“Did you go to Venezuela when you were out collecting Arkies?” Luisa asked him.
The way she stressed the word “go” suggested that Venezuela was an obvious topic of conversation—the thing that well-informed persons would naturally begin talking about first thing in the morning. Doob didn’t know why. He had heard a few people talking recently about Kourou, which was the place in French Guiana where the Europeans, and sometimes the Russians, launched big rockets into orbit. In the last two years it had become one of the most important launch sites for arklets and supply ships. So he had the vague sense that something was afoot there, something that people were concerned about.
He had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children.” These were still visible, through increasingly thick clouds of rocky debris. When the White Sky happened they would vanish into a cloud of dirt, and he might not see them for a while. So he had been looking at PP1, PP2, and PP3 while the looking was still good, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs. PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.
“Doob? You still with me?” Luisa asked. “I was going to say ‘Earth to Doob, Earth to Doob,’ but it doesn’t apply anymore.”
“Sorry,” he said. He had gone into a reverie thinking about that huge crevice on the side of Cleft, imagining what it must look like from the inside. “What was your question again?”
“Venezuela,” she said. “Did you do any of your ‘abduction runs’ there?”
“No,” he said. “Closest I came was Uruguay. Which isn’t that close. And by that time I was pretty burned out.”
“Why were you burned out?”
Typical Luisa!
“Overscheduling?” she went on. “That is, was it physical burnout? Or more emotional/spiritual?”
“I had just had it,” he said. “It’s hard. Taking young people—the best and the brightest—away from their families.”
“But it was for a good purpose, right?”
“Luisa, where are you going with this?”
“Are you aware of what is going on offshore of Kourou?” she asked in return.
“No,” he said flatly.
“You’ve checked out,” she said.
“I talk to my family every day. But other than that? Yes, Luisa, I have checked out of planet Earth. Nice place. Lovely people. But I have to focus on what comes next.”
“So say we all,” she said. “But one could argue that things happening in Old Earth’s final three weeks could have repercussions on New Earth.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Apparently not a single one of the seventy-five Venezuelans who were picked in the Casting of Lots has actually been sent into space,” she said.
“You know that the overall ratio has ended up being something like one in twenty,” Doob said. Meaning that for every twenty candidates chosen in the worldwide Casting of Lots and brought to the training centers, only one had found a place up here in the Cloud Ark. Not a figure to be proud of. But it was the best they’d been able to do, and they hoped to bring the number down to more like one in fifteen, or even one in ten, with a last-minute surge of launches.
“Yes. And the Venezuelans know that too. So they’re saying that three or four of their seventy-five ought to have made it up here by now.”
“Statistically, that is not a valid—”
“These people do not look like statisticians.”
“Politics.” Doob sighed.
Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
“And I’ve been in enough faculty meetings at Caltech to know how right you are,” Doob said. “But I meant it in a different way. The way that the Venezuelans ran their selection program was overtly political. In most countries they took the Casting of Lots idea with a grain of salt. There was a random element, yes—but they also filtered for ability. The Venezuelans chose not to do that. So, they ended up sending in kids from the boondocks, truly chosen at random. Many of whom had fine personal qualities. If I had my way, we’d get some of them up here. But I’m not the one who is choosing. The people who are, are choosing on the basis of math ability and things like that. So it makes me sad that other people are in line ahead of the Venezuelans, but it doesn’t surprise me.”
“Three weeks ago, boat people started squatting on Devil’s Island,” Luisa said, “refusing to move.”