IOWA, 2025
High summer.
Blue sky above and green corn below.
In the middle of the green, four silver ARK ships, each the size of an ocean tanker, lay waiting on the grass, their noses lifted into the soft wind. Depending on where you stood, the ships reflected either the sun or the grass and corn.
It was, thought Milo, standing miles away, near the fence at the ARK perimeter, as if each ship were a world trapped in a mirror.
He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, ten feet high and topped with razor wire. He traced its gray length across the hills, a rough circle maybe sixty miles in circumference. How useful would the fence be, really, if they came? There would be thousands of them, and they’d be angry.
How else could you expect them to feel, when they knew they were all about to die?
It had begun, five years earlier, with the Disappearances.
Scientists and engineers.
Just a few at first. They were not famous people, and their disappearances rarely made the news. There was enough going on in the news already, in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Everything the scientists had warned people about was happening all at once.
The seas were rising. The oceans had died, from plankton right up the food chain. The water tables had gone toxic. Computer viruses formed networks that shut down the Internet at least once a week.
A few vanishing eggheads didn’t seem like a big deal.
The Disappearances caught Milo’s attention when they started happening at Stanford, where he worked. Melinda Warnstein-Keppler, the electronics guru, vanished from her apartment, leaving dinner in the microwave. Zhou Chen-Barnhart, the builder of the orbital neutrino collector, was next, then Claudine Fraas, the Nobel laureate author of Problems in Holographic Relativity.
Milo didn’t worry about disappearing, himself. He was a research assistant. An information-science gunslinger, but he would never be a giant. He worked for the giants and was honored to do so. They were all, in their way, trying to save the world, back when they still thought it could be saved.
Milo had come to science in a way that was both usual and unusual. Like most science-worshippers, he was curious. There was nothing he didn’t want to know, and this made him absorb books and computer links the way other kids absorbed loud music. That was the ordinary part. The extraordinary part was why he wanted so badly to understand how the world worked (and how time worked, and space, and life and death).
He heard voices in his head.
Not the voices of schizophrenia but voices that seemed to be from the past. Other lives he had lived. Memories spanning thousands of years. Information that came to him out of nowhere, because he had once lived in Japan or had once been an Egyptian mathematician.
Hell, maybe he was schizophrenic. Maybe he had a brain tumor.
(You don’t have a brain tumor, a voice told him. A former doctor.)
He wound up working for Wayne Aldrin, the rock star of Systems Integration Science. At twenty-five, Aldrin had published It’s Only an Island if You Look at It from the Water, a treatise that revolutionized problem solving. At thirty, he had developed a food plant that would thrive in toxic earth; it broke down poisons, cleaned the soil, and dropped fruit that was basically a big yellow multivitamin. It could have fed half the world, Milo had heard, except that it would have cost the wrong people a lot of money.
“The trouble with problem solving,” Aldrin often complained, “is that too many people are making money off the problems.”
Aldrin was forty now. He wore his gray mane like an ocean wave, curling backward and breaking around his neck. His surgeon’s hands were machines the way a flute is a machine. He was the sort of man da Vinci might have imagined.
Milo considered Aldrin the greatest human alive.
They were working, in those days, on the Nowhere Computer. It was a computer that existed only in cyberspace and worked like a vacuum: pulling in functions and data that were already “out there.” It was immeasurably powerful, according to Aldrin, for something that didn’t actually exist. When the Disappearances began, they hadn’t gotten it to work yet.
Milo didn’t let this bother him. To be honest, his attention was elsewhere. Not on the voices but on his fellow info-cruncher, Kim. The torch he carried for her was the lab’s worst-kept secret. Someday he was going to ask her out. When he wasn’t so busy.
One quiet Friday, Kim leaned over his desk and said, “I wonder if you could do me a favor.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I have a date,” she said, “but no babysitter. I don’t think anyone even does babysitting anymore. I wonder if you could come over and watch Libby for me.”
She should have just shot him. All around the office, eavesdroppers winced. Ouch, ouch, ouch…
(No way! said some of his voices.)
Shit. Really? Fuck!
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” Fuck.
“Seven?” she said.
“Okay.”
He rang the doorbell at Kim’s ground-level apartment, and she answered wearing a long, sheer dress that left one shoulder exposed. One tanned, smooth shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, stepping in. “You look great.”
“Why, thanks.”
“Hey,” he said to Libby (Kim’s six-year-old), who was parked in front of the TV. It was a good TV night, meaning the TV stations were broadcasting.
Libby didn’t answer.
“What time are you expecting the lucky fellow?” Milo asked. Maybe he could manage to be in the bathroom when the doorbell rang.
“He’s here,” said Kim, opening a bottle of white wine.
Here? Already? Shit. Where?
“Didn’t I tell you, Milo? It’s you. I’m going on a date with you tonight. If that’s okay. It’ll just have to be here, because, like I said, the babysitter thing.”
She blinked at him with wide, sunny eyes.
Oh, wow!
“I…well, of course,” he said.
“I was getting old,” said Kim, “waiting for you to ask.”
He felt silly for waiting and decided to balance it with an act of spontaneous courage. He slipped an arm around her waist, drew her to him, and kissed her on the lips. She returned the kiss, and they released each other.
Libby watched them over the back of the couch.
“Are you guys getting married?” she asked.
(Are you guys getting married? asked some of the voices.)
They had dinner, the three of them, by candlelight. Milo found himself having a kind of double date.
“I have one of the lab computers here at home,” Kim told him, over roast beef. “I’ve been working on the satellite problem.”
“I hate spiders,” Libby told him.
That’s how it went. Two conversations, two dates, at once.
“It’s been three years,” answered Milo, “since anyone launched a new satellite. It’s going to be like a new Dark Ages if we don’t find a new way to transmit. I don’t care for spiders, either. Aren’t you glad they don’t fly?”
“What if we teach data packets to ignore the existing systems? What if we could get info to just, I don’t know, bounce off the magnetosphere?”
“Did you know some cockroaches can fly?”
Milo was stunned. That was frigging brilliant. It was the kind of thing Aldrin would get excited about.
“We should call the Doc,” he said. “I heard about flying cockroaches!” he added. “Gross!”
“They’re called palmetto bugs. I have to go number one.”
There was lemon meringue pie for dessert, in front of the TV. They watched an old Batman movie and fell asleep on the couch together, all three of them.
The next morning, an hour before daycare opened, they took Libby along when they sped over to the university, hoping to catch Aldrin at his customary cafeteria table, with his tablet and his orange and his orange juice.
But he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t in his office, either, although his door was open. And he wasn’t in the lab. Neither was any of his stuff.
Milo and Kim shared the same unbelieving look.
“Disappeared,” they whispered together.
“What’s that mean?” asked Libby.
Before they could answer, two scary guys in black suits marched into the lab.
“Milo Osgood?” they asked. “Kimberly Dodd and”—one of them checked a handheld tablet—“Libby?”
Ah, shit, thought Milo.
“Yeah,” all three of them said, and, just like that, they were disappeared, too.
First they were driven to the airport. Then they were rushed aboard a small jet and flown east. On landing, they were driven down a bunch of farm roads, through golden morning light and corn, to a white building with no windows, surrounded by military tents and military people. They were escorted inside, down a long, spotless white hallway, and left before a spotless, featureless door.
The door opened before Milo could knock, and there stood Wayne Aldrin. He looked ruffled, if unharmed, and had a haunted look in his eye that hadn’t been there before.
“First of all,” he said, “I’m sorry. Second of all, come in and sit down.”
Libby was about to say something, but at that precise moment a bright-looking teenager in a jumpsuit and ponytail came hurrying up, saying, “Are you Libby?”
Fifteen seconds later she and Libby were off, down the hall, hand in hand. “I’ll get her breakfast!” promised the teen, “and have her back to you in an hour!”
Milo gave Kim’s waist a squeeze as Aldrin ushered them into his new office. A cheap desk, a table, coffee machine, filing cabinets, computers, and some folding chairs. Aldrin, plainly, hadn’t disappeared; he’d been transplanted.
“It’ll be best,” said Aldrin, “if I just explain, without interruption. Then you can ask questions or yell and scream, if you want.
“A year ago, some amateur astronomers sighted an anomaly in the night sky. The professionals took a look at it, and it’s bad news. In October of 2025, a comet the size of Ireland is going to hit the planet Earth like a big, fat musket ball and probably kill every living thing. So they—let me finish, Milo—so they had a big conference to decide what we should do, and what they decided was this: to collect the right scientists and nuts-and-bolts people and have them build spaceships to carry humanity away from Earth. One ship for Venus, one for Earth orbit, one for Mars, and one for Jupiter’s moons. The ships will serve as habitats and carry materials to build more habitats.”
Milo had to lace his fingers together to keep his hands from shaking. Beside him, Kim softly gasped.
“So,” Aldrin continued, “to do all this, we need to do a hundred years of science and engineering in just five years. Now, before you go asking a bazillion questions, let me see if I can anticipate you. One: How many people can go on these big ships? The answer is: Not many. Maybe six thousand on each of the arks. Two: What are they telling the rest of the planet? The answer is: Nothing for as long as possible, or they’ll come here and rip us all to shreds. Third: Why are you here? You’re here because I’m here, and I’m allowed a staff of two. Why am I here? Because in order to make this all work without breaking down, it has to be as simple as possible. I’m here to try and make it all…”
“Elegant,” suggested Milo. Then he threw up on the floor.
“Exactly,” said Aldrin. “Oh, damn. I’ll call a custodian. Don’t worry. I threw up, too.”
They repaired to the hallway and kept talking while waiting for the custodian. Holding hands, Kim and Milo asked some questions that Aldrin must have anticipated but hadn’t gotten to yet.
He listened patiently, gravely.
“No,” he answered. “You are not guaranteed a place aboard one of the arks. Only the team leaders are guaranteed, at first. Yes, I’m one of them. No, Kim, I’m sorry, there’s no special exception for children. As we get closer to our launch date, skilled workers will be selected, as we learn more about our needs. Later, there will be a series of lotteries.”
Kim glared a hole in the floor.
“If you won’t guarantee Libby a seat,” she said quietly, “I will do nothing whatsoever to help you.”
“Nor will I,” said Milo, surprising himself.
Aldrin shook his head.
“They’re not my rules, you guys,” he said. “That’s something you have to understand. Just because I’m a key designer doesn’t mean I have any say where policy’s concerned.”
“Who does?” asked Milo.
“Money,” spat Kim. “Who else? When it comes right down to it, there’s about five or six world banks that hold the loan on everything.”
“That’s a myth,” said Milo.
“No, she’s right,” said Aldrin. “Money’s no different from anything else. It forms systems along paths of least resistance and collects in places. Those places, the banks, are the only ones with the muscle to pull off what we’re trying to do here.”
“What, then,” said Milo, “we don’t cooperate, they come and put a bullet in us?”
“I don’t know,” said Aldrin, eyes darkening. “Just don’t make trouble. Play the game, and try to improve your hand. In the meantime, let’s do our best.”
The custodian arrived with his rolling tool closet and vanished with a nod into the office.
“We’re in a whole new reality,” Aldrin said, placing a firm hand on each of their shoulders. “Take some time to get your brain around it. I got you guys an apartment together. Go sit. Get something to eat. They’ll bring you clothes.”
“Together?” asked Milo. “How did you know? I mean, we just…last night was—”
“Jesus, you guys,” Aldrin laughed. “Everybody knew, except you. Now get outta here.”
Aldrin’s door shut behind them. Way down the hall, Libby and her babysitter came galloping their way, laughing.
“I knew,” said Kim, burying her head in Milo’s shoulder.
The world outside of central Iowa continued to fall apart.
A dirty bomb turned Seattle into a ghost town. The pharmaceutical industry finally hit a tipping point and overcharged itself out of existence. All over the world, people who needed medicine to stay alive began to sicken and die.
Milo stopped getting his asthma meds. Now, when he had an attack, he toughed it out.
The ARK compound developed into a small city. A city no one knew about and no one was allowed to fly over.
In the largest buildings, they designed the gigantic arkships themselves. This was partly Aldrin’s domain. Within a week, they had begun brainstorming spaceships based on living creatures. Their systems would breathe like lungs, flow like blood, see and hear and think like brains.
In other buildings, they studied ways for people—whole communities!—to live and work in space. One of the first things they decided was that people would be happier with fewer social restrictions. The need to restart the human race would make conventional marriage impractical. Human culture aboard the ships, it appeared, was going to be very “free.”
These experiments and conclusions had a heavy influence on the current ARK culture. ARK became like a party school that was really, really, really hard to get into.
In their dormitory, Milo and Kim lived in much the same way other families lived. They made friends. They celebrated holidays. During the day, Libby went to daycare, and Milo and Kim worked in the spacecraft-assembly building.
They were invited to parties. They usually went.
They were invited to join Free Love cohorts and politely declined. Milo and Kim had decided to be monogamous.
It was not a bad life, if you were able to ignore the fact that the world outside was doomed and you were probably doomed right along with it.
Milo found himself fighting depression. Not the full-on, soul-crushing kind that could paralyze you, but an abiding and sublime sadness that seemed to well up from across the ages.
It was the voices again. They had all lived lives on Earth, supposedly, in every age of human history. And now that part of history was going to end. Violently and badly.
There was a Fauvist painter who feared the death of Earth far more than he had his own death, of pneumonia. There was a deeply religious farm girl from a thousand years ago who didn’t mind her own death, because the world and God’s works would endure. But now even that was in danger.
Most of the voices were silent. That’s what depressed Milo—the silence. Eight thousand years of silent voices in his head, looking out through his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Kim asked him one night, catching him woolgathering by the apartment’s one window.
“I hear voices,” he told her bluntly, at last. “Usually, anyway.”
“No shit,” she said, taking his arm. “You talk about them in your sleep.”
A year passed.
Within the perimeter, the spaceships themselves began to take shape. Mighty frames, at first, like cages the size of city blocks, swarming with workers, prodded by cranes. There were four. The Looking Glass, an experimental ship, would be finished first and would tour the solar system in the greatest sea trial of all time before the others—the Avalon, the Atlantis, and the Summerland—left Earth just ahead of the comet.
Outside, the economy evaporated.
“It’s dying fast out there,” Aldrin remarked. “And I don’t get it. Everything that’s happening was preventable. The whole last sixty years has been like watching our business leaders drive us all toward a brick wall without ever trying to turn or swerve.”
They were in the computer lab. They were almost always in the lab these days. The ships’ giant chemical lungs weren’t cycling properly yet. Milo and Kim were pouring all their work hours into a computer model that Aldrin swore would root out the cause.
If it worked, they’d celebrate.
There was a lot of celebrating at ARK, because there were breakthroughs every day. It could rain Nobel Prizes at the ARK compound, and there still wouldn’t be enough recognition to go around. There wasn’t time.
The computer model worked beautifully. Food plants growing in the ventilator bronchia were reproducing too fast. They’d have to be spread out. Maybe some of them could be grown in the coolant chambers, where there’d be condensation.
They celebrated. Their achievement shared the news that night with a team that had discovered how to make radiation shielding out of cardboard and peanut oil.
After a while, tiring of the crowds and the bars, Milo, Kim, and Aldrin found their way to a wide-open space far from the compound, in the middle of open grass, under stars like an ocean of ice and fire.
They signed out a portable fire pit, and brought marshmallows, and sat in the middle of the Iowa night, drinking wine.
Then Aldrin said, “I miss my wife.”
What?
“Did you know I was married?” he asked. “It was a long time ago. She died quite suddenly.”
“I knew,” said Kim. She gave his arm a squeeze.
“It’s not that I would wish her back now, with things the way they are. It’s only my way of observing that this project takes being alone and kind of shoves it right in your face. I mean, being a social species is what this is all about, right? Keeping the chain going. We’re not like hamsters. Hamsters live alone. Know that? They don’t even like other hamsters. We’re more like wolves. When wolves are apart, and then they come back together, they jump around and lick each other and go all crazy. They call it ‘the Jubilation of Wolves.’ ”
Something in the fire popped, sending sparks into the night.
“It’s not an easy time,” said Aldrin, “to be a lone wolf.”
He put a hand on Kim’s knee and gave it a squeeze.
Oh, man! thought Milo. What was happening here?
Kim’s mouth wobbled open. She said, “I think I’ve had enough wine,” and stood.
The hand dropped away. Aldrin focused on the fire.
“I think we all have,” said Milo. He gathered up his jacket. He draped Kim’s shawl over her shoulders.
“I’m going to stay out awhile longer,” said Aldrin, so they said their good-nights and left him there.
When they’d gone about three hundred yards, they heard a long, broken howl.
“Drunk, horny bastard,” muttered Milo.
Kim took his arm and said, “Be nice.” Nice? Milo thought about the word.
His depression had turned to raw frustration now. All their work on integration, on building a ship that worked like an organism, had become so promising. And now the great man himself was proving too human. Not only that, but his sense of appropriateness seemed to have slipped.
Fuck.
Might have known it would get complicated, Milo thought.
Problems are complicated, said the Egyptian mathematician in his head. That’s what makes them problems.
The night of the first lottery, they prepared Libby’s favorite supper—mac and cheese, extra cheesy, with sliced-up hot dogs in it—and watched Libby’s favorite movie, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 47. After the child fell asleep, they practically devoured each other in their tiny sleep pod.
Their message to each other was simple and unmistakable: They were a family and they loved one another.
They were not chosen.
“Libby, Libby, Libby,” Milo heard Kim whispering over her home laptop, after midnight, as the last numbers flashed. “At least Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby,” like a magic spell that wasn’t magic enough.
The Looking Glass took its final shape, and you’d think they had built some kind of cathedral out there on the Iowa plain. She lay across the hills like a trick of the eye, out of scale and shining.
Watching her leave the Earth was like watching a whale made of fire.
Earth and air both shook, and the whale rose—slowly, at first, still reflecting the green hills and green corn, and as it lifted away, it was like watching the Earth lift away from itself. Then the great engine bells ignited, and she crossed the sky like a second sun.
The weather changed on the hills and blew their hair and their lab jackets and clippings from the freshly mown grass, and they all squinted, the three hundred thousand ninety-two of them that remained, as the ship shot across the sky, and up, and out.
And they all went back to work, and the countdown resumed, a little faster.
Finally, some amateur astronomers in Mexico noticed the comet. They were calling it Comet Marie. Other people outside the fence, in different parts of the world, started putting two and two together.
“Maybe this is why all those scientists disappeared,” they said.
So a few of the ARK staff were assigned to get on the Internet and spread disinformation. There was, they said, a place in the Andes Mountains of Peru where you weren’t allowed to go and weren’t allowed to fly over. But here were some fuzzy satellite pictures of what looked like a tent city for thousands of people and several giant rockets under construction.
People swarmed into South America, storming the Andes in search of survival. They were hindered by the fact that it was getting damn hard to get around out there. Luxuries like passenger flight had crashed with the world economy. Ocean travel was expensive and dangerous and mostly under pirate control. Everywhere, law was breaking down.
Up in Iowa, they worked in peace for a while longer.
Months passed.
The ships took their final shapes. Their anatomical systems were tested, and the ships breathed and their hearts pumped and their brains crackled and their engines flexed.
Everywhere around ARK, work quickened and peaked. People worked harder, hit the bars harder, loved harder. They watched the clock and the skies, anticipating the reappearance of the Looking Glass and the exodus that would follow.
For the first time, many of the ARK staffers seemed to understand that their lives weren’t going to go on for much longer. They hit the bars, but they were quiet about it. Some of them began disappearing over the fence at night. Some of them wanted to see friends or family before the world died. Some of them meant to survive and wanted time to prepare.
Milo and Kim didn’t talk about it. Kim refused. On the outside, she clung to a prim belief that chance or justice would intercede and at least deliver her kid. On the inside, Milo could tell, she was coming apart. Instead of talking about it, they drank. They didn’t hit the bars; they just drank. For a while they supplanted talk with lovemaking. And then the lovemaking grew sad, and slowed, and stopped, almost with a shrug. Then Libby began spending nights in their bed, between them.
The world had already ended, thought Milo. You could see it on people’s faces; they had a stretched-out, jittery look to them now, as if something had bitten them and they didn’t know what. You started coming around corners and finding people crying, and they’d look ashamed and hurry away.
Milo didn’t cry. But he started having asthma attacks that were so bad they knocked him out. He told no one.
In his head—or in his soul, wherever that was—certain voices chimed in, trying to be helpful. A fisherman on Krakatoa who had seen the end of the world already, in a volcanic blast heard round the world. An eight-year-old who had seen the plague approach her village, take her family, and then crawl down her own throat. A banker who took too many risks, leaping from the roof of the Grain Exchange.
It’s ended before, they said. Who would suppose it shouldn’t end again?
This cheered Milo up a little, believe it or not.
Most nations dissolved into chaos and rioting. The Internet gasped, flashed, and went silent.
Milo walked into the lab one morning to find Kim and Aldrin in the midst of a heated argument. Both were red-faced and turned away from each other the moment they glimpsed him.
“What did I miss?” Milo asked.
“Nothing import—” Aldrin began.
“What did I miss?” Milo roared, kicking over the nearest chair. “I’d appreciate it if one of the two of you would have the courtesy to not treat me like an idiot.”
“He,” said Kim, her voice shaking, pointing a finger at Aldrin, “says he’ll make a place on the Summerland for us, if we’ll make him…”
She couldn’t continue.
“Make him what?” asked Milo.
“Part of your family,” said Aldrin. He was trying to be dignified, with his hands folded behind his back.
“ ‘Part of your family’?” said Milo, advancing. “Sounds like pig Latin for ‘I want to fuck your wife.’ ”
(This, piped up the Egyptian mathematician, is yet another way the world ends.)
“It’s not that simple,” said Aldrin, “or that coarse.”
They were nose-to-nose.
Kim stepped up beside them, looking worried. She’d never seen Milo hit anyone, but he sure looked ready to now, and that wouldn’t help anything. They didn’t tolerate violent people at ARK.
Something quite complicated was happening in Milo’s mental wilderness just then. A strange inner voice was shouting at him, almost as if thousands of previous lives were trying to give him advice. Behind his anger, his soul was trying to be wise.
The thousand voices convinced Milo to be silent and thoughtful for a minute.
When he spoke, this is what Milo said:
“Wayne, we love you. And with the crazy future coming down on us, your suggestion even makes some sense. But I have a problem with something. Why didn’t you come to both of us with this…proposal, if you will? But more so, how can we possibly get around the fact that it sounds like you’re trying to use Libby, and your influence, to get Kim into your bed? That doesn’t sound like you. It’s not the Wayne Aldrin I know. Why don’t you answer those questions, and then I’ll decide whether to break your teeth with a wrench.”
Aldrin nodded.
“Thank you for asking,” he said. “In your way, you’ve been patient. The answer to the really important question is: I haven’t changed in that way. I am not trying to get you to prostitute yourselves or to hold Libby hostage.”
“Then what could you possibly mean?” asked Kim.
“They have announced a change,” said Aldrin. “Only to the preselected team leaders. For whatever reason, the policy wonks have decided to give extra chances to our immediate families. I think things are getting a bit shaky. They need to make sure the teams stay cohesive and keep working, so they’re throwing the team leaders a bone.”
Milo’s asthma launched an attack.
“Go on,” he wheezed.
“Well, that’s it. I’m not trying to get in bed with your wife. I’m trying to get your family aboard an ark.”
Milo could swear he read Kim’s mind at that moment. One thought, one priority: Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby…
God, he didn’t want to do this.
They were his family, goddammit.
“We’ll do it?” he said, looking at Kim.
Kim practically burst with relief. Rivers of tears.
“Yes,” she said.
Then they all just backed away, awkward, awkward, awkward, and did computer stuff and didn’t look at one another until lunchtime, when the three of them went to a notary office over in admin and got married by what was essentially a vending machine.
The comet appeared in the night sky.
“So beautiful,” you could hear people say. They crowded the hills around the arks at night. Every night, on blankets, as if waiting for fireworks. Couples, here and there. Larger groups, whole teams of spouses.
Milo, Kim, and Libby moved into Aldrin’s pod. It was more spacious, better appointed. “He has a dishwasher!” cried Libby, who obviously felt that this, above all, signaled some kind of evolution for their family.
Milo and Kim spent nights in Aldrin’s sleep chamber. Aldrin himself had the grace to sleep on the couch. They progressed through an uncomfortable cycle: At first, they didn’t make love in Aldrin’s bed, any more than they made love in their own. Then something desperate and wordless got ahold of them, and they made love three nights in a row. Then they didn’t again. Kim actually shivered when Milo touched her.
“What’s the matter?” Milo whispered. “Afraid your husband will hear?”
“What’s the matter?” whispered Kim the first time Milo wouldn’t put out. “Afraid your husband will hear?”
Libby spent days playing with the dishwasher, rolling the little cart in and out. She looked at Aldrin like some kind of tall, friendly dog they had come to live with.
They explained nothing to her, out of sheer cowardice.
The second lottery began at nine in the morning, the same day that administration reported contact with the returning Looking Glass.
All was well. The ship had flown like a silver swallow.
The separate lottery for the leaders’ families offered an 80 percent chance. By nightfall, they knew Libby had drawn a seat. Kim went into the bathroom and cried. Not softly, but braying like a donkey.
“Why’d she even bother to go in the bathroom?” asked Aldrin, and the two husbands laughed together for the first time.
By nine P.M., they knew Kim’s seat was assured.
They all had a glass of wine in the kitchen. Even Libby.
By midnight, the passenger lists were complete. Milo was not on any of them.
No one knew what to say, so they said nothing.
In the middle of the night, Milo left.
It was something he had decided, weeks ago, to do if the lottery turned out as it had.
He bought a sleeping bag, pup tent, and a mess kit from the commissary automat, left the dormitory, and made himself a little camp in the hills.
He wasn’t alone. They dotted the hillside: Dark patches, sleeping bags, on dark grass. Campfires here and there, like red stars. These were the ranks of those who were staying behind. Putting some distance between themselves and the silver future-ships.
It was not comforting, Milo found, joining these ranks, this great pre-dying. It was empty and terrible and made him feel as if someone had performed a stomach operation on him. It brought his asthma on so strong that he went to sleep that way and dreamed he was strangling.
They called themselves the Earth People.
In the morning, some of them got up and went to work. Others slipped off through the corn. Milo did not go back to the lab. They were finished there. The Earth People who slipped away left holes in thousands of jobs, and those jobs still needed doing.
Those who remained became job-doers. This was all that remained of what had once been full, above-average lives. Now anything that required time and years and a future was set aside. Dreams and plans. Fears about growing old. Wishes. All that remained was the doing of jobs, and maybe memories and some indiscriminate sex. Milo’s voices grew quiet, almost silent.
He took a job with the fueling teams, making sure the awesome chemistries stayed cold or hot. He worked in an astronaut suit, amid clouds of cryogenic steam.
He tried not to think about anything.
He was helping to fuel the Avalon when Kim found him. She rode up on the tiny crew elevator, at lunchtime. With an actual old-fashioned lunch pail and a baloney sandwich.
He was sitting on the fueling tower with his legs dangling into space. He saw Kim’s lab shoes out of the corner of his eye. Felt her there, looking down at him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Why would you leave like that?”
He stood.
“You know why,” he said.
“We still have three days!” she cried, hitting him in the chest. “At least it’s something!”
Milo shook his head. “You have to try and be a family, the three of you, for real, before they strap you in and take you away, wherever. You need this time, and I’m giving it to you.”
She gripped herself with both arms. Eyes squinched closed, but no tears.
He drew her to him and pulled their bodies tight together.
She tried to slip her hand inside his enviro-suit.
“No,” whispered Milo. “Go be his. Make him yours.”
Softly, she hit him in the chest again. They stood rocking, their foreheads touching.
“Libby?” he asked.
“We tried to tell her. We had to try and tell her everything, really—I mean, we’re loading in two days practically. Plus, we had to try and explain about you, and…well, what do you expect? We had to sedate her. That’s all there is to tell. She loves you. I love you.”
Milo nodded. He kissed her forehead.
After a minute, she did what she had to do. She rode the elevator out of sight.
After work that day, Milo stopped in the lower hills and looked back down at the compound. The arks lay waiting, ready, their noses lifted into the soft wind, reflecting green grass and blue sky.
He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, traced its gray length for miles across the hills. How useful would the fence be if they came? Surely they would come, once they saw the arks go up. There would be no disguising it. They would see, and they’d come, finally.
The Earth People did their jobs.
On the third morning, they helped to load the arks.
They sealed the mighty hatches and primed the awesome engines.
They fled to the farthest hills.
And it happened.
The ships boomed, and the ground shook, and the air went blurry like water, and the shock waves arrived.
The Avalon flared, lifted, then burned away into the sky, white-hot, mirror-bright.
Then the Atlantis.
Then the real heartbreaker, the Summerland. And that tugged at them and hurt them in a way they hadn’t anticipated, because when she was gone—which she was, too soon—it was really over. The great accomplishment had been accomplished, and now here they all were, a bunch of dead people standing around looking at one another, without even a job to do.
They built bonfires. Halloween bonfires. Beach-sized bonfires, college pep rally–sized bonfires. Some commandeered the surviving shipbuilding cranes and built pyramids and Jenga towers. There were architects and engineers among them, so there were marvels and wonders by the end of the week, spread over miles, drenched in everything from kerosene to leftover rocket fuel.
At night, exhausted, they slept.
Who knows what they did everywhere else on the Earth?
Milo worked on the construction of a giant wooden man. He had a giant wooden mouth and a pecker and everything.
On the last morning, people finally came to the fence.
They stood outside at first, fingers hanging on the mesh, looking in like jailbirds in reverse. Then they climbed over or cut their way through. Some of them were angry, but they didn’t do anything to hurt anyone once they got a look at the bonfires, at the pyramids and towers and the huge wooden man. Whatever had happened here was over. All that was left was this tribe of doomed people, just like them.
At nightfall, they lit the fires.
The whole landscape went up in a garish false day, roaring, an elemental mockery of the launching of the arks. Where were they now, the ships? Hanging in orbit? Were they watching?
The night writhed in pagan howls. Everywhere, shadows leaped or clustered in groups. They sang in some cases. Some were silent.
Milo’s voices were silent, too, finally and completely. They had all experienced their own deaths. No need to share this one.
Not long after full dark, the comet rose in the sky. Different from before. Dreadful.
A woman staggered past Milo, calling, “Terry? Terry!” (And Milo thought, That’s how the world ends? People stumbling around, yelling, “Terry”?)
The comet brightened and moved with sudden speed.
An immense riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipping tore the sky.
A knot of men and women came dancing along, drunk, naked, and crazy-eyed.
“Dance with us!” they howled, clutching at him. Milo tore himself away, baring his teeth like a dog.
Thunder like a million rockets.
The ground tore open and the air caught fire.
“Terry!” someone screamed.
And then dark. And then nothing.