WE (3 page)

It watched, patiently, for eight years.

S
leep held him close, like a membrane around a newborn thing. He was blind with it. He stirred feebly but it held him. In his darkness he could hear a voice saying something. It was a woman's voice.

There was something strange about the words. They were like nothing he had heard in his training classes. They were drawn out, and some of them changed in pitch as they were uttered. There was music in them. Of course he remembered music. There had been days when he had set it to run through his head continuously. He had not heard it made from a human throat before, because there were better and easier ways of doing it. But he knew it was possible. There was a word for it.

The woman was ‘singing'.

Was this a dream? He had not had a dream in so long. He could not remember how long. All this long sleep had been a blackness. He could barely imagine the other side of it.

He was lying on something solid. He thought that there should have been a harness round him but there was not. If there ever had been one, it was gone.

If he was asleep, he was not sure that he wanted to wake. He thought that if he did he might be sick. There was something wrong with his head, as if there was too much fluid in it. There was something wrong in his throat too. He could not breathe through his nose.

The singing had stopped. He heard a movement.

‘Are you awake yet?' said the woman's voice.

After a moment he felt a touch on his wrist. Fingers that were not his covered his pulse. They were warm. He did not think this could be a dream.

‘Oh, come on! Wake up and talk to me,' said the voice. ‘I'm getting nervous!'

His hand was put gently back where it had been lying. He heard her move away. There was an irregular clicking sound. He did not recognize it. He would not have dreamed of sounds he did not recognize.

The singing began again. He would not have dreamed that either.

He opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a bright surface curving over his head. The light it emitted rippled with little wavelets of orange. He knew exactly what it was. It was the wall of a
modern bubble-chamber: active, so that occupants could set it to project whatever images, colours and light-levels they chose. He had not thought there would be one out here.

Out here
, meaning …

He lifted his head.

The chamber was small. There was just room in it for the bed on which he lay, for the workstation and for the woman who sat there, humming as her fingers played up and down on a peculiar array of mechanical keys.

He looked at the woman. And he knew at once that he was indeed
out here
.

It was as if some child had drawn her. Her proportions were all wrong. Her head was big, her face puffy and swollen. Her skin was so pale that it was almost white. Her body was shapeless in her dark overalls. Her arms and legs and neck were dreadfully thin. There seemed to be no muscle on them. They could be little more than bone, so delicate that they could not possibly carry her. She was like a giant mantis, distorted and horrible to look at.

But she did not seem to be suffering in her condition. She sat poised at her workstation with her delicate fingers nibbling at the mechanical keyboard and her eyes on figures that danced on a wall-screen before her. She was frowning as she worked, as if she was having to think about what she was doing and did not really enjoy this kind of mental activity.
There was a rich, ruddy sheen to her hair, which was tied back from her face. And when she looked round at him, her pony-tail floated as if she were suspended in water. She saw him watching her.

‘Hey, that's better!' she said. Her voice was light, clipped and a little dry. ‘I was beginning to worry. How do you feel?'

He had to think about it.

His head ached. There seemed to be something wrong with his throat. His nose was blocked. He felt sick. And of course he was weak – weaker than he had ever been in his life.

Experimentally, he sat up. Despite his own frailty his body seemed to flow upwards from the couch. The blanket that had been over him slipped away and drifted gently to the floor, rippling slowly as it fell.

Gravity here was less than one-tenth of that on Earth.

He looked down at himself. He saw that he was naked. And his body was not his any more.

He was looking at limbs that were as spindly as hers. The great muscles of calf and thigh had wasted almost to nothing. All the meat of them had gone. The knees stood out like knobbly balls at the joints of sticks. His arms sprouted from the corners of his undiminished torso, looking feeble and ridiculous. If he had not recognized a small mole, clinging obstinately in the crook of his elbow, he
would have thought they belonged to someone else. Gingerly he lifted one arm and flexed it. Only the smallest, pathetic bulging showed where his biceps had been. His skin was dead white. No sun had touched it for eight years.

And for eight years, while he had slept, his body had been exposed to a programme of artificial gravity and exercise designed to adapt him for his existence here. His mass had reduced. His muscles had wasted. The calcium in his bones had diminished, leaving them feeble and brittle. If he stood on the Earth now he would collapse at once. His skeleton would splinter under his weight. He would lie in agony, helpless as a stranded jellyfish. Here …

He was like her, as deformed as she was.

He looked at himself – at the limbs that might have belonged to someone else. And he felt a kind of horror, but so dimly and quietly that this too might have been the horror of someone else. Memory tapped from the far side of his long, black sleep, telling him that there had been a time when he had known that this would happen to him. He had known and accepted the changes that were coming. There was no need for weight-bearing muscles now. There never would be. And from now on the fluids in his body would always rise to his head, blocking his nose and making his face puffy like hers. He would live for the rest of his life with this insect's body and a permanent
head cold. Because that was how things were, out here.

He said nothing. After a little he frowned and shifted himself along the bed to try the easy gravity. He reached down to pick up the blanket and draw it around his waist. It floated and settled slowly over his bony thighs. The woman rose and stepped towards him. He saw her cross the short distance between them in one flowing skip, seeming to move in slow motion. Her limbs, though frail, carried her easily.

‘How do you feel?' she repeated.

He thought about it. Then he said: ‘Yes.'

‘Yes?' She looked puzzled. ‘Do you mean that you feel well?'

He frowned again. She was talking far more quickly than his speech tutors had done, back before his eight-year night. And although he could understand her well enough, he could not hope to speak as she did.

But the answer was easy, after all. Positive feedback. It should be ‘Yes' again.

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Are you sure? How's your sight? Can you see clearly? Or are you getting double vision, for example? Headache? Sickness? What can you tell me?'

He thought. It was an effort, trying to deal in words. But he was going to have to get used to it.

‘Yes,' he said. Yes, he could see clearly.

‘No,' he said, meaning that he did not have double vision.

And ‘Yes,' again. He did have a headache.

Then he stopped, because he saw that she thought something was wrong.

‘Can you tell me your name?' she asked.

Name?

He knew what a name was. It was used like a reference number, in speech. Of course it was inferior to a reference number because there was no guarantee that a name would be unique. In any population of a thousand or more, confusion could arise.

But out here, the entire population, including himself, was just four. Names were easier to say than numbers. So here the balance of advantage did favour names.

And of course he had a name. He knew it quite well, even though he could not remember when he had last had to use it.

So he said: ‘Yes.'

He saw her face change. For some reason his answer had worried her even more. Why was positive feedback worrying? What was he doing wrong?

He was nervous. Of course he was nervous. It was all difficult. He had known it would be difficult but that did
not help. Picking words (so
slow!
), looking at what had happened to his body, trying to adjust to this new place – he knew that he had expected it all, somewhere back in his past. He had been trained for all of it. And yet it was still difficult. Now he was doing something wrong and he couldn't think what it was. Panic was beginning to stir.

She looked more closely at him. He could sense her anxiety even before she spoke.

‘Please tell me your name,' she said.

‘Mun … Munro.' He was not used to saying it. But it came out right the second time.

She let out her breath. Her face cleared. ‘That's all right. Though mostly we just use first names here. So I'm May and you're Paul – unless you want us to call you something else. Do you mind being called Paul?'

‘No.'

‘Paul, then. And you're not confused, are you, Paul? For a moment I thought you must be. But it's just that you're not used to speaking, isn't it?'

‘Yes!' he said emphatically.

She laughed. ‘Yes, no, yes, no … Have they stopped speaking altogether back home? No – don't you answer that,' she added as she saw him beginning to think again. ‘I'm supposed to be checking you. That's what we're doing. First tell me – how's the throat? Does it hurt?'

‘No.'

‘Not painful but a bit stiff perhaps?'

‘Yes.'

‘No surprise there. Your larynx was all one huge sore when we got you into the station. You've been eight years on ventilation, breathing through a tube down your throat. Even that clever little nozzle you were on was rubbing you to bits by the time you landed. I've kept some images of what the inside of your mouth looked like when I first got you, if you're interested. Now' – she reached down and put fingers that were like pale twigs on his shin – ‘could you try standing up for me, Paul? Carefully.'

Obediently, clumsily, he stood. He felt her fingers testing his bone as it took the strain – the light strain of his diminished body in this gentle gravity field.

‘Very good!' she said, releasing him.

She took him briskly through the checks. Height: one metre eighty-four (slightly more than on departure). Weight: just under five kilograms, whatever that meant in this gravity. Blood pressure. Eyesight. Reactions.

‘Yeah, that's good,' she said. ‘Do you need a rest now?'

‘No.'

‘Sure? You're going to tire quickly, though. So look out for that. All right then. Maybe you could try taking some steps for me?'

He hesitated. Then he leaned forward. It seemed to him that he had to lean much too far and wait too long before he sensed himself beginning to fall and could push off with his foot. He flew.

‘Careful!' she cried, catching him with an arm across his chest, so that instead of sailing across the room he spun slowly with her like a dancer and came to rest on his toes.

Her head was close to his. It filled his vision. He saw that it was in fact not quite as horrible as he had first thought when he had seen it so unnaturally balanced on top of her body. Yes, her skin was shockingly pale, her cheeks puffy with fluids, but her face-bones were delicate and her eyes had widened just a little in alarm – alarm for him. And she was small. She had to crane right back to look up at him. His mind jerked back to the woman he had left on Earth, who had held him and looked up at him just like this at their last parting. Who had buried her head on his chest and whose sadness had been pain for them both.

The woman released him.

‘Take it carefully, yeah?' she said. ‘If you push yourself off like that you'll fly across the room. And your bones are much, much more brittle than they were. You don't want to go smashing into anything. Secret is, don't think about it. Your body should already know how to control itself. That's what it's been learning while you were
asleep. Let it do the job for you. Try again – and don't think.'

Pushing aside the memory of that other face, he tried again.

But he couldn't help thinking about control. All his conscious effort was focused on it because he was doing it for the first time. His feet moved him in a long skip, floating through the air to the far wall. It was still too hard! He put out his hand to break the impact and felt the orangepulsing surface give slightly as he pressed against it.

He paused to steady himself. The wall beneath his hand seemed thicker than any chamber wall on Earth would have been. There would be good reasons for that, he thought.

He turned himself with his hands and took another step back, this time landing on the other foot.

‘Hey, better!' said May, clapping. ‘You know, I think you're almost perfect! When we got here we were all sick and frail. I'd have hospitalized the lot of us if it had been possible. But there's a lot of cleverness back on Earth. And it's learning all the time. You've been kept doing just the right amount while you were on your way here. Still, no risks, yeah? It's going to be bed and rehab exercises only to begin with. And after I let you go I want you to come and see me every day so I can check on you. We'll keep that up until I think it's safe to stop. And if you start to feel at all
uncomfortable, in any way, you must tell me at once. I can't help you if you don't.'

‘Yes,' he said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I'm going to ban you from saying that, Paul. “Yes” and “No” all the time! If you want to say “Yes” or “No” you'll have to say something else as well. If you don't practise, you won't improve. Now, are you ready to meet the others? Just for a short time. We've been jumping up and down to see you – I tell you, when we took you out of that capsule it was like unwrapping the biggest and best birthday present ever! It was very nearly Van's birthday too. Will you be all right to do that?'