“Well done,” Venus said. “I guess our naked-eye astronomy training is paying off-all those observing trips up in the mountains. Remember how Magnus Howe used to yell at us when we got bored waiting for breaks in the clouds? But Magnus was lucky. There was a window after the air cleared of human pollution, and before the global-ocean weather cut in with all those clouds and storms, when you had the best seeing since the Stone Age. The result was a generation of natural naked-eye astronomers. Grace Gray remembers it. But we were born that bit too late.”
Holle, who had never been too strong on warp physics, had always been faintly surprised that the outside universe was visible from inside the bubble at all. It was, but the view was distorted. A warp bubble was a patchwork of universes, stitched together by a thin, dynamic, highly deformed layer of spacetime. That deformity meant a strong gravity field, and the path of a light ray could be bent by gravity-which was how Einstein’s relativity had first been validated, when starlight was observed to be bent by the sun’s gravity during a solar eclipse. So the warp bubble acted as a lens wrapped around the ship, a lens of gravity that deflected the starlight that washed over the Ark.
The distortions were strongest ahead of and directly behind the ship’s motion. Ahead, space appeared crumpled up around the destination point, like a blanket being gathered in. Behind, though, in the direction of the sun and Earth, it was a different story, and a stranger one. The sun lay in the constellation of Opiuchus, the serpent-bearer, directly opposite Orion and Eridanus in the sky. But in that direction there was only darkness, a murky, muddy disc surrounded by faint stars. The ship was simply outrunning the photons coming from the sun and its planets.
Holle said, “If we could see the solar system-”
“Imagine a disc the size of the moon, as seen from Earth. That angle in your field of view. From here, that tiny disc would cover a volume of space ten times wider then the orbit of Neptune. After six months we’ve traveled around one and a half light-years-that’s a third of the way to Alpha Centauri, if we happened to be going that way. But even now we’re still within the solar system, just, approaching the outer limit of the Oort Cloud.” A vaguely spherical shell of ice worldlets and inert comet nuclei, following million-year orbits yet bound by the sun’s gravity, just like Earth.
When the warp bubble had first wrapped itself around the spinning ship, they had swept past one tremendous milestone after another at an astonishing rate. Even after the mighty push of the Orion drive it had taken them a whole year to coast to Jupiter. Under warp, within the first few hours they had sailed past the orbits of the outermost planets, and had soon overtaken the decades-long slog of Voyager One, the most distant spacecraft before the Ark.
And it was impossible to imagine that seen from outside, the ship and its crew and all their dreams and ambitions and conflicts would be almost entirely invisible, the warp bubble just a speck, smaller than microscopic, fleeing the solar system like a bullet.
“So,” Venus said, “you spoken to Zane yet?”
“I’ve been waiting for the right time. Maybe after the parliament. At least that will take him away from his work for a while.”
Venus pulled a face. “If I were you I’d wait a bit longer before you make your choice of life partner. Losing Mel is still an open wound, it’s obvious. See if there’s somebody else aboard you could fall for.”
“I’ve looked,” Holle said earnestly. “Believe me.”
Venus shrugged. “Your choice. Your risk.”
Holle often wished she could speak to her father about this. Or even Mel. But nobody on Earth could speak to the Ark, not since the instant they had gone to superluminal speed. Maybe, Holle thought, it was just as well that that disc of warped space hid the sun and Earth. It was as if all that had gone before warp had never existed anyhow, as if the twin worlds of the hulls contained all of reality.
Venus pushed out of her chair. “Time for Kelly’s talking shop. Come on, let’s get it over so we can get back to some real work.”
58
Holle and Venus passed back through the small airlock between the cupola and Seba. They emerged onto a gantry fixed to Seba’s curving, green-painted inner wall. They were up near the nose here, and Holle looked down through a mesh of decks and partitions and equipment. The light was bright, coming from an array of arc lamps that, during a ship’s “day” still slaved to Alma time, shed something like sunlight. It was like being inside some big open-plan building, Holle thought, a little like the science museum back in Denver. This was Holle’s world, or half of it. The furthest point she could see, the curving base of the pressure shell below all the decks, was only about forty meters away, and when she looked across the hull to the opposite wall she was spanning a distance of only eight or ten modest paces.
People swarmed everywhere today. There was a steady hubbub of voices, and the occasional squeal of a child. Most of the crew had come across to Seba for the parliament, though some would have stayed behind in Halivah according to ship’s rules. This parliament was a special one, being held to mark the end of the first six months in which, having unpacked the warp generator from its twin holds in the hulls, the crew had completed the reconfiguring of the hulls’ interior.
Kelly was holding her parliament on the eighth of the hull’s fifteen decks, counting down from the top, so Holle and Venus clambered down a spiderweb of lightweight catwalks and ladders. The hulls had served as zero-gravity space habitats during the cruise to Jupiter and the years of their stay there; everything possible had been packed out of the way, and the hulls’ roomy interiors left open for the crew’s weightless maneuverings, and their games of Frisbee and microgravity sumo. Now the interior had been remodeled for a long voyage under steady gravity. Decks had been strung across to provide floor space, and partitions had been set up, places for work, sleep and privacy. The design was ingenious, with equipment no longer necessary after one mission phase being reused in the next; thus the catwalks and ladders on the walls had been constructed from the frames of acceleration couches. The social engineers in their offices in Denver and Gunnison had based their interior design on the dynamics of hunter-gatherer groups, the most ancient human social form, with a “village” on every deck and a “clan” uniting each hull. The social engineers, of course, didn’t have to live here.
The green shades deepened as they descended further. The hulls had been planned to maximize the visual stimuli given to the crew, and on Seba the design conceit was that each deck represented a different kind of terrain on Earth. The lowest levels, where the effective gravity was the highest, were meant to be rainforest, and the green paint was darkest there, the mid-levels temperate forest or grassland, and the highest montane, painted with the pale colors of mosses and lichen. There were real-life plants nestling among the paintwork, living things from Earth growing in metal tubs welded to the walls, plants and grasses and even dwarf trees. In a morale-boosting gimmick the crew had to tend to the plants themselves. It had worked; even when a clogged filtration unit had shut down the reclamation systems for twenty-four hours and the crew had had to ration their available drinking water, they hadn’t let the little plants die.
By the time they reached the eighth deck Kelly was ready to start her parliament.