Ark (16 page)

32

A
lone, Grace got herself a fresh mug of coffee, and watched the oppressive wall clock.

124 DAYS 5 HOURS 55 MINUTES 1 SECOND
124 DAYS 5 HOURS 55 MINUTES 0 SECONDS
124 DAYS 5 HOURS 54 MINUTES 59 SECONDS

She was repelled by all she had seen so far of Project Nimrod. The huge engineering, the arrogant old men like Gordo Alonzo who appeared to run it, the spoiled children like Holle Groundwater who had grown up cosseted by it, while Grace and so many others had walked and worked, starved and drowned. Her instinct was still to walk away. But Ark One appeared to be the only show in town.

A girl walked into the restaurant, black, about the same age as Holle. Another Candidate, judging by her bright uniform. She walked up to Grace and dropped a handheld computer and a pen and pad of paper on the tabletop. “These are for you. I’m Venus Jenning. Holle said you wanted to see me. Is this about Harry?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You want another coffee?”

Grace shook her head. The girl walked over to the dispenser to help herself.

Grace inspected the handheld and the paper. The handheld was an antique, scuffed from years of use, and heavy, milspec maybe. The paper had a peculiar smooth sheen, and was stamped with the AxysCorp cradled-Earth logo. She knew this stuff; it had been manufactured from sea-shells on Ark Three.

She took the pen, and wrote down four names.
Harry Smith. Zane Glemp. Venus Jenning. Matt Weiss.

Venus sat down. “I didn’t kill him,” she said bluntly. She faced Grace, making frank eye contact. She struck Grace as tough, clever, motivated, but reserved. “You got my name from Holle, did you?”

“I needed some kind of steer, to get started on this. You’re all strangers to me, you Candidates and your teachers, this weird little family of yours. Don’t blame Holle if she got it wrong.”

“I don’t blame Holle. You had to ask the question, she had to give you an answer. But she doesn’t
know.
She only knows what she saw from the outside. I never spoke about it to her, or anybody else.” She grimaced. “I was hoping the whole thing would die with Harry. Then when I found out it was murder, I realized it was all going to get opened up. So go ahead, ask me your questions.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

“Yes, I had sex with him. Look, he was my tutor, he tutored all of us from when we joined the program. I joined at eleven, myself. I wasn’t happy. I missed my family in Utah, my home. Everybody else had been in the program for years—Holle, Kelly Kenzie, people like that. I was an outsider.”

“Harry comforted you.”

“He counseled me. That was his job. That was all it was at first. I liked him and I trusted him. But it started to change, after a couple of years.”

“Change how?”

“He started talking to me about how the final selection would be made. You know there are only eighty places available on the Ark. There have been far more than eighty of
us.
Every so often there would be a policy change, and a whole swathe of us would go.

“Harry talked to me about my color, my race. He said that the social engineers were concerned about ethnic divisions. He said they were considering restricting the crew to all-white. Harry said this policy was being pushed by some kind of white-supremacist cabal within the project organization, but it had logic behind it in terms of crew stability, and might carry the day. All this was confidential—he said. I had to keep it quiet. Well, you can see how that would affect my chances. But Harry said he would protect me.”

“In return for sex.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that.” Her face showed anger, irritation. “He was smart. I guess he’d played fish like me before. All he wanted in return, it seemed to me then, was respect. Loyalty. Affection. Love, if you want. Look, a good teacher can win all those things.”

“So when did the sex start?”

“We were on a field trip at the Monarch Pass. I was fifteen then. It had been a bad day. Back then Utah and the Denver federal government were still fighting, sporadically. Utah had just mounted a raid in the north, and the talk was all of retaliating. Look, I was frightened for my family in Salt Lake City, they weren’t Mormon but some of them were still in the war zone. And I was frightened for myself. It wasn’t just a case of getting thrown off the program. I thought I might end up in internment, or a labor camp.”

“So Harry came to you.”

“I had a two-person tent. I shared with Cora Robles, but she was away on a night exercise. I was asleep. He unzipped my sleeping bag and got in behind me. You want the details?”

“I—”

“He made me masturbate him. I had to reach behind my back to do it.” She shrugged. “That was it. I cleaned up after he left. I always thought Cora suspected something. Maybe she could smell him, I wouldn’t be surprised. I couldn’t wait to get to the shower the next day. I was shocked by the whole thing. Not so much by the sex itself, I was no virgin. Everything he had done for me was compromised.”

“And it went on from there.”

“I didn’t see a choice. He did have real power over me. Frankly, I thought I was fighting for my life. And I didn’t care about the sex. He just disgusted me. We never had full sex by the way, he never penetrated me. He liked to touch, and for me to use my hands or my mouth. I thought he preferred boys, if you want the truth. He was using me the way he might a boy. Maybe it was the power he got off on.”

“So this went on until he died?”

“Hell, no. I guess it lasted a couple of years. Then I found out the truth about the social engineers’ ethnic selection policy.”

“Which is?”

“There isn’t one. Their mantra is genetic diversity, in the first generation and afterward. They’re more likely to select a rainbow-colored crew than a white one. I found out in fact that there was a lobby, not for a white crew, but for an entirely African-American crew, because diversity among Africans is greater than anywhere else; humanity came from Africa. So Harry lied all the way through.

“When I discovered that I kicked him in the balls, if you want to know.” Her eyes were hard at the memory. “I was old enough by then to know that I had as much power over him as he did over me. To work on the project is a prized berth, even if you aren’t a Candidate, and Harry didn’t want to become an eye-dee. He liked his comforts, did Harry. But he was going to get no more comfort from me. In the end, you know, he cried, and not just from the ball-kicking. He asked me why I’d stopped loving him. Maybe he really believed I loved him. Or maybe he was lying to himself. I don’t actually care what was going on in his head.”

“Did you kill Harry Smith?”

“No,” she said bluntly. “Why should I?”

“He abused you. He lied to you. He misused his power over you.”

“Look, there are a lot of people with too much power in this world. You must have seen that. Harry with his grubby, pathetic fumblings was no worse than many. I took control in the end. I didn’t need to kill him. He was out of my life long before he died.” She said this flatly, quite composed. “You can believe that or not. I couldn’t prove any of it. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

33

H
olle came to fetch Grace from the restaurant, and took her out of the building to where a small convoy of armored vehicles was waiting. “We do several runs a day between here and Gunnison. This is the next to go.”

Here too was Zane Glemp, a little younger than Holle and Venus, thin, pale, intense under his shock of black hair. He wasn’t in a Candidate uniform, and looked as if he wouldn’t have been right in it anyhow. He was carrying a laptop computer. Holle had suggested he ride with Grace to Gunnison, where he had work to pursue, and talk to her on the way.

So Grace found herself sitting alone with Zane in a self-drive vehicle, with thick glass windows and a closed aircon system, sandwiched between two heavy-duty trucks, each of which bristled with weapons. The vehicles set off at a brisk speed, fast enough to push Grace back in her seat, and she grabbed at a rail.

Zane had been unfolding his laptop. “Are you OK?”

“I’m just not much used to speed. I spent most of my life walking, and the last six years on a cruise ship. A motor launch is about as much acceleration as I ever got used to.”

He brought up a map on his laptop screen. “This is the way we’re going.” It was a drive of maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers through mountain country, south from the Hoosier Pass through Buena Vista and Poncha Springs, and then west through Monarch to Gunnison. “They’re mountain roads but the military have strengthened them and put in barriers and they’re pretty good. It’s safer to get through the open country fast, but you do get thrown around. Here . . .” He showed her how to tighten her restraints.

“Why is it safer to go fast?”

For answer he pointed out of the window. Beyond the thick wire fence that lined the road, the country was littered with people, looking out of tents and shacks as the convoy went by. In some places they seemed to be trying to farm, with furrows scratched in the thin dirt, plots jealously guarded. Elsewhere they just sat silently by the road. Children watched blank-eyed as the vehicles passed.

“Sometimes they take potshots,” Zane said. “Or they try to block the road. There’s a system of watchtowers between Gunnison and Alma. If there’s trouble, you get heavier units coming from either terminus, or from Twin Lakes or Monarch.”

“It looks like it’s been raining people.”

“Well, Colorado’s a big country, but we ran out of room a long time ago. The sea’s not far from Gunnison itself, actually. When the wind is right you can smell it. The engineers worry about salt corrosion of the spacecraft and the gantries. But they had the same problem at Canaveral.” Zane’s face was oddly expressionless, as if he was not quite engaged with the world, with her. “You’re here to ask me about Harry Smith.”

“Yes.” Zane was evidently a more complex personality than Holle or Venus. Grace tried to work out a way in. “He was killed by a pulse unit.”

“A mock-up, yes.”

“I’m new to all this. I don’t know what a pulse unit is.”

On his screen he produced a cutaway diagram of an object like a vase, with a round body and a flared throat, sitting in a cylindrical casing. The top was sealed by a plate. “You understand that the Orion launch stage is propelled by a series of nuclear explosions.”

She stiffened. She hadn’t known that. What the hell was she getting into here? “Go on.”

“The idea is to shape each explosion so that it doesn’t just blast out its energy in all directions, but channels its energy and momentum transfer to the spacecraft’s pusher plate.” He mimed with his hands. “Which is like a big cymbal sitting over the throat of the pulse unit, up here. So when the bomb goes off the energy is confined by the radiation case around the charge, which is a shell of uranium, then it is passed up through this channel filler of beryllium oxide in the throat, and thus it’s focused onto the propellant slab—this lid of tungsten at the top. You understand this all happens in an instant, it’s all blown to atoms, but the setup lasts just long enough to direct the bomb energy. The tungsten slab vaporizes, and it’s that product that flies up and hits the pusher plate.

“The early nuclear engineers found out some interesting stuff about how objects vaporize when hit by a nuclear charge. If you have a pancake-shaped object, like this tungsten slab, you get a cigar-shaped plasma cloud. That’s because the center vaporizes first and kind of leads the way. Conversely, if you have a cigar-shaped object it turns into a pancake-shaped cloud, as the energy works its way up the length of the thing. The cigar cloud is better for us, because you get your momentum transfer focused on a small area. You can demonstrate all this with bomb design software, we dug up some of the old code from the 1950s and implemented the algorithms with modern methods. And that’s why this design—”

“It’s something like this that killed Harry Smith.”

Zane hesitated. Evidently he was happier with the technical stuff. “Harry was supervising a few of the Candidates involved in the test. There was meant to be a controlled detonation with conventional explosives to demonstrate some of the principles. Somebody loaded in ten times the nominal charge strength. The way the explosion was shaped—it smashed the containing bunker wide open. It killed Harry, and one other man.”

“You think it was deliberate, then?”

“Oh, yes. Somebody engineered this to kill Harry; I’m sure the other guy was only caught by accident.”

“Except it wasn’t an accident.”

“No.”

“How many people on the project could have set that up?”

Zane shrugged. “A handful of ground engineers. But none of them knew Harry well, which is the point, isn’t it? Of the Candidates, Matt Weiss or myself, without independent help. Many of the others could have done it with support, they’d know the principles.”

“Venus Jenning, perhaps.”

“She’d have needed help with the details.”

“So that leaves you and Matt.”

“I guess.”

“Venus told me about her relationship with Harry.”

Zane’s face went blank. “And you want to hear the same from me?” “I know it’s difficult. Just tell me how it started.”

It had been the day of the 2036 accident that had almost killed Zane’s own father. “That was the lowest point. That was the opportunity to exploit.” He told her something about that first sexual encounter, which was similar to what Harry had done to Venus, her first time. It sounded like a practiced technique. But Zane told this oddly, describing the incidents and actions with passive verbs, entirely impersonally.

“Did he tell you he loved you?”

“That remark was made.”

“Did he ask you if you loved him?”

“The question was asked.”

“
Did
you love him?”

“There was a problem to be solved.”

Grace stared at him. She had met many bruised people in the course of her life; it was a bruising world. But Zane was exceptional. “Do you think any of the others loved him?”

“Matt loved him, I think, Matt Weiss. Matt told me so, once. He was drunk.”

“Did you ask anybody for help? Did you tell anybody what was going on?”

“He asked the father,” he said oddly. Then, a double-take: “I asked my father.”

“And?”

“He said a Candidate for the Ark crew should sort out such issues himself. He said such a victim was dirty and unworthy.”

She pressed him for more details, and he replied in the same abstracted, impersonalized way.

For Zane there had been no sudden fracture of his relationship with Harry, no revealed lies, no blowup, no rejection, as there had been for Venus. Zane had never taken control. The relationship had gone on and on, the sex. Yet there had been an ultimate crisis.

“Harry said he’d protect you. But in the end he failed, didn’t he? You were deselected.”

“There was a psych test. Zane Glemp is technically capable but emotionally unintelligent. That was what the doctors said.”

“So in the end Harry didn’t fulfill the bargain. All that sex, all the creeping around, your father’s anger—the shame you must have felt. Despite all that he didn’t deliver the one thing you wanted, a place on the crew.”

“Perhaps that was never possible. His influence was always more negative than positive, the ability to stop people with a bad report rather than confirm a place.”

“It was all a lie, then. You hated him for it,” she said, pushing. “You hated him for blackmailing you, for not delivering you a place on the Ark. You had means and motive to kill him.”

“There was no hate. There was nothing. Murder was not necessary.” And instinctively she believed him. Zane was a victim, not an perpetrator; he could never have taken control, as Venus had, and as the killer evidently had.

“Then if you didn’t kill him, who? It sounds as if it must have been Matt.”

“I don’t know.”

“But logic suggests—”

“Logic?” For the first time he turned to look at her directly; his eyes were surprisingly soft, full of character. “To see the logic, ask yourself what Matt wanted. And, indeed, what Harry wanted. We’re here. Gunnison.”

The car was slowing. Grace peered out of the windows, curious. The sky had cleared to reveal a deep blue, and the old town was a pretty place of clapboard buildings, surrounded by pine trees and with the Rockies floating on the horizon. But it was overwhelmed by Project Nimrod, crowded with fresh-looking prefabricated buildings and industrial facilities, gantries, rails, pipelines that bridged the road, immense storage tanks that were plastered with frost even in the August heat. She thought she recognized a rocket gantry, slim and upright, with propellant hoses dangling.

The car pulled up at the foot of a massive building, like a factory, a rectangular block maybe thirty meters wide and three times as tall. A tangle of cylindrical tanks and immense coiled springs were contained within a framework of scaffolding.

“So where’s your spacecraft?” She had been expecting something like the moth-shaped space shuttle orbiters in the photos Gary Boyle used to show her.

He smiled and pointed at the large industrial building. “That’s it.”