“Seven billion died. Next to that, this is small. And God knows we’ve all thought about eating the dead, so let’s not pretend to be shocked that they actually did it. The real reason we’re all freaked out by this is that our hopes have been dashed. We thought that the Swarm was going to contain hundreds of healthy people, lots of food, lots of good company. Oh, intellectually we knew it wouldn’t be the case, but we were all hoping for it. Now we learn it’s eleven carrion eaters. Are we going to leave them to die? No. We’re going to make room for them and for their heptad full of scarce vitamins.”
“I am terrified of the woman Aïda,” Michael Park said.
Luisa sighed. “Let me throw out an idea, which is that you’re terrified because you wonder, at some level, whether you could turn into Aïda if you got hungry enough.”
“Still — to let her on board Endurance—”
“And J.B.F. too,” Tekla said. She and Moira were sitting next to each other as they always did, hands clasped, fingers intertwined.
“I hoped I would never see Julia again,” Camila put in. “I know it is small and selfish of me, but. .”
“I understand all of your misgivings,” Ivy said, “because I share them. The question, now, is whether those misgivings are going to have any effect on the decision we make. Are we really going to let one-third of the surviving human race die because Aïda’s creepy and we hate J.B.F.? Obviously not. So, we transmit our params and our burn plan. And during the remainder of this orbit we make arrangements to accommodate some new arklets.”
THE REMAINDER OF THE ORBIT WAS BUSY INDEED, TO THE POINT where they broke out hoarded rations and upped their calorie intake to fuel their brains and their bodies. In the middle of that ten-day stretch, however, was an intermission. Dinah and Ivy had wordlessly agreed to spend it together in what Doob had once called the Woo-Woo Pod, and what they now called the Kupol.
After the Break, when Rhys had reengineered Izzy and Ymir into a single moving sculpture of metal and water, he had moved this module to a different location in the Stack and then let the living ice flow around it, completely surrounding its inboard hemisphere and later building up in a protective brow that shielded part of its windowed half. It projected from the side of Endurance like an eyeball and gave people a place to go when they wanted to look at the universe. As such it had no legitimate function from an engineering point of view. In fact it was a liability, since it got hit by little rocks from time to time, depressurized, and had to be repaired. Anyone in it was getting directly exposed to cosmic radiation, and so it was a no-go zone when they were passing through the Van Allen belts, which was often. But people loved it anyway, and kept patching it up when it was broken, and went there when they wanted to be alone or when they wanted to share some special time with another person. Putting it there had been one of Rhys’s best moves as a designer, and Dinah silently thanked him whenever she used it. Doob’s old term for it had begun to seem a little tasteless after the Hard Rain. For a little while, people had instead referred to it as the Dome. But dom had a different meaning in Russian, and so they’d settled on Cupola or Kupol, whose meanings in English and Russian respectively were not too far apart. In the latter language it carried a vaguely religious connotation, having to do with cathedral domes.
Ivy and Dinah didn’t have to worry too much about cosmic rays during the intermission, because they had so arranged it that the Kupol was on Endurance’s nadir side, facing toward Earth. And Earth was close enough to fill their view. Useless as the planet might be for the support of life, it still acted as a very effective cosmic ray absorber. Nothing was getting through that, short of another mysterious Agent that could pass all the way through a planet and keep on going. So, Dinah and Ivy hovered in the middle of the sphere, arms linked so that they wouldn’t drift apart, and sucked bourbon from plastic bags, and looked at their old planet for the last time. In their six years of hurtling around this world, they’d grown accustomed to the steep angle that Izzy’s orbital plane made with the equator, and the views it afforded them of the high latitudes. Because of the changes they had lately been making to Endurance’s plane, however, they were now confined to a belt around the tropics.
Not that it mattered a hell of a lot with Earth in its current state. The sky was still on fire, streaked with the bluish-white incandescence of the Hard Rain. The ground, where they could see it through smoke and steam, was a mottled terrain of dully glowing lava: some of it the hot impact craters of recent big meteorites, some of it spewing up out of the Earth’s fractured crust. Oceans were dark at night, hazed with steam in daylight, their coasts difficult to make out, but clearly shallower than they had been. Florida was reaching out toward the Keys but being battered down and chipped away by bolides, and washed away by tsunamis, even as it did so. A year and a half ago, a big rock had torn the lid off the long-dormant Yellowstone supervolcano. That had been cloaking most of North America with ash ever since then; glimmers of yellow light in the northern extreme of their view hinted at a vast outpouring of magma. A long-suppressed habit told Dinah, absurdly, that she should go and turn on her radio in case Rufus was transmitting. This made the tears come, and that in turn made Ivy’s tears come, and so they spent the last half of the intermission, from perigee onward, gazing at Earth through water. It didn’t really affect the view much. But Dinah tried to register the memories as best she could. Humans would not again look on Earth from such a close vantage point for thousands of years.
The burning planet started to drop away from them. It would only ever get smaller from now. They needed to get back to work. But they found it difficult to let go of each other. Back in the old days, before Zero, they’d had the occasional heart-to-heart about their shared, secret fear that they weren’t qualified to carry out the missions for which they’d been sent up, at vast taxpayer expense. That they’d screw it up, fall on their faces, and embarrass a lot of people on the ground. By now, of course, they had long since put those fears to rest, or at least seen them overwhelmed and buried by much greater fears. Ever since the beginning of the Cloud Ark project, however, and especially since they had made the irrevocable decision to build Endurance and go on the Big Ride, it had frequently come back to them in a bigger and more dreaded form. What if they were completely getting it wrong? They could scarcely remember, now, the great civilization that had once spread across the planet below them. But the contrast between it and its orbiting residue was painful. The dirty, beat-up kludge that was Endurance was an embarrassment to the human race. Could they really have done no better than this? And now, after a voyage of three years — three years that had been an unrelieved spiral of decline, punctuated by catastrophes — they were reduced to a maneuver, coming up in five days’ time, that seemed more and more desperate the more they thought about it.
If they screwed it up, it would be their fault, more than anyone else’s.
Of course, no one would be left to blame them for it.
They went through these crises of confidence frequently, but usually at different times, so that one could pull the other out of despair. Right now they were both feeling it together, and so they had to pull themselves out.
Dinah was thinking about Rufus’s last transmission: