“Basic how?”
“Well, Wilson was always taller than Kelly. He’s been pumping up for years. And he’s a man-”
“Being a big strong man qualifies him as leader? Are you kidding?” Zane smiled again. “You have to consider what reassures people. And then there’s the timing. This is the year the flood wins…”
They had had no news of Earth, not since going to warp, but they had all followed the likely progress of the flood with simulations based on the best science models available. This year and the next were seeing the succumbing of whole continents. In January, Europe must finally have gone when Mount Elbrus, Russia’s highest point, was covered. In May it was Africa’s turn, when Kilimanjaro drowned. And the continental US would all be gone too by now, save a couple of mountains in Alaska. Next year South America, even the Andes, would be covered, and there would be nothing left in the western hemisphere at all, no trace of land.
Zane said, “Wilson always thought there would be trouble this particular year, the year the survivor guilt really cuts in. What people want above all else is stability, and that’s what Wilson will provide. People will welcome his rule, believe me.” His smile flickered. “I think Zane 3 is getting restless. Maybe I should go back now?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s always stimulating talking to you, Dr. Wetherbee.”
“For me too. Thanks, Jerry… Zane? Are you there?”
Zane slumped in the chair, and his face crumpled, as if he was about to cry. “Dr. Wetherbee?”
“Do you remember anything?”
“I don’t think so. I thought I saw you… I don’t remember.”
“It went very well. Close the door and lock up your room now. Have you done that?”
“Yes.”
“OK, come back to the surgery with me. Here we go, come back as I count backward from five. Five, four, three…”
67
July 2048
They held the ballot using paper from a sacrificed social engineers’ manual on optimal breeding policies. Holle moderated the process, with observers from all the crew’s principal factions. She even got little Helen Gray and Steel Antionadi, just six and three, to help gather the ballot slips and count them, as a way of tying in the new shipborn generation to the results.
In the first round Venus came third, and was eliminated. And in the runoff Wilson beat Kelly by two-thirds to one-third. Much to Holle’s relief, nobody disputed the result.
68
September 2049
“We might have a problem,” was all Venus would say to Holle, very quietly, over the command crew’s Snoopy-hat comms link.
So Holle made her way to the cupola, and took a seat, and waited in the humming dark while Venus and Cora Robles completed some complex number-crunching procedure, the data passing back and forth between their screens in columns of numbers, swirling curves and eye-boggling multidimensional displays.
In the cupola, you got used to long silences. That was Venus Jenning’s way. The cupola was an island of calm, with its scents of plastic and metal and electronics, even a new-carpet smell of cleanness, and the smooth humming of the air-cycling fans. It was like sitting inside a computer core. And beyond the glass walls there were only the patient stars. Sitting in here you could forget the hulls even existed, with their chaos and shabbiness and endless fractiousness, ruled over by Wilson and his allies with their aloof, faintly menacing power.
The cupola was a refuge for Holle, she freely admitted, and it was obviously a refuge for those who worked here too. All of Venus’s people were damaged in one way or another. All of them Candidates, all of them around thirty, roughly the same age as Venus and Holle herself: Cora Robles who had lost a child, Thomas Windrup mutilated in Kelly’s last act as speaker, and Elle Strekalov, traumatized by the long-drawn-out dispute between Thomas and Jack Shaughnessy.
Even Venus had become more withdrawn since the bruising events fourteen months ago, what Kelly continued to call Wilson’s coup against her. Venus had always suspected that she had been maneuvered, somehow, by Wilson into challenging Kelly first. She felt betrayed. She conceded Wilson had brought a certain stability that had been lacking under Kelly. But she always pointed out that the one part of Wilson’s draft constitution that had been quietly struck out after he took office was a limitation clause, restricting any speaker to one term of four years. At least this peculiar relationship, between Venus and Wilson, was stable. Holle hoped it would remain so for the remaining couple of years of the cruise to Earth II.
And it was Earth II, and Venus’s latest data on it, that Holle had been summoned to discuss today.
The astronomers reached some break point in their study. They sat back and breathed deep and stretched, as if coming up for air. Cora smiled at Holle, and clambered out through the airlock into Seba. Venus and Holle were left alone. Venus tapped a key on a laptop, and Holle heard a faint rattle of bolts.
“You locked us in,” Holle said, surprised.
“You got it.” Venus produced a flask from the low shelf unit beside her workstation. “You want some coffee?”
“I’m honored.”
Venus poured out two cups.
Holle sipped gratefully. The ability of the processing systems to keep producing a hot, warm liquid that still tasted something like actual coffee nearly eight years after launch from Gunnison was one of the Ark’s minor miracles. “You always seem to have the best brew in here, Venus.”
Venus smiled, her face dimly illuminated by her glowing screen. “Got to give people some kind of incentive to visit. By the way, when that hatch is locked the data feed to the rest of the ship is cut too. So we have a little privacy.”
Holle stared. “You cut yourself off even from Wilson?”
“Oh, our great leader gets a continuous feed.” She winked at Holle.
“Which isn’t to say he’s fed the unvarnished truth the whole time.”
“You manipulate the data feed?”
“Wilson needs us, he needs what we do. As long as I’m no direct threat to him, I think he lets me keep my little secrets.”
And there was an expression of the most basic tactic for survival on this Ark: to grab a bit of power and hold on to it.
“So you have a ‘little secret’ today?”
Venus nodded. “I’ll tell Wilson about it when I’m ready. We need more data to establish the case. But-”
“You said there’s a problem.”
“With Earth II,” Venus said. “I think there’s a problem with our destination, Holle. I need you to help me figure out how to handle it.”
“Shit.”
Venus grinned. “That doesn’t begin to cover it.” She swiveled a screen so it faced Holle. “We have images of Earth II. Still rudimentary, but-”
Holle was astonished. “Wow. Images. And you kept them to yourself?”
“So far.”
“Suddenly I feel like Columbus.”
“More like the crew of Apollo 8,” Venus said. “Remember how Gordo used to claim to have met them all, Borman, Lovell and Anders? The first to leave Earth orbit, the first to see the world whole and complete…” Her finger hovered over a key. “Let me show you how we got the data.”
Since going to warp, Venus and her team had continued to use the Ark as a mobile telescopic platform for inspecting the nearby stars and their planets, extending the depth and quality of the searches that had been possible from Earth, and from the Ark itself at Jupiter. It seemed remarkable to Holle that it was possible to perform such fine work from within a warp bubble, with the telescopes peering out through a wall of folded spacetime. But the lensing of the light was easy to unravel; you just traced the rays back along the paths they had followed, following solutions through the forest of relativistic equations that described the Alcubierre warp.