Stephen Baxter - Ark

Kelly said, “Grace is on Halivah-the other hull, the hull that didn’t come back to Earth.”

“She was pregnant when she joined the crew.”

“She had the baby before we got to Jupiter. A girl called Helen. She’s grown up now, I guess, she must be seventeen years old.”

Thandie nodded. “That’s good to hear. Lily and Grace went way back. Lily was devoted to saving Grace’s life, saving her from the flood. I guess she succeeded.”

“Grace never mentioned her,” Kelly said.

Lily had died not long after Everest. She had done all she possibly could for Grace. Thandie was glad she had never learned of this slow revenge of Grace’s. Some people never forgave you for saving their lives.

“After Everest, Manco and Ana, Lily’s great-nephew and his wife, took me in. Just as they will take in all of you now. They’re generous people, fundamentally.”

Kelly was staring at the kids, most of whom, as Thandie had expected, had got bored and gone off to their eternal playground of the sea. “They seem-alien. But no more than we are to them, I guess.”

“They grew up knowing nothing different from this,” Thandie said. “Just the raft and the ocean. Some of them barely learn to walk before they go jumping overboard. Some barely talk. It’s not that they’re preverbal, but they seem to be evolving a language of their own, of words, gestures, body shapes that they can use underwater. In the end some of them just slip away. Literally; they go over the side and you don’t see them again. Maybe the sharks get them; that’s what the parents fear. I wonder if they’re just finding some place of their own to live. Maybe on the big natural rafts where the gulls live, all driftwood and guano. Good luck to them.”

Mike Wetherbee said, “It sounds like the mother of all generation gaps.”

“Well, so it is. In five hundred years their grandkids will probably have webbed feet. But I hope they will remember their own humanity, remember the history that bore them, the civilization their ancestors built. I try to teach Boris astronomy…”

The kids were kind to Thandie, but they rarely listened to anything she had to say. That was fine with her, fine to be disregarded, as it had been for forty years or more, since she had seen London and New York flooded, and then the huge, astonishing marine transgressions as low-lying continental land was covered over in great sudden swathes, and human civilization dissolved in flight. The flood was just too big; to observe was all you could aspire to. In fact it was a privilege to have lived through this moment of transition. And after all none of these children and grandchildren were hers. She had no stake in their future. The present was enough, and the past…

They were watching her curiously.

She had drifted away, into the oceanic depths of her own head, fallen asleep sitting there in lotus. “Sorry,” she said. “Old lady narcolepsy.”

“And I apologize for staring,” Mike Wetherbee said. “It’s a long time since any of us saw anybody old. Forgive me.”

“You mentioned something called the Split. Tell me about it.”

Kelly glanced at Masayo and Mike. She shrugged, and related a fast version of her story, of the disputes that came to a head when Earth II was reached, and the three-way split that ensued. Kelly looked nervous, as if she feared she was going to have to repeat all this to some kind of tribunal. Thandie wondered what different versions of this saga she might have heard from Wilson Argent or Holle Groundwater.

When she was done, Thandie nodded. “I always thought you might come home. I never agreed with the basic philosophy of Project Nimrod, to go flying off into the sky. Earth has become alien, but not as alien as another planet entirely. I never thought you would split three ways, which must be about the dumbest choice you could have made from an engineering point of view. Gordo Alonzo would hit the roof. But, wow-three roads, three destinies. I wonder how it will turn out.”

Masayo said, “Well, Earth II is twenty-one light-years away. We outran any signal they might send. We might hear from them in another fourteen years or so. But we won’t hear from Earth III for another century, at least.” He frowned. “Strange thought.”

Thandie reminded herself he was basically a military man who had had to learn to deal with some very odd concepts. “You chose to come back to Earth, Masayo. Why?”

“I have a kid, from a previous relationship,” Masayo said awkwardly. “On Earth, I mean. I never meant to leave him behind. It was an only an accident I was on the Ark in the first place.”

“I’ve a kid too,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s what brought me home.”

“That and your ambition,” Mike Wetherbee snapped. “Your damn pride.”

Kelly would have replied, but Thandie held up her hand. “These are old arguments. You may as well leave them behind, leave them up in space.” She glanced around at the waters of Panthalassa, a world ocean given a name coined by one of the pioneers of the study of continental drift. “I don’t know what you were expecting. This is all we have to offer you. This is where you will spend the rest of your lives-”

“There is something else we’re looking for,” Kelly said. “We listened from orbit. I hoped we’d make contact, but we heard nothing.”

Thandie nodded; she’d expected this. “You hoped to hear from Ark Two.”

“It was my father’s project. He may even be still alive,” Kelly said a little wildly. “It’s a long shot, he would be in his nineties, but-”

“I never heard that he died. And I never heard that Ark Two failed. Not spoken to them for years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still sitting there. I can arrange for you to talk to them, if you want. Or anyhow I can try.”

Kelly’s eyes widened. “And to travel there?”

“That’s up to the Ark Two crew. We don’t have the means to take you.” She eyed Kelly and the others, who looked uncertain. “Are you sure you want to go chasing the past?”

Kelly’s face hardened. “I’d appreciate it if you’d make the call rather than psychoanalyze me.”

Masayo looked concerned at her aggression. Mike Wetherbee just smiled.

Thandie bowed her head, and rested her hands on her folded knees once more.

“Mom?” Little Eddie Saito came stumbling toward Kelly. Only four years old, he walked like a newborn baby deer, thought Thandie, who was probably the only person on the raft who remembered what a baby deer looked like. “I played with the children. Can I go swimming?”

Kelly ignored him. “So where is Ark Two?”

Mike Wetherbee smiled nastily. “All those years, and your precious father never even told you that? Some relationship you had.”

“Just tell me, Thandie.”

Thandie pointed down. “Yellowstone.”

Eddie pulled Kelly’s sleeve. “Mom? Can I go swim?”

On her way to confront Wilson over his relationship with Steel, Holle met Grace in the upper cone of Halivah, where they waited for Venus to join them.

They looked down the length of the open tank. In the post-Split microgravity most of the deck partitions had been taken out once more to open up the hull’s big inner space. The long fireman’s pole was still in place down the hull’s axis, and cabins clustered along the length of the pole, attached by staples and cables and sticking out at all angles. It was the middle of the working day. People swam everywhere, engaged on their business. There was a clamor of noise, of voices; the removal of the decks had turned the whole hull into an echo chamber. Down about Deck Five Holle saw a dream circle gathered, mostly youngsters. One of them was Zane Glemp, talking, holding them spellbound. Around Deck Eight half the flooring had been left in place to serve as a base for Wilson’s cabin, a grand affair of partitions and blankets, a palace of trash. The whole volume was bathed in the fake sunlight of the big wall-mounted arc lamps, the light diffused in the dust-laden air.