Face it, no one had shot down the Paris-St Lucius shuttle, had they? Not after C3N had pre-broadcast its launch, stressing it was stuffed full of kids.
“Has Paris fallen?” LizAlec demanded without thinking, her question out of her mouth before she realized. “A friend at school...” LizAlec said hurriedly. The rest of her sentence trailed away into embarrassed silence.
“No, not yet.” The tall priest looked thoughtful, one arm sliding sympathetically round the girl’s thin shoulders. “You have family in Paris?”
LizAlec shook her head hastily. “No, my father’s in Shanghai.”
“And your mother?”
LizAlec froze, suddenly realizing she knew less than nothing about Anchee’s mother. Which, when LizAlec thought about it, told her all she needed to know. “I don’t know my mother.”
Brother Michael’s smile was compassionate. “Such is the world...”
From the way his voice trailed away, LizAlec wasn’t sure if he assumed her mother was dead or just divorced. Mind you, the Family were fundamentalist, so to Brother Michael they were probably interchangeable.
“The boy...?” Brother Michael nodded over his shoulder at Lars, who was turning somersaults along the corridor ceiling and giggling to himself. He was dribbling, too, pearl-like drops of spittle strung out from his mouth.
“He’s...” LizAlec shrugged. She was unwilling to commit to anything Lars might later contradict but, more than that, she didn’t want Brother Michael separating the two of them, not while she had that bioSemtex worm curled up inside her face.
“Lars relies on me,” LizAlec said. It was meant to sound smooth, but it came out clumsy, childlike.
The tall priest shrugged. The Arc didn’t really need a goat boy: every simple-minded Bible-belt fanatic in the US wanted a place on board. And even Brother Michael was shocked by the number of lottery tickets the Family had sold. Humbled was the word he used, but it translated the same.
Heiresses were something different. The primal couple might be chosen by lottery to go and reclaim Eden but there was always room for another suitable handmaiden. Though it obviously depended on how the trusts were set up. It was a waste of his time to fawn over some kid who couldn’t buy a set of powerblades without getting written agreement from at least two trustees.
Maybe she was being too cynical, thought LizAlec, maybe the man really was after her souclass="underline" but given the way his fingers now rested lightly on the nape of her neck, she doubted it. Cash first, LizAlec decided, and then something rather more basic.
“If we could have cabins close together?”
“Cabins?” Brother Michael asked. Beyond his shoulder, LizAlec could see Sister Rachel smile sourly.
“This is a cargo shuttle,” Brother Michael said gently. “We have two dormitories. Men to port, women starboard, just like Noah’s ark. Though I have a small prayer room, just behind the cockpit. You could sleep there, for tonight only...”
Very softly, one of the bodyguards shook her head; so briefly that for a second LizAlec almost thought she was imagining it.
“No,” said LizAlec. “I’ll sleep in the dorm.”
“No special treatment.” Brother Michael nodded to himself. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”
The Arc looked like nothing so much as a fat ring-doughnut with a pen pushed through the hole in the middle. Except that, instead of just hanging there, the doughnut was attached to the pen with four vast steel spars and the ten-klick-long pen was actually the Arc’s spindle, capped at the top end with a vast Gothic cathedral fashioned from glass and steel.
Far down at the other end of the spindle were the computing rooms of NilApocrypha, where every word of the Old Testament was to be referenced and cross-referenced by vast banks of parallel processors. Until God’s certain opinion — on everything — could be had at the click of a key. The “southern” end was also where the shuttle was to dock, swallowed whole by an iris-ringed door in the spar.
But that wasn’t what was impressive.
What impressed the fuck out of LizAlec, though she wouldn’t admit it, was the doughnut itself, a fat fifty-kilometre silver ring that spun twenty times an hour around the spindle, like a vast wheel rolling around a hub.
LizAlec decided to be impressed. Anchee would have been.
“It’s incredible,” she said softly.
Beside her, Brother Michael smiled.
“No,” said Brother Michael, “it’s a miracle.” The bodyguard on the other side of him sighed slightly and LizAlec realized it wasn’t the first time she’d heard that line. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. To build that...
“It’s huge,” said LizAlec. None of the newsfeeds had done The Arc justice in their descriptions. God, if only she had a camera. LizAlec could just imagine what CySat would pay for on-site digital grabs of the finished colony. They had shots of the squat fat drones that would haul it out into deep space and they had long-range grabs of the outside seen from Earth, from the Moon, from passing shuttles. But shots of the actual inside...?
“Fabulous,” LizAlec whispered to herself, almost shivering with excitement.
“God’s purpose always is.”
“How many people?” asked LizAlec.
“Just ten of us,” Brother Michael said, sounding amused. “Sister Aaron, myself, Brother Gerard, my two protectors and five handmaidens. We tend to our hope and the world.” Brother Michael gestured towards the distant ring. “Once the new primal couple are in place the world will be left to look after itself. Well...” Brother Michael smiled. “Perhaps with a little help.”
LizAlec nodded, watching the distant ring on one screen, while on another the cargo shuttle got closer and closer to the central spar. The man was barking, certifiably mad. “What about the animals?” LizAlec asked.
“We loaded American reptiles last month, this month it’s smaller African mammals. Of course...” His voice sounded sad, resigned...” These days it’s hard to find species that aren’t geneered, which means it takes us longer.” He nodded towards the hold. “That’s why we ended up having to buy those beasts from the Voertrekkers. But then, we don’t want sheep that produce human milk, or rice that cooks itself. We want what God intended...”
Which counted her out, LizAlec thought darkly. Though how right she was LizAlec didn’t yet know. The product of an inactivated clone and frozen sperm, especially one whose cortex was overrun with bioClay symbiote, wasn’t what the Family had in mind. As for being the daughter of Alex Gibson... The girl shivered and turned her attention back to the screen. However hard she tried, she couldn’t take in the size of that spinning wheel.
“Here,” Brother Michael said. “Let me.” He leant across, his shoulder just brushing her front as he opened a distant window. That is, he hit a key that activated a camera floating by itself in space, ten klicks distant. If LizAlec didn’t know better, she’d have thought it part of some defence system.
She’d have liked to have seen The Arc for real, with her own eyes. But radiation was too much of a problem to allow random use of window glass, even the toughened stuff. And the other alternatives were too expensive for a mere shuttle.
“You can see the ring better from the cathedral,” Brother Michael told her. “It has shielded glass.” His hands rested lightly on the console, tapping at an occasional key, but he wasn’t actually docking the ship himself. A semi-AI was taking them in, LEDs on the deck lighting as retros fired in turn to slow the shuttle even further.