“Do you have enough water to match our trajectory?”
“Yes,” A?da said. She was a beautiful young woman, Doob thought, with a fierceness about her that helped explain her success in the social media campaign against Tav and J.B.F. “We have performed all of the calculations. If we jettison mass and pack all we have into a heptad, we can make the rendezvous around the time of your next apogee. But we will need to know your exact params.”
“We will discuss your proposal,” Doob said, “and make any necessary preparations.” He looked over at Steve Lake, who severed the connection just as A?da was about to say something.
THEY SAT IN THE BANANA AND DISCUSSED IT AS IF THERE WAS ANYTHING really to discuss. They all registered their rote shock and disgust at what the Swarm had been reduced to. It all sounded hollow to Luisa. Finally she spoke up. It was what Luisa did. They expected it of her. They relied on it.
“Seven billion died. Next to that, this is small. And God knows we’ve all thought about eating the dead, so let’s not pretend to be shocked that they actually did it. The real reason we’re all freaked out by this is that our hopes have been dashed. We thought that the Swarm was going to contain hundreds of healthy people, lots of food, lots of good company. Oh, intellectually we knew it wouldn’t be the case, but we were all hoping for it. Now we learn it’s eleven carrion eaters. Are we going to leave them to die? No. We’re going to make room for them and for their heptad full of scarce vitamins.”
“I am terrified of the woman A?da,” Michael Park said.
Luisa sighed. “Let me throw out an idea, which is that you’re terrified because you wonder, at some level, whether you could turn into A?da if you got hungry enough.”
“Still—to let her on board Endurance—”
“And J.B.F. too,” Tekla said. She and Moira were sitting next to each other as they always did, hands clasped, fingers intertwined.
“I hoped I would never see Julia again,” Camila put in. “I know it is small and selfish of me, but . . .”
“I understand all of your misgivings,” Ivy said, “because I share them. The question, now, is whether those misgivings are going to have any effect on the decision we make. Are we really going to let one-third of the surviving human race die because A?da’s creepy and we hate J.B.F.? Obviously not. So, we transmit our params and our burn plan. And during the remainder of this orbit we make arrangements to accommodate some new arklets.”
THE REMAINDER OF THE ORBIT WAS BUSY INDEED, TO THE POINT where they broke out hoarded rations and upped their calorie intake to fuel their brains and their bodies. In the middle of that ten-day stretch, however, was an intermission. Dinah and Ivy had wordlessly agreed to spend it together in what Doob had once called the Woo-Woo Pod, and what they now called the Kupol.