Ark

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 southwest corner of the state, maybe five hundred kilometers 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 labeled “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 meters to a seabed that had so recently been the Midwestern prairie, to bring up linear accelerators and superconducting magnets and X-ray sources, and tons 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 percent 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 hyperdimensional 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 labored 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 intended 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 labeling. Wilson had figured out where to break through the fake paneling 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.

All their phones were ringing. The museum’s fabric had been laced with conductors to turn it into a Faraday cage, a block against transmissions. Cora Robles now had the largest fan base among the Candidates, or so she claimed, and she wasted no time, working her handheld with jabs of her thumb, replying to weeks of messages. Zane, vaguely guilty, turned his own phone off without looking at the screen.

He became aware of the people watching them.

The town of Cortez was a small place, once devoted to ranching and farming and catering for the tourists who had come to see the mountains and the river valleys and mesa tops where people had lived for thousands of years. Now the town was overwhelmed by the eye-dees’ shelters and tents and shanties of cardboard and corrugated metal, crowding the sidewalks and every open space. And the people were everywhere, standing on doorsteps, or poking their heads out of tents, or walking the sidewalks and traffic-free streets, some dragging ancient supermarket carts, looking at the Candidates. But the Candidates, intent on their phones and handhelds, barely registered the staring locals.

A little girl came walking up to the Candidates. Aged maybe nine, she wore a faded adult T-shirt tied around her waist with a bit of old electrical flex. Don watched warily, his hand on the heft of the nightstick at his belt. She pointed at Kelly. “I know you. You’re Kelly Kenzie.”

With a smug glance at Cora, Kelly smiled. “How do you know that?” “My dad works at Gunnison. He has a computer that lets you watch what you’re all doing and read your blogs and stuff.” She smiled. “I like watching you. I like the pretty colors you wear. I don’t live here.”

“You mean in Cortez? Where, then?”

“Mesa Verde. In the Cliff Palace.”

Zane was amazed. He had seen the Cliff Palace, his father had once taken him there, dwellings built by ancestors of the Pueblo people and pecked into the rock. Now that precious, ancient place had become home to this little ragged little girl.

“There are lots of us,” she said, matter-of-fact. “We have TV and stuff.” She approached Kelly, holding out a precious bit of paper and a sliver of coal to write with. “Can I have your autograph?”