WE (15 page)

‘That's it. Show me.'

It was an entry that she had added to the Knowledge Store.

WS2: 20:03:1118 I have finally understood the full evil of the We. It means that the whole human race has lost its Free Will. Free Will is not just the ability to make a choice. Without Free Will no relationship with God is possible. All He has taught us has been lost and His sacrifice for us has proved to be in vain. The We is the last triumph of Satan.

‘It's not about child killing,' Paul murmured.

‘
Do you wish me to search—
'

‘No.'

Paul studied Vandamme's entry. It had been written the day she had met him. It had been in him that she had finally seen the evil that the We had done.

But he did not understand what she meant. On Earth he
had been making choices all the time. That was how it had seemed to him. It was just that on Earth, equipped with the World Ear, the choices had been far, far easier than they were here. All he had needed to do was consult until the answers became obvious.

Linked to Vandamme's entry was a short exchange between her and Lewis.

WS1: 20:03:1334 So we should re-name our station ‘Eden'? Is that what you are saying, Van?

WS2: 20:03:1357 Eden at thirty degrees Kelvin? ‘Ark' might be better. And I shall set my display to a rainbow to remind me of God's promise.

WS1: 20:03:1540 I don't recall that story in detail. But you prompt me to wonder whether the We itself might contract some kind of spiritual life – or at least start looking for a purpose. There's a suggestion in the last download that it can imagine bringing about the next Big Bang. If so, it would have secured – at least in its own mind – its place as an indispensable aspect of the universe. The universe created it so that it can create the next universe. That's purpose for you.

WS2: 20:03:1712 You don't ‘contract' a spiritual life. You ‘contract' diseases.

WS1: 20:03:1726 My point entirely, Van. Although in the case of the We, it might be more of a genetic disorder.

Vandamme appeared to have broken off the contact at that point. Her next entry sequentially read:

WS2: 20:03:2100 Borehole achieved by Search Crawler 14 at 51.975' N, 34.695' W. No content.

And the next was from May:

WS3: 20:03: 2234
Alpha, beta, gamma
Particle and ray,
The Sun has boiled the sea,
The sky is stripped away.
Naked in the dust.
Infinity returns.
And I will cradle you, my love,
My love, my little love,
While all creation burns.

My love, my little love
. That meant her child. Hers and Lewis's. The one they said he had wanted to kill.

He hadn't meant …

Useless to protest. They would decide what he had meant. For them, only that would be the truth.

Paul gritted his teeth. He went to Vandamme's entries about her god and searched them for the word ‘evil'. There were so many occurrences that he did not look at any of them. Instead he searched for the words she had said in the crawler, about
quiet waters
. He found them. He found other words around them, about paths and green pastures – and the shadow of death. He supposed they were what Vandamme had meant by ‘prayer'.

After a little, he went back to the string of Vandamme/Lewis entries. He began to construct an entry of his own.

A date-time group sprang up automatically.
WS4: 03:04:1134
.

He looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and dragged the keyboard towards him. Frowning with concentration, he started to spell out what he wanted to say.
About Lewis's 20:03:1540. The plan on Earth is to …

The words were not right. They did not capture how things worked in the scientific communities. The word ‘plan' was too certain. He tried again.

Some scientists have proposed …

That was wrong too. That put the emphasis on individuals. It did not recognize the thousands of reactions that each proposal would have received, or the part they would have played. Feedback was at least half of anything that happened in the World Ear.

Words were the problem. There were World Ear symbols for the thing he wanted to express but he could think of no exact translation. And then there was the keyboard – the damned, wretched, primitive keyboard! It slowed him down. It made his silent speech the more halting. He felt he had receded almost to the state in which he had first arrived at the station, capable of saying ‘Yes' and ‘No' and little else.

But it was better than coding. Anything was better than coding.

The idea is …
he tapped.

That was as close as he could come to it in a few words. The Idea. A series of proposals, met by a storm of feedback from peer communities. An idea was something that
might
be – that could not be achieved yet, but that was retained in the consciousness as a possible future action, for when circumstances were right.

The idea is that we …

He hesitated over ‘we'. But he did not want to use ‘it', or ‘the We', as the others would have done.

The idea is that we achieve the first Big Bang. We will be the creators of our own universe.

‘Paul?'

He jumped. It was Lewis.

It was Lewis, speaking over the intercom, but his voice had sounded so present that Paul had automatically blanked his screen.

‘Yes?'

Lewis's voice filtered coldly into the room.

‘I'm shuffling the watches. Will you stand in for Van at the next passage of the tail?'

Paul thought.

‘Yes.'

‘Thank you. And something else. Are you listening?'

‘Yes.'

‘The interference was happening before Thorsten died. Yes?'

‘Yes.'

‘So how could it have been a plot to get you here – when we still had our telmex?'

Paul did not answer.

‘It doesn't work, Paul,' said Lewis. ‘Think about it.'

After that there was silence, so Paul decided he had gone. He flicked the screen back to the log entry he had
written. He had been about to add more, but the interruption had broken his train of thought. Instead he called up transmission records of the station's first year, before Thorsten had died. He found reports of the interference. He found requests from his predecessor to Earth for a translation program to circumvent the problem. None had been sent, it seemed. That was strange.

But it might not be as it seemed. As station manager, Lewis had permissions to enter or amend any part of the system. The records Paul was looking at could have been planted for him to find. They could have been planted just moments before Lewis had called him.

Grimly, he began to code again.

Time passed. When he checked the external view, he saw that the shadow was creeping over the planet once more. The disc was narrowing to a downturned mouth. A great aurora glowed on the dark face, like a chain of nebulae in the blackness. Soon they would make the passage of the tail.

He stole out to collect a long-overdue meal and ate it in his room. He slept for a short while and woke to begin coding again. In his breaks he thought about evil, and about going insane.

He called up the station archive and looked for the biographies of the crew members: their photographs, their qualifications and their histories. He studied them
carefully. None of them had any grounding in telemetry.

In Lewis's training record he found a minor degree in computer coding. Vandamme obviously had major degrees in dynamic meteorology, but prior to her assignment to the station only limited experience in radio astronomy. Her first name, the record reminded him, was
Erin
.

He noticed that May had been in her mid-twenties when the mission had been launched. Not counting the eight years of flight, when all body processes would have slowed, she would be thirty-five now. That was old for a first child, even on Earth, but not impossible. Lewis was older. Of all of them, Paul was the youngest. If he was the youngest, there might also come a time when he was the last.

He did not think so. He could imagine that future but he could not believe that it was real. The real future was the one in which the child lived and grew and became one of them. And that was a future he could not imagine, because he had no idea what the child would be like. Would he speak with it, perhaps even teach it things? How could he prepare it for its bleak life? Would it ever find out that he had argued against its birth? There was no knowing. It was pure potential, an unwritten record, a biography that did not exist.

He called up another entry.
91/926.2 639: Thorsten Bondevik
.

It was a long, solemn face, the shape of an upside-down tear drop, with a little mouth and chin and pronounced lines across the brow. The ears were small but they stuck out prominently from the side of the head. Like Lewis, Thorsten had been nearly bald. The photograph did not show him smiling. Looking at it, Paul wondered if his predecessor had ever smiled. He could not remember smiling himself – not since arriving here.

The entry said:
Deceased 11:03:1331 2057. Cause of death: asphyxiation following decompression of pressure suit
.

He wondered if he could ever come to the point when he would go to the outer layers and decompress his suit. He tried to imagine himself looking at the displays.
Ex: 0.3 Suit:1.0 Temp: 90K
, and then he would bring his hand across to unlock his helmet. And the hiss of air and the sudden scream of pain in his ears as his tiny personal atmosphere exploded and was lost into the half-vacuum …

Even in his mind, his fingers refused to find the buttons. He looked into the eyes of the dead man and wondered what had happened that day in Thorsten's brain.

It was time for his watch.

He tapped in his entry codes immediately, so that Lewis would know he was on duty and would not be tempted to remind him. He tuned his monitor to the field readings. Then he adjusted the wall-display. The blue sky and yellow
grasses vanished. All around him was darkness. In the dome over his head the tiny Sun was low over the crescent of the planet. He looked up at it.

There, somewhere there, a mere one hundred and fifty million kilometres from that point of light, was the place that should have been his home. It was so close to the Sun that it might have been one and the same: a tiny fleck of rock, a little gravity well just strong enough to cloak itself in a protective atmosphere, at exactly the right distance from its star for water to run freely on its surface and so for life to begin. And after four billion years, a form of life had evolved that was sufficiently intelligent to speak, to perceive the universe, and to step off the life-bearing rock and into the empty vastness around it. To send one of its number across space, to sit on another little rock, cold and empty, copying out strings and strings of numbers while a tiny seed of life stirred close by.

And now something else was happening back there. If he could view it not with his eye but with a radio telescope, he would see not one star but two. First with its primitive broadcasts and televisions, and latterly with its mobile networks and then the World Ear, the Earth had become a source of radio and microwave emissions almost as intense as the Sun itself. In the We, another new life had glowed into being. An infant yet, rising wobbly to its feet in the great
dark room of space, looking around, beginning to wonder why it was alone.

It knew it must die. Some day, it too must come to an end. Why?

‘I could feel sorry for you,' he murmured to the diamond spark. ‘I could feel sorry. But you sent me here. You are my enemy, after all.'

There was a lump in his throat. He had been aware of it for some time. His body wanted to weep. He could feel his lips drawn back. His face muscles were bunched. His eyes were hot and runny. He hit the console with his fist – his weak, flimsy fist that sprang from his insect-thin arm. He was a victim, an object, an experiment.
What is it like, having the World Ear?
Vandamme had asked. And his answer:
You belong
.

He had been part of something much bigger. He had had purpose – something to which he could contribute. What purpose could an individual have by himself? A single I? Only to increase the
We
: the thing that was made of the millions of things called
I
. The
I
died for its tribe or nation. The parent lived and died for its child. The
I
must die. Only the
We
could live on.

And he had died, now. Once they had cut him off and put him in the rocket, his life within the We had ended. Death was the absence of life, just as dark was the absence of
light and vacuum the absence of matter. What life could live out here, in this unanchored immensity, forty degrees above absolute zero? Death lay all around him. It lay in the bitter temperatures beyond the sealed doors of the station. It lay in the wastes of ice, uncloaked by atmosphere, naked to the emptiness of space. It held the frozen remains of a man up there in the blue-grey dusk on the canyon lip. The remains would not have decayed. Decay was only another form of life. Here, there was not even decay.

Now, in the darkness, he could believe what Lewis had said to him. Humanity was gone. For all those billions of human bodies, there was only one mind, callous, even oblivious of the individual cells that composed it. It had been there all the time. Perhaps it had been there even before the World Ear had let it leap to a new level of consciousness. It was a cold, stupid, animal brain. And it had dispensed with him. It had cast him out to where he could no longer belong. Why? Because it had been tricked by the crew? That did not work. For its own reproduction? That did not work either. There had been a man and two women here already. It must have had a reason and yet its reason was opaque. Its thoughts were slow. From the inside, in that swift and living stream of communications, he had never seen it. Only now, looking back from the very edge of the solar system, could he know that it was there.