Stephen Baxter: Ark

The doors were locked, the walls swept. “We’re sealed in tight as a mouse’s ass,” Kenzie said. He tapped a screen to begin recording. “As you can see we got a bunch of blank screens here. We’ve got secure access to the university servers through these things, and we can look wider if we want. We got reference sources, everything we need to find answers to the questions we’ll raise. All right, let’s start. And you can begin by introducing this gentleman you’ve brought in, Jerzy.”

Glemp beckoned, and the slim young man stepped forward. “My name is Liu Zheng. I am Chinese. I am twenty-nine years old; I am an engineer.”

“I found him in IDP processing in the Pepsi Center, right here in Denver,” Jerzy Glemp said with a gleam of satisfaction. “It’s astounding the talent you can filter out of the flood of displaced. Anything you want.”

Edward nodded. “And what talent have you got that’s so valuable, Liu?”

The Chinese, his face blank, said, “My father trained as a taikonaut. To fly in space. I design spaceships.”

There was a long pause. Patrick asked, “What exactly are we talking about building here?”

Liu Zheng said, “A means to send a viable population away from the Earth.”

Jerzy said, “An ark.”

“No less than Ark One, damn it,” Kenzie said. “I made sure we secured that little honor from Nathan Lammockson and those other assholes.” He clapped Patrick on the shoulder. “Did you never see When Worlds Collide? Let’s get on with it. What’s the first question we need to address, Jerzy?”

Glemp smiled. “Where are we going?”

The man sitting on the floor with his legs crossed wore black trousers and a black jumper. He might have been younger than Dad, but Holle wasn’t sure. He smiled at her. “My name is Harry. Harry Smith. I’m a teacher. But it’s not a school day today! I’m just here to make sure we’re all OK together. Your name is Holle, right? Look, this is Kelly, and Zane.”

The two children eyed her warily. Kelly was the little girl she had met yesterday in that other place full of books, the big dusty room where the lady had the crystal ball. The boy, Zane, looked a bit younger than Holle was, and he had thick black hair and big eyes. He looked shy, but she kind of liked him. He looked like a doll.

“Look, we’ve got neat toys,” Harry said. “You can play with us. See the fort? These guys are knights. Look, they have horses.”

Kelly and Zane were playing with a kind of fort that you put together, and plastic people that you lined up inside. The fort had circular towers and walls that you set up on a base, and a drawbridge that you could let down, and little buildings inside. But the fort looked crooked, there were gaps between the wall panels, and Holle could see that the drawbridge was stuck. Maybe it hadn’t been put together right. She didn’t go near the toy, not yet. Kelly hung onto the little people she’d been playing with, and Zane copied her. They weren’t sure about Holle, not sure enough to share.

Harry said smoothly, “Have you got your own toys? What did you bring in your bag?”

“I’ve got my handheld and my Angel.” She dug them out of the bag, shoving aside the box of tissues and the drinks bottles.

“Oh, wow, that’s neat.”

Holle looked at him. “You say ‘neat.’ ”

“That’s how I was brought up to talk, I guess. I’m American. You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Scottish. Neat. Neat, neat, neat!”

The other children laughed.

Impulsively she held out the Angel to Harry. “Do you want to listen? It’s got good songs on.”

“Why, thank you, Holle, that’s very kind.” He held the heavy black gadget in his hand, and thumbed through the menu of choices. “Oh, you’ve got ‘Phone.’ Always liked that one.” He pressed to select, and nodded as the music played inside his head, murmuring the words: “ ‘I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV…’ ”

Zane and Kelly were watching Holle, not doing anything, just holding onto their toy people.

“I’ve got a handheld.” Holle showed them.

“I’ve got one of those,” Kelly said.

“It’s got a camera.”

“So has mine.”

“We could film the toy, the fort. We could make the people attack, like a war, and film it.”

That enthused them, and Kelly immediately took control. “Look, Zane, I could be in charge of the army inside and you’re the army outside.”

He looked doubtful. “Why can’t I be inside?”

She snorted. “Because if you’re outside you’re an eye-dee, and I don’t want to be one of them. ”

Harry smiled, still listening to the song. “An IDP is an internal displaced person, Kelly. An American who’s become a refugee. That word you used isn’t nice. It’s OK, Zane. Look, this polished floor can be the sea, the flood. And you can make a raft out of the box the fort came in. See?”

Zane started experimenting with the box, skimming it back and forth over the polished wooden floor with his people inside. Kelly marched her little men and women up and down in front of the fort, calling out orders, readying them to repel the hordes of flood-driven refugees.

Now she was let into the circle, Holle put down her handheld and got hold of the fort itself. The pieces were plastic that fit onto molds on the base. She saw she’d been right, that two towers by the gate had been jammed onto the wrong sockets. If she swapped them over the gate should work better. But it was going to take an effort to dislodge the towers from the sockets.

She looked at Harry to see if she could ask him to help. But Harry was working with Zane. As the boy crouched down and pushed his cardboard-box-lid raft around the floor, Harry leaned right over him, so his belly touched Zane’s back, and he ruffled the boy’s thick hair. That looked funny, and she didn’t like to watch.

Holle glanced up at the other grown-ups, who were all sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talking in deep rumbles. Dad had his back to her, but he wasn’t far away.

Glemp’s question hung heavy in the air over the table.

Liu Zheng spoke first. “If I may-” He tapped a blank screen to image up a keypad, and started listing headings. “I would suggest we have two broad categories of destination. Category One, the solar system. Category Two, beyond.”

Patrick already felt out of his depth. “Beyond? What’s beyond the solar system? The stars? You’re talking about going to the stars?”

Jerzy grinned. “Only if we have to.”

“Category One,” Liu said, methodically typing out labels. “We can list various subcategories of destination. Earth orbit-we could imagine a permanent settlement something like the International Space Station. Or such a settlement in space beyond Earth orbit. Or we can imagine a planet or moon as destination-a colony there-Earth’s moon or Mars seem the most obvious choices, or the ice moon of a giant planet. Europa, perhaps. Or we could imagine exploiting an asteroid or a comet.”

Jerzy Glemp nodded, his eyes apparently unfocused. “You list old dreams. O’Neill cylinders. Domes on the moon and Mars. Comet ice blown into great bubbles, where people swim in the air.”

Liu Zheng said smoothly, “We are poor at building closed life-support systems-that is, systems which do not suffer losses as they operate. We have to assume that in this scenario supplies from the ground won’t be forthcoming-”

“Because there won’t be any fucking ground,” Kenzie said. He glanced at the kids again.

Patrick nodded. He tapped his own screen, and inserted red crosses beside some of Liu’s categories. “So no space stations, no free-flying colonies. We need somewhere we can mine resources.”