Kelly shook her head. “It’s not my policy. Right now it’s just the recommendation of the task group I asked to consider the problem. Look, we have a conflict between two obligations. We have to try to ensure maximal genetic diversity in the next generation. But at the same time, thanks to the presence of the gatecrashers and illegals, we have a gender imbalance on the Ark…”
There were more men than women. Three gay couples, two male and one female, eased the burden slightly, although there was another issue in that the gays would also be expected to contribute to the gene pool of the next generation; the social engineers had at least bequeathed guidelines as to how that should be handled. But the guidelines were no help with the basic issue of imbalance.
Elle said hotly, “I have the right to choose who my life partner is going to be.”
“Yes, you do,” Kelly said patiently. “But the excess men have rights too. And we as a group have an obligation to ensure we preserve as wide a gene pool for the future as we can.”
“So I have to spread my legs for some illegal?”
Holle laughed. “Nicely put.”
“Artificial insemination is possible,” Kelly said to Elle. “You wouldn’t have to sleep with anybody.”
Masayo said mildly, “Sometimes I can’t believe we have these conversations.”
Elle said, “But I would still have some illegal’s brat in my womb. That’s how Thomas will see it for sure.”
Kelly said with a kind of brittle patience, “We get this kind of issue all the time, Elle, you know that. Your right to control your own body conflicts with the rights and responsibilities of the group as a whole. The proposal is that each of us women should choose a second partner from among the men involved, that we each have children by more than one man. If you can’t choose, there will be a ballot-”
Elle snorted. “Rigged like every ballot on this tub since the day we launched.”
“There’ll be no rigging. We’re all going to have to face this, Elle. All the women, all the men come to that. We’ll have to separate partnerships for companionship from partnerships for procreation. The former is entirely your choice, and the mission has no need to interfere with that, but the second has to have some direction from the crew as a whole, to fulfill our wider obligation. It’s the only way a crew this small can maintain genetic diversity. We’re in a unique situation which-”
“Oh, I’ve had enough of this.” Elle stood, knocking back her chair; it fell languidly in the half-gravity. “You always come out with this super-ethical bullshit. Kelly. You never focus on the human being in front of you. Well, I’m going to talk to Venus in the cupola. She won’t let you go ahead with this. And maybe she’ll do something to keep Thomas and Jack apart before they kill each other.” She stalked off.
Kelly sighed, and sipped water from a covered tumbler. “Christ, Christ.”
“I’ll have a word with Jack Shaughnessy,” Holle said. “Just quietly. Try to make sure he keeps his distance from Elle.”
“I’ve seen no signs he’s still after her. That fight with Thomas seems to have convinced Jack that Elle wants to stay where she is. This whole thing is probably just Thomas’s paranoia. Be careful, Holle, say the wrong thing and you might make things worse.”
“We’re going to get this kind of conflict over and over,” Masayo said.
“I know,” Kelly said. “All the way to Earth II. But what else can we do? This is the nature of the mission. It wouldn’t be half so difficult if we were crewed by the full complement of Candidates as we should have been, with a proper sex balance and training in the issues.”
Masayo rolled his eyes.
Kelly asked Holle, “So what about the missing kid over in Halivah?”
“Wilson said he’d call if there was any news.”
“Damn kids,” Kelly said. “They’re so weird. You know, I’ve seen them catch spiders and flies and make pets of them. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d think they’d go crazy, growing up in a bottle like this. But I suppose they’ve never known any different. What about Cora?”
Holle summarized what had happened, how she and Wilson had had to help get Cora out of the booth. “I asked Doc Wetherbee to take a look at her. I don’t think she’s even been eating properly.”
“It’s not food that’s her problem,” Kelly said. “It’s her addiction to the HeadSpaces. You know, we excluded alcohol and every drug we could think of, and yet still we’re raising addicts. There’s always some damn thing.” She looked at Holle sharply. “What’s your opinion about Theo? Do you think he is dealing in HeadSpace credits like Wilson says?”
“I think it’s possible,” Holle said carefully. “But Theo’s naive. Or he was when he came on board the ship. It may be he doesn’t understand what he’s doing, the moral implications, the effect on other people.”
Masayo laughed. “So he’s inventing a drug-dealing trade from first principles. God bless human nature.”
Kelly shook her head. “You know, I’ve been doing some research in the archive on prisons. There you have people marking their territory, picking fights over food, swapping stories about dreams for lack of stimulation, pushing drugs. Just like us. Is that all we managed to build here, a prison between the stars?”
Masayo Saito said, “Grace Gray’s mother was held hostage in Barcelona for years. Chained to radiators in cellars. Grace herself was the result of a rape by one of the guards, and was born in captivity. An unbelievable story. And yet, are we all hostages on this Ark, hostage to the ambitions of the mission designers?”
Holle said, “I’d say they were our ambitions too.”
“God only knows,” Masayo said.
“Sometimes I think that’s the problem,” Kelly said. “God, I mean. The social engineers always tried to keep God out of our lives. The Ark is a mission of a state that was deliberately secular, a state that was trying to be a reverse image of the Mormon state in Utah it was at war with. And despite the gatecrashers and illegals, they succeeded in that goal, didn’t they? Many people on the Ark are religious, but we aren’t a religious community. Sometimes I wish we were, that we had a common mission ordained by one god or another. A monastery would surely be a better social model than a prison.”
Masayo shook his head. “Too late for that, Kelly. I think we left God behind back on Earth.”
Holle stood. “I need to go. Doc Wetherbee says he wants to review Zane’s therapy.”
“Well, that’s also a priority. And keep me informed about the progress on the kid. OK, Masayo, what’s next?”
63
Mike Wetherbee invited Holle, Venus and Grace into the small cabin that he called his surgery, with its bunk beds and persistent antiseptic smell, and cabinets of medical gear to treat everything from eye conditions to bad teeth. On a monitor he showed a recording of himself and Zane at their last therapy session, the latest of a program which had now been going on for over two years. On the monitor, Zane and Wetherbee spoke quietly, over a game of infinite chess.
“This is the bullshit part,” Wetherbee murmured. “How’s your day been, and so forth. Takes him an age to warm up. I do most of the talking. And I hate that damn game.”
“Let’s just watch,” murmured Grace. She was perched on the edge of one of the patients’ beds.
Infinite chess was in fact an invention of Zane’s. It was played with regular pieces on a regular board, save that the players had to imagine the board wrapped around itself, so that the right edge was glued to the left, and the upper edge glued to the lower. So, given normal restrictions on movement, a given piece could move right, off the edge of its world, and reappear to the left. It gave the illusion of infinity on a finite board. Zane said, and he liked to produce computer graphics showing how the wrapped-around board was topologically equivalent to a torus, a doughnut. A queen became particularly powerful; faced by an empty diagonal, row or column, she could leap, theoretically, an infinite number of squares in a single move. Zane and other keen players were busy working out variants to standard rules, and to standard sequences of game play. For instance, white had an immediate advantage with the first move. Your queen could step backward and wrap around the world to take your opponent’s queen, though she would then fall to the opposing king. Your rooks, stepping back into your opponent’s back rank, could do a lot of damage before being quelled. End-game analysis was less affected, as the board was so open anyhow.