Ark

59

She followed Zane to his small, solitary cabin. It wasn’t exactly far.

He seemed surprised to see her, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. But he didn’t object when she asked if she could come in and talk. Her nervousness increased as she followed him inside, and she wondered how she was going to broach the subject she wanted to discuss.

But she was distracted by his cabin. It was nothing but a box of partitions. Everybody else had personalized their cabins one way or another. Holle’s small room had her personal stuff, her bits of clothing, her images of her father and mother, her Angel. And if you had a kid, like Grace Gray, you had a spontaneous homemaker on your hands. There was none of this about Zane’s space. The furniture was functional, just a bed, a couple of chairs, a cupboard. There was work stuff here, an elaborate workstation and some precious hardcopy manuals on relativity and warp drive and space engineering. But, aside from heaps of clothes on the floor, that was it. This was just somewhere Zane existed, rather than lived.

She sat on a chair; she had to clear off a heap of socks first. Zane sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded on his knees. Uncertain of his mood, uneasy about the space he lived in, she became even more unsure about the wisdom of what she was planning to do. But, overwhelmed by her own nervousness and self-consciousness, she went ahead anyway.

“It’s this way, Zane,” she said.

His head turned toward her.

“I’ve been thinking. Look, you know the nature of the mission-the social design. The crew was chosen to be as genetically diverse as possible, so that when we have kids they have the best chance of avoiding inbreeding. This was drummed into us at the Academy. But that means we all have a duty. We need to become parents. It’s our responsibility to ensure that all our genes join the pool of the colonists on Earth II.”

“So why are you telling me this?”

She bit her lip. Did she really have to spell it out? She began to suspect that something was wrong here, something beyond her own nervousness. But she pressed on. “Zane, you’ve seen people pairing up, especially since Jupiter. The rumor is Kelly and Wilson are a couple now.”

He frowned again. “Wilson. The external systems engineer.”

“Yeah,” she said, confused by his response. “That Wilson, Wilson Argent who you grew up with… The truth is, Zane, I left Mel behind on Earth. Well, you know that. And I can’t see myself falling in love with anybody else on this rust-bucket. And, frankly, I can’t see you pairing up with anybody either.”

He looked baffled.

She felt concern, and a spasm of affection. She crossed to him, kneeled on the floor, and took his hands. “Zane, we may not be soul mates. But we’ve known each other most of our lives. We’ve worked together for the same goal. And we always supported each other. I remember how you waited for me on my first day at the Academy, and got yourself in trouble as a result. I wondered if-I mean, it doesn’t apply now, not until we get to Earth II. But maybe we should think about having kids together. You and me. There. So what do you say?”

He raised his head and for the first time looked straight at her. “Do you believe in the warp bubble?”

She settled back on her ankles. “What did you say?”

“Do you believe in it?” He glanced at his workstation, and laughed, and spoke rapidly. “I mean, I’ve studied the theory. But it’s impossible! Basic physical principles would have to be violated for it to work. Aside from obvious issues of causality and the breaking of the weak, strong and dominant energy conditions, the vacuum stress-energy tensor of a quantized scalar field in an Alcubierre spacetime diverges if the ship exceeds the speed of light. Diverges! That would lead to the formation of a horizon, which, which…” His voice cracked, and he stopped speaking, as if he had run down. “I can show you the mathematics.”

“Zane? I don’t understand what you’re saying. The warp works — we’re in flight. You worked on the design solutions, with Liu Zheng and the others, which got us to this point…” As she had been holding his hands, his coverall sleeves had ridden up his arms, and she saw a pattern of marks on the skin of each forearm, small cross-shapes. She touched them cautiously. Some were healed-over scabs, other were more livid. It looked as if he had been jabbing the point of a Phillips screwdriver into his flesh.

“I can’t have kids with you.” He laughed, but it was a ghastly, hollow sound.

She looked up. “Why not?”

“I’m dirty. You must know that.”

“Dirty?”

“It’s all in the journal.” He pulled away his hands and tapped at his workstation. A kind of diary came up, text and short video clips, Zane’s own talking head. “He tells it all there.”

“Who does?”

“Zane. He says he’s going to kill himself, in some of these clips. Like suicide notes.”

“He… Zane, that’s you. Is that why you’re harming yourself now?”

“What do you mean?”

She took his right arm, turned it over firmly and pointed at the screwdriver marks. “Here, and here.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember doing that. I guess I wasn’t here.”

“Then where were you?”

“I’m faking it, you know,” he said abruptly. He laughed again. “That’s the truth.” He stared at her. “I don’t know who you are. None of you. I listen to you speaking, and I make notes of what you call each other, and I check for surnames and so forth on the system. I make notes, and try to remember. It’s been that way since Jupiter.”

She stared at him. “Then what do you remember?”

“I woke up,” he said.

“Woke up?”

The words came tumbling out now. Evidently he hadn’t spoken of this with anybody else. “I was in a pressure suit. I was floating in space. I was surrounded by the warp generator, the collider. He was with me.”

“Who?”

“The external systems engineer.”

“Wilson?”

“Yes. There was a shimmering around me, a visual effect, the stars. Wilson grabbed me and started slapping me on the back. Big gloved hands. He said we’d done it, that I’d done it.”

Holle remembered. She had been in Seba watching this very scene on 13th March 2044, the day the warp generator had first been activated.

“I didn’t know what I’d done,” Zane whispered.

“Zane-you’d initiated warp. It was everything you’d been working for.”

“Wilson took me on an inspection tour of the collider torus. I just followed his lead. When I got back inside, everybody was smiling and nodding and shaking my hand, and I just smiled and nodded back. I didn’t even know their names. When I got to a workstation I looked up the relativity. I understood that, it’s so elementary. And I studied the warp generator, so called. It can’t work!”

“You don’t remember anything before warp day?”

“And I have blanks.”

“Blanks?”

“Other times since then that I don’t remember. It’s like I just wake up again.” He rubbed his face. “But I’m not getting much sleep.”

She smiled, and backed off. She needed to get to Mike Wetherbee, she realized. She needed to tell him that their only warp engineer might be schizoid. And so much for having his babies.

“Just wait here, Zane. Will you promise me that? We need to talk some more.” Leaving him sitting on the bed, she turned and fled.