Ark (43 page)

“It was necessary,” Venus said. “Or so the mission planners thought.”

And maybe, Holle thought, clinging to Grace’s words, the crew would be able to forgive her.

“Well,” Grace said. “This has been—eye-opening. So is that all?”

“For now,” Holle said. “Let’s get to work.”

Without another word, and apparently with relief, Grace arrowed out through the hatch, with an unconscious skill born of decades in free fall.

Wilson prepared to follow. “Have to admit I never saw this side of you either, Holle. Shame it didn’t come out earlier. We’d have made a great team.”

When he’d gone, Venus lingered for a moment. “I guess the others didn’t pick up on our long-term problem.”

“What problem?”

“The loss of shuttle A. I don’t have any solution to that. Do you?”

“No,” Holle whispered. “No, I don’t.”

Venus nodded. “Well, it’s a long way to Earth III yet. We’ve time to figure it out. As for the rest—” She looked at Holle for long seconds, as if she’d never seen her before. “Ah, the hell with it.” She floated up out of the cabin after the others.

Holle was left alone in Wilson’s cabin. She sat still. Then she folded over on herself, hugging her knees. She dared not cry for fear that she might be overheard.

90

May 2078

H
elen Gray brought Zane a present. Wrapped roughly in a sheet of insulating foam, it was a block of frozen urine, elaborately sculpted into a bust, a human head. The artist intended it as a memorial to the dead, to mark a decade since Steel Antoniadi’s Blowout Rebellion.

In the gloom of his cabin, Zane hefted it, cupping its cheeks in his stiff, liver-spotted hands. The glow from the cabin’s single lamp shone through the ice, picking out its dark golden color and highlighting bubbles and streaks of other fluids within. Zane said dryly, “I do like the way the light catches piss ice, if you display it right.”

This was Zane 3, Helen tentatively decided, the determined amnesiac who remembered nothing before his own awakening after the launch from Jupiter. She was glad Zane 3 was out today. Though his mood was often black, and though Zane had been a pariah for ten years since his conspiracy theories fueled the Blowout, Zane 3 was a rounded person with a unique perspective of his own, while Jerry was competent but hollow, a bluff, arrogant bully. According to Holle and Grace, who had long since given up their attempts to reintegrate Zane, there was evidence of other alters orbiting inside Zane’s head now, spun off at various crises to take away more distress from the core personality, alters with names like Leonard and Robert and Christopher. The only objects of interest on the Ark were other people. Zane 3 might be nothing more than a fragment of a disintegrating mind, but he remained one of the more interesting people on the ship.

“It’s well made,” he said now, turning the urine head over in his hands. “If the features are exaggerated. These features, the big eyes, the mouth, the nose. It’s like a puppet head.”

“Bella used other bodily fluids to highlight internal structures. Look, you can see that string of blood . . .”

“Not too anatomically precise.”

“It’s fanciful, meant to represent the mind, not the body.”

“Yes. You can see the expression she’s trying to capture. Curiosity. Doubt, maybe. How old is this Bella?”

“Eighteen.”

Bella Mayweather was of the generation who had come of age in the decade since the Blowout; only eight years old at the time of the rebellion, she likely had only blurred, nightmarish memories of those events themselves, and had grown up under Holle Groundwater’s tough-love rule.

“Eighteen years old,” Zane said, turning the head over in his hands. “Shipborn art does fascinate me. So does their culture, the language they seem to be evolving. The way they flock like birds in microgravity. You know, the one thing I’ve learned above all on this cruise to nowhere is about the resilience of the human spirit. We go on and on, decade after decade, and each new year is worse than the last, each subsequent cadre of kids growing up in even worse conditions than those before. Now we have nothing left to give them, not even any raw materials for art. And yet they manage to express themselves anyway. Their sculptures of frozen piss, and their paintings of blood and mucus on the walls of the ship, those elaborate tattoos they wear, their endless songs. All evanescent, of course.”

“Yes. Even this head will have to go into the hoppers in another few days. The image will be stored in the archive, but . . .”

But even Halivah’s digital archive, stored on radiation-hardened diamond-based chips, was running out of room. Half the capacity had been lost to Seba at the Split, and the rest had only been intended to record a voyage of a decade or less. As Holle sought new capacity, for instance for the revival of the HeadSpace booths she had ordered, the institutional memory stored in the archive had been “rationalized,” and whole swathes of it dumped.

Zane said, “This is the sort of thematic resonance which underpins my so-called conspiracy theories. You see the same themes expressed over and over at different levels in our little world, which is evidence of artifice, of deliberate if clumsy design. Thus we are all trapped together in this hull like racing thoughts in a single skull, just as I and my alters are trapped in my own head. And now the Ark’s electronic memory is being wiped out, megabyte by megabyte, library shelf by library shelf. Will the Ark wake up one day not knowing what it is, just as I did at the start of the voyage? Maybe there’s nobody here but me,” he said suddenly. He looked at her. “Maybe you are just another alter, spun off to save me from loneliness. Maybe there’s only me, alone in this empty tank, while the observers watch me going steadily crazy.”

Helen shivered. As with so many of Zane’s visions there was something authentic in this latest speculation, this latest bizarre hypothesis. After all, even though at thirty-six years old she was among the very oldest of the shipborn, she couldn’t remember Earth herself. Intellectually she believed that the stars were real, that Earth was real, that there really had been a flood that had drowned a planetary civilization, and that in only three more years they would reach Earth III. But it was a matter of faith, for her. And there were people like Steel Antoniadi who had been born, lived and died on the Ark without ever experiencing anything outside its hull. What difference had it made to them if it had all been real or not?

Listening to Zane’s theorizing was like listening to a horror story, giving her a kind of pleasurable scare. But, since the Blowout, listening to Zane had been against ship’s rules.

“This is why none of the kids are allowed to come and see you, if you talk like this.”

“Ah, the children. I am still the ship’s bogeyman, aren’t I? But I do miss those dream-sharing sessions we used to have.” He glanced at her belly, where her coverall showed a slight swelling. “You’ve another coming yourself ?”

She smiled. “We just got in before the deadline. Holle wants a moratorium on conception from here until Earth III. She doesn’t want us landing with newborns aboard.”

“That makes a certain paranoid sense. A little sister for Mario?”

“Actually a brother.”

“Another boy for Jeb. That will please him.”

“I guess,” she said indifferently. Jeb Holden, formerly one of Wilson’s bruisers, had not been her first choice as father to her children—and nor, she knew, had she been his choice. After all he was about Zane’s age, nearly sixty, much older than Helen. But Holle had encouraged everybody to get busy producing babies, following some demographic logic of her own, and the ten years since the Blowout had seen a whole new crop of infants growing up, second-generation shipborn. Helen could hardly stay aloof. “Just remember,” Grace had said with a strained smile, “I didn’t get to choose your father either. And nor did my mother have any choice about the man who fathered me.” Grace had hugged her daughter. “But we didn’t turn out too bad, did we?”

“Jeb’s OK,” Helen told Zane now. “He came from a good family, I think. We named Mario after his own father, a farmer who died in an eye-dee flash war, which was how Jeb ended up fighting for his life on a raft. Wilson was a bad influence on him.”

“And what are you going to call the new addition? What was your father’s name—Hammond?”

Helen smiled. “My mother won’t hear of that. We’re thinking of calling him Hundred. Because when he’s born we will just have completed a hundred light-years from Earth.”

He groaned. “These made-up shipper names! I can’t abide them.” She drifted to the door. “I need to go. You can keep the head for a few days. Don’t let it melt.”

“Oh, believe me, I won’t.” Zane stared into the eyes of the sculpture, as if seeking answers there.

She felt an odd impulse to hug him. But with Zane you couldn’t be sure
who
you were hugging. “You’re very valued, you know.”

“Oh, really?”

“You’re still the authority on the warp generator. We need you.”

“No,” he said. “Come on. You know as well as I do that our flight to Earth III, regarding the warp mechanics, has been programmed in from launch.”

“But if the warp failed in flight—”

He laughed. “If that happened it would most likely kill us all in an instant. No, my usefulness ended the moment the warp bubble successfully coalesced at Earth II.”

“You’re useful to me, if you want to put it like that. I enjoy our talks.”

“You’re very kind. But as your children grow, when you reach Earth III and you start the great project of building a new world—” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m fine. You go back to your little boy. Go, go!”

91

“I
t was the ruins on Earth II that were the clue,” Venus said softly. “I mean, think about it. The first world we come to, the first exoplanet ever visited by humans, and we find ruins, traces of some civilization long gone. The principle of mediocrity dictates that there’s no such thing as coincidence; you must expect that what you discover is average, typical. So, find one world with ruins and you’ll find more . . .”

They were sitting in the cupola, Venus holding court with Holle and Grace. Venus spoke softly, and the others followed suit. Somehow, even after all these years, the subdued twilight of the cupola was a place where hushed voices seemed the right thing. And even now Venus was mean with the coffee, and Holle tried to resist asking for another cup. They huddled together, their three faces softly lit by the light of Venus’s screens, while the stars hung like lanterns outside the big windows. All three of them were around sixty or older, their hair roughly cut masses of gray, their faces lined, their bodies solid and stiff, nothing like the slim, smooth-faced girls who had boarded the Ark all those years ago. And Holle knew that she had aged most of all.

All the way from Jupiter, Venus and her slowly changing cast of trainee astronomers and physicists had studied the universe through which they traveled, from a vantage point unique in all mankind’s history. And, having sifted nearly four decades’ worth of data, Venus had come to some conclusions, and had come up with a deeper theory of life in the universe than had been possible for any earthbound astronomer.

“It’s remarkable that mankind discovered life in the universe, through the analysis of data from the planet-finder projects, just at the moment civilization was falling apart because of the flood. What a tragedy that was! But all we found was mute evidence of atmospheric changes, such as the injection of oxygen and methane, a glimpse of what looked like photosynthetic chemicals. You don’t need intelligence to produce such signatures. But it was intelligence we wanted above all to find.

“But, despite decades of listening long before the flood came, and an even more careful survey from the Ark in the years since we launched, we’ve found nothing. Heard nothing, not a squeak. I might say we’ve not just been looking for radio and optical signals but city lights and industrial gases, and evidence of more exotic objects, Dyson sphere infrared blisters, wormholes, even warp bubbles like our own.

“And yet we do see traces of their passing. Well, we think so. Even when there aren’t actual ruins, obvious traces. You recall how the Earth II system was depleted of asteroids? We’ve found other depletions, anisotropies—differences in concentrations of key materials between one side of the sky and another. Even the solar system had some odd deficiencies, for instance of neon and helium, that we couldn’t explain away with our models of planetary creation.”

Holle asked, “So what are you suggesting? That somebody came by and used up all the good stuff and moved on?”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. And why do we find this? Because, I think, the Galaxy is old . . .”

As the Galaxy formed from a vast, spinning cloud of dust and gas and ice, embedded in a greater pocket of dark matter, the first stars had congealed like frost.

“In the primordial cloud there wasn’t much of anything except hydrogen and helium, the elements that had emerged from the Big Bang. Those first stars, mostly crowded in the Galaxy’s center, were monsters. They raced through fusion chain reactions and detonated in supernovas, spewing out metals and carbon and oxygen and the other heavy elements necessary for life—at any rate, life like ours. The supernovas in turn set off a wave of starmaking in the regions outside the core, and those second stars were enriched by the products of the first.” She mimed a cage with her hands, slowly expanding. “So you have this zone of intense activity in the center of the Galaxy, and a wave of starmaking washing outwards, with metals and other heavy elements borne on the shock front. That starbirth wave finally broke over the sun’s region maybe five billion years ago, and the Earth was formed, and so were we.

“But Sol is out in the boondocks, and was born late. The Galaxy’s starmaking peak was billions of years earlier. Most stars capable of bearing planets with complex life are older than the sun, an average of two billion years older. That’s half the Earth’s lifetime—maybe four times as long as it has been since multicellular life emerged on Earth.”

Grace asked, “And you believe this is why we see no signs of intelligence?”

Venus shrugged. “We’re latecomers to the party—like the gatecrashers on the Ark.
They
were most likely to emerge billions of years before us. What happens to a culture after billions of years? Most likely they die out, right? Or maybe they migrate. Me, I’d head for the Galactic core. That’s where the action is, the crowded stars, the energy.” She glanced out of the windows. “The energy of starlight is thin out here, a millionth the strength of sunlight at Earth. Which is why the Ark is not equipped with solar panels. In the core you could just coast around in the starlight, lapping up all that free energy falling from the sky. It must be like a city in there, hot, crowded, dangerous. Whatever, after a billion years, they’re nothing like us, and they’re not
here.
”

Grace asked, “So where does that leave us?”

“Alone,” Venus said firmly. “If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain’t going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard. ‘Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where thou ridest, that there are no gods.’ That’s Seneca—
Medea.
”

Holle said, “You always were pretentious, Venus.”

Venus grinned. “Sorry.”

“I sometimes wonder why we care,” Grace said. “I mean, why would we long to find minds on other worlds? Gary Boyle used to say that we are lonely because of our evolutionary history. Our ancestors were hominids, just one species in a world full of other kinds of hominids. There are many species of dolphins and whales;
they
aren’t alone. But our cousins all went, we out-competed them. We’re not evolved for a world where the only minds are ours. We’re lonely but we don’t know why.”

Holle considered. “Well, if all this is so, it’s up to us not to fail. On the Ark, I mean. If Earth has gone, if Earth II fails, we may be the only receptacle of high intelligence left in the Galaxy.”

“Quite a responsibility,” Grace murmured.

“Especially as we’re dumb as shit,” Venus said. “I mean, we can’t even last a few years in this tin can without turning on each other.”

They were silent for a while, and Holle wondered grumpily again if Venus would ever get around to offering them that coffee refill. She said at length, “You know, I sometimes think we were terribly ill-equipped, the Candidates. We spent our whole lives training for this mission, but we weren’t rounded. I mean, for instance we never even read any
books
—no books that counted. Do you remember, Venus? I liked historicals, tales of a vanished past. You liked old science fiction about vanished futures. We never engaged with the world as it was unfolding around us, not even through fiction.”

“Nobody was writing novels about the flood,” Venus pointed out. “They were all too damn busy. More to the point, Holle, you and I never had kids, before or after we left Earth.”

Holle shrugged. “True. I sometimes think I never got over Mel. And then there was that strange business about Zane. After that, I always felt I had too much to do.”

“Yeah. As for me, my students are my children.”

“Those are excuses,” Grace said gently. “You were Candidates. You were brought up knowing it would be your
duty
to have children, to pass on your genes. But you didn’t. On some level you both deliberately chose not to, for whatever reason.”

“Maybe I was scared,” Holle said. “Scared to make that kind of commitment.”

“To have kids and to know you couldn’t save them.”

“Something like that.”

Venus said coolly, “I wonder if you could do the job you’re doing now, Holle, if one of your own kids was affected by your decisions. Living in your water empire.”

“I don’t know,” Holle said honestly. “I think Kelly Kenzie could have done it. She was always the best of us, wasn’t she? Before the Split she was hooking up with—with—”

“Masayo Saito.”

“Yes. She intended to have kids with him. Maybe she has by now. And if not for the Split, maybe she’d have had kids with Wilson. Either way she’d have been able to keep on functioning as a mother, I think.”

“And she’d have kept Wilson in check better.”

“Yeah. She’d have done a better job than any of us.”

“You can only do your best,” Grace said to Holle. “Kelly isn’t here; she’s long gone. All we can do is keep on until the end—”

An alarm went off, a faint buzz, one of Venus’s screens flashing red. She turned and tapped a key. “Oh, shit.”

Holle leaned forward. “What?”

“It’s a suicide note. From Zane. He says he doesn’t want to be a, let me see, ‘a useless drain on resources.’ ”

Grace shook her head. “That’s Zane 3. He’s done that before, the other alters overpower him.”

“This is signed by a committee. Jerry, Zane 2, Zane 3, somebody called Leonard and Christopher and—”

Grace unbuckled and clambered out of her couch. Venus was already opening the airlock hatch.