Stephen Baxter - Ark

“It’s not the theory that matters,” Venus Jenning said. She was flicking through a yellowing paperback. She was a slim, tall girl, calm and quiet, and, perhaps prompted by the chance of her name, fascinated by astronomy. And she liked science fiction, images of vanished futures. “Hey, look at this,” she said now. Her book was called The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein. “Denver gets to be the national capital in here too. After the Six Weeks War in 1970!”

Howe said evenly, “You were making a point about theory and practice, Ms. Jenning?”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. Look, because of the religious ban we lost Jews, Hindus, Muslims. Barry Eastman. Yuri Petrov. Miranda Nikolski! She was the best mathematician we had. She’s a year younger than me, and she was teaching me interstellar navigation! You can’t afford to lose people like that. Even Zane was almost pulled out.”

The group focused on Zane Glemp. After three years in the Academy, twelve-year-old Zane was still among the shiest of the group, and he looked to the floor.

Magnus Howe prompted, “Zane?”

“Well, it’s true. My father’s ancestors were Jews. We don’t practice ourselves. But my father didn’t like the idea that we had to reject our tradition altogether. And I don’t think he liked the social engineers meddling in his project.”

Don Meisel snorted. “Jerzy Glemp was in at the start. But no matter what ideas he’s been putting in, it’s not his project. It’s fueled by my father’s money, and yours and yours and yours,” he said, jabbing a finger around the room at children of the superrich: Kelly, Susan Frasier, Venus Jenning, Cora Robles, Joe Antoniadi, Holle. Cora, a rich kid who had grown up with attacks on her parents’ wealth, just laughed prettily.

Magnus Howe prompted, “Zane? So why are you still here?”

Zane shrugged. “We wanted the Ark more, I guess. What use is faith if your family is extinct? Also Mr. Smith visited a few times. He urged my dad to keep me in the project.”

There was an odd silence at that. Harry Smith, their pastoral tutor, loomed large in all their lives, big, bluff, complicated. He was close to his charges. He spent a lot of out-of-hours time with the Candidates. He had even taken to dressing like the students, in a version of their gaudy Lycra uniforms. And he had a heavy, hard-eyed, challenging way of looking at you sometimes. He looked that way especially at Zane Glemp. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that Harry Smith had been there urging Zane’s father to keep him in the project. Holle bet the others were thinking about this now. Nobody said anything, however. Nobody ever did. The Academy was a ferociously competitive place, and the Academy authorities were always looking for an excuse to dump you. Nobody went looking for trouble. If Harry Smith was a problem for Zane, it was up to Zane to sort it out.

If Magnus Howe was aware of any of this running around in his students’ heads, he didn’t show it. “Let’s get to the point. Why do you think we’re trying to exclude religion from this project?”

“To avoid conflict,” Wilson said. “A starship is too small for jihads or crusades or pogroms. Maybe you could have a ship’s crew that was entirely Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim-”

“Or Mormon,” Don Meisel said.

Venus nodded. Her own family, though from Utah, had not been Mormons. “Or Mormon, yes. But a selection from any one faith would be limiting, and surely divisive politically.”

“What about polytheism?” Susan Frasier asked. “Like the Hindu faith, for instance, or the old pagan religions. When you have many gods, not just one, you have flexibility, room for tolerance.”

Miriam Brownlee said, “It worked for the Romans, their pantheon was roomy enough just to absorb all their provinces’ gods-”

Mike Wetherbee said, “That came unstuck with Jehovah!”

Miriam laughed at his joke. A slim Texan, she had gravitated to Mike through a common interest in human biology and medicine.

“But even a single-faith group would be liable to splinter,” said Elle Strekalov. “Think of Sunni versus Shia, Catholic versus Protestant-”

The conversation took off. The Candidates, growing interested, abandoned their other projects and started accessing social-dynamics software suites to study how different religious and social configurations might prosper in the enclosed environment of a starship-purely Christian or Muslim or Buddhist crews, or crews guided by an attic full of squabbling gods.

Magnus Howe let the explorations run for a while. Dark-haired, intense, he was quite young, under thirty. Rumor had it he’d once studied to become a Jesuit. He was actually a pretty good teacher, given the dry nature of his subject matter, and young enough to share his students’ sheer pleasure in learning, in acquiring new knowledge.

Holle didn’t join in. The engineering of the ship rather than its crew was her sphere of interest. But she felt a kind of warm gravity as she sat here with this group of smart, eager kids. It was heartbreaking to think that many of them were likely to be discarded long before the Ark ever got off the ground.

Magnus clapped his hands to bring them back together. He glanced down at his own laptop, on which he’d been monitoring their improvizations. “I can tell some good work’s emerging here. Come back tomorrow with a presentation on your results.” He didn’t specify the assignment further; it would, as always, be up to the students to define their goals properly, to organize the work, to figure out how it would be reported and who by. “For now, let’s concentrate again on the decision that’s actually been made-to exclude anybody with strong religious convictions from the crew.”

“What about atheists?” Wilson called.

“Including atheists.”

Don Meisel said, “It’ll be hard to police. You know how desperate people are to get their kids on the Ark. If it means covering up your faith for a few years, people will do it.”

“You’d be found out,” Zane Glemp said. He pointed to cameras mounted in the corners of the ceiling, silently watching as always.

Holle frowned. “And though we might exclude religion, we can’t leave religiosity behind.”

They seized on that new thread. Susan Frasier, small, plump, generous and popular, spoke up now. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe we humans have a tendency for religious thinking programmed into us. It might be a consequence of our need to figure out cause and effect in the world around us.”

“Don’t forget theory of mind,” Miriam Brownlee said.

“We’ll take all that with us into space,” Holle said. “Whatever else we leave behind we’ll take the essence of our humanity.”

Magnus Howe nodded his head. “That’s a good contribution. All of you, all save Holle, are talking in the abstract-of how ‘the crew’ will react to various stimuli, or the lack of them. It’s only Holle who says we. Only Holle who seems to be grasping, today, that you’re not predicting the behavior of some bunch of victims in a psychological experiment. We’re talking about you — some of you, at least, who might survive to board the Ark. How will you react? Look inwards.”

That shut them up, briefly. Then Susan Frasier said, “Earth. I think no matter how far I travel, even light-years, I will always look back to Earth. As I look back to my mother.”

“Yes,” Magnus Howe said, nodding vigorously. “Earth, the planet that shaped its cargo of life for four billion years before any of us in this room were born. Surely none of you will ever shut her out of your mind and heart.”

“But Earth has betrayed us,” said Wilson Argent. “She may be our mother, but she’s drowning us now.”

“It’s not a betrayal,” said Susan. “Not necessarily. It’s just a change, an evolution in Earth’s own conditions. A transition from one climatic state to another.”