by Unknown
The station was a huge thing: a hulking sponge of artificial fabrics, machines and ecosystems, lurking in its crevice like some soft-skinned reef creature. If molten ice welled up from the moon’s crust, the station would float upwards until the flows solidified. If a seal malfunctioned, or if by ill-chance some small asteroid fell directly into the canyon and punctured the fabric, the multiple-celled structure would prevent a catastrophic loss of warmth and pressure. It was a creation of great ingenuity, achieved in the face of staggering physical challenges of transport and construction, to protect and nurse the four tiny lives within it.
And yet it had already failed once.
Lewis spoke a command. The ceiling of the bubble went dark.
‘Ugh,’ said May.
The gas giant hung in the space above them: a misty blue half-disc, swimming in a great starless blackness that stretched the length of the ceiling. The blackness was marbled by grey wisps that must have been thin clouds of crystals floating in the near-vacuum of the moon’s atmosphere. Above and below the giant, uneven silvery lines marked the glitter of ice on either lip of the canyon. And outside these the screen showed the solid blackness of the cliff wall.
‘It’s like an eye, isn’t it?’ said May. ‘Makes me shiver.’
Perhaps it was. The pale half-disc was the right shape, widening perceptibly as the moon swung round towards its sunlit side. But the white of the eye was not white: it was blue. And there was no iris, no pupil.
‘Blind,’ Paul said.
‘Wait till you see it with a storm system on it,’ said May. ‘A great dark blob the size of this moon or bigger, yeah? It’s just like an eye then. And sometimes it’s looking straight at us.’
Paul put up an arm, sighting along it to his clenched fist and to the shape that hung in the sky. His fist was not big enough to cover the disc. He put up both fists, pressing them together at the knuckles and the heel of the palm. That covered it – just.
‘The planet is fifty thousand kilometres in diameter,’ said Lewis, watching him. ‘From here, that gives you ten degrees of arc.’
On Earth Paul could have covered the full moon with the tip of his little finger. And yet the giant still looked small in that blackness.
‘There’s an ocean up there that you could sink the Earth in,’ said Lewis. ‘And poach it too. At the lower levels the temperature reaches thousands of degrees.’
Paul looked away. His eyes found a silvery mark on the near cliff-face. It seemed to be some sort of ledge that dropped diagonally downwards from the top. It was too straight to be natural. On Earth it would have been a path.
‘That line?’ he asked.
‘That’s the Highway – the track our crawlers use when we want to get them up on that side. Seventy per cent of it follows a fault in the ice. The constructors only had to improve it in places. There’s nothing like it on the other side. If we want to send anything in that direction it has to go six kilometres down the canyon to Chesapeake and then back along the top.’
The crew had littered the landscape with names. ‘Chesapeake’ was where the canyon opened, in a great bay of ice that had somehow reminded someone of the beautiful blue waters of home. There were others: ‘Boston’ and ‘Humperdinck’ and ‘Cattle Grid’ and ‘Rain Tree’, each of which described some deathly barren feature on the surface that was nothing but ice and unimaginable cold.
‘And that?’ asked Paul.
There was a bright, angular shape at the canyon edge, near to where the ‘Highway’ reached it. It stuck up like a needle, catching the light of the planet. It might have been an antenna but it was not.
‘That’s Thorsten,’ said May after a moment’s pause.
‘The cairn is covered with ice now,’ Lewis added. ‘But we put that pylon there so we’ll know where he is.’
‘Yes,’ said Paul. He noticed that Lewis had said he where he should have said it. But it was a small discrepancy and his meaning seemed clear.
Then he saw the way that Lewis was looking at him. They were all looking at him.
‘Thorsten Bondevik,’ said Lewis. ‘Your predecessor. That’s where he’s buried.’
‘… Yes,’ said Paul.
Then he said, ‘What was the accident?’
‘Accident?’ repeated the one called Vandamme.
‘Thorsten.’
‘Thorsten’s death was not an accident,’ said Lewis slowly. ‘Weren’t you told?’
Paul frowned. ‘They said … accident.’
There was a short silence.
‘It just doesn’t happen on Earth any more,’ said Vandamme.
‘It does, still,’ said Lewis. ‘But in the more developed networks, almost never.’
‘But to call it an accident!’ May protested. ‘That makes it our fault!’
‘No?’ said Paul.
‘It was not an accident, Paul,’ said Lewis. ‘He killed himself.’
Paul frowned. Then he blinked, deliberately. Nothing came. (Of course it did not – he had forgotten.) He felt a dizziness in his brain – a shift of balance, as if his mind had somehow drifted further from his feet than it should have done. He tried to think.
He thought that yes, a man could damage his own body. If that damage was severe he would die. That would still be an accident, of course.
Unless …
Lewis said, ‘Restore ceiling.’
The blackness above them vanished. The great planet was gone. The view of that vast emptiness was replaced by the opaque creamy light of the living quarters – a plain, arched chamber with eight doors off it. But the words Paul had heard still wandered in his mind, trying and trying and finding no answer. He looked around helplessly.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘He became depressed, Paul,’ said Lewis. ‘I don’t suggest we go over the history now. I’ll brief you on it another time.’
Paul nodded. He turned to May.
‘Why did he kill himself?’
May and Lewis exchanged glances.
‘He just got lonely, Paul,’ May said. ‘And frustrated. He used to spend hours looking at the walls. We didn’t realize what was wrong because to start with he had adapted better than any of us …’
The woman called Vandamme was still watching him. There was something about the way she was standing there while the other two answered his questions.
Paul asked her, ‘Why did Thorsten kill himself?’
‘Paul …’ said Lewis.
Vandamme’s hand moved to her collar. It played with the fabric there.
‘May’s talking to you,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask me?’
‘He didn’t mean it like that, Van,’ said May hurriedly.
‘He didn’t think of it as interrupting,’ said Lewis. ‘Paul, what May says is correct. Thorsten became depressed. He preferred to die rather than go on living here. We had thought this would be included in your briefing but evidently it was—’
Paul said to her again, ‘Why did Thorsten kill himself?’
‘Oh God!’ muttered Vandamme.
‘Just give him a chance, yeah?’ said May. ‘He’s putting it for confirmation, to all of us, the same as he would on Earth. He doesn’t realize—’
‘What is God?’ said Paul.
Lewis snorted. It might have been a laugh. ‘One thing at a time, Paul, shall we?’
‘It’s the World Ear,’ said May. ‘Don’t you remember what it was like?’
‘We weren’t like this,’ said Vandamme quietly.
She had turned her head sideways a little so that now she was watching him from the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was a short straight line. She was frowning a little.
She was a tall woman, a head taller than May. She might have been the same height as Paul, although it was hard to tell because both of them were bouncing lightly on their tiptoes in the low gravity. Her eyes were large and dark. He sensed a great depth to them, as if the light that entered her pupils still had to travel a long, long way before it reached the person wi
thin.
She said, ‘It was good to meet you, Munro. I am glad you have come. Though I suppose you may not be.’
Of all of these strange people, he thought, she was the strangest. She was the strangest because she spoke the least. And unlike May and Lewis, she called him ‘Munro’ – the second and more formal part of his name. ‘Vandamme’ must be the equivalent for her. If she had an informal name, she did not expect others to use it – not even her colleagues, who would be out here with her for the rest of their lives.
‘I have things to do now,’ she said.
She skipped slowly away from him, covering three or four metres in each glide, and came to rest by a seal at the far end of the room.
‘Van …’ May called after her.
Vandamme touched the control with her hand. The seal opened with a hiss. Paul glimpsed a small, brightly lit airlock beyond. Then the seal closed behind her, restoring the unbroken glow of the wall.
‘Where has she gone?’ asked Paul.
‘Only to her chamber,’ said Lewis.
‘That’s one thing about being here,’ said May. ‘We can’t go very far, however bad we feel.’
Paul frowned. ‘I have … offended her?’
‘Thorsten was her partner,’ said Lewis bluntly. ‘But I suppose that wasn’t in your briefings either.’
Her partner!
Of course he would have been.
There were so many cues that he was missing! There should have been alerts about the man Thorsten – and about Vandamme – before he came to this meeting. With the World Ear he could have guessed at Vandamme’s mood from the way she framed her messages and from the colours she used in them. And there were other cues too that were present but that he was maybe not interpreting correctly: the way Lewis and May stood looking at the seal through which Vandamme had gone; the way Lewis spoke, as if his mind was only partly on what he was saying; the frown on May’s face … They had been hoping for something. It hadn’t happened. What had it been?
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said May. She sounded suddenly bitter. ‘That’s just Van being Van. It happens.’
‘We can’t expect too much,’ said Lewis sombrely. ‘At this stage. But, Paul – please remember, you cannot use speech as you would the World Ear. You cannot have simultaneous conversations. Everyone will hear everything you say. And if I am speaking to you, I do not expect you to interrupt me. Concentrate on what I am saying. It will seem long to you but please concentrate! Then you may reply.’
‘It helps to look at whoever’s speaking too,’ said May.
‘Slow,’ grumbled Paul.
‘Yes, it is slow,’ snapped Lewis. ‘It’s also more skilful, more entertaining, superior in many ways! And it’s what we do, Paul. I’m sorry but you’ll have to get used to it!’
‘And be careful about God,’ said May. ‘It’s important to Van, yeah?’
Lewis snorted again.
‘You all right, Paul?’ said May. ‘You want to rest?’
Paul shook his head angrily. ‘I want to work,’ he said.
V
Within a few hours of his waking he knew the place where he was to spend the rest of his life. Four work-chambers opened off the main common room, two on each side. There was also a little kitchen, and opposite it the sanitary unit. At one end of the long chamber was an airlock leading to the outer layers of the station. At the other was another airlock, this time leading to another suite of living quarters where the woman Vandamme worked and slept alone.
And that was all.
The work-chambers were identical in size and shape: globes some four metres in diameter with a floor inserted about a third of the way up to give purchase for the feet. Hand-holds studded the walls at intervals. Each pair of work-chambers had a little two-person sleeping cell sited between them. One of these work-and-sleeping suites was his. It was different from the one that May and Lewis inhabited only in that he had not yet set any displays, so the walls and ceiling of his three rooms were all blank.
It was slightly cooler too. The light had a shimmery, misty quality. Tiny beads of moisture were gathering on one area of the wall. It was Paul’s own breath, condensing on the cold surface as he sat in his little capsule of dense, warm air. The shimmering of the light told him what the wall concealed: that behind that glowing barrier the temperature fell sharply (and at this moment was probably even lower than it should be). Beyond the wall lay another chamber, one where the air was too thin and cold for a human to survive unaided. And beyond that would be another, and another, each with a pressure and a temperature that was lower than the last, until finally there was nothing but the skin of the station and the enormous, frozen void outside.
‘Munro?’ said a voice at his door.
‘Yes!’ He answered more loudly than necessary because he was surprised. There was a slight draught of air as she came in.
Paul had been expecting a visitor. He had agreed with Lewis that he would be shown the station communications at precisely this time. He had not been expecting Vandamme.
‘Where is Lewis?’ he asked.
‘He says he has tests to run. He has asked me to do your induction.’
She crossed to the far wall and ran her finger down it.
‘This is bad,’ she said, peering at the wetness on her finger tip. ‘You should report it.’
Paul looked away from her. He still did not like to look at the human form in this place, to see how brittle and thin her limbs were, and how large and puffy her face. He was unsettled too. Yesterday they had spoken and she had walked away. The connection between them had been affected by his blunder about the man Thorsten. Now he would have to repair it. He was not used to this. If he had met with such a difficulty on Earth, he would simply have dropped that connection and opened others to compensate. There always had been others, there.
‘I am sorry I offended you,’ he said.
‘You did not offend me,’ she replied.
Neither his words nor her answer seemed to be enough. He was not sure how to proceed.
‘Please sit down,’ he said.
‘Sure. I was going to.’ She settled beside him, folding up her thin limbs as if she were folding a tripod. They were both tense.
‘So – you want to get started?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I thought you were going to be on rehab for a week.’
‘I am. But I want to work. Work is … good.’
She thought about it for a moment. Then she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’
A command, spoken to a wall receiver, brought a control console rising out of a hatch in the floor. The equipment was supported on a flexible arm that could be drawn to any point in the room. It consisted of a microphone, a joystick and an array of mechanical keys patterned with letters, numbers and symbols.
‘Screen,’ said Vandamme. Opposite them, a long oval of wall changed colour. ‘That’s the working area. You can adjust it if you want. Now, you see that alert?’
In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen area, a small red rectangle was blinking on and off. On it was an acronym that Paul did not recognize.
‘You get one of those, you need to report it. That’ll be because the system is picking up the condensation here.’
‘So … we tell Lewis?’
‘In a moment. We’ll look at the comms first. Lists.’
A column, composed mostly of words, appeared on the screen.
‘Comms,’ said Vandamme.
The column was replaced by a much shorter one.
Int
Ex-L
Ex-R
‘Interior comms is inside the station. You can call up any of the living chambers, the airlocks and any of the headsets that we might be wearing if we suit up to go into the outer areas of the station. So you can speak to anyone at any time – though if we’re off watch, we might be asleep.’
‘Yes,’ said Paul. He had remembered that he should be look
ing at her as they spoke. He should be acknowledging her messages with his eyes as well as his voice. He was trying to do this.
But she was not returning his looks. This confused him. He did not know if he was acting incorrectly, or if she was. Her voice continued in a level stream of words.
‘Ex-L is the laser. That carries most of our communications to Earth. Ex-R is the radio. That’s for communications to crawlers and other equipment out on the surface. It also relays our radio observation data to Earth, and any other remotely gathered data that’s transmitted in to us by radio. It’s a backup in case there’s ever a pointing error on the laser. Both the laser and the radio go via the comms satellite, because our horizon down in the bottom of this pit is pretty well non-existent.’
Paul gave up and looked at the instruments instead. What he saw disgusted him. A screen, a joystick – even a keyboard! The World Ear had been making equipment like this obsolete when he was born. He hoped fervently that he would never have to use the keyboard. He knew he could not spell.
‘How do you send?’ he said.
‘You can type, speak or select. Speaking is easiest, especially for internals.’ She clicked the joystick twice. Symbols flickered briefly on the screen. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’ said Lewis’s voice.
‘We’re in Munro’s work-chamber. There’s an alert. Condensation on the north wall.’
‘Shit! Why’s that happening?’ There was a pause. Lewis, in one of the other chambers in the living quarters, must have been checking some readings. ‘That shouldn’t be happening,’ he said. ‘I’ll look into it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Vandamme. She clicked the joystick again. ‘And that’s how you sign off,’ she said.
Paul was looking at the screen. Words had appeared there. He puzzled through them and found that they were a record of the short conversation between Lewis and Vandamme.
