Pinned to her lapel was a loop of ribbon. All the important people had been wearing these for the last few weeks, and they had become popular among the hoi polloi as a gesture of solidarity with the mission of the Cloud Ark. Selecting the color scheme had consumed resources equivalent to the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country. They had settled on a thin red line down the center, symbolizing the bloodline of the human race, flanked by bands of white, symbolizing starlight, flanked by bands of green, symbolizing the ecosystem that would keep the Arkies alive, flanked by bands of blue, symbolizing water, and, finally, edged by bands of black, symbolizing space. The discussion had been as lively as the results were complicated. Black symbolized death to Westerners, white symbolized it to Chinese, and so on. This design offended everybody. It had gotten loose on the Internet as the “official” ribbon design even though the commission charged with designing it had become hopelessly deadlocked and was still evaluating twelve different candidate designs submitted by schoolchildren from around the globe. Factories in Bangladesh had been repurposed to hurl this stuff out by the linear kilometer, they had shown up in kiosks and souvenir shops from Times Square to Tiananmen Square, and the world’s leaders had bowed to the verdict and begun wearing them. The president had attached hers using a lapel pin consisting of a simple disk of turquoise rimmed in platinum. The blue disk on the white field was meant to echo Crater Lake amid the snows of November; it was a visual emblem of the Crater Lake Accord, and the closest thing that the Cloud Ark had to a flag.
The sound had been turned down, so Doob couldn’t hear what J.B.F. was saying, but he could guess it well enough, and a few seconds later the highlights began to show up in the crawl at the bottom of the screen. The so-called People’s Justice Blockade was no grass-roots movement but an operation planned and carried out by the Venezuelan government. It was a reprehensible political stunt that was actively interfering with the all-important building of the Cloud Ark. It was not true, as some had been whispering and the Venezuelan president was now openly saying, that the White Sky was a hoax. The blockade was not, as its sympathizers would have you believe, a peaceful civil disobedience protest; armed intruders had begun landing on the beaches of French Guiana a few hours ago, and were now being held at bay by the French Foreign Legion, bolstered by a multinational force including United States and Russian marines. Doob, doing his best to tune it out, couldn’t defeat the irrational feeling that J.B.F. was staring directly at him: a feeling he had come up here partly to get away from.
One of the PR flacks down in Houston reached him over a video chat link that Doob had not had the presence of mind to disable. He talked Doob into spending the next hour writing a little homily about how everyone down on Earth needed to unite behind the all-important mission of the Cloud Ark, and detailing how the Kourou blockade was affecting that. Doob wanted in the worst way to tell this guy to get lost, but he had a soft spot for people who had only three weeks to live.
Doob called Ivy—for Izzy had its own cell-phone system now—and got her to supply a few hard quotable numbers, which he rounded off and typed into his script. He then devoted a minute to psyching himself up to adopt the Doc Dubois persona. Formerly the ruin of his first marriage, the basis of his livelihood, and his ticket to the Cloud Ark, Doc Dubois was a person he rarely had to be anymore. That guy seemed as dated as a character from a 1970s television serial. Getting into the persona was nearly as cumbersome as donning a space suit. It required an extra cup of coffee with sugar. When he felt he was ready, he turned on his tablet’s video camera, identified himself as Doc Dubois, greeted the people of Earth, and read his little script.
When he was finished, he emailed the file down to Houston. Then he tried to go back to his memo, but he became distracted when the Situational Awareness Monitor flashed up a red BREAKING NEWS banner and began to show footage of indistinct flashes against a dark background. Some sort of hostilities had broken out on the ground in French Guiana, between the perimeter of the spaceport and the beach. The French Foreign Legion was participating in what might be the last battle ever fought. But the television news cameras couldn’t get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.
In the middle of all that, the flack in Houston got back to him and asked if he could please relocate to a part of Izzy where zero gravity prevailed, and rerecord the little pep talk. Conspiracy theorists were saying that the Cloud Ark didn’t really exist and that it was actually just a bunch of movie sets in the Nevada desert. Whenever they saw video from parts of the space station with simulated gravity, they cited it as evidence, and added millions of friends and followers to their social media profiles.
Doob said he’d see what he could do, and departed from the Farm. Nothing was going on here anyway; Markus wasn’t around at the moment. He ascended a spoke to H2 and thus entered zero gravity.