Patrick didn’t hear her come in. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the sofa, one arm over a cushion and the other hand cradling a glass of corn liquor. He had his shirt open at the neck, his shoes off, his black-socked feet crossed.
The news was uniformly awful, Holle saw as she glanced at the big multiscreen. In Denver the police were shaping up for another night of trouble from the itinerant agricultural workers in the City Park. Elsewhere diplomatic notes were being exchanged with Utah; Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City were now refusing to pay federal taxes. President Vasquez was going to make a statement about that. Seawater forcing its way up the Tennessee valley from Alabama was causing yet another evacuation crisis, producing yet more images of sodden, huddled people tramping along rain-spattered highways. The government was considering sending troops into the Friedmanburgs, the troubled new cities on the Great Plains, where residents were protesting against exploitation by the rich who had bought up the land and funded much of the development in the first place. Holle knew her dad had something to do with that. Surviving recon satellites reported what appeared to be nuclear detonations going off in Tibet, the flashpoint of friction between India, China and Russia.
Meanwhile there were more tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes as the Earth shuddered under the weight of the water that laid ever more heavily over the continents. These were reported against a summary map that showed that some forty percent of the world’s pre-flood land area had been lost, some four billion people displaced.
Holle hated the news. All these shells of horror and misery and conflict, spreading out around the bubble of safety Holle had grown up in-which, she was coming to realize, was a very special place. And though sometimes there would be scientists talking about how the flood might be ending soon, the water receding, they never seemed to have much to go on, and her father never responded to the faint hopes they raised.
“Dad, can’t we switch over to Friends?”
Patrick jumped. He hadn’t known Holle was there. “Oh, hi, sweets.” He snapped the TV over to a multiscreen conference call; Holle recognized Edward Kenzie, a suntanned Nathan Lammockson, and others. Their deep voices rumbled. He lifted his arm, making room for her. She got down on the carpet next to him and huddled in. He was hot, tired, sweating. His smell was immensely reassuring. “Sorry,” he said, “I guess I was playing hooky. I’m supposed to be in this conference. Friends later, maybe. Well, it’s on all day and all night.”
Holle had grown up with the old pre-flood TV shows. They were comforting, set in a world as unreal to her as any fairy tale. “What’s the conference about?”
“An astronomical survey going on at an observatory in Chile. Place called La Silla, very high up. It’s South America, you know? Used to be owned by the Europeans, but now Nathan Lammockson, who’s based in Peru, is supporting it for us. Not that he knows what we’re doing up there specifically.”
“Looking for planets, I bet.”
“Well, that’s the idea. Somewhere for the Ark to go. And once the new space center is up and running, there’s a plan to run a starshade mission.”
“A what?”
“I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s interesting. You send up a giant sheet, spinning for stability. It looks like a flower, with petals. Then you have a conventional telescope-we’re using the Hubble-thousands of kilometers away. The shade is supposed to block out the light of the star, allowing the telescope to see any planets. With that arrangement we should be able to image continents on an Earthlike planet, even out to thirty or forty light-years. It’s a scheme that was championed years ago by an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is how we were able to dig it up.”
“And this is your idea of taking a break, watching the news? It’s always bad.”
“I know.”
“Everybody’s frightened, I think sometimes.” It was true: people were frightened of the flood, which was still remote from this place, and frightened of the waves of eye-dees for the dirt and disease and hunger they brought and the space they used up, and people were frightened of each other, for in the future there mightn’t be room for everybody. Holle herself would have felt a lot safer if Alice Sylvan, who she’d grown up thinking of as a kind of honorary aunt, hadn’t got herself taken out by a sniper in downtown.
“I know, I know.” Patrick tousled her hair. “But there’s no good in turning away. So how was the Academy?”
“Dad, it was awful. The kids are all bright and noisy and they compete like mad. There was only Zane who was friendly.”
“Zane will be glad you’re there.”
“I’m not like Zane,” she blurted. “And I’m not like Kelly Kenzie. I’m not tall and pretty and confident. Don’t tell me those things aren’t important, because they are. I know what they call the students. The Candidates. You have to be special to be a Candidate, a star. I felt like Joey out of Friends. ”
He laughed, and sipped his drink. “OK. But, look-it’s my money that’s backed the Academy, as part of a consortium, among a lot of other initiatives related to Ark One. But the Academy is not a finishing school for little rich kids. If you weren’t thought capable of justifying your place there, on your own abilities, you wouldn’t be in there, no matter whose daughter you were. You deserve to be there, sweets.” He kissed her head. “But if it’s ever too tough for you, just come home.”
“Oh, I won’t give up.”
The TV pinged, and filled up with a head-and-shoulders image of Liu Zheng.
Patrick said, “Liu? How can I help you?”
Liu grinned. It was a more human expression than any he’d adopted in class. “Actually it was Holle I hoped to speak to. Ms. Groundwater, you have a knack, I suspect, of asking the right questions.”
“What right questions? You mean that discussion about the biggest warp bubble we could make? But the answer was teeny-tiny. Everybody laughed.”
Liu said seriously, “Listen to me now. We are dealing with the engineering of spacetime, engineering in multiple dimensions. Everything we believe we know, all our intuition, is likely to be wrong. Inspired by that discussion, I returned to something I unturned in the literature during my earlier researches. A thirty-year-old piece of speculation by a worker in Belgium. Do you have your handheld? Try to follow the argument…”
And, as if Patrick weren’t present, he slipped easily into his odd, absent-minded lecturing style and the big wall screen began to fill up with graphics and equations. Holle let the tensors flutter past her like falling leaves, and tried to follow the essence of what he was saying.
Liu said, “A warp bubble is a separate universe connected to our own, like a blister growing from a flaw in the wall of a toy balloon. The bubble wall, umm, surrounds this pocket universe. But ‘surround’ is a three-dimensional word, inadequate to describe the higher-dimensional reality. The bubble is actually the neck of the flaw connecting mother spacetime to daughter. So it can be much smaller than the daughter universe itself.”
“Smaller than the ship!”
“That’s it. The warp bubble can be as small as you like.” His grin widened. “Too small, on the face of it, even to fit in a single neutrino. There are other advantages. We have been concerned about the collision cross-section of our warp ship. Even dust grains, hitting the forward end of the warp bubble, would suffer enormous compression forces. There could be damage to the ship, and perhaps a loss of energy from the warp field. That danger is much reduced with this new geometry.”
“My God,” Patrick said. “I understand maybe five percent of what you’ve said. But I do know that the mass-energy issue has been the key stumbling block that’s been holding up the design-”
“We are years behind any notional schedule,” Liu said heavily. “This may be the conceptual breakthrough we have needed.”