Stephen Baxter: Ark

She raised the key ring. The pendant was a translucent sphere, bluish, maybe a centimeter across. Embedded within it were two silver splinters, connected by a bit of thread. “What is it?”

“Ask Holle. Catch you later, Groundwater.” He strode off back toward the cars, and once more Grace was abandoned with a stranger.

“This way-Grace, is it?” Holle led Grace into the building.

Inside, the block was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace of facilities aboard Lammockson’s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room.

The two of them didn’t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world-continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green-with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labeled with a disc. Gary’s amateur education program had always heavily favored science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.

Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on the Ark, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost forever.

“This is at the heart of what we do,” Holle said.

“What is this place?”

“Mission Control. We’re running a simulation right now-”

“And this?” Grace held up the key ring globe.

“Our spaceship.” Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. “Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We’ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I’ll tell you how we got started here.”

June 2025

It was raining in Denver, a steady, unrelenting downpour that fell from a gray lid of sky. It pinged off the wings of the plane that brought Patrick Groundwater and his daughter in over the city, and glistened on the runways and sculpted roofs of the terminal buildings as he carried six-year-old Holle through the international airport, discreetly tailed by Alice Sylvan and the rest of her security team, and hammered on the roofs of the cars that drove them through kilometers of suburban sprawl, crowded with IDP camps and welfare facilities, toward downtown. Under rusting junction signs the interstate was deserted save for police and government vehicles, and only a handful of private cars. To the west the mountain line was entirely invisible.

Patrick had visited Denver long ago, in his early teens, on his way to go skiing at Aspen. This was before the turn of the millennium, maybe fifteen years before the inception of the flood. He remembered the breathlessness, and today the air felt just as thin. Back then it hadn’t rained at all, save for a couple of intense storms which had been kind of fun, nothing like this steady, relentless downpour. But since those days the sea had risen two hundred meters from where it used to be, the air was full of heat and moisture, and you couldn’t expect to escape the rain even in the mile-high city. Well, Thandie Jones would tell Patrick and the other assembled mega-rich folk of LaRei all about that tomorrow.

All Thandie’s words wouldn’t deflect a single raindrop from his daughter’s head. But in Denver he hoped to meet people who intended to do something about it.

At the hotel they were met by smiling porters in galoshes and wielding umbrellas.

Patrick was reassured by his first impression of the Brown Palace. Set on a peculiar triangular lot where two street layout systems collided, it reminded him oddly of an ocean liner wrought of red granite and sandstone. Inside, an atrium towered up eight stories. While Alice completed the check-in formalities, Holle ran around the polished floor, pointing at the golden onyx pillars and lifting up her little face to peer wide-eyed at the filigree rails and the stained-glass ceiling far above, from which hung an immense Stars and Stripes. In a world that was slowly breaking down, you could rely on a church-like Victorian-vintage pile like the Brown to stand solid and comfortable where newer confections of glass and reinforced concrete were crumbling. Besides, it was only a few hundred meters from Denver’s civic center, where in the morning he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson and the rest of the LaRei people.

The suite Patrick was given had everything he needed to keep Holle happy, including a kid-friendly mini-bar, a net sack of books and toys, and screens with a variety of entertainments. There were tough notices about conserving water. Denver’s weather had always come from rain on the Rockies, and although the climate was a lot wetter now, the disruption to the rainfall patterns and the increased population made the freshwater supply chancy.

One TV screen was tuned permanently to a news channel, put out by the Rocky Mountain News, a defunct old print outlet revived as a broadcaster. Over a rolling tickertape of more or less dismal headlines, the channel showed images of the latest disaster, in this case a kind of limited civil war that had broken out around Alice Springs, Australia, as the residents resisted attempts by the federal government to relocate refugees from flooded-out Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

Holle played before the TV, investigating the toys. She seemed immune to the bombardment of horrors on the news, just as the world’s various disasters had seemed unreal to Patrick when he was a kid in the long-lost twentieth century. Best not to hide stuff from her, he had decided. Holle’s life was liable to be shaped by bad news. He liked to think Linda would have backed up this intuition, but he was never going to know.

That evening he took Holle down to dinner in one of the hotel’s fancy restaurants. The waiters made a fuss of her as they elegantly served her a kiddie version of paella. It was a special request from Patrick, a kind of comfort food, a dish her mother used to make for her. Afterward, back in the suite, he played card games with her, and let her watch a couple of episodes of Friends on TV, and read to her until she slept.

Then he opened up his laptop and checked his e-mails.

The big construction projects up on the Great Plains were proceeding well, although disgruntled refugees being settled there bitterly called them “Friedmanburgs.” He referred that to his PR department for guidance.

Patrick was also involved in the furiously paced open-cast mining of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta. Oil, coal, gas and oil shale were already being intensively mined in Colorado, all over the Western Slope. The Alberta grab was on a different scale. It was supposedly sanctioned by the relocated Canadian government in Edmonton, but that was a fig-leaf fiction. The US federal government in Denver intended to extract as many of the hundreds of billions of barrels of oil available from the bitumen as possible before the seas closed over it all, in not many years from now if the gloomier experts were right. The government’s purpose was to secure its own position in the short term, and have a basis for national recovery in the longed-for day when the flood started to recede. The damage already done to the ecology and environment and so forth was ruinous. But rich men in the right place, like Patrick Groundwater, were getting even richer. Patrick had never imagined he would find himself in such a role. But somebody had to do it, and he tried to fulfill what he saw as his responsibilities conscientiously. Such was the way of the world.