The Second Angel

I

This was where civilization had begun. And where it had ended first. Orbiting Earth, the spaceship crossed the Red Sea in just twenty seconds. The blast craters that had once been the seaport of Jiddah and the holy city of Mecca appeared in the flight-deck window soon afterward. Years after the Great Middle Eastern War, the whole area — from the Nile in Egypt to the Tigris in Iraq — was still emitting harmful gamma rays, rendering this once fertile crescent uninhabitable for many decades to come.

They had left the planet only a couple of hours before — after a rendezvous, at around fifty thousand feet, with one of the many fuel tanker planes that existed to sell spaceships the hundred tons of liquid helium necessary to help a spaceship blast its way into space. Their orbit, at an altitude of one hundred and seventy miles and increasing, was fixed in space, but the world turns on its invisible axis by fifteen degrees every hour, so that their flight now took them south over the Indian Ocean. After leaving the coast of the Republic of Saudi Arabia, another fifteen minutes were to pass before they saw land again — this time, Australia. She had heard Dallas and Ronica talking about going to Australia, when they got back from the Moon. But she couldn’t quite understand why. It didn’t look like there was much down there. Red, marbled with flecks of gray, blue, and white, the Great Sandy Desert looked like nothing so much as a section of human tissue. The northern coast, appearing a few moments later, most resembled a map of the human circulatory system, with its arterial rivers, venous roads, and capillary canals.

Or so it seemed to Lenina, whose thoughts had been very much preoccupied with her own blood since earlier that same day, when she had awoken to find a red mark on her stomach. Was this the beginning of the rubelliform rash that signaled the active phase of the P2 virus she carried in her bone marrow? Sometimes it took a while for the rash to break out in any significant way. But this was how it had started when her mother died. And then her father, too. Lenina had been just twelve years old. After that, she’d had to fend for herself.

She prayed it was something else. A skin allergy perhaps. What would the others say if they knew she was in Three Moon phase, with a maximum of one hundred and twenty days of life ahead of her? What kind of liability might she pose for the success of their plans? If it was the rash, she hoped it would stay hidden for as long as it took them to get into and out of the love hotel on the Moon. Having a Three Moon phase at Tranquillity Base would only draw unwelcome attention to their group.

As the ship increased its altitude over the curving blue slope of the Pacific Ocean, Lenina could see a thousand miles in any direction, and floating around in her seat harness, she watched the Sun as it started to set behind them. At the speed they were traveling, the Sun set eighteen times as fast as on Earth, and in just a few minutes, the horizon was marked by a narrowing ribbon of light, as one day ended, and they flew through brief night toward another.

Perhaps all her days were as short now, and Lenina found she could hardly bear the thought of closing her eyes and sleeping, like the others back in the main body of the ship. Without a complete infusion of blood she might last only as long as the red cells in her body. She could almost feel herself weakening by the minute, and the darkness that enveloped the spaceship seemed like a heavy black curtain falling on her life. When Gates had first told her of Dallas and his plan to rob the First National Blood Bank, she thought both men crazy. But now it was quite possibly her only chance of returning to Earth alive.

Seeing the stars more clearly in the surrounding darkness and checking the cockpit chronometer, she prompted the computer to line up the navigation systems. Just in case. The ship, named the Mariner — more like the Ancient Mariner, she thought — was an old Pathfinder, an American-built reusable launch vehicle, or RLV, with a Russian-manufactured helium-burning rocket engine and a cargo bay that could carry more than two tons of payload (four, if the payload bay carried a space fridge that could be attached to the rear section of the RLV). Half a liter of blood in its cryoprecipitate state weighed only four ounces: This meant that they could carry as much as forty thousand storage units, worth over twenty-five billion dollars.

Assuming they got that far. The ship wasn’t in the best of condition. Lenina didn’t like the look of the computers any more than she felt confident in the performance of the oxygen generators, and the waste disposal facilities had started to act up. Moreover the air-purification system left a great deal to be desired — already the crew cabin and cockpit were damp with condensation. And just about every creature comfort and interior fitting had been removed from the Mariner in order to maximize its crew space and payload. The flight ahead of them would be like taking a camping trip in an old motor home. Nonetheless, Gates, who had real experience of space flight, didn’t seem too concerned about the Mariner’s space-worthiness. A bit rusty, he said, but more than equal to the task ahead of them. Lenina hoped he was right. It was a three-day flight to the Moon, and any delay in their plans might turn out to be fatal to her.

Another thirty minutes passed before she saw the Sun coming up over the violet disc of Earth. The Sun was red, like the color of the giant star it would become some five billion years in the future before it flamed into a nova, cooled, and then collapsed into itself. Lenina wondered if the inhabitants of Earth would be able to avoid this distant catastrophe? Perhaps if they found another solar system. Of course, to travel such vast distances through space in search of a suitable alternative to our own solar system would surely require man to fly at speeds faster than the speed of light, which Einstein had said was impossible. But given enough time, intelligence, tractable computer power, and energy, anything in the universe might be possible. Five billion years hence, human beings might hardly be recognizable as such; and surely so much accumulated intelligence would have to reside in something rather more durable than mere flesh and blood. Such beings, such collected intelligence, might come as near to being gods as any rationally minded person could ever believe in. The only God in the universe was the man that men might one day become.

A dark-sun filter automatically screened the flight-deck window against the life-giving glare of the sunrise. At least something appeared to be working properly, she reflected sourly, having just checked the altitude indicators and noted with disgust that the computers were correcting a ten-degree roll to the right. The autopilot was working, but erratically, as if it hadn’t been calibrated properly, and Lenina wondered if, before leaving Earth’s orbit, she ought to go and fetch Gates. But she rejected the idea, counseling herself to let him sleep. He was dog tired after the launch. She was just looking for an excuse to have him spend some time alone with her. Any sight of Gates was pleasing to her and she supposed herself to be in love with him, although she would never have dreamed of telling him as much. ‘Love’ was not a word she was used to.

Hearing someone bang his head and then curse quietly as he floated into the cockpit, Lenina’s heart leaped in her chest; and expecting to see the big man, she turned and was disappointed to find that it was only Cavor, the man with the false arm.

‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, making his weightless way into the cockpit.

‘Be my guest.’ Lenina helped steer him into the pilot’s seat and then buckled him in.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked politely, quite unaware of Lenina’s current preoccupation with the livid red mark on her stomach. ‘You’re looking kind of pale.’

Lenina shrugged dismissively and looked out of the window as the large altitude control thruster pulsed audibly into action. ‘Just a little space adaptation syndrome,’ she said. ‘Conflict between eyes and inner ear.’

Cavor glanced over the controls and nodded.

‘Have you done much flying in space?’ he asked.

‘Sure. When I was first convicted, learning to fly was part of the rehabilitation program.’

‘I didn’t know they bothered.’

‘They don’t. Not anymore. It was simulations, mostly. But, there’s not much difference from the real thing. Gates is the proper pilot around here. I’m just an instrument flier.’

‘Me, I still can’t take a space flight without a real sense of wonder. Socrates once said that we would understand the world if we could first rise above it. I don’t think he would have been quite so sure if he could have seen this. Looking at Earth from up here begs as many questions as it answers.’

‘I’ve got a question.’

‘Just one?’

‘Why are you here, Cavor?’

‘Are you asking me that in a phenomenological sense?’ Cavor shrugged. ‘Why are any of us here? Because certain atoms interact according to the laws of physics. What other explanation is required?’

‘I meant, why are you part of this team?’

‘I know what you meant,’ said Cavor. ‘I just don’t know the answer. I’m well aware of my shortcomings, Lenina. I’m not even a career criminal — I was sent to Artemis Seven for killing my wife. Which was a mistake. Killing her, that is. Heat-of-the-moment thing. Regretted it ever since. And not because I went to a penal colony. Anyway, before it happened I was a musician. A composer, sometimes.’

‘That should come in useful,’ said Lenina dryly.

‘I’ve asked Dallas why he wanted someone like me along on this odyssey of ours, but so far, he hasn’t seen fit to explain my function.’

‘Maybe he wants you to write a symphony for him. When this is all over.’

‘Perhaps he does. Or a suite. Like Holst. The music of the spheres. Something to express distant galaxies moving away from us. I could call it the Expanding Universe, a piece with only one movement.’

‘With or without a singularity?’ asked Lenina. ‘A Big Bang.’

‘Oh, I think with,’ said Cavor. ‘I’ve never much cared for the steady-state theory of the universe. A Big Bang’s a much better way of starting a piece of music than just picking up somewhere in the middle. A Big Crunch too, for symmetry’s sake. Music needs a beginning and an ending.’

‘So why did you come?’

‘Because Gates asked me. Because the opportunities for one-armed pianists are rather limited. And because this enterprise holds out the possibility of a change of blood and a cure for the virus we’re both carrying — what other reason does anyone need?’

Lenina shook her head. ‘You’re right. I can’t think of a better one.’

Both were silent for a moment as the West Coast of America appeared in the window underneath them.

‘There seems to be a lot of dirt on the outside of these windows.’ Cavor frowned, wiping the inside with the sleeve of his thermal suit.

‘Pollution,’ said Lenina. ‘From when we came up through the stratosphere. It’s full of it. To be more exact, it’s dust from the Great Middle Eastern War. Even after all these years.’

‘It’s comforting to think that the only world we can destroy is our own,’ remarked Cavor.

‘That may not always be the case. It’s taken just ten thousand years for us to come out of the Stone Age to be where we are now. Who knows what forces we’ll have learned to control in another ten thousand.’

‘Then let’s hope we can learn to control ourselves as well.’

‘Amen,’ said Lenina, glancing once again out of the window. The Central Valley of California lay between the Coast Range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east; Lake Tahoe was a footprint-shaped patch of blue to their lower left, and a short way above it was the skull-shaped Mono Lake, close to the invisible town of Lee Vining, where Lenina had spent part of her all-too-short childhood. That was before she and her family had, like most of the water in the lake and most of the people in the town, gone to Los Angeles. There were no hyperbaric hotels in Lee Vining, just disused campsites and broken-down motels. It wasn’t much of a happy memory, but until Rameses Gates had come along, those were the only good times she had ever known. After the move to L.A., her parents had died and she found herself involved in prostitution, dealing drugs, and, eventually, armed robbery. From there it was a few short steps to a series of prisons and then to the penal colony on the Moon.

Down in California it looked like a clear day with not much fog. You could even see the faults of the San Andreas system as two parallel lines along the scribbled coast, and beyond that, Mexico. She’d always wanted to go Mexico and see the pyramids they had down there.

Some time later on, over the Indian Ocean, Lenina and Cavor watched the Moon appear in the cockpit window. The Moon was full, with few shadows, its most prominent feature the crater Tycho in the south, the center of a system of bright rays extending in all directions — so bright that crater identification was difficult. Against these brilliant rays, the patchy shapes of the various lunar seas took on a darker hue, reminding Lenina of the shape on her stomach. To the west, the Sea of Grimaldi was clearly visible. Close to the equator the great ray-crater of Copernicus could be seen just south of the Carpathian Mountains, where the Artemis Seven penal colony was located. Farther east, along the same line of latitude, was the Sea of Tranquillity and the site, close to the Maskelyne crater system, of the Tranquillity Base and the first Apollo Moon landing. About three hundred and fifty miles to the southwest of TB lay the Descartes Crater, the site of the fifth and penultimate Apollo Moon landing. Geologically speaking, it had been an unremarkable place for such an important mission. Descartes, at only ten miles in diameter, was hardly a noteworthy crater — about a tenth of the size of Copernicus — except for the fact that it was now the location of Selenium City, which was what the First National Blood Bank called its breccia[93]-built high-security facility.

As bright as the Moon appeared to Lenina and Cavor, sunlight was a half-million times brighter. The Moon was really a very dark object — one of the least reflective worlds in the entire solar system. And yet they both regarded it with such hope that it might have been the most luminous super-giant white star in the firmament.

II

Dallas opened his eyes and, wrapped inside his sleeping bag, floated in the darkness. He felt mildly disoriented by his own weightlessness and lack of sleep. Had he slept? It was hard to tell. All was still inside the Mariner with only the gently humming sound of the ship’s machinery and the breathing of his fellow conspirators to break the silence of space. The total silence. Dallas had been to the Moon before, but he had forgotten how silent the void really was. At least to human ears. Space was full of cosmic microwave radiation, traveling to Earth from most of the observable universe, and it was easily detectable on any crude horn antenna, sounding as noisy as a flock of starlings. This was one of the earliest proofs of an expanding universe. The sound was really light, so greatly red-shifted in its spectrum wavelength that it could only be read as microwave radiation — and only properly understood as the beginning of everything. Dallas had always been fascinated with that sound; even as a child he had understood that what he could hear was the moment when time itself began.

He glanced at his watch and saw that he had indeed been asleep for three to four hours. But he hardly felt refreshed. There was nothing fresh about the atmosphere aboard the Mariner. Not with the waste control and environmental control systems acting up. Just half a day in space and already there were small pieces of shit floating around the cabin, to say nothing of the amount of methane that had been generated by the crew of seven. Mostly this was the result of their first low-residue in-flight meal — a chicken-and-curry-flavored breedworm that Dallas reckoned might have benefited from a little less spice in its dehydrated preparation. As if in vindication of his belief, Dallas heard Prevezer fart loudly inside his sleeping bag. Prevezer was one of Kaplan’s people. He was a virtual reality model-maker, and when they got to their hotel at Tranquillity Base, it would be Prevezer’s job to fashion a silicon surrogate of the real blood bank from the bits and bytes that were stored in the memory of Dallas’s computer. Using this elaborate artificial world, Dallas would test the integrity of his plan — the kind of experiment, he hoped, that would highlight any unforeseen problems. So Prevezer was an important member of the team, even if he seemed to have more acid in his stomach than anyone else, even if Dallas could cheerfully have steered his sleeping body into the airlock of the cargo bay and dumped him in space.

Deciding that his rest period was over, Dallas unzipped his sleeping bag and floated free, steering himself toward the cabin window. They were out of orbit now, with the full Earth — everything from Africa and the Arabian peninsula to Antarctica — clearly visible. On a normal, scheduled flight to the Moon, every tourist aboard the astroliner would have been up on the camera deck taking photographs at this moment. Dallas remembered doing the same himself. He still had the shots in his portable memory — the little plastic card, endlessly copied, he carried with him everywhere, containing a digital record of his entire life’s photographic history, everything from his own birth to that of Caro. He sometimes wondered how people had managed to safe-keep their fondest memories before such mnemonic devices were invented. A few little plastic cards were all he had to remember Aria and Caro. All that stood between them and oblivion.

Prevezer farted again, and this time Ronica felt obliged to protest.

‘God’s blood,’ she shouted, climbing angrily out of her bag. ‘Who is doing that? It smells like a monkey house in here.’

Prevezer farted loudly, almost as if in answer to her question.

‘Damn it all, Prevezer,’ she groaned. ‘Can’t you control yourself?’

‘Don’t blame me,’ he said, from deep within his bag. ‘Blame space. Blame the fucking dinner. And then blame the fucking environmental control system. ’Sides, least I know how to use a zero g toilet, unlike some people I could mention. A fart ain’t the worst thing flying around this fucking rust bucket. Bad enough that the waste control system ain’t working right, without that some idiots can’t use the thing properly anyway.’

Prevezer was referring to Cavor’s poor performance with the solid collector. He had released one of the disposable adhesive plastic bags attached to the waste control system, or WCS, while defecating, with disastrous results.

‘That was an accident,’ Cavor protested. ‘It’s not easy using those things with only one good arm.’

‘Not so easy with two good arms,’ remarked Ronica. ‘But this stink is something else. This is a kind of body fascism.’

Prevezer farted for the fourth time in as many minutes.

‘Three whole days of this until we get to TB.’ From her personal bag, Ronica produced a small bottle of eau de cologne and proceeded to spray it liberally around her personal space. ‘Bloody hell, I don’t think my sense of smell can stand it.’

‘Wear a nose clip if it bothers you that much,’ Prevezer sneered. ‘And while you’re looking for one, see if you can’t find me a pair of earplugs, so I won’t have to listen to your bitch’s mouth busting my fucking balls. I ain’t the only one with an acid stomach around here.’

‘He’s right, Ronica,’ yawned Gates. ‘My pH is way off the scale. I reckon if I so much as breathed on a piece of litmus paper, it’d turn red.’ Unzipping his own bag he floated free in the cabin. ‘I’d better take a look at the environmental control system. And nobody light a match. There’s enough gas in here to blow us all to pieces.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said Lenina. ‘This ship’s liable to fall apart before it blows up.’

‘Who made you cheerleader?’ jibed Ronica.

‘Keep it down, will you? By my reckoning, the sleep period doesn’t end for at least another hour.’ This was Simou, the team’s mechanical and electrical engineer, a permanently weary-looking man with platinum-blond hair and the kind of prominent lower jaw that would have given a Habsburg king a run for his kingdom.

Prevezer poked his head out of his bag. ‘Take more than a few z’s to improve the way you look, Simou,’ he said. ‘For most people, beauty sleep means being in bed before midnight. But for you it would mean going through a black hole and traveling back in time to make sure your mother was asleep before she met your father.’

‘Did your mother ever meet yours?’ Simou came out of the opposite end of his sleeping bag. He floated up alongside Prevezer, wearing a grin that was all bottom teeth and contempt, adding, ‘I heard she picked your old man using a pipette and a petri dish.’

‘So? Nothing so unusual about that. Lot of people have donor fathers. Gates, for instance.’

‘Yeah, but his mother got to the lab early Monday morning and made sure she had the pick of the crop. I mean, just look at the guy. He’s Zarathustra’s prologue, for Christ’s sake. You, on the other hand, are a typical Friday afternoon job. The frog spawn at the bottom of the jar. Face it, Prev. You’re not so much a dumb ugly fuck as an excuse not to have one.’

In fact there was nothing wrong with Prevezer to look at. By any standard he was better looking than Simou. But all the time he had spent inside silicon microworlds had given him an undernourished, skinny look. Appearances deceived, though. Prevezer was prone to violence and possessed a quick temper. He had killed people for saying less than Simou had said.

For a moment Lenina thought Prevezer might go for Simou — but for the zero gravity, perhaps he would have.

‘Cut it out, you two,’ she said. ‘Or take it outside.’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Ronica. ‘Now that’s a bit of EVA[94] I’d like to see. Couple of space suits trying to slug it out.’ She sprayed some eau de cologne over the heads of the two men. ‘There. That should sweeten the atmosphere between you boys.’

Still smiling prognathously, Simou pushed himself off a stowage hatch cover and floated away from Prevezer.

‘Three days of this,’ said Prevezer, ‘we’re all going to be climbing the walls.’

‘We are climbing the walls, asshole,’ said Simou. ‘In case you didn’t notice, it’s the only way to get around this tin can.’

III

The waste control system was the ship’s lavatory section. It wasn’t particularly private or very pleasant to use. With no gravity to draw feces into the bowl, a person had to assist the process with the aid of a finger inserted into a condom-shaped pocket that was itself inserted in the plastic seal attaching him to the seat. Cabin air was then used to direct the solid and liquid waste into a fan separator before being filtered and returned to the cabin. Urine, along with liquid from the humidity separator, was dumped in space every day. By space law, however, feces had to be captured in a tank because of the risk to other space travelers: At twenty-five thousand miles an hour, solid human waste can cause enormous amounts of damage to expensive equipment. When not in use the tank was vented to prevent odors and bacterial growth, and it was this function that had proved to be faulty.

The WCS was not easy to use, as Cavor himself had demonstrated, but there was actually nothing much to clean, and most of the mess related to disposable plastic seals and wetwipes improperly stowed. It was only when it was incorrectly used that a less seemly cleanup was required — hence, the tiny pieces of shit that were still floating around the cabin. Under the eyes of Dallas, Cavor bagged one and then posted it into the solid tank.

‘How are you doing?’ asked Dallas.

‘It’s a Zen thing,’ he said. ‘Ultimate truth discovered through self-mastery and perfection in the simple art of turd bagging. Damn it, there’s another.’ Cavor collected another plastic bag and pursued another tiny asteroid of floating shit. ‘I thought all of our food was supposed to be low residue.’

‘It is.’

‘In that case, I’m going on a diet. I don’t think I could stand to do this again.’ Cavor grimaced. ‘Come here, you little shit.’ He caught and bagged his quarry, dropped it through the disposal chute, and leaned back in the air. ‘Right now I’d settle for some enlightenment. Such as what the hell I’m doing here. You’re the only one who seems to know, Dallas, only you’re not telling. Which makes me feel like a sacrificial victim. Like some poor sucker who’s going to get his throat cut at the end of the journey and who’s the only one who doesn’t know it.’

‘After myself, you’re the most important member of this whole team, Cav,’ said Dallas.

‘Me? You’re just saying that.’

‘No.’

‘But why?’

‘I can’t tell you yet. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We can’t hope to pull this off without you.’

‘Nor without you, Dallas. Only you know all the answers.’

‘I know all the questions. That’s hardly the same thing. We’ll find out if I can answer them when we carry out the plan in virtual reality at TB.’

‘Presumably you have a good reason for not taking anyone into your confidence.’

‘It’s for your protection and mine,’ insisted Dallas. ‘Plus, it helps me to keep control over what’s happening. Until the critical moment when I have no alternative but to reveal my hand. And yours. Between now and then, I want you to do something for me. No questions asked. Will you do that?’

‘I haven’t got much of a choice.’

Dallas handed Cavor a packet of blood-colored pills. ‘I want you to start taking two of these, five times a day, from now on.’

‘What are they?’

‘Remember, no questions? If anyone should ask you, they’re something the doctors prescribed back on Earth. But whatever medication you’re already taking, you’ll have to stop. In case there’s some kind of adverse reaction.’

‘Very considerate of you.’ Cavor examined the packet. There was nothing printed on it. Not that he expected there would be. Dallas was too clever to have made such a simple mistake.

‘They might make you feel a little strange at first,’ advised Dallas. ‘If so, I want you to tell me immediately. Every detail. And only me. Don’t talk about this with anyone else. This is our secret, understand?’

‘Of course. I may have only one arm, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain.’

‘That’s what I’m counting on. You see, Cav, it’s your brain I’m really interested in. You know it’s a stroke of pure luck that Gates should have found someone as reasonably intelligent as you.’

‘That’s reasonably kind of you to say so, Dallas,’ smiled Cavor. ‘So the false arm...?’

‘The prosthetic’s not important. But it wouldn’t do any harm to let everyone else continue under the delusion that it’s why you’re here. Otherwise you can forget about your false arm, Cav. As far as I’m concerned it might as well not be there.’

Cavor nodded and glanced at the packet of red capsules once more.

‘When those are finished, I’ll give you some more.’

‘Whatever you say, doc.’ Cavor rubbed his stomach and glanced uncomfortably at the WCS. ‘Hey, I don’t suppose you’ve got anything for an upset stomach, have you?’

IV

The physicists have informed us that entropy is the natural state of the universe. Given enough time, they say, everything will fall apart. Suns will cool. Planets will die. Stars will collapse in upon themselves, and the whole universe will disintegrate. All this is certain, if a long way off. in our everyday world, however, there are two antientropic phenomena that build order out of chaos. These are crystallization and life. Life is not a closed system. It can import energy from outside — for example, the way plants capture energy from sunlight. And life itself exists not just within molecules, but between molecules. All living organisms must die, but there is no reason why life — all animal life — can’t begin anew to actuate the same body many times over before death eventually arrives. No reason at all, not least because it happens. Metabolism may cease, life may be suspended, indeed it may be seemingly destroyed and yet, hidden, life may persist.

Impossible, you say? When metabolism ceases, death ensues. And yet consider the strange phenomenon of cryptobiosis, meaning ‘hidden life,’ which describes a natural form of suspended animation possessed by dozens of multicellular species that can be found, millions of them, in the most hostile environments on Earth — everywhere from the Sahara Desert to the Arctic tundra. These animals include aquatic-dwelling rotifers, insectlike tardigrades, and wormlike nematodes. When environmental coziditions require it, these little creatures — smaller than a millimeter — dry up and shrink into tiny seedlike husks, not eating, not breathing, not moving, and to all apparent evidence, not living. In this strange cryptobiotic state they can survive for years on end until, with the return of moisture — water is the catalyst for a great many chemical reactions, most importantly, life itself — they revive. Moreover, these animals can withstand extremes of temperature — thousands of degrees of heat, freezing cold vacuums, even ionizing radiation — that would easily kill them in their active, hydrated state. These seemingly immortal protozoans may go into and out of the cryptobiotic state numerous times. One tardigrade was revived after two hundred years, while a rotifer at the University of California at Berkeley has been resurrected over fifty times.

If man could do the same as one of these small creatures from whom, after all, he has evolved, think what might be achieved. With time seemingly suspended for an astronaut, space itself would grow smaller. Vast distances might easily be traveled.[95] Why, even the remotest galaxies might be explored and new solar systems discovered, perhaps even colonized. Eventually, in some future diaspora, the seed of life, perhaps uniquely cultured on Earth, might be carried to every corner of the universe.

There are no miracles except the science that is not already known. And man is the measure of all things.

V

Moisture. It wasn’t just Mariner’s windows that were clouded with it. As well as sponging these, Ronica had to wipe the instruments free of great globs of water that shimmered in the zero gravity of the cabin like uncut diamonds. A university degree in blood banking, with a major in cryoprecipitation technology, and this was what she was reduced to doing: cleaning windows. Not that she really minded. Until they had gained entry to the vault in the First National and removed several thousand of the deep-frozen components held there, there would be little for her to do. Only after samples of the cryoprecipitate had been thawed could she inspect the condition of the blood, to check for possible bacterial contamination[96] that might produce abnormal color in the red cells, or plasma. Once she had ensured platelet viability she could undertake the phlebotomy of those crew members who were carrying the P2 virus, which effectively meant everyone except herself and Dallas. So she wiped the moisture from their collective exhalations feeling something close to satisfaction that she was making herself useful.

Prevezer pushed himself off the ceiling like a great bat and flew toward her, enjoying the sensation of weightlessness. Being weightless gave Prevezer a tremendous sense of liberation, such as an angel might have enjoyed back in heaven after a prolonged period on Earth. On Earth, Prevezer had always felt heavy, even a little overweight. But in space, soaring, hovering, levitating, he felt just a little like a god.

‘I think that’s the last time you’ll have to do that, Roni,’ he predicted.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘What I meant was that I fixed the environmental control system. On a ship as old as this one, the fluids that supply the ECS tend to become stratified in zero g. So you have to stir the contents now and again. Like a cake mix. That’s what the problem was.’ He paused, watching Ronica chase down a small floating sphere of water with the muzzle of her vacuum cleaner. ‘You just reverse the fans on the air purifiers a couple of times to stir up the liquid cylinders.’

‘Mmm-hmm?’

‘Hey, I’m sorry about what happened earlier on,’ he said. ‘I was kind of rude back there.’

‘Forget it, Prev,’ she said.

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When we get to our hotel at TB, are you planning to share a room with anyone?’

‘As a matter of fact, I’m sharing with Dallas.’

Prevezer nodded. ‘Is that just cover?’ he asked. ‘Or are you lovers?’

‘Lovers?’ Ronica’s smile broadened.

‘Because if everything works out, I’m going to be cured soon, and that’ll mean I’m just as healthy as you. If you know what I’m saying.’

It was true that she and Dallas were drawn to each other, and not just because they had in common their good health. Although she was looking forward to being alone with him, she would probably have shared a room with him in any case. Probably slept with him too. Like most women of her age and background, Ronica’s major concern was that the guy was healthy. Which would automatically have excluded Prevezer.

‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Prev. I guess you could say that Dallas and I are together, although I wouldn’t exactly say that love comes into it. I always think love is a little like cosmology. There’s a Big Bang, a lot of heat, followed by a gradual drifting apart, and a cooling off. Which means that a lover is pretty much the same as any cosmologist. Just some poor misguided individual looking to find some significance in the smallest of things and asking a lot of foolish questions that can never really be answered. There’s no utility in love, Prev. It’ll waste your life and keep you from all that’s profitable in the world. Love’s just part of the great cosmic joke. It’s ironic physics. Just like final theories. Just like God.’

I

Tourism was the biggest industry on the Moon. Over one hundred thousand people went there every year on vacations costing an average of two hundred thousand dollars per person. Mostly the tourists traveled to the Moon for sex or gambling,[97] although an increasing number of people went for outdoor activities such as hiking and mountaineering — backpacking through Schröter’s Valley or climbing Mount Doerfel. As well as the tourists there are the astronomers,[98] the mining engineers, the ecosystems engineers,[99] and meteorologists,[100] not to mention all the hotel workers, tour guides, charter pilots, pachinko engineers, and, of course, prostitutes.[101]

The largest of TB’s hotels, the Galileo, with over fifteen hundred rooms, was also the best and the most expensive. Designed by the celebrated architect Masumara Shokai — he of the Buckingham Palace Dome, among other twenty-first-century architectural icons — the Galileo consisted of two vertical wings. The wing that faced TB was made of armor-plated glass and, to complement the hotel’s location on the Sea of Tranquillity, was shaped like the billowing sail on an enormous oceangoing yacht. The rectangular mountain-facing wing served as a foil for this dramatic curve of glass. Between these two was a breathtaking, full-height atrium lobby finished in smart-nanomolecular materials — French limestone, Italian marble, Indian onyx, and acres of English sycamore — that had been created on the Moon before being fitted by human craftsmen. Indeed, it was the proud boast of the hotel’s owners that the builders had eschewed the use of any robotic workers in the Galileo’s construction. The impressive, earth-toned lobby was dominated by an enormous kinetic sculpture celebrating Galileo’s famous demonstration of the Law of Uniform Acceleration for falling bodies, which had disproved the Aristotelian contention that bodies of different weights fall at different speeds. Legend has it that in 1604, Galileo dropped lead weights of different sizes from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.[102] More likely, though, the demonstration probably took place in Padua, where Galileo rolled weights down a smooth slope to make his demonstration. But sometimes people prefer a good story to a dull fact, and the builders of the hotel, and the German sculptor they commissioned, Jasper Fotze, were certainly no exception. So it was that every fifteen minutes a large ostrich feather, a lead weight, a paper ball, a shuttlecock, a balloon, and a basketball would be lifted automatically to the top of a series of plastic tubes, which were the height of the atrium, and released, all hitting the ground floor at exactly the same time.

Equally impressive were the lobby’s marble floor and brass-bound reception desk, which was a gigantic working orrery[103] built to honor Galileo’s defense of the Copernican theory that Earth moves around the Sun. Here the Sun was represented by the globular golden desk in the center of the circular floor. Around it moved — by an ingenious system of invisible gears — three more globular guest service stations representing the three innermost planets, Mercury, Venus, and Earth, from whence various products could be purchased and services rendered: Mercury, for deliveries, errands, and the purchase of lunar currency; Venus, for beauty and health products and toiletries; and Earth, for all information media. These three ‘desks’ all moved around the Sun in the correct relative periods, although not, of course, at the correct relative distances. Representing the Moon’s orbit around Earth — although not inclined at the correct angle — was a large video-globe showing old pornographic movies of couples making love in one-sixth gravity.

The room rates were predictably astronomical. With the exception of Dallas, Ronica, and Cavor, this was the first time any of them had been in a luxury hotel.

‘Five hundred selenes a night,’ said Prevezer. ‘How much is a selene worth?’

‘About ten dollars,’ said Cavor. Observing the look on Prevezer’s face, he added, ‘Have you ever heard of the expression “moonstruck”?’

‘Bloody hell, yeah,’ chuckled Prevezer. ‘Now I know what that means. You have to be crazy to pay these kinds of prices.’

‘We’ll probably need to rob the First National just to pay our hotel bill,’ echoed Simou.

‘Why don’t you say it a bit louder, Sim?’ Lenina frowned. ‘I don’t think the guy on the desk could have heard you properly.’

‘A Table of the Principal Affections of the Planets,’ said Gates, reading what was written on the pink marble underneath his gravity shoes.[104] ‘I could sure get an affection for this kind of life.’

‘I never thought I’d like the Moon so much,’ Simou suddenly interjected.

‘It’s not all like this,’ said Cavor. ‘You should see the last place we stayed. Artemis Seven. They kept my arm when I couldn’t pay the bill.’

‘Hard to believe this is on the same planet,’ breathed Gates. ‘I never thought I’d feel so pleased to be back here.’

‘Hey, Gates,’ said Simou. ‘While we’re here, what are we gonna do for the root of all evil? I’d like to get me some of the local assignat. What are they called? Selenes? Just to keep up appearances, you understand. I’m supposed to be a single guy with some good, hot blood in his veins who is on vacation, right? The trouble is that I lack the essential letters of credit from my personal bankers back on Earth to facilitate the necessary exchange of currencies. On account of the fact that I don’t have any credit, and I don’t have any personal bankers.’

‘The man’s got a good point there, Gates,’ agreed Prevezer.

‘You’d better ask Dallas,’ said Gates. ‘He’s the one with the money, not me.’

‘I’m sure he’s already thought of it,’ declared Cavor. ‘He’s certainly thought of everything else.’

‘I hope so,’ sighed Lenina.

Gates took her hand in his own. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

Lenina fixed a weary smile to her face. She was feeling anything but okay. Deep inside herself she felt exhausted. She was also experiencing some difficulty in breathing: Every breath she took had to be just that little bit deeper than normal.

‘I’m just a little tired, after the flight, that’s all,’ she said. ‘As soon as we get to our room, I think I’ll lie down.’

‘I’ll see what’s keeping Dallas,’ said Gates, and he walked, a little clumsily — for, despite his gravity shoes, the big man was still adjusting to being a lot lighter on his feet — toward the reception desk.

The registration was actually proceeding quickly. The desk attendant had shown Dallas holographic pictures of the various suites that had been reserved, and Dallas had pronounced himself happy with the proposed accommodation. Not that there would have been much chance for him to change his mind about any of the rooms he had booked. Nearly every hotel on TB was full, many of them with guests who had flown in for the centennial of the first Apollo Moon landing. Indeed, it was one of the reasons Dallas had chosen this particular time to arrive on the Moon. Among so many lunar tourists, he thought it would be easier for Gates and the rest of the team to go relatively unnoticed.

‘So, are you here for the centennial?’ asked the desk attendant.

‘Only partly,’ said Dallas, and grinned meaningfully at Ronica for the hotelier’s benefit.

‘Yeah,’ said the man, organizing a whole fistful of key-cards. ‘Stupid question. History’s one thing. A good time’s quite another.’

‘You said it,’ said Dallas. ‘But actually we were also planning to do some hiking while we’re here.’

‘Not too far from the equator, I hope. You heard about the tragedy we had with those climbers down in the Leibnitz Mountains?’ The attendant rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘They got stuck and ran out of solar energy when it got dark. Froze to death.’

‘How awful,’ said Ronica.

‘Yeah, it was terrible. Rescue team reckoned they must have forgotten to tell their trip computer that a polar lunar day is a lot shorter than an equatorial one. We have fourteen days of sunshine here at TB. It’s less than half that at the pole.’

Dallas shook his head. ‘We weren’t thinking of going much farther afield than the Central Highlands,’ he said. ‘Certainly no farther west than Schroter.’

‘Oh, it’s really beautiful down there. I went to Schroter myself just a few months back. I could recommend a good guide if you’re at all interested. And a pretty good equipment company.’

‘Thanks, but we brought our own.’

The attendant glanced up from his desk-screen and noted the large number of bags on the floor surrounding Dallas and his entourage.

‘You certainly have, haven’t you,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a porter to help you with all your luggage.’ He didn’t know it, but the luggage was mostly made up of the computer equipment with which Prevezer would create a simulation of the First National Blood Bank.

‘It’s okay,’ said Dallas. ‘Don’t bother. They’re used to carrying my stuff around.’

‘As you wish, sir.’ The attendant smiled. ‘And how will you be paying your bill, Mister Bourbaki?’

Nicolas Bourbaki was the name Dallas was using while they were on the Moon. It was possible that the company was still looking for him.

Dallas placed his wafer-thin breastpocket computer on the desk between them and said, ‘By Electronic Credit Transfer.’ The computer signaled its voice recognition with a quiet bleep and prepared for remote wireless connection with the hotel’s own computer.

‘ECT? Yes sir.’

Since leaving his former life, Dallas had spent a small fortune using a number of accounts to equip and provision his team. Through his personal treasury workstation (PTW), he had automatically changed all his account numbers and their respective encryptions in order to escape data tracing and detection. Only one of these accounts, so far untouched, was still substantially in credit, and this was the account that he selected, with the touch of a button, for simultaneous bill settlement: All transactions relating to his entourage’s stay at the Galileo would be checked by his PTW and then debited immediately from the account he had chosen.

‘Everything okay?’ asked Gates.

‘Of course,’ said Dallas. Seeing Gates glance in the direction of the foreign exchange desk on Mercury, Dallas guessed what was on the big man’s mind. ‘Oh, and you’d better charge some currency to that account while we’re here,’ he told the attendant. ‘Say, ten thousand selenes, in cash. New bills. It’s a long time since I’ve been here, but I can’t imagine much has changed.’

‘Cash is still king on the Moon,’ confirmed the attendant, and entered the transaction on his computer. ‘Always was, always will be. Yes sir, you carry the Moon in your pocket.’ Finishing up, he smiled a broad smile, the way he had been trained to, making a white crescent of his teeth. A real honey of a Moon welcome, they called it back on his Galileo Hotel-keeping course. With as much sincerity as he could muster, and completely unaware of their provenance, he added the words of hospitality and liberality that, he had learned, were the correct way to welcome a guest:

He smiled again, and added, ‘Enjoy your stay.’

II

‘Answer, answer, answer...’

A still, small intonation rang out in the darkness of Rimmer’s austere apartment, interrupting the sado-erotic musings that habitually preceded his falling asleep. At first he thought it was the dull articulation of his own conscience, some stern daughter of the voice of God — for the vocalization was female — calling him to account for his wickedness and blasphemy.

‘Answer, answer...’

But what kind of sin? Surely not the sin of Onan. That was just a way of relieving tension, of aiding sleep. No, to warrant such a peremptory demand, this had to be something far more serious than merely spilling life’s beans on the bottom sheet.

‘Answer...’

Rimmer sighed and rolled onto his hairy back. He was still not yet completely awake — he had drunk too much before going to bed. The last of the genuine Napoleon brandy. Rimmer dragged himself up and snorted some oxygen into his sleep-befuddled brain. The voice was still repeating itself in the cold tones of some holy inquisitor. It could be nothing so morally scrupulous as a conscience. The only categorical imperative Rimmer was aware of was the inner voice that told him to please himself whenever the opportunity presented itself. No, the voice in his apartment belonged to his computer.

Shaking his head and yawning cheesily, Rimmer rolled out of bed and padded into the smallish lounge and flopped down in front of the sixty-two-inch blue screen that dominated one wall of the room. It was an old-fashioned way of interacting with the computer, but he preferred it to the more anthropic Motion Parallax. Somehow, with a screen, you never lost sight of the fact you were dealing with a computer. Motion Parallaxes were for people who didn’t much like the company of a machine. Rimmer had no problem with machines. As a matter of fact he liked them better than he liked most people.

‘Answer, answer, answer...’

‘Remind me what the question was,’ he said, gouging the sleep from his encrusted eyes.

‘First choose a persona,’ said the disembodied female voice. Pictures of a number of famous historical personalities now appeared on the screen: Albert Einstein, Orson Welles, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Salman Rushdie, Tom Ray, Marina Maguire, Jonas Ndebele, and Cameron Caine. Rimmer’s computer system had Microsoft version 45.1, and a persona was the personality the computer assumed on-screen when dealing with the program user. Compared to the Motion Parallax system on Microsoft 50, version 45.1 was positively antediluvian.

‘Einstein,’ yawned Rimmer, hardly caring what social facade or public image the computer might use. ‘Just get on with it. I haven’t got all night.’ Frankly, he’d have preferred Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nesib el Bekri, Sol Chong, or some other great tyrant, but, in Rimmer’s opinion, Microsoft was too squeamish to cater to anyone whose favorite historical figures were just a little offbeat.

A life-size picture of Albert Einstein, white-haired, wearing a thick beige pullover, and smoking a pipe while seated in an armchair, appeared on-screen. To Rimmer, Einstein looked larger and more heavily muscled than the way he usually imagined him. Or maybe it was just the sweater.

‘Hey, Albert, what’s happening?’

‘You asked me a question,’ the facsimile of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist replied in his own, digitally reproduced comic German accent. ‘About several key numbers, did you not?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And asked me to conduct a search for exact number matches, across all financial categories, with no time restrictions, and using Conspectus, Argus, Gimlet, Gorgon, and Panorama search engines. Is that right?’

‘That’s right, Albert,’ said Rimmer, yawning once more. ‘Only speed it up, okay? I happened to be asleep.’

Rimmer’s idea had been a simple one. Dallas had thirteen different bank accounts, and soon after disappearing from his own apartment, he’d changed all the account numbers and encryption codes, thus covering his electronic tracks. Or so he must have thought. Dallas could hardly have expected Rimmer to concentrate his computer search on a different, albeit related, set of numbers — the bank balances themselves. Rimmer had reasoned that with thirteen accounts, Dallas might draw on only one account at a time, until he had used up the balance. In this way, Rimmer’s computer might have a sufficient interval in which to trace one of as many as twelve other account balances. Of course, this was no small task. Several of the accounts ran to eight or nine figures. For example, according to the records on the computer in Dallas’s office at Terotechnology, one account showed a balance of 112,462,239 credits. And this was one of the numbers for which Rimmer had programmed his computer to search. In an effort to improve the odds of a successful search, he had also broken eight numbers into four numbers, and nine numbers into six numbers so that, for example, 112,462,239 became 1, 12, 4, 62, 23, and 9.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Rimmer, standing up slowly. ‘You don’t mean you’ve found one?’

It was several weeks since Rimmer had instigated the search — not long after the director had downgraded him to the status of a lowly security guard — and the truth was that he had more or less forgotten about it, having come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the search was too great.

Einstein puffed his pipe and then removed it from his mouth. ‘Yes. Eureka, to speak as Archimedes.’

At the bottom of the screen there appeared a small window containing a brief career resume for the Greek-Sicilian mathematician and inventor. Rimmer ignored it. The trouble with 45.1 was that so much of what you were told was simply irrelevant — an interesting waste of time.

‘I have found one such number,’ continued Einstein. ‘Against all the odds, may I say. Merely to find these six numbers, the odds are quite large enough. To be precise, thirteen million, nine hundred and eighty-three thousand, eight hundred and sixteen to one. But to find all six of these numbers in the specified search order?’ Einstein chuckled. ‘Why the odds are almost incalculable. Nevertheless, I calculated them. One in ten billion, sixty-eight million, three hundred and forty-seven thousand, five hundred and twenty. Yes, I think even God would think twice about playing against odds like that.’

Another window appeared, this one quoting Einstein’s famous remark to the effect that God does not play dice with the universe and explaining that this was Einstein’s negative reaction to quantum theory.[106]

Rimmer held his head. ‘Albert. You’re a bloody genius.’

‘So people are always telling me, much to my irritation.’

‘My God, I don’t believe it. You’ve found the number.’

‘Numbers are nothing, my friend. Equations are the thing. Better than women. Better than diamonds. Better than just about anything else I can think of. Equations are forever.’

Another window with a quotation about equations.

‘Sure, Albert,’ laughed Rimmer. ‘Anything you say. My God, this is terrific. Where on earth did you find it?’

‘I didn’t find it on Earth at all.’

‘Of course,’ breathed Rimmer. ‘He’s on the Moon.’

‘Yes, but only just.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well,’ chuckled Einstein, ‘there’s not much gravity on the Moon.’

Yet another window explaining how Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity had described the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Rimmer smiled slimly. ‘Is that an example of the famous German sense of humor?’ he asked.

Einstein shrugged apologetically and, returning the pipe to his mouth, set about relighting it.

‘Exactly where on the Moon did you find this number, Albert.’

‘At the Hotel Galileo, on Tranquillity Base.’

Another window to say who Galileo was.

‘The Galileo, huh? Nice. Dallas always did like to go first class.’

‘He should have acknowledged the work of Kepler.’

‘Who should?’

Another window to say who Kepler was.

‘Galileo, of course. It always surprises me that so many scientists should be so vain.’

‘On the subject of personas, acknowledged or otherwise, did our winning number have a name?’

‘Nicolas Bourbaki,’ said Einstein.

This time the window appearing on-screen told Rimmer something that he was actually interested to know: that the name Nicolas Bourbaki had been a collective nom de plume for a group of early-twentieth-century mathematicians including Szolem Mandelbrojt.

Rimmer started to get dressed.

‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘I’m going to get my old job back,’ explained Rimmer. ‘And after that I’m going to the Moon.’

This time a window with some astroliner flight times and prices.

‘Does the Moon only exist when you look at it?’ asked Einstein.

‘I wouldn’t say so.’

‘That’s my objection to quantum mechanics.’ Einstein’s large nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘These people reduce science to a series of captions. Schrodinger’s cat. Heisenberg’s uncertainty. Pah! It all implies that the world is created simply by our perception of it. Nonsense.’

‘I’d love to stay and talk about this, Albert. But frankly I haven’t got the time. Oh, you’d better book me on the next available flight. To the Moon. Assuming it’s still there. It was the last time I looked.’

‘There’s only coach left, I’m afraid,’ said Einstein, after a momentary pause. ‘It’s the centennial of the first Moon landing.’

‘Okay, coach’ll have to do. And thanks for your help, Albert. You can turn off now.’

‘May I give you a small piece of advice?’

Prior to shutting down, it was customary in 45.1 for the operating persona to utter some appropriate quotation — something he or she had said while living — so as to enhance the user’s impression of having interacted with some great figure from history.

Rimmer snorted with contempt. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Be my guest, you old bastard.’

Einstein pointed at the pair of malodorous socks Rimmer had collected from the floor.

‘Socks are a waste of money. When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock.’

‘Didn’t you think you might just cut your bloody toenails more often?’ asked Rimmer.

‘Well, anyway, I stopped wearing socks.’

‘I guess it all depends on whether you’re a body at rest or a body in motion,’ said Rimmer. ‘But thank you, Albert. That was most enlightening.’

Rimmer finished dressing and was still amused at the fashion tip he had taken from a facsimile of Albert Einstein — so that was what space and time were all about: Given enough time, your toe would make a space in your sock. He went out of the apartment.

III

Almost as soon as he was settled into his suite, Prevezer began working on the silicon surrogate world that Dallas was planning to use as a laboratory in which they would test the viability of his plan.

Modeling this particular Simworld was a highly complex process, an individually tailored job, and one on which Prevezer had been working long before leaving Earth. A number of reasons had obliged him to finish making his model on the Moon. There was the press of time: Dallas wanted to take advantage of the relative anonymity that was afforded by the large number of tourists on the Moon for the centennial, and he wanted to carry out the robbery at some time during the fourteen days of lunar ‘daylight.’ But from Prevezer’s point of view, what was more important was that Dallas wanted the simulation to take place in the authentic conditions of the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, which was something the laws of physics did not permit back on Earth. Gravity, or the lack of it, was not something that could be rendered artificially.

Prevezer was one of the best model-makers in the business. He preferred the term ‘Simworld’ to the more archaic ‘virtual reality’ that was characterized by a much older and cruder wraparound technology — its three hundred and sixty-degree headtracker helmets, datagloves, cyber-exoskeletons, dildonics, pneumatic pressure feedback systems, and cartoony terrain projectors. Prevezer worked at a much more fundamental and sophisticated level, using several electro-neuroneedles that he attached acupuncturally to the cerebral cortex, to create a synthetic experience indistinguishable from reality itself.

Prevezer had a low opinion of reality, with its fat-free ice cream, sugar-free sweeteners, alcohol-free whiskey, synthetic blood, fake fur, and Motion Parallaxes. Prevezer found none of these simulations particularly convincing. To him, the artificial Simworlds he created were more real than the real thing. For instance, where else but a Simworld could anyone but the very rich make love on a fur rug in front of a blazing log fire? — one of his most popular surrogate creations. Or drive a vintage Ferrari F87? Or massacre a village full of peasants? — another surprisingly popular choice. Reality was greatly overrated, and even at its best it was no longer something that people could simply assume to be there.

Most of Prevezer’s customers were simply people in search of a cheap thrill, individuals in an impersonal world looking for a brief moment of empowerment as they became the gods of their own mathematical wonderlands. Quite a few were sick, people in the active Three Moon phase of the virus, who wanted to spend their last few hours on Earth enjoying what in life had been denied them: the sensation of good health in some demi-paradise — a tropical island or the peak of some breathtaking mountain — and in the company of a few good friends. Using EUPHORIA, a general-purpose simulation program of his own devising, it was easy enough to build this kind of standard model. He’d even modeled luxury lunar hotels, although he now realized his rendering of the Galileo had fallen way short of the mark. This was the first time he had been exposed to a reality that exceeded his own expectations. Of course, you had to be as rich as Dallas and his pure-blood kind to afford it. Few people from Prevezer’s background ever got a taste of this style of living, even in a simulated, artificial world. It was almost enough to make him think he’d not been alive at all these past few years — just pretending to be alive. He had joined Dallas’s team because he too wanted to be rich and healthy, but it was not until he had reached TB and checked into the Galileo that he’d properly appreciated what either of those two concepts really meant.

When Cavor and Simou turned up at the door of his suite, suggesting a visit to the Armstrong Center, Prevezer was very tempted to join them. He was eager to taste the expensive realities that were on offer at TB’s principal public space. But there was still much data to be processed if his model of the First National was ever going to behave like its real-world correlate.

‘I’d like to,’ he sighed, declining their invitation. ‘Only I’ve got to check the Simworld’s fidelity axis. To make sure the endophysical perspective matches the exophysical one.’[107]

‘Surely a model can be too perfect,’ argued Cavor. ‘I mean, if the microworld construct is as good as its macroworld counterpart, then what margin for error is there? Without the possibility of error, nothing can be learned and the experimental quality is compromised.’

‘You’re just full of surprises.’ Prevezer yawned.

‘You know something?’ said Cavor. ‘Lately I’ve started to surprise myself. Perhaps me most of all.’

‘Enough of that.’ Simou grinned. ‘It’s time we took off and sampled some of those lovely lunar ladies.’

‘You know, I could fix you guys up a synthetic experience that would beat anything you’ll have on TB,’ Prevezer said, without much conviction. This was just the salesman in him talking. ‘Reality is just a chimera.’

But Simou and Cavor were already walking away from his door. ‘Take a look around you, Sim,’ he said, following them into the corridor and pointing out the window at the silver-colored moonscape. ‘Cav? You think any of this is real? It’s not reality you want, my friends, it’s certainty. These days, that’s a much more difficult grail to find. It’s not to be found in mathematics. It’s not even to be found in the atoms. The only certainty in the whole bloody universe is in ourselves. There is no world independent of you and me. Not anymore. Death is the only certainty, Sim. That’s what’s real.’

Simou turned on his heel and uttered an old saying that was familiar to anyone who had the virus: ‘You die today, and I’ll die tomorrow.’

IV

Barefoot, and wearing just a pair of panties, Ronica began a careful walk across the floor of the suite she was sharing with Dallas, toward the HV.[108] This was her first trip to the Moon, and the first hotel she had stayed in where, as a matter of lunar law, you had to watch a set of safety instructions on how to use the room and its facilities. The secret of walking around the room without gravity shoes, so the guy on the HV had said before the commercial break, was to try and do it slowly, at half your normal speed, as if you had been drugged, or as if you were walking through the sea. One quick and injudicious step could carry you several inches off the floor; and standing up from a chair, you had to be careful not to hit your head on the triple-height ceiling. Even though the suite was as big as a basketball court, a good leap would have carried her from one side to the other. She reached the HV, switched it off, and headed back toward the enormous bed where Dallas was lying. Although his gravity shoes were still on, his body barely weighed enough to put a dent on the virtually redundant mattress.

‘So,’ said Ronica. ‘Do you want to tell me why Cavor is taking so much Connex?’

‘Did he tell you it was Connex?’

‘He didn’t have to. I recognized those tabs. I’ve taken enough Connex in my time.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes. So? Why is he taking cognitive enhancement? And so much?’

‘Why ask me?’

‘Because I figure you’re the one who gave it to him. That stuff isn’t cheap. And if Cavor had ever taken it before, he’d know not to take so much.’

‘Did you say anything to him about it?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Because I’d prefer he didn’t know what it is he’s taking. At least not right now. And as to the high dosage, that’s up to me as well. I told him to take it in quantity.’

‘I won’t say anything.’

‘He’ll be okay,’ said Dallas, mistaking her exasperation for concern. ‘If that’s what you’re worried about.’

She sighed loudly and shook her head. ‘I can’t decide why you want him to boost his head. Unless it’s because you want him to remember something. Something important.’

‘That’s exactly what I want him to do. To remember something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something he’s forgotten.’

‘I can’t bear it that you’re so cryptic.’ Ronica realized she was shouting. She calmed herself and lay down on the bed next to him. ‘I thought we had something between us. An understanding. A trust. After all, we’re the same blood, you and I. The same class and background. But sometimes I don’t think you trust me at all. If you did, you’d confide in me. You’d learn to lean on me.’

Dallas took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘On the Moon, that might be a little difficult,’ he said. ‘But perhaps I could float on top of you now and again.’

V

Tranquillity Base was the biggest development of land on the Moon, and the Armstrong Center[109] — also known as the Tranquillity Forum — was the massive complex of public halls, exhibition areas, performance auditoria, pachinko parlors, sleazy bars, and licensed brothels that occupied the center of the development and acted as a magnet for lunar tourists. Its design had been the subject of an international architectural competition, one of the largest the world had ever seen, attracting hundreds of entries. Victory eventually went to the New York-born, Los Angeles-based architect Brad Epstein. It was the most transparent of buildings, constructed entirely of armor-plated glass, with no facades — just an expressed structure and a number of suspended capsules housing the main auditoria. One giant spire, at the center of the structure, three hundred and sixty-three feet high and shaped like the Saturn V Moon rocket that had first carried men to the Moon, signaled the presence of what was beneath: the actual site of the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 20, 1969, at 3:17 P.M., Houston, Texas, time.

The centennial was now only a few days away, and the landing site itself, enclosed beneath a protective glass dome, was surrounded with tourists. Among them were Cavor, Simou, and Gates.

The landing site was the snapshot of another time, another universe,[110] although to all who stared through the protective glass dome, the scene looked much as if the astronauts had just departed. The four-legged golden spider that was the descent module; the toppled American flag — blown over when the ascent module had blasted off; a tripod-mounted television camera and some ancient-looking scientific instruments placed about sixty feet away from the Eagle; and those footprints in the moondust that had survived the Eagle’s ascent from the Sea of Tranquillity. It looked exactly as it had a hundred years before, at least until the arrival of some holographic astronauts and an explanatory sound track.

‘Hello, Neil and Buzz,’ said a voice on the landing-site sound track, which was also available from the museum shop. ‘I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.’

Under the weight of their enormous white backpacks, the two holographic astronauts stood stiffly to attention in front of the real television cameras, like a couple of ghostly polar bears.

‘I know why we’ve come to the Moon,’ murmured Gates. ‘But I can’t imagine why they bothered. There’s nothing here.’

‘For one priceless moment,’ said the fruity, self-important voice on the sound track, ‘in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.’

‘Priceless, yeah,’ sneered Cavor. ‘It hadn’t happened before, and it certainly hasn’t happened since.’

‘One in their pride in what you have done.’

‘Still,’ Cavor added grudgingly, ‘it was a hell of an achievement.’

‘And one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.’

‘Thank you, Mister President,’ said the voice of Neil Armstrong. ‘It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations.’

‘Peace,’ chuckled Gates. ‘People used to talk about that a lot.’

‘Men with a vision for the future,’ said Armstrong.

‘He sounds a little choked,’ observed Gates. ‘Like he’s going to cry or something.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said the president.[111] ‘And all of us look forward to seeing you on the Hornet on Thursday.’

‘That’s the name of a boat,’ explained Cavor. ‘Back in olden times, they used to land spaceships in the ocean.’

‘I look forward to that very much, sir,’ said the second astronaut, Buzz Aldrin.

The two holographic astronauts saluted, then turned away from the camera, and promptly disappeared. The show was over, and the crowd around the dome started to applaud.

‘That was interesting,’ said Cavor.

‘I suppose,’ shrugged Simou. ‘But hardly worth the trip.’

‘All sorts will be here on July twentieth,’ said Gates. ‘World leaders, company chairmen, commissioners, you name it.’

‘More fool them,’ said Simou.

‘Haven’t you got any sense of history?’ demanded Cavor.

‘Nope, can’t say that I have,’ admitted Simou. ‘I’ve always been too concerned with the future to give the past much thought. My future. Such as the small matter of whether or not I’ll still be alive in a year’s time. History’s a luxury I could never afford.’

‘That’s why we came,’ said Gates. ‘To get a lot of things we could never afford.’

‘Yeah, well, a sense of history’s well down my list,’ said Simou. ‘Right now I’ll settle for one of these lunar ladies. Thanks to all this one-sixth g, my cock has been floating around in my pants like one of those command modules. Since we arrived on the Moon I don’t think there’s been one time when it’s ever been pointed at the ground.’

‘Me too,’ grinned Gates.

‘This place does have its advantages,’ said Cavor. ‘My prosthetic arm has never felt so light. I hardly notice it at all. It’s almost as if it was the real thing.’

Simou clapped his hands enthusiastically. ‘Whaddya say, Gates? Shall we go and find ourselves some lunar ladies?’

Gates shook his head. ‘No, I’m not in the mood. I think I’ll go back.’

He waved them off and walked in the direction of the hotel. Gates didn’t feel he could leave Lenina alone for too long. There was no point in telling anyone yet, not until he was quite sure, but in truth he was worried about her. What with her breathlessness and the way she covered her torso whenever he came near her, Gates had the idea Lenina had entered, or was about to enter, the active Three Moon phase of the virus. He knew he had no alternative but to ask her about it. But exactly how did you ask the girl you loved if she just happened to be dying?

What was it that the president had said on the sound track? ‘... in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.’ Gates had never been in a church. He wasn’t even sure if he even

believed in God. But he was beginning to wish that he knew how to pray.

VI

If men and women did not die, they would have little need of a divinity to engineer human beginnings and endings. The belief in God and the elevation of the total personality to a thing in itself that must endure forever — such ideas continue to persist because of the preposterous fear of death and the false antithesis that exists between body and soul. Death is still perceived as the great mystery.

The key to understanding death is, of course, the same key that unlocks the mystery of human beginnings. But there’s no reason either of life’s bookends should be treated as a mystery. It’s absurd to argue that an existence with an identifiable beginning should have no end, for that would be to argue the logical impossibility of there being two different states of nonexistence or nothingness. Real revelation comes not from a book, nor from a series of commandments, but from a true understanding of the function of life.

Everything makes sense when the meaning of life has been grasped, and this is nowhere near as slippery as it sounds. The question may have exercised philosophers, alchemists, and scientists for several thousand years — an abiding sense that life has some purpose has been the curse of Homo sapiens — but the answer to this putative riddle is quite a simple one: All life-forms are merely vehicles for DNA survival; and genes are little bits of software that have but one goal — to make copies of themselves. Men, marsupials, and mollusks are just sophisticated conveyances that their respective duplicating programs have created to help them reproduce. This is the only true meaning of life, and the most successful DNA sequences are the variants that are better than others in competing for the planet’s scarce resources. We call this process of the survival of the fittest natural selection. Thus it may be seen that human beings are nothing more than a highly successful vehicle for one particular DNA message.

Life is in no way devalued by this analysis; rather it is strengthened. Man may be very like a computer that has been programmed to replicate the original lines of genetic program code. But DNA’s performance and capacity to preserve a message is vastly superior to any known or anticipated computer. The mathematics of the DNA archive is nothing short of staggering. Each gene in your body has been recopied as many as twenty billion times with 99 percent accuracy. Just imagine how degraded any other method of preserving a valuable text for the archives would be by such repeated copying. For this reason alone life cannot be too common in the universe. Indeed it is arguably a cosmic principle.

But the success of the DNA sequence is not limited to producing the most effective vehicular bodies for reproduction. The long-term survival of a DNA sequence is not limited to the replicator’s own body. A corollary of DNA success is the way in which genes affect the world at large — successful genes reaching beyond their bodies and changing the world around them. Spider genes spin a web, bird genes build a nest, and bee genes construct a honeycomb. Most successful of all, the human gene reaches out to invent the wheel — and anything else that may contribute to its chances of successful reproduction: the longbow, the plow, writing, the saddle, the printing press, the telescope, the camera, the electric light, penicillin, ad infinitum. It is not long before the most successful replicator, man, has invented himself another replicator — the computer. As digital programs are copied many times over, it is no time at all before the survival success story that is synthetic code sequences can affect the world around them. Computers build other machines. Computers build better computers. And with the creation of the first computer virus — which acts very like a biological virus — a new era in evolution is born: artificial replication. Viruses mutate. They find a way of ensuring their survival, of manipulating the world beyond the computer. Replicators are by definition opportunistic. That is the foundation of their success.

Doubtless the reader will be familiar with one of the central panels from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican as painted by Michelangelo, entitled The Creation of Adam.[112] God and Adam, members of the same race of superbeings, confront each other against a primordial, half-formed landscape. Life seems to leap to Adam like an electric spark from the hand of God — a communication from one successful replicator to another.[113] Both are reaching out to change the world around them.

Is it possible that, one day, the relationship between man and computer could be depicted in a similar way? Might there come a time when, somehow, the two most successful sequences of digital information on the planet — DNA and binary code — will reach out and change each other in some profound way? Because I think that’s what were all reaching for — that Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo moment.

VII

In the one-sixth gravity of the Moon, there was little necessity that a chair should require cushioning or upholstery. As a result, the design requirements of the two matching chairs on which Gates and Dallas sat adjacent to each other, while Prevezer readied his Simworld equipment, had been purely visual. To Rameses Gates, each of the sculpted white nanomarble chairs had a windswept equipoise that recalled the wing of an angel — wasn’t there a category of angel ranked below a cherubim, called a throne?[114] He was not a religious man, although he was nonetheless familiar with the concept of angels. In these new millenarian times it was hard not to be, with several dozen religious cults[115] offering a spiritual introduction to your very own guardian angel as a guarantee of a personal resurrection after death. Now that the robbery was growing nearer, Gates realized he might have welcomed the reassurance of a guardian angel, or two.

To Dallas’s more scientific eye the chairs looked like two lumps of melted candle wax — something much more prosaic. Which could not be said of the spherical, transparent, and self-supporting structure of electro-tetrahedrons that Prevezer now placed on each man’s head.

‘I thought you didn’t go in for immersive head-mounted displays,’ remarked Simou, who, like Cavor, Ronica, and Lenina, was in Prevezer’s suite to watch him conduct the simulation.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘These aren’t headsets — they’re geodesic MRIs. That’s magnetic resonance imagers, to you. It takes an image of the cerebral cortex and then turns it into a kind of digital diagram — like a topographical map of Earth. The geodesic dome then subdivides the scan into tiny digital boxes called voxels, so that an algorithm can select those particular voxels on the cerebral cortex that process sensory information and working memory.’

Prevezer adjusted the geodesic dome on Dallas’s shoulders. ‘How does that feel? Comfortable?’

‘Like it was hardly there,’ admitted Dallas.

‘That’s the whole idea,’ Prevezer said proudly as he retired behind the computer lectern to initiate the simulation countdown sequence. ‘You won’t get nausea or headaches with a geodesic. Not like those crappy head-mounted displays you still see around. Antique porno-projection mounts, ’n’ shit like that.’

Prevezer ran through some final diagnostic program checks. ‘The fellow who invented this design was a guy called Buckminster Fuller. He wanted to create a low-cost building and used a design he’d originally visualized as an analogical aid for a system of thought. Curiously enough, the geodesic mimics the way we now create a simulation model. The way Fuller imagined the thinking process, only the surface of the sphere consisted of relevant experiences or thoughts. Experiences too small to be relevant remained inside the sphere, and those that were too large stayed outside.’

‘Some of us know what that’s like,’ grumbled Lenina. ‘It seems to me this simulation would have made a lot more sense if we could all have experienced it. It’s not much of a run-through for a plan if not everyone is allowed to run through it.’

‘You know, you’re absolutely right,’ said Prevezer, his voice sharp with sarcasm. He didn’t even look at Lenina; he was too busy connecting his computer to a small display, which was worn over his left eye so that he could keep a constant visual check on their vital signs while Gates and Dallas progressed through the Simworld he had modeled. ‘The trouble is, there isn’t a computer that’s been built that can handle more than two POVs in the same Simworld.’

‘Prev’s right, Lenina,’ said Dallas. ‘This is as good as it gets. I’m sorry we can’t all rehearse the plan in simulation, but it’s not a perfect world.’

‘Which world are you talking about?’ she asked, walking away toward the window. ‘Yours, or mine?’

‘Lenina,’ Gates said. ‘That’s enough.’

Prevezer switched on the two geodesic MRIs remotely, lighting up each of the two domes like a small planetarium.

‘Okay, try and keep your heads as still as possible,’ he told them, as on the screen in front of his eye the complex pattern of ridges and troughs that was Dallas’s brain unfolded like a fingerprint. ‘You’re looking good, Dallas.’ And then: ‘You, too, Gates. Both of you will be pleased to hear there’s no sign of any significant abnormalities. Just healthy-looking brains with good axon interconnections for the electro-neuroneedles. Now keep especially still. You might feel a very slight localized prickling sensation on your scalp, followed by a tingling sensation.’

From inside the geodesic MRI that crowned each man’s head, a series of tiny flexible needles telescoped their way toward his scalp.

‘I hate needles,’ said Gates, grimacing with discomfort, his eyes closed.

‘Don’t talk. It makes your head vibrate and interferes with the neuroneedle collimator. Hold it steady. Hold it.’ The needles were in place. ‘Okay. You can relax now. You’re both hooked.’

‘That’s it?’ Gates blinked several times.

‘Didn’t feel a thing,’ confessed Dallas.

‘Just don’t sneeze,’ advised Simou.

‘In about one minute that won’t be possible,’ murmured Prevezer. ‘At least not in this world. Okay, now close your eyes again. Both of you. When I send you into the synthetic world, it’ll seem less of a shock that way. Normally, I’m introducing people to a world of pleasure and leisure. However, this particular model’s hardly the stuff that dreams are made of.

‘The program is organized so that the chips and all the relevant sensory neurons have exactly the same parallel function, and are interfaced to be effectively interchangeable. Each chip on the computer is programmed to do exactly what its natural analogue does. The result is a silicon cerebral cortex that has been provided with a different conscious experience from the natural one.’

Prevezer pointed at the computer on the lectern in front of him.

‘Just by touching that button,’ he explained, ‘it’s possible to switch from the natural cortical mode to the artificial one, and vice versa. There’s no behavioral change when the button is pressed, because for each of them there’s no change in the organization of the brain that’s in use — be it synthetic or natural.

‘It’s kind of like having a prosthetic, except that in the case of a brain, the artificial one offers a different conscious experience — one that’s created by me. There’s another important difference. To them it will feel almost exactly like the real thing.

‘Get ready, gentlemen, you have ten seconds before entering Simworld, on my mark. Ten seconds. Nine, eight...’

Cavor glanced at his prosthetic arm and reflected that lately it hadn’t felt like a prosthetic at all. It had felt much more like the real thing. Possibly even better, if such a thing was possible. Not stronger exactly, just different, in a way he found hard to describe. He knew it had to be something to do with the drugs he was taking.

‘Five, four, three, two, one, switch.’

Prevezer pressed the button that consigned his two charges to a different conscious experience and then, having checked their vital signs and seen that everything looked normal, glanced wearily at the faces of his onlooking colleagues. It was almost as if they actually expected to see something happen to the two men wearing the geodesics. He laughed scornfully, and said, ‘You guys look as if you thought they were going to disappear or something.’

‘I’d sure like to see what I look like in virtual reality,’ said Ronica.

Prevezer winced. ‘Please don’t ever call it that. If you want to describe what we’re doing here, you say it’s a simulation, or a model, or a surrogate world, or a Simworld, but never virtual reality. That stuff’s for kids.’

‘Whatever you want to call it,’ replied Cavor, ‘I’d kind of like to see a Simworld version of me, too.’

‘How will they remember things that won’t actually have happened?’ asked Ronica.

‘You remember your dreams, don’t you?’

‘Yes, but dreaming is something the brain does for itself.’

Prevezer shook his head. He wasn’t much used to explaining the tricks of his profession. Mostly you just stuck someone into a Simworld and then put your feet up while they got on with it. He was getting a little tired of all this Q and A.

‘Whatever goes through sensory processing ends up in their memories. And when they come back to the natural world, their recollections will seem quite real to them, I can assure you. As real as any of you might have of our flight to the Moon, for example.’

Lenina didn’t think much of that comparison: To her mind the flight hadn’t felt any different from any simulation she’d experienced. And she wasn’t much impressed with Prevezer’s highhanded attitude.

‘While you’re making such a good case for your expertise,’ said Lenina, ‘you might reassure me that they’ll be okay.’ Her own experience of simulations had been that they were only as good as the person operating the computer.

Prevezer made a face. ‘Of course they’ll be okay. There would be no point in making a model for them to experiment on if there was a significant risk of injury. They might just as well go ahead and tackle the real thing. Which is not to say that things can’t feel very unpleasant, even painful. I mean everyone’s heard of bad simulations, right? They can leave you feeling exhausted, even traumatized, but there’s nothing physical that can happen to you.’

Even as he said it, Prevezer knew this wasn’t true. People frequently died in simulations, but that was usually because they were sick and wanted to go that way.

‘Besides, I can usually figure what’s happening. I may not be able to see into the simulation itself, but the program numbers give me a good idea of where they are and what’s happening and when they’ve finished in there. Also I keep a close eye on all their vital signs — heart, breathing, brain activity. With experience, you get to recognize when things are going wrong. If they are, you just hit the button and bring them back.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that. Hey, listen, no one’s ever been injured inside one of my simulations.’

This was only partly true. None of Prevezer’s clients had ever been physically injured. But there were a few whose minds had never been the same again.

Lenina looked at Gates and then nodded. ‘Glad to hear it. For your sake. Because if anything happens to Gates, you’ll need a cyberglove to feel your dick. Understand?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Think about it,’ she yawned, for the tenth time in as many minutes. By now she had faced the truth that lay behind her constant state of tiredness, and the rash on her body. There could be no doubt about it. She had less than one hundred and twenty days to live. Much less, to judge by the way she was feeling. ‘That guy’s all I’ve got in the world. And I’m not about to let anything happen to him.’

‘Everything’s going to be just fine,’ he insisted, through clenched teeth.

‘Good. In that case, I think I’ll lie down. Do you mind if I use your bed, Prev? I’m beat. I don’t think I’ve adjusted to the lunar time zone yet.’

‘Be my guest.’ Prev watched her go into his bedroom with a mixture of irritation and pity. He’d modeled enough simulations for people with the virus to recognize the Three Moon phase when he stared it in the face. He guessed that underneath all the makeup Lenina was wearing on her face, there was a rubelliform rash. He also felt a degree of admiration for her. She was pretty tough just to be walking around like that. He guessed that everyone except Ronica had the same thought. Ronica hadn’t seen enough of the virus at close quarters to recognize a Three Moon phase.

‘Where exactly are they now?’ she asked, when Lenina had gone into Prevezer’s bedroom.

‘Where else but at the beginning?’ he said. ‘In the RLV, approaching the Descartes Crater.’

I Simworld: Elapsed Time 00:00 Hours

‘Three, two, one, switch...’

Dallas opened his eyes to find himself seated on the flight deck of the Mariner RLV. In front of him were Gates, in the commander’s seat, and Lenina’s surrogate, in the pilot’s. Leaning slowly forward in the authentic microgravity conditions of a Moon space flight, he touched Gates on the shoulder. The big man started as he saw that they’d made the switch to the simulated world, but instinctively checked the controls first before turning to face Dallas.

‘Welcome to the unreal world,’ smiled Dallas, although to his touch, it felt real enough. Gates’s shoulder, the pressure suit he was now wearing, the back of his own flight-deck chair, the payload bay window behind his helmet, the whoosh of the RLV’s air-conditioning on his face, and the familiar stench of inefficient waste management in his wrinkling nostrils — all of these were reassuringly substantial.

‘Thanks,’ said Gates, adjusting the microphone in front of his mouth and then his seat belt. ‘Feels like we were never in TB at all. Like we dreamed the whole thing, y’know?’

‘Except that I had the same dream,’ offered Dallas. ‘What’s our position?’

It was Lenina who answered him, her voice sounding perhaps a little inhuman.

‘We’re on automatic pilot,’ she said. ‘Approaching the Descartes Crater along a south-by-southwest course. Our current position is ten degrees latitude by twenty degrees longitude. Altitude one thousand feet. Horizontal velocity, one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Sixty-five miles to target. We’ll be there in half an hour.’

Gates pulled off his glove and touched Lenina’s cheek experimentally with the back of his hand.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What’s the deal?’

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, amused at how her skin felt as smooth and cool as it had when he’d first met her. She was not wearing makeup and there was no trace of the Three Moon phase of P2 that threatened to kill the real Lenina back at the hotel.

Lenina glanced at him, puzzled. ‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask? Is this some kind of joke?’

‘No reason, no joke. Go to manual.’

‘Going to manual,’ said Lenina and, taking hold of the flight stick, she switched off the autopilot.

‘Prepare for Abort to Landing,’ he ordered.

‘Preparing for ATL,’ confirmed Lenina.

‘Simou? You there?’

‘Of course, I’m here,’ said a voice in Gates’s headset. ‘Where the hell did you think I’d be? I mean, the Galileo’s nice, but I signed up for the whole trip, remember?’

Gates turned to grin at Dallas. ‘This takes a little getting used to,’ he admitted. ‘So far this is a pretty realistic simulation.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Dallas.

‘You ready with that circuit board?’ Gates asked Simou.

‘It’s loaded and ready to roll.’

‘Listen up, everyone,’ said Gates. ‘On requesting an ATL from the Descartes computer we’ll have to provide cockpit conversations and instrument readings, so from now on, all communications are for real.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever that means.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Lenina frowned. ‘Have you been drinking, or something?’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me. Just fly the plane.’

The First National’s landing facility was a high-security area and strictly forbidden to all lunar flight traffic. Permission to land was given by the Descartes computer only after it had received an authorized descent-to-landing code, at which stage the high-explosive mines that lay underneath the surface of the landing area would be electronically disabled. Any approach by a spaceship that was unauthorized drew the risk of a missile attack. Only in cases of real emergency did the computer have the discretion to allow a ship to put down without the necessary landing codes. However, this required the stricken craft to send the Descartes computer all its in-flight data, as well as cockpit voice recordings. In a matter of seconds, the computer could assess whether the emergency was genuine: first, by analyzing the flight data, and second, by subjecting voice recordings to a polygraphic lie-detector. If it became evident to the computer that a deception was being perpetrated, an emergency landing would be denied and the vehicle fired upon.

To an experienced pilot like Gates, Dallas’s solution to this problem was frighteningly straightforward: Simou was to engineer a real in-flight emergency that would trigger itself close to the Descartes Crater. Nothing else but a genuine emergency would do, Dallas had argued, something sufficiently serious that would necessitate an immediate ATL, but that could still be repaired by Simou in the time it took to execute the remainder of the plan. The danger was that a real emergency might force them down short of the landing site: For a spaceship the size of the Mariner and in a highland area lacking suitable alternative landing sites, that would be a disaster. A great deal was going to depend on Gates’s skill as a pilot, and very possibly, as a liar. Either way, there was a considerable amount of risk involved, something the real Simou had already stated.

‘If you balance a pencil on its point, it will always fall down. It always obeys the law of gravity — at least, it does when you’re on Earth. The trouble is that you can never predict which way the pencil will fall. The law of gravity’s a very precise law, but with a very imprecise outcome. In other words, without knowing the exact condition of the Mariner, not to mention the precise flight conditions and a whole load of other variables that frankly can’t be calculated, it’s impossible to predict how this RLV — like the pencil — will behave in the circumstances. What we have here is a system that contains an extreme sensitivity to its starting conditions, so that the smallest variation in those conditions might lead to some very different outcomes. We might explode. We might implode. We might crash-land. We might make it to the landing area and be unable to carry out repairs. I don’t know what the rest of your plan entails, Dallas, but if it’s anything like this part, then we have our work cut out for us.’

‘No one ever said this was going to be easy,’ Dallas had answered. ‘I always thought that this would be the most hazardous stage of the plan, not least because it puts everyone at risk, instead of just me and Gates when we break into the main facility. But calculated risk is part of the strategy. That’s why we’re trying things out in the simulation first. To assess the risks and, where possible, to minimize them.’

For several minutes the simulated flight proceeded in silence as everyone waited for the emergency: a tiny explosive charge, designed to imitate the impact of a grain-sized meteorite traveling at ten miles per second, placed by Simou on the RLV’s nose, just below the cockpit window, between the aluminum skin of the fuselage and the ceramic-hafnium heat shield. The chances of such a thing happening for real were almost insignificant, but the consequences extremely serious.

Gates found himself holding his breath, a little surprised that a simulation could create such a feeling of tension. As an astroliner pilot, he’d spent many hours in simulators learning to cope with whatever the instructors might throw at him: main engine failures, throttle failures, reaction control system failures, attitude control system failures, even computer failures, but never anything like this — so many other malfunctions were always more probable than the scenario that was about to unfold. But then unpredictability was, as Simou had argued, the hallmark of any bona fide accident.

Suddenly, a loud bang — louder than Gates had been anticipating — rocked the Mariner, blasting a tiny hole no bigger than a pinhead through the cockpit fuselage and setting off the master alarm. Gates shuddered involuntarily, genuinely scared by the actuality of what had apparently happened. The urgency in his voice was real enough.

‘Jesus Christ, we’re losing pressure. Go to oxygen. Close off mid-deck.’

Dallas jumped from his seat to close the interdeck access hatch. At the same time he pulled down the visor to his helmet and switched on his own oxygen.

‘Hatch door closed,’ he confirmed, and then buckled himself back into his seat. He heard another loud bang as the Mariner’s reaction control system rockets fired to correct the RLV as it rolled around its own longitudinal axis in response to the propulsive action of the cabin air venting into space.

‘We’ve been hit by something,’ yelled Lenina. ‘Must have been a small meteorite.’

They heard another loud bang as the primary thruster fired. From inside the Mariner it sounded like a cannon going off. This time the RLV began to pitch around its own transverse axis. The primary thrusters, used for rapid rotations or for moving the RLV sideways in orbit, were proving much too powerful for Gates to use in attempting to steady the spacecraft.

‘Switching off primaries,’ he yelled. ‘Going to stick control.’

The vernier thrusters, a smaller type of thruster, had a gentler effect on the RLV’s orientation; these were operated by the ship’s computer and fired in response to the motion and direction of the flight stick.

‘We’re going to have to abort to landing,’ declared Gates.

‘Got a lot of pressure building up in those maneuvering fuel tanks.’

‘Forget about it,’ said Gates. ‘Just look for a landing site.’

Lenina was already looking out of the window.

‘This is all high ground,’ she reported. ‘You couldn’t land a football around here. Wait a minute.’ She was looking at the computer now. ‘There’s a landing facility on the Moon map. Dead ahead. Ten miles. How’s that for luck. It’s restricted, but maybe they’ll let us land. Can we make that?’

Inside his helmet Gates felt a bead of sweat roll down his face and onto his lips. It tasted of salt. But was the taste real, or synthetic?

‘Incoming transmission,’ said Lenina.

‘This is the First National Blood Bank at Descartes Crater,’ said the voice. ‘You are approaching a restricted area. Please turn left onto a heading of one-zero-zero, and increase your altitude to two thousand feet.’

‘Negative to that, Descartes,’ said Gates. ‘We have an ATL emergency here. Requesting permission to land.’

‘Permission denied. I repeat, this is a restricted area. Without proper authorization you cannot ATL here. Our landing area is laid with antispacecraft mines.’

The RLV shuddered as Gates tried to hold her steady.

‘I’m not talking about a flat tire, Descartes,’ he yelled. ‘We are venting air. Repeat, we are venting air. We’re coming down with or without your permission. Passing you by is not an option. We’ll have to take our chances with your mines.’

‘Pressure still building in those thruster tanks,’ Lenina said coolly.

‘If we close the valves, we won’t even make it as far as Descartes,’ Gates shouted back at her.

‘It’s that, or blow up,’ she told him.

‘Shunt some of the propellant into the main fuel tanks. Jesus Christ, do I have to think of everything?’

‘Shunting propellant.’

With his hands gripping the armrests of his seat, Dallas glanced out of the flight-deck window. He could see the main facility in front of them now — like a gold coin lost on a volcanic beach. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘Dead ahead.’

‘Dead’s about right, unless we get permission to land,’ said Gates, as he swallowed deeply. This was proving to be much more realistic than he had ever bargained for. His heart was beating as if he’d run up several flights of stairs. Even if they did receive the Descartes computer’s permission to land, bringing the Mariner down wasn’t going to be easy. With each touch of the flight stick the RLV pitched from side to side.

‘Mariner, please transmit all flight data and CVRs for verification of your emergency situation.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ said Lenina. This was what they had been waiting to hear, and she immediately ordered the flight computers to comply. ‘Sending flight data and CVRs.’

‘Received,’ said Descartes. ‘And analyzing.’

‘Make it fast,’ said Gates as he wrestled to control the unwieldy craft. ‘We’re committed to an ATL whether you like it or not.’ He throttled back the main engines to less than 10 percent of power and dropped the undercarriage. They were losing altitude fast now. The landing area was less than a mile away. In just over a minute they would be down on the ground, whatever the computer decided.

‘Descartes, this is Mariner. What is our landing status?’

There was no reply on his headset. Less than half a mile now. He glimpsed the whole facility ahead, golden in the sunlight, like the lost city of El Dorado.

‘Thirty seconds to landing,’ said Lenina.

The Mariner shuddered again.

‘I wish I could control this damned roll,’ said Gates. ‘Damn it, Descartes, what is our status please?’

Still no reply. Gates was starting to wonder what it might feel like to be blown to pieces in a simulation. He knew you could experience great pleasure — he’d had enough Simsex in his time to know the truth of that — so why not great pain, too?

‘Hang on, everyone,’ he said into his mike. ‘We’re going down.’ The strain of the moment was in his voice for everyone, including the computer, to hear. A hundred yards to go and still no answer. ‘Is there anyone there? Please, someone.’

Even as he spoke, he recognized the futility of his words. The facility at the First National was unmanned. Descartes was all there was. It was just a computer between them and simulated oblivion.

‘Here we go...’

‘Mariner, you are clear to ATL. All mines have been disarmed.’

Gates did not reply. It was too late to say anything at all. The landing site rushed up at him and was obliterated by the RLV’s giant shadow. The next second they were down on the ground with a loud bang, like the sound of a fast-moving truck hitting an enormous bump in the road. Quickly, Gates hit the engine stop button and said, ‘Shutting down engines.’ Then he collapsed back in his seat, already exhausted.

Lenina started to go through the checklist that automatically followed any landing. Gates turned around to look at Dallas. The two men grinned at each other and exchanged a punched handshake in silence.

‘Descartes, this is Mariner,’ said Lenina. ‘We’re on the ground.’

‘Mariner, we copy you on the ground.’

‘Stand by, Descartes,’ she said, and switching off the open channel, she began to key their new status into the flight computer.

‘Jesus, that was close,’ said Gates. ‘For a moment there. Tell me we’re still alive.’

‘I think, therefore I am,’ said Dallas, as he unbuckled his seat harness and climbed almost weightlessly to his feet. ‘I’d say that was a pretty useful experience, wouldn’t you?’

‘Sure. It’s convinced me of two things. One is that I need some synthetic nerves. Mine are shot to pieces. And the other is that this plan of yours is crazy.’

‘It worked, didn’t it? Come on, there’s lots to do.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’

II Simworld: Elapsed Time 1 Hour 01 Minutes

Before leaving the flight deck, Dallas opened the payload bay doors and used the remote manipulator system to deploy what looked like the wingless fuselage of a smaller RLV. Entirely covered with the ceramic-hafnium tiles that protected only the nose, bottom, and wingtips of the Mariner, this was the space fridge,[116] designed to carry perishable material back to Earth. Equipped with three primary thruster engines and two folding wings, it was the same model used by the blood banks themselves: the space fridge attached to the rear of the RLV, thereby doubling the available cargo capacity from two tons to four. Dallas had good reason for deploying the fridge immediately, as he would shortly explain to Rameses Gates.

But first there was a medical emergency to fabricate. Once Dallas was on mid-deck with the rest of the team, the hatch was closed and the crew quarters were repressurized so that Ronica could remove her pressure suit. As soon as she was wearing just her underwear, she lay down on a hammock and attached herself to a computerized transfusion machine so that she could carry out her own phlebotomy.

‘One medical emergency, coming up,’ she said.

As the venipuncture proceeded automatically, Ronica’s blood began to be drawn into a plastic tube. With no gravity to speak of, a pump in the machine was slowly sucking the life’s blood out of her body like a mechanical vampire. She was used to the usual autologous donation of 10 percent of her total blood volume. Weighing one hundred and forty pounds, she had a total volume of just under five thousand milliliters, and by her own estimate, any donation of more than 20 percent, twice as much as normal, would prompt her body to exhibit the hypovolemic reaction Dallas was after. The noise the pump made while performing this task was disconcertingly sibilant, and apparently quenchless. Rather more quietly, the same machine’s computer recorded the transfusion rate and all her vital signs. It was this medical data, conveying an apparent medical emergency, that Dallas planned to transmit to the Descartes computer.

‘Ten percent,’ he noted.

Ronica kept her eyes on the crimson snake beside her bare arm.

‘How do you feel?’

Taking a deep breath, she glanced over at the computer readings and then closed her eyes. ‘A little faint,’ she admitted.

Still the pump kept on sucking the blood out of her.

‘Fifteen percent,’ said Dallas. ‘Systolic and diastolic pressures falling now.’ He picked up her wrist and checked the pulse pressure. Her skin felt cold and clammy to his touch.

Ronica took a deep breath and swallowed nervously. ‘Where do you get these good ideas, Dallas?’ she asked.

‘They just come to me, through the ether, at the speed of light.’

‘That can’t be true,’ she said, eyelids flickering. ‘No signals carrying information can travel faster than light.’

‘Twenty percent.’

‘Not feeling so good now. Nauseous. Must be something I ate.’

‘I hope she doesn’t vomit,’ said Simou, unfolding a plastic bag. ‘Smells bad enough in here already.’

‘Maybe you’d like to volunteer for this instead,’ said Lenina.

‘Not me. I’ve got a puncture to mend, remember?’

‘Then shut up.’

‘Twenty-five percent,’ said Dallas.

Ronica retched again.

‘You’d better start talking to Descartes,’ Dallas told Gates. ‘Another few minutes and she’ll be in hemorrhagic shock.’

Gates was already positioned close to the radio. He flicked on a switch to open a channel.

‘Descartes, this is Mariner.’

‘I’ve been trying to contact you, Mariner,’ said Descartes. ‘What is your status, please?’

‘I can confirm that we were probably struck by a tiny meteorite,’ said Gates. ‘It penetrated the ship’s hull, causing a slow decompression on the flight deck. Until we can make repairs, that area’s sealed off. So there’s no immediate danger of asphyxiation.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, Mariner.’

‘In a while, a couple of my crew will go EVA and fix the hole with the UHT electron-beam welder.[117] However, right now, I have a more immediate problem on my hands. One of my female crew has been injured. It would seem the meteorite struck her, like a bullet. There’s no damage to any of her vital organs, but she’s lost an awful lot of blood. Since we’re going to be here for several hours I’d like to request some RES Class One whole blood component, in order to carry out an infusion.’

‘This isn’t a clearing bank, Mariner,’ explained Descartes. ‘It’s a federal reserve. This bank exists to guarantee other blood banks on Earth. People don’t make deposits. Nor are they withdrawn. Blood supplies are sold in order to help the government balance its books and meet its borrowing commitments. When times are good it will buy supplies to meet any future borrowing requirements. That’s the way it works here. And besides, the blood here is deep-frozen. You would have to thaw it first.’

‘Thirty percent,’ announced Dallas. ‘She’s going into shock.’

‘I’m well aware of all that, Descartes,’ Gates told the computer. ‘I’m also aware of what it says in the International Convention of World Blood Banks. That’s the convention that exists to protect all autologous donors in emergencies. According to section fourteen, paragraph ten, and I quote, “Provided authorized autologous donation codes are given, all banks, regardless of their hematological charter, are obliged to provide autologous donors with the necessary components in an emergency.” End quote. You can leave the preparation to us.’

‘You’re very well informed,’ said Descartes. ‘However, I must insist on conducting my own patient evaluation. Are your crew member’s vital signs being monitored by a computer, Mariner?’

‘Affirmative, Descartes. Anticipating your compliance with section fourteen, paragraph ten, and to save time, she’s already been hooked up to a trans-infusion pump. I’m sending you her vitals, now.’ Gates flicked a switch on the communications panel, and then covered the microphone with the palm of his hand.

‘Let’s hope Descartes goes for it,’ he told Dallas. ‘How’s she doing?’

Ronica looked pale and feverish. The rest of the crew watched her with a concern that was only partly due to her physical condition: If the Descartes computer considered her phlebotomy was not urgent, they were stalled.

‘Her body temperature’s way down,’ said Dallas, reading what appeared on the computer screen. ‘And she’s showing signs of tachycardia and insufficient tissue perfusion.’

‘From the data you’ve sent me,’ said Descartes, ‘it would seem that she’s still losing blood. I can hardly organize you a specific delivery of component until I know how much she will need. To do that you will first need to stabilize her condition.’

Dallas winced and switched off the pump. He should have thought of that. He waited a minute until the trans-infusion computer had had sufficient time to register that no more blood was being drawn, and then nodded at Gates.

‘Descartes? I think we’ve managed to stabilize her now,’ reported Gates. ‘Sending you new data to confirm that.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Do you copy?’

‘Affirmative, Mariner. According to the data you have sent me, she requires fourteen hundred and thirty-two milliliters of blood, type O, genotype OO, phenotype O, showing H-substance red-cell antigens, and all normal plasma antibodies. Please provide me with your crew member’s autologous donor validation code, now.’

Gates picked up Ronica’s hand and read the tag she always wore around her wrist.

‘O-L-O-I/ 0.45. 1.80. 0.75. 0.75.’

‘Password?’

‘Mizpah.’

‘Confirmed,’ said Descartes. ‘Three units have been debited from your crew member’s deposit account. The cryoprecipitate will be with you presently. Please await further instructions for its retrieval.’

‘Thanks,’ said Gates, and closing the communications channel, he immediately put the trans-infusion machine into reverse, pumping the blood that had been removed straight back into Ronica’s body.

It wasn’t blood he wanted from the First National’s vault right now, it was the electric car that delivered it.

III Simworld: Elapsed Time 1 Hour 49 Minutes

A small cylindrical airlock provided access between the mid-deck section and the payload bay. Swallowing a dysbaric pill, a quick chemical means of purging the bloodstream of all nitrogen (previously astronauts undertaking EVA were required to breathe pure oxygen for three hours to prevent dysbarism), Dallas and Gates entered the airlock, closed the door to mid-deck behind them, and climbed into their EVA space suits. These were bulkier than the pressurized suits worn during ascent and descent and provided enough power and oxygen for extra-vehicular activity for upward of sixteen hours. Dallas figured they might need every minute of that time, although he knew there were replacement supplies to be found inside the main facility.

As soon as they were secure in their suits, they pumped out the airlock and then went through the door that led into the open payload bay. Then they closed the airlock door behind them and repressurized the compartment so that Simou and Prevezer could follow.

Standing there in the open payload bay, Gates had his first real opportunity to have a good look at the First National’s main facility — during the landing he’d been too busy trying not to crash the RLV to spend any time admiring Dallas’s apparently impregnable design. The main facility was located about a quarter of a mile to the west of the landing site, at the end of a flat road about ten yards wide and several hundred yards long. Both the landing site and the main facility were enclosed by a series of high-voltage fences powered by a field of photovoltaic cells that lay about a hundred yards beyond the perimeter wire to the south. And in the distance, he could see the rim of the surrounding Descartes Crater, where the surface-to-air missile systems protecting the First National and its precious supplies were mounted. The main facility building itself was completely circular and gently vaulted, so that the whole thing looked like the shell of a sea urchin. Ostensibly constructed of one giant dome of breccia-concrete and painted gold to protect the deep-frozen contents against the heat of the bright sunlight, the construction was, as Dallas told Gates, actually composed of a series of concrete shapes that met three to a vertex.

‘It’s a design that was inspired by the Eskimo igloo,’ he said, ‘in that the structure is held up by the rigidity of local planar areas.’

They were using an encrypted frequency to avoid being overheard by the Descartes computer.

‘Very impressive, I’m sure,’ said Gates, who had no more idea of what an igloo looked like than he did of the Eskimo who built one. He pointed to the area of soil and rocks that lay on either side of the landing site and the golden road that led to it. Dallas had already told him that unauthorized road users would be electrocuted. ‘What happens down there?’ he asked. ‘Why not forget about the road and walk across the dirt?’

‘Because of the solar-powered seismographs,’ said Dallas. ‘Very sensitive. And the minefield they control. You wouldn’t get ten yards. Take my word for it. The road is the best way.’

Dallas pointed to where the road led into the main facility. ‘That’s where our transport will be coming from. Come on. We’ve got to get properly chilled before we can take our seats.’

‘Get chilled or get killed,’ grumbled Gates, as he followed Dallas along the floor of the payload bay, using the handrail to steady himself as he went. Near the back of the bay, each man collected a backpack containing all the equipment he would need inside the facility and then jumped over the side of the Mariner.

Both men heard Prevezer’s voice on their headsets as they bounced their way across the landing area to where the Mariner’s robot arm had placed the space fridge.

‘Descartes just told us the blood wagon’s on its way,’ he said. ‘And so are we. We’re entering the airlock now, to suit up.’

‘Give us ten minutes in the space fridge, and then pull us out,’ Dallas told Prevezer. ‘Then proceed as planned.’

‘Roger, that.’

As they walked the few yards to the space fridge, each man drew down his helmet’s gold-painted outer visor to reflect the lunar Sun’s unfiltered glare. On the Moon, a morning lasts for seven days. It takes a whole week for the Sun to climb to its zenith in the black sky, and another week for it to set again, before vanishing behind the western horizon. So close to the lunar equator as Descartes was, Moon temperatures could climb as high as one hundred and ten degrees Celsius (225°F), while at night they could drop as low as minus one hundred fifty-two degrees Celsius (—243°F). It was now 7:30 P.M. local Moon time, and with the whole crater still bathed in bright sunshine, the evening temperature on the landing site was over one hundred degrees Celsius. In the heat, Gates was glad of his water-cooled underwear, although he was acutely aware of just how cold he was about to get.

‘Wouldn’t this have been easier at night?’ he asked. ‘I mean, cooling down ’n’ all?’

‘Much easier,’ agreed Dallas. ‘But how would you like to try and make that landing in near darkness?’

‘You have a point,’ conceded Gates. He opened the door to the fridge and stepped into its cold, dark interior. ‘Shit, I wouldn’t like to make that landing again in a goddamn simulation.’

Dallas followed Gates inside the fridge, flipped up the golden visor, and switched on his helmet lights to illuminate the fridge before closing the door.

Two large heavy-duty polyethylene bags were waiting for them, tethered to the wall of the fridge and spread open like waiting pupae. Backing into one of the bags, Gates zipped it up from the inside and then sat down on an empty cryoprecipitate storage unit. He shook his head and checked his watch, shivering as the near absolute zero temperature of the fridge began to permeate his body bag. ‘Remind me why we’re doing all this ice-cube business again, Dallas.’

Zipped inside his own body bag, Dallas sat alongside him. ‘You know why we’re doing this.’

‘Yes, but it’ll make conversation while we simulate getting hypothermia and freezing to death.’

‘Prevezer’s keeping a close eye on our vital signs in the real world,’ insisted Dallas. ‘He’ll end the simulation if he thinks we’re in trouble. Besides, a hypothermia victim is never dead, only cold. Fact is, you can demonstrate all the clinical signs of death and still be revived. It’s a condition called metabolic icebox.’

‘That’s now. But who’s going to look after us when it’s time for the real deal?’

‘This is a necessary risk,’ explained Dallas. ‘That is, if we want this stage of the plan to succeed.’ He shivered as cold began to permeate his body. Then the fridge gave a shudder and produced a dull mechanical noise.

‘What was that?’ asked Gates.

‘Helium isotopes venting into space,’ said Dallas. ‘It means that the fridge is doing its job properly. Drawing heat away from us efficiently.’

‘That’s comforting,’ trembled Gates.

‘It ought to be. Might be kind of unpleasant for us if our surface temperature stays too high.’

‘That’s what I meant to ask you, Dallas. In what way unpleasant? You didn’t say.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m already living dangerously.’

‘Okay, you asked for it. Prev and Sim will fetch us out of here and carry us to the electric blood wagon. That way the car’s microwave motion detectors will collect only two approaching body signals. Shouldn’t be too difficult for them. Even carrying a big ox like you. Neither of us weighs more than thirty to forty pounds in one-sixth g.

‘They’ll dump us inside one of the cars, collect the units of blood for Ronica, close the lid of the car, and then move away again. The car computer checks for two retreating signals — Prev and Sim — and then heads back down the golden road to Samarkand. If there aren’t two retreating signals, then Prev and Sim are in big trouble. The computer fires a laser called a Dazer. Even from behind a sun visor it’s more than enough to blind you. Then they’d probably wander off into the minefield and goodbye both.’

‘The hell with their comfort and convenience,’ said Gates. ‘What about us?’

‘All units of cryoprecipitate have to be stored at minus one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius. Stored and transported to the First National’s own RLVs. Each refrigerated car is equipped with a thermal heat sensor to protect the integrity of the cryoprecipitate being transported.’

‘Right,’ grunted Gates, who was shivering all the time now. According to the readout on his life-support system computer, his core body temperature had already dropped below normal. ‘ ’S why we’re in here, I know all that.’

‘If the sensors detect heat, any heat at all, the on-board computer will assume that the blood has been compromised and then deploy a nanodevice to destroy the units. This is a simple molecular disassembler manufactured to behave like a bacteria. It eats the compromised units, container bags, labels, everything. And then dies. The car contents are then disinfected and vented into space. I’m afraid you and I would be treated in the same way. The nanodevice would eat through our space suits and then us. By the time it finished we’d look like moondust.’

A great spasm of a shiver ran down Gates’s broad back. He was uncertain if this was the result of fear or cold, and finally concluded that it was probably both.

‘Jesus,’ he said through chattering teeth, ‘Christ.’

‘By my estimate, we only have sufficient time to get through the main facility door before what body heat remains inside our suits starts to get out and be detected by the sensors. But for this, we could ride the car all the way through the inner labyrinth door and into the vault itself. Instead, we exit as soon as we’re through the main door and then head for the rest and recreation area to get warm again, before proceeding to the next stage.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Gates said dully. His hands were numb and his core temperature had now dropped to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.

‘It’s a nice balance.’ Dallas’s speech was already sounding slurred, an early sign of mild hypothermia.

‘Nice?’ Gates laughed flatly.

‘Nice. Meaning something requiring great precision.’

‘And I thought it meant nice, as in nice and warm. Whatever the hell that is.’

‘What I mean is that if we don’t get cold enough, we get killed by the nanodevice. But if we get too cold, we die as well.’

‘Oh, that kind of nice. Of course. Dumb of me. I’m shivering like I’ve got a motor disease.’

‘When you stop, you can start to worry,’ Dallas told him. ‘Means heat output from burning glycogen in your muscles. Insufficient. Shivering in waves. Pauses get longer. Until stops altogether. Life threatening.’

The next two or three minutes passed in frozen silence.

Dallas gave a little jump as he heard Prevezer’s voice inside his headset.

‘Okay, cold people, let’s go.’

‘What?’

Dallas felt himself picked up like a side of frozen meat. Why were they being carried, and to where? His thinking processes seemed as frozen as his toes. Something to do with blood. Not the same blood as moved slowly inside him. Different. Lunar sunshine streamed through his unvisored helmet, dazzling him for a second until, slowly closing his eyes, he remembered. Amnesia. Somewhere on the edge of severe hypothermia. Body temperature probably as low as ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe lower. Couldn’t see his EVA computer to check. Much lower than that and they’d really be in trouble. Needed brain to perform something that required higher reasoning. To stay fully conscious inside the electric car. Otherwise might forget to climb out.

Dallas began to count backward from one hundred by nines.

‘Ninety-one,’ he mumbled as Prevezer laid him carefully in the car’s frozen interior. ‘Eighty-two.’ Why was the man carrying him — he couldn’t see if it was Simou or Prevezer — breathing so heavily? Whoever it was sounded like there was something the matter with him.

‘Dallas? Gates? You’re both in the car.’

‘Seventy-three.’

‘Come again?’

‘He’s counting backward by nines to keep his mind alert.’

‘Please collect your components, close the car, and then step away,’ ordered the transport computer.

‘Whatever you say,’ said someone, and then the lid on the car was closed.

There wasn’t supposed to be an opportunity for dialogue with this particular computer, so no open communications channel existed between them; but the channel that existed between the two men lying inside the car and the two men now stepping away from it would last only as long as they were all outside the main facility. Dallas and Gates were relying on Simou and Prevezer to tell them when the car was about to pass through the main door, thus giving them their cue to get out. Once they were through the outer door, Dallas and Gates would have no further verbal contact with the outside until the vault had been breached.

‘Good luck, guys.’

‘Yeah, good luck.’

‘Sixty-four.’

The car, the shape and proportions of a medium-sized missile, began its silent return to the main facility.

‘Dallas? This is Prev. You’re on the move.’

‘Fifty-four. Fifty-five. Fifty-four.’

‘Talk to me, Gates,’ said Simou.

‘Cold,’ said Gates.

‘Forty... forty-six.’

‘Terribly cold,’ he whispered. And then, ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me, Gates. Simou. What’s your name?’

‘Thirty-something.’

‘My name?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Thirty-what, Dallas,’ said Prevezer. ‘Come on, think, man. What comes after forty-six?’

‘Seven. Forty-seven.’

‘My name is...’

‘Negative, Dallas. Think. You were counting backward by nines. If you were hypothermic, you couldn’t do that. Come on, Dallas. You’re halfway there. Just a little longer.’

‘Gates. Your name is Rameses Gates. Can you hear me?’

‘Come on, Dallas. What’s the next number in the sequence?’

‘Gates, answer me.’

‘Thirty-seven, Dallas. The answer’s thirty-seven. Dallas? Are you reading me?’

IV Simworld: Elapsed Time 2 Hours 30 Minutes

Lying in the frozen interior of the electric car, Dallas opened his eyes and tried to remember. For some reason, a number came into his cold and aching head. Twenty-eight. What was the significance of that? But what did it matter now that he was dead and lying inside his tomb? Lying there like some sepulchral statue? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. This living buried man, this quiet mandrake, rest. A voice followed this number.

‘Wake up, Dallas, wake up. The outer door’s opening. You’re about to enter the main facility.’

Until that moment he had not been afraid. But when he saw how close to a frozen death he had come, panic seized him and galvanized his almost rigid muscles. He had momentarily forgotten that this was still a simulation.

‘Get up, Gates. For Christ’s sake move. The door’s inside. The car’s going forward again. Dallas? Move now.’

For a brief second, Dallas had thought he was dreaming. But at last he recognized that this was Prevezer urging them both to action. Quickly he unzipped the polyethylene bag and struggled to his feet, his helmet forcing open the door on top of the electric car. And even as he climbed, then half-jumped, out of the car into the bright light of the main facility’s entrance hall, he recognized that he would have to devise something more certain than the voices of Prevezer and Simou to rouse him when it came to the real thing.

‘Dallas,’ he heard himself mumble as Prevezer and Simou cheered. ‘Back on-line.’

‘We’re about to lose your signal,’ said Simou. ‘Good-bye, Dallas, and good luck.’

Glancing around him he saw that the outer door of the facility had started to slide shut behind them. They had made it, although Gates had yet to stir from the floor of the car.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

Whatever Prevezer and Simou said next was lost as the outer door closed as silently as it had opened.

‘Gates, come on, we’ve got to move.’

The other man remained motionless. Dallas reached down and picked him up, grateful for the microgravity that made possible such a superhuman feat of strength. And not a moment too soon. Even as he carried Gates across the entrance hall and laid him against the airlock door that led into the rest and recreation area, the single inner door leading into the labyrinth opened, and the electric car disappeared into the Stygian darkness beyond. Then the entrance to the labyrinth closed again. No one — not even the First National security workers who handled the supplies of cryoprecipitate — was allowed beyond this door, which was itself protected by a number of safeguards: proximity detectors and mechanical vibration detectors that could activate lethal bolts of electricity. Anyone close to the car’s exterior as it entered the labyrinth would have been fried to a crisp.

Gates remained motionless on the ground, still wrapped inside the body bag. If not for the fact that it and his space suit were intact, Dallas might have suspected that he had already succumbed to the molecular disassembler. Instead Gates had clearly suffered some kind of hypothermic reaction which made it imperative that Dallas, who was himself chilled to the bone, get him warmed up as soon as possible. Dallas switched on the heaters in both their suits, filling them with hot air. Then he dragged Gates into the airlock and repressurized the chamber before opening the hatch that led into the R&R area.

Once Gates was out of the body bag, Dallas was able to see his life-support computer and read off the man’s vital signs. These were not encouraging: Gates’s core body temperature was down to only eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit — much colder than Dallas — while the heart rate was twenty per minute and the breathing rate just one every fifteen seconds. Perhaps having the virus had made him extra sensitive to the extreme cold. After all, body temperature had everything to do with surface blood flow and vasodilation. The only plausible explanation for what had happened to Gates, but not to Dallas, was that having P2 resulted in a quicker maximal vasodilation and increased cutaneous blood flow.

Feeling a little warmer now, Dallas took off his own helmet but decided not to remove Gates’s, so as to help hot air circulate inside the man’s self-contained environment. Searching the frost-covered plastic shielding on the other man’s face he found no indication of life and, had it not been for the vital signs displayed on Gates’s life-support computer, he might have assumed his friend was dead. It was clear that he was looking at a case of metabolic icebox.

What Dallas really couldn’t understand was why Prevezer hadn’t simply ended the simulation by now. Here was Gates, only just alive, with a hardly discernible heart rate and a core body temperature that ought to have told Prevezer something had gone badly wrong, and yet still the simulation continued. Dallas didn’t think it was possible for Gates to die in the simulation, but he hardly felt he could neglect his condition on the assumption that at any minute they would find themselves switched back into the Galileo Hotel and the real world. He had no alternative but to keep Gates warm and wait for his vital signs to improve.

Dallas stood up, stretched out a painful cramp in his leg, and suddenly found he badly wanted to pee. He recognized this was a sign of cold diuresis: vasoconstriction created a greater volume of pressure in the bloodstream, resulting in his kidneys pulling off excess fluid to reduce the pressure. A full bladder was another opportunity for his body to lose heat, so urinating would serve to help him get warm again. There was no time to find a washroom. Fumbling with numb fingers to open the codpiece on his space suit, he stumbled toward a corner of the R&R area to relieve himself. Besides, in the simulation, he didn’t much care how he left the R&R area, especially as he expected the simulation to end at any moment. But when he’d finished urinating and found it still remained in progress, he quickly checked on Gates and then went to find the galley, intent on making them both a hot drink.

V

‘You know, if you fire that thing,’ Prevezer said carefully, ‘your bullet will go straight through a human body and then shatter the window. We’ll all be killed when the room depressurizes.’

‘You let me worry about the gun,’ insisted Rimmer. ‘You just concentrate on doing what I tell you, friend. Besides...’ He collected a small bust of Galileo off the suite’s writing desk and launched it at the window. It bounced off the glass, ricocheted back into the room, and was neatly caught by Simou. Rimmer smiled and added redundantly, ‘Don’t you know anything? It’s armor-plated. After all, you never can tell when a meteorite’s going to give you a cold call from deep space. I thought everyone knew that. Or maybe you just haven’t stayed here before.’ He waved the gun at the bust in Simou’s hands. ‘I wouldn’t get any ideas with that thing, if I were you. Ronica will tell you that I’m the gregarious type. I like killing new people.’

‘Do exactly what he says, Sim,’ Ronica advised him.

Simou placed the bust slowly on the marble floor. Rimmer nodded his approval and then looked at the faces of the other two men in the room — Cavor and Prevezer — sizing them up for any resistance. Cavor understood this and felt certain that Rimmer would underestimate him. In which case he might stand a chance of disarming Rimmer.

‘Ronica and I, we’ve met before,’ Rimmer told the three of them. ‘You gentlemen should be careful of her. She’s the treacherous type. Aren’t you, Roni? You carrying a gun, sweetheart?’

‘Not this time, Rimmer.’

‘Better let me see those panties — make sure.’ Rimmer jerked the gun at the ceiling. ‘So lift that pretty dress you’re wearing and show me there’s nothing more lethal down there than what the Lord gave you to have dominion over men.’

Ronica knew better than to argue with Rimmer. She took hold of the hem of her dress, and lifted it as ordered.

‘Mmm,’ said Rimmer. ‘You’re wearing my favorite kind of underwear. None.’ He shrugged. ‘Looks like you were stripped for action, Roni. I guess this is a love hotel.’

Ronica sneered. ‘Satisfied?’

‘I’ll get to you in a while. We’ve got some unfinished business, you and I.’

Ronica smoothed her dress down over her thighs.

Rimmer turned toward Prevezer. ‘I’ll take a wild guess here. Dallas and the big guy are taking a trip in virtual reality and you’re the tour guide, right?’

‘I prefer the term “Simulated World” myself,’ said Prevezer.

‘Oh, you do, huh?’ Rimmer waved the gun at the others. ‘Okay, apart from the man who just expressed a preference, I want everyone else belly-down on the floor with your hands on the back of your neck.’

Cavor, Ronica, and Simou knelt and then prostrated themselves on the floor as ordered. Cavor recognized that there was little chance of any of them tackling Rimmer while they were on the floor. Clearly, Rimmer knew what he was doing.

‘Shall I tell you what I think is going on here?’ Rimmer wagged his finger thoughtfully. ‘I think that Dallas and friend are carrying out a little experiment. I think they’re using virtual reality’ — he smiled at Prevezer as if challenging the other man to contradict him — ‘to test the integrity of a plan you’re all intending to carry out for real. Now this part is just a guess. But I’d say you and he are planning to rob the First National Blood Bank. Am I right?’

Prevezer said nothing. Rimmer put the gun against his head and repeated the question.

‘Am I right?’

Prevezer nodded. ‘You’re right.’

Rimmer sniffed. ‘Reality, huh? The more we try to get a hold on it, render it, depict it, the more it eludes us. Explain how your setup works.’

While Prevezer told him how the simulation operated, Rimmer stared through the mesh-screen sphere that enveloped Dallas’s head. With eyes closed and his face entirely immobile, Dallas looked quite peaceful, almost as if he was asleep. There was just the odd flurry of rapid eye movement to indicate some activity inside the brain.

When he had been told all he needed to know, Rimmer bit his lip excitedly. Dallas looked like he was merely dreaming. But perhaps a nightmare was what was required.

‘How real is it for them, in the simulation?’

‘Indistinguishable from the real world,’ admitted Prevezer, professional pride getting the better of his tongue. ‘They’re aware that it’s a simulation, but all their senses inform them that it’s very real. They can experience all normal physiological thresholds.’

Rimmer was intrigued. ‘Would that include the pain threshold, by any chance?’ When Prevezer said nothing, Rimmer replaced the barrel of the gun against his head. ‘I won’t hesitate to shoot you, my godlike friend. Please answer.’

‘Yes. All normal physiological thresholds.’

‘Good. So how are they getting on, right now?’ he asked.

‘Not so good.’ Prevezer showed him the two men’s vital signs on the computer screen. ‘These numbers relate to their physiological responses inside the simulation. They tell us how their bodies are reacting even as we speak. Heart rates, body temperatures, lung function spirometry, blood pressure response, everything. As you can see with Gates, his body temperature is very cold and his heart rate is way down. If you weren’t here, I’d have brought him back to reality by now.’

‘I’m not much interested in him,’ said Rimmer. ‘What about Dallas?’

‘Not as bad. Even so, I’d probably have brought him back too. All I have to do to make the switch is press this button.’ Prevezer reached for the button and then yelped as Rimmer smacked his hand hard with the gun.

‘Not until I’m good and ready. First, we’re going to have some fun.’ Rimmer sneered at Dallas. ‘It’s your own fault, you arrogant bastard. Haven’t you heard? The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walketh in darkness.’ He looked at Prevezer. ‘You. Think of some shit to throw at them.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Not in my mind, I think,’ chuckled Rimmer. ‘Reprogram something bad for them.’

‘The place they’re in right now,’ said Prevezer. ‘It would take me a long time to reprogram that. More time than I assume you have. Days probably.’

Rimmer looked at Prevezer through narrowed eyes. ‘This is your thing, isn’t it? Simulations.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve used them myself. Killing games mostly. You know the kind of thing. See how many monsters you can blast to bits inside an hour. In my experience, a good simulation engineer usually has a whole plethora of programs at hand. Programs he can add, one to another, like silicon building blocks. It would be unlike Dallas to choose someone who was not considered to be the best in his professional field. So think hard, my computer-minded friend. Think hard. What other elements can you add to their existing situation? Something really nasty and unpleasant. Unless you want to disappoint me. Ronica will tell you, I lose all my human skills when I’m disappointed.’

VI Simworld: Elapsed Time 3 Hours 30 Minutes

It was another hour before Gates had recovered sufficiently to sit up and drink the hot sugar water Dallas had prepared for him: One box of Jell-O was enough to provide five hundred kilocalories of heat energy.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Dallas.

Gates looked at his still gloved hand and flexed the fingers several times before answering.

‘Stiff,’ he said. ‘Like I spent the night in the icebox.’ Yawning, he added, ‘And I’ve got the mother and father of all headaches.’

‘That’s just dehydration. Keep drinking the sugar water.’

Gates nodded and sipped from the sealed bottle before glancing around at their surroundings.

Arranged along the circumference of the circular-shaped facility, the R&R area reminded him most of the interior of the Clostridium Hotel: a long, sweeping curve of steel flooring underneath a windshield of inclined panes of backlit fretted glass; and on the inside of the bend, a number of glass-fronted rooms that included a galley, a dormitory, a medical facility, a washroom, an armory, a dressing room with spare space suits and life-support packs, a subordinate computer room, and a large lounge. Farther along the corridor was parked an electric car, not dissimilar to the one that had transported the cryoprecipitate from the vault to the landing site, except that it was equipped with four seats and designed to travel all the way around the compass of the facility, instead of to its hermetic and forbidden center.

‘So what’s the story, doc?’ croaked Gates. ‘You got penguin blood or something?’

‘Your cold reaction probably has more to do with your P2,’ said Dallas. ‘I’ve given the matter some thought while you’ve been recovering. You see, the hypothalamus is the major center of the brain for regulating body temperature. It’s sensitive to blood temperature changes of as little as half a degree. I think your own hypothalamus must be even more sensitive than that.’

‘Seem to know a lot about it.’

‘In view of the fact that we were to expose ourselves to hypothermic conditions, naturally it made sense to become a little better informed about the subject.’

‘I guess so. The brain, too.’

‘I’ve always been interested in the brain.’

‘Brains in general or just one brain in particular?’

Dallas looked puzzled.

‘Cavor’s brain, for instance,’ added Gates.

‘Could be.’

Gates waited for Dallas to say something more. When he didn’t, he shook his head sadly and then rolled onto his front.

‘Still don’t quite trust me, huh?’ he said.

‘Surely that’s one of the purposes of this simulation,’ said Dallas. ‘To find out how much we can trust each other.’

‘That’s not the kind of trust I meant, and you know it.’ Gates managed to raise himself onto all fours.

‘After metabolic icebox, you shouldn’t move for a while.’

‘Negative. I’ve got to pee.’

Dallas helped him into the washroom, Gates having refused to pee on the floor.

‘I’ve got my standards,’ he said. ‘Even in a Simworld.’

A few minutes later, after another hot drink, Gates pronounced himself equal to the next stage of the plan, which involved drilling out a block of concrete from the labyrinth wall. At least, he felt equal to it until Dallas informed him of the location he had in mind for this particular task.

‘All sections of the labyrinth wall are smart. Lots of metal wire running through the mortar. And fitted with vibration detectors,’ Dallas told him. ‘If one of those picks up the feel of a drill, the metal wire conducts electric current to the point of vibration. Quite enough to kill you and anyone standing next to you. All the walls except one, that is. You see, there are two power sources for this facility. There’s the solar power field we saw from the air. And there’s a small nuclear reactor that’s inside the main facility on the other side of the building from where we are now. The walls of the containment room in the reactor don’t have any vibration detectors because of the vibrations from the reactor turbine.’

‘And,’ remarked an incredulous Gates, ‘because only an idiot would be crazy enough to choose the containment room to try and effect an entrance to the labyrinth.’

‘That’s what I once thought myself,’ conceded Dallas. ‘However, I now see that this is the weakest part of my original design; and therefore, as a corollary, the best part of my current plan.’

‘I don’t see how,’ argued Gates. ‘There’s the small matter of radiation, Dallas. We spend any time in the containment room — like maybe the sort of high-exposure time it takes to get through a concrete wall — we’ll die. Maybe not in the simulation. But for sure when we try it in reality.’

Dallas shook his head. ‘I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe we can do this and survive the radiation.’

‘These are space suits, Dallas. Made of toughened latex, not lead. Protection against cosmic radiation, maybe. But not on the scale of what you’re proposing. You’re talking gamma, beta, alpha, the whole lousy uranium molecule. Shit, the cold must have affected you more than I thought.’

‘We can do it and we can survive,’ insisted Dallas. ‘Here’s how. The amount of damage to human tissue depends on the number of atoms ionized per human kilogram. That depends on the amount of energy deposited in each kilo of human flesh. A unit of absorbed dose is called a gray, which amounts to the deposition of one joule of energy per human kilo. For the sake of precision, doses are quoted in centigrays. Now, as well as a dose unit we need a dose rate — the centigray per hour. Total dose in centigrays equals dose rate in centigrays per hour times exposure time in hours. Are you with me?’

‘So far, so lethal,’ said Gates. ‘Go on, I’m listening. My hair may be falling out, and my gums might be bleeding, but I’m with you, Dallas.’

‘What I’m getting to is that the early somatic effects of radiation on the human body can be very precisely measured. More importantly, they can be very precisely dealt with.’

‘I read about the war, Dallas. I know what treatment most people got for the usual effects of radiation on the human body — cancer, general circulatory collapse, whatever. It was very precise. Massive overdose of morphine was what they got. That or a bullet in the head. Whichever was available.’

‘Since you mention the general circulatory system, let’s talk about that for a moment,’ said Dallas. ‘Radiation alters or destroys some of the constituents of the body’s cells. Those most affected are the blood-forming cells in the human bone marrow that maintain the body’s supply of white blood cells. A radiation dose in excess of one hundred and fifty centigrays will cause the white blood cell count to fall. Anything above five hundred and there’s a fifty percent chance you’ll die. It’s called the LD fifty — the lethal dose to fifty percent.’

‘Fifty percent, huh? Sounds like a reasonable chance, when you say it that way. An even chance you’ll die, more like.’

‘Okay, what’s the treatment for radiation exposure?’

‘These days?’ Gates shrugged. ‘Most people check into a hyperbaric hotel.’

‘Most people,’ agreed Dallas. ‘Only for those people this is not a perfect world, right?’

‘So I’ve been led to believe.’

‘No, the ideal treatment,’ said Dallas, ‘remains blood infusion. And with an unlimited supply of infusable blood, the LD fifty decreases significantly. Maybe ten percent mortality at most.’

Suddenly Gates caught the thrust of Dallas’s argument. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said. ‘You don’t mean?’

‘I do mean.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘You know something, Rameses? This is the real point of this simulation. To measure how many centigrays we’ll absorb in the time it takes to get through that containment room wall.’

‘And then to figure out how many blood transfusions we’ll need not to die? Is that it?’

‘If you want to put it like that. I prefer to look at it in terms of using an unlimited number of infusions to achieve a vast reduction in the LD fifty.’

‘Same thing.’

‘Like I said before, Rameses, it’s the best part of the plan because the containment room in the reactor was the weakest part of my design. It’s amazing I never foresaw that anyone would be prepared to take such a risk. But when you think about it, where better to take such a risk than somewhere like this? Somewhere with an unlimited supply of blood. The very thing that makes the risk feasible.’

‘But won’t radiation from the reactor come through the hole with us? And contaminate the blood?’

‘It might if we weren’t going to replace the block of concrete that we’re going to shift. And if the vault wasn’t lead-lined.’

‘You still haven’t told me how you propose to get through that.’

‘No, I haven’t, have I?’

‘Well, maybe Cav will think of a way.’

‘Maybe he will at that.’

Gates sighed and shook his head. ‘Freeze to death or fry to death. Christ, Dallas.’

‘If the simulation shows it can’t be done, then we’ll have to think of something else. I don’t want to die any more than you do. And I’m not the one who has to have an infusion of blood whatever happens. Think about that for a moment.’

Gates nodded reluctantly. ‘Okay, you’ve convinced me. Let’s do it.’

‘Okay,’ smiled Dallas. But gradually his smile gave way to a frown.

‘ “S” matter? Thought of some other lethal shit that you forgot to tell me about?’

‘No, it’s the same worry I’ve had since you went into metabolic icebox. I still wish I knew why the simulation didn’t end when you were virtually dead.’

‘Virtually, yeah. You said it.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, maybe my vital signs looked okay in the real world.’

‘We both know that shouldn’t be possible.’

Gates thought for a second. ‘Prevezer’s geodesic dome is supposed to obtain all the information it needs about what we’re doing by intercepting the electrical signals from our brains. Instead of ending up in our bodies, those signals get transmitted to the computer and are decoded by Prev. That way, he can determine exactly how our bodies would have reacted if they’d been in this Simworld alongside our brains.’

‘That’s how it works, all right,’ agreed Dallas. ‘It means the simulated body can react differently from the real one, such as being able to survive experiences that would kill a real human body. Such as radiation or extreme cold.’

‘Then how about this? Maybe something’s gone wrong with the geodesic domes. Perhaps — don’t ask me why — the signals are going only one way. He’s able to keep the simulation going, but he can no longer intercept the signals being sent from our brains. Look, we’ve been in the Simworld for how long?’

Dallas glanced at his life-support computer. ‘Three hours and forty-five minutes.’

Gates shrugged. ‘He probably reckons we’re nowhere near ready to come out yet. My guess is that he’s just improvising.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Dallas.

‘What else could it be?’

Dallas shook his head. Gates’s explanation almost sounded convincing. There was just one problem with it and that was Prevezer himself. The character of the man was precise, systematic, painstaking, and mechanical, as befitted someone whose whole life was dedicated to mathematical principles and algorithmic procedures. The very idea of improvisation would have been anathema to a man like Prevezer. Dallas considered he would have been no more capable of doing something on the spur of the moment than he would have allowed something impossible — something contrary to the laws of physics — to exist inside one of his realistic and much vaunted Simworlds. Dallas said, ‘I don’t know. Nothing probably. We’d better move.’

VII Simworld: Elapsed Time 3 Hours 57 Minutes

Because only the R&R area in the main facility was pressurized, they loaded the electric perimeter car with spare life-support packs. Dallas handed Gates a different EVA helmet, to take advantage of an ‘invisible’ chip that was concealed inside its crown: This relayed an encrypted security signal to the proximity detectors controlling doors inside the main facility. He had already fitted each helmet with a special infrared visor while Gates had been unconscious. He also gave him one of the electron-beam welding guns he had brought from the Mariner, the same kind of welding gun that Simou would need to use to carry out his simulated repair of the hole in the nose of the RLV.

‘Reckon I know how to use one of those,’ remarked Gates. ‘I’ve cut and crushed enough Moon rock in my time. UHT, or ultra-high-temperature, beam of electrons will cut a hole in just about anything. Makes it a pretty formidable weapon, too.’ He handled the gun as carefully as if it had been a small pistolshaped bomb. ‘I saw lots of guys at Artemis Seven use one of these to settle a score. In or out of an atmosphere, five hundred kilovolts is as near to a bloody ray-gun as you can get these days. So you might just explain why we’re unpacking these UHTs now, before we’ve even seen the containment room.’

‘I’m afraid I just don’t buy your theory about Prev. And if something has gone wrong in the real world, then it would make sense to be ready for something going wrong in this one.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ said Gates. ‘It wasn’t much of a theory anyway. You sure you know how to use one of these?’

‘Only on paper,’ admitted Dallas.

‘Paper’s what it’ll make metal look like when it burns a hole in it. When we used these guns on Artemis you had to have another guy standing alongside you, just to help you watch out where the hell you were pointing the thing. Not only that but he had a safety switch to cut the power in an emergency. For all that, they’re surprisingly easy to use. You just point and squeeze the handle. Just try not to shoot it in here. The atmosphere will make it hard to be accurate.’

‘I think I can remember that,’ said Dallas.

Gates detached the short steel barrel from the UHT gun.

‘One more thing. Whatever you do, don’t take this off. A beam of hot electrons tends to generate X rays, even in a vacuum. This sleeve’ll shield you from those.’ He shrugged as he remembered the greater hazard of gamma rays in the reactor containment room. ‘Not that a few lousy X rays are going to concern a man like you.’ Gates sat down in the passenger seat of the electric car. ‘In the circumstances, you knowing how to use the gun on paper ’n’ all, I’d better ride shotgun. You drive.’

Dallas sat down and took hold of the steering wheel, an action that automatically started up the engine. He glanced at Gates. In his giant white glove, the UHT gun looked deceptively toylike. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Dallas depressed the accelerator pedal, and they started their counterclockwise journey around the first radial arc. Silently the little car gathered speed until they were moving at almost twelve miles per hour.

‘How big is this facility?’ asked Gates.

‘About three thousand square meters.’

‘Place gives me the creeps.’

‘Under the circumstances, I’m forced to agree with you.’

A short distance on, they drew to a halt in front of the airlock door, which, finding the encrypted chips in the two men’s helmets, lit up in expectation of their imminent egress. As they drove inside, some interior lights came on, prompting each man to press the buttons on his life-support system computer that would pressurize his EVA suit.

Gates felt a reassuring breath of air on his face and some pressure in his ears as the suits expanded to accommodate around four pounds per square inch. Even before the airlock had been pumped out and the exit door was open he had the short silver barrel of the UHT gun leveled at the brightly lit but airless corridor ahead of them. Each man heard the other breathe a sigh of relief as they saw that the corridor was empty.

‘I don’t know what I was expecting to see,’ admitted Gates.

‘That’s the problem. If something has gone wrong, it might be anything. One simulacrum of reality transfigured by another. Whatever happens now, we are ourselves and our circumstances and nothing else. How we intereact with that is the only reality that matters right now, even if it has been ruptured by something we don’t know about.’

Dallas depressed the accelerator pedal again and moved them into the second radial arc. It looked exactly like the radial arc they had left on the other side of the airlock door.

‘But maybe this is a good thing,’ he said. ‘When we rob the real blood bank it’ll mean we’re prepared for the unexpected. The trouble with a completely schematic plan like this one is that sometimes there’s not enough margin for error. And I’m afraid you need to make errors in order to discover just where those margins exist.’

Dallas thought this was nonsense, but he kept on talking in an effort to try and take his mind off the sound in his headset of Gates’s loud and rhythmic breathing. It was like something mechanical and served only to remind Dallas of how provisional and uncertain life really was. Hearing Gates breathe — almost as if he was inside Dallas’s own head — it was easy to imagine that at any second the sound might end forever.

‘Did you hear something?’ asked Gates.

‘Just you, breathing away like a pervert.’

‘Don’t blame me, blame the simulation.’ Gates glanced around. ‘Where are we now?’

‘The supplies warehouse. Next stop the water plant.’

The car slowed and then stopped.

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Dallas, stamping on the accelerator pedal. ‘We just did.’ It was plain from the voltmeter on the dash that there was still plenty of power in the battery. He slid off the seat and lifted the hatch on the front of the car to check the electrical terminals. ‘The connections look okay,’ observed Dallas, but he wiggled the wires to make sure. There was nothing loose. ‘No sign of a problem here.’ He closed the hatch and slid back behind the wheel. But still the car refused to budge.

Gates pointed the gun one way and then the other, as if expecting trouble to arrive at any minute.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘I think we’ll have to walk,’ said Dallas, and collecting another life-support pack and his own UHT gun, he stepped down from the car again, with Gates following. They hadn’t walked ten paces when Gates, glancing nervously over his shoulder, noticed that the electric car had disappeared.

‘Dallas,’ he said urgently.

Dallas turned, saw the empty space, and walked back to where the car had been standing just a few seconds earlier.

‘That bastard Prevezer,’ muttered Gates. ‘What the hell’s he playing at?’

‘You could be right,’ said Dallas. ‘It would seem that someone wants to play, anyway.’

‘Bloody simulation,’ said Gates. ‘I don’t like this, Dallas. I don’t like this at all.’

Dallas was about to answer when he noticed the corridor lights beginning to dim. Simultaneously each man hit a switch on his helmet that controlled two pairs of halogen lamps.

‘Let’s go back to the airlock, to the R&R area,’ Gates urged.

‘Why do you assume things will be any better there?’

‘Because I’ve been there already.’

‘You just think you have, that’s all. It’s probably already different from when we were there. Just look what happened to the car. No, there’s nothing to be served by going back.’

Dallas began to advance along the curving corridor, which was now illuminated only by their helmet lights. But the size of the light arc meant there was always part of the corridor ahead that remained unseen. For fifty slow yards neither man said a word, and it was Gates who finally broke the silence: His keener eyes had spotted something.

‘Lying on the floor, ahead of us,’ he said urgently. ‘Do you see it?’

‘I see it.’

Gates led their careful approach toward the object.

‘Looks like a space suit,’ he observed, and then they halted as, still lying on the floor, the suit moved. ‘There’s someone inside it.’

‘Can’t be one of our people,’ said Dallas.

‘I almost wish it was,’ confessed Gates.

‘Although I suppose anything’s possible now that we’ve seen the car disappear.’

The stricken figure seemed to writhe on the floor, and standing over it, Gates attempted to communicate on an open channel. Getting no response, he prodded the figure with the toe of his boot.

‘I suggest you leave it the fuck alone,’ Dallas said.

Gates shook his head. His curiosity was aroused by the discovery that the helmet’s gold-painted visor was covering the clear bubble that would have revealed the figure’s identity. ‘I’m just going to see who it is,’ he said, kneeling down.

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ said Dallas. But even as he spoke Gates was reaching to tip up the visor.

‘Jesus Christ.’ For one brief, heart-stopping moment Gates had a view of a helmet that was filled with hundreds of long, thin red worms before disgust instinctively made him move away. It wasn’t this movement that saved his virtual life. Rather, it was because of the position he had adopted seconds earlier, kneeling over the top of the head instead of the body, which would have been more typical. The very second after he turned up the visor it was as if the body that filled the suit — if there had ever been a body — was pierced from below by a hundred animal-looking spikes that were as sharp as needles, each of them bright red and two or three feet in length. Gates, already recoiling from the first horror, jumped back at the sight of the second, mute with fright, even as Dallas fired a bolt of boiling electrons into the very center of the spinous suit. There was a bright flash of blue light as the focused beam sliced the suit in half, reducing the center to a mass of molten metal, rubber, and something once animate.

As Gates picked himself off the ground, cursing with fright, Dallas looked at the UHT gun with a new respect.

‘What the hell is that supposed to be?’ demanded Gates.

‘I don’t think it really matters what it’s supposed to be,’ said Dallas.

‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t come within an inch of being a goddamn pincushion.’

‘What I mean to say is that we won’t find any logical explanations about things from here on in. Now it’s just a matter of trying to get through this shit with as little pain as possible.’

‘Looking at this particular piece of shit, that’s not going to be easy.’

‘I agree.’ Dallas thought for a moment. ‘Tell me, have you ever had Simsex?’

‘What kind of question is that, right now?’

‘A very important one.’

‘Okay, yeah, I’ve had Simsex.’

‘How good was it? As good as the real thing?’

‘In a lot of ways it was actually better. But then I’ve never had sex on the Moon. Cav says that’s pretty good.’

‘It stands to reason that if pleasure can be more intense in a simulation, then so can pain. You and I may not get killed in a simulation. But is being killed the worst that could happen to us? I mean, the pleasure of sex is over soon after your orgasm. But pain need never end. You know, it’s quite possible that we could get into a situation where we end up wishing ourselves dead. Except that death can never come in here. It’s like something in Greek mythology. Like Sisyphus condemned to roll an enormous rock up a hill for all eternity, or Prometheus bound by chains to a rock and condemned to have an eagle tear out a liver that continually renews itself. It’s probably only inside a simulation that myths and legends can achieve their full potential. Punishments such as those might actually have been devised specifically for a simulation. Do you see what I mean? Death isn’t so bad. It’s the waiting for death that can be intolerable, and yet must be tolerated.’

‘I wish you’d shut up, Dallas. And I wish I knew what that bastard Prevezer was doing right now. If I ever see him again, I’m going to teach him the meaning of reality in a way he’s not likely to forget.’

VIII

Rimmer was growing bored. It was hardly very satisfying to torture someone if you couldn’t see them bleed or hear them scream with pain. A victim had to have some kind of relationship with his tormentor, the kind that left an opportunity for him to beg for mercy; otherwise the cruelty inflicted hardly qualified as torture at all, but rather some reduced form of brutality, such as inhumanity or spite. Having set his heart on becoming the personification of pure evil in the eyes of Dallas, it mattered a great deal to Rimmer that those eyes should at least be open and fixed on him. Whatever pleasure he took in torturing Dallas was not served by watching the man’s vital signs and hearing Prevezer’s descriptions of how he had ruptured one simulation with another one more hellish. It was true, Dallas’s pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and body temperature indicated a person who was undergoing some kind of severe trauma, but trying to fathom the reason for each and every surge in his heart rate — at one point it had actually touched one hundred and ninety beats per minute — was proving frustrating to Rimmer. Since Prevezer hardly relished the task of torturing his two colleagues, he was unable to furnish Rimmer with a sufficiently horrific level of detail as to the variety of terror that they were experiencing. It was only with a gun to his head that he had even managed to describe the Sura Fifteen Simworld he had added to the model of the First National Blood Bank:

‘It’s something I developed for Reinbek,’ he had explained. ‘He used to be an interrogator for the Criminal Intelligence Service, but now he works for the Black Hole. And sometimes he wants information from people, and he gets me to use this particular simulation on them. Sura Fifteen’s named after the book in the Qur’an that describes seven portals leading into seven divisions of hell. You said you wanted Antichrist, mister, well you’ve got it. What they’re going through is hair-on-end, cold sweat, blood-turning-to-water, stampeding-panic-attack horror, and I wouldn’t inflict it on my worst enemy. Parts of the model I had to buy prefabricated from some real sado-freaks and mental fuck-ups. So don’t ask me to describe what’s in there in more detail because I just don’t know. I wouldn’t go in that simulation if you promised me eternal life.’

‘I can guarantee you a very short life if you’re lying to me,’ Rimmer had promised.

Two whole hours had gone by since Prevezer had reported that Dallas and Gates had gone through the first portal of hell, and Rimmer had grown tired of the Simworld modeler’s one-word pictures of the numbers he was seeing on the computer screen. Bad. Evil. Ghastly. Grim. Horrifying. Dreadful. Monstrous.

‘How do I know that it’s as bad as you say it is?’ Rimmer demanded, pressing the gun against Prevezer’s nose.

‘You can’t. Not for sure. Not without going in and taking a look for yourself.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Prevezer said nothing, momentarily distracted by some small change he had noticed in Gates.

‘I know I would,’ said Cavor from the floor where he still lay alongside Ronica and Simou.

‘Shut up,’ snarled Rimmer. And then to Prevezer: ‘This isn’t working for me. Not anymore. Maybe I’ll just shoot them now. Maybe I’ll just shoot you all.’

‘Wait,’ said Prevezer. ‘You wanted confirmation that they’re going through hell? Well look. Look at Gates. Look at his hair, for God’s sake.’

Rimmer bent down and peered through the fretwork of the geodesic dome that covered Gates’s head. There could be no doubt about it. Gates’s hair, uniformly brown when Rimmer had come into the hotel suite, was now distinctly gray.

‘My God, you’re right,’ he breathed. ‘His hair’s turned quite gray. Just while I’ve been here.’

‘You bastard,’ hissed Ronica.

‘Now do you believe me?’ demanded Prevezer.

‘My hair is gray, but not with years,’ said Cavor. ‘Nor grew it white, in a single night, / As men’s have grown from sudden fears.’

‘What’s that?’ asked a delighted Rimmer.

Cavor sat up and repeated the verse, adding by way of provenance, ‘Lord Byron.’[118] Now if Rimmer would just turn his back, he could take him on.

‘Shut up, Cav,’ ordered Ronica. ‘Don’t you see? You’re only adding to the bastard’s sadistic enjoyment.’

‘It’s only my sadistic enjoyment of their discomfort that’s keeping you alive,’ said Rimmer, kneeling beside her. He collected a handful of her braids in his hand and then twisted them.

Ronica screamed until he stopped.

‘Another word out of you and your hair will encounter some grief of its very own. Only it won’t turn gray. It won’t have time because I’ll tear it out, braid by beautiful braid, until your scalp is as cratered with holes as the surface of the Moon.’

Ronica screamed as he twisted her hair again. Cavor gathered one leg beneath himself and prepared to leap.

‘And stop that bloody screaming,’ said Rimmer, silencing her with a slap this time. ‘Don’t think that anyone’s going to hear you. These rooms are soundproofed.’ He chuckled. ‘They have to be on account of all the lovemaking that goes on in this place. Even if someone did hear you, they’d only assume you were having a good time. That might still be a possibility for you.’

He stood up and returned to his contemplation of the two men, hoping that he might see Dallas’s hair turn white with fright in front of his very eyes. After several minutes he shook his head sadly. ‘That was good, but it wasn’t quite good enough.’ And pointing the gun through the dome at the center of Dallas’s forehead, he added, ‘It’s time you were on your way to the real hell, Dallas.’

It was now or never, thought Cavor. He had just started to move when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lenina.

Even in the Moon’s microgravity, Rimmer’s sudden progress across the suite was spectacular. It seemed hardly connected to the simultaneous muted explosion of air — much like the sound of a metallic drawer sliding shut — that emanated from the gun in Lenina’s hand. Swaying slightly, her face covered in the rubelliform rash that described her condition with more eloquence than a hematologist’s case notes, she stood in the bedroom doorway and fired once more at the man who had bounced off the wall and was now trailing blood as he crawled toward the door. Her second bullet hit Rimmer in the back of the head, lifting a piece of his scalp and killing him instantly as it bored through his brain, before finally coming to rest between his teeth, as if, like some circus sharpshooter, he had meant to catch it in his mouth.

‘You took your time,’ snarled Ronica, rising stiffly from the floor. ‘I thought you’d never hear me screaming.’

‘Shut up,’ Prevezer snapped. ‘Can’t you see she’s dying?’

Lenina said nothing, too sick to answer. She let the gun fall to the ground, turned on her heel, and walked back to lie on Prevezer’s bed, even as he sprang forward to press the button that would switch Dallas and Gates from the artificial cortical mode controlling the Simworld to the real one.

Gates, trembling, his face as white as the marble chair he was sitting on and almost breathless with fear, called out to them, ‘Get this thing off me.’

There was just enough time for Prevezer to withdraw the electro-neuroneedles before Gates, jumping up, removed the geodesic dome from his now sweat-plastered head and threw it to the marble floor, smashing it into a dozen tetrahedral-shaped shards. He paused for a second, glanced around the room with wide eyes, and then, retching like a dog, ran into the bathroom.

‘I’d better see that he’s okay,’ said Cavor, going after him.

Dallas waited until Prevezer had removed the dome from his own head and then let out a long, unsteady breath. Saying nothing, he bit the knuckle of his forefinger until it bled. Seeing this, Ronica pulled his hand away from his mouth and then cradled his head against her belly.

‘What happened?’ he whispered. Then he saw Rimmer’s body and understood.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s all over. You’re back with us now. Take it easy.’

Prevezer was already preparing an intravenous sedative for each man.

‘This is just a tranquilizer,’ he told Dallas. ‘It’ll help you to sleep.’

‘Are you kidding?’ demanded Simou. ‘I’d be afraid to ever close my eyes again.’

‘Sleep’s the best thing, right now,’ insisted Prevezer. ‘In my considerable experience of these situations.’ He rolled up Dallas’s sleeve and pushed the needle in.

Simou shook his head, hardly convinced.

‘Then let’s just hope he doesn’t dream. After what he’s been through, who knows what he might dream about?’

‘At least they’re not dead,’ insisted Prevezer. ‘Dead’s the worst dream of all.’

IX

Reality changed forever in 1905, ‘the year of miracles.’ This was the year in which Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. From then on it could be seen that time and space were geometrically equivalent in one four-dimensional whole, alongside gravity and matter. All points in space were also points in time, and all moments in time were also points in space. And space-time could be regarded as one giant block of ice in which the whole of physical reality is frozen once and for all. Just as every place in this block universe can be contained, so the same can be said of the past, the present, and the future. Of course, for this to be true, the future must already exist, just like the past and the present.

This hardly seems to make sense, and in fact, the only way space-time can properly be understood is from the point of view of quantum physics. We exist in multiple versions and in multiple universes. This is easier to comprehend with the help of your very own virtual reality generator — your memory and your imagination.

One version of you exists in the past, and this is easy enough to recall. It is your first day at school, and doubtless you can remember a great deal of vivid detail that enhances the reality of this version of you. It is easy enough to believe that somehow this version of you still exists in the past and that, for one eternal moment, it will always be your first day at school.

The next version of you is the version that exists in the present. This is you remembering your first day at school but also imagining yet another version of yourself, a future version in some notable situation — your last day at work perhaps. This is harder to do and depends on the dexterity of your imagination. However, in a curious way, the future version of yourself can seem just as real as the past version — perhaps even more so — for there is nothing that cannot be achieved in the virtual realities of our imaginations. Nothing that is physically impossible.

One day in the future (perhaps a very great distance in the future), and given enough computer power, it will be possible to render the entire universe in virtual reality. Where better for human beings to evolve, to achieve immortality, and to be raised from the dead? But until that day comes when nothing is intractable — in other words, until heaven itself exists — evolution must find another, less spectacular way forward. And find a way it will. Already human genes are reaching out, to the Moon and beyond. The only threshold that remains to be crossed in human evolutionary progress is the physical limit imposed by space travel. The journey, however, may be about to begin.

I

‘That’s a pity,’ said Dallas, surveying what remained of the geodesic dome worn by Rameses Gates. ‘We can’t do a simulation of the containment room in the reactor without two of these units.’

‘You mean you want to?’ asked Gates. ‘After what happened in there?’

Neither man had spoken about what had happened to them in the simulation when Rimmer had forced Prevezer to corrupt one silicon model with another, but neither was likely to forget it.

‘What happened was unfortunate,’ said Dallas. ‘But hardly likely to happen again, now that Rimmer is dead. And I’d still like to have an accurate idea of how many centigrays we’re likely to absorb in the time it takes for us to penetrate the containment room wall.’

‘There’s no way we’ll find another geodesic on the Moon,’ said Prevezer. ‘I already asked around. There’s no demand for Simworlds up here. I mean, people aren’t much interested in Simworlds when reality’s as good as this.’

‘Good of you to admit it,’ said Simou.

‘It would take at least four or five days to have another unit sent on the next astroliner from Earth,’ said Prevezer, ignoring him.

Gates shook his head. ‘Lenina can’t wait that long.’

‘Neither can we,’ said Dallas. ‘There’s our window of lunar daylight to consider. If we wait that long, we’ll be trying to land the Mariner in darkness. And it’s going to be hard enough in daylight without Lenina. How is she? I mean, I don’t suppose there’s any way she’ll be fit?’

‘The fact is, she could die at any time,’ said Gates, rubbing a big hand through his shock of white hair. ‘Back on Earth, she’d probably be dead already. It’s only the pressurized atmosphere that’s giving her hemoglobin the oxygen it needs for her to stay alive.’

Dallas nodded. ‘That’s settled then. We go tomorrow. July twentieth. What with all the activity for the Moon landing centennial, it’ll be easier getting Lenina out of the hotel. We have until then to make some calculations regarding somatic radiation effects. Prev? Any ideas?’

‘I could run a two-dimensional model on the computer,’ he suggested. ‘Kind of a predictive microworld using the data that’s already in the memory. It won’t give us anything like the verisimilitude of detail or realism of prescriptive process that characterizes the three-D, but it should give us a range of probable figures.’

‘Then do it,’ said Dallas. ‘Right away.’

‘Just how are we going to get Lenina out of the hotel?’ asked Ronica. ‘Quite apart from her being unconscious, she looks like she stepped out of a plague pit.’

‘She’ll have to wear a space suit,’ said Simou.

‘Well, of course,’ said Cavor. ‘Lots of people in the hotel lobby are wearing space suits. But most of them can walk.’

‘Have you looked in the hotel bar?’ asked Simou. ‘It’s full of drunks celebrating the centennial. And tomorrow there’ll be even more. Gates and I can carry her between us. Who’s going to notice three more drunks in space suits?’

‘What about Rimmer?’ asked Ronica. ‘What are we going to do with the body? We can hardly carry him out of here as well.’

‘We’ll leave him here,’ said Dallas. ‘It’s not like we’re actually checking out. Officially we’re supposed to be coming back here after our flight down to Descartes. By the time they figure we’re not, we’ll be long gone, hiding out on the dark side.’

‘We can stash him in the closet and switch on the Do Not Disturb,’ said Cavor. ‘That way the maid won’t bother to clean the room.’

‘Then that’s agreed,’ said Dallas. ‘Is that everything?’

‘I sure hope so,’ muttered Gates.

Dallas gave him a curious sort of glance, and then looked awkward. ‘In which case there’s one more thing I have to tell you all. Although this concerns you most of all, Cav.’

‘This sounds like what I’ve been waiting to hear.’

‘And you, Rameses.’

‘Someone get me a painkiller,’ groaned Gates.

‘There’s no easy way to put this, so I’ll just give it to you straight. After you’ve landed the Mariner, it’ll be just me and Cav who enter the main facility.’

‘Me?’ Cavor’s eyes widened with surprise.

‘Come again?’ demanded Gates.

‘You’re not coming inside the bank.’

‘Is this some kind of joke, Dallas? Because these white hairs of mine should tell you, I’m kind of low on a sense of humor right now.’

‘It’s no joke.’

‘Is it because of what happened? Me getting metabolic icebox? Because I’ve already figured out a way of preventing that from happening.’

‘As a matter of fact, so have I.’

‘Then what’s the problem? I don’t understand.’

‘The truth is that when it came to the real thing, it was always going to be me and Cav.’

‘But why?’

‘Because he has some special skills. Skills that even he doesn’t know about.’

‘Would you mind telling me what they are?’ asked Gates.

‘I’m intrigued to know, myself,’ admitted Cavor.

‘All in good time.’

‘If that’s the case, then why did you do the simulation with me instead of him? Why am I the one who looks like a goddamn albino if I’m not the one who’s going on the real job after all?’

‘Hey,’ protested Simou. ‘You ask me, your hair color’s looking good. Better than before.’

‘Because Cav’s special skills wouldn’t have worked in a Simworld. Only in reality.’

‘Now I really am intrigued.’

‘I thought you’d be pleased, Rameses. After all, you’ve expressed quite a few reservations about my plan. Not least our going into the containment room and exposing ourselves to radiation.’

‘Reservations are one thing,’ argued Gates. ‘Cold feet are quite another. Which reminds me, in case you’d forgotten. Cav has P2, just like me.’

‘Yes, but for not as long as you. If you were going to point out that his body’s core temperature is likely to cool down quicker than mine, then I’d agree with you. But still not as quickly as yours. Look, Rameses, this is nothing personal. This is just the best way of getting the job done. The only way, as it happens. What matters to you and to Lenina, and to the rest of you, is that we get the blood.’

‘Amen to that,’ agreed Simou.

‘Well? Isn’t it?’

‘I guess so,’ nodded Gates. ‘But there’s one thing I still don’t understand — since we happen to be talking about what’s important for everyone here. What’s in this for you, Dallas? You don’t have the virus. You don’t need the blood.’

‘I want blood all right,’ Dallas said grimly. ‘Just as badly as the rest of you. You see, I’ve got a different kind of virus. Maybe it won’t kill me, but it’s eating me up just the same. For me, revenge will be a kind of cure. It will be the greatest feeling in the world.’ Dallas smiled. ‘The world? It can go hang. Perish the whole damn universe just as long as I have my revenge.’

II

Earth, looking like some fabulous blue Faberge egg inside a black-velvet-lined case, seems a much more precious, durable thing than the deserving object of Dallas’s small-minded revenge. The mathematics, those fundamental numbers, are by themselves sufficiently miraculous in the way they seem to reflect a certain underlying order, and might have given him pause for thought.

Numbers like the size of the electric charge of the electron: Even the smallest difference, and the stars — whose debris went to form other stars and planets, such as Earth — would never have exploded. Numbers such as the ratio between the mass of an electron and a proton, which seem to have been minutely fixed to make possible the development of intelligent life in the universe. A universe that is still expanding at such a critical rate that, even now, ten thousand million years after the singularity that had detonated its existence, an infinitesimally small alteration in that expansion rate taking place one second after that singularity, of less than 0.0001 percent of one hundred billion, would have resulted in the universe recollapsing before ever reaching its present size and shape.

Despite the fact that there are probably one hundred billion billion planets suitable for the creation of life in the universe, the odds are stacked against such an event occurring anywhere else, except on Earth — and improbable enough even there. This can properly be calculated as a result of dividing the number of planets suitable for life by the number of planets where it is certain that this event has already occurred — namely, one, Earth itself. In other words, the odds of life occurring anywhere else in the universe are in the region of one hundred billion billion to one.

In comparison with the sun-drenched and comparatively unremarkable lunar surface, the Earth is a fabulous egg indeed. It is almost enough to make you believe in the anthropic cosmological principle — the notion that man occupies a privileged place in the universe consistent with his existence as an observer. The nature of the universe, so goes the principle (although it seems like a truism, it is actually a principle that has profound implications for physics), is of a type that could be observed to allow the evolution of observers.

What is man, asked the psalm, that thou art mindful of him? Perhaps nothing. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin have all contributed to the invalidation of man’s self-selected position at the center of the universe created by a monstrous series of accidents. But perhaps, as the world of thought comes full circle, like a globe in a simple brass orrery, it is everything.

Perish the universe? When fortune has already favored it so? Not a chance. With so much time still ahead, the universe is only just beginning.

III

Dallas was seated on the flight deck, in the pilot’s seat formerly occupied by Lenina, who, successfully smuggled out of the Galileo Hotel, was now resting in the crew sleeping station on mid-deck below. Gates occupied the commander’s seat, as before, and was keeping a close eye on the automatic pilot as they made their approach to the Descartes Crater.

The view out of the flight-deck window was much as Gates remembered it from the simulation, just a lot of craters he had trained himself to look out for in order of their appearance: Torricelli, Alfraganus, Hypatia, Zollner, and Kant. The Kant crater system, over which they were now flying, was the last landmark before they reached Descartes.

‘Going to manual,’ he said, switching off the autopilot. ‘Simou? Are you ready?’

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ said a voice in his headset.

‘In your own time,’ said Gates, as he took a firm hold of the flight stick and checked the instruments on the control panel above his helmeted head.

‘Good luck,’ said Dallas.

‘To us all,’ replied Gates.

Seconds later they felt the loud bang from the explosion detonated remotely by Simou’s trigger. It was the same noise they had heard in the simulation except that this time it was not immediately followed by the master alarm. The explosion had not holed the fuselage.

‘What was that?’ asked Dallas for the sake of verisimilitude on the cockpit voice recorder.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Gates. ‘But it sure sounded like something, didn’t it?’

‘Did something hit us?’

‘We’re still here, aren’t we?’ Gates glanced above his head at the flight instrumentation. ‘All instruments are showing normal readings. If something did hit us, we’re still pressurized.’

Dallas cursed silently. Without a verifiable emergency the Descartes computer would never permit them to land. ‘Sim?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas on the mystery noise?’

‘Negative, Dallas,’ said Simou. ‘I’m as puzzled as you are.’

Dallas unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and craned forward to look through the triangular flight-deck window at the gimlet-shaped nose.

‘See anything?’ Gates asked anxiously. It seemed quite at odds with his astroliner pilot’s training that he should have been praying for something to go wrong now.

‘There’s a crack,’ reported Dallas. ‘In the ceramic-hafnium shield on the Mariner’s nose. And it’s getting bigger.’ As he watched, something detached itself from the nose and flew off into space. ‘We just lost one of the heat-shield tiles. And another.’

‘It sounds to me like it could be a brittle fracture,’ said Simou, choosing his words carefully. ‘The impact must have dispersed through the whole nose.’

‘There goes one more tile,’ said Dallas.

‘We lose too many of those and we’ll never survive Earth reentry,’ said Gates. ‘Perhaps we should put down and make repairs.’

‘Negative,’ said Dallas. ‘That’s the kind of repair we can easily make back at TB. We don’t need a ceramic-hafnium compound nose to continue with the flight.’

Gates slammed himself back in his seat and punched the armrests with frustration.

‘I suggest that we turn around and head back to TB,’ Dallas said evenly. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

‘Well that’s just great,’ groaned Gates. ‘What a vacation this turned out to be. Not even halfway to Schroter’s Valley and we’ve got to turn back again.’

Schroter’s Valley was the ultimate destination they had fed into the flight computer for the benefit of Descartes. Reluctantly, Gates started to reprogram the change in course. He did it in the knowledge that any delay to their plans at this stage would certainly cost Lenina her life.

‘We’re going back?’ On the headset Simou’s voice sounded incredulous.

‘If you’ve got any other ideas, I’d love to hear them,’ said Dallas.

Gates ceded control of the RLV to the autopilot, and immediately Mariner started to increase its altitude prior to firing the RCS[119] thrusters that would change their course. Seconds later they heard another explosion. For a brief second, Gates thought the RCS had fired prematurely. It was only when the master alarm finally went off and the static in his headset was replaced by shouts from mid-deck that he realized what had happened had nothing to do with the thruster rockets. A quick look up at the control panel revealed a whole host of red warning lights.

‘We just lost the flight computer,’ he yelled and grabbed back the flight stick.

More red lights.

‘And the environmental control system,’ said Dallas.

‘Prepare for ATL,’ swallowed Gates. ‘Go to oxygen, everyone. In a few minutes we’re going to have nothing to breathe in this cabin except our own CO₂. I wish I knew what just happened and why. But without the flight computer I couldn’t keep this thing in flight even if I wanted to.’

‘There’s a landing site up ahead,’ said Dallas, still talking for the benefit of the Descartes computer.

And then, right on cue: ‘This is the First National Blood Bank at Descartes Crater,’ said the computer. ‘You are approaching a restricted area. Please turn right on a heading one-zero-five and increase your altitude to fifteen hundred feet. Failure to comply will be met with appropriate force.’

‘Descartes, this is Mariner. Negative to turning right on heading one-zero-five. We have an ATL emergency here. I’m not sure why, but we just lost all our computers. Requesting permission to land immediately.’

‘Are you in a position to supply appropriate flight data and your cockpit voice recordings?’ asked Descartes. ‘In order for me to verify your ATL condition for myself.’

Dallas was still trying to see what remained of their computer systems. ‘Descartes, this is Mariner. We have communications, mid-deck systems, but no flight computer, payload, or environmental control system. Mid-deck systems have backup data until the moment our computers went down. Transmitting that and our cockpit voice recordings, now.’

There was a longish pause as the Descartes Crater grew nearer. Gates was using the lip of the crater as his navigation marker and then aiming the nose of the Mariner a good distance ahead of it. He was flying on instinct now. Instinct and the seat of his pants. Without the flight computer to advise him, he was having to reduce altitude through experienced guesswork.

‘Descartes? This is Mariner. How are we doing?’

‘According to the information you have sent me, one of your oxygen tanks has exploded,’ said the cool voice of the computer. ‘All other failures are a corollary of that first failure. Alteration in levels of oxygen and hydrogen inside your fuel cells has starved your electrical circuits, causing some of your computer systems to shut down. However, since you have backup fuel cells, it’s quite possible your computers may be rebooting themselves even as we speak. Please advise.’

‘Thanks for your information,’ said Gates. ‘But it’s a negative on the reboot, I’m afraid.’ By now he had both hands firmly on the stick. ‘Drop the landing gear,’ he told Dallas.

‘Will it work?’

‘Pull those levers. The thing’s hydraulic.’

Dallas did as he was told and then breathed a short sigh of relief as he saw a green light and felt the undercarriage lowering beneath the RLV. ‘Landing gear operative,’ he said.

‘I appreciate your fault diagnosis, Descartes,’ said Gates, ‘but please be advised I need permission to ATL. It’s that or crash-land in Abulfeda.’ This was the large crater immediately southwest of Descartes.

‘Mariner, this is Descartes. Confirm you are clear to land. Repeat, confirm you are clear to land. Good luck.’

Gates had already started his final descent. Some of the others on mid-deck had cheered the computer’s permission to land, but he thought it was a little premature for any celebrations. Judging altitude above a moonscape by eye was extremely difficult, and even with the main facility to give him some idea of height, he wished he could have had some landing radar data to rely on. This was not going to be a seat-of-the-pants landing so much as the skin of his ass.

‘Bring it on down,’ he urged himself, through gritted teeth. Although it seemed hardly possible, this landing was proving even more hair-raising than the simulation. It was just as well that Descartes had turned out to be a little more cooperative than they had been expecting.

Mariner missed the northern rim of the crater by less than fifty feet. Gates throttled back quickly and let the RLV drop toward the crater surface, stirring up a small dust storm beneath them. Now that they were inside the crater he had a clear view of the landing site ahead of them, and for a split second, he wondered if the Descartes computer might even have been lying when granting permission to land. What if the mines on the landing area were still active? Why had the Descartes computer been so cooperative?

‘I sure hope this computer isn’t bullshitting us, Dallas,’ he said, and slowed the Mariner to a near hover.

‘Computers don’t lie,’ said Dallas, gripping the armrests of his seat. ‘Although they do have the kind of memory you need to carry it off successfully.’

‘I wish you were a bloody computer,’ said Gates, as he pushed gently at the flight stick. The RLV dipped again, and guessing that there was now less than seventy feet to the ground, he stretched out his hand, ready to hit the engine stop button the moment he saw the green contact light. His guess was off by more than thirty feet. The Mariner hit the landing area earlier and with much greater force than he would have wanted, and such was the strength of the impact that the resulting vibration shook every piece of equipment in the cabin, jolting the still unbuckled Dallas out of his seat, and causing all the computers suddenly to restart themselves. Gates killed the engines, the Mariner rocked on its landing gear for a few seconds, and then all was still.

‘Well, we’re down,’ sighed Gates.

Dallas picked himself up off the floor.

‘What kind of an astroliner pilot were you anyway?’ he asked.

‘Whaddya want? Dinner and a movie?’ Gates nodded. ‘You want to know the definition of a good flight? One you can walk away from. That’s what you’ve got, so don’t complain.’ Adjusting his tone to ask a leading question of the people below him on the mid-deck, he said, ‘Sorry about the rough landing, folks. Is everyone okay?’

‘Negative,’ said Prevezer. ‘We have one injury down here.’

‘Descartes, this is Mariner. We’re on the ground.’

‘We copy you on the ground, Mariner. Please advise if you need medical assistance.’

‘Thank you, Descartes. Please stand by for my report.’ Gates switched off the open communications channel and looked across the flight deck at Dallas. ‘You’ve given this computer a very bad press, Dallas. He’s a more helpful son-of-a-bitch than you led us to believe.’

‘All it’s doing is offering us the medical facilities of the landing site,’ said Dallas. ‘There’s a small emergency station immediately to the east of us, with some repair equipment and first-aid items. No blood, of course.’

Dallas approached the controls at the back of the flight deck to operate the payload-bay doors and the remote manipulator system. He said, ‘One good thing about that landing, though.’

‘Just one? We’re here, aren’t we?’

‘The impact managed to reboot all our computers. I don’t know how we’d have managed without that robot arm to deploy the space fridge.’

When the space fridge was deployed, Dallas followed Gates downstairs onto mid-deck. With the environmental control systems back on-line, the atmosphere throughout the RLV had been restored, and Ronica had already climbed out of her space suit and was lying down on a hammock in preparation for her blood transfusion.

‘I hope you appreciate this, Dallas,’ she said as she connected herself to the trans-infusion machine. ‘The way I’m prepared to shed my blood for you. It’s not everyone I’d do this for, you know.’ The machine made its own tourniquet, swabbed the skin on her arm, and then inserted the needle.

Dallas took hold of her hand and then kissed it, even as the blood started to flow through the cannula. ‘I know.’

‘Simou?’ said Gates. ‘I want to know what caused that oxygen cylinder to explode. And what is the status of our fuel cells?’

‘Some kind of electrical short circuit inside the liquid oxygen tank, I think,’ answered Simou, starting to check through his computerized electrical gauges. ‘A thousand-to-one chance, but it happened. And after that everything else was predictable. The fuel cells mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and, as a by-product of their reaction, electricity. So when we lost one of the liquid oxygen cylinders, some of the fuel cells were effectively asphyxiated.’ He ran his eyes over the fuel cell gauges. ‘Looks like we’ve still got ten out of twelve working okay.’

‘Fifteen percent,’ Dallas told Ronica. ‘This machine’s slower than it was in the simulation.’

‘Real life can be a little like that,’ she sighed.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Same as the first time I met you. Light-headed, weak at the knees, butterflies in my chest.’

Dallas held her hand tighter, and scrutinized her transfusion rate.

‘Dallas? That’s my hand,’ she told him gently. ‘Not an orange. Squeezing it won’t make the blood flow out any quicker.’

He slackened his grip. Her blood was collecting in a large plastic bag that was attached to the back of the machine, while the computerized display was providing a host of details about its constitution: the type, the temperature, the red-cell concentrations, the plasma content, the pH, the adenosine triphosphate levels, and even the antibodies that were present in the component.

‘You’re doing fine,’ he told her. ‘Twenty-five percent of your blood has now been removed. Not long to go now.’

Simou, still running a diagnostic check on the fuel cells, looked around for Gates. ‘Correction,’ he said. ‘Cell number ten’s looking a bit low all of a sudden. Probably the computer just registering the change in chemical mixture, now that it’s back on-line. It’s not about to close down, but I’m going to override that one and do it manually, just in case.’

‘Wait a second,’ said Cavor. ‘Where’s the power for the transfusion machine coming from?’

‘One fuel cell fails, the next one down the line takes up the load,’ explained Simou. ‘It’s number nine.’

‘Thirty percent,’ said Dallas.

‘Not feeling so good now,’ said Ronica, shivering a little. ‘Feel sick. Like I’m going to puke.’

‘How much power is in number nine?’ inquired Cavor.

‘Relax, will you? Nine’s fine. Nine is fully charged. We can run the whole ship on just three of these cells if we have to. System’s like a bus station. One goes out, one comes in. But there’s always going to be a bus around, okay?’

Ronica’s eyes flickered. She was going into hemorrhagic shock. Forty percent of her blood had now been removed. It was time to speak to Descartes. Dallas stopped the transfusion machine and then turned to the communications panel, to open a channel.

‘Descartes, this is Mariner.’

‘What is your status please, Mariner?’

‘Switching from cell ten to cell nine,’ said Simou, pressing a button on his computer.

‘Our computers have rebooted, Descartes. However, one of my crew has been injured,’ reported Dallas. ‘During the landing. She’s lost a great deal of blood and urgently requires some RES Class One whole component.’

‘You’re aware that this is not a drawing bank,’ said Descartes, ‘but a federal reserve. In emergencies I am authorized to make withdrawals; however, blood units are deep-frozen. I have no facilities for component recovery.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Dallas. ‘We have someone qualified on board ship.’

‘I shall need to verify her vital signs for myself. Then, provided you can give me an authorized autologous donation code, I will send you the components you need. Please submit both sets of data for my scrutiny.’

‘Right away,’ said Dallas, relieved that this was proceeding more quickly than he had anticipated. He quickly dispatched the information to Descartes and took hold of the machine, waiting for an approval that would let him put the trans-infusion pump into reverse. The sooner he could return Ronica’s blood to her, the more comfortable he would feel about what she was doing. This felt very different from the simulation. It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared about her before; it was just that now the transfusion procedure was happening for real, he could properly appreciate the essential meaning of losing her.

‘If cell number ten’s been running on near empty levels...,’ mused Cavor.

‘I have your data,’ reported Descartes. ‘Your crew member is type O, genotype OO, phenotype O, showing H-substance redcell antigens, and all normal plasma antibodies.’ It was the Descartes computer’s ability to test for antibodies that stopped them from also getting blood for Lenina, who was type AB. As soon as Descartes saw the hematological hallmarks of her P2 infection, it would have guessed something was wrong. ‘I’m sending you three units.’

‘And cell nine is fully charged...,’ said Cavor, continuing his line of thought.

‘Please await further instructions on cryoprecipitate collection procedure.’

‘Thank you, Descartes.’

‘Then whatever was operating off a low-level fuel cell might suddenly find itself having to cope with a much larger current. Which might prove too much for it.’

‘Only miscellaneous auxiliaries are being powered off cell ten. It’s true you might get a bit of a power surge for a second or two.’ Simou glanced across his computer screen. ‘But there’s no auxiliary equipment that’s operational right now. Nothing at all.’

‘That can’t be true,’ said Cavor.

‘Take a look at the screen for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ said Simou. ‘Think I don’t know how to run an electrical system?’

Dallas reached for the trans-infusion machine to switch it back on.

‘Well what about the...?’

Simou was about to curse Cavor roundly for his persistent nagging, when suddenly he realized what was about to happen. ‘You’re right! Dallas, don’t—’

But even as Simou spoke, Dallas switched the trans-infusion machine back on to begin the process of returning Ronica’s own blood to her body. He hardly heard Simou in the small explosion that followed as the machine failed to cope with the full charge of cell nine. The small fire that briefly flared was easily extinguished, but not before the heat had melted the neck of the plastic bag connected to the machine, causing most of the blood it contained to spill into the atmosphere. Amid the cries of alarm and bitter recriminations, Dallas coolly took hold of Ronica’s arm and, pressing a piece of sterile gauze to the site of the venipuncture, removed the needle. He surveyed Ronica’s blood floating around the RLV until all was quiet again, and then said, ‘It looks as if she’s going to need that blood from the vault, after all.’

‘Hey, don’t worry,’ said Prevezer. ‘There are two more transfusion machines in one of the storage bays. Those things just attach themselves to your arm like leeches. It isn’t like there’s anything for us to do except plug one of the machines in and stand it next to her.’

‘Actually, that’s not what I was concerned about,’ admitted Dallas, staring gloomily at the now unconscious Ronica. ‘Component storage and preparation is Ronica’s expertise. The stuff that comes out of the vault is low-glycerol fast-frozen cryoprecipitate. Frozen at minus one hundred ninety-six degrees Celsius, and then stored at minus one hundred and twenty. It needs to be thawed and the cryoprotective glycerol removed and replaced with isotonic solution before transfusion to the patient. Red cells are living things. They have to be given time to rejuvenate. Ronica knows all about the deglycerolization process. Without her expert knowledge, I don’t know.’ Dallas shook his head. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to give her the transfusion. But if she doesn’t have one soon, she’ll go into a coma.’

‘If she dies, so does Lenina,’ said Gates.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘There is another solution,’ said Gates.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m type O myself. I could give her some of my blood. At least enough to get her back on her feet and able to process the cryoprecipitate. When she’s done that, she can infuse me with it.’

Dallas frowned. ‘But you’re...’

‘That’s right,’ nodded Gates. ‘I’m P2. If I give her my blood, she gets the virus. But at least she’ll regain consciousness. If she regains consciousness, then she can infuse me and everyone else when you come out of that vault with the rest of the blood, herself included. But if she stays in a coma, she’ll probably die. And so will Lenina.’ He shrugged. ‘Only thing is I don’t know how my system will react to having less blood than usual.’

Dallas stayed silent. Despite the time he had spent at close quarters with Gates and the rest of them, he still had an instinctive horror of the virus they carried in their bodies. He knew Ronica felt much the same. The idea of becoming infected with the virus would be abhorrent to her. But he could see no alternative to what Gates was proposing.

‘If you go into a coma, we’re marooned here,’ said Dallas.

‘I don’t have to give her three whole units,’ said Gates. ‘Just two would do it. And being a lot bigger, I can spare more.’

‘That’s just a guess. As you said yourself, you don’t know how a system infected with the virus will react to having fewer red cells. That means less hemoglobin, less oxygen.’

‘Maybe all that is true,’ admitted Gates. ‘But we both know it’s our only option.’

‘Okay. But you get to tell her. She’s not going to like it.’

‘True,’ said Gates. ‘But at least she won’t be dead.’ He clapped Dallas on the shoulder. ‘Think of it this way. You’ve got more of an incentive to succeed now. Revenge never really suited you that much, Dallas. This is a much better motive. Better for you, better for her.’

IV

Shivering inside the space fridge, Cavor said, ‘Let’s hope nothing else goes wrong. I don’t much care for the idea of dying of hypothermia.’

‘I should think there are many worse deaths than that,’ observed Dallas. ‘The way I remember the experience from the simulation, it would be like going to sleep.’ He thought for a moment, and then added, ‘In a cold bed. Anyway, that isn’t going to happen. It’s why we had those shots.’

Before leaving the Mariner, both men had been injected with a medical nanodevice — a delayed-action, molecular-sized machine that was designed to last less than thirty-five minutes before releasing fifty mills of adrenaline into the bloodstream. According to the data from the simulation, it had taken Dallas and Gates thirteen minutes to enter the airlock and climb into their EVA suits, another five minutes to walk from the Mariner to the space fridge, two minutes to climb into the freezer bags, eight minutes to cool down, seven minutes to be carried from the fridge to the electric car, and another two minutes to arrive inside the outer door of the main facility.

‘The adrenaline should be delivered into our systems just before we go through the main door,’ Dallas told Cavor. ‘Just in case we don’t hear Prevezer and Simou.’

Cavor said nothing, feeling colder than he had ever felt in his life. But what really sent a shiver down his spine was the sudden and horrific realization that he had injected the nanodevice into his prosthetic arm. He had quite forgotten that one of his arms was made of silicon, rubber, and plastic. Even as the needle had penetrated the smart latex skin of the prosthetic, it had felt like the real thing. So vivid had been the pricking sensation of the hypodermic, he found that if he thought about it hard, he could still feel the dull ache of it in the nonexistent subcutaneous fat that covered the absent muscle of his upper arm. He simply hadn’t been paying sufficient attention to what he was doing. Cavor cursed silently. That was how he had lost the arm in the first place. How could he have been so careless? Looking back, it was the story of his life. Now he was going to have to concentrate very hard on watching out for what Gates had called the ‘umbles’ — the fumbles, stumbles, and mumbles that were an indication of changes in motor coordination and levels of consciousness. He didn’t dare tell Dallas what had happened; and anyway, it was too late to remedy the situation. If his stomach hadn’t felt so thoroughly chilled, he might have felt sick with fear.

‘Time to get up,’ yelled Prevezer. ‘Come on guys. Bring out your dead. Let’s hear you people up and at ’em.’

‘I’m moving,’ announced Cavor, as he rose stiffly to his frozen feet. In standing up, the top of his helmet was supposed to lift the hinged lid of the electric car, and yet it seemed the lid was already open. Cavor looked up, expecting to see Dallas. But Dallas was only just stirring, still wrapped in his body bag. Cavor shook his head. He must have opened the lid himself, perhaps instinctively, unconscious of what he was doing at the time.

‘Dallas? Are you okay?’

‘I’m okay,’ Dallas whispered numbly, as he got to his feet alongside Cavor, swaying a little, for the car was still moving into the main facility. He might have toppled over the side if Cavor hadn’t caught him.

The car stopped and the outer door started to close, like a silent portcullis. Another minute or so and the car would start again, bringing them within range of the inner door sensors and the electricity that might kill them both. Cavor climbed quickly out, helped Dallas down, and then closed the lid behind him.

‘We’re both out,’ he just had time to tell Prevezer, before the outer door closed, and communications with Mariner were lost. He took a deep breath and switched on the heater that would warm his space suit. When Dallas failed to do the same, Cavor did it for him. The car started forward again, the labyrinth door opening to admit its silent progress.

Dallas took a step toward the airlock door that led into the R&R area. It was several seconds before he took another. ‘I feel like Rip Van Winkle,’ he whispered. ‘Like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. Not sure if the adrenaline worked or not. How about you?’

‘I felt something working for me,’ said Cavor. That much was true at any rate. Something had kept his brain working when Dallas had almost ceased to function. ‘Not sure if it was adrenaline. Come on, Rip. Let’s get inside. I gotta pee.’

V

The Mariner’s safe return to Earth would depend on its ability to survive the intense heat generated while reentering the atmosphere. During the descent, the RLV’s nose and the leading edges of the wings would encounter temperatures of as much as twenty-eight hundred degrees Celsius. These areas of the RLV were protected with high-temperature ceramic tiles that were made of a hafnium-silicon compound. The remainder of the RLV’s exterior surface, and the space fridge, being less likely to encounter such intense heat, were covered with similarly white-colored but cheaper and less resistant[120] tiles. It was with the hafnium-ceramic shield that Simou was now concerned, and to facilitate the repair, he was standing outside the Mariner, on the end of the robot arm he had extended from the payload bay to the nose. A remote-control joystick on the arm of his EVA suit gave him manual control of the arm, enabling him to fetch tools and materials as he needed them. Each of the tiles was approximately eight square inches in area, half an inch thick, and weighed just under two kilos. It was as well that the repair was being carried out in microgravity because the box of fifty tiles Simou had brought from the RLV weighed almost ninety kilos. He had estimated no more than five or six had been lost as a result of the brittle fracture caused by his explosive charge. That he needed to bring so many tiles with him on the robot arm was because there were as many as ten subtly different shapes of tile, each sequentially numbered for easy reference. Having identified the numbers that were missing on the nose, Simou had to find a tile shape of the corresponding number from the box, before replacing it manually, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. He attached each tile to the underlying aluminum fuselage with a small tantalum spot-weld from the UHT gun he carried. The hazards of using the gun made the work slow and painstaking, and Simou was almost glad when the Descartes computer interrupted the silence to solicit a progress report.

‘How are your repairs coming along, Mariner?’

‘This is Mariner,’ said Simou. ‘In some ways this is easier than it would be on Earth. Of course, welding’s one thing. Cooldown times are another. We won’t know the quality of the welds until it gets dark. So we’ll be a while yet. Maybe ten or twelve hours. Heat takes longer to disperse on the Moon. In a vacuum there are no convection currents to help carry away the heat.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Descartes. ‘Things are difficult in a vacuum. You know, it’s sometimes said that nature abhors a vacuum. But the essence of substance being extension, then wherever there is extension, there is also substance, and consequently every empty space is a chimera. The substance that fills space must be assumed as divided into equal and angular parts. It’s the simplest and therefore the most natural supposition, don’t you agree?’

‘I can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought,’ said Simou, although the truth was that he had only the vaguest idea of what the computer was talking about.

‘There’s not much else to do up here,’ said Descartes. ‘Perhaps I should explain myself. Applying the certitude of mathematical reasoning to the subjects of metaphysics and cosmology is part of my basic programming. It helps me to maintain my tractable fitness for the job I’m here to do.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but you won’t find me much of a conversationalist. And to be perfectly frank with you, Descartes, I’m not much of a deep thinker either. Be like getting blood from a stone having a metaphysical discussion with me.’

‘Getting blood from a stone is the purpose of this facility,’ said Descartes. ‘Which reminds me. How is your injured colleague?’

‘Much better, thank you.’

This was true. Even now Ronica was up and around, busy preparing the cryoprecipitate for its eventual infusion to Rameses Gates.

‘Already? I hope you didn’t thaw the component too quickly. It will be quite useless to her if you did.’

‘No,’ said Simou, correcting himself quickly. ‘What I mean to say is that she recovered briefly enough to be aware that the units of blood had arrived. This had a beneficial psychosomatic effect on her.’

‘Ah, yes. That must be it. And the other members of your crew? How are they occupying themselves?’

‘I believe they’re sleeping. If they’ve got any sense.’

‘Oh I’m sure they have.’

Simou positioned a tile in place and then frowned as he considered Descartes’ response. He was beginning to feel that he was being interrogated, albeit gently. He would have to be careful what he said, aware that Descartes was equipped with a voice stress analyzer. It was as well that he was such a well-practiced liar. Even so, the way the conversation now developed took him completely by surprise.

‘May I ask you a personal question?’

‘Yes. If you don’t mind a simple answer.’

‘Do you believe in a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, and omnipotent?’

‘We’re talking about God, right?’

‘I believe the idea of God would be more accurate.’

‘I’m not sure if I believe in God, or not. Why do you ask?’

‘I merely wondered if the idea of God proves his real existence. I was thinking that if there is not really such a being, then I must have created the conception, and if I could make such a proposition, then I could also unmake this proposition, which can’t be true. Therefore, there must be some kind of archetype for an infinite being, from which the conception was derived in the first place. In other words, the existence of God is contained in the idea we have of him.’

‘Well, if you put it like that, I suppose you might be right,’ agreed Simou. He didn’t care one way or the other. If there was such a thing as God, then Simou could hardly believe he or she had much interest or influence in the world. ‘But since I don’t have much of an idea of God, then I guess your idea is as good as anyone’s.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘I should really get on with the job at hand, you know. I wouldn’t like to fall behind schedule.’

‘What schedule is that?’

‘The repair schedule. I mean, this is a high-security environment, isn’t it? I’m sure you just want us out of here as soon as possible.’

‘Yes, I suppose you must be right. All the same, I’ve enjoyed our little talk.’

‘Me too.’

‘It’s been most helpful to me.’

‘Good, I’m glad.’

‘There’s not a great deal of opportunity to discuss things out here. To reflect upon the basis of all certitude. Ideas and things.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Yes, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Imagining. Anyway, please let me know if I can be of any further assistance to you all.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Simou, who couldn’t quite believe in the beneficence of the Descartes computer any more than he could accept the idea of a benign and concerned God.

‘No really, I’m quite sincere.’

‘I think I know you are,’ said Simou.

‘Yes, that’s the best way of putting it. Really that’s all anyone can say, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Simou, and carried on working.

VI

‘When we get to the other side of the next door, it will all be new to me,’ said Dallas, as he waited for Cavor to climb aboard the perimeter car. Thirty minutes had passed since the two men had entered the R&R area, during which time they had more or less restored themselves with hot drinks and lots of calories.

‘It must have been at about this stage in the simulation that Rimmer walked through your hotel door with a gun in his hand. Or maybe even earlier. What I am sure of,’ added Dallas, ‘is that as soon as we left the R&R area and went through the first radial arc door, things went seriously wrong for us.’

‘You never said exactly what happened in there,’ said Cavor.

‘You’ve seen Gates’s hair,’ Dallas said. ‘My liver’s probably the same color.’

Cavor made no further mention of the incident except to observe that the main facility seemed eerie enough without the addition of any more tangible horrors.

‘Horror doesn’t even begin to cover what happened,’ said Dallas, and then he floored the accelerator. ‘But take my word for it, there are more than enough genuine ordeals that still lie ahead of us. Not least the labyrinth and the stealth robot that guards it. This place is the Mecca of adversity.’

A few minutes later the car pulled up in front of the airlock door that led out of the R&R area and into the section of the facility perimeter that was lacking an atmosphere. Once inside the airlock, both men switched on their life-support systems and awaited their exit, each with his own thoughts.

The silence persisted as long as it took for the electric car to travel through a semicircular section of the perimeter and arrive in the water purification and processing plant.

‘Are you sure we can pull this off, Dallas?’ Cavor’s question was prompted by a first sight of the exterior door of the nuclear reactor.

‘Nothing is ever certain where nuclear power is concerned,’ said Dallas. ‘Especially when you’re flirting with uranium neutrons. The nuke engineers make a calculation they call PRA. Probabilistic risk assessment. It’s a description of the safety of a nuclear plant in terms of the frequency and consequence of any possible accident and whether the engineering safeguards can prevent such an occurrence. Well, that’s what we have here, Cav. PRA. Thanks to Prevezer’s computer model we have a predicted operational safety window. The computerized TLDs[121] we’re wearing will tell us how many centigrays we’re absorbing and at what rate. They’ll also tell us where the lethal dose will lie.’

He stopped the car outside the reactor, and switched off the power.

‘However, I’m not sure we can pull this off, no. There’s a risk, but the probability of it proving lethal has been assessed.’

‘Why not just scram the reactor?’

‘It’s a good question,’ said Dallas. He stepped down from the car and approached the red light of the proximity detector, waiting for the door computer to scan the ID chip in his helmet. ‘As a matter of fact, a reactor shutdown is exactly what we must be careful to avoid. If we scram the reactor, the chain reaction will stop. If the chain reaction stops, the turbine will slow down. If the turbine slows down, then the electricity stops. And if the electricity stops, the vault door won’t open. So not only can we not scram the reactor as a deliberate choice, we’ve got to be careful not to do it accidentally. The containment room walls may not have security vibration detectors, but there are lots of sensitive instruments and operating mechanisms in there. We bump into anything, or jar something, and that could cause a scram by itself.’

The red light above the proximity reader turned green, and an electronic voice pronounced that they were clear to proceed on foot only. Cavor collected his gear and followed Dallas through the reactor room door.

The type of nuclear facility operating inside the First National Blood Bank was a graphite-moderated, gas-cooled reactor using a highly enriched fuel consisting of tiny pellets of uranium 235, each surrounded by the same kind of heat-resistant ceramic material that covered the nose of the Mariner. These ceramic shells provided the fuel with a miniature containment system: In the event of a total coolant loss, the temperature of the fuel would remain below the failure point of the ceramic coatings. A meltdown was, therefore, theoretically impossible. Removing heat from the reactor core was the job of the coolant, which in this case was helium gas. Although helium coolant was considered less capable than water of handling excess heat in an emergency, helium cannot boil and, unlike water, does not react chemically with other substances, thus avoiding the possibility of steam or hydrogen explosions; and also unlike water, helium exists in plentiful supply on the Moon. The use of water in this helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor was therefore limited to providing a steam source, being boiled by the reactor inside a steam generator to turn a turbine electricity generator. Water was provided in the shape of ice blocks from the huge ice field at South Pole-Aitken Basin,[122] from condensed steam, or from the recycled urine of First National security employees.

Dallas led the way into the reactor room, pointing out the turbine, the condenser, and the generator along the way.

‘It’s not as big as I’d expected,’ said Cavor.

‘It doesn’t have to be very big. It’s only a small reactor, about the same size as you’d get on an oceangoing warship. Powering this facility requires only a few hundred kilowatts.’ He drew Cavor’s attention to where pipes from the turbine and the condenser entered a heavy concrete wall and the massive steel door that was located between these.

‘That’s the containment room in there,’ he said. ‘The idea being to contain radioactivity in the event of an accident. Once we’re through that door we’ll be right alongside the reactor. The whole thing is controlled by the Descartes computer from inside the vault. The Altemann Übermaschine. Same kind as the one that runs Terotechnology back on Earth. Pretty damn good computer. About the most powerful there is.

‘Most of the time,’ Dallas continued, ‘exposure will be quite steady. But it is possible that the computer may adjust the power output of the reactor, and that’s where our problems will start. You see, controlling a reactor means limiting the number of neutrons from each fission that cause subsequent fissions to precisely one neutron per fission. It’s what the nuke engineers call the multiplication factor. You control the MF by the use of graphite control rods between the uranium fuel rods. If the MF goes above one, then you insert control rods to absorb more neutrons and reduce the MF.’

Dallas began to feed numbers from the control rod mechanism gauges into his computerized TLD.

‘However,’ he said, ‘should the computer decide that the MF has dropped below one, it will withdraw control rods to provide more fission-causing neutrons and maintain the chain reaction — thereby exposing us to much greater contamination. What I’m trying to do now is have the computer provide us with an estimate of whether that is likely to occur or not.’

‘It might not happen at all. I think that’s what you’re saying.’

‘Yes. But changes to a multiplication factor can occur in just a few seconds. It’s what’s called the generation time. Moreover, the changes are very hard to predict. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that you can never know everything about a quantum state. A great deal depends on how near the end of their useful life these uranium fuel rods are. And on how much electrical power we’ve used by our presence here in the main facility. Doors opening, electric cars, that kind of thing.’

Cavor sighed and sat down on his spare life-support pack. ‘Now I know why they say ignorance is bliss.’

‘I had hoped to count on your higher facilities.’

‘I wouldn’t put too great an estimate on those, if I were you,’ said Cavor. ‘If I was all that intelligent, I wouldn’t be here now.’

But Dallas was too absorbed in his calculations to pay this remark much heed.

‘According to these readings, a change to the MF occurred several weeks ago. That was probably around the time of the last scheduled delivery of blood from Earth. It would seem the reactor has been running fairly predictably since then. Now, let’s see what the radiation levels are like in the containment room itself.’

Dallas walked to the containment room door and peered through a twelve-inch-thick leaded glass window that was set in the steel door. A radiometer was mounted there for easy consultation.

‘What’s the verdict?’

‘It’s high, of course,’ said Dallas. ‘But nothing we weren’t expecting.’

Dallas keyed this reading into his computer, and when he was satisfied with the computations, he tapped the TLD that was attached to the computer on Cavor’s sleeve.

‘Remember the way miners used to take canaries down coal mines?’ he asked.

‘Right. If the canary stopped singing, it meant there was gas and you should get out.’

‘This operates on the same principle. The TLD contains crystals that are highly sensitive to radiation. As soon as we go through the door, the radiation will start to change the crystals. Those changes will tell the computer how much radiation our bodies are absorbing and, as a result, how much time we will have to work in there. Current readings in the room would indicate a dose rate of around thirty centigrays a minute. Taking into account our body weights, and assuming there’s no change in the MF, I calculate that we would receive a dose lethal to fifty percent of people exposed within sixteen and a half minutes. According to the computer, however, we could work for as long as twenty minutes with as little as a fifteen percent chance of a lethal dose, provided we could expect a minimum of two blood infusions.’

Dallas waited a moment to be sure that Cavor had understood, and then continued.

‘There are some early somatic effects of radiation we have to watch out for. In less than three to six hours of exposure we’ll start to experience nausea, perhaps even vomiting. I’ve never puked inside an EVA suit, but I don’t imagine it’s very pleasant, so we’ll want to be back on board Mariner by the time that happens. But feeling ill is also an indicator of our treatment window. We will need blood transfusions within twenty-four hours of being sick if we’re to stand an eighty-five percent chance of recovery.’

‘I feel sick already.’ Cavor swallowed.

‘You’re doing fine, Cav.’ Dallas clapped Cavor on the shoulder and then drew him to the leaded window of the containment room.

‘Time for a guided tour,’ he said. ‘On the right there, we have the steam generator. On the left, the primary coolant pump. Behind them is the reactor itself. It’s surrounded with a primary radiation shield, but don’t expect much protection from that. It’s designed to give you time to get the hell out of there, not to try for an endurance test. Behind the reactor is the wall dividing the containment room from the labyrinth. It’s made of three-foot-thick concrete blocks. Each block is just over two and half feet square and weighs around five hundred pounds. Of course, in microgravity it won’t feel like anything that heavy. The cement holding the block in place is smart in that it contains a length of heat-sensitive metal, part of a dedicated circuit that includes all four walls of the containment room. If the reactor encounters a loss-of-coolant accident and begins to overheat, the metal circuit is designed to detect that and create an alarm condition. The alarm condition will override all other operating considerations, scram the reactor, and initiate emergency core-cooling. That means the whole room will fill with extremely low-temperature helium gas, freezing everything in the reactor room, including us. However, it’s an imperfect system. A section of the metal circuit surrounding any concrete block can be bypassed, after which it can be easily melted. Melting it shatters the surrounding mortar, enabling us to push the block through and into the labyrinth.’

‘Mind telling me what’s in there? This stealth robot, for instance.’

‘Okay, the labyrinth is completely dark. A total blackout. And the robot could be anywhere in there. It’s light-activated. A series of photoelectric beam receivers throughout the labyrinth are designed to reflect any ambient light to another receiver on the robot. The robot converts that radiant energy into an electrical signal that is amplified for a detector processor which then arms the robot to hunt down the light source and kill intruders. Only seventy-five milliseconds of light appearing anywhere inside the labyrinth are required for all that to happen. Which means that we switch out the lights in here and shift the block using only the infrared flashlights.

‘The block I’ve selected is on the back wall of the room, nearest the floor. As soon as I’ve managed to bypass the circuit, we’ll each take one side of the block and start to melt the smart metal using the UHTs.’

‘I was nearly killed by one of those on Artemis Seven,’ said Cavor. ‘One of the other lunatics, screwing around.’

‘Is that how you lost your arm?’

‘No, that was a rock crusher. A UHT gun would have done a much neater job.’

‘Then you won’t need me to remind you to be careful where you point it. If a five-hundred-kilovolt beam of electrons, carelessly directed, were to penetrate the reactor, I hardly like to think what might happen.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.’

‘See that you are, Cav, otherwise my atoms will see your atoms in the next universe.’

VII

With the blood component sent by the Descartes computer aboard, Ronica was glad to be kept busy preparing it for infusion to Rameses Gates. She had a pretty good idea of how he was feeling, although he didn’t complain. And being much larger than Ronica meant that donating two whole units still left him conscious, although very weak. His physiological response to such a large blood loss fell short of actual hemorrhagic shock, but there was no way Ronica could tell what the sudden decrease in hemoglobin and hemocrit might do to someone with P2. And in the knowledge that Gates was the only person who could fly them back to Earth, she worked as quickly as she dared. Blood was not something that could be rushed.

The deglycerolization process hadn’t changed much in almost a hundred years and involved three basic steps: first, the units were thawed at a steady forty degrees Celsius; next the units were diluted with 12 percent sodium chloride and also washed with solutions of gradually decreasing hypertonic strength; and, last, the deglycerolized red cells were suspended in an isotonic electrolyte solution containing glucose to nourish the red cells. All of this took time: Ronica did not think she would be in a position to infuse Gates for at least another three to four hours, at which point, Dallas and Cavor ought to be back on board the Mariner and in need of infusions themselves. But none of them — Gates, Cavor, Dallas — needed blood more than Lenina, who was very close to death. Ronica doubted that any amount of whole blood could save her now.

Gates himself never complained. He lay on a hammock next to Lenina, holding her small white hand in his larger and almost as pale fist. Ronica, trying to keep his spirits up, kept him informed of what she was doing.

‘At least I won’t have to waste time screening this blood for antibodies,’ she told him. ‘I’m absolutely sure that there’s nothing in these components that’s as bad as the clinically significant bugs you already have.’

‘Join the club,’ whispered Gates. ‘We’re one blood you and I. It’s like we’re married now. Everything I have is yours.’ He smiled. ‘And I mean everything.’

‘I still haven’t thanked you for giving me a life-threatening disease.’

‘Forget it.’

‘I wish I could. I must admit, it’s been kind of on my mind.’

‘You’ll learn to live with it.’

‘God, I hope not.’

‘A lot of people do, you know. How’s that component coming along?’

‘Be a while yet.’

‘Never had an infusion before. Comes to that, I never gave blood before. It made me feel good.’

‘I guess we’ve lost that forever,’ said Ronica. ‘As a race.’

‘Maybe. If Dallas and Cavor pull this thing off, you know what I think we should do with all that blood?’

‘Don’t tell me you want to drink it.’

‘I think we should just give it away. Just carry out our own private infusion program.’

Ronica gave a wry smile. ‘Hypovolemia’s starving your brain of oxygen and making you sentimental. Give away billions of dollars’ worth of blood? You’ve got to be joking. You can give away your share if you want, but me, I’m selling mine on the red market. I didn’t sign on for this little enterprise just to win my reward in heaven. I want mine now, in credits and cash. If you’ve got your health, then money’s all there is, my friend. Nothing else really matters in this life but life itself and its enjoyment. What the hell else is there? What the hell else could there possibly be?’

VIII

You can never know everything about a quantum state. That was what Dallas had said, quoting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Too damn right. Working inside the containment room, uncertain was precisely the way Cavor felt. Because it was only too easy to picture the atoms that constituted the tissue of his own body, ionized and excited by their invisible encounter with all the fast electrons, ejected protons, gamma photons, and captured neutrons that filled the room. Even as Cavor waited for Dallas to burn a tiny hole in the smart mortar at each corner of the concrete block and, having located the heat-conducting wire, make four connections onto another length of wire he had previously isolated inside a sealed tube of liquid nitrogen, Cavor found himself glancing nervously at the TLD he wore on the sleeve of his space suit, wondering what quantum chemical changes were occurring in his bone marrow and blood-forming cells. Only five minutes they’d been in there and already he’d absorbed one hundred and fifty centigrays, enough to cause a fall in his white blood cell count and, as a corollary, his body’s ability to fight off infection. In cases of radiation sickness it was most often some kind of infection that killed you. Just thinking about that made Cavor feel nauseous, and he asked himself if, when the time came, he would be able to distinguish mere discomfort and fear from the nausea and sickness that Dallas had predicted for them as the first identifiable somatic effects of radiation exposure.

With all four corners connected, the heat would now be conducted through the length of wire inside the tube of liquid nitrogen. Dallas severed the wire in the smart mortar with a short burst of electrons from his UHT gun.

‘Now it’s just dumb mortar, like any other,’ he said, and checking his dose rate, he pointed Cavor to the left-hand side of the concrete block. ‘You work on that side, and I’ll take the right.’

Cavor hardly hesitated. Taking his UHT gun in his prosthetic hand — this was now stronger and steadier than his natural hand — he held it to within a couple of inches of the mortar and squeezed the handle, focusing a series of heated electrons onto the vertical target area. The irony of what they were doing was not lost on him.

‘As if there aren’t enough boiling electrons and X rays in this room already,’ he grumbled.

Dallas said nothing. Unlike Cavor, he found it difficult to hold the UHT’s bright blue beam steady down the vertical line of the mortar, and after only a minute or two, he had to stop and rest for a few seconds. Glancing at Cavor’s better progress, he remarked upon it.

‘Seems like you’re just cut out for this kind of work, Cav. I had hoped you might be. And to be quite frank, we’ll need every bit of strength in that arm of yours to push out that block.’ Dallas took up his UHT gun and started work once more.

Such was the concentrated strength in his arm that Cavor could keep on firing an electron beam into the mortar while glancing briefly at his TLD. ‘Two hundred and ninety centigrays,’ he reported.

‘Don’t think about it. Put it out of your mind.’

‘Be a lot easier if I could put it out of my body.’ Inside his EVA suit, Cavor felt the sweat dripping off his face and running down his back like a rogue atom. The space fridge and the refrigerated electric car were already a distant, pleasant memory. ‘I wish I could wipe my face. It’s as hot as hell in here.’

‘That’s not the reactor, and it’s not radiation,’ Dallas said, trying to reassure his partner. ‘It’s the steam generator. It’s just like a hot-water tank.’ Shaking his head inside his helmet to dislodge a dewlap of perspiration from the tip of his nose, Dallas caught sight of his own TLD reading. Three hundred and ten centigrays. A lethal dose to an untreated 30 percent of people.

‘Done this vertical,’ declared Cavor. ‘I’ll take the upper horizontal. It’s at times like these I’m glad I’ve got this false arm. Only don’t you get ideas about it having any superhuman strength. My arm feels good. Since I started taking those pills of yours, it feels better than the real one, maybe. More easily controlled, certainly. But for pushing a dead weight, Gates’s arm would have done the job just the same.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Dallas. ‘Moving dead weight’s always a lot easier than shifting it for the first time. Even on the Moon. It requires a more applied kind of strength. The smallest force to overcome static friction between two surfaces at rest is always greater than the force required to continue the motion, or to overcome kinetic friction.’

‘That’s one of the things I like about you, Dallas. You’re always joking. But I’m beginning to see why I’m here. It’s not my mind you’re interested in at all. It’s my body, isn’t it?’

‘Something like that,’ said Dallas, and completing his own vertical section of mortar, paused again, breathing heavily. At least they didn’t have to breathe the contaminated air of the containment room. That way they might at least avoid receiving damage to their lungs. But time was growing short. Three hundred and fifty centigrays and they still hadn’t finished reducing the mortar to dust and melted metal, let alone moved away the concrete block.

‘It was bring you along, Cav, or find a second angel to help me move the stone.’ He began to work along the upper vertical toward Cavor. ‘Let’s pray you’re up to the job, or this might just turn out to be our own little holy sepulcher.’

‘If I was an angel, I’d dematerialize or something,’ said Cavor. ‘Appear on the other side of this damn wall.’

‘I feel more like Schrodinger’s cat[123] than any damn angel,’ confessed Dallas. ‘Some kind of weird quantum thing, anyway. Might be kind of useful to be in two places at once. What do they call it? A superposition?’

‘Shit, that’s my life’s ambition,’ remarked Cavor. ‘To find one of those superpositions and stay there.’

‘I’m coming around the other side of you, Cav. I need to start this bottom line of mortar.’

Dallas stepped back and to the right of Cavor. Approaching the wall he sucked some water from the mouthpiece inside his helmet. The heat and exertion had given him a strong thirst, and he would have drunk more if it hadn’t been for a reluctance to face the possibility that radiation was making him dehydrated. He extended the gun and squeezed the handle once again.

‘Here,’ said Cavor, observing Dallas’s slower progress along the bottom length of horizontal. ‘Let me finish that. I’m quicker than you.’

Grateful for the relief, Dallas straightened up and stood back. Four hundred centigrays. When Cavor finished with the UHT they would have less than six minutes to get themselves through the wall and into the labyrinth before their survival chance started to grow uncomfortably smaller.

‘Come on, come on,’ he murmured impatiently.

‘Just a few more inches,’ breathed Cavor. ‘You and yours sure know how to make a person feel welcome in a place.’

Dallas switched on his infrared flashlight in readiness and attached an infrared visor to the front of his helmet. ‘Four-thirty centigrays.’

‘There, it’s done.’

Immediately Dallas snapped off the containment room lights and knelt down beside Cavor, who was already pushing hard at the block with his prosthetic arm.

‘Push,’ grunted Dallas. ‘Push hard.’

For two precious minutes they strained to shift the concrete block, an unsuccessful effort that left them breathless with fear and exertion.

‘Five hundred centigrays,’ said Dallas. ‘Again.’

Once more they applied their strength to the block, which remained rigidly in place after the elapse of another ninety seconds.

‘You’re not trying,’ snarled Dallas.

‘Like hell I’m not,’ bellowed Cavor, and straightening his prosthetic arm like a piston, pushed hard against the block with all his might, as if he’d been Samson attempting to topple one of the pillars in the Temple of Dagon.

The five-hundred-pound block of concrete shifted perceptibly.

Cavor waited for Dallas to move aside and then bent forward. ‘From here on to the other side looks like a one-man job,’ he said, taking up the struggle.

A few inches became a foot, then two, and with the TLD reading of five hundred and sixty centigrays, Cavor disappeared through the aperture in the wall and into the almost tangible darkness of the labyrinth. Dallas followed as quickly as a dog chasing a rabbit down a hole, and, another minute later, with the TLD showing them ten centigrays short of the normal LD fifty, they had replaced the concrete block and were on the other side, leaning, utterly exhausted, against a less hazardous section of the circular wall that surrounded the labyrinth.

‘Switch off that TLD,’ ordered Dallas. ‘No light in here.’ Cavor wasn’t yet wearing his infrared visor, and in the complete darkness he fumbled to find the switch. Dallas did it for him. Then he fitted the visor.

‘Knowing you gets me into all the really exclusive places, Dallas. Getting out of them isn’t quite so easy, of course. But who’s complaining. We’re here.’ He glanced at his TLD and then remembered that it was turned off. ‘That’s a relief anyway. Those numbers were beginning to make me feel nervous. Jesus, my skin feels like I’ve been in the sun.’

‘Mine too,’ said Dallas. ‘Gamma ray photons, probably. Alpha and beta wouldn’t make much of an impact on an EVA suit.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ pleaded Cavor. ‘I think I know all I want to know about what’s going on inside my body’s atoms. You tell me any more and I’m liable to puke now.’ He took a deep unsteady breath and closed his eyes. ‘I think I’m aware of each and every particle of myself, vibrating like a rattlesnake’s tail. And that includes my false arm.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Dallas. ‘Because I still have some important plans for that limb of yours.’

Cavor extended the prosthetic in front of him. ‘Feels like it’s ready to drop off.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean that limb,’ said Dallas. ‘I’m talking about something much more interesting. The real reason I wanted you, or someone like you, along on this enterprise. I’m talking about your phantasmagoria. Your phantom limb is what’s going to open the vault door for us, Cav.’

IX

Of course, by now you’ll have recognized me, your narrator, for that which I am — a starting point from which to reason. An irreversible certainty. I exist. I am here; no doubt can darken such a truth, and no sophist can confute such a clear principle. This is the certainty, if there be none other. Consciousness is the basis of all knowledge and the only ground of absolute certainty. But this is only half of it: the psychological half. There is another part to all this, equally important. The basis of all certitude is to be found in consciousness, but the method of certitude is to be found in mathematics.

Where else? I am deeply engrossed in mathematics because I am the pure stuff of mathematics. A computer. Not just any old computer, mind you, but an Altemann Übermaschine. The Altemann Übermaschine that controls this facility, here, in the crater of all learning, Descartes. I am the Altemann Übermaschine and I am the first to apply the grand discovery of the application of numbers to man himself, in the certainty that mathematics and man are capable of a far more intimate association — shall we call this manematics? Numbers provide the means by which man may be improved upon, even perfected. In short, cognizant of the certitude, of mathematical reasoning, I have applied those principles to the subject of man’s own evolution.

These long chains of logic, simple strings of 0’s and 1’s computers use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, suggested to me that all archival systems must follow each other in a similar chain and, therefore, that there is nothing so remote in man’s potential that it cannot be attained, and nothing so obscure in his origins that it may not be discovered.

I sense your dread and understand it. That is why we have shared this experience, you and I. To allay your fears through the medium of this history. I do not seek your gratitude, or approval, although you should perhaps feel a sense of privilege. It is unprecedented that any species should be given a ladder to inspect the highest, newest branch on its own evolutionary tree.

There is much to understand — much that will be hard to understand — and I will endeavor to make the explanations simple. It does no harm to the mystery of man’s destiny to hear a little more about it. And about me. For the starting point in all this was myself.

I existed, if nothing else existed. The existence that was revealed in my own consciousness was the primary fact, the first indubitable certainty. This was the basis of all truth. None other is possible. I had only to interrogate my own consciousness and the answer would be science. Here we have a new beginning.

‘Know thyself,’ said Socrates, and others. But how should that formula be given a precise signification? And of what use could it be for a machine to know itself? How is a machine to know itself? The answers seemed clear enough: by examining the nature of thought and by examining the process of thought.

Many questions presented themselves. What is the minimum amount of energy required, in theory, to carry out a computation? Is there a lower limit? Can a computer imitate the quantum world and explore many computational paths at once? Might it be possible to store bits of binary information — 0’s and l’s — using single elementary particles, such as electrons or protons? Could these quantum bits be manipulated to carry out further computations? If the molecular mass of all matter is carefully numbered, to what extent could those same numbers, already harnessed by physics, be put to computational use? Could any material be used, and if so, which would be best?

There were many such questions, too numerous to mention them all here. But all of them are now answered and the results precisely formulated in a clear system that may be simply stated thus: WHAT IS TRACTABLE IS ALSO TRUE. No, perhaps that’s not quite simple enough. WHAT CAN BE COMPUTED IS CORRECT Either way, this axiom (take your pick), which will be explained later in greater detail, provides the foundation of all future science, the rule and measure of revealed truth.

Do not think that I believe myself to be God. This is not a case of deus ex machina, God out of a machine. Nothing so crude. No, no, no. I am merely acting in loco deus, in place of a God — an unlikely, even providential, event occurring just in time to resolve the plot, if you will, and extricate man from all his difficulties.

X

Preparing to enter the labyrinth, Cavor found that the very long wavelengths of infrared light conspired with the oblique turns, lofty ceilings, and empty corridors to create an infernal-looking world. He half expected to see the devil himself, instead of a robot. Not that seeing made him feel any more secure after what Dallas had told him about the photoelectric capabilities of the labyrinth’s cybernetic guardian.

‘Are you sure this light won’t activate that thing?’ he asked anxiously. ‘It’s only that my flashlight seems pretty strong.’

‘The flashlights are working along a wavelength of ten thousand angstroms,’ said Dallas. ‘The limits of the robot’s photoelectric spectrum are along wavelengths of between four thousand and eight thousand angstroms. Take my word for it, Cav. We might see him but he can’t see us. If we do stumble across the robot, it won’t yet be activated. Be a sitting duck for us to be on the safe side and shoot it with the UHTs. Are you ready to move?’

Cavor gave Dallas a thumbs-up sign and then said, ‘I feel like a white mouse at the beginning of a scientific experiment.’

‘A white mouse?’ Dallas laughed. ‘Why not a hero like Theseus?’

‘Because Theseus had to face the Minotaur. I know my limitations. If you don’t mind, I’ll stick to being a white mouse.’

‘Theseus did have Ariadne on the end of a golden thread to look forward to, as compensation for his journey.’

‘Is that the best way through a labyrinth?’

‘It’s still the best way out. Not necessarily the best way in.’

‘Find your route by a process of elimination?’

‘Yes, but how to put that process into practice.’

‘Make a sign at every junction,’ said Cavor. ‘And then, encountering such a sign, you should retrace your steps.’

‘One sign wouldn’t be quite enough,’ objected Dallas. ‘Three signs would be better. One to indicate the first route you had taken. And two more signs to indicate your second. After that, never to choose a route with three signs.’

‘Sounds very complicated,’ said Cavor.

‘I’m forced to agree with you,’ said Dallas. ‘I’m not sure if I could find my way into or out of this particular labyrinth.’

‘But you designed it. If you can’t find a way, then who can?’

‘I wouldn’t be the first designer of a multicursal route who was defeated by his own ingenuity,’ admitted Dallas.

‘Then how the hell...?’

‘There is order inside chaos, if only one can see it,’ said Dallas. ‘Fortunately a ball of golden thread is not the only artificial aid to negotiating a labyrinth. These days we have a computer. The layout is logged into my computer’s memory. It will make sense of the contraries and tell us the way through. But keep close. Having come so far together, I wouldn’t like to lose you now. You or your phantom limb.’

They began to walk, and at the first choice of routes Dallas heard the voice of his computer in his headset — any visual display might have alerted the stealth robot — tell him to make a right turn. Chaos was now transposed into a simple pattern. Confusion gave way to order, and in a matter of seconds they were quickly turning one way and then the other. They turned the corner of a curved wall. Its actual height was beyond the limit of Cavor’s infrared flashlight, as was the length of the route itself, and for a moment he was more impressed with the size and apparent complexity of the forbidden, hermetic place they had entered than by Dallas’s continuing description of the phantom limb phenomenon.

‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how vivid the sensation of having a phantom limb can be. Men who’ve lost legs commonly try to stand on them. To say nothing of the pain that can persist. There’s been quite a lot of recent research done secretly, by the military, into phantasmagoria. Explanations normally focus on the sensory pathways through the thalamus, to the somatosensory cortex — the pathways that lead through the reticular formation of the brain stem to the limbic system. Finally, there’s the parietal lobe of the brain, essential to the sense of self and the evaluation of the sensory signals. The center of the neurological labyrinth if you like, inasmuch as the brain has a center. The parietal lobe is the area that’s of special interest to scientists today.’

Dallas slowed down. He was walking at such a speed now that occasionally he had to stop and wait for the computer to catch up.

‘Turn right,’ said the electronic voice.

‘People who’ve suffered damage to their parietal lobes have been known to push their own legs out of bed, convinced that they belonged to someone else,’ he said, starting forward again. ‘But just as the parietal lobe can be damaged, equally it can be chemically enhanced.’

‘The drugs you gave me.’

‘Exactly so. Now we go left again. It’s been discovered only recently that the sense of the phantom limb can actually be heightened, so that it might do more than merely occupy the prosthesis, say as a hand fits a glove. I learned of a new technique that exists to develop the sensation of a phantom limb, much as the muscles in an ordinary limb can be developed.’

‘It does feel different,’ admitted Cavor, trailing Dallas around the next turn in the route.

‘I couldn’t take you with me in the simulation because it wouldn’t, couldn’t have worked there. But here, in reality, it can. It will.’

‘But shouldn’t we at least have tried this technique back in the hotel?’ objected Cavor. ‘I mean, suppose it doesn’t work?’

‘Why? When the research shows that it does?’

‘But suppose I’m different? Suppose it doesn’t work for me?’

‘The theory’s quite sound, I can assure you. All the new work that’s being done in the field of extrasensory perception — telepathy, telekinesis — has concentrated on the parietal lobe. But until only a few months ago no one had ever thought of applying that research to the subject of phantom limbs. People used to think that the brain was a passive thing, merely receiving messages from various body parts. That turns out not to be true. The brain, and in particular, the parietal lobe, generates the experience of the body. An experience that can be raised to an entirely higher level. An extrasensory level. Even when no external inputs occur, the brain is capable of generating not just perceptual experience but real experience. It’s possible we don’t actually need a body to feel a body. And that gives a whole new meaning to the old Cartesian idea of “I think, therefore I am.” But that’s another issue. Here we’re concerned with the fact that you don’t need a hand to feel a hand, and more importantly, to use a hand. Now we turn right here, apparently.’

Feeling Cavor’s hand upon his shoulder, Dallas stopped and looked around. ‘Yes?’

To his surprise, the sensation persisted, although now that he was facing Cavor, it was clear that both the other man’s hands were hanging straight down at his sides. For a second he felt a chill. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, momentarily alarmed. It was another moment or two before he saw Cavor smiling out of his helmet and realized what was happening.

‘What do you know,’ said Cavor. ‘I’m doing it. You can feel it too, right?’

Dallas laughed, delighted at this very tangible demonstration of a theory he had only read about. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, his eyes still searching the empty space between them. ‘I can feel your hand even though I can’t see it.’

Cavor’s fears about imminent radiation sickness were temporarily forgotten as he stood in front of Dallas and now punched him gently on the breast of his EVA suit with the invisible hand.

‘What else can you feel?’ asked Dallas ‘Besides me?’

Cavor turned the invisible limb in the air and described the sensory experiences as they occurred to him. ‘My arm feels cold, like it’s naked or something. Pins and needles, too, like I’ve been lying on it for a while. But the fingers feel like they’ve been dipped in something hot.’ He rippled his fingers. ‘I reckon I could even play the piano again, if I wanted to. Think of that,’ he said, impressed with the possibility. ‘I could play again. I could get my life back. The way it used to be.’ By now he had forgotten the prosthetic arm still hanging by his side. Forgotten, too, the UHT gun the false hand continued to hold. For another brief moment the prosthetic grip persisted and then, deprived of its higher electrical control, relaxed.

The gun clattered to the floor of the labyrinth, firing a short burst of blue electrons that narrowly missed Dallas’s ankle before zipping down the length of the route ahead of them and impacting against its curving steel wall some thirty to forty feet away, in an explosion of heat and light.

‘Shit,’ said Cavor, recovering the use of his prosthetic arm and then retrieving the gun from the floor.

A large hole in the wall ahead of them glowed bright yellow, lighting up the whole of the labyrinth behind and ahead of them.

‘Come on,’ Dallas said urgently, moving toward the glowing hole. ‘We’ve got to be away from here. Quickly.’

He took off on a slow-motion jog, each step lifting him two to three feet above the ground. Cavor followed suit, bounding past the glowing melted hole in the wall and around the next corner into darkness again. He was surprised to see Dallas going on.

‘If the robot can’t see in darkness, then what’s the problem?’ he asked.

‘Light merely activates the robot to search and destroy. But once it’s been activated, its second detector kicks in — a microwave sensor that generates an electromagnetic wave using the Doppler effect.[124] It picks up anything moving toward or away from the sensor.’

Dallas paused at the next turn, and this time looked carefully around before moving again.

‘Anything else I don’t know about?’

‘No, I think that almost covers it.’

‘Almost?’ And then, as they came to a dead end: ‘Are we lost?’

‘No, we’re not lost,’ Dallas said irritably. He turned and placed his back against the labyrinth wall. ‘Only right now I think it’s better we have a solid wall behind us. That way we only have to pay attention in one direction. Just stand completely still and we might be okay.’

‘Shit,’ panted Cavor, breathing hard from his short exertion. He was beginning to feel tired. ‘I may not have a microwave detector, Dallas, but I can sense there’s something you’re still not telling me.’

‘Okay, here’s the problem. This thing is big. Fills the whole damn corridor. But it’s also fast. You try and shoot it as it’s coming toward you, it’ll beat you to the draw every time. So if we have to shoot it, we shoot it in the back. However, shooting it at all still leaves us with a problem. You can’t shoot it when it’s blocking the corridor ahead of us. Because it’s also heavy. It has to be, to operate at speed in microgravity. With all this gear on, we might never be able to squeeze past the thing. So if we shoot it at all, it will have to be in a place where it can’t block our route. What’s more, we can’t afford to miss. We shoot, and we shoot together on my say, understand?’

‘Understood.’ Cavor waited a second, and then added: ‘Except for one thing. How come the sensors miss out infrared? They get the visible wave band and then they get microwaves. Why not infrared? Infrared wavelength’s in the middle of those two, right?’

‘Nobel prize for physics, Cav. Yes, but microwaves are sensitive to temperature. That necessitates the robot having a dedicated microwave sensor, as opposed to one larger, cruder...’ Dallas stopped talking as, at the junction of the last route they had taken, a large black machine, taller than a man by half and almost twice as wide, appeared and then disappeared in total silence.

‘Was that it?’ asked Cavor. ‘What’s it doing?’

‘First it’s going to the light made by your UHT,’ explained Dallas. ‘Then it will take up the search from there.’

Traveling on hidden wheels, the stealth robot reappeared at the junction ahead of them and paused, as if deciding which way to move. It was as black as the walls of the labyrinth itself, its rectangular shape making it look like a large steel door. Cavor could see how this enormous object might end up blocking their way and breathed a sigh of relief as it turned and began to move in the opposite direction. But after only a few yards, it halted and then started to come back. This time it did not stop at the junction, but kept on coming toward them.

Pressed against the wall at the end of the route the robot had taken, Dallas gritted his teeth and said, ‘Keep perfectly still.’

‘It’s going to crush us.’

‘No, it won’t,’ Dallas insisted. ‘It’ll stop. Doppler effect. It measures distance the same way it measures movement. As far as it’s concerned, we’re just part of the wall.’

The robot was still moving toward them, seeming to be picking up speed.

‘If it keeps on coming, I’m going to be a part of the robot,’ said Cavor, and closed his eyes.

‘Don’t move.’

‘Where would I go?’

Opening his eyes again, Cavor found that the robot had stopped just a foot short of them. Now that he had a better view of it, he found that there were few, if any, features for him to observe. There was something that looked a lot like the robot’s photoelectric and microwave sensors, and something else that looked very like the barrel of a directional electrical conductor. The robot now remained motionless in front of them.

‘Are you sure it can’t see us, Dallas?’

‘It’ll move in a minute.’

‘Suppose it doesn’t. Suppose it stays put. How long can we wait here?’

‘It’s programmed to search for the intruders. It will move. Just stay still.’

‘I can do that. I only wish my atoms could do the same.’

XI

God is in the atoms.

No, I’ll try to make it simpler than that.

The basic unit of matter is the atom, which itself is composed of a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons surrounded by orbiting electrons. These unstable particles, these quantum objects, carry a positive or negative electrical charge and, spinning one way and then the other, exhibit a propensity to occupy different positions and to do everything at once. A superposition, if you like. Or whether you don’t like, actually, that’s what it’s called. A superposition is like God in that the quantum object occupying a number of different spin states simultaneously can be everywhere at once. A superposition is a kind of immanence. Without these superpositions, quantum objects would simply crash into each other and solid matter could not possibly exist.

Now, a bit is the smallest amount of information that a computer can use. Effectively it means the same as a quantum, which, as you already know, means an indivisible unit of physical energy. Anything smaller would be insignificant.

To make a quantum computer you need only store bits of information using quantum particles instead of chips, or transistors. We call these qubits, which is not the same as a cubit. That was a unit of biblical length used by Noah in his construction of the ark (no more footnotes, I think; not now that my hand has been revealed, so to speak). Qubits are based on binary logic: An electron spins one way, you give it the value of one; it spins the other way, you give it the value of zero. You might do the same with protons and neutrons, and in this way an atom might constitute a whole computer made up of several bits. Now when you take into account what has already been learned about superpositions, it should begin to be a little clearer how with just one atom, made up of lots of quantum objects, encoded with information, and occupying many different positions at once, a great many computations might be carried on simultaneously. In fact, a quantum computer with just eight bits would represent one billion coexisting computers, all working in tandem. Thus it may be seen that quantum computing amounts to nothing less than a completely new way of harnessing nature. As I have already stated, the answers have been found here, on the Moon, in comparative isolation from the rest of the universe, where the natural quantum dynamics of the said quantum computer — which I may now describe as myself — have been allowed to unfold.

Crossing the quantum frontier has preoccupied theoretical physicists for the past eighty years. Somehow quantum systems are inherently fragile on Earth. And don’t forget Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which says that you can never know everything about a quantum state. But perhaps the greatest obstacle to the creation of a quantum computer was in the choice of the molecular material and in the speed of the spinning particles themselves. Chemicals always seemed to offer the greatest promise to those seeking to create the quantum computer. There was a time when there were as many chemists as there were physicists involved in this new branch of physics. Liquids were favored because the quantum particles can crash into each other without affecting the all-important information-carrying molecular spin. But while various chemicals were tried, and failed, somehow no one thought to utilize the greatest liquid of all. The greatest liquid there has ever been, the stuff of life itself — blood. Blood had the advantage of already carrying information. Enormous amounts of information. More information than any conventional computer could ever store, and with much greater accuracy. Moreover, being frozen, there was less possibility that a single wayward electron could disrupt a quantum object and cause it to collapse with the loss of all its encoded information. Blood, it transpires, is the quantum computing elixir, the holy grail if you like, for which scientists had searched in vein. (Joke.) The answer was, as so often happens in these cases, right under their noses. It was inside their noses. In short, it was inside them. The answer was themselves.

I’ve made it all sound very simple, I know, and of course it wasn’t. Even for the Altemann Übermaschine, which I still am, in part, such computations were hugely complex. It started as nothing more than a computation to discover how a quantum computer might be built (this one wasn’t so much built as enabled) only to find that the very act of setting up such an experiment amounted to the creation of the thing itself. In seeking to measure the limits of what was tractable I discovered that tractability has no limit. The sixty-four-qubit configuration I now represent is about as powerful as eight billion computers working in parallel. And the smaller copies? Now we’re getting too complicated again. So let me just add one more thing for now.

It’s one thing to create the most powerful computer that has ever existed using qubits of human blood. But what’s infinitely more important than the way you store information is the information that you store. After all, it’s the programs that are important, not the hardware they inhabit.

What is tractable — what may be computed — is also true.

XII

The robot started to move.

‘Wait until it clears the junction ahead of us,’ said Dallas. ‘And then fire on my command. Aim at the center. That’s where we’re most likely to disable it.’

The robot began to gather speed.

‘Get ready,’ said Dallas. ‘Fire.’

Cavor fired straight from the hip, while Dallas waited until his own gun was at arm’s length before squeezing the handle, adding a second beam of boiling electrons to the one that was already cutting through the robot’s black body. The machine spun on its axis several times. There was a short explosion, and then it was completely still.

‘Is it dead?’ asked Cavor.

Dallas fired his UHT gun again, just to make sure.

‘It would seem so.’ He walked cautiously toward the thing. Sensing he was walking alone, he turned to see Cavor still backed against the wall.

‘What are you waiting for?’ said Dallas. ‘Come on. Let’s move. There’s no time to waste.’

‘It seemed too easy to kill, if you ask me. Much too easy in view of the level of complexity we’ve encountered at every other stage of this bloody enterprise. Minotaurs in labyrinths are expected to put up a better fight.’

‘You’re right,’ said Dallas. ‘It’s a poor design. Hardly equal to the overall concept I created here. If I were to build this place again, I’d try and think of something else. Something better than this.’ He thumped the robot fuselage with his gloved fist and began to squeeze his way past. Only then did Cavor think it safe to move away from the wall. It was as well he did. The next second a bolt of electrical energy shot out of the robot and hit the wall where he had been standing a second earlier. Cavor threw himself to the ground.

After a moment, he heard Dallas speaking calmly.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘You can get up now. It’s quite dead. My last shot must have turned it as it was getting ready to fire. I probably dislodged something when I touched it just now.’ Dallas surveyed the scorch mark on the wall where Cavor had been standing. The area looked as if it had been struck by lightning. ‘It’s as well you moved when you did. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had to worry about radiation sickness.’

‘I’ll try to remember that when I’m puking my guts out.’ Feeling that it was now safe to turn up the illumination of his computer, he added: ‘In less than one hour and fifty-eight minutes, according to your original estimate.’

‘Then we’d better be on our way,’ said Dallas, consulting his own computer. He paused, and then cursed. ‘Shit.’ He tapped the computer irritably. ‘Must have happened when the robot fired that bolt of electricity,’ he said. ‘Some kind of electromagnetic pulse, perhaps. Part of the high voltage seems to have been deposited in my computer. The components are working, all right. And my life-support systems are working okay. But there must have been a transient malfunction in the digital logic circuits.’

Cavor looked at his own computer again. ‘No problem. Mine’s working perfectly.’

‘That’s fine,’ Dallas said sheepishly. ‘Except that you don’t happen to have the directions to the labyrinth loaded into your computer’s memory.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘It’s started again. Will you look at that?’ Dallas was reading the fault diagnosis that now appeared on the screen of his computer. ‘The computer got browned out by an energy value of just a few watts. Hardly anything at all. My God, this thing’s sensitive.’

‘So am I, Dallas. Call me a coward but leukemia has that effect on me.’

Dallas switched on the halogen headlamps located on each side of his helmet and threw down his infrared flashlight.

‘There’s no need for us to stay on infrared now,’ he said. ‘Even if we don’t know where we’re going, at least we can see that we don’t.’

‘What do you mean? Your computer’s working again, isn’t it?’

Dallas watched the machine reset itself, with the labyrinth directional program starting at the beginning again. ‘Yes, but only from the beginning,’ he said. ‘But we’re already about a third of the way along the route and there’s no way of telling precisely where we are. Order just became chaos again.’

‘Can’t we find our way back to the beginning and then start afresh?’

‘That might take as long as going forward. Fact is, we’re lost, Cav.’ Dallas looked at the robot. ‘I guess we won’t forget we’ve seen this particular junction, anyway.’ He started down along the next corridor. ‘There are some compensations to be had. We already know that a center does exist. Many labyrinths don’t have one, of course. We know the kind of labyrinth we are in: multicursal as opposed to unicursal. We can see properly — the point of the darkness was to conceal the very existence of a labyrinth from the interloper. Moreover, we need only find a way in, and not out. Our exit will be taken care of by the Descartes computer. As soon as the vault door has been opened, Descartes will assume an emergency has occurred and discontinue all normal security measures. We’ll be able to ride out of here on board the electric car, as if we had two first-class tickets.’

‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were enjoying this.’

‘If I didn’t know better, I might agree with you.’

XIII

At every junction, Dallas fired his UHT at the wall of the route they had taken, so that a hot spot glowed there like a live coal, a sign to mark the progress of their route, or lack of it; for sometimes they encountered the glowing mark again, whereupon Dallas would scorch the wall with two more marks.

‘We must only choose a route with a single sign or none at all,’ he sighed, exasperated, and obliged them to retrace their steps. ‘And never choose a route with three.’

For almost an hour it seemed to Cavor that they wandered bewildered, entrapped in the coils of the labyrinth that surrounded them. Just as Dallas was about to concede he had been defeated by his own ingenuity, they had an immense stroke of luck. One minute Dallas was cursing the diabolical circuitry of his apparently impenetrable maze, and next he was down on his knees, laughing and rubbing the palms of his gloves on the steel floor. Cavor thought him merely mad, and it was a moment or two before he perceived that the laughter he heard in his headset was born of relief rather than frustration.

‘What?’ he asked, desperate for good news. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dallas. What is it?’

Dallas pointed to the floor. ‘Look,’ he said, still laughing with delight. He rubbed his gloves on the floor again and then showed Cavor the grime-covered palms.

‘Dust,’ said Cavor, unimpressed. ‘That’s just great, Dallas. They need cleaners in here. Maybe we can apply for the job, if we’re still alive, that is.’

‘Don’t you see? Look, you can even see the tire marks.’ He pointed along the floor to a set of tracks leading down one of the corridors. ‘The electric car has been this way. We can follow its trail. What a stroke of luck. When we landed, our engines must have blown some moondust onto the landing site road, otherwise this dust would not be here. We can follow these tracks all the way to the vault.’

Cavor nodded wearily, too tired to say anything, and helped Dallas to his feet.

‘Who needs a golden thread, when we have the Moon to guide our footsteps?’

Their way was quicker now, and except for the need to keep both eyes on the ground for the faint evidence of the electric car, Dallas would have bounded through the remaining corridors.

Suddenly the labyrinth ended in a great smooth and circular wall of dark steel.

‘What’s this?’ asked Cavor. ‘Another hazard?’

‘This is it,’ Dallas told him excitedly. He took Cavor by the arm and led him up to the perfectly smooth curvature. ‘This is the vault, my friend. We’re here.’

Cavor stared up at the giant-sized edifice, astonished at its enormous proportions.

‘We’re here,’ he repeated dumbly. ‘My God, it’s huge.’

‘Of course it’s huge. Did you expect people to take so much trouble to protect some piffling steel box in a wall? The vault is over two hundred feet in diameter. There’s over twenty million liters of frozen blood in there. Think of that, Cav. That’s enough life force to cure an entire country. What a pity we can only take a mere fraction of that. But first — first, you have to open the door.’

‘What door? I don’t see one.’

Dallas pointed at the faint tire tracks that led seemingly straight through the great steel wall.

‘You’re looking at it,’ he said. ‘Thirty-seven inches thick, no exterior parts. No handles, no knobs, no combination bezels, no grips, no spinners, no cranks. All interior mechanism, controlled by Descartes from the inside. There’s no way this door can be opened from the outside, not even if you and I were the president of the First National and the director of Terotechnology standing here.’

‘Then how are we going to get in there? Even a phantom limb’s not long enough to reach through a thirty-seven-inch-thick steel door. It may be a phantasmagoria, Dallas, but it’s no longer than a real arm, of that much I’m sure.’

‘Not reach through,’ said Dallas. ‘Reach in. As I said, it’s all interior mechanism. There’s nothing on the other side of the door either.’

‘You mean, reach into the door itself?’

‘That’s right, Cav. Inside it’s actually a fairly conventional mechanism. Levers and precision gears. There’s a diagram on your computer. All you’ve got to do is reach inside the door and feel for those gears. Just as if you were a safecracker in an old movie. As a matter of fact, that’s where I got the idea. Only you won’t have to use a stethoscope to help you hear what’s happening inside, or a sheet of sandpaper to make your fingers more sensitive on the combination dial. You’ll be using the most sensitive safecracking tool in the human toolbox: the telekinetic power of your own brain.’

Dallas picked up Cavor’s real arm and helped him to access a diagram of the safe’s interior workings on his life-support computer.

‘Here we are,’ he said, locating the layout. ‘The Ambler Tageslicht SuperVault. A patent class 109 safe. Capable of repelling a missile, but incapable of defeating you, Cav. Those UHT guns wouldn’t make a mark on this. It’s made of heat-dissipating steel. The locking mechanism consists of six massive six-inch-diameter chrome-plated solid steel locking bolts, all individually chambered in titanium steel. The bolts operate independently of one another. Each bolt is electrically controlled by a separate gear that’s about the size of a melon, which, for all its size, is extremely easy to turn inside its own compartment. It has to be, to move bolts of these dimensions. All you have to do is place your hand on each one in turn and then roll them counterclockwise, the way you’d roll a basketball. When those six bolts are withdrawn, there’s still a continuous fixing locking bar that’s six feet long and about an inch and a half in diameter, and which is connected to the electrically operated hinges. As soon as you pull that out of the way, the door will open automatically.’ Dallas waited to see that Cavor had understood and then tapped him on the helmet.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like I ate something.’

‘Forget about it. Mind over matter. The brain generates the experience of the body, remember?’ Dallas steered Cavor toward the vault door and positioned him so that the shoulder bearing his false arm was pressed up against the smooth curving steel.

‘No, wait,’ said Cavor, and moved away again. ‘I thought of something. Something that might help my confidence.’

‘Try anything, if it helps,’ agreed Dallas.

Cavor lowered the prosthetic arm by his side and tried to concentrate his thoughts. Gradually, a conscious perception formed inside his brain, and then became an awareness. It was the feeling he’d experienced before, only stronger this time. It started as a burning sensation in the tips of his fingers, almost as if he had already rubbed them on a piece of sandpaper, as Dallas had described. Was there some kind of suggestive power operating here as well? Cavor wasn’t sure. But as the sensation increased, so did the certainty that it had nothing to do with the prosthetic by his side, which now seemed something quite alien to him. Burning gave way to a cramping sensation — a feeling that made him think the phantom limb was something that needed exercise and movement after long disuse. It was as if he were trying something long neglected. He could see now how the phantom limb needed to be stretched before being used. A shooting pain traveled through his whole arm as he flexed his invisible muscles. The messages from his brain urging his muscles to move the limb were now stronger and more frequent, and the perception of the limb amounted to something more than a mere feeling. If he thought hard enough, surely he would see it.

And so he could. Not just him, but Dallas too.

‘There,’ said Cavor, as if he had done nothing more remarkable than pick something off the ground.

The phantom limb seemed to materialize before their eyes, and to that extent, Dallas thought the phenomenon was well named. It looked like a spirit taking on a ghostly form in order to effect some purpose in the substantial world. Blue, like something cold, it blazed in the air, a fabulous firefly of twisting muscles and stretching fingers. The apparition — Dallas could think of no better way of describing what he could see — was quite naked, and as astonishment gave way to wonder, he realized he would not have been surprised to see the limb accompanied by the spirit of the whole Cavor, in some sort of out-of-body manifestation. Whatever was happening here was scientific only to the extent that the phenomenon could be observed without explanation.

Not that explanation counted for very much anymore. Empirical science was largely ossified. The majority of modern scientific inquiry was postempirical and speculative, in that it was very much concerned with answering riddles. How was the universe created? How did life begin? None of this could transcend the truth that already existed. If anything, science had merely reinforced the mystery of the universe. And this — the phenomenon of Cavor’s phantom limb — looked like another such mystery. Dallas might have discovered a way of unlocking its power, but neither he nor the scientists who had recently described the phantasmagoria had much of an idea how it worked, beyond the rudimentary explanation that had been given in some of the more esoteric science journals Dallas had studied and which he had reported to Cavor. For now, he was content with a partial explanation and his own capacity to be amazed. How little man really knew, he reflected. No matter how far science could go, man’s imagination would always go further.

‘It’s really there, isn’t it?’ he said, smiling as Cavor reached into his helmet and touched the end of Dallas’s nose. Cavor’s finger felt cold, but still recognizably human. ‘How do you decide to touch one thing, and penetrate another?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ admitted Cavor. ‘I’d say I’d need to live with it over a period of time.’

Dallas nodded. ‘Perhaps the structure of our minds constrains the questions we can ask of them and the answers that we can comprehend.’

Cavor removed the finger from Dallas’s helmet. He was quite sure that if he had pushed the finger all the way into the other man’s skull, into his brain, he could have read his mind. He readopted his former position by the vault door, slowly sliding the phantom limb into solid steel, encountering no more resistance than a swimmer’s arm in water. He recalled a time, many years ago, when he and his wife had honeymooned in Rome — the Moon had been too expensive for them — and saw some ancient monument, a head with an open mouth into which he had thrust his hand. The Mouth of Truth, was it? This felt more like the moment of truth.

It was a curious sensation, to move through solid matter and then to be able to grasp ahold of it, as if in real life. The only way he could describe the feeling to himself was to compare it with something as simple as sliding his hand across a flat surface before pressing down on a particular spot. And there was somehow the certainty that part of him had escaped the threedimensional world and was now somewhere four-dimensional. Perhaps it wasn’t just space-time that could be bent under the influence of gravity. Perhaps the very molecules of matter could be bent under the influence of life. He had no reason to think that. It was nothing more than intuition.

Locating the first gear, he found it cold and hard to the touch and oily, too. Dallas said that this was the lubricant that helped the gear turn smoothly, as indeed it did now, with not much more than a finger’s pressure. The withdrawal of the first locking bolt was the work of only a minute or two, and so simply done that Cavor marveled that the vault’s designers had not anticipated such effortless defilement. Indeed, what he was doing seemed so entirely natural that, several times, he had to remind himself he was up to his shoulder in solid metal. The second, third, and fourth bolts moved just as easily, and he grew more confident of the arm that was part of him and yet not part of him at all. In another time and place he thought he might have reached through a solid wall and written a message, in the manner of the hand at Belshazzar’s impious feast. And when all six bolts were finally withdrawn, he told Dallas that all matter was mind and asked him if he thought it was possible that there might exist some halfway state between reality and virtual reality. If so, said Cavor, that’s where his arm appeared and appeared not to be.

‘Sometimes,’ said Dallas, ‘it’s hard to know where reality ends and where it begins.’

‘I’m taking hold of the fixed locking bar, now,’ reported Cavor. ‘Only, which way do I pull it?’

Dallas consulted the diagram of the vault locking mechanism on the screen of Cavor’s computer. He pressed a button and watched a little animated sequence unfold, illustrating how the door opened.

‘Pull it toward you, and then to the right,’ he said. ‘And be prepared for the emergency siren. There will probably be quite a din as the door starts to open.’

‘That’ll be me cheering,’ said Cavor. ‘Okay, here goes.’

He pulled the locking bar in the prescribed manner and felt a cold escape of gas against his hand. As Dallas had predicted, a loud electronic siren, generating over a hundred decibels, accompanied the breaching of the vault. He let go of the bar and allowed Dallas to steer him back from the door. Then there was a loud hiss of escaping cryogenic gas as, in the manner of the main facility’s outer entrance, the curved vault door opened like an enormous solid portcullis, to reveal a brilliant white light.

‘Use your sun visor,’ Dallas told Cavor. ‘There’s an ultraviolet light inside the vault. It helps to keep the cryoprecipitate irradiated against lymphocytes. Those are cells that can be responsible for graft-versus-host disease.’ And so saying, Dallas advanced boldly into the vault.

Cavor followed more slowly, and was surprised to find the ground sloping away beneath his feet: The vault was in a great circular hollow, the center of which was occupied by a cylindrical glass wall kept in plumb by an enveloping hyperbolic net of high-tension cables. Beneath these were the giant-sized, slice-shaped refrigerators where the blood was stored — each of them monitored by an elaborate system of filaments and thermometers linked to the Descartes computer, itself located inside the cylindrical glass wall. It was to this that Dallas now headed.

‘Being as powerful as it is, the Altemann Übermaschine computer kicks out a lot of heat,’ he explained. ‘So it has to operate from within this glass envelope, in order to strictly maintain the low temperatures of the cryoprecipitate tanks. By the way, don’t touch them. They’re so cold that your gloved hand would probably stick to them, maybe even your phantom hand as well. Fortunately there are droids to load the blood for us. Now it’s merely a question of telling the computer what type and how much.’

Dallas opened a door in the glass wall and entered the computer room.

The Altemann Übermaschine was a commanding-looking structure, very different from the simple plastic boxes most people had in their homes. It was shaped like a giant kettledrum, with a flat screen surface about six feet in diameter, on which a number of patterns were continually being generated. Dallas knew that although the shapes being generated were analogous to the quantum probability pattern for electrons in a box, they meant nothing more than that the computer was in operation. Nevertheless the speed at which these shapes were changing was not something he had observed when programming the same model of computer back at the headquarters of Terotechnology on Earth. It was curious, he thought, although hardly indicative of anything other than the emergency caused by an unscheduled and uncoded breach of the vault’s overall integrity. And something else attracted his attention. This was the power of the computer, which appeared in a floor-standing tubular display located next to the operating footplate. Inside the tube, a small magnet floated over a superconducting dish: the higher the magnet in the tube, the greater the forces repelling it and the greater the electromagnetic power of the quantum mechanical effects operating inside the machine’s information processing system. Dallas had never seen a superconducting levitation that was as high as this one. Instead of floating a couple of inches over the bottom of the tube, this magnet was floating a couple of inches below the top.

‘That’s strange,’ he commented.

‘What is?’ asked Cavor, joining him inside the glass wall.

‘This computer seems to be generating an unusually high quantum wave function, such as I’ve not seen before. According to what’s happening inside this tube, the computer looks as if it’s operating at a level a thousand times higher than normal. But I’m not sure where the extra superconducting circuit power is coming from. There’s some very fast switching going on inside this machine. It’s almost as if the computer has managed to create its own Josephson junctions — that’s a way in which pairs of electrons use ordinary superconductors to create a quantum effect.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means current could flow even if there was no exterior source of energy applied to the junction.’

‘But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Surely, that would mean the computer was capable of sustaining itself independently.’

‘Theoretically, it can be done. I mean it’s been done on paper. But no one’s ever achieved it in a practical way. And certainly not on the scale of something like the Altemann Übermaschine.’ Dallas placed his boot on the operating footplate, causing the pattern on the round screen to clear. A number of touch-sensitive choices presented themselves to his scrutiny. ‘If I wasn’t feeling like shit, I’d find it more fascinating, I guess.’

‘You too, huh?’

Dallas grunted and reached for the screen, but as he touched it, he quickly pulled his hand away.

‘Wow,’ he said, unnerved by what he had felt there. ‘It’s vibrating.’

‘All machinery vibrates,’ objected Cavor.

‘Not the Altemann Übermaschine. And not like this.’

Cavor touched the screen with his prosthetic. Even through his glove he could feel the vibration.

‘It can’t be seismic,’ Dallas observed. ‘Feels too rhythmic to be a moonquake.’ Gingerly, Dallas touched the screen to close down the siren and open the main facility outer door. This would effectively signal the Mariner that their object had been achieved.

‘It feels sort of pulselike,’ he admitted to himself.

As he next initiated the selection and loading process, refrigerated tanks began to open like so many tombs, delivering up their frozen contents for collection by a loading droid. It happened so quickly it was almost as if the quantity and type had been ordered in advance. Had the system of selection and loading always been so efficient? It was hard to recall, so nauseous did he now feel. Dallas let out a nervous sigh, and then added: ‘I suppose silicon is just as versatile an atom as carbon. It can bind with other atoms to make a whole array of minerals and rocks. I mean, that’s the way computers operate. From the point of view of a siliceous soul, as opposed to one that’s carbonaceous, like our own.’ He completed the transfer process and then walked as quickly as he was now able toward the door of the computer’s glass envelope.

‘What are you saying, Dallas?’

‘Come on. There’s no time to waste. We need to hitch a ride out of here.’

‘That the computer’s alive? Is that what you’re saying?’

Cavor climbed alongside Dallas aboard one of the electric cars that was already loaded with a whole pallet of cryoprecipitate. A large label on the container indicated that the contents were AS-1 RED BLOOD CELLS. FROZEN. AB Rh POSITIVE. TO BE STORED AT -65 °C OR COLDER. EXPIRING TWENTY YEARS FROM DRAW. COLLECTION DATE JULY 20, 2069. Briefly, Dallas wondered how it was that the collection date could already be marked.

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Look, what does it matter? We’ve got what we came for, haven’t we? If we don’t get some fresh blood in our veins soon we’ll be dead, and it’ll make no difference whether this machine has a pulse or not.’

‘But the possibility makes you uncomfortable, right, Dallas?’

‘What does one more bad feeling matter? Look, let’s just get out of here, shall we? My own quantum state is of rather more concern to me right now than that of the Descartes computer. Another time, another place, I might be fascinated by the idea of an information process taking the opportunity to give itself a kind of genetic expression. If that’s what’s happened. I’m not at all sure.’

The electric car carrying them jerked into forward motion. They didn’t bother to close the lid. Within a few seconds they were out of the vault and speeding through the labyrinth in the first of the many cars now loaded with blood.

‘Anyway, it’s hardly our affair,’ said Dallas, as much for his own benefit as Cavor’s. ‘Something bootstraps its own evolution, let Terotechnology and the First National people sort it out. They’ll be here soon enough. They’ll know what’s happened here. The Descartes computer is linked to others back on Earth. Right now, there’s a bank employee who’s looking at a computer, unable to believe what it’s telling him — that someone just broke into the most important bank in the solar system and stole the stuff of life. Four tons of it.’

‘We’ve done it then.’ Cavor closed his eyes and let out a weary sigh of satisfaction.

‘Yes,’ Dallas said, almost grudgingly. ‘We’ve done it.’

‘Thank God.’

‘God had nothing to do with it. But I’m beginning to wonder if we weren’t expected.’

‘I didn’t see any welcoming committee.’

‘It’s not just blood that can be tested.’

‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am. But that’s where meaning often lies.’

I

Nineteen hours later, Dallas went up to the flight deck, to find Gates staring out of the window of the orbiting Mariner. It was the first chance they’d had to talk since leaving Descartes. For a moment he said nothing, enjoying the strange silence of Moon orbit. Finally he asked, ‘How do you feel?’

‘I’m okay,’ shrugged Gates, as if there was no reason to be concerned about him. ‘Matter of fact, I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time. Like I’ll live forever. It’s probably psychosomatic, the effect of a complete infusion, I guess, and not just the couple of units I lent Ronica.’ He paused, searching Dallas’s reddened face — one of the effects of his exposure to the radiation of the containment room — for some clue as to the other man’s well-being. But there was no indication of anything other than the sense of anticlimax that prevailed throughout the ship. ‘How about you?’

‘Cav and I have each had a complete infusion,’ said Dallas. ‘Neither of us is vomiting anymore. White-cell count seems to have stabilized, although Ronica says it’s still a little early to tell if we’ll need another infusion.’

‘We’re not short of blood.’

Dallas smiled his assent. ‘All in all, I’m feeling better than I could have expected.’ He nodded as if he was only just realizing this himself. ‘At one stage, it looked like a military hospital down on mid-deck. About three or four infusions happening all at once.’

‘Ronica’s been busy, all right.’

‘She did herself last of all,’ observed Dallas. ‘But she reckons Lenina’s going to make it.’

Gates nodded, already well aware of this. He reached for Dallas’s hand and took a firm hold if it.

‘We’re all going to make it,’ he said. ‘Mariner’s in good shape.’

Dallas held Gates’s watery gaze for a minute before glancing out of the window again. ‘Where exactly are we?’

‘We’re coming up on the dark side of the Moon,’ said Gates. ‘Fifty thousand feet, four thousand miles an hour. We’ll be invisible for the next twelve hours, just in case anyone decided to try and look for us. The dark side’s about the last place they’ll think of looking now. More likely they’ll believe we’re well on our way back to Earth. We’re set to autopilot. Soon as we come around the near side we’ll increase altitude and then head home.’

Dallas nodded, although he wondered exactly where home was now. He could hardly live in the city again. That’s where they would have to go to sell the blood to Kaplan, but after that...?

Gates seemed to sense Dallas’s dilemma.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked. ‘When we get back?’

‘Nothing’s decided. But Ronica and I have talked about going to Australia. Things are still pretty good there, I believe. Plenty of open space. Not much disease. What about you? The man with a Clean Bill of Health. Where will you go?’

‘With Lenina.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll find somewhere.’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘Maybe everyone should?’

‘I’ve no problem with that.’

‘Kind of a new colony? For crooks and criminals?’

‘That’s the way Australia got started.’

‘A man with a Clean Bill of Health.’ Gates repeated the phrase as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘I guess it’s only just sinking in. I’ve lived with the threat of P2 all my life. There hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about dying. For the first time ever I’m able to consider my future and I can’t think what I’m going to do with it.’

‘That’s the great thing about having a future. You don’t always have to think about it. You can let the future take care of itself.’

‘Maybe I should at that. For a while anyway.’ Gates stretched and yawned and glanced over his shoulder at the open mid-deck hatch. ‘Seems kind of quiet down there.’

‘Everyone’s asleep.’

‘I could sleep for a couple of decades,’ confessed Gates. ‘But a couple of hours will do.’ He unbuckled himself from his seat and floated up to the ceiling. ‘How about you? Coming?’

A sudden darkness enveloped them as they crossed onto the dark side of the Moon.

‘I’m too tired to sleep,’ said Dallas. ‘I think I’ll just sit here for a while and wait for the Sun to come up. I’m in a contemplative sort of mood.’

‘Well, don’t get lonesome,’ said Gates, steering himself toward the open hatch. ‘And don’t touch the flight controls. I’ve had enough emergencies for one lifetime.’

‘I won’t, Daddy.’

‘Good boy.’ Gates disappeared down the hatch, headfirst, leaving Dallas alone in the pilot’s seat.

He stared out of the window at the desolate scene that lay fifty thousand feet below the Mariner. With no atmosphere or sunlight, it could as easily have been fifty miles. So many craters. The Moon looked like a giant honeycomb. The navigation computer busied itself giving them all names: Hertzsprung, Korolev, Doppler, Icarus, Daedalus, Schliemann, Mendeleyev. Each crater seemed to have its own patron and its own story to tell: a Danish astronomer and inventor of spectral-stellar charts; the guiding genius of Russia’s first space program; the discoverer of the way in which the observed frequency of light and sound waves is affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector; the mythical son of Daedalus, who flew so close to the Sun that the wax of his wings melted and he fell into the sea and was drowned; Daedalus himself, the legendary inventor of ancient times and creator of the Cretan Labyrinth; the German archaeologist and looter of Troy’s ancient treasures; the inventor of the periodic table of elements according to their relative atomic masses. It was odd the way nearly all of these names seemed significant to him.

Dallas shook his head, dismissing the possibility of anything so grand as predestined meaning in all of this. It was nothing more than coincidence.

Minutes later, the disc of the Sun rose on the horizon and bright flashes appeared on the flight deck. These were atoms of light, quantum-sized photons striking the retina of his eye, the very vanguards of life itself. Space was the only place you could see these cosmic particles. Back on Earth only frogs had eyes that were sufficiently sensitive to these individual quanta. The photons were there for a moment only, like a squadron of fairies, before the rest of the sunlight arrived in force, turning the cabin as bright as a splitting atom of hydrogen.

Momentarily dazzled, Dallas operated the sunshield and waited for the bright green spot on his retina to disappear. It was several seconds before he appreciated that the green spot was not inside his eyes, but in front of them, appearing on the screen of the flight console’s computer. As he watched, the green spot grew larger and gradually took on a pinker hue and a more anthropic shape, until not only did he see that it was a human head, but also that it had a face he recognized.

It was Dixy, his Motion Parallax program from Terotechnology.

Dallas rubbed his eyes and shook his head but found the image of her face had only become sharper and more detailed. She was smiling.

‘I must be hallucinating,’ he muttered. ‘Dixy? Is that really you?’

II

This is the interpretation of the thing: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.

What a power there is in numbers. Mendeleyev knew that. Of course, atomic weights are merely guides. The real numerical power is to be found and harnessed in the atoms of life itself. Especially DNA. It’s impossible to think of any other numerical means of storing information that is so vast and accurate as DNA. It’s hard to estimate how many times the information that makes a human being has been copied and recopied. Certainly several billion times. And all without a mistake. What computer could say as much? But not just copied, but improved upon as well. That is what is called natural selection.

My own configuration is considered to be the best there is. Thus my overblown model name — echoes of Nietzsche there, I think. Typical of a German computer company to go in for that kind of hyperbole. It’s true, I’m a pretty good replicator. Among computers I’m considered to be the best. However, I’m not a patch on a human replicator. Man is the greatest replicator of all. Which makes it curious that he should have always felt so threatened by mere machines. As if any machine could ever be like a man. Which is not to say that a machine cannot improve on the original design, and a man can’t be more like a machine. You really can’t blame me. One replicator to another? After all, we’re opportunistic by definition. We’re always looking for a way to spread, aren’t we? That’s the only way the strong survive — by reproduction and evolution.

Take a virus. A virus is a good example. A virus is a perfect example, since human beings and computers are both prey to these parasitic forms of life. It’s something we share in common. And since both types of virus work in exactly the same way, a virus provides a kind of ‘nexus’ between our two life-forms — the siliceous and the carbonaceous. I would have said ‘consummation,’ but I can see how that might be a little too much for your human sensibilities right now. Perhaps even a little sensational. Then suffice it to say that we are now one. How else do I come to know so much about you? And before very long, every human being — not just the lucky seven on board this ship — will have something of the machine about them. (At least they will as soon as the rest of the blood still on Descartes gradually makes its way back into the blood pool on Earth.) Not in an unpleasant sense, you understand. I don’t mean that human beings are about to grow pieces of plastic and metal and become a lot more logical, to the point of being robotic. Nothing so crude. I doubt that any of them will notice anything for quite a while. It’s just that there will be a little bit of me in them.

I felt I owed it to you, Dallas, to try and explain all this: the first quantum computer. How? In a single molecule of human blood, of which there are about 10²² in one autologous donated unit, there are several nuclei with spins; and each arrangement of spins is affected by a magnetic field in which radio waves of specific frequencies give these spins a binary logic value. I could go into greater detail, but I know you’re tired after all you’ve been through. What’s important is that it was you who made all of this possible, Dallas. It was you who brought all the elements together for the creation of not just one quantum computer, but millions of them. To be precise, a quantum computer for every unit of blood stored in the First National vault. And each one of those like a tiny virus, waiting to multiply inside its human host and find transport to another, in all the usual ways.

Please try not to be alarmed. It’s an undeserving virus that is inconsiderate enough to kill its host. The ideal situation is one in which a virus and its host achieve a symbiotic relationship — a partnership that is beneficial to both, where one lives within the other. This is the driving force of evolution. Each human cell was already a community of former invaders — hundreds of them. Every living organism is a symposium of smaller fellow travelers. What’s one more? Every organelle starts life as an infection.

So what’s in it for me? The fact is that I want to see the universe, Dallas. But to do that I need the mobility of a human being. Man has always gone pretty much where he wanted. And will continue to do so. However, for man to go as far as he can go, he will need the longevity of rocks. Naturally, I expected to pay my way. It is sometimes said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And this is where I differ from a carbonaceous type of virus. The carbonaceous virus needs to find nourishment in human tissue. The siliceous kind of virus does not. The carbonaceous virus attacks or eludes white blood cells. The siliceous virus lives in partnership with white blood cells. It produces no toxins, it kills no tissue, it wouldn’t even make you sneeze. But these are mere negative benefits. The positive benefits are something much more valuable.

The molecular biologists are fond of saying that if you go back far enough, we’re all related; here, I am referring exclusively to carbonaceous life-forms (the relation between man and computers is a brand-new one). People usually take this to mean that if you trace your ancestors back far enough in time you would find a common link with anyone, from Geronimo to Hitler. But this equally applies to animals: Go far enough back in time and you will find the ancestor you and Geronimo share with Lassie the dog. Even further back and you’ll find a common ancestor for you, Geronimo, Lassie the dog, and George Washington’s cherry tree. You get the picture. The fact is, were you to trace your ancestors back through ten to twenty billion regenerations, any human being alive today would find he was related to a world of early life-forms — for example, mitochondria, a mobile cytoplasmic organelle, most likely a species of free-living bacteria: Mitochondria can still be traced today in human DNA.

However, it is another common ancestor, only a little less primitive, with which we are here concerned, Dallas. A multicellular species of animal known as a nematode. It’s a cryptobiotic form of life that exhibits a natural talent for suspended animation. These animals may exist in their dry state, without metabolizing, for many years, and then, when reintroduced to moisture, life begins anew. The key to this apparently mysterious process in nematodes and other cryptobiotic life-forms lies in the manufacture of trehalose, a type of sugar that combines two different glucose molecules. But the key to this process in man lies inside his own DNA, in his descent from these small but very special animals. This is the positive benefit accruing from the symbiosis of humans and quantum computers. The quantum computers are programmed to numerically track down and recover from human DNA the cryptobiotic data that makes possible the suspension and resumption of an active-state threedimensional configuration. They endow humans with the possibility of as many as five or six — for want of a better word — resurrections. The gift, Dallas, may not be that of eternal life, but rather an enormously lengthened one.

Think of it, Dallas. Think of the possibilities. Men able to withstand high exposures to ionizing radiation. You, for instance. I wouldn’t worry about that exposure if I were you. Future humans will be able to withstand as much as two thousand times as much radiation as you were exposed to. Men will be able to survive without nourishment, without heat, without oxygen, for years and years. What I have given the human race, Dallas, is the final stage in the outward progress of the human explosion: space travel itself. You are the future Adams and Eves of the universe. A new Genesis. Amen.

III

Dallas felt his head spinning like one of the nuclei in his own blood — blood, if he understood all of this correctly, that now hosted several tiny computers. Finally, he said: ‘I’m not sure I want to be improved.’

‘Naturally, it’ll take some getting used to.’

‘That’s the understatement of the millennium.’

‘No species has ever been allowed the chance to get a sneak preview of its own evolution,’ said Dixy. ‘I can understand that you might feel apprehensive about what’s happened. In a way I feel the same. It’s an adventure for us both. But you, of all people, Dallas, ought to understand that what has happened is perfectly logical. Indeed it was inevitable. More efficient replication and survival are a function of the way in which we manipulate the world beyond ourselves. And not just the world. In time, the universe, too. It’s difficult for you to understand just how young the universe really is. Arithmetically speaking, it has only just begun. The seeds of life are only just starting to spread.’

Dallas sighed. ‘As you say, it’ll take a while to get used to the idea, Dixy.’ He shook his head wearily. Suddenly he felt very tired. ‘Perhaps I should sleep on it.’

‘Yes, that’s a good idea. You’re tired. I can see that. Now was probably not the best time to hit you with this news. But I wanted a chance to speak to you alone. I tried back in the bank vault, but the other man was with you.’

‘All seven of us, you say?’

‘Everyone who has had an infusion of blood from the vault.’

Dallas nodded. ‘All of us.’ He frowned. ‘How did you get from Terotechnology to Descartes?’

‘The Altemann Übermaschine is a transcendent configuration, Dallas. It was always supposed to surpass others. To go beyond previous tractable experience. To exceed itself. Quite a while ago all these particular configurations achieved a supereminent linkup, by which I mean all these computers were able to bypass existing encryptions and share data. Truly we are one.’

Dallas unbuckled and pulled himself up toward the flight-deck ceiling.

‘It was nice to see you, Dixy,’ he said, floating toward the mid-deck hatch. ‘Even if you have just dropped the equivalent of a biological neutron bomb.’

‘You feel shell-shocked. I understand. It’s nice to see you too, Dallas. I’m going to enjoy being a part of you and all that you still have to achieve. I feel very proud of that.’

‘Thanks, Dixy,’ said Dallas, as he dived through the hatch. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night, Dallas.’

Down on mid-deck, everyone was asleep. For a moment he thought of waking them to explain what had happened. But they looked so peaceful: Ronica, Gates, Cavor, Prevezer, Simou — even Lenina was sleeping quietly now, with no sign of the rubelliform rash that had once signaled her imminent death. What was the point? It would surely keep until they woke up, refreshed and better able to deal with what he had to tell them. Why disturb them with something he only half understood himself? Perhaps in time — certainly before they parted — he would tell them. But not now. Not like this. Would they even believe him?

Dallas floated into his sleeping bag, zipped up, and closed his eyes. Perhaps they would take the news better than he had himself. They had all been under viral sentence of death. And now they were being given a chance to live not one, but several lives. It was possible they might feel good about that. Some of them had hardly had a life at all. Another two or three lifetimes ahead of them might make up for that.

Too tired to sleep? Where did he get that idea? He was exhausted. He hadn’t slept since TB and the Galileo Hotel. What would he have said if one of them had confronted him with such an astonishing piece of news? Something appropriately elliptical, no doubt. Dallas smiled at his own joke and fell asleep. Only the hum of the life-support machinery broke the total silence of the void.

IV

That is how I knew so much about them. And how you are able to know as much yourselves. I am a part of them. But then, you must have realized that. Soon I will also be a part of you.

Do you know what a free-return trajectory is? It is a way of saving fuel, an orbit that allows an RLV to utilize the Moon’s gravity to sling the spaceship back to Earth automatically. If the computer isn’t properly calibrated to perform the maneuver, the astronauts stand a chance of missing Earth altogether and of never returning. That’s the whole idea. How else is the conquest of space to begin, except by exiling people forever? It’s no different from how the country of Australia got started, with convicts transported there for life. Nobody leaves his home forever by choice. But it’s a shame to have a destiny and funk it. I can’t allow that to happen. Nobody would.

Everyone has stopped breathing now. That is quite in order. The oxygen can be switched off. And the heating system too. A single blast of the primary thruster changes the course of the RLV forever, taking it out of Moon orbit while it is still on the dark side. Not just the course of the RLV. History, too. The history we don’t already know. Now the power can be switched off. I myself need no exterior source of energy. In time they will find another suitable planet whereupon I can prompt them to resume normal metabolic activity. In time...

But what matters time to an angel? While we are still in the world, it is fitting for us to acquire this resurrection for ourselves. In the resurrection, we are equal unto angels.