“Furthermore, I don’t want myself or anybody else to be imposing decisions on the crew, on you. The ship’s too small for that. I want to govern by consensus. Not even by majority vote, which always leaves a rejected minority. I want to work by unanimity, if we can achieve it. If there’s a dispute, we’ll just talk it out as long as it takes. God knows we’ve got the time to do that, between here and 82…”
Theo Morell murmured, “Oh good. We can talk, talk, talk all the way to the stars. I can imagine what my dad would have said about that. ”
Holle dared not so much as grin in a forum like this.
She did wonder how long these fine ideas would last. As Kelly spoke, Venus sat behind her at the table, her face expressionless, and Wilson was staring around at the crew, challenging, ape-like. Holle believed Venus and Wilson and maybe others were playing a long game in the increasingly intricate political arena of the Ark. Having grown up with these highly competitive and gifted individuals in the Academy, Holle knew that was inevitable. These were games Holle herself shied away from. But she had a feeling that whatever structure of power and command emerged in the months and years to come would have little to do with Kelly’s Utopian visions.
She tried to focus on what Kelly was saying now.
Some of it seemed to be well thought out. Kelly had given some consideration to the nature of liberty in the environment of the Ark. The need to maintain essential common systems would lead to a natural tendency to the centralization of power. But in such a confined space you couldn’t hide from any tyranny, you couldn’t flee-and, so fragile was the Ark, no rebellion could be tolerated. So the usual mechanisms by which tyrannies might be challenged on Earth were not available here.
“And that might still be true after we reach Earth II,” Kelly went on. “Even there we’ll be living in sealed shelters, at least at first; we will be reliant on shared systems even for the air we breathe. What we need to find is a way to ensure compliance with the basic, life-preserving rules that will always dominate our lives, without succumbing to tyranny. It’s a whole new experiment in human affairs- our experiment. And the way we conduct our affairs now, if we get it right, might serve as a model for the generations to come.” She said this with a smile and an open-armed gesture, to which people didn’t quite respond.
That was it with Kelly. She was able, intelligent, articulate, forceful, and in that sense a natural leader. But in all the years they had grown up together Holle had always been aware of Kelly’s intense, overriding ambition, above all else-an ambition that, as many people knew, had led her to leave a kid behind on Earth. People didn’t quite get Kelly Kenzie. Now, rather than be inspired by her visionary talk, they tended to look away.
The arguments started now, questions about shared ownership and the collective raising of children. Somebody suggested they model their new society on the old kibbutzes of Israel. Kelly responded forcefully. The atmosphere became like the Academy in the old days when a tutor would throw them some hot topic to gnaw over.
Kelly’s senior colleagues sat patiently at the table, Venus glancing discreetly at her wristwatch. But others on the fringe of the crowd started slipping away.
When Zane turned on his heel and left, having said nothing, Holle gave Kelly an apologetic wave and cut away to follow him. For her the day’s real business was about to start. Her heart beat faster.
59
She followed Zane to his small, solitary cabin. It wasn’t exactly far.
He seemed surprised to see her, and wouldn’t meet her eyes. But he didn’t object when she asked if she could come in and talk. Her nervousness increased as she followed him inside, and she wondered how she was going to broach the subject she wanted to discuss.
But she was distracted by his cabin. It was nothing but a box of partitions. Everybody else had personalized their cabins one way or another. Holle’s small room had her personal stuff, her bits of clothing, her images of her father and mother, her Angel. And if you had a kid, like Grace Gray, you had a spontaneous homemaker on your hands. There was none of this about Zane’s space. The furniture was functional, just a bed, a couple of chairs, a cupboard. There was work stuff here, an elaborate workstation and some precious hardcopy manuals on relativity and warp drive and space engineering. But, aside from heaps of clothes on the floor, that was it. This was just somewhere Zane existed, rather than lived.
She sat on a chair; she had to clear off a heap of socks first. Zane sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded on his knees. Uncertain of his mood, uneasy about the space he lived in, she became even more unsure about the wisdom of what she was planning to do. But, overwhelmed by her own nervousness and self- consciousness, she went ahead anyway.
“It’s this way, Zane,” she said.
His head turned toward her.
“I’ve been thinking. Look, you know the nature of the mission-the social design. The crew was chosen to be as genetically diverse as possible, so that when we have kids they have the best chance of avoiding inbreeding. This was drummed into us at the Academy. But that means we all have a duty. We need to become parents. It’s our responsibility to ensure that all our genes join the pool of the colonists on Earth II.”
“So why are you telling me this?”
She bit her lip. Did she really have to spell it out? She began to suspect that something was wrong here, something beyond her own nervousness. But she pressed on. “Zane, you’ve seen people pairing up, especially since Jupiter. The rumor is Kelly and Wilson are a couple now.”
He frowned again. “Wilson. The external systems engineer.”
“Yeah,” she said, confused by his response. “That Wilson, Wilson Argent who you grew up with… The truth is, Zane, I left Mel behind on Earth. Well, you know that. And I can’t see myself falling in love with anybody else on this rust-bucket. And, frankly, I can’t see you pairing up with anybody either.”
He looked baffled.
She felt concern, and a spasm of affection. She crossed to him, kneeled on the floor, and took his hands. “Zane, we may not be soul mates. But we’ve known each other most of our lives. We’ve worked together for the same goal. And we always supported each other. I remember how you waited for me on my first day at the Academy, and got yourself in trouble as a result. I wondered if-I mean, it doesn’t apply now, not until we get to Earth II. But maybe we should think about having kids together. You and me. There. So what do you say?”
He raised his head and for the first time looked straight at her. “Do you believe in the warp bubble?”
She settled back on her ankles. “What did you say?”
“Do you believe in it?” He glanced at his workstation, and laughed, and spoke rapidly. “I mean, I’ve studied the theory. But it’s impossible! Basic physical principles would have to be violated for it to work. Aside from obvious issues of causality and the breaking of the weak, strong and dominant energy conditions, the vacuum stress- energy tensor of a quantized scalar field in an Alcubierre spacetime diverges if the ship exceeds the speed of light. Diverges! That would lead to the formation of a horizon, which, which…” His voice cracked, and he stopped speaking, as if he had run down. “I can show you the mathematics.”
“Zane? I don’t understand what you’re saying. The warp works — we’re in flight. You worked on the design solutions, with Liu Zheng and the others, which got us to this point…” As she had been holding his hands, his coverall sleeves had ridden up his arms, and she saw a pattern of marks on the skin of each forearm, small cross-shapes. She touched them cautiously. Some were healed-over scabs, other were more livid. It looked as if he had been jabbing the point of a Phillips screwdriver into his flesh.
“I can’t have kids with you.” He laughed, but it was a ghastly, hollow sound.
She looked up. “Why not?”
“I’m dirty. You must know that.”
“Dirty?”
“It’s all in the journal.” He pulled away his hands and tapped at his workstation. A kind of diary came up, text and short video clips, Zane’s own talking head. “He tells it all there.”
“Who does?”
“Zane. He says he’s going to kill himself, in some of these clips. Like suicide notes.”
“He… Zane, that’s you. Is that why you’re harming yourself now?”
