“The names of saints and virtues were all taken at my orphanage,” Love said with a shrug, and this was also true. “Our nuns had to get creative by the time I arrived.”
The Professor snorted. “In Austria, the nuns had mustaches and made me stand in the snow without my jacket.”
In perfect German, Love asked if he deserved it. The Professor smiled at his native tongue and beckoned Love back the way he had come. Amy gave the pair a respectful distance, but not so respectful that she couldn’t hear their conversation.
“You are known to speak and write in at least thirty-six languages and dialects,” the Professor continued, “but you yourself won’t confirm the total number.”
Love said nothing. She was never interested in the fame that came with quantity and chose instead to make her mark in mastery. Growing up, she learned Bantu Swahili along with local dialects from the other children at her orphanage. She learned English, French, Spanish, and German from the nuns and did extra chores in order to borrow their books and magazines from abroad. By the time she had to leave the orphanage at seventeen, Love had labored through Achebe, Proust, Steinbeck, and García Márquez all written in their original languages.
“Whatever the number,” the Professor said, “use it. Engineers from all over the world will converge here. You must translate all that you hear. Technical details, instructions, conversations, even insults…You must go room to room—and tear the walls down.”
The Professor said they must fly one flag only, that of the Effort. Love looked into offices and cubicle workspaces as they walked past. The people packed inside didn’t look up but remained focused, murmuring in French, English, and Dutch. By the time the three reached the end of the corridor, the Professor’s breathing was labored. Amy stepped up and used her security badge before helping him into an elevator.
“The core team is in the Janus meeting room,” she said to Love.
Love figured those words would make sense in due time. At the top floor of the building, Amy nodded for her to get a head start out of the elevator. Love walked up to the open doors of a large conference room and peeked around the frame. Long tables formed a square with nine people seated around a corner to the right and another thirty or so gathered at the opposite sides.
Amy helped the Professor as far as the doorway. It appeared that someone had dragged a padded armchair up from the lobby and placed it flush against the wall. The Professor dropped onto its cushions.
“Love,” he said, between breaths. “Allow me to introduce you to…the knower of one hundred twenty-two impact scenarios, the seer of likely futures…Ben Schwartz, our fortune-teller.”
He used the end of his cane to point to a slight, hairy man in thick glasses somewhere in his early forties who was presiding at the corner to the right with the smaller group of people.
“Grab a seat,” Ben said, pausing only a moment to address Love with a hoarse voice.
As Love approached the table, she nearly tripped on a pair of high-heel pumps that someone had left on the floor. Nude pantyhose lay close by like molted snakeskin. Amy immediately claimed the empty chair to Ben’s right, evening out the numbers so that five people were seated on each side of the corner.
Love sat in the sixth chair, next to an Asian man with silvered hair and smile lines around his eyes and lips. His face looked haggard, but all of their faces looked haggard. All except Amy’s. In accented English, the man introduced himself as Dr. Jin-soo Lee, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University. He projected his voice and looked expectantly at Ben. Only Amy caught his social cue and turned to kick Ben under the table.
“Ow, what?”
Ben rubbed his shin and looked to Amy. He followed her stare to Love and Jin-soo.
“Again?” he sighed. “Ahh, fine.”
Ben stood on sandaled feet and motioned to the men and women in disheveled corporate dress gathered at the other end of the room.
“Those are UN minions,” he said, as they continued to converse, talk on phones, and/or work on laptops. “And their two overlords are sitting on either side,” Ben said, sweeping his finger to a woman on the far left and a man on the far right.
“The rest of us sitting at this corner form the Effort’s scientific core. Here’s Chuck to my left,” Ben said, nodding to a heavy man with ginger-colored hair and beard, glasses, and faded freckles on his meaty arms. “He works with me at NASA JPL. Next to him is Ed from Sandia National Labs. Then there’s…sorry, guy, I forgot your name already. Hey, who do I have to screw to get some name tags around here?”
One of the UN minions across the room lifted her phone off the table to go find the answer.
“Anyway, Ponytail Guy is from NASA Goddard and was once a student of the Professor’s. Next to him is Jin-soo, who you’ve already met—”
Amy interrupted to claim human resources for herself. Ben nodded and picked up with the scientists sitting to her right.
“That’s Julie from Livermore. Ziggy from Stanford and Los Alamos back in the day. On the end, we have Marcel, the director of the space center and his very tall assistant director, Anneke. Duck, duck, goose. Where were we?”
Discussion among the science core continued. Love spotted a photographic image on the screen of Jin-soo’s laptop. The scientist followed her stare and whispered that the image was recently captured by the Hubble telescope and showed UD3 at 1.5 billion miles from the sun. The comet’s frozen nucleus was pure white, and the hazy aura of dust surrounding it was glittering blue—a killer beauty.
Love tried to listen to the scientists, but their strange words were practically Greek. (Not literally. Love was fluent in modern Greek.) Jin-soo was too polite to ignore her frustration. Instead of asking if Love had a question, he asked for the first one.
“What is a high civ?” she asked. “You all keep using that word.”
Ben did the answering. His attention was everywhere at once.
“Hypervelocity comet intercept vehicle. HYCIV. Check the folder in your Effort kit. There’s an acronym sheet—we can’t have our interpreter needing an interpreter!”
Love had left her paperwork back in the utility closet with her luggage.
“I just got here,” she said. “I haven’t had time to memorize your literature.”
More than several people winced.
“No time?” Ben asked in mock concern. “Gee, I wonder what that’s like.”
His voice cracked on the last word. Ben grabbed a bottle of spring water off the table and chugged. Amy crossed her arms and stared daggers that Ben willfully ignored. Jin-soo tried to be more helpful.
“The HYCIV is the spacecraft we need to build in order to deflect the comet,” he explained, and turned his laptop to face her.
Using the trackpad, Jin-soo opened a file into a new window that visualized what looked like a large potato floating in outer space.
“That’s an asteroid rendering,” Jin-soo admitted, “but the same rules apply to a comet.”
He clicked the Play button and started a crude animation of a boxy spacecraft—a HYCIV—propelling toward the potato asteroid. Love watched as the front of the spacecraft separated and detonated against the asteroid’s surface, leaving a crater. The rest of the spacecraft maneuvered into the crater and detonated in a large, pixelated blast that nudged the asteroid into a new orbit.
“The HYCIV on Jin-soo’s monitor takes five years to build and test,” Ben called over. “And guess what?”
Love’s stomach sank as their brown eyes locked.
“I thought guessing was your job, Ben?” Amy said with a casual edge. Her expressive eyebrows were drawn low as she added, “You’re the fortune-teller. Love here is our star interpreter.”
“We don’t have five years,” Ben said, to the point. “So we can’t start from scratch.”
He lifted a stapled pile of spreadsheets off the table and held it up for Love.
“This is a global inventory of all spacecraft and satellite
s in their final stages of production. We’re going to reengineer the HYCIV on Jin-soo’s screen by using repurposed subassemblies that’ve already been built and tested.”
The scientist called Chuck smirked in a way that shifted his beard.
“We’re gonna beg for good Cadillac parts,” he said. “And you’re gonna help.”
“Also on this list,” Ben added, “are all the nuclear arsenals worldwide, according to research for the nonproliferation treaty—”
“Ben?”
There were microphones sprouting up from the tables so that anyone could be heard throughout the large room. Love located a UN minion tapping his spongy microphone for attention.
“Ben? Iran’s insisting on keeping their satellite.”
“What?” Ben squeaked. “Why!”
“They said it cost them four hundred million.”
Ben started to violently shake his head but winced and held both palms against his forehead. One of the UN overlords showed no hesitation or emotion of any sort as she stated, “The Islamic Republic approved thirteen billion in defense spending last year. Our HYCIV is an investment in defense.”
“The only defense that might matter in the history of Homo sapiens,” Ben shouted.
He pointed to Love.
“Do you speak…Iranian?”
Love coolly stated that she spoke most of the Persian and Turkic dialects, Kurdish and Arabic.
“I told you she was good,” said the UN overlord, with a smooth smile.
Ben admitted, in a rare show of appreciation to a humanities scholar, that he had flubbed Hebrew school. The other UN overlord spoke into his microphone.
“Troy Andrews,” he said, lifting a hand into the air.
He was a good-looking, tall man with gelled hair combed back to expose silver temples. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his collar was unbuttoned, but he still looked somewhat crisp and alert. He reminded Love of Lower Manhattan’s Financial District, where such elites went to move around money and make their fortunes.
“We’re speaking to translators and scientists, in the more difficult cases,” Troy explained to Love. “But we need to talk to decision makers in their own language. Can you help us?”
Love rose to her full height, ready to heed the call of the UN and repay an old debt.
EIGHT
Burning, Bering Sea
August 13
T-minus 172 days to launch
JACK’S PHONE LOST all signal as Healy sailed farther into the Bering Sea. He busied himself taking pictures of offshore oil rigs emerging from cold fog. Their flare stacks extended sideways like the nozzle of an Arabic oil lamp, reminders of the burning fossil fuels contributing to climate change. Jack’s editors wanted him to keep an eye out for heightened development now that an Obama-era executive order had been reversed to open more drilling in the Arctic.
Jack made his way around Healy’s perimeter until he spotted Maya’s boots with telltale purple laces lying by the door of an ISO van. He lingered before finally removing his own boots and quietly stepping inside. Maya sat on an overturned bucket in front of a row of plastic tubes. She wore surgical gloves and held a small sample bottle that she was labeling with painstaking detail. Jack snapped a picture of her bent form and tangled ponytail. The click startled her.
“You didn’t ask to take my photo.”
“I didn’t capture your face,” Jack said smoothly. “Just your back and hands. Whatcha doin’?”
Maya considered his words before answering.
“Bottling and labeling seawater from our rosette casts. I test these samples for trace elements of mercury—”
“Like what’s paralyzing the eagles?” Jack asked.
Maya shook her head. The current levels were dangerous. Mining and fossil fuels had tripled the amount of mercury in the surface of the ocean since the Industrial Revolution, but it did not explain the strange phenomenon of the eagles.
“Why does your hand keep dipping in and out of your pocket?” Maya asked suddenly.
“I remember there’s no service just as I’m reaching for my phone,” he said, and shrugged. “Habit, I guess. The feeds are good company, but not like the real thing.”
Jack tried to look in Maya’s eyes, but they were trained on his left hand. When he moved, Maya grabbed his hand on reflex.
“Sorry,” she muttered quickly, and dropped it like a hot poker. “I was looking at your scar.”
“Little bastard of a parasite,” Jack said ruefully. “Picked ’em up in Afghanistan.”
He held out his hand with its round, shiny, and raised scar like a plastic button. Maya no longer wanted to inspect it and looked annoyed with herself as she pulled off her gloves, now contaminated with his germs.
“I might as well ask about the one on your neck while we’re at it,” Maya muttered.
“Hmm? Oh, that was from a piece of shrapnel in Syria.”
Maya looked up at Jack. The skin between her thick brows was pinched.
“I never expected to live this long,” he admitted.
There was a commotion from the crew outside. Jack propped open the door of the van and stuck out his head to listen.
“Whale sighting!” he called back.
Maya moved fast. She reached the outer rail of the ship’s deck with unlaced boots and only one arm through her parka. The gathered crowd had to wait until the impossibly giant mammal surfaced and exhaled in two misty towers.
“Gray whale, I think!” Maya called above the wind. “Two blow-holes.”
When she smiled at him, Jack saw her teeth for the first time. They were small, crooked, and pointy. He wondered how it would feel to get a nibble or bite and almost shivered.
Their whale swam beside Healy, dipping and spouting. It jumped in a back flip with its barnacled snout and flippers rising out of the water. Most of the scientists clapped, but Maya let out something between a yelp and a scream.
* * *
THERE WERE MORE sightings of the comet. All major news outlets had picked up the story by now, managing the risk of overhyped sensationalism while reporting on the very real sense of growing alarm. Online news articles posted images of a bright gradient of light scattering dust beside the full heat of the sun. The comet’s tail wasn’t visible because UD3 was pointed directly at Earth like an arrow.
Scientists were still gathering and reporting a trickle of facts but gave no assurances—at least not in the New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, or Washington Post—that the comet’s trajectory would miss Earth. Jack’s fingers banged on his keyboard as he typed out his frustrated questions into a search engine. Instead of facts, there were opinions sometimes presented as facts. Jack once worked with an editor at the New York Times Magazine, a grizzled old-school journalist who smoked cigars and didn’t sleep. Opinions are like assholes, he always said. Everyone’s got one.
Jack typed, “will comet ud3” and read the autofill options:
kill us all?
miss Earth?
prove there is no God?
be a tool for terrorists?
be a tool for infidels in the holy war?
…
So many of the same unanswered questions in cyberspace, and yet Jack felt alone. The science lounge was full of people, but none who wanted to talk. All were busy typing, either searching for more information on UD3 or writing home to their wives, husbands, children, lovers, and old friends.
As for Jack, he had no wife, girlfriend, or children. Everyone wanted to be Jack’s friend, and Jack was friendly with everyone, but only his editors could rely on him at any given moment. Jack had fallen out of most social circles by his own lack of participation. This he only realized with a sinking ache in his gut when no one responded to his email messages and posts. In the advent of UD3, no one had time for a charming acquaintance, a colleague, a Brooklyn neighbor, or even an ex-boyfriend whose love had been intense but as brief as a lightning bolt.
Jack left the science lounge and p
assed Healy’s barber station on his way to lunch. Ned, the pilot, was seated stock-still in an apron for a fresh buzz cut.
“I hear you were poking around some off-limit zones,” Ned called out.
Jack stopped and said he was only taking pictures of the ship and documenting Healy’s journey.
“What does off-limits mean to you?” Ned asked.
His smile had always been sunny and simple when they joked around or passed each other in the corridors. The one he gave now was more complicated; it had the usual chumminess but with an edge that spoke to his feelings about a fuck-up guest passenger with no respect for rules and regulations.
“Camila says your bunkmate could also use some help with accountability,” Ned added, and then bent his head with closed eyes so the barber could shave his nape.
Instead of heading on to the galley, Jack turned toward the living quarters. He usually avoided his stateroom when he could. Gustavo wanted to be left alone for the most part, but Jack needed to talk to someone, and he was quite sure Gustavo needed to talk as well. They had to help each other, because there was no one else. They weren’t crew and they weren’t scientists; they were troublemaking artists who needed solidarity.
Jack knocked on his stateroom door and entered. The curtain on the top bunk was fully drawn. Gustavo rarely ventured out of their room during normal hours, preferring instead the empty, red-lit hallways of the graveyard shift and the quiet meal served at midnight. Judging by the restless turning in his bunk, he didn’t sleep much.
“You’ve got your own Wikipedia page, you know,” Jack called out.
Gustavo pushed back his curtain, looked down at Jack, and waited.
“There was a link to a New York Times article on there,” Jack continued. “It reported on the time you hijacked the floor of the Brazilian senate. I mean, I don’t know you, but I want to. We’re strangers now, sure. But given these circumstances, stuck in this tiny room while we try to wrap our heads around that comet…”
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