Flamboyantly, she snapped her fingers.
The big image of Earth II dissolved, to reveal a glum red star, and a planet orbiting it, glistening with oceans, gray-black in the crimson light. The bloody glow of the star filled the improvised auditorium.
“Earth III,” Venus announced. “Or at least I think it could be. The best attainable prospect in our survey. And far more habitable than Earth II. I’ve lodged relevant data in the archive.”
“Crap,” Wilson said. “That’s a Krypton! Gordo always swore he wouldn’t send us to a Krypton. You’re just digging up those old arguments from ten years ago.”
Venus said doggedly, “Yes, that’s true. Yes, it’s not a clone of Earth. Yes, we had these arguments back in Gunnison. But-look! Most of the stars in the Galaxy aren’t like Sol-two-thirds of them are M-class, like this baby. If we can learn to live here, we can live anywhere.”
“Bullshit!” somebody cried, and the mass arguments broke out again, the angry shouts, the finger- pointing.
Holle herself was swept along by Venus’s rhetoric. But of course there was one crucial fact that Venus hadn’t yet offered.
Grace Gray put her hand up. “Venus-what star is this?”
“It’s in the constellation of Lepus, the hare, as seen from Earth. Near Orion. Not naked-eye visible; it doesn’t have a name, only a catalog number.”
“And how far away is it?”
Venus took a breath. “It’s further out, further from Earth. Another ninety light-years.”
And at three times light speed that translated to another thirty years’ journeying.
More outrage. “Thirty more years in this stinking tank?”
Abruptly Kelly stepped forward, to the edge of the catwalk she shared with Holle. The way she moved made Holle’s heart sink. This was her moment, and she was seizing it.
Wilson looked reluctant, but he nodded to give Kelly the floor.
“Let’s cut through this,” she said. “This business of Earth III is a distraction, a chimera. The solution’s obvious. If it takes more effort for us to survive here than to have stayed on Earth and live on rafts, we should never have come, it wasn’t worthwhile.”
Wilson prompted, “And so-”
“And so we should go home.” She glared around, as if daring anybody here to shout her down. “We don’t travel on and on. We go home, to Earth.”
Venus said, “That’s impossible. Go home to what? Next year Everest drowns.”
“We’ll cope with whatever we find. The Ark was designed to sustain us for fifteen years, as a margin; I’m sure we can extend that to cover the seven years of superluminal travel it would take to get us back. Zane, we have enough antimatter stock to re-create the warp bubble, don’t we? We can go home. We must! We tried our hardest, we came all this way, it didn’t work. This is no place for us, for our children. Let’s take them home, and see what we can build on Earth.”
A riot of angry arguments broke out again. Holle, utterly shocked, tried to look into Kelly’s soul, through that hard, ambitious face.
Wilson faced Kelly, his expression thunderous. “That didn’t come out of the blue, did it? How long have you been planning this little stroke?”
She smiled back at him, her eyes dead. “And how long did you spend planning to topple me, while we were still sharing a bed? Don’t judge me by your standards, Wilson.” She turned and walked away from him, and was instantly surrounded by a chattering gaggle of supporters.
Wilson, arms folded, intense frustration creasing his face, had no choice but to let the furious debate continue, the shouts echoing from the stripped-bare hull walls.
72
Eventually Wilson broke up the session. The Ark wouldn’t run itself while they argued, and there were children to be fed.
But, thinking on his feet, Wilson carved up the crew into study groups, to look in more detail at the various options. How survivable would Earth II actually be? Could they really make a home on Venus’s Earth III, and would the ship and its crew last out the even longer journey to get there? Or if the ship survived seven years back to Earth, what were they to do on arrival at an ocean world? He said he would reconvene the forum at first watch in the morning, and maybe they could come to a more considered decision about the future.
Holle made sure that her own areas of responsibility were covered, that nothing was going to break down or burst into flames during the night watch. Then, grabbing some food, she moved from group to group where they huddled in corners of Halivah, and talked and talked, some arguing over handhelds or drawing down data from the ship’s archive. Some went back to Seba, but most stayed here in Halivah. As the hours wore on, as the arc lights were reduced to their nighttime dim glow, the talking continued, a murmuring that filled the hull.
People were responding emotionally, Holle perceived, not to the science, the facts. Some just longed to go home. Masayo Saito, missing his child, was in that group, and Holle suspected the Shaughnessys and others of the illegals and gatecrashers, who had never expected to join the crew of an interstellar spaceship in the first place, felt the same way. It was possible that was in Kelly’s heart too, some kind of wish to put things right with the child she’d left behind. But Holle was pretty sure that simple revenge over Wilson was a motivation too.
Others, unable to stand the idea of more years of their lives lost inside these tin cans, wanted only to get out-to finish the journey, to set down here, however hard a shore Earth II might prove to be. People with kids tended to feel that way, not wishing to doom their children to a lifetime in a tank.
Then there were those who were entranced by Venus’s visionary rhetoric. Why not go on and grab the whole Galaxy, rather than succumb to the exhausting, perhaps lethal, trap of Earth II? That was the way Holle’s own heart was drawn. But she quailed at the thought of thirty more years in these metal hulls. She was thirty-two years old. She tried to grasp the meaning of herself still shipbound at sixty, but could not.
And then there was the brute politics of the Ark, as they had been festering for a decade already, Kelly and Wilson drawing people apart like iron filings to opposing magnetic poles.
Holle didn’t sleep that night, and nor did many others. Yet the hours seemed brief, the arguments still unresolved, before Wilson drew them together again in the improvised auditorium on Deck Eight.
Thandie’s crystal ball was inert this morning, a lifeless piece of engineering. In the bright lights of the arc lamps people looked tired, worn out, subdued.
Wilson glared around, hands on hips. Holle saw that he had handled this situation about as well as he could have. He had given people time to cool down, and now, in the morning, the universe seemed a colder and more rational place. Wilson’s leadership had its flaws, but he did display a brute understanding of human nature.
“I don’t want to waste time on this,” he began. “Let’s try to make a decision, and get behind it and start implementing it. Everybody agree with that? OK. We have three options on the table, as far as I see. One. Stay here, colonize Earth II. Two. Take the Ark back to Earth. Three. Go on to Venus’s Earth III, out in Lepus. Do I have that right? So let’s choose. We’ll start with a show of hands, and I hope to Christ we get an easy majority for one option or the other.” He checked a monitor. “Can you guys over in Seba see me? OK then. Show me your hands for Earth II… And Earth… And Earth III. Shit.”
There was a ripple of amusement among the crew, black humor. It was a split with significant support for all three options.
“Plan B,” Wilson called now. “Let’s separate into groups. Then we’ll get an accurate count and see where we go from there. If you want Earth II, come down and gather over here. Earth, to my left. Earth III, to my right…”
Alarm bells rang in Holle’s head. She had the immediate fear that if Wilson made the division of their opinions into a physical split, the group might never be put back together. But it was too late. She could do nothing but move to represent her own choice.
She stood with those, led by Venus, who wanted to go on, to Earth III. Wilson himself walked this way.
