Ark

48

Grace Gray’s favorite part of each day on the Ark was the end of it.

Mission Control back at Alma had imposed a three-shift system on the crew in their twin hulls, so that Seba slept one shift, then Halivah, then both were awake. That way at least half the crew was awake and functioning at any given moment, increasing the chances of the Ark as a whole surviving any sudden calamity.

But there was no real privacy in either hull, aside from doors on the lavatories, though some kind of partitioning-off of the big volumes had been promised for the long interstellar cruise phase. That meant that you had to learn to sleep as if in a huge dormitory, with others above and below you-their groans and snores all too audible, their couches visible through the mesh of the deck-and you would see ghostly figures swimming back and forth, silent and weightless as bubbles.

But still Grace had learned to relish the moments when she strapped herself loosely in her couch, inside a cocoon of sleeping bag and blanket. This was the best of microgravity, away from the petty irritations of the day when you would find yourself drifting through other people’s garbage, or clouds of loose stuff, screws and plastic scraps and bits of sealant, all evidence of the hasty construction of the ship. In your couch you floated, as if you were in the most comfortable bed on Earth.

And just as the sleep period began the ubiquitous cameras, mounted on wall stanchions, turned themselves away. Earth didn’t need to watch you sleep, either Mission Control or the wider public who, Gordo assured them, otherwise watched their every move, as if the ship was a reality show designed to distract them from the awful truth of the flood. The ratings were high, Gordo said. Grace believed the surveillance was inhibiting conflict aboard the ship, so she didn’t object to it, but it was pleasant when the electronic eyes turned away.

And then Kelly Kenzie would make her final round, a visual inspection that all was well. This was a good instinct by Kelly, Grace thought, a way for her to bond with her crew. Maybe it would make up for rash actions like her planned gun raid. As she passed, Kelly had the ship’s systems dip the hull lights down to their emergency settings, one by one. Thus the hull grew dark in sections as she floated by.

Once, when Grace was with Walker City, she had been no older than twelve or thirteen, the okies had stayed for six months working on a construction project near Abilene, Texas. One of her companions, an English-man called Michael Thurley, had grown up a Catholic, and when he had discovered a small, pretty Catholic church in the city he had taken to attending Mass there. A few times Grace had sat with him. She particularly liked the end of the service, when an altar boy would go around the church snuffing out candles. That was what Kelly’s quiet daily procession was like, as if they were children sleeping in a vast church where the lights were snuffed out one by one. Grace drifted off to sleep thinking of those days, of Michael and Gary Boyle, and their tents and their portable gadgets and all the walking, and the church in Texas where the lights went out one by one.

She was woken by a stab of pain in her belly, and a surge of dampness between her legs. Her waters had broken. It was three a.m., Alma time.