Grace asked, “So in all this, where is Zane?”
Wetherbee shrugged. “They’re all parts of him. I think Zane 3 serves as a kind of central point, but he’s not the leader.”
“It sounds fantastic.”
“I know. A lot of commentators believed DID was always iatrogenic-that is, a product of the diagnosis itself, a kind of fantasy concocted between doctor and patient, maybe unconsciously. I knew doctors who would have loved to have a DID case on their hands. You could write a book about it.”
“But not you,” Holle said.
“Hell, no. I’m not smart enough to have cooked this up, believe me.”
Grace asked, “So what’s the prognosis? What can you do about it?”
“There are ways to reintegrate the various personalities into a whole. But we’re talking more years of therapy. I think I’m going to hold off until after ’51, when we’re due to reach Earth II. That will be the last time we will need Zane the warp engineer. He is in fact functioning, in his strange, broken way. I don’t think I can risk endangering that. When I get my clinic up and running on Earth II-then maybe I’ll have time to fix Zane.”
Holle asked, “Of his alters, which one do you like the least?”
“Good question. That one,” Wetherbee said, pointing to Zane. “The alters are stuck at the age they were created. Zane 1 will be seventeen years old, forever. And he relives the abuse, the pain he absorbed, over and over. That’s his function, to take those memories away from Zane. But it means he’s trapped in an eternal present, like a recording stuck on replay. Zane 1 is in hell.”
They fell silent, and watched Zane sitting with the dreamers as he jabbed the toy screwdriver into his arm over and over. These were the crew who would have to face the dramatic, unexpected challenges of Earth II, Holle thought. How could they possibly cope?
70
December 2051
Everybody crowded into Halivah for Venus’s crew report on Earth II, all save for a watch crew left over in Seba, and Holle knew that they too would be glued to the comms system. For her presentation Venus set up a crystal ball, a three-dimensional display unit that hadn’t been unpacked since they left Earth, that hummed and glistened as its panels rotated, too fast for the eye to follow. Holle knew this was a gift to the Ark from Thandie Jones, and was the very same piece of equipment Thandie had once used to brief the LaRei people in Denver, with Holle and Kelly running around on the floor, and she’d used it even before then in New York for the IPCC.
Holle herself found a place on a catwalk beside Kelly Kenzie. Venus had taken out the mesh panels over three decks to open up a kind of auditorium in the heart of the hull, so everybody could see and hear, and more than eighty people, including kids and babies, were jammed in, clinging to catwalks and ladders and waiting for the show. A rumble of excited conversation echoed, and there was a rare sense of crowd. Holle picked out familiar faces all around the chamber, the people with whom she had shared so much, in some cases since they were all children together in Denver. There was Mike Wetherbee standing by Zane Glemp, his most intractable yet his most valuable patient, and Theo Morell, the half-corrupt king of the HeadSpace booths, and the Shaughnessy brothers, solid hard workers both, Jack with a cap pulled down over his burn-scarred face, and Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov, still together despite all their tribulations, and Masayo Saito, the army lieutenant who, thrust into an impossible and unexpected position, had proven to be a bridge-builder of wisdom and courage, and poor Cora Robles who had never got over the loss of her little girl, a shadow of her old brilliant self-yet who was now pregnant again. Helen Gray, nine years old now, stood by her mother on a catwalk on the opposite side of the hull. She was playing pat-a-cake with six-year-old Steel Antoniadi. When she glimpsed Holle, Helen waved her hand. She was growing into a pretty kid with her mother’s very English coloring. It struck Holle that Helen had never seen as many people together as this in one space, not in her whole life. But Helen’s eyes were drawn, like the other children’s, to Venus’s glittering toy.
Holle felt a mood of exhilaration, of belonging. For all their triumphs and their tragedies, their weaknesses and their strengths, they had got here, across ten years since Gunnison and more than twenty light-years. They had reached 82 Eridani. And they had all seen the prize, Earth II, with their naked eyes. Venus had allowed the crew into her precious cupola, a few at a time, to gaze down on the huge world turning a few hundred kilometers beneath the orbiting Ark, with its creased oceans, scattered cloud, rusty landmasses. There was a sense of unity, at last; together they had achieved a mighty triumph.
But Earth II wasn’t what they had hoped for. And now, today, six months after the Ark’s arrival at 82 Eridani, they had grave decisions to make. Holle wondered how much of that wonderful unity would survive the day.
Wilson Argent came strutting across the deck, and the conversations hushed. Wilson looked around at the crew, on the decks and catwalks and clinging to the ladders. He was a big man, imposing and impressive. Three years after his takeover from Kelly his power over the crew was absolute, and he was regarded with a mixture of admiration, awe and fear. Today he had opened up for discussion the biggest decision they had had to make since leaving Earth, a decision about the whole future of the mission, the Ark; even he couldn’t railroad this. But as a result this decision day was a moment of comparative vulnerability for Wilson.
On impulse Holle glanced at Kelly. Her expression was hard, set. Holle recognized Kelly’s “ambitious” face, the face she had worn when she’d announced she was leaving her kid behind to keep her place on the Ark. Since he had ousted her, Wilson had always let Kelly alone, but at best they had been like two warring armies under an armed truce. Well, today Kelly looked like she was planning something, and Holle felt a stab of deep unease.
“You all know why we’re here.” Wilson’s voice, subtly amplified, boomed through the whole hull. “We achieved mankind’s first star flight, we reached Earth II, and we’ve all had one hell of a party. But the job’s not done yet-not until we’re down on the new ground, turning the turf and planting our first crops. Now Venus is going to summarize what we’ve learned so far about the planet. And then we’ll decide, as a group, what we’re going to do about it.” That was Wilson, blunt and to the point. He nodded to Venus and backed off to stand with the gang of illegals and gatecrashers who had gravitated to his court.
Venus stepped forward, looking around at the expectant faces. She tapped her handheld. The crystal ball flared with light, and an image of Earth II coalesced.
It was a sphere more than a meter across, turning slowly around a horizontal axis. It was bright and detailed, and its glow, blue and gray, brown and white, lit up the faces of the watching people. Venus stayed silent, giving them a few seconds to take it in. The last murmurs hushed.
Holle remembered the first blurred images of the new planet, images taken from light-years out and constructed with extraordinary care by Venus’s planet-finder technologies. This new mapping was as detailed as any image of Earth as seen from space she had ever seen. And the planet wasn’t simply some abstract entity any more; now, after their months in orbit, it was a world already replete with human names. They had tentatively labeled the rotation pole that was currently pointing at the sun as “north”; the world turned counterclockwise as seen by an observer above that pole. Subject to months of unbroken heat from 82 Eridani the pole was blanketed in cloud, with storms visibly spinning off a massive central swirl.