Ark

3

They drove through one last town, Fairplay, where an open-air museum of old wooden structures from the mining camps had been colonized by refugees. Gordo said the museum had once been much more extensive, but wood to burn was precious.

Then they followed the signs for Hoosier Pass, driving along a well-maintained highway, and came at last into Alma. The place was overlooked by a broad peak called Mount Bross, on whose flanks sprawled a pine forest, much scarred by logging. The original town was little more than a handful of blocky buildings to either side of the road, clustered between rusting speed-limit signs. But newer, more extensive facilities had accreted around the old stock, blocks of glass and unpainted concrete.

The cars pulled off the road onto a dirt track, and stopped before one anonymous block. A slogan was neatly painted over a heavy steel door: “Genesis 11:6: NOW NOTHING WILL BE RESTRAINED FROM THEM, WHICH THEY HAVE IMAGINED TO DO.” Oddly, a child’s swing, metal and bright plastic, stood before the door.

Their driver got out and opened the door for Gordo, saluting him briskly.

Gordo had a cell phone clamped to his ear. “Hey, Holle? Glad I caught you. Would you mind coming out front? There’s somebody I want you to meet.” He put away the phone. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? But we retrieved a lot of facilities from the NASA sites in Houston. Control, comms, training centers. There’s even a small nuke reactor. We brought all this stuff all the way up to Alma, some little bitty miners’ town. And you know why? Because Alma, ten thousand, three hundred and sixty-one feet above the old sea level, is the highest incorporated municipality in the United States.”

The driver, a woman no older than Grace, said, “Actually, sir, that’s not quite true. My mother was born around here, and she said it lost out to Winter Park-”

Gordo waved that away. “All Winter Park has above Alma’s elevation are ski lifts, so the hell with that, Cooper.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Grace, at times government works in simple ways. The decision-makers wanted this facility to survive as long as possible, no matter how bad the flood gets. So where do you build? You go to the record books for the highest town in America, and that’s why a significant chunk of the single most expensive federal project since the decampment to Denver was unloaded on this little mountain town of two hundred souls. Look, I live over there-see the block in back of the Stone Church? Some of us pray in there, come Sundays.”

“ What facility? What is this place?”

The door opened. A young woman emerged, slim, not tall, pale, her red hair shaved short. She wore a lurid red and blue jumpsuit, with phones and other gadgets stuck in pockets. She was young, twenty-one, twenty-two. Blinking in the daylight she looked warily at Grace.

“Grace, this is Holle Groundwater, one of our most promising Candidates. Not that that’s saying much. Holle, meet Grace Gray-and Gray junior,” he said, clumsily pointing to Grace’s belly. “Here for selection. Maybe you could show her the ropes.”

“Sure.” Holle smiled at Grace, and offered a hand to shake. But Grace could see the smile was forced.

“You aren’t glad to see me,” Grace said bluntly.

Holle raised thin eyebrows over sea blue eyes. “It’s just we’ve got enough competition for places already, and there are only a few months left. The last thing we need is more applicants.” Her accent was soft, lilting, British maybe, unfamiliar to Grace. Then she grinned. “Of course that’s not your fault.”

“Places? Places on what?”

But there was no reply. Evidently secrecy was habitual. Holle was well fed, earnest, bright. Grace remembered how she had been at Holle’s age, still on the road, feet like leather and not a gram of fat on her body, everything she owned in a faded pack on her back.

Maybe Gordo sensed the tension between the women. He took off his cap and ran a hand over his grizzled scalp. “Listen, Grace. You’re going to need some way to prove your capabilities. Let me give you an assignment. Just now we have a crime we need solving here.”

“What kind of crime?”

“A murder,” Gordo said simply.

The word shocked Grace. She looked blankly at the block, the biblical slogan, Holle’s intent, competent-looking face. “I don’t know anything about investigating crimes. We had cops in Walker City, and on the Ark Nathan’s guards-”

“You can start by talking to Holle, here. Find out how it all started for her. I mean, you’ve been in the program since you were six years old-right, kid?”

Holle smiled. “According to my father, since I was conceived.”

“It will be a way for you to figure out what we’re up to here.” Gordo grinned. “Yeah. Solve the crime, and earn your place. Two birds with one stone. I don’t often have ideas, but when I do they’re generally doozies. Now I got work to do, not least organizing the retrieval of Nathan Lammockson’s seed cache from his sinking ship. But before I go-” Gordo fished in a jacket pocket, and produced a key ring with a bauble pendant. “I hand these out to the government suits, and anybody else I think needs some inspiration. What we’re working toward.” He put the little artifact in Grace’s hand.

She raised the key ring. The pendant was a translucent sphere, bluish, maybe a centimeter across. Embedded within it were two silver splinters, connected by a bit of thread. “What is it?”

“Ask Holle. Catch you later, Groundwater.” He strode off back toward the cars, and once more Grace was abandoned with a stranger.

“This way-Grace, is it?” Holle led Grace into the building.

Inside, the block was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace of facilities aboard Lammockson’s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room.

The two of them didn’t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world-continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green-with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labeled with a disc. Gary’s amateur education program had always heavily favored science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.

Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on the Ark, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost forever.

“This is at the heart of what we do,” Holle said.

“What is this place?”

“Mission Control. We’re running a simulation right now-”

“And this?” Grace held up the key ring globe.

“Our spaceship.” Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. “Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We’ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I’ll tell you how we got started here.”