WE (11 page)

I don't have to spell it out for you, do I?
No. Not any more.
He understood it now. They wanted him here, but not because he was a telemetrist. They wanted him here because of the woman who shut herself away beyond the airlock door.

The four of us …

May was dreaming of ‘wonderful things' that were going to happen. What happened between a man and woman?
Do you know, I've no idea!
Lewis had said. And,
I'm looking forward to—
And then he had stopped himself. To what? To something new. Something that had not happened in the station before – and that Lewis had told Earth could never happen.

What are we going to do about that, Paul?

Alone in his chamber, Paul guessed it. He guessed too that the interference with the signals was part of it. As May had said, he had been utterly betrayed.

It had been done deliberately. To get him here.

He sent to Earth for a Hunter.

I
f a single human was an axon in the brain of a larger consciousness, then a Hunter was a white blood cell. It was a program designed to identify and destroy electronic threats that had invaded where they should not have done. And because a Hunter was no more than a mass of electronic coding, it could be fired through space at the speed of light.

When it came, two days later, he showed it to May. He showed it to her because he wanted her to see, without understanding, that he had the power to destroy her. With the Hunter he could strip away the lies of which the station was made.

May was thrilled.

She jumped lightly up and down in his work-chamber, clapping her hands. ‘Hey, Lewis!' she called. ‘Hey, come and see what Paul has got! You come and see!' And then, as Lewis drifted in through the seal, she said. ‘Show it again, Paul. From the beginning!'

Paul clicked the manual controls. Cold, concealed rage
drove his movements and made them deliberate. There was no hurry. He had the rest of his life for what he was going to do.

‘Watch!' said May.

The working area of the bubble wall blinked and changed. It showed a scene from four and a half billion kilometres away and perhaps a million years ago – a level land of tall yellow grasses, dotted with curiously shaped trees, sunlit under a hard blue sky.

‘Can you make it three-sixty, Paul?' asked May.

Wooden-faced, he clicked his controls again. Now the scene filled the whole of the chamber wall, all around them, so that but for the tasteless air and the few square metres of grey floor they might have been standing on that plain themselves. Lewis, coming to rest inside the chamber, appeared to have ducked under the branch of a fat-trunked tree that spread its dark green shade behind him.

‘What's the excitement?' he asked.

‘Ssh! Call it, Paul. It's wonderful!'

‘Hunter,' Paul said.

At once the yellow grasses parted and a creature stepped heavily out. It was a man, or very nearly. It was the same height as Paul and Lewis, with an intelligent, ape-like face under a high domed skull and heavy ridges above the eyes. Its body too was man-like, but thickset and heavy, with far
too much muscle in the arm and neck and thigh. It was naked, dark-skinned, and as it stumped towards them they could see that it was covered with fine dark hair that thickened into a mat on its head, on the back of its neck and in the indistinct region of its groin.

‘Very discreet,' said Lewis.

‘Wouldn't have bothered me,' said May smugly. ‘I'm a doctor, remember?'

‘And your diagnosis, Doctor?'

‘I'd say the poor guy's missing something.'

The creature halted, appearing to watch them. In one hand it held a long sharpened stick like a spear, sinister in its slenderness.

‘It's a Hunter, is it, Paul?' said Lewis.

‘Yes,' Paul said. ‘To help me find the communications fault.'

He used the word
fault
, although in his mind he meant
culprit
. Lewis nodded slowly.

‘Thorsten had one of those, once,' said May. ‘But it didn't look like this, did it? What happened to it?'

‘I cleared it out with a lot of other data a few years ago,' said Lewis. ‘A shame, really. I was in one of my puritanical moods. I don't suppose this one—' He broke off, watching the creature thoughtfully.

Suddenly he put one foot forward, lifted a palm towards
the screen and declaimed in a loud, dramatic voice, ‘Come away, servant, come! I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel; come!'

The mouth of the ape-man moved. A voice rich in resonance answered, ‘
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come to answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, to swim, to—
'

‘It does! That's wonderful!' said Lewis, smiling. And then, striking another pose, he chanted in a quick, light voice, ‘
Leporello, ove sei?
'

‘
Son qui, per mia disgrazia, e voi?
' fluted the ape-man.

‘
Son qui
,' put in Lewis.

‘
Chi è morto—
' began the Hunter.

But again Lewis interrupted. ‘No one's dead, thank you very much.' He turned to the others. ‘Amazing what they get loaded with. It's as if the works themselves know they are on the verge of extinction, so they hide in every corner they can in an effort to survive. What was once immortal art is now useless electronic clutter in programs primarily intended for cleaning up computer systems.'

‘I remember that. That was
opera
, wasn't it?' said May.

‘Part of one. But you're nearly twenty years out of date. Opera doesn't happen back there any more. Stories about people – individuals – are dying out. Celebrity gossip is confined to the less developed networks. Imagination is less and less concerned with alternative individual existences.
Abstract audio-visual experience is becoming the dominant art form.'

‘Not just audio-visual,' said Paul. ‘Most forms are for smell and touch too.'

‘And taste as well?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Clever, isn't it?' said May, still beaming at the ape-man. ‘What else does it know?'

‘Hunter,' said Lewis. ‘What is the age of the Earth?'

‘
Four point five billion years
,' said the Hunter, in a round smooth voice unlike either it had used so far.

‘And what is the mass of the Sun?'

‘
One point nine nine times ten to the power of thirty kilograms
.'

‘How do you know this?'

‘
I have applied the rules of physics to observation
.'

‘And what if your rules are wrong?' said Lewis with a wicked smile.

The ape-man looked at them blankly.

‘What if they are wrong, Hunter?'

‘It can't answer that,' Paul snapped.

‘Of course it can't. If May had asked, “What else is it loaded with?” the answer would be more than any of us have time to find out. Just like the human chromosome, ninety per cent of which contains information that is never
activated. It will have AI capabilities, some pattern recognition and the capacity to learn. But it can't think like a human. What I've done is ask it to question its original programming. It can't do that. Don't be fooled by its appearance. A walking, talking ape-man from a past age is exactly what it isn't.'

His eyes lingered on the ape-man figure, which watched them impassively.

‘
Homo Erectus
,' he murmured. ‘Our probable ancestor. Why do you suppose it was made to look like that, Paul?'

‘I don't know,' said Paul stiffly. ‘I only asked for one that worked with speech.'

‘And we were sent a face from a million years ago. So speech isn't just history. It's gone into the fossil record.'

‘Is that what they're telling us?' gasped May. ‘God, that's rude!'

‘Have you seen enough?' said Paul. And when no one answered he said, ‘Proceed, Hunter.'

The Hunter turned and walked heavily away into the sunlit grasses. Lewis watched it go, rubbing his chin softly with one hand. ‘A Hunter,' he murmured. ‘Well, well.'

‘You said Thorsten had one,' said Paul.

Lewis looked at him. Paul could not read his eyes. ‘Yes. It didn't find anything.'

‘This one will be more capable,' said Paul.

‘Oh, I should think so,' said Lewis.

‘Why did you delete Thorsten's?'

‘Because …' said Lewis with a tight, secret smile, ‘because I was wasting far too much time playing with it. Well, thank you, Paul, for showing this to us. Best of luck with it. When you're not using it, perhaps you'd turn it over to me and we'll see if it knows any duets.'

‘Shit!' said May, following him out of the chamber. ‘Must I put up with you singing as well as snoring now?'

‘I promise I won't sing in my sleep. Where's Van? That thing's probably carrying all the scripture that was ever written. Shall I tell her, do you think?'

‘She's hiding, I guess. And you know damned well she won't take any help from a thing like that …'

When they had gone, Paul muttered aloud, ‘Stupid!'

He meant himself. Lewis would know that Hunters were for malicious programs. He would wonder why Paul had not said so. And the answer would be obvious: because Paul thought that one of them might be the author of whatever was affecting the communications. Lewis would have guessed that. And he had said nothing.

Stupid! It had been stupid to show it to May! And he knew why he had done it – because he was angry. Anger was making him stupid.

He turned to his controls, meaning to reset the displays.
To his surprise he saw that the Hunter was back, looking at him from the wall of his chamber, even though Paul had seen it walk into the long, pale grasses only moments before.

And now he realized that the creature was not exaggeratedly thickset and heavy, as it had first seemed. Its muscular neck and limbs were no more than a man would need to support his frame in the gravity of Earth. To the Earthbound eye the creature might even have seemed graceful. But his own had adjusted to the physiques of the station and the way that a body moved in low gravity. It no longer saw his companions as hideous. It saw Earth-things as fat and ungainly. Even the meaning of beauty had changed up here.

‘I said, proceed, Hunter,' he repeated.

‘
I have finished
,' said Hunter.

‘Finished? Already?'

‘
I have searched all the local systems
.'

‘And?'

‘
There is nothing
.'

Paul's hands dropped to his sides. ‘What do you mean, “nothing”?'

‘
There is nothing
.'

‘You have found no irregular entries affecting the radio communications?'

‘
There are many entries that do not conform to the
required standards. I have assessed all of them. They are benign
.'

Paul fell slowly into his chair. He put his fist to his mouth. After a moment he bit it, hard enough for it to hurt.

‘Keep looking,' he said. ‘Look for different things. Look for anything that might be intelligent interference with the radio communications.'

‘
Define “intelligent” for this purpose
.'

Paul thought.

‘It can see something, react, see what happens and learn to do better,' he said.

‘
I have already applied this parameter.
'

So the Hunter had conducted its search, found nothing, and reset its criteria automatically before trying again – and all in the time it had taken for Lewis and May to leave his chamber.

It was indeed capable. And it had still found nothing.

‘There will be something,' said Paul. ‘Try again.'

Wordlessly the Hunter stomped off into the grasses.

T
he display reflected inside his pressure-suit helmet included a temperature reading. It stood at minus eighty degrees Celsius: as cold as an Antarctic winter. The exterior pressure was about one half of an atmosphere. He was standing within fifty metres of the living quarters.

Vandamme was taking him on his first tour of the outer layers of the station. According to the schedules, it should have been her rest period. But Lewis had found some reason to shuffle the watches, and when he looked at them again he had said that Paul's companion must be Vandamme. Paul had not been surprised.

Her face was invisible inside her helmet. Her voice, however, came over the intercom as clearly as if they had been back in the living quarters together. Her words were clipped and dry. He wondered if she knew why Lewis had chosen her for this. It infuriated him that she might know, and that even so she could be so passionless. But his anger was not at her. It was aimed at May and Lewis. Of the three
of them now, Vandamme was indeed the most tolerable.

‘This is the hangar for the mobile equipment,' she was saying. ‘Surface crawlers and harvesters, mostly. The crawlers are of three types, Search, Construction and Utility. Searchers are for ST2. Constructors were used to erect the station and will do the repairs if we have an impact. Utilities do everything else.'

The hangar was a great grey bubble, far larger than the main living-quarter chamber. The curving roof rose to three times the height of Paul's head. Ranked down the centre of it were lines of crawlers, each two to three metres long and roughly a metre high. Their wheels were big, set so wide that their wheel-base must have been almost square. The bodies were brightly coloured, so that they would be visible on the moon's landscape if it were ever necessary to search for them by sight. The utility and construction crawlers were yellow, angular machines with small solar packs and numerous limbs folded up together like the legs of ungainly spiders. The searchers were orange. These were meaner-looking things, with a high clearance and even wider axles than the utilities. They had big wheels that rose above their bodies, long antennae and large solar packs to give them range.