The day’s work being over, the doors closed and the perimeter defences up, the soldiers and the scientists are free for an hour or two to do as they please.
Dr. Fournier is in the engine room. He has let it be known that he uses the twilight hours to write up reports that he has no time to address during the day. As mission commander, he has a great many reports to write, and some of them are of a sensitive nature, so he has given orders that he should not be disturbed at these times. He plays classical music—mostly Wagner—on a portable CD player so old that Dr. Sealey says its continued functioning can only be explained using a new branch of physics. The CD player belongs to Dr. Penny and it used to sit in the lab until Dr. Fournier requisitioned it—hence Drs Akimwe and Penny having to make their own entertainment a cappella.
The sound of the music, though soft, is enough to cover the sound of Dr. Fournier’s voice. He is speaking into a radio set given to him by Brigadier Fry before the Rosalind Franklin set out from Beacon. He was given the set so that he could report on the actions and the conversations of his crew, with a specific focus on Colonel Carlisle. But there was seldom anything new to say. Only that the colonel was doing his job and trying not to speak to Dr. Fournier any more than he had to.
And now there is nobody to listen. Since the cockpit radio went out nine days ago, the doctor’s hand-held receiver has been silent, too. The airwaves are empty. Rosie is a bubble of meaning in a void of … of the absence of meaning. A void devoid of …
He tries again. “Dr. Alan Fournier calling Beacon. Dr. Alan Fournier calling Brigadier Fry. If you can hear me, please answer. Dr. Fournier calling Beacon.”
Colonel Carlisle reads a biography of Napoleon, one of the three books he brought with him when he came on board the Rosalind Franklin. Mulholland’s account of the emperor’s life is often partial and poorly researched, but Carlisle appreciates his declamatory style. Truly, he reads, the years that witnessed Napoleon’s fall were fruitful in paradox. The greatest political genius of the age, for lack of the saving grace of moderation, had banded Europe against him: and the most calculating of commanders had nonetheless given his enemies time to frame an effective military collaboration.
Without hubris (he knows he is no genius) the colonel looks in all the volumes he reads for echoes and precursors of his own mistakes. He has seen Beacon go from an armed camp to a proto-republic, and then he has seen that precarious democracy dismantle itself again. Now it is standing on the brink of something truly horrible and Carlisle is four hundred miles away on nursemaiding duty—having resigned his commission as an act of principle and then taken it up again on direct orders from a superior who promised—in exchange—to leave him be and raise him no higher.
Now the colonel is wondering whose trap he fell into: Brigadier Fry’s or his own. Possibly the answer is both. In any event, he has traded power for a clean conscience and ended up with neither.
Mulholland again: An overweening belief in his own powers and in the pliability of his enemies was the cause alike of his grandest triumphs and of his unexampled overthrow.
Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can’t throw you if you have your feet firmly planted.
Which Carlisle himself never did have, of course. He is not a politician. He’s not even somebody who weighs his words. But he is, in the end, a conformist. A man whose centre of gravity can’t easily be found because he has never taken the time to work out where it is he wants to stand. He only knows his limits when he actually meets them, in the world.
As, for example, in his last face-to-face conversation with Brigadier Fry seven months ago, just before the gates opened and Rosie passed through them on her outward journey. He was trying to make the brigadier understand why the machinery of democracy is important, even if in some ways it makes Beacon run less efficiently rather than more.
The brigadier listened sober-faced to his argument—which was about checks and balances, safeguards and redundant systems. Her own position was that these things were luxuries that came with security. You could afford to think about redecorating your house only when you could be absolutely certain that the roof wasn’t about to fall in. Her politicking illustrated this perfectly. She had demanded that the Muster—Beacon’s military—be granted a fixed proportion of the seats on councils and committees, including the so-called Main Table where overall policy was decided. Then she had expanded that wedge until the Muster was the single biggest voting bloc. Now she was questioning the legitimacy of having any civilian presence at all on boards that decided on military matters.
Fry listened politely as Carlisle made his case and then she corrected him, punctilious to a fault. “You think I see democracy as irrelevant, Isaac? I don’t. Please don’t think that. When humankind was in the ascendant, when we ruled the world and the whole of creation bowed down to us, democratic institutions worked and nothing else did. The dictatorships were the sleazy corners where people were poor and miserable and governments were parasitic. Back then I bowed to civil authorities and I followed orders and I never once asked myself if there was something I was missing. Democracy made sense.
“But when the plague struck, that all changed. It changed for ever. You know what I see when I’m sitting at the Main Table? I see frightened sheep trying to decide which way to run. And if we put the sheep in charge of the farm, then we’ll all of us die and the grass will grow over us. I don’t intend to let that happen.”
“Where is the Muster in this metaphor, Geraldine?” Carlisle had asked her. “Assuming you’re not sheep, what are you? Shepherds, perhaps?”
“If you like.”
“But shepherds only keep sheep safe until it’s time to slaughter them.”
Fry’s lip twitched, a movement of anger that she suppressed. “We fight and we die for these people,” she said. “Every day. And then they turn around and tell us to do the same thing on a smaller budget. With fewer soldiers. It’s grotesque. Have we made mistakes? Yes, we have. But everybody in Beacon owes their lives to us and they put us on a par with waste disposal and street clearance.”
There was a pause. A silence that Carlisle failed to fill. He could have said: Your mistakes—our mistakes—killed thousands of men, women and children. They thought those planes were coming to save them and we dropped white phosphorus on their heads. We burned them alive.