WE (2 page)

No sound could be heard from up here, behind the glass of the window. And there was not much movement to be seen. The occasional vehicle or walker was passing peacefully down the huge avenues that previous city-dwellers had
thought necessary to carry their transport. Yet all that landscape was humming with life, with messages passing from person to person, invisibly, inaudibly, but all the time. The city was a great living thing. And none of it was for him. None of it could reach him.

All that living – and none of it could touch him! He could no more feel them than he could hear or see them, up here. That … That was what was different now. It always would be.

His fist thumped the window, gently, but enough to make it shake and for him to feel the impact afterwards. He wondered why he had done it. He looked at his hand and found he could no longer see it clearly. His sight had blurred. He wanted to screw up his eyes.

Something was happening to him! He could not see! His eyes were hot. His breathing was coming in gasps that he could not control. Something wet was on his cheeks. It was not sweat – not any kind of sweat that he knew. He could not call for help. He had no way of calling for help! His mind was dumb – dumb, and beginning to fight with panic.

But there was a way. There was the red alarm button by the bedside. When they had showed it to him, he had noted it but had never thought that he might use such a thing. Now he must try, before things got worse. He stumbled back to the bedside. He fumbled for the button and pressed it
clumsily with the tip of his finger. Then he sat on the bed, not daring to move. He felt the fit subsiding. His breathing was more even now. He wiped his cheeks on his arm. His sight returned, although his eyes still stung. He tried to order his mind. He tried to remember the various possible complications that could arise from his operation and match them with the symptoms he was experiencing. He could not. He longed desperately to be back on the networks, just for a few moments, so that he would be able to look them up and know what was happening to him. Knowing was so important. Not knowing was horrible – not knowing, when he should have been able to know! And no one was coming to help him. He had pressed the alarm and they were not coming! How long ago had he pressed it?

Again he could not know.

They came. Two people entered the room. He recognized one, a gentle-faced man in blue surgical overalls who had informed him beforehand of the likely course of the operation. The other was a young woman with short brown hair about whom he knew nothing.

Yesterday he would have known. Yesterday, even before she had stepped into his sight, he would have known her age, qualifications, family status and preferred protocols. Notes of her financial status, social and antisocial behaviours (if any) would have been available. He could have dealt with
her with confidence, knowing she knew the same about him. Now he was helpless.

The doctor's eyes blinked and tracked. The woman spoke.

‘You pressed the alarm?' she said.

She was a Talker: someone who was trained to use her throat and mouth to form words so that it was possible to communicate with individuals who, for whatever reason, were not on the networks. She was a Talker for the doctor.

He looked at the doctor. The mild, concerned face looked back at him.

No, not at him. The eyes were not focused on him. They were following their displays. If they saw his physical body at all, it was through a veil of images and symbols, options, communications with the Talker, all marshalled to address whatever the problem might be.

And then he realized that he could not tell them what it was.

It should have been so easy. An image of his own face, taken from his handcam and focusing on the symptoms. Colours of red and amber to convey alarm. Perhaps a word or two –
dangerous side-effect query
. Quick and unambiguous – that was all a message needed to be. And he could not do it. He had no handcam to take images, no display and pupil
tracker with which to transmit, no World Ear with which to receive. Everything was gone.

To communicate now, he had to talk. He could not do that either. He knew what words should sound like but he had had no practice forming them. Not for years and years.

‘Are you well?' said the Talker. Her voice had a gentle sound.

He opened his mouth.

‘Aa … Aaah …' It was all he could manage.

And in his stress his symptoms were worsening again. His eyes were hot and screwed up. His cheeks were wet. He choked.

Desperately he jabbed his fingers at his face, pointing. ‘
Aaarh!
' he said.

The doctor's eyes focused. He bent to look closely. His face wore the detached concern of one who knew he would never suffer as the person before him was suffering. His pupils tracked.

‘It is Tears,' translated the Talker. ‘Just Tears. They are …'

She hesitated. The information the doctor was giving her had far outpaced her ability to put it into speech.

‘They are normal,' she said.

It was not a good choice of word. Tears were not normal. None of them could remember crying. But it was the best she could do.

T
hat first stage – the operation, together with subsequent therapies and speech training – took knowledge, the right tools and materials, and some man-days of time from a number of specialists.

The next required an effort greater than the output of a hundred thousand human lifetimes.

At a moment determined by the relative positions of planets and the Sun, his training was interrupted. He was taken to another surgery, one that specialized in anaesthetics, and there he was put into a sleep. His body was fitted into a dynamic harness capable of exercising his limbs gently while his mind was unconscious. Then he and his harness were slung in a capsule and taken to a place unlike any other in the world.

The vehicle that carried him left the city and passed through rich green countryside speckled with gardens and the shining domes of houses. It climbed through hills that were covered with thick forests teeming with birds, insects and brightly coloured life. Hundreds of different species
crammed every square metre here, shrieking, scuttling, growing, decaying, but he saw none of it. He did not see the great blue gem of the sea, flecked with white, when it rose into view as the road climbed. Nor did he see the dusty uplands, coated with low thorns, across which his vehicle sped for hours under a deep blue sky.

And then in the sky there was a line.

It was like a crack in the blue, a pencil-stroke drawn from the heavens straight down to the earth. The vehicle sped on towards it, spurring light dust-clouds in its wake, and for a long time nothing changed. There was only the earth, the sky and that straight, impossible line that grew neither thicker nor nearer.

In the last stage of the approach the road snaked among low, rocky rises. As it snaked, a watcher from the vehicle would have seen the line appear to move against the thorncovered hills beyond it. Only then could a human eye have been sure that it was something that really existed. The line was now just a few kilometres away, rising in a steep curve from the ground. It rose and rose. A bend in the road revealed the buildings and other structures that clustered at its foot. By now a traveller in the vehicle would have had to crane backwards for his eye to follow it up. And at last it would have gained a width that the mind could have grasped. It was a cable, as thick as the trunk of an ancient
tree, yet in comparison to its length far more slender and frail than a spider's thread, rising from the Earth to the sky.

The passenger saw none of this. He was asleep. And the people who accompanied him and received him did not see it either. They moved with the live displays flickering across their vision and barely glanced up at the thing that soared and disappeared above their heads.

The cable was made of special carbon-based materials designed for this one purpose: to create a structure strong enough to reach into space without collapsing under its own weight. It was nearly forty thousand kilometres long – almost as long as the imaginary line of the equator itself. Its far end was anchored to a satellite in geostationary orbit. And there it hung, like some line of longitude come adrift from Earth: a ladder that men had built towards the stars.

Clutching at its base, in a cocoon of red gantries, was a man-made insect the size of a small house. It was white, sprouting black solar panels like wings. But it was blind. It had no windows because it had no crew. Its operations were all automatic or controlled from the ground. It sat with its nose pointed up the first gentle curve of the cable, waiting for the man who lay unconscious in his capsule.

The precious burden was lifted up the gantries and placed inside the giant white insect. Then more checks were performed: on the occupant; on the capsule with its
life-supporting array of instruments and its reservoirs of supplies; and on the cable-vehicle itself, which had to pass a hundred routine tests before the start of each climb.

Waiting. Results. Orders. A risk was noted. Permission was sought for a ten-day postponement.

Permission was denied. The astronomical window was too small for any delay. The risk must be accepted.

More orders. Codes were entered. Systems aboard the white insect woke. Gantries were withdrawn. The black wings trained themselves to the Sun. A gentle humming filled the site.

More waiting.

Then a signal, sent automatically from the white insect to its controllers.
Ready.

More codes were entered and acknowledged. The final one was repeated three times for confirmation.

The hum deepened and increased. Gently the white insect began to rise along the cable, curving away upwards from the ground. Clinging to the impossible thread, it needed nothing like the acceleration required by rockets of past eras. The force of the Earth pulled on it but could not slow it. The detail of the launching site was lost in the enormous green-brown of the diminishing land. Up and up the insect sped, like a train hurrying into the sky. The solar panels angled to catch the Sun. The Earth turned but the
cable turned with it, towed by the satellite at the far end. It turned four times on its axis. And still the insect hurried up and up and up out of the little, safe well of gravity that life inhabited, out to the rim of space.

On the last stage of its journey it slowed. Here, one-tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, the anchoring satellite swung at the end of its line. It was almost a little moon itself, a near-Earth asteroid diverted to its current orbit, so that the cable's outer end would be secured while the white insects scuttled to and fro. It had huge solar panels, and directional rockets to permit slight variations to its orbit should drifting debris threaten either it or the precious cable. It was Earth's outer door to space.

It was also its shipyard. Here, crews of remotely controlled robots moved along runners to assemble spacecraft that would have no need to fight their way up from the pit of Earth's gravity. Along one gantry lay the skeleton of a craft five hundred metres long, the first of a non-recoverable fleet planned for the hundred-year project to make a habitable world from the hell of Venus. The robots slid patiently to and fro along their scaffolding, bearing components to the vessel, adding to it bit by bit like metal ants feeding a huge queen.

Out here, beyond the atmosphere, there was no sound at all. But there was still vibration, dropping in pitch as the cable-vehicle slowed and slowed to dock at the inbound
gantry. Then there was a pause. At workstations forty thousand kilometres away on Earth, routine checks were performed.

Satisfactory.

Commands were transmitted to the station. A hatch on the insect opened. Great arms reached down into it and fastened around the capsule inside.

More checks. Secure.

The arms lifted the capsule with its living, sleeping burden out of the cable-craft. Silently, passionlessly, they bore it along a gantry to a smaller spacecraft which had completed its assembly and tests some weeks before. This craft had two huge arms, folded in three sections along the gantry. At the end of each arm was a large globe. In one of these globes a hatch opened, revealing a small chamber surrounded by massive shielding. The capsule was placed inside. The hatch closed.

Six hours passed. After more checks and conferences on Earth, final commands were given. Gently the spacecraft separated from the satellite and began its journey. At a safe distance the two arms unfolded. Locked in their extended position, they were each a kilometre long. Gently they began to turn in a giant cartwheel around the spacecraft, one globe acting as counter-weight to the other, to simulate the effect of a light gravity field pulling on the body in its capsule.
Down on the surface, congratulations rippled around the command centres, universities, engineering concerns and surgeries that had been directly involved. There were images and comments on the news sites and among the wider population. None of it reached the sleeping man, riding in his tiny bubble through the vastness of space.

Six months later there was another wave of interest on Earth, mostly among the space engineering community, as the craft made its passage past the Sun. Anxious eyes monitored the levels of radiation absorbed by the shielding on the passenger globe. Automatic messages from the vessel reported that systems aboard remained normal. The capsule detected no apparent damage to its occupant. At the closest point the rockets fired to kick the little spaceship onward. Swung by the enormous gravity of the star, it accelerated away into the void.

There were more congratulations. Then interest faded as effort was switched to other things. But it did not die altogether. A rota of staff checked the regular reports that came back from the craft and the capsule within it, day in, day out. Occasional corrections were discussed and transmitted. So Earth settled down to watch as the tiny artificial mote diminished and diminished towards the outer edge of the solar system.