Stephen Baxter - Ark

She swam through the lock from Seba. Mike Wetherbee and Masayo were waiting for her, loosely strapped into the twin pilots’ couches at the nose of the shuttle. Kelly briskly kissed Masayo, and she drifted behind the two men, looking over their shoulders. For long minutes they looked out of the flight deck’s big windows in silence.

There, looming over them beyond the windows, was the Earth itself. Even after five days it was hard to believe that they were here, that after a seven-year flight from Earth II they had actually made it home again. Yet here was the blunt reality.

The world was a shield of lumpy cloud, so close that its curvature was barely visible. Looking ahead to the horizon Kelly could see the cloud banks in their three-dimensional glory, continent-sized storms crowned by towering thunderheads. Seba was approaching the terminator, the diffuse boundary between night and day, and the sun, somewhere behind the hull, cast shadows from those tremendous thunderheads onto the banks of clouds beneath. Meanwhile on console screens data and imagery about the Earth chattered and flashed, information on climate and oceanography and atmospheric content and the rest compiled by instruments intended to inspect a new world, and whose electronic eyes were now turned on the old.

Masayo asked, “So how’s Eddie?”

“Fine. Going crazy. You know how he gets before he crashes for his nap.” Eddie, Kelly’s second child and fathered by Masayo Saito, four years old now, conceived and born in microgravity, was a spindly explosion of energy. Eddie was one of just four children born during the voyage from Earth II, which had brought the crew roster up to twenty-three. In a hull designed for a nominal crew of forty or more, there was plenty of room for the kids to play. “Jack Shaughnessy’s with him. Says he’ll put him to bed when he calms down.”

“Good.” Masayo smiled, his broad face bathed in the light of Earth.

Kelly felt a stab of affection for him. Now forty-one, Masayo had lost his boyish good looks to thinning hair and a fattening neck, and like all of the crew after eighteen years in the Ark he was sallow, too pale, with a darkness about the folds of his eyes. But his enduring good nature showed in his face, and the easy command that had once won him the loyalty of the Shaughnessys and his other ragtag illegals now inspired love from his son with Kelly.

Did Kelly love Masayo? Did he love her? Those questions weren’t answerable, she had long ago decided. They would never have come together, never stayed together, if not for the unique situation of the mission. But that was the frame in which they lived, and within which any relationship had to flourish. For sure, she believed he was good for her.

But Mike Wetherbee was watching Kelly in that clinical, mildly judgmental way of his. “Jack’s pretty reliable,” he said, his tone needling. “You can trust him. I guess.”

Mike seemed on the surface to have got over his hijacking from Halivah, seven years earlier, drugged and bound. But whenever he got the chance he put pressure on Kelly, especially over her children, digging into that dull ache, that awful memory of having given up a child. Mike hadn’t trained as a psychiatrist; whatever skills he had he’d picked up on treating patients since the launch, notably Zane. He seemed to have learned well, if his slow, subtle torture of Kelly was any sign.

But today Kelly’s focus was on the present, not the past, and she ignored him. “So what have we learned?”

Masayo grunted. “Nothing good. If we’d hoped Earth had somehow healed-well, we’re disappointed.” He paged through images and data summaries on a screen before him. “There’s no exposed land, none at all. But according to the radar the flood’s not as deep as we might have expected. It’s around fifteen kilometers above the old datum, whereas we were expecting nearer twenty-five from the models the oceanographers produced before we left.”

Mike Wetherbee grimaced. “ Only fifteen kilometers?”

Masayo grinned. “Yeah. How shall we break it to the crew? Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Now he produced a schematic map of the planet’s climate systems. “The weather’s got simpler now there are no continents in the way, no Saharas or Himalayas. Take a look.”

In each hemisphere the sun’s equatorial heating created three great convection belts parallel to the equator, transporting heat toward the cooler poles. These tremendous cycles created a kind of helix of stable winds that snaked around the rotating planet. It was a pattern that had endured for billions of years, and even now its continued existence still determined much of the world’s long-term climate patterns. Meanwhile in the ocean the network of currents was much simpler now that the continents were drowned kilometers deep, and unable to offer any significant obstacle to the currents’ circulation. Even the huge gyres, dead spots in the ocean, where humanity’s garbage had collected and hapless rafting communities had gone to scavenge, were dispersed now. A crude system of atmospheric circulation, powerful ocean currents following simple patterns, not a trace of land or even polar ice anywhere in the world: this was an Earth reduced to elementals, like a climatological teaching aid, Kelly thought. Nothing but the basic physics of a spinning planet.

And yet it was not uniform; this ocean world had features. Masayo produced an image of a vast storm prowling the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, a milky spiral the size of a continent that continually spun off daughter storms, themselves ferocious hurricanes in their own right. “As far as we know this is the same storm they called the Spot, eighteen years ago,” he said. “Maybe somebody down there will be able to confirm that for us. It drives winds at around three hundred kilometers an hour. That’s about Mach point two five-a quarter the speed of sound. Must do a hell of a lot of damage to those garbage rafts.”

“So we splash down away from it,” Kelly murmured. “But where?”

“There’s nowhere immediately obvious,” Masayo said. “No land, clearly. Nothing but a scattering of rafts. Sometimes you see their lights at night. Some don’t seem to have lights at all. They tend to cluster over the old continental shelves, and particularly over urban areas, the great cities.”

Mike said, “We picked up some radio transmissions, mostly not aimed at us.”

“ ‘Mostly’?”

“It’s just chatter. People asking after relatives and lost kids, and swapping news about storms and fishing grounds. A few people still making observations of the climate, the ongoing changes. They can talk through the surviving satellite network. I suspect some of them are trying to bounce signals off the moon-”

“Mike, back up. You said, ‘mostly.’ The signals were ‘mostly’ not aimed at us.”

He grinned. “That’s why we called you in here, Kelly. Half an hour ago we picked up this, from a raft over North America.” He tapped his screen, and a speaker crackled with a looped message:

“… knew you’d be back. I’ve been waiting a year for you to show up, since the earliest theoretical return time. Earth II isn’t so hot, huh? Well, if you need a native guide come down here and look me up. You can track this signal… This is Thandie Jones, somewhere over Wyoming, on the Panthalassa Sea. Thandie calling Ark One. I see you! I knew you’d be back…”

In the cupola’s twilit, humming calm, with the hull of Halivah and the silent stars arrayed beyond the windows, Grace Gray gazed on beautiful, spectacular images of young star systems, a million years old or less, in the throes of formation from an interstellar cloud, and tried very hard to understand what her daughter was telling her.