“Thank you for investigating it.”
“Speaking of which — you have armed guards posted outside the door to the Tank!”
“I will speak briefly to that, because I am busy,” Markus said. “My feelings about it are basically the same as yours. But I am not here to express my personal feelings but to carry out certain operations to the best of my ability. I didn’t want to be the king of the universe. Nevertheless, now I am. Everything I have ever seen in the history of human civilization, disagreeable as it might seem, says that someone in my position needs to have security.”
Luisa’s face suggested that she could make all kinds of objections to that. But she got the better of it, and just let out a sigh. “We will talk about it later,” she said.
“Good.”
“Do you know what is happening down there?”
“I can guess what is happening. It is none of my concern.”
“Understood. But I think that the king of the universe needs to make an announcement pretty soon.”
“I have one prepared,” Markus said.
“Oh, yes, of course you would have one prepared. When were you thinking of delivering it? Because there are a lot of people who need to be calmed down.”
“Is one of those people you, Luisa?” Markus asked the question clinically, but not unkindly.
Luisa drew herself up. Ivy braced herself for a sharp reaction, but then a change came over Luisa’s face as she saw that Markus was merely asking for information. Not being snide.
“Yes,” she answered. “A few minutes ago, Manhattan was struck by a hundred-foot wall of water. I presume that the same is true of most of the East Coast. I was listening to the service from St. Patrick’s Cathedral when it went off the air.”
Markus nodded and changed the display on the projection screen to a live view of Earth.
Ivy was shocked by how far the fire had spread during the few minutes she’d been in here.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket and discovered a series of messages from Cal, sent during the last several minutes.
Hey
You busy?
OK I guess you got pulled away
In case we get cut off I love you
Will look for a mermaid like you said but no substitute 4 u
Lost contact with Norfolk. No chain above me
Holy crap it is getting hot
Diving
Bye
And the last message in the series was a photograph snapped on his cell phone’s camera. It took Ivy a minute of panning and zooming to figure out what she was seeing. Cal had taken the photo while standing in the conning tower of his boat, looking straight up the ladder at the open hatch above him. This provided a tunnel-vision view of a disk of sky.
The sky was on fire.
In his other hand he was holding up his engagement ring — a simple band of polished titanium. He was holding it between his thumb and index finger, shooting the picture through the ring, making it concentric with the disk of the burning sky.
She looked up. Someone had spoken her name.
“Mine just faded away,” Doob told her.
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” Ivy said, the Morg’s manners triumphing over all circumstances.
“I had been gearing up for these final goodbyes with Amelia, with my kids,” Doob said. He spoke quietly, without marked emotion, as if relating a mildly surprising anecdote. “But, you know, the communications just broke down slowly over a couple of days, and there was never really a goodbye.”
“Very well,” Markus said, “I will make the announcement.”
HOT ENOUGH TO BAKE TATERS ON HOOD OF THIS TRUCK
GO INSIDE DAD
NOT KIDDING ABOUT THERMAL EFFECTS. PAINT BUBBLING
I AM NOT KIDDING EITHER YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE
GOT A SPACE BLANKET TO PROTECT ME WHEN I MAKE A RUN FOR IT
THEN FOR GODS SAKE USE IT DAD
AH BUT THEN I CAN’T CHEW THE RAG WITH YOU ANY LONGER DINAH
WHAT IF YOUR GAS TANK EXPLODES
HA HA WE DRAINED IT FOR GENERATOR FUEL. WAY AHEAD OF YOU KID
GOD U R A SMARTASS
Dinah was keying this in, thankful that Morse code still worked when your vision was blurred by tears and your voice choked by sobs, when a voice came out of a speaker. It was Markus’s voice: “This is Markus Leuker.”
“I know who you are,” she answered. But then she understood that Markus was speaking on the all-Ark PA system, which supposedly reached into every corner of Izzy as well as to all of the arklets. They had tested it a few times with prerecorded messages, but never actually used it. Markus considered the thing a relic of the twentieth century, and detested it; communications ought to be targeted, busy people ought not to be interrupted by disembodied voices barking from speakers.
“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect.”
Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. “This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”
She keyed:
MARKUS IS CALLING IT
WHO SAID HE WAS BOSS?
Rufus’s transmission was getting scratchy. Dinah wiped her eyes and looked out her window to see Earth encircled by a belt of fire. The trails of the incoming meteorites, once a pattern of bright scratches in the air, had merged into a blinding continuum of superheated air that had set fire to anything on the surface capable of burning. Since more of the rocks were coming in around the equator, the belt of radiance and fire was brightest there; but north and south of it, long swaths of the surface were aflame, and the belt was widening to envelop the high latitudes of Canada and South America.
She transmitted:
ABOUT TO LOSE YOU, TELL BOB AND ED AND GT AND REX I LOVE THEM. AND BEV.
ALREADY DID BUT WILL AGAIN. CHRIST IT IS HOT
GET INSIDE DAD
DONT WORRY I AM RIGHT BY THE DOOR. CAN HEAR THEM ALL SINGING BREAD OF HEAVEN.
THEN GO JOIN THE CHORUS DAD
OKAY BOB AND ED ARE COMING OUT TO GRAB ME. BYE HONEY DO US PROUD QRT
QRT QRT QRT QRT
She wasn’t sure how many times she keyed that in.
She pulled herself out of her sobs, later, by imagining what had happened: her brothers, Bob and Ed, dressed in silver fireman suits, rushing out of the mine’s entrance to haul Dad out of the old pickup truck, wrapping him in the space blanket to keep him from being broiled by the sky, and dragging him inside. An inch-thick steel plate being slammed across the doorway, the welders going to work laying down fat fillets made to last five thousand years. Once that was done, the heavy machinery fired up, shoving tons of rock and gravel up against the steel plate to bolster it against any shock waves powerful enough to punch it out of its frame.
Then silence, save maybe for the distant thuds of meteorite strikes, and sitting around the table to say grace and tuck into the first of fifteen thousand or so meals that the MacQuaries and their descendants would have to prepare and eat if they were ever to escape from that tomb. They had five hundred people down there, and, at least on paper, enough food-growing capacity to keep that many alive. Exactly how you made that a sustainable proposition wasn’t clear to Dinah; she hadn’t bothered Rufus for every last little detail of his plan.