Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  DAY 260

  “You’re going, Dr. Harris,” said Julia Bliss Flaherty.

  From time to time Doob became distracted by the sheer oddity of the fact that he now met with the president on a regular basis. It was a lot less weird, in the big scheme of things, than the fact that the moon had exploded and that everyone was going to die. But his mind, born and raised in a world free of such prodigies, was more comfortable being freaked out by little things, such as talking to the president. In the Oval Office. With her science advisor Pete Starling on one side and the White House communications director on the other. And a butler pouring ice water into crystal tumblers.

  He saw the usefulness of the butler. But what was the point of having the communications director here? Margaret Sloane was good at her job, and the perfection of her grooming was a perpetual source of wonderment, but it had become pretty clear that she was out of her depth in any technical discussion beyond “big rocks from space are dangerous.”

  They were all looking at him as if he was expected to say something.

  What had been the president’s words? You’re going.

  Did that mean he was on his way out? Going to be replaced by someone younger and more web-savvy, like Tav Prowse?

  Into the awkward silence, Margaret Sloane poured an explanation. “Your skills and your presence have done so much to calm the waters. To give the people of the United States, and of Earth, something to pin their hopes on in the guiding concept of Our Heritage. Your willingness to roll up your sleeves, go to places like Moses Lake, Baikonur, the rocket factories—that has all been so appreciated. But we feel that the time has come—”

  “To replace me with a fresh face, I get it,” Doob said. “To tell you the truth, that’s fine. I would like to spend more time with my kids and my new wife. Tav will do a great job.”

  For once, the president looked flummoxed. Her eyes flicked toward Margaret.

  “That’s not where we were going with it at all,” said Margaret. “We need you—the people of the world need you—to take the next step—to advance to a higher level.”

  “We are asking you,” said the president, a bit testy with Doob’s slowness and with Margaret’s breathy and roundabout phrasings, “to travel into space on or about Day 360, and to become part of the population of the Cloud Ark.”

  “I don’t want to go!” Doob blurted out. It was rare for him to forget himself in that way, so he then just sat for a few moments, stunned by his own ineptitude.

  “Dr. Harris,” said the president after a few moments, “as you probably know from your high school civics class, the person who sits where I’m sitting has a lot of powers. One of them is that I can grant reprieves and pardons for convicted criminals. Every inmate who goes to the execution chamber in Texas goes there in part because I made the decision not to pardon him or to commute his sentence. I have never exercised that power in the case of a death row inmate. In effect, however, I am exercising it in your case now.”

  The president paused there for a moment, and Doob became aware that she was waiting for his attention.

  He was staring at a flower arrangement on the table in front of him. Wondering how long it would be before anyone cultivated flowers on the Cloud Ark. He reached for his tumbler and took a sip of water.

  J.B.F. unnerved him when she was like this. It took a certain conscious and deliberate act of will for him to peel his eyes off the flowers and look up into her eyes. They stared back at him wide and unblinking.

  “By virtue of being on the surface of this planet, you are under a death sentence,” said the president. “I just pardoned you. You can go into space and live. I cannot. Do you understand that, Dr. Harris? I cannot even pardon myself in this case without flagrantly violating the Crater Lake Accord, which makes national leaders and their families ineligible. Now, what the hell is your problem?”

  Doob’s honest answer, had he voiced it, would have been most impolitic: I have become convinced that the Cloud Ark scheme cannot possibly succeed. I have been playing along in public just to keep people happy. I would rather die quickly on the ground with my loved ones than slowly, alone, in space.

  “There are others who deserve it more than I do,” he said. And in the same moment he cursed himself for saying something so lame. So easily refuted. Because in all honesty he was a fine choice for inclusion on the Cloud Ark’s roster.

  “I couldn’t disagree more!” exclaimed Pete Starling, with a nervous chuckle. “Doob, you’re going to be so useful up there, I’m afraid you’ll never get a moment’s rest! You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn. You can pivot from working on astrophysics problems, to teaching the young Arkers, to podcasting to folks on the ground, without skipping a beat!”

  Doob turned to look into Pete Starling’s eyes as he was saying those words and understood, with a shock like diving into cold water, that Pete was lying.

  Not about Doob’s usefulness. In that he was sincere. He was lying about something more fundamental.

  He didn’t believe that the Cloud Ark was going to work any more than Doob did.

  He needed Doc Dubois to go up there and lie for him.

  Now, Doob was a scientist who had spent decades of his life training in a particular discipline, namely, to seek and to speak the truth. Even among hard scientists—a notoriously blunt crowd—he had a reputation for saying what he thought. Never mind whose feelings he wounded, whose careers got damaged as a result. This seemed to come across, somehow, on camera. The very reason that so many people trusted him when he went on TV was that he was a straight shooter, he said things that offended the powerful, he stirred things up, and he didn’t care. Certain of those moments had been enshrined forever in YouTube clips and Reddit memes: taking down a Republican senator who didn’t believe in evolution, destroying a climate change denier in an impromptu sidewalk confrontation, reducing a movie star to tears on the Today show by telling her that her stand against childhood vaccination made her personally responsible for the deaths of thousands of babies.

  So, in a way, there were two questions in his head at the same time: whether he would lie, and whether he could lie.

  As to the first question, was it okay for him to lie if it would make billions of people go to their deaths a little happier?

  As to the second, would people sense it? Would they detect a shift in the tone of his voice, the set of his face, when he was just standing there in front of the camera talking shit?

  That was the real question. Whether he could pull it off. Because if he couldn’t pull it off—if he couldn’t lie convincingly—then there was no point in even trying.

  And he was pretty sure that he couldn’t do it.

  One of the ice cubes in Doob’s glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing.

  Doob thought of Sean Probst, now half a year into his quest to fetch a big piece of ice. He couldn’t believe it had been that long already.

  You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up.

  He remembered people asking difficult questions around the time of Sean’s departure for the L1 gate. What the hell was this crazy billionaire doing? Clearly, it was not part of the official plan. The official plan did not seem to recognize a need for a huge piece of ice. But Sean Probst believed it was so important that he was willing to go up there personally and take care of the problem. There was a good chance he would die in the process, or come back so broken from radiation exposure and long-term weightlessness that his health would never recover. And so people had asked Doob what he thought Sean was thinking. And Doob, who hadn’t studied it at the time, had answered vaguely, saying that water was always a good thing to have in space: you could drink it, grow crops with it, use it for radiation shielding, split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or pipe it through hoses to radiate excess heat into space. All of which was quite true, but sort of begged the question. It was so blindingly obvio
us that NASA must have thought of it already. What additional demand for water was Sean Probst seeing that NASA had failed to notice, or turned a blind eye to?

  Later Doob had figured it out based on background conversations with people at Arjuna and scuttlebutt reaching him through friends working on the planning of the Cloud Ark. It was all about propellant. The Cloud Ark would have to burn a lot of it. Sean didn’t think they had enough.

  So he had gone up there and done something about it.

  Because Sean wasn’t a talker. He was a doer. And as such he didn’t have to agonize, as Doob was doing now, about what he was going to say. What his public stance was going to be. How he was going to be positioned and perceived.

  “That’s a hundred days from now,” Doob said.

  He’d been silent for so long that the other occupants of the Oval Office were a bit startled. J.B.F.’s attention had wandered to a tablet on her desk, and Pete Starling was looking out the window.

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” said the president, turning that gaze back upon him. But he no longer felt intimidated by it. He was going to go somewhere where she could never look at him again.

  “This is 260,” Doob said. “You said you wanted me to go up there around 360.”

  “Yes,” said Maggie Sloane, relaxing into an entirely new posture. “That’s not the first wave—which is going to be more exploratory, more of a dress rehearsal—but it would be the first real wave of Arkers going into space, and our thought was that we would embed you with them. You could partake of their experiences and show the people of Earth what a day in the life of an Arker consists of. Providing a sense of continuity.”

  Holy shit, Doob thought. Seven years a Ph.D. candidate, two postdocs at major European research institutions, a tenured position at Caltech, shortlisted for a Nobel Prize, and here he was, with the fate of the human race at stake, being positioned as an observer to provide a sense of continuity.

  “I can do that,” he said. And some other things as well, as long as I’m up there.

  What were they going to do, yank him back down to the planet?

  The worst they could do was to stop broadcasting his stuff, and that would be fine with him. There had to be something he could do up there that would be more useful than talking into a camera. Sean Probst had identified one problem with the Cloud Ark and taken action to remedy it; in a hundred days, what could Doob learn that might be useful? What actions could he take, once he got up there, to give the whole thing a better chance of success?

  “A hundred days,” he said. “Three months for me to spend with my wife and my kids and my embryo.”

  “Embryo?” Pete Starling repeated, not getting it.

  Margaret Sloane, mother of three, picked it up instantly. “Amelia’s pregnant?” she asked, with the warm smile that, until Zero, had been the normal response to such blessed events. Nowadays, people’s reactions were a bit more complicated, of course; but it was hard to shed old habits.

  “Not anymore,” Doob said. “We froze the embryo. My only condition is that it travel up into space with me.”

  “Consider it done,” said the president, in a tone, and with a look, that told them the meeting was over.

  DAY 287

  “Got any tater-related humorous items for me?” Ivy asked. “’Cause oh, man, could I ever use some comic relief.”

  Dinah wasn’t sure how she felt about Ivy looking to her doomed family as a source of casual amusement, but as they were only some 433 days away from the end of the world, she didn’t really think there was much point in getting shirty about it.

  The situation did breed a kind of coarseness toward those stuck on the ground. It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved. Dinah had begun to hear instances of dark humor over the radio, and had noticed herself being at least a little bit amused by it.

  Nor was that dark humor restricted to Arkers, as Dinah’s family demonstrated. They were intelligent people—you had to be, to do what they did—but they went in for a certain brand of mining-camp humor, heavy on the practical jokes and novelty items that you’d never see in a boardroom or a faculty lounge. And once they’d latched on to something that they thought was funny, they’d never let go of it. A half-serious Morse code message about planting a flat of potatoes, transmitted by Rufus shortly after the Crater Lake announcement, had sprouted into a whole subgenre of running jokes about the preparations that the MacQuarie clan was making for the Hard Rain. In her occasional care packages from the ground, Dinah was now accustomed to finding fingerling potatoes, still with real dirt on them, or plastic parts for Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead toys. She even had a rusty old Idaho license plate duct-taped to the wall of her shop now, emblazoned with the slogan FAMOUS POTATOES, courtesy of Rufus, who’d gotten it from a mining industry pal in that state’s silver-rich panhandle.

  “Is that a no?” Ivy asked.

  “Oh, I have potato shit all over the place now,” Dinah said. “I’m just no longer sure that they’re joking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At first I thought it was their way of saying, ‘We know we are screwed, no point in being babies about it, let’s laugh it up until the end.’ But now I’m starting to ask myself what it is they’re doing. I mean, they’re up there in the Brooks Range with all of this equipment. They could drive down to Fairbanks any time they feel like it, and from there go anywhere in the world. Check out the pyramids. See the Mona Lisa. Visit old friends and family. Instead they’re up in the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen, doing what?”

  “Prepping?” Ivy said.

  “That’s the only thing I can think,” Dinah said. “Prepping for a five- to ten-thousand-year stay.”

  “They’re not the only ones,” Ivy said.

  It took Dinah a few moments to catch her friend’s meaning. Then it was clear, just from the look on Ivy’s face. “Are you shitting me? Cal?”

  Ivy made just a suggestion of a nod with her eyes. “Mixed in with the stuff you’d expect from a fiancé—which is none of your business—he asks me questions about things like the comparative merits of lithium versus sodium hydroxide scrubbers. He requests copies of Luisa’s PDFs about the sociology of persons confined in small places for long periods.”

  “He can’t think you’re not going to notice that.”

  “Sure. I’m going to read between the lines.”

  “What do you suppose he’s thinking?”

  “Well,” Ivy said, “he does have sole authority over a huge submarine designed to ride out global thermonuclear warfare. And when the United States ceases to exist, I guess there’ll be no one above him, chain-of-command-wise. What’s a commander to do?”

  “But how would it work?”

  “I think a lot depends,” Ivy said, “on whether the oceans boil dry. If I were him, I’d make for the Marianas Trench and keep my fingers crossed.”

  “I would think it would be even harder than staying alive in space.”

  Ivy looked at her friend with dry amusement.

  “What?!” Dinah said.

  “Staying alive in space is going to be a piece of cake, remember?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot . . .” To put on my makeup. “It would present some fascinating challenges,” she corrected herself, switching to her best NASA PR voice.

  “I think it’s like what we are doing,” Ivy said. “You have to break it down into a lot of little things and solve them one at a time, or you get overwhelmed.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “Yeah.” Ivy rolled her eyes.

  “What’s on your mind? Other than the need for comic relief?”

  “You. How you’re doing. Your health,” Ivy said.

  “Oh my god, is this an actual meeting? Are we on official business here?”

  Ivy ignored her. “You haven’t been logging much T2 time.”

  T2—the second torus, which Rhys had been responsible for building—had
started to spin on Day 140. Its simulated gravity was one-eighth of Earth normal, only a little greater than that on the first torus. It was bigger and spun more slowly, which Rhys hoped would make it a little more comfortable. Simply being in it helped counteract some of the negative effects of living in space for extended periods of time. People who lived without gravity suffered a gradual loss of bone density and muscle mass. Eyes went out of shape and vision deteriorated. Space station crews tried to fight this by using exercise machines that placed stress on the bones, but these were stopgap measures meant for people who were only going to be in space for a few months. Dinah, Ivy, and the other ten members of the original Izzy crew had now been up here for close to a year. During the first few months after Zero, no one had paid much attention to long-term health issues. Everyone was going to die. Scouts were showing up dead on arrival. It had been all emergency, all the time. But during the months of hamster tube building and structural consolidation, the life scientists had been quietly having their say. This wasn’t the first time Dinah had been nudged in recent weeks about her failure to spend more time in the simulated gravity field of T2.

  “It’s just hard to go back and forth between gravity and no gravity,” Dinah said. “It makes me barf. And none of my stuff is in T2.” She was referring, as Ivy would know, to the shop where she worked on her robots.

  “But isn’t that mostly remote work? Writing code?”

  “Yeah, I just like to be where I can see them out the window.”

  “Don’t they have little cameras on them?”

  Dinah had no answer for that.

  “Whatever you’re doing here,” Ivy continued, “you could do from a cabin in T2, where the gravity would build your bones.”

  “It’s also Rhys,” Dinah admitted. “Things have been a little weird with him and I just don’t want to—”