The movement outside goes on for a long time. The screams and yells, the pleading and cursing likewise, a very long time.
When the last of Fry’s troops have been dispatched, the children move forward out of the brambles and the trees into the relative openness of the parade ground. They inspect the bodies, finishing off those who are still moving. Only then do they kneel down and feed. Perhaps it’s Greaves’ imagination but he believes he can see the moment when the scarred girl (he has recognised her from her silhouette and from the way she moves) nods her permission. He wonders if she is looking for him among the dead as he looked for her after the fire. He wonders what the captain’s voice box told her that morning, assuming that she pulled the string and listened to the words. She wouldn’t have understood them in any case. She doesn’t speak the captain’s language.
These are pointless thoughts. It’s time, he decides. He needs to go down. He assumes the children will come in any case, to complete the errand that has brought them all this far, but just in case he will meet them more than halfway. He descends from the turret.
“Greaves!” Dr. Fournier bellows. Stephen flinches. “I can see you there. Untie me. Untie me right now, or you’ll face a courtmartial. We’re under military law! I can order you shot!”
Steeling himself, Greaves enters the lab. He is shaking with terror, but he has a contingency plan. If Dr. Fournier asks him about the cure or starts any sentence with a question word, then Greaves will sing the theme tune from Captain Power loudly enough to drown out the words.
Dr. Fournier sags with relief as he sees Greaves. “Thank you!” he snarls with heavy sarcasm. Then he gasps out loud as Stephen walks right on past him. “Greaves! Stop what you’re doing and loosen these straps! I’m warning you—”
He’s the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer, Greaves tells himself. He doesn’t say it aloud but he’s ready to. At a moment’s notice. If a single dangerous word comes out of Dr. Fournier’s mouth. He keeps his face averted as he fills a canteen with water and loops its strap over his shoulder. As he opens freezer compartment ten and removes the dead boy. Then as he sets the cold corpse down on the work table a few inches from Fournier’s head. Fournier pulls back from it with a yelp of protest.
“I’m warning you is tautologous,” Greaves says. He almost shouts it, his strained voice rising in pitch. This is the most dangerous moment, with the feral child actually in Dr. Fournier’s line of sight—a visual cue for the forbidden topic.
“What?” Dr. Fournier splutters.
“To say you’re warning somebody is to perform a self-enacting speech act. The warning is contained in the words used to announce that a warning is being given.” He’s babbling, pushing the conversation like a boulder away from the place where it mustn’t go.
“Greaves, are you mad?” The doctor’s face has darkened to a deep red, almost purple.
Perhaps he is. There would be no way of knowing, which of course is always the problem—not just for him but for everyone. Sanity is a suspended state, moored in nothing but itself. You test the ground an inch in front of you, move forward as though it’s solid. But the whole world is in freefall and you’re in freefall with it.
“I don’t know,” Greaves admits. “I just don’t know.”
He is staring at the small cadaver, guilty and desolate. The life that was here is long gone, but the dead boy’s kindred have come a very long way to reclaim the part of him that they can still see. Greaves has disrespected that part. There are incisions and excavations where he took his tissue samples, raw wounds that have never bled because the blood had already congealed before the flesh was broken.
“Greaves.” Dr. Fournier’s tone has changed. He is staring at Stephen with a new urgency. “Put that specimen back. You hear me? It belongs to the expedition. And your findings, your discovery—all of it! The colonel will be very angry with you if you do anything to jeopardise our mission. Our—our joint mission. He’ll be angry and disappointed. Why would you put at risk everything we’ve—?”
Stephen slams the freezer cabinet shut and flees, taking the corpse with him. “He’s the hero of the spaceways!” he yells. “The galactic engineer!”
“What? Greaves! Come back!”
The baby. The baby is next. Too many things, too many factors to keep straight in his head. He sets the dead boy down in the mid-section just inside the airlock door. His hands are shaking. There is no sequence here. None of the things he is doing are in the long, long list of things he has done before.
For a moment, he is completely lost. In a panic he almost hits the airlock’s controls. No no no. Not yet. Not yet.
Dr. Fournier’s cries follow him into the crew quarters. They echo around him as he goes to collect the baby from Rina’s bunk, but the shrilling of the crying child is louder and the pounding of his own blood seems louder still. It’s easy now to shut out any meaning in the stream of sound coming from the lab.
The baby is lying on his back, screaming, his mouth an O of hysterical misery. He has kicked his blanket away. Greaves picks him up and swaddles him again with ginger care. Miraculously and very suddenly the baby stops crying at this point, as though human contact was all it wanted. As though all its sorrows came down to being alone. Perhaps that’s true of everyone.
“Soon,” Stephen whispers, staring into the baby’s solemn, inscrutable eyes.
The blanket is green, like all the blankets in Rosie. Army issue. Greaves takes another, from his own bunk, tugging it free one-handed with the baby cradled in his other arm. Dr. Fournier continues to yell through all of this, but baby Khan stays quiet. Nonetheless he gapes his tiny mouth and tastes the air, which is no doubt rich with scents of possible food. Greaves notices that all the baby’s teeth are now fully grown in.
He goes back out into the mid-section, carrying the baby in one hand and the spare blanket draped across his arm. Will it be enough? It’s all he can do. He sets the baby down on the deck plates, making a nest out of the folded blanket to protect him a little against the cold metal. “I won’t be long,” he whispers.
On the other side of the airlock doors, the night is impenetrably black. But through the infra-reds, once he slips them on again, he sees a forest of bright blue lozenges converging on Rosie from all sides. Blue indicates a temperature between 10 and 14 degrees Celsius, barely higher than background ambient. The children are coming to meet him.
“Greaves, I demand that you untie me! This is your last warning!”
Stephen hesitates for a long time. Finally he goes back into the lab, opens one of the instrument drawers and finds a scalpel. He turns to face Dr. Fournier.