Doob bit his tongue.
Julia continued. “What about reversing the roles a little — sending members of the GPop on temporary home stays in randomly selected arklets?”
“What about it?” Doob asked. “What purpose would it really serve?”
“From a purely technocratic standpoint, perhaps none whatsoever,” Julia said. And left the rest of her thought unsaid.
“If I went on a ‘home stay’ in a random arklet, what would I learn that I can’t learn from Scape or Spacebook?”
“A great deal, since you don’t actually use those applications,” said Julia, her voice deepening in amusement.
“I’m a little busy trying to get New Caird home. Go ahead, tell me. What am I missing?”
Movement caught his eye across the table.
He looked up to see Luisa shaking her head. Then Luisa clamped her face between her palms, closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Doob felt his face warming, and once again resisted the temptation to slap himself.
“There is a lot of ferment in the AC around alternative strategies,” Julia said, speaking briskly and authoritatively, as befit a woman who had just been anointed the spokesperson for said Arkie Community. “A fascinating school of thought is developing around the idea of making a passage through clean space to Mars.”
“Clean space?”
“Oh, I forget you haven’t been following the relevant discussion groups. Clean space is just what Tav has been calling the translunar zone, relatively free of bolides.”
“Tav? Tavistock Prowse?”
“Yes, you should have a look at your old friend’s blog occasionally.”
Tav had been sent up to Izzy a month before the White Sky, when someone on the ground had decided that social media was going to be the glue that would hold the Cloud Ark together and that Tav was just the man for that sort of thing.
“I’ve been busy,” Doob said. “But Tav ought to know that we have simulated and war-gamed the Mars option to within an inch of its life, and it’s just not a good idea.” He could see Julia formulating an objection that he didn’t have the patience to listen to. “Anyone who is seriously advocating we go to Mars is—” He didn’t want to say what he was thinking, which was smoking crack, and so he settled for “—not taking some of the practical realities into account. One solar flare at the wrong time could kill everyone.”
“Only if everyone goes.”
“If you’re talking about just sending a contingent to Mars, then you have to consider how much of our equipment and supplies they’ll be allowed to take with them.”
“I think many talented Arkies would volunteer to be part of a small, lean advance party. The lure of clean space is strong.”
“Well, we are not in what I guess Tav considers clean space,” Doob said. “We are in dirty space, and we have to focus on that reality, rather than woolgathering about trips to the Red Planet.”
“You needn’t remind me,” Julia began.
“Yes. You saw your friend and colleague Pete Starling get chowdered by a bolide. I did actually see your Spacebook post about that, Julia. It was most affecting. I sense a ‘but’ coming, however.”
“As the days go by without a serious incident, people begin to wonder how dirty space really is. Interest grows in the Dump and Run option. The White Sky now feels like ancient history. The Hard Rain is upon us. Every day brings a course correction or two, to avoid a major bolide, and a litany of minor events. But the death toll stands at—”
“Eighteen, as of ten minutes ago,” Doob said. “We just lost Arklet 52. See, I am keeping my ear to the ground.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Julia said, “and I’ll bet the rest of the AC will feel the same way, once that news has been distributed to them.”
“It’s on a fucking spreadsheet, Julia. All you have to do is look at it. We don’t distribute news. This is not the White House.”
“But in many respects it behaves like the White House,” Julia said. “An orbiting White House unfettered by constitutional checks and balances. But at least the White House had a briefing room, a way of reaching out. I would be happy to. .”
“Why are you even talking to me about this?” Doob asked. “I’m a fucking astronomer.” Then, a thought. “How many conversations like this one have you been having with other members of the GPop?” He’d been assuming that Julia had singled him out as special, but for all he knew she had a call list as long as her arm, organized by those assiduous youngsters in the background. “Ivy is temporarily in charge.”
“I am familiar with the chain of command that has been improvised,” Julia returned. “To answer your question, Dr. Harris, I am talking to you precisely because you are an astronomer, and well positioned to answer the questions and concerns among the AC about the exact nature of the dirty space threat. This news from Arklet 52 is going to raise questions about the effectiveness of Ivy’s current strategy.”
“It is a statistical problem,” Doob said. “On about A+0.7 it stopped being a Newtonian mechanics problem and turned into statistics. It has been statistics ever since. And it all boils down to the distribution of bolide sizes, and of the orbits in which they are moving, and how those distributions are changing over time — which we can only know from observation and extrapolation. And you know what, Julia? Even if we had perfect knowledge of every single one of those statistical parameters, we still wouldn’t be able to predict the future. Because we have an n of 1. Only one Cloud Ark, only one Izzy to work with. We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we find meaning in randomness. A minute ago you were casting doubt on whether dirty space was really that dirty at all — obviously arguing in favor of Dump and Run. Then I told you about what just happened to Arklet 52 and now you’re swinging around to the other point of view. You are not helping, Julia. You are not helping.”
Julia did not look to be accepting Doob’s remarks in the spirit intended. Instead she squinted through the screen at him and shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand the intensity of your reaction, Dr. Harris.”
“This conversation is over,” Doob said, and hung up on her. He then fought off a temptation to slam the tablet down on the table. Instead he sat back in his chair and looked Luisa in the eye for the first time in a while. On one level he’d wanted to watch her face the whole time. But Julia would have noticed that, would have figured out that someone else was in the room, silently listening.
Just as someone had probably been doing at Julia’s end.
Luisa just sat there in her listening shrink mode.
“It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.”
“You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.”
Doob pulled his tablet closer and started trying to find Tav’s blog. “To what extent do you imagine she really is reporting facts about the AC? As opposed to creating the reality she describes?” Doob asked.
“What’s the difference?” Luisa asked.
DINAH LOOKED UP AND SAW THAT THE EARTH WAS THE SIZE OF A grapefruit. She took a nap, ate some food, and buckled down to work again, then looked up to see that it was the size of a basketball. Still not that big; and yet such was their speed that it was only an hour away.