Having thus settled into a family life, and made a much-discussed decision to keep her maiden name, Julia Bliss Flaherty had swung her sights around to politics. She had narrowly lost a senatorial race in California. Visibly pregnant by the time Election Day arrived, she had soon given birth to a baby with Down syndrome and become a human Rorschach blot for all sorts of angst around amniocentesis and selective abortion. Making the rounds of talk shows to discuss those topics, she had drawn the eye of national political campaigns on both sides of the aisle. During the following presidential campaign, she had found herself in the unusual position of being on both parties’ vice presidential short lists. She was staunchly middle-of-the-road, with enough ambiguity in her politics to extend the Democrats’ reach rightward and the Republicans’ leftward. No one had expected her to end up in the Oval Office; that was never seriously expected, nowadays, of vice presidents. But the scandal that had brought down the president in only the tenth month of his inaugural year had elevated her to the presidency and made her hairstyle fair game for dissertation-length treatments in the press. Much of it was about those glints of silver. Were they natural, or artificial? If natural, why didn’t she get rid of them? The technology existed. If artificial, then wasn’t it really just a sneaky trick to make her look older, more serious? Either way, should a woman in today’s society need to make herself look matronly in order to be taken seriously?
Doob was pretty sure that no such articles would ever again be written after the announcement that J.B.F. was making today. And indeed he felt the requisite shame over the fact that he was paying any attention whatever to the president’s hair, on this of all days.
But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.
The announcements all started at the same time but some went on longer than others, the imams and the pope segueing into prayers. The president and other secular leaders, having finished their remarks, stood there uncomfortably for a minute or two, then began to shuffle away toward aides who enveloped them in big warm coats. Doob and the other scientists, as much a part of the backdrop as Crater Lake, were obliged to remain in place until the last prayers ended.
He thought he might come up here with Amelia and watch it happen. It would be a fine place to observe the White Sky and the beginning of the Hard Rain. During the announcement, he had seen a single bolide streak across the sky south of them, a trail of white fire bright enough to leave a slow-fading blue streak in his vision, popping apart into two, then five discrete chunks before it all went over the horizon. It was too far away for him to feel its radiant heat on his face. But people who had been closer to recent events reported that the warmth was palpable. It was also fleeting, since the bolides came and went at hypersonic velocities. But when the Hard Rain began in earnest, they’d be coming in thick and fast, their fiery trails crisscrossing the sky and then merging into a continuous sphere of broiling heat. Even those people who were fortunate enough—if that was the right word—not to get hit directly by a rock would be driven beneath cover. And it would have to be something like a sheet of metal that would reflect heat and not catch fire. That would buy them some time, but soon the air itself would become too hot to breathe. He had been wondering at what point during all of that he should just end his own life.
It was three weeks and a day since the disintegration of the moon, and a mere twelve days since he had convinced himself that the Hard Rain was going to happen. He was astonished in a way that the world’s leaders had responded so quickly. But they had been driven to it by the spread of rumors. The same calculations had been made by astronomers all over the world. They were accustomed to working in the open, sharing their ideas on email lists. Anyone who really wanted to know, and who had an Internet connection, could have learned about the Hard Rain a week ago. The president and the other leaders, he reckoned, had been impelled to do this sooner rather than later so that they could focus openly on the development of the Cloud Ark.
And also so that they could give the peoples of the world some agency. Not to be confused with the Agent that had torn up the moon. “Agency,” in the lingo of the sorts of people who had set up this announcement, meant giving people options, giving them some things that they could do to have an effect—imaginary or not. There was nothing they could do, of course, about the Hard Rain. And very few of them could contribute on a technical level to the Cloud Ark—there were only so many people qualified to go on space walks or assemble rocket engines, and those had already been mobilized.
But there were things that people could do to help the Cloud Ark achieve its mission, and thereby become a part of the legacy that would be carried forward into space.
Once the announcements and the prayers were finished, three people converged on the central lectern where the president had spoken a few minutes earlier. They were going to talk in English and their words would be translated into as many languages as the organizers had been able to find interpreters for. First up on the dais was Mary Bulinski, the United States secretary of the interior, an inveterate hiker and climber, spry at sixty. By training she was a wildlife biologist. Next was Celani Mbangwa, a big South African woman and a well-regarded artist. Last was Clarence Crouch, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist from Cambridge, moving slowly on a cane because his own genes had played a nasty trick on him and he had come down with colon cancer. He was being assisted over the rocky ground by one of his postdocs, Moira Crewe, who never seemed to leave his side. Clarence’s wife had committed suicide ten years ago and King’s College was the only thing that was keeping his body and his soul together.
They had all been made aware of what was going to happen several days ago so that they would have some time to recover from the shock and make themselves presentable on television. They had been flown as soon as possible to Oregon and ensconced in rooms at the lodge on the rim. Doob and other scientists, filtering in from all over the world, had set up a kind of war room in a meeting room downstairs, trying to figure out what exactly Mary and Celani and Clarence were going to say. Because that was an essential part of the announcement. No one was really expecting mass panic or chaos. There would be some of that, of course. But billions of people would want to know how they could be useful. And some answers needed to be provided for them.
And so it didn’t matter that Mary and Celani and Clarence were standing with their backs to Doob and talking into a cold wind, because he knew what they were going to say, had gone over the text a hundred times.
Mary’s piece of it was to talk about how the Cloud Ark was going to preserve the genetic legacy of the Earth’s ecosystems, largely in digital form. They couldn’t send giraffes into space, or keep them alive once up there, but they could preserve samples of their tissue. Space was a pretty effective refrigerator. Better yet, the genetic sequences could be recorded by feeding samples into machines, taking the DNA strands apart one base pair at a time, and preserving them as strings of data that could easily be archived and replicated. Special machines would be sent up on the Cloud Ark, machines that could take those digital records and turn them back into functioning DNA and embed them in living cells, so that giraffes and sequoias and whales could be reconstituted from raw elements at some point down the road, perhaps thousands of years in the future. How could ordinary people help? By collecting samples of living things in their environment, especially rare or unusual ones, and taking pictures and GPS readings with their smartphones, and sending them to certain addresses, postage free.
In a way Mary had the hardest job, because this part of the plan was utter BS and she had to know it. Biologists had long ago collected all the samples that mattered. All the flowers and raccoon skulls and bird feathers and sticks and snails that got mailed
to those addresses by helpful kids would end up being destroyed. All the genetic sequencing machines were already operating full tilt, around the clock, and the machines that made more of those machines were doing likewise. Nevertheless, she managed to sell it, or so Doob guessed from the set of her shoulders and the movements of her head as she spoke into the teleprompter.
Celani’s job was to convince the people of the world that they could contribute to a literary, artistic, and spiritual legacy that would outlive them. All the world’s books and websites were already being archived. What was wanted now was for people to write stories and poems, draw pictures, or simply aim cameras at themselves and shoot photos or videos that would one day be browsed by the distant descendants of the Cloud Ark pioneers. This was an easier thing to explain convincingly, since it was legitimate, and simple. Archiving lots of digital files and sending them into space was straightforward.
Clarence, the last up, had some explaining to do.
Doob knew the text of his talk by heart. They had discussed various ways of saying this, but Clarence had gravitated toward the High Church phrasings that came naturally to him.
“The time has come for a great Casting of Lots,” he announced. “The Lord has seen fit to populate the Earth with people of many colors and kinds. A burden has now been laid on us, as it was once laid on Noah. Like him we must populate our Ark in a manner respectful of the diversity of life around us. Mary Bulinski has already spoken of how we will preserve the legacy of the world’s plants, animals, and other life-forms. We will not do this as Noah did, by bringing them aboard the Ark two by two. There is not room for them, and there is no way to keep them alive. We go another way where the plants and the animals are concerned.
“The peoples of the world are a different matter. We will need people in that Ark. It is not an automatic mechanism. It will require the ingenuity and adaptability of human minds. We will populate it. We will begin with astronauts, cosmonauts, military, and scientists whose skills are needed. But there are only so many of those, and they are drawn from only a small portion of the world’s peoples.”
This question—how many?—had bedeviled them all along. In two years, how many humans could be launched into space, assuming that rocket factories all operated full-time, and we weren’t too fussy about safety procedures? Estimates varied through two orders of magnitude, from a few hundred to tens of thousands. They had no idea. And it was one thing to get them up there and another thing to keep them alive. The most solid estimates that Doob had seen were converging on a number somewhere between five hundred and a thousand. But they had carefully scrubbed Clarence’s speech of any specific numbers, or even hints.
“We ask every village, town, city, and district to perform a Casting of Lots and to choose two young persons, a boy and a girl, as candidates for training and inclusion in the crew of the Cloud Ark. We do not seek to impose any rules or procedures upon how the selection is made. Our objective is to preserve, as best we can, the genetic and the cultural diversity of the human race. We trust that the candidates selected will exemplify the best features of the communities from which they were chosen.”
The statement was subtly self-contradictory. Clarence was saying that they were not going to impose any rules. But they had already done so by insisting that there had to be both a boy and a girl. They knew perfectly well that many cultures would have trouble with that.
“The boys and the girls so chosen,” Clarence went on, “will be gathered together in a network of camps and campuses, where they will be trained for the mission they are to undertake, and launched into the Cloud Ark as room is made for them.”
Doob, aware that he might be in the background of some camera angle, did his best to maintain a poker face. Clarence wasn’t exactly lying. But he was leaving a lot out. How many boys and girls would end up in those camps? More than could be transported to or accommodated in any conceivable space ark. How many of them could really be trained to do anything useful?
In reality it would be much more selective than Clarence made it sound. Only some of those chosen in the Casting of Lots would actually be collected. Those belonging to rare or distinctive ethnic groups probably had a leg up. Once they got to the training center, they would begin to understand that not all of them were actually going to get launched into space before the Hard Rain. It would get competitive. Perhaps brutally so. Doob didn’t like to think about it.
For the thousandth time in the last three weeks, he mused about how funny the mind was. It didn’t matter that conditions in the training camps might become unpleasant. It was nothing. And yet the thought of young persons being cruel to each other upset him more than the fact that most of them were going to die.
A curtain twitched up in a window of the lodge, and Doob looked to see Amelia, arms crossed, elbows on the windowsill, looking down at him from the room they had shared the last three nights. She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it.
It was Thanksgiving week. School was out. She’d flown up to Eugene on Wednesday, rented a car, and driven here to be with him.
The staff at the lodge, still unaware of what was about to happen, had served the traditional turkey dinner on Thursday afternoon. The scientists, politicians, and military who had come here from all over the world to contemplate the end of days had tried to see the humor in the holiday. In a way, though, Doob actually was thankful. He was thankful that Amelia had come up to spend time with him. He was thankful that she had shown up in his life at exactly the moment when he most needed to have someone around.
On Day 7, when he had met Amelia and fallen for her in the same instant, he’d felt foolish. He’d wondered what was going on in his brain for it to react so. But she’d let him know, in the correct, even steely manner of an elementary school teacher, that the interest was reciprocated. The school where she taught was less than a mile from the Caltech campus and so they would get together for quick early dinners before she went home to grade papers and he went back to his office to check and recheck his calculations about the exponential, the White Sky. The split between the joy of new love and the growing awareness of what was going to happen was almost too wide for his mind to address. He would wake up every morning and enjoy those first few moments of consciousness before his mind swung uncontrollably to one topic or the other.
After he had come back from Camp David and the teleconference where he’d explained matters to the crew of the International Space Station, she had asked him what was troubling him, and he had told her. That night was the first time they had slept together. But they slept together four times before he found himself able to have sex. It wasn’t so much the dread of the catastrophe that got in the way. Disasters could be sexy. He’d had some of the best sex of his life while on the road to attend loved ones’ funerals. What weighed him down and left him impotent was the stress and distraction of having to communicate what he knew to one person at a time.
Problem solved. Everyone knew now.
Clarence wound up his announcement with some inspiring talk about how the young men and women who ascended to the safety of the Cloud Ark would build a new civilization in space and populate it with the genetic legacy of all mankind. Frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos would be sent up there too, so that even those who were left behind to die on the Earth’s surface could enjoy some hope that their offspring would one day grow to maturity in orbiting space colonies, and commune with their departed ancestors through digitally preserved letters, photographs, and videos. To Doob, this part of the talk seemed tacked on, something put in there just to hold out a glimmer of hope. But he knew that it was, in a way, the most important thing that any of the speakers would say today. The rest of the message had been stunningly grim, too shocking for most people to take in. The news anchors covering the announcement had been sworn to secrecy and briefed on it yesterday, just to give them some time to recover emotionally
in the hope that they could hold it together on air. The announcement had to conclude with some straw for people to grasp at. This kindly, ancient Cambridge professor, hollowed out by cancer, speaking in the cadences of the King James Bible about the new world in the heavens that would be populated by the children of the dead, venerating their ancestors’ JPEGs and GIFs, was the closest thing to an uplifting message that anyone was going to see today. He had to sell it, and he did. And Doob and all the other scientists who were now running the Cloud Ark program, along with the world’s military and politicians and business leaders, had to follow through.