Ark (36 page)

76

F
ive days after Seba arrived in Earth orbit, Masayo called Kelly to the shuttle flight deck.

She swam through the lock from Seba. Mike Wetherbee and Masayo were waiting for her, loosely strapped into the twin pilots’ couches at the nose of the shuttle. Kelly briskly kissed Masayo, and she drifted behind the two men, looking over their shoulders. For long minutes they looked out of the flight deck’s big windows in silence.

There, looming over them beyond the windows, was the Earth itself. Even after five days it was hard to believe that they were here, that after a seven-year flight from Earth II they had actually made it home again. Yet here was the blunt reality.

The world was a shield of lumpy cloud, so close that its curvature was barely visible. Looking ahead to the horizon Kelly could see the cloud banks in their three-dimensional glory, continent-sized storms crowned by towering thunderheads. Seba was approaching the terminator, the diffuse boundary between night and day, and the sun, somewhere behind the hull, cast shadows from those tremendous thunderheads onto the banks of clouds beneath. Meanwhile on console screens data and imagery about the Earth chattered and flashed, information on climate and oceanography and atmospheric content and the rest compiled by instruments intended to inspect a new world, and whose electronic eyes were now turned on the old.

Masayo asked, “So how’s Eddie?”

“Fine. Going crazy. You know how he gets before he crashes for his nap.” Eddie, Kelly’s second child and fathered by Masayo Saito, four years old now, conceived and born in microgravity, was a spindly explosion of energy. Eddie was one of just four children born during the voyage from Earth II, which had brought the crew roster up to twenty-three. In a hull designed for a nominal crew of forty or more, there was plenty of room for the kids to play. “Jack Shaughnessy’s with him. Says he’ll put him to bed when he calms down.”

“Good.” Masayo smiled, his broad face bathed in the light of Earth.

Kelly felt a stab of affection for him. Now forty-one, Masayo had lost his boyish good looks to thinning hair and a fattening neck, and like all of the crew after eighteen years in the Ark he was sallow, too pale, with a darkness about the folds of his eyes. But his enduring good nature showed in his face, and the easy command that had once won him the loyalty of the Shaughnessys and his other ragtag illegals now inspired love from his son with Kelly.

Did Kelly love Masayo? Did he love her? Those questions weren’t answerable, she had long ago decided. They would never have come together, never stayed together, if not for the unique situation of the mission. But that was the frame in which they lived, and within which any relationship had to flourish. For sure, she believed he was good for her.

But Mike Wetherbee was watching Kelly in that clinical, mildly judgmental way of his. “Jack’s pretty reliable,” he said, his tone needling. “You can trust him. I guess.”

Mike seemed on the surface to have got over his hijacking from Halivah, seven years earlier, drugged and bound. But whenever he got the chance he put pressure on Kelly, especially over her children, digging into that dull ache, that awful memory of having given up a child. Mike hadn’t trained as a psychiatrist; whatever skills he had he’d picked up on treating patients since the launch, notably Zane. He seemed to have learned well, if his slow, subtle torture of Kelly was any sign.

But today Kelly’s focus was on the present, not the past, and she ignored him. “So what have we learned?”

Masayo grunted. “Nothing good. If we’d hoped Earth had somehow healed—well, we’re disappointed.” He paged through images and data summaries on a screen before him. “There’s no exposed land, none at all. But according to the radar the flood’s not as deep as we might have expected. It’s around fifteen kilometers above the old datum, whereas we were expecting nearer twenty-five from the models the oceanographers produced before we left.”

Mike Wetherbee grimaced. “
Only
fifteen kilometers?”

Masayo grinned. “Yeah. How shall we break it to the crew? Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Now he produced a schematic map of the planet’s climate systems. “The weather’s got simpler now there are no continents in the way, no Saharas or Himalayas. Take a look.”

In each hemisphere the sun’s equatorial heating created three great convection belts parallel to the equator, transporting heat toward the cooler poles. These tremendous cycles created a kind of helix of stable winds that snaked around the rotating planet. It was a pattern that had endured for billions of years, and even now its continued existence still determined much of the world’s long-term climate patterns. Meanwhile in the ocean the network of currents was much simpler now that the continents were drowned kilometers deep, and unable to offer any significant obstacle to the currents’ circulation. Even the huge gyres, dead spots in the ocean, where humanity’s garbage had collected and hapless rafting communities had gone to scavenge, were dispersed now. A crude system of atmospheric circulation, powerful ocean currents following simple patterns, not a trace of land or even polar ice anywhere in the world: this was an Earth reduced to elementals, like a climatological teaching aid, Kelly thought. Nothing but the basic physics of a spinning planet.

And yet it was not uniform; this ocean world had features. Masayo produced an image of a vast storm prowling the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, a milky spiral the size of a continent that continually spun off daughter storms, themselves ferocious hurricanes in their own right. “As far as we know this is the same storm they called the Spot, eighteen years ago,” he said. “Maybe somebody down there will be able to confirm that for us. It drives winds at around three hundred kilometers an hour. That’s about Mach point two five—a quarter the speed of sound. Must do a hell of a lot of damage to those garbage rafts.”

“So we splash down away from it,” Kelly murmured. “But where?”

“There’s nowhere immediately obvious,” Masayo said. “No land, clearly. Nothing but a scattering of rafts. Sometimes you see their lights at night. Some don’t seem to have lights at all. They tend to cluster over the old continental shelves, and particularly over urban areas, the great cities.”

Mike said, “We picked up some radio transmissions, mostly not aimed at us.”

“ ‘Mostly’?”

“It’s just chatter. People asking after relatives and lost kids, and swapping news about storms and fishing grounds. A few people still making observations of the climate, the ongoing changes. They can talk through the surviving satellite network. I suspect some of them are trying to bounce signals off the moon—”

“Mike, back up. You said, ‘mostly.’ The signals were ‘mostly’ not aimed at us.”

He grinned. “That’s why we called you in here, Kelly. Half an hour ago we picked up this, from a raft over North America.” He tapped his screen, and a speaker crackled with a looped message:

“. . . knew you’d be back. I’ve been waiting a year for you to show up, since the earliest theoretical return time. Earth II isn’t so hot, huh? Well, if you need a native guide come down here and look me up. You can track this signal . . . This is Thandie Jones, somewhere over Wyoming, on the Panthalassa Sea. Thandie calling Ark One. I see you! I knew you’d be back . . .”

77

I
n the cupola’s twilit, humming calm, with the hull of Halivah and the silent stars arrayed beyond the windows, Grace Gray gazed on beautiful, spectacular images of young star systems, a million years old or less, in the throes of formation from an interstellar cloud, and tried very hard to understand what her daughter was telling her.

Helen, earnest, seventeen years old, said, “It’s like we’re putting together an album of the birth of a solar system, frame by frame. You see how the young star, having imploded out of the cloud itself, starts to interact with the cloud remnant. A central collapsed disc slices the wider cloud in two . . .” The sundered cloud, lit up from within by the invisible star, reminded Grace of a child’s toy, a yo-yo, with the planetary system forming in the gap between the two halves, where the string would wrap. Tremendous jets shot up out of the poles of the star, at right angles to the yo-yo. Helen spoke on, of ice lines and migrating Jovians and photo-evaporation, of how starlight could strip away the mantle of a Jupiter to expose a Neptune or a Uranus.

The cupola was empty save for the two of them and Venus, who, intent on her own work, with headphones and virtual glasses wrapped around her head, was effectively absent.

Helen was beautiful, Grace thought, studying her daughter, her profile silhouetted against the star field. Beautiful in a way
she
had never been, even at seventeen, when everybody is beautiful, even though she shared Helen’s coloring. Helen’s father, Hammond Lammockson, son of Nathan, had been short, squat, bullish like his father. Grace could see little of Hammond in Helen—some of Nathan’s determination, maybe. Or perhaps she was an expression of Saudi royal blood. Or maybe it was something to do with the microgravity they had all endured for the last seven years, since the Split had made rotational artificial gravity impossible. Helen had only been ten. All the kids who had grown up since were slender and graceful—though, against expectation, they weren’t tall. Or maybe she looked like Grace’s mother, whom she had been named for, who Grace herself couldn’t remember.

Whatever, Helen was a winner of the lottery of genetics—“gifted,” Venus Jenning had once called her, one of the handful of the next generation deemed bright enough for an intensive education. Grace had always suspected as much, even back in the days when Helen had tried to teach her the rules of Zane’s infinite chess. And she never looked more beautiful than when she was intent on her studies.

She realized Helen had stopped talking.

“Am I losing you?”

“Not quite.”

“Look, would you like a coffee before I show you some more?”

Venus pushed her glasses up into her graying hair. “Somebody mention coffee?”

“There may be some in the flask.”

“I think that’s pretty much stewed by now. Why don’t you go fill it up for us?”

“Oh.” Helen looked from one to the other. “You want to talk without me being around, right?”

Grace smiled, and brushed a floating lock of blond hair back into the knot her daughter wore at the back of her head. “Well, it was Venus I came to see, honey.”

“I can take a hint.” Helen had her legs crossed around a T-stool; now she unwrapped, floated into the air, and with a fish-like precision arrowed down and grabbed the coffee flask from its holder beside Venus.

“I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I get to show you more good stuff, Mum. Deal?”

Grace smiled. “Deal.”

When she had sailed out through the airlock, Venus turned to Grace. “You’re here to talk about Wilson, I guess.”

“Yeah. And Steel Antoniadi. He’s gone too far with that girl. The hull’s full of talk about it. I’m seeing Holle later. Maybe you could come. If the three of us confront him—”

“OK.” Venus yawned and stretched; she wasn’t wearing any restraint, and the arching of her back made her drift up out of her chair. “I guess it has to be done. I have to admit it gets harder and harder to care about that kind of crap.” She stared out at the stars. “Sometimes I just lose myself in here. And thank God Wilson got to be speaker, not me. Helen really is one of the best we have, you know. Do you resent me taking her away to study?”

“No. In fact she’s spending even more time training up as a shuttle pilot than she does in here. I’m grateful she has these opportunities. But there’s plenty of griping about your students and their privileges. To be fair to him Wilson defends you, he always points out how we need the planet-spotting and navigation functions.”

“Well, so we do. But how does he feel about my programs of basic research? The fundamental physics, the cosmology—”

“I never spoke to him about it.”

Venus looked back to the stars again. “I just think we should be doing more than, you know, washing down walls and clearing out blocked latrines. And if you think about it, this is a unique opportunity. Even if all goes well, Helen’s kids will be dirt farmers down on Earth III. It’s only this generation, Helen’s generation, of all the generations since Adam, who have grown up among the stars, away from the overwhelming presence of a planet. Who knows how that’s shaping their minds? Call it an experiment, Grace. Besides, these are seriously bright kids, seriously curious, who aren’t allowed to explore anything in case they wreck the ship. So I try to direct their curiosity
out there.
” She fell silent, as she was wont to do, drifting into the private universe of her own head.

Grace prompted her, mildly mocking, “And are you coming up with anything useful?”

Venus laughed. “Now you sound like Holle, queen of the plumbers. Hell, who knows? Look at Zane’s warp generator. We managed to build a unified-physics engine even before we managed to unify the physics in the first place. It’s as if we built it by accident. Maybe Helen’s generation will come up with something that will make Zane’s drive look like a steam engine. Then we’ll have some fun.”

But, Grace thought, all this planet-hunting and exponentiating scientific theorizing had nothing to do with the complex human reality unfolding within the shabby walls of the Ark.

The lock opened and Helen came bustling in, floating expertly through the air while juggling two flasks and a bunch of mugs. She looked entirely at home in this microgravity observatory, and her face was intent, alive with intelligence. But she had never looked more alien. Grace felt a stab of helpless, hopeless love.

78

T
he shuttle from the Ark was a spark, falling down the midday sky. Thandie hadn’t seen such a sight in years. As it fell the spark became a glider, white and fat. It banked once over the raft. Then it came drifting down to a cautious belly-down landing that threw up a huge plume of water.

This was literally the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the lives of most of the inhabitants of the raft. The children jumped and clapped. Some of the older rafters, like Boris’s parents, Manco and Ana, were more fearful, as if this technological irruption would perturb the calm, relatively safe lives they had carefully constructed for themselves.

The shuttle came to rest only a couple of hundred meters from the raft, an impressive bit of positioning after a journey of forty-two light-years. The downed craft looked harmless enough, bobbing in the gentle oceanic swell, with its upper hull covered with a blanket of insulation, blackened by charring in places, and the Stars and Stripes and the words UNITED STATES still visible as the faintest trace of faded paintwork. But Thandie, operating under instructions from a radio link to Kelly Kenzie on the flight deck, made sure that nobody approached the craft for some hours. The black shield that covered the whole of the shuttle’s underside was still ferociously hot from atmospheric friction, and the crew were busy venting gases and other toxins from attitude control systems and fuel cells.

It was the end of the day before the shuttle’s hatch swung open at last. The raft kids, some as young as four or five, dived into the water and went splashing over, towing plastic cables.

A pale face emerged from the craft’s hatch, a spindly figure standing uncertainly in blue coveralls. Bundles were thrown out onto the ocean, packages that popped open to become bright orange lifeboats, to more gasps of delight from the children. The crew began unloading the shuttle, lowering down bits of equipment first, and then their youngest children, four little ones wrapped up in bulky flotation jackets. Then the adults and older children came out, nineteen of them climbing down the shuttle’s short flight of steps. These skinny, pale creatures from space had to be helped aboard their own boats by naked brown raft children. It was like a meeting between separate species, Thandie thought. The raft children swarmed aboard the shuttle, hunting for souvenirs.

The lifeboats set off across the water toward the raft. A couple of the occupants leaned over the side and heaved, miserably sick. One little boy from the shuttle was wailing, “Let me go back! Oh, let me go back!”

At the raft, the shuttle crew had to be helped once more across the short distance between the bobbing lifeboats and the more stately raft. They all had trouble standing, especially the children who panted hard, straining miserably at the thick air.

Thandie had arranged for all twenty-three to be housed together in a hastily evacuated shack, where they were laid down on pallets of blankets padded with dried seaweed. She came to see them a few times that first night, as Manco and Ana led the rafters’ efforts to make their strange visitors comfortable, bringing them cups of rainwater and bowls of fish soup. It was like a hospital ward; the stink of vomit and excrement was dense. The raft children looked in, fascinated and fearful, but were driven back by the stink. Thandie had yet to learn what had become of the Ark, and why only half of it, and much less than half the crew, had returned home.

The next morning, at Kelly’s request, she and two others were brought out and sat in a row of couches scavenged from the shuttle, so they could talk with Thandie.

Thandie sat before her guests on the raft floor in a yoga posture, back erect, legs crossed, hands resting on her knees.

The space travelers sat out in the open in their couches, tipped back, covered in blankets. Their faces were ghostly pale. They all gratefully accepted cups of hot seaweed tea from Manco. The sea was choppy, and they seemed to cower from a sky where thick gray clouds bubbled. A handful of raft kids hung around them, staring wide-eyed. Thandie ignored the kids, confident they would soon go swimming and forget all about the returned astronauts.

Thandie remembered Kelly Kenzie as one of the brightest buttons among the Candidates. She had gone to space as a girl in her early twenties. Now she had returned as a woman of forty-one, too thin, too pale, her blond hair streaked with gray. She was still beautiful, but she had a face that showed the years she had lived, the choices she had made. Thandie gathered that one of the children from the shuttle was Kelly’s. The other adults were both men. One was another Candidate who Thandie vaguely remembered; he was called Mike Wetherbee. The second, a bulky forty-some-year-old called Masayo Saito, she didn’t recognize at all. Kelly introduced him as her partner, father of her kid, and said he had a military background.

Thandie twisted her head to the right, breathed in to center, turned to the left breathing out, back to center and breathed in. “Forgive my old lady stretching routine. So how’s your health this morning?”

Kelly grunted. “Mike here is the doctor.”

Mike Wetherbee rubbed his chest, apparently having trouble breathing himself. “I expected problems with the gravity,” he said. “Brittle bones, problems with fluid balance, all of that. Why, we’ve got children in there, including Kelly’s little Eddie, who were
born
in free fall. And I was expecting us to be prone to viruses and bugs, and I shot us all full of antibiotics and antihistamines before we cracked the shuttle. What I wasn’t expecting was this damn breathlessness.” He had a broad, nasal Australian accent, not much diluted by the years.

“I guess I should have warned you. The air is thicker than it used to be—we’re under greater pressure than the old sea-level value—but oxygen is depleted.”

Kelly nodded, cautiously, as if her very head was too heavy for her neck. “We got some spectrometer readings from orbit. I didn’t believe it.”

“The world isn’t as fecund as it used to be. Not yet anyhow. When the flood came we had extinction events on land, of course, but in the sea too. No more nutrients washing down from the land. The productivity of the biosphere as a whole has gone off a cliff, and as a consequence so has the oxygen content of the atmosphere—down to sixteen percent, according to some of the hearthers, down five points. That’s equivalent to three kilometers’ altitude before the flood.”

“Great,” Mike Wetherbee said. “We drowned the world, but I still get to feel like I climbed a mountain.”

“Worse than that, the air’s warmer than it used to be. You’re panting, trying to keep cool, and you miss the oxygen even more.”

“Warmer,” Masayo Saito said. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than the others, and he spoke in short staccato bursts. “Greenhouse gases?”

“Yes. All those drowned, rotting rainforests. We do think the flood is finally tailing off, however, at last. It seems to be heading for an asymptote of about eighteen kilometers above the 2012 datum. Which means Earth will have an ocean of around five times the volume of the pre-flood value, which in turn matches some of my models of subterranean sea release, as I called it. You can see that even now I am obsessed with academic priority.”

Kelly smiled. “I worked with guys like Liu Zheng, at the Academy. I can appreciate that.”

“Yeah. I survived to deliver history’s most almighty ‘I told you so.’ Some consolation. We might be heading toward a new climatic equilibrium out there somewhere in parameter space. There’s a model circulating on the hearth, called the Boyle model, and that old plodder would love to know he’s been immortalized.” But none of them had heard of Gary Boyle, or of the hearth, a loose interconnected community of aging climatologists and oceanographers, and she got blank looks. “Boyleworld will have very high carbon dioxide content, very low oxygen. Extreme heating will drive even more violent storms, which could mix up the ocean layers and thereby promote life, and in particular plankton photosynthesis—”

“Which would draw down carbon dioxide,” Kelly said.

“Yes. You can see there’s a feedback loop to close there, and that’s how you get stability. At higher temperatures underwater weathering of limestone kicks in also. But it’s all very controversial. Nobody has the computer facilities to test such models any more. And even if Boyleworld does come to pass, it might not be survivable by humans. Too damn hot.”

Masayo glanced around the raft, and pointed to a rack of fish. “The ocean’s evidently not that unproductive. And are those gull eggs?”

“There’s a kind of bounce-back going on among some deep-water species, despite the lack of nutrients in the ocean, now we stopped over-fishing and are no longer pumping in pollutants. It’s as if the Earth is breathing a sigh of relief. The birds have suffered, of course. No land, nowhere to nest. But some gulls seemed to be surviving. We think they’re making their nests on floating detritus.”

“We didn’t see many congregations of rafts,” Kelly said. “Over the major cities mostly. Even there, people are pretty spread out.”

“We come for the garbage,” Thandie said bluntly. “Even after so many years. Toxic leaks drive the fish away, but conversely they’re drawn back to the nutrient upwellings.” She didn’t elaborate on what that nutrient material might be, but Mike Wetherbee looked at the drying fish more suspiciously. “We do keep in touch, we have radio links, we swap information and we trade kids. We fret about inbreeding, just like the social engineers in your Academy.” She pointed. “The kid over there, fixing the cabling on that corner of the raft—he’s called Boris. Thirteen years old. I joined this raft seven years ago, after I came to visit a woman called Lily Brooke, so we could watch the submergence of Everest together. Lily was related to Boris—his great-great-aunt, I think. Maybe you heard of Lily. She was a friend of Grace Gray. She made sure Grace got on Ark One.”

Kelly said, “Grace is on Halivah—the other hull, the hull that didn’t come back to Earth.”

“She was pregnant when she joined the crew.”

“She had the baby before we got to Jupiter. A girl called Helen. She’s grown up now, I guess, she must be seventeen years old.”

Thandie nodded. “That’s good to hear. Lily and Grace went way back. Lily was devoted to saving Grace’s life, saving her from the flood. I guess she succeeded.”

“Grace never mentioned her,” Kelly said.

Lily had died not long after Everest. She had done all she possibly could for Grace. Thandie was glad she had never learned of this slow revenge of Grace’s. Some people never forgave you for saving their lives.

“After Everest, Manco and Ana, Lily’s great-nephew and his wife, took me in. Just as they will take in all of you now. They’re generous people, fundamentally.”

Kelly was staring at the kids, most of whom, as Thandie had expected, had got bored and gone off to their eternal playground of the sea. “They seem—alien. But no more than we are to them, I guess.”

“They grew up knowing nothing different from this,” Thandie said. “Just the raft and the ocean. Some of them barely learn to walk before they go jumping overboard. Some barely talk. It’s not that they’re preverbal, but they seem to be evolving a language of their own, of words, gestures, body shapes that they can use underwater. In the end some of them just slip away. Literally; they go over the side and you don’t see them again. Maybe the sharks get them; that’s what the parents fear. I wonder if they’re just finding some place of their own to live. Maybe on the big natural rafts where the gulls live, all driftwood and guano. Good luck to them.”

Mike Wetherbee said, “It sounds like the mother of all generation gaps.”

“Well, so it is. In five hundred years their grandkids will probably have webbed feet. But I hope they will remember their own humanity, remember the history that bore them, the civilization their ancestors built. I try to teach Boris astronomy . . .”

The kids were kind to Thandie, but they rarely listened to anything she had to say. That was fine with her, fine to be disregarded, as it had been for forty years or more, since she had seen London and New York flooded, and then the huge, astonishing marine transgressions as low-lying continental land was covered over in great sudden swathes, and human civilization dissolved in flight. The flood was just too big; to observe was all you could aspire to. In fact it was a privilege to have lived through this moment of transition. And after all none of these children and grandchildren were hers. She had no stake in their future. The present was enough, and the past . . .

They were watching her curiously.

She had drifted away, into the oceanic depths of her own head, fallen asleep sitting there in lotus. “Sorry,” she said. “Old lady narcolepsy.”

“And I apologize for staring,” Mike Wetherbee said. “It’s a long time since any of us saw anybody
old.
Forgive me.”

“You mentioned something called the Split. Tell me about it.”

Kelly glanced at Masayo and Mike. She shrugged, and related a fast version of her story, of the disputes that came to a head when Earth II was reached, and the three-way split that ensued. Kelly looked nervous, as if she feared she was going to have to repeat all this to some kind of tribunal. Thandie wondered what different versions of this saga she might have heard from Wilson Argent or Holle Groundwater.

When she was done, Thandie nodded. “I always thought you might come home. I never agreed with the basic philosophy of Project Nimrod, to go flying off into the sky. Earth has become alien, but not as alien as another planet entirely. I never thought you would split three ways, which must be about the dumbest choice you could have made from an engineering point of view. Gordo Alonzo would hit the roof. But, wow—three roads, three destinies. I wonder how it will turn out.”

Masayo said, “Well, Earth II is twenty-one light-years away. We outran any signal they might send. We might hear from them in another fourteen years or so. But we won’t hear from Earth III for another century, at least.” He frowned. “Strange thought.”