all the mental chatter in which he belonged. He would know he had a purpose that served them all.

  They would come soon. She was bringing them to him, leading them up the walkways and along the passages to his door. Soon it would open. He waited, looking at the door.

  He was looking out of the window at the city. He was looking at the high buildings and the low buildings, at the lines of trees and the bubbles nestling among them. He was looking for Her, coming towards him with the boy beside her. He was looking for anyone moving towards him along the avenues, coming to him, knowing he was there, even though it would take them a long time to reach him. But he could see no one. He waited. Still he saw no one.

  And he knew that the building around him was empty. The city was empty. There was no one there. There was no one left on Earth.

  He woke, in the station.

  It was eerie, stepping through the airlock. He entered a common room exactly like the one he had just left, with a curving ceiling, cream-lit walls and the doors of four work-chambers, a kitchen and a sanitary unit spaced evenly down the sides. It was as if he had turned round without noticing, so that when leaving the airlock he had arrived back at the point from which he had entered it.

  This was the Alfa suite – the original living–quarter module that the crew had inhabited when they had first arrived on the station. It was heated, pressurized and powered to the same standards as the living-quarter module Paul had just left. Only Lewis would know what the extra drain on the station’s resources must be.

  The station was designed for two couples. Each pair of work-chambers had just one two-person sleeping chamber associated with it. But because Paul and Vandamme were not a couple the crew needed extra space. Therefore, shortly before Paul’s arrival, they had opened up the Bravo suite, one of three additional living-quarter modules that had been provided for redundancy in case of impact or other damage. May and Lewis had moved into the Bravo suite because of growing problems with the ageing systems in Alfa. It was in the Bravo suite that Paul had woken, and it was the Bravo suite that he now inhabited with May and Lewis. Vandamme remained in Alfa, alone.

  Three of the seals to the work-chambers were open. The walls of the rooms inside were blank and the equipment stowed away. The door to the fourth chamber was closed. He stopped outside it and called. No one answered. He went in anyway.

  He came to rest on the moon’s surface.

  The wall-display showed a 360-degree view of the landscape, taken from one of the search crawlers operating outside the station. The gas giant, half in shadow, hung in the blackness overhead. The stars were bright and did not twinkle. It was as if Paul had stepped out of the station altogether. Around him, glowing an eerie purple in the blue twilight, was the ice.

  It was everywhere. It heaved in great waves like a frozen sea: low curves and sharp ridges, remnants of ancient flows. Close to, the shapes were fantastic. There were ripples and curls, eddies and spills, and spines erupting from them like the fins of vast sea-creatures in a nightmare ocean. Tiny frost particles drifted, carried on the thinnest of winds. On the horizon a line of icy geysers lifted their fumes to the sky. Everything else was still.

  To his right, a kilometre away, was a dark streak that might be the lip of a chasm such as the station nestled in. But there must be thousands of such chasms. He could not see Thorsten’s pylon or any of the Sun mirrors or radio transmitters. Nor could he recognize any of the natural features that populated the landscape around the home canyon – not ‘Chesapeake’, not ‘Macclesfield’, not even the high, triangular point of ‘Humperdinck’, which was almost always in view. They might have been just out of sight beyond a nearby ridge of ice.

  Vandamme was sitting at her console in the middle of that barren, deathly landscape. She was punching a command into the keyboard, patiently pressing one key after another. The pointer was at her elbow, unused. She had not looked up when Paul entered.

  Paul took a skip across the chamber. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

  Vandamme lifted her head from the keyboard and looked at the wall. The working screen was focused on a patch of surface ice. Probing into the picture was an arm of the crawler. It had driven into the ice and seemed to be turning slowly. It must have just begun drilling.

  ‘No,’ said Vandamme. ‘I don’t mind.’

  She had not taken her eyes off the display. She was watching the drilling arm intently, as if she expected to have to intervene with another command at any moment. And she might. That drill would be working in a temperature of some thirty degrees Kelvin. If it had been hardened steel it would have shattered like glass.

  The waste of ice all around him; the woman at the console; and the image of the robot arm on the bubble wall.

  ‘Boring for life forms?’ asked Paul.

  He heard the double meaning in his
words even as he spoke them. But Vandamme answered the question he had intended.

  ‘For signs of extinct life. Yes.’

  ‘Have you found any?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Not after ten years of searching.

  ‘And … conditions to support life?’

  ‘There is water.’

  ‘But too cold, surely.’

  Vandamme looked up. Not at Paul but at the half-disc of the giant planet overhead.

  ‘The orbit is retrograde,’ she said. ‘So the moon may have been captured at a late stage in the formation of the solar system. We do not know its previous history.’

  Paul looked up too. Then he looked around at the bizarre shapes of ice again. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In my chamber,’ said Vandamme, without any trace of humour. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor once more.

  Paul tried again. ‘How far is the crawler from the station?’

  ‘One hundred and twenty-three kilometres.’

  No wonder the display showed nothing that Paul recognized. And if he stayed here in Vandamme’s chamber he could watch the scenery change as the crawlers lumbered on across the moon’s surface. The scene would change and change and change, and yet like a dream it would always be the same.

  ‘How many bores have you drilled?’ he asked. ‘Approximately?’

  ‘Approximately ten thousand,’ said Vandamme.

  Paul thought that if he had asked for an exact figure she would have given him one. Ten thousand boreholes meant a thousand boreholes a year. Say three a day, day in, day out. And no life, nor any sign that there had ever been life, out here. This was ST2 – the long, meticulous, pointless search. Turning over every pebble on a beach that ran on for ever.

  There was nowhere to sit. Paul stood with his hands on his hips just inside the chamber seal. He watched the woman at her console desk, surrounded by images of wasteland.

  To his surprise, he found that she was no longer so difficult to look at. Her head was tilted towards him as she worked. The most prominent features were her eyebrows, a clean arc, and the neat curves of her cheek and chin. The strange proportions of her head and limbs did not seem so strange now. She was another human, out here with him.

  She was ignoring him. But she was not being rude. She was just being herself. She was giving her attention to the thing that she felt had priority – her work. Her ten thousandth borehole which, like all its predecessors, would show no sign that life had ever existed in this place.

  Of course it would not. Not in all the probes and explorations man had attempted within the solar system had they found the merest single-celled organism that had not proved to be an infection from Earth. And still the search went on, obsessively. After this hole, Vandamme would move the crawler and make another. And another after that. Boring for life? That would have been a joke, if only Paul had intended it.

  Click, went the keyboard under Vandamme’s forefinger. Click, click, click. On the monitor, the drilling arm stopped.

  ‘Do you think we will find life here?’ Paul asked carefully.

  ‘It is possible. There is a liquid water mantle, deep down.’

  ‘But intelligent life?’

  Vandamme frowned at the chamber wall, as though the thought was relevant but strange. ‘No, of course not,’ she said.

  ‘There must be some, somewhere.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it is not close. We have been scanning space for a hundred years. We have seen nothing yet that we could confirm to be an intelligent transmission. If it takes a hundred years for their transmissions to reach us, then it would be two hundred years before they could receive our replies.’

  ‘Perhaps they are closer but we have not yet developed the right technology.’

  ‘The technology is adequate.’

  ‘Then perhaps they are hiding from us. Hiding in the shadows.’ The image in his mind, of faraway beings cowering in the recesses of space and peering nervously towards Earth’s system, brought a grim smile to his lips.

  Vandamme took it seriously. ‘They would have to have been aware of us before we began to listen for them – before our first radio telescopes were constructed.’

  ‘You think that impossible?’

  ‘Anything is possible, but it is not likely,’ said the woman who hunted for life in the coldest places of the solar system.

  ‘Will not alien life be so alien that we will not know if it is life?’

  Now Paul was nudging the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. He did not want to talk about alien life. He did not want to talk about the magnetic field or the radio. He wanted to talk about Earth. But he feared that if he asked her directly, she might lie, and he would not know if she had lied. So he was choosing his questions as carefully as he could.

  He was also having to search for the right words. For the first time since arriving at the station he was the one who was proposing ideas. And although his speech had improved faster than he could have imagined, he was still severely limited by what he knew how to say. We will not know if it is life fell far short of describing the debates that would seethe through the World Ear networks, perhaps for years, if evidence of alien organisms were ever to be found.

  ‘All life shares four characteristics,’ said Vandamme, as if reciting a lesson. ‘It uses energy. It adapts. It replicates itself. And it tends towards complexity.’

  ‘If an alien looked at humans on Earth,’ said Paul, ‘would it see many creatures? Or would it see one, composed of many things all linked together by the World Ear?’

  ‘It would depend upon the nature of the alien,’ said Vandamme.

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Vandamme was silent. So Paul prompted gently: ‘When you look at Earth, what do you think?’

  Her head jerked away from the screen. Her fingers left the keyboard.

  After a moment she said, ‘I try not to.’ She began to tap laboriously at her keyboard again. Paul watched her.

  It would depend upon the nature of the alien. If the alien were one of a race of individuals, it would see first the individuals. But if it were itself a composite creature, sharing its consciousness among its organisms, there might be something else for it to see.

  Paul could accept that. It was less extreme than Lewis’s vision of a single brain. It simply said that a human could be both an individual and at the same time a component of something greater. That had always been so. That could be true for almost any form of life.

  So did it mean anything at all?

  Where did the consciousness rest? Could there be an ‘I’ and a ‘We’ at the same time? And which ruled which?

  It would depend upon the nature of the alien. A clever, elusive answer. It did not address the real question. Had she meant to be clever and elusive? Paul did not know. But she was familiar with the idea that the human race might have fused into a single consciousness. She had not found it strange when Paul had suggested it to her. Did she think it was true?

  I try not to.

  Suddenly Vandamme spoke. ‘What is it like, having the World Ear these days?’

  What was it like? thought Paul.

  The image that came was of his partner, sitting on the end of the bed in the room that overlooked the sea. It had been a bright morning, with the sunlight pouring in so strongly that the wall-displays seemed dull. He had just shown her the plan that would take him away to the station. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the floor with her face furrowed. She was not crying and she never would. Already the rising stress in her body had triggered the therapy routines she relied on. The images she sent back were dark and fragmented. He saw, rather than received, her sense of loss and bewilderment: the sudden, gaping uncertainty of a future without him; her fears for the child who would know no father. For him it had not outweighed the immense force of the proposal from headquarters, with all its myriad ramifications reaching out through medical, engineering and astronomical networks. But it could not be blotted out eit
her. It was there, a small, sad coda to the great thing he carried in his brain.

  His throat was dry. ‘You belong,’ he said.

  Click, click, click. More slow commands, relayed to the crawler on the unimaginable cold of the moon surface, a hundred and twenty-three kilometres away.

  ‘Do you have any problems with your transmissions?’ said Paul.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never any interference between you and the crawlers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the data you send to Earth?’

  ‘The transmission window is not affected.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was a message from Earth waiting for him when he returned to his chamber.

  His signal recording the passage of the tail had been corrupted. He was to investigate the cause and report.

  VIII

  ‘Paul?’

  It was May’s voice, calling from just outside his work-chamber. He did not answer.

  ‘Paul, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. I am all right.’

  There was a hesitation. Then: ‘May I come in?’

  He thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Yes.’

  She entered and came to rest beside him as he sat at his workstation. ‘Paul, is something the matter?’ she asked. ‘Lewis and I were expecting you at supper.’

  ‘I ate here.’

  ‘You should have said. We were worried about you.’

  Paul shrugged. He had known they would worry. He had not cared much because he had been angry. He was still angry.

  ‘It’s better to eat together, Paul,’ said May. ‘It may seem old-fashioned to you but it helps to keep us friends.’

  Paul scowled. ‘I am busy,’ he said.

  May peered at the figures on his console. ‘It’s long past the end of your shift. What’s the crisis?’

  ‘Our transmissions of the passage of the tail were corrupted.’