Seveneves

“Yes, of course,” the president said. “Your job is to—”

“Pardon me, Madam President, can I take this?” Dr. Harris asked. Dinah noted the flick of the president’s eyes, the look of shock on her face. The president of the United States had just been interrupted. Shouldered out of the way. As a woman who had made her way up in the world, she probably had some raw nerve endings around that sort of thing.

But this wasn’t that. It wasn’t J.B.F. asking herself did he interrupt me because I’m a woman? They were past all of that now. This was her asking herself did he interrupt me because the president of the United States doesn’t matter anymore?

“Is Lina there?” Dr. Harris asked. “Pan the camera around please—ah, there you are. Lina, I have read your articles about the swarming behaviors of fish in the Caribbean. Great stuff.”

“I didn’t know your interests extended to things underwater,” said Lina Ferreira. “Thank you.”

People were fu

“The videos are amazing. They all move in tight formation, until a predator comes through. Then, suddenly, a hole just opens up in the swarm and the predator sails through it and doesn’t catch a single fish. A moment later they’re back together again. Well, nothing’s been decided yet, but—”

“You want to use swarming behavior in the ark?”

“The proposal is called the Cloud Ark,” the president cut back in. “And you have it correct. Rather than putting all our eggs in one basket—”

“Eggs . . . and sperm,” Jibran muttered, in his Lancashire accent, so low that only Dinah picked it up.

“We will take a distributed architecture,” J.B.F. said, with perhaps too careful enunciation, as if she had learned the phrase ten minutes ago. “Each of the ships that will make up the Cloud Ark will be autonomous to an extent. We will mass-produce them, I am told, and send them up just as fast as we can. They will swarm around Izzy. When it is safe to do so, they can dock together, like Tinkertoys, and people can move from one to the other freely. But when a rock approaches, fwoosh!” And she spread her fingers apart, the purple lacquered nails darting away from one another.

But what about Izzy? Dinah wondered. She thought better of asking just now.

“In order to make ready for that, there are tasks for all of you,” the president said. “And that is why I asked the director to join us on this call.” Meaning Scott Spalding, the director of NASA. “I’m going to turn it over to Sparky, so that he can walk you through the details. As you can imagine, I have some other concerns to look after, and so I am going to bid you goodbye at this point.”

The twelve in the Banana mustered a low murmur of thanks to usher the president out of whatever conference room this transmission was coming from. Someone torqued the camera around until it was pointing at Scott Spalding. He had managed to find a blazer but he was tieless, and probably would be for the remainder of his life. As a young astronaut, Sparky had been slated for an Apollo mission that had been canceled during the budget cutbacks of the early 1970s. He had stuck with the program, getting his Ph.D. during the hiatus in ma

Exactly what Rilke poems Sparky thought could address the world’s current predicament, it was impossible to guess. For a moment there, after the camera swung around to autofocus on his sagging and creased face, it almost seemed like some poetry might be on the tip of his tongue. Then he shook it off and found the camera’s lens with his pale eyes. “Words fail me,” he said, “so I am just going to concentrate on business. Ivy, you remain in charge. There’s no one better. Your job is to keep things ru

And from there he went down the list.

Frank Casper, a Canadian electrical engineer, and Spencer Grindstaff, an American who specialized in communications and who had been doing mysterious work for intelligence agencies, were going to work on establishing the network infrastructure needed to support the activities of the Cloud Ark. Jibran, an instrumentation specialist who was always getting roped into such problems anyway, would work with them.

Fyodor Panteleimon, their grizzled space walk specialist, and Zeke Petersen, a more boyish-looking American air force pilot who also had many hours of experience in space suits, would begin preparing for the arrival of new modules that, they were assured, were being designed and built with un-NASA-like haste and would begin arriving at Izzy in less than a month. Dinah found that time estimate to be ludicrously optimistic until she remembered that essentially all the world’s resources were being thrown at this.

Konrad Barth was simply asked to stay on after the meeting for a talk with Doob. It was obvious enough that he would soon be repurposing every astronomical gadget on the space station to the problem of looking for incoming rocks. This was a topic no one wanted to dwell on. If Izzy got hit by a rock of any size, it was all over. In that sense there really was no point in talking about it.

The life scientists were Lina Ferreira; Margaret Coghlan, an Australian woman studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body; and Jun Ueda, a Japanese biophysicist ru

That covered eleven of the twelve. So far, Sparky hadn’t said a word to Dinah.

Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It had always been thus. The fact that the world was ending changed nothing. As Sparky kept ticking down the list, telling each person what they would be doing in the coming weeks, she kept feeling more and more the point of focus precisely because she hadn’t been focused on yet. And when it became clear that she was last on Sparky’s list, she had a good long while, as he talked to Margaret and Jun and Marco, to wonder what that meant. Being Dinah, her first assumption was that she was considered so important that she was being saved for last. But by the time Sparky finally spoke her name, she had arrived at a different guess as to what was happening. Her heart was already thumping and her pinkies tingling, her tongue bulky in her mouth.