by Matthew Spence
“We should wait.” She looked uncertainly at the modular sections of the Outer Wall. “I don’t think we were meant to go this far. We should wait until the rest of the repair team gets here, at least.”
“They’re at least half a length behind us,” her partner’s voice said in her ear. “Besides, this is a historic moment. We’re the first people in our generation to see this part of the Ark. Just stay where you are and maneuver around the breach. Can you actually see it?”
“Yes,” she finally replied. “It’s…just beyond the seals. I…I can see darkness, some reflective flashes, and the atmospheric venting, like little jets of steam or fissure eruptions.”
“Wow. That’s open space, all right. OK, I’m coming up. Look behind you, you should see me…”
Anna Eve did so, switching her helmet view to show Adam River climbing the side of the “cliff” behind her. The cliff was an illusion created by the shape of the Ark, which was too big for them or anyone else to see all the way around, but it looked like he was walking sideways along the crust of the Ark’s inner habitat.
Adam joined her at the edge of the bridge. For a moment they both simply stared at the darkness beyond.
“This is it,” Adam whispered. “The Outside. Ha! I wish our Minister could see this. No angels or ET’s, just…the sky. Like our ancestors used to see it.”
“Except that they could breath it when they did,” Anna replied. “If we went through without our suits…”
“Decompression. Yeah, I know. But just imagine — the hull is all that keeps us safe from it. Okay, let’s take our measurements for the team. I’ll save a copy for us, for posterity.”
Anna had to inwardly smile at that. Adam had his faults but his enthusiasm for the unknown was infectious. Neither one of them had ever been this far up the side of the Habitat, where the curve of the ground met the curve of the “sky” and the upper half of the Ark.
Like their parents and parents’ parents, they’d been born on the Ark and would most likely die on it before the Ark reached its final destination, the Target that the Ministers practically worshipped as humanity’s new Eden, which was still hundreds of light years and decades of travel away. They’d become fixated on it, while the scientists simply took their measurements and waited, and the engineering teams took care of the Ark, as generations before them had.
Anna and Adam maneuvered out of the way as the rest of the team finally arrived with sealant and sheets to repair the breach. Like them, they took a moment to look at the Outside before getting to work; also like them they’d never actually seen the Outside except in vids and slides.
The Ark had no windows. It was a cylinder, several dozen kilometers long and wide, with a center where gravitational spin stopped and weightlessness took over. On the “surface” above and below, generations of people had been born, lived, and died knowing Earth only from old histories or legends, depending on which section they lived in. Over over the course of time those sections had become divided by culture and what resources they’d had passed down to them from their ancestors. The lower half, where Adam was from, was the more advanced, having saved their ancestors’ knowledge through the scientists and the Ministers that both halves had. Anna was from the other half, where life had been simpler, harder, and more focused on survival than knowledge, but the the two halves had enough contact with each other that she could get an education “down below.” That was where she’d met Adam, and where she’d decided to stay and become part of a repair team with him. Aside from the promise of a steady job, she took their working together as a sign that there might be greater contact between the two halves aside from the occasional trade and “border” conflicts that took place.
“Quite an experience,” the team leader, an experienced engineer, said when they were done. “The seals will hold until they can finish healing the outer hulls. Then we’ll repair the surface crust. Even if it ruptures again, it won’t affect the rest of the Ark’s interior. In fact, the exterior is so pitted and blasted from particle debris, from the vids I’ve seen, that one more crack or two on the outer hull really won’t matter that much.”
They lowered themselves in their transport dirigible back down to their side of the Ark, where the familiar farm plots and sectional homes waited. With their shift over, Anna and Adam went to their favorite eatery, which had a mixture of Old Earth and mixed Ark Asian and Euro food, for dinner before heading back to their respective habitat apartments.
Once home, Anna reflected on what they’d seen. Her place was somewhat smaller than Adam’s, with mementos and reminders of both the upper and lower halves that made up parts of the whole. She’d lived two lives, she thought, but maybe today had been the beginning of a third…the start of having seen something greater than the inside of the Ark, a hint of what lay beyond, a reminder of where they were eventually going. She wouldn’t see it, but maybe her children would; her and Adam’s, she thought with some hope.
They would be the children who would no longer have to wait it out, on their way home.