His discomfort with deliberate falsehood is like his discomfort with uncertainty raised to its own power. If he says something that isn’t true, he is bringing uncertainty into the world. He is blinding the people around him to a small part of the truth—and every part of the truth is important. You can’t complete a jigsaw if one of its pieces has been swapped out for a piece of a different jigsaw.
“I knew it,” Dr. Khan exclaims. “Stephen, you can’t keep doing this!” He darts a glance at her face. Her eyes, which are looking directly at him, are full and glistening. She told him a while ago (five weeks, two days, seven hours and some minutes and seconds that he could calculate but chooses not to) that the baby she is carrying will make her less in control of her emotions than she usually is. There will be a soup of hormones sloshing around inside her, and it will show itself in her reactions. Perhaps this is why she forgets that he finds sustained gaze uncomfortable. “Whatever you’re trying to find, it’s not worth dying for.”
Which is true, of course—but trivially true. If he dies, he won’t be able to finish his work, and it’s only his work and its outcomes that will vindicate the risks he takes. Or fail to.
But they all take risks. And they have all accepted the implied logic. Without a cure for the hungry plague, or a work-around, they will all die, one by one. The great spreading tree of humanity will be hewn away at its base until it falls. Until the number of survivors is so small that congenital abnormalities multiply and intensify and viable births fall off to nothing. This is why the risks they take are worth taking. This is why Rosie was sent.
Rosie and Charlie. But their sister vessel, the Charles Darwin, never came home. The prevailing theory is that Charlie fell into an ambush set by junkers—roving, outlaw bands of survivalists—who then dismantled the vehicle, pillaged its tech and slaughtered its crew. But nobody knows, and most likely nobody will ever know. The most they will be able to tell—when they get to a spot where there should be a specimen cache and find nothing there—is how far the Charles Darwin got before misfortune overtook it.
So now it’s the turn of Dr. Fournier’s team. And they will either find what they came here to find or else they will fail and the extinction event will continue at its present pace (which for extinctions is very rapid indeed). There is no contingency plan, no backup. It’s hard to quantify risk when they’re already way up on the high wire without a safety net. But that seems to be what Dr. Khan is asking Stephen to do.
“Promise me,” she says now. “Promise me you won’t do this again.”
He meets her gaze. This is hard for him. Like pulling something heavy up out of a well and holding it, at arm’s length, in front of his face. A part of himself that he offers up to her, effortfully.
“No,” he says. “No, Rina.”
And he walks on past her into the lab.
9
In Rosie’s cramped interior, there is no such thing as privacy. Over the months that they have lived here, the various members of her crew have adapted to this, each in their own way.
Most have not been able, as Dr. Fournier and the colonel have done, to stake out a specific territory for themselves. With all other spaces owned in common, the bunks have become inviolate. Dr. Khan and Dr. Sealey, most evenings, eat their meal with everyone else in the kitchen area and then retire to their beds with the curtains drawn across. They are not disturbed: that tiny space is sacrosanct.
The soldiers—grunts and sniper elite alike—devote the lion’s share of their down-time to a single unending game of poker. No actual money changes hands, but Private Phillips keeps score in a kids’ notebook decorated with Pokémon stickers to a depth of half an inch. It is not clear to anyone where this notebook came from.
On most evenings, after the game winds up, Lieutenant McQueen goes up into the turret and cleans his rifle, whether he has used it that day or not.
Dr. Akimwe and Dr. Penny work late, unless there is no work at all to be done. They sing show tunes, very softly, working their way amicably through the oeuvres of Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman. They have agreed to draw the line at Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This uses up all of Rosie’s available space, but Stephen Greaves has found another space that no one wants. He sits in the airlock and is completely undisturbed. There is no light there, apart from the dim glow from the keypad that controls the airlock’s cycling mechanism. More to the point, it feels to the rest of the crew like a negotiated space, a halfway house between the safe (if claustrophobic) interior and the hostile outside. To try to relax there would be futile.
But Greaves isn’t relaxing. Like Penny and Akimwe, he is still working—by natural light until there is none left, and after that by the narrow, focused beam of a portable reading lamp clamped to the top of the repurposed page-a-day diary in which he writes. He would prefer to be in the lab, of course, but Dr. Fournier has placed tight restrictions on Greaves’ use of lab time. He has to file requests, which will be considered only after everyone else’s needs have been met. “He’s just a child,” Fournier has said on many occasions. “A bright child, but a child nonetheless. And we have a tight remit. He can’t be allowed to impede that.”
In practice, Greaves is usually able to get around these strictures, but it’s by a precarious route that makes him deeply uncomfortable. He works when Dr. Khan is in the lab, and if Dr. Fournier asks what he is doing there Dr. Khan answers for him. “He’s assisting me.” Greaves himself says nothing, and keeps his eyes on the bench, but the lie (even though it’s someone else’s, not his) twists in his stomach and in his throat, makes him feel as though he is going to have to vomit to get it out of him. Officially, therefore, he has no research of his own. Don’t-ask-don’t-tell, with all its attendant difficulties, is the best compromise he has been able to find.
When Dr. Khan isn’t in the lab, Greaves mostly uses the airlock—a lab for thought experiments only. On such occasions, he has a set routine that makes the most productive use of his time. He compartmentalises his brain in order to maintain a through-line for clear, undistracted thoughts. The distractions are simply sent away into sub-routines where they can be indulged without any harm to his reasoning.
He is doing this now. Cross-legged, head down, as motionless as a hungry: but vaulting on mental swing-bars.
On the top level—the most important—he is tabulating his observations from the day. Below that, he is considering the problem of the anomalous girl. And below that, on a more emotionally compromised level Greaves thinks of as the tumble-drier, he is thinking about his altercation with Dr. Khan.