Ark

72

Eventually Wilson broke up the session. The Ark wouldn’t run itself while they argued, and there were children to be fed.

But, thinking on his feet, Wilson carved up the crew into study groups, to look in more detail at the various options. How survivable would Earth II actually be? Could they really make a home on Venus’s Earth III, and would the ship and its crew last out the even longer journey to get there? Or if the ship survived seven years back to Earth, what were they to do on arrival at an ocean world? He said he would reconvene the forum at first watch in the morning, and maybe they could come to a more considered decision about the future.

Holle made sure that her own areas of responsibility were covered, that nothing was going to break down or burst into flames during the night watch. Then, grabbing some food, she moved from group to group where they huddled in corners of Halivah, and talked and talked, some arguing over handhelds or drawing down data from the ship’s archive. Some went back to Seba, but most stayed here in Halivah. As the hours wore on, as the arc lights were reduced to their nighttime dim glow, the talking continued, a murmuring that filled the hull.

People were responding emotionally, Holle perceived, not to the science, the facts. Some just longed to go home. Masayo Saito, missing his child, was in that group, and Holle suspected the Shaughnessys and others of the illegals and gatecrashers, who had never expected to join the crew of an interstellar spaceship in the first place, felt the same way. It was possible that was in Kelly’s heart too, some kind of wish to put things right with the child she’d left behind. But Holle was pretty sure that simple revenge over Wilson was a motivation too.

Others, unable to stand the idea of more years of their lives lost inside these tin cans, wanted only to get out-to finish the journey, to set down here, however hard a shore Earth II might prove to be. People with kids tended to feel that way, not wishing to doom their children to a lifetime in a tank.

Then there were those who were entranced by Venus’s visionary rhetoric. Why not go on and grab the whole Galaxy, rather than succumb to the exhausting, perhaps lethal, trap of Earth II? That was the way Holle’s own heart was drawn. But she quailed at the thought of thirty more years in these metal hulls. She was thirty-two years old. She tried to grasp the meaning of herself still shipbound at sixty, but could not.

And then there was the brute politics of the Ark, as they had been festering for a decade already, Kelly and Wilson drawing people apart like iron filings to opposing magnetic poles.

Holle didn’t sleep that night, and nor did many others. Yet the hours seemed brief, the arguments still unresolved, before Wilson drew them together again in the improvised auditorium on Deck Eight.

Thandie’s crystal ball was inert this morning, a lifeless piece of engineering. In the bright lights of the arc lamps people looked tired, worn out, subdued.

Wilson glared around, hands on hips. Holle saw that he had handled this situation about as well as he could have. He had given people time to cool down, and now, in the morning, the universe seemed a colder and more rational place. Wilson’s leadership had its flaws, but he did display a brute understanding of human nature.

“I don’t want to waste time on this,” he began. “Let’s try to make a decision, and get behind it and start implementing it. Everybody agree with that? OK. We have three options on the table, as far as I see. One. Stay here, colonize Earth II. Two. Take the Ark back to Earth. Three. Go on to Venus’s Earth III, out in Lepus. Do I have that right? So let’s choose. We’ll start with a show of hands, and I hope to Christ we get an easy majority for one option or the other.” He checked a monitor. “Can you guys over in Seba see me? OK then. Show me your hands for Earth II… And Earth… And Earth III. Shit.”

There was a ripple of amusement among the crew, black humor. It was a split with significant support for all three options.

“Plan B,” Wilson called now. “Let’s separate into groups. Then we’ll get an accurate count and see where we go from there. If you want Earth II, come down and gather over here. Earth, to my left. Earth III, to my right…”

Alarm bells rang in Holle’s head. She had the immediate fear that if Wilson made the division of their opinions into a physical split, the group might never be put back together. But it was too late. She could do nothing but move to represent her own choice.

She stood with those, led by Venus, who wanted to go on, to Earth III. Wilson himself walked this way. Grace Gray joined them, with Helen, and Theo Morell. So did Zane, which wasn’t a surprise to Holle, and Doc Wetherbee, which was.

Holle said, “So you’re staying with your warp drive, Zane?”

“Not just that.” There was a gleam in his eye, a kind of manic calculation. Holle thought this was Zane 3, the amnesiac shell left behind when his other alters had split off.

“What, then?”

“There’s nothing outside the ship. Nothing! If these others step out they will cease to exist. I have no choice but to stay aboard.”

Wetherbee gave Holle a grim smile. “How could I leave my star patient behind?”

Venus faced Wilson. “Didn’t think you’d join us, Wilson, after what you had to say about ‘Kryptons.’”

Wilson grinned. “Base selfish calculation. Look around. In here, in this ship, I’m a big man. Down on a planet I’ll be nothing. I don’t want to be a farmer. And if I go back to Earth I’ll probably be prosecuted. No, I’ll stick to what I’ve got.”

Holle glanced around to see how the other groups were forming. The Earth faction was unsurprisingly led by Kelly Kenzie, with Masayo Saito at her side, and a number of the other illegals, including the Shaughnessys. The would-be colonists of Earth II included Elle and her partner Thomas Windrup, and Cora Robles, an expectant mother. Counting quickly she guessed the numbers were forty-plus adults with their children in Venus’s Earth III group, the largest, around nineteen in Kelly’s Earth group, and maybe fifteen in the Earth II camp.

When the sorting-out was done, Wilson stepped forward. “Now what? It seems to me the obvious strategy is to eliminate the third-place choice. Then, depending on the numbers-”

“Like hell,” Kelly Kenzie snapped. She stepped forward and faced up to Wilson. “I can see where that would lead. There’s no way I’m submitting to you and your manipulation. Not anymore, not over this.”

“Oh, yeah? So, on your say-so, we just bin our process? You’re full of shit, Kelly. This has nothing to do with Earth. This is all because of me, isn’t it? You and me. Gordo Alonzo would call this a mutiny.”

“Gordo isn’t here. You call it what you fucking like.”

They were in each other’s faces. Holle saw Wilson’s hard-faced young men taking their positions around the chamber. Suddenly the crisis was here.

And Zane walked into the center of the deck. His stride was bold, and he was actually grinning.

“Strewth,” Doc Wetherbee murmured to Holle. “I hope this is Jerry.”

Wilson glared at Zane. “You got something to say, nut job?”

Zane glanced around, gradually gathering the group’s attention to himself. “I always knew this would be the outcome. This indecision. We’re like a bunch of kids. We’ll never agree on anything between us. And so while you were all spending the night discussing how to grow trees on Earth II, I worked out the technical aspects of the most obvious option.”

“Which is?”

“We split up,” Zane said brightly.

“That’s insane,” Wilson said immediately.

Zane boldly jabbed a finger at his chest. “No. You just don’t want to see your kingdom split into three. Technically, we can do it. We have massive redundancy. We can separate the Arks, one for Earth, one for the stars. We can use our spares to build a separate warp generator! And we have four space-to-surface shuttle gliders. We can land the colonists of Earth II in one of those, leaving one for the return to Earth, and two for use at Earth III. It will take time and effort, but we can do this…”

There were immediate objections, particularly about the compromise to the basic redundancy design strategy this would entail-no more spare parts, if they were used to build another ship. And the social engineers’ plans for genetic diversity would be trashed; Holle had no idea whether even forty would be enough for a viable colony without lethal inbreeding. Every instinct in her told her this was wrong, that three smaller groups would be much more vulnerable than one.

But she saw, too, that Zane’s proposal had been greeted with immediate approval. If they split up, Kelly would be able to get away from Wilson. Thomas Windrup would be free of Jack Shaughnessy and his scars. Their future, and maybe the future of all mankind, was going to be determined by the fact that after a decade on the Ark they were all sick of each other.

Mike Wetherbee growled, “You realize what’s happened. The craziest man on the ship just determined our whole damn future. And he did it by turning us all into a kind of mirror of his own fractured self. Jeez! He should be giving us therapy, not the other way around.”