Stephen Baxter: Ark

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.

Helen 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.