Read Online WE by John Dickinson - Free Book Online Page B

aborted?’
    â€˜Earth wasn’t going to abort – not after it had got as far as it had. It put an extra gas layer onto the station to give us that bit more stopping distance. The in-place systems got some extra shielding and the station as a whole got some extra redundancy. The one thing it couldn’t shield was the World Ear. There’s no way a World Ear can interact with the nervous system through half a centimetre of metal, is there? So this station, alone of all the stations in the solar system, runs without it. And we run fine – except that every now and then it gets too much for the radio systems and our comms to Earth get interrupted—’
    â€˜That is not the field,’ said Paul.
    â€˜I don’t know what else it could be, Paul.’
    â€˜Earth does not think it is the field!’
    There was a pause.
    â€˜You’d better come over,’ said Lewis. ‘We need to talk.’
    â€˜If it was the field, I would not have been sent.’
    â€˜Paul … this is difficult. When you and I see something happen to someone, we look for a cause, and we expect that cause to make sense to us. Why not?
We
are still humans, after all. What we have to understand is that Earth looks at things very differently. Just because our loss happened to be the telemetry executive doesn’t mean—’
    â€˜Stop!’ said Paul roughly.
    Silence. He swallowed. ‘You say we are still human. You mean everyone else is not?’
    Again Lewis paused.
    â€˜That’s exactly what I mean, Paul,’ he said slowly. ‘We – the four of us here – are, or soon will be, the only humans left.’
    Paul said nothing.
    â€˜We are the only humans left,’ Lewis repeated. ‘The billions on Earth are no longer
humans
. They are no longer rational beings who think for themselves. They have become joined into something much larger. They have become part of a single, gigantic consciousness. That is the World Ear.’
    Silence, so thick that Paul could hear the faint hum of his wall-display. He heard Lewis draw breath over the intercom. He drew breath himself and held it.
    â€˜I don’t agree,’ he said.
    â€˜Then you’d better come over,’ snapped Lewis. ‘
You
may not need eye contact for this, but I do!’
    Lewis needed eye contact, Paul thought, because without it his words would only be words – easily considered and dismissed. But his eyes added to what he said. Paul felt them waiting for him even as he crossed the common room. Powerful and grey, circled in their rings of flesh, they met him as he entered Lewis’s work-chamber. They pointed him towards the inflated seat. (‘Sit down,’ said Lewis.) And when he had sunk into it, feeling hollow and a little tense, they rested upon him like hands placed lightly on his shoulders, as if they could lock with great strength and pin him down when he tried to rise. Paul looked away. He looked around the room.
    He saw that the chamber was the same size and shape as every other work-chamber in the station. But every square metre of wall was set to display a different image. There were tall white buildings, shining in the sun against a blue sky. There were ships under sail on a wide sea. There was a man directing other men, who walked in rows and wore the sameold-fashioned clothes. There was a courtyard of an old brickbuilt house, with yellow-painted woodwork and the sunlight filtering down through dusty air and a woman sitting doing something that involved straw. From time to time one would change to another, unhurriedly, but with a lazy power that implied a million other images waiting to be shown, all things that had been done by people, great things and little things that the watching eye must never forget.
    Paul wondered why so many of the images were from long ago.
    â€˜So,’ said Lewis. ‘Tell me what you think.’
    â€˜On Earth,’ said Paul, ‘I knew