The system of camps where the young people chosen in the Casting of Lots would be taken for training and selection was going to be a roach motel for boys. Young men would go in, but they wouldn’t come out. Save for a few lucky exceptions.
He had been drifting toward the lodge for a couple of minutes, nagged by the vague sense that there was something he ought to be doing.
Talking to the media. Yes, that was it. Normally, camera crews would be homing in on him. And normally he would be trying to dodge them. But not today. Today he was willing to stand around and talk, to be Doc Dubois for the billions of people out there in TV land. But no one was coming after him. Anchors of many nations were gazing soulfully into their teleprompters, intoning prepared remarks. Journalists of lesser stature—tech bloggers and freelance pundits—were filing their reports. Doob noticed a familiar face, Tavistock Prowse, off in a corner of the parking lot. He had set up a tablet on a tripod, aimed its camera at himself, and clipped on a wireless mike, and was delivering some kind of a video blog entry, probably for the website of Turing magazine, which had employed him for these many years. Doob had known him for two decades. He looked terrible. Tav had showed up this morning. He didn’t have the credentials or the access to get the advance warning, so all of this was news to him. Doob had pinged him a few times last night, on Twitter and Facebook, trying to give him a heads-up so that his old friend wouldn’t be wrong-footed by the announcement, but Tav hadn’t responded.
It didn’t seem like a great moment to be doing an impromptu interview with Tav and so Doob pretended he had not seen him. He flashed his credentials at the Secret Service guys stationed at the lodge’s entrance, but this was just to be polite—they knew who he was and had already pulled the door open for him.
He passed the elevators and climbed the stairs to the room, just to get blood moving in his extremities. Amelia had left the door ajar. He hung up the DO NOT DISTURB placard, locked the door behind him, and collapsed into a chair. She was still at the window, leaning back perched on its broad rustic sill. This side of the lodge was facing away from the sun, but the light of the sky came in and illuminated her face, showing the beginnings of lines below her eyes, around her mouth. She was second-generation Honduran American, some kind of complicated African-Indian-Spanish melange, big eyed, wavy haired, alert, birdlike, but with that essentially positive nature that any schoolteacher needed to have. It was a good trait in current circumstances.
“Well, that’s over,” she said. “It must be a big load off of your mind.”
“I have ten interviews in the next two days,” he said, “explaining the whys and the wherefores. But you’re right. That’s easy, compared to breaking the news.”
“It’s just math,” she said.
“It’s just math.”
“What about after that?” she asked.
“You mean, after the next couple of days?”
“Yeah. Then what?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” he admitted. “But we have to keep gathering data. Refining the forecast. The more we know about when the White Sky is going to happen, the better we can plan the launch schedule, and everything else.”
“The Casting of Lots,” she said.
“That too.”
“You’re going, aren’t you, Dubois?” She never called him by his nickname.
“Beg pardon?”
Irritation flashed over her face—unusual, that—and then she focused on him, and she gradually became amused. “You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what, Amelia?”
“Obviously, you’re going.”
“Going where?”
“To the Cloud Ark. They’re going to need you. You’re one of the few who can be useful up there. Who can actually help its chances of survival. Be a leader.”
It really hadn’t occurred to him until she said it. But then he saw that it was probably true. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, “I think I would rather croak down here. With you. I was thinking we could come up here, camp out on the rim, and watch it. It’s going to be the most amazing thing ever.”
“A real hot date,” Amelia said. “No, I think I’ll be spending that day with my family.”
“Maybe you and I could be family by then.”
Tears gleamed in the pouches beneath her eyes, and she ran a finger under her nose. “That has got to be the strangest proposal ever,” she said. “The thing is, Dubois, that my husband is going to be in orbit and I’m going to be in California.”
“I could look for a way to—”
She shook her head. “They will never, ever agree to bringing a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher up to the Cloud Ark.”
He knew she was right.
“A frozen embryo, though—that seems like a possibility.”
“That has got to be the strangest proposition ever,” Doob said.
“We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger.”
So it was that, half an hour after Doc Dubois had listened with high intellectual skepticism to the soothing speech of Clarence Crouch, and picked it apart logically in his mind, proving to himself that it was just a comforting sop for the bereaved billions, a distraction to keep them busy with sex during the two years they had left, he was in Amelia’s arms, and she in his, as they got busy making an embryo for him to carry up into space for implantation in some other, unknown woman’s womb.
He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.
DINAH WAS GLAD NOT TO HAVE BEEN ON THE PLANET WHEN THE Crater Lake announcement was being made. She sat alone in her workshop, peering out her window past the craggy black silhouette of Amalthea at the luminous blue limb of the Earth below. She knew the time of the announcement and she knew how long it was supposed to last. She chose not to watch the video feed. It hit her as strange that the Earth itself did not change its appearance in any way. Down below, seven billion people were hearing the worst news imaginable. They were going through a collective emotional trauma unknown in the history of the human race. Police and military were being deployed in public spaces to “maintain order,” whatever that meant. But Earth looked the same.
Her radio started beeping. She looked down, blinked away tears, and saw Alaska, bent over the curve of the world far to the north.
WE ARE PROUD THAT YOU ARE UP THERE
She recognized her father’s fist—his touch on the Morse key—as easily as his smell or his voice. She returned:
I WISH THAT I COULD SEE YOU AGAIN
AUNT BEVERLY IS SOWING SOME FLATS OF POTATOES. WE WILL BE FINE.
She cried for a while.
QSL, he signaled, which was a Q code meaning, in this case, “Are you still there?”
She sent QSL back, meaning “Yes.”
She knew that the purpose of Q codes was to make communication more efficient, but she understood now that they could serve another purpose. They could enable you to eke out a few scraps of useful information when words were too difficult.
YOU BETTER GET TO WORK KIDDO
AND YOU SHOULD STOP POUNDING THAT KEY AND HELP