Stephen Baxter - Ark

Helen, earnest, seventeen years old, said, “It’s like we’re putting together an album of the birth of a solar system, frame by frame. You see how the young star, having imploded out of the cloud itself, starts to interact with the cloud remnant. A central collapsed disc slices the wider cloud in two…” The sundered cloud, lit up from within by the invisible star, reminded Grace of a child’s toy, a yo-yo, with the planetary system forming in the gap between the two halves, where the string would wrap. Tremendous jets shot up out of the poles of the star, at right angles to the yo-yo. Helen spoke on, of ice lines and migrating Jovians and photo-evaporation, of how starlight could strip away the mantle of a Jupiter to expose a Neptune or a Uranus.

The cupola was empty save for the two of them and Venus, who, intent on her own work, with headphones and virtual glasses wrapped around her head, was effectively absent.

Helen was beautiful, Grace thought, studying her daughter, her profile silhouetted against the star field. Beautiful in a way she had never been, even at seventeen, when everybody is beautiful, even though she shared Helen’s coloring. Helen’s father, Hammond Lammockson, son of Nathan, had been short, squat, bullish like his father. Grace could see little of Hammond in Helen-some of Nathan’s determination, maybe. Or perhaps she was an expression of Saudi royal blood. Or maybe it was something to do with the microgravity they had all endured for the last seven years, since the Split had made rotational artificial gravity impossible. Helen had only been ten. All the kids who had grown up since were slender and graceful-though, against expectation, they weren’t tall. Or maybe she looked like Grace’s mother, whom she had been named for, who Grace herself couldn’t remember.

Whatever, Helen was a winner of the lottery of genetics-“gifted,” Venus Jenning had once called her, one of the handful of the next generation deemed bright enough for an intensive education. Grace had always suspected as much, even back in the days when Helen had tried to teach her the rules of Zane’s infinite chess. And she never looked more beautiful than when she was intent on her studies.

She realized Helen had stopped talking.

“Am I losing you?”

“Not quite.”

“Look, would you like a coffee before I show you some more?”

Venus pushed her glasses up into her graying hair. “Somebody mention coffee?”

“There may be some in the flask.”

“I think that’s pretty much stewed by now. Why don’t you go fill it up for us?”

“Oh.” Helen looked from one to the other. “You want to talk without me being around, right?”

Grace smiled, and brushed a floating lock of blond hair back into the knot her daughter wore at the back of her head. “Well, it was Venus I came to see, honey.”

“I can take a hint.” Helen had her legs crossed around a T-stool; now she unwrapped, floated into the air, and with a fish-like precision arrowed down and grabbed the coffee flask from its holder beside Venus.

“I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I get to show you more good stuff, Mum. Deal?”

Grace smiled. “Deal.”

When she had sailed out through the airlock, Venus turned to Grace. “You’re here to talk about Wilson, I guess.”

“Yeah. And Steel Antoniadi. He’s gone too far with that girl. The hull’s full of talk about it. I’m seeing Holle later. Maybe you could come. If the three of us confront him-”

“OK.” Venus yawned and stretched; she wasn’t wearing any restraint, and the arching of her back made her drift up out of her chair. “I guess it has to be done. I have to admit it gets harder and harder to care about that kind of crap.” She stared out at the stars. “Sometimes I just lose myself in here. And thank God Wilson got to be speaker, not me. Helen really is one of the best we have, you know. Do you resent me taking her away to study?”

“No. In fact she’s spending even more time training up as a shuttle pilot than she does in here. I’m grateful she has these opportunities. But there’s plenty of griping about your students and their privileges. To be fair to him Wilson defends you, he always points out how we need the planet-spotting and navigation functions.”

“Well, so we do. But how does he feel about my programs of basic research? The fundamental physics, the cosmology-”

“I never spoke to him about it.”

Venus looked back to the stars again. “I just think we should be doing more than, you know, washing down walls and clearing out blocked latrines. And if you think about it, this is a unique opportunity. Even if all goes well, Helen’s kids will be dirt farmers down on Earth III. It’s only this generation, Helen’s generation, of all the generations since Adam, who have grown up among the stars, away from the overwhelming presence of a planet. Who knows how that’s shaping their minds? Call it an experiment, Grace. Besides, these are seriously bright kids, seriously curious, who aren’t allowed to explore anything in case they wreck the ship. So I try to direct their curiosity out there. ” She fell silent, as she was wont to do, drifting into the private universe of her own head.

Grace prompted her, mildly mocking, “And are you coming up with anything useful?”

Venus laughed. “Now you sound like Holle, queen of the plumbers. Hell, who knows? Look at Zane’s warp generator. We managed to build a unified-physics engine even before we managed to unify the physics in the first place. It’s as if we built it by accident. Maybe Helen’s generation will come up with something that will make Zane’s drive look like a steam engine. Then we’ll have some fun.”

But, Grace thought, all this planet-hunting and exponentiating scientific theorizing had nothing to do with the complex human reality unfolding within the shabby walls of the Ark.

The lock opened and Helen came bustling in, floating expertly through the air while juggling two flasks and a bunch of mugs. She looked entirely at home in this microgravity observatory, and her face was intent, alive with intelligence. But she had never looked more alien. Grace felt a stab of helpless, hopeless love.

The shuttle from the Ark was a spark, falling down the midday sky. Thandie hadn’t seen such a sight in years. As it fell the spark became a glider, white and fat. It banked once over the raft. Then it came drifting down to a cautious belly-down landing that threw up a huge plume of water.

This was literally the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the lives of most of the inhabitants of the raft. The children jumped and clapped. Some of the older rafters, like Boris’s parents, Manco and Ana, were more fearful, as if this technological irruption would perturb the calm, relatively safe lives they had carefully constructed for themselves.

The shuttle came to rest only a couple of hundred meters from the raft, an impressive bit of positioning after a journey of forty-two light-years. The downed craft looked harmless enough, bobbing in the gentle oceanic swell, with its upper hull covered with a blanket of insulation, blackened by charring in places, and the Stars and Stripes and the words UNITED STATES still visible as the faintest trace of faded paintwork. But Thandie, operating under instructions from a radio link to Kelly Kenzie on the flight deck, made sure that nobody approached the craft for some hours. The black shield that covered the whole of the shuttle’s underside was still ferociously hot from atmospheric friction, and the crew were busy venting gases and other toxins from attitude control systems and fuel cells.

It was the end of the day before the shuttle’s hatch swung open at last. The raft kids, some as young as four or five, dived into the water and went splashing over, towing plastic cables.