Thandie reminded herself he was basically a military man who had had to learn to deal with some very odd concepts. “You chose to come back to Earth, Masayo. Why?”
“I have a kid, from a previous relationship,” Masayo said awkwardly. “On Earth, I mean. I never meant to leave him behind. It was an only an accident I was on the Ark in the first place.”
“I’ve a kid too,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s what brought me home.”
“That and your ambition,” Mike Wetherbee snapped. “Your damn pride.”
Kelly would have replied, but Thandie held up her hand. “These are old arguments. You may as well leave them behind, leave them up in space.” She glanced around at the waters of Panthalassa, a world ocean given a name coined by one of the pioneers of the study of continental drift. “I don’t know what you were expecting. This is all we have to offer you. This is where you will spend the rest of your lives-”
“There is something else we’re looking for,” Kelly said. “We listened from orbit. I hoped we’d make contact, but we heard nothing.”
Thandie nodded; she’d expected this. “You hoped to hear from Ark Two.”
“It was my father’s project. He may even be still alive,” Kelly said a little wildly. “It’s a long shot, he would be in his nineties, but-”
“I never heard that he died. And I never heard that Ark Two failed. Not spoken to them for years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still sitting there. I can arrange for you to talk to them, if you want. Or anyhow I can try.”
Kelly’s eyes widened. “And to travel there?”
“That’s up to the Ark Two crew. We don’t have the means to take you.” She eyed Kelly and the others, who looked uncertain. “Are you sure you want to go chasing the past?”
Kelly’s face hardened. “I’d appreciate it if you’d make the call rather than psychoanalyze me.”
Masayo looked concerned at her aggression. Mike Wetherbee just smiled.
Thandie bowed her head, and rested her hands on her folded knees once more.
“Mom?” Little Eddie Saito came stumbling toward Kelly. Only four years old, he walked like a newborn baby deer, thought Thandie, who was probably the only person on the raft who remembered what a baby deer looked like. “I played with the children. Can I go swimming?”
Kelly ignored him. “So where is Ark Two?”
Mike Wetherbee smiled nastily. “All those years, and your precious father never even told you that? Some relationship you had.”
“Just tell me, Thandie.”
Thandie pointed down. “Yellowstone.”
Eddie pulled Kelly’s sleeve. “Mom? Can I go swim?”
79
On her way to confront Wilson over his relationship with Steel, Holle met Grace in the upper cone of Halivah, where they waited for Venus to join them.
They looked down the length of the open tank. In the post-Split microgravity most of the deck partitions had been taken out once more to open up the hull’s big inner space. The long fireman’s pole was still in place down the hull’s axis, and cabins clustered along the length of the pole, attached by staples and cables and sticking out at all angles. It was the middle of the working day. People swam everywhere, engaged on their business. There was a clamor of noise, of voices; the removal of the decks had turned the whole hull into an echo chamber. Down about Deck Five Holle saw a dream circle gathered, mostly youngsters. One of them was Zane Glemp, talking, holding them spellbound. Around Deck Eight half the flooring had been left in place to serve as a base for Wilson’s cabin, a grand affair of partitions and blankets, a palace of trash. The whole volume was bathed in the fake sunlight of the big wall-mounted arc lamps, the light diffused in the dust-laden air.
You could easily differentiate the various generations. Like Holle and Grace themselves, most people on board still belonged to the generation that had boarded the ship on Earth eighteen long years ago. Aging now, mostly in their late thirties or early forties, they moved around efficiently but without elegance.
Then came the teenagers, like Helen Gray born after the launch from Gunnison, who had spent the years of their adolescence in microgravity and moved with unconscious skill. Most of them weren’t much like Helen, however. They wore basic wraps that left their arms and legs bare, their flesh adorned with tattoos that matched graffiti on the walls, markings incomprehensible to any adult that badged their allegiance to one tribe or another. They moved in swarms like exotic fish in a tank, ignoring the adults and eyeing each other with suspicion. Holle knew that few of these kids ever attended formal classes. It worried her that they were so disconnected from the ship and its mission; this was the next generation of crew after all. Wilson claimed not to care. If he ever had to confront them he sent in his illegal buddies, a bigger, tougher gang than the rest. But then Wilson had his own take on these youngsters, which was the reason Holle and Grace were going to see him now.
And then came the youngest of all, the kids of seven and under who had actually been born and grown up in free fall. Having known nothing else they rocketed through the air, fearless. One group of kids was working its way up a wall, cleaning it; they had pads in their hands and canisters of water on their little backs. Through the general clamor Holle could hear the piping of the nonsense song the children sang as they worked: “I laugh you more my fun / you’re my enjee / you’re my tee-fee / I laugh you more my fun…” They sang it as a round, overlapping the fragmentary lines, shoving their sponges over the wall to the rhythms of their music. They were a spindly breed, Holle always thought, surprisingly small in height, and pale too, pale like the sightless worms that had once swum in Earth’s deep lightless oceans.
And, in a moment of comparative quiet, Zane’s thin voice carried up from the dream circle.
“The doctors, but they’re not really doctors and even they admit that, say I don’t exist. I am only a construct of the relationship between these partial people who live inside my head, who don’t exist either. Maybe that’s true of all of us. Maybe none of us exist, except in how we relate to each other. Maybe if we went out of this hull one by one we would each cease to be, alone in the dark. And then when the last of us was left, one person left in the hull-maybe he or she would go too, just popping out of existence…”
This was clearly Zane 3; Holle recognized the content of what he said, the mannerisms. But it was a more forceful Zane 3, angrier, stronger, somehow more determined. Fueled by the reintegrated pain of Zane 1, maybe.
Grace murmured, “You know Wilson’s concerned about the stuff Zane’s saying. Zane denies that anything exists outside the hull, and says he doesn’t remember anything that occurred before the warp launch from Jupiter. Well, most of these kids have never been outside the hull either, and they remember nothing but the voyage. He’s saying what they want to hear on some deep level, I think.”
“It’s just entertainment. The HeadSpace booths are too pricey, so they swap dreams. Zane is just a storyteller. A spooky one, but that’s all.”
“Are you sure? He’s been developing justifications for his theories for years. For instance he says that warp drive is impossible; he can prove it from first principles.”
“But any of these kids can go to the cupola and look out at the stars. How does he explain that away?”
“It’s a simulation, with obvious flaws. Such as the warp field lensing, which is just a scrambling of a star field projection.”
“What other ‘obvious flaws’?”
“Odd matches. We’re supposedly fleeing from a flood, but Earth II was in a constellation called the River. Flood, river? To find our destination in the starscape you look for Orion-and yet we claim that we were launched from Earth by a drive also called Orion. Zane argues that these name matches are symptoms of a lazy design regime. Or maybe they are clues smuggled in by some dissident sim designer to help us figure out the truth of our situation.”