“We don’t believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis—the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That’s not what we mean by reincarnation at all.”
“What do you believe in, then?” Doob asked. Tav had lost interest and was belaboring his phone with his thumbs.
“A better analogy might be to a burned-down stump being used to ignite a new candle. But I won’t be able to give you a satisfactory answer, Dr. Harris. The teachings are esoteric—deliberately hidden from the uninitiated, specifically to prevent false interpretations. How an enlightened lama would think about the question of the seven billion is as far beyond my comprehension as are the quantum gravity theories that you study in your work.”
On this side of the river the ground rose almost vertically. The mountain barrier was cleft by a steep-sided valley that zigzagged up and away from them; the road leaped up into it and switchbacked up a stone cliff, fringed here and there with clusters of hardy evergreens that had found toeholds in crevices. Tendrils and torn veils of mist drifted across the face of the rock, providing occasional glimpses of a white tower, high above them, that had somehow been constructed on the precipice. It was one of those buildings, like some monasteries in Greece and Spain, whose whole point was to proclaim to those below, “This is how far we will go to achieve separation from the world.”
They drove up a road between long green terraces until the ground became too steep for wheels, and then the king stopped the Land Rover and set the brake. “How’s your cardio?”
“Could be better,” Doob said, “but I don’t have a heart condition, or anything like that.”
“We are at about three thousand meters above sea level. You are welcome to await the chosen ones here in my vehicle, or—”
“I could use a walk, thanks,” Doob said, and glanced back at Mario, who shrugged philosophically, and at Tavistock Prowse, who appeared to be biting his tongue.
As they hiked up the trail, followed at a respectful distance by an entourage of lamas, children, photographers, and officers of the Bhutanese military, the king told Doob that the place they were going was called the Tiger’s Nest and that it was one of the most sacred sites in their religion, being the spot where Guru Rinpoche, the Second Buddha, had, in the eighth century, flown in from Tibet on the back of a tiger. Later a temple complex had been built around the caves where Padmasambhava (for apparently this was an alternate name for the same personage) had lingered to meditate.
Doob pleased himself by suppressing the urge to point out to the king that tigers were not capable of flight. This was only partly because he was gasping for air. He did not really care about the plausibility of the story, given the astonishing beauty of the place through which they were hiking. It was one thing to be fed a line of religious hokum in a desert hellhole that had nothing to recommend it as a site for tourism. But in order to go for a few hours’ walk with a king in Shangri-La, he would put up with any amount of fairy tales and metaphysical ramblings.
Small temples and devotional sites emerged from the mist every few minutes. They stopped part of the way up to enjoy a serving of chai in a little café with a fine view of the Tiger’s Nest. Tav, at the end of his rope physically, announced he would go no farther. Doob, Mario, and the king pushed on along the increasingly precarious walkway to the gates of the monastery itself. This, the king had already informed Doob, was off-limits, and in any case would have made a poor showing as a site for a ceremony, being rather cramped, dark, mazy, and ancient. Crag-dwelling hermit monks didn’t go in much for grand ceremonial courtyards.
Instead there was a sort of wide spot in the ledge just before the entrance to the white temple. Waiting there were the two Arkers, a boy and a girl, both in their early twenties, clad in what Doob assumed was traditional costume: For the boy, a robe that stopped at his knees, with a large white scarf over his shoulder and crossed to his hip. For the girl, a bolt of colorfully woven cloth, wrapped around her waist and falling to her ankles as a sort of columnar skirt, with a yellow silk jacket above that, draped with many necklaces of turquoise and other colorful stones.
Had she been here, Amelia, in a single glance, would have noticed a hundred details about the weaving, the embroidery, the jewelry, the drape of the fabrics, the choice of colors. She would have charmed the king right out of his saffron scarf. She would have climbed out of the Land Rover back in Paro and made friends with the soccer-playing boys. Amelia, not Doob, was the person who ought to be doing all of this.
But Amelia wasn’t going to the Cloud Ark and Doob was.
The boy and the girl—Dorji and Jigme, respectively—were backed up by some leathery oldsters in similar but simpler costumes, presumably their families, and several lamas. Prayer wheels were spinning, bells were chiming back inside the monastery, monks were chanting.
Everyone was crying.
They all bowed to their king.
Doob was glad Tav had not come this far.
Some kind of conversation took place in the local language. Doob didn’t even know what the name of that language was. Mario, oblivious to the emotional tenor of the proceedings, darted around snapping photographs, dropping to his knees or even throwing himself flat on the ground so that he could get mountain peaks or temple roofs in the backdrop of shots.
Doob, who had no idea what was going on, couldn’t take his eyes off the faces of the elders, who were doing their best to hold it together in the presence of their monarch but clearly suffering through ruinous emotional pain as they prepared to say goodbye to Dorji and Jigme forever. It was almost worse than watching your kid die, Doob thought. Then there was finality, certainty, a grave site to visit. Whereas these two were just going to hike off into the mist. A thunder of helicopter blades would announce their departure, and after that the family members would get vague assurances that Dorji and Jigme were going into space to carry forward the cultural legacy of Bhutan. Assurances that, Doob was pretty sure, were going to be fundamentally dishonest. These people were going to go to their deaths in fifteen months consoling themselves with that belief.
He now understood his job a lot more clearly. Why were the doomed people of Earth not going completely berserk? Oh, there had been some outbreaks of civil disorder, but for the most part people were taking it surprisingly calmly.
It was because events like this were happening in every city and province with more than a few hundred thousand people, and they were being stage-managed well enough to convince people that the system was working.
When he was a kid he had read the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, which hinged on the premise that the people of Athens had somehow been persuaded to select seven maidens and seven boys by lot, every few years, and send them to Crete to serve as monster chow. This had always struck him as the weakest point of what was otherwise a great yarn. Who would do that? Who would choose their kids by lot and send them to such a fate?
The people of Bhutan, that was who. And the people of Seattle and of the Canelones district of southern Uruguay and of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the South Island of New Zealand, all of which Doob was scheduled to visit in the next two weeks to collect the maidens and the boys they had chosen by lot. They would do it if they could be made to believe it would protect them.
As Mario had predicted, Doob was presented with some extremely old-looking artifacts by almost equally old-looking monks who smiled at him through tears and backed away, bowing, once Doob had accepted their prayer wheels and sutras and carvings into his hands.
The king took Dorji and Jigme by the hand, turning his back on the mourners or the well-wishers or whatever they were, and nodded at Doob as if to say “your move.”
Doob bowed one last time, then turned around and began leading them down the mountain.
DAY 306
Arklet 1, which had been sent up on Day 285, turned out to have a few teething problems with its maneuvering thrusters, and so the first bolo coupling in the history of the Cloud Ark took place between Arklet 2 and Arklet 3. Those had been launched on Days 296 and 300, respectively. These first three Arklets represented competing designs and so they all looked a little different. No matter; they were destined to be punched out in different factories and launched on different types of heavy-lift rockets from different spaceports, so minor variations in styling were to be expected. They all had the same general shape, though: a cylinder with domed end caps. That was for the ineluctable reason that they had to be pressurized in order to perform their basic function of keeping humans alive, and pressure sooner or later made everything round. Dinah thought that the pressure hulls looked like the big liquid propane tanks seen next to cabins and mobile homes in the rural mining camps where she had grown up. Others likened them to railway tanker cars, or stubby hot dogs.
They were just big aluminum cans with domes welded onto the ends. The walls of the can had a thickness of about a millimeter. The domes were a bit sturdier. The thickest and strongest parts of the hull were in the places where the domes overlapped the ends of the can. The analogy was to a plastic soda bottle, whose thin walls could be crumpled in one hand when the lid was off, but which became amazingly stiff and strong when it was pressurized. Or at least that was what NASA was saying to people who were alarmed by the idea of living one millimeter away from the vacuum of space.
The first three arklets were launched “naked” and smooth, but the hundreds to follow would come up clothed in translucent fabric jackets, pleated and wrinkled during the passage through the atmosphere, protected beneath fiberglass fairings. Once in space the blanket would be inflated to form a flexible outer hull somewhat larger than the inner one. It was in that inter-hull space where food would be grown, making use of sunlight that would diffuse through the fabric. It was not clear yet whether each arklet could be self-sufficient in terms of food production—probably not—but growing some food was better than growing none. Having some green stuff on board helped reduce the load on the CO
scrubbers, and having water between humans and space helped stop some incoming radiation.
One of the end caps sported a docking port, designated in NASA public-relations cant as the “front door.” It was a bit of a misnomer since it was the only door. Once sealed up inside the pressure hull, the occupants could only get out of it by docking the arklet to something with breathable air on the other side of it.
The opposite end of the arklet was called the “boiler room.” Mounted outside of it was the trash-can-sized nuclear generator that supplied the arklet with power. Around that were various fittings for connection of plumbing lines, electrical mains, cooling equipment, and the like, none of which would ever be used except in the case when a number of arklets decided to dock themselves together and form a semipermanent cluster.
Those sturdy, thick rings where the domes met the main body served as attachment points for anything of a structural nature—anything that would exert significant forces on the body of the arklet. Radiating from each of those rings were eight stubby, radial spokes, extending outward to halolike rings where thrusters and grappling equipment were attached. Those parts were shipped inside of the arklet, then, once it was in space, extracted through the docking port by spacewalkers and bolted on in zero gee. The halos also served to stiffen and stabilize the inflatable outer hull in arklets so equipped, but in the first three test units they just projected out into space like bicycle rims, studded with small thruster nozzles and laced through with plumbing.
Spanning the distance between the “front door” halo and the “boiler room” halo was a single long spindly member, hinged at the “front” or forward end so that it could, on command, snap up and out, projecting sideways from the arklet for a distance of about ten meters. Mounted to the end of this arm were a camera, a target, and an electromechanical grappling device, collectively known as the Paw. A cable ran from the Paw back down the length of the arm to a reel near the docking port, where 250 meters of it were wound up like thread on a spool. The arm, the Paw, the rope, and the reel were all there to achieve a specific maneuver, never before attempted, denoted in official NASA engineering documents as the Bolo Coupling Operation but referred to everywhere else as the High Five.
On Day 306, after Arklets 2 and 3 had been assembled and checked out, the first Bolo Coupling Operation was initiated. It happened several kilometers away from Izzy. It was done quietly and secretly, in case it failed, but lots of video was taken, in case it succeeded. The operation had many possible failure modes, which was engineering-speak meaning that it could go wrong in so many different ways that trying to think them all through was impossible. So each of the two arklets needed to have a qualified pilot: someone who understood orbital mechanics and spaceship propulsion well enough to bring an errant craft back in hand by manual control. Few such people had ever existed, and only four of them were aboard Izzy. Right now, down on the ground, thousands of young people selected in the Casting of Lots were learning how to do it by piloting virtual arklets in video game simulations, but none of those people was ready, or in orbit, yet. So Ivy ended up at the controls of Arklet 2, with Dinah as passenger and general assistant. Piloting Arklet 3 was a recent arrival, Markus Leuker, a Swiss air force pilot turned astronaut and a veteran of two previous missions to the ISS. His background piloting high-performance fighter jets through Alpine valleys seemed like a reasonable qualification for this job. His assistant was Wang Fuhua, one of the first Chinese taikonauts to have reached Izzy during the Pioneer days of a few months back.
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.