“Especially as we’re dumb as shit,” Venus said. “I mean, we can’t even last a few years in this tin can without turning on each other.”
They were silent for a while, and Holle wondered grumpily again if Venus would ever get around to offering them that coffee refill. She said at length, “You know, I sometimes think we were terribly ill-equipped, the Candidates. We spent our whole lives training for this mission, but we weren’t rounded. I mean, for instance we never even read any books — no books that counted. Do you remember, Venus? I liked historicals, tales of a vanished past. You liked old science fiction about vanished futures. We never engaged with the world as it was unfolding around us, not even through fiction.”
“Nobody was writing novels about the flood,” Venus pointed out. “They were all too damn busy. More to the point, Holle, you and I never had kids, before or after we left Earth.”
Holle shrugged. “True. I sometimes think I never got over Mel. And then there was that strange business about Zane. After that, I always felt I had too much to do.”
“Yeah. As for me, my students are my children.”
“Those are excuses,” Grace said gently. “You were Candidates. You were brought up knowing it would be your duty to have children, to pass on your genes. But you didn’t. On some level you both deliberately chose not to, for whatever reason.”
“Maybe I was scared,” Holle said. “Scared to make that kind of commitment.”
“To have kids and to know you couldn’t save them.”
“Something like that.”
Venus said coolly, “I wonder if you could do the job you’re doing now, Holle, if one of your own kids was affected by your decisions. Living in your water empire.”
“I don’t know,” Holle said honestly. “I think Kelly Kenzie could have done it. She was always the best of us, wasn’t she? Before the Split she was hooking up with-with-”
“Masayo Saito.”
“Yes. She intended to have kids with him. Maybe she has by now. And if not for the Split, maybe she’d have had kids with Wilson. Either way she’d have been able to keep on functioning as a mother, I think.”
“And she’d have kept Wilson in check better.”
“Yeah. She’d have done a better job than any of us.”
“You can only do your best,” Grace said to Holle. “Kelly isn’t here; she’s long gone. All we can do is keep on until the end-”
An alarm went off, a faint buzz, one of Venus’s screens flashing red. She turned and tapped a key. “Oh, shit.”
Holle leaned forward. “What?”
“It’s a suicide note. From Zane. He says he doesn’t want to be a, let me see, ‘a useless drain on resources.’ ”
Grace shook her head. “That’s Zane 3. He’s done that before, the other alters overpower him.”
“This is signed by a committee. Jerry, Zane 2, Zane 3, somebody called Leonard and Christopher and-”
Grace unbuckled and clambered out of her couch. Venus was already opening the airlock hatch.
92
Helen Gray sat on hot, prickly sand.
The beach, textured by dunes and wave marks, stretched off as far as she could see. Before her was another semi-infinite plain, a sea that reached to a razor-sharp horizon. The sky was a blue dome, and in it, directly before her, was a star-no, the word was “sun.” It was a disc of light just like the hull’s arc lamps. It warmed her face and dazzled her eyes, and scattered highlights on the sea and cast a shadow from the child playing before her.
Mario, four years old, dressed in a baggy old adult’s T-shirt, paddled in the surf. He squealed every time the water lapped over his toes. He looked quite at home. But his walk along the beach was clumsy, a babyish scrape at the ground. You had to walk in these planetary sims, that was Holle’s rule, the kids were going to have to walk on Earth III and this was where they would learn how, and the HeadSpace suit constrained you to do just that. But the sim could not simulate the effects of gravity, and so the whole experience was incomplete.
Further along the beach sat another parent, Max Baker, with another child, five-year-old Diamond, the little boy Max had fathered with Magda Murphy. Max was talking steadily to his son, encouraging him to race and splash. Helen liked to see Max being like this. It had taken a lot for him to get over the loss of his twin sister during the Blowout, and Magda the loss of her baby. Like herself and Jeb, Max and Magda were parents if not lovers, but they seemed to have found consolation in each other’s company. Magda had even had a second child with Max, a one-year-old girl called Sapphire. Maybe later Diamond and Mario could play together.
The detail of this HeadSpace sim was good. The waves on the sea’s surface and the froth where they broke, generated by simple fractal routines, were convincing enough, or so Helen’s mother had told her. Each individual grain of sand cast a shadow. She could even feel the sand under her bare legs, gritty and sharp-more fractal processing. But to a trained eye it wasn’t hard to see the virtual’s limitations, such as differing shades in the blue sky delineated by straight-line boundaries, as if it were constructed of huge panels. Grace, who had actually stood on genuine beaches on Earth, pointed out the lack of such features as clouds in the sky, and seaweed and jellyfish in the ocean, and seawrack on the sand-and, she had observed dryly, raft-loads of eye-dees crowding out as far as the eye could see. The HeadSpace booths were aging technology, and the processor capacity devoted to these sims was restricted.
But, wrapped up in their virtual suits in their separate HeadSpace booths, sharing this virtual sky, the children could wrestle and race and splash in the water.
All this was Holle’s idea. She had also reinstated sports tournaments, like wrestling and sumo, young bodies stressed against each other in weightlessness, programs designed to build up muscle mass and bone strength to cope with the gravity field of Earth III. Holle didn’t want the crew spilling to the ground like babies, baffled and terrified by such basic features as an open sky.
It seemed to be working. Mario, playing, wasn’t fazed by the fact that you couldn’t turn down the sun or turn up the wind. But sometimes Helen wondered if something unique was being lost as the mission approached its terminus, a culture born of necessity over forty years in the ship’s dark corners, with its own furtive art and language and style. The tribes of half-naked, elaborately tattooed children had to be taught the word for “sky” by being taken into a HeadSpace booth and shown the referent. But the shipborn had evolved forty new words for “love.”
Besides, Helen herself hated the sims. She too was a shipborn, and maybe it was too late for her to adjust to the openness of a planet. But landfall loomed ahead like the date of her own execution-even though she relished the challenge of piloting a shuttle down to the new world. So as little Mario played his way through his allotted time she endured the openness, the sunlight on her bare arms, the lack of the comforting enclosure of scuffed metal walls. And she clung to faulty details, the lines of broken shade in the sky, as reassurance that none of this was real, and she could come to no harm.
She was relieved when time was up and she called Mario back from the edge of the sea.
93
February 2079
Once, just once, as Venus drifted in the dark of the cupola, she picked up a strange signal. It appeared to be coherent, like a beam from a microwave laser. She used her space-borne telescopes to triangulate the signal, determining that it wasn’t anywhere close. And she passed it through filters to render it into audio. It sounded cold and clear, a trumpet note, far off in the galactic night.
If it was a signal it wasn’t human.
