Stephen Baxter - Ark

Venus didn’t offer her coffee. Venus was always mean with coffee. Or maybe it was punishment for that crack about the water supply.

“So,” Venus said at length, “what’s new with the plumbing?”

“On schedule and under budget.”

“And how are your illegal brothers getting along?”

“The Shaughnessys are doing fine. With the simpler stuff anyhow-the big junk you can see and fiddle with, like the oxygen generation system and the water recovery racks. They find it hard to grasp the overall systems flows, or even to see why they need to.”

Venus was dismissive. “That’s jarheads for you.”

“They’re more than that. At least we better hope they are.”

Venus nodded, watching Holle with those strange, large eyes. “I’ll tell you something. There’s nobody I’d trust more to run such essential subsystems than you, Holle. That might be important, when things get tougher later on.”

Holle didn’t like this kind of apocalyptic talk, that she heard from Venus and Wilson and a few of the others. “Then let’s make sure things don’t get tough in the first place.”

“Yeah. So are you up for a little star-spotting? Can you tell me which way we’re headed?”

That wasn’t a trivial question. Holle turned in her chair. She looked out through the window and up along the flank of the hull, a vertical curving wall covered with insulation blanket and pocked with handholds, instrument mounts and micrometeorite scars. She could see the big particle-accelerator ring of the warp generator suspended above, and beyond that she glimpsed Halivah, a cylinder poised nose-down in the sky, with the tether a gleaming thread between the twin hulls. All this was picked out by starlight and the ship’s own lights. The hulls were turning around the tether’s midpoint, and their orientation at any moment had nothing to do with the Ark’s overall direction of motion. However, Holle knew how to find her bearings. “Look for Orion…” She scanned around the sky, and it wasn’t long before she found the proud frame of the hunter, with his distinctive belt of stars. “And Eridanus is that sprawl to his right.” It was in the constellation of the river that their destination G-class star lay, still more than nineteen light-years away.

“Well done,” Venus said. “I guess our naked-eye astronomy training is paying off-all those observing trips up in the mountains. Remember how Magnus Howe used to yell at us when we got bored waiting for breaks in the clouds? But Magnus was lucky. There was a window after the air cleared of human pollution, and before the global-ocean weather cut in with all those clouds and storms, when you had the best seeing since the Stone Age. The result was a generation of natural naked-eye astronomers. Grace Gray remembers it. But we were born that bit too late.”

Holle, who had never been too strong on warp physics, had always been faintly surprised that the outside universe was visible from inside the bubble at all. It was, but the view was distorted. A warp bubble was a patchwork of universes, stitched together by a thin, dynamic, highly deformed layer of spacetime. That deformity meant a strong gravity field, and the path of a light ray could be bent by gravity-which was how Einstein’s relativity had first been validated, when starlight was observed to be bent by the sun’s gravity during a solar eclipse. So the warp bubble acted as a lens wrapped around the ship, a lens of gravity that deflected the starlight that washed over the Ark.

The distortions were strongest ahead of and directly behind the ship’s motion. Ahead, space appeared crumpled up around the destination point, like a blanket being gathered in. Behind, though, in the direction of the sun and Earth, it was a different story, and a stranger one. The sun lay in the constellation of Opiuchus, the serpent-bearer, directly opposite Orion and Eridanus in the sky. But in that direction there was only darkness, a murky, muddy disc surrounded by faint stars. The ship was simply outrunning the photons coming from the sun and its planets.

Holle said, “If we could see the solar system-”

“Imagine a disc the size of the moon, as seen from Earth. That angle in your field of view. From here, that tiny disc would cover a volume of space ten times wider then the orbit of Neptune. After six months we’ve traveled around one and a half light-years-that’s a third of the way to Alpha Centauri, if we happened to be going that way. But even now we’re still within the solar system, just, approaching the outer limit of the Oort Cloud.” A vaguely spherical shell of ice worldlets and inert comet nuclei, following million-year orbits yet bound by the sun’s gravity, just like Earth.

When the warp bubble had first wrapped itself around the spinning ship, they had swept past one tremendous milestone after another at an astonishing rate. Even after the mighty push of the Orion drive it had taken them a whole year to coast to Jupiter. Under warp, within the first few hours they had sailed past the orbits of the outermost planets, and had soon overtaken the decades-long slog of Voyager One, the most distant spacecraft before the Ark.

And it was impossible to imagine that seen from outside, the ship and its crew and all their dreams and ambitions and conflicts would be almost entirely invisible, the warp bubble just a speck, smaller than microscopic, fleeing the solar system like a bullet.

“So,” Venus said, “you spoken to Zane yet?”

“I’ve been waiting for the right time. Maybe after the parliament. At least that will take him away from his work for a while.”

Venus pulled a face. “If I were you I’d wait a bit longer before you make your choice of life partner. Losing Mel is still an open wound, it’s obvious. See if there’s somebody else aboard you could fall for.”

“I’ve looked,” Holle said earnestly. “Believe me.”

Venus shrugged. “Your choice. Your risk.”

Holle often wished she could speak to her father about this. Or even Mel. But nobody on Earth could speak to the Ark, not since the instant they had gone to superluminal speed. Maybe, Holle thought, it was just as well that that disc of warped space hid the sun and Earth. It was as if all that had gone before warp had never existed anyhow, as if the twin worlds of the hulls contained all of reality.

Venus pushed out of her chair. “Time for Kelly’s talking shop. Come on, let’s get it over so we can get back to some real work.”

Holle and Venus passed back through the small airlock between the cupola and Seba. They emerged onto a gantry fixed to Seba’s curving, green-painted inner wall. They were up near the nose here, and Holle looked down through a mesh of decks and partitions and equipment. The light was bright, coming from an array of arc lamps that, during a ship’s “day” still slaved to Alma time, shed something like sunlight. It was like being inside some big open-plan building, Holle thought, a little like the science museum back in Denver. This was Holle’s world, or half of it. The furthest point she could see, the curving base of the pressure shell below all the decks, was only about forty meters away, and when she looked across the hull to the opposite wall she was spanning a distance of only eight or ten modest paces.

People swarmed everywhere today. There was a steady hubbub of voices, and the occasional squeal of a child. Most of the crew had come across to Seba for the parliament, though some would have stayed behind in Halivah according to ship’s rules. This parliament was a special one, being held to mark the end of the first six months in which, having unpacked the warp generator from its twin holds in the hulls, the crew had completed the reconfiguring of the hulls’ interior.