Ark

32

A lone, Grace got herself a fresh mug of coffee, and watched the oppressive wall clock.

124 DAYS 5 HOURS 55 MINUTES 1 SECOND

124 DAYS 5 HOURS 55 MINUTES 0 SECONDS

124 DAYS 5 HOURS 54 MINUTES 59 SECONDS

She was repelled by all she had seen so far of Project Nimrod. The huge engineering, the arrogant old men like Gordo Alonzo who appeared to run it, the spoiled children like Holle Groundwater who had grown up cosseted by it, while Grace and so many others had walked and worked, starved and drowned. Her instinct was still to walk away. But Ark One appeared to be the only show in town.

A girl walked into the restaurant, black, about the same age as Holle. Another Candidate, judging by her bright uniform. She walked up to Grace and dropped a handheld computer and a pen and pad of paper on the tabletop. “These are for you. I’m Venus Jenning. Holle said you wanted to see me. Is this about Harry?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You want another coffee?”

Grace shook her head. The girl walked over to the dispenser to help herself.

Grace inspected the handheld and the paper. The handheld was an antique, scuffed from years of use, and heavy, milspec maybe. The paper had a peculiar smooth sheen, and was stamped with the AxysCorp cradled-Earth logo. She knew this stuff; it had been manufactured from sea-shells on Ark Three.

She took the pen, and wrote down four names. Harry Smith. Zane Glemp. Venus Jenning. Matt Weiss.

Venus sat down. “I didn’t kill him,” she said bluntly. She faced Grace, making frank eye contact. She struck Grace as tough, clever, motivated, but reserved. “You got my name from Holle, did you?”

“I needed some kind of steer, to get started on this. You’re all strangers to me, you Candidates and your teachers, this weird little family of yours. Don’t blame Holle if she got it wrong.”

“I don’t blame Holle. You had to ask the question, she had to give you an answer. But she doesn’t know. She only knows what she saw from the outside. I never spoke about it to her, or anybody else.” She grimaced. “I was hoping the whole thing would die with Harry. Then when I found out it was murder, I realized it was all going to get opened up. So go ahead, ask me your questions.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

“Yes, I had sex with him. Look, he was my tutor, he tutored all of us from when we joined the program. I joined at eleven, myself. I wasn’t happy. I missed my family in Utah, my home. Everybody else had been in the program for years-Holle, Kelly Kenzie, people like that. I was an outsider.”

“Harry comforted you.”

“He counseled me. That was his job. That was all it was at first. I liked him and I trusted him. But it started to change, after a couple of years.”

“Change how?”

“He started talking to me about how the final selection would be made. You know there are only eighty places available on the Ark. There have been far more than eighty of us. Every so often there would be a policy change, and a whole swathe of us would go.

“Harry talked to me about my color, my race. He said that the social engineers were concerned about ethnic divisions. He said they were considering restricting the crew to all-white. Harry said this policy was being pushed by some kind of white-supremacist cabal within the project organization, but it had logic behind it in terms of crew stability, and might carry the day. All this was confidential-he said. I had to keep it quiet. Well, you can see how that would affect my chances. But Harry said he would protect me.”

“In return for sex.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that.” Her face showed anger, irritation. “He was smart. I guess he’d played fish like me before. All he wanted in return, it seemed to me then, was respect. Loyalty. Affection. Love, if you want. Look, a good teacher can win all those things.”

“So when did the sex start?”

“We were on a field trip at the Monarch Pass. I was fifteen then. It had been a bad day. Back then Utah and the Denver federal government were still fighting, sporadically. Utah had just mounted a raid in the north, and the talk was all of retaliating. Look, I was frightened for my family in Salt Lake City, they weren’t Mormon but some of them were still in the war zone. And I was frightened for myself. It wasn’t just a case of getting thrown off the program. I thought I might end up in internment, or a labor camp.”

“So Harry came to you.”

“I had a two-person tent. I shared with Cora Robles, but she was away on a night exercise. I was asleep. He unzipped my sleeping bag and got in behind me. You want the details?”

“I-”

“He made me masturbate him. I had to reach behind my back to do it.” She shrugged. “That was it. I cleaned up after he left. I always thought Cora suspected something. Maybe she could smell him, I wouldn’t be surprised. I couldn’t wait to get to the shower the next day. I was shocked by the whole thing. Not so much by the sex itself, I was no virgin. Everything he had done for me was compromised.”

“And it went on from there.”

“I didn’t see a choice. He did have real power over me. Frankly, I thought I was fighting for my life. And I didn’t care about the sex. He just disgusted me. We never had full sex by the way, he never penetrated me. He liked to touch, and for me to use my hands or my mouth. I thought he preferred boys, if you want the truth. He was using me the way he might a boy. Maybe it was the power he got off on.”

“So this went on until he died?”

“Hell, no. I guess it lasted a couple of years. Then I found out the truth about the social engineers’ ethnic selection policy.”

“Which is?”

“There isn’t one. Their mantra is genetic diversity, in the first generation and afterward. They’re more likely to select a rainbow-colored crew than a white one. I found out in fact that there was a lobby, not for a white crew, but for an entirely African-American crew, because diversity among Africans is greater than anywhere else; humanity came from Africa. So Harry lied all the way through.

“When I discovered that I kicked him in the balls, if you want to know.” Her eyes were hard at the memory. “I was old enough by then to know that I had as much power over him as he did over me. To work on the project is a prized berth, even if you aren’t a Candidate, and Harry didn’t want to become an eye-dee. He liked his comforts, did Harry. But he was going to get no more comfort from me. In the end, you know, he cried, and not just from the ball-kicking. He asked me why I’d stopped loving him. Maybe he really believed I loved him. Or maybe he was lying to himself. I don’t actually care what was going on in his head.”

“Did you kill Harry Smith?”

“No,” she said bluntly. “Why should I?”

“He abused you. He lied to you. He misused his power over you.”

“Look, there are a lot of people with too much power in this world. You must have seen that. Harry with his grubby, pathetic fumblings was no worse than many. I took control in the end. I didn’t need to kill him. He was out of my life long before he died.” She said this flatly, quite composed. “You can believe that or not. I couldn’t prove any of it. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”