One day, after Tekla had left for work, Dinah took one of the chocolate bars she had brought up from Earth, wrote her email address on the wrapper, and handed it off to a Grabb, which she then put out the airlock. She piloted the Grabb across Amalthea’s surface to the mooring point where Tekla’s Vestibyul was cabled in place, then made it climb along the cable (which was easy, it had an algorithm for that) and clamber into the Vestibyul, where it took up position and waited, holding the chocolate bar out in a free claw.
When Tekla came back at the end of her shift, Dinah got the satisfaction of watching her unwrap the bar and eat the chocolate. She held up one hand and sort of waved through the plastic. Dinah couldn’t resolve her facial expression.
The Grabb was still in the Vestibyul, and would remain trapped there until Tekla’s next departure. Seeing Tekla float over in that direction, Dinah turned to her computer and switched on the video feed from the Grabb. She was fascinated to see Tekla’s face, clearly resolved, float into the frame.
She didn’t look that bad. Dinah had been expecting someone who looked like a concentration camp survivor. But she appeared to be getting enough food.
Of course, she could not see Dinah. And there was no audio hookup. Since there was no sound in a vacuum, space robots didn’t come with microphones or speakers.
Tekla was just staring at the Grabb, impassive, perhaps wondering whether it could see her.
Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb’s free claw, and waved.
Tekla’s green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion.
Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?
Tekla held up the candy bar wrapper. On it, beneath Dinah’s email address, she had written NO EMAIL.
What did that mean? That she lacked an email address? That her tablet couldn’t receive it?
Or was she imploring Dinah not to communicate with her that way?
The Grabb had a headlamp, a high-powered white LED that she could switch on by hitting a key on her keyboard. Dinah turned it on, saw the glow on Tekla’s face, the highlights on the lenses of her eyes.
Did the Russians even use the same Morse code as Americans?
Tekla had to know it. She was a pilot.
Dinah made the light flash with the dots and dashes for M O R S E.
Tekla nodded, and Dinah could see her mouth making the word “Da.”
Dinah signaled:
DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?
The faintest trace of a smile came over Tekla’s lips. It was not a warm kind of smile. More bemused.
She held up what was left of the chocolate bar, and pointed to it.
Dinah returned:
TOMORROW
Tekla nodded. Then she turned away, her buzz-cut blond hair glinting in the light of the LEDs, and drifted back into the middle of her onion.
“FIVE PERCENT” WAS HOW IVY BEGAN THE NEXT MEETING IN THE Banana.
It was full to capacity: the original twelve-person crew of Izzy, the five who had come up on the Soyuz on A+0.17, and Igor, the Scout who had come in from the cold when his suit had failed. He, Marco, and Jibran had prepped for the meeting by jury-rigging some fans to blow more air through the space, so it wouldn’t fill up with carbon dioxide. This had prompted Dinah to joke that perhaps all meetings should take place in hermetically sealed rooms, so that they could only go on for so long. No one, with the possible exception of Rhys, had seen it as funny. Anyway, the roar of ventilation was even louder than it usually was in space, and so Ivy had to speak up and use her Big Boss Voice.
“This is Day Thirty-Seven,” Ivy went on. “That’s ten percent of a year. If it’s true that we had two years from Zero to the Hard Rain, then we have already burned through five percent of the time during which we can expect to receive any help from Earth. Five percent of the time needed to turn this installation into a society and an ecosystem that is sustainable indefinitely.”
Ivy was standing with her back to the big screen, so she couldn’t see the reaction of the Arkitects down below, in some conference room at the other end of the video link. For today’s meeting, there were three of them: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, who was still the administrator of NASA; Dr. Pete Starling, the president’s science advisor; and Ulrika Ek, a Swedish woman who had worked as a project manager for one of the private commercial space startups until recent events had forced a career change: she was now coordinating the activities of several different space agencies and private companies as they worked on the Cloud Ark. Apparently, she had become the Arkitect-in-chief.
“Apparently” being the key word, since every time Dinah had any contact with the ground she was reminded of how little she understood of what was happening there. On one level she was one of the luckiest people in the human race. She was going to get to stay alive. At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues.
She’d compared notes on this with Ivy, who had confirmed that even she had little to go on, and what she did hear contradicted itself from hour to hour.
It had all become Kremlinology. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the only way for Westerners to guess what was going on there was to look at the lineup of dignitaries on Lenin’s Tomb in the May Day parade, and riddle it out from the seating chart and who shook hands with whom. Now Dinah was doing the same thing with these three faces on the screen. Sparky was no use. He’d spent so much time in space that he had developed a kind of thousand-light-year stare. He was famous for being oblivious to the political side of things.
His opposite in that respect was Pete Starling. Pete’s job was to mutter scientific explanations into the president’s ear. He’d been doing rather a lot of it in the last thirty-seven days. He had a background running big science programs at universities, climbing the ladder from Mankato State to Georgia Tech to Columbia to Harvard in a mere ten years. Why was he sitting in on this meeting? There was little he could contribute. He must be here as the eyes and ears of J.B.F.
But why should J.B.F. care? No decisions were going to be made here; it was just a status report, a check-in.
As soon as Ivy finished her sentence, the corners of Pete’s mouth turned down. He looked at Ulrika Ek, a somewhat matronly woman in her late forties, extremely good at her job, according to Rhys. On the high-def video feed, Dinah saw the slightest deflection of her eyes, noticing the turn of Pete Starling’s head, but not exactly acknowledging it.
Ulrika clearly didn’t like him. But there was a reason she was a well-regarded project manager. “Ivy,” she said, “just for clarity, when we speak of ‘this installation’ we’re using the term in an elastic sense. Of necessity.”
Ivy turned to look at the screen. “‘Installation’ probably isn’t the right word,” she admitted. “Since it’s not installed anywhere.”
Pete Starling spoke up. “I believe that where Ulrika is going is that the Cloud Ark is a fluid concept that may paradigm-shift beyond recognition as we proceed adaptively through the next ninety-five percent of the timeline.”
Ivy’s brow furrowed. Something was going on, some kind of political tussle down on the ground. It was important to people like Pete.
“This is not efficient use of time,” Fyodor said. “I am working to extend truss to receive Pioneers.” Fyodor’s