WE (26 page)

‘What have we said to Earth?' he asked.

Lewis!

But he must have remembered the Listener too, because he added, ‘Careful.'

‘You'll see when you come in,' said Paul.

‘All right.'

‘Are you coming down now?'

‘Yes, I'm on my way. But you need to understand what I'm going to do, Paul. I'm going to confuse Earth. I'm going to send such nonsense that it'll think we're mad. It won't trust our findings. This is the last hope. You have to let me try. I won't stop you sending what you decide to send. But you must not stop me either.'

‘I won't stop you,' promised Paul.

May's message had requested a translation program. Earth would send that now. They would want to double-check the data, look for patterns, study every blip that had occurred in the ten years of the station's history. Everything the creature was trying to hide about itself would now stream Sunward over the laser link. Nothing Lewis could do would change that. His last hope was hopeless.

Lewis was right about only one thing. They had been tired and scared. There had been nothing logical in the way they had thought about it. It had been the worst of all possible times to make their decision.

But that was how the mind worked. That was how it decided what ‘we' meant, and that
now
was the moment to choose.

And love, morality, freedom and free will – none of those things had counted. In the end they had chosen to give the next generation the best chance. The genes had seen to that. Of course they had.

‘Will he make it?' said May softly.

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘You nearly didn't.'

‘He's a better driver. And I had drained the power further. I was using the crawler equipment, remember.'

He picked up the view from the crawler again. It was in
motion, tipping forward down the steep incline of the Highway. There in the valley bottom was the station, the scattered flare of the mirrors, the huge dull curves of the domes, the gleam of ice that flowed away from beneath it. In the light of Lewis's headlamps individual lumps crawled towards them and disappeared off the bottom or the sides of the screen.

May put her head in her hands.

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

‘Fine – just shattered. God, I'm so tired! And as soon as he's back we'll be into who can say what to Earth, and what the rules are and all that. And we'll have to live with it until he can get himself to accept what's happened. And I'm the one he'll blame most …' Her hair had fallen about her face. She pushed it back. It wavered in the air. ‘Thanks, Paul. For a moment I thought we'd killed him there, between us. But you got him back. Thanks …'

‘He came back for us.'

‘Yeah. He does care about us. We all care, in the end. Even Van does.'

‘Erin.'

‘You think she'll let us call her that?'

‘Things may be changing with her now.'

‘That would be good.'

And she added, ‘Well done, Paul.'

They watched the station grow nearer and nearer. Its outlines grew to the edge of the screen and were lost. Now Paul could see the occasional flicker of the particle action in the outer layer. He had time to watch for it, as he had never had before – the momentary little glow as a mote from space was absorbed within the station's first skin. Yesterday, during the bombardment, it must have been alive with light. The shadows of the ice-shapes would have danced and twisted like creatures in a cold hell. But there were no shadows now.

‘Of course,' said Lewis suddenly, ‘we don't know how long Earth will take to react. Does it think something like this through in days, or decades? It might all be pointless. We might all be dead by the time it makes up its mind.'

Paul thought that it had taken less than a year for Earth to decide to send him out here. But he remembered that other presence, listening. He said nothing.

‘It would bugger things up for our descendants, though,' said Lewis. ‘This generation or the next. It would come to the same thing in the end.'

The crawler was approaching the outer airlock. Paul did not wait for Lewis to open the door. He did it himself.

‘Maybe we'll have grown strong enough to fight them off,' said Lewis.

Still Paul said nothing. When the outer door closed behind the crawler he let out a long, silent breath.

‘I'm going to make it think we've gone mad,' said Lewis. ‘Why not? I thought it was mad to start with and I live here! I'll make it think we're
trying
to get it to come …'

‘Maybe,' said Paul warily. Even though Lewis was inside the station they were still using the radio link. A signal broadcast in the station might well leak out. And the Listener was still there.

They followed the crawler through the layers. Paul switched to the hangar view to see it arrive. They watched Lewis's suited figure appear, dock the power feed and meticulously complete the exterior checks before turning towards the living quarters. Only when he knew Lewis was in the living-quarter airlock, when he saw the pressure climbing back towards normal, did he at last switch the view.

He chose the land of the Hunter – the wavering yellow grasses, the hard blue sky. He projected it all around the common room, overriding the lighting and the ceiling display, so that all memories of outside were hidden and the whole of that large chamber was bright with the imaginary scene. It was huge and yet no detail was lost. On the horizon was a line of clouds – great thunderheads that would spill their fire and water in huge quantities over the virtual plain. He saw that Erin had been right, that their undersides were dark and feathery, and that they trailed dark
diagonal streaks which were the falling sheets of rain. He had not noticed those before. Of the Hunter himself there was no sign.

And the message they had sent would still be on its way to its destination. Even if the laser had fired at once, the little pulses of energy that told the story would only now be approaching the orbit of the inner gas giants. They would still have an hour or more to fly before they reached the receptors on Earth. Yet they were travelling, and at the speed of light. Nothing could stop them or call them back. The future had already been chosen.

The airlock hatch opened and closed. Lewis was there, looking older and more tired than Paul had ever seen him.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I've been a fool.'

‘You had us
shitting
ourselves!' said May fiercely. She took a long skip towards him. Her arm lifted as if to strike him. Lewis flinched. But at the last moment it went around the back of his neck and caught her other wrist there. She pushed her face into his chest.

‘I'm
never
letting you go out again,' she said. ‘Not without one of us to keep an eye on you.'

‘Sorry,' he said again. His arm was around her waist.

Paul watched them clinging to each other by the airlock door. No one spoke. Behind them the grasses waved on the walls, yellow under the blue sky.

‘What do you think?' said Lewis at last. ‘Will Earth believe you?'

‘Earth will believe us,' Paul said.

‘What makes you so sure?'

‘It knows there must be someone else.'

Afterwards he went to look for Erin.

This novel was drafted and the title chosen before my attention was drawn to Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel
We
, published in English in 1924. I have only my ignorance to blame, for Zamyatin's novel is an important forerunner of the dystopian genre, inspiring Orwell's
1984
and influencing many others.

I did look for another title (
Cold Eden
seemed a possibility, although this again was not original). But nothing else captures with such short, stark simplicity the theme I wanted to write about – the place of the individual in the larger group, which is of course the meat of all dystopian fiction. So
We
it remains. And now I too owe a debt to the great Russian.

I also want to thank the members of the Physics and Astronomy Department of the Open University – Nigel Mason, Sylvia Miller, Jon Dawson, Stephen Wolters and Al Gronstal – for their help with the scientific aspects of the novel, and all those many others who have read the
typescript or otherwise contributed: Kim, Bruce, Amanda, Alan, Ginger, David, Hannah, both Alisons, Sophie and Dr Daryl Dobb – thank you all so very much.

John Dickinson

Also by John Dickinson

THE CUP OF THE WORLD
THE WIDOW AND THE KING
THE FATAL CHILD

THE LIGHTSTEP

www.john-dickinson.net