If all thats so, Adam Zimmerman observed, its surely not impossible that alien starships fitted with exotic drives might have been ducking in and out of the system for centuries.
Niamh Horne didnt believe that for a minute but she couldnt prove the negative. Thereve always been stories and sightings, she conceded, politely, and anomalous traces on all kinds of recording devices. We dismiss them all as travelers tales, hallucinations and mechanical glitchesbut everyone whos spent much time in space has heard the rumors. For a minute she sounded as if she were halfway to talking herself into it, but then she shook her head.
If we really had been a team, of course, Id have told them what Christine had told me: that we were aboard the so-called Lost Ark, Charity. Charity was one of four giant spaceships that had been put together as a desperation measure when the Crash was at its worst and it seemed that the ecocatastrophe might make the Earths surface uninhabitable. All four had become effectively redundant before attempting to hitch a ride in the blizzard a cluster of cometary fragments that had crossed the Earths orbit for the second time shortly before I was born but their makers had invested everything they had in their obsession, so they went ahead anyhow. Only three of the vessels had been successfully integrated into the cometary masses, though, because Charity had been so badly damaged in the process that it had been written off. The colonists aboard that Ark had been transferred to the others.
By the time I was old enough to take notice the Arks were well on the way to being forgotten, but one of them Hope had come crashing back into the news seven hundred years later after it had made a landfall on a life-bearing planet: Ararat, also known as Tyre. Id worked out that if what Alice had told me about herself was true, she must have been a passenger on one of the Arks. I had hesitated over believing that, because I wasnt at all sure that an Ark lost in the 2100s could still be lost in 3263, presumably having made at least one more pass through the inner system in the meantime but Niamh Horne had just told me that it could. If so, then it was not inconceivable that some of the prospective colonists had remained aboard rather than transferring to the other Arks. Even if that were not the case, the lost Ark might be an obvious target for other Ark dwellers returning to the system after a very long absence, if they wanted to establish themselves quietly and unobtrusively in a home-away-from-home. Even if everyone in the system had lost track of its orbit, that orbit would still be recorded in the Ark dwellers data banks.
Unfortunately, it still left the difficult questions conspicuously unanswered. Why should Ark dwellers of any sort want to hijack a Titanian spaceship? Why, if they did, would they choose to do it while it was playing temporary host to Adam Zimmerman, Michael Lowenthal, and Niamh Horne, to name but three?
If Alice had returned to the solar system from elsewhere Ararat being the likeliest contender then she must presumably have the use of a spaceship that was far more advanced than Charity , which could easily have stayed in the Outer System rather than coming all the way in to Earth orbit
I knew it had to make sense somehow, but I still couldnt see how. I was keeping it all to myself because I still didnt know whose side I wanted to be on and also because I wanted to put a story together before I let the others in on my secret. If and when I came clean I didnt want to leave anyone in the slightest doubt that a twenty-second-century mortal was as good a man as any thirty-third-century emortal. In the meantime, the people who had Charity were running the show. I wanted them to think that they could trust me that I was willing to cooperate with their desire to keep things dark until they had sorted out their own diplomatic problems.
I didnt think I owed anything to Davida Berenike Columella, let alone to Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne. If we really were in deep trouble, embroiled in something that might turn into a war, the only loyalty
I owed was to myself.
Twenty-Seven
Further Possibilities
While I was trying hard to make my own headway with the puzzle into which Id been precipitated, the discussion went on around me. At present, Chairman Lowenthal wasnt making any obvious attempt to control its direction, perhaps because he was locked in his own private struggle to get one up on his rivals.
Adam and Christine had both lived in eras which had looked forward to the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial species, and they both took advantage of Niamh Hornes recklessness to wonder whether there might not be aliens about whom we knew nothing, who had been keeping tabs on us ever since we announced our existence to the cosmos by inventing radio. Mortimer Gray told them that everything our space probes had reported back to us suggested that complex extraterrestrial life was extremely rare, especially by comparison with the all-conquering Afterlife but that assurance only brought forth a further string of prevarications.