Ark

79

On her way to confront Wilson over his relationship with Steel, Holle met Grace in the upper cone of Halivah, where they waited for Venus to join them.

They looked down the length of the open tank. In the post-Split microgravity most of the deck partitions had been taken out once more to open up the hull’s big inner space. The long fireman’s pole was still in place down the hull’s axis, and cabins clustered along the length of the pole, attached by staples and cables and sticking out at all angles. It was the middle of the working day. People swam everywhere, engaged on their business. There was a clamor of noise, of voices; the removal of the decks had turned the whole hull into an echo chamber. Down about Deck Five Holle saw a dream circle gathered, mostly youngsters. One of them was Zane Glemp, talking, holding them spellbound. Around Deck Eight half the flooring had been left in place to serve as a base for Wilson’s cabin, a grand affair of partitions and blankets, a palace of trash. The whole volume was bathed in the fake sunlight of the big wall-mounted arc lamps, the light diffused in the dust-laden air.

You could easily differentiate the various generations. Like Holle and Grace themselves, most people on board still belonged to the generation that had boarded the ship on Earth eighteen long years ago. Aging now, mostly in their late thirties or early forties, they moved around efficiently but without elegance.

Then came the teenagers, like Helen Gray born after the launch from Gunnison, who had spent the years of their adolescence in microgravity and moved with unconscious skill. Most of them weren’t much like Helen, however. They wore basic wraps that left their arms and legs bare, their flesh adorned with tattoos that matched graffiti on the walls, markings incomprehensible to any adult that badged their allegiance to one tribe or another. They moved in swarms like exotic fish in a tank, ignoring the adults and eyeing each other with suspicion. Holle knew that few of these kids ever attended formal classes. It worried her that they were so disconnected from the ship and its mission; this was the next generation of crew after all. Wilson claimed not to care. If he ever had to confront them he sent in his illegal buddies, a bigger, tougher gang than the rest. But then Wilson had his own take on these youngsters, which was the reason Holle and Grace were going to see him now.

And then came the youngest of all, the kids of seven and under who had actually been born and grown up in free fall. Having known nothing else they rocketed through the air, fearless. One group of kids was working its way up a wall, cleaning it; they had pads in their hands and canisters of water on their little backs. Through the general clamor Holle could hear the piping of the nonsense song the children sang as they worked: “I laugh you more my fun / you’re my enjee / you’re my tee-fee / I laugh you more my fun…” They sang it as a round, overlapping the fragmentary lines, shoving their sponges over the wall to the rhythms of their music. They were a spindly breed, Holle always thought, surprisingly small in height, and pale too, pale like the sightless worms that had once swum in Earth’s deep lightless oceans.

And, in a moment of comparative quiet, Zane’s thin voice carried up from the dream circle.

“The doctors, but they’re not really doctors and even they admit that, say I don’t exist. I am only a construct of the relationship between these partial people who live inside my head, who don’t exist either. Maybe that’s true of all of us. Maybe none of us exist, except in how we relate to each other. Maybe if we went out of this hull one by one we would each cease to be, alone in the dark. And then when the last of us was left, one person left in the hull-maybe he or she would go too, just popping out of existence…”

This was clearly Zane 3; Holle recognized the content of what he said, the mannerisms. But it was a more forceful Zane 3, angrier, stronger, somehow more determined. Fueled by the reintegrated pain of Zane 1, maybe.

Grace murmured, “You know Wilson’s concerned about the stuff Zane’s saying. Zane denies that anything exists outside the hull, and says he doesn’t remember anything that occurred before the warp launch from Jupiter. Well, most of these kids have never been outside the hull either, and they remember nothing but the voyage. He’s saying what they want to hear on some deep level, I think.”

“It’s just entertainment. The HeadSpace booths are too pricey, so they swap dreams. Zane is just a storyteller. A spooky one, but that’s all.”

“Are you sure? He’s been developing justifications for his theories for years. For instance he says that warp drive is impossible; he can prove it from first principles.”

“But any of these kids can go to the cupola and look out at the stars. How does he explain that away?”

“It’s a simulation, with obvious flaws. Such as the warp field lensing, which is just a scrambling of a star field projection.”

“What other ‘obvious flaws’?”

“Odd matches. We’re supposedly fleeing from a flood, but Earth II was in a constellation called the River. Flood, river? To find our destination in the starscape you look for Orion-and yet we claim that we were launched from Earth by a drive also called Orion. Zane argues that these name matches are symptoms of a lazy design regime. Or maybe they are clues smuggled in by some dissident sim designer to help us figure out the truth of our situation.”

“It’s just coincidence!”

“No such thing as coincidence in Zane’s world. Only conspiracies. There’s more. To find where we’ve come from you look back at Opiuchus, the serpent-bearer. That part of the sky is blanked out, so you can’t see Sol, the home of man. But why the serpent-bearer? Zane has been into the archive and he found an account of Ouroboros, a myth of ancient Egypt, a serpent endlessly devouring its own tail. So, Zane says, what we see behind us isn’t any kind of warp cone but the mouth of Ouroboros, continually devouring our fake reality, just as a fresh reality is continually constructed ahead of us to give us the illusion of movement.”

“My God. I had no idea this had got so elaborate.”

Grace shrugged. “Sometimes I believe him myself. After eighteen years in this tank Earth does seem a remote memory, unreal. If it wasn’t for the way my feet still ache from all those years of walking on the Plains-”

Holle shook her head. “Whether we’re buried in some cage in the Nevada desert or not, the plumbing still needs fixing. That’s what I cling to. Here comes Venus. Let’s go see Wilson, and get this business about him and Steel over.”

In his cabin, Wilson wore only grimy shorts, vest and socks, and he lounged, loosely tethered to a heap of blankets. He was putting on weight, and his skin was greasy.

A couple of his buddies were here with him, illegals called Jeb Holden and Dan Xavi. They were both former eye-dees who had switched to the security services, and forced their way onto the Ark at launch. Now, overweight forty-year-old men, they hung in the corners of the cabin, saying and doing nothing, just watching the women with a faintly intimidating air.

There was no sign of Steel, the point of contention.

Wilson knew why they were here. Holle began to speak, self-conscious and nervous, working her way around the issue.

Since the Split, as far as Holle knew, Wilson had never replaced Kelly with any other long-term partner. But he had been taking lovers from throughout the crew. He had fathered a number of kids too. All this was with the consent of the women involved, and the social engineers back in Colorado would have approved of him spreading his genes around. But then Steel Antoniadi had caught Wilson’s eye, during a dance festival. Named for the color of the walls in this stripped-bare hull, she had grown up dark, willowy, unconsciously graceful in microgravity, exotic in her tunic and tattoos, and just fourteen. Her mother, an illegal called Sue Turco, had been too intimidated by Wilson to do anything about it. But her father, Joe Antoniadi, a former Candidate, had protested to the other elders about it, especially Holle, his boss.

Wilson cut Holle short. “The hell with this, Holle. I’m not forcing the kid.”

“That’s not the point, Wilson-”

“Look at me. I’m the most powerful man on the ship. Have been for ten years. And rich, too! A credit millionaire. But there’s nothing I can buy. So what’s in it for me? I’ll tell you. Only the sweetest commodity on the ship. I’m talking about young flesh, Holle. Young, just coming ripe, and as limber as all fuck after a lifetime swimming around in zero G. That’s what’s in it for me-or so I decided, when I saw Steel doing that whirling dance in the air.”

“The mission is about the kids, Wilson,” Venus said hotly. “They aren’t just some ‘commodity’ for you to indulge in. What’s next, are you going to start raiding the school groups for bait for your henchmen? I can’t believe the boy I grew up with has turned out like this.”

Wilson just laughed. One of his buddies farted, a liquid sound.

Holle said, “Well, you’re asking for trouble, Wilson. This isn’t some feudal village. In the end you govern by consent. And you’re pushing your luck.”

Wilson glanced at Jeb and Dan, who grinned back at him. “I’ll take that on advisement. Is there anything else I can do for you ladies?”