Grace Gray joined them, with Helen, and Theo Morell. So did Zane, which wasn’t a surprise to Holle, and Doc Wetherbee, which was.
Holle said, “So you’re staying with your warp drive, Zane?”
“Not just that.” There was a gleam in his eye, a kind of manic calculation. Holle thought this was Zane 3, the amnesiac shell left behind when his other alters had split off.
“What, then?”
“There’s nothing outside the ship. Nothing! If these others step out they will cease to exist. I have no choice but to stay aboard.”
Wetherbee gave Holle a grim smile. “How could I leave my star patient behind?”
Venus faced Wilson. “Didn’t think you’d join us, Wilson, after what you had to say about ‘Kryptons.’”
Wilson grinned. “Base selfish calculation. Look around. In here, in this ship, I’m a big man. Down on a planet I’ll be nothing. I don’t want to be a farmer. And if I go back to Earth I’ll probably be prosecuted. No, I’ll stick to what I’ve got.”
Holle glanced around to see how the other groups were forming. The Earth faction was unsurprisingly led by Kelly Kenzie, with Masayo Saito at her side, and a number of the other illegals, including the Shaughnessys. The would-be colonists of Earth II included Elle and her partner Thomas Windrup, and Cora Robles, an expectant mother. Counting quickly she guessed the numbers were forty-plus adults with their children in Venus’s Earth III group, the largest, around nineteen in Kelly’s Earth group, and maybe fifteen in the Earth II camp.
When the sorting-out was done, Wilson stepped forward. “Now what? It seems to me the obvious strategy is to eliminate the third-place choice. Then, depending on the numbers-”
“Like hell,” Kelly Kenzie snapped. She stepped forward and faced up to Wilson. “I can see where that would lead. There’s no way I’m submitting to you and your manipulation. Not anymore, not over this.”
“Oh, yeah? So, on your say-so, we just bin our process? You’re full of shit, Kelly. This has nothing to do with Earth. This is all because of me, isn’t it? You and me. Gordo Alonzo would call this a mutiny.”
“Gordo isn’t here. You call it what you fucking like.”
They were in each other’s faces. Holle saw Wilson’s hard-faced young men taking their positions around the chamber. Suddenly the crisis was here.
And Zane walked into the center of the deck. His stride was bold, and he was actually grinning.
“Strewth,” Doc Wetherbee murmured to Holle. “I hope this is Jerry.”
Wilson glared at Zane. “You got something to say, nut job?”
Zane glanced around, gradually gathering the group’s attention to himself. “I always knew this would be the outcome. This indecision. We’re like a bunch of kids. We’ll never agree on anything between us. And so while you were all spending the night discussing how to grow trees on Earth II, I worked out the technical aspects of the most obvious option.”
“Which is?”
“We split up,” Zane said brightly.
“That’s insane,” Wilson said immediately.
Zane boldly jabbed a finger at his chest. “No. You just don’t want to see your kingdom split into three. Technically, we can do it. We have massive redundancy. We can separate the Arks, one for Earth, one for the stars. We can use our spares to build a separate warp generator! And we have four space-to-surface shuttle gliders. We can land the colonists of Earth II in one of those, leaving one for the return to Earth, and two for use at Earth III. It will take time and effort, but we can do this…”
There were immediate objections, particularly about the compromise to the basic redundancy design strategy this would entail-no more spare parts, if they were used to build another ship. And the social engineers’ plans for genetic diversity would be trashed; Holle had no idea whether even forty would be enough for a viable colony without lethal inbreeding. Every instinct in her told her this was wrong, that three smaller groups would be much more vulnerable than one.
But she saw, too, that Zane’s proposal had been greeted with immediate approval. If they split up, Kelly would be able to get away from Wilson. Thomas Windrup would be free of Jack Shaughnessy and his scars. Their future, and maybe the future of all mankind, was going to be determined by the fact that after a decade on the Ark they were all sick of each other.
Mike Wetherbee growled, “You realize what’s happened. The craziest man on the ship just determined our whole damn future. And he did it by turning us all into a kind of mirror of his own fractured self. Jeez! He should be giving us therapy, not the other way around.”
73
November 2052
It took nearly a year to implement the Split.
They broke up the warp generator, under Zane Glemp’s uneven leadership, and used spares to rebuild it as two copies of itself. Kelly and Wilson thrashed out which subgroup would take which hull; it was decided that it was fairer for Kelly’s crew, with their shorter journey back to Earth, to take Seba, the fire-damaged hulk, while Wilson took Halivah. That decision seemed logical, but Holle wondered to what extent personal politics had again played their part. And they equipped a single shuttle glider to take Elle’s crew down to Earth II, with a share of tools and raw materials and seed stock from the store bequeathed to the project long ago by Nathan Lammockson.
They began to say their goodbyes, first to the colonists of Earth II. Wilson arranged a kind of ceremony, in which each of the colonists was given a small stainless-steel globe of their new planet, manufactured in the Ark’s machine shop. Holle found it almost impossible to say good-bye to the Candidates, like Cora and Thomas and Elle, with whom she’d grown up, and shared a common mission all her life, and with whom she’d expected to grow old. Now she’d never see them again.
The two hulls were still linked by the tether, still wheeling around their common center of gravity over the steel ocean of Earth II, when the colony shuttle was released. Everybody left aboard the Ark followed the little craft’s progress as it cut into the new world’s tall, thin atmosphere, and created a shining contrail of incandescent plasma that dipped down toward its landing place on the Belt.
Then came the final sorting-out between the twin hulls, Seba and Halivah, the last transfer of materials, the last handshakes. Holle hated to let go of the Shaughnessys, who she had worked closely with since the launch at Gunnison. But they wanted to go home.
And then, for the second time since Jupiter, the tether was cut by its explosive guillotine, and the hulls drifted apart.
Seba was to be the first of the hulls to create its warp bubble. From Halivah, Holle watched curiously from the cupola, beside Venus. It happened as Seba was crossing the face of Earth II, from Holle’s point of view. A whole section of the planet, a rough disc, seemed to crumple as if crushed by an invisible fist, the colors of land and sea running like wet paint. But then it rebounded, and Seba was gone.
It was only then that Wilson discovered that Kelly Kenzie had kidnapped Mike Wetherbee, the only doctor, and taken him away to Earth. Wilson’s rage endured for days.
Five
74
