Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson Page B

you, Dubois?” She never called him by his nickname.
    “Beg pardon?”
    Irritation flashed over her face—unusual, that—and then she focused on him, and she gradually became amused. “You don’t know.”
    “Don’t know what, Amelia?”
    “Obviously, you’re going.”
    “Going where?”
    “To the Cloud Ark. They’re going to need you. You’re one of the few who can be useful up there. Who can actually help its chances of survival. Be a leader.”
    It really hadn’t occurred to him until she said it. But then he saw that it was probably true. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, “I think I would rather croak down here. With you. I was thinking we could come up here, camp out on the rim, and watch it. It’s going to be the most amazing thing ever.”
    “A real hot date,” Amelia said. “No, I think I’ll be spending that day with my family.”
    “Maybe you and I could be family by then.”
    Tears gleamed in the pouches beneath her eyes, and she ran a finger under her nose. “That has got to be the strangest proposalever,” she said. “The thing is, Dubois, that my husband is going to be in orbit and I’m going to be in California.”
    “I could look for a way to—”
    She shook her head. “They will never, ever agree to bringing a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher up to the Cloud Ark.”
    He knew she was right.
    “A frozen embryo, though—that seems like a possibility.”
    “That has got to be the strangest proposition ever,” Doob said.
    “We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger.”
    So it was that, half an hour after Doc Dubois had listened with high intellectual skepticism to the soothing speech of Clarence Crouch, and picked it apart logically in his mind, proving to himself that it was just a comforting sop for the bereaved billions, a distraction to keep them busy with sex during the two years they had left, he was in Amelia’s arms, and she in his, as they got busy making an embryo for him to carry up into space for implantation in some other, unknown woman’s womb.
    He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.
    DINAH WAS GLAD NOT TO HAVE BEEN ON THE PLANET WHEN THE Crater Lake announcement was being made. She sat alone in her workshop, peering out her window past the craggy black silhouette of Amalthea at the luminous blue limb of the Earth below. She knew the time of the announcement and she knew how long it was supposed to last. She chose not to watch the video feed. It hit her as strange that the Earth itself did not change its appearance in any way. Down below, seven billion people were hearing the worst news imaginable. They were going through a collective emotional trauma unknown in the history of the human race. Police and military werebeing deployed in public spaces to “maintain order,” whatever that meant. But Earth looked the same.
    Her radio started beeping. She looked down, blinked away tears, and saw Alaska, bent over the curve of the world far to the north.
               WE ARE PROUD THAT YOU ARE UP THERE
    She recognized her father’s fist—his touch on the Morse key—as easily as his smell or his voice. She returned:
               I WISH THAT I COULD SEE YOU AGAIN
     
               AUNT BEVERLY IS SOWING SOME FLATS OF POTATOES. WE WILL BE FINE.
    She cried for a while.
    QSL, he signaled, which was a Q code meaning, in this case, “Are you still there?”
    She sent QSL back, meaning “Yes.”
    She knew that the purpose of Q codes was to make communication more efficient, but she understood now that they could serve another purpose. They could enable you to eke out a few scraps of useful information when words were too difficult.
               YOU BETTER GET TO WORK KIDDO
     
               AND YOU SHOULD STOP POUNDING THAT KEY AND HELP BEV
     
               LOVE YOU QRT