Seveneves - Страница 13

“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 HAVE 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.