Stephen Baxter - Ark

“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!”

“It 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?”