Ark (35 page)

73

November 2052

I
t took nearly a year to implement the Split.

They broke up the warp generator, under Zane Glemp’s uneven leadership, and used spares to rebuild it as two copies of itself. Kelly and Wilson thrashed out which subgroup would take which hull; it was decided that it was fairer for Kelly’s crew, with their shorter journey back to Earth, to take Seba, the fire-damaged hulk, while Wilson took Halivah. That decision seemed logical, but Holle wondered to what extent personal politics had again played their part. And they equipped a single shuttle glider to take Elle’s crew down to Earth II, with a share of tools and raw materials and seed stock from the store bequeathed to the project long ago by Nathan Lammockson.

They began to say their goodbyes, first to the colonists of Earth II. Wilson arranged a kind of ceremony, in which each of the colonists was given a small stainless-steel globe of their new planet, manufactured in the Ark’s machine shop. Holle found it almost impossible to say good-bye to the Candidates, like Cora and Thomas and Elle, with whom she’d grown up, and shared a common mission all her life, and with whom she’d expected to grow old. Now she’d never see them again.

The two hulls were still linked by the tether, still wheeling around their common center of gravity over the steel ocean of Earth II, when the colony shuttle was released. Everybody left aboard the Ark followed the little craft’s progress as it cut into the new world’s tall, thin atmosphere, and created a shining contrail of incandescent plasma that dipped down toward its landing place on the Belt.

Then came the final sorting-out between the twin hulls, Seba and Halivah, the last transfer of materials, the last handshakes. Holle hated to let go of the Shaughnessys, who she had worked closely with since the launch at Gunnison. But they wanted to go home.

And then, for the second time since Jupiter, the tether was cut by its explosive guillotine, and the hulls drifted apart.

Seba was to be the first of the hulls to create its warp bubble. From Halivah, Holle watched curiously from the cupola, beside Venus. It happened as Seba was crossing the face of Earth II, from Holle’s point of view. A whole section of the planet, a rough disc, seemed to crumple as if crushed by an invisible fist, the colors of land and sea running like wet paint. But then it rebounded, and Seba was gone.

It was only then that Wilson discovered that Kelly Kenzie had kidnapped Mike Wetherbee, the only doctor, and taken him away to Earth. Wilson’s rage endured for days.

Five

2059

74

July 2059

I
t was Boris Caistor, thirteen-year-old Boris with his sharp young eyes, who first noticed the new light in the sky, a spark sailing through the deeper dark between the banks of cloud.

“Thea saw it too,” he told Thandie Jones. “She says she can see a shape. Sort of long and thin, a splinter.”

Thandie, sitting on a surging raft in the middle of the ocean, looking up at a cloud-choked sky, frowned. “Surely two splinters, end to end, connected by a thread . . .”

“Nope. Just one. Of course she might be lying. Thea lies all the time, or makes stuff up anyhow. Once she said she saw this whale which—”

“Never mind!”

Thandie was pretty sure Boris didn’t understand what he had seen, not really, nor did he grasp its possible significance. And, worse, she was also sure he didn’t give a damn about it. Thandie had followed Lily Brooke’s lead in trying to maintain some kind of education program for the kids on the raft. But astronomy was about all you could manage, the changing starry sky the only show in town, all that would actually hook these kids’ interest in something other than food and swimming games and each other’s pretty bodies. Thandie suspected Boris’s brain was dissolving like those of the rest of his generation.

But he was a loyal kid, and he was kind to his honorary aunt Thandie, just as when she’d first met him in a cluster of rafts over the drowning relic of Everest and she’d seen him indulge the whims of another elderly lady, his great-great-aunt Lily Brooke. Boris was also bright and observant, and even though the seeing was always so phenomenally bad on this new, stormy ocean world he had been able to recognize the new light in the sky as something special, and maybe it was what Thandie had told him she had been expecting to see, for a year already.

If Boris had seen it so had others. So Thandie took one of her precious handhelds from within its brine-proof layers of plastic sheeting and let the solar cells power up the internal battery. She posted Boris’s sighting up to the hearth, and she sent out queries for other observations, especially of the thing’s first appearance in Earth orbit.

But she needed to see it for herself, and maybe get some idea of its orbital elements.

After that, for one night, two, then three, hell, as long as it was going to take, she sat on the raft’s deck in her old, much-traveled fold-out bucket chair, with a blanket wrapped over her legs, waiting for the clouds to clear. She kept drifting in and out of sleep. At seventy-three, and after a pretty hard life, she was blessed with reasonable health, but she felt the damp, and spent a lot of time asleep.

The raft was a big one, by the standards of those that had survived twenty years or more on an ocean patroled by the Spot and its offspring storms. It was constructed on pontoons of plastic oil drums and barrels, covered by sheets of slippery tarpaulin lashed down with orange cable. Once, this had been reinforced by a base of gen-enged seaweed, an AxysCorp product, a substrate that would feed on sunlight and the produce of the sea and grow and self-repair. This miracle substance, which Nathan Lammockson had hoped would be the saving of a waterlogged mankind, had turned out to have some fatal genetic flaw. After it had blackened and crumbled away, Thandie’s raft community had been able to scavenge replacement materials from the wrecks of other, even less fortunate rafts, all of its garbage recycled from the drowned civilization beneath their keels.

On this base sat a kind of floating shantytown, constructed of sheets of plastic and corrugated iron, proofed against the weather and the salty air of the sea. People lived off fish and other sea creatures, and birds’ eggs and processed seaweed, and they gathered their drinking water from the rain in upturned buckets. There was a farm, of sorts, in the middle of the raft, a heap of topsoil detached from the Andean hillside where the raft had first been constructed. Spindly crops grew, lovingly tended by old folk. There were even chickens, in a big plastic cage strapped to a wall. For power, a small bank of windmills stood over the farm, and there were panels of bright green AxysCorp solar energy panels, self-cleaning and self-repairing, almost like living things themselves. It was a constant battle to maintain all this, as the salt water forever poisoned the soil and withered the crops, and corroded electrics and any metal parts.

The younger generations helped out reluctantly. They didn’t care about farms. They didn’t even care about artificial light. They made fish-oil lamps, but rarely used them. If the skies were clear there was moonlight and starlight, and the luminescence of living things in the sea. And besides, who needed light at night? You didn’t need light to sleep or screw. So while the last of the land-born veterans struggled to keep all this junk going, the youngsters, Boris and his generation, went diving off the side of the raft into the endless ocean.

Thandie was tolerated. People left her alone with her obsessions, with her science and her gadgets and her theorizing. The raft was full of kids, and of parents caring for them, feeding, playing, stitching together clothes from faded worn-out relics—though, in the perpetually warm, moist air, a lot of kids were taking to nudity, and even some of the younger adults. The currents of their lives washed around Thandie as if she was a monument in a flood, a statue of some long-forgotten hero . . .

Her handheld, in her lap beneath the protection of the blanket, was bleeping softly.

She’d been dozing again. This was the fifth night. The sky was a lid of black cloud. She dug out the little computer and, cursing, felt inside her coat for her ancient reading glasses.

It was a message from Elena Artemova, once Thandie’s lover, now separated from her by age, ocean, and a kind of weary indifference. Elena was on another big raft, floating over the drowned corpse of Rio de Janeiro. And she, alert to the new light in the sky, had picked up a chance observation made by a raft over Los Angeles. “So the returning ship first appears in the skies over North America,” Elena mailed. “Not by chance, I would be sure . . .”

Thandie eagerly studied the observation, a short, poorly resolved video sequence taken through some raft-borne telescope.

Then she waited until Boris emerged from the water, dripping, thirteen years old, his muscles hard and his belly flat, his mouth smeared with fish oil, his penis limp from enthusiastic underwater sex. She made him sit down beside her, and talked him through the sequence of images.

“See—this shows the arrival of the object you saw, the bright new satellite. This was taken by a telescope that happened to be looking into the right corner of the sky, just at the point where it first appeared. I knew there had to be somebody who’d have caught it. Now wait . . . Watch the clock . . . Pow!” A bright flash appeared, off to the right of center of the star field, that was the ship itself, and a shimmer of light washed away from it, heading left in a dead straight line, fading, as if the ship had sent a bright optical message back the way it had come. “You see?” Thandie asked triumphantly, staring at Boris. “You understand what this is, what this observer saw?”

“No,” Boris said bluntly. He looked restless, his focus wandering. The kids had virtually no attention span at all.

Thandie suppressed irritation. “This is a ship that traveled faster than light. It’s visible as it travels; its warp bubble emits a cascade of exotic radiation energy, some of which folds down into the visible spectrum. But it outruns its own image. So the ship arrives first and the light has to catch up, all the photons it emitted back along its path arriving at mere light speed. The older images arrive last, and you get this effect as if the ship was receding, not arriving . . .” She played the little sequence over and over. “This is the signature of the arrival of a faster-than-light vessel, Boris, an FTL starship. It’s the Ark, Ark One. I knew they’d come back.”

He frowned, a comical thirteen-year-old’s attempt to feign interest. At least he was being polite. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“Break out the radio beacon. See if the batteries have retained any charge. Let’s bring them home.”

75

Z
ane floated into Holle’s surgery, a compact, burly thirty-nine-year-old man, confident, definite in his movements in microgravity. He pulled himself down onto the couch and fastened a restraint loosely around his waist. “Ah,” he said. “After more than a decade of therapy I feel like this old couch is part of me.”

Holle had been waiting for him with Theo Morell, who was setting up the cameras on their wall brackets to film the session. Holle settled in her seat, facing the couch, her handheld on her lap. “I take it I’m talking to Jerry.”

“I finished the day’s duties before coming here. The warp bubble is functioning within all nominal parameters, incidentally. Driving us onwards to Earth III. I thought I should stay out to, umm, pilot Zane 3 here, so to speak. He knows what you’re intending today, it’s been on his mind. He’s nervous about it, I have to tell you. He fears he will lose something of himself in the process of integration. He’s aware he’s popular with the crew, the younger ones. That gives him a certain validation.” He eyed Holle. “Which is one reason you’re pressing ahead with the process, isn’t it? I know there are reservations about the influence Zane has on the youngsters.”

There was no point lying about that. “Wilson has expressed some concerns.”

Zane snorted. “Wilson has his own ‘concerns’ with the youngsters, as we all know.”

“But that’s not why we’ve decided to try to begin the process, Jerry. If we didn’t think you were ready we wouldn’t attempt it. You’re very important to us, obviously. Your needs are paramount.”

“All right. The question is, are
you
ready? It’s only been seven years since you took over from Mike!”

“Give us a break,” Holle said. “I had to learn psychiatry from scratch. It’s not easy, Jerry. In fact, I don’t think we’d have been able to get this far at all without you.” That was true. The alter called Jerry had been like a study partner, as Holle and Theo and Grace had gone through the psychiatry journals, books and expert systems stored in the ship’s archive, and Mike Wetherbee’s incomplete notes on the case. “And you’re happy about undergoing the process yourself?”

“Even a partial integration will strengthen us, all of us, I’m sure of that. And besides,
I
am under no threat today; I don’t expect to feel any change.”

In the program they had drawn up, a sequence of steps without a fixed timescale, Jerry would be the last of the alters to be integrated.

Theo leaned forward. “Jerry, you know there’s another reason we decided to start the process today. Because, if all’s gone to schedule, Seba should have arrived back at Earth about now. And if they did it’s entirely to your credit. You programmed the warp bubble.” Theo mimed throwing a basketball. “You picked them up and threw them home.”

Zane grinned. “Well, of course I’m aware of that. If it all worked it’s a significant triumph—
if.
But we’ll never know, will we?”

Holle touched Theo’s arm. “I think that’s enough. It’s been good to talk to you, Jerry.”

“Always a pleasure, Holle.”

“Is Zane 3 there? Maybe you could let him come forward.”

“Momentarily.” Zane closed his eyes and lay back on the couch. For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen asleep. Then he stirred, restless.

His face softened, his lips pushed forward into a kind of pout. He opened his eyes and looked around the surgery. “Oh, crap, I’m still here.”

“Hi. Am I speaking to Zane?”

“You know who I am.”

“And you know why you’re here today.”

“You’re going to try this ridiculous reintegration procedure, so-called.”

“Are you happy about that?”

He laughed, a dull, bitter sound. “What difference does it make if I’m happy or not?”

Theo said, “Seba should be arriving at Earth about now. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?”

“They went outside the hull,” Zane said. “Kelly and those others. They’re either dead, or in a cage somewhere. We’ll never see them again.” He stared directly at Theo, until Theo looked away.

Holle said to Zane, “Shall I take it you consent to the procedure?” “Yes, yes. Just get it over.” He lay back, his eyes screwed shut.

Holle began the patient process of hypnosis. “Just relax. You can feel the tension, the energy, pouring out of your fingers and your toes, like a liquid. You’re sinking deeper into yourself . . .” The trigger words Wetherbee had used to put Zane into a hypnotic trance always worked quickly.

Holle, as she had for seven years, felt the strain of just being in the same room as Zane 3. His passiveness, his depression, his all-consuming self-pity were crushing. It was a small consolation to her that Mike Wetherbee, according to the marginalia of his notes, had often felt the same way.

After the Split and Mike Wetherbee’s kidnapping, Wilson had had to find volunteers to take over various aspects of Wetherbee’s medical role. Grace Gray, grave, apprehensive but responsible, had taken the lead, and was self-educating into the role of ship’s doctor as best she could. And Holle had stepped up to take over Zane’s complex case. She had already shadowed some of Wetherbee’s sessions, knew roughly what the work involved, and she saw that it needed pursuing if Zane was to be salvaged.

And it had been Wilson who had suggested that Theo support her. Wilson, shuffling what was left of his crew after what he called Kelly’s mutiny, thought Theo needed another focus, another key duty aside from his gatekeeping of the HeadSpace booths. Theo had done well, after initial reluctance. He had thrown himself into the studying. His experience with virtual systems was a help, in a way—for it was as if Zane was living in some faulty virtual reality of his own.

As she’d got to know him better, Holle started to see how poor Theo’s education had been; rightly or wrongly his father, who he always called “the general,” had identified a military career as Theo’s only option in a drowning world, and had restricted his wider development. In different times, given the opportunity, his personality and talents might have expressed themselves in quite different ways.

But that was probably true of her too. None of them was ever going to know.

Being with Zane 3 made her realize how tired she was herself. As seven years had worn away since the Split the burden of keeping the hull going weighed ever more heavily. She had very few spares, very little in the way of redundancy or backup, and any fault required ingenuity to fix, even the manufacture of replacement parts in the machine shop that were never as good as the original. The thought that the journey might last another twenty-two years was crushing. She was tired, all the time.

But she had to park that feeling outside the door of the surgery, and focus on Zane. Maybe it did her good to have two burdens to distract her, rather than just one.

When Zane was safely under they checked the recording equipment was working, and Holle made a diary note of date and time. “All right, Zane. We’re going to try to help you welcome the alter we call Zane 1.”

Theo glanced at the notes on his handheld. “He’s seventeen years old. He carries the shame you felt when Harry Smith abused you in the Academy. That was his purpose, that was why he was created. To help you cope with that.”

Zane sneered. “So
you
say.”

“Are you in your safe place?”

“I’m in the museum. In my room.”

“What can you see?”

“The door is open.”

Holle said, “What can you see through the door?”

“A boy. He’s frightened.”

“I know. Well, you can help him, Zane. Can you go get him, and bring him into the room with you?”

“I don’t know.” Zane twitched on the couch.

“You can send him out again any time you want.”

Zane lay silently for a minute, then stirred.

“Is he there?”

“He’s standing beside me. He’s smaller than me. Skinny. He’s sort of shivering.”

“Can I speak to him?”

Zane shuddered, and when he spoke again, his voice had a subtly higher pitch. “I can’t see. It’s dark.”

It had always been dark when Harry Smith had come for Zane. “Do you know who I am?”

“Doctor Wetherbee?”

They went through this every time. “No. I’m Holle. Dr. Wetherbee asked me to help. Do you remember we discussed that?”

“Yes.”

“And do you remember what we said we’d do today?”

“You said you’d try to make me go into Zane 3.”

“How do you feel about doing that?”

“I don’t know what it means.” He rubbed his arms, which were pitted with the small scars of the self-harm he still managed to achieve, periodically. “I’m dirty. I should wash first. Zane won’t want me.”

“No. You’re clean. Clean inside. Zane knows that, Zane 3. He wants to welcome you, because that way he can help you, he can take away how you’re hurting, and you can help him, because he needs to remember what
you
remember. So it’s all a good thing, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be gone, if I go into him.”

“No. You’ll still be there, everything that makes you unique. It’s just that you’ll be inside Zane 3, not outside. I won’t forget you.”

Zane suddenly opened his eyes and stared straight at Holle, his face twisted. “Promise me that.”

Holle had never helped Zane, or Venus or Matt, while the abuse was actually going on, though all the Candidates had suspected what Harry Smith was up to. For years she’d turned her back, afraid for her own position. Now, hearing this plea for help as if from the boy Zane had been back then, but expressed in the gruff voice of a thirty-nine-year-old, her heart broke. “I promise. Maybe you could step back and let me talk to Zane 3 again.”

After another pause the alter Zane 3 emerged, visibly. “So what now? How do we actually do this? How do I get him inside me?”

Holle glanced at Theo. The texts and case studies were vague on the precise mechanics of this crucial moment.

Theo leaned forward. “Can you see him? What’s he doing now?” “He’s crying.” Zane sounded faintly disgusted.

“Then just hold him,” Theo said. “Put your arms around him. See if you can stop him crying.”

“OK.” Zane sounded reluctant, but his upper arms twitched, a vestige of movement. “I’m holding him. He’s making my shirt wet. He’s stopping crying. I . . . Come on. It’s OK.”

Holle asked, “What’s happening?”

“It’s like a shadow falling across me, I—oh, I can see him, but he’s inside my head now. Inside my eyelids!”

“Don’t be afraid,” Holle said, soothing. “It’s going well. Everything’s fine. Can you hear his voice? Can you hear what he’s thinking?”

“I can hear, I can see, oh God. I can see his memories. It’s like HeadSpace porn. Did this happen to me? I remember now, I remember the first time, Harry was comforting me about the antimatter accident, he put his big heavy arm around me—oh, shit.”

“It’s OK, Zane, you’re doing well.”

“And this poor kid has been carrying this garbage around for all these years?”

“He did it for you, Zane. I’ll count down from five, and then you’ll wake up, you’ll be here with me and Theo in the surgery. OK? Five. Four . . .”

On waking, Zane was subtly different. More anguished. Angrier.

Holle asked, “Are you OK? Do you want anything, some water?”

“No water. I’m fine.” He sounded anything but fine. He looked dazzled; he shaded his eyes. “Everything’s bright. Ow, and
loud.
” But the only noise in the room was the unending hum of the ECLSS pumps and fans. “I hear my heartbeat.”

Holle spoke softly. “What do you remember?”

“That I didn’t remember before? Years of systematic abuse by that prick Smith. And, in retrospect, years of grooming even before that.” His eyes snapped open. Suddenly he was mocking, angry. “Or maybe you put this shit in my head. Nothing else about this experience is real. Why should these memories be any more valid?”

Holle felt beaten. “Zane, we’re just—”

“Are we done? Can I go?”