Ark (44 page)

92

H
elen Gray sat on hot, prickly sand.

The beach, textured by dunes and wave marks, stretched off as far as she could see. Before her was another semi-infinite plain, a sea that reached to a razor-sharp horizon. The sky was a blue dome, and in it, directly before her, was a star—no, the word was “sun.” It was a disc of light just like the hull’s arc lamps. It warmed her face and dazzled her eyes, and scattered highlights on the sea and cast a shadow from the child playing before her.

Mario, four years old, dressed in a baggy old adult’s T-shirt, paddled in the surf. He squealed every time the water lapped over his toes. He looked quite at home. But his walk along the beach was clumsy, a babyish scrape at the ground. You had to walk in these planetary sims, that was Holle’s rule, the kids were going to have to walk on Earth III and this was where they would learn how, and the HeadSpace suit constrained you to do just that. But the sim could not simulate the effects of gravity, and so the whole experience was incomplete.

Further along the beach sat another parent, Max Baker, with another child, five-year-old Diamond, the little boy Max had fathered with Magda Murphy. Max was talking steadily to his son, encouraging him to race and splash. Helen liked to see Max being like this. It had taken a lot for him to get over the loss of his twin sister during the Blowout, and Magda the loss of her baby. Like herself and Jeb, Max and Magda were parents if not lovers, but they seemed to have found consolation in each other’s company. Magda had even had a second child with Max, a one-year-old girl called Sapphire. Maybe later Diamond and Mario could play together.

The detail of this HeadSpace sim was good. The waves on the sea’s surface and the froth where they broke, generated by simple fractal routines, were convincing enough, or so Helen’s mother had told her. Each individual grain of sand cast a shadow. She could even feel the sand under her bare legs, gritty and sharp—more fractal processing. But to a trained eye it wasn’t hard to see the virtual’s limitations, such as differing shades in the blue sky delineated by straight-line boundaries, as if it were constructed of huge panels. Grace, who had actually stood on genuine beaches on Earth, pointed out the lack of such features as clouds in the sky, and seaweed and jellyfish in the ocean, and seawrack on the sand—and, she had observed dryly, raft-loads of eye-dees crowding out as far as the eye could see. The HeadSpace booths were aging technology, and the processor capacity devoted to these sims was restricted.

But, wrapped up in their virtual suits in their separate HeadSpace booths, sharing this virtual sky, the children could wrestle and race and splash in the water.

All this was Holle’s idea. She had also reinstated sports tournaments, like wrestling and sumo, young bodies stressed against each other in weightlessness, programs designed to build up muscle mass and bone strength to cope with the gravity field of Earth III. Holle didn’t want the crew spilling to the ground like babies, baffled and terrified by such basic features as an open sky.

It seemed to be working. Mario, playing, wasn’t fazed by the fact that you couldn’t turn down the sun or turn up the wind. But sometimes Helen wondered if something unique was being lost as the mission approached its terminus, a culture born of necessity over forty years in the ship’s dark corners, with its own furtive art and language and style. The tribes of half-naked, elaborately tattooed children had to be taught the word for “sky” by being taken into a HeadSpace booth and shown the referent. But the shipborn had evolved forty new words for “love.”

Besides, Helen herself hated the sims. She too was a shipborn, and maybe it was too late for her to adjust to the openness of a planet. But landfall loomed ahead like the date of her own execution—even though she relished the challenge of piloting a shuttle down to the new world. So as little Mario played his way through his allotted time she endured the openness, the sunlight on her bare arms, the lack of the comforting enclosure of scuffed metal walls. And she clung to faulty details, the lines of broken shade in the sky, as reassurance that none of this was real, and she could come to no harm.

She was relieved when time was up and she called Mario back from the edge of the sea.

93

February 2079

O
nce, just once, as Venus drifted in the dark of the cupola, she picked up a strange signal. It appeared to be coherent, like a beam from a microwave laser. She used her space-borne telescopes to triangulate the signal, determining that it wasn’t anywhere close. And she passed it through filters to render it into audio. It sounded cold and clear, a trumpet note, far off in the galactic night.

If it was a signal it wasn’t human.

She listened for two years, all the way to Earth III. She never heard it again.

She said nothing about this to Holle and the others.

94

July 2081

V
enus brought Thandie’s old crystal ball out of storage one last time, and set it up at the heart of the hull, mounted on a strut attached to the fireman’s pole. Holle drifted beside her, clinging loosely to the pole, two solid, competent women in their sixties, side by side.

Helen Gray, clinging to a strut that had once supported a deck partition, glanced around as the crew settled into their places, all around the hull. People clung to guide ropes or handrails every which way up, unconscious of their differing orientations after so many years without gravity, and they made a shell of faces all turned toward Venus. Save only for the crew on watch in the shuttle and cupola, everybody was here, all chores suspended for the day, and there was a buzz of conversation.

Helen spotted her mother. Grace had her grandson, two-year-old Hundred, with her today; the little boy seemed fascinated by the whirling of the crystal ball. And there was Jeb, with seven-year-old Mario sitting on his shoulders. Close by was Mario’s best friend Diamond Murphy Baker, a year older than Mario, with his own parents, Magda and Max, and little Sapphire. Helen was struck how many children there were, the final shipborn. But the survivors of the original crew, those few who remembered Earth, were here too, like Venus and Holle, work-hardened sixty-somethings, and Cora Robles, now a contented grandmother. Wilson Argent hovered up near the apex of the hull, within the charred walls of what had once been his palace. Still a big man at sixty-plus, his hair snow white, he was alone; even now people were generally in awe of him.

If only Zane was here, Helen thought suddenly. She’d scarcely thought of Zane since his suicide three years back. For all his problems he had always achieved everything that had been asked of him. When they got around to building the statues on Earth III, Helen promised herself, there would be one for Zane Glemp, alters and all.

Now Venus seemed to be ready. She didn’t call for order but just looked around. She had always had a kind of natural command, Helen thought. Everybody quietened down quickly, save for the piping voices of a couple of the children. Venus touched her crystal ball. The whirling screens spun into invisibility to reveal a glowing pink-white sphere, a star small as a pea, with a single visible planet, one side illuminated by the star, the other in darkness. The hull’s big arc lights dimmed.

The session was suddenly so like Venus’s report on Earth II, when Kelly had challenged Wilson, provoking the Split. It was so long ago, Helen had only been nine years old and now she was a year away from forty, but she remembered its drama distinctly. The hull, a battered, half-burned-out wreck, was all but unrecognizable from the bright, clean ship of those days. Now it was more like a cave, with its charred walls and worn equipment racks and panels covered with the gangs’ graffiti scrawls. And yet the green plants still grew in their hydroponic beds down on the lower deck, and Holle’s pumps and fans still hummed as they cycled air and water through the hull’s levels. Like the worn-out crew, Halivah had done its job.

Venus began: “Well, we got here.”

There was a spontaneous storm of applause. Helen saw little Hundred happily clapping about something he couldn’t possibly understand, his grandmother’s hand on his shoulder to stop him drifting off into space.

Venus turned to her display. “Here is your new sun, the M-sun. These images have been assembled from observations taken from the cupola and the free-floating space telescopes.” The view panned in on the star, so that the pea-sized image swelled up to the size of a basketball. “It’s a red dwarf star, an unremarkable member of the constellation Lepus, not even visible to the naked eye from Earth. We are a hundred and eleven light-years from Earth, yet the star is not unlike the closest star of all to Earth, Proxima Centauri—though it has twice Proxima’s mass, about a fifth of a solar mass. And it’s small, about a quarter the sun’s diameter. It would fit into the Earth-moon system, in fact, with one edge brushing Earth, the other the moon. It’s of the stellar type M6.” She pointed at snakes of yellowish light that crawled across the star’s surface and reached up in spindly arches. “You can see it’s active. We can expect solar storms—lots of auroras. In fact it was a lot more active when it was younger, but it’s pretty quiescent now. There is no significant ultraviolet component in its light, for instance, unlike Sol. It will be a safe and stable sun—and it will outlive Sol a hundred times over.”

“And it’s white!” somebody yelled.

“Yes,” Venus said, and she grinned. “Its spectrum peaks in the infrared, but there’s enough light in the rest of its spectrum that close up it will saturate your eyes’ receptors, and will look white.”

“So much for Gordo and Krypton,” Wilson called down.

“And here is Earth III.”

The viewpoint panned back so that the pinpoint planet swam back into view, and then zoomed in. Everybody had had a chance to glimpse the new world through the cupola windows, to see an unfolding panorama of lakes and mountains and seas passing under the orbiting hull. But this was the first time they had been able to inspect the planet as a whole. There was another burst of applause, but it was muted, Helen thought. For Earth III looked nothing like Earth.

There was an ocean at its subsolar point, where the M-sun would be directly overhead. Further away continents could be made out, fractal shapes against the ocean’s face, wrinkled by mountain ranges and incised by river valleys. But unlike the gray-green of Earth’s continents seen from space the land was eerily black. And there was a kind of banding effect across the planet, concentric circles with different textures as you looked away from that oceanic subsolar point, so the sun-facing hemisphere looked like the targets they used in the kids’ microgravity archery contests. All this was obscured by a thick layer of atmosphere, with banked clouds at the higher latitudes, and haze as you looked toward the horizon. The shadowed side of the planet, the night side, was entirely dark save for lightning crackles. At the antipode to that subsolar point Helen saw the pale gleam of ice, illuminated by the faint light of the distant stars.

Huddling for warmth, Earth III orbited so close to its parent star that tides had long since massaged its rotation so that its day equalled its year, and it kept the same face permanently turned toward its sun. One side was in perpetual light, the other in unending darkness, save for the starlight. But even the side of perpetual day was so cold that glaciers draped equatorial mountaintops.

Maybe it was habitable. It was not like Earth. That was the basic truth that was driven home to Helen even as she first examined these images, even as Venus began to describe the new world.

Venus said, “Earth III is the innermost planet in its system, but there are other planets further out. More Earths and super-Earths. Not as easy to colonize as Earth III, but they’re there for our descendants—new homelands just waiting in the sky for them, off in the future.

“We looked for planets in the habitable zones of stars, that is the orbital radius where liquid water is possible on the surface, and that’s just what we found here. You can see the oceans. But this M-sun is a lot dimmer than Sol, so Earth III has to be closer in to its parent, only about ten million kilometers out—much less than the orbit of Mercury. The year is different, of course. Earth III’s year is just fifteen of our days long. The stars will shift quickly in the sky. But there is no ‘day,’ and there are no seasons. From the ground you will never see the sun move from the same position in the sky. And it’s cool. Even at the subsolar point you’ll only get about sixty percent of the radiant energy as you’d receive from the sun, on Earth. If you’re on the night side you never see the sun at all.” She pointed. “There’s an ice cap at the point of deepest shadow, as you can see. It gets pretty cold back there.

“You might wonder why the air doesn’t all freeze out on the dark side. It doesn’t work like that; the atmosphere is thick, full of greenhouse gases injected by volcanoes, a blanket that transports heat around the world. Also you have the planet’s own inner heat, which is greater than Earth’s. The climate is stable. It’s just different.

“And Earth III is larger than the Earth—that’s the most basic fact about it. It’s an exoplanet of the kind the planet-hunters called a super-Earth. It has around twice Earth’s mass, and maybe twenty-five percent higher gravity. That will feel hard, but you’ll soon muscle up, and your children will grow up stockier than you are and won’t even notice.

“More planetary mass is
good,
and it’s one reason we selected this world. More mass means more inner heat, a thinner crust, plate tectonics, a spinning iron core. That core produces a healthy magnetosphere, so there is plenty of shelter from radiation, both from the M-sun’s flares and from cosmic radiation. And you can see the evidence of the plate tectonics for yourself. Lots of mountain-building, and active volcanoes.” She pointed to the horizon. “See the layer of dust and ash up there? Volcano smog. Plate tectonics keep a world young. The good news is that this world, being more massive, will keep its inner heat longer than Earth. Earth III will
stay
young, long after Earth itself has seized up and turned into a bigger copy of Mars.

“And there is life here. We knew that from the spectroscopic studies we did of the atmosphere from light-years away. There is photosynthesis going on in the oceans. On the continents, you can see there are bands of different vegetation types working out from the subsolar point, adapted to the lower light levels. We think we’ve seen living things even in the twilight band, around the rim of the daylit face, at the terminator. Like trees maybe, straining up so their leaves can catch the last scraps of light. That’s something for you to find out, some day.”

She looked around, an earnest, exuberant woman, testing to make sure they understood the nature of this gift she was presenting to them. “So you have a sun that will last a hell of a lot longer than Sol, and an Earth that will stay young too, and more worlds to explore. We couldn’t have found a better refuge for your children, for mankind, stretching off into the distant future.

“This is the Ark. After a voyage of forty years, here is your Ararat.” She stepped back.

But she was met by silence, and blank looks. Perhaps the world she had given them was simply too strange.

Then Holle came forward, her face tough, determined, her eyes sunken. Everybody was silent and stock still, save for a few wriggling children. Even little Hundred seemed to be paying attention. Holle’s grim expression was racking up the tension. Helen suddenly realized she had no idea what Holle was about to say.

“Thanks, Venus,” Holle said. “So much for the good news. Now we have to talk about landfall. We have a problem.”