Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  ′And this here is Matt Weiss. Matt′s in a police cadet corps with Denver PD. You want to know where Matt cut his teeth? Out on the front line, on the coastline of what′s left of America, a coast that recedes every day. Matt has been out there helping senior DPD officers choose whose children get to land and whose don′t, and implementing those choices. Which of you has experience to compare with that?′

  Kelly Kenzie put her hand up. ′Colonel Alonzo, I don′t deny the validity of what you say. But there′s no room here, on the course. We′ve all been training specifically for this mission for years. If these two are to join—′

  ′Good point, blondie. I′ll have to make room,′ he said with a cold brutality. His gaze swept along the row.

  Holle saw people cringe back as if from a laser beam. She told herself to stand tall.

  Alonzo stared at Kelly, who′d asked him the question. And then he pointed at Don Meisel, who stood beside her. ′You. Redhead. Pack your bags. As of now you′re filling Matt′s place with DPD.′

  Don was shaking. ′Me? You don′t know anything about me. You don′t even know my name! And I didn′t say anything—′

  ′Exactly. Kid next to you had the guts to speak out.′ When Don didn′t move, he spoke with an ominous calm. ′You still here?′

  Don turned and walked. He pushed past Holle, his face red, eyes burning with humiliation and anger.

  ′And in the morning,′ Alonzo said, ′I′ll pick the second ejectee. Now go to work.′ He turned on his heel and walked out.

  All Holle felt was a cold horror. Since the day she′d joined the group, Don Meisel had been one of the obvious leaders. She′d even imagined he might make captain. And now he was gone, just like that. If Don Meisel could lose his place so arbitrarily, then who might go tomorrow?

  17

  Less than thirty minutes after Gordo Alonzo′s speech, Don Meisel was delivered to the door of the Denver police department head-quarters on Delaware Street.

  He walked into a crowded hall full of cops coming and going, in shabby uniforms or plain clothes, some shouting into the air or listening absently to Angels. Heavy security doors, all closed, led off deeper into the building. Many of the cops carried paper cups of coffee; the smell of the stuff was strong in the air. The fluorescent lights seemed dim, the paint on the walls a muddy yellow. With the noise and the muddy light, it felt like walking into a cave. None of it seemed real, in fact. He couldn′t believe he was here. One man, a heavy-set Latino, sat on a plastic chair, his hands cuffed before him. His nose looked flattened, the nostrils plugged with bloody tissue. He stared at Don in his gaudy Candidate′s uniform and sneered, showing a mouth full of broken teeth. Don shrank, self-conscious.

  A uniformed cop came up to Don. She was maybe fifty, with thick greying hair tied back in a bun behind her head. Her face was a mask, the wrinkles around her mouth and small nose chiselled deep, and her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. She had a small scar on her right cheek, maybe inflicted by a punch by ringed fingers. She was carrying a clipboard and handheld. ′You′re Don Meisel, from the Academy?′ She didn′t look at him as she said this.

  He stayed silent.

  That made her look up at him. ′Don Meisel,′ she said more firmly.

  ′Yes.′

  ′Yes, ma′am.′ She looked at him more closely, focusing on his face. ′Defiant cuss, are we? You won′t find that goes down well here. OK, Meisel, we don′t want you here.′

  ′And I don′t want to be here.′

  ′Then we′re equal. Equal in mutual loathing.′ There was a flicker of humour in her eyes. ′Look, I′ll give you a once-only head′s-up about how your life is going to be from now on. After that you′re on your own. OK?′

  He nodded stiffly.

  ′I can imagine how you′re feeling. Really I can. Getting thrown out of your cushy berth, the wonderful expensive programme they′re running back there. Thrown down into the pit, here on Delaware. That′s how it feels, right? And I know what you think your life will be like now. Policing food riots and battling eye-dees with TB.

  ′But it′s not all like that. This is still a city, it′s still populated by American citizens who are still preyed on by corner boys and touts and pimps and drug slingers and all the rest. And we′re still professional cops. I′m talking about ordinary, old-fashioned policing, of which the challenges have only got worse as wave after wave of refugees have washed over this town of ours.′ She looked deep into his eyes, challenging him. ′Think you might find some satisfaction in that kind of work? You′re a smart kid, I can tell by the files they sent over from the Academy. It′s still possible to build a career in this department. Just focus on the job and we′ll see how you prosper.′

  Don said nothing.

  ′OK, Meisel, your training starts as of now. Down the hall to the left, ask for Officer Bundy, I asked him to find you a berth in the squad for the first couple of days, and a partner. He′ll show you where to get a cadet badge and pick up a uniform. You seriously need to get out of the Spider-Man outfit.′

  ′Thank you,′ he said. ′Ma′am.′

  ′Oh, and Meisel. Ask Bundy about lodging.′

  ′I don′t need lodging.′

  She sighed. ′Yes, you do. You′ll get no more support from the Academy. Look, it′s not so bad. One time you had to be a Denver resident to be a cop here. Now it′s switched around, if you serve as a cop you have a residency entitlement. A rookie cadet like you has a right to a quarter-share in a dorm room. Bundy will give you the paperwork. Go, go, get on with it.′

  He walked stiffly into the building, ignoring the stares and grins of the officers he encountered.

  18

  SEPTEMBER 2036

  The morning′s class debate in the isolation camp was between Zane who had to defend the Ark′s latest draft design model, and Mel Belbruno who argued for the tough engineering disciplines that had been brought into the project by veterans of NASA, the USAF and the Navy.

  The Candidates were in the Cultural Center at Cortez, a small museum once run by the University of Colorado in this tiny little town in the south-west corner of the state, maybe five hundred kilometres from Denver. Within the walls of this hundred-year-old building, the Candidates in their gaudy scarlet-and-blue jumpsuits looked vivid against the drab background. Zane was on the stage, facing Mel, listening intently. Mel, though a fully fledged Candidate, had always been subtly excluded by the rest since being forced on the project by Gordo Alonzo four years back. But Zane knew Mel was no fool, and he had powerful allies.

  Mel said forcefully, ′In the Ark you′re looking at a single machine big and complex enough to keep humans alive, that′s going to have to function to something like its optimal parameters for years, decades even. In the military and aerospace we′ve been doing this for a long time. Look at the B52, fleets of which we kept flying for fifty years and more. Or the space shuttle, which lasted over three decades from first test to final operational flight, and which despite its problems had a safety record in terms of human flight hours per casualty that was second to none—′

  ′Poor examples,′ Wilson Argent snapped back. ′B52 missions lasted hours, shuttle missions maybe weeks, and even then you had ground support for maintenance.′

  ′But my point is that there are precedents of technologies being maintained for long periods - even across multiple generations, even centuries. We can look at these cases and abstract those features that enabled them to endure. A continuing purpose, for instance, as with medieval cathedrals in Europe—′

  That earned him guffaws. Kelly said, ′Are you seriously calling a cathedral a technology? Aqueducts are a better example of what you′re talking about, engineering intended to do something. There were aqueducts built by the Romans and kept functioning in southern Europe until the flood finally washed them away.′

  Mel regrouped. ′OK, I′ll take that point. But what kept the aqueducts working? You need to ensure your machine has clarity of purpose and a compelling need to
exist. You need to design on a basis of supreme reliability and low failure rates. And you need to build in ease of maintenance, redundancy, robustness of components. All of which argues against some of the fancier stuff you folks cook up. Nanotech. Self-replicating machines. Autonomous AIs, a ship that can run itself. These are things which we don′t know how to do. The experience of decades of space missions is that you use stuff that′s no more complex than it needs to be, and is proven in flight. No fancy, unproven technologies. No magic tricks.′

  And that, of course, was a jab directly at Zane and his father, and the whole warp-drive development effort. But more indirectly it dug into a split in the philosophy behind the whole project.

  There were test pilots working on Nimrod now. If you were an ambitious American flyboy in the year 2036 there was really only one show in town, one place to be, and that was Nimrod. There had even been a test launch of an Ares booster from the new launch facility at Gunnison, a thrilling, startling sight, despite the surrounding perimeter fences against which resentful IDPs pressed their faces.

  But as if in reaction to all this nuts-and-bolts work a whole raft of alternate schemes continued to be floated among the more fanciful thinkers. Maybe the whole project had started off in the wrong direction. If you took actual humans into space, lumpy bags of water, most of your ship′s mass would necessarily be devoted to plumbing. But maybe there were ways to save weight. Kelly often loudly advocated taking just women and buckets of frozen sperm. Better yet, you could take frozen zygotes and let the first generation of colonists be raised by machine. All such schemes had eventually been ruled out, partly because of technical implausibility, and partly because there was something distancing about them for those who had to build the ship. The Ark was an expression of dreams, as much as logic; better to send a single living child than a million frozen geniuses.

  But still the debate went on, and when Mel was done Zane was going to have to defend the fact that even the baseline design relied on at least one technological miracle, in the warp bubble.

  Even as Mel spoke, Zane was aware of the muttering among the leaders: Kelly Kenzie, the big glamorous star of the Candidate corps, and Wilson Argent, brash, impatient, bossy, and sharp, intense Venus Jenning, and Holle Groundwater, unassuming, bright and loyal, who Wilson had labelled ′the Mouse′ - even soft, motherly Susan Frasier. Zane had heard enough to know what was going on. Kelly and some of the others were planning a breakout today, Day Fifty of their latest isolation exercise. Kelly′s core group, bonded years ago, always dominated things. Once Don Meisel would have been in with them. Now, distanced, he sat away from the rest in his drab DPD coverall. Not for the first time Don had been called away from his regular duties and thrown back into a group from which he′d been arbitrarily excluded, to provide a minimum security cover while not disrupting the group′s dynamics with strangers.

  Whenever they put their pretty heads together like this, Zane felt a kind of deep panic. He was always left out of such discussions. Oh, Holle always took care of him, ever since her own first day at the Academy, when Zane had taken care of her. But that wasn′t enough to give him a way into the core social network of this bunch of bright, attractive, intensely competitive sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds.

  Nor was it much better for Zane in the outside world. His father was too deeply immersed in project politics and the intricacies of his own work on antimatter production to pay much attention to the adolescent angst of his son, save occasionally when he turned on Zane for some perceived failure or other. Zane did have the tutors, and in particular Harry Smith, but Zane was always uneasily aware of deeper levels to Harry′s regard for him.

  The nights were worst of all, when he lay in his bed in one of the big communal dorms, and heard the patter of feet and the giggling, and the soft parting of lips.

  Zane was afraid, all the time. He felt as if his personality was nothing but a rag of bluffs and pretensions that at any moment could be torn aside like a rotten curtain to reveal the dark, miserable truth that he was no good at anything and of no value to anybody. Maybe all sixteen-year-olds felt like this at times, even when the world wasn′t threatening to end. But if Holle or Kelly or Wilson had such doubts, they never betrayed them, not for a second that he could ever see. Only Zane, alone with his doubts and inadequacies and torments.

  Mel had run down his argument, and it was Zane′s turn to speak. He settled his laptop on his knees, brought up figures and notes, and focused his thoughts on what he was supposed to say.

  ′I hear your arguments, Mel, but it remains the case—′ Ugh, he sounded like his father, like a fifty-year-old man, how he hated that in himself, but he couldn′t help it. ′It remains the case that we′re going to have to rely on at least one brand new technology, which is the Alcubierre drive. We haven′t actually created a warp bubble yet, but we believe we′re coming close.′

  He tapped his screen and fed their computers with images he′d taken from his father′s files. They showed progress in building an atom-smasher in a suburb of Denver.

  ′We relied on scavenged equipment to build the thing, from the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and Fermilab in Chicago.′ Divers had descended hundreds of metres to a sea bed that had so recently been the Midwestern prairie, to bring up linear accelerators and superconducting magnets and X-ray sources, and tonnes of high-quality metals and cable. ′We use a new technology, plasma accelerators, to deliver a comparable performance to the CERN LHC from a machine a fraction of the size. But unlike with the pre-flood colliders we′re not interested in studying exotic products of high-speed proton collisions; we′re not doing physics here, just trying to make antimatter. We accelerate protons to within a whisker of the speed of light, and smash them together, six hundred million collisions a second. The result is a trickle of antiprotons which are in turn stored in what we call the Antiproton Source, a magnetic bottle …′

  If they came into contact, antimatter and matter enthusiastically annihilated. Only magnetic fields would do to keep the twin forms of matter entirely apart. But antimatter was worth the trouble. Fusion reactions typically turned only a few per cent of the available fuel mass to energy; matter-antimatter reactions converted it all. As a result matter-antimatter was the most compact energy source known, yielding, as Jerzy liked to tell his son, as much energy from a gram or so as the Hiroshima bomb.

  But the antimatter was only a step in the process. Once enough antimatter was created and stored it would be used to drive the even higher-energy collisions you needed to create a single point of such energy density that the fundamental string-fabric of matter and energy would be twanged and pulled tight, and spacetime′s narrow hyper-dimensional throat would be squeezed until it burst, and a warp bubble was born.

  Zane spoke on about the engineering tweaks which his father had had to devise, and how he had laboured to contain the costs.

  Nobody was listening. You were supposed to listen. Here in Cortez, sealed off from the world, with their phones and net connections blocked, they were expected to feed themselves by working in a small indoor garden, to maintain the air-cycling system that mimicked the environment support of the ship, to figure out and divide up other essential chores - and, most importantly, to learn from each other. These isolation exercises were supposed to help the Candidates develop the skills they would need when they faced the even deeper confinement of a long-duration spaceflight. So it paid to listen. Well, Don Meisel watched from his perch at the back of the room, and Mel Belbruno was assiduously making notes. But among the others the decision point was coming, something was passing between the core group in looks and nods and furtive grins. And now, like a breeze passing over a cornfield, a bunch of them unfolded their legs and stood up.

  ′We′re going out,′ Kelly Kenzie announced. ′Fifty days without sunlight is enough. Come if you want.′ She announced this to the outsiders, Mel, Zane. But she looked challengingly at Don.

  Don folded his arms without standing up. ′How
will you do that?′

  ′We found the exit you blocked up.′

  ′It′s on the other side of the shop,′ Holle said with a laugh. ′My father said that in places like this they always made you go out through the shop.′

  ′Won′t this count against you in terms of the exercise?′

  ′Not necessarily,′ Kelly said. ′We′re rewarded for initiative. I think Gordo Alonzo will be disappointed if we don′t try busting out.′

  ′My orders are to keep you safe,′ Don said. ′Not to stop you making assholes of yourselves. Do what you want.′ His face was blank. It seemed to Zane that since being reassigned to DPD he had become very good at hiding his emotions, but he never spoke to the group about his experiences, what he had seen and done.

  Kelly grinned. ′Let′s do it.′

  They all piled into the remains of the museum′s small shop, with its bare shelves and faded labelling. Wilson had figured out where to break through the fake panelling that had been used to conceal the shop′s main door, and he used a modified taser to disable the magnetic locks that held it shut. As the door swung open an alarm sounded, and they laughed nervously. But there was daylight beyond, a street, a slab of blue sky. It was irresistible.

  They all hurried out, pushing and giggling in the doorway in their bright uniforms. Zane too was pleased to be out, to feel the sun on his face, and to breathe deeply of crisp uncirculated air.

  ′You look happy,′ Holle said with a grin. She linked her arm in his.

  ′I always feel more real out of doors.′

  ′I know what you mean. But on the ship we′ll be cooped up for years, not weeks. I sometimes wonder how we′ll cope … Oh, that′s my phone.′ She dug in her pocket.