Masayo laughed. “So he’s inventing a drug-dealing trade from first principles. God bless human nature.”
Kelly shook her head. “You know, I’ve been doing some research in the archive on prisons. There you have people marking their territory, picking fights over food, swapping stories about dreams for lack of stimulation, pushing drugs. Just like us. Is that all we managed to build here, a prison between the stars?”
Masayo Saito said, “Grace Gray’s mother was held hostage in Barcelona for years. Chained to radiators in cellars. Grace herself was the result of a rape by one of the guards, and was born in captivity. An unbelievable story. And yet, are we all hostages on this Ark, hostage to the ambitions of the mission designers?”
Holle said, “I’d say they were our ambitions too.”
“God only knows,” Masayo said.
“Sometimes I think that’s the problem,” Kelly said. “God, I mean. The social engineers always tried to keep God out of our lives. The Ark is a mission of a state that was deliberately secular, a state that was trying to be a reverse image of the Mormon state in Utah it was at war with. And despite the gatecrashers and illegals, they succeeded in that goal, didn’t they? Many people on the Ark are religious, but we aren’t a religious community. Sometimes I wish we were, that we had a common mission ordained by one god or another. A monastery would surely be a better social model than a prison.”
Masayo shook his head. “Too late for that, Kelly. I think we left God behind back on Earth.”
Holle stood. “I need to go. Doc Wetherbee says he wants to review Zane’s therapy.”
“Well, that’s also a priority. And keep me informed about the progress on the kid. OK, Masayo, what’s next?”
63
Mike Wetherbee invited Holle, Venus and Grace into the small cabin that he called his surgery, with its bunk beds and persistent antiseptic smell, and cabinets of medical gear to treat everything from eye conditions to bad teeth. On a monitor he showed a recording of himself and Zane at their last therapy session, the latest of a program which had now been going on for over two years. On the monitor, Zane and Wetherbee spoke quietly, over a game of infinite chess.
“This is the bullshit part,” Wetherbee murmured. “How’s your day been, and so forth. Takes him an age to warm up. I do most of the talking. And I hate that damn game.”
“Let’s just watch,” murmured Grace. She was perched on the edge of one of the patients’ beds.
Infinite chess was in fact an invention of Zane’s. It was played with regular pieces on a regular board, save that the players had to imagine the board wrapped around itself, so that the right edge was glued to the left, and the upper edge glued to the lower. So, given normal restrictions on movement, a given piece could move right, off the edge of its world, and reappear to the left. It gave the illusion of infinity on a finite board. Zane said, and he liked to produce computer graphics showing how the wrapped-around board was topologically equivalent to a torus, a doughnut. A queen became particularly powerful; faced by an empty diagonal, row or column, she could leap, theoretically, an infinite number of squares in a single move. Zane and other keen players were busy working out variants to standard rules, and to standard sequences of game play. For instance, white had an immediate advantage with the first move. Your queen could step backward and wrap around the world to take your opponent’s queen, though she would then fall to the opposing king. Your rooks, stepping back into your opponent’s back rank, could do a lot of damage before being quelled. End-game analysis was less affected, as the board was so open anyhow.
The game was an obvious psychological metaphor for the freedom they all sought in an enclosed world, but it was ferociously difficult to play. “Bastard beats me every time,” Mike Wetherbee murmured.
“You’re very patient,” Grace said.
“Yeah, right,” Wetherbee said sourly. “When he’s in this phase he’s so depressive, so passive, he just sits there soaking in misery. He sucks the life out of you.”
Holle knew that Wetherbee was uncomfortable with the therapy program, although he had finally accepted the responsibility given how essential Zane was to the mission. That was why he had got others involved in the treatment: Holle who had referred Zane in the first place, Venus who had also suffered abuse at the hands of Harry Smith, a likely trigger for Zane’s condition, and Grace Gray, who had spoken to Zane on the ground after Harry’s murder. Grace was turning out to be one of the more competent of Wetherbee’s backup paramedics, having picked up a lot of field experience in her years with the okie city on the Great Plains. They made a good team, Holle thought, emotionally strong even if they had no experience with this kind of case.
But really, Wetherbee was just sharing the burden around. He had the mentality Holle had seen in a lot of medical students and doctors on the ground. Brisk, good-looking and competent, he didn’t have a steady partner, but he had had a string of relationships with women among the crew-a lot of people would want to tie the ship’s only doctor to them, and their children. But he’d never show a trace of survivor guilt, or any interest in the fate of his drowned homeland. And he maintained a kind of distance from his patients that sometimes made you wonder why he had ever gone into medicine in the first place.
Now Mike leaned forward and touched the screen to up the volume. “We’d been talking about the chess. Then suddenly he started talking about his father. Look, see the switch there?”
Holle saw how Zane sat up straight and looked around, almost as if he’d just arrived in the room. “Dr. Wetherbee?”
“Zane, I’m right here.”
“We’re in the surgery. We’re playing chess.” He glanced at the board. “I’m two moves away from getting you in check.” He smiled. Everything about Zane seemed brighter, Holle thought, as if he was another person.
“Two moves? I can’t see it, but that doesn’t surprise me.”
“I play chess with my father.”
“Note the present tense,” Wetherbee murmured to the women.
“I never beat my father. He’d hate that, if I ever did.”
“Did you, I mean do you let him win?”
“Oh, no. He’d hate to think of himself as weak. And he’d hate to see me being sentimental. The game is everything, winning…”
“You see the conflict,” Wetherbee commented. “I think he did let the father win, and then blocked it out. The old man kept setting up barriers the kid couldn’t break through. Listen to what he initiates now.”
“I tried to tell Dad about Harry Smith,” Zane said, on the screen.
“About what we talked about? The touching-all of that.”
“Yes. I tried more than once. The first time Dad just wouldn’t listen. The next time he hit me. He said I was lying about Harry Smith, who was a good man, a man he knew well. And he said I was dirty, soiled. He said I should shut up. He said if I told anybody these lies it would make trouble for no one but me, and get me thrown off the Ark, and then the eye-dees would rape me and kill me, and if they didn’t the flood would drown me.”
“But now that’s all over. You’re on the Ark. You’re safe.”
Zane smiled, looking quizzical. “Well, I’m still a Candidate, Dr. Wetherbee. That’s not the same thing at all.”
“Like he’s stuck in the past,” Venus said. “He doesn’t know he’s on the Ark.”
“Something like that, some of the time… Listen.”
On the screen, Wetherbee asked, “If you do make it onto the Ark, how do you think all this will affect you? The business with Harry Smith and your father.”
Zane frowned. “I don’t think much about that. Launch is years away.”
“You’ll have a duty,” Wetherbee said, pushing. “You won’t be there just as a person, but as a repository of genes. A contributor to genetic diversity.”
“I’m interested in the engines, the theory of the warp field-”
“Yes, but this is a key part of the mission, the human side of it. You will have to have children, on the Ark, or on Earth II. That’s the whole point. How do you feel about that?”
“Dirty.”
