Stephen Baxter - Ark

Harry released his hand, and Zane pulled his arm back. There was semen on his palm, hot and stringy. He wiped it on the sheet.

For long minutes Harry just lay there, his left arm still under Zane’s body. Then he withdrew his arm and kissed Zane on the neck. “Sleep now.” Zane felt the weight shift as Harry got out of the bed, and then a fumbling as he adjusted his clothes before walking out through the door.

Zane felt behind himself in the dark. The sheets where Harry had lain were a sticky mess, as were the back of Zane’s own pants. Zane got out of the bed, and stripped off his pants and threw them to the floor. Then he pulled the blanket off the other bed, wrapped it around his shoulders, and huddled down in the corner of the room, facing the door. He sat there, sleepless until morning.

Three days after the accident Gordon James Alonzo hosted a preliminary inquiry in the Capitol building in Denver. To her surprise Holle was summoned, along with Kelly Kenzie and Mel Belbruno.

The walk across town, escorted by Don Meisel, was grim. The city was now surrounded by rings of defensive perimeters, and internally was sliced up into control zones, with barriers between Auraria and LoDo and the Central Business District. The civic center was like a fortress. Don was alert, wary. There was a fear that the Candidates could be a target.

Holle thought the mood was changing, generally. The rising flood had now passed the altitude of the lowest point in Colorado, a place called Holly in the valley of the Arkansas, a symbolic moment. The water was coming, and the inward flow of refugees was intensifying. Invesco Field and Coors Field and the Pepsi Center had become not so much processing as detention centers. A potato blight had drastically worsened the food situation. And now the Byers incident had raised tensions. As the flood went on and on, relentlessly rising, the waters seemed to be washing away any hope, any optimism that this vast convulsion would ever come to an end. For the first time the idea that this really was an end of the world was being taken seriously, absorbed imaginatively. That was what lay under all the stress, she thought. And that tension crackled across the dingy downtown.

Magnus Howe met them at the State Capitol. Once they were through the security barriers he escorted them to a meeting room, and showed where they should take their places at a big conference table.

Holle looked around warily. Gordo himself sat at the head of the table. Behind him was a big interactive whiteboard, and flipcharts summarizing the status of the project’s various aspects. Screens and touch pads were set into the surface of the table before the attendees.

Down one side of the table sat senior air force, NASA and government people. The big names of the old civilian control of the project were lined up along the other side, including Holle’s and Kelly’s fathers. Liu Zheng and more of the technical team sat looking impatient, abashed. Some of the attendees had teams of assistants sitting behind their seniors, backs against the walls, so the room was filling up.

Holle’s father caught her eye and smiled. She hadn’t spoken to him face to face since the accident. Everybody had been running around too much, scrambling to cope with the accident’s aftermath, preparing for reviews like this, and thinking about options for recovery and rescoping. But Holle knew that it was at Patrick’s and Edward’s insistence that the Candidates had representatives here at this crucial meeting. They might not be able to contribute much, but in a sense the whole exercise was for them; they ought to be here. “Even if,” as Kelly had said gloomily, “it’s only to hear the whole show is going to be canceled.”

The air was already hot. The aircon was juddery, even here in the Capitol building. Everything was breaking down. Water jugs stood full on the table, glinting with dew, and Holle longed to pour herself a glass, but she didn’t dare. As the attendees filed in there was silence save for a scraping of chairs, an occasional cough. Everybody seemed so old, save the Candidates and one or two aides.

At last only one space remained at the table, and there was a tense pause. Then the doors opened, held back by an air force orderly, and a paramedic in a bright orange coverall pushed in a wheelchair. Jerzy Glemp sat in the chair, his whole body swathed in a green blanket. A patch covered one eye.

As he was shoved into position at the table, Patrick leaned forward. “Jerzy, you shouldn’t be here. The doctors insisted you stay in the hospital.”

“Fooey. I wouldn’t-” Jerzy broke up in coughing that jerked his body, and Holle could see the pain every movement caused him. The paramedic hovered with an oxygen mask, but Jerzy shook his head minutely, and she backed away. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Jerzy looked around, his one good eye glinting. He found Holle. “How’s my boy? They haven’t let him see me.”

“We thought that was for the best,” Magnus Howe said.

Jerzy snapped, “I asked Miss Groundwater.”

“Zane’s fine,” Holle said. “But-” She thought of Zane as he’d been in the hours since the accident, Zane who’d hardly spoken a word to anybody, Zane who seemed to cling to corners, to shadows, Zane pushed in on himself. She said at last, “He’s working. His work is good.”

“Ah. That’s all one can ask, isn’t it? Tell him I’ll see him as soon as I can.”

“I will.”

“So we’re all here,” said Gordo Alonzo, rapping on the tabletop with a fat, old-fashioned fountain pen. Holle wondered vaguely where he got the ink. “I have to face President Vasquez herself later today, and make my recommendations about the future of Project Nimrod. I suspect that in my heart of hearts I’d rather just can this bull session right now, and go do something more productive. Because, you know why? I think I already know what recommendation I’m going to make, no matter what is said today. That we pull the plug on this whole fucking shambles.”

“You don’t have the authority for that,” Patrick said heatedly. “In terms of the command and reporting structure-”

Gordo laughed. “Don’t you guys get it? Command structure! At this minute that’s me, pal. When your magnetic bottle went pop it took everything else down with it.”

Kenzie said, “There’s also the issue of hope, Colonel Alonzo. Of purpose. What would you have the administration do instead? Give the Homeland goons bigger sticks with which to beat back the refugees?”

Gordo said, “The sea is going to cover over us all in a few years or less whatever we do, buddy. I’m not sure if to give false hope is a worse sin than to give no hope at all.” He turned to his charts and boards. “Let’s get back to basics. Tell me how you think you’re going to fly this dumbass mission in the year 2040. Which, let me remind you, is just four years from now.” He stared around. “Who wants to lead off?”

Edward Kenzie spoke up again. “The basics are simple. We need to assemble a starship, with a crew of no less than eighty, in orbit.” He got up stiffly. With age he was getting ever stouter, and according to Kelly he suffered badly from gout. He went to a flipchart and turned pages until he came to a construction schedule. “From scratch, we built a space launch center at Gunnison, Colorado.” He tapped the whiteboard, and up came an image: a single launch gantry, blockhouses around it, mountains in the distance. He sat heavily in an empty seat by the board. “Intended to fly Ares I and V booster stacks, the launch technology designed to take humans back to the moon and to Mars, which of course never happened. We had to procure transport facilities. Fuel manufacture and storage-”