Free WE by John Dickinson Page B

Van to study that giant up there and—Hah! To look for life on the coldest object in the solar system! Paul, doesn’t it strike you as …
strange
that so much of the effort of this station is devoted to ST2? Fifty per cent, indeed, since you and May and I are only here to support the functions of Vandamme?’
    â€˜No. That is standard.’
    â€˜But
why
is it standard? Whatever the mission and whatever the conditions? It is standard because it is important to the We. Alien life? Here? Come off it! But still it is standard. The We knows it is missing something. Locked in its makeup is the idea of social interaction, which it inherits from the individuals that compose it. Social interaction has been the key to the growth of the human brain, both through the generations and to the learning child. The We has a complex environment – think of all the adjustments and balances necessary to maintain a stable world and climate back there – but it has no one to interact with. It may be dimly aware of a range of possible actions, from mating to murder andconquest. But it is alone. There is only one of it. There only ever will be. It is a new-born, wailing in a dark room with no one to hear.’
    Behind his shoulder an image changed. It showed a man on Earth, painting a portrait of a woman who sat naked and smiling before him. The man had a long beard and wore robes from another time. Between his plump forefinger and thumb a fine brush caressed the canvas as if it were the woman’s bare skin.
    Paul brought his eyes back to Lewis’s face. ‘I think you are lying,’ he said.
    Lewis’s brows thickened on his forehead. ‘Lying? Why would I lie to you? I am not lying, Paul!’
    â€˜You said humans are not human any more. That is not the truth.’
    â€˜I may have simplified for effect.’
    â€˜You lied.’
    â€˜I did not lie. I told the truth.’
    â€˜It is not the truth if you simplify things.’
    â€˜Yes, it
damned
well is!’ Lewis leaned forward until his head filled Paul’s vision. His face was redder than Paul had ever seen it. Paul felt the unfamiliar stir of physical anxiety.
    â€˜Paul – you want a purpose. I know that. You think it’s to work our communications for the We. You still want to be part of the We, even though you are cut off from it. That’swhat you think will make your existence bearable. And I’m sorry for you. But let me ask you this.
Why man this station at all?
’
    â€˜To learn!’ said Paul.
    â€˜To learn what? What is there here that a machine could not measure and report back to Earth by itself?’
    Paul opened his mouth to answer. The answer seemed immediate. It was there. But …
    To learn what?
    The station had to be manned. He had known that all along. Everyone he had worked with had known it.
    But when he searched his brain he found nothing. Only the incidental advantages – the reduced turnaround times for tests and experiments, the increased capacity for self-repair, the superiority of human pattern-recognition – presented themselves. They were true but inadequate. Nothing substantial answered.
    Still he searched, as if in a nightmare, opening door after door in his mind behind which the great facts should have been stored, and still there was nothing. The walls of his mind trembled and its floor seemed to drop open and pitch him into stomach-dropping darkness. And the eyes of Lewis watched him all the time.
    â€˜It’s bad, isn’t it?’ said Lewis. ‘When you see that we add a vast cost, and almost no value, to what robotscould do here in our place. Where’s the sense in that?’
    Paul looked at his hands, thin and brittle and bony at the end of his brittle and bony limbs.
    â€˜It makes no sense because you are trying to understand it at the level of
individual
intellect. But the We is not an individual. It is regressive, inconsiderate of its