Venus looked back to the stars again. “I just think we should be doing more than, you know, washing down walls and clearing out blocked latrines. And if you think about it, this is a unique opportunity. Even if all goes well, Helen’s kids will be dirt farmers down on Earth III. It’s only this generation, Helen’s generation, of all the generations since Adam, who have grown up among the stars, away from the overwhelming presence of a planet. Who knows how that’s shaping their minds? Call it an experiment, Grace. Besides, these are seriously bright kids, seriously curious, who aren’t allowed to explore anything in case they wreck the ship. So I try to direct their curiosity out there. ” She fell silent, as she was wont to do, drifting into the private universe of her own head.
Grace prompted her, mildly mocking, “And are you coming up with anything useful?”
Venus laughed. “Now you sound like Holle, queen of the plumbers. Hell, who knows? Look at Zane’s warp generator. We managed to build a unified-physics engine even before we managed to unify the physics in the first place. It’s as if we built it by accident. Maybe Helen’s generation will come up with something that will make Zane’s drive look like a steam engine. Then we’ll have some fun.”
But, Grace thought, all this planet-hunting and exponentiating scientific theorizing had nothing to do with the complex human reality unfolding within the shabby walls of the Ark.
The lock opened and Helen came bustling in, floating expertly through the air while juggling two flasks and a bunch of mugs. She looked entirely at home in this microgravity observatory, and her face was intent, alive with intelligence. But she had never looked more alien. Grace felt a stab of helpless, hopeless love.
78
The shuttle from the Ark was a spark, falling down the midday sky. Thandie hadn’t seen such a sight in years. As it fell the spark became a glider, white and fat. It banked once over the raft. Then it came drifting down to a cautious belly-down landing that threw up a huge plume of water.
This was literally the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the lives of most of the inhabitants of the raft. The children jumped and clapped. Some of the older rafters, like Boris’s parents, Manco and Ana, were more fearful, as if this technological irruption would perturb the calm, relatively safe lives they had carefully constructed for themselves.
The shuttle came to rest only a couple of hundred meters from the raft, an impressive bit of positioning after a journey of forty-two light-years. The downed craft looked harmless enough, bobbing in the gentle oceanic swell, with its upper hull covered with a blanket of insulation, blackened by charring in places, and the Stars and Stripes and the words UNITED STATES still visible as the faintest trace of faded paintwork. But Thandie, operating under instructions from a radio link to Kelly Kenzie on the flight deck, made sure that nobody approached the craft for some hours. The black shield that covered the whole of the shuttle’s underside was still ferociously hot from atmospheric friction, and the crew were busy venting gases and other toxins from attitude control systems and fuel cells.
It was the end of the day before the shuttle’s hatch swung open at last. The raft kids, some as young as four or five, dived into the water and went splashing over, towing plastic cables.
A pale face emerged from the craft’s hatch, a spindly figure standing uncertainly in blue coveralls. Bundles were thrown out onto the ocean, packages that popped open to become bright orange lifeboats, to more gasps of delight from the children. The crew began unloading the shuttle, lowering down bits of equipment first, and then their youngest children, four little ones wrapped up in bulky flotation jackets. Then the adults and older children came out, nineteen of them climbing down the shuttle’s short flight of steps. These skinny, pale creatures from space had to be helped aboard their own boats by naked brown raft children. It was like a meeting between separate species, Thandie thought. The raft children swarmed aboard the shuttle, hunting for souvenirs.
The lifeboats set off across the water toward the raft. A couple of the occupants leaned over the side and heaved, miserably sick. One little boy from the shuttle was wailing, “Let me go back! Oh, let me go back!”
At the raft, the shuttle crew had to be helped once more across the short distance between the bobbing lifeboats and the more stately raft. They all had trouble standing, especially the children who panted hard, straining miserably at the thick air.
Thandie had arranged for all twenty-three to be housed together in a hastily evacuated shack, where they were laid down on pallets of blankets padded with dried seaweed. She came to see them a few times that first night, as Manco and Ana led the rafters’ efforts to make their strange visitors comfortable, bringing them cups of rainwater and bowls of fish soup. It was like a hospital ward; the stink of vomit and excrement was dense. The raft children looked in, fascinated and fearful, but were driven back by the stink. Thandie had yet to learn what had become of the Ark, and why only half of it, and much less than half the crew, had returned home.
The next morning, at Kelly’s request, she and two others were brought out and sat in a row of couches scavenged from the shuttle, so they could talk with Thandie.
Thandie sat before her guests on the raft floor in a yoga posture, back erect, legs crossed, hands resting on her knees.
The space travelers sat out in the open in their couches, tipped back, covered in blankets. Their faces were ghostly pale. They all gratefully accepted cups of hot seaweed tea from Manco. The sea was choppy, and they seemed to cower from a sky where thick gray clouds bubbled. A handful of raft kids hung around them, staring wide-eyed. Thandie ignored the kids, confident they would soon go swimming and forget all about the returned astronauts.
Thandie remembered Kelly Kenzie as one of the brightest buttons among the Candidates. She had gone to space as a girl in her early twenties. Now she had returned as a woman of forty-one, too thin, too pale, her blond hair streaked with gray. She was still beautiful, but she had a face that showed the years she had lived, the choices she had made. Thandie gathered that one of the children from the shuttle was Kelly’s. The other adults were both men. One was another Candidate who Thandie vaguely remembered; he was called Mike Wetherbee. The second, a bulky forty-some-year-old called Masayo Saito, she didn’t recognize at all. Kelly introduced him as her partner, father of her kid, and said he had a military background.
Thandie twisted her head to the right, breathed in to center, turned to the left breathing out, back to center and breathed in. “Forgive my old lady stretching routine. So how’s your health this morning?”
Kelly grunted. “Mike here is the doctor.”
Mike Wetherbee rubbed his chest, apparently having trouble breathing himself. “I expected problems with the gravity,” he said. “Brittle bones, problems with fluid balance, all of that. Why, we’ve got children in there, including Kelly’s little Eddie, who were born in free fall. And I was expecting us to be prone to viruses and bugs, and I shot us all full of antibiotics and antihistamines before we cracked the shuttle. What I wasn’t expecting was this damn breathlessness.” He had a broad, nasal Australian accent, not much diluted by the years.
“I guess I should have warned you. The air is thicker than it used to be-we’re under greater pressure than the old sea-level value-but oxygen is depleted.”
Kelly nodded, cautiously, as if her very head was too heavy for her neck. “We got some spectrometer readings from orbit. I didn’t believe it.”
“The world isn’t as fecund as it used to be. Not yet anyhow. When the flood came we had extinction events on land, of course, but in the sea too. No more nutrients washing down from the land. The productivity of the biosphere as a whole has gone off a cliff, and as a consequence so has the oxygen content of the atmosphere- down to sixteen percent, according to some of the hearthers, down five points. That’s equivalent to three kilometers’ altitude before the flood.”
“Great,” Mike Wetherbee said. “We drowned the world, but I still get to feel like I climbed a mountain.”
“Worse than that, the air’s warmer than it used to be. You’re panting, trying to keep cool, and you miss the oxygen even more.”
“Warmer,” Masayo Saito said. He seemed to be having even more trouble breathing than the others, and he spoke in short staccato bursts. “Greenhouse gases?”
“Yes. All those drowned, rotting rainforests. We do think the flood is finally tailing off, however, at last. It seems to be heading for an asymptote of about eighteen kilometers above the 2012 datum. Which means Earth will have an ocean of around five times the volume of the pre-flood value, which in turn matches some of my
