“Yeah. You always had your fan club, superstar. Well, your great days are in your past, if you ever had any. And now here you are with nowhere to go and nothing but a squalling brat by some renegade. So let’s talk about the mission. What went wrong?”
“You read the logs. You know what happened. I did what I had to do.”
“Horseshit.”
“It’s true. In my judgment Earth II wasn’t a viable option. And going on across another three decades to another hopeful case wasn’t viable either. Coming back was the only choice.”
Edward thumped the desk with his bony fist. “I say again, horseshit! I know you, lady. I force-grew you like a greenhouse tomato. I know your strengths and your flaws. Yes, you were by far the outstanding Candidate, you always were. You had brains, athletic abilities, leadership skills, charisma. Hell, you even had a good body and a face to match. But you had a flaw, one deep flaw, and that’s your damn pride. You weren’t going to accept being forced out by Wilson Argent. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to Kelly Kenzie! So instead of applying your skills to some other aspect, you fucked over a multibillion-dollar mission and wrecked mankind’s best hope of long-term survival in the process. And no justification about the good of the crew or the viability of the mission or how you longed to see your lost little kiddie again is going to wash with me. ” He was shouting now, his voice shrill, his body immobile. “You’d rather have led your crew to hell than follow Wilson or anybody else to paradise. So you fell to Earth, like Satan.”
“You made me what I am, Dad, with your pushing and your lies. You never even told me this place existed! My flaws are your flaws.”
Dexter said, “And did you make me, Kelly?”
Kelly felt a stab of shame that, in the heat of her confrontation with her father, she had briefly forgotten that Dexter was even in the room.
Edward snorted. “Christ. Look at us, the three of us stuck in a metal box at the bottom of the fucking sea, arguing like shit. What a family.”
The door opened. Masayo stood there apologetically, holding Eddie’s hand. Thandie was at his side. Masayo said, “I’m sorry. He missed his mom. I think he’s a little scared.”
“Come here, sweetie.” Kelly held out her arms. Eddie ran to her, and with a boost from Masayo she lifted him up onto her lap.
Edward watched, his heavy, frog-like face unreadable. His burst of anger seemed to have exhausted him. “Well, at least you had the sense to come home, to the safest place there is.”
Kelly said, “Safe?”
“Sure. The last refuge. That’s the point of this place. Earth has had hard times before, so the brainiacs like Thandie Jones assure me. In the early days of its formation, when it was battered by moon-sized impactors, life always retreated to where it was safest. Down and in. You know there are life-forms down there in the deep crust that eat silica from the rocks and live off the mineral seeps and the heat, that have been there since the beginning. So now here we are too, living as best we can, off the fish and the black-smoker ecologies.
“But this Ark is only a way station. In the longer term we should follow the life into its deeper retreat. I’m talking about a merger, of human DNA with extremophiles. I’m talking about sending prokaryotic bugs laced with the substance of humanity down into the deep hot biosphere, and maybe even beyond. It will be like the great endosymbiotic mergers of the past, where we took organelles like mitochondria within the substance of our cells. The essence of humanity sinking into the Earth, where a new genesis event will take place, in a hot Eden. At the heart of the Earth is a core of iron the size of the moon. Maybe our descendants will build cities on the surface of that inner world…” He fell silent, his rheumy eyes watering. He dug out a handkerchief, dabbed his eyes, blew his nose, and then coughed, his bulky frame making the wheelchair shudder. “That’s the vision.” He was silent again.
Then he began to snore.
Thandie murmured, “The sub’s ready to take you up, whenever you are.”
“We should wait until grandfather wakes,” Dexter said.
“Yes.” Eddie was falling asleep too. He wriggled on Kelly’s lap, trying to get his head comfortable against her belly. His weight, drawn by the pull of Earth, was huge, precious. “Yes, we’ll wait.”
Kelly wondered where Holle and Wilson and Venus were, right now.
Six
83
May 2068
Steel Antionadi waited for Max Baker by the wet farm in the base of Halivah, as far down-pole as she could get from Wilson and his thugs. Nobody was around. Nothing stirred except the green things growing in their glop tanks.
She looked up along the length of the hull. She could see up-pole all the way to Wilson’s nest in the dome. In the middle of the day it was bright, the arcs glowing warmly, and people came and went, old folk and kids, and babies gurgling in the air. A work party had taken out the equipment racks from Deck Six and was scrubbing the walls in a spiral pattern.
All this was background to Steel. What she looked for was other shippers like her, shipborn, where they clustered in their little territories, marked by scratchy graffiti signatures on the walls. To her they stood out against the hull’s drab background like stars against the black sky. Every so often you would see one of them glare down at you, making eye contact like a zap from a laser beam. There was information in the way they clustered, information in the way they looked and laughed. Nobody much older than Steel even saw any of this going on.
Max Baker came swimming down. Slim and supple, he was good in the air, and he showed off for her, staying away from the guide ropes and handholds, letting the friction of the air slow him down. He was fifteen, she twenty-three. He somersaulted and landed neatly on a T-stool beside her. “Got ’em,” he said without preamble.
She glanced around. Wilson said he had taken out the cameras, but everybody knew there were cameras and spies. But Wilson didn’t watch the wet farm because shippers didn’t work here mostly, and what he liked to watch was shippers, especially the younger ones. Still, she whispered. “The caps. You got enough?”
“Yeah. Exterior store.”
He was talking about explosive charges intended for such uses as blowing hatches in emergency evacuations, or separating the shuttles from the hull’s main body.
“Hid?”
“Yeah.” He glanced up at Wilson’s nest in the dome. “ He won’t see them.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
He looked back at her, thoughtful, conflicting feelings visible in his face. She could see he was trying to big up in front of her. Well, they had had a relationship. There were so few of them on the hull that everybody had done some kind of fooling with everybody else, on a spectrum of warmth all the way from best buddies to moms ’n’ pops. Every gradation of love and friendship had a name. There were even more names for kinds of enemies. With Max she had got as far as feelie-friends before they backed off. He was too young, or she was too old. Being with him reminded her of her time with Wilson, but sort of upside down, for with Max she had been the old one. Anyhow she liked Max, and respected him. She didn’t want him to get himself killed, which was a strong possibility if they went ahead with their plan.
But he shrugged. “He’s got Terese. Wilson. Cold-fucking her. That’s not right.”
She knew that even the shipborn word, cold-fucking, wasn’t appropriate for what Wilson was doing to Max’s twin. He was using Terese just as he had used Steel, before she grew too old for his taste, her bones too long, her breasts too big. It was a word Max was using for comfort, a lie he told to himself. That was Max’s motive. Hers was deeper.
She grabbed his arm. “We’ll do this, end the lies.”
He nodded, anger and fear warring in his expression. “When?” “You’ll know.”