Stephen Baxter - Ark

A pale face emerged from the craft’s hatch, a spindly figure standing uncertainly in blue coveralls. Bundles were thrown out onto the ocean, packages that popped open to become bright orange lifeboats, to more gasps of delight from the children. The crew began unloading the shuttle, lowering down bits of equipment first, and then their youngest children, four little ones wrapped up in bulky flotation jackets. Then the adults and older children came out, nineteen of them climbing down the shuttle’s short flight of steps. These skinny, pale creatures from space had to be helped aboard their own boats by naked brown raft children. It was like a meeting between separate species, Thandie thought. The raft children swarmed aboard the shuttle, hunting for souvenirs.

The lifeboats set off across the water toward the raft. A couple of the occupants leaned over the side and heaved, miserably sick. One little boy from the shuttle was wailing, “Let me go back! Oh, let me go back!”

At the raft, the shuttle crew had to be helped once more across the short distance between the bobbing lifeboats and the more stately raft. They all had trouble standing, especially the children who panted hard, straining miserably at the thick air.

Thandie had arranged for all twenty-three to be housed together in a hastily evacuated shack, where they were laid down on pallets of blankets padded with dried seaweed. She came to see them a few times that first night, as Manco and Ana led the rafters’ efforts to make their strange visitors comfortable, bringing them cups of rainwater and bowls of fish soup. It was like a hospital ward; the stink of vomit and excrement was dense. The raft children looked in, fascinated and fearful, but were driven back by the stink. Thandie had yet to learn what had become of the Ark, and why only half of it, and much less than half the crew, had returned home.

The next morning, at Kelly’s request, she and two others were brought out and sat in a row of couches scavenged from the shuttle, so they could talk with Thandie.

Thandie sat before her guests on the raft floor in a yoga posture, back erect, legs crossed, hands resting on her knees.

The space travelers sat out in the open in their couches, tipped back, covered in blankets. Their faces were ghostly pale. They all gratefully accepted cups of hot seaweed tea from Manco. The sea was choppy, and they seemed to cower from a sky where thick gray clouds bubbled. A handful of raft kids hung around them, staring wide-eyed. Thandie ignored the kids, confident they would soon go swimming and forget all about the returned astronauts.

Thandie remembered Kelly Kenzie as one of the brightest buttons among the Candidates. She had gone to space as a girl in her early twenties. Now she had returned as a woman of forty-one, too thin, too pale, her blond hair streaked with gray. She was still beautiful, but she had a face that showed the years she had lived, the choices she had made. Thandie gathered that one of the children from the shuttle was Kelly’s. The other adults were both men. One was another Candidate who Thandie vaguely remembered; he was called Mike Wetherbee. The second, a bulky forty-some-year-old called Masayo Saito, she didn’t recognize at all. Kelly introduced him as her partner, father of her kid, and said he had a military background.

Thandie twisted her head to the right, breathed in to center, turned to the left breathing out, back to center and breathed in. “Forgive my old lady stretching routine. So how’s your health this morning?”

Kelly grunted. “Mike here is the doctor.”

Mike Wetherbee rubbed his chest, apparently having trouble breathing himself. “I expected problems with the gravity,” he said. “Brittle bones, problems with fluid balance, all of that. Why, we’ve got children in there, including Kelly’s little Eddie, who were born in free fall. And I was expecting us to be prone to viruses and bugs, and I shot us all full of antibiotics and antihistamines before we cracked the shuttle. What I wasn’t expecting was this damn breathlessness.” He had a broad, nasal Australian accent, not much diluted by the years.

“I guess I should have warned you. The air is thicker than it used to be-we’re under greater pressure than the old sea-level value-but oxygen is depleted.”

Kelly nodded, cautiously, as if her very head was too heavy for her neck. “We got some spectrometer readings from orbit. I didn’t believe it.”

“The world isn’t as fecund as it used to be. Not yet anyhow. When the flood came we had extinction events on land, of course, but in the sea too. No more nutrients washing down from the land. The productivity of the biosphere as a whole has gone off a cliff, and as a consequence so has the oxygen content of the atmosphere-down to sixteen percent, according to some of the hearthers, down five points. That’s equivalent to three kilometers’ altitude before the flood.”

“Great,” Mike Wetherbee said. “We drowned the world, but I still get to feel like I climbed a mountain.”

“Worse than that, the air’s warmer than it used to be. You’re panting, trying to keep cool, and you miss the oxygen even more.”

“Warmer,” Masayo Saito said. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than the others, and he spoke in short staccato bursts. “Greenhouse gases?”

“Yes. All those drowned, rotting rainforests. We do think the flood is finally tailing off, however, at last. It seems to be heading for an asymptote of about eighteen kilometers above the 2012 datum. Which means Earth will have an ocean of around five times the volume of the pre-flood value, which in turn matches some of my models of subterranean sea release, as I called it. You can see that even now I am obsessed with academic priority.”

Kelly smiled. “I worked with guys like Liu Zheng, at the Academy. I can appreciate that.”

“Yeah. I survived to deliver history’s most almighty ‘I told you so.’ Some consolation. We might be heading toward a new climatic equilibrium out there somewhere in parameter space. There’s a model circulating on the hearth, called the Boyle model, and that old plodder would love to know he’s been immortalized.” But none of them had heard of Gary Boyle, or of the hearth, a loose interconnected community of aging climatologists and oceanographers, and she got blank looks. “Boyleworld will have very high carbon dioxide content, very low oxygen. Extreme heating will drive even more violent storms, which could mix up the ocean layers and thereby promote life, and in particular plankton photosynthesis-”

“Which would draw down carbon dioxide,” Kelly said.

“Yes. You can see there’s a feedback loop to close there, and that’s how you get stability. At higher temperatures underwater weathering of limestone kicks in also. But it’s all very controversial. Nobody has the computer facilities to test such models any more. And even if Boyleworld does come to pass, it might not be survivable by humans. Too damn hot.”

Masayo glanced around the raft, and pointed to a rack of fish. “The ocean’s evidently not that unproductive. And are those gull eggs?”

“There’s a kind of bounce-back going on among some deep-water species, despite the lack of nutrients in the ocean, now we stopped over-fishing and are no longer pumping in pollutants. It’s as if the Earth is breathing a sigh of relief. The birds have suffered, of course. No land, nowhere to nest. But some gulls seemed to be surviving. We think they’re making their nests on floating detritus.”

“We didn’t see many congregations of rafts,” Kelly said. “Over the major cities mostly. Even there, people are pretty spread out.”

“We come for the garbage,” Thandie said bluntly. “Even after so many years. Toxic leaks drive the fish away, but conversely they’re drawn back to the nutrient upwellings.” She didn’t elaborate on what that nutrient material might be, but Mike Wetherbee looked at the drying fish more suspiciously. “We do keep in touch, we have radio links, we swap information and we trade kids. We fret about inbreeding, just like the social engineers in your Academy.” She pointed. “The kid over there, fixing the cabling on that corner of the raft-he’s called Boris. Thirteen years old. I joined this raft seven years ago, after I came to visit a woman called Lily Brooke, so we could watch the submergence of Everest together. Lily was related to Boris-his great-great-aunt, I think. Maybe you heard of Lily. She was a friend of Grace Gray. She made sure Grace got on Ark One.”