Stephen Baxter: Ark

Liu spoke softly. “I have it.”

He read, “ ‘The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity.’ A 1994 paper. I am no specialist in relativity but I recognize the soundness of the idea. It is only a theoretical concept, but there are a number of citations…”

Jerzy quickly brought up a copy of the paper and skimmed it. “My God, Liu. Riding a wave of spacetime at superluminal speeds. This is it.”

“The engineering details are entirely absent. And the energy requirements are daunting-”

“But we have the concept.” Jerzy grinned at Kenzie. “We must start work immediately.”

Kenzie looked from one to the other, openmouthed. “If this isn’t bullshit-all right. Tell me the first thing you need.”

Jerzy considered. “Mathematicians. Physicists. Computer scientists. Anybody who had contact with predecessor studies, like the old NASA Breakthrough Propulsion program of the 1990s. And, by the way, if we are serious about planning for a long-duration spaceflight we will need life-support experts, biologists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists.”

Liu said, “Also an artificial intelligence suite, equipped with symbolic manipulator tools.”

“A what-now?”

“We will build a warp bubble. This will be a designer metric.” He mimed a bubble with his hand. “A piece of spacetime, molded to our purposes. To design such a thing we will need a computer system that can solve Einstein’s relativity equations.”

“Make a list.”

Patrick, feeling lost again, shook his head. “Are we serious? Are we really going to try to build a warp drive?”

Jerzy shrugged. “Compared to terraforming a planet, or trying to run a spaceflight lasting centuries to thousands of years, it is a relatively easy option.”

“Fine. So we have something to work on. Meeting adjourned!” Kenzie slammed his palm down on the desk, and toasted them in cold coffee. “Here’s to Ark One, born today. Hey, Joe, make a note of the date and time.”

As the meeting broke up, Patrick went over to collect Holle. The kids were watching a playback of their movie on Holle’s handheld. The teacher, Harry, was cuddling Zane; he moved away, smiling, as Patrick approached.

Holle ran to her father and hugged his knees. “Dad! Did you see what we did?”

“The fort and everything? Some of it. We were busy over there. But you can show me later.”

She looked up at him, her face round and serious. “And did you have a good morning, Dad?”

Which was a question Linda had always asked. He ruffled her hair and said, “Yes, I think so. I hope so. We got stuck for a bit. You know what I always say, sweets. If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question. I think maybe we asked the right question in the end.”

“That’s good. Is it lunchtime now?”

“Yes, it’s lunchtime. Let’s get out of here.”

January 2031

Holle was late on her first morning at the Academy, at the very start of the new term. She’d meant to cut through the City Park, on her way to the Academy which had been set up in the old Museum of Nature and Science on the park’s east side. But the park had been turned into a mixture of farm and refugee camp, and overnight there had been trouble as mid-process eye-dees had protested over being forced to work on biofuel crops. Her father always said it was simply dumb to make mothers with hungry babies work on anything other than food crops. So this morning the whole park was closed off, and Holle, eleven years old and alone, had to skirt south along 17th Avenue, hurrying past cordons of Denver PD cops and Homeland Security, with their advisers from the Office of Emergency Management and homeless-IDP welfare agencies.

It wasn’t a pleasant walk. It had been snowing, not so much as it used to in January according to long-term residents, but enough to leave a covering on the fields and slush in the gutters that she tried to walk around. And the air was foul. She kept her mouth clamped shut against the smoke and tear gas. There was an irony. Her father told her the air was cleaner than it had been when he was Holle’s age, despite a global injection of volcanic products. Not this morning. Some days, everything sort of piled up to make life harder.

Denver wasn’t as much fun as it had seemed when they had first come here six years ago. It was growing shabbier every day, and was increasingly cluttered up with eye-dees and everything that came with them-including diseases like tuberculosis, now that the capability to manufacture antibiotics was breaking down. The city itself was being transformed, in anticipation of a tougher future. Flood walls and storm drains were extended. Wherever possible hard paved surfaces were being ripped up to expose earth where crops could be grown and, more importantly, flood water allowed to soak away. Meanwhile the last year had been a record for tornadoes hitting the city, another outcome of the flood-induced global warming. The big sirens in downtown had wailed over and over, scarily, and buildings had been left battered and glassless, barely habitable. Even if you went driving out of the city, as her father sometimes took her out on the scrubland beyond Denver’s urban sprawl, you couldn’t escape it. You saw nothing but eye-dees walking in from the drowned eastern states and just setting down where they could. When no shelter was provided for them they built huts of bricks cut from sod, as the pioneers had once done a hundred and fifty years earlier, and started planting potatoes and raising pigs.

Sometimes she missed the gated community in New York State where she’d lived when she was small, with its clean apartments and swimming pools, and the tall whitewashed wall that excluded the rest of the world. And no floods or tornadoes or eye-dees in sight.

She was relieved to reach Colorado Boulevard and cut down to the museum. Though stained with age now, the museum was a big block of brick and glass set on a slight rise overlooking the sweep of the park to the west, toward downtown, and beyond that the Rockies. From here the park looked like a medieval village, packed with smallholdings and shabby huts, and threads of smoke rising up from dung fires. But the museum on its rise was fortified.

She had to show her Candidate’s pass and submit to three biometric ID inspections before she was allowed into the main entrance. By the time she got through everybody else had already gone in-everybody save Zane Glemp, who was waiting for her by the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said, breathless.

“It’s not me you’ll have to apologize to. Come on. ” He led her inside the building, through an echoing ticket hall and toward the stairs behind the closed-up museum shop. This was a bright tall open space, and overhead the dusty skeletons of marine dinosaurs from Colorado’s vanished Cretaceous sea still swam in the air.

She felt a rush of affection for Zane. He was a skinny kid, and at ten he was a year younger than she was. But he had his father’s brains, and had been allowed into the Academy a whole two terms ahead of her. This first morning he had promised to meet her and show her around, and he was keeping that promise even at the risk of making himself late as well. “Thanks for waiting for me.”

“I was here already.” That was true; he had his own room in the Academy, that he used when his father was away.

“It wasn’t my fault I was late. There was a riot in the park, and I-”

“Save it. They don’t accept excuses here.”

“Well said, Mr. Glemp.” By the elevator shaft, Harry Smith was hauling a small trolley laden with books. He stepped toward them and folded his arms. “Late on your first day, Groundwater? Not a good start.” He was being teacher-strict, nothing more, and that was sort of reassuring to Holle as she tried to get her bearings. But he was standing very close to them. Something about him always made her uneasy.