Stephen Baxter - Ark

A woman broke out of the melee and hurled herself at the ladder. She was young, no more than twenty, twenty-one. She was dressed in rags, and she had a baby in a kind of improvised papoose on her chest. Don and Mel fielded her. She started struggling. “Let me on that thing!” The baby was wriggling, screaming. Don and Mel were reluctant to deal with the woman, Patrick saw, for fear of harming the baby.

Gordo stepped forward, a knife in his hand. Briskly he cut the papoose harness, plucked the baby off its mother, and hurled it away into the crowd. The woman instantly gave up her struggle and followed it. Gordo said, “And I will see that woman’s face on my deathbed.” He tucked his knife into a sheath in his sleeve.

Don was all business. He handed the ladder to Gordo. “Sir, there are four places on the chopper. We can’t take everybody.”

Thandie pushed Gordo forward. “Up you go, Colonel. Orders, remember.”

“And you,” Gordo snapped, and grabbed her hand.

Edward Kenzie dragged Patrick forward by the arm. “Come on, Patrick, we’ve been in on this from the beginning. Without our money the Ark wouldn’t have got built-and that’s our kids flying the bird. We’re owed.”

But Patrick pulled his arm away.

The chopper dipped and bucked; some sniper was getting his range, and a round pinged off the hull.

Don said, “Sir, this bird is lifting in one second.”

Edward Kenzie was on the ladder. He yelled down, “Groundwater, what the fuck?”

“Not me, Edward. We had our time.” And just as the chopper lifted Patrick lunged forward and shoved Mel against the ladder.

Mel grabbed on to keep from falling, and was immediately borne away, raised up from the ground like an angel. Patrick could see Mel’s open mouth, his shocked expression.

Patrick said grimly, “That’s for Holle.”

Don Meisel just laughed. “Nice timing, Mr. Groundwater.”

A trooper faced Don, a woman, her face hard, a frizz of gray hair loose under her helmet. “Sir. The position is lost. Some of us are going to try to break out to higher ground.”

Don nodded. “Stay close to me, sir,” he said to Patrick.

“I’m no soldier, son.”

Don thrust an AK-47 into Patrick’s arms. “You are now.”

The Chinook had gone, its roar receding into the sky, its lights a dying constellation. And over Patrick’s head the sky was clearing, to reveal a bloody eclipse light.

When the moon had gone into totality, when the Earth’s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling bloodred color bloomed, Lily Brooke had heard the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd’s murmur of awe, children saying, “Look at that!” in a variety of languages. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.

Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth’s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky.

She sat with Nathan Lammockson on her scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from Ark Three, spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of the raft. She’d tried to make Nathan comfortable with a heap of blankets. In the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea.

Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future.

“The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough molding, and we’ll come through it, smarter and stronger then ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that…” He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. “Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim…” His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.

“Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.”

“They just swim…”

A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.

“I got you here, didn’t I? I kept you alive.”

“Yes, Nathan.” She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. “Yes, you did that.”

But if it had been the Ark, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.

“I kept you alive. We’ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they’ve got to learn…”

September 2044

An hour before Kelly’s parliament, Holle, on a whim, tried to get inside the cupola. She felt like talking over with Venus the encounter with Zane she was building up to.

But Thomas Windrup, sitting in the airlock working through some kind of data-reduction exercise on a laptop, was acting as a gatekeeper. Slim, dark, his bookish looks spoiled now by Jack Shaughnessy’s gift of a broken nose, he checked over an admission schedule.

“Oh, for God’s sake, just let me in,” Holle said. “I only want a few minutes.”

“We got work to do in here,” Thomas said, with the pronounced Omaha accent that he’d maintained all through their years in the Academy. “And then there’s the dark adaptation.”

“What do you think I’m going to do, shine a light in your eyes? Let me in or I’ll turn off the water supply to your coffee machine.”

Venus turned at that, her eyes bright in the dark. Over her shoulder, in the cloistered darkness of the cupola, Holle could see Elle Strekalov, and beyond them both a star-littered sky. “That is seriously not funny,” Venus said. “Power like that is real in this dump, Holle. Even if Kelly Kenzie wants to believe we’re all one big happy family. Oh, let her in, Thomas.”

Thomas stood aside with a grudging grin.

Holle entered the cupola and sat on a lightweight swivel chair beside Venus. Now that the hulls were spun up, gravity was less than half Earth normal here, up near the nose of Seba. Every chair you sat on felt soft as feathers, and this transparent blister attached to the flank of Seba had become a dome fixed sideways-on to a vertical wall, separated into horizontal levels by mesh decking. Venus and her team worked at stations equipped with dimly lit screens and red lamps, to protect their dark-adapted eyes. Venus’s wide pupils gave her an eerie, doped-out look.

Holle peered beyond the curved window into the deeper dark, at the sharp, intense star fields. There was little apparent distortion from the passage of the light through the wall of the warp bubble, at least if you looked away from the axis of the bubble’s motion, and the stars looked much as they had always done in the skies over Colorado. But as her own eyes adapted it was as if more stars were emerging from the velvet blackness, layer upon layer of them beneath the scattered sprawl of the constellations she’d been familiar with from Earth. This grand panorama turned over, all the stars in the universe orbiting the Ark, once every thirty seconds.