Stephen Baxter - Ark

Howe said, “This is a class in which we’re discussing the discarding of religion. It wouldn’t be appropriate to start deifying the Earth herself; Earth is surely a self-organizing system, but not a conscious entity. But there is a school of thought that we should simply accept the wisdom of the unconscious adjustment of Earth’s biological and physical cycles.”

Don Meisel leapt on that. “That’s abider talk. Are you an abider, Mr. Howe?”

There was immediate tension. The loosely defined philosophy that had come to be known as “abider thinking” came from a biblical quotation: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the Earth abideth forever”-Ecclesiastes 1:4. It was born of a kind of exhaustion, twenty years after the global flooding had first begun to interfere in human affairs. Maybe, some argued, humankind should just give in. The federal government saw such ideas as a reason not to pay your taxes, and cracked down hard.

And abider talk was frowned on in the Academy as the kind of thinking that could sabotage the project as surely as the actions of disaffected eye-dee terrorists. So Don’s was a serious charge; Howe could lose his job.

Howe just smiled. “The question is, what is in your hearts-and what will be there in the future, when Earth is no more than a memory to you? You see-” His phone chimed. In class phones were supposed to be set to accept only the most high-priority calls. Howe frowned and dug the phone out of his pocket.

Then Kelly Kenzie’s phone rang.

And Don’s. And Wilson’s. The screens of laptops and handhelds began to flash too.

And, at last, Holle’s phone rang. It showed a simple text message from her father: she should come to the Capitol building right away, where President Vasquez was going to speak.

The crowd that had gathered around the clean obelisk of the veterans’ monument, before the steps of the State Capitol, was smaller than Holle might have expected, only a couple of hundred. A selected group, but most of those close to the heart of the Ark project seemed to be there.

President Vasquez herself was already in place by the time the Candidates got there. She was a stocky woman in a dark blue suit, standing behind a lightweight podium bearing the presidential seal. She had a backing of military people, cops, city officials and suited security officers. Periodically checking her watch, Vasquez spoke to a man in a blue air force uniform. Stern-faced, tanned, very fit, he might have been sixty.

The day was dull, overcast, but warm, humid. Not a typical midsummer Colorado day, old-timers said, but then no day was typical any more. The Capitol looked the worse for wear, the pale stone streaked by years of dirty rain, but two big Stars and Stripes hung on poles to either side, stirring in the fitful breeze. Holle glanced back over the park, which was fenced off from the government buildings around it. Marble pavements had been dug up to reveal raw earth, and shabby residents worked on rows of potatoes. Potatoes were the Food of the Flood, according to official government advice.

Standing in the crowd, Holle felt self-conscious in her colorful uniform, aware of resentful glances from those around her. The Candidates were becoming celebrities, of a sort, even to their coworkers. Though hundreds worked on various aspects of the project, such as the huge construction sites out at Gunnison, few even knew that the whole idea was to build a starship. But even so it was clear the Candidates were being groomed for some great adventure. Not many in Denver were leading aspirational lives, and a lot of people liked to follow the Candidates’ activities, their ups and downs, as if they were characters in some reality TV show. Some of the Candidates played up to it. Kelly and Don competed over hits on their blogs. But the downside was resentment and envy.

Holle recognized a lot of the faces around her, including the rich men and women of LaRei, some of them parents of Academy students themselves. The parents, huddled in little knots talking seriously, were mostly men, fathers. The Candidates had observed that many of their number came from families without a mother, like Holle, Kelly, Zane. Maybe only fathers dreamed of shooting their children off into space. Edward Kenzie, Kelly’s father, wasn’t here, however. Holle had heard rumors that he was spending a lot of time at Yellowstone Park, pursuing a different Ark project-Ark Two, maybe. But if Kelly knew anything about that she wasn’t saying. Secrecy was everywhere, endemic.

Holle’s father found her. He gave her a brief hug. “Hi, sweets.” He looked tired, edgy. But then he always looked tired and edgy.

“Any idea what’s going on, Dad?”

“I just got called out of a meeting, and then called you.”

“If something’s going on you should know about it.”

Patrick shook his head. There was movement on the podium. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

Suddenly this was a key day, an exceptional moment. Holle felt a knot in her stomach tighten. As a Candidate, always aware of the possibility of expulsion, you lived with an edge of anxiety, and you didn’t like surprises.

A suited aide stepped up to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said simply, “the President of the United States.”

Linda Vasquez stepped forward, pocketing a phone and checking her watch as she did so. She glanced at the military man to her right. “The cordon is complete, Gordo? I can speak freely?”

“Correct, ma’am.”

“All right.” She glared around. She was a heavyset woman; she looked strong, ageless to Holle. She had held the presidency for four full terms, almost, three years longer than Holle had even been alive. Rumor had it she was planning to run for a fifth come the elections in the autumn. Holle found it difficult to imagine anybody else in her role. When Vasquez spoke, her voice still carried the lilt of the New York Alphabet City slums where she’d grown up, and which had slumped under the waters in the days of her first administration.

“I guess you know who I am. And, looking around, I know who you are. This is Ark One, right? You are the group who are intending to fly an honest-to-God starship right out of here, out of Colorado. And for this reason, this remarkable, wonderful, hopeful goal, my administration has been happy to back you. And also because of the synergy. The nation will need a space launch capability in the event of any meaningful recovery program in the future.

“But now things are changing. The flood doesn’t let up, in case you haven’t noticed. In the last year alone the water rose another seventy meters. Seventy meters! And that vertical rise translates into much more lost territory as the water pushes inland across the continents.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I get out of bed in the morning, and I look at my daily update, and I still can’t believe what we’re having to deal with.”

Holle was amazed that a president should speak to them this way.

“However, deal with it we have to, as best we can. I continually review and revise my priorities. And as the flood keeps on pressing, what were once outlandish options for the worst case slowly become more realistic, more vital. Because in the end those extreme options might be all we have left.

“Which brings me to Ark One.” Unexpectedly, she slammed the podium with her fist; there was a blare of feedback that made Holle jump. “And what’s been going on here is simply not acceptable. Chaotic organizational forms, lack of leadership, waste, infighting and general confusion are strangling this project. You’ve had seven years since the start-up meeting that kicked off the whole thing. Am I right? Seven years. I’m told it’s only a couple of years since you even got together a feasible design-I say ‘feasible’; my science adviser tells me that in this case that means a design that doesn’t actually break the laws of physics. And you haven’t flown so much as a Fourth of July rocket out of Gunnison yet. Seven years! The Second World War was won in four.”