Ark (29 page)

62

B
ack in Seba, Kelly had started her day at her table on Deck Eight with her usual series of rolling meetings. Holle showed up to report on what was going on over in Halivah regarding Meg. She settled at the table with a coffee, knowing that she’d have to wait her turn to speak.

Kelly looked tired, sleepless. The thousand-day festival, because it was forcing all the Arks’ factions and rivals to come together to cooperate on a single event, was causing Kelly and her senior people even more grief than usual. But right now Kelly and Masayo Saito were listening to Elle Strekalov complaining about Kelly’s proposed new procreation rules.

A mother went by with a little kid, not yet two years old. Kelly pointed grandly. “Look at that! Sue Turco with her brat by Joe Antoniadi—what did they call her, Steel?—and the rumor has it she’s got another one on the way already. You know the basic rule: we aren’t supposed to be pupping until we reach Earth II. It’s only another four, five years to wait. The only kids on this ship should be the ones that came aboard in utero, like little Helen Gray. But there’s been a steady trickle of pregnancies. People are having babies because they
want
them.”

Masayo said, “Doc Wetherbee says procreation is a natural reaction after a trauma, like how the birth rate rises after a war. The flood, the whole launch process, the severing from everything we knew—that was traumatic enough, surely.”

“Or maybe they’re just bored,” Holle suggested.

“Why ever they’re doing it? That’s not the policy. That’s not what the social engineers’ maximal genetic diversity rules say. That’s not what Ship’s Law says.” Kelly emphasized her words by thumping the tabletop with her open hand.

Elle Strekalov broke in, impatient. “But that’s got nothing to do with my issue. It’s the talk of a ballot for second children that’s caused the problem for me.”

Holle, new to the conversation, asked, “What’s wrong, Elle?”

Elle smiled at her, looking tired. “It’s Jack Shaughnessy. This new policy of Kelly’s has got Jack ‘sniffing around’ me again. But that’s how Thomas puts it. I won’t have anything to do with Jack, any more than I would before. Thomas doesn’t believe it. He thinks Kelly’s policy will open the door for Jack.”

Kelly shook her head. “It’s not
my
policy. Right now it’s just the recommendation of the task group I asked to consider the problem. Look, we have a conflict between two obligations. We have to try to ensure maximal genetic diversity in the next generation. But at the same time, thanks to the presence of the gatecrashers and illegals, we have a gender imbalance on the Ark . . .”

There were more men than women. Three gay couples, two male and one female, eased the burden slightly, although there was another issue in that the gays would also be expected to contribute to the gene pool of the next generation; the social engineers had at least bequeathed guidelines as to how
that
should be handled. But the guidelines were no help with the basic issue of imbalance.

Elle said hotly, “I have the right to choose who my life partner is going to be.”

“Yes, you do,” Kelly said patiently. “But the excess men have rights too. And we as a group have an obligation to ensure we preserve as wide a gene pool for the future as we can.”

“So I have to spread my legs for some illegal?”

Holle laughed. “Nicely put.”

“Artificial insemination is possible,” Kelly said to Elle. “You wouldn’t have to sleep with anybody.”

Masayo said mildly, “Sometimes I can’t believe we have these conversations.”

Elle said, “But I would still have some illegal’s brat in my womb. That’s how Thomas will see it for sure.”

Kelly said with a kind of brittle patience, “We get this kind of issue all the time, Elle, you know that. Your right to control your own body conflicts with the rights and responsibilities of the group as a whole. The proposal is that each of us women should choose a second partner from among the men involved, that we each have children by more than one man. If you can’t choose, there will be a ballot—”

Elle snorted. “Rigged like every ballot on this tub since the day we launched.”

“There’ll be no rigging. We’re all going to have to face this, Elle. All the women, all the men come to that. We’ll have to separate partnerships for companionship from partnerships for procreation. The former is entirely your choice, and the mission has no need to interfere with that, but the second has to have some direction from the crew as a whole, to fulfill our wider obligation. It’s the only way a crew this small can maintain genetic diversity. We’re in a unique situation which—”

“Oh, I’ve had enough of this.” Elle stood, knocking back her chair; it fell languidly in the half-gravity. “You always come out with this super-ethical bullshit. Kelly. You never focus on the human being in front of you. Well, I’m going to talk to Venus in the cupola.
She
won’t let you go ahead with this. And maybe she’ll do something to keep Thomas and Jack apart before they kill each other.” She stalked off.

Kelly sighed, and sipped water from a covered tumbler. “Christ, Christ.”

“I’ll have a word with Jack Shaughnessy,” Holle said. “Just quietly. Try to make sure he keeps his distance from Elle.”

“I’ve seen no signs he’s still after her. That fight with Thomas seems to have convinced Jack that Elle wants to stay where she is. This whole thing is probably just Thomas’s paranoia. Be careful, Holle, say the wrong thing and you might make things worse.”

“We’re going to get this kind of conflict over and over,” Masayo said.

“I know,” Kelly said. “All the way to Earth II. But what else can we do? This is the nature of the mission. It wouldn’t be half so difficult if we were crewed by the full complement of Candidates as we should have been, with a proper sex balance and training in the issues.”

Masayo rolled his eyes.

Kelly asked Holle, “So what about the missing kid over in Halivah?”

“Wilson said he’d call if there was any news.”

“Damn kids,” Kelly said. “They’re so weird. You know, I’ve seen them catch spiders and flies and make pets of them. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d think they’d go crazy, growing up in a bottle like this. But I suppose they’ve never known any different. What about Cora?”

Holle summarized what had happened, how she and Wilson had had to help get Cora out of the booth. “I asked Doc Wetherbee to take a look at her. I don’t think she’s even been eating properly.”

“It’s not food that’s her problem,” Kelly said. “It’s her addiction to the HeadSpaces. You know, we excluded alcohol and every drug we could think of, and yet still we’re raising addicts. There’s always some damn thing.” She looked at Holle sharply. “What’s your opinion about Theo? Do you think he is dealing in HeadSpace credits like Wilson says?”

“I think it’s possible,” Holle said carefully. “But Theo’s naïve. Or he was when he came on board the ship. It may be he doesn’t understand what he’s doing, the moral implications, the effect on other people.”

Masayo laughed. “So he’s inventing a drug-dealing trade from first principles. God bless human nature.”

Kelly shook her head. “You know, I’ve been doing some research in the archive on prisons. There you have people marking their territory, picking fights over food, swapping stories about dreams for lack of stimulation, pushing drugs. Just like us. Is that all we managed to build here, a prison between the stars?”

Masayo Saito said, “Grace Gray’s mother was held hostage in Barcelona for years. Chained to radiators in cellars. Grace herself was the result of a rape by one of the guards, and was born in captivity. An unbelievable story. And yet, are we all hostages on this Ark, hostage to the ambitions of the mission designers?”

Holle said, “I’d say they were our ambitions too.”

“God only knows,” Masayo said.

“Sometimes I think that’s the problem,” Kelly said. “God, I mean. The social engineers always tried to keep God out of our lives. The Ark is a mission of a state that was deliberately secular, a state that was trying to be a reverse image of the Mormon state in Utah it was at war with. And despite the gatecrashers and illegals, they succeeded in that goal, didn’t they? Many people on the Ark are religious, but we aren’t a religious community. Sometimes I wish we were, that we had a common mission ordained by one god or another. A monastery would surely be a better social model than a prison.”

Masayo shook his head. “Too late for that, Kelly. I think we left God behind back on Earth.”

Holle stood. “I need to go. Doc Wetherbee says he wants to review Zane’s therapy.”

“Well, that’s also a priority. And keep me informed about the progress on the kid. OK, Masayo, what’s next?”

63

M
ike Wetherbee invited Holle, Venus and Grace into the small cabin that he called his surgery, with its bunk beds and persistent antiseptic smell, and cabinets of medical gear to treat everything from eye conditions to bad teeth. On a monitor he showed a recording of himself and Zane at their last therapy session, the latest of a program which had now been going on for over two years. On the monitor, Zane and Wetherbee spoke quietly, over a game of infinite chess.

“This is the bullshit part,” Wetherbee murmured. “How’s your day been, and so forth. Takes him an age to warm up. I do most of the talking. And I hate that damn game.”

“Let’s just watch,” murmured Grace. She was perched on the edge of one of the patients’ beds.

Infinite chess was in fact an invention of Zane’s. It was played with regular pieces on a regular board, save that the players had to imagine the board wrapped around itself, so that the right edge was glued to the left, and the upper edge glued to the lower. So, given normal restrictions on movement, a given piece could move right, off the edge of its world, and reappear to the left. It gave the illusion of infinity on a finite board. Zane said, and he liked to produce computer graphics showing how the wrapped-around board was topologically equivalent to a torus, a doughnut. A queen became particularly powerful; faced by an empty diagonal, row or column, she could leap, theoretically, an infinite number of squares in a single move. Zane and other keen players were busy working out variants to standard rules, and to standard sequences of game play. For instance, white had an immediate advantage with the first move. Your queen could step backward and wrap around the world to take your opponent’s queen, though she would then fall to the opposing king. Your rooks, stepping back into your opponent’s back rank, could do a lot of damage before being quelled. End-game analysis was less affected, as the board was so open anyhow.

The game was an obvious psychological metaphor for the freedom they all sought in an enclosed world, but it was ferociously difficult to play. “Bastard beats me every time,” Mike Wetherbee murmured.

“You’re very patient,” Grace said.

“Yeah, right,” Wetherbee said sourly. “When he’s in this phase he’s so depressive, so passive, he just sits there soaking in misery. He sucks the life out of you.”

Holle knew that Wetherbee was uncomfortable with the therapy program, although he had finally accepted the responsibility given how essential Zane was to the mission. That was why he had got others involved in the treatment: Holle who had referred Zane in the first place, Venus who had also suffered abuse at the hands of Harry Smith, a likely trigger for Zane’s condition, and Grace Gray, who had spoken to Zane on the ground after Harry’s murder. Grace was turning out to be one of the more competent of Wetherbee’s backup paramedics, having picked up a lot of field experience in her years with the okie city on the Great Plains. They made a good team, Holle thought, emotionally strong even if they had no experience with this kind of case.

But really, Wetherbee was just sharing the burden around. He had the mentality Holle had seen in a lot of medical students and doctors on the ground. Brisk, good-looking and competent, he didn’t have a steady partner, but he had had a string of relationships with women among the crew—a lot of people would want to tie the ship’s only doctor to them, and their children. But he’d never show a trace of survivor guilt, or any interest in the fate of his drowned homeland. And he maintained a kind of distance from his patients that sometimes made you wonder why he had ever gone into medicine in the first place.

Now Mike leaned forward and touched the screen to up the volume. “We’d been talking about the chess. Then suddenly he started talking about his father. Look, see the switch there?”

Holle saw how Zane sat up straight and looked around, almost as if he’d just arrived in the room. “Dr. Wetherbee?”

“Zane, I’m right here.”

“We’re in the surgery. We’re playing chess.” He glanced at the board. “I’m two moves away from getting you in check.” He smiled. Everything about Zane seemed brighter, Holle thought, as if he was another person.

“Two moves? I can’t see it, but that doesn’t surprise me.”

“I play chess with my father.”

“Note the present tense,” Wetherbee murmured to the women.

“I never beat my father. He’d hate that, if I ever did.”

“Did you, I mean
do
you let him win?”

“Oh, no. He’d hate to think of himself as weak. And he’d hate to see me being sentimental. The game is everything, winning . . .”

“You see the conflict,” Wetherbee commented. “I think he did let the father win, and then blocked it out. The old man kept setting up barriers the kid couldn’t break through. Listen to what he initiates now.”

“I tried to tell Dad about Harry Smith,” Zane said, on the screen.

“About what we talked about? The touching—all of that.”

“Yes. I tried more than once. The first time Dad just wouldn’t listen. The next time he hit me. He said I was lying about Harry Smith, who was a good man, a man he knew well. And he said I was dirty, soiled. He said I should shut up. He said if I told anybody these lies it would make trouble for no one but me, and get me thrown off the Ark, and then the eye-dees would rape me and kill me, and if they didn’t the flood would drown me.”

“But now that’s all over. You’re on the Ark. You’re safe.”

Zane smiled, looking quizzical. “Well, I’m still a Candidate, Dr. Wetherbee. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“Like he’s stuck in the past,” Venus said. “He doesn’t know he’s on the Ark.”

“Something like that, some of the time . . . Listen.”

On the screen, Wetherbee asked, “If you do make it onto the Ark, how do you think all this will affect you? The business with Harry Smith and your father.”

Zane frowned. “I don’t think much about that. Launch is years away.”

“You’ll have a duty,” Wetherbee said, pushing. “You won’t be there just as a person, but as a repository of genes. A contributor to genetic diversity.”

“I’m interested in the engines, the theory of the warp field—”

“Yes, but this is a key part of the mission, the human side of it. You will have to have children, on the Ark, or on Earth II. That’s the whole point. How do you feel about that?”

“Dirty.”

“That’s what your father said. But it isn’t necessarily true.”

“Dirty, dirty!” Zane swept his arm, scattering the pieces from the chessboard. Then he slumped.

Wetherbee paused the recording.

“You pushed him pretty hard,” Grace said.

“I know, I know.” Wetherbee sighed, and massaged a pale, stubbly face. “But when he gave me the opening about the father, I thought it was an opportunity I shouldn’t miss. I think the relationship to the father is the key to the whole mess.

“Look at the contradiction he’s trying to resolve. His father loaded onto him all the pain and the blame of the sexual abuse, and the father’s own drive and ambition, and maybe his own shame at what became of his son. So Zane’s dirty because of the Harry Smith thing, and isn’t fit to have kids. But on the other hand if he can’t contribute to the gene pool he shouldn’t be on the Ark. He should have been left back on Earth in the hands of the monsters his father depicted. But that’s a primal choice, of life and death. He could hardly be put under more pressure. Maybe deep inside he’s always just evaded the whole issue, buried the contradiction. It was showing up in the memory lapses, the self-harm. And then—”

“And then I triggered the crisis,” Holle said. “That day I suggested he and I could have a kid.”

Grace said, “That’s one of the kindest gestures you could ever have made to a man like Zane. You weren’t to know what was going on inside his head. He didn’t know himself.”

“Even I still don’t,” Wetherbee said, “after years of my ham-fisted therapy. But, look, I think he has some kind of dissociative disorder. He has splits in his identity, caused by the contradictions he can’t resolve, the pain he has to bury. That explains the memory lapses, the apparent shifts in identity—the way he seems to ‘wake up,’ uncertain of where he is, or even when.”

Venus said, “You’re saying our only warp engineer is Jekyll and Hyde?”

“So what do we do?” Holle asked.

He shrugged. “I have limited facilities for MRI scans. I tried that but can see nothing physically abnormal in his brain functions, whichever aspect of himself is apparent. I think the only answer is therapy—to understand him fully, and the damage that’s been done. And then to find some way to start the healing. Hypnosis is often used in these cases. I never hypnotized anybody in my life, but there are routines in the archive I might be able to adapt.” He grimaced. “This is going to take years more, if it works at all.”

“I guess we don’t have much choice,” Holle said. “Thanks, Mike. I know you didn’t sign up for this.”

“No, I didn’t.” Wetherbee looked resentful, then grinned. “But then, neither did Zane.” As they got up to leave, he cleared the screen and turned to a computer program.

It snagged Venus’s attention. “What’s this?”

“I’m trying to teach the ship’s AI to play infinite chess. With some prompting in my ear at least I might be able to put up a fight against Zane . . .”

In the small hours of the next morning, Holle was woken by two more calls. The first was from Wilson Argent in Halivah. They had found the little girl, Meg Robles.

“She zipped herself up in a pressure suit. You wouldn’t think a four-year-old could do that. Then she got stuck, and couldn’t get out.”

She listened to his tone. “She’s dead.”

“I’m afraid so. First death since launch. And the first dead child.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“No, we’ll handle it. We’re looking after Cora. Just let Kelly know.”

“Sure.”

And later, she had a call from Mike Wetherbee.

“I got an e-mail from Zane’s user ID. It was in kind of broken English, and it asked for a meeting, asked for my help.”

“So?”

“The sender signed himself Jerry. Holle, there’s no Jerry on the ship. And when I checked the surveillance monitors, when he sent it Zane was alone in his room.”