“Maybe a third torus. Big enough to make something close to Earth-normal gravity. Lots of space to work in. A staff of eager Arkers.”
“That’s your job now, isn’t it?” Moira said. “Cheerleader for the Ark.”
“It was my ticket up here,” Doob said. He could feel a little warmth creeping into his face, and cautioned himself not to say anything he was going to regret. “We all needed that ticket. Now that we have paid the price of admission, we need to make it work.”
Moira, perhaps sensing she’d gone a little too far, kept her silence and would not meet his gaze.
“And as of today,” he said, “we have one year.”
Part Two
DAY 700
ON DAY 700, ALSO KNOWN AS A+1.335 (ONE YEAR AND 335 DAYS SINCE the destruction of the moon), the Cloud Ark, as seen from the Earth, looked like a bright bead strung on a silver chain. For the reasons that Dr. Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris had tried to articulate during his soliloquy aboard Arklet 2, back on A+1.0, it was expensive, in terms of propellant, to maintain an actual cloud or swarm of arklets around Izzy. Much cheaper and more reliable was to have them precede or follow the space station along the same orbital path, like a queue of ducklings with Mom in the middle. Once an arklet had found its place in that train, changing its position was a maneuver whose complications were a perennial source of surprise and consternation to newly arrived members of the so-called General Population.
Arkies as such—people who had been selected in the Casting of Lots, who had spent up to two years in training for this mission, and who had been sent up here specifically to manage, and live in, arklets—understood it implicitly. As of Day 700, there were 1,276 of those, with about two dozen more coming up each day during the final surge of launches. New arrivals were assigned to empty arklets that awaited them at the head or the tail of the queue. These were launched on separate heavy-lift rockets about four times a day. Since an arklet consisted mostly of empty space, it weighed almost nothing compared to the lift capacity of a big rocket, and so they were always crammed from boiler room to front door with vitamins. These had to be extracted and stowed before the arklet could be occupied. Each arklet had its own unique manifest of stuff. Some of them were just full of compressed gas, such as nitrogen, which would later be used to fertilize crops. Others might be packed with enough diverse and seemingly random goods to open a space bazaar: medicines, cultural artifacts, micronutrients, tools, integrated circuits, spare parts for Stirling engines, Arkies’ personal effects, and, in one notable case, a stowaway who was found dead on arrival. With the exception of the stowaway—who was stashed in the morgue with the rest of the deceased—all of these items had to be extracted, cataloged, and stowed appropriately. Each arklet had some onboard storage space, so to some extent the storage was distributed—that being a fundamental tenet of the whole swarm-based Arkitecture. Bulk materials like gases could be pumped into external tanks or bladders: little ones dangling from arklets, big ones distributed around Izzy’s periphery where they could serve as extra shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. So-called dry goods were likewise stashed in mesh bags that lived “outside” until such time as they were needed. Scarce and crowded “inside” space was reserved for organisms and goods that actually needed air and warmth. So, compared to the way it had looked a year ago, Izzy was spare and clean on the inside.
Anyone who had not been chosen in the Casting of Lots and trained as an Arkie was categorized as General Population. There were 172 of those. The number grew only slowly, since most of the people who were qualified, and who were needed, ought to have been sent up a long time ago. Adding new members was attended by much political controversy down on the Earth. The Crater Lake Accord had ratified the general scheme of a Cloud Ark populated by those chosen in the Casting of Lots. It had been obvious, and uncontroversial, that experienced specialists were also needed, and so no one had quibbled over sending up the Scouts and the Pioneers. The concept of the General Population had been written into the Crater Lake Accord precisely to allow for that. People like Rhys Aitken, Luisa Soter, Dubois Harris, Moira Crewe, and Markus Leuker had been sent up under the “GPop clause” because they knew how to do things. For every one of them who got sent up, however, a hundred with similar qualifications were stranded on the ground, where some of them called their congressmen, chancellors, presidents, or dictators. The politics had become so involved as to throttle the incoming flow to a trickle. The remaining available GPop slots were being hoarded by national governments. They were being filled grudgingly and with byzantine premeditation.