Moira Crewe, Clarence’s postdoc, and Mary Bulinski each got a hand under one of Clarence’s arms and helped him down the steps to the rim of the crater, where a few shell-shocked journalists had gathered to ask questions. For the most part, though, the place was dead quiet. None of the usual post-news-conference hubbub. Most of the networks had cut back directly to their headquarters.
Doob looked up at the window. Amelia tucked her hair behind her ear and drew back from the glass. He trudged back to the lodge on legs stiff with cold. He was thinking about those frozen sperm samples and eggs. How long would they last? It was known that such cells could be thawed and used to produce normal babies after as long as twenty years in the freezer. Cosmic rays might complicate things. A single ray passing through a human body might damage a few cells—but bodies had a lot of spare cells. The same ray passing through a single-celled sperm or egg would destroy it.
The bottom line was that every man now on Earth could ejaculate into a test tube, every woman could go in for the much more complicated process of having her eggs harvested, embryos could be gathered and put on ice by the millions, but none of it would make a bit of difference unless there were healthy young women willing to receive those donations into their own wombs and gestate them for nine months. In time the population would grow. A new generation of—to put it bluntly—functional uteruses would come online in fourteen or fifteen years. And a second generation would be available in thirty. But by then, many of the frozen samples that the people of Earth were pinning their hopes on would be past their expiration dates.
Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.
The system of camps where the young people chosen in the Casting of Lots would be taken for training and selection was going to be a roach motel for boys. Young men would go in, but they wouldn’t come out. Save for a few lucky exceptions.
He had been drifting toward the lodge for a couple of minutes, nagged by the vague sense that there was something he ought to be doing.
Talking to the media. Yes, that was it. Normally, camera crews would be homing in on him. And normally he would be trying to dodge them. But not today. Today he was willing to stand around and talk, to be Doc Dubois for the billions of people out there in TV land. But no one was coming after him. Anchors of many nations were gazing soulfully into their teleprompters, intoning prepared remarks. Journalists of lesser stature—tech bloggers and freelance pundits—were filing their reports. Doob noticed a familiar face, Tavistock Prowse, off in a corner of the parking lot. He had set up a tablet on a tripod, aimed its camera at himself, and clipped on a wireless mike, and was delivering some kind of a video blog entry, probably for the website of Turing magazine, which had employed him lo these many years. Doob had known him for two decades. He looked terrible. Tav had showed up this morning. He didn’t have the credentials or the access to get the advance warning, so all of this was news to him. Doob had pinged him a few times last night, on Twitter and Facebook, trying to give him a heads-up so that his old friend wouldn’t be wrong-footed by the announcement, but Tav hadn’t responded.
It didn’t seem like a great moment to be doing an impromptu interview with Tav and so Doob pretended he had not seen him. He flashed his credentials at the Secret Service guys stationed at the lodge’s entrance, but this was just to be polite—they knew who he was and had already pulled the door open for him.
He passed the elevators and climbed the stairs to the room, just to get blood moving in his extremities. Amelia had left the door ajar. He hung up the DO NOT DISTURB placard, locked the door behind him, and collapsed into a chair. She was still at the window, leaning back perched on its broad rustic sill. This side of the lodge was facing away from the sun, but the light of the sky came in and illuminated her face, showing the beginnings of lines below her eyes, around her mouth. She was second-generation Honduran American, some kind of complicated African-Indian-Spanish melange, big eyed, wavy haired, alert, birdlike, but with that essentially positive nature that any schoolteacher needed to have. It was a good trait in current circumstances.
“Well, that’s over,” she said. “It must be a big load off of your mind.”
“I have ten interviews in the next two days,” he said, “explaining the whys and the wherefores. But you’re right. That’s easy, compared to breaking the news.”
“It’s just math,” she said.
“It’s just math.”
“What about after that?” she asked.
“You mean, after the next couple of days?”
“Yeah. Then what?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” he admitted. “But we have to keep gathering data. Refining the forecast. The more we know about when the White Sky is going to happen, the better we can plan the launch schedule, and everything else.”
“The Casting of Lots,” she said.
“That too.”
“You’re going, aren’t you, Dubois?” She never called him by his nickname.
“Beg pardon?”
Irritation flashed over her face—unusual, that—and then she focused on him, and she gradually became amused. “You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what, Amelia?”
“Obviously, you’re going.”
“Going where?”
“To the Cloud Ark. They’re going to need you. You’re one of the few who can be useful up there. Who can actually help its chances of survival. Be a leader.”
It really hadn’t occurred to him until she said it. But then he saw that it was probably true. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, “I think I would rather croak down here. With you. I was thinking we could come up here, camp out on the rim, and watch it. It’s going to be the most amazing thing ever.”
“A real hot date,” Amelia said. “No, I think I’ll be spending that day with my family.”
“Maybe you and I could be family by then.”
Tears gleamed in the pouches beneath her eyes, and she ran a finger under her nose. “That has got to be the strangest proposal ever,” she said. “The thing is, Dubois, that my husband is going to be in orbit and I’m going to be in California.”
“I could look for a way to—”
She shook her head. “They will never, ever agree to bringing a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher up to the Cloud Ark.”
He knew she was right.
“A frozen embryo, though—that seems like a possibility.”
“That has got to be the strangest proposition ever,” Doob said.
“We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger.”
So it was that, half an hour after Doc Dubois had listened with high intellectual skepticism to the soothing speech of Clarence Crouch, and picked it apart logically in his mind, proving to himself that it was just a comforting sop for the bereaved billions, a distraction to keep them busy with sex during the two years they had left, he was in Amelia’s arms, and she in his, as they got busy making an embryo for him to carry up into space for implantation in some other, unknown woman’s womb.
He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.
DINAH WAS GLAD NOT TO H
AVE BEEN ON THE PLANET WHEN THE Crater Lake announcement was being made. She sat alone in her workshop, peering out her window past the craggy black silhouette of Amalthea at the luminous blue limb of the Earth below. She knew the time of the announcement and she knew how long it was supposed to last. She chose not to watch the video feed. It hit her as strange that the Earth itself did not change its appearance in any way. Down below, seven billion people were hearing the worst news imaginable. They were going through a collective emotional trauma unknown in the history of the human race. Police and military were being deployed in public spaces to “maintain order,” whatever that meant. But Earth looked the same.
Her radio started beeping. She looked down, blinked away tears, and saw Alaska, bent over the curve of the world far to the north.
WE ARE PROUD THAT YOU ARE UP THERE
She recognized her father’s fist—his touch on the Morse key—as easily as his smell or his voice. She returned:
I WISH THAT I COULD SEE YOU AGAIN
AUNT BEVERLY IS SOWING SOME FLATS OF POTATOES. WE WILL BE FINE.
She cried for a while.
QSL, he signaled, which was a Q code meaning, in this case, “Are you still there?”
She sent QSL back, meaning “Yes.”
She knew that the purpose of Q codes was to make communication more efficient, but she understood now that they could serve another purpose. They could enable you to eke out a few scraps of useful information when words were too difficult.
YOU BETTER GET TO WORK KIDDO
AND YOU SHOULD STOP POUNDING THAT KEY AND HELP BEV
LOVE YOU QRT
QRT
“It’s still a miracle to me that you can make sense of that.”
She turned around to discover Rhys Aitken, poised in the hatchway that connected her shop to the SCRUM: the Space Commercial Resources Utility Module, which was the large can-shaped object that connected Izzy’s forward end to Amalthea. Along its sides, the SCRUM sported several docking ports where other modules could be connected. Owing to various delays and budget cutbacks, only one of those ports was currently in use, and Rhys was now hovering in it. Tucked under one of his arms was a bundle, wrapped in a blanket.
She sniffled, suddenly aware that she was a mess. “How long have you been there?”
“Not long.”
She turned her back on him, grabbed a towel, and dried her eyes and nose. Rhys filled the time with some gentle patter. “I couldn’t stand watching the announcement any longer, so I tried to make myself useful. Discovered something marvelous. Water runs downhill. All right, I already knew that, actually. There’s a section of the torus, underneath the deck plates, where condensation tends to collect—it’s been a maintenance issue, something we’ve been keeping an eye on.
“So, I brought you something,” he concluded.
She turned and looked at the bundle under his arm. “A dozen roses?”
“Perhaps next week. Until then—” and he held it out.
She took it from him. Like everything else up here it was, of course, weightless, but she could tell by its inertia that it had some heft.
She peeled back the blanket and heard a crinkling, crackling noise, then saw underneath it a layer of the metallized Mylar sheeting that they used all over Izzy as thermal shielding. The object beneath that was lumpy and irregular. And it was cold. She peeled away the Mylar to reveal a slab of ice. It was oval and lens shaped: a frozen puddle.
“Perfect,” she said.
A few drops of water spun away from it, gleaming like diamonds in the shaft of sunlight spearing in through her little window. She captured them using the same towel she’d just used to dry her face. But not before pausing, just a moment, to admire their brilliance. Like a little galaxy of new stars.
“You’d said something about a cryptic message from Sean Probst.”
“All of his messages are that way,” she said, “even after they’ve been decrypted.” Sean Probst was her boss, the founder and chairman of Arjuna Expeditions.
“Something about ice, anyway,” Rhys went on.
“Hang on, let’s get this in the airlock before it melts any more.”
“Right.” Rhys pushed himself to the far end of the shop, where a round hatch, about half a meter in diameter, was set into the curved wall. “I see green blinkies all about, so I’ll just open this?”
“Fine.”
He actuated a lever that released the latching mechanism, then pulled the hatch open to reveal a little space beyond. This was the airlock that Dinah used when she needed to bring one of her robots inside for maintenance, or send one back out onto Amalthea. Human-rated airlocks were big—they had to accommodate at least one person in a bulky space suit—and complicated and expensive, partly because of safety requirements and partly because they were designed by government programs. This one, by contrast, had been prototyped in a few weeks by a small team at Arjuna Expeditions, and was meant for smaller equipment. It was roughly the dimensions of a big garbage can. To save space on the inside, it protruded from the side of the module, jutting into space like a stubby, oversized fire hydrant. At its far end was a dome-shaped hatch that Dinah could open and close from inside her shop using a mechanical linkage of pushrods and levers straight out of a Jules Verne novel. At the moment, of course, that hatch was closed, and the airlock was full of air that had gone chilly, since the sun had not been shining on its outside until a few minutes ago.
Dinah gave the chunk of ice a gentle push and it glided across the shop to Rhys. “Up and under!” he called, and caught it.
“What?”
“Rugby,” he explained, and slid the ice into the airlock. “Have you got a Grabb or something that can come round and fetch this?”
“In a minute,” she said. “It’ll keep in there for now.”
“Right.” He closed the inner door and dogged it shut. Then he turned back and looked at Dinah, and she looked at him, and they appraised each other for a few moments.
“So water condenses and puddles at this one place in the torus,” she said, “which you can reach by pulling up a deck plate?”
“Yes.”
“And it freezes?”
“Well, normally, no. I may have helped it freeze by fiddling with certain environmental controls.”
“Ah.”
“Just trying to save energy.”
She was floating in the opposite end of the shop, near the hatch where it connected to the SCRUM. She looked through and verified that no one was around. Some of them, she knew, were in a meeting in the torus, and others were doing a space walk.
“Now, technically . . .” she began.
“Technically, this is wrong,” he said. She admired the self-aware bluntness. “It is wrong because when you open the outer hatch and put that piece of ice out in space, where your robots can muck about on it, it is going to sublimate.”
Sublimation was essentially the same thing as evaporation, skipping the liquid phase; it just meant a process by which a solid, exposed to vacuum, gradually turned into vapor and disappeared. Ice tended to do this pretty quickly unless it was kept extremely cold.
“So Izzy is going to lose water,” Dinah said, “which is a scarce and valuable resource.”
“It’ll never be missed,” Rhys said blithely. “This isn’t the old days. Now that those people have made that announcement, rockets will be coming up here thick and fast.”
“Still, what Sean wants me to do is an Arjuna Expeditions project. A commercial thing. A private thing. And that water is a shared—”
“Dinah.”
“Yes?”
“Snap out of it, love.”
A long silence followed, concluded by a big sigh from Dinah. “Okay.” Rhys was right. Everything was different now.
“Now, what is it he wants, and how does ice enter into it?”
Her mild annoyance at his curiosity finally gave way. Maybe he could help. She turned her head toward the window and nodded at the familiar bulk of Amalthea,
a few meters away. “That’s been my career, and my family’s career,” she said. “Working with minerals. Hard rock. Metallic ore. All of the robots are optimized for crawling around on a big piece of iron. They use magnets to stick to it. Their tools use plasma arcs or abrasive wheels to work it. Now, Sean’s basically telling me to shelve all of that. The future is ice, he says. That’s all he wants to hear about. All he wants me to work on.”
“There’s lots of it on Earth,” Rhys pointed out, “but you never think of it as a mineral.”
She nodded. “It’s an annoyance you have to clear out of the way.”
“Your colleagues down on the ground? Also working on ice?”
“Judging from email traffic, this is a company-wide directive,” she said. “They’re buying ice by the truckload, dropping it on the floor of the lab, refrigerating the building—fortunately it’s winter in Seattle; they only need to drop the temperature a few degrees. They’re all buying long underwear at REI so that they can work in a refrigerator.”
“What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze?”
“I was going to say the Penguin,” Dinah said, “but people in Seattle don’t carry umbrellas.”
“Nor do they wear top hats, in my experience. No, it’s definitely a Mr. Freeze scenario.”
“Anyway,” Dinah said, “yesterday’s shipment of vitamins contained a few of these.”
She opened a storage cubby next to her workstation and took out a bag made of the metallic gray plastic used to protect sensitive electronics from static electricity. Taped to it was a NASA business card.
“Nice to have friends in high places,” Rhys remarked. He had noticed the name on the card: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, the NASA administrator.
Dinah smiled. “Or low, as the case may be.”
It was a weak joke. Rhys didn’t respond. Dinah felt her face get a little warm. Not so much because of the failed attempt at humor as out of a kind of political defensiveness. “Scott told me a couple of weeks ago that he wouldn’t ditch me out. That he had my back.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
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