Ark

11

January 2031

Holle was late on her first morning at the Academy, at the very start of the new term. She’d meant to cut through the City Park, on her way to the Academy which had been set up in the old Museum of Nature and Science on the park’s east side. But the park had been turned into a mixture of farm and refugee camp, and overnight there had been trouble as mid-process eye-dees had protested over being forced to work on biofuel crops. Her father always said it was simply dumb to make mothers with hungry babies work on anything other than food crops. So this morning the whole park was closed off, and Holle, eleven years old and alone, had to skirt south along 17th Avenue, hurrying past cordons of Denver PD cops and Homeland Security, with their advisers from the Office of Emergency Management and homeless-IDP welfare agencies.

It wasn’t a pleasant walk. It had been snowing, not so much as it used to in January according to long-term residents, but enough to leave a covering on the fields and slush in the gutters that she tried to walk around. And the air was foul. She kept her mouth clamped shut against the smoke and tear gas. There was an irony. Her father told her the air was cleaner than it had been when he was Holle’s age, despite a global injection of volcanic products. Not this morning. Some days, everything sort of piled up to make life harder.

Denver wasn’t as much fun as it had seemed when they had first come here six years ago. It was growing shabbier every day, and was increasingly cluttered up with eye-dees and everything that came with them-including diseases like tuberculosis, now that the capability to manufacture antibiotics was breaking down. The city itself was being transformed, in anticipation of a tougher future. Flood walls and storm drains were extended. Wherever possible hard paved surfaces were being ripped up to expose earth where crops could be grown and, more importantly, flood water allowed to soak away. Meanwhile the last year had been a record for tornadoes hitting the city, another outcome of the flood-induced global warming. The big sirens in downtown had wailed over and over, scarily, and buildings had been left battered and glassless, barely habitable. Even if you went driving out of the city, as her father sometimes took her out on the scrubland beyond Denver’s urban sprawl, you couldn’t escape it. You saw nothing but eye-dees walking in from the drowned eastern states and just setting down where they could. When no shelter was provided for them they built huts of bricks cut from sod, as the pioneers had once done a hundred and fifty years earlier, and started planting potatoes and raising pigs.

Sometimes she missed the gated community in New York State where she’d lived when she was small, with its clean apartments and swimming pools, and the tall whitewashed wall that excluded the rest of the world. And no floods or tornadoes or eye-dees in sight.

She was relieved to reach Colorado Boulevard and cut down to the museum. Though stained with age now, the museum was a big block of brick and glass set on a slight rise overlooking the sweep of the park to the west, toward downtown, and beyond that the Rockies. From here the park looked like a medieval village, packed with smallholdings and shabby huts, and threads of smoke rising up from dung fires. But the museum on its rise was fortified.

She had to show her Candidate’s pass and submit to three biometric ID inspections before she was allowed into the main entrance. By the time she got through everybody else had already gone in-everybody save Zane Glemp, who was waiting for her by the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said, breathless.

“It’s not me you’ll have to apologize to. Come on. ” He led her inside the building, through an echoing ticket hall and toward the stairs behind the closed-up museum shop. This was a bright tall open space, and overhead the dusty skeletons of marine dinosaurs from Colorado’s vanished Cretaceous sea still swam in the air.

She felt a rush of affection for Zane. He was a skinny kid, and at ten he was a year younger than she was. But he had his father’s brains, and had been allowed into the Academy a whole two terms ahead of her. This first morning he had promised to meet her and show her around, and he was keeping that promise even at the risk of making himself late as well. “Thanks for waiting for me.”

“I was here already.” That was true; he had his own room in the Academy, that he used when his father was away.

“It wasn’t my fault I was late. There was a riot in the park, and I-”

“Save it. They don’t accept excuses here.”

“Well said, Mr. Glemp.” By the elevator shaft, Harry Smith was hauling a small trolley laden with books. He stepped toward them and folded his arms. “Late on your first day, Groundwater? Not a good start.” He was being teacher-strict, nothing more, and that was sort of reassuring to Holle as she tried to get her bearings. But he was standing very close to them. Something about him always made her uneasy.

“I won’t let it happen again.”

He nodded. “Good answer.”

“I’ve got my assignment.” She dug her handheld out of her bag, and tried to show him her study of the ecological disaster unfolding up in the Rockies, of how the tree line had already ascended so far that the old regions of montane forest and shrubland, with their ponderosa pines and cactuses, were withering, whole ecozones disappearing.

But Harry waved that away. “You’ve both made yourselves late for Dr. Zheng’s class, haven’t you? Pop quiz.”

Zane fretted, and shuffled from one foot to another. “Can’t we just go to class? A quiz will make us even later.”

“Then you’ll just have to make up that much more work, won’t you? OK. Overnight the Ark executive announced they’ve finally made their decision on where to locate the space launch center-at Gunnison, Colorado. Why there?”

Holle glanced at Zane. “I didn’t know about Gunnison. I listened to the news. But it wasn’t in the bulletin I saw-”

Harry said, “Of course not. You know as well as I do about the secrecy around the project. You can’t keep a space center under wraps, and there will be an official announcement later today. But both your fathers are at the center of the project. You both are. You should know everything they know.” He dug into the pile of books on the trolley, found an atlas, and threw it at Holle; it was a big, heavy, pre-flood volume, and she had trouble catching hold of it. “Why Gunnison? Work it out. I’ll give you five minutes. Otherwise, another question.” And he walked away, towing his trolley.

The two of them kneeled on the floor and spread out the atlas, looking for the right map. “What an asshole,” Holle murmured.

“He’s our pastoral tutor,” Zane said. “Looking after our overall personal development, while the specialist teachers-hey, look, here it is. Colorado.”

They peered at the map, a splash of yellow and green laced across with roads marked in orange and blue. Denver showed up as a knot of development where major highways intersected. The map was pre-flood, but the shoreline of the great inland sea that had washed across the eastern United States, now reaching as far as a line from the Dakotas down to the Gulf, was still too far east to have shown up on this map.

Zane looked at her doubtfully. “So why would you build a space center in Colorado at all?”

“The government would need to keep it close to Denver to make sure it was safe.” Her father talked this sort of thing through with her. As the flood bit away at the remaining land area, more roads and rail routes were cut, more people joined the homeless throngs that washed back and forth across the high ground, and the government’s political control was weakening. The news bulletins were full of growing tension over a would-be separatist Mormon state in Utah; there was even talk of war. “Somewhere in Colorado. But where?”

“High up enough that it won’t flood before 2040.”

“But that still leaves a lot of choice.” She thought about where Cape Canaveral had been situated-on the Atlantic shore, the eastern coastline of America. Why there? For safety reasons, she remembered. You always launched rockets eastward, to get a boost from Earth’s own rotation. Launching from Canaveral had meant that any failure would result in a rocket, flying east, falling harmlessly into the sea. Now the same principle surely applied. “Look,” she said, stabbing a finger at the map. “Gunnison. Twenty-three hundred meters above the old sea level. In 2040 it will be close to the eastern coast of the surviving land. A safe place to launch east.” What else? She dug her handheld out of her bag and quickly interrogated it. “The town’s on a valley bottom, so plenty of flatland. There’s an airport nearby, so you have transport links, and this reservoir, the Blue Mesa, can provide water. And it’s a college town, so there’s a population of workers already in place-”

Harry Smith approached them. “Actually that took you only four minutes. Yes, that’s why Gunnison, Colorado, is going to host the world’s latest, and maybe last, space launch facility. Twenty years ago you’d never have believed it. Good bit of deduction, Ms. Groundwater. OK, you’re free to go.”

They got to their feet, handed back the atlas, and ran for the stairs.

“And, Ms. Groundwater- don’t be late again. Next time you might find somebody else sitting in your seat…”