Ark

8

The next morning a courier arrived at the Brown Palace bearing a handwritten note addressed to Patrick Groundwater: “Personal-Your Eyes Only-Do Not Disclose Contents.”

The courier was just a kid, a boy aged about fourteen, in an anonymous AxysCorp-brand coverall. In a world full of hungry refugees, you didn’t have to be too rich to afford a runner. But even so, in a world that was almost paper-free, it was an unusual way to receive a message. Patrick had Alice Sylvan tip the kid and sent him away. Then, as Holle was eating her room-service breakfast in the suite’s main living room, Patrick, following the spirit of the note, took it to the bathroom, huddled in a corner he thought had to be free of prying surveillance cameras, and opened it.

The note was from Edward Kenzie. Handwritten like its envelope, it invited him to come to the Auraria campus at ten a.m. that morning, “to attend the launch of a new project.” Feeling mildly foolish, Patrick ripped the note into shreds and flushed them down the lavatory.

Then he went back to the living room, gulped another coffee, and helped Holle get ready for her day.

It was a morning of sun and scattered cloud. The warmth and light lifted everybody’s mood, and Holle skipped as they made their way across town, cutting southwest down Larimer Street to the bridge over Cherry Creek to the campus. Alice Sylvan, nightstick in her left hand and her right resting on her gun holster, smiled as Holle peered into the concreted-in creek. From here, Patrick could see the shoulders of the Rockies to the west, and the quartz splinters of Denver’s small downtown to the east.

They reached the campus. Patrick had attended Yale and Oxford. Auraria, shared by three colleges, must once have been like a redbrick movie-set mock-up of a traditional campus, he thought, with broad leafy avenues set amid acres of car parks. Some of the academic buildings still functioned; in a federal capital there was still a need for college-level educated. But many of the buildings had been abandoned to housing and the athletics fields plowed up for crops.

The note directed Patrick and his party to the campus library and media center. This was a box of glass and white-painted steel shutters. Outside, they were met by a sober-suited man whose jacket barely concealed the bulge of his own weaponry. He waved a wand to check them over-even Holle, even the day bag with her toys and orange juice bottles-then led them into the aircon-cooled building. The interior space was wide and open, the floors connected by skeletal staircases. They were led down a short corridor to a small conference room.

Gathered around a table with inset touchscreens were Edward Kenzie, Jerzy Glemp, and a slim young man, perhaps Chinese, who Patrick didn’t recognize. Alice joined a couple of security men on seats by the wall. The air was full of the aroma of coffee from a percolator on a table in one corner, and Patrick thought he detected a stale whiff of cigarette smoke.

In one corner a couple of kids, both about Holle’s age, were playing with plastic toys. Patrick recognized Kelly, the bright blond daughter of Edward Kenzie, from the session yesterday. The other was a boy, a pretty kid with thick black hair. A young man sat on the floor with the kids, smiling, watching them play. Patrick released Holle’s hand and let her walk tentatively over.

Kenzie came up to Patrick and handed him a mug of coffee.

“Edward,” Patrick said. “So you decided to hook up with Jerzy too?”

Kenzie snapped, “I’ve got other irons in the fire, frankly. But after what Thandie Jones had to say, isn’t the right course obvious? We got to get off this submerging planet. Besides it was Glemp’s contacts through Eschatology, Inc. that set up the session in the first place.”

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing my daughter.”

“She is welcome,” Jerzy Glemp put in. “There is my own little boy, Zane. Say hello, Zane!” The boy, who with his thick dark hair and Slavic looks only faintly resembled Glemp, gave Patrick a shy nod. Jerzy said, “Of course our children should be with us-even now they may be old enough to understand something of what is said here. And after all, the project is for them and of them. In the year 2040, we will need crew.”

Crew. The word thrilled Patrick.

Jerzy Glemp rubbed his hands. He looked excited, delighted, as if he’d been waiting his whole life for this moment, and perhaps he had, Patrick thought. “So shall we begin?”