Milo had to lace his fingers together to keep his hands from shaking. Beside him, Kim softly gasped.
“So,” Aldrin continued, “to do all this, we need to do a hundred years of science and engineering in just five years. Now, before you go asking a bazillion questions, let me see if I can anticipate you. One: How many people can go on these big ships? The answer is: Not many. Maybe six thousand on each of the arks. Two: What are they telling the rest of the planet? The answer is: Nothing for as long as possible, or they’ll come here and rip us all to shreds. Third: Why are you here? You’re here because I’m here, and I’m allowed a staff of two. Why am I here? Because in order to make this all work without breaking down, it has to be as simple as possible. I’m here to try and make it all…”
“Elegant,” suggested Milo. Then he threw up on the floor.
“Exactly,” said Aldrin. “Oh, damn. I’ll call a custodian. Don’t worry. I threw up, too.”
—
They repaired to the hallway and kept talking while waiting for the custodian. Holding hands, Kim and Milo asked some questions that Aldrin must have anticipated but hadn’t gotten to yet.
He listened patiently, gravely.
“No,” he answered. “You are not guaranteed a place aboard one of the arks. Only the team leaders are guaranteed, at first. Yes, I’m one of them. No, Kim, I’m sorry, there’s no special exception for children. As we get closer to our launch date, skilled workers will be selected, as we learn more about our needs. Later, there will be a series of lotteries.”
Kim glared a hole in the floor.
“If you won’t guarantee Libby a seat,” she said quietly, “I will do nothing whatsoever to help you.”
“Nor will I,” said Milo, surprising himself.
Aldrin shook his head.
“They’re not my rules, you guys,” he said. “That’s something you have to understand. Just because I’m a key designer doesn’t mean I have any say where policy’s concerned.”
“Who does?” asked Milo.
“Money,” spat Kim. “Who else? When it comes right down to it, there’s about five or six world banks that hold the loan on everything.”
“That’s a myth,” said Milo.
“No, she’s right,” said Aldrin. “Money’s no different from anything else. It forms systems along paths of least resistance and collects in places. Those places, the banks, are the only ones with the muscle to pull off what we’re trying to do here.”
“What, then,” said Milo, “we don’t cooperate, they come and put a bullet in us?”
“I don’t know,” said Aldrin, eyes darkening. “Just don’t make trouble. Play the game, and try to improve your hand. In the meantime, let’s do our best.”
The custodian arrived with his rolling tool closet and vanished with a nod into the office.
“We’re in a whole new reality,” Aldrin said, placing a firm hand on each of their shoulders. “Take some time to get your brain around it. I got you guys an apartment together. Go sit. Get something to eat. They’ll bring you clothes.”
“Together?” asked Milo. “How did you know? I mean, we just…last night was—”
“Jesus, you guys,” Aldrin laughed. “Everybody knew, except you. Now get outta here.”
Aldrin’s door shut behind them. Way down the hall, Libby and her babysitter came galloping their way, laughing.
“I knew,” said Kim, burying her head in Milo’s shoulder.
—
The world outside of central Iowa continued to fall apart.
A dirty bomb turned Seattle into a ghost town. The pharmaceutical industry finally hit a tipping point and overcharged itself out of existence. All over the world, people who needed medicine to stay alive began to sicken and die.
Milo stopped getting his asthma meds. Now, when he had an attack, he toughed it out.
The ARK compound developed into a small city. A city no one knew about and no one was allowed to fly over.
In the largest buildings, they designed the gigantic arkships themselves. This was partly Aldrin’s domain. Within a week, they had begun brainstorming spaceships based on living creatures. Their systems would breathe like lungs, flow like blood, see and hear and think like brains.
In other buildings, they studied ways for people—whole communities!—to live and work in space. One of the first things they decided was that people would be happier with fewer social restrictions. The need to restart the human race would make conventional marriage impractical. Human culture aboard the ships, it appeared, was going to be very “free.”
These experiments and conclusions had a heavy influence on the current ARK culture. ARK became like a party school that was really, really, really hard to get into.
In their dormitory, Milo and Kim lived in much the same way other families lived. They made friends. They celebrated holidays. During the day, Libby went to daycare, and Milo and Kim worked in the spacecraft-assembly building.
They were invited to parties. They usually went.
They were invited to join Free Love cohorts and politely declined. Milo and Kim had decided to be monogamous.
It was not a bad life, if you were able to ignore the fact that the world outside was doomed and you were probably doomed right along with it.
—
Milo found himself fighting depression. Not the full-on, soul-crushing kind that could paralyze you, but an abiding and sublime sadness that seemed to well up from across the ages.
It was the voices again. They had all lived lives on Earth, supposedly, in every age of human history. And now that part of history was going to end. Violently and badly.
There was a Fauvist painter who feared the death of Earth far more than he had his own death, of pneumonia. There was a deeply religious farm girl from a thousand years ago who didn’t mind her own death, because the world and God’s works would endure. But now even that was in danger.
Most of the voices were silent. That’s what depressed Milo—the silence. Eight thousand years of silent voices in his head, looking out through his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Kim asked him one night, catching him woolgathering by the apartment’s one window.
“I hear voices,” he told her bluntly, at last. “Usually, anyway.”
“No shit,” she said, taking his arm. “You talk about them in your sleep.”
—
A year passed.
Within the perimeter, the spaceships themselves began to take shape. Mighty frames, at first, like cages the size of city blocks, swarming with workers, prodded by cranes. There were four. The Looking Glass, an experimental ship, would be finished first and would tour the solar system in the greatest sea trial of all time before the others—the Avalon, the Atlantis, and the Summerland—left Earth just ahead of the comet.
Outside, the economy evaporated.