Stephen Baxter - Ark

As with so many other aspects of their lives, they had practiced their lovemaking assiduously, and they were proficient.

Though she had known Mel since they had both been thirteen, when he and Matt Weiss had been foisted on the Candidate group by Gordo Alonzo, it was only recently, the last few months, that they had hooked up together. Holle still wasn’t sure why it was Mel who had emerged as her partner, out of the swirl of brief, intense relationships that had swept through the Candidate group like a firestorm when they were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Their relationship had never been obvious, the way Thomas and Elle had been obvious since they were kids, or Mike Wetherbee and Miriam Brownlee, thrown together through their work. And Holle wasn’t a voracious sampler like Cora Robles who, starting with poor, hapless, loyal Joe Antoniadi, had worked her way through most of the unattached men in the cadre. Holle had even had a brief experimental fling with Kelly Kenzie, when they found themselves isolated together on one desert-training exercise on the Uncompahgre Plateau-they’d both enjoyed it, but decided once was enough. Maybe it was because Mel had come from outside, having spent his first dozen years with his air force family in an environment quite unlike the one in which Holle had grown up since the age of six. Maybe something in her longed to be grounded-ironic for a woman who was likely to spend most of her life drifting among the stars.

They lay together under a heap of blankets, and drank a little fruit juice.

And then they began again. This time Holle worked her way on top. She’d discovered a variant of the on-all-fours back-flexing yoga exercise called “cat” that drove him crazy.

Then they pulled on fresh AxysCorp coveralls, grabbed some food packets, and went to find the others.

As Holle had expected Kelly and Don were waiting for them at the transparent airlock, the narrow neck that connected the two shelters. Zane and Venus were there in Beta on the far side, easily visible through the lock’s faintly misty transparent panels. Zane was on a low fold-out chair with his “injured” leg thrust out before him; he was sharing a pack of hot food with Venus. There was no sign of Matt or Susan.

It was obvious that Kelly and Don had been making good of their opportunity just as had Holle and Mel. They sat huddled together, wrapped in blankets, sharing sips from a plastic flask. Kelly raised the flask to Holle. “Malt whiskey. Smuggled it in inside my suit.” Her blond hair was loose, and falling down her neck. Her eyes were sleepy, a half-smile on her lips, and the curve of her bare back showed where the blanket had fallen forward.

Holle smiled at her. “That’s what I call your just-fucked look.”

“Well, you should know.”

Zane and Venus worked doggedly at their food, their eyes lowered, and Holle regretted her remark.

Whenever sex came up among the Candidates, Zane and Venus and Matt always held back, or got out of the way altogether. None of them had been known to have a relationship with anybody in the Academy. Holle had had a whispered conversation about this with Kelly one night. Zane and Venus were both close to Harry Smith. Maybe Matt too. Kelly said bluntly that she thought Harry was running some kind of harem, of both men and women. Holle suspected she might be right. But none of the “harem” were talking. It was up to them to fight their own battles.

Mel asked, “So where’s Matt and Susan?”

“Matt’s off by himself,” Venus said. “Working, I think.”

Kelly frowned. “He spends too much time alone. He’ll be marked down for that.” On the crowded Ark, it mightn’t be possible to go off in isolation; you were supposed to socialize.

“And Susan’s gone out,” Zane said bluntly, around a mouthful of food.

“Out where? Oh, shit,” Don said. “Not to meet Pablo?” Pablo was a kid, a bit younger than Susan, from one of the big IDP camps near Denver. “She should keep away from eye-dees like him.”

Kelly reached out of her blanket and slapped his beefy arm. “Stop using that disgusting word.”

“Well, President Peery uses it,” said Venus, her eyes on Don, provocative. “All your DPD buddies use it-don’t they, Don?”

“What if they do? Just a word.”

“You still hanging around with those Covenanters?”

Don snapped, “That’s my business.”

The Covenanters were a quasi-religious network with a philosophy that justified personal survival. This had come out of the circles of the superrich, safe in their fortress-like gated communities and their vast oceangoing craft. In contrast to his predecessor President Peery endorsed their creed, and was plugging it in his speeches, as a justification for his regime’s treatment of refugees. Holle’s father said that he believed people were reaching for theological justifications for the cruelty they were forced to inflict by circumstance, and that was what Peery was providing. It might be a comfort for somebody like Don.

But Venus said, “Everything the Covenanters say disgusts me.”

Don took a slug of the liquor, unperturbed. “Everything you’ve heard, maybe. You want to come along on a patrol some time?”

“Can it,” Zane said sharply. “We’re going to be too busy to squabble. We just got sent an exercise for tomorrow.” He had a laptop at his feet. “I’ll send the details to your machines.”

Mel groaned. “What exercise?”

“They’re making us go through a root-and-branch review of the launch system, the Orion stage. The engineering decisions made so far. We have to come back with a retrospective report on everything: the use of polyethylene versus aluminum to line the pusher plate, the two-stage shock absorber system, the nonlinear instabilities you get when the plasma flow from one nuclear blast mixes with the turbulent ablation products left over from the previous blast, how we can cut down the AI systems to fit the capacity of the mil-spec radiation-hardened chips we’ll have to use…”

Kelly frowned. “What’s that got to do with the sim? The Orion will have been discarded light-years back by the time we get to Earth II.”

“Yes. But there will be science to be done on Earth II, from the moment we land. The science of how to stay alive, to begin with. I think they wanted to set us some useful academic work to do in these conditions-hard thinking, in surface suits. Oh, and they gave us a swing. An hour per day for each of us, mandatory, in our envo-suits.”

More groans. But a swing, no more elaborate than a child’s garden toy, had been found to be a good sim of the crew’s experience of the Orion in flight, with a surge in acceleration of a few gravities coming every few seconds as each bomb went off under the pusher plate-surge, float, surge, float, just like riding through the bottom of a swing’s arc.

Kelly quickly brought the conversation around to the topic that had been dominating their small world since the social engineers had dropped it on them: the issue of newly pregnant women being allowed into the crew. In her competitive, logical way Kelly had done more hard thinking on the topic than anybody else.

“You see how it affects us? Think of this. You go for it, you see the launch day coming, so two, three months ahead you find some stud at random and get yourself knocked up. You’re increasing your chances, you think. You’ll be just ripe when the launch day comes, so you plan. But then there’s a postponement. Six months, say, nothing drastic. But that’s the end of you because when the Ark flies you will have a belly like a balloon, or, worse yet, a kid in your arms. Wave bye bye, and book your swimming lessons.”

Venus said, “You’re talking about giving birth. About the bond between mother and child. The most primal aspects of our humanity. How can you be so calculating?”