Stephen Baxter - Ark

Zane spoke on about the engineering tweaks which his father had had to devise, and how he had labored to contain the costs.

Nobody was listening. You were supposed to listen. Here in Cortez, sealed off from the world, with their phones and net connections blocked, they were expected to feed themselves by working in a small indoor garden, to maintain the air-cycling system that mimicked the environment support of the ship, to figure out and divide up other essential chores-and, most importantly, to learn from each other. These isolation exercises were intended to help the Candidates develop the skills they would need when they faced the even deeper confinement of a long-duration spaceflight. So it paid to listen. Well, Don Meisel watched from his perch at the back of the room, and Mel Belbruno was assiduously making notes. But among the others the decision point was coming, something was passing between the core group in looks and nods and furtive grins. And now, like a breeze passing over a cornfield, a bunch of them unfolded their legs and stood up.

“We’re going out,” Kelly Kenzie announced. “Fifty days without sunlight is enough. Come if you want.” She announced this to the outsiders, Mel, Zane. But she looked challengingly at Don.

Don folded his arms without standing up. “How will you do that?”

“We found the exit you blocked up.”

“It’s on the other side of the shop,” Holle said with a laugh. “My father said that in places like this they always made you go out through the shop.”

“Won’t this count against you in terms of the exercise?”

“Not necessarily,” Kelly said. “We’re rewarded for initiative. I think Gordo Alonzo will be disappointed if we don’t try busting out.”

“My orders are to keep you safe,” Don said. “Not to stop you making assholes of yourselves. Do what you want.” His face was blank. It seemed to Zane that since being reassigned to DPD he had become very good at hiding his emotions, but he never spoke to the group about his experiences, what he had seen and done.

Kelly grinned. “Let’s do it.”

They all piled into the remains of the museum’s small shop, with its bare shelves and faded labeling. Wilson had figured out where to break through the fake paneling that had been used to conceal the shop’s main door, and he used a modified taser to disable the magnetic locks that held it shut. As the door swung open an alarm sounded, and they laughed nervously. But there was daylight beyond, a street, a slab of blue sky. It was irresistible.

They all hurried out, pushing and giggling in the doorway in their bright uniforms. Zane too was pleased to be out, to feel the sun on his face, and to breathe deeply of crisp uncirculated air.

“You look happy,” Holle said with a grin. She linked her arm in his.

“I always feel more real out of doors.”

“I know what you mean. But on the ship we’ll be cooped up for years, not weeks. I sometimes wonder how we’ll cope… Oh, that’s my phone.” She dug in her pocket.

All their phones were ringing. The museum’s fabric had been laced with conductors to turn it into a Faraday cage, a block against transmissions. Cora Robles now had the largest fan base among the Candidates, or so she claimed, and she wasted no time, working her handheld with jabs of her thumb, replying to weeks of messages. Zane, vaguely guilty, turned his own phone off without looking at the screen.

He became aware of the people watching them.

The town of Cortez was a small place, once devoted to ranching and farming and catering for the tourists who had come to see the mountains and the river valleys and mesa tops where people had lived for thousands of years. Now the town was overwhelmed by the eye-dees’ shelters and tents and shanties of cardboard and corrugated metal, crowding the sidewalks and every open space. And the people were everywhere, standing on doorsteps, or poking their heads out of tents, or walking the sidewalks and traffic-free streets, some dragging ancient supermarket carts, looking at the Candidates. But the Candidates, intent on their phones and handhelds, barely registered the staring locals.

A little girl came walking up to the Candidates. Aged maybe nine, she wore a faded adult T-shirt tied around her waist with a bit of old electrical flex. Don watched warily, his hand on the heft of the nightstick at his belt. She pointed at Kelly. “I know you. You’re Kelly Kenzie.”

With a smug glance at Cora, Kelly smiled. “How do you know that?” “My dad works at Gunnison. He has a computer that lets you watch what you’re all doing and read your blogs and stuff.” She smiled. “I like watching you. I like the pretty colors you wear. I don’t live here.”

“You mean in Cortez? Where, then?”

“Mesa Verde. In the Cliff Palace.”

Zane was amazed. He had seen the Cliff Palace, his father had once taken him there, dwellings built by ancestors of the Pueblo people and pecked into the rock. Now that precious, ancient place had become home to this little ragged little girl.

“There are lots of us,” she said, matter-of-fact. “We have TV and stuff.” She approached Kelly, holding out a precious bit of paper and a sliver of coal to write with. “Can I have your autograph?”

The question was, what to do with their liberty. They spent a few minutes consulting search engines. Then they settled on making for the Hawkins Preserve, a couple of kilometers away. This hundred-acre cultural park had been preserved by the city fathers, who had decided early that even the children of refugees needed a place to run and play ball.

So off they set, led by Kelly and Wilson, following interactive maps that took them south on North Market Street and then right onto West Main, then left down South Chestnut. Most of the Candidates stared into their screens rather than at the town around them, devouring news and mail, gossip and speculation.

Venus Jenning said, “They’re still studying that detonation out in the Oort Cloud…” One deep space telescope, intent on exoplanet-spotting, had fortuitously caught a flash out in the halo of comet cores that drifted far beyond the orbits of the planets, cold and lightless. Later a handful of probes had reported anomalous traces of high-energy radiation and particles.

Zane asked, “So are they sure it’s a nuclear explosion yet?”

Venus shrugged. “That’s still the best fit to the data. Somebody lobbed a nuke out there and set it off, or a lot of nukes. But who? The Chinese, the Russians-”

“Could be the Americans,” Wilson put in dryly. “Our whole project is a secret.”

“OK,” Venus said. “But why? The whole world’s drowning. Why blow up a long-orbit comet? What’s the point?”

None of them had an answer.

“Shit,” Mike Wetherbee said. “The age-profile selection committee has handed down its recommendations.” This was a lot more interesting, something that would affect them all. They crowded around him to see, and started downloading data to their own screens.

The social engineers had been devising ways to give the nominal crew, the target number now set at eighty, the best chance of social stability while maximizing genetic diversity. For instance, it had long been decided that families would not be taken, as they represented too many copies of the same genes. There would be no parents on the Ark, no siblings; each crew member, as genetically distinct from the rest as possible, would walk onto the Ark effectively alone.

But how old should the crew be? A uniform distribution of ages, matching the human world they had left behind, seemed the obvious choice. But such a distribution would leave any one individual with only a small number of possible mates of her own age. So, the social engineers had decided now, to maximize an individual’s mating opportunities and to ensure the genetic diversity of the group as a whole, you had to have everybody on board about the same age: everybody would belong to a single “age-set echelon,” in the demographers’ term. The idea would be to wait for several years before having children-maybe even until after landfall on the destination planet-and then to produce another large cadre of children, all around the same age, who would follow their parents up the age graphs with a lag of twenty or twenty-five or thirty years. And, when they in turn came of age, they too would find they had a large choice of potential partners to choose from.