Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  The cars pulled off the road onto a dirt track, and stopped before one anonymous block. A slogan was neatly painted over a heavy steel door: ′Genesis 11,6: NOW NOTHING WILL BE RESTRAINED FROM THEM, WHICH THEY HAVE IMAGINED TO DO.′ Oddly, a child′s swing, metal and bright plastic, stood before the door.

  Their driver got out and opened the door for Gordo, saluting him briskly.

  Gordo had a cell phone clamped to his ear. ′Hey, Holle? Glad I caught you. Would you mind coming out front? There′s somebody I want you to meet.′ He put away the phone. ′Doesn′t look like much, does it? But we retrieved a lot of facilities from the NASA sites in Houston. Control, comms, training centres. There′s even a small nuke reactor. We brought all this stuff all the way up to Alma, some little bitty miners′ town. And you know why? Because Alma, ten thousand, three hundred and sixty-one feet above the old sea level, is the highest incorporated municipality in the United States.′

  The driver, a woman no older than Grace, said, ′Actually, sir, that′s not quite true. My mother was born around here, and she said it lost out to Winter Park—′

  Gordo waved that away. ′All Winter Park has above Alma′s elevation are ski lifts, so the hell with that, Cooper.′

  ′Sorry, sir.′

  ′Grace, at times government works in simple ways. The decision-makers wanted this facility to survive as long as possible, no matter how bad the flood gets. So where do you build? You go to the record books for the highest town in America, and that′s why a significant chunk of the single most expensive federal project since the decampment to Denver was unloaded on this little mountain town of two hundred souls. Look, I live over there - see the block in back of the Stone Church? Some of us pray in there, come Sundays.′

  ′What facility? What is this place?′

  The door opened. A young woman emerged, slim, not tall, pale, her red hair shaved short. She wore a lurid red and blue jumpsuit, with phones and other gadgets stuck in pockets. She was young, twenty-one, twenty-two. Blinking in the daylight she looked warily at Grace.

  ′Grace, this is Holle Groundwater, one of our most promising Candidates. Not that that′s saying much. Holle, meet Grace Gray - and Gray junior,′ he said, clumsily pointing to Grace′s belly. ′Here for selection. Maybe you could show her the ropes.′

  ′Sure.′ Holle smiled at Grace, and offered a hand to shake. But Grace could see the smile was forced.

  ′You aren′t glad to see me,′ Grace said bluntly.

  Holle raised thin eyebrows over sea-blue eyes. ′It′s just we′ve got enough competition for places already, and there are only a few months left. The last thing we need is more applicants.′ Her accent was soft, lilting, British maybe, unfamiliar to Grace. Then she grinned. ′Of course that′s not your fault.′

  ′Places? Places on what?′

  But there was no reply. Evidently secrecy was habitual. Holle was well fed, earnest, bright. Grace remembered how she had been at Holle′s age, still on the road, feet like leather and not a gram of fat on her body, everything she owned in a faded pack on her back.

  Maybe Gordo sensed the tension between the women. He took off his cap and ran a hand over his grizzled scalp. ′Listen, Grace. You′re going to need some way to prove your capabilities. Let me give you an assignment. Just now we have a crime we need solving here.′

  ′What kind of crime?′

  ′A murder,′ Gordo said simply.

  The word shocked Grace. She looked blankly at the block, the biblical slogan, Holle′s intent, competent-looking face. ′I don′t know anything about investigating crimes. We had cops in Walker City, and on the Ark Nathan′s guards—′

  ′You can start by talking to Holle, here. Find out how it all started for her. I mean, you′ve been in the programme since you were six years old - right, kid?′

  Holle smiled. ′According to my father, since I was conceived.′

  ′It will be a way for you to figure out what we′re up to here.′ Gordo grinned. ′Yeah. Solve the crime, and earn your place. Two birds with one stone. I don′t often have ideas, but when I do they′re generally doozies. Now I got work to do, not least organising the retrieval of Nathan Lammockson′s seed cache from his sinking ship. But before I go—′ Gordo fished in a jacket pocket, and produced a key-ring with a bauble pendant. ′I hand these out to the government suits, and anybody else I think needs some inspiration. What we′re working towards.′ He put the little artefact in Grace′s hand.

  She raised the key-ring. The pendant was a translucent sphere, bluish, maybe a centimetre across. Embedded within it were two silver splinters, connected by a bit of thread. ′What is it?′

  ′Ask Holle. Catch you later, Groundwater.′ He strode off back towards the cars, and once more Grace was abandoned with a stranger.

  ′This way - Grace, is it?′ Holle led Grace into the building.

  Inside, the block was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace of facilities aboard Lammockson′s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room.

  The two of them didn′t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world - continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green - with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labelled with a disc. Gary′s amateur education programme had always heavily favoured science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.

  Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on the Ark, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost for ever.

  ′This is at the heart of what we do,′ Holle said.

  ′What is this place?′

  ′Mission Control. We′re running a simulation right now—′

  ′And this?′ Grace held up the key-ring globe.

  ′Our spaceship.′ Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. ′Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We′ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I′ll tell you how we got started here.′

  TWO

  2025-2041

  4

  JUNE 2025

  It was raining in Denver, a steady, unrelenting downpour that fell from a grey lid of sky. It pinged off the wings of the plane that brought Patrick Groundwater and his daughter in over the city, and glistened on the runways and sculpted roofs of the terminal buildings as he carried six-year-old Holle through the international airport, discreetly tailed by Alice Sylvan and the rest of her security team, and hammered on the roofs of the cars that drove them through kilometres of suburban sprawl, crowded with IDP camps and welfare facilities, towards downtown. Under rusting junction signs the interstate was deserted save for police and government vehicles, and only a handful of private cars. To the west the mountain line was entirely invisible.

  Patrick had visited Denver long ago, in his early teens, on his way to go skiing at Aspen. This was before the turn of the millennium, maybe fifteen years before the inception of the flood. He remembered the breathlessness, and today the air felt just as thin. Back then it hadn′t rained at all, save for a couple of intense storms which had been kind of fun, nothing like this steady, relentless downpour. But since those days the sea had risen two hundred metres from where it used to be, the air was full of heat and moisture, and you couldn′t expect to escape the rain even in the mile-high city. Well, Thandie Jones would tell Patrick and the other assembled mega-rich folk of LaRei all about that tomorrow.

  All Thandie′s words wouldn′t deflect a single raindrop from his daughter′s head. But in Denver he hoped to meet people who inte
nded to do something about it.

  At the hotel they were met by smiling porters in galoshes and wielding umbrellas.

  Patrick was reassured by his first impression of the Brown Palace. Set on a peculiar triangular lot where two street layout systems collided, it reminded him oddly of an ocean liner wrought of red granite and sandstone. Inside, an atrium towered up eight storeys. While Alice completed the checkin formalities, Holle ran around the polished floor, pointing at the golden onyx pillars and lifting up her little face to peer wide-eyed at the filigree rails and the stained-glass ceiling far above, from which hung an immense Stars and Stripes. In a world that was slowly breaking down, you could rely on a church-like Victorian-vintage pile like the Brown to stand solid and comfortable where newer confections of glass and reinforced concrete were crumbling. Besides, it was only a few hundred metres from Denver′s civic centre, where in the morning he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson and the rest of the LaRei people.

  The suite Patrick was given had everything he needed to keep Holle happy, including a kid-friendly mini-bar, a net sack of books and toys, and screens with a variety of entertainments. There were tough notices about conserving water. Denver′s weather had always come from rain on the Rockies, and although the climate was a lot wetter now the disruption to the rainfall patterns and the increased population made the fresh water supply chancy.

  One TV screen was tuned permanently to a news channel, put out by the Rocky Mountain News, a defunct old print outlet revived as a broadcaster. Over a rolling tickertape of more or less dismal headlines, the channel showed images of the latest disaster, in this case a kind of limited civil war that had broken out around Alice Springs, Australia, as the residents resisted attempts by the federal government to relocate refugees from flooded-out Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

  Holle played before the TV, investigating the toys. She seemed immune to the bombardment of horrors on the news, just as the world′s various disasters had seemed unreal to Patrick when he was a kid in the long-lost twentieth century. Best not to hide stuff from her, he had decided. Holle′s life was liable to be shaped by bad news. He liked to think Linda would have backed up this intuition, but he was never going to know.

  That evening he took Holle down to dinner in one of the hotel′s fancy restaurants. The waiters made a fuss of her as they elegantly served her a kiddie version of paella. It was a special request from Patrick, a kind of comfort food, a dish her mother used to make for her. Afterwards, back in the suite, he played card games with her, and let her watch a couple of episodes of Friends on TV, and read to her until she slept.

  Then he opened up his laptop and checked his emails.

  The big construction projects up on the Great Plains were proceeding well, although disgruntled refugees being settled there bitterly called them ′Friedmanburgs′. He referred that to his PR department for guidance.

  Patrick was also involved in the furiously paced open-cast mining of the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta. Oil, coal, gas and oil shale were already being intensively mined in Colorado, all over the Western Slope. The Alberta grab was on a different scale. It was supposedly sanctioned by the relocated Canadian government in Edmonton, but that was a fig-leaf fiction. The US federal government in Denver intended to extract as many of the hundreds of billions of barrels of oil available from the bitumen as possible before the seas closed over it all, in not many years from now if the gloomier experts were right. The government′s purpose was to secure its own position in the short term, and have a basis for national recovery in the longed-for day when the flood started to recede. The damage already done to the ecology and environment and so forth was ruinous. But rich men in the right place, like Patrick Groundwater, were getting even richer. Patrick had never imagined he would find himself in such a role. But somebody had to do it, and he tried to fulfil what he saw as his responsibilities conscientiously. Such was the way of the world.

  A gentle snoring told him Holle was sleeping deeply. He checked on her, covering her with her blanket a little more tightly, and made sure her Angel was switched off.

  Then he went back to work.

  In the morning Holle woke him up at six a.m., as usual. To his huge relief it wasn′t raining, and the summer sun was trying to break through towering clouds. By eight they had finished their room-service breakfast.

  Despite Alice Sylvan′s protestations, he decided they were going to walk and see the sights; they had a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson at the city′s public library. Holle had spent most of her young life in gated communities. It would be enriching for her to see something resembling a functioning city. So he packed a bag with child-type essentials, tissues, a book, a couple of toys, Holle′s Angel, a water bottle. Holle wore a summer dress, and with sun block on her arms and face and a pink hat on her head they were ready to go.

  They set off with Alice′s team scattered around them, pushing through the early morning crowds down Tremont Place towards the 16th Street Mall. The buildings were marred by cracked glass panes and peeling paint, the green spaces given over to crops like potatoes and beans, and the trees had long ago been cut down for firewood. Few cars moved on the wide avenues - you saw tanks or armoured vehicles more than cars - but the roads were full of pedestrians and cycles and rickshaws, pushing past long-disconnected traffic lights.

  The Mall itself was a straight-line strip of shops, once a pedestrian precinct, with rusting tram lines and tree stumps. The shoppers′ trolley-buses no longer ran, but heavy vehicles from the Sheriff′s office and the police passed slowly along the road, occasionally barking instructions from bullhorns. Patrick was struck by how many military and security operative types he was seeing. He suspected that the Mall was being used as a control corridor, stretching through the Central Business District and maybe up to Lower Downtown.

  The walking turned out to be relatively easy, with only a fringe of homeless camped under heaps of blankets and cardboard in the doorways, some families with children. Cops and Homeland Security on foot were checking the permit papers and biometric ID markers of the unresisting IDPs, making sure no more illegals had slipped into the city during the night. Aid workers handed out cups of beans, rice and hot water.

  Some of the shops were still functioning. The food stores and restaurants sold local produce almost exclusively. In the other windows you saw rebuilt and repaired electronics, clothes and accessories, shoes and coats, even books, everything recycled or reclaimed from drowned cities. Patrick found the existence of the shops comforting, a sign that he was in a functioning city, a contrast to the chaos prevailing over much of the surviving country. But if any of the original character of Denver had lasted into the twenty-first century, anything of its origins as a western trading post, nothing had survived the great erasure of the refugee flows. Without buying anything, they walked on.

  They came to California Street, and cut down to the Colorado Convention Center on 14th. This had been turned into a refugee processing camp, and long lines wound through the streets around it. The IDPs, from a distance, were grey clumps of misery, as they always were. The time for the meeting was approaching and, following Alice′s lead, they turned down 14th towards the civic centre park. As they tried to cross Colfax Avenue, the main east-west artery through the city, they had to get through a cordon around the civic centre, manned by police and military detachments.

  Patrick led his daughter past the monumental buildings set around the park: the US Mint, the curving frontage of the City and County Building, and the public library where Thandie Jones was due to give her briefing. The Art Museum was particularly striking, and Holle stared at its angular geometric forms, like the abandoned origami experiments of a giant. But the thin metal panels were streaked and corroded, the windows boarded up, the billboards empty. The coming of the flood had frozen all Earth′s great cities at around 2015, save for emergency construction to cope with refugee flows, where it hadn′t drowned them altogether.
That was a decade ago, and buildings like the Museum, neglected or co-opted for purposes for which they had never been designed, were showing their age.

  Denver, as the largest city for a thousand kilometres around and a key junction for transport and communications, had been a significant federal centre long before the flood. Since the capital had decamped here after Washington had flooded six years before, properties around the city had been requisitioned by the great departments of government. President Vasquez herself, the first three-term president since Roosevelt, had moved into the governor′s mansion. Patrick happened to know that much of the government′s business was run out of a more secure location, an old FEMA regional command centre, a two-storey bunker refurbished and revamped for the purpose. There were even embassies here, some from drowned nations, their flags hanging limp in the morning air. These struck Patrick as pitiful relics.

  In this civic centre, however, you had the sense of a great capital, the way Patrick remembered DC in the old days. People in suits bustled everywhere, many of them speaking into the air or with the characteristically absent expression of Angel users. Patrick imagined they were lobbyists and bureaucrats and staffers of all stripes, maybe even congressmen and senators. Patrick had a sense of the vast resources being poured into this place, that the city was the focus of huge energies and determination, a new refuge for the spirit of America and a base for the recovery to come. The President herself was in Denver. If you weren′t safe here, then where?

  A brace of helicopters swept low overhead with a great clatter of noise. Holle squealed and jumped, excited.

  Holle was enchanted by the State Capitol, an eighteen-storey structure with Greek columns and rotunda and golden dome, gleaming in the watery morning sunlight. She skipped up the Capitol′s stone steps, counting them until she got to the eighteenth. Here the step was engraved, and she read with painstaking care: ′ ′′One mile above sea level.′′ Is that right, Dad?′