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.