He no longer had an accurate visual memory of the size of the moon in the sky, and so he could not estimate how many times larger the cloud was. Of course, he could look those numbers up and calculate it. But he didn’t really care what the numbers said. The full moon had always been the same size, but sometimes it looked huge and sometimes it looked small, depending on how close it was to the horizon, and on factors that were purely psychological or aesthetic. To all but a few of the people on the night side of Earth, looking up at the cloud, those factors were the only ones that mattered. He wanted to know how big it looked to them; he wanted to know how it felt. He wanted to see it over the Chino Hills from the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum, which was where he had last seen the moon, a few minutes before Zero, and to know how it was to stand there on terra firma and to see it and to know it was death coming.
Like most people, he had drawn up a list of everyone in the world he needed to say goodbye to, then gone through it and ruthlessly weeded out 90 percent of the names, since there wasn’t time. And then, during his last few months on Earth, he had sought out and said goodbye to the ones he needed to see in person. From orbit he had said goodbye to others on videoconferencing links or with carefully written email messages. Once he had said goodbye to a given person, he avoided communicating with them again. It was awkward to go out for a last night of drinking with a colleague, reminisce and cry and hug and say farewell, and then find yourself emailing the same person two months later with a question about their latest observations. Consequently, his scope of acquaintances had steadily narrowed as he had worked his way down the list. By this point he was down to his wife and his children. Reaching them became a lot more difficult after the Eight Ball had done its work. The volume of communications between Izzy and the ground was limited by the total bandwidth of the station’s antennas and radios. Personal communications had lower priority than operations, and operations were peaking as the final surge of launches was prepared. Or, as Dinah called it, the Splurge. Doob sent text messages to Amelia and the kids all the time; they sat in the delivery queue for minutes or hours, and half of them never got sent at all. Just when he was about to give up hope, he’d get a message back from Henry or Hadley or Hesper. Sending those messages, and seeing the responses, became more important than sleeping, so he “broke shift,” as the saying went, and dozed whenever he could, lying on the floor of the Farm or just putting his head down on a table like a kindergarten kid, his phone right next to his face so he’d feel it jump when anything came through.
It finally became clear to him, maybe twenty-four hours after he had given the news about the Eight Ball to Markus, that he was never going to communicate with his loved ones again save through sporadic and unpredictable texts. Anything he needed to say to them directly, he ought to have said before. Which should not have come as news; he had been telling himself for a long time that you had to act as if each conversation might be the last. This did not stop him from reviewing his final video chats with each one of them, on the evening of Day 700, and wishing he’d said certain things.
How does it look from up there? Henry texted him.
Doob checked the time. It was night in Moses Lake. He imagined Henry sitting out on that crappy old couch that they’d moved out of the house in Seattle, drinking a beer between work shifts, watching the White Sky reach out for him like a spectral hand.
Doob didn’t know what to say.
I think I am seeing some spread along the orbital axis—the beginnings of rings, he texted back.
I meant Earth, Henry returned.
Doob went looking for a place where he could look down at Earth through a real window—not one of those damned Situational Awareness Monitors. This ended up being the Woo-Woo Pod. It was pretty crowded. Izzy was about to swing over the terminator from day into night. Even over the brightly lit Pacific they could see what looked like hairline scratches in the pellucid shell of the atmosphere: the white trails left by incoming bolides. Above the dark side of the Earth these became arcs of blue fire that sometimes forked, and sometimes ended in red bursts when they made it all the way to the ground. In other words, it looked the way it had looked the day before, and the day before that. This level of meteorite activity would have been the most amazing astronomical event in human history had it happened suddenly, two years ago. But beginning with the first big rock that had plowed into Peru just a few days after Zero, the ambient level of bolide strikes had steadily crept upward. People had adjusted to it. Some had posted red-faced self-portraits after suffering “bolide burn,” meaning an acute case of sunburn caused by exposure to the ultraviolet light emitted by meteor trails in the nearby sky.
Looking down at you now, Doob texted. He wanted to add Wish I was there but it would have been stupid. Looks like a big one coming in over southern BC.
I see it, Henry returned. Feeling its heat.
Busy there?
You know it. Racking and stacking the big boys, getting ready for the Surge.
Doob wondered how it worked. What was to prevent desperate people from rushing the launch pads, trying to cram themselves aboard the last of those big boys? Like the last chopper out of Saigon, people dangling from the skids as soldiers punched them in the face. Or was he underestimating human nature? Maybe it was all perfectly orderly down there.
I need you here. That one was from Markus.
Reluctantly, Doob pushed himself away from the window and got turned toward the tube that would conduct him back to the Stack. From there he would make his way back to T3, where Markus was presumably hanging out in the Tank—
Markus Leuker was hovering directly in front of him, face illuminated by the blue light of a phone. He turned it off and slid it into his pocket.
“I don’t mean that I need you in the same room as I,” he said. “I mean that I need your brain here, in space, on the Cloud Ark, not down there. Your family is dead, Dr. Harris.”
“Dead. But still talking,” Doob said, feeling the start of a slow burn that might lead to him punching Markus in the nose, if only he could get to a place with gravity.
“What is it you think they would most like to hear back from you?” Markus asked. “Lovey-dovey stuff? They know you love them. Were I in their position, you know what I would like to hear? I would like to hear ‘Sorry, my darling, but I am very busy just now ensuring the survival of our species.’ May I suggest you text something in that vein and then join me in the Tank; we have matters to discuss.”
And Markus Leuker, using one of the ropes that were strung across the Woo-Woo Pod as handholds, propelled himself toward the exit. As he passed through into the tube, Doob saw his silhouette against the circle of light, a Da Vinci Man, just for a moment. Then two others swung in behind him and spoiled the effect. That detail caught his attention. Markus now had an entourage. Or perhaps a bodyguard.
Hard Rain
LIKE ANY GOOD STORM, THE HARD RAIN BEGAN WITH A SUDDEN thunderclap: a kilometer-wide rock that lit up eastern Europe with eerie, silent flashes as it skidded in across the upper atmosphere before digging into thick air somewhere around Odessa. Its trail set fire to dry leaves and combustible litter in the Crimea, then painted a long brushstroke of burning buildings and forests across the northeast rim of the Black Sea, ending with a long elliptical crater in the steppe between Krasnodar and Stavropol. The former city was first set on fire by radiant heat from the sky and then flattened by a blast wave. The latter got only the blast, followed by a rain of ejecta. Both disappeared from human ken.