Ark

90

May 2078

Helen Gray brought Zane a present. Wrapped roughly in a sheet of insulating foam, it was a block of frozen urine, elaborately sculpted into a bust, a human head. The artist intended it as a memorial to the dead, to mark a decade since Steel Antoniadi’s Blowout Rebellion.

In the gloom of his cabin, Zane hefted it, cupping its cheeks in his stiff, liver-spotted hands. The glow from the cabin’s single lamp shone through the ice, picking out its dark golden color and highlighting bubbles and streaks of other fluids within. Zane said dryly, “I do like the way the light catches piss ice, if you display it right.”

This was Zane 3, Helen tentatively decided, the determined amnesiac who remembered nothing before his own awakening after the launch from Jupiter. She was glad Zane 3 was out today. Though his mood was often black, and though Zane had been a pariah for ten years since his conspiracy theories fueled the Blowout, Zane 3 was a rounded person with a unique perspective of his own, while Jerry was competent but hollow, a bluff, arrogant bully. According to Holle and Grace, who had long since given up their attempts to reintegrate Zane, there was evidence of other alters orbiting inside Zane’s head now, spun off at various crises to take away more distress from the core personality, alters with names like Leonard and Robert and Christopher. The only objects of interest on the Ark were other people. Zane 3 might be nothing more than a fragment of a disintegrating mind, but he remained one of the more interesting people on the ship.

“It’s well made,” he said now, turning the urine head over in his hands. “If the features are exaggerated. These features, the big eyes, the mouth, the nose. It’s like a puppet head.”

“Bella used other bodily fluids to highlight internal structures. Look, you can see that string of blood…”

“Not too anatomically precise.”

“It’s fanciful, meant to represent the mind, not the body.”

“Yes. You can see the expression she’s trying to capture. Curiosity. Doubt, maybe. How old is this Bella?”

“Eighteen.”

Bella Mayweather was of the generation who had come of age in the decade since the Blowout; only eight years old at the time of the rebellion, she likely had only blurred, nightmarish memories of those events themselves, and had grown up under Holle Groundwater’s tough-love rule.

“Eighteen years old,” Zane said, turning the head over in his hands. “Shipborn art does fascinate me. So does their culture, the language they seem to be evolving. The way they flock like birds in microgravity. You know, the one thing I’ve learned above all on this cruise to nowhere is about the resilience of the human spirit. We go on and on, decade after decade, and each new year is worse than the last, each subsequent cadre of kids growing up in even worse conditions than those before. Now we have nothing left to give them, not even any raw materials for art. And yet they manage to express themselves anyway. Their sculptures of frozen piss, and their paintings of blood and mucus on the walls of the ship, those elaborate tattoos they wear, their endless songs. All evanescent, of course.”

“Yes. Even this head will have to go into the hoppers in another few days. The image will be stored in the archive, but…”

But even Halivah’s digital archive, stored on radiation-hardened diamond-based chips, was running out of room. Half the capacity had been lost to Seba at the Split, and the rest had only been intended to record a voyage of a decade or less. As Holle sought new capacity, for instance for the revival of the HeadSpace booths she had ordered, the institutional memory stored in the archive had been “rationalized,” and whole swathes of it dumped.

Zane said, “This is the sort of thematic resonance which underpins my so-called conspiracy theories. You see the same themes expressed over and over at different levels in our little world, which is evidence of artifice, of deliberate if clumsy design. Thus we are all trapped together in this hull like racing thoughts in a single skull, just as I and my alters are trapped in my own head. And now the Ark’s electronic memory is being wiped out, megabyte by megabyte, library shelf by library shelf. Will the Ark wake up one day not knowing what it is, just as I did at the start of the voyage? Maybe there’s nobody here but me,” he said suddenly. He looked at her. “Maybe you are just another alter, spun off to save me from loneliness. Maybe there’s only me, alone in this empty tank, while the observers watch me going steadily crazy.”

Helen shivered. As with so many of Zane’s visions there was something authentic in this latest speculation, this latest bizarre hypothesis. After all, even though at thirty-six years old she was among the very oldest of the shipborn, she couldn’t remember Earth herself. Intellectually she believed that the stars were real, that Earth was real, that there really had been a flood that had drowned a planetary civilization, and that in only three more years they would reach Earth III. But it was a matter of faith, for her. And there were people like Steel Antoniadi who had been born, lived and died on the Ark without ever experiencing anything outside its hull. What difference had it made to them if it had all been real or not?

Listening to Zane’s theorizing was like listening to a horror story, giving her a kind of pleasurable scare. But, since the Blowout, listening to Zane had been against ship’s rules.

“This is why none of the kids are allowed to come and see you, if you talk like this.”

“Ah, the children. I am still the ship’s bogeyman, aren’t I? But I do miss those dream-sharing sessions we used to have.” He glanced at her belly, where her coverall showed a slight swelling. “You’ve another coming yourself?”

She smiled. “We just got in before the deadline. Holle wants a moratorium on conception from here until Earth III. She doesn’t want us landing with newborns aboard.”

“That makes a certain paranoid sense. A little sister for Mario?”

“Actually a brother.”

“Another boy for Jeb. That will please him.”

“I guess,” she said indifferently. Jeb Holden, formerly one of Wilson’s bruisers, had not been her first choice as father to her children-and nor, she knew, had she been his choice. After all he was about Zane’s age, nearly sixty, much older than Helen. But Holle had encouraged everybody to get busy producing babies, following some demographic logic of her own, and the ten years since the Blowout had seen a whole new crop of infants growing up, second-generation shipborn. Helen could hardly stay aloof. “Just remember,” Grace had said with a strained smile, “I didn’t get to choose your father either. And nor did my mother have any choice about the man who fathered me.” Grace had hugged her daughter. “But we didn’t turn out too bad, did we?”

“Jeb’s OK,” Helen told Zane now. “He came from a good family, I think. We named Mario after his own father, a farmer who died in an eye-dee flash war, which was how Jeb ended up fighting for his life on a raft. Wilson was a bad influence on him.”

“And what are you going to call the new addition? What was your father’s name-Hammond?”

Helen smiled. “My mother won’t hear of that. We’re thinking of calling him Hundred. Because when he’s born we will just have completed a hundred light-years from Earth.”

He groaned. “These made-up shipper names! I can’t abide them.” She drifted to the door. “I need to go. You can keep the head for a few days. Don’t let it melt.”

“Oh, believe me, I won’t.” Zane stared into the eyes of the sculpture, as if seeking answers there.

She felt an odd impulse to hug him. But with Zane you couldn’t be sure who you were hugging. “You’re very valued, you know.”

“Oh, really?”

“You’re still the authority on the warp generator. We need you.”

“No,” he said. “Come on. You know as well as I do that our flight to Earth III, regarding the warp mechanics, has been programmed in from launch.”

“But if the warp failed in flight-”

He laughed. “If that happened it would most likely kill us all in an instant. No, my usefulness ended the moment the warp bubble successfully coalesced at Earth II.”

“You’re useful to me, if you want to put it like that. I enjoy our talks.”

“You’re very kind. But as your children grow, when you reach Earth III and you start the great project of building a new world-” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m fine. You go back to your little boy. Go, go!”