Chapter 9

It was a truly massive undertaking, perhaps the largest that humankind had ever attempted and certainly the most complex.

Basically it fell into two broad subdivisions. The first, and the most spectacular in scale, was the building of the ark itself. No existing spacecraft offered anything even close to the capacity that would be needed, as Meiersdottir and Eden Rescue came to envision the project. They wanted to save not only the intelligent native population in enough numbers to assure their long-term survival but at least a representative sampling of the Eden wildlife as well.

As they outlined their grandiose plan the SES engineers brought in to consult with them at first threw up their hands. It couldn't be done, they protested; no vessel of the size that would be required could possibly withstand the acceleration forces necessary to reach the velocity to enter worm space and make transit to the Eden system, then decelerate and rendezvous with the planet at the other end, and then replicate the feat in reverse on the return trip. The repetitive stresses would be too much, the ship would collapse.

But gradually, torturously Eden Rescue, and the impressive roster of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and designers that Meiersdottir and her board had recruited, showed their more stodgy SES counterparts ways around the constraints they'd previously regarded as insurmountable. A new paradigm of space travel began to emerge, fueled by the time pressure imposed by Chen's nova and the inexorable speed with which its deadly emissions were traveling toward Eden.

Finally, with time perilously short, the actual construction of the Ark—for so it had been named—began. As had been so for all previous interstellar craft, the work would have to take place far above the Earth's surface in the vacuum of space; this would be a ship that could never touch even a planetary atmosphere. Even so a new generation of technology had to be devised to allow ferrying of the huge parts that were to be incorporated into the finished ship from the surface, where they were fabricated, to the orbital assembly site. Shuttles nearly as large as the original Gardener, the ship that had carried Meiersdottir and the others on their only two previous voyages to Eden, were making the trip between Earth and the mid-space assembly area almost daily for months on end.

Meantime the second prong of the project was equally imposing in its own way: the complex process of transforming Meiersdottir's Pacific island home into an area that would support Eden life. Eden's soil was far richer in mineral content than was Earth's, and it had to be duplicated exactly if the Edenites were to find a home there. Up to that point it had been done only on a laboratory scale; now the job was larger by many levels of magnitude.

It was made more difficult yet by the nature of the island itself. Like most Pacific islands, New Eden (for so it had been rechristened) was the remains of a now-long-dormant volcano that had erupted out of the ocean floor. Over millennia a combination of erosion and accretion had created a thin layer of arable soil on top of the underlay of igneous rock, the cooled lava flow that made up its base, deep enough to support Earthly flora though little deeper in most places.