Stephen Baxter - Sea Wrack

2025. Sea level rise 200m.

Plotting for the worst case:

'You know that I work for Eschatology, Inc.,' Jerzy Glemp said to Patrick Groundwater, walking over. 'We are an independent company backed by such organisations as the Rand Corporation and the Lifeboat Institute. Our task is to brainstorm ways by which the extinction of mankind can be averted.'

Extinction. That was a dread, heavy word on such a beautiful Denver morning, Patrick thought.

'We have worked with the LaRei people for some time, hoping to find ways to stimulate the funding of practical solutions by resourceful leaders -'

Edward Kenzie held up a finger. 'Wait. Sorry, Jerzy. Look, I don't mean to take over the show. But before we go any further, you remember what I said yesterday, and in my notes to you both. I'm convinced of the need for absolute secrecy concerning this project, right from the off. What is to take place in this room over the next few hours will be life-changing for all of us who take part. Life-defining. Nothing will be the same. And this won't be something you can walk away from, not ever, any more than you can resign from al-Qaeda.'

Patrick frowned. 'That sounds threatening.'

'Not at all. For now we haven't done anything, I've made no record of the meeting yet - if any of you walk out now, it will be as if you were never here at all. But if you stay, you're in.' He glanced at the security people.

Patrick, feeling bombarded, wondered if he really wanted to be part of this thing; he suspected working with Kenzie and Glemp wasn't going to be easy. He looked for Holle. 'What about the kids?'

2036. Sea level rise 800m.

A montane extinction:

For once it was a beautiful Colorado afternoon of the old kind, the mountain sky deep blue, the surviving trees and fields a vivid green. But the human world was a muddy brown, with the only colour in the Candidates' gaudy costumes.

In the four years since President Vasquez had spoken to the Ark workers the sea had swept a further three hundred kilometres west across North America, and now lapped across Nebraska. The Rockies still stood tall, but the rising sea had lifted the air and the weather systems with it, pushing the snow line up towards the sky. A town like Aspen now had a climate as Denver's had once been, with a winter low temperature of only a few degrees below zero, and maybe a metre of snow instead of the seven or eight metres that had once attracted millions of tourists.

And the summits of the Rockies had suffered a subtle extinction event. The rising climate bands had eliminated the upper Alpine-tundra zones, scraped them right off the peaks, leaving no room for the hardy lichen and marmots and ptarmigans that had once lived there.

Crisis and near-cancellation:

Jerzy Glemp said gravely, 'You know as well as I do that if you walk around Denver or Aspen or Boulder or Gunnison, the project is inspiring a sense of purpose, a sense that as bad as things are getting the government is still working, that we are still trying to come up with a solution. And, Colonel, if you're so convinced the project is finished - if you're so sure about what you're going to recommend to the President - why are we still sitting here?'

Mel Belbruno surprised Holle by standing up. He pushed back his chair, and stood geometrically straight and tall in his crisp uniform. 'If I may answer that, sir?'

Gordo Alonzo frowned, but nodded.

'Despite what you've said, you're here to give this project one last chance. To see if the people gathered here can't yet come up with some way to shove this wayward bird back on course. You're here to give me one last chance to fly to the stars. And by God, sir, you give me that chance and I'll take it, and I won't let you down.' He sat, his spine so straight it didn't come into contact with the back of the chair.

There was a stunned silence. Gordo just stared at Mel. Then he burst out laughing. 'Jesus Christ, boy, who trained you to do that? There ain't a dry eye in the house.'

Mel stiffened. 'I don't know what you mean by that, sir.'

'Yeah, sure you do.' Gordo stood before the table, and his fountain pen tapped on the tabletop, chit, chit, chit.

But if it had been some trick of that kind, cooked up by Harry Smith or Magnus Howe or even Edward Kenzie, and despite Gordo seeing through it, maybe it worked anyhow, Holle thought, for the tone of the meeting changed from then on.

2039. Sea level rise 1400m.

Abandoning Denver:

'My God,' Holle said. 'The road's full, as far as I can see.'

'A ragged army, armed with pitchforks and knives,' said a man behind her. He wore a patched AxysCorp coverall; he was aged perhaps fifty, but looked strong, like a farmer, with big, dirt-encrusted hands. 'Like a medieval army, a crusade - a people's crusade. Though no crusade, even, amounted to as many souls as this. And as for the defences, they are virtually Iron Age.' He pointed. 'The ditch especially. You can see how the attackers will have to run down that slope, exposed to fire from the other side, and then struggle up the steeper side -'

As he spoke, she thought she heard another sound under the distant battle noises, a kind of thrumming that sounded familiar. 'I don't know much about the Iron Age.'

'No.' He smiled at her. 'Nor much about concrete mixing, I'll bet? I was behind you in the line.'

'And you do?' she said defiantly. 'What are you, a professor of history?'

'No, just a schoolteacher, back when the schools taught more than survival skills.' He looked at his big hands. 'But I used to run a smallholding, on the east bank of Back Squirrel Creek. I can use my hands. I can dig a ditch or lay a fence, I think.'

2041. Sea level rise 1800m.

Loading the Ark:

'We're archiving, creating vaults, physical and digital, of all the resources we can think of. The Library of Congress records. The big genetic libraries the Mormons built up. We've been using hackers to download all they can from the big computer centres as they've finally gone offline. Stuff from overseas, that we've been dredging up. You're English, aren't you?'

'Half English.'

'Someone told me once we even got hold of the letter Henry VIII wrote to the Pope saying he was divorcing his wife. Jesus! We've five objectives. We're making this stuff as secure as we can against the day when, I don't know, when the dolphins learn to read. Two. We're finding someplace safe for the President and his administration to hide out. The continuity of the nation. That's Ark Two, and even I don't know anything about that. Three. Security. Holding the yoogees at bay, on land and on sea. That gets harder as the sea rises, and more of us turn into more of them, but still - Four. Building rafts. And five.'

'The Ark?'

Launch day:

Mel thrust the pack into her arms. Then he grabbed her, and pressed his naked body against hers. He smelled of bed, and his skin was greasy with sweat. 'We said it all. We did it all. We had time, didn't we?'

'We could have had forever.'

'Nobody gets that much - not even you, Holle Groundwater.' He kissed her hungrily, his mouth and tongue hot. 'Now piss off.' He grabbed her shoulders, spun her around, shoved her out of the door, and slammed it closed behind her.

She stood in the corridor, stunned. No more arguments, no more goodbyes.

2049. 15 light years from Sol.

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 indeed from the Ark itself at Jupiter. Holle gazed on beautiful, spectacular images of young stellar systems, a million years old or less, in the throes of formation from an interstellar cloud.

Venus said, 'It's like we're putting together an album of the birth of a solar system, frame by frame. You see how the young star, having collapsed out of the cloud itself, starts to interact with the cloud remnant. A central collapsed disc slices the wider cloud in two ...

'Look at these pictures. See how these planetary systems start out? Just clouds of rock and ice, nothing acting on them but their own gravity. Yet you give it a few hundred million years to bake, and out pops a solar system and a new star, every one of them as rich in worlds as our own - every one of them different. The universe is more than some mathematical exercise, Holle. It generates complexity, richness, diversity - all of it starting from scratch. And that's a wonderful thing, isn't it? But what's the point of all that richness if there's no eye to see it?'

2059. Return to Earth.

'I'll tell you how I sold this place to the President. OK, we were sending you, Ark One, up and out. Maybe we should also think about a backup plan, I said, think about sending a crew the other way. So I told the President that as we've been betrayed by two of the elements, the water that drowns us, the air that is starting to suffocate us, we should turn to the others, earth and fire, the deep ground and the fire within, elements that may have borne life in the first place and have sheltered it since.

'And that, my friend, is Ark Two. Down and in ... And you can go further.

'I know Thandie told you about the mantle waves and whatnot she studies, trying to figure out why all the water got released. I'll tell you what else some of us think we found evidence of down there, even deeper. Life - more life, a very exotic sort in the high pressures and the temperatures, feeding off the most abundant energy flow down there, which is radioactivity. Some of us call them neutron birds. We think we see them flock. And down there, believe me, they never even noticed the flood, never even noticed the great impacts, which affected only the top few per cent of the Earth's volume.'

Kelly shook her head, bemused. 'Dad, this is - remarkable. I'm no scientist ... But so what? I can imagine living off the worms and the crabs that live around Thandie's black smokers. But who cares about the deep stuff, and these neutron creatures, if they exist? What can they have to do with us?'

2059. 42 light years from Sol.

A new universe:

In the cupola's twilit, humming calm, with the hull of Halivah and the silent stars arrayed beyond the windows, Grace Gray tried very hard to understand what Venus was telling her.

'I'll tell you what I've come to believe, after eighteen years of contemplating the universe from inside this glass box. I believe we'll come through this crisis - humans, I mean, life from Earth - one way or another, whether it's on Earth, Earth II, Earth III. I don't believe in our own imminent extinction.' She raised her hands before her face, flexed her fingers. 'The human experience of the universe is simply too rich for that to be conceivable. Do you know what I mean? Isn't it true that that climatologist guy you knew predicted that the Earth after the flood, after that great erasing, would actually have a greater biomass than before?'

'Gary Boyle. Yes, he believed that.'

'Well, there you go. It's been the same after every extinction event back to the dinosaurs, so I'm told. I'll tell you what else I no longer believe in. I don't believe in the dismal cosmologies that they came up with on Earth before the flood. I don't believe in the Big Bang, or a universe tearing itself into pieces in a Big Rip. Bullshit. These are juvenile projections of current cosmic trends far beyond any possible range of validity.

'Look around! We live in a universe of constantly increasing complexity, in which as each successive age passes new features, new phenomena emerge. Consider Earth. Given what it started out as, muddy pools of organic chemicals on a world so battered by impacts the rocks glowed red, could you have ever predicted lungs and wings and eyes, and cellphones and starships? Of course not. Yet all these things were somehow implicit in the fundamental properties of the universe.

'I see the cosmos as a set of interacting adaptive autocatalytic systems, that is they drive themselves from simple to complex states. This basic creative process is all-pervasive and so overwhelmingly productive that if you ever wanted to call something divine, well, it's that. And I simply can't believe that somehow that fecundity of complexifying is going to stop any time soon. The universe just doesn't feel like that.'

Faint alarm bells rang in Grace's head whenever anybody aboard this tub used a word like 'divine'. 'OK,' she said. 'But is it any use?'

2068. 69 light years from Sol.

The Blow-Out Rebellion:

He barely seemed to know where he was. He was gone to some place beyond fear, maybe. He might even be in shock, which Grace had diagnosed for many of the crew, even days after the decompression disaster.

Holle asked, 'You know why we put you in this cabin? I mean, this particular one?'

'I dunno.'

'Because this was where Jenny Turco lived. Did you know her? Probably not. She was a Candidate, like me, like Wilson. Too old for you.'

'What you want, Groundwater?'

'But she's dead now, because of the decompression. One of those who tried to hold her breath.' Holle shook her head. 'Funny. She was the only Candidate who died. And because of something that was drummed into us from when we joined the Academy, forty, forty-five years ago. After all that training, and on the Ark since, when the crisis finally came, instinct cut in, and she made the wrong choice, and died for it. She's got a daughter, you know, born on the ship. And even a granddaughter, a second-generation shipborn -'

'Not my fault.'

'What did you say?'

'It's not my fault. I know what you're thinking. I was with Wilson. It was those kids, those insane little bastards who blew us up.'

He was coming out of his shock. 'Listen to me, Jeb. Things were already tough on this tub, and now they're going to get even tougher. You worked for me before. You know what my responsibilities were, and still are.' She saved a hand. 'Everything inside the hull that keeps us alive - that's my domain. But I took a battering. We lost a hull-load of air and water. We have reserves, we wouldn't be alive if we didn't. But the volumes, in the hull and in store, a down to the bare bones. It's going to be hard. We're looking at tough, endless work to keep the systems from failing. And even then I'll have to impose some kind of rationing.'

'Rationing?' His eyes narrowed.

She smiled. 'You see, you're not stupid. Nobody likes rationing, do they? But it's going to be essential. I can't tolerate any defiance - any theft, any sabotage. That could kill us all. What I need -'

He saw it. 'You're offering me a job.'

She leaned closer. 'It will be just like Homeland. Find some others, five or six. You report directly to me. You'll secure the life support. Every aspect of it is to be under my control. Totally and exclusively. You understand?'

He grinned. But then a ghost of his fear came back, and he quailed back. 'Do I get a choice?'

'No. Not a meaningful one. Nobody else wants you, frankly. Wilson won't be in a position to protect you. And there will be plenty out looking for revenge -'

'It's a deal,' he said hastily. 'When do I start?'

'Now,' she said immediately. 'Find your team. Brief them. Be discreet. Set yourself up. I don't have to tell you how to do that. You worked the systems before. You know what's necessary. Try not to hurt anybody if you don't have to.'

'We had a good life under Wilson,' he said, resentful, vengeful for one more instant. 'You can't blame a man for grabbing what he can.'

'I wish I could say it will be a pleasure working with you, Jeb. It's a necessity, that's all. Screw up, go soft - or go corrupt, I'm not Wilson - and I'll destroy you. Don't doubt it for a second. You understand?'

And she pushed her way out of the poky cabin, into the bright light of the arc lamps. There she gave way to a shuddering that shook her to her bones.

2081. 111 light years from Sol.

Earth III:

'You've got a thick blanket of air, plenty of carbon dioxide for greenhouse trapping, that transports the heat around the world. The atmosphere mix is heavy on carbon dioxide and is thicker, heavier surface pressure, but the oxygen content is actually closer to Earth's than Earth II. Gravity is higher than Earth; we'll have to live with that. This is a bigger world, an exoplanet of a kind we call a super-Earth. But that's good, because the bigger the world, the longer plate tectonics last. And we can see that it's active. We can see the volcano chains, the mountains; we can see volcanic gases in the air. We'll have time on this planet, all the time we want.

'Let me show you what else this system offers.' She tapped her handheld and the image reduced, more planets swimming into view. 'This is the system's second planet. But it's not unique. See this one, and this, further from the sun? More super-Earths, not as easy to colonise as Earth III, but they're there for our descendants - new homelands just waiting in the sky for them, off in the future.

'This is the Ark. After a voyage of forty years, here is your Ararat.

'What happens next is up to you.'