Ivy was standing with her back to the big screen, so she couldn’t see the reaction of the Arkitects down below, in some conference room at the other end of the video link. For today’s meeting, there were three of them: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, who was still the administrator of NASA; Dr. Pete Starling, the president’s science advisor; and Ulrika Ek, a Swedish woman who had worked as a project manager for one of the private commercial space startups until recent events had forced a career change: she was now coordinating the activities of several different space agencies and private companies as they worked on the Cloud Ark. Apparently, she had become the Arkitect-in-chief.
“Apparently” being the key word, since every time Dinah had any contact with the ground she was reminded of how little she understood of what was happening there. On one level she was one of the luckiest people in the human race. She was going to get to stay alive. At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues.
She’d compared notes on this with Ivy, who had confirmed that even she had little to go on, and what she did hear contradicted itself from hour to hour.
It had all become Kremlinology. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the only way for Westerners to guess what was going on there was to look at the lineup of dignitaries on Lenin’s Tomb in the May Day parade, and riddle it out from the seating chart and who shook hands with whom. Now Dinah was doing the same thing with these three faces on the screen. Sparky was no use. He’d spent so much time in space that he had developed a kind of thousand-light-year stare. He was famous for being oblivious to the political side of things.
His opposite in that respect was Pete Starling. Pete’s job was to mutter scientific explanations into the president’s ear. He’d been doing rather a lot of it in the last thirty-seven days. He had a background running big science programs at universities, climbing the ladder from Mankato State to Georgia Tech to Columbia to Harvard in a mere ten years. Why was he sitting in on this meeting? There was little he could contribute. He must be here as the eyes and ears of J.B.F.
But why should J.B.F. care? No decisions were going to be made here; it was just a status report, a checkin.
As soon as Ivy finished her sentence, the corners of Pete’s mouth turned down. He looked at Ulrika Ek, a somewhat matronly woman in her late forties, extremely good at her job, according to Rhys. On the high-def video feed, Dinah saw the slightest deflection of her eyes, noticing the turn of Pete Starling’s head, but not exactly acknowledging it.
Ulrika clearly didn’t like him. But there was a reason she was a well-regarded project manager. “Ivy,” she said, “just for clarity, when we speak of ‘this installation’ we’re using the term in an elastic sense. Of necessity.”
Ivy turned to look at the screen. “‘Installation’ probably isn’t the right word,” she admitted. “Since it’s not installed anywhere.”
Pete Starling spoke up. “I believe that where Ulrika is going is that the Cloud Ark is a fluid concept that may paradigm-shift beyond recognition as we proceed adaptively through the next ninety-five percent of the timeline.”
Ivy’s brow furrowed. Something was going on, some kind of political tussle down on the ground. It was important to people like Pete.
“This is not efficient use of time,” Fyodor said. “I am working to extend truss to receive Pioneers.” Fyodor’s English was excellent, but when he was annoyed, as he was now, he dropped his articles. “I have eight suits outside, five inside, for unlucky number of thirteen.”
It had become common to use a form of synecdoche in which “suit” denoted “a person qualified to perform extravehicular activities who is equipped with a space suit that still works.”
“Pioneers arrive in two weeks, this is still true? Then I need more Scouts yesterday, as saying goes.”
When Fyodor had come up to Izzy six months ago, it had been understood as a valedictory mission before getting shunted to an administrator’s job at Roskosmos. Not that he hadn’t taken his duties seriously, but he always seemed to be taking the long view, perceiving Izzy through the eyes of a future bureaucrat who would need to make it run smoothly until his retirement. That had all changed on Zero, of course. It had changed even more with the Russian invasion. No new rank or title had been bestowed on Fyodor. None was needed. All the Russians just accepted him, implicitly and without question, as their leader. And his manner had changed accordingly. He was scrupulously respectful of Ivy’s authority, but there was no question that he was the boss of all things suit related, and the authority had seemed to make him physically larger and more imposing, his creased face tougher, his voice firmer.
Sparky answered him. “Fyodor, that fuel pump has been fixed. It was just a bad sensor. So the launch is going up as scheduled . . .” He checked his wristwatch, did a mental calculation. “Fourteen hours from now. Six hours after that, you’ll have your suits.”
“And the Zavods, the Vestibyuls—the things I mentioned.”
“We have had teams of engineers working on those fixes around the clock, Fyodor.”