Don nodded. “Stay close to me, sir,” he said to Patrick.
“I’m no soldier, son.”
Don thrust an AK-47 into Patrick’s arms. “You are now.”
The Chinook had gone, its roar receding into the sky, its lights a dying constellation. And over Patrick’s head the sky was clearing, to reveal a bloody eclipse light.
56
When the moon had gone into totality, when the Earth’s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling bloodred color bloomed, Lily Brooke had heard the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd’s murmur of awe, children saying, “Look at that!” in a variety of languages. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.
Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth’s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky.
She sat with Nathan Lammockson on her scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from Ark Three, spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of the raft. She’d tried to make Nathan comfortable with a heap of blankets. In the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea.
Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future.
“The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough molding, and we’ll come through it, smarter and stronger then ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that…” He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. “Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim…” His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.
“Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.”
“They just swim…”
A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.
It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.
That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?
Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.
“I got you here, didn’t I? I kept you alive.”
“Yes, Nathan.” She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. “Yes, you did that.”
But if it had been the Ark, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.
“I kept you alive. We’ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they’ve got to learn…”
Four
57
September 2044
An hour before Kelly’s parliament, Holle, on a whim, tried to get inside the cupola. She felt like talking over with Venus the encounter with Zane she was building up to.
But Thomas Windrup, sitting in the airlock working through some kind of data-reduction exercise on a laptop, was acting as a gatekeeper. Slim, dark, his bookish looks spoiled now by Jack Shaughnessy’s gift of a broken nose, he checked over an admission schedule.
“Oh, for God’s sake, just let me in,” Holle said. “I only want a few minutes.”
“We got work to do in here,” Thomas said, with the pronounced Omaha accent that he’d maintained all through their years in the Academy. “And then there’s the dark adaptation.”
“What do you think I’m going to do, shine a light in your eyes? Let me in or I’ll turn off the water supply to your coffee machine.”
Venus turned at that, her eyes bright in the dark. Over her shoulder, in the cloistered darkness of the cupola, Holle could see Elle Strekalov, and beyond them both a star-littered sky. “That is seriously not funny,” Venus said. “Power like that is real in this dump, Holle. Even if Kelly Kenzie wants to believe we’re all one big happy family. Oh, let her in, Thomas.”
Thomas stood aside with a grudging grin.
Holle entered the cupola and sat on a lightweight swivel chair beside Venus. Now that the hulls were spun up, gravity was less than half Earth normal here, up near the nose of Seba. Every chair you sat on felt soft as feathers, and this transparent blister attached to the flank of Seba had become a dome fixed sideways-on to a vertical wall, separated into horizontal levels by mesh decking. Venus and her team worked at stations equipped with dimly lit screens and red lamps, to protect their dark-adapted eyes. Venus’s wide pupils gave her an eerie, doped-out look.
Holle peered beyond the curved window into the deeper dark, at the sharp, intense star fields. There was little apparent distortion from the passage of the light through the wall of the warp bubble, at least if you looked away from the axis of the bubble’s motion, and the stars looked much as they had always done in the skies over Colorado. But as her own eyes adapted it was as if more stars were emerging from the velvet blackness, layer upon layer of them beneath the scattered sprawl of the constellations she’d been familiar with from Earth. This grand panorama turned over, all the stars in the universe orbiting the Ark, once every thirty seconds.
Venus didn’t offer her coffee. Venus was always mean with coffee. Or maybe it was punishment for that crack about the water supply.
“So,” Venus said at length, “what’s new with the plumbing?”
“On schedule and under budget.”
“And how are your illegal brothers getting along?”
“The Shaughnessys are doing fine. With the simpler stuff anyhow-the big junk you can see and fiddle with, like the oxygen generation system and the water recovery racks. They find it hard to grasp the overall systems flows, or even to see why they need to.”
Venus was dismissive. “That’s jarheads for you.”
“They’re more than that. At least we better hope they are.”
Venus nodded, watching Holle with those strange, large eyes. “I’ll tell you something. There’s nobody I’d trust more to run such essential subsystems than you, Holle. That might be important, when things get tougher later on.”
Holle didn’t like this kind of apocalyptic talk, that she heard from Venus and Wilson and a few of the others. “Then let’s make sure things don’t get tough in the first place.”
“Yeah. So are you up for a little star-spotting? Can you tell me which way we’re headed?”
That wasn’t a trivial question. Holle turned in her chair. She looked out through the window and up along the flank of the hull, a vertical curving wall covered with insulation blanket and pocked with handholds, instrument mounts and micrometeorite scars. She could see the big particle-accelerator ring of the warp generator suspended above, and beyond that she glimpsed Halivah, a cylinder poised nose-down in the sky, with the tether a gleaming thread between the twin hulls. All this was picked out by starlight and the ship’s own lights. The hulls were turning around the tether’s midpoint, and their orientation at any moment had nothing to do with the Ark’s overall direction of motion. However, Holle knew how to find her bearings. “Look for Orion…” She scanned around the sky, and it wasn’t long before she found the proud frame of the hunter, with his distinctive belt of stars. “And Eridanus is that sprawl to his right.” It was in the constellation of the river that their destination G-class star lay, still more than nineteen light-years away.