Ark

78

The shuttle from the Ark was a spark, falling down the midday sky. Thandie hadn’t seen such a sight in years. As it fell the spark became a glider, white and fat. It banked once over the raft. Then it came drifting down to a cautious belly-down landing that threw up a huge plume of water.

This was literally the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the lives of most of the inhabitants of the raft. The children jumped and clapped. Some of the older rafters, like Boris’s parents, Manco and Ana, were more fearful, as if this technological irruption would perturb the calm, relatively safe lives they had carefully constructed for themselves.

The shuttle came to rest only a couple of hundred meters from the raft, an impressive bit of positioning after a journey of forty-two light-years. The downed craft looked harmless enough, bobbing in the gentle oceanic swell, with its upper hull covered with a blanket of insulation, blackened by charring in places, and the Stars and Stripes and the words UNITED STATES still visible as the faintest trace of faded paintwork. But Thandie, operating under instructions from a radio link to Kelly Kenzie on the flight deck, made sure that nobody approached the craft for some hours. The black shield that covered the whole of the shuttle’s underside was still ferociously hot from atmospheric friction, and the crew were busy venting gases and other toxins from attitude control systems and fuel cells.

It was the end of the day before the shuttle’s hatch swung open at last. The raft kids, some as young as four or five, dived into the water and went splashing over, towing plastic cables.

A pale face emerged from the craft’s hatch, a spindly figure standing uncertainly in blue coveralls. Bundles were thrown out onto the ocean, packages that popped open to become bright orange lifeboats, to more gasps of delight from the children. The crew began unloading the shuttle, lowering down bits of equipment first, and then their youngest children, four little ones wrapped up in bulky flotation jackets. Then the adults and older children came out, nineteen of them climbing down the shuttle’s short flight of steps. These skinny, pale creatures from space had to be helped aboard their own boats by naked brown raft children. It was like a meeting between separate species, Thandie thought. The raft children swarmed aboard the shuttle, hunting for souvenirs.

The lifeboats set off across the water toward the raft. A couple of the occupants leaned over the side and heaved, miserably sick. One little boy from the shuttle was wailing, “Let me go back! Oh, let me go back!”

At the raft, the shuttle crew had to be helped once more across the short distance between the bobbing lifeboats and the more stately raft. They all had trouble standing, especially the children who panted hard, straining miserably at the thick air.

Thandie had arranged for all twenty-three to be housed together in a hastily evacuated shack, where they were laid down on pallets of blankets padded with dried seaweed. She came to see them a few times that first night, as Manco and Ana led the rafters’ efforts to make their strange visitors comfortable, bringing them cups of rainwater and bowls of fish soup. It was like a hospital ward; the stink of vomit and excrement was dense. The raft children looked in, fascinated and fearful, but were driven back by the stink. Thandie had yet to learn what had become of the Ark, and why only half of it, and much less than half the crew, had returned home.

The next morning, at Kelly’s request, she and two others were brought out and sat in a row of couches scavenged from the shuttle, so they could talk with Thandie.

Thandie sat before her guests on the raft floor in a yoga posture, back erect, legs crossed, hands resting on her knees.

The space travelers sat out in the open in their couches, tipped back, covered in blankets. Their faces were ghostly pale. They all gratefully accepted cups of hot seaweed tea from Manco. The sea was choppy, and they seemed to cower from a sky where thick gray clouds bubbled. A handful of raft kids hung around them, staring wide-eyed. Thandie ignored the kids, confident they would soon go swimming and forget all about the returned astronauts.

Thandie remembered Kelly Kenzie as one of the brightest buttons among the Candidates. She had gone to space as a girl in her early twenties. Now she had returned as a woman of forty-one, too thin, too pale, her blond hair streaked with gray. She was still beautiful, but she had a face that showed the years she had lived, the choices she had made. Thandie gathered that one of the children from the shuttle was Kelly’s. The other adults were both men. One was another Candidate who Thandie vaguely remembered; he was called Mike Wetherbee. The second, a bulky forty-some-year-old called Masayo Saito, she didn’t recognize at all. Kelly introduced him as her partner, father of her kid, and said he had a military background.

Thandie twisted her head to the right, breathed in to center, turned to the left breathing out, back to center and breathed in. “Forgive my old lady stretching routine. So how’s your health this morning?”

Kelly grunted. “Mike here is the doctor.”

Mike Wetherbee rubbed his chest, apparently having trouble breathing himself. “I expected problems with the gravity,” he said. “Brittle bones, problems with fluid balance, all of that. Why, we’ve got children in there, including Kelly’s little Eddie, who were born in free fall. And I was expecting us to be prone to viruses and bugs, and I shot us all full of antibiotics and antihistamines before we cracked the shuttle. What I wasn’t expecting was this damn breathlessness.” He had a broad, nasal Australian accent, not much diluted by the years.

“I guess I should have warned you. The air is thicker than it used to be-we’re under greater pressure than the old sea-level value-but oxygen is depleted.”

Kelly nodded, cautiously, as if her very head was too heavy for her neck. “We got some spectrometer readings from orbit. I didn’t believe it.”

“The world isn’t as fecund as it used to be. Not yet anyhow. When the flood came we had extinction events on land, of course, but in the sea too. No more nutrients washing down from the land. The productivity of the biosphere as a whole has gone off a cliff, and as a consequence so has the oxygen content of the atmosphere-down to sixteen percent, according to some of the hearthers, down five points. That’s equivalent to three kilometers’ altitude before the flood.”

“Great,” Mike Wetherbee said. “We drowned the world, but I still get to feel like I climbed a mountain.”

“Worse than that, the air’s warmer than it used to be. You’re panting, trying to keep cool, and you miss the oxygen even more.”

“Warmer,” Masayo Saito said. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than the others, and he spoke in short staccato bursts. “Greenhouse gases?”

“Yes. All those drowned, rotting rainforests. We do think the flood is finally tailing off, however, at last. It seems to be heading for an asymptote of about eighteen kilometers above the 2012 datum. Which means Earth will have an ocean of around five times the volume of the pre-flood value, which in turn matches some of my models of subterranean sea release, as I called it. You can see that even now I am obsessed with academic priority.”

Kelly smiled. “I worked with guys like Liu Zheng, at the Academy. I can appreciate that.”

“Yeah. I survived to deliver history’s most almighty ‘I told you so.’ Some consolation. We might be heading toward a new climatic equilibrium out there somewhere in parameter space. There’s a model circulating on the hearth, called the Boyle model, and that old plodder would love to know he’s been immortalized.” But none of them had heard of Gary Boyle, or of the hearth, a loose interconnected community of aging climatologists and oceanographers, and she got blank looks. “Boyleworld will have very high carbon dioxide content, very low oxygen. Extreme heating will drive even more violent storms, which could mix up the ocean layers and thereby promote life, and in particular plankton photosynthesis-”

“Which would draw down carbon dioxide,” Kelly said.

“Yes. You can see there’s a feedback loop to close there, and that’s how you get stability. At higher temperatures underwater weathering of limestone kicks in also. But it’s all very controversial. Nobody has the computer facilities to test such models any more. And even if Boyleworld does come to pass, it might not be survivable by humans. Too damn hot.”

Masayo glanced around the raft, and pointed to a rack of fish. “The ocean’s evidently not that unproductive. And are those gull eggs?”

“There’s a kind of bounce-back going on among some deep-water species, despite the lack of nutrients in the ocean, now we stopped over-fishing and are no longer pumping in pollutants. It’s as if the Earth is breathing a sigh of relief. The birds have suffered, of course. No land, nowhere to nest. But some gulls seemed to be surviving. We think they’re making their nests on floating detritus.”

“We didn’t see many congregations of rafts,” Kelly said. “Over the major cities mostly. Even there, people are pretty spread out.”

“We come for the garbage,” Thandie said bluntly. “Even after so many years. Toxic leaks drive the fish away, but conversely they’re drawn back to the nutrient upwellings.” She didn’t elaborate on what that nutrient material might be, but Mike Wetherbee looked at the drying fish more suspiciously. “We do keep in touch, we have radio links, we swap information and we trade kids. We fret about inbreeding, just like the social engineers in your Academy.” She pointed. “The kid over there, fixing the cabling on that corner of the raft-he’s called Boris. Thirteen years old. I joined this raft seven years ago, after I came to visit a woman called Lily Brooke, so we could watch the submergence of Everest together. Lily was related to Boris-his great-great-aunt, I think. Maybe you heard of Lily. She was a friend of Grace Gray. She made sure Grace got on Ark One.”

Kelly said, “Grace is on Halivah-the other hull, the hull that didn’t come back to Earth.”

“She was pregnant when she joined the crew.”

“She had the baby before we got to Jupiter. A girl called Helen. She’s grown up now, I guess, she must be seventeen years old.”

Thandie nodded. “That’s good to hear. Lily and Grace went way back. Lily was devoted to saving Grace’s life, saving her from the flood. I guess she succeeded.”

“Grace never mentioned her,” Kelly said.

Lily had died not long after Everest. She had done all she possibly could for Grace. Thandie was glad she had never learned of this slow revenge of Grace’s. Some people never forgave you for saving their lives.

“After Everest, Manco and Ana, Lily’s great-nephew and his wife, took me in. Just as they will take in all of you now. They’re generous people, fundamentally.”

Kelly was staring at the kids, most of whom, as Thandie had expected, had got bored and gone off to their eternal playground of the sea. “They seem-alien. But no more than we are to them, I guess.”

“They grew up knowing nothing different from this,” Thandie said. “Just the raft and the ocean. Some of them barely learn to walk before they go jumping overboard. Some barely talk. It’s not that they’re preverbal, but they seem to be evolving a language of their own, of words, gestures, body shapes that they can use underwater. In the end some of them just slip away. Literally; they go over the side and you don’t see them again. Maybe the sharks get them; that’s what the parents fear. I wonder if they’re just finding some place of their own to live. Maybe on the big natural rafts where the gulls live, all driftwood and guano. Good luck to them.”

Mike Wetherbee said, “It sounds like the mother of all generation gaps.”

“Well, so it is. In five hundred years their grandkids will probably have webbed feet. But I hope they will remember their own humanity, remember the history that bore them, the civilization their ancestors built. I try to teach Boris astronomy…”

The kids were kind to Thandie, but they rarely listened to anything she had to say. That was fine with her, fine to be disregarded, as it had been for forty years or more, since she had seen London and New York flooded, and then the huge, astonishing marine transgressions as low-lying continental land was covered over in great sudden swathes, and human civilization dissolved in flight. The flood was just too big; to observe was all you could aspire to. In fact it was a privilege to have lived through this moment of transition. And after all none of these children and grandchildren were hers. She had no stake in their future. The present was enough, and the past…

They were watching her curiously.

She had drifted away, into the oceanic depths of her own head, fallen asleep sitting there in lotus. “Sorry,” she said. “Old lady narcolepsy.”

“And I apologize for staring,” Mike Wetherbee said. “It’s a long time since any of us saw anybody old. Forgive me.”

“You mentioned something called the Split. Tell me about it.”

Kelly glanced at Masayo and Mike. She shrugged, and related a fast version of her story, of the disputes that came to a head when Earth II was reached, and the three-way split that ensued. Kelly looked nervous, as if she feared she was going to have to repeat all this to some kind of tribunal. Thandie wondered what different versions of this saga she might have heard from Wilson Argent or Holle Groundwater.

When she was done, Thandie nodded. “I always thought you might come home. I never agreed with the basic philosophy of Project Nimrod, to go flying off into the sky. Earth has become alien, but not as alien as another planet entirely. I never thought you would split three ways, which must be about the dumbest choice you could have made from an engineering point of view. Gordo Alonzo would hit the roof. But, wow-three roads, three destinies. I wonder how it will turn out.”

Masayo said, “Well, Earth II is twenty-one light-years away. We outran any signal they might send. We might hear from them in another fourteen years or so. But we won’t hear from Earth III for another century, at least.” He frowned. “Strange thought.”

Thandie reminded herself he was basically a military man who had had to learn to deal with some very odd concepts. “You chose to come back to Earth, Masayo. Why?”

“I have a kid, from a previous relationship,” Masayo said awkwardly. “On Earth, I mean. I never meant to leave him behind. It was an only an accident I was on the Ark in the first place.”

“I’ve a kid too,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s what brought me home.”

“That and your ambition,” Mike Wetherbee snapped. “Your damn pride.”

Kelly would have replied, but Thandie held up her hand. “These are old arguments. You may as well leave them behind, leave them up in space.” She glanced around at the waters of Panthalassa, a world ocean given a name coined by one of the pioneers of the study of continental drift. “I don’t know what you were expecting. This is all we have to offer you. This is where you will spend the rest of your lives-”

“There is something else we’re looking for,” Kelly said. “We listened from orbit. I hoped we’d make contact, but we heard nothing.”

Thandie nodded; she’d expected this. “You hoped to hear from Ark Two.”

“It was my father’s project. He may even be still alive,” Kelly said a little wildly. “It’s a long shot, he would be in his nineties, but-”

“I never heard that he died. And I never heard that Ark Two failed. Not spoken to them for years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still sitting there. I can arrange for you to talk to them, if you want. Or anyhow I can try.”

Kelly’s eyes widened. “And to travel there?”

“That’s up to the Ark Two crew. We don’t have the means to take you.” She eyed Kelly and the others, who looked uncertain. “Are you sure you want to go chasing the past?”

Kelly’s face hardened. “I’d appreciate it if you’d make the call rather than psychoanalyze me.”

Masayo looked concerned at her aggression. Mike Wetherbee just smiled.

Thandie bowed her head, and rested her hands on her folded knees once more.

“Mom?” Little Eddie Saito came stumbling toward Kelly. Only four years old, he walked like a newborn baby deer, thought Thandie, who was probably the only person on the raft who remembered what a baby deer looked like. “I played with the children. Can I go swimming?”

Kelly ignored him. “So where is Ark Two?”

Mike Wetherbee smiled nastily. “All those years, and your precious father never even told you that? Some relationship you had.”

“Just tell me, Thandie.”

Thandie pointed down. “Yellowstone.”

Eddie pulled Kelly’s sleeve. “Mom? Can I go swim?”