Ark (33 page)

69

H
olle put off going to see Wilson about Venus’s issues. She felt she needed time to think it through.

Instead, back in Seba, she went down to Deck Ten where she was due to meet Doc Wetherbee and Grace Gray for an update on the progress of Zane Glemp’s therapy. Wetherbee said Zane was participating in a dream circle there today, and Wetherbee wanted to observe.

Coming out of the airlock from the cupola Holle met Grace, and they crossed the deck heading for the downward stair. In the open area at the center of the deck Grace had to pull Holle back, to avoid the hard body of a kid who went plummeting down the length of the fireman’s pole.

“Whee!”

“Jeez,” Holle said, breathing hard. “Nearly got me that time.”

“Yes. They get faster every day. They dare each other to see how far they can fall without grabbing the pole.” They reached the ladders, and began their descent. “I persuaded Wilson to put a net across the hole in Deck Fourteen, to keep them from smashing into the hydroponics at least.”

“Little bastards go crazy.”

Grace, climbing down below Holle, grinned. “It’s hard to control them twenty-four seven, Holle. I mean, my Helen’s seven years old now.”

“I listen to them speak sometimes. Even their language is different from ours. They play complicated games of tag, and they must have fifty words for ‘gotcha.’”

“Yes. But no word for ‘sky’ or ‘sea’ . . .”

They reached Deck Ten. More than a year after the fire the deck was still pretty much a ruin, with blackened walls and burned-out instrument racks. Even the flooring was a lash-up to replace the melted mesh panels. The whole of this hull had never really recovered, and had an air of shabbiness and age.

The dream circle was just getting started, and a toll collector was having the dreamers press their thumbs to a handheld pad to collect their payments. Wilson had installed a new currency of credits, collected electronically and stored in the ship’s memory; you were paid for your work, and in turn you had to pay for everything save for air and water. You even had to pay for sharing your own dreams on a burned-out deck. And a slice of every payment went straight to the common treasury, which Wilson controlled.

Among the dreamers was Zane, who looked shy, subdued. Holle wondered which alter was dominant today.

Grace was still talking about the children. “Kids just adapt to the place they’re brought up in, I guess. On Ark Three we used to deal with raft communities. Trading, you know. We encountered kids older than Helen who had spent their whole lives on the sea, who never saw dry land at all . . . They were happy, or could be. Wherever you’re born, you think is normal—all the world, all you ever need.”

“But they’re so different from us.”

“As we were different from our parents’ generation. They were bound to be. And I guess the next children, the colonists on Earth II, will be different again.”

“If we ever get there.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, nothing. Hey, here’s Mike.”

Mike Wetherbee came clambering down from the upper decks. He looked harassed, as he always did; his hair graying, he looked to be aging quickly. He carried an emergency medical pack at his waist, and a small camera. He was here to film Zane’s participation in the dream circle. You never saw a camera nowadays save for such specific purposes.

As Wetherbee took his place beside Holle and Grace, the dreamers began to listen to Theo Morell, who spoke first. “I was trapped in this tunnel. Like being stuck behind an equipment rack, you know? I was all alone, everybody else was dead—no, they never existed in the first place. It was just me, I was shut in but I couldn’t breathe. Then somebody started banging on the outside of the hull, and I started shouting and I screamed, but my voice just echoed. Then I wriggled forward and I saw a kind of light . . .”

The rest listened, spellbound. The dozen dreamers were a mix of the Ark’s various factions, Candidates and gatecrashers and illegals. Holle noticed that one girl was making notes on a handheld, a record of what was said. Zane just rocked back and forth, and he jabbed at his bare arm with a plastic toy, a kid’s screwdriver. Holle thought it was ironic that Theo Morell should be the one to start the sharing. He remained king of HeadSpace, but since Wilson had restricted access to the booths by the simple means of imposing a hefty charge on their use, the cheaper dream circles were flourishing.

Mike Wetherbee murmured, “Classic Ark dream. Confinement, claustrophobia, a fear of what’s outside, but a longing for release.”

Grace whispered, “Sounded to me like a memory of his birth. Like he was struggling to pass through a giant vagina.”

Wetherbee grinned. “Oh, yeah, that too. The dreams are always about sex.”

“No kids today,” Holle murmured. Generally a few children took part in sessions like this. The transcripts showed how the kids recounted the visions that bubbled up inside their heads of Earth, fantasies of the planet for which they were evolved but which they could never see. Holle found them fascinating, but terrifically sad.

“No,” Wetherbee said, “but the kids like Zane. You’d think they’d fear him. They think he’s funny, or something, the different people that speak out of his mouth. He’s a novelty, in an environment that lacks novelties.”

Grace murmured, “What are his dreams like?”

“Depends which alter is speaking.” Wetherbee pointed. “I think that’s Zane 1, the youngest. See he’s playing at self-harm with that plastic screwdriver? I gave him that to deflect him from doing it for real. At least he can’t break the flesh. Zane I has anxiety dreams, very sexual. Zane 3’s are the most disturbing, elaborate fantasies about rivers and serpents and hunters, in which nothing is real but just melts away when you look at it.”

Grace shook her head. “Do you think you have all the alters mapped out now?”

Wetherbee looked pained. “After three years I hope so. I continue to believe he has dissociative identity disorder—more than one personality inside the one head. These alters are spun off at times of extreme stress or pain.

“
This
one, Zane 1, was created when Zane was about seventeen, and was subject to sexual abuse by Harry Smith. Zane couldn’t stand the distress this caused him, the shame, the lying, the bullying response from his father. So he spun off Zane 1, who serves as a receptacle for all the pain. It’s a coping mechanism, you see.

“The next big crisis for Zane came when he was around twenty-four, as we prepared to go to warp at Jupiter. That crisis caused
two
splits, I believe. He was already guilty at being on the Ark because he was too ‘dirty’ to be able to contribute his genes to the pool. Zane 2 was a receptacle for all that shame and remorse. And now he felt he wasn’t coping with his duties at that key time—which, if you think about it, was the crux of his whole life. So he created another entity, called Jerry—an older man, calmer, away from all the adolescent crises. Jerry comes out, often at night when Zane sleeps, to handle Zane’s work assignments. Zane just sort of wakes up to find everything done and sorted out, and he has no memory of doing it, no physical trace of the events save maybe lost sleep. Jerry is the sanest of the alters, if you can use that word. Pain in the ass to deal with, actually. There may have been other splits, other alters created at earlier points of crisis—the launch from Earth, for instance. I’m not sure.

“All these alters took away an awful lot of Zane’s functioning. The alter that’s left is the one I call Zane 3. He’s an empty shell. He has no real memory of his life before Jupiter. It’s as if he just woke up after we went to warp, fully formed. And he doesn’t have any knowledge of the work he does aboard the ship; that’s all Jerry, you see. In some ways Zane 3 is the craziest. I think he genuinely doesn’t believe he’s on a ship at all.”

Grace asked, “So in all this, where is Zane?”

Wetherbee shrugged. “They’re all parts of him. I think Zane 3 serves as a kind of central point, but he’s not the leader.”

“It sounds fantastic.”

“I know. A lot of commentators believed DID was always iatrogenic—that is, a product of the diagnosis itself, a kind of fantasy concocted between doctor and patient, maybe unconsciously. I knew doctors who would have loved to have a DID case on their hands. You could write a book about it.”

“But not you,” Holle said.

“Hell, no. I’m not smart enough to have cooked this up, believe me.”

Grace asked, “So what’s the prognosis? What can you do about it?”

“There are ways to reintegrate the various personalities into a whole. But we’re talking more years of therapy. I think I’m going to hold off until after ’51, when we’re due to reach Earth II. That will be the last time we will need Zane the warp engineer. He is in fact functioning, in his strange, broken way. I don’t think I can risk endangering that. When I get my clinic up and running on Earth II—then maybe I’ll have time to fix Zane.”

Holle asked, “Of his alters, which one do you like the least?”

“Good question. That one,” Wetherbee said, pointing to Zane. “The alters are stuck at the age they were created. Zane 1 will be seventeen years old, forever. And he relives the abuse, the pain he absorbed, over and over. That’s his function, to take those memories away from Zane. But it means he’s trapped in an eternal present, like a recording stuck on replay. Zane 1 is in hell.”

They fell silent, and watched Zane sitting with the dreamers as he jabbed the toy screwdriver into his arm over and over. These were the crew who would have to face the dramatic, unexpected challenges of Earth II, Holle thought. How could they possibly cope?

70

December 2051

E
verybody crowded into Halivah for Venus’s crew report on Earth II, all save for a watch crew left over in Seba, and Holle knew that they too would be glued to the comms system. For her presentation Venus set up a crystal ball, a three-dimensional display unit that hadn’t been unpacked since they left Earth, that hummed and glistened as its panels rotated, too fast for the eye to follow. Holle knew this was a gift to the Ark from Thandie Jones, and was the very same piece of equipment Thandie had once used to brief the LaRei people in Denver, with Holle and Kelly running around on the floor, and she’d used it even before then in New York for the IPCC.

Holle herself found a place on a catwalk beside Kelly Kenzie. Venus had taken out the mesh panels over three decks to open up a kind of auditorium in the heart of the hull, so everybody could see and hear, and more than eighty people, including kids and babies, were jammed in, clinging to catwalks and ladders and waiting for the show. A rumble of excited conversation echoed, and there was a rare sense of crowd. Holle picked out familiar faces all around the chamber, the people with whom she had shared so much, in some cases since they were all children together in Denver. There was Mike Wetherbee standing by Zane Glemp, his most intractable yet his most valuable patient, and Theo Morell, the half-corrupt king of the HeadSpace booths, and the Shaughnessy brothers, solid hard workers both, Jack with a cap pulled down over his burn-scarred face, and Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov, still together despite all their tribulations, and Masayo Saito, the army lieutenant who, thrust into an impossible and unexpected position, had proven to be a bridge-builder of wisdom and courage, and poor Cora Robles who had never got over the loss of her little girl, a shadow of her old brilliant self—yet who was now pregnant again. Helen Gray, nine years old now, stood by her mother on a catwalk on the opposite side of the hull. She was playing pat-a-cake with six-year-old Steel Antoniadi. When she glimpsed Holle, Helen waved her hand. She was growing into a pretty kid with her mother’s very English coloring. It struck Holle that Helen had
never
seen as many people together as this in one space, not in her whole life. But Helen’s eyes were drawn, like the other children’s, to Venus’s glittering toy.

Holle felt a mood of exhilaration, of belonging. For all their triumphs and their tragedies, their weaknesses and their strengths, they had got here, across ten years since Gunnison and more than twenty light-years. They had reached 82 Eridani. And they had all seen the prize, Earth II, with their naked eyes. Venus had allowed the crew into her precious cupola, a few at a time, to gaze down on the huge world turning a few hundred kilometers beneath the orbiting Ark, with its creased oceans, scattered cloud, rusty landmasses. There was a sense of unity, at last; together they had achieved a mighty triumph.

But Earth II wasn’t what they had hoped for. And now, today, six months after the Ark’s arrival at 82 Eridani, they had grave decisions to make. Holle wondered how much of that wonderful unity would survive the day.

Wilson Argent came strutting across the deck, and the conversations hushed. Wilson looked around at the crew, on the decks and catwalks and clinging to the ladders. He was a big man, imposing and impressive. Three years after his takeover from Kelly his power over the crew was absolute, and he was regarded with a mixture of admiration, awe and fear. Today he had opened up for discussion the biggest decision they had had to make since leaving Earth, a decision about the whole future of the mission, the Ark; even he couldn’t railroad this. But as a result this decision day was a moment of comparative vulnerability for Wilson.

On impulse Holle glanced at Kelly. Her expression was hard, set. Holle recognized Kelly’s “ambitious” face, the face she had worn when she’d announced she was leaving her kid behind to keep her place on the Ark. Since he had ousted her, Wilson had always let Kelly alone, but at best they had been like two warring armies under an armed truce. Well, today Kelly looked like she was planning something, and Holle felt a stab of deep unease.

“You all know why we’re here.” Wilson’s voice, subtly amplified, boomed through the whole hull. “We achieved mankind’s first star flight, we reached Earth II, and we’ve all had one hell of a party. But the job’s not done yet—not until we’re down on the new ground, turning the turf and planting our first crops. Now Venus is going to summarize what we’ve learned so far about the planet. And then we’ll decide, as a group, what we’re going to do about it.” That was Wilson, blunt and to the point. He nodded to Venus and backed off to stand with the gang of illegals and gatecrashers who had gravitated to his court.

Venus stepped forward, looking around at the expectant faces. She tapped her handheld. The crystal ball flared with light, and an image of Earth II coalesced.

It was a sphere more than a meter across, turning slowly around a horizontal axis. It was bright and detailed, and its glow, blue and gray, brown and white, lit up the faces of the watching people. Venus stayed silent, giving them a few seconds to take it in. The last murmurs hushed.

Holle remembered the first blurred images of the new planet, images taken from light-years out and constructed with extraordinary care by Venus’s planet-finder technologies. This new mapping was as detailed as any image of Earth as seen from space she had ever seen. And the planet wasn’t simply some abstract entity any more; now, after their months in orbit, it was a world already replete with human names. They had tentatively labeled the rotation pole that was currently pointing at the sun as “north”; the world turned counterclockwise as seen by an observer above that pole. Subject to months of unbroken heat from 82 Eridani the pole was blanketed in cloud, with storms visibly spinning off a massive central swirl.

At lower latitudes Holle made out landmasses that were already familiar to everybody aboard. A big strip of land stretching north to south across the equator was “the Belt,” a kind of elderly Norway with deep-cut fjords incising thousands of kilometers of coastline. The northern half of the Belt was currently ice-free, but its southern half, stretching into the realm of shadow, was icebound, and snow patches reached as far north as the equator. Sprawling across a good portion of the eastern hemisphere was the roughly circular continent they called “the Frisbee,” a mass of rust red broken by the intense blue of lakes and lined by eroded mountains. Its center was dominated by a huge structure, a mountain with a base hundreds of kilometers across, and a fractured caldera at the top. The mount was so like Olympus Mons on Mars that giving it the same name had been unavoidable, and it so dominated the overall profile of the continent, giving it an immense but shallow bulge, that the nickname “Frisbee” was a good fit. Then, to the west of the Belt, an archipelago sprawled, a widespread group of islands, some as large as Britain or New Zealand, that they called “the Scatter.” There was one more continent at the south pole, currently plunged in darkness and buried under hundreds of meters of winter snow, called “the Cap.” The world ocean itself had no name yet; the seas could be named when they were ready to go sailing on them, Holle thought.

The most exciting features were the patches of purple at the coasts of the continents and the shores of the lakes:
life,
native life on Earth II, plants of some kind, busily using 82 Eridani’s light to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen with their own unique photosynthetic chemistry.

Venus began without preamble.

“You all have access to the full reports in the ship’s archive. Today I’m just going to summarize the key findings.

“We’ve been here in this system for six months. We’ve surveyed atmosphere, land and oceans spectroscopically at all wavelengths, and have used radar to probe the subsurface and to map the seabeds, and have also dropped a series of penetrating probes for direct ground-truth sampling.” These were landers like slim missiles, hardened to withstand violent impacts and to bury themselves a few meters beneath the surface, with ground cameras that gave a close-up view of the final stages of the descent, and equipped with seismometers, chemical sensors, thermal sensors, magnetometers.

“Here’s the good news,” Venus said. “Obviously we have a world of about the right mass and the right volatile inventory, orbiting in a stable circular orbit at about the right distance from its sun to allow stable water oceans on the surface. ‘Right’ meaning it’s Earthlike.

“And on a basic level it’s habitable. If you landed in one of the shuttles and stepped outside, you’d experience a gravity of about eighty percent of a G; Earth II is less massive than Earth, and smaller in radius. Right now the northern summer is somewhere near its midpoint. If you were to stand at the pole you’d see the sun circle close to the zenith, right above your head. At the equator the sun is circling around the horizon, maybe dipping below for a few hours a day, depending on exactly where you are. It’s cold, there’s snow on the ground, but it’s no worse than a winter day in one of Earth’s temperate zones.

“Where the sun is up you could walk around with no more protection than a decent coat, some strong boots, a face mask. You could expose your skin, at least from the point of view of the sun’s radiation; there’s a healthy ozone layer. You would need some protection from cosmic radiation; the planet’s magnetic field is a lot weaker than Earth’s. You could breathe the air, we believe. It’s basically a nitrogen-oxygen mix of about the same proportions as Earth’s atmosphere. In the early days you’ll be wearing a face mask, in case of trace toxins from geological or maybe biological sources.

“We know there’s life down there. Life at the microbial level and, it seems, at some kind of simple multiple-cell level, something like stromatolites maybe. That’s what puts the oxygen in the air. It’s unlikely it will harm us, unlikely our alien biochemistries will interact significantly, but we’ll have to check it out. We believe that once we establish some terrestrial soil down there, Earthlike flora will take a hold: our crops will grow, our animals, when we incubate them, will be able to feed. Our children will be able to run and play.” She got a scattering of applause for that: But there was no joy in her face.

“This much we were able to guess from observations from Earth and Jupiter,” she said. “But all we could see from the solar system was a blurry dot with some evidence of mass, orbit, atmospheric composition. That’s all. On that basis it looked promising. But as it’s turned out, Earth II is not that close a sister to Earth I.

“This is a much less active world than Earth, geologically. You can see that from the eroded chains of mountains, the flat landscapes. The penetrators’ seismometers have detected few earthquakes. And we see no significant evidence of continental drift, no active plate-forming mid-ocean ridges, no subduction zones at plate boundaries—no colliding plates to trigger volcanism and to throw up mountain chains, as on Earth.

“Tectonic shift has seized up, here. It’s not absent, but is clearly operating at a much reduced rate than on Earth. And the result is the geology we see. The Frisbee is not unlike Australia, ancient and stable, so old its mountains are worn down, the rocks shattered to dust and rusted red. The big volcano at the heart of the Frisbee is a shield volcano, like Hawaii on Earth, and just like Olympus Mons on Mars—we named it well. It’s been created by a magma plume, an upwelling of hot material from the planet’s mantle, like a fountain. Olympus has been stuck over that plume for a long time—hundreds of millions of years, maybe. Over similar periods on Earth, the continents slide all the way from equator to pole.

“Is that important? We think so, for the sake of the long-term habit-ability of the planet. On Earth, plate tectonics play a key part in the vast geological and biological cycling that maintains Gaia. This world, with tectonic processes much reduced, can’t sustain such a significant cargo of life.

“Why has Earth II turned out to be so much less active than Earth? First, Earth II is that much smaller than Earth. Like Mars, it must have shed a greater proportion of its interior heat of formation, and a greater proportion of its inventory of radioactive materials will have decayed away. So the big internal heat engine that drives plate tectonics has run down. And second, we believe Earth II is actually an older world than Earth, by a billion years or more; whatever triggered planet-forming in this system happened much earlier than back home.”

Wilson put in, “So a billion years ago this world might have looked that much more like Earth.”

“Yes. With a much richer biosphere. I think we can expect to find traces of past complexity, lost as the planet has run down. That may be why we see no traces of extant intelligence.”

Kelly seized on that word. “ ‘Extant’? Does that imply you found traces of nonextant cultures?”

Holle felt unreasonably excited.

For answer, Venus tapped a handheld.

The turning world winked out of existence, to be replaced by an image of one of the larger islands of the Scatter, as if seen from a low-flying aircraft. Once it may have been mountainous; now its mountains were worn to stubs. “We call this Little Jamaica.” Venus pointed to features on a plain close to the sea. “Can you see?” There were faint circles, hints of straight-line features. “We don’t know what this is. You need to remember that this island is covered by the pack ice every local winter; any traces of surface structures, of buildings and cities, would long ago have been destroyed. It could be the trace of a quarry, we think. That might survive as long as a billion years. Maybe it’s something else, like a city. There are other indicators of intelligence. We’ve found no evidence of deep-buried carbon deposits. If there was any oil or coal on this world, or the local equivalent, it’s long gone. No evidence of particularly rich seams of mineral ores near the surface. A paucity of asteroids in this system, too.”

Wilson folded his arms. “I don’t get it. These are indicators of what?”

“That somebody used up the easily available resources—the oil, the easily mined ores, even off-world resources in the asteroids. And then they died out, or went away. We might find direct evidence one way or the other when we start doing some real archaeology down on the surface.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of sand to sift.”