The car stopped in front of a barracks, a long low building with no adornment, windows and doors set in straight lines regular as soldiers at drill. The doors opened directly onto the weedy dirt outside. Two women stood in front of the farthest door, one young and pretty, the other Marianne’s age but much shorter and wider. “Here we are,” the driver said.
The young woman held out her hand. “Dr. Jenner, I’m Allison Blake, the boys’ teacher. And you two must be Jason and Colin.”
“Hi,” Colin said, but Jason made a little noise of disgust.
“You can’t be both of our teacher ’cause I’m in second grade and Colin’s in first!”
“But I am,” Allison Blake said solemnly, “because I’m a super-teacher.” She reached up behind her neck and released a red cape, which billowed around her. Her expression remained completely serious. After a bewildered moment, Jason laughed.
Colin did not. “Then what’s your superpower?” he demanded.
“That’s for you to find out. But I know yours. You can hear the ground.”
Marianne blinked. What? How the hell did she know that Colin—
“You’re wondering how I know that,” the teacher said. “It’s because I have another student who can do it, too. Would you like to meet him sometime soon?”
“Yeah!” Colin’s eyes shone with wonder. Jason also looked interested. Marianne thought, not for the first time, that if Jason’s temperament had included any jealousy at all, life would be even more difficult than it was now. Ever since Paul Tyson’s assault, Colin had been moody and unpredictable.
Allison Blake said, “Then put your suitcases in your room here and ask your grandmother if you can come with me.”
“Yes, go on,” Marianne said. She was here for their safety, and she had to trust this place or she would go mad. “I’ll get the cases.”
Allison led the boys away. The short woman said to Marianne, “Quite a show. She’s great with kids. Has to be or Jonah wouldn’t have hired her. I’m Judy Taunton, deputy physicist in this medicine show. Jonah sent me to greet you.”
“Where is he? And how did he know—”
“About the kids? Jonah knows everything. And the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde so presciently said. Excuse me, I know this is a filthy and archaic habit, but I’m in desperate need.” She lit a cigarette.
Marianne studied her. Judy Taunton was no more than five feet tall, solid as a cinder block, with gray hair in a buzz cut. Up close, her face looked younger than her body, and Marianne revised her estimate downward to midforties. She wore baggy jeans and a loose blue work shirt that made her look even wider than she was. The shirt was embroidered on the collar and placket with exquisite silk flowers, hand done. Judy exhaled a perfect smoke ring.
“Okay, let’s get you oriented. Jonah wanted to meet you himself but spaceships are demanding bitches, so you get me. This is your suite. Not exactly the Ritz but we’re practicing Taoist simplicity here, or possibly scientific socialism. Nobody else has anything better, not even His Nibs.”
Judy picked up the boys’ duffel bags and Marianne wheeled in her suitcase, laptop bag on her shoulder. The rest of their luggage, minimal anyway, would arrive later. The “suite” consisted of two rooms, each with a door to the outside and a connecting door of lumber so raw that fresh wood shavings lay on the floor beside it. The boys’ room had two beds, a cheap chest of crude pine, a table and four chairs. Hers was exactly the same except for a double bed. There were no closets, just pegs on the wall. There were bathrooms, one per bedroom, with showers but no tub. Blinds on the windows, no curtains, plain white blankets and pillows.
Judy said, “A hospital room has more charm. At least there you get flowers in plastic vases and nurses in scrubs with little duckies on them. Most of us only use our rooms to sleep—not, however, that the work buildings have any more pizzazz. Mess is the big building with ‘EATS’ spray-painted all over it, courtesy of a drunken night for some construction guys. Food is served pretty much all the time, and it’s not bad. Jonah doesn’t want the masses to rise up in culinary revolution.”
“Thanks,” Marianne said. “What else should I know?”
“Oh, tons and tons. But the first thing, since I see you unpacking your laptop, is that the site is Faraday shielded.”
Marianne stopped and looked at her. “What?”
“Jonah doesn’t want hackers getting any information whatsoever about our progress. There’s a big invisible shield, proprietary tech, over everything inside the inner fence. Nothing electronic gets in and nothing out.”
Marianne put her laptop back in its case. “We’re leaving.”
Judy laughed. “That’s everybody’s first reaction. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. The LAN is shielded, although I suppose eventually somebody will hack in somehow, because they always do. But there are computers in the mess with secure and encrypted underground cables and you can use those to communicate with the outside world. They’re monitored, though, so any communication you send outside will be read and your web surfing will be tracked. Come on outside so I can finish this cigarette without stinking up your rooms.”
Marianne followed Judy out the door. “Cell phones?”
“No.” Judy stopped smiling. “Look, I know it’s draconian, but Stubbins knows what he’s doing. He must trust you or you wouldn’t be here, and he told me I can be as open with you about project details as you can stand. I know you’re a geneticist, not a physicist or an engineer. We’re much farther along on the ship than Space X, the European Union, or China. India is hopeless. The Russians are our only competition and we can’t afford leaks of how we’re solving the problems associated with the Deneb plans. We have to be first.”
“Why?” Marianne said.
Judy stared at her. “You really are a trusting soul, aren’t you? Do you know what the Russian ship is called?”
“Stremlenie—the Endeavor.”
“That’s the public name. The top-secret project name is Mest’.”
“I don’t speak Russian.”
“It means ‘revenge.’”
Something tightened in Marianne’s chest. “If it’s top secret, how does Stubbins know that?”
“He knows. The Venture is private enterprise, but of course Stubbins works with Washington. Not openly, because every congressional district has way too many people who hate the Denebs, and lawmakers have this pesky need to get reelected. But Central Asia suffered more than anybody from the spore cloud. You’re a geneticist—you must know that. They lost more people to the plague, and the mouse die-off affected their crop ecology the most. And the current regime is so old-school tyrannical that they might as well be czars.”
“Yes.” Marianne was thinking furiously. Revenge—against World. Against Noah, against Smith, against Marianne’s half-Deneb grandchild. Against a star-faring section of humanity, who reported themselves as peaceful but who were capable of creating the technology that the Russians now wanted to use as a warship.
“Can the star drive be weaponized? Can it?”
Judy shrugged. “Nobody knows. It’s hard to convey to a non-physicist how alien these plans, and the physics behind them, really are. No, don’t look at me like that, I know the Denebs are human, not alien. But the thinking behind their tech is so strange to us that there is speculation it isn’t even theirs but came to them from somewhere else.”
Marianne’s mouth opened, then closed again without anything coming out.
“Just speculation,” Judy said. “And here’s more of the same, although this one is founded on some actual data. Did you ever wonder why the Denebs needed human scientists aboard the Embassy? Why not just get a few human lab-rat volunteers and work out the immunity issues by themselves? I’ve gone through every published article by every one of you who was aboard—Harrison Rice, Ahmed Rafat, Jessica Yu—and I got some biologist friends to do it with me. Every single breakthrough seems to have been made by Terrans, not Denebs. Don’t you see what that means? It means
the same thing as bringing you human scientists aboard in the first place. When it comes to genetics, we know more than they do. So what other science have they gotten from somebody else, and are just piggybacking on?”
Marianne found her voice. “You sound like one of the conspiracy theorists out there. Damn it, Judy, I worked with these people. I was there!”
“I know you were. And I could be dead wrong. But I’m not the only scientist saying that. And whatever I suspect, or believe, or entertain as mad fantasy, doesn’t change a very real fact—no one knows what will happen the day we finish the ship and press the button to start her. Actually, we’re all grateful it is a button and not some peculiar thing we wouldn’t even recognize. The drive appears to harness the repulsion force of dark matter, and nobody on Earth understands that very well.”
Judy took a long final drag on her cigarette, dropped it on the ground, and turned her heel on it. Then, noting Marianne’s expression, she carefully picked it up, wrapped it in a tissue, and put it in her pocket. “I was on the Dark Energy Survey, incidentally, in the Strong Lensing work group, that ended up confirming the existence of dark energy. The survey got delayed because of funding problems after the collapse and also because of the totally inane … never mind. You aren’t interested in the politics. I’m not even interested anymore in the stupidity of the politicians involved. The point is that dark energy exists, or at least the mathematics say it does, and it seems to power the Deneb star drive, although nobody knows how.
“We’re doing things we don’t understand to Terran materials, processes that make baking nobium-3-tin into superconductors look like kindergarten play. A lot of that is going on in underground bunkers. The engineers are in control and we physicists struggle to keep up, which is a dead reversal of the normal order. It’s not just the blind leading the sighted, it’s like the blind pushing them over cliffs. And David Chin, project chief, is cliff-diving just as much as the rest of us, although don’t tell him I said so.”
Marianne said, “How do you know—”
“That we’re building it right? Of course we can’t really be sure, not to every tiny intended tolerance—the error bar on this project is the size of Rhode Island. All of which means that nobody understands the implications of what may or may not happen when we turn it on.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. What if”—this was a stupid question but she had to ask it—“the star drive blows up Earth?”
“Aren’t you the one who keeps insisting the Denebs are our friends?”
“Yes, but if we somehow build it wrong … if we don’t understand the plans correctly…”
“It won’t blow up Earth,” Judy said. “We think.”
The physicist was grinning. Was she just playing with her? Marianne wasn’t sure she believed Judy. But then Judy said something that tipped the balance.
“We know enough to know what we don’t know—unlike the anti-alien yahoos out there—but we’re not completely ignorant. The physics fits with quantum theories and brane theory both, once you make certain radical adjustments in your thinking, and even with general relativity. Which, God knows, quantum mechanics didn’t. But the basic underlying idea for all of it seems to be that everything in the universe is interconnected in ways we hadn’t expected. Quarks and galaxies and time and spores and coffee spoons and consciousness. All of it.”
“That sounds religious.”
“It isn’t. I mean, yes, it is, but not in the way most people mean. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Judy’s eyes, small and dark in her broad face, pierced Marianne. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I didn’t used to think so, but I do now.” Since Colin’s revelations to her. A lot more was interconnected than she’d ever believed.
“I thought so. But that’s enough philosophy for now. You want a tour of this candy factory? Willy Wonka himself asked me to show you around.”
“Yes,” Marianne said again. “I want to see everything.”
* * *
The spaceship camp was the coolest place ever. Jason said so, and now Colin agreed.
It had so much stuff! Trucks and bulldozers and steam shovels like in Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Colin’s second favorite book. His favorite was still Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement, but probably there wasn’t an elephant here. Still, like Grandma said, you couldn’t have everything.
The camp had things to climb on, and Colin liked their teacher, and the spaceship was awesome. But best of all was Luke.
Mr. Stubbins brought him to Ms. Blake’s classroom, which was really just a room like Colin’s and Jason’s bedroom only with some tables, chairs, books, and computers. Grandma was there because it was their first morning. They were doing math. Ms. Blake was showing Jason something called multiplication, making little piles of polished stones. Colin wrote numbers on paper and drew little balls to show how many the numbers were. That was babyish but Ms. Blake explained that she needed to find out how much math Colin already knew, so she could teach him new things.
“Kids, Dr. Jenner,” Mr. Stubbins said, “this is Luke. He’s already been here a while, but this morning he was with me at the ship. Luke, this is Jason and Colin.”
Luke looked down at his sneakers, which seemed really new and clean. So were the rest of his clothes. He was big and moved slow, with crinkly hair the color of dry sand. When he raised his head, Colin saw that he looked afraid.
Mr. Stubbins said, “Say hello, Luke.”
“Hello,” Luke said. His voice was a little hard to understand.
“Hi,” Jason and Colin said.
“Hello,” Grandma said.
Luke didn’t answer or even look at anyone. Grandma said to Mr. Stubbins, “Traumatized, developmentally challenged, or Asperger’s?”
“All three. Be nice, Marianne.”
Colin said, “Grandma is always nice!”
“So she is,” Mr. Stubbins said. He talked different when he was around Grandma than he did to other people.
“A word, please,” Grandma said. “You, too, Allison.”
The three adults went into a corner and whispered hard at each other. Grandma waved her hands. Jason talked to Luke. “Do you live here?”
“Yes.” It seemed hard for him to say the word.
“It’s awesome, isn’t it? Where are your parents?” Jason said.
“Dead.”
“My mother is dead, too.”
Still Luke didn’t look at the boys. His face twisted like he had a pain. Jason said, “What’s wrong?”
“Too loud.”
Colin glanced out the window. All the machinery had stopped for lunch. “It’s quiet in here.”
Luke said, “The ground.”
Colin caught his breath. This was the kid that Ms. Blake said could hear the way Colin did! Right now Colin heard not only the ground but the plants outside and the electricity fence and some water deep under the building and a whole lot of other stuff. Could Luke hear it, too?
He said, “Do you hear plants? And storms coming?”
Then, for the first time, Luke did look at him. His eyes widened. “You can hear?”
“Yes! All those things! And not only that, I can show you how to block out the noise. You need to put it in rows.…” Colin sat at the table and picked up the polished stones for Jason’s multiplication. He told Luke about putting the noises in rows in his mind, and that Luke should practice. Luke’s heavy face twisted with trying. Why was it so hard for him? And why hadn’t he thought of it himself? Colin had, before he could even remember. He went over it with Luke again, and then again. Grandma and Mr. Stubbins and Ms. Blake were still whispering shouts at each other. Jason got bored and went back to the math stuff on his worksheet.
Finally Luke’s eyes went round and he said, “Oh—”
“See? That’s better, right?”
Luke burst into tears and grabbed Colin’s hand. Colin was embarrassed but didn’t pull away. Luke wasn’t like Paul. He was
going to be Colin’s friend, and Jason’s too, but Luke would be a friend who could hear the world, just like Colin did.
This really was the coolest place ever.
Sometimes it even made him forget what a bad person he was for crashing a tree branch onto Paul.
* * *
Judy and Marianne had become friends. In some mysterious way she reminded Marianne of Evan Blanford, although on the surface no two people could have been more different. Judy had given Marianne a complete tour of the Venture, but Marianne still understood very little about the ship being constructed on a reinforced-concrete launchpad. She was staggered by how close to completion the vessel was. A gleaming silvery cylinder with odd projections, it looked far too fragile to withstand liftoff through the atmosphere. Apparently some version of the Deneb energy shield activated during liftoff, protecting it. She was also surprised by the ship’s small size. Had Smith’s compatriots lived in such cramped quarters for the voyage to Earth? And could the Venture launch something as large and complex as the Embassy had been?
“No,” Judy said. “We haven’t found anything that would suggest that capability. What we have here is an abridged version of the alien tech. Either they didn’t want to share the full monte, or they adapted everything so we poor knuckle-draggers can actually build the thing. Prometheus handing down fire but not the Franklin stove.”
The more Marianne saw, the more questions she had. Three things, however, were completely clear.
First, the ship was the kind of massive, coordinated, expensive engineering effort that could only have been built by someone with complete control of the project, a fabulous fortune plus the ability to borrow even more money, and freedom from all committees, including Congress. If Stubbins was working with Washington, as Judy had said, it didn’t interfere with his ability to make, modify, reverse, or implement decisions as he alone saw fit.
Second, Stubbins’s staff were an eclectic lot. The only world-class physicist was David Chin, from Stanford, second in command. The rest of the physicists and astronomers, like Judy, were steady and unremarkable craftsmen who were probably not going to move humanity closer to understanding how World’s star drive worked. The engineers were drawn from various enterprises, as were the workmen and tech staff. “Stubbins looked for people who really want to go to the stars themselves,” Judy said. “Because of course we’re all hoping to be picked for ship’s crew, eventually. Also people who can be trusted completely. Stubbins wants no doubters, no betrayers, no leaks.”