Ark

71

Wilson stepped to the center of the stage and bellowed, “Shut up! I’m speaker, remember, so stop talking.” That raised an ironic laugh, and broke the mood a bit. Wilson said, “One at a time. Elle.” He pointed to Elle Strekalov, standing by on a catwalk. “You worked with Venus on all this stuff. What have you got to say?”

“That I don’t agree,” Elle called down. Holle immediately wondered if Wilson had called her first knowing she would dissent from Venus. “Maybe we can make a go of it here. Venus, you said yourself that there’s at least some equatorial land we could colonize. Otherwise we could consider strings of rafts-”

Paul Shaughnessy hooted. “Rafts? If we wanted to live on rafts, we could have stayed on fucking Earth.”

“You illegals should have,” somebody called back, and there was a rumble of anger, the usual tensions barely suppressed.

“One at a time,” Wilson growled. “Go on, Elle.”

“OK, not rafts. We need to get down there and understand how the native life survives-because survive it does, we can see that. For instance, trees. Because the ice melts off annually the depth of any freezing would be shallow, maybe two or three meters. You could imagine a tree with long roots tapping into water and nutrients deep down beneath the frozen surface. Needle leaves like a conifer that it never sheds. Some kind of transpiration adaptation for the dry months. We could gen-eng trees from Earth to live that way,” Elle insisted. “As for animals, their crucial feature is mobility. We could develop migratory herds from our stock. The Belt especially is a north-south corridor which the herds could use to escape the aridity and the freezing, going wherever the climate was temperate in a given month.”

Masayo called, “And what about the people? Will we have to migrate too?”

“No,” Elle said defiantly. “We could seek shelters where we could over winter and over summer, ride out the extremes. Caves, maybe.”

“Caves?” Paul Shaughnessy called. “Rafts, now caves?”

Elle pressed on, “Look, this planet is not uninhabitable. There are places where the growing season is longer than it was on Earth-though you have to wait that much longer for the next season to come around. With time, with a program of genetic modification, of continent-wide seeding, of building or adapting suitable shelters, and maybe ultimately a degree of terraforming-”

Venus said, “We won’t have the resources to achieve all that, even assuming it’s possible. We’ll be fighting for survival from the day we land.”

Wilson said, “Anybody else?”

Holle waved her own hand. “Venus-you said we couldn’t stay here, we had to go on. So where do we go?”

Venus smiled. “Thank you, Holle. Look-during the interstellar cruise we extended the deep sky survey begun on Earth, searching for habitable planets as far as we can see. We thought it was one of the greatest legacies we could leave for the next generation. And that’s how we came up with this-an alternative destination.” Flamboyantly, she snapped her fingers.

The big image of Earth II dissolved, to reveal a glum red star, and a planet orbiting it, glistening with oceans, gray-black in the crimson light. The bloody glow of the star filled the improvised auditorium.

“Earth III,” Venus announced. “Or at least I think it could be. The best attainable prospect in our survey. And far more habitable than Earth II. I’ve lodged relevant data in the archive.”

“Crap,” Wilson said. “That’s a Krypton! Gordo always swore he wouldn’t send us to a Krypton. You’re just digging up those old arguments from ten years ago.”

Venus said doggedly, “Yes, that’s true. Yes, it’s not a clone of Earth. Yes, we had these arguments back in Gunnison. But-look! Most of the stars in the Galaxy aren’t like Sol-two-thirds of them are M-class, like this baby. If we can learn to live here, we can live anywhere.”

“Bullshit!” somebody cried, and the mass arguments broke out again, the angry shouts, the finger-pointing.

Holle herself was swept along by Venus’s rhetoric. But of course there was one crucial fact that Venus hadn’t yet offered.

Grace Gray put her hand up. “Venus-what star is this?”

“It’s in the constellation of Lepus, the hare, as seen from Earth. Near Orion. Not naked-eye visible; it doesn’t have a name, only a catalog number.”

“And how far away is it?”

Venus took a breath. “It’s further out, further from Earth. Another ninety light-years.”

And at three times light speed that translated to another thirty years’ journeying.

More outrage. “Thirty more years in this stinking tank?”

Abruptly Kelly stepped forward, to the edge of the catwalk she shared with Holle. The way she moved made Holle’s heart sink. This was her moment, and she was seizing it.

Wilson looked reluctant, but he nodded to give Kelly the floor.

“Let’s cut through this,” she said. “This business of Earth III is a distraction, a chimera. The solution’s obvious. If it takes more effort for us to survive here than to have stayed on Earth and live on rafts, we should never have come, it wasn’t worthwhile.”

Wilson prompted, “And so-”

“And so we should go home.” She glared around, as if daring anybody here to shout her down. “We don’t travel on and on. We go home, to Earth.”

Venus said, “That’s impossible. Go home to what? Next year Everest drowns.”

“We’ll cope with whatever we find. The Ark was designed to sustain us for fifteen years, as a margin; I’m sure we can extend that to cover the seven years of superluminal travel it would take to get us back. Zane, we have enough antimatter stock to re-create the warp bubble, don’t we? We can go home. We must! We tried our hardest, we came all this way, it didn’t work. This is no place for us, for our children. Let’s take them home, and see what we can build on Earth.”

A riot of angry arguments broke out again. Holle, utterly shocked, tried to look into Kelly’s soul, through that hard, ambitious face.

Wilson faced Kelly, his expression thunderous. “That didn’t come out of the blue, did it? How long have you been planning this little stroke?”

She smiled back at him, her eyes dead. “And how long did you spend planning to topple me, while we were still sharing a bed? Don’t judge me by your standards, Wilson.” She turned and walked away from him, and was instantly surrounded by a chattering gaggle of supporters.

Wilson, arms folded, intense frustration creasing his face, had no choice but to let the furious debate continue, the shouts echoing from the stripped-bare hull walls.