Ark

2

They clambered aboard a jeep, and the convoy moved off with a soft whirr of electric engines. This small fleet of cars, emblazoned with Homeland Security and US military logos, had brought the Ark crew here from the coast. The convoy soon broke up, cars peeling off, leaving Gordo’s jeep and one other heading steadily north out of town, skirting the flanks of Pikes Peak.

Gordo sat with Grace behind the young uniformed woman who drove the jeep. He pointed ahead; the road was a good track through the mountains. “The drive will take a few hours. This is mountain country, the Rockies. We’re following the old state highway up to US 24 at Divide, where we’ll head west. We’ll turn north at Hartsel and make for Fairplay, and then you’re only a few miles from Alma, which is south of the Hoosier Pass.”

“Is that where we’re going? Alma?”

“It’s just a little town, an old mining place. Or was. I don’t know if any of these names mean anything to you.”

“We never walked this way.”

“Right, with your okie army.”

“Walker City. We had maps from the old days. But on Ark Three there were computer maps. Up to date.” The ship’s computers generated maps that showed the consequences of a flood that now approached eighteen hundred meters above the old sea level, maps of the archipelago that was the surviving remnant of the Rocky Mountain states. “The flooding started just about when I was born. I don’t remember the country the way it used to be.” You always had to explain that to older people, who clung in their heads to images of what had been.

Divide, when they reached it, was just another small town. Whatever it had once been before the flood it was now overwhelmed by eye-dees, IDPs, Internal Displaced Persons, as was everywhere else. The road was fenced off by rabbit wire. As the little convoy passed through people came out of their shacks and tents to watch. Grace saw how the troopers in the lead jeep cradled weapons.

The two jeeps drove steadily west, through Ute Pass that Gordo said was above nine thousand feet. Everything seemed to be feet, inches, miles with Gordo the astronaut. Gary Boyle, the scientist who had raised her, had taught Grace to measure her world in meters and kilometers.

The mountains had a bare, brown look. It hadn’t snowed here for years. As they passed through a tiny community called Florrisant, Gordo talked about a park of fossil beds nearby, full of petrified redwood thirty-five million years old. Now, he said, it held more people than fossils.

Then, at Wilkerson Pass, views of a high-elevation meadow called South Park opened up, and the road seemed to sail off into the air.

“God,” Gordo said suddenly, “ look at that view. You know, it’s just not reasonable that all this can be drowned beneath a mile of fucking seawater. I guess this is why I work so hard at Nimrod-trying to save something of it, the essence anyhow. Bobbing around on some crumbling raft just won’t be the same.”

Grace stared at him. The driver kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road, as if she hadn’t heard this outburst.

Gordo relaxed, and laughed at himself. “Sorry. Am I coming over like a tourist guide?”

She frowned. “I’m not sure what a tourist is.”

“OK. I’m told you used to be a princess.”

“My mother, in captivity, was raped by a Saudi prince. Does that count? If so I still am a princess. You used to be an astronaut.”

He nodded his bullet head. “I guess I still am, following your logic. Flew in space once, to ISS.”

“To what?”

“The space station.” He pointed up. “But after that my own career got fucked over by the flood. Well, grounded I may be, but I found something worthwhile to do here.”

“It’s got nothing to do with me. And I didn’t ask for it.”

“Maybe not. But we didn’t ask for you either. Look, there’s a selection process for newcomers to the project. Like Thandie said back in Cripple Creek, you’re actually a better candidate than your husband would have been, in terms of Nimrod’s criteria. You’ve shown independent survival skills. I saw that for myself. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Well, if you make it you’ll be one of the oldest on the crew. Any religious affiliation?”

“Walker City had priests, rabbis, imams-”

“I didn’t ask about Walker City. I asked about you.”

“No. I’m not religious.”

“Good. The social engineers are trying to make the crew an entirely secular society. Lessens the chance of factionalization and conflict, they think. Well, we’ll see about that. And Thandie was right that the selectors currently like pregnant women, by the way. With a pregnant woman aboard you’re getting two sets of genes in one package. You’ll be an easier sell.”

“Lily Brooke planned it that way,” Grace said, the bitterness welling up again. She had figured all this out in the hours since Lily had delivered her into the hands of Gordo, had reevaluated everything that had happened to her over the last months and years on Ark Three. All of it had been the product of manipulation by Lily. “She set up my relationship with Hammond so Nathan would favor me. She even timed my pregnancy, I think, so I’d tick another box on your chart.”

“And she did this because-”

“Lily was in captivity with my mother. In Barcelona, Spain. I was born there, in some cellar, with my mother manacled to a radiator. Lily feels obligated to me because of that.”

“You’re not entirely grateful.”

“Lily just controls me. Who would want that?”

He waved a hand. “Well, none of that matters now. You’ll never see Lily again. Here you are, here’s the situation you face, however you got here. The only question is where you go from here.”

“And if I choose not to go along with your project?”

Gordo said bleakly, “Then you’ll have no place with us. You or your kid. We can’t feed you.”