Ark (28 page)

59

S
he followed Zane to his small, solitary cabin. It wasn’t exactly far.

He seemed surprised to see her, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. But he didn’t object when she asked if she could come in and talk. Her nervousness increased as she followed him inside, and she wondered how she was going to broach the subject she wanted to discuss.

But she was distracted by his cabin. It was nothing but a box of partitions. Everybody else had personalized their cabins one way or another. Holle’s small room had her personal stuff, her bits of clothing, her images of her father and mother, her Angel. And if you had a kid, like Grace Gray, you had a spontaneous homemaker on your hands. There was none of this about Zane’s space. The furniture was functional, just a bed, a couple of chairs, a cupboard. There was work stuff here, an elaborate workstation and some precious hardcopy manuals on relativity and warp drive and space engineering. But, aside from heaps of clothes on the floor, that was it. This was just somewhere Zane existed, rather than lived.

She sat on a chair; she had to clear off a heap of socks first. Zane sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded on his knees. Uncertain of his mood, uneasy about the space he lived in, she became even more unsure about the wisdom of what she was planning to do. But, overwhelmed by her own nervousness and self-consciousness, she went ahead anyway.

“It’s this way, Zane,” she said.

His head turned toward her.

“I’ve been thinking. Look, you know the nature of the mission—the social design. The crew was chosen to be as genetically diverse as possible, so that when we have kids they have the best chance of avoiding inbreeding. This was drummed into us at the Academy. But that means we all have a duty. We need to become parents. It’s our responsibility to ensure that all our genes join the pool of the colonists on Earth II.”

“So why are you telling me this?”

She bit her lip. Did she really have to spell it out? She began to suspect that something was wrong here, something beyond her own nervousness. But she pressed on. “Zane, you’ve seen people pairing up, especially since Jupiter. The rumor is Kelly and Wilson are a couple now.”

He frowned again. “Wilson. The external systems engineer.”

“Yeah,” she said, confused by his response. “That Wilson, Wilson Argent who you grew up with . . . The truth is, Zane, I left Mel behind on Earth. Well, you know that. And I can’t see myself falling in love with anybody else on this rust-bucket. And, frankly, I can’t see you pairing up with anybody either.”

He looked baffled.

She felt concern, and a spasm of affection. She crossed to him, kneeled on the floor, and took his hands. “Zane, we may not be soul mates. But we’ve known each other most of our lives. We’ve worked together for the same goal. And we always supported each other. I remember how you waited for me on my first day at the Academy, and got yourself in trouble as a result. I wondered if—I mean, it doesn’t apply now, not until we get to Earth II. But maybe we should think about having kids together. You and me. There. So what do you say?”

He raised his head and for the first time looked straight at her. “Do you believe in the warp bubble?”

She settled back on her ankles. “What did you say?”

“Do you
believe
in it?” He glanced at his workstation, and laughed, and spoke rapidly. “I mean, I’ve studied the theory. But it’s impossible! Basic physical principles would have to be violated for it to work. Aside from obvious issues of causality and the breaking of the weak, strong and dominant energy conditions, the vacuum stress-energy tensor of a quantized scalar field in an Alcubierre spacetime
diverges
if the ship exceeds the speed of light. Diverges! That would lead to the formation of a horizon, which, which . . .” His voice cracked, and he stopped speaking, as if he had run down. “I can show you the mathematics.”

“Zane? I don’t understand what you’re saying. The warp
works
—we’re in flight. You worked on the design solutions, with Liu Zheng and the others, which got us to this point . . .” As she had been holding his hands, his coverall sleeves had ridden up his arms, and she saw a pattern of marks on the skin of each forearm, small cross-shapes. She touched them cautiously. Some were healed-over scabs, other were more livid. It looked as if he had been jabbing the point of a Phillips screwdriver into his flesh.

“I can’t have kids with you.” He laughed, but it was a ghastly, hollow sound.

She looked up. “Why not?”

“I’m dirty. You must know that.”

“Dirty?”

“It’s all in the journal.” He pulled away his hands and tapped at his workstation. A kind of diary came up, text and short video clips, Zane’s own talking head. “He tells it all there.”

“Who does?”

“Zane. He says he’s going to kill himself, in some of these clips. Like suicide notes.”

“He . . . Zane, that’s
you.
Is that why you’re harming yourself now?”

“What do you mean?”

She took his right arm, turned it over firmly and pointed at the screwdriver marks. “Here, and here.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember doing that. I guess I wasn’t here.”

“Then where were you?”

“I’m faking it, you know,” he said abruptly. He laughed again. “That’s the truth.” He stared at her.
“I don’t know who you are.
None of you. I listen to you speaking, and I make notes of what you call each other, and I check for surnames and so forth on the system. I make notes, and try to remember. It’s been that way since Jupiter.”

She stared at him. “Then what do you remember?”

“I woke up,” he said.

“Woke up?”

The words came tumbling out now. Evidently he hadn’t spoken of this with anybody else. “I was in a pressure suit. I was floating in space. I was surrounded by the warp generator, the collider. He was with me.”

“Who?”

“The external systems engineer.”

“Wilson?”

“Yes. There was a shimmering around me, a visual effect, the stars. Wilson grabbed me and started slapping me on the back. Big gloved hands. He said we’d done it, that I’d done it.”

Holle remembered. She had been in Seba watching this very scene on 13th March 2044, the day the warp generator had first been activated.

“I didn’t know what I’d done,” Zane whispered.

“Zane—you’d initiated warp. It was everything you’d been working for.”

“Wilson took me on an inspection tour of the collider torus. I just followed his lead. When I got back inside, everybody was smiling and nodding and shaking my hand, and I just smiled and nodded back. I didn’t even know their names. When I got to a workstation I looked up the relativity. I understood
that,
it’s so elementary. And I studied the warp generator, so called. It can’t work!”

“You don’t remember anything before warp day?”

“And I have blanks.”

“Blanks?”

“Other times since then that I don’t remember. It’s like I just wake up again.” He rubbed his face. “But I’m not getting much sleep.”

She smiled, and backed off. She needed to get to Mike Wetherbee, she realized. She needed to tell him that their only warp engineer might be schizoid. And so much for having his babies.

“Just wait here, Zane. Will you promise me that? We need to talk some more.” Leaving him sitting on the bed, she turned and fled.

60

December 2046

H
olle was woken by a soft whisper from her Snoopy cap, on the low cupboard beside her bed. The in-suit systems had been adapted by the senior crew as a clandestine communications channel for times of crisis. In the dark, she grabbed the set and pulled it over the pillow. “Groundwater.”

“Holle? Wilson. Could do with some help over here.”

“Over in Halivah?” She was half asleep; her thinking was fuzzy. “Light.” A soft glow filled the room, and she checked her watch. Four a.m., not yet dawn here in Seba or in Halivah, in either of the Ark’s twin hulls. She propped herself up on her elbow. “Go ahead, Wilson. What’s up?”

“We lost a kid.”

“A kid?”

“Meg Robles.”

Now four years old, going on five, Meg was one of the first cadre of babies born on the Ark. Her mother, Cora Robles, had been pregnant on embarkation.

“Wilson, how do you lose a kid? . . . Never mind.”

“We’re searching. But the kid’s only half my problem.”

My
problem, Holle noted. He might be Kelly’s partner, but Wilson did have a way of treating the whole of Halivah as a personal fiefdom. “The mother?”

“Theo can’t get her out of HeadSpace, and he’s worried how she’ll react if he pulls the plug.”

“And you’re calling me because—”

“I need your feminine intuition on this one, Holle.”

“Oh, piss off, Wilson.” But he knew she wasn’t about to refuse a request for help; she never did. “OK. Give me a few minutes.”

“Out.”

In her sleep suit, she stumbled out of her cabin into the cool dim green of nighttime Seba, heading for the deck’s communal bath block. Nobody was around, nobody moving on the decks above or below. She made a mental note to check that whoever was supposed to be on watch tonight wasn’t goofing off asleep or in a HeadSpace booth. When the hull was empty like this it seemed bigger, grander, somehow, almost church-like. You were more aware of the sounds, the smells, the tang of electricity and metal that never let you forget you were in the guts of a big machine—and the lingering staleness, a sewer smell that was the signature of thirty-some people having lived in this tank for nearly five years already, since the launch from Gunnison.

The toilet block was part of a pillar structure that spanned the hull longitudinally from one end to the other; the sinks and showers and toilets on each level connected to a common water and drain system. She used the toilet and washed her face. She derived some satisfaction from the smooth running of her systems, the freshness of the cold water on her face, and the even hum of pumps and fans and filters. This was what she did, she and her apprentices, and she didn’t really care that amid all the politicking and bickering and daily crises nobody ever seemed to notice.

Back in her cabin she pulled on underwear, coverall and boots.

Then she clambered up the series of steel ladders that led to the nose of the hull, and the airlock for the tether transit to Halivah. Wall-mounted cameras swiveled, following her passage incuriously. The paintwork hadn’t been modified from the natural green scheme that had been bequeathed them from the ground, although after five years the paint was chipped, flaking. And there were no particular signs of the upcoming thousand-day festival. Kelly, following a lead from Gordo Alonzo, was keen to promote celebrations whenever there was an excuse, a mission anniversary, a birthday. Given how short they were of such basic materials as paper and fabric, the crew’s artistic leanings were expressed in more ephemeral forms: oral poetry, music, dance. When the festival day came, the thousandth since the warp launch from Jupiter, the hull would briefly be filled with a carnival. But for now the crew’s artistic endeavors slept in their heads with them.

At the nose of the hull she slipped off her boots, pulled her Snoopy comms hat on her head, and clambered into one of the three transit suits stored here, hanging like pupae from the wall. It closed up easily, the joints and seals well lubricated, but it smelled of stale farts. She ran through basic integrity checks. Then she climbed up into the nose airlock and waited for the pumps to drain the precious air from the small chamber.

These cut-down pressure suits were an innovation of Wilson’s, who had grown impatient with the time it took for crew to complete a spacewalk transfer from one hull to another. The most important change was to the suit’s air content, which was an oxygen-nitrogen mix of about the same pressure as within the hulls. The higher pressure made the suit rigid and all but impossible to move around in, but that didn’t matter if all you had to achieve was this simple transfer. Most importantly the higher pressure cut out the need for the hours of prebreathing you had to endure before a full EVA.

The hatch opened. She pushed her way out into space, and found herself standing on the nose of the hull. The insulation blanket was soft under her booted feet, worn by years in space, pocked by micro-meteorite scars, crisped by solar radiation, and stained a faint yellow by the sulfurous compounds emitted by Io. But the Stars and Stripes were still bright in the ship’s lights, and from here she could see the bold black U and N and I of the words UNITED STATES painted down the hull’s flank, the identity of a drowned nation displayed to the stars.

She clipped herself to the winch unit and began her ascent, up through the lessening gravity toward the accelerator ring. Unlike some of the crew she wasn’t troubled by the transit itself, or the peculiar sensations as gravity faded away to zero and then flipped over past the midpoint as she began her descent to Halivah. But she was always disconcerted by the unnatural sight of huge masses of engineering hanging in the sky; some animal part of her was always convinced the whole lot was going to come crashing down.

Only minutes after leaving Seba her booted feet descended toward Halivah’s nose.

“Welcome aboard,” Wilson murmured through the comms. “I’m down on sixth.”

“Copy that. I’ll find you.”

61

H
alivah was stirring, ending another ship’s night, but the lights were as low as aboard Seba. The ground-mandated routine of having the two hulls on different day-night cycles, so there was always half the crew awake and functional, had soon been abandoned for the tensions it caused between two sets of crewmates in different states of wakefulness. There had even been a petty dispute about which hull should have the honor of being slaved to Alma time, and which should be eight hours out of sync. Now both hulls followed the same clock cycle, both mirroring Alma time, with a rota for a small night watch in each hull.

The feel of this hull was strikingly different, however. The social engineers’ paintwork, urban design in contrast to Seba’s natural colors, had been meticulously scrubbed away, to reveal the raw textures of the artificial surfaces beneath, the plastic, the metal, the glass. Even the mesh decking plates were bare. The Halivah inhabitants as a group had decided on this as a kind of artistic gesture of their own—they chose to live with the cool mechanical reality of their environment, rather than try to mask it with the colors of a planet none of them would ever see again. Holle was enough of an engineer to appreciate the stripped-down beauty of the result.

But some surfaces had been filled in with artwork, rendered with precious smears of paint, crayon and pencil. On the fifth deck Holle paused by one painting of a kind of house filled with light, surrounded by a dark, threatening sky—and a knock on the door represented by arcs of yellow paint. The painting was signed: HALIV. DREAM CIRCLE 4.

“Psst.”

The whisper came from under her feet. She glanced through the mesh floor to see Wilson on the next deck down, in pants and a vest that showed off his muscular torso. “You like the artwork?”

“Not much. It’s well enough done. But the subject’s obvious, isn’t it?” This was one of the most common dreams, or nightmares, endured by the crew. Here were the last humans alive (possibly), fleeing through space in these metal hulls: what if there were a knock on the wall?

Wilson grunted. “I don’t like these damn dream circles. All they do is recycle morbid rubbish like this. Feeding off each other’s mental garbage.”

“Maybe. But some days there’s nothing to do but scrub down the walls, Wilson. People need some kind of stimulus from outside their own heads.”

Wilson wasn’t impressed. “It’s just another fucking fad. The circles only caught on when we started rationing access to the HeadSpace booths. And speaking of HeadSpace—”

“Let’s go see Theo.”

“Yes.”

Holle followed Wilson down a few more decks. They passed through cabin villages that were subtly different from those aboard Seba, the crew fiddling with the partitions and gradually modifying the place to suit their own tastes.

Holle said, “I take it you haven’t found little Meg.”

“No. I got the night watch searching, and when everybody else has woken up we’ll start a top-to-bottom inspection. Probably have to take the damn ship apart to do it.”

“These kids are growing up here. I guess they’re going to know these hulls better than we ever will.”

“Yeah. Poor little bastards. Morning, Theo.”

Theo Morell was waiting for them outside a small cabin, the eleventh deck’s HeadSpace booth. He was leaning against a wall, arms folded, a handheld dangling from his waist. “I see you brought backup.”

“Thought it was safest to have a woman here, in case Cora kicks off again.”

“Oh, she will,” Theo said airily. “She always does.”

Wilson glanced at the booth, where a red light glowed over the door. “She’s in there now?”

“Yeah. Been in all night. She’s alone. Doesn’t even take her kid. You want to see?” Theo hefted his handheld and pressed a button.

A screen on the wall lit up to show a little girl playing on a sunlit patio. She was outside an apartment that overlooked a sparkling sea. Dimly realized avatars shared the space with her. The patio was wide, the sea a gleaming plain that stretched to a sharp horizon with a blue sky.

The basic premise of the scene was obvious: it was about space, room to run and play, alone and free of the pressure of people all around, free of adult responsibility. A copyright stamp, dated 2018, said that the scenario, based loosely on Sorrento, Italy, had been devised as a personal space by Maria Sullivan, a HeadSpace user in Manchester, Britain, and donated to the Nimrod project by the corporation. Holle wondered what had become of Maria Sullivan.

“So Cora is the little girl?”

“You got it. Look, I tried to get her out of there. I tried all the tactics you recommended, Wilson. Like doing deals, another half-hour and then you come out. Nothing works, not with her. Believe me, calling you was the last resort.”

“I don’t want to hear your justifications,” Wilson said. “Just shut it down.”

Theo raised his handheld, and poised his thumb over a key. “You ready for this?”

“Just do it.”

Theo stabbed down his thumb and stood back. The light over the door turned from red to green.

Almost immediately the booth door slammed open. Cora Robles came staggering out, pushing a sensor mask from her face. She wore a black all-body suit, gloves with thick touch-stimulating finger pads, and she trailed a fat cable back into the booth. She glared at Theo. “You shut it off? I wasn’t done!”

He backed off. “Cora, look, I asked you enough times—”

“Give me that console.”

“No, Cora.”

“Start me up again, you little prick!” She launched herself at Theo, her gloved fists raised.

Holle lunged forward and put herself between Cora and Theo. She took a couple of blows on the chest, and then she got her arms wrapped around Cora’s torso. Cora flailed, trying to get at Theo, but for all her anger she was weak and not difficult to contain. The suit was tight enough for Holle to feel how thin she was, her bones prominent, her shoulder blades, her hips. Either she had been skipping meals or she had been swapping food for HeadSpace credits. Wilson hauled at the data cable connecting Cora to the booth, pulling her away from Holle. Cora slipped and fell backward to the mesh floor. She lay there, panting hard, her face twisted.

Holle was shocked at the state Cora was in, and felt guilty she hadn’t noticed. Holle had grown up with this woman. Cora had always been beautiful, bright, flirtatious, a live-wire party girl. Maybe all that energy had been turned in on herself, in the confines of the Ark.

Holle kneeled down beside her. “Look, I’m sorry that had to happen, Cora. You needed to come out of there. Your little girl’s lost.” As Cora had left Meg’s father back on Earth, she was the child’s prime carer.

Wilson snapped, “She knows. We fed it into the booth. Didn’t make any difference. She cares more about her HeadSpace fantasy than about her own kid.”

“And she’s out of credits,” Theo said, grinning down at her.

Wilson wasn’t impressed by his attitude. “What are you laughing at? You run this fucking system, gatecrasher. You should take responsibility for dealing with hassles like this.”

Theo held his hands up. “Last time I tried to get Cora out of there she accused me of assault. Not risking that again. She’s a Candidate, after all, she’s one of you. At least I want witnesses.”

Once it became clear it would be necessary to ration access to the HeadSpace booths, it had been Holle’s idea to give Theo the responsibility of running the rationing system. He did it competently enough, with a system of credits maintained in the public areas of the Ark archive. But Theo was too damn cocky. Maybe there was truth in the rumors that he had been bartering HeadSpace credits for other stuff, that he was turning into a kind of pusher for addicts like Cora. Holle hadn’t wanted to believe it. Theo had grown up a lot since the launch, she thought, though he was still only twenty-one. And not all that growing up had been in a good way.

She turned away and put an arm around Cora. “Come on. Let’s get you on your feet and out of this stupid suit. You look like you need a drink, food and sleep, not necessarily in that order. And then you’re going to have to help us figure out where Meg might be . . .” She led her away.

Wilson stormed off, with a final glare at Theo.