Stephen Baxter - Ark

Thandie was tolerated. People left her alone with her obsessions, with her science and her gadgets and her theorizing. The raft was full of kids, and of parents caring for them, feeding, playing, stitching together clothes from faded worn-out relics-though, in the perpetually warm, moist air, a lot of kids were taking to nudity, and even some of the younger adults. The currents of their lives washed around Thandie as if she was a monument in a flood, a statue of some long-forgotten hero…

Her handheld, in her lap beneath the protection of the blanket, was bleeping softly.

She’d been dozing again. This was the fifth night. The sky was a lid of black cloud. She dug out the little computer and, cursing, felt inside her coat for her ancient reading glasses.

It was a message from Elena Artemova, once Thandie’s lover, now separated from her by age, ocean, and a kind of weary indifference. Elena was on another big raft, floating over the drowned corpse of Rio de Janeiro. And she, alert to the new light in the sky, had picked up a chance observation made by a raft over Los Angeles. “So the returning ship first appears in the skies over North America,” Elena mailed. “Not by chance, I would be sure…”

Thandie eagerly studied the observation, a short, poorly resolved video sequence taken through some raft-borne telescope.

Then she waited until Boris emerged from the water, dripping, thirteen years old, his muscles hard and his belly flat, his mouth smeared with fish oil, his penis limp from enthusiastic underwater sex. She made him sit down beside her, and talked him through the sequence of images.

“See-this shows the arrival of the object you saw, the bright new satellite. This was taken by a telescope that happened to be looking into the right corner of the sky, just at the point where it first appeared. I knew there had to be somebody who’d have caught it. Now wait… Watch the clock… Pow!” A bright flash appeared, off to the right of center of the star field, that was the ship itself, and a shimmer of light washed away from it, heading left in a dead straight line, fading, as if the ship had sent a bright optical message back the way it had come. “You see?” Thandie asked triumphantly, staring at Boris. “You understand what this is, what this observer saw?”

“No,” Boris said bluntly. He looked restless, his focus wandering. The kids had virtually no attention span at all.

Thandie suppressed irritation. “This is a ship that traveled faster than light. It’s visible as it travels; its warp bubble emits a cascade of exotic radiation energy, some of which folds down into the visible spectrum. But it outruns its own image. So the ship arrives first and the light has to catch up, all the photons it emitted back along its path arriving at mere light speed. The older images arrive last, and you get this effect as if the ship was receding, not arriving…” She played the little sequence over and over. “This is the signature of the arrival of a faster-than-light vessel, Boris, an FTL starship. It’s the Ark, Ark One. I knew they’d come back.”

He frowned, a comical thirteen-year-old’s attempt to feign interest. At least he was being polite. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“Break out the radio beacon. See if the batteries have retained any charge. Let’s bring them home.”

Zane floated into Holle’s surgery, a compact, burly thirty-nine-year-old man, confident, definite in his movements in microgravity. He pulled himself down onto the couch and fastened a restraint loosely around his waist. “Ah,” he said. “After more than a decade of therapy I feel like this old couch is part of me.”

Holle had been waiting for him with Theo Morell, who was setting up the cameras on their wall brackets to film the session. Holle settled in her seat, facing the couch, her handheld on her lap. “I take it I’m talking to Jerry.”

“I finished the day’s duties before coming here. The warp bubble is functioning within all nominal parameters, incidentally. Driving us onwards to Earth III. I thought I should stay out to, umm, pilot Zane 3 here, so to speak. He knows what you’re intending today, it’s been on his mind. He’s nervous about it, I have to tell you. He fears he will lose something of himself in the process of integration. He’s aware he’s popular with the crew, the younger ones. That gives him a certain validation.” He eyed Holle. “Which is one reason you’re pressing ahead with the process, isn’t it? I know there are reservations about the influence Zane has on the youngsters.”

There was no point lying about that. “Wilson has expressed some concerns.”

Zane snorted. “Wilson has his own ‘concerns’ with the youngsters, as we all know.”

“But that’s not why we’ve decided to try to begin the process, Jerry. If we didn’t think you were ready we wouldn’t attempt it. You’re very important to us, obviously. Your needs are paramount.”

“All right. The question is, are you ready? It’s only been seven years since you took over from Mike!”

“Give us a break,” Holle said. “I had to learn psychiatry from scratch. It’s not easy, Jerry. In fact, I don’t think we’d have been able to get this far at all without you.” That was true. The alter called Jerry had been like a study partner, as Holle and Theo and Grace had gone through the psychiatry journals, books and expert systems stored in the ship’s archive, and Mike Wetherbee’s incomplete notes on the case. “And you’re happy about undergoing the process yourself?”

“Even a partial integration will strengthen us, all of us, I’m sure of that. And besides, I am under no threat today; I don’t expect to feel any change.”

In the program they had drawn up, a sequence of steps without a fixed timescale, Jerry would be the last of the alters to be integrated.

Theo leaned forward. “Jerry, you know there’s another reason we decided to start the process today. Because, if all’s gone to schedule, Seba should have arrived back at Earth about now. And if they did it’s entirely to your credit. You programmed the warp bubble.” Theo mimed throwing a basketball. “You picked them up and threw them home.”

Zane grinned. “Well, of course I’m aware of that. If it all worked it’s a significant triumph- if. But we’ll never know, will we?”

Holle touched Theo’s arm. “I think that’s enough. It’s been good to talk to you, Jerry.”

“Always a pleasure, Holle.”

“Is Zane 3 there? Maybe you could let him come forward.”

“Momentarily.” Zane closed his eyes and lay back on the couch. For a moment it seemed as if he had fallen asleep. Then he stirred, restless.

His face softened, his lips pushed forward into a kind of pout. He opened his eyes and looked around the surgery. “Oh, crap, I’m still here.”

“Hi. Am I speaking to Zane?”

“You know who I am.”

“And you know why you’re here today.”

“You’re going to try this ridiculous reintegration procedure, so-called.”

“Are you happy about that?”

He laughed, a dull, bitter sound. “What difference does it make if I’m happy or not?”

Theo said, “Seba should be arriving at Earth about now. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?”

“They went outside the hull,” Zane said. “Kelly and those others. They’re either dead, or in a cage somewhere. We’ll never see them again.” He stared directly at Theo, until Theo looked away.

Holle said to Zane, “Shall I take it you consent to the procedure?” “Yes, yes. Just get it over.” He lay back, his eyes screwed shut.

Holle began the patient process of hypnosis. “Just relax. You can feel the tension, the energy, pouring out of your fingers and your toes, like a liquid. You’re sinking deeper into yourself…” The trigger words Wetherbee had used to put Zane into a hypnotic trance always worked quickly.