Ark by Stephen Baxter

conference about?”
    “An astronomical survey going on at an observatory in Chile. Place called La Silla, very high up. It’s South America, you know? Used to be owned by the Europeans, but now Nathan Lammockson, who’s based in Peru, is supporting it for us. Not that he knows what we’re doing up there specifically.”
    “Looking for planets, I bet.”
    “Well, that’s the idea. Somewhere for the Ark to go. And once the new space center is up and running, there’s a plan to run a starshade mission.”
    “A what?”
    “I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s interesting. You send up a giant sheet, spinning for stability. It looks like a flower, with petals. Then you have a conventional telescope—we’re using the Hubble—thousands of kilometers away. The shade is supposed to block out the light of the star, allowing the telescope to see any planets. With that arrangement we should be able to image continents on an Earthlike planet, even out to thirty or forty light-years. It’s a scheme that was championed years ago by an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which is how we were able to dig it up.”
    “And this is your idea of taking a break, watching the news? It’s always bad.”
    “I know.”
    “Everybody’s frightened, I think sometimes.” It was true: people were frightened of the flood, which was still remote from this place, and frightened of the waves of eye-dees for the dirt and disease and hunger they brought and the space they used up, and people were frightened of each other, for in the future there mightn’t be room for everybody. Holle herself would have felt a lot safer if Alice Sylvan, who she’d grown up thinking of as a kind of honorary aunt, hadn’t got herself taken out by a sniper in downtown.
    “I know, I know.” Patrick tousled her hair. “But there’s no good in turning away. So how was the Academy?”
    “Dad, it was awful. The kids are all bright and noisy and they compete like mad. There was only Zane who was friendly.”
    “Zane will be glad you’re there.”
    “I’m not like Zane,” she blurted. “And I’m not like Kelly Kenzie. I’m not tall and pretty and confident. Don’t tell me those things aren’t important, because they are. I know what they call the students. The Candidates. You have to be special to be a Candidate, a star. I felt like Joey out of Friends. ”
    He laughed, and sipped his drink. “OK. But, look—it’s my money that’s backed the Academy, as part of a consortium, among a lot of other initiatives related to Ark One. But the Academy is not a finishing school for little rich kids. If you weren’t thought capable of justifying your place there, on your own abilities, you wouldn’t be in there, no matter whose daughter you were. You deserve to be there, sweets.” He kissed her head. “But if it’s ever too tough for you, just come home.”
    “Oh, I won’t give up.”
    The TV pinged, and filled up with a head-and-shoulders image of Liu Zheng.
     
     
     
    Patrick said, “Liu? How can I help you?”
    Liu grinned. It was a more human expression than any he’d adopted in class. “Actually it was Holle I hoped to speak to. Ms. Groundwater, you have a knack, I suspect, of asking the right questions.”
    “What right questions? You mean that discussion about the biggest warp bubble we could make? But the answer was teeny-tiny. Everybody laughed.”
    Liu said seriously, “Listen to me now. We are dealing with the engineering of spacetime, engineering in multiple dimensions. Everything we believe we know, all our intuition, is likely to be wrong. Inspired by that discussion, I returned to something I unturned in the literature during my earlier researches. A thirty-year-old piece of speculation by a worker in Belgium. Do you have your handheld? Try to follow the argument . . .”
    And, as if Patrick weren’t present, he slipped easily into his odd, absent-minded lecturing style and the big wall screen began to fill