Read Online WE by John Dickinson - Free Book Online

therapy routines that kick in the moment their pulserate starts rising. It’s because all their lives their brains have been conditioned to being part of something – something far bigger than they are – and so the things that happen to
them
don’t seem to matter so much. That’s not what we’re meant to be.’
    â€˜Meant?’
    She sighed. ‘You don’t believe in God, do you?’
    He had looked this up in the station Knowledge Store after their first meeting. The Knowledge Store had said that belief in a god had once been required for the propagation of accepted social and political behaviour. It was now obsolete.
    He had also started to read the entries that she had recorded alongside this. She had written entry after entry. They were not facts or observations or conclusions. They were stories – things that other people had written and that she was writing again from memory. They were things that could not be true, but she believed them. She believed them because she believed in God.
    That was what she did, watch in, watch out, when she was not sleeping or working. She went to her chamber and wrote things that could not be true.
    â€˜No,’ he said.
    â€˜Then I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Because you have no one but yourself here. That is difficult. That is very difficult.’

VI
    T he Sun was tiny. Seen from a distance of four and a half billion kilometres, the power that drove all life, all energy, all the orbits around it, was no more than a brilliant point like a star. And the star was setting.
    Paul had called up the external view on his chamber display so that he could watch the eclipse. The crescent of the great planet above him had slimmed to the finest curved line, with the star touching on it like a tiny, brilliant diamond on a huge ring. The rest of the planet was solid black, the field it swam in was a misty black, and only the faintest traceries of reflected light showed where the blackness of planet and sky gave way to the sheltering cliffs around the station. The marker of Thorsten’s grave shone dully, like a needle in firelight.
    The star sank towards the planet. As it sank it carried with it, tucked away in the vast nothingness around it, all the world he had known. There went the humming life, the constant flickering busyness that he had felt every wakinghour. There went the rainforests, the blue oceans and skies – the things he had hardly ever looked at when he was among them. And She went with them too, in her little bubblehouse by the shore, sad but still living in the communities of the World Ear.
    She had not replied to his message. He had sent another, with images of the station, and asking for images of herself and the boy. He had found that he desperately wanted to see what the child looked like. He needed to see that there was a copy of himself, planted in the rich warm soil of Earth where it could grow. It would have helped him. She must have had that message too by now. There had been no answer.
    The last light was fading. The diamond was merging into the ring. The ring itself seemed to grow brighter for a few moments, and then to diminish. The spark was drowning in blackness. It was nearly gone.
    Still it seemed to hesitate, on the brink of its death. The faint brightness clung to the rim of the black disc longer than Paul thought possible. And for a few moments he imagined that it was still there, even after it had gone. His eyes hunted for ghosts of the spark in the field that was entirely black. Black, black, and all those distances of kilometres and hundreds of thousands of kilometres and billions of kilometres were all melded into one flat blacknessthat had no depth and no meaning. He had been looking at a point of light, no more.
    Roughly he swung himself back to his work. On his wallscreen he had laid out the latest steps in his hunt for the fault – the time groups of the messages known to have been corrupted,