by Unknown
Vandamme did not answer. Only the blink of her eyes as she stared at the walls told Paul that she was still living and had not somehow taken her own life in her despair.
‘You have to come,’ Paul told her. He reached and shook her by the shoulder.
Vandamme tensed. She glared, not at Paul but at a point on the distant moonscape. ‘Why?’ she said.
‘We’re being attacked.’
It came in waves, again and again – lines of force coinciding over the station, bringing highly energetic particles down from space. Paul felt his stomach lurch each time he saw the numbers spike on the screen. He thought of the radiation pouring out of the sky. He thought of the particles smashing into the gas molecules in the outer layers, showering into thousands more particles, bombarding, showering again … They could not penetrate far into the station, but to reach the computer units they would not have to. And those impacts would have other effects – X-rays and gamma rays. Nothing in the station would stop gamma – not gas, not chamber wall, not pressure suit or human skin. If the designers on Earth had seen radiation as a serious hazard they would have buried the station in the ice. They hadn’t. And now the creature was trying to kill them with it, just as health workers on Earth would kill a cancerous cell.
Cold was creeping through the air. Paul felt it like a bar of ice pressing on his forehead. His breath frosted when he exhaled. He desperately wanted to put his helmet on, power his suit and sit in warmth and complete protection. But the power in the suits would only last so long. There was no use exhausting it now if they were going to need it later. He sat and watched and shivered.
Vandamme was in the common room with him. They sat together on the inflated seating, with their eyes and noses peeping over the tops of their high collars and their frosty breath fuming upwards like the steam from little volcanoes. Their hands, muffled in their great gauntlets, were too clumsy for the workstation controls. They watched the screen and controlled it by voice. Behind them the seal to Lewis’s chamber was open. Lewis was in there with his legs in his suit and the top half of it spilling over his knees like a clumsy blanket, so that his hands were free and he could use every possible resource that his workstation gave him. Paul had looked in to see him there, muttering over the controls, squinting at the screen while May watched over his shoulder and the brightly coloured images of long-ago Earth still changed and changed upon his walls.
Another wave. It did not seem angry or fearful. It was like the action of a huge tongue, probing and probing at something that irritated in the mouth. Each time the system registered a new peak Paul wondered how much higher it could go.
Not even the World Ear could have given him an answer to that.
More error messages appeared. Malfunction reports from one of the computer sites, from an auxiliary transmitter, from a search crawler. Particle damage in all cases. All had had shielding. All had been overwhelmed. The loss of the computer site might be trivial, or it might be serious. Everything depended on what the effects were and how Lewis could compensate for them. It depended too on what happened next: where the next chink in the station’s armour would be.
They could do nothing but wait.
Paul turned to the woman beside him.
‘Erin?’ he said.
Her face – as much as Paul could see of it – did not change at all. It was as if she did not think Paul could have been speaking to her.
‘Erin. That’s your name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said at last.
‘Do you mind if I call you that?’
She seemed to think about it. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said.
‘Helmets,’ said Lewis’s voice.
Fumble. Heave the huge thing over his head and lower it onto the rigid collar. Click. Twist. Power the suit. Check the displays.Ex: 1.0 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -1°. (Only minus one? Surely it had been lower than that!) And reach over, already feeling the warmth beginning to build around his legs, and check her fitting, and wait while she checked his.
‘Lewis?’ said Paul. ‘We have our helmets on.’
‘Good.’
‘Are you suiting up too now?’
‘Not yet. Not until I really have to. But, Paul?’
‘Yes?’
‘You have to carry on trying to get through to it. Wait until the wave has died and then de-helmet and do it by voice. I think it’s dying now. Can you see what you can do?’
Paul looked at the record of messages he had sent each time the waves had died. We cannot understand you … Your signal is too strong … You are hurting us … You are damaging us – be more gentle … You must use words that we use …
‘What do you want me to say this time?’
‘As before. Tell it that we don’t understand and that it’s hurting us. Get it to calm down.’
‘No,’ said Erin Vandamme. ‘Don’t transmit.’
‘Why the hell not?’ cried Lewis. ‘We’ve got to get through to it!’
‘We are getting through to it! That’s how it knows where we are.’
There was silence.
‘It doesn’t sense the station,’ she said. ‘It can’t see and it can’t touch. It senses the transmissions. It reacts to them.’
‘Why should it stop hitting us just because we stop transmitting?’
‘When pain goes, you stop rubbing at it, don’t you?’ said May.
‘The moon’s orbit will carry us away from where it last sensed us,’ said Erin.
‘And out of the tail,’ said Paul.
‘They’re right, Lewis,’ said May. ‘Maybe we should give up for the time being.’
‘But we’ve got to talk to the thing!’
‘We can try again any time. Right now we’re putting the station in danger. And ourselves.’
‘What’s going to be different—Damn!’
More alerts were scrolling up the screen – a long string of them.
‘That’s one of the algae tanks.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Lewis. ‘I knew that would happen.’
‘Won’t we lose the harvest?’
‘Not so long as—Hell! What’s that?’
Another alert. Once again the acronym meant nothing to Paul. He heard Lewis muttering to himself.
‘Lewis?’ said May. ‘What do you think?’
‘Yes, all right. Paul – no transmission please. Of any sort. Shut down anything you think might be emitting. And don’t use the intercom unless you have to. We’ll sit this passage out and then take stock.’
‘Will you suit up now, Lewis?’ said Paul.
‘I said no transmission, please.’
They sat in silence, watching the numbers dance on the screen and the relentless march of the error alerts superimposed upon them. One was from the second auxiliary transmitter again. A number were from the Knowledge Store, which appeared to be responding to a query no one had sent. Most of the others Paul did not recognize. They were things that only Lewis knew about.
Paul thought about the shielding engineers – the people back on Earth who had been given the task of estimating how much magnetic interference and radiation the systems would be exposed to and of designing equipment to tolerate the load. There would have been good minds among them, lifetimes spent in the study of particle physics, modelling programs and the properties of materials. They had had the experience of a hundred years of space exploration to draw upon. What would they have felt if they were here now? If they were ranged behind him, watching the screen with him as the numbers danced and the errors mounted? Guilt, that the magnetic field was more intense than they had allowed for? Or pride, that so far only a small proportion of the station systems had actually failed?
Or would they feel nothing at all? Would it be a fatalistic shrug of the shoulders? It wasn’t our fault. Department X provided the readings. Department Y predicted the maximum strength of the field. We did what we were asked to do. And then Department Z insisted … It wasn’t just the shielding engineers that the crew must rel
y on. It was everyone – everyone who had been a part of the great network, the mini-We that had designed, built, transported and erected the station out here. And he was depending too on the great We itself, which must have imposed the resource limits that the project had worked to. One failure, one honest miscalculation that escaped detection, could mean that the whole station failed now. That he, Paul Munro, would fail with it.
And that had been true ever since he had been laid inside his transport capsule back in the warm air of Earth.
A touch woke him from his thoughts. Erin Vandamme had tapped him on the shoulder. She mimed removing her helmet.
He checked the display. Ex: 0.9 Suit: 1.0 Temp: -6°. Pressure in the living quarters had fallen. The cold had deepened. It was all perfectly survivable, for the moment. But things were happening that were never meant to happen. And it might suddenly get worse.
Still she was miming at him. He hesitated. Then he nodded and gently powered down his suit. He felt it sag onto his body. He felt his ears pop and the sudden increase of cold. He lifted his hands to his helmet. It came free just as Erin removed hers. They looked at each other over their high collars.
‘Why did you ask me that?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘About my name.’
‘You called me Paul, didn’t you?’
She hesitated. Then she said, ‘It’s not because you own me now?’
‘Own you?’
‘Because of what I did.’
He looked blankly at her. She looked away.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ she said. ‘I think about you so much. Why you are really here. Why you say the things you do. You always seem to have reasons. I look at each thing you do and say, and I think, Yes, this is why … But that doesn’t tell me why I’ve felt so afraid of you …’
‘You are afraid of me?’ he said, bewildered.
‘Sometimes … Sometimes, yes I am. And yet when you come through my door I want you to stay and talk to me. When you stay in your chamber I want to go in to you …’
‘What makes you afraid of me?’
She laughed – a nervous little laugh. She put her head in her hands. ‘Is it going to be meaningless to you? Or are you being very clever? I don’t know. I’ve no way of knowing … Do you know what Lewis calls this place sometimes? He calls it “Eden”. You’ve heard him say that, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He likes the name because that was the place in the story where the first man and woman met – the father and mother of all men. He wants a new race of men in this place, of course …
‘What he’s forgotten is that the man and woman were not alone in Eden. There was – someone else – there with them. The Serpent. That’s who I’m afraid of.’
‘Serpent?’
Paul blinked slowly. Nothing came. Groaning aloud, he reached for the keyboard.
‘How do you spell it?’ he asked.
She told him. He called up the Knowledge Store. The entry he found was one she herself had written. He read it. It was the story she was talking to him about.
‘What did you do?’ he asked.
‘About what?’
‘You did something that made you think I owned you. What was it?’
‘I told May what you said. You remember – about her child being alone here after we had all gone. Of course she’s been telling herself it won’t be and of course she fears it will. It hit her when I said it. Very hard. I meant it to.’
‘I heard, I think. Lewis said you were not kind.’
‘Kind! I wanted to punish her. I knew that was what I was doing. And I was so pleased with myself for resisting you! And I fell at once. She’s been miserable ever since. You must have noticed.’
Paul nodded. He had noticed. Today he had, when they had been preparing the message.
He dismissed the entry from his screen.
‘I am not that,’ he said.
‘What are you, then?’
‘Maybe I am Change. Change can make you afraid too.’
She seemed to think about that.
‘I should tell her I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I can’t. It just sticks in me. I can’t!’
After a moment Paul put his hand on hers. Through the thickness of their two suit gauntlets he could just feel the shapes of fingers, remote but there, alive within the protective layers. He thought she might take her hand away, but she did not. Neither of them spoke.
It was cold. He was shivering in his suit and his face felt numb. He thought that they should both put their helmets back on. But he did not want to take his hand from hers. Just at the moment the levels on the screen seemed to be falling, anyway. That was another alert cancelled. Well done, Lewis. How long would this go on?
‘Do you remember Earth?’ said Erin.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘No, but really remember it? Can you remember the dampness and coolness of the air in the early morning? I can’t. I know it was like that but I can’t remember what it felt like.’ She sighed. ‘I was looking at a picture of clouds, a couple of watches back. I’d forgotten the way their undersides looked when it was about to rain – all dark and feathery, and those dark streaks below them slanting towards the ground.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ he said.
‘Sometimes I dream of it,’ he added.
‘It’s a strange thing to worry about,’ she said. ‘If this is the last hour of my life, I should be asking for forgiveness – from May, from you, from everybody. But that’s what I really feel. Some little cell in me containing that memory has died, and I can’t bring it back. That’s what—’
‘I don’t think it is.’
‘What?’
‘The last hour of your life.’
‘I’m glad you’re so sure.’
He pointed to the screen. The wave of activity was still falling. The alerts had stopped.
XIX
‘I can find no pattern in the waves,’ said Paul. ‘Nor can Hunter. It was not trying to communicate.’
They were in the common room again, bathed in the warm cream light of the walls. The temperature was normal. The unnerving cold was gone. The damage checks had been carried out, the results analysed, repair tasks prioritized. In the sky above them the crescent of the planet would be swelling again as the moon swung away from the tail.
But the signs of the last hours were written on their faces. No one had slept. No one – not even Erin – had gone off to shut themselves in their room. They had clustered together in the common room as if for comfort, taking turns to work on the main screen, making each other coffee and bringing in food at odd times. The schedule of watches, set mealtimes and rest periods was ignored and no one mentioned that they were ignoring it. It was as if that too had been shattered by some stray particle back in the passage of the tail.
‘Maybe it can’t communicate,’ said Lewis. ‘Maybe its intelligence is enough to recognize words but not to use them. Like a dog’s, say.’
‘A very big dog,’ said Erin. ‘And wild. You still want to talk with it?’
‘If I can.’
‘Why? You want it to sit up and beg?’
Lewis threw up his hands. ‘Because it’s intelligent! Because we’re sharing its space. Because it knows things we don’t, maybe. We should treat it like a person, with respect!’
‘It attacked us. And this station wasn’t designed for high levels of radiation.’
‘High?’ said Lewis. ‘I mean, yes, it was more than advisable, certainly. And over a sustained period—’
‘Lewis,’ said Paul. ‘We shouldn’t be risking any more exposure than we must. May should not at all.’
May said nothing. She was sitting with her knees tight together and her elbows held close against her sides. She was looking down at her hands, which were tucked in between her thighs. A pink spot had appeared upon her cheeks, just as it had when Lewis had handed around Earth’s response to Paul’s message about her child. She was angry because she wa
s helpless. She had written about cradling her child, even as particles fell from space. But the womb could not protect the embryo from electrons moving with the energy imparted by thousands of volts. If that were repeated and repeated, every six days, some price would have to be paid. She knew that. The embryo was the most vulnerable of them all.
‘All right,’ said Lewis, frowning. ‘There is that. So what do you think we should do?’
‘We should shut down all transmissions,’ said Erin. ‘We send nothing to anything by radio. Not to crawlers, not to Earth, not to each other. Let it think it’s killed us.’
‘For how long?’
‘Indefinitely.’
Lewis raised his eyebrows. ‘Total radio shutdown? That’s impractical. We have to control the utilities somehow.’
‘We use it as little as possible, then. We suspend all search operations – why should I go on searching if we know we’re not going to report what I find? We suspend the active experiments too. And we only use the utility crawlers when we absolutely have to. We communicate with Earth only by laser. In the meantime we try to map how the field works – what’s keeping it stable. We interfere with it as little as possible, at least to begin with. In time maybe we can try stimulating it again. But I’d want to be very gradual, both for its sake and ours.’
‘Earth will complain,’ said May.
Lewis shrugged. ‘I’m not worried about Earth. We’ll tell them the transmitters were damaged in a magnetic storm. It’s pretty well true. If it’s a question of our survival—’
‘I am worried about Earth,’ said Paul.
‘What do you mean?’
They were looking at him – all three of them. Lewis was frowning a little, as if the very mention of Earth was enough to cause suspicion. May had a lock of her long hair caught in the corner of her mouth. And Erin – her eyes were widening as she turned to him on the seat beside her. Somehow she knew what was coming from his mouth.
‘Erin was right,’ he said. ‘We must think again. We must report what we have found.’
‘We’ve taken that vote, Paul,’ said Lewis, with a dangerous softness.
‘We must take it again.’
‘Why? For what possible reason? Earth is eight years’ travel away! Even if we called it now and confessed everything it would make no difference! We would still have to find a way of living with this thing. There’s nothing Earth can do to help us and everything it can do to destroy us and the way we think!’