Stephen Baxter - Ark

Kelly was holding her parliament on the eighth of the hull’s fifteen decks, counting down from the top, so Holle and Venus clambered down a spiderweb of lightweight catwalks and ladders. The hulls had served as zero-gravity space habitats during the cruise to Jupiter and the years of their stay there; everything possible had been packed out of the way, and the hulls’ roomy interiors left open for the crew’s weightless maneuverings, and their games of Frisbee and microgravity sumo. Now the interior had been remodeled for a long voyage under steady gravity. Decks had been strung across to provide floor space, and partitions had been set up, places for work, sleep and privacy. The design was ingenious, with equipment no longer necessary after one mission phase being reused in the next; thus the catwalks and ladders on the walls had been constructed from the frames of acceleration couches. The social engineers in their offices in Denver and Gunnison had based their interior design on the dynamics of hunter-gatherer groups, the most ancient human social form, with a “village” on every deck and a “clan” uniting each hull. The social engineers, of course, didn’t have to live here.

The green shades deepened as they descended further. The hulls had been planned to maximize the visual stimuli given to the crew, and on Seba the design conceit was that each deck represented a different kind of terrain on Earth. The lowest levels, where the effective gravity was the highest, were meant to be rainforest, and the green paint was darkest there, the mid-levels temperate forest or grassland, and the highest montane, painted with the pale colors of mosses and lichen. There were real-life plants nestling among the paintwork, living things from Earth growing in metal tubs welded to the walls, plants and grasses and even dwarf trees. In a morale-boosting gimmick the crew had to tend to the plants themselves. It had worked; even when a clogged filtration unit had shut down the reclamation systems for twenty-four hours and the crew had had to ration their available drinking water, they hadn’t let the little plants die.

By the time they reached the eighth deck Kelly was ready to start her parliament.

Kelly sat at the table she regularly used as a command position. She was flanked by those Candidates Gordo Alonzo had always referred to as the senior officers, such as Wilson Argent and Mike Wetherbee, the doctor.

Holle and Venus took their places, and Holle looked around at her crewmates. Zane stood near Kelly’s desk, an absent look on his face. Masayo Saito sat slightly away from the rest, more wary. Wilson had changed a lot since they’d left Jupiter, Holle thought. He was bulking up for one thing; they were all supposed to exercise, to ensure the low gravity didn’t cause their physiologies any long-term harm, but Wilson spent long hours pounding at the treadmills and weights machines down in the lowest deck of Seba, the heaviest gravity. There was a rumor that he was screwing Kelly Kenzie, though Holle had no proof of that, and there was no sign of it in their body language now.

The rest of the crew stood around the table or sat on the deck or on chairs, jostling to see. There wasn’t much room; the partitions crowded close. Holle spotted Grace Gray cradling a sleeping Helen, now two and a half, the kid’s mop of blond curls bright in the fake sunlight. Joe Antoniadi stood by Sue Turco, the only female illegal and already pregnant with Joe’s baby. And there were Jack and Paul Shaughnessy, illegal brothers side by side. Holle saw Jack wore his tool belt with a kind of pride. She felt obscurely pleased at the sight; maybe he wasn’t missing his gun quite so much now.

With everybody gathered together like this, it struck Holle once again how young they all were-nobody much older than Grace at twenty-nine, nobody much younger than Theo Morell at nineteen, aside from the handful of kids born in flight. Even the irruption of the illegals and the gatecrashers hadn’t made much of a difference to that basic balance. Holle had the feeling that if an authentic grown-up walked in here even now, someone like Gordo Alonzo, they would all defer in a second. But Gordo was not going to do that ever again; they were on their own.

Kelly hopped up onto her table so everybody could see her. In half a G it was an easy jump. “Welcome,” she began. “You know why I called this parliament. This is a special day. Today we mark the end of the opening phase of our cruise to 82 Eridani, and hopefully to Earth II. We finally got the ship up and running, and the warp bubble is stable and whisking us to the stars, and now we can put everything that happened so far behind us, and look ahead.

“And we need to think about the command structure within the ship.

“Even while we were at Jupiter we still had Gordo Alonzo and the Nimrod project executive as a chain of command above us. But now there’s no higher chain of command, outside of the Ark. And we need to find a new way of running things.

“This isn’t a warship; it’s our home. And so I don’t think a military-style hierarchy of command is appropriate. That’s why I liked Grace’s suggestion of the name ‘parliament’ for these bull sessions with the council, which you based, Grace, on how Nathan Lammockson ran Ark Three?” Grace nodded. “A parliament is a place where you talk.

“As for leadership-well, we need a leader, a focus for decisions and disputes. Before we went to warp Gordo appointed me captain for the interstellar cruise, and it was an honor, I’m proud of that. But I don’t need, and shouldn’t have, the absolute authority of a captain of a ship at sea. I propose that I should be referred to as the ‘speaker’-that is, my only real privilege is that I’m the first to speak at these sessions, and each of you, when you speak, should address me. OK?”

Without giving anybody a chance to respond she pressed on.

“Furthermore, when it comes to the laws by which we order our lives, we have a manual, a law book drawn up by the social engineers back at Denver. But they aren’t here-and neither are half the Candidates it was meant to apply to. We can use that as guidance, but I propose that instead we should develop what we already refer to as ‘Ship’s Law.’ Iron rules regarding safety and the maintenance of the ship and its systems, rules that we all accept can be the basis of a set of laws which will emerge as we need them, by precedent, on a case by case basis. A law we don’t need is a bad law, in my book. Let’s work it out ourselves. I might say that I am making these recommendations having consulted with my senior colleagues here; these are collegiate proposals.

“Furthermore…”

Holle detected a slight shift in the crowd at that second “furthermore,” the first signs of strained patience.

“Furthermore, I don’t want myself or anybody else to be imposing decisions on the crew, on you. The ship’s too small for that. I want to govern by consensus. Not even by majority vote, which always leaves a rejected minority. I want to work by unanimity, if we can achieve it. If there’s a dispute, we’ll just talk it out as long as it takes. God knows we’ve got the time to do that, between here and 82…”

Theo Morell murmured, “Oh good. We can talk, talk, talk all the way to the stars. I can imagine what my dad would have said about that. ”

Holle dared not so much as grin in a forum like this.

She did wonder how long these fine ideas would last. As Kelly spoke, Venus sat behind her at the table, her face expressionless, and Wilson was staring around at the crew, challenging, ape-like. Holle believed Venus and Wilson and maybe others were playing a long game in the increasingly intricate political arena of the Ark. Having grown up with these highly competitive and gifted individuals in the Academy, Holle knew that was inevitable. These were games Holle herself shied away from. But she had a feeling that whatever structure of power and command emerged in the months and years to come would have little to do with Kelly’s Utopian visions.