These things were important. It wasn’t just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A few months ago Doob would have betrayed cynicism, possibly long enough for Enrique to notice it. And a few months before that he might have launched into a detailed explanation of why he was cynical, making it clear that the Cloud Ark was going to be an experiment in hastily improvised survival against nearly impossible odds.
None of that happened. He looked at the faces of Enrique and of Hesper, lit on one side by blue twilight and on the other by the glow of the coals, and he answered the question. He answered it as if he were standing in front of a television camera streaming live to the Internet. “The resources up there are basically infinite. That was true even before the moon blew up. Now it has been busted open like a pi?ata. All it needs is to be shaped into the right architecture—enclosed habitations that we can fill with air and fertilize with the genetic heritage of the Earth. That’s going to take a while, and we’ll go through some tough times first. It’s going to be tough emotionally when the Hard Rain hits and we have to say goodbye to all that was. And it’s going to be tough afterward when the Arkers have to learn how to work together and make hard choices. By far the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. But we’ll survive. We’ll use what’s up there to build incubators for Our Heritage to live in, to grow, and to improve on what we brought with us. And eventually the day will come when we return. The Hard Rain won’t last forever. Oh, it’ll last for many lifetimes—as long as human civilization has existed until now. And what it is going to leave behind will be a hot and rocky wasteland. But by that point many generations will have devoted all of their hopes and their creative genius to the problem of remaking the world as well as, or better than, what we see here. We will come back. And that’s the real answer, Enrique. Will we survive? Yeah. It’ll be touch and go, but we will survive. Will we build space habitats? Absolutely. Small ones at first, big ones later. But that’s not the real goal. The real goal will take thousands of years. The real goal is to build Earth again, and build it better.”
It was the first time he’d said it this way. But it wasn’t the last. In the next few weeks—his last weeks on Earth—he’d say it again, to television cameras, to the president, to a stadium full of Arkers in training. All he knew at the time was that Enrique was nodding in a way that said It’s going to be okay, Doob’s got this, and Hesper was snuggling her head against Enrique’s powerful shoulder, eyes gleaming, staring into the future that her father was conjuring with those words.
Behind her, a meteor knifed across the twilight sky and exploded out over the Atlantic.
Cloud Ark
Day 365
“TODAY WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT WHAT IT REALLY MEANS TO have a swarm of arklets in orbit,” said famous astronomer and science pundit Doc Dubois. He was hovering in the center of Arklet 2, currently docked to Izzy. He was wearing a pressure suit with its helmet detached and slung under his arm. He was talking into one of the arklet’s built-in high-def video cameras, trusting that some computer, somewhere, was recording the footage.
“Cut,” he said. Then he felt a little sheepish. He was producing and editing his own videos now, so he had just said “cut” to himself. In space, there were no video crews, photographers, production assistants, or makeup artists to follow you around. He rather liked it that way. But there was something to be said for having at least one other human in the room who could react to what you were saying. He needed Amelia there, silently shaking her head or nodding. Instead of which he tried to imagine that he was talking to the kids in her classroom in South Pasadena on a sunny Tuesday morning. He replayed his own dialogue in their ears.
What it really means sounded skeptical. As if everything said on the topic heretofore had been a bunch of BS. And in orbit wasn’t really necessary. Everyone knew that they were in orbit.
“Today we’re going to talk about what it means to have a swarm of arklets,” he said. “In normal space, like on Earth, we use three numbers to tell where something is. Left-right, forward-back, up-down. The x, y, and z axes from your high school geometry class. Turns out that this doesn’t work so well in orbit. Up here we need six numbers to fully specify what orbit an object, such as an arklet, happens to be in. Three for position. But another three for velocity. If you’ve got two objects that share the same six numbers, they’re in the same place. Right now, my six numbers are the same as those of this arklet that I’m floating in, and so we’re moving through space together. But if one or more of my numbers changed, you’d see me drifting.”
Doob had brought with him a small can of compressed air—a common convenience used by electronics technicians to blow dust away from things they were working on. He aimed it “down” toward the aft end of the arklet and pressed the button. Air hissed out and he began drifting “up” toward the front door. He raised a hand above his head in time to kill his upward motion against the forward bulkhead, then turned to look into a different camera.