WE (6 page)

‘Munro?' said a voice at his door.

‘Yes!' He answered more loudly than necessary because he was surprised. There was a slight draught of air as she came in.

Paul had been expecting a visitor. He had agreed with Lewis that he would be shown the station communications at precisely this time. He had not been expecting Vandamme.

‘Where is Lewis?' he asked.

‘He says he has tests to run. He has asked me to do your induction.'

She crossed to the far wall and ran her finger down it.

‘This is bad,' she said, peering at the wetness on her finger tip. ‘You should report it.'

Paul looked away from her. He still did not like to look at the human form in this place, to see how brittle and thin her limbs were, and how large and puffy her face. He was unsettled too. Yesterday they had spoken and she had walked away. The connection between them had been affected by his blunder about the man Thorsten. Now he would have to repair it. He was not used to this. If he had met with such a difficulty on Earth, he would simply have dropped that connection and opened others to compensate. There always had been others, there.

‘I am sorry I offended you,' he said.

‘You did not offend me,' she replied.

Neither his words nor her answer seemed to be enough. He was not sure how to proceed.

‘Please sit down,' he said.

‘Sure. I was going to.' She settled beside him, folding up her thin limbs as if she were folding a tripod. They were both tense.

‘So – you want to get started?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘I thought you were going to be on rehab for a week.'

‘I am. But I want to work. Work is … good.'

She thought about it for a moment. Then she nodded. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘It is.'

A command, spoken to a wall receiver, brought a control console rising out of a hatch in the floor. The equipment was supported on a flexible arm that could be drawn to any point in the room. It consisted of a microphone, a joystick and an array of mechanical keys patterned with letters, numbers and symbols.

‘Screen,' said Vandamme. Opposite them, a long oval of wall changed colour. ‘That's the working area. You can adjust it if you want. Now, you see that alert?'

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen area, a small red rectangle was blinking on and off. On it was an acronym that Paul did not recognize.

‘You get one of those, you need to report it. That'll be because the system is picking up the condensation here.'

‘So … we tell Lewis?'

‘In a moment. We'll look at the comms first. Lists.'

A column, composed mostly of words, appeared on the screen.

‘Comms,' said Vandamme.

The column was replaced by a much shorter one.

Int
Ex-L
Ex-R

‘Interior comms is inside the station. You can call up any of the living chambers, the airlocks and any of the headsets that we might be wearing if we suit up to go into the outer areas of the station. So you can speak to anyone at any time – though if we're off watch, we might be asleep.'

‘Yes,' said Paul. He had remembered that he should be looking at her as they spoke. He should be acknowledging her messages with his eyes as well as his voice. He was trying to do this.

But she was not returning his looks. This confused him. He did not know if he was acting incorrectly, or if she was. Her voice continued in a level stream of words.

‘Ex-L is the laser. That carries most of our communications to Earth. Ex-R is the radio. That's for communications to crawlers and other equipment out on the surface. It also relays our radio observation data to Earth, and any other remotely gathered data that's transmitted in to us by radio. It's a backup in case there's ever a pointing error on the laser. Both the laser and the radio go via the comms satellite, because our horizon down in the bottom of this pit is pretty well non-existent.'

Paul gave up and looked at the instruments instead. What he saw disgusted him. A screen, a joystick – even a keyboard! The World Ear had been making equipment like this obsolete when he was born. He hoped fervently that he would never have to use the keyboard. He knew he could not spell.

‘How do you send?' he said.

‘You can type, speak or select. Speaking is easiest, especially for internals.' She clicked the joystick twice. Symbols flickered briefly on the screen. ‘Hello?'

‘Hello?' said Lewis's voice.

‘We're in Munro's work-chamber. There's an alert. Condensation on the north wall.'

‘Shit! Why's that happening?' There was a pause. Lewis, in one of the other chambers in the living quarters, must have been checking some readings. ‘That shouldn't be happening,' he said. ‘I'll look into it.'

‘Thank you,' said Vandamme. She clicked the joystick again. ‘And that's how you sign off,' she said.

Paul was looking at the screen. Words had appeared there. He puzzled through them and found that they were a record of the short conversation between Lewis and Vandamme.

‘He thinks it is our shit?'

‘No. That's just an exclamation. It is to give force to what is said. In the World Ear you would have used colour or music, I think. He likes to say things the way they used to
be said. He says “shit” and “damn” when he's angry. He also says “God” but he doesn't mean it. He even quotes scripture at me,' she finished sourly. ‘Like to try the externals now?'

‘Yes.'

‘We'll report to Earth that you've declared yourself operational.' She clicked the joystick again. ‘This goes out over the laser. Again you have a choice of type or voice. For a message to Earth, I usually type. It makes me think about what I'm saying.' Her fingers flickered on the keys.
TR1: 21:03:0437 Telmex operational.

‘TR1?'

‘Our call sign. “Telmex” is you – the telemetry executive. The numbers are the date-time group, which is Zulu-time on Earth. It means nothing here, but the systems insist on it.'

‘Yes.'

‘Would you like to send?' She offered him the joystick.

He reached for it.
Click
. A group of laser pulses began a long journey through space.

‘They answer in – eight hours?'

‘Maybe a bit more. The satellite will fire it as soon as Earth's over its horizon. And there'll be an acknowledgement, yes. But if we ask for anything complicated it may take days for Earth to reply.'

‘Why so long?' Paul asked sharply.

‘Does that bother you? I suppose it would. All that
messaging – it may be very quick when you're in it. But seen from out here it can take days for Earth to build up a response. Sorry, Munro. That's the way it is.'

She still had not looked at him – not once, since stepping into his chamber.

Paul shifted. He frowned at the screen. He thought of the chamber beyond the wall, and the ones beyond that, and then …

Four hours at light speed. He could never go back.

He gripped his knees.

‘When we drink coffee?' he asked.

‘When you like. I will not.'

‘With others.'

‘Oh – hours yet. You'll be off watch when the others come back on. But you can join them if you want to.'

Hours!

‘We send another,' he said firmly.

‘Another message?'

‘Yes!'

‘Who to?'

Who? To anyone! To everyone he could! And receive back! Build a network – that was what he wanted to do. To give and receive as much as possible!

‘To … my partner,' he said.

Her eyes widened. And now, for the first time, she turned to face him.

‘Your partner?' she repeated.

‘She can receive, I think.'

‘Yes. But—' She stopped. She dropped her eyes, frowning.

‘I must not?' he asked.

She shook her head. She bit her lip. ‘Sure you can,' she said. ‘If you want. But … it's been eight years for her, hasn't it? Will it feel the same to her as it does to you?'

‘No. I know that.'

She looked at him again. He saw the swollen face, the narrow neck – every wound left by this gravity was there for his examination. Those marks were on him too.

‘Won't she have someone else by now? Through the matching systems?'

‘Yes of course.' On Earth there was no need to be alone if you did not want to be alone.

But that was on Earth.

‘All right,' she said at last. ‘If you think it's right. Classify it “Personal” and they'll know what to do with it at the other end.'

Paul faced the screen. He took the joystick and picked the laser. The screen, a pale, blue oval, waited for him. He looked at the keyboard. Then he remembered that he could speak his commands. ‘Message,' he said.

Instantly the screen responded:
TR1: 21:03:0441
…

‘Personal,' he said. ‘Romeo Echo Alfa Two Six Two Five Point Two One Eight' – crazy, that he must spell out her reference like that! – ‘I have arrived. I am well …'

He hesitated.

‘I want you …'

‘No you don't,' said Vandamme. ‘You don't want her to be here. Not if you still love her.'

He thought about it.

‘No,' he said, ‘you are right.'

And because the machine was receiving voice, the screen now read:

TR1: 21:03:0441 Personal. REA2625.218 I have arrived. I am well. I want you. No you don't. You don't want her to be here. Not if you still love her. No you are right.

Stupid! Clumsy!

‘You mean “I miss you”,' sighed Vandamme.

You mean I miss you
appeared on the screen. Paul swallowed. He felt as if the little cold droplets from his wall had started to form inside his throat. Deliberately he controlled the joystick to remove the unnecessary words. He left
I miss you
. Then he sent the message.
Click
. It disappeared.

The screen showed him nothing.

And nothing.

And nothing.

Of course there would be no answer. Not yet. There couldn't be.

(Four hours – just to get there!)

Vandamme was waiting for him.

She was waiting for him with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the chamber wall. A moment ago he thought he had sensed a response from her, just the faintest sympathy, as he fired all his love and his loss over the vastness of space. But it was gone now. Now she was like an adult waiting for a child to finish some game – patient, but remote from what he was doing. To her it had been pointless.

There were nine billion people in orbit around the Sun. None of them were responding to him. He could pour his words out over the lasers –
I am lonely, I need help
– in endless repetition. He could run out into the vacuum and die screaming it at the planet overhead. There would be no answer. And there was no answer, either, from the woman beside him. The screen still showed nothing.

‘Tell me about the problem,' he said.

‘The problem?'

‘The radio.'

‘Oh, that. You want to get started right away?'

‘Yes!'

She shrugged. ‘All right,' she said. ‘So, it's the radio systems. I guess you must have been briefed on the basics before you came. We have an intermittent loss of data on the radio transmissions to Earth.'

Yes, they had told him. They had filled him with it – the patterns of loss, the small percentage of groups known to be corrupted, the far larger percentages of groups that were suspect because it was known that corruptions could occur. They had told him all of it. It was the whole reason why he had been sent. And now he was here, eight years later, with all that effort behind him. And the crew replied, ‘
Oh, that
.'

‘What …?' he began painfully.

‘What causes it? We don't know for sure. Most of the time everything's fine. But about once an orbit, something goes wrong and we lose a few groups. It's probably charging on the satellite, caused by the planet's magnetic field.'

Paul frowned. ‘Show me,' he said.

Vandamme turned to the controls. ‘Graph,' she said. ‘Planetary readings. Current.'

Jiggling lines appeared on the screen. Paul looked at them.

‘Low?' he said.

‘At this point in the orbit, yes. But it fluctuates—'

‘No,' said Paul.

Of course the satellite could be picking up a charge as it followed the moon round and round on its journey through the magnetic field. And at some point that charge would be released, sending phantom signals through the satellite's systems and maybe even damaging components. But the levels Paul was looking at were too low to worry him.

Vandamme shrugged. ‘Not at the moment, no. But when we get round to the tail there's a region that's highly active. You know what a substorm is?'

‘Substorm?'

‘We get them in Earth's field from time to time. The solar wind distorts the planet's magnetic field. It compresses it on the sunward side and pushes it out into a long tail on the dark side, like the tail of a comet, yes?' She drew an imaginary shape in the air. ‘All right. So sometimes, in Earth's field, this magnetic tail gets snapped in two – pinched out by the solar wind. Then the lines of force on the Earth side flow back violently towards the Earth. That's what we call a substorm – like an eddy in a stream. In Earth's field they happen in ones or twos and they're not long-lived. Here, there's a region with
thousands
of these eddies. We skim one edge of it every time we orbit the dark side of the planet. And the currents around these eddies whip up high levels of energy, like the winds around a hurricane …'

Paul listened with growing horror.

‘… I can't figure it out. Somehow it's achieved a kind of stability. The outer eddies are not dispersing at once, so they have time to act on the inner systems, which then divide, replacing the outer ones when they are lost. But there must be something that keeps it going. It could be the solar wind – though that's weak out here. Or it could be some property of the planetary core, which isn't like Earth's core at all. Anyway, these patterns just copy and copy themselves, boiling away in the wake of the planet. They're unique. And they're strong. Early observations missed the region altogether, so the satellite wasn't designed for the charge that would build up—'