Ark

19

The question was, what to do with their liberty. They spent a few minutes consulting search engines. Then they settled on making for the Hawkins Preserve, a couple of kilometers away. This hundred-acre cultural park had been preserved by the city fathers, who had decided early that even the children of refugees needed a place to run and play ball.

So off they set, led by Kelly and Wilson, following interactive maps that took them south on North Market Street and then right onto West Main, then left down South Chestnut. Most of the Candidates stared into their screens rather than at the town around them, devouring news and mail, gossip and speculation.

Venus Jenning said, “They’re still studying that detonation out in the Oort Cloud…” One deep space telescope, intent on exoplanet-spotting, had fortuitously caught a flash out in the halo of comet cores that drifted far beyond the orbits of the planets, cold and lightless. Later a handful of probes had reported anomalous traces of high-energy radiation and particles.

Zane asked, “So are they sure it’s a nuclear explosion yet?”

Venus shrugged. “That’s still the best fit to the data. Somebody lobbed a nuke out there and set it off, or a lot of nukes. But who? The Chinese, the Russians-”

“Could be the Americans,” Wilson put in dryly. “Our whole project is a secret.”

“OK,” Venus said. “But why? The whole world’s drowning. Why blow up a long-orbit comet? What’s the point?”

None of them had an answer.

“Shit,” Mike Wetherbee said. “The age-profile selection committee has handed down its recommendations.” This was a lot more interesting, something that would affect them all. They crowded around him to see, and started downloading data to their own screens.

The social engineers had been devising ways to give the nominal crew, the target number now set at eighty, the best chance of social stability while maximizing genetic diversity. For instance, it had long been decided that families would not be taken, as they represented too many copies of the same genes. There would be no parents on the Ark, no siblings; each crew member, as genetically distinct from the rest as possible, would walk onto the Ark effectively alone.

But how old should the crew be? A uniform distribution of ages, matching the human world they had left behind, seemed the obvious choice. But such a distribution would leave any one individual with only a small number of possible mates of her own age. So, the social engineers had decided now, to maximize an individual’s mating opportunities and to ensure the genetic diversity of the group as a whole, you had to have everybody on board about the same age: everybody would belong to a single “age-set echelon,” in the demographers’ term. The idea would be to wait for several years before having children-maybe even until after landfall on the destination planet-and then to produce another large cadre of children, all around the same age, who would follow their parents up the age graphs with a lag of twenty or twenty-five or thirty years. And, when they in turn came of age, they too would find they had a large choice of potential partners to choose from.

So that was the scheme. As it sank in, many of the Candidates looked troubled-Susan Frasier, for instance, who often spoke of her nephews and nieces, and her desire to have kids of her own, sooner rather than later.

Holle looked appalled. “My God, what a trip that’s going to be. Just us, no grown-ups, no kids, going on and on and on.”

Wilson grinned. “Can’t face it, Mouse? You want to wash out, and stay here to teach your babies to swim?”

“Don’t be an arsehole,” Holle said, her long Scottish vowels rich.

Zane kept his own doubts to himself. Personally he couldn’t care less about having kids or not, though if he made it into the crew it would be his duty to pass on his genes. But he was concerned about the age restriction. He was among the youngest in the group. What if he washed out just because his birthday lay just on the wrong side on some arbitrarily decreed limit? It was something else to fret about, another pointless, uncontrollable worry.

Something flickered in the corner of his eye.

He turned. It had been off to the north, like a distant lightning strike, or the reflection of the sun on a tilting window. Some of the others hesitated, distracted by the flash, or by reflections in the screens of their phones.

Now the phones started ringing again. Zane dug his own phone out of his pocket.

Holle covered his hand with hers. She had her own phone clamped to the side of her head. “Wait, Zane. Don’t switch it on.”

That eternal fear chewed deep into his belly. “What’s wrong?”

“Harry Smith is coming. He’ll tell you.” She glanced around, and pushed a lock of hair from her eyes. “We need to get you back to the Center. Don, help me.”

“Sure.” Don stepped up, brisk and competent.

With Don on one side, Holle the other, both of them taller than he was, Zane found himself being marched along the street. The others watched him sympathetically. Everybody seemed to know what was happening except him. Even the heavy-handed care of Holle and Don felt like a humiliation. It was as if his worst fears were coming true. “What’s going on? Has something happened to my father?”

“Wait for Harry,” Holle said. She wouldn’t look him in the eye.

And then he heard a rumble, as of distant thunder, coming from the north.