Kelly tried to stay composed. “And what about Don Meisel?”
He looked at her, surprised. “He stayed at Alma to the end. Protecting Mission Control. That’s the last place I saw him; I made it out, he didn’t. You didn’t know?”
“Nobody told me.” Mike Wetherbee was watching her, waiting for her to crack. She forced a smile. “So why Yellowstone, Thandie? What’s here?”
Thandie said, “This park contains half the word’s geothermal features. Two-thirds of the world’s geysers, in fact. I think your father and his advisers dreamed of surviving down here, and living off geothermal heat and the produce of black smokers. And I, and others, argued for a major seismic monitoring facility.”
Mike frowned. “What’s a black smoker?”
“A drowned geyser,” Thandie said. “Heated water escaping from the depths, eventually building up chimneys like smokestacks. You found them in the deepest oceans, in the trenches. And each of them attracts life, extremophile bacteria-that is, lovers of heat and salinity and extreme pressure-off which feed the crabs and the fish and the worms. A whole food chain fed by the Earth’s inner heat, and entirely independent of sunlight, which, you’ll notice, they don’t get much of here. And, Ed Kenzie’s idea is, maybe people could live off that. Also you’d have access to the seabed and related resources which wouldn’t be available from a raft on the ocean surface. You could mine for metals and oil and such.”
Kelly said, “And the seismology?”
Yellowstone was such a geologically active area because it sat directly over a mantle plume, a hot spot, a fountain of rock flowing like liquid up from the Earth’s deeper core.
“There’s actually a supervolcano here,” Thandie said. “It’s erupted several times in the past-the last more than six hundred thousand years ago. Some of us theorize that the shifting weight of water over the land might trigger a new eruption, which is actually overdue. Which is why we wanted a station here. Even before the waters came there was evidence of uplift, for instance Old Faithful turned off in 2039.
“They’ve also been running seismic tomography surveys, studying rock flows in the deep mantle. We’re still working on theories of why all the subterranean water should have been released just now. It may have something to do with human activity or it may not. Perhaps it’s because of the configuration of the continents. They slide around, you know, granite rafts drifting on the mantle, and every few hundred million years or so they coalesce into giant supercontinents. This is called the chelogenic cycle. The supercontinents are like vast lids that block Earth’s heat flow, the way Yellowstone traps the heat of the mantle plume. Eventually that heat causes the supercontinent to shatter, and the bits go spinning away. Now the last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke up two hundred and fifty million years ago, and the next formation event is another two hundred and fifty million years off in the future. So we’re at a midpoint, and maybe the mantle currents are adjusting somehow to this unique moment. We might be entirely irrelevant…”
Kelly saw that Thandie had lost her focus. She was talking to herself, receding into a mist of speculation, forever unprovable.
Mel was staring out of the window. “It was incredible to watch the life forms come and go. I mean, in the park there used to be grizzlies and wolves and herds of bison and elk, as well as vast forests. As the water closed over us, we just knew they were drowning, all of them. What’s that phrase from Genesis about Noah’s flood? ‘All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.’ But then, you know, we got recolonized, by all the strange creatures that live off the smoker chemicals. Giant worms and shrimps and crabs, and sea cucumbers, and xenophyophores-just single cells, the size of your hand. Incredible things.”
Thandie said, “But there was an extinction event even for the creatures of the abyss. The deep trenches were so profoundly physically separated from each other that each trench had its own unique biota. When the flood came they mixed up and competed, and some went to the wall.”
“There are critters out there that bore into wood,” Mel said. “Clams, worms, crustaceans. They used to rely on the fall of wood from the continents to the seabed. Now they got a whole sunken forest to eat. Those guys are in hog heaven, all around us…”
Kelly caught Mike’s glance. Buried in their steel tanks at the bottom of the ocean, Mel’s people had become introverted, self-obsessed. Strange even by the standards of star-travelers who had spent eighteen years in a converted fuel tank. Kelly touched Mel’s arm. “Maybe I could see my father now.”
He seemed to come to himself, as if waking from a dream. “Sorry. Yeah. I’ll take you to him and see if he woke up yet.”
They walked on around the curve of the spherical tank, past window after window that revealed the endless dark of the ocean.
82
Edward Kenzie met his daughter in a storm shelter, a reinforced room right at the heart of one of the tanks. This room was evidently used as a kind of boardroom, for the walls were paneled with wood and a big triangular pine table dominated the floor. It was even carpeted, with a thick pile woven with the wedge-of-Earth symbol of Ark Two.
Edward Kenzie’s heavy bulk was stuck in a wheelchair, and his head, entirely hairless, was covered in liver spots. He wore a business suit complete with tie tightly knotted around his neck. He permitted Kelly to kiss his cheek, and he gazed upon his second grandson, Eddie. He showed no signs of recognition, still less of joy. His massive presence in the chair frightened Eddie. The boy cried and clung to his father Masayo, who, as an illegal boarder of Ark One, Edward wouldn’t acknowledge at all.
That was it for the family stuff. After that, everybody but Kelly, Edward and Dexter was excluded. They each sat at the center of one of the table’s three sides. The silence stretched.
“I feel like I’m on trial,” Kelly blurted.
“Ha!” Edward snapped. “That was always your way. Get the first word in and take control, right? Well, this isn’t a trial. Tell you who should be on trial, that boyfriend of yours and the other illegals who robbed the Candidates and others of their righteous places on Ark One.”
“It wasn’t Masayo’s choice. Anyhow what’s done is done, and even you and all your bitterness can’t change that, Dad.”
“Bitterness? Is that what you think this is about?”
“Where do you want to start?” She glared at them both. “How I betrayed you, Dexter, by leaving Earth? Or how I betrayed you, Dad, by coming back?”
Dexter was red-faced with anger of a more confused kind. Kelly saw he must have fantasized about this situation, about having some kind of confrontation with the mother who had left him behind. Now she was here, he couldn’t find the words.
“He lost his father too, you know,” Edward said. “Don Meisel died at Alma, after-”
“I know! I know.”
“Good job this boy had me to save him, don’t you think?”
“Oh, don’t preach at me, you old fraud. You know that if I hadn’t volunteered to go back into the selection pool you’d have ordered me to. It was all about the mission. It always was. I was the best Candidate they had, I topped every assessment scale for years. In flight I was a competent commander. I even formed liaisons, I was ready to have more kids and fulfill my obligations regarding the gene pool.”