Stephen Baxter - Ark

Kelly snorted. “A secret ballot? You’d really condone such a waste of resources?”

Wilson looked back at her steadily, then significantly at Masayo. “There has to be no intimidation. A secret ballot is the way to ensure that.”

He carried the day. And when the wider group broke up, chattering with excitement, Holle kept the three of them back, Kelly, Venus and Wilson, with Grace watching remotely as a witness, to thrash out a basic schedule for the coming week. Kelly and Wilson stayed apart, and wouldn’t even look at each other.

Then, when it was done, hugely relieved, Holle fled to the calm and silence of her cabin where she began the business of picking up Kelly’s workload, and figuring how she was going to juggle it with her own responsibilities.

But Wilson Argent came knocking on the door. “We need to talk. I need your vote-for all our sakes.”

“Make yourself comfortable on the couch,” Wetherbee said. Zane, restrained by a loosely fastened belt, was in a foldout couch in Wetherbee’s surgery on Halivah, the one on Seba still being out of action. He said, “It’s hard not to be comfortable in free fall, Doctor.”

Wetherbee bit back on his irritation. This was the alter, the partial personality, that he had tentatively labeled Zane 3, the passive, shadowy, depressive relic left behind when the other alters had taken away their various loads of guilt and responsibility. But even Zane 3 was a smartass. He kept his tone moderate. “You know what we’re going to do, the hypnotic procedure?”

“It’s not a problem. It’s worked for us before. You may know I was noted as readily hypnotizable back in the Academy.”

“So you were.” And in fact a willingness to submit to hypnotic commands was, Wetherbee had learned, a characteristic of people with Zane’s peculiar disorder. “So let’s begin. Take deep slow breaths. Feel the tension washing out of your arms, your hands, your feet. Let your shoulders relax, your neck. Let your head just float. You’re falling gently, falling inside yourself. Deeper and deeper you go, you’re more and more relaxed. You find yourself in the Academy, in your cabin, the old museum building in Denver…” With his father close by, long before the damaging serial abuse by Harry Smith had started and the flood was still a remote threat, Zane had felt as safe in the DMNS as he had ever felt in his life. Now Wetherbee returned him there, to that place and time, as a secure place to begin his analysis.

“What can you see?”

“My handheld, my books, my sports stuff. My AxysCorp coveralls. We’re supposed to go on a hike tomorrow.”

“OK. Now look around, Zane. Can you see that special door we talked about? The extra one, that leads into the other room.”

“I see it. It’s open.”

“Good. Good.” The “door” had always been closed before, and sometimes locked. “Can you see through the doorway? What do you see?”

“People.”

“How many? Who are they?”

“There is a boy, and kind of a young man, and an older man.”

“All right. Do you think any of them would like to speak to me?”

“I think the older man. He’s smiling and nodding.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He’s about my height. He’s a little bulky. He has silver hair and glasses.”

Wetherbee was pretty certain this was the alter called Jerry. The description closely matched Zane’s father, as did the name-“Jerry” for “Jerzy.” Zane was a smartass, but not always very inventive in the details of his alters.

“Would you let the man talk to me? You just have to step back a bit.”

“We’ve done that before.”

“Yes, we have. You’ll still be in your cabin, your safe place. And you know that if you aren’t happy at any point you can just come right back, and the man will go back outside and the door will be locked up, just like that.”

“OK.”

Zane 3 sounded passive rather than convinced. He was so malleable, so lacking in self-motivation, it was extraordinarily hard not to direct him. “Thanks, Zane. I’ll speak to you later.”

Wetherbee knew he had a few minutes before the alter communicated with him. He murmured to the camera overhead, “Wetherbee medical log, 30th June 2048. With Zane Glemp. I believe I’ve been communicating with the alter I call Zane 3, the alter that first presented. I expect to be talking in a moment to the alter known as Jerry, the older man. For the record it’s three days since I last repeated the appropriate structured clinical interview as recommended by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, 2015 edition; I still uphold my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder-”

“Hi, Dr. Wetherbee.” Zane was smiling, his eyes open; he was looking around curiously. Everything about his body posture was changed. He looked alert, inquisitive, confident, not passive. His accent was faintly middle European.

“Hello. Who am I speaking to?”

“Well, this is Jerry, but I think you guessed that. How are you?”

“Very well.”

“And how’s the fake mission going? Still happy with your Las Vegas hotel?”

Jerry actively mocked Zane 3’s suspicions that the whole mission was unreal, a fake mounted on Earth. “Not enough ice with the room service champagne.”

Jerry laughed. He liked it if you played along with him, treated him as a peer.

“You’ve been busy, Jerry.” Wetherbee held up his handheld. “You seem to be running Wilson Argent’s election campaign for him.”

“Well, I guess I am. That’s why I exist, you know, to work. Zane spun me off because he needs organizing skills, which is what I contribute, and I come out to take over when things get on top of him and he can’t cope. But Zane’s life is pretty small scale. I have time to do other things.” He winked at Wetherbee. “Wilson knows I’m just an alter. Oh, he wouldn’t put it like that… When he asks Zane a question to do with me, and Zane can’t remember the previous conversation, Wilson just smiles and backs off and waits until I can come out to talk to him. He doesn’t know the medical stuff, but he has an intuitive understanding of people, I think. Even of us!” He laughed.

“Maybe that will make him a good speaker.”

“Well, I think so,” “Jerry” said. “You decided which way you’re going to vote yet, Doc?”

“I’m still considering. I’m impressed that you put out a manifesto.” He scrolled through it now on the handheld. “You caught the other candidates on the hop with this.”

“Nothing wrong with being professional. We put a lot of thought into the proposals in there, especially the bill of rights.”

“I see that.” This was a document, still in draft form, that would assure the crew of what Wilson called fundamental human rights. This included the right to the basics of life, to free air and water-a right you wouldn’t have to spell out on Earth, but in a ship like this where every cubic centimeter of air had to be supplied by a machine that somebody else maintained, it wasn’t a given. “Alongside our rights, you also spell out our responsibilities. Maintaining the ship’s systems, not threatening its integrity. I see you’re planning to introduce a credit system.”

“Hell, yes.” He smiled. “That’s one of mine. We need basic incentivization. Do more good work and you accumulate wealth, you can buy stuff from other people, and your status goes up. Simple human nature. We have to move away from the vague socialist stuff Kelly spouted. This isn’t a kibbutz. We’re all Americans, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, mostly. No offense. Oh, some of the stuff in Ship’s Law can stand. We figured most of it out by precedent, after all, and much of it is fit for purpose. But we need clearer thinking about the rest.”