Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  Mel grabbed on to keep from falling, and was immediately borne away, raised up from the ground like an angel. Patrick could see Mel′s open mouth, his shocked expression.

  Patrick said grimly, ′That′s for Holle.′

  Don Meisel just laughed. ′Nice timing, Mr Groundwater.′

  A trooper faced Don, a woman, her face hard, a frizz of grey hair loose under her helmet. ′Sir. The position is lost. Some of us are going to try to break out to higher ground.′

  Don nodded. ′Stay close to me, sir,′ he said to Patrick.

  ′I′m no soldier, son.′

  Don thrust an AK47 into Patrick′s arms. ′You are now.′

  The Chinook had gone, its roar receding into the sky, its lights a dying constellation. And over Patrick′s head the sky was clearing, to reveal a bloody eclipse light.

  56

  When the moon had gone into totality, when the Earth′s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling blood-red colour bloomed, Lily Brooke had heard the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd′s murmur of awe, children saying, ′Look at that!′ in a variety of languages. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.

  Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth′s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky.

  She sat with Nathan Lammockson on her scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from Ark Three, spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of the raft. She′d tried to make Nathan comfortable with a heap of blankets. In the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea.

  Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future.

  ′The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough moulding, and we′ll come through it, smarter and stronger then ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that …′ He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. ′Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim …′ His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.

  ′Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.′

  ′They just swim …′

  A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon′s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

  It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

  That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

  Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.

  ′I got you here, didn′t I? I kept you alive.′

  ′Yes, Nathan.′ She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. ′Yes, you did that.′

  But if it had been the Ark, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.

  ′I kept you alive. We′ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they′ve got to learn …′

  FOUR

  2044-2052

  57

  SEPTEMBER 2044

  An hour before Kelly′s parliament, Holle, on a whim, tried to get inside the cupola. She felt like talking over with Venus the encounter with Zane she was building up to.

  But Thomas Windrup, sitting in the airlock working through some kind of data reduction exercise on a laptop, was acting as a gatekeeper. Slim, dark, his bookish looks spoiled now by Jack Shaughnessy′s gift of a broken nose, he checked over an admission schedule.

  ′Oh, for God′s sake, just let me in,′ Holle said. ′I only want a few minutes.′

  ′We got work to do in here,′ Thomas said, with the pronounced Omaha accent that he′d maintained all through their years in the Academy. ′And then there′s the dark adaptation.′

  ′What do you think I′m going to do, shine a light in your eyes? Let me in or I′ll turn off the water supply to your coffee machine.′

  Venus turned at that, her eyes bright in the dark. Over her shoulder, in the cloistered darkness of the cupola, Holle could see Elle Strekalov, and beyond them both a star-littered sky. ′That is seriously not funny,′ Venus said. ′Power like that is real in this dump, Holle. Even if Kelly Kenzie wants to believe we′re all one big happy family. Oh, let her in, Thomas.′

  Thomas stood aside with a grudging grin.

  Holle entered the cupola and sat on a lightweight swivel chair beside Venus. Now that the hulls were spun up, gravity was less than half Earth normal here, up near the nose of Seba. Every chair you sat on felt soft as feathers, and this transparent blister attached to the flank of Seba had become a dome fixed sideways-on to a vertical wall, separated into horizontal levels by mesh decking. Venus and her team worked at stations equipped with dimly lit screens and red lamps, to protect their dark-adapted eyes. Venus′s wide pupils gave her an eerie, doped-out look.

  Holle peered beyond the curved window into the deeper dark, at the sharp, intense star fields. There was little apparent distortion from the passage of the light through the wall of the warp bubble, at least if you looked away from the axis of the bubble′s motion, and the stars looked much as they had always done in the skies over Colorado. But as her own eyes adapted it was as if more stars were emerging from the velvet blackness, layer upon layer of them beneath the scattered sprawl of the constellations she′d been familiar with from Earth. This grand panorama turned over, all the stars in the universe orbiting the Ark, once every thirty seconds.

  Venus didn′t offer her coffee. Venus was always mean with coffee. Or maybe it was punishment for that crack about the water supply.

  ′So,′ Venus said at length, ′what′s new with the plumbing?′

  ′On schedule and under budget.′

  ′And how are your illegal brothers getting along?′

  ′The Shaughnessys are doing fine. With the simpler stuff anyhow - the big junk you can see and fiddle with, like the oxygen generation system and the water recovery racks. They find it hard to grasp the overall systems flows, or even to see why they need to.′

  Venus was dismissive. ′That′s jarheads for you.′

  ′They′re more than that. At least we better hope they are.′

  Venus nodded, watching Holle with those strange, large eyes. ′I′ll tell you something. There′s nobody I′d trust more to run such essential subsystems than you, Holle. That might be important, when things get tougher later on.′

  Holle didn′t like this kind of apocalyptic talk, that she heard from Venus and Wilson and a few of the others. ′Then let′s make sure things don′t get tough in the first place.′

  ′Yeah. So are you up for a little star-spotting? Can you tell me which way we′re headed?′

  That wasn′t a trivial question. Holle turned in her chair. She looked out through the window and up along the flank of the hull, a vertical curving wall covered with insulation blanket and pocked with handholds, instrument mounts and micrometeorite scars. She could see the big particle-accelerator ring of the warp generator suspended above, and beyond that she glimpsed Halivah, a cylinder poised nose-do
wn in the sky, with the tether a gleaming thread between the twin hulls. All this was picked out by starlight and the ship′s own lights. The hulls were turning around the tether′s midpoint, and their orientation at any moment had nothing to do with the Ark′s overall direction of motion. However, Holle knew how to find her bearings. ′Look for Orion …′ She scanned around the sky, and it wasn′t long before she found the proud frame of the hunter, with his distinctive belt of stars. ′And Eridanus is that sprawl to his right.′ It was in the constellation of the river that their destination G-class star lay, still more than nineteen light years away.

  ′Well done,′ Venus said. ′I guess our naked-eye astronomy training is paying off - all those observing trips up in the mountains. Remember how Magnus Howe used to yell at us when we got bored waiting for breaks in the clouds? But Magnus was lucky. There was a window after the air cleared of human pollution, and before the global-ocean weather cut in with all those clouds and storms, when you had the best seeing since the Stone Age. The result was a generation of natural naked-eye astronomers. Grace Gray remembers it. But we were born that bit too late.′

  Holle, who had never been too strong on warp physics, had always been faintly surprised that the outside universe was visible from inside the bubble at all. It was, but the view was distorted. A warp bubble was a patchwork of universes, stitched together by a thin, dynamic, highly deformed layer of spacetime. That deformity meant a strong gravity field, and the path of a light ray could be bent by gravity - which was how Einstein′s relativity had first been validated, when starlight was observed to be bent by the sun′s gravity during a solar eclipse. So the warp bubble acted as a lens wrapped around the ship, a lens of gravity that deflected the starlight that washed over the Ark.

  The distortions were strongest ahead of and directly behind the ship′s motion. Ahead, space appeared crumpled up around the destination point, like a blanket being gathered in. Behind, though, in the direction of the sun and Earth, it was a different story, and a stranger one. The sun lay in the constellation of Opiuchus, the serpent-bearer, directly opposite Orion and Eridanus in the sky. But in that direction there was only darkness, a murky, muddy disc surrounded by faint stars. The ship was simply outrunning the photons coming from the sun and its planets.

  Holle said, ′If we could see the solar system—′

  ′Imagine a disc the size of the moon, as seen from Earth. That angle in your field of view. From here, that tiny disc would cover a volume of space ten times wider then the orbit of Neptune. After six months we′ve travelled around one and a half light years - that′s a third of the way to Alpha Centauri, if we happened to be going that way. But even now we′re still within the solar system, just, approaching the outer limit of the Oort Cloud.′ A vaguely spherical shell of ice worldlets and inert comet nuclei, following million-year orbits yet bound by the sun′s gravity, just like Earth.

  When the warp bubble had first wrapped itself around the spinning ship, they had swept past one tremendous milestone after another at an astonishing rate. Even after the mighty push of the Orion drive it had taken them a whole year to coast to Jupiter. Under warp, within the first few hours they had sailed past the orbits of the outermost planets, and had soon overtaken the decades-long slog of Voyager One, the most distant spacecraft before the Ark.

  And it was impossible to imagine that seen from outside, the ship and its crew and all their dreams and ambitions and conflicts would be almost entirely invisible, the warp bubble just a speck, smaller than microscopic, fleeing the solar system like a bullet.

  ′So,′ Venus said, ′you spoken to Zane yet?′

  ′I′ve been waiting for the right time. Maybe after the parliament. At least that will take him away from his work for a while.′

  Venus pulled a face. ′If I were you I′d wait a bit longer before you make your choice of life partner. Losing Mel is still an open wound, it′s obvious. See if there′s somebody else aboard you could fall for.′

  ′I′ve looked,′ Holle said earnestly. ′Believe me.′

  Venus shrugged. ′Your choice. Your risk.′

  Holle often wished she could speak to her father about this. Or even Mel. But nobody on Earth could speak to the Ark, not since the instant they had gone to superluminal speed. Maybe, Holle thought, it was just as well that that disc of warped space hid the sun and Earth. It was as if all that had gone before warp had never existed anyhow, as if the twin worlds of the hulls contained all of reality.

  Venus pushed out of her chair. ′Time for Kelly′s talking shop. Come on, let′s get it over so we can get back to some real work.′

  58

  Holle and Venus passed back through the small airlock between the cupola and Seba. They emerged onto a gantry fixed to Seba′s curving, green-painted inner wall. They were up near the nose here, and Holle looked down through a mesh of decks and partitions and equipment. The light was bright, coming from an array of arc lamps that, during a ship′s ′day′ still slaved to Alma time, shed something like sunlight. It was like being inside some big open-plan building, Holle thought, a little like the science museum back in Denver. This was Holle′s world, or half of it. The furthest point she could see, the curving base of the pressure shell below all the decks, was only about forty metres away, and when she looked across the hull to the opposite wall she was spanning a distance of only eight or ten modest paces.

  People swarmed everywhere today. There was a steady hubbub of voices, and the occasional squeal of a child. Most of the crew had come across to Seba for the parliament, though some would have stayed behind in Halivah according to ship′s rules. This parliament was a special one, being held to mark the end of the first six months in which, having unpacked the warp generator from its twin holds in the hulls, the crew had completed the reconfiguring of the hulls′ interior.

  Kelly was holding her parliament on the eighth of the hull′s fifteen decks, counting down from the top, so Holle and Venus clambered down a spider-web of lightweight catwalks and ladders. The hulls had served as zero-gravity space habitats during the cruise to Jupiter and the years of their stay there; everything possible had been packed out of the way, and the hulls′ roomy interiors left open for the crew′s weightless manoeuvrings, and their games of frisbee and microgravity sumo. Now the interior had been remodelled for a long voyage under steady gravity. Decks had been strung across to provide floor space, and partitions had been set up, places for work, sleep and privacy. The design was ingenious, with equipment no longer necessary after one mission phase being reused in the next; thus the catwalks and ladders on the walls had been constructed from the frames of acceleration couches. The social engineers in their offices in Denver and Gunnison had based their interior design on the dynamics of hunter-gatherer groups, the most ancient human social form, with a ′village′ on every deck and a ′clan′ uniting each hull. The social engineers, of course, didn′t have to live here.

  The green shades deepened as they descended further. The hulls had been planned to maximise the visual stimuli given to the crew, and on Seba the design conceit was that each deck represented a different kind of terrain on Earth. The lowest levels, where the effective gravity was the highest, were meant to be rainforest, and the green paint was darkest there, the mid-levels temperate forest or grassland, and the highest montane, painted with the pale colours of mosses and lichen. There were real-life plants nestling among the paintwork, living things from Earth growing in metal tubs welded to the walls, plants and grasses and even dwarf trees. In a morale-boosting gimmick the crew had to tend to the plants themselves. It had worked; even when a clogged filtration unit had shut down the reclamation systems for twenty-four hours and the crew had had to ration their available drinking water, they hadn′t let the little plants die.

  By the time they reached the eighth deck Kelly was ready to start her parliament.

  Kelly sat at the table she regularly used as a command position. She was flanked by those Candidates Gordo Alonzo had always referr
ed to as the senior officers, such as Wilson Argent and Mike Wetherbee, the doctor.

  Holle and Venus took their places, and Holle looked around at her crewmates. Zane stood near Kelly′s desk, an absent look on his face. Masayo Saito sat slightly away from the rest, more wary. Wilson had changed a lot since they′d left Jupiter, Holle thought. He was bulking up for one thing; they were all supposed to exercise, to ensure the low gravity didn′t cause their physiologies any long-term harm, but Wilson spent long hours pounding at the treadmills and weights machines down in the lowest deck of Seba, the heaviest gravity. There was a rumour that he was screwing Kelly Kenzie, though Holle had no proof of that, and there was no sign of it in their body language now.

  The rest of the crew stood around the table or sat on the deck or on chairs, jostling to see. There wasn′t much room; the partitions crowded close. Holle spotted Grace Gray cradling a sleeping Helen, now two and a half, the kid′s mop of blond curls bright in the fake sunlight. Joe Antoniadi stood by Sue Turco, the only female illegal and already pregnant with Joe′s baby. And there were Jack and Paul Shaughnessy, illegal brothers side by side. Holle saw Jack wore his tool belt with a kind of pride. She felt obscurely pleased at the sight; maybe he wasn′t missing his gun quite so much now.

  With everybody gathered together like this, it struck Holle once again how young they all were - nobody much older than Grace at twenty-nine, nobody much younger than Theo Morell at nineteen, aside from the handful of kids born in flight. Even the irruption of the illegals and the gatecrashers hadn′t made much of a difference to that basic balance. Holle had the feeling that if an authentic grown-up walked in here even now, someone like Gordo Alonzo, they would all defer in a second. But Gordo was not going to do that ever again; they were on their own.

  Kelly hopped up onto her table so everybody could see her. In half a G it was an easy jump. ′Welcome,′ she began. ′You know why I called this parliament. This is a special day. Today we mark the end of the opening phase of our cruise to 82 Eridani, and hopefully to Earth II. We finally got the ship up and running, and the warp bubble is stable and whisking us to the stars, and now we can put everything that happened so far behind us, and look ahead.