“They won’t get the choice,” Holle said flatly. “OK. Then there’s the question of punishment for the actions leading up to the blowout.”
“Ah.” Wilson sat back and folded his arms. “So this is some kind of trial after all.”
Holle shook her head. “No. Listen, Wilson, you’re indispensable. But you are going to have to survive in this ship, and it’s a damn small place. I’m not putting you on trial, you won’t be formally punished. I won’t even criticize you in public. You need to make some kind of recompense of your own. Find ways to apologize to the kids you hurt, and their families. That’s up to you.”
Wilson nodded. “Well, that’s pragmatic.”
Grace said, “If we aren’t punishing Wilson-who?”
Venus said, “I’m guessing Steel Antionadi.”
Holle nodded. “Right. For the crime of a rebellion that nearly killed us all. We have to make an example of her.”
Wilson grinned again. “Why not just say it straight out? You’re going to execute her.”
Grace laughed nervously. But Holle kept her face expressionless.
Venus gasped. “Are you serious? Holle, the kid was abused by this gorilla here, she had her head filled with rubbish from Zane-what chance did she have? Her crime was our fault, our generation’s.”
Grace said, “And to execute her-in Walker City we had crime, we had rape and murder. But we rejected capital punishment, the mayors did. We were too small a society for that. Each of us would have been too close to the executioner, each of us would become a killer. And compared to this crew, we were a mob. Everybody will be tainted by this.”
“Good,” Holle said.
Venus said, “Besides, Holle, you said we can’t afford any more losses. Steel is one of the brightest of her cadre. Even if you consider the rebellion, she showed vision, leadership, planning, even a kind of military skill. She managed to unite all those teenage gangs. And she was thorough. She cut the comms links, including the backup. She sabotaged the shuttle. All in complete secrecy-”
“I don’t want leadership,” Holle said. “Not among the shipborn. I don’t want vision, or idealism, or curiosity, or initiative. I don’t want courage. All I want is obedience. It’s all I can afford, until we’re down on Earth III and the day comes when we can crack open the domes and let the kids just walk away. Yes, she’s the best of her generation, and that’s why she’s such a danger. We have to make the process as public as possible. In fact that’s the point. But in the end, yes, she’ll die. Grace, I’ll expect you to make recommendations on how we do that, fast and painless.”
Wilson blew out his cheeks. “Wow! You really have been thinking this through, haven’t you?”
Venus shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything. Just accept my verdict.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. I’ve known you almost your whole life, Holle. Now you’re imposing a regime of total surveillance backed up by total power. Is this you?”
Holle faced her. “Remember all those theoretical debates, back in the Academy? About the conflict inherent in a situation like this between human rights and the need to sustain life itself? The truth is, no matter what system we tried, we were always going to fail in the end. The only way we can survive now is to impose total control from the center. And the only right the crew have left is the right to a chance of surviving the journey.”
Grace murmured, “Maybe Holle’s right. It’s not our fault. Nobody should be made to endure a journey like this. Nobody should condemn a generation of children to grow up in a cage.”
“It was necessary,” Venus said. “Or so the mission planners thought.”
And maybe, Holle thought, clinging to Grace’s words, the crew would be able to forgive her.
“Well,” Grace said. “This has been-eye-opening. So is that all?”
“For now,” Holle said. “Let’s get to work.”
Without another word, and apparently with relief, Grace arrowed out through the hatch, with an unconscious skill born of decades in free fall.
Wilson prepared to follow. “Have to admit I never saw this side of you either, Holle. Shame it didn’t come out earlier. We’d have made a great team.”
When he’d gone, Venus lingered for a moment. “I guess the others didn’t pick up on our long-term problem.”
“What problem?”
“The loss of shuttle A. I don’t have any solution to that. Do you?”
“No,” Holle whispered. “No, I don’t.”
Venus nodded. “Well, it’s a long way to Earth III yet. We’ve time to figure it out. As for the rest-” She looked at Holle for long seconds, as if she’d never seen her before. “Ah, the hell with it.” She floated up out of the cabin after the others.
Holle was left alone in Wilson’s cabin. She sat still. Then she folded over on herself, hugging her knees. She dared not cry for fear that she might be overheard.
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.”