May 2032
The day the government took over the project started like any other day in the Academy. Holle would never have guessed it was the last day of her old life, the end of the old regime, and the start of something new.
Magnus Howe liked to take his ethics classes on the old museum’s Level Two, in the big hall devoted to North American Indian culture, with its dioramas and artifacts set behind glass walls in curving corridors. He said they were grounded here by the hall’s association with the deep past of the landscape. Holle thought he was reminding them of other human cultures wiped out by earlier disasters, in the Amerinds’ case a flood of greed and ignorance.
A dozen students of Holle’s age cadre, twelve to fourteen, sat on the polished floor in a loose circle around Howe, who sat on the only chair in the room. They were mostly wearing their fancy new Candidates’ costumes, robust one-piece Lycra uniforms in royal blue with crimson sleeves and rib panels. As usual, people were multitasking, breaking off in little huddles to discuss some assignment or other, or working through material on laptops and handhelds. Venus Jenning was walking around the book stacks, browsing; the room doubled as the Academy’s library. Some students had the abstracted look that came from the murmuring of Angels in their heads. Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov were sharing the feed from an Angel. Thirteen years old, their hands intertwined, they rocked gently together.
The class was discussing why the Candidates and their families, those of a Christian background, had not been allowed to celebrate Easter.
“It was tough on my father,” Holle said. “We could have done with a break.” There was now an ambitious schedule in place which would see a fuel lode of antimatter, the key to the interstellar drive, being manufactured on the ground, and a long sequence of Ares boosters rising up from Gunnison to launch Ark modules to the space station, which was to be refurbished and used as a construction shack. All this to be done in just eight more years. But as milestone after milestone was missed the pressure was relentless on the senior people, including her father.
Magnus Howe said, “Easter is a vacation, yes. But what about the theology?”
Wilson Argent blew a raspberry. “It’s got nothing to do with theology. It’s politics. President Vasquez went to war with the Mormons. And then you have those New Covenant nutjobs who say that God is drowning the sinners. We’re going secular in reaction.” Dark, sharp, heavyset, Wilson was a recent recruit from the refugee camps, selected for his ferocious ability and tough personality. It seemed to Holle he was challenging Don and Kelly for the informal leadership of the cadre.
“You’re forcing people into a choice,” Kelly Kenzie said. “We lost some good people, whose parents chose the other way, chose God over your selection process.”
“Well, it wasn’t my process,” Howe said. “The social engineers’ theory was-”
“It’s not the theory that matters,” Venus Jenning said. She was flicking through a yellowing paperback. She was a slim, tall girl, calm and quiet, and, perhaps prompted by the chance of her name, fascinated by astronomy. And she liked science fiction, images of vanished futures. “Hey, look at this,” she said now. Her book was called The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein. “Denver gets to be the national capital in here too. After the Six Weeks War in 1970!”
Howe said evenly, “You were making a point about theory and practice, Ms. Jenning?”
“Oh, sure. Sorry. Look, because of the religious ban we lost Jews, Hindus, Muslims. Barry Eastman. Yuri Petrov. Miranda Nikolski! She was the best mathematician we had. She’s a year younger than me, and she was teaching me interstellar navigation! You can’t afford to lose people like that. Even Zane was almost pulled out.”
The group focused on Zane Glemp. After three years in the Academy, twelve-year-old Zane was still among the shiest of the group, and he looked to the floor.
Magnus Howe prompted, “Zane?”
“Well, it’s true. My father’s ancestors were Jews. We don’t practice ourselves. But my father didn’t like the idea that we had to reject our tradition altogether. And I don’t think he liked the social engineers meddling in his project.”
Don Meisel snorted. “Jerzy Glemp was in at the start. But no matter what ideas he’s been putting in, it’s not his project. It’s fueled by my father’s money, and yours and yours and yours,” he said, jabbing a finger around the room at children of the superrich: Kelly, Susan Frasier, Venus Jenning, Cora Robles, Joe Antoniadi, Holle. Cora, a rich kid who had grown up with attacks on her parents’ wealth, just laughed prettily.
Magnus Howe prompted, “Zane? So why are you still here?”
Zane shrugged. “We wanted the Ark more, I guess. What use is faith if your family is extinct? Also Mr. Smith visited a few times. He urged my dad to keep me in the project.”
There was an odd silence at that. Harry Smith, their pastoral tutor, loomed large in all their lives, big, bluff, complicated. He was close to his charges. He spent a lot of out-of-hours time with the Candidates. He had even taken to dressing like the students, in a version of their gaudy Lycra uniforms. And he had a heavy, hard-eyed, challenging way of looking at you sometimes. He looked that way especially at Zane Glemp. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that Harry Smith had been there urging Zane’s father to keep him in the project. Holle bet the others were thinking about this now. Nobody said anything, however. Nobody ever did. The Academy was a ferociously competitive place, and the Academy authorities were always looking for an excuse to dump you. Nobody went looking for trouble. If Harry Smith was a problem for Zane, it was up to Zane to sort it out.
If Magnus Howe was aware of any of this running around in his students’ heads, he didn’t show it. “Let’s get to the point. Why do you think we’re trying to exclude religion from this project?”
“To avoid conflict,” Wilson said. “A starship is too small for jihads or crusades or pogroms. Maybe you could have a ship’s crew that was entirely Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim-”
“Or Mormon,” Don Meisel said.
Venus nodded. Her own family, though from Utah, had not been Mormons. “Or Mormon, yes. But a selection from any one faith would be limiting, and surely divisive politically.”
“What about polytheism?” Susan Frasier asked. “Like the Hindu faith, for instance, or the old pagan religions. When you have many gods, not just one, you have flexibility, room for tolerance.”
Miriam Brownlee said, “It worked for the Romans, their pantheon was roomy enough just to absorb all their provinces’ gods-”
Mike Wetherbee said, “That came unstuck with Jehovah!”
Miriam laughed at his joke. A slim Texan, she had gravitated to Mike through a common interest in human biology and medicine.
“But even a single-faith group would be liable to splinter,” said Elle Strekalov. “Think of Sunni versus Shia, Catholic versus Protestant-”
The conversation took off. The Candidates, growing interested, abandoned their other projects and started accessing social-dynamics software suites to study how different religious and social configurations might prosper in the enclosed environment of a starship-purely Christian or Muslim or Buddhist crews, or crews guided by an attic full of squabbling gods.
Magnus Howe let the explorations run for a while. Dark-haired, intense, he was quite young, under thirty. Rumor had it he’d once studied to become a Jesuit. He was actually a pretty good teacher, given the dry nature of his subject matter, and young enough to share his students’ sheer pleasure in learning, in acquiring new knowledge.
Holle didn’t join in. The engineering of the ship rather than its crew was her sphere of interest. But she felt a kind of warm gravity as she sat here with this group of smart, eager kids. It was heartbreaking to think that many of them were likely to be discarded long before the Ark ever got off the ground.
Magnus clapped his hands to bring them back together. He glanced down at his own laptop, on which he’d been monitoring their improvizations. “I can tell some good work’s emerging here. Come back tomorrow with a presentation on your results.” He didn’t specify the assignment further; it would, as always, be up to the students to define their goals properly, to organize the work, to figure out how it would be reported and who by. “For now, let’s concentrate again on the decision that’s actually been made-to exclude anybody with strong religious convictions from the crew.”
“What about atheists?” Wilson called.
