Stephen Baxter - Ark

Holle felt a mood of exhilaration, of belonging. For all their triumphs and their tragedies, their weaknesses and their strengths, they had got here, across ten years since Gunnison and more than twenty light-years. They had reached 82 Eridani. And they had all seen the prize, Earth II, with their naked eyes. Venus had allowed the crew into her precious cupola, a few at a time, to gaze down on the huge world turning a few hundred kilometers beneath the orbiting Ark, with its creased oceans, scattered cloud, rusty landmasses. There was a sense of unity, at last; together they had achieved a mighty triumph.

But Earth II wasn’t what they had hoped for. And now, today, six months after the Ark’s arrival at 82 Eridani, they had grave decisions to make. Holle wondered how much of that wonderful unity would survive the day.

Wilson Argent came strutting across the deck, and the conversations hushed. Wilson looked around at the crew, on the decks and catwalks and clinging to the ladders. He was a big man, imposing and impressive. Three years after his takeover from Kelly his power over the crew was absolute, and he was regarded with a mixture of admiration, awe and fear. Today he had opened up for discussion the biggest decision they had had to make since leaving Earth, a decision about the whole future of the mission, the Ark; even he couldn’t railroad this. But as a result this decision day was a moment of comparative vulnerability for Wilson.

On impulse Holle glanced at Kelly. Her expression was hard, set. Holle recognized Kelly’s “ambitious” face, the face she had worn when she’d announced she was leaving her kid behind to keep her place on the Ark. Since he had ousted her, Wilson had always let Kelly alone, but at best they had been like two warring armies under an armed truce. Well, today Kelly looked like she was planning something, and Holle felt a stab of deep unease.

“You all know why we’re here.” Wilson’s voice, subtly amplified, boomed through the whole hull. “We achieved mankind’s first star flight, we reached Earth II, and we’ve all had one hell of a party. But the job’s not done yet-not until we’re down on the new ground, turning the turf and planting our first crops. Now Venus is going to summarize what we’ve learned so far about the planet. And then we’ll decide, as a group, what we’re going to do about it.” That was Wilson, blunt and to the point. He nodded to Venus and backed off to stand with the gang of illegals and gatecrashers who had gravitated to his court.

Venus stepped forward, looking around at the expectant faces. She tapped her handheld. The crystal ball flared with light, and an image of Earth II coalesced.

It was a sphere more than a meter across, turning slowly around a horizontal axis. It was bright and detailed, and its glow, blue and gray, brown and white, lit up the faces of the watching people. Venus stayed silent, giving them a few seconds to take it in. The last murmurs hushed.

Holle remembered the first blurred images of the new planet, images taken from light-years out and constructed with extraordinary care by Venus’s planet-finder technologies. This new mapping was as detailed as any image of Earth as seen from space she had ever seen. And the planet wasn’t simply some abstract entity any more; now, after their months in orbit, it was a world already replete with human names. They had tentatively labeled the rotation pole that was currently pointing at the sun as “north”; the world turned counterclockwise as seen by an observer above that pole. Subject to months of unbroken heat from 82 Eridani the pole was blanketed in cloud, with storms visibly spinning off a massive central swirl.

At lower latitudes Holle made out landmasses that were already familiar to everybody aboard. A big strip of land stretching north to south across the equator was “the Belt,” a kind of elderly Norway with deep-cut fjords incising thousands of kilometers of coastline. The northern half of the Belt was currently ice-free, but its southern half, stretching into the realm of shadow, was icebound, and snow patches reached as far north as the equator. Sprawling across a good portion of the eastern hemisphere was the roughly circular continent they called “the Frisbee,” a mass of rust red broken by the intense blue of lakes and lined by eroded mountains. Its center was dominated by a huge structure, a mountain with a base hundreds of kilometers across, and a fractured caldera at the top. The mount was so like Olympus Mons on Mars that giving it the same name had been unavoidable, and it so dominated the overall profile of the continent, giving it an immense but shallow bulge, that the nickname “Frisbee” was a good fit. Then, to the west of the Belt, an archipelago sprawled, a widespread group of islands, some as large as Britain or New Zealand, that they called “the Scatter.” There was one more continent at the south pole, currently plunged in darkness and buried under hundreds of meters of winter snow, called “the Cap.” The world ocean itself had no name yet; the seas could be named when they were ready to go sailing on them, Holle thought.

The most exciting features were the patches of purple at the coasts of the continents and the shores of the lakes: life, native life on Earth II, plants of some kind, busily using 82 Eridani’s light to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen with their own unique photosynthetic chemistry.

Venus began without preamble.

“You all have access to the full reports in the ship’s archive. Today I’m just going to summarize the key findings.

“We’ve been here in this system for six months. We’ve surveyed atmosphere, land and oceans spectroscopically at all wavelengths, and have used radar to probe the subsurface and to map the seabeds, and have also dropped a series of penetrating probes for direct ground-truth sampling.” These were landers like slim missiles, hardened to withstand violent impacts and to bury themselves a few meters beneath the surface, with ground cameras that gave a close-up view of the final stages of the descent, and equipped with seismometers, chemical sensors, thermal sensors, magnetometers.

“Here’s the good news,” Venus said. “Obviously we have a world of about the right mass and the right volatile inventory, orbiting in a stable circular orbit at about the right distance from its sun to allow stable water oceans on the surface. ‘Right’ meaning it’s Earthlike.

“And on a basic level it’s habitable. If you landed in one of the shuttles and stepped outside, you’d experience a gravity of about eighty percent of a G; Earth II is less massive than Earth, and smaller in radius. Right now the northern summer is somewhere near its midpoint. If you were to stand at the pole you’d see the sun circle close to the zenith, right above your head. At the equator the sun is circling around the horizon, maybe dipping below for a few hours a day, depending on exactly where you are. It’s cold, there’s snow on the ground, but it’s no worse than a winter day in one of Earth’s temperate zones.

“Where the sun is up you could walk around with no more protection than a decent coat, some strong boots, a face mask. You could expose your skin, at least from the point of view of the sun’s radiation; there’s a healthy ozone layer. You would need some protection from cosmic radiation; the planet’s magnetic field is a lot weaker than Earth’s. You could breathe the air, we believe. It’s basically a nitrogen-oxygen mix of about the same proportions as Earth’s atmosphere. In the early days you’ll be wearing a face mask, in case of trace toxins from geological or maybe biological sources.

“We know there’s life down there. Life at the microbial level and, it seems, at some kind of simple multiple-cell level, something like stromatolites maybe. That’s what puts the oxygen in the air. It’s unlikely it will harm us, unlikely our alien biochemistries will interact significantly, but we’ll have to check it out. We believe that once we establish some terrestrial soil down there, Earthlike flora will take a hold: our crops will grow, our animals, when we incubate them, will be able to feed. Our children will be able to run and play.” She got a scattering of applause for that: But there was no joy in her face.