slide around, you know, granite rafts drifting on the mantle, and every few hundred million years or so they coalesce into giant supercontinents. This is called the chelogenic cycle. The supercontinents are like vast lids that block Earth’s heat flow, the way Yellowstone traps the heat of the mantle plume. Eventually that heat causes the supercontinent to shatter, and the bits go spinning away. Now the last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke up two hundred and fifty million years ago, and the next formation event is another two hundred and fifty million years off in the future. So we’re at a midpoint, and maybe the mantle currents are adjusting somehow to this unique moment. We might be entirely irrelevant…”
Kelly saw that Thandie had lost her focus. She was talking to herself, receding into a mist of speculation, forever unprovable.
Mel was staring out of the window. “It was incredible to watch the life forms come and go. I mean, in the park there used to be grizzlies and wolves and herds of bison and elk, as well as vast forests. As the water closed over us, we just knew they were drowning, all of them. What’s that phrase from Genesis about Noah’s flood? ‘All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.’ But then, you know, we got recolonized, by all the strange creatures that live off the smoker chemicals. Giant worms and shrimps and crabs, and sea cucumbers, and xenophyophores-just single cells, the size of your hand. Incredible things.”
Thandie said, “But there was an extinction event even for the creatures of the abyss. The deep trenches were so profoundly physically separated from each other that each trench had its own unique biota. When the flood came they mixed up and competed, and some went to the wall.”
“There are critters out there that bore into wood,” Mel said. “Clams, worms, crustaceans. They used to rely on the fall of wood from the continents to the seabed. Now they got a whole sunken forest to eat. Those guys are in hog heaven, all around us…”
Kelly caught Mike’s glance. Buried in their steel tanks at the bottom of the ocean, Mel’s people had become introverted, self-obsessed. Strange even by the standards of star-travelers who had spent eighteen years in a converted fuel tank. Kelly touched Mel’s arm. “Maybe I could see my father now.”
He seemed to come to himself, as if waking from a dream. “Sorry. Yeah. I’ll take you to him and see if he woke up yet.”
They walked on around the curve of the spherical tank, past window after window that revealed the endless dark of the ocean.
82
Edward Kenzie met his daughter in a storm shelter, a reinforced room right at the heart of one of the tanks. This room was evidently used as a kind of boardroom, for the walls were paneled with wood and a big triangular pine table dominated the floor. It was even carpeted, with a thick pile woven with the wedge-of-Earth symbol of Ark Two.
Edward Kenzie’s heavy bulk was stuck in a wheelchair, and his head, entirely hairless, was covered in liver spots. He wore a business suit complete with tie tightly knotted around his neck. He permitted Kelly to kiss his cheek, and he gazed upon his second grandson, Eddie. He showed no signs of recognition, still less of joy. His massive presence in the chair frightened Eddie. The boy cried and clung to his father Masayo, who, as an illegal boarder of Ark One, Edward wouldn’t acknowledge at all.
That was it for the family stuff. After that, everybody but Kelly, Edward and Dexter was excluded. They each sat at the center of one of the table’s three sides. The silence stretched.
“I feel like I’m on trial,” Kelly blurted.
“Ha!” Edward snapped. “That was always your way. Get the first word in and take control, right? Well, this isn’t a trial. Tell you who should be on trial, that boyfriend of yours and the other illegals who robbed the Candidates and others of their righteous places on Ark One.”
“It wasn’t Masayo’s choice. Anyhow what’s done is done, and even you and all your bitterness can’t change that, Dad.”
“Bitterness? Is that what you think this is about?”
“Where do you want to start?” She glared at them both. “How I betrayed you, Dexter, by leaving Earth? Or how I betrayed you, Dad, by coming back?”
Dexter was red-faced with anger of a more confused kind. Kelly saw he must have fantasized about this situation, about having some kind of confrontation with the mother who had left him behind. Now she was here, he couldn’t find the words.
“He lost his father too, you know,” Edward said. “Don Meisel died at Alma, after-”
“I know! I know.”
“Good job this boy had me to save him, don’t you think?”
“Oh, don’t preach at me, you old fraud. You know that if I hadn’t volunteered to go back into the selection pool you’d have ordered me to. It was all about the mission. It always was. I was the best Candidate they had, I topped every assessment scale for years. In flight I was a competent commander. I even formed liaisons, I was ready to have more kids and fulfill my obligations regarding the gene pool.”
“Yeah. You always had your fan club, superstar. Well, your great days are in your past, if you ever had any. And now here you are with nowhere to go and nothing but a squalling brat by some renegade. So let’s talk about the mission. What went wrong?”
“You read the logs. You know what happened. I did what I had to do.”
“Horseshit.”
“It’s true. In my judgment Earth II wasn’t a viable option. And going on across another three decades to another hopeful case wasn’t viable either. Coming back was the only choice.”
Edward thumped the desk with his bony fist. “I say again, horseshit! I know you, lady. I force-grew you like a greenhouse tomato. I know your strengths and your flaws. Yes, you were by far the outstanding Candidate, you always were. You had brains, athletic abilities, leadership skills, charisma. Hell, you even had a good body and a face to match. But you had a flaw, one deep flaw, and that’s your damn pride. You weren’t going to accept being forced out by Wilson Argent. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to Kelly Kenzie! So instead of applying your skills to some other aspect, you fucked over a multibillion-dollar mission and wrecked mankind’s best hope of long-term survival in the process. And no justification about the good of the crew or the viability of the mission or how you longed to see your lost little kiddie again is going to wash with me. ” He was shouting now, his voice shrill, his body immobile. “You’d rather have led your crew to hell than follow Wilson or anybody else to paradise. So you fell to Earth, like Satan.”
“You made me what I am, Dad, with your pushing and your lies. You never even told me this place existed! My flaws are your flaws.”
Dexter said, “And did you make me, Kelly?”
Kelly felt a stab of shame that, in the heat of her confrontation with her father, she had briefly forgotten that Dexter was even in the room.
Edward snorted. “Christ. Look at us, the three of us stuck in a metal box at the bottom of the fucking sea, arguing like shit. What a family.”
The door opened. Masayo stood there apologetically, holding Eddie’s hand. Thandie was at his side. Masayo said, “I’m sorry. He missed his mom. I think he’s a little scared.”
“Come here, sweetie.” Kelly held out her arms. Eddie ran to her, and with a boost from Masayo she lifted him up onto her lap.
Edward watched, his heavy, frog-like face unreadable. His burst of anger seemed to have exhausted him. “Well, at least you had the sense to come home, to the safest place there is.”
Kelly said, “Safe?”
“Sure. The last refuge. That’s the point of this place. Earth has had hard times before, so the brainiacs like Thandie Jones assure me. In the early days of its formation, when it was battered by moon-sized impactors, life always retreated to where it was safest. Down and in. You know there are life-forms down there in the deep crust that eat silica from the rocks and live off the mineral seeps and the heat, that have been there since the beginning.
