Ark

62

Back in Seba, Kelly had started her day at her table on Deck Eight with her usual series of rolling meetings. Holle showed up to report on what was going on over in Halivah regarding Meg. She settled at the table with a coffee, knowing that she’d have to wait her turn to speak.

Kelly looked tired, sleepless. The thousand-day festival, because it was forcing all the Arks’ factions and rivals to come together to cooperate on a single event, was causing Kelly and her senior people even more grief than usual. But right now Kelly and Masayo Saito were listening to Elle Strekalov complaining about Kelly’s proposed new procreation rules.

A mother went by with a little kid, not yet two years old. Kelly pointed grandly. “Look at that! Sue Turco with her brat by Joe Antoniadi-what did they call her, Steel? — and the rumor has it she’s got another one on the way already. You know the basic rule: we aren’t supposed to be pupping until we reach Earth II. It’s only another four, five years to wait. The only kids on this ship should be the ones that came aboard in utero, like little Helen Gray. But there’s been a steady trickle of pregnancies. People are having babies because they want them.”

Masayo said, “Doc Wetherbee says procreation is a natural reaction after a trauma, like how the birth rate rises after a war. The flood, the whole launch process, the severing from everything we knew-that was traumatic enough, surely.”

“Or maybe they’re just bored,” Holle suggested.

“Why ever they’re doing it? That’s not the policy. That’s not what the social engineers’ maximal genetic diversity rules say. That’s not what Ship’s Law says.” Kelly emphasized her words by thumping the tabletop with her open hand.

Elle Strekalov broke in, impatient. “But that’s got nothing to do with my issue. It’s the talk of a ballot for second children that’s caused the problem for me.”

Holle, new to the conversation, asked, “What’s wrong, Elle?”

Elle smiled at her, looking tired. “It’s Jack Shaughnessy. This new policy of Kelly’s has got Jack ‘sniffing around’ me again. But that’s how Thomas puts it. I won’t have anything to do with Jack, any more than I would before. Thomas doesn’t believe it. He thinks Kelly’s policy will open the door for Jack.”

Kelly shook her head. “It’s not my policy. Right now it’s just the recommendation of the task group I asked to consider the problem. Look, we have a conflict between two obligations. We have to try to ensure maximal genetic diversity in the next generation. But at the same time, thanks to the presence of the gatecrashers and illegals, we have a gender imbalance on the Ark…”

There were more men than women. Three gay couples, two male and one female, eased the burden slightly, although there was another issue in that the gays would also be expected to contribute to the gene pool of the next generation; the social engineers had at least bequeathed guidelines as to how that should be handled. But the guidelines were no help with the basic issue of imbalance.

Elle said hotly, “I have the right to choose who my life partner is going to be.”

“Yes, you do,” Kelly said patiently. “But the excess men have rights too. And we as a group have an obligation to ensure we preserve as wide a gene pool for the future as we can.”

“So I have to spread my legs for some illegal?”

Holle laughed. “Nicely put.”

“Artificial insemination is possible,” Kelly said to Elle. “You wouldn’t have to sleep with anybody.”

Masayo said mildly, “Sometimes I can’t believe we have these conversations.”

Elle said, “But I would still have some illegal’s brat in my womb. That’s how Thomas will see it for sure.”

Kelly said with a kind of brittle patience, “We get this kind of issue all the time, Elle, you know that. Your right to control your own body conflicts with the rights and responsibilities of the group as a whole. The proposal is that each of us women should choose a second partner from among the men involved, that we each have children by more than one man. If you can’t choose, there will be a ballot-”

Elle snorted. “Rigged like every ballot on this tub since the day we launched.”

“There’ll be no rigging. We’re all going to have to face this, Elle. All the women, all the men come to that. We’ll have to separate partnerships for companionship from partnerships for procreation. The former is entirely your choice, and the mission has no need to interfere with that, but the second has to have some direction from the crew as a whole, to fulfill our wider obligation. It’s the only way a crew this small can maintain genetic diversity. We’re in a unique situation which-”

“Oh, I’ve had enough of this.” Elle stood, knocking back her chair; it fell languidly in the half-gravity. “You always come out with this super-ethical bullshit. Kelly. You never focus on the human being in front of you. Well, I’m going to talk to Venus in the cupola. She won’t let you go ahead with this. And maybe she’ll do something to keep Thomas and Jack apart before they kill each other.” She stalked off.

Kelly sighed, and sipped water from a covered tumbler. “Christ, Christ.”

“I’ll have a word with Jack Shaughnessy,” Holle said. “Just quietly. Try to make sure he keeps his distance from Elle.”

“I’ve seen no signs he’s still after her. That fight with Thomas seems to have convinced Jack that Elle wants to stay where she is. This whole thing is probably just Thomas’s paranoia. Be careful, Holle, say the wrong thing and you might make things worse.”

“We’re going to get this kind of conflict over and over,” Masayo said.

“I know,” Kelly said. “All the way to Earth II. But what else can we do? This is the nature of the mission. It wouldn’t be half so difficult if we were crewed by the full complement of Candidates as we should have been, with a proper sex balance and training in the issues.”

Masayo rolled his eyes.

Kelly asked Holle, “So what about the missing kid over in Halivah?”

“Wilson said he’d call if there was any news.”

“Damn kids,” Kelly said. “They’re so weird. You know, I’ve seen them catch spiders and flies and make pets of them. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d think they’d go crazy, growing up in a bottle like this. But I suppose they’ve never known any different. What about Cora?”

Holle summarized what had happened, how she and Wilson had had to help get Cora out of the booth. “I asked Doc Wetherbee to take a look at her. I don’t think she’s even been eating properly.”

“It’s not food that’s her problem,” Kelly said. “It’s her addiction to the HeadSpaces. You know, we excluded alcohol and every drug we could think of, and yet still we’re raising addicts. There’s always some damn thing.” She looked at Holle sharply. “What’s your opinion about Theo? Do you think he is dealing in HeadSpace credits like Wilson says?”

“I think it’s possible,” Holle said carefully. “But Theo’s naive. Or he was when he came on board the ship. It may be he doesn’t understand what he’s doing, the moral implications, the effect on other people.”

Masayo laughed. “So he’s inventing a drug-dealing trade from first principles. God bless human nature.”

Kelly shook her head. “You know, I’ve been doing some research in the archive on prisons. There you have people marking their territory, picking fights over food, swapping stories about dreams for lack of stimulation, pushing drugs. Just like us. Is that all we managed to build here, a prison between the stars?”

Masayo Saito said, “Grace Gray’s mother was held hostage in Barcelona for years. Chained to radiators in cellars. Grace herself was the result of a rape by one of the guards, and was born in captivity. An unbelievable story. And yet, are we all hostages on this Ark, hostage to the ambitions of the mission designers?”

Holle said, “I’d say they were our ambitions too.”

“God only knows,” Masayo said.

“Sometimes I think that’s the problem,” Kelly said. “God, I mean. The social engineers always tried to keep God out of our lives. The Ark is a mission of a state that was deliberately secular, a state that was trying to be a reverse image of the Mormon state in Utah it was at war with. And despite the gatecrashers and illegals, they succeeded in that goal, didn’t they? Many people on the Ark are religious, but we aren’t a religious community. Sometimes I wish we were, that we had a common mission ordained by one god or another. A monastery would surely be a better social model than a prison.”

Masayo shook his head. “Too late for that, Kelly. I think we left God behind back on Earth.”

Holle stood. “I need to go. Doc Wetherbee says he wants to review Zane’s therapy.”

“Well, that’s also a priority. And keep me informed about the progress on the kid. OK, Masayo, what’s next?”