the center. And the only right the crew have left is the right to a chance of surviving the journey.”
Grace murmured, “Maybe Holle’s right. It’s not our fault. Nobody should be made to endure a journey like this. Nobody should condemn a generation of children to grow up in a cage.”
“It was necessary,” Venus said. “Or so the mission planners thought.”
And maybe, Holle thought, clinging to Grace’s words, the crew would be able to forgive her.
“Well,” Grace said. “This has been-eye-opening. So is that all?”
“For now,” Holle said. “Let’s get to work.”
Without another word, and apparently with relief, Grace arrowed out through the hatch, with an unconscious skill born of decades in free fall.
Wilson prepared to follow. “Have to admit I never saw this side of you either, Holle. Shame it didn’t come out earlier. We’d have made a great team.”
When he’d gone, Venus lingered for a moment. “I guess the others didn’t pick up on our long-term problem.”
“What problem?”
“The loss of shuttle A. I don’t have any solution to that. Do you?”
“No,” Holle whispered. “No, I don’t.”
Venus nodded. “Well, it’s a long way to Earth III yet. We’ve time to figure it out. As for the rest-” She looked at Holle for long seconds, as if she’d never seen her before. “Ah, the hell with it.” She floated up out of the cabin after the others.
Holle was left alone in Wilson’s cabin. She sat still. Then she folded over on herself, hugging her knees. She dared not cry for fear that she might be overheard.
90
May 2078
Helen Gray brought Zane a present. Wrapped roughly in a sheet of insulating foam, it was a block of frozen urine, elaborately sculpted into a bust, a human head. The artist intended it as a memorial to the dead, to mark a decade since Steel Antoniadi’s Blowout Rebellion.
In the gloom of his cabin, Zane hefted it, cupping its cheeks in his stiff, liver-spotted hands. The glow from the cabin’s single lamp shone through the ice, picking out its dark golden color and highlighting bubbles and streaks of other fluids within. Zane said dryly, “I do like the way the light catches piss ice, if you display it right.”
This was Zane 3, Helen tentatively decided, the determined amnesiac who remembered nothing before his own awakening after the launch from Jupiter. She was glad Zane 3 was out today. Though his mood was often black, and though Zane had been a pariah for ten years since his conspiracy theories fueled the Blowout, Zane 3 was a rounded person with a unique perspective of his own, while Jerry was competent but hollow, a bluff, arrogant bully. According to Holle and Grace, who had long since given up their attempts to reintegrate Zane, there was evidence of other alters orbiting inside Zane’s head now, spun off at various crises to take away more distress from the core personality, alters with names like Leonard and Robert and Christopher. The only objects of interest on the Ark were other people. Zane 3 might be nothing more than a fragment of a disintegrating mind, but he remained one of the more interesting people on the ship.
“It’s well made,” he said now, turning the urine head over in his hands. “If the features are exaggerated. These features, the big eyes, the mouth, the nose. It’s like a puppet head.”
“Bella used other bodily fluids to highlight internal structures. Look, you can see that string of blood…”
“Not too anatomically precise.”
“It’s fanciful, meant to represent the mind, not the body.”
“Yes. You can see the expression she’s trying to capture. Curiosity. Doubt, maybe. How old is this Bella?”
“Eighteen.”
Bella Mayweather was of the generation who had come of age in the decade since the Blowout; only eight years old at the time of the rebellion, she likely had only blurred, nightmarish memories of those events themselves, and had grown up under Holle Groundwater’s tough-love rule.
“Eighteen years old,” Zane said, turning the head over in his hands. “Shipborn art does fascinate me. So does their culture, the language they seem to be evolving. The way they flock like birds in microgravity. You know, the one thing I’ve learned above all on this cruise to nowhere is about the resilience of the human spirit. We go on and on, decade after decade, and each new year is worse than the last, each subsequent cadre of kids growing up in even worse conditions than those before. Now we have nothing left to give them, not even any raw materials for art. And yet they manage to express themselves anyway. Their sculptures of frozen piss, and their paintings of blood and mucus on the walls of the ship, those elaborate tattoos they wear, their endless songs. All evanescent, of course.”
“Yes. Even this head will have to go into the hoppers in another few days. The image will be stored in the archive, but…”
But even Halivah’s digital archive, stored on radiation-hardened diamond-based chips, was running out of room. Half the capacity had been lost to Seba at the Split, and the rest had only been intended to record a voyage of a decade or less. As Holle sought new capacity, for instance for the revival of the HeadSpace booths she had ordered, the institutional memory stored in the archive had been “rationalized,” and whole swathes of it dumped.
Zane said, “This is the sort of thematic resonance which underpins my so-called conspiracy theories. You see the same themes expressed over and over at different levels in our little world, which is evidence of artifice, of deliberate if clumsy design. Thus we are all trapped together in this hull like racing thoughts in a single skull, just as I and my alters are trapped in my own head. And now the Ark’s electronic memory is being wiped out, megabyte by megabyte, library shelf by library shelf. Will the Ark wake up one day not knowing what it is, just as I did at the start of the voyage? Maybe there’s nobody here but me,” he said suddenly. He looked at her. “Maybe you are just another alter, spun off to save me from loneliness. Maybe there’s only me, alone in this empty tank, while the observers watch me going steadily crazy.”
Helen shivered. As with so many of Zane’s visions there was something authentic in this latest speculation, this latest bizarre hypothesis. After all, even though at thirty-six years old she was among the very oldest of the shipborn, she couldn’t remember Earth herself. Intellectually she believed that the stars were real, that Earth was real, that there really had been a flood that had drowned a planetary civilization, and that in only three more years they would reach Earth III. But it was a matter of faith, for her. And there were people like Steel Antoniadi who had been born, lived and died on the Ark without ever experiencing anything outside its hull. What difference had it made to them if it had all been real or not?
Listening to Zane’s theorizing was like listening to a horror story, giving her a kind of pleasurable scare. But, since the Blowout, listening to Zane had been against ship’s rules.
“This is why none of the kids are allowed to come and see you, if you talk like this.”
“Ah, the children. I am still the ship’s bogeyman, aren’t I? But I do miss those dream-sharing sessions we used to have.” He glanced at her belly, where her coverall showed a slight swelling. “You’ve another coming yourself?”
She smiled. “We just got in before the deadline. Holle wants a moratorium on conception from here until Earth III. She doesn’t want us landing with newborns aboard.”
“That makes a certain paranoid sense. A little sister for Mario?”
“Actually a brother.”
“Another boy for Jeb. That will please him.”
“I guess,” she said indifferently. Jeb Holden, formerly one of Wilson’s bruisers, had not been her first choice as father to her children-and nor, she knew, had she been his choice. After all he was about Zane’s age, nearly sixty, much older than Helen. But Holle had encouraged everybody to get busy producing babies, following some demographic logic of her own, and the ten years since the Blowout had seen a whole new crop of infants growing
