After a good night’s sleep and a light breakfast, the four participants met in the Banana to go over the details one last time with engineers on the ground, then ascended a spoke into the weightless environment of H1 and glided up the Stack—the central axis of the space station—snaking through work bays and temporary supply dumps until they reached a docking node that, after a few twists and turns, led them into a hamster tube. One after the other they slithered down it. Dinah, in number three position behind Markus, found it difficult to keep up with him; the soles of his feet kept getting farther and farther away. “Just like scaling the Daubenhorn,” he said at one point, “except without the annoyance of gravity!”
“Is that a mountain?” Dinah asked, since the hamster tube was long, and she felt that a bit of light conversation would help ease the lump in her stomach.
“Yes, a famous Klettersteig where I grew up—you must come and give it a try one of these days,” Markus called back.
A common error in etiquette, among people who had only recently arrived at Izzy, was to talk about Earth as a place that it was possible to go back to. As if this were a temporary mission like all of the previous ones. Dinah said nothing. Markus would realize his mistake, if he hadn’t already.
“Oh, well,” he added. Yes, he had realized it.
“What’s a Klettersteig?” Dinah asked, trying to move on.
“It is a mountain climb that is preengineered with cables, ladders, and so on.”
“To make it easier,” Dinah guessed.
“Oh, no. It is not easy. It is a way to take a climb that would be impossible, and make it merely extremely difficult.”
“Okay,” Dinah said. “A good metaphor for what we are trying to do up here, then.”
“Yes, I suppose so!” Markus said, cheerfully enough.
They came to a junction of hamster tubes, and after scrutinizing the felt-tipped annotations on the walls left by past travelers, they went their separate ways, Dinah leading Ivy to the right while Fuhua and Markus headed straight on. After passing three occupied docking ports, and exchanging perfunctory greetings with the people living in the capsules on the other sides, they came to the end of the hamster tube and passed through a docking port.
They floated into a tubular space four meters in diameter and twelve meters long, illuminated by icy bluish-white LEDs. Its wall was a smooth cylinder of aluminum, striped with bar codes and stippled with batch numbers from the mill that had produced it. A long, straight weld ran up its length. At the far end, the curve of its “boiler room” dome, penetrated by many plumbing and electrical connections, was visible through a flat fiberglass grate—a disk of industrial catwalk material in a bilious shade of green. A ladder, made of the same material, extended “up” from there to the “front door,” through which Dinah, and now Ivy, entered. It put Dinah immediately in mind of Markus with his talk of Klettersteigs. You didn’t need to have a ladder unless you were expecting gravity, or a reasonable facsimile of it. The grate at the far end of the arklet was going to end up serving as the floor.
Or as a floor—the lowermost story. The arklet was long enough to divide vertically into as many as five stories by inserting more of those grated disks. Cleats for that purpose were attached to the walls at regular intervals, but the grates hadn’t been installed yet.
Dinah pushed off against the top rung of the ladder and flew “down” until she could arrest her momentum against the boiler room grate, then spun herself about so that her feet were touching it and her head was pointed back “up” toward the front door. This brought her eyes level with several flat-panel screens that had been mounted to the walls. They served as status indicators and control panels for the equipment mounted to the outside of the dome. The little nuke was the only thing that mattered to them at the moment. It had a screen all to itself. Dinah woke it up with a tap. It refreshed itself with a graphical display, showing the temperature of the plutonium pellet at its core, its current output level, the RPMs and health metrics of the Stirling engine that converted its heat into electrical power, and the charge level of the batteries and of the supercapacitor that served as a buffer to store energy when it wasn’t needed and release it when it was. Everything seemed normal there. Not much could really go wrong with these things. This one was brand new.
She pivoted to another display that gave her information about the array of thrusters mounted to the halo just outside. Arklets were pretty short on windows; the only place you could see out was at the forward end, where a couple of small portholes had been let into the dome adjacent to the docking hardware. Just below one of them was what the engineers called a couch and what the casual observer would be more likely to describe as an expensive lawn chair that had somehow found its way into space. Ivy had already strapped herself into it and was waking up another bank of flat-panel screens there. Dinah could hear her murmuring into the microphone on her headset, which she had jacked into the assortment of plastic boxes that, in this context, passed for a control panel. She was running through a checklist with mission control and talking to Markus, who by now must be strapped in at the controls of Arklet 3.
Gazing around, Dinah saw the gleam of a camera lens, no larger than a raven’s eye, set into a tiny plastic pod on the wall in the middle of the arklet.
Then, for no particular reason, she started crying.
There’d been surprisingly little of this. Certain Morse code messages from Rufus were guaranteed to turn on the old waterworks. Ivy and Dinah permitted themselves to shed tears in each other’s presence when no one else was around, and a few other people such as Luisa had joined that club more recently. But there was always something to do, some emergency to take care of, always people around watching. No privacy. This empty arklet was the largest volume of uninterrupted, unoccupied space that Dinah had been inside of since boarding the Soyuz capsule at Baikonur a year and a half ago. It seemed vast to her, and she felt alone in it, and she couldn’t help herself. She knew that the camera was watching her and that she was being recorded on digital video that was being archived. Psychologists in Houston might be judging her fitness for duty at this very moment. But she didn’t care. She’d stopped caring about what the people in Houston thought a long time ago. Once she started crying, it developed a kind of unstoppable momentum and she just had to let it run for a while. Her thoughts had begun to ramble away from her own family and situation and toward the Arkers who would live and die in tin cans like this one. If it didn’t work—if the whole Cloud Ark idea was just a panacea, as some people suggested—then the last thoughts and impressions ever recorded by a human soul might take place in an environment exactly like this one. And maybe Dinah would be that soul.
The problem with crying in zero gee was that tears didn’t run down your cheeks. They built up in jiggling sacs around your eyes, and you had to shake them off or dab them away. Dinah didn’t have anything to dab with—the plastic coveralls they wore were notoriously nonabsorbent—and so she just drifted in the bottom of the arklet, looking at the light from the control screens through bags of warm salt water.
“Some assistant you are!” Ivy called back, after letting her go on for a few minutes.
“Sorry,” Dinah blurted out. “That was mission critical.”
“Try not to short out any of the equipment. Tears conduct electricity.”
“I think they made it all pee-proof. Remember, these things are designed for amateurs.”
“Tell me about it,” Ivy snorted. “The user interface is so easy to use, I can’t do anything.”