Ark

74

July 2059

It was Boris Caistor, thirteen-year-old Boris with his sharp young eyes, who first noticed the new light in the sky, a spark sailing through the deeper dark between the banks of cloud.

“Thea saw it too,” he told Thandie Jones. “She says she can see a shape. Sort of long and thin, a splinter.”

Thandie, sitting on a surging raft in the middle of the ocean, looking up at a cloud-choked sky, frowned. “Surely two splinters, end to end, connected by a thread…”

“Nope. Just one. Of course she might be lying. Thea lies all the time, or makes stuff up anyhow. Once she said she saw this whale which-”

“Never mind!”

Thandie was pretty sure Boris didn’t understand what he had seen, not really, nor did he grasp its possible significance. And, worse, she was also sure he didn’t give a damn about it. Thandie had followed Lily Brooke’s lead in trying to maintain some kind of education program for the kids on the raft. But astronomy was about all you could manage, the changing starry sky the only show in town, all that would actually hook these kids’ interest in something other than food and swimming games and each other’s pretty bodies. Thandie suspected Boris’s brain was dissolving like those of the rest of his generation.

But he was a loyal kid, and he was kind to his honorary aunt Thandie, just as when she’d first met him in a cluster of rafts over the drowning relic of Everest and she’d seen him indulge the whims of another elderly lady, his great-great-aunt Lily Brooke. Boris was also bright and observant, and even though the seeing was always so phenomenally bad on this new, stormy ocean world he had been able to recognize the new light in the sky as something special, and maybe it was what Thandie had told him she had been expecting to see, for a year already.

If Boris had seen it so had others. So Thandie took one of her precious handhelds from within its brine-proof layers of plastic sheeting and let the solar cells power up the internal battery. She posted Boris’s sighting up to the hearth, and she sent out queries for other observations, especially of the thing’s first appearance in Earth orbit.

But she needed to see it for herself, and maybe get some idea of its orbital elements.

After that, for one night, two, then three, hell, as long as it was going to take, she sat on the raft’s deck in her old, much-traveled fold-out bucket chair, with a blanket wrapped over her legs, waiting for the clouds to clear. She kept drifting in and out of sleep. At seventy-three, and after a pretty hard life, she was blessed with reasonable health, but she felt the damp, and spent a lot of time asleep.

The raft was a big one, by the standards of those that had survived twenty years or more on an ocean patroled by the Spot and its offspring storms. It was constructed on pontoons of plastic oil drums and barrels, covered by sheets of slippery tarpaulin lashed down with orange cable. Once, this had been reinforced by a base of gen-enged seaweed, an AxysCorp product, a substrate that would feed on sunlight and the produce of the sea and grow and self-repair. This miracle substance, which Nathan Lammockson had hoped would be the saving of a waterlogged mankind, had turned out to have some fatal genetic flaw. After it had blackened and crumbled away, Thandie’s raft community had been able to scavenge replacement materials from the wrecks of other, even less fortunate rafts, all of its garbage recycled from the drowned civilization beneath their keels.

On this base sat a kind of floating shantytown, constructed of sheets of plastic and corrugated iron, proofed against the weather and the salty air of the sea. People lived off fish and other sea creatures, and birds’ eggs and processed seaweed, and they gathered their drinking water from the rain in upturned buckets. There was a farm, of sorts, in the middle of the raft, a heap of topsoil detached from the Andean hillside where the raft had first been constructed. Spindly crops grew, lovingly tended by old folk. There were even chickens, in a big plastic cage strapped to a wall. For power, a small bank of windmills stood over the farm, and there were panels of bright green AxysCorp solar energy panels, self-cleaning and self-repairing, almost like living things themselves. It was a constant battle to maintain all this, as the salt water forever poisoned the soil and withered the crops, and corroded electrics and any metal parts.

The younger generations helped out reluctantly. They didn’t care about farms. They didn’t even care about artificial light. They made fish-oil lamps, but rarely used them. If the skies were clear there was moonlight and starlight, and the luminescence of living things in the sea. And besides, who needed light at night? You didn’t need light to sleep or screw. So while the last of the land-born veterans struggled to keep all this junk going, the youngsters, Boris and his generation, went diving off the side of the raft into the endless ocean.

Thandie was tolerated. People left her alone with her obsessions, with her science and her gadgets and her theorizing. The raft was full of kids, and of parents caring for them, feeding, playing, stitching together clothes from faded worn-out relics-though, in the perpetually warm, moist air, a lot of kids were taking to nudity, and even some of the younger adults. The currents of their lives washed around Thandie as if she was a monument in a flood, a statue of some long-forgotten hero…

Her handheld, in her lap beneath the protection of the blanket, was bleeping softly.

She’d been dozing again. This was the fifth night. The sky was a lid of black cloud. She dug out the little computer and, cursing, felt inside her coat for her ancient reading glasses.

It was a message from Elena Artemova, once Thandie’s lover, now separated from her by age, ocean, and a kind of weary indifference. Elena was on another big raft, floating over the drowned corpse of Rio de Janeiro. And she, alert to the new light in the sky, had picked up a chance observation made by a raft over Los Angeles. “So the returning ship first appears in the skies over North America,” Elena mailed. “Not by chance, I would be sure…”

Thandie eagerly studied the observation, a short, poorly resolved video sequence taken through some raft-borne telescope.

Then she waited until Boris emerged from the water, dripping, thirteen years old, his muscles hard and his belly flat, his mouth smeared with fish oil, his penis limp from enthusiastic underwater sex. She made him sit down beside her, and talked him through the sequence of images.

“See-this shows the arrival of the object you saw, the bright new satellite. This was taken by a telescope that happened to be looking into the right corner of the sky, just at the point where it first appeared. I knew there had to be somebody who’d have caught it. Now wait… Watch the clock… Pow!” A bright flash appeared, off to the right of center of the star field, that was the ship itself, and a shimmer of light washed away from it, heading left in a dead straight line, fading, as if the ship had sent a bright optical message back the way it had come. “You see?” Thandie asked triumphantly, staring at Boris. “You understand what this is, what this observer saw?”

“No,” Boris said bluntly. He looked restless, his focus wandering. The kids had virtually no attention span at all.

Thandie suppressed irritation. “This is a ship that traveled faster than light. It’s visible as it travels; its warp bubble emits a cascade of exotic radiation energy, some of which folds down into the visible spectrum. But it outruns its own image. So the ship arrives first and the light has to catch up, all the photons it emitted back along its path arriving at mere light speed. The older images arrive last, and you get this effect as if the ship was receding, not arriving…” She played the little sequence over and over. “This is the signature of the arrival of a faster-than-light vessel, Boris, an FTL starship. It’s the Ark, Ark One. I knew they’d come back.”

He frowned, a comical thirteen-year-old’s attempt to feign interest. At least he was being polite. “So what do you want to do about it?”

“Break out the radio beacon. See if the batteries have retained any charge. Let’s bring them home.”