WE

by Unknown

  Fifteen years, and another forty-five years from the reserve machines made sixty. The station had already lasted ten years, so it had another fifty years before anyone left in it starved, or came out to pick lichens by hand. What else would last fifty years in this place? The power plant? The waste recycling? The door seals? Some chambers had failed and were disused. The station was already trading on its redundancy. But then no one knew how long a human body would last here either.

  It was madness, what they were doing. She must see that. She would have more reason to see it than Lewis or May.

  ‘So – would you like to drive it back?’ said Vandamme.

  ‘… All right.’

  ‘You don’t have to turn it. Just put it into reverse. I’ll change the view … there.’

  The joystick in the control panel was enormous – two to three times the size of the control on his monitor. He took it in his clumsy great gauntlet and it worked easily.

  ‘That’s reverse,’ said Vandamme. ‘Now, at your feet there are two pedals. Press firmly but don’t stamp … That’s right.’

  Paul had a sensation of moving backwards. Confusingly, the end of the chamber on his screen was coming closer.

  ‘This is fun!’ said Vandamme, with a cheerfulness that was almost eerie, springing so suddenly from her lips. ‘Byebye, breakfast. See you tomorrow. And let us thank God for his goodness. “I’ll not want, for he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters …”’

  ‘There are no waters,’ said Paul.

  ‘There are,’ she said, and he could tell she was grinning. ‘Once we’ve returned the crawler I’ll show you.’

  The ceiling of this bubble was a blaze of light, like a roof of opaque glass on a sunny day. The glare was filtering down through at least three layers of transparent bubble-wall, so all definition was lost and it was impossible to pick out the structure of the sun mirror, poised on the roof of the station far above their heads. Even to look up was to wince. Paul tried to shade his eyes with his hand. His gauntlet bumped clumsily against the visor of his helmet and did no good.

  The floor of the bubble was a tank like a long, thin swimming pool, surrounded by a walkway with a handrail. The water was a murky brown. The air was full of steam. His vision blurred as a layer of droplets formed on his helmet. Under the mirror the air was as warm as a mild Earth day. And the pressure was near normal. If it was any less, the rate of evaporation would increase and precious water would be lost to the station.

  ‘What’s in the tank?’ he asked.

  ‘Algae, again. The simplest, single-celled varieties. The base of any food chain.’

  ‘This goes into the lichen-feed?’

  ‘Primarily this. Also expired or defective lichen harvests, and of course our own waste – anything organic.’

  So we are eating our own shit, thought Paul. At just one remove. It should neither have surprised nor revolted him but it did. And the ‘coffee’ that they drank – which was not coffee but a substitute, a lie like all the other lies in the station – that had shit in it too.

  ‘We’re right over the living quarters now,’ Vandamme said. ‘Obviously this arrangement helps keep the living quarters warm. It also means we can have conventional water-based sanitary systems rather than anything working on vacuum. It wasn’t done for our comfort but it’s nice when something works out in our favour for once.’

  ‘Can I take off my helmet?’ he said.

  She hesitated. But in almost eighty per cent of an atmosphere there would be no risk. It would be like standing on the top of a mountain on Earth.

  ‘You want to sniff the air? I warn you, it’s pretty fetid. All right. Living quarters? We’re up in the tanks. Munro is going to remove his helmet. I think it’s safe.’

  ‘Very good,’ came Lewis’s voice.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘You check the external pressure. Never mind if you’ve done it already, you do it again. Now you unlock the suit controls and take the suit pressure down to the exterior pressure – slowly, or you’ll do yourself damage …’

  Paul made a sequence of touches on the suit control at his chest. There was a faint hissing noise from somewhere. His ears rang, and then shrieked with pain and popped. His display read: Ex: 0.8 Suit: 0.8.

  ‘Done that? Now you power down the suit—’

  He touched the control again. Vandamme’s voice was cut off. His display disappeared and the weight of the suit on his limbs and shoulders suddenly increased. His fingers found the lock on his helmet. He twisted, lifted the helmet free – and gasped.

  The air was fetid. It stank. The brown soup in the tank gave off a sour, musty smell, which rose with the steam from the surface and was hauled all the way down his throat as his lungs heaved at the thin air.

  He looked down at his hands and saw that his gauntlets – his whole suit in fact – was covered with tiny water droplets, which had condensed out of the atmosphere. When he looked closer he saw that the droplets were ice. The exterior of his suit had been exposed to temperatures well below freezing for over an hour. So had Vandamme’s. She stood beside him like a statue made of ice, with a grotesque, blind, outsized head. Her face was lost inside the veil of her visor. She glistened in the overhead glare. When she moved, her limbs shimmered with light.

  He put his hand to her visor and clumsily wiped away the crystals. Dimly now, he could see her eyes and nose within. He signed for her to take her helmet off.

  For a moment she did not respond. So he tapped on her visor and signed again.

  She shook her head. There must be some safety procedure: at least one member of the party must be suited and pressurized at all times – something like that. Paul didn’t care. He had decided to take the risk of talking to her. So she should take a risk to listen.

  He tapped and signed again, more urgently. Take it off, he mouthed.

  She stood there in front of him. Inside her helmet, her lips were moving. She must be consulting Lewis. Paul did not want her to consult Lewis. The whole point was that if she took her helmet off, no one in the living quarters would hear what he had to say.

  Take it off ! he screamed silently into her face.

  Her hands moved. They touched the buttons on her controls. He saw the little jets of air, warm from inside her suit, melting long streaks of droplets down her legs as she reduced the pressure. Then her hands lifted and the helmet came off, revealing the upper half of her face peering out from inside the high, circular suit-collar.

  ‘Munro? What is the matter?’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  She frowned. ‘What about?’

  ‘About May. And Lewis. They want to have a child.’

  ‘Oh God – that! Why do I have to talk about that?’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes I did,’ she said shortly. ‘Did they tell you?’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘You haven’t guessed all of it then. She’s pregnant.’

  Pregnant.

  ‘About nine weeks, she thinks. Is this what you wanted to say? I thought it was something urgent – something you wanted me to see or smell.’

  ‘It is urgent! If she’s pregnant it is more urgent!’

  ‘Can’t we do this in the living quarters?’

  ‘Not so easily.’

  ‘I see.’

  She was angry – angry about May, and angry with him for wanting to talk about it.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘She will die! In this gravity it’s … it’s stupid. There’s no one to help!’

  ‘Do you think she doesn’t know there’s a risk? She’s our doctor, after all. Who knows better than she?’

  ‘She wants it too much to see the risk!’

  ‘Are you a medic, Munro?’

  ‘No.’

  No, but he was learning to think for himself. He was learning not to rely on networks and data, because there were none. Nor would he rely on experts. May might be a doctor but
she was not dispassionate. The baby was one of the ‘wonderful things’ she believed in. It must be the biggest of them all. Therefore she could not be suspicious of it.

  Childbirth put the bodies of mother and baby under enormous stress. It was the fault of the human brain. It had to grow to a size larger than could be contained inside the mother. The baby had to be protected as long as possible, so it was kept inside the mother until the last moment and then forced out through the narrow channel of the pelvic bones. So tight was the fit of the baby’s head that its skull was squeezed out of shape during its passage.

  In one-tenth of Earth’s gravity, with bones attenuated to a fraction of their strength – what would happen to mother and child then?

  ‘It is possible, Munro. There was a successful birth on Mars station. That’s what made them finally decide to try it.’

  He had not known that. It must have happened during his long sleep. But it did not make any difference.

  ‘Van – Mars has more than four times our gravity! They have hundreds of people. Medical teams, operating theatres … It’s madness here! Worse, it’s our doctor! Who can help her when it goes wrong?’

  ‘All right! Look, I’ll agree it’s dangerous! But it’s no use us saying that. It’s her choice. It’s what she’s always wanted. Do you think you could persuade her not to go ahead? Anyway, it’s already happening. It would be a risk even for her to stop at this stage. Abortion is not straightforward, even if she was prepared to do it. And she isn’t.’

  ‘She doesn’t know the science,’ said Paul roughly. ‘She’s a medic, but this is not her field. If she understood the risks—’

  ‘For God’s sake! I don’t want to talk about this – can’t you see? I can’t talk to them about it and they wouldn’t listen if I did! All I can do for them is pray. And I am praying, believe me!’

  ‘Earth would know the risks,’ he persisted. ‘If Earth—’

  ‘Munro!’

  She had checked in the act of replacing her helmet. Now she was looking at him as if he had hit her.

  ‘You must not tell Earth. You must not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Earth is evil,’ she said flatly.

  They stood face to face by the pool where life was beginning.

  ‘You must not tell Earth,’ she repeated.

  His message had gone out over the laser the previous day. He did not tell her. She would find out soon enough.

  They all would.

  XI

  They sat opposite him in a row in the main bubble of the living quarters, all three of them.

  Lewis, tight-lipped, was in the middle. In his hand he held a printout. Printouts were rare in the station, where all consumables were derived from the same supply of lichens and all manufacturing processes drew on the same precious sources of energy. The crew did not use printouts unless they thought it was important. Lewis’s eyes flicked repeatedly down to it and up to Paul again. Only the redness of his cheeks and the soft clip of his voice as he arranged the crew in their places gave any hint of his fury.

  May’s cheeks were flushed too. There was a bright-red spot in the centre of each of them and the rest of her face was pale. She did not look at Paul at all. She looked at her feet. Her hair was tied back so that her ears showed. Her hands were in her lap. Paul looked at her belly and wondered if the slight swelling there was the first visible sign of the baby, or if it had always been like that. He could not remember.

  He told himself that they could do nothing to him. They could do nothing that they had not already done when he had been picked out of the living air of Earth and sent to this place.

  ‘All right, let’s start,’ said Lewis.

  He handed the printout to Vandamme.

  ‘This came in on my last watch,’ he said. ‘I could not immediately see which aspect of the station’s function it was referring to, so I interrogated the message-bank. It turned out to be a reply to two messages Paul had sent over the laser.

  ‘Paul, do you recall the message you sent to Earth at twenty-eight: zero three: sixteen zero three?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the one at twenty-nine: zero three: eleven thirty-two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps you would say what the contents were.’

  Nerves were constricting Paul’s throat. He fought the impulse to clear it.

  ‘I told Earth that I thought you and May were planning a child, and that you had lied to Earth about the chances for more generations here. In the second message I said she was pregnant. I asked for instructions.’

  He made himself look at Vandamme then. The first message had gone before they had taken off their helmets by the algae-bath. The second had gone later, after she had told him that it mattered more than anything that Earth should not know.

  She nodded once. Her expression was blank.

  ‘I am tempted to ask what instructions you thought Earth might give,’ said Lewis.

  Paul looked at the printout in Vandamme’s hand. The message seemed to be quite short. He had expected something much longer, containing medical analyses, predictions, images, graphs, statistics, all pointing firmly towards an inescapable conclusion. He was itching to know what it did say. But to ask would be weakness.

  ‘The best course for us,’ he said.

  ‘Again I am tempted to ask who you mean by us.’

  Paul clamped his jaw shut. He was not going to play this game.

  ‘It must have been clear to you, Paul, that we wanted her pregnancy to be kept confidential, and above all that we did not want it revealed to Earth. It should also have been clear to you that the four of us depend absolutely on each other’s cooperation. If you suspected that we were embarked on a course that you thought unwise, it should have been your duty to consult with us first and find out our reasons. Instead, you informed Earth at the earliest possible opportunity. Why?’

  ‘You had lied to Earth.’

  ‘I have good reasons for what I’ve done. If you ask me I’ll tell you. But I want to know what yours are.’

  Paul looked at the printout again. What did it say?

  ‘Because of the risk,’ he told them.

  ‘What can Earth do about the risk? It takes eight years for a ship to reach us! We are completely beyond any help that Earth might send. You know that perfectly well. What did you think Earth would say?’

  Vandamme returned the printout to Lewis, who passed it on to May. May read it, and Paul watched her as she did so. She did not look up at him. She put it carefully down on the table. She rose. Still she did not look at him. With long, slow skips she left the room.

  In the silence Paul reached across and drew the printout across to him. It read:

  01:04:1337 Your 28:03:1603 and 29:03:1132. Congratulations. Relevant updates will be transmitted to your files. Keep us informed. Good luck. Ends.

  ‘I suppose you thought they would order an abortion,’ said Lewis coldly. ‘You must have known we would not wish it, but you thought you could get Earth to overrule us. You wanted it to bombard us with World-Ear knowledge, so that in the end we would be persuaded despite ourselves. But it wouldn’t have worked. I’ve thought about this for years. Nothing Earth could say would persuade me now.

  ‘And you don’t understand Earth, Paul. It is not interested in us as people. It thinks of us as a thing. A seed. As long as it thought the seed was sterile, it would have left us alone. Now it knows we have begun to germinate. It will watch us more closely. It will think about expanding the colony and about how to get the World Ear to function out here after all. This is the worst possible thing you could have done.’

  ‘She will die,’ said Paul harshly.

  ‘I know there’s a risk! Do you think I don’t care? Do you think she doesn’t know it? She is a very, very brave woman! But we both know this is the only future there is.’

  ‘Future? What future?’

  ‘For humanity. We are the last humans left. Don’t you see that? We are the l
ast chance to build a community in which individuals are free to respect one another. And we can! We have the mistakes of Earth for our guide. We can observe the norms and behaviours that inoculate us against the disease of the We. But that’s no good if it stops with the four of us! If it stops with us, we’ve failed! Don’t you see how much it matters?’

  ‘You are crazy,’ Paul said. ‘Mad.’

  ‘Think about what you’re saying, Paul. Just think about it. If we die out, that’s the end. There’s no one else.’

  ‘Mad! This won’t work!’

  ‘Mad? What do you mean by mad? Which of us is mad, Paul? An ant will go mad if it is taken from its nest. But a human taken from his community will build himself another one, however he can. Are you ant or human, Paul?’

  ‘You want to breed more people,’ said Paul, reddening. ‘You have to make a bigger station. You can’t do that.’

  ‘What do you know about how many people the station can hold? Which chambers I can pressurize, heat and keep in balance? With three hundred per cent redundancy I could support another twelve people without even trying! They could be there now and you wouldn’t know the difference!’

  ‘So you jam the radio to make Earth send you a telmex! What next? Will you breed a new virus, to make them send us a microbiologist? Break the computers to make them send an engineer? Man, woman, man, woman – yes?’

  Lewis stared at him. ‘What are you saying, Paul? What the hell are you saying?’

  ‘You said Earth sends people into space to make children. No. That was a lie. It was not Earth’s idea. It was yours. You got me sent here to help you breed!’

  ‘Paul – I had nothing to do with that!’

  ‘Then why do you jam the transmissions?’

  ‘I do not jam the transmissions. That’s the field!’

  ‘It is not the field! It is you!’

  ‘By God, you are mad! Why would I waste my time doing that?’

  ‘Lewis,’ said Paul furiously. ‘This child of yours—’

  ‘You mean the one you wanted to kill?’