Ark

80

August 2059

There was great excitement on the morning of the arrival of the submarine from Ark Two.

Kelly watched her fellow space travelers crowding to the raft’s edge, waiting for the sub to surface. Compared to the raft’s healthy, robust crew, with skins tanned brown and swimming muscles taut, the Seba people looked like ghosts, spectral, their limbs too long, their heads too large. Their eagerness faintly worried Kelly. They had spent most or all of their lives inside an engineered environment, and were too easily distracted from the shabby garbage raft they were going to have to live on for the rest of their lives. But then it had been Kelly herself who had interrogated Thandie Jones about Ark Two, in their very first proper conversation together.

As they waited it started to rain, just gently, the drops hissing on the ocean. The sky held the remnants of a red dawn, with a faint stink of sulfur in the air. Thandie sniffed. “Volcano weather. Rain precipitating out around ash particles…”

There was a ragged cheer as the sub broke the surface. Naked brown-skinned kids swam out to it. Kelly made out a boat-shaped streamlined hull, a conning tower with periscope and radio masts, and a bold Stars and Stripes painted on its flank. The sub drew close enough that ladders could be thrown across from raft to sub, and you could simply walk across without getting your feet wet. The raft kids scampered back and forth over the ladders carelessly, playing in the water that streamed off the sub’s hull.

A couple of the sub crew emerged, a man and a woman. They were young, maybe early twenties. They wore reasonably clean-looking blue coveralls and boots, and they had their hair cropped short, military style. Sturdy-looking but pale, they had more in common with the Seba people than the rafters, Kelly thought. They crossed the ladders to the raft easily enough. Little kids swarmed around them, plucking at their hands and trouser legs.

Thandie Jones walked up to the two of them stiffly, and Kelly followed.

The young man was about Kelly’s height, his hair blond, his eyes pale blue. He wore patches on his coverall, a US flag and a mission badge, like the astronauts’ patches Gordo Alonzo used to show the Candidates. The patch was an inverted triangle containing a pie-slice of the Earth’s cross-section, with a strip of bubbling ocean and the bold words ARK TWO plastered over a schematic sky. Kelly stared. This patch was the first piece of physical evidence she had ever seen that Ark Two, hidden from her by her father’s lies and evasions, actually existed.

“Ms. Kenzie,” the young man said.

She was staring. Disconcerted, she said, “Call me Kelly.”

“Welcome home. I can’t imagine what you’ve done, what you’ve seen.” His accent was odd to Kelly’s ears, stilted, not quite American. He seemed to be having trouble making eye contact with her. “I wish I could see your ship.”

Mike snorted. “No, you don’t. After eighteen years it’s a flying toilet; best to let it burn up.” He stuck out his hand. “Mike Wetherbee.”

“I know who you are, Dr. Wetherbee. We all read the log you transmitted down to the Ark. You’re heroes to us, all of you. It’s an honor.” She shook Mike’s hand, and Masayo’s, and then bent down to inspect Eddie, who grinned back. “And I know who you are too.”

“This is the party for the Ark,” Thandie said. “Me, Kelly, Mike, Masayo, little Eddie here. You got room for us in that tub of yours?”

“It’s not the Trieste, but we do our best.” He faced Kelly, glancing at her, looking away. “You’ve come so far, across forty light-years. But it’s another twelve kilometers to Ark Two-straight down. Are you ready?”

“Help me across that ladder and I’m all yours,” Kelly said. “You’re being very generous to us-I don’t even know your name.”

He stared at her with an odd intensity. “You don’t recognize me.”

“I’m sorry.”

His face turned red. “I’m your son. Dexter. Your first son.”

This was completely unexpected. Kelly felt as if she had been punched. Eddie squealed, and she realized she was gripping his hand too tight. She deliberately let go.

“My colleague is called Lisa Burdock.” Dexter seemed to be trying to say more. Then he turned on his heel and walked back, over the ladder to the sub.

Mike Wetherbee was grinning. “The son you abandoned for the stars. Well, well.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Doctor.” Kelly, heavy with gravity, bewildered, realized she was in danger of collapsing, right here. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. She patted Eddie’s head, took his hand again, and stepped forward. “Who’s going to help me over that ladder?”

The rain hardened, becoming torrential.

To get inside the sub Kelly had to climb down through the conning tower into a narrow well with handholds stapled to the wall, penetrating further down into the hull than she’d expected. There was a stink of metal, electrics, gasoline and urine.

She emerged into a spherical compartment a few meters across, with a simple pilot station set before a bank of screens. Fat windows pierced the sphere’s hull, mostly looking down into murky blue water. Mesh partitions had been laid down to make a flat floor, with the volume underneath used as storage space for loose equipment and air tanks. Lisa Burdock was laying down fold-out couches. Kelly sat gratefully in one of the couches, hiding the weakness in her legs, back, neck. Dexter started handing out blankets and thick padded coats, though the sphere was hot and cramped. Eddie had to be carried down, passed from hand to hand, as the handholds were too far apart for him. But once down in the spherical chamber he seemed to brighten up.

As soon as they were all in their couches, Dexter slammed closed the hatch. With a gurgle of water filling the surface tanks, they sank immediately. Kelly had a stomach-churning sense of the drop.

The design of the sub was indeed based on that of the Trieste, a classic deep-dive vessel which had reached the ocean’s extreme depths nearly a century before. When the flood had begun, Thandie Jones had made many exploratory dives in a rebuilt Trieste, its components dug out of various museums by Nathan Lammockson. Now this new sub was one of a fleet of ferries capable of reaching the ocean floor. “She was constructed in Jackson, Wyoming,” Dexter said. “A long way from the ocean back then. But when the flood came in ’43 she just floated off.” He rapped his fist on the metal wall. “This is our pressure hull. The rest of the sub’s volume is mostly taken up with flotation tanks, full of gasoline, pretty much incompressible even at extreme depths; conventional air tanks would just crumple, though we do have those for navigation close to the surface. We have hoppers of rocks we can dump if we need to ascend quickly, though mostly we abort down to the Ark in such contingencies. More likelihood of help there than up top.”

Thandie said, “You got any coffee in this tub?”

Masayo had strapped Eddie loosely into a couch, but the boy soon clambered out and started crawling over the floor, poking his fingers through the mesh.

Dexter watched him curiously. “We don’t carry many little kids on these ferries, as you can imagine. He looks like he feels at home.”

“He was born in a box,” Mike Wetherbee said. “This is what he’s used to. The safety of confinement.” He breathed a deep breath. “And the peculiar, comforting staleness of recycled air.”

There wasn’t much conversation after that. Dexter handed out coffees.

Within minutes the ocean beyond the windows was growing dark. Thandie had told Kelly that little light from the surface seeped deeper than a hundred meters or so. Kelly heard the hull pop and bang, creaking as it adjusted to the increasing pressure of the water. How strange it was that she had spent two decades inside hulls intended to contain breathable air against a vacuum, and now the situation was precisely reversed, she was inside another hull surrounded by water clenching like a fist.

She looked at her companions. Thandie lay back in her couch, a blanket tucked up to her chin, her eyes closed. Mike Wetherbee seemed quietly interested in the engineering. Masayo kept his eyes on Eddie, who sat on the floor happily fiddling with the mesh partition. Lisa Burdock sat facing the passengers, saying nothing. Kelly realized, in fact, that the girl hadn’t said a single word. She was a creature of Ark Two, evidently, perhaps educated all her life for a single purpose, and now was not truly interested in anything else-not even returned star travelers. Kelly wondered if as a Candidate she had once been just as monomaniac.

And Dexter concentrated on his controls. That was his job, but Kelly was pretty sure he was using his absorption in his tasks to avoid any conversation with her, or indeed with Masayo and Eddie, his half-brother.

She was guiltily relieved. She definitely needed time to come to terms with the situation. Although she had always said that part of her motive for coming back to Earth was the child she’d left behind, in her heart she hadn’t really believed that she would ever find him again. It hadn’t occurred to her that if her father had constructed Ark Two as some kind of haven for himself, it was likely that he would take his grandson in there with him. She’d never even imagined Dexter growing up, she realized now. In her head he had always been the two-year-old she had kissed goodbye that last morning, sneaking out of his bedroom before he woke up to know she was gone, and then running for her transport to Gunnison. It was as if Dexter had died, not that she’d abandoned him.

Well, she was trapped with him now, committed to whatever confrontations and conciliations lay ahead.

As the dive continued the air temperature dropped steadily. Dexter wiped condensation from the control surfaces with his sleeve. The adults bundled into the thick coats Lisa and Dexter had handed out. Eddie said he didn’t need a coat, but Masayo draped a blanket around his thin shoulders. A little later the boy started to slow down, and Masayo lifted him onto his lap and wrapped him up inside his own coat, and let him nap.

In the sapping, damp cold, in the humming, comforting calm of the submarine, despite the kilometers of ocean water piling up over her head, Kelly felt oddly safe, reminded of the Ark.

Maybe she slept.

She was jarred awake by a buffeting, a whirr of engines. Lisa pointed at one of the small windows, beyond which lights moved in the dark.

Kelly got out of her couch, stiff and cold, and bent down to peer through the plug of glass. She saw spheres set out on the ocean floor, fixed by cables and illuminated by floods, gleaming like some industrial facility. The spheres touched each other, kissing at the circular interfaces that connected them. The spheres all had paintwork on their hulls, the Stars and Stripes, a bold UNITED STATES, and that triangular Ark Two logo. Another submarine like their own hovered over the facility, tethered by loose cables.

They were floating over what looked like a road, and a hummock in the dirt that might once have been some kind of vehicle. But ocean-floor silt lay everywhere like a murky snow, and strange fish and crabs worked their way over broken tarmac, pale pink and white in the sub’s lights. A fence of wire mesh stretched off as far as she could see, picked out by the sub’s own spotlights, broken by what looked like watchtowers.

Dexter tapped a key. A screen filled up with a human face, broad, gnarled, and a harsh voice rasped, “Ferry Three, you have permission to dock. And you passengers, you are now twelve point four kilometers beneath the waves, deeper than any point on the ocean floor before the flood started. Welcome to Ark Two.”

Kelly stared. “Dad?”

Edward Kenzie glared. “That you, Kelly? I knew you’d screw up. I’ll see you when you come through regularization. Ark out.” The screen flickered and filled with blue.