models of subterranean sea release, as I called it. You can see that even now I am obsessed with academic priority.”
Kelly smiled. “I worked with guys like Liu Zheng, at the Academy. I can appreciate that.”
“Yeah. I survived to deliver history’s most almighty ‘I told you so.’ Some consolation. We might be heading toward a new climatic equilibrium out there somewhere in parameter space. There’s a model circulating on the hearth, called the Boyle model, and that old plodder would love to know he’s been immortalized.” But none of them had heard of Gary Boyle, or of the hearth, a loose interconnected community of aging climatologists and oceanographers, and she got blank looks. “Boyleworld will have very high carbon dioxide content, very low oxygen. Extreme heating will drive even more violent storms, which could mix up the ocean layers and thereby promote life, and in particular plankton photosynthesis-”
“Which would draw down carbon dioxide,” Kelly said.
“Yes. You can see there’s a feedback loop to close there, and that’s how you get stability. At higher temperatures underwater weathering of limestone kicks in also. But it’s all very controversial. Nobody has the computer facilities to test such models any more. And even if Boyleworld does come to pass, it might not be survivable by humans. Too damn hot.”
Masayo glanced around the raft, and pointed to a rack of fish. “The ocean’s evidently not that unproductive. And are those gull eggs?”
“There’s a kind of bounce-back going on among some deep-water species, despite the lack of nutrients in the ocean, now we stopped over-fishing and are no longer pumping in pollutants. It’s as if the Earth is breathing a sigh of relief. The birds have suffered, of course. No land, nowhere to nest. But some gulls seemed to be surviving. We think they’re making their nests on floating detritus.”
“We didn’t see many congregations of rafts,” Kelly said. “Over the major cities mostly. Even there, people are pretty spread out.”
“We come for the garbage,” Thandie said bluntly. “Even after so many years. Toxic leaks drive the fish away, but conversely they’re drawn back to the nutrient upwellings.” She didn’t elaborate on what that nutrient material might be, but Mike Wetherbee looked at the drying fish more suspiciously. “We do keep in touch, we have radio links, we swap information and we trade kids. We fret about inbreeding, just like the social engineers in your Academy.” She pointed. “The kid over there, fixing the cabling on that corner of the raft-he’s called Boris. Thirteen years old. I joined this raft seven years ago, after I came to visit a woman called Lily Brooke, so we could watch the submergence of Everest together. Lily was related to Boris-his great-great-aunt, I think. Maybe you heard of Lily. She was a friend of Grace Gray. She made sure Grace got on Ark One.”
Kelly said, “Grace is on Halivah-the other hull, the hull that didn’t come back to Earth.”
“She was pregnant when she joined the crew.”
“She had the baby before we got to Jupiter. A girl called Helen. She’s grown up now, I guess, she must be seventeen years old.”
Thandie nodded. “That’s good to hear. Lily and Grace went way back. Lily was devoted to saving Grace’s life, saving her from the flood. I guess she succeeded.”
“Grace never mentioned her,” Kelly said.
Lily had died not long after Everest. She had done all she possibly could for Grace. Thandie was glad she had never learned of this slow revenge of Grace’s. Some people never forgave you for saving their lives.
“After Everest, Manco and Ana, Lily’s great-nephew and his wife, took me in. Just as they will take in all of you now. They’re generous people, fundamentally.”
Kelly was staring at the kids, most of whom, as Thandie had expected, had got bored and gone off to their eternal playground of the sea. “They seem-alien. But no more than we are to them, I guess.”
“They grew up knowing nothing different from this,” Thandie said. “Just the raft and the ocean. Some of them barely learn to walk before they go jumping overboard. Some barely talk. It’s not that they’re preverbal, but they seem to be evolving a language of their own, of words, gestures, body shapes that they can use underwater. In the end some of them just slip away. Literally; they go over the side and you don’t see them again. Maybe the sharks get them; that’s what the parents fear. I wonder if they’re just finding some place of their own to live. Maybe on the big natural rafts where the gulls live, all driftwood and guano. Good luck to them.”
Mike Wetherbee said, “It sounds like the mother of all generation gaps.”
“Well, so it is. In five hundred years their grandkids will probably have webbed feet. But I hope they will remember their own humanity, remember the history that bore them, the civilization their ancestors built. I try to teach Boris astronomy…”
The kids were kind to Thandie, but they rarely listened to anything she had to say. That was fine with her, fine to be disregarded, as it had been for forty years or more, since she had seen London and New York flooded, and then the huge, astonishing marine transgressions as low-lying continental land was covered over in great sudden swathes, and human civilization dissolved in flight. The flood was just too big; to observe was all you could aspire to. In fact it was a privilege to have lived through this moment of transition. And after all none of these children and grandchildren were hers. She had no stake in their future. The present was enough, and the past…
They were watching her curiously.
She had drifted away, into the oceanic depths of her own head, fallen asleep sitting there in lotus. “Sorry,” she said. “Old lady narcolepsy.”
“And I apologize for staring,” Mike Wetherbee said. “It’s a long time since any of us saw anybody old. Forgive me.”
“You mentioned something called the Split. Tell me about it.”
Kelly glanced at Masayo and Mike. She shrugged, and related a fast version of her story, of the disputes that came to a head when Earth II was reached, and the three-way split that ensued. Kelly looked nervous, as if she feared she was going to have to repeat all this to some kind of tribunal. Thandie wondered what different versions of this saga she might have heard from Wilson Argent or Holle Groundwater.
When she was done, Thandie nodded. “I always thought you might come home. I never agreed with the basic philosophy of Project Nimrod, to go flying off into the sky. Earth has become alien, but not as alien as another planet entirely. I never thought you would split three ways, which must be about the dumbest choice you could have made from an engineering point of view. Gordo Alonzo would hit the roof. But, wow-three roads, three destinies. I wonder how it will turn out.”
Masayo said, “Well, Earth II is twenty-one light-years away. We outran any signal they might send. We might hear from them in another fourteen years or so. But we won’t hear from Earth III for another century, at least.” He frowned. “Strange thought.”
Thandie reminded herself he was basically a military man who had had to learn to deal with some very odd concepts. “You chose to come back to Earth, Masayo. Why?”
“I have a kid, from a previous relationship,” Masayo said awkwardly. “On Earth, I mean. I never meant to leave him behind. It was an only an accident I was on the Ark in the first place.”
“I’ve a kid too,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s what brought me home.”
“That and your ambition,” Mike Wetherbee snapped. “Your damn pride.”
Kelly would have replied, but Thandie held up her hand. “These are old arguments. You may as well leave them behind, leave them up in space.” She glanced around at the waters of Panthalassa, a world ocean given a name coined by one of the pioneers of the study of continental drift. “I don’t know what you were expecting. This is all we have to offer you. This is where you will spend the rest of your lives-”
“There is something else we’re looking for,” Kelly said. “We listened from orbit. I hoped we’d make contact, but we heard nothing.”
Thandie nodded; she’d expected this. “You hoped to hear from Ark Two.”
“It was my father’s project. He may even be still alive,” Kelly said a little wildly. “It’s a long shot, he would be in his nineties, but-”
“I never heard that he died. And I never heard that Ark Two failed. Not spoken to them for years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still sitting there. I can arrange for you to talk to them, if you want. Or anyhow I can try.”
Kelly’s eyes widened. “And to travel there?”
