Milo and Kim didn’t talk about it. Kim refused. On the outside, she clung to a prim belief that chance or justice would intercede and at least deliver her kid. On the inside, Milo could tell, she was coming apart. Instead of talking about it, they drank. They didn’t hit the bars; they just drank. For a while they supplanted talk with lovemaking. And then the lovemaking grew sad, and slowed, and stopped, almost with a shrug. Then Libby began spending nights in their bed, between them.
The world had already ended, thought Milo. You could see it on people’s faces; they had a stretched-out, jittery look to them now, as if something had bitten them and they didn’t know what. You started coming around corners and finding people crying, and they’d look ashamed and hurry away.
Milo didn’t cry. But he started having asthma attacks that were so bad they knocked him out. He told no one.
In his head—or in his soul, wherever that was—certain voices chimed in, trying to be helpful. A fisherman on Krakatoa who had seen the end of the world already, in a volcanic blast heard round the world. An eight-year-old who had seen the plague approach her village, take her family, and then crawl down her own throat. A banker who took too many risks, leaping from the roof of the Grain Exchange.
It’s ended before, they said. Who would suppose it shouldn’t end again?
This cheered Milo up a little, believe it or not.
—
Most nations dissolved into chaos and rioting. The Internet gasped, flashed, and went silent.
Milo walked into the lab one morning to find Kim and Aldrin in the midst of a heated argument. Both were red-faced and turned away from each other the moment they glimpsed him.
“What did I miss?” Milo asked.
“Nothing import—” Aldrin began.
“What did I miss?” Milo roared, kicking over the nearest chair. “I’d appreciate it if one of the two of you would have the courtesy to not treat me like an idiot.”
“He,” said Kim, her voice shaking, pointing a finger at Aldrin, “says he’ll make a place on the Summerland for us, if we’ll make him…”
She couldn’t continue.
“Make him what?” asked Milo.
“Part of your family,” said Aldrin. He was trying to be dignified, with his hands folded behind his back.
“?‘Part of your family’?” said Milo, advancing. “Sounds like pig Latin for ‘I want to fuck your wife.’?”
(This, piped up the Egyptian mathematician, is yet another way the world ends.)
“It’s not that simple,” said Aldrin, “or that coarse.”
They were nose-to-nose.
Kim stepped up beside them, looking worried. She’d never seen Milo hit anyone, but he sure looked ready to now, and that wouldn’t help anything. They didn’t tolerate violent people at ARK.
Something quite complicated was happening in Milo’s mental wilderness just then. A strange inner voice was shouting at him, almost as if thousands of previous lives were trying to give him advice. Behind his anger, his soul was trying to be wise.
The thousand voices convinced Milo to be silent and thoughtful for a minute.
When he spoke, this is what Milo said:
“Wayne, we love you. And with the crazy future coming down on us, your suggestion even makes some sense. But I have a problem with something. Why didn’t you come to both of us with this…proposal, if you will? But more so, how can we possibly get around the fact that it sounds like you’re trying to use Libby, and your influence, to get Kim into your bed? That doesn’t sound like you. It’s not the Wayne Aldrin I know. Why don’t you answer those questions, and then I’ll decide whether to break your teeth with a wrench.”
Aldrin nodded.
“Thank you for asking,” he said. “In your way, you’ve been patient. The answer to the really important question is: I haven’t changed in that way. I am not trying to get you to prostitute yourselves or to hold Libby hostage.”
“Then what could you possibly mean?” asked Kim.
“They have announced a change,” said Aldrin. “Only to the preselected team leaders. For whatever reason, the policy wonks have decided to give extra chances to our immediate families. I think things are getting a bit shaky. They need to make sure the teams stay cohesive and keep working, so they’re throwing the team leaders a bone.”
Milo’s asthma launched an attack.
“Go on,” he wheezed.
“Well, that’s it. I’m not trying to get in bed with your wife. I’m trying to get your family aboard an ark.”
Milo could swear he read Kim’s mind at that moment. One thought, one priority: Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby…
God, he didn’t want to do this.
They were his family, goddammit.
“We’ll do it?” he said, looking at Kim.
Kim practically burst with relief. Rivers of tears.
“Yes,” she said.
Then they all just backed away, awkward, awkward, awkward, and did computer stuff and didn’t look at one another until lunchtime, when the three of them went to a notary office over in admin and got married by what was essentially a vending machine.
—
The comet appeared in the night sky.
“So beautiful,” you could hear people say. They crowded the hills around the arks at night. Every night, on blankets, as if waiting for fireworks. Couples, here and there. Larger groups, whole teams of spouses.
Milo, Kim, and Libby moved into Aldrin’s pod. It was more spacious, better appointed. “He has a dishwasher!” cried Libby, who obviously felt that this, above all, signaled some kind of evolution for their family.
Milo and Kim spent nights in Aldrin’s sleep chamber. Aldrin himself had the grace to sleep on the couch. They progressed through an uncomfortable cycle: At first, they didn’t make love in Aldrin’s bed, any more than they made love in their own. Then something desperate and wordless got ahold of them, and they made love three nights in a row. Then they didn’t again. Kim actually shivered when Milo touched her.
“What’s the matter?” Milo whispered. “Afraid your husband will hear?”
“What’s the matter?” whispered Kim the first time Milo wouldn’t put out. “Afraid your husband will hear?”
Libby spent days playing with the dishwasher, rolling the little cart in and out. She looked at Aldrin like some kind of tall, friendly dog they had come to live with.
They explained nothing to her, out of sheer cowardice.
—
The second lottery began at nine in the morning, the same day that administration reported contact with the returning Looking Glass.
All was well. The ship had flown like a silver swallow.
The separate lottery for the leaders’ families offered an 80 percent chance. By nightfall, they knew Libby had drawn a seat. Kim went into the bathroom and cried. Not softly, but braying like a donkey.
“Why’d she even bother to go in the bathroom?” asked Aldrin, and the two husbands laughed together for the first time.
By nine P.M., they knew Kim’s seat was assured.
They all had a glass of wine in the kitchen. Even Libby.
By midnight, the passenger lists were complete. Milo was not on any of them.
No one knew what to say, so they said nothing.
—
In the middle of the night, Milo left.
It was something he had decided, weeks ago, to do if the lottery turned out as it had.