Stephen Baxter - Ark

“I know, I know.” Patrick tousled her hair. “But there’s no good in turning away. So how was the Academy?”

“Dad, it was awful. The kids are all bright and noisy and they compete like mad. There was only Zane who was friendly.”

“Zane will be glad you’re there.”

“I’m not like Zane,” she blurted. “And I’m not like Kelly Kenzie. I’m not tall and pretty and confident. Don’t tell me those things aren’t important, because they are. I know what they call the students. The Candidates. You have to be special to be a Candidate, a star. I felt like Joey out of Friends. ”

He laughed, and sipped his drink. “OK. But, look-it’s my money that’s backed the Academy, as part of a consortium, among a lot of other initiatives related to Ark One. But the Academy is not a finishing school for little rich kids. If you weren’t thought capable of justifying your place there, on your own abilities, you wouldn’t be in there, no matter whose daughter you were. You deserve to be there, sweets.” He kissed her head. “But if it’s ever too tough for you, just come home.”

“Oh, I won’t give up.”

The TV pinged, and filled up with a head-and-shoulders image of Liu Zheng.

Patrick said, “Liu? How can I help you?”

Liu grinned. It was a more human expression than any he’d adopted in class. “Actually it was Holle I hoped to speak to. Ms. Groundwater, you have a knack, I suspect, of asking the right questions.”

“What right questions? You mean that discussion about the biggest warp bubble we could make? But the answer was teeny-tiny. Everybody laughed.”

Liu said seriously, “Listen to me now. We are dealing with the engineering of spacetime, engineering in multiple dimensions. Everything we believe we know, all our intuition, is likely to be wrong. Inspired by that discussion, I returned to something I unturned in the literature during my earlier researches. A thirty-year-old piece of speculation by a worker in Belgium. Do you have your handheld? Try to follow the argument…”

And, as if Patrick weren’t present, he slipped easily into his odd, absent-minded lecturing style and the big wall screen began to fill up with graphics and equations. Holle let the tensors flutter past her like falling leaves, and tried to follow the essence of what he was saying.

Liu said, “A warp bubble is a separate universe connected to our own, like a blister growing from a flaw in the wall of a toy balloon. The bubble wall, umm, surrounds this pocket universe. But ‘surround’ is a three-dimensional word, inadequate to describe the higher-dimensional reality. The bubble is actually the neck of the flaw connecting mother spacetime to daughter. So it can be much smaller than the daughter universe itself.”

“Smaller than the ship!”

“That’s it. The warp bubble can be as small as you like.” His grin widened. “Too small, on the face of it, even to fit in a single neutrino. There are other advantages. We have been concerned about the collision cross-section of our warp ship. Even dust grains, hitting the forward end of the warp bubble, would suffer enormous compression forces. There could be damage to the ship, and perhaps a loss of energy from the warp field. That danger is much reduced with this new geometry.”

“My God,” Patrick said. “I understand maybe five percent of what you’ve said. But I do know that the mass-energy issue has been the key stumbling block that’s been holding up the design-”

“We are years behind any notional schedule,” Liu said heavily. “This may be the conceptual breakthrough we have needed.”

Patrick hugged his daughter. “All down to my little girl.”

“Oh, Dad — ”

“Of course that is not so,” Liu said with unexpected sternness. “Can she handle the relativistic mathematics necessary to fully describe this new solution? Of course not. What she has contributed is an insightful question, which provoked an answer which may lead to an ultimate solution. Zane Glemp contributed more, actually. This is teamwork. At the Ark Academy we are not looking for the outstanding individual, Holle Groundwater. We are seeking to construct a team, a crew. Today you have shown you may have the potential to join that team. May have. It was a good first day. Now I suggest you sleep well, and make sure you are on time tomorrow.” His image winked out, to be replaced by the muted talking heads of Lammockson, Kenzie and the others.

“Phew.” Patrick let Holle go, and climbed stiffly to his feet. “I need another drink, and something to eat, in that order. Quite a day. A spaceship the size of a neutrino!”

“No, Dad,” she said, following him. “A sub-neutrino-sized corridor to a pocket universe containing a spaceship.”

“Whatever. Who’s peeling the potatoes?”

May 2032

The day the government took over the project started like any other day in the Academy. Holle would never have guessed it was the last day of her old life, the end of the old regime, and the start of something new.

Magnus Howe liked to take his ethics classes on the old museum’s Level Two, in the big hall devoted to North American Indian culture, with its dioramas and artifacts set behind glass walls in curving corridors. He said they were grounded here by the hall’s association with the deep past of the landscape. Holle thought he was reminding them of other human cultures wiped out by earlier disasters, in the Amerinds’ case a flood of greed and ignorance.

A dozen students of Holle’s age cadre, twelve to fourteen, sat on the polished floor in a loose circle around Howe, who sat on the only chair in the room. They were mostly wearing their fancy new Candidates’ costumes, robust one-piece Lycra uniforms in royal blue with crimson sleeves and rib panels. As usual, people were multitasking, breaking off in little huddles to discuss some assignment or other, or working through material on laptops and handhelds. Venus Jenning was walking around the book stacks, browsing; the room doubled as the Academy’s library. Some students had the abstracted look that came from the murmuring of Angels in their heads. Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov were sharing the feed from an Angel. Thirteen years old, their hands intertwined, they rocked gently together.

The class was discussing why the Candidates and their families, those of a Christian background, had not been allowed to celebrate Easter.

“It was tough on my father,” Holle said. “We could have done with a break.” There was now an ambitious schedule in place which would see a fuel lode of antimatter, the key to the interstellar drive, being manufactured on the ground, and a long sequence of Ares boosters rising up from Gunnison to launch Ark modules to the space station, which was to be refurbished and used as a construction shack. All this to be done in just eight more years. But as milestone after milestone was missed the pressure was relentless on the senior people, including her father.

Magnus Howe said, “Easter is a vacation, yes. But what about the theology?”

Wilson Argent blew a raspberry. “It’s got nothing to do with theology. It’s politics. President Vasquez went to war with the Mormons. And then you have those New Covenant nutjobs who say that God is drowning the sinners. We’re going secular in reaction.” Dark, sharp, heavyset, Wilson was a recent recruit from the refugee camps, selected for his ferocious ability and tough personality. It seemed to Holle he was challenging Don and Kelly for the informal leadership of the cadre.

“You’re forcing people into a choice,” Kelly Kenzie said. “We lost some good people, whose parents chose the other way, chose God over your selection process.”

“Well, it wasn’t my process,” Howe said. “The social engineers’ theory was-”