old datum, whereas we were expecting nearer twenty-five from the models the oceanographers produced before we left.”
Mike Wetherbee grimaced. “ Only fifteen kilometers?”
Masayo grinned. “Yeah. How shall we break it to the crew? Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Now he produced a schematic map of the planet’s climate systems. “The weather’s got simpler now there are no continents in the way, no Saharas or Himalayas. Take a look.”
In each hemisphere the sun’s equatorial heating created three great convection belts parallel to the equator, transporting heat toward the cooler poles. These tremendous cycles created a kind of helix of stable winds that snaked around the rotating planet. It was a pattern that had endured for billions of years, and even now its continued existence still determined much of the world’s long-term climate patterns. Meanwhile in the ocean the network of currents was much simpler now that the continents were drowned kilometers deep, and unable to offer any significant obstacle to the currents’ circulation. Even the huge gyres, dead spots in the ocean, where humanity’s garbage had collected and hapless rafting communities had gone to scavenge, were dispersed now. A crude system of atmospheric circulation, powerful ocean currents following simple patterns, not a trace of land or even polar ice anywhere in the world: this was an Earth reduced to elementals, like a climatological teaching aid, Kelly thought. Nothing but the basic physics of a spinning planet.
And yet it was not uniform; this ocean world had features. Masayo produced an image of a vast storm prowling the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, a milky spiral the size of a continent that continually spun off daughter storms, themselves ferocious hurricanes in their own right. “As far as we know this is the same storm they called the Spot, eighteen years ago,” he said. “Maybe somebody down there will be able to confirm that for us. It drives winds at around three hundred kilometers an hour. That’s about Mach point two five-a quarter the speed of sound. Must do a hell of a lot of damage to those garbage rafts.”
“So we splash down away from it,” Kelly murmured. “But where?”
“There’s nowhere immediately obvious,” Masayo said. “No land, clearly. Nothing but a scattering of rafts. Sometimes you see their lights at night. Some don’t seem to have lights at all. They tend to cluster over the old continental shelves, and particularly over urban areas, the great cities.”
Mike said, “We picked up some radio transmissions, mostly not aimed at us.”
“ ‘Mostly’?”
“It’s just chatter. People asking after relatives and lost kids, and swapping news about storms and fishing grounds. A few people still making observations of the climate, the ongoing changes. They can talk through the surviving satellite network. I suspect some of them are trying to bounce signals off the moon-”
“Mike, back up. You said, ‘mostly.’ The signals were ‘mostly’ not aimed at us.”
He grinned. “That’s why we called you in here, Kelly. Half an hour ago we picked up this, from a raft over North America.” He tapped his screen, and a speaker crackled with a looped message:
“… knew you’d be back. I’ve been waiting a year for you to show up, since the earliest theoretical return time. Earth II isn’t so hot, huh? Well, if you need a native guide come down here and look me up. You can track this signal… This is Thandie Jones, somewhere over Wyoming, on the Panthalassa Sea. Thandie calling Ark One. I see you! I knew you’d be back…”
77
In the cupola’s twilit, humming calm, with the hull of Halivah and the silent stars arrayed beyond the windows, Grace Gray gazed on beautiful, spectacular images of young star systems, a million years old or less, in the throes of formation from an interstellar cloud, and tried very hard to understand what her daughter was telling her.
Helen, earnest, seventeen years old, said, “It’s like we’re putting together an album of the birth of a solar system, frame by frame. You see how the young star, having imploded out of the cloud itself, starts to interact with the cloud remnant. A central collapsed disc slices the wider cloud in two…” The sundered cloud, lit up from within by the invisible star, reminded Grace of a child’s toy, a yo-yo, with the planetary system forming in the gap between the two halves, where the string would wrap. Tremendous jets shot up out of the poles of the star, at right angles to the yo-yo. Helen spoke on, of ice lines and migrating Jovians and photo-evaporation, of how starlight could strip away the mantle of a Jupiter to expose a Neptune or a Uranus.
The cupola was empty save for the two of them and Venus, who, intent on her own work, with headphones and virtual glasses wrapped around her head, was effectively absent.
Helen was beautiful, Grace thought, studying her daughter, her profile silhouetted against the star field. Beautiful in a way she had never been, even at seventeen, when everybody is beautiful, even though she shared Helen’s coloring. Helen’s father, Hammond Lammockson, son of Nathan, had been short, squat, bullish like his father. Grace could see little of Hammond in Helen-some of Nathan’s determination, maybe. Or perhaps she was an expression of Saudi royal blood. Or maybe it was something to do with the microgravity they had all endured for the last seven years, since the Split had made rotational artificial gravity impossible. Helen had only been ten. All the kids who had grown up since were slender and graceful-though, against expectation, they weren’t tall. Or maybe she looked like Grace’s mother, whom she had been named for, who Grace herself couldn’t remember.
Whatever, Helen was a winner of the lottery of genetics-“gifted,” Venus Jenning had once called her, one of the handful of the next generation deemed bright enough for an intensive education. Grace had always suspected as much, even back in the days when Helen had tried to teach her the rules of Zane’s infinite chess. And she never looked more beautiful than when she was intent on her studies.
She realized Helen had stopped talking.
“Am I losing you?”
“Not quite.”
“Look, would you like a coffee before I show you some more?”
Venus pushed her glasses up into her graying hair. “Somebody mention coffee?”
“There may be some in the flask.”
“I think that’s pretty much stewed by now. Why don’t you go fill it up for us?”
“Oh.” Helen looked from one to the other. “You want to talk without me being around, right?”
Grace smiled, and brushed a floating lock of blond hair back into the knot her daughter wore at the back of her head. “Well, it was Venus I came to see, honey.”
“I can take a hint.” Helen had her legs crossed around a T-stool; now she unwrapped, floated into the air, and with a fish-like precision arrowed down and grabbed the coffee flask from its holder beside Venus.
“I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I get to show you more good stuff, Mum. Deal?”
Grace smiled. “Deal.”
When she had sailed out through the airlock, Venus turned to Grace. “You’re here to talk about Wilson, I guess.”
“Yeah. And Steel Antoniadi. He’s gone too far with that girl. The hull’s full of talk about it. I’m seeing Holle later. Maybe you could come. If the three of us confront him-”
“OK.” Venus yawned and stretched; she wasn’t wearing any restraint, and the arching of her back made her drift up out of her chair. “I guess it has to be done. I have to admit it gets harder and harder to care about that kind of crap.” She stared out at the stars. “Sometimes I just lose myself in here. And thank God Wilson got to be speaker, not me. Helen really is one of the best we have, you know. Do you resent me taking her away to study?”
“No. In fact she’s spending even more time training up as a shuttle pilot than she does in here. I’m grateful she has these opportunities. But there’s plenty of griping about your students and their privileges. To be fair to him Wilson defends you, he always points out how we need the planet-spotting and navigation functions.”
“Well, so we do. But how does he feel about my programs of basic research? The fundamental physics, the cosmology-”
“I never spoke to him about it.”
