Ark

92

Helen Gray sat on hot, prickly sand.

The beach, textured by dunes and wave marks, stretched off as far as she could see. Before her was another semi-infinite plain, a sea that reached to a razor-sharp horizon. The sky was a blue dome, and in it, directly before her, was a star-no, the word was “sun.” It was a disc of light just like the hull’s arc lamps. It warmed her face and dazzled her eyes, and scattered highlights on the sea and cast a shadow from the child playing before her.

Mario, four years old, dressed in a baggy old adult’s T-shirt, paddled in the surf. He squealed every time the water lapped over his toes. He looked quite at home. But his walk along the beach was clumsy, a babyish scrape at the ground. You had to walk in these planetary sims, that was Holle’s rule, the kids were going to have to walk on Earth III and this was where they would learn how, and the HeadSpace suit constrained you to do just that. But the sim could not simulate the effects of gravity, and so the whole experience was incomplete.

Further along the beach sat another parent, Max Baker, with another child, five-year-old Diamond, the little boy Max had fathered with Magda Murphy. Max was talking steadily to his son, encouraging him to race and splash. Helen liked to see Max being like this. It had taken a lot for him to get over the loss of his twin sister during the Blowout, and Magda the loss of her baby. Like herself and Jeb, Max and Magda were parents if not lovers, but they seemed to have found consolation in each other’s company. Magda had even had a second child with Max, a one-year-old girl called Sapphire. Maybe later Diamond and Mario could play together.

The detail of this HeadSpace sim was good. The waves on the sea’s surface and the froth where they broke, generated by simple fractal routines, were convincing enough, or so Helen’s mother had told her. Each individual grain of sand cast a shadow. She could even feel the sand under her bare legs, gritty and sharp-more fractal processing. But to a trained eye it wasn’t hard to see the virtual’s limitations, such as differing shades in the blue sky delineated by straight-line boundaries, as if it were constructed of huge panels. Grace, who had actually stood on genuine beaches on Earth, pointed out the lack of such features as clouds in the sky, and seaweed and jellyfish in the ocean, and seawrack on the sand-and, she had observed dryly, raft-loads of eye-dees crowding out as far as the eye could see. The HeadSpace booths were aging technology, and the processor capacity devoted to these sims was restricted.

But, wrapped up in their virtual suits in their separate HeadSpace booths, sharing this virtual sky, the children could wrestle and race and splash in the water.

All this was Holle’s idea. She had also reinstated sports tournaments, like wrestling and sumo, young bodies stressed against each other in weightlessness, programs designed to build up muscle mass and bone strength to cope with the gravity field of Earth III. Holle didn’t want the crew spilling to the ground like babies, baffled and terrified by such basic features as an open sky.

It seemed to be working. Mario, playing, wasn’t fazed by the fact that you couldn’t turn down the sun or turn up the wind. But sometimes Helen wondered if something unique was being lost as the mission approached its terminus, a culture born of necessity over forty years in the ship’s dark corners, with its own furtive art and language and style. The tribes of half-naked, elaborately tattooed children had to be taught the word for “sky” by being taken into a HeadSpace booth and shown the referent. But the shipborn had evolved forty new words for “love.”

Besides, Helen herself hated the sims. She too was a shipborn, and maybe it was too late for her to adjust to the openness of a planet. But landfall loomed ahead like the date of her own execution-even though she relished the challenge of piloting a shuttle down to the new world. So as little Mario played his way through his allotted time she endured the openness, the sunlight on her bare arms, the lack of the comforting enclosure of scuffed metal walls. And she clung to faulty details, the lines of broken shade in the sky, as reassurance that none of this was real, and she could come to no harm.

She was relieved when time was up and she called Mario back from the edge of the sea.