Ark

9

The doors were locked, the walls swept. “We’re sealed in tight as a mouse’s ass,” Kenzie said. He tapped a screen to begin recording. “As you can see we got a bunch of blank screens here. We’ve got secure access to the university servers through these things, and we can look wider if we want. We got reference sources, everything we need to find answers to the questions we’ll raise. All right, let’s start. And you can begin by introducing this gentleman you’ve brought in, Jerzy.”

Glemp beckoned, and the slim young man stepped forward. “My name is Liu Zheng. I am Chinese. I am twenty-nine years old; I am an engineer.”

“I found him in IDP processing in the Pepsi Center, right here in Denver,” Jerzy Glemp said with a gleam of satisfaction. “It’s astounding the talent you can filter out of the flood of displaced. Anything you want.”

Edward nodded. “And what talent have you got that’s so valuable, Liu?”

The Chinese, his face blank, said, “My father trained as a taikonaut. To fly in space. I design spaceships.”

There was a long pause. Patrick asked, “What exactly are we talking about building here?”

Liu Zheng said, “A means to send a viable population away from the Earth.”

Jerzy said, “An ark.”

“No less than Ark One, damn it,” Kenzie said. “I made sure we secured that little honor from Nathan Lammockson and those other assholes.” He clapped Patrick on the shoulder. “Did you never see When Worlds Collide? Let’s get on with it. What’s the first question we need to address, Jerzy?”

Glemp smiled. “Where are we going?”

The man sitting on the floor with his legs crossed wore black trousers and a black jumper. He might have been younger than Dad, but Holle wasn’t sure. He smiled at her. “My name is Harry. Harry Smith. I’m a teacher. But it’s not a school day today! I’m just here to make sure we’re all OK together. Your name is Holle, right? Look, this is Kelly, and Zane.”

The two children eyed her warily. Kelly was the little girl she had met yesterday in that other place full of books, the big dusty room where the lady had the crystal ball. The boy, Zane, looked a bit younger than Holle was, and he had thick black hair and big eyes. He looked shy, but she kind of liked him. He looked like a doll.

“Look, we’ve got neat toys,” Harry said. “You can play with us. See the fort? These guys are knights. Look, they have horses.”

Kelly and Zane were playing with a kind of fort that you put together, and plastic people that you lined up inside. The fort had circular towers and walls that you set up on a base, and a drawbridge that you could let down, and little buildings inside. But the fort looked crooked, there were gaps between the wall panels, and Holle could see that the drawbridge was stuck. Maybe it hadn’t been put together right. She didn’t go near the toy, not yet. Kelly hung onto the little people she’d been playing with, and Zane copied her. They weren’t sure about Holle, not sure enough to share.

Harry said smoothly, “Have you got your own toys? What did you bring in your bag?”

“I’ve got my handheld and my Angel.” She dug them out of the bag, shoving aside the box of tissues and the drinks bottles.

“Oh, wow, that’s neat.”

Holle looked at him. “You say ‘neat.’ ”

“That’s how I was brought up to talk, I guess. I’m American. You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Scottish. Neat. Neat, neat, neat!”

The other children laughed.

Impulsively she held out the Angel to Harry. “Do you want to listen? It’s got good songs on.”

“Why, thank you, Holle, that’s very kind.” He held the heavy black gadget in his hand, and thumbed through the menu of choices. “Oh, you’ve got ‘Phone.’ Always liked that one.” He pressed to select, and nodded as the music played inside his head, murmuring the words: “ ‘I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV…’ ”

Zane and Kelly were watching Holle, not doing anything, just holding onto their toy people.

“I’ve got a handheld.” Holle showed them.

“I’ve got one of those,” Kelly said.

“It’s got a camera.”

“So has mine.”

“We could film the toy, the fort. We could make the people attack, like a war, and film it.”

That enthused them, and Kelly immediately took control. “Look, Zane, I could be in charge of the army inside and you’re the army outside.”

He looked doubtful. “Why can’t I be inside?”

She snorted. “Because if you’re outside you’re an eye-dee, and I don’t want to be one of them. ”

Harry smiled, still listening to the song. “An IDP is an internal displaced person, Kelly. An American who’s become a refugee. That word you used isn’t nice. It’s OK, Zane. Look, this polished floor can be the sea, the flood. And you can make a raft out of the box the fort came in. See?”

Zane started experimenting with the box, skimming it back and forth over the polished wooden floor with his people inside. Kelly marched her little men and women up and down in front of the fort, calling out orders, readying them to repel the hordes of flood-driven refugees.

Now she was let into the circle, Holle put down her handheld and got hold of the fort itself. The pieces were plastic that fit onto molds on the base. She saw she’d been right, that two towers by the gate had been jammed onto the wrong sockets. If she swapped them over the gate should work better. But it was going to take an effort to dislodge the towers from the sockets.

She looked at Harry to see if she could ask him to help. But Harry was working with Zane. As the boy crouched down and pushed his cardboard-box-lid raft around the floor, Harry leaned right over him, so his belly touched Zane’s back, and he ruffled the boy’s thick hair. That looked funny, and she didn’t like to watch.

Holle glanced up at the other grown-ups, who were all sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talking in deep rumbles. Dad had his back to her, but he wasn’t far away.

Glemp’s question hung heavy in the air over the table.

Liu Zheng spoke first. “If I may-” He tapped a blank screen to image up a keypad, and started listing headings. “I would suggest we have two broad categories of destination. Category One, the solar system. Category Two, beyond.”

Patrick already felt out of his depth. “Beyond? What’s beyond the solar system? The stars? You’re talking about going to the stars?”

Jerzy grinned. “Only if we have to.”

“Category One,” Liu said, methodically typing out labels. “We can list various subcategories of destination. Earth orbit-we could imagine a permanent settlement something like the International Space Station. Or such a settlement in space beyond Earth orbit. Or we can imagine a planet or moon as destination-a colony there-Earth’s moon or Mars seem the most obvious choices, or the ice moon of a giant planet. Europa, perhaps. Or we could imagine exploiting an asteroid or a comet.”

Jerzy Glemp nodded, his eyes apparently unfocused. “You list old dreams. O’Neill cylinders. Domes on the moon and Mars. Comet ice blown into great bubbles, where people swim in the air.”

Liu Zheng said smoothly, “We are poor at building closed life-support systems-that is, systems which do not suffer losses as they operate. We have to assume that in this scenario supplies from the ground won’t be forthcoming-”

“Because there won’t be any fucking ground,” Kenzie said. He glanced at the kids again.

Patrick nodded. He tapped his own screen, and inserted red crosses beside some of Liu’s categories. “So no space stations, no free-flying colonies. We need somewhere we can mine resources.”

“The moon is closest,” Kenzie said. “And we’ve been there, we know we can operate there.”

Glemp shook his head. “There have been studies of how you could mine the moon for metals, various minerals, even oxygen. But the moon is a ferociously hostile environment-fourteen days of unfiltered sun followed by fourteen days of dark, no shielding from solar flares and cosmic rays. Crucially, the moon has only a trace of water. Apollo proved that. Water is the key resource for human life. Find water and you have solved most of your problems.”

Liu said, “The asteroids and comets are a possibility. Some of them are rocky, some composed of water ice and other volatiles. Some of them are even rich in organic compounds. Similarly the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn are balls of frozen water. One would not so much land on an asteroid as dock with it. The gravity is very low…”

Kenzie pulled his face. “Let’s cut the Buck Rogers shit. All we ever did in space, in the end, was send a few guys to the moon for a few days at a time. Right? That and send them up to space stations in Earth orbit that were resupplied from the ground. So let’s go for the obvious options, missions we know we can achieve. What’s wrong with Mars? Mars has got water, hasn’t it? All those scrubby little probes NASA sent there found signs of water.”

“Of course,” Liu Zheng said. “There are probably aquifers, certainly permafrost. We could land near the polar caps, where water is exposed at the surface. Mars has other resources, such as carbon compounds-the air is mostly carbon dioxide.”

“Mars is no paradise,” Glemp said. “The air is too thin to allow you to venture outside without a pressure suit. It doesn’t even offer a significant shield against solar ultraviolet-the upper layers of soil are thought to be effectively sterilized because of that.”

Kenzie growled, “OK. But compared to swimming with the asteroids, Mars is a picture I can understand.”

Patrick raised a finger. “But we, our crew, would be living under domes? Would the domes include farms? What if the domes wore out, or collapsed? How many would you need for safety? I mean, I imagine you’re talking decades here-centuries-living under those domes forever …”

Glemp nodded. “A domed colony on Mars would have to contain everything needed to sustain a technological human civilization, which means farms, water systems, air recycling, factories, resource extraction and processing plants. It would have access to local resources outside itself, but would otherwise be much like a habitat adrift in space. A closed, finite system, ever at risk of complex and catastrophic failure. You could imagine running such a thing for a few years, but how long?”

They talked on, each of them coming up with examples of long-term technological continuity, such as the Dutch managing land reclaimed from the sea for centuries. But Glemp’s point was well made, Patrick thought. It was hard to imagine maintaining a machine as complex as a space station or a domed ecosphere over more than a few lifetimes.

Glemp said, “What we humans need is room. A world like Earth, big enough that it is effectively infinite in terms of resources. If Mars were Earth-like-”

“But Mars isn’t Earth-like,” Kenzie said. “Even Earth won’t be Earth-like in a few more years. So what are you saying, Jerzy? That we ought to make Mars Earth-like?”

“The word,” Jerzy Glemp said, smiling, “is terraforming. To make a world like the Earth.”

And they talked about that. Once again there were studies by NASA and various earlier thinkers on how Mars could be made into a smaller sibling of Earth, with air thick enough to breathe, and an ocean pooling in the great basin of Hellas, and pine trees braving the flanks of Mons Olympus. It quickly emerged that to build such a new world you would have to import most of the “volatiles,” in Jerzy’s term, that Mars was lacking right now. There were schemes to do that, such as by deflecting comets and crashing them into Mars’s surface..

This time it was Patrick who put a stop to the discussion. “You’re describing a program of engineering that would span the solar system, and would take centuries.”

“Millennia, probably,” Glemp murmured.

Kenzie thumped his fist onto the table. “It would be easier to terra-form Earth. ”

“And that,” Jerzy Glemp said enigmatically, “has been considered. Ask the Russians.”

Kenzie shook his head. “Let’s not go into that. ”

Patrick had heard something about mysterious behavior by the Russians in space. In the summer of the previous year, 2024, the year Moscow was abandoned, there had been a brief flurry of ICBM launches from the Russian heartlands. US intelligence analysts had triggered an alert. But the missiles had flown into space, never touching down. Some analysts thought the Russians had simply dumped their weapons stock before the flood reached it. Others had developed elaborate and exotic conspiracy theories. If anybody in the American administration knew the truth-if anybody in this room knew-they weren’t sharing it with Patrick.

Kenzie leaned back and locked his fleshy fingers behind his head. “We’re stuck, aren’t we? We agree we need a new Earth. But there are no new Earths in the solar system. We’ve exhausted our options.”

Liu Zheng said patiently, “We have exhausted Category One. Category Two remains.”

Jerzy Glemp grinned. “The stars.”

Kenzie pushed his chair back. “Christ, before we get to that I need a cigarette. I know, I know. But I quit quitting after I lost my first thousand acres of seafront property to the flood. Hey, Joe, can you rustle up more coffee?”

As they broke, Kenzie went out to smoke and the others milled around the refreshed coffeepot.

Patrick approached Liu Zheng, who stood alone, politely waiting for the coffee. “You’re a long way from home,” Patrick said tentatively.

“As are many of us,” Liu said, but he smiled.

“How did you come to be in the US?”

“When the floods came, my family was driven from our home in Shanghai. I was twenty. We lived in a refugee colony in Zhejiang province. I was able to pursue a career. Then came the draft.”

“The draft?”

“For the coming war with the Russians and Indians, over the high ground of central Asia. I did not wish to fight in such a futile and wasteful conflict. My family paid for me to come to America. I was fortunate that, thanks to the aptitude tests administered in the processing center, I came to the attention of Dr. Glemp.”

“You’re more than a commodity, man. More than a set of skills.”

“Am I? None of us is anything without land, Mr. Groundwater. Room to stand, a place to lie. If you have that, and I do not, you can do what you like with me. So it is here, just as at home.”

“Well, maybe.” But Patrick felt a new determination burn in him that that fate was not going to befall Holle. “So you have a wife at home, kids?”

“A wife,” he said. “When I fled I had to leave her. Her family would not release her to come with me. I am not sure if she wanted to anyway. Fleeing is shameful.”

“Is it? More shameful than sitting there until you’re drowned out?”

“China is different, Mr. Groundwater. We have a cultural continuity going back to what is known in Britain as the Bronze Age. We, our ancestors, have survived many calamities before, fire, flood, plague, invasion. Always the essence of China has endured. Many cannot believe that it will not be so this time, that the flood is a terminus.”

“But you think it is.”

“I am an engineer, not a climatologist. But I understand enough of the science to believe that, yes, this is the end of China, and of the world. So here I am.”

Kenzie came bustling back into the room.

As they walked back to the table Patrick asked Liu, “Do you still hope to bring your wife here someday?”

“It is a dream. But to find her in the great chaos of the flood, even if she survives, and to bring her here-it may be easier to fly to the stars, Mr. Groundwater.”