Ark

by Charles McCarry

  Admiral Henderson took custody of the apparatus that had been summoned into existence by Henry’s genius and dollars. If Henry’s prophecy of cataclysm was going to be fulfilled—and judging by the expressions on their faces, no one present seriously doubted that it would be—money was about to become worthless, along with just about everything else that had value on Earth simply because the world pretended that it did. What use could there possibly be for currency aboard the mother ship—or for that matter, for whatever and whoever survived on Earth?

  Within the hour, Henderson and an advance party of crew members were ferried into orbit aboard one of the Spaceplanes. Two more of these ships were parked on the tarmac. They had returned to Earth all but the one hundred space maidens who had decided to remain aboard—under one condition. Ng Fred, immune to the melancholy that bound the rest of us together, was amused by the message they sent him in this regard.

  “They took a vote,” he told us. “They will only fly if we send no men to join them.”

  Clementine, who up to this moment had been remarkably still, said, “What about the men you’ve been training for the mission?”

  “They stay behind.”

  Clementine said, “You mean to say you’ve bowed to the ultimatum?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Ng Fred asked. “Angus Henderson won’t launch without the women. The ship is their baby. They built it from scratch, on the ground and in orbit. They know it and care about it as nobody else does or possibly can. They’re indispensable.”

  “How are the men taking this?”

  “They’re disappointed. Men have feelings, too.”

  “What about your feelings?”

  “Frankly, a load has been lifted from my shoulders,” Ng Fred said. “I’ve always been of two minds about adding the men. They’re unpredictable, especially if they’re Chinese, and they make women unpredictable.”

  Melissa said, “All I have to say is, good move, girls.”

  “The girls think so, too,” Ng Fred said. “No more loudmouth thugs ordering them to do stupid things and beating them up in one way or another if they don’t obey.”

  “Forgive my asking,” Clementine said, “But doesn’t this raise a question about replacing the space maidens through natural increase?”

  “Yes, but it was easy to resolve.”

  “Of course—the embryos.”

  Amerigo answered. “The girls vetoed that,” he said. “As a matter of principle, the embryos aren’t sorted by race or ethnicity. You take what you get. The ladies are Han. They want Han babies, not funny-looking kids who are half something else.”

  “What an old-fashioned dilemma.”

  “Not really. The girls had thought it over. At their suggestion, the men have provided sperm samples. These have been labeled with DNA information and frozen. They will be loaded aboard the mother ship for future use.”

  Melissa said, “What a turncoat to your gender you are, Amerigo. You should be proud.”

  None of us, not even Henry, visited the mother ship. To me, and I think to most of the others, the ship, as soon as it was assembled in space, had become a concept, rather than an actuality. Even after it became visible as a glittering dot in the sky and an image on television screens, it remained beyond the reach of the mind—remote, untouchable, like everything else in the night sky. Yet it was something human beings had made while other human beings watched from five hundred miles below. It was as material, as earthly, and in its own way as familiar as a brick house on a suburban lot. Except that it wasn’t.

  2

  AS SOON AS THE LAST member of the crew was safely aboard the mother ship, Henry and I went home. As the desert flowed beneath the wings of the airplane, I felt in my bones that I would never look upon its monotony again. The thought filled me with sorrow. This was a surprise for any number of reasons. Always before, when something came to an end, I had asked, “What next?” and awaited the answer, knowing that it would sooner or later come into being. Not this time. There was no next thing except chaos and darkness. I upbraided myself for yielding to despair, and then absolved myself by blaming Henry for it, unjust and unintelligent as this was. He, too, was silent and withdrawn, and as usual, I caught his mood like a cold. In all our time in Mongolia he had said nothing more about a honeymoon. That was all right with me. After months in the wilderness, I wanted to be in New York—no tropic islands, no deserts, no artificial gravity. I had found out through research that mountains are not so idyllically safe as I had thought. The Rio Grande Rift, where the planet’s crust split apart thirty-five million years ago, ran through the Colorado Rockies. The Andes were nudged by the Nazca Plate just off the coast of South America, the Alps were being pulled asunder by tectonic forces, and the Caucasus, infested with pious bandits and kidnappers, was not a destination for sweethearts.

  We returned to Manhattan. For our first anniversary, we went out to dinner, walking to the restaurant inside our ring of chaps. We clinked wineglasses. We smiled into each other’s eyes. I touched Henry’s wedding band and for once he got the signal and touched mine, too. He drank his customary dram of champagne. I did rather better by the Oregon pinot noir that came with the three or four mouthfuls of veal and the morel mushrooms and the dab of sauce and the herbal leaf that constituted the entrée. The politics of the veal, the cost of it, disturbed me. I could not help but think that there was something deeply wrong about paying so much money for food. I could have bought a hundred cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli for the price of the morsels of veal on each of our plates, and been more pleased with the taste. Alas, I had no place to hide the canned goods from Henry, who was as offended by the sight of a Chef Boyardee can as I was put off by the medallion of veal. Nevertheless, I ate it and said how good it was.

  We moved at last to Henry’s town house because it was at ground level instead of being the top floor of a skyscraper. At first I liked the change. It was wonderful to live with the art, to come to know it so well that you did not so much look at it as simply know it was there. But when Henry and I lived together, just the two of us, in the apartment, he was always present. At all times I could see him, hear him, smell him. Now he was swallowed by the house. I would rush through rooms, looking for him, listening for him. What if the end came all of a sudden, as it was bound to do? What if the roof collapsed between us, trapping Henry in one distant room, me in another, a mountain of debris or a wall of fire between us? When I wandered through the old-fashioned, labyrinthine house until I found him at last, I would smile like a starlet and say something cheery like, Oh there you are! Or Hi there! For an instant, his eyes would focus momentarily—Ah, it’s you! He would vouchsafe a fleeting smile, knowing exactly what I was up to, then slip back into his own thoughts.

  Henry was in this mode only in the daytime. We still catnapped the night away, waking often at more or less the same moments, and if Henry woke first I sometimes was wakened—I am not making this up—by a dream in which he called my name from a tremendous distance while I strained my eyes to find him and finally located him, a tiny figure stuck to a caramel-color landscape.

  One night I said, “I want to go back to the apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s home.”

  “The apartment is on the fortieth floor.”

  “So?”

  “Forty floors is a long way to fall.”

  I knew. Imagine the Event as it might be. We are in bed. It is pitch-dark, so dark that you cannot make out colors or shapes—no moon, no stars, no glow of incandescent light above the city. The building shakes a little, then harder, then violently. Windows break, rain blows in, we hear a noise the like of which no human being has ever heard before. Then we are inside a thick cloud of dust, we choke, we gasp for breath, we are thrown across the room, we fall to the floor. This hurts, but not for long. The floor disappears. Gravity seems to strengthen. We are falling through a cumulus of dust. We cannot breathe, we cannot move, we cannot feel our bodies. In our terror we
do not scream or call out the name of the one we love. For each of us, the other is already as good as dead. I think as I fall, of course I do, fool that I am. I try to remember how tall our building is, so that I can ask Henry how long it will take for us to fall to earth at thirty-two feet per second per second. My nose, my mouth, my eyes, my lungs are filled with dust. Will I suffocate before I hit the ground? Are such small mercies part of the plan, like the choir and the church bells in Henry’s dream? Will a great white light suddenly shine, will my father appear, wearing his brown tweed jacket with the leather buttons, and beckon me into the light with a loving smile? If Henry dies first, even by a second, will he be there beside my dad?

  How could anyone who knew anything about the history of extinction think such trusting thoughts?

  3

  THE SEASONS CHANGED. THE MOTHER ship and its escorts remained in orbit. The mother ship stopped transmitting video images to Earth. Admiral Henderson did not call home, nor did Henry call the ship. If you lived in a place—the Hsi-tau or rural New Mexico, say—where there was little artificial light, the naked eye perceived the mother ship in the night sky as a speck of tinfoil. Through a backyard telescope it was a blurry string of moonlets hanging inertly in near space. The public quickly lost interest in the flotilla and its mission. Most people had long since lost interest in what was to come. In their hearts, they did not believe in it. Natural catastrophes—meteors, flood or universal thirst, the death of species, fire or ice—that never came to pass were always being predicted.

  Who had time to listen to yet another cry of wolf? Media coverage withered in the absence of information and audience interest. Even Henry did not know exactly what was going on aboard his own ships. He thought this was a good thing. The mother ship’s mission had been designed to be completely independent. The ship and its crew were on their own, responsible for everything, without possibility of rescue—just like the United States of America had been. There was no Houston, no ground control, no spokesman the media could badger. Admiral Henderson’s powers of command were absolute. He and he alone would decide when to cut the umbilical cord. Meanwhile, he was acclimating his crew to the lower gravity aboard ship, and to the reality that they were living in isolation from the rest of the species and would go on doing so for the remainder of their lives and, most likely, the lives of several generations of their descendants. The programmed flight was a round trip to Neptune, a voyage of 1.6 billion miles. Even at flank speed with Henry’s revolutionary engines, that would take the psychological equivalent of forever. The mother ship would explore the solar system as it went along, seeking out likely spots for human colonization and opportunities for profit. The window for a flight to Mars and the outer planets opened every twenty-six months. This wouldn’t happen for another eleven months. Henderson had been to Mars before. He was a Mars enthusiast. He had written a book and given lectures proposing that mankind should become a two-planet civilization. Almost certainly he would want to make another landing, and establish a base. Another possibility was a colony on Earth’s own moon, assuming that the pilgrims could find enough hidden water to support life, or on one of Jupiter’s moons, probably Europa, which had an oxygen atmosphere and a crust of frozen water. Europa’s gravity was only about fifteen percent of Earth’s, but within the spheres in which colonists would live, it could be increased artificially, as it had been on the mother ship and aboard the Spaceplanes. The fusion reactors could produce the heat and melt the ice necessary for human beings to live on a moon whose temperature at the poles was minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The Spaceplanes would provide transport between the mother ship and the surface of the planets and moons of the solar system. The stars were out of reach of the technology now in Earth orbit. The nearest one, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, was 4.2 light-years distant from our sun. Even at the speed attainable by the mother ship’s brand-new ion thruster system, whatever that was, the journey to this star would take at least fifty thousand years. The otherworldliness of the mother ship’s technology might be routine stuff to Henry and the folks aboard ship, but it was a mystery to me. If there were beings on Proxima Centauri’s planets, the ship and its wonders might be Toys ’R’ Us to them.

  I didn’t quiz Henry on his thoughts on this matter. The mission was accomplished. By day he was idle, as if between jobs. In the marches of the night he was interested in the combination of him and me, a far more agreeable subject than the number of protons and electrons in a particular ion. I wasn’t such a fool as to trifle with what was by asking him questions whose answers would mean nothing to me.

  In daylight, Henry’s mind was completely elsewhere. Sometimes he smiled to himself. Sometimes he suddenly spoke a name or a thought. In other circumstances, or if he had been anyone but Henry, I might have sniffed his clothes for traces of somebody else’s perfume or kept an eye out for strands of silky, dyed blonde hair. Instead, I left him in peace. We dined together, and although I almost never won, we played chess. We watched movies. I no longer drank wine except at meals. It’s one thing to drink alone, another to be snookered while the person you love is stone-cold sober. For an hour first thing every day, we ran together in the park, usually just before daylight, right after we got out of bed. Whatever the time, the chaps were always with us—discreet, watchful, cunningly camouflaged. For the rest of the day, Henry folded his consciousness back into its chrysalis. He was waiting for the inevitable. The list of unanswered questions was not so very long: When would it happen, how would it happen? And what then? However, Henry’s possibilities were peculiar to himself, so I had no idea what revelation he was waiting for. Part of him was absent, and I missed being in the presence of the entire man. Insane as it was, under the circumstances, to wish my life away, I hoped that the hours and days that lay between the question he was asking himself and the answer he was waiting for would pass with the speed of light.

  If truth be told, I, too, was living a secret half life. Even when I was with Henry, even when I was writing, I thought of little else but my children. I don’t mean just the embryos to which Henry and I had contributed the necessary ingredients—not made, mind you, in any human way in the many, many times we had simulated conception—but also the child Bear had deposited in me. He or she—surely “she,” for I was now positive I had given birth to a female, because how could I have been condemned even by the most vengeful possible god to bring another Bear into the world? My daughter would now be almost as old as I had been when she was born. For most of her life I had forbidden myself to imagine her. I failed. She had been wandering for years in the outskirts of my consciousness—blue dress, supple little body, pretty little face, bouncing braid, cornflower eyes, sweet smile, quick mind, endearing giggle. She was another me, as my father, who loved me so helplessly, must have seen me when I was small. Was she looking for me? Is that why I kept catching these glimpses of her? Would she turn up one morning on the doorstep of this unfindable house and identify herself? Such prodigals showed up on doorsteps all the time, abandoned children who refuse to remain abandoned. Would she be so unmistakably herself, when she finally showed up, that no identification other than her mere materialization would be required? Would she love me in the flesh as she had loved me in my imagination, would she have sought me out in order to be with me at the end, to be cuddled and stroked and to whisper “Mommy”?

  4

  THE EARTHQUAKES STOPPED. ONLY THE most minor tremors were recorded by seismographs. This phenomenon was new to science. Clairvoyants and astrologers all over the world were given credit for having predicted it. The religious offered thanks for this answer to their prayers, and in some cases no doubt felt disappointed that sinners hadn’t gotten what they deserved. Scientists mostly had not seen it coming, and they offered no unified explanation as to why it had occurred. Some thought that the core of the earth had already vented its excess energy in a series of small events such as the cluster of quakes that had devastated the Admiralty archipelago, and would now go quiet aga
in. Others believed that this was the stillness before the darkness, and a hyperquake was imminent. Henry offered no opinion. The evidence of his worst fears was orbiting the earth, waiting to make sure the worst had happened before heading for Mars and Jupiter and Neptune.

  The question was, how long would it last? I myself believed, with even less reason than a psychic or an astrologer, that the respite was temporary, that the planet had taken a geological moment to center its ch’i, and when it had done so, it would let loose the energy it had been storing. Would the result be an explosion of popcorn—many, many small quakes happening all over the globe—or a single, focused surge that would open a seam in the planet as a dragon impatient to be born after millennia of gestation awakens and breaks out of its egg?

  Thirteen

  1

  ON THE FOURTEENTH OF JUNE, Henry and I started running, as usual, at the break of day. He had the peculiar habit of taking his first step with his right foot instead of his left, so in the beginning of the run we were out of synch until I skipped a step. After this our shoes thudded on the pavement in counterpoint, Henry’s thuds a fraction of a second quicker than my own and slightly more basso. I enjoyed the sound of it, left-right, left-right, him-me, him-me. The intensity of the light grew stronger as the iris of the day opened. Seldom had I ever been so happy. We were on the shady path that led from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the running track around the Reservoir. The usual early-to-rise dog-walkers milled sleepily in our way. I wasn’t wearing my contacts, so the people and the animals and the trees looked something like a Seurat tableau come to life. The people were all sorts, young and old, beautiful and not so beautiful—ectomorph, endomorph, even a mesomorph or two. The dogs were more various. Terriers and spaniels and collies were so out of fashion that they might as well have been extinct, and now nearly every dog owner held the leash of a creature beautiful and strange to behold. These exotic animals looked less like living, breathing canines born of bitches than fantastical living toys constructed by genetic artists through the manipulation of DNA.