“It’s not gonna kill you, is it? If he’s got a big yellow scarf over his left shoulder, he’s the king. Bow lower in that case.”
“Thanks. Anything else?”
Sitting next to Doob was Mario, their photographer: a man in his thirties with a short, dark mustache, a New York accent, and no expectation whatsoever of being picked for the Cloud Ark. On the flight over he had divided his time between reading his own copy of the same dossier and playing a video game on his phone. He had been on many more of these than Doob or Tav. Getting into the spirit of things, he pocketed his phone and piped up: “People are going to hand you things. Some of them might be really crusty and old and funny smelling. Those things are probably really important. Really important.”
“Then why are they—”
“Because they believe you are going to take it all up into space and preserve it.”
“Oh.”
“So if anyone hands you anything, even if you have no idea what on God’s green Earth it might be, look impressed, bow, take it carefully, admire it, and then hand it off to the helper kid.”
“Helper kid?”
“People have been deputized to follow you around and help you carry all of the priceless national treasures that are going to be bestowed on you. They’ll look after the stuff and bring it all back here to the chopper so you can keep your hands free for making those little bows and shaking hands with the king or whatever. As soon as we get back to the aircraft carrier, we’ll throw it overboard.”
“Done this before, have you?”
“This is my seventy-third abduction run. Let’s go.” Mario stood up, carefully, letting his cameras and bags swing free, patting each one as it settled into place. Tav and Doob were undoing their seat belts and watching him for cues. Mario took two steps toward the door, which the pilot had just swung open. Cold damp air, scented with pine and coal smoke, was pouring in.
Doob almost rear-ended Mario as he stopped suddenly and turned around to look him in the eye. “One other thing.”
“Yes?” Doob said.
“What is about to happen is going to be incredibly fucking sad. Like maybe the saddest thing you have ever seen. Try to hold it together.”
Mario held Doob’s gaze until Doob nodded and said, “Thanks.” Then he turned around and bolted for the door so that he could get some good pictures of Dr. Harris emerging from the chopper.
Dr. Harris paused in the open hatchway. Spread out in front of him were at least two dozen people in red and yellow clothing, drawn up in readiness to extend greetings.
He put his palms together in front of his chest and bowed. In front of him, Mario’s shutter began to whirr. Behind him, faint digitized clicks spilled out of Tav’s phone as he live-tweeted it.
THE KING DROVE HIM UP THE MOUNTAIN IN HIS PERSONAL LAND Rover, Doob riding shotgun in the passenger seat on the left—for Bhutan, as it turned out, was a drive-on-the-left country. Mario sat in the back angling to get both of them in the photo, and Tav sat next to Mario muttering voice memos into his phone. The king apologized for today’s murky weather, which was blocking potentially spectacular views of high mountains all around.
“But I suppose that is a very small matter in the larger scheme of things,” he concluded.
They had stopped at an intersection in the town of Paro to let three boys kick a soccer ball across the road in front of them. Piled up on the road behind them was a small motorcade of lama-packed Toyotas.
“So much joy they take in this simple game,” the king mused. “They know, of course. All of them know about the disaster that is to come. When they are thinking of it, it makes them sad. But at other times, they are as you see them—oblivious.”
The boys got out of their way and the king eased forward into the intersection. The town had a surprisingly Alpine look to it, with deep brown weather-beaten structures of wood built on stone foundations.
“Until a few days ago,” the king went on, “they might have consoled themselves by imagining that they would be the ones chosen.”
“In the Casting of Lots,” Doob said.
“Yes.” The king shot him a keen look. “I was responsible for choosing, you know.” He glanced back at Tav. “That is off the record.”
“No, Your Highness, I did not know that,” Doob said.
“We received guidelines, I suppose you could call them. Saying that it was not a literal casting of lots. The choice is best not left to chance—we must send only the finest candidates. Bhutan has only two places in the Cloud Ark. It would be foolish to waste them on someone unable to represent our people. So, it was a selective process.”
“Most people have come to the same conclusion,” Doob said. “A pool of promising candidates is identified and then the choice is made from among them by some process which might be random—just so no one person carries the entire responsibility.”
“When you are a king you sometimes have such responsibilities whether you want them or not. In this case, though, I was able to involve some of the lamas. There are precedents for such a selection procedure in the way that certain reincarnate lamas are identified—the drawing of lots from an urn is sometimes used.”
Tav couldn’t resist asking from the backseat: “What does the doctrine of reincarnation have to say about the situation we are faced with now?”
The king smiled. “Mr. Prowse, this is only a journey of ten kilometers. I am taking it slow. If we had a road trip ahead of us of ten thousand kilometers—an enjoyable thought—I might be able to impart enough information to you about what reincarnation means to my people that we would be able to have an intelligent conversation about it.”
“Fair enough. Sorry,” Tav said, glancing up from the screen of his phone when his brain detected a pause in the king’s speech. “You have to understand, my job is to communicate with geeks. People who like math. So I was trying to imagine—”
“When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?”
“Yes.”
They turned off what Doob guessed was the main road and onto a fork that wound through a wooded hamlet above the river. This hooked onto a bridge that took them across a fast-running, cold-looking stream, green and milky with rock flour carried down from melting glaciers thousands of meters above their heads. Doob still couldn’t get over the fact that in a little more than a year those glaciers would be gone, the rock beneath them exposed for the first time in millions of years, and no scientist would be there to record it.
“We don’t believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis—the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That’s not what we mean by reincarnation at all.”
“What do you believe in, then?” Doob asked. Tav had lost interest and was belaboring his phone with his thumbs.
“A better analogy might be to a burned-down stump being used to ignite a new candle. But I won’t be able to give you a satisfactory answer, Dr. Harris. The teachings are esoteric—deliberately hidden from the uninitiated, specifically to prevent false interpretations. How an enlightened lama would think about the question of the seven billion is as far beyond my comprehension as are the quantum gravity theories that you study in your work.”
On this side of the river the ground rose almost vertically. The mountain barrier was cleft by a steep-sided valley that zigzagged up and away from them; the road leaped up into it and switchbacked up a stone cliff, fringed here and there with clusters of hardy evergreens that had found toeholds in crevices. Tendrils and torn veils of mist drifted across the face of the rock, providing occasional glimpses of a white tower, high above them, that had somehow been constructed on the precipice. It was one of those buildings, like some monasteries in Greece and Spain, whose whole point was to proclaim to those below, “This is how far we will go to achieve separation from the world.”
They drove up a road between long green terraces until the ground became too steep for wheels, and then the king stopped the Land Rover
and set the brake. “How’s your cardio?”
“Could be better,” Doob said, “but I don’t have a heart condition, or anything like that.”
“We are at about three thousand meters above sea level. You are welcome to await the chosen ones here in my vehicle, or—”
“I could use a walk, thanks,” Doob said, and glanced back at Mario, who shrugged philosophically, and at Tavistock Prowse, who appeared to be biting his tongue.
As they hiked up the trail, followed at a respectful distance by an entourage of lamas, children, photographers, and officers of the Bhutanese military, the king told Doob that the place they were going was called the Tiger’s Nest and that it was one of the most sacred sites in their religion, being the spot where Guru Rinpoche, the Second Buddha, had, in the eighth century, flown in from Tibet on the back of a tiger. Later a temple complex had been built around the caves where Padmasambhava (for apparently this was an alternate name for the same personage) had lingered to meditate.
Doob pleased himself by suppressing the urge to point out to the king that tigers were not capable of flight. This was only partly because he was gasping for air. He did not really care about the plausibility of the story, given the astonishing beauty of the place through which they were hiking. It was one thing to be fed a line of religious hokum in a desert hellhole that had nothing to recommend it as a site for tourism. But in order to go for a few hours’ walk with a king in Shangri-La, he would put up with any amount of fairy tales and metaphysical ramblings.
Small temples and devotional sites emerged from the mist every few minutes. They stopped part of the way up to enjoy a serving of chai in a little café with a fine view of the Tiger’s Nest. Tav, at the end of his rope physically, announced he would go no farther. Doob, Mario, and the king pushed on along the increasingly precarious walkway to the gates of the monastery itself. This, the king had already informed Doob, was off-limits, and in any case would have made a poor showing as a site for a ceremony, being rather cramped, dark, mazy, and ancient. Crag-dwelling hermit monks didn’t go in much for grand ceremonial courtyards.
Instead there was a sort of wide spot in the ledge just before the entrance to the white temple. Waiting there were the two Arkers, a boy and a girl, both in their early twenties, clad in what Doob assumed was traditional costume: For the boy, a robe that stopped at his knees, with a large white scarf over his shoulder and crossed to his hip. For the girl, a bolt of colorfully woven cloth, wrapped around her waist and falling to her ankles as a sort of columnar skirt, with a yellow silk jacket above that, draped with many necklaces of turquoise and other colorful stones.
Had she been here, Amelia, in a single glance, would have noticed a hundred details about the weaving, the embroidery, the jewelry, the drape of the fabrics, the choice of colors. She would have charmed the king right out of his saffron scarf. She would have climbed out of the Land Rover back in Paro and made friends with the soccer-playing boys. Amelia, not Doob, was the person who ought to be doing all of this.
But Amelia wasn’t going to the Cloud Ark and Doob was.
The boy and the girl—Dorji and Jigme, respectively—were backed up by some leathery oldsters in similar but simpler costumes, presumably their families, and several lamas. Prayer wheels were spinning, bells were chiming back inside the monastery, monks were chanting.
Everyone was crying.
They all bowed to their king.
Doob was glad Tav had not come this far.
Some kind of conversation took place in the local language. Doob didn’t even know what the name of that language was. Mario, oblivious to the emotional tenor of the proceedings, darted around snapping photographs, dropping to his knees or even throwing himself flat on the ground so that he could get mountain peaks or temple roofs in the backdrop of shots.
Doob, who had no idea what was going on, couldn’t take his eyes off the faces of the elders, who were doing their best to hold it together in the presence of their monarch but clearly suffering through ruinous emotional pain as they prepared to say goodbye to Dorji and Jigme forever. It was almost worse than watching your kid die, Doob thought. Then there was finality, certainty, a grave site to visit. Whereas these two were just going to hike off into the mist. A thunder of helicopter blades would announce their departure, and after that the family members would get vague assurances that Dorji and Jigme were going into space to carry forward the cultural legacy of Bhutan. Assurances that, Doob was pretty sure, were going to be fundamentally dishonest. These people were going to go to their deaths in fifteen months consoling themselves with that belief.
He now understood his job a lot more clearly. Why were the doomed people of Earth not going completely berserk? Oh, there had been some outbreaks of civil disorder, but for the most part people were taking it surprisingly calmly.
It was because events like this were happening in every city and province with more than a few hundred thousand people, and they were being stage-managed well enough to convince people that the system was working.
When he was a kid he had read the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, which hinged on the premise that the people of Athens had somehow been persuaded to select seven maidens and seven boys by lot, every few years, and send them to Crete to serve as monster chow. This had always struck him as the weakest point of what was otherwise a great yarn. Who would do that? Who would choose their kids by lot and send them to such a fate?
The people of Bhutan, that was who. And the people of Seattle and of the Canelones district of southern Uruguay and of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the South Island of New Zealand, all of which Doob was scheduled to visit in the next two weeks to collect the maidens and the boys they had chosen by lot. They would do it if they could be made to believe it would protect them.
As Mario had predicted, Doob was presented with some extremely old-looking artifacts by almost equally old-looking monks who smiled at him through tears and backed away, bowing, once Doob had accepted their prayer wheels and sutras and carvings into his hands.
The king took Dorji and Jigme by the hand, turning his back on the mourners or the well-wishers or whatever they were, and nodded at Doob as if to say “your move.”
Doob bowed one last time, then turned around and began leading them down the mountain.
DAY 306
Arklet 1, which had been sent up on Day 285, turned out to have a few teething problems with its maneuvering thrusters, and so the first bolo coupling in the history of the Cloud Ark took place between Arklet 2 and Arklet 3. Those had been launched on Days 296 and 300, respectively. These first three Arklets represented competing designs and so they all looked a little different. No matter; they were destined to be punched out in different factories and launched on different types of heavy-lift rockets from different spaceports, so minor variations in styling were to be expected. They all had the same general shape, though: a cylinder with domed end caps. That was for the ineluctable reason that they had to be pressurized in order to perform their basic function of keeping humans alive, and pressure sooner or later made everything round. Dinah thought that the pressure hulls looked like the big liquid propane tanks seen next to cabins and mobile homes in the rural mining camps where she had grown up. Others likened them to railway tanker cars, or stubby hot dogs.
They were just big aluminum cans with domes welded onto the ends. The walls of the can had a thickness of about a millimeter. The domes were a bit sturdier. The thickest and strongest parts of the hull were in the places where the domes overlapped the ends of the can. The analogy was to a plastic soda bottle, whose thin walls could be crumpled in one hand when the lid was off, but which became amazingly stiff and strong when it was pressurized. Or at least that was what NASA was saying to people who were alarmed by the idea of living one millimeter away from the vacuum of space.
The first three arklets were launched “naked” and smooth, but the hundreds to follow would come up clothed in translucent fabric jackets, pleated and wrinkled dur
ing the passage through the atmosphere, protected beneath fiberglass fairings. Once in space the blanket would be inflated to form a flexible outer hull somewhat larger than the inner one. It was in that inter-hull space where food would be grown, making use of sunlight that would diffuse through the fabric. It was not clear yet whether each arklet could be self-sufficient in terms of food production—probably not—but growing some food was better than growing none. Having some green stuff on board helped reduce the load on the CO2 scrubbers, and having water between humans and space helped stop some incoming radiation.
One of the end caps sported a docking port, designated in NASA public-relations cant as the “front door.” It was a bit of a misnomer since it was the only door. Once sealed up inside the pressure hull, the occupants could only get out of it by docking the arklet to something with breathable air on the other side of it.
The opposite end of the arklet was called the “boiler room.” Mounted outside of it was the trash-can-sized nuclear generator that supplied the arklet with power. Around that were various fittings for connection of plumbing lines, electrical mains, cooling equipment, and the like, none of which would ever be used except in the case when a number of arklets decided to dock themselves together and form a semipermanent cluster.
Those sturdy, thick rings where the domes met the main body served as attachment points for anything of a structural nature—anything that would exert significant forces on the body of the arklet. Radiating from each of those rings were eight stubby, radial spokes, extending outward to halolike rings where thrusters and grappling equipment were attached. Those parts were shipped inside of the arklet, then, once it was in space, extracted through the docking port by spacewalkers and bolted on in zero gee. The halos also served to stiffen and stabilize the inflatable outer hull in arklets so equipped, but in the first three test units they just projected out into space like bicycle rims, studded with small thruster nozzles and laced through with plumbing.
Spanning the distance between the “front door” halo and the “boiler room” halo was a single long spindly member, hinged at the “front” or forward end so that it could, on command, snap up and out, projecting sideways from the arklet for a distance of about ten meters. Mounted to the end of this arm were a camera, a target, and an electromechanical grappling device, collectively known as the Paw. A cable ran from the Paw back down the length of the arm to a reel near the docking port, where 250 meters of it were wound up like thread on a spool. The arm, the Paw, the rope, and the reel were all there to achieve a specific maneuver, never before attempted, denoted in official NASA engineering documents as the Bolo Coupling Operation but referred to everywhere else as the High Five.
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