“They’re all going to die, yes,” said another voice. “But we’re not.” It was Luisa. She came up behind Tekla and wordlessly asked permission to use the chair on which the Russian had draped her arm. Tekla not only gave it but rose to her feet and pulled the chair out as a courtesy.
“We’re not all going to die, or at least that’s what I’m hoping,” Luisa went on, “and we have all just seen this happen. It’s in our memories now. And not just that. But in a few hours we’ll be taking deliveries from Kourou, reaping the benefits of having used fuel-air explosives and nuclear weapons against people who were basically defenseless. It’s in our DNA now.” Her eyes flicked toward Moira. “If you’ll pardon the poetic imagery, Dr. Crewe.”
Moira gave her a little smile and nodded.
Markus said, “So, do you disagree with it?”
“No,” Luisa said. “Let’s be clear, Markus, I have baggage too. I’m a brown Spanish speaker from South America. I devoted years of my life to hanging out with refugees on boats. And I’m a Jew. That’s my baggage, okay?”
“Understood,” Markus said.
“I’m not down there, I don’t know what advice J.B.F. was getting, what she knew that we don’t.”
“So what is your point?” Markus asked, crisply but politely.
“We have no laws. No rights. No constitution. No legal system, no police.”
Markus and Tekla looked at each other across the table. It was not a sneaky look, or a guilty look, or a conniving look. But it was a significant look.
“It is being worked on,” Markus said. He wasn’t kidding; ever since the Crater Lake Accord had been signed, a whole think tank full of constitutional scholars had been toiling away on it in The Hague, and one of them was now resident up here.
“I know it is,” Luisa answered, “and it is very important to me that atrocities such as what we’re seeing on these screens don’t somehow infect that process. This cannot be business as usual.”
Markus and Tekla, still looking at each other, seemed to arrive at a mutual decision to say nothing.
Moira’s phone vibrated. Looking at its screen she saw that she had an appointment in fifteen minutes. She excused herself from what had become a very strange kaffeeklatsch. Oh well, perhaps it had cured her of some sentimental ideas. She had walked in aspiring to somehow re-create the experience of breakfasting in a sidewalk café in Europe and instead been treated to half an hour of nuclear warfare, mass incineration of protesters, and serious ethical discourse, mixed in with a suddenly keen sexual tension between her and Tekla. Like quite a few other people on the Cloud Ark, she hadn’t had sex since she had come up here. Many whose consciences were unencumbered by the existence of doomed spouses or fiancés on the ground had figured out a way to make it happen, but many others were not getting any. This couldn’t possibly last. A couple of docked capsules had been set aside for conjugal visits, and everyone knew of quiet places around the space station where you could do it. Moira didn’t have anyone down on the ground. She had abstained for lack of anyone up here, and just because it was the least sexy place you could possibly imagine. But it was starting to get to her.
One of the items on her long-term to-do list, actually, was to come up with a policy for how to handle pregnancy aboard the Cloud Ark. Since pregnant people weren’t fundamentally that different from those who weren’t, what that really boiled down to was how to handle babies. The assumption made by the Arkitects was that this was going to be an orderly process, and that anyone who got pregnant would do so with the intent of having the embryo frozen so that it could be implanted later, when conditions were better for raising little ones. Having now spent the better part of a year up here, Moira doubted this. The Arkitects were, she felt, underestimating the cultural difference between the General Population and the Arkies.
Until a few months ago they’d been referred to as Arkers, and, in all official communications, they still were. Then someone had coined the term “Arkies,” and, in one of those only-on-the-Internet viral phenomena, it had swept across the planet in about twenty-four hours and become universal. A few sensitive Arkansas historians had registered objections, but they had been steamrolled.
The Arkies were just kids, and they had surprisingly little exposure to the GPop. The arklets they lived in couldn’t really change their positions in the swarm. Moving from one arklet to the next was nearly impossible—it was an epic journey in a space suit, requiring some fancy tricks with orbital mechanics. Small utility spacecraft, called Flivvers, were available to squire people around, but there were only so many of them, and qualified pilots were few. Markus, following suggestions from Luisa, had tried to make up for this by “stirring the pot,” meaning that about 10 percent of the Arkies at any given time were living and working aboard Izzy. But most of the time, most of them were stranded in individual arks or on triads or heptads, their only connection to the General Population being through videoconferencing (“Scape”), social media (“Spacebook”), and other tech that had been transplanted from the earthbound world. Moira would be astonished if some girls weren’t pregnant already, but no one had approached her about getting an embryo frozen.
And any normal person who followed Moira forward through Zvezda and “down” into the cold storage facility would understand why. There was nothing about this place that tickled the nerve endings that mattered to people who wanted to start families. It was clinical/industrial to a degree that was almost laughable.
But by the same token she hoped it would seem impressive to the new arrivals, who showed up right on time for their appointment. They had arrived several hours ago on a passenger capsule launched from Cape Canaveral: long enough for their antinausea meds to kick in and for them to pull themselves together a little bit. It was a small contingent from the Philippines: a scientist who had been working on genetically modified strains of rice, a sociologist who had been working with Filipino sailors who spent their whole lives on cargo freighters—she’d be working with Luisa, presumably—and a pair of Arkies who, judging from looks, were from ethnic groups as different as Icelanders were from Sicilians. One of them was carrying the inevitable beer cooler. As Moira knew perfectly well—for she did this at least once a day—it contained sperm, ova, and embryos collected from donors scattered around the country of origin—in this case, the Philippines. She accepted it with due ceremony, like a Japanese businessman taking another’s business card, and flipped the lid open for inspection. A few chunks of dry ice were still visible on the bottom; good. The finger-sized vials were all contained within a hexagonal cage. She sampled some of them with a pistol-shaped infrared thermometer and verified that none of them had thawed out. Then, after putting on some cotton gloves to protect her skin from the cold, she pulled a few out and spot-checked them just to verify that they had been sealed, labeled, and bar-coded in accordance with the procedures specified in the Third Technical Supplement to the Crater Lake Accord, Volume III, Section 4, Paragraph 11. They had. She’d have expected nothing less from Dr. Miguel Andrada, the geneticist.
She also guessed that Dr. Andrada suspected, at some level, that none of these samples had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever developing into sentient life-forms, but this was not a subject to talk about now. For the benefit of the others, Moira gave a little canned speech, trying to make it sound spontaneous, thanking them and, by extension, the people of the Philippines for having entrusted her and the Cloud Ark with these most precious contributions, and hinting, without promising, at a future in which a cornucopia of vibrant humanity would spring forth from each little plastic vial. It was expected that these people would go forth now to their arklets and text or Facebook the news down to their friends and family at home. The promise in those words was meant to keep people on Earth from getting too rambunctious while they waited for the end; and if that failed, as it had in the case of Venezuela, well, J.B.F. could just nuke them.
“May I see how it all works?” Dr. Andrada asked, after the rest of his
delegation had been sent on their way. So it was just the two of them now, hovering in a long, slim docking module that projected to the nadir side. “Below” them its far end was sealed off by a hatch with a keypad. Most of Izzy was open to anyone who wanted to wander in and poke around; they didn’t get a lot of riffraff. But the HGA, the Human Genetic Archive, had a kind of quasi-sacred status and was kept under the digital equivalent of lock and key.
Dr. Andrada was a small, wiry man with prominent cheekbones. Like some other ag geneticists Moira had known, he had a callused, tanned, leathery look, the result of spending a lot of time in experimental plots, digging in actual dirt. Except for a nice pair of eyeglasses he could have passed for a farmer anywhere in Southeast Asia. But he had a Ph.D. from UC Davis and had been on the fast track for a Nobel Prize before the Agent had intervened.
“Of course,” Moira said. “I’d fancy a chat anyway, about how we’re going to grow things other than humans up here.”
“We need to talk about that,” Dr. Andrada agreed.
She drifted down, performing a slow somersault so that she could address the keypad, and punched the button that turned on the iris scanner. After a few moments, the device agreed that she was Dr. Moira Crewe and unlocked the hatch. Bracing herself with a handle on the wall, she pulled it open, then allowed herself to drift through into the docking module beyond. There was barely room in this for both her and Dr. Andrada. White LEDs came on automatically. Clipped to the wall was a simple nylon web belt with a few small electronic gadgets holstered in it. Moira took this and buckled it around her waist.
They had entered through the hatch on the module’s zenith side. To port and starboard were openings that had been sealed off by round plastic shields. Each of these had a handle projecting from its center. The closest to Moira was the one on the port side, so she grabbed the handle, squeezed it to release a latch, and then pulled it out of the way.
Dr. Andrada flinched at the frigid air that washed into the space in its wake. They were looking down a straight tube about ten meters long, large enough for one person to work comfortably, or for two to pass each other if they didn’t mind bumping bodies. Its walls were studded with long neat rows of smaller hatches about as wide as a splayed human hand, each with its own little handle. Hundreds of them. Closer to the entrance these bore neat machine-printed labels and bar codes; farther away they were blank. Next to each one of them was a blue LED; these provided the space’s only illumination.
“Would you like to do the honors?” Moira said.
“If I don’t freeze to death first!” Dr. Andrada said.
“Space is cold,” Moira said. “We rely on that.”
She gave him a minute to put on the cotton gloves, then opened the cooler and held it out. He removed the little rack containing the samples. Moira zapped its bar code with a handheld scanner from her belt. Dr. Andrada pulled himself into the cold storage module and began to drift deeper into it, gingerly prodding the walls in a way that marked him out as a new arrival to zero gravity. “Take the first one that’s unlabeled,” Moira said. “Leave the door open, please.”
Dr. Andrada coughed as the chilly air made his throat spasm. He opened one of the small hatches and slid the sample rack into it. In the meantime Moira was using a handheld printer to generate a sticker identifying the sample in English, in Filipino, and in a machine-readable bar code language. Once Dr. Andrada had returned to the central module, she went up to the open hatch, verified that the sample rack was properly seated in the tubular cavity beyond, then closed the hatch and affixed the sticker to its front. Printed on the hatch was a unique identification number and a bar code conveying the same thing, which she zapped and then double-checked.
The LED next to this hatch had turned red, signaling that the compartment’s temperature was too high. While Moira checked her work, it turned yellow, which suggested the cold was “soaking in.” Later she’d pull it up on the screen of her tablet and verify that it had gone blue.
She flew back out to the docking module and grabbed the round shield that sealed off the cold store. “Now you know what these are for,” she said. “Thermal insulation.” She snapped the shield back into place. “I could open the other one,” she offered, “but you would see the same thing.”
“Thank you anyway,” said Dr. Andrada, “but I have never been so cold in my life!”
They went back “up” to Zvezda and then proceeded forward to the complex of modules where most of the genetic engineering gear was stored. There was nothing to see here but boxes. They could just as easily have gone aft to one of the tori, but Moira knew from experience that new arrivals didn’t benefit from switching back and forth between zero gee and simulated gravity.
Through the nice eyeglasses, Dr. Andrada was giving Moira a look that she read as polite but skeptical. Fair enough. She decided to broach what was probably on his mind. “Forgive me that bit of ceremony,” she said. “I have done it once or twice a day for a year. I’m as much priestess as scientist. You’re meant to blog it, of course. To tell the people down below that you personally hand-carried the samples all the way from Manila to a cold storage location on Izzy.”
“Yes, I understand that. I will do so.” He paused, signaling a change in topic. “It is not exactly decentralized.”
Moira nodded. “If that thing gets hit with a rock ten minutes from now, all of the samples are destroyed.”
“Yes. That is my concern.”
“Mine as well. It all boils down to statistics and mathematics. For now, there aren’t that many rocks, and we can see them and avoid them if necessary. Keeping all the eggs in one basket . . .”
“And sperm,” Dr. Andrada said, in what had become the oldest joke in Moira’s personal universe.
“. . . is actually a safer bet, for the next couple of weeks, than trying to distribute them among all of those arklets. But there is a plan, Dr. Andrada, for so distributing them, which will be triggered when the BFR breaks through a certain threshold.”
He nodded. “Please call me Miguel.”
“Miguel. Moira, if you would.”
“Yes. Now, you know why I was chosen to come up here.”
“You figured out a way to make photosynthesis in rice more efficient by transplanting genes from maize. Greenpeace destroyed your research facility in the Philippines but you kept the project alive anyway, in Singapore. Starting shortly after Zero you began developing strains of that rice adapted for cultivation in low-gee hydroponic environments.”
“Sprice,” Miguel said, with an ever-so-slight roll of the eyes. The term, a contraction of Space Rice, had been coined by an enthusiastic reporter for the Straits Times and become an unkillable staple of tabloid headlines and Internet comment threads. “Do you understand, Moira, that it cannot grow without some amount of simulated gravity? There has to be an up and a down or the root system cannot develop. In this it is more difficult than algae, which doesn’t care.”
“Oh, we’re all going to be eating algae for a long time,” Moira said. “Sprice will come later, after we have constructed more environments that rotate to make gravity. And then, Miguel, then!”
“Then what?” Miguel asked.
“Sprew.”
“Sprew?”
“Space brew,” Moira said. “It’s not as good as barley, but you can make beer from rice in a pinch.”
“TAP,” MARKUS SAID. HE HAD TO SAY IT BECAUSE HE COULDN’T DO IT. The traditional way for a wrestler to tell his training partner that an unbreakable submission hold had been achieved was by tapping him or her on the hand, arm, leg, or whatever could be reached. But Markus couldn’t reach anything. Tekla had both of his arms controlled.
She let go of him moments before they drifted into the padded wall of the Circus—a large, mostly empty module reserved for exercise—and they raised their hands to absorb the impact.
Watching interestedly from the far side of the Circus were Jun Ueda, an engineer named Tom Van Meter, Bolor-Erdene, and Vyachesla
v Dubsky. The three men were taciturn. Bolor-Erdene, who was nothing if not enthusiastic, permitted herself three claps, then stopped when it became clear that no one else was joining in.
“Okay,” Vyacheslav said. “Seeing is believing. It is possible to perform Sambo in zero gravity.” His eyes flicked in the direction of the others. “Or jujitsu, or wrestling, or bökh, I presume.”
“Obviously there are no throws. None of that shifting of the weight that is so important on the ground,” Markus said.
Jun nodded. “It is a subset. A little bit like ground fighting. But without the ground.”
Tom Van Meter, who’d been a collegiate wrestler en route to an engineering degree at Iowa, turned himself around to face the padded wall, then tried delivering a punch. In spite of his considerable size and strength, it landed weakly and sent him drifting backward across the module.
“We experimented with that too,” Markus said. “Punches are problematic.”
Just before striking the opposite wall, Tom flung both arms outward and slapped the mat to absorb energy. “If you’re in a torus, or a bolo, all the usual stuff is going to work,” he said. “But you’re right, martial arts in zero gee is a new frontier.”
“Once you have come to grapple,” Tekla said, “not so different.”
“The Cloud Ark is equipped with a dozen Tasers,” Markus said. “I did not request these. They were here when I arrived. No one knows about them. I am not comfortable with having some persons go around with sidearms—even if they are just Tasers—while everyone else is unarmed. And yet. We have a population of two thousand or so. There is no town on Earth of such a population that does not have police. There will be crimes. Disputes.”