WE

by Unknown

  ‘But that keeps happening, Paul! It’s not like it was the first time.’

  ‘This is the first time it has happened to me.’

  ‘You’re upset,’ she said, ‘and tired. You can’t be working efficiently any more. Wouldn’t it be better to take a rest?’

  ‘Not until I can find out how it happened.’

  He had monitored the transmissions himself. He had sent that test signal and received an acknowledgement from Earth. He had checked the downloads and the modulation. He had double-checked, because he had known that he was agitated after his talk with Lewis, and therefore he might have made mistakes. There had been no mistakes. He had watched the first groups go out. The automatic acknowledgements had come back from Earth on cue, eight hours later. There had been no sign that anything had been wrong. And now there was this.

  Your 25:03:0141: Message corrupted. The following groups unreadable …

  … Investigate and report.

  It might have been a fault affecting the station transmitters. The two auxiliaries, working together, were powerful enough to have jammed a signal from the main transmitter if they had somehow fired at the same time. But the records showed nothing. They were clean. He had also checked the main transmitter files, in case it had somehow resumed transmissions after the signal had been sent, confusing the satellite relay to Earth. Now he was hunting through all the files of allied operations (control signals to crawlers, automatic activations of arrays, even the pressure readings from the external bubble layers) to see if there was anything that might inadvertently have bled across to affect the message, perhaps by corrupting the modulation of the data onto the signal in a way that he had not noticed. He was finding nothing.

  He should be able to find it. It should be within his capabilities. That was what he had been trained for. That was what he had been sent here for. But one by one the possibilities were being eliminated. He was angry. Angry because he could not find it. When May peered past him at the screen he felt resentment prickle around his neck and shoulders.

  After a moment she said, ‘We’re worried about you, Paul.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We think you’re finding it tough.’

  ‘I will get used to it,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. But you’ve hit a crisis and you’re trying to cope alone. You can’t do that. You need us to help you along. We need you to be part of us anyway. You’ll need us much more. You will.’

  ‘You stay in your room when you want.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘I will do my shifts. I will keep to the rules. But when I am not on my shift I will be where I want. What is the matter?’

  ‘The matter, Paul, is that you’re having to make a massive adjustment! You came here trusting the We, like the rest of us. You’ve been utterly, utterly betrayed. Either you don’t see it yet, or you do but don’t want to believe it. The longer it takes, the worse it’ll be for you. You’ll chase round and round in smaller circles, trying to find something that isn’t there—’

  ‘It is there,’ he snapped. ‘I will find it.’

  ‘Thorsten couldn’t,’ she said.

  She spoke softly. But as she looked at him her face hardened. Paul realized he was glaring at her. He reset his face muscles.

  ‘You think because I shut my door that I will—’

  ‘I’m not saying that, Paul. Please – I’m just saying—’

  ‘You think I don’t know about people who kill themselves. You think it has not happened on Earth. You are wrong. It has happened. I remember. There was a man who did it. He did it because he had been cut off. No one would connect with him. They would not connect with him because they knew he had lied.’

  He said the word lied with emphasis, deliberately. But if May understood, she did not show it.

  ‘I don’t mean you’ll do what Thorsten did …’

  ‘I do not know what he did.’

  ‘… that’s not what I’m trying to say …’

  Anger rose in Paul like vomit. ‘Why do you hide?’ he yelled.

  She stared at him, shocked. Her eyes went to the door. He thought she would get up and leave him. She wanted to, but she did not. She took a big breath.

  ‘You want me to tell you about Thorsten,’ she said.

  ‘Lewis said he would brief me. He has not. Why has he not briefed me?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Paul! Why are you so suspicious? There’ve been a million and one things to do with your induction … Look, what do you want to know?’

  ‘What happened.’

  ‘But we’ve told you … Oh, all right. It’s all logged, but – but I suppose that doesn’t really make it real.’

  She looked at her hands, then drew another breath.

  ‘He was working on the loss of transmissions, like you. He had decided it was the field, by then, but he couldn’t see … Anyway, he stopped observing the schedules. He’d work in a kind of frenzy, for hours at a burst. And then he’d do nothing, not even when it was his watch. We didn’t think very much of it to begin with. We all had stuff we were trying to cope with. But that was the start. We let him get into habits that weren’t good for him. And by the time we did worry it was too late. He wasn’t responding even to Van. Then, one watch, he put on a pressure suit and went into the outer layers …

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to. The rule is that you don’t go out of the habitable bubbles without alerting the rest of us. The first I knew was when Lewis called us into his work-chamber. He had Thorsten on his monitor. Thorsten had gone right out into the radiation layers, where the gas isn’t for breathing but for shielding, and is cold and dense like mist. Lewis was arguing with him over the intercom. There was something odd about Thorsten’s answers – not evasive, just uncaring. I remember feeling suddenly that I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Then Lewis got Van to try. She bent over the speaker and said, “Thorsten?” And he just said, “Goodbye, Erin.” There was an awful hissing. I looked at the microphone and I thought, What’s wrong with it? Then I realized he had opened the seals on his pressure suit.’

  She had put her hand to her cheek. She looked away, remembering.

  ‘He asphyxiated before we could reach him. And suddenly we were only three.’

  ‘You went out to him?’

  For a moment she did not seem to have heard him. She was reliving the moments she had described. Then, slowly, she said, ‘Lewis did. Of course we shouldn’t have let him do it alone. But none of us were thinking clearly. I suppose he wanted to spare us dealing with the body. That was the worst. Waiting for him to come back, thinking that he was out there, alone, where Thorsten had just done what he had done … I think it was the most horrible moment of my life. When something like that has happened, it just seems the most likely thing in the world that it’s going to happen again …’

  After a moment she said, ‘But he did come back. And then he got us all going again, just as he had at the beginning when we arrived, all sick and lost, and saw for the first time what it was going to be like. He’s brilliant, in some ways. In others he drives me mad. And so does Van. God – the things I could do to Van sometimes! Was it my fault she lost Thorsten? And now she goes work, pray, work, pray, and nothing else! We’ve got to get her to come out! I thought she would, now you’re here. The four of us—’ She checked herself.

  ‘We have to be like … like family. Because we’re all we have. You see?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  He said, ‘You are saying that I should not look for the fault, because it is the field and I can do nothing about that. You are saying that I should rest, take meals with you and learn to be as humans were before the World Ear. You are saying that if I do not do this I will become depressed, as Thorsten did.’

  She was still for a moment. Then she nodded and said, ‘Yes. Well done. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  ‘Nutshell? There are no nuts here.’

  ‘Not that kind of nut,
’ she said. Then she laughed – a short, shrill laugh as if she were close to tears. ‘Oh God! Of course words don’t get used like that on Earth any more! Why use words to make an image when you can send diagrams and pictures and stuff? Oh God! Sometimes I feel so … left behind.’

  She sighed. Her eyes were on the floor.

  Paul looked at the floor too. He thought of the thin fabrics that supported them in these little warm bubbles, suspended just a short distance above the surface where nitrogen froze and the ice was four hundred kilometres thick.

  ‘What do you believe in?’ he said.

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘Lewis says you must believe.’

  She looked up. There was a slight, secret smile on her face.

  ‘I believe in wonderful things, Paul. For all of us. And they’re going to happen.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh – all sorts. Some are really, really important. Others aren’t, but I can still believe in them. Right now I believe you should get some rest. And when you’re feeling better I think you should go down to Van and have a really good long talk about the field. Get into those ions and flows and things that you both know about. She’ll love that. You should do it every day. It’ll be good for both of you.

  ‘And I promise you, Paul. It does get better. When I think back to how we were when we first arrived and saw what it was going to be like … we all wept. Even Lewis. Even Van. We’d all get together and hug each other for long, long minutes. It really helps. Do you want a hug, Paul?’

  She held her arms out to him. Her eyes were liquid. His heart bumped as if the floor had suddenly shifted under his feet.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said.

  Her face went blank. ‘All right. Be tough if you want. I’ll go and find Lewis and hug him all I like. But tell me you’re feeling better.’

  ‘I am feeling better.’

  Another pause. She was waiting for something more. But he did not want to give it to her.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Paul. Don’t work too hard.’

  She left. The seal closed behind her.

  That’s it in a nutshell.

  That was it in a lie.

  They wanted him to think it was the field. It could not be the field.

  If it had been the field causing discharges on the satellite, it would have shut down everything that depended on the radio. It would have confused Vandamme’s link with her crawlers, scattered far out across the ice. But the crawlers had experienced no interference – not once in ten years. Vandamme had confirmed that. Whether she had meant to or not, she had destroyed that theory in a sentence. For the crawlers at least, the radio had always worked as it should.

  So had the satellite. He still had to check the satellite’s Earthbound antenna but it would not be that. A fault on the satellite would not make the crew lie.

  I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I? No. Not any more. He understood it now. They wanted him here, but not because he was a telemetrist. They wanted him here because of the woman who shut herself away beyond the airlock door.

  The four of us …

  May was dreaming of ‘wonderful things’ that were going to happen. What happened between a man and woman? Do you know, I’ve no idea! Lewis had said. And, I’m looking forward to— And then he had stopped himself. To what? To something new. Something that had not happened in the station before – and that Lewis had told Earth could never happen.

  What are we going to do about that, Paul?

  Alone in his chamber, Paul guessed it. He guessed too that the interference with the signals was part of it. As May had said, he had been utterly betrayed.

  It had been done deliberately. To get him here.

  He sent to Earth for a Hunter.

  IX

  If a single human was an axon in the brain of a larger consciousness, then a Hunter was a white blood cell. It was a program designed to identify and destroy electronic threats that had invaded where they should not have done. And because a Hunter was no more than a mass of electronic coding, it could be fired through space at the speed of light.

  When it came, two days later, he showed it to May. He showed it to her because he wanted her to see, without understanding, that he had the power to destroy her. With the Hunter he could strip away the lies of which the station was made.

  May was thrilled.

  She jumped lightly up and down in his work-chamber, clapping her hands. ‘Hey, Lewis!’ she called. ‘Hey, come and see what Paul has got! You come and see!’ And then, as Lewis drifted in through the seal, she said. ‘Show it again, Paul. From the beginning!’

  Paul clicked the manual controls. Cold, concealed rage drove his movements and made them deliberate. There was no hurry. He had the rest of his life for what he was going to do.

  ‘Watch!’ said May.

  The working area of the bubble wall blinked and changed. It showed a scene from four and a half billion kilometres away and perhaps a million years ago – a level land of tall yellow grasses, dotted with curiously shaped trees, sunlit under a hard blue sky.

  ‘Can you make it three-sixty, Paul?’ asked May.

  Wooden-faced, he clicked his controls again. Now the scene filled the whole of the chamber wall, all around them, so that but for the tasteless air and the few square metres of grey floor they might have been standing on that plain themselves. Lewis, coming to rest inside the chamber, appeared to have ducked under the branch of a fat-trunked tree that spread its dark green shade behind him.

  ‘What’s the excitement?’ he asked.

  ‘Ssh! Call it, Paul. It’s wonderful!’

  ‘Hunter,’ Paul said.

  At once the yellow grasses parted and a creature stepped heavily out. It was a man, or very nearly. It was the same height as Paul and Lewis, with an intelligent, ape-like face under a high domed skull and heavy ridges above the eyes. Its body too was man-like, but thickset and heavy, with far too much muscle in the arm and neck and thigh. It was naked, dark-skinned, and as it stumped towards them they could see that it was covered with fine dark hair that thickened into a mat on its head, on the back of its neck and in the indistinct region of its groin.

  ‘Very discreet,’ said Lewis.

  ‘Wouldn’t have bothered me,’ said May smugly. ‘I’m a doctor, remember?’

  ‘And your diagnosis, Doctor?’

  ‘I’d say the poor guy’s missing something.’

  The creature halted, appearing to watch them. In one hand it held a long sharpened stick like a spear, sinister in its slenderness.

  ‘It’s a Hunter, is it, Paul?’ said Lewis.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said. ‘To help me find the communications fault.’

  He used the word fault, although in his mind he meant culprit. Lewis nodded slowly.

  ‘Thorsten had one of those, once,’ said May. ‘But it didn’t look like this, did it? What happened to it?’

  ‘I cleared it out with a lot of other data a few years ago,’ said Lewis. ‘A shame, really. I was in one of my puritanical moods. I don’t suppose this one—’ He broke off, watching the creature thoughtfully.

  Suddenly he put one foot forward, lifted a palm towards the screen and declaimed in a loud, dramatic voice, ‘Come away, servant, come! I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel; come!’

  The mouth of the ape-man moved. A voice rich in resonance answered, ‘All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come to answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, to swim, to—’

  ‘It does! That’s wonderful!’ said Lewis, smiling. And then, striking another pose, he chanted in a quick, light voice, ‘Leporello, ove sei?’

  ‘Son qui, per mia disgrazia, e voi?’ fluted the ape-man.

  ‘Son qui,’ put in Lewis.

  ‘Chi è morto—’ began the Hunter.

  But again Lewis interrupted. ‘No one’s dead, thank you very much.’ He turned to the others. ‘Amazing what they get loaded with. It’s as if the works themselves know they are on the verge
of extinction, so they hide in every corner they can in an effort to survive. What was once immortal art is now useless electronic clutter in programs primarily intended for cleaning up computer systems.’

  ‘I remember that. That was opera, wasn’t it?’ said May.

  ‘Part of one. But you’re nearly twenty years out of date. Opera doesn’t happen back there any more. Stories about people – individuals – are dying out. Celebrity gossip is confined to the less developed networks. Imagination is less and less concerned with alternative individual existences. Abstract audio-visual experience is becoming the dominant art form.’

  ‘Not just audio-visual,’ said Paul. ‘Most forms are for smell and touch too.’

  ‘And taste as well?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Clever, isn’t it?’ said May, still beaming at the ape-man. ‘What else does it know?’

  ‘Hunter,’ said Lewis. ‘What is the age of the Earth?’

  ‘Four point five billion years,’ said the Hunter, in a round smooth voice unlike either it had used so far.

  ‘And what is the mass of the Sun?’

  ‘One point nine nine times ten to the power of thirty kilograms.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I have applied the rules of physics to observation.’

  ‘And what if your rules are wrong?’ said Lewis with a wicked smile.

  The ape-man looked at them blankly.

  ‘What if they are wrong, Hunter?’

  ‘It can’t answer that,’ Paul snapped.

  ‘Of course it can’t. If May had asked, “What else is it loaded with?” the answer would be more than any of us have time to find out. Just like the human chromosome, ninety per cent of which contains information that is never activated. It will have AI capabilities, some pattern recognition and the capacity to learn. But it can’t think like a human. What I’ve done is ask it to question its original programming. It can’t do that. Don’t be fooled by its appearance. A walking, talking ape-man from a past age is exactly what it isn’t.’

  His eyes lingered on the ape-man figure, which watched them impassively.

  ‘Homo Erectus,’ he murmured. ‘Our probable ancestor. Why do you suppose it was made to look like that, Paul?’