All the Birds in the Sky (31 page)

Laurence said, “Listen, can you help me get a phone?” At the same time that Isobel said, “Milton is back.” Then they were both like, “You first.” Laurence won—so Isobel went first.

“Milton is back. He wants me to bring you and the others up to his office right away. I think things are about to get interesting around here.” She stood, to lead Laurence away, and then remembered. “What were you trying to say, before?”

“Uh, nothing. Actually, no, wait. It is something. I need a phone. My frien—my girlfriend, I guess. Patricia. You met her a few times. I haven’t talked to her since the flood. Her parents died. It’s been the hardest time, and I should have been there for her. I need to make sure she’s okay and let her know I’m thinking about her. It’s really important.”

“I’m sorry.” Isobel had already gotten halfway to the door, and she turned back. “I’m sorry, there’s just no way.” This had turned out to be a bad time to ask, given that Isobel was in a hurry to get to this meeting, but Laurence was committed.

“Please, Isobel. I just want, need, to talk to her a moment. Really.”

“We’re on total lockdown here. This whole campus is full of people who want to talk to their loved ones. I don’t know if you’ve been following the state of the world out there, but it’s total chaos. We can’t trust anybody.”

“Isobel. I’ve never asked you for anything before.” Laurence let a little of his desperation and dislocation show in his voice, and then had to struggle to keep it from overwhelming him.
Keep calm, make your case.
“I’ve been your friend my whole life, and now I’m asking you for something that’s massively important to me. Like, this could make the difference between me having a life and not having a life.”

“So she’s the one, huh?” Isobel shut the door and smiled. “I thought Serafina was the one.”

“So did I. But you know, the heart is not a lie detector. Or something. Falsely identifying the One is part of how you find the One.” He squelched a
Matrix
joke.

“I guess so.” Isobel gave another tragic smile. “I wouldn’t know. I married my college boyfriend.”

Laurence didn’t point out that Isobel and Percival had stayed together nearly fifteen years, which was a pretty respectable run. Instead, Laurence just waited, with arms folded and what he hoped was a decently pathetic look on his face.

Isobel held out a second longer, then handed him a phone. “But I have to stay and listen in. For security reasons. I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine.” Laurence seized the phone with both hands and dialed Patricia’s last known number.

It rang, while Isobel watched him, and rang some more, and went to voicemail. He dialed again, same result. This time, Laurence let it beep.

He breathed, trying not to look at Isobel. “Hey. It’s Laurence. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. And also, just to say that I’m really sorry about your loss. Your parents, I mean. They were … I can’t even begin to say. There’s nothing I can say. I wish I could be there for you, in person.” He wasn’t sure what else to say, on her voice mail, without being able to hear her response. Anything he could think of seemed inadequate, or maybe insensitive.

He almost just hung up and handed the phone back to Isobel, but then he realized: He’d just been looking at a freaking wormhole generator, a working model. He had
no way of knowing what might happen next
. They were, all of them, standing on terra incognita, and this felt like a moment that was radically discontinuous with everything that had come before. There was a nontrivial chance these were the last words he would ever speak to Patricia.

So Laurence pretended Isobel wasn’t there, staring, and he said, “Listen, I meant it when I said I loved you, it just sort of came out but it was the truth coming out. There’s a huge, vital part of me that reaches out to you in some kind of emotional phototropism. I have so many things I want to say to you, and I wish our lives could wrap around each other forever. I’m kind of … I can’t go anywhere right now. I have to see something through. But I promise you, as soon as I’m free I will track you down and we will be together, and I will try my fuckedest to make up for all the comfort I’m not giving you right now. That’s a promise. I love you. Goodbye.” He hung up with the flat of his thumb and handed the phone back to Isobel. She seemed pretty overcome, by a grab bag of emotions.

Isobel put her hand on Laurence’s upper arm as she slipped the phone back into a hiding place in her purse. But all she said was, “Tell nobody about this phone.” Laurence nodded.

Milton surveyed a roomful of geeks from his Herman Miller throne, ankle crossed over thigh and lips pursed as if he’d just finished a slice of the tartest Meyer lemon pie. Laurence stumbled over the limbs of a dozen of his colleagues, seeking a corner of a beanbag to occupy. Someone gave up his folding chair for Isobel. They were in an old server room, with no windows and only one thick door, so it would be hard to eavesdrop. Nobody was talking, and Laurence realized they were in the middle of one of Milton’s dramatic pauses. As soon as Laurence got settled, Milton restarted in the middle of an unfinished sentence, about the crisis in the U.S. government, the possibility of a new civil war, martial law, the deterioriating international situation in the absence of American military resolve, all the ways this could soon turn to hellshit. Something in Milton was pessimistic to the point of brokenness, and yet he was usually right. Listening to Milton’s dark litany, Laurence felt a surge of affection for the nearly bald man with his moth-wing eyebrows. Part of Laurence still wanted to be Milton Dirth when he grew up.

“All of our unpaid bills are coming due at once,” Milton was saying.

Laurence and Sougata kept looking at each other and half-grinning, because as soon as Milton got done talking about the collapse of civilization, he would move on to the fact that they had actually built it, the machine, and it seemed like it might work. Milton wanted to remind them all of the reasons why this could be humanity’s last hope, and then they would get on to the good part.

“All of this just makes this project even more urgent than we already thought,” said Milton. “Isobel, where are we with that?”

“Very preliminary tests on the equipment are looking good,” said Isobel. “It could be months before we’re ready to try anything more serious. Meanwhile, the most promising exoplanet candidate continues to be KOI-232.04. The Shatner Space Telescope has gotten some very promising readings as it transits its star, and we know it has oxygen and liquid water. And we’re pretty sure that if we create a stable wormhole with an opening near to KOI-232.04’s gravity well, the mouth of the wormhole will be drawn down to the planet’s surface. But there’s no guarantee it would be pulled down onto solid land.”

Laurence couldn’t believe they were talking about visiting another planet. This was really really happening. He kept falling off his half beanbag with the giddiness. Every time Isobel said something about the evidence for KOI-232.04’s habitability, and the other exoplanet candidates they’d identified, he had to sit on his hand to keep from pumping his fist. Even with so many people dead and dying, even with the world on the edge of ruin. This was straight-up amazing.

“Thank you for that update.” Milton stared into his own lap for a moment. Then he looked up, in every direction at once. “There’s been a wrinkle. Earnest Mather has been running some numbers, and he has a … let’s say a concern. Earnest, can you share your findings with the group?”

“Umm.” Mather looked as though he’d been through a lot since Laurence dropped out of the sky and bought his company. He’d cut off his exuberantly frizzy hair and started wearing chunky engineer glasses. His shoulders were permanently hunched as he sat on a stool. “I have done the math about two thousand times, and there’s, well, a possibility. Let’s put it between ten percent and twenty percent. A possibility that if we turn this machine on, we’ll start a reaction that would lead to an antigravity cascade, which in turn could tear the Earth apart.”

“But tell them the good news,” Milton said quickly.

“The good news? Yes. The good news.” Earnest did his best to sit up straight. “First, we would probably have about a week, between turning the machine on and the Earth being obliterated. So, with efficient crowd control, we could get a lot of people through the gateway before Earth was gone. And there’s around a fifty percent chance that if the destructive reaction started, we could stop it by turning the machine off.”

“So,” said Milton. “Let’s say it’s a ten percent chance of the destructive reaction starting, and a fifty-fifty chance that we could avert a catastrophic outcome in that case. In fact, it might only be a five percent chance of planetary rupture. Or a ninety-five percent chance that everything would be fine. So, let’s discuss.”

Laurence felt like he’d jumped off that high gantry, instead of taking the elevator. He wondered if he should have found a way to warn more people about what happened to Priya. Everybody was trying to talk at once, but all Laurence could make out was Sougata’s cursing. Laurence looked at Isobel, whose folding chair wobbled as she hugged herself, and he wouldn’t swear she wasn’t crying. With no windows and the door sealed tight, the room seemed even more airless than it had before, and Laurence had an irrational panic that he would step outside this room and find the whole outside world erased, gone for good.

Earnest Mather was weeping into a wad of paper towels, even though he alone had known about this bombshell in advance. Maybe because he’d been processing the information for longer, he was readier to cry over it. Laurence couldn’t believe it was going to end like this. How was he going to keep Isobel from falling to pieces?

The room was full of declarations. Someone quoted Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Tanaa said even a 1 percent chance of blowing up the planet was too much. “We always knew there were risks,” Tanaa said, “but this is insane.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Milton when the initial outrage had died down. “This technology was always a last resort. We went into this knowing we were leaping into the dreadful darkness. And I give you all my word: This technology will never see use, unless we all judge that the human race is past the brink of self-destruction.”

He paused again. Everybody inspected his or her hands.

“The sad truth is, there is a strong possibility our entire species is hosed, unless we act. It’s all too easy to imagine a number of different scenarios in which conflicts escalate to the point where doomsday weapons are unleashed. Or a total environmental collapse happens. If we see an overwhelming likelihood of that happening, and
if
we have confidence that we can keep a wormhole open for long enough to transport a sustainable population, then we have a duty to proceed.”

Nobody spoke for a while, as everybody chewed on this.

Anya was the one who decided to jump straight to being process-oriented. “What kind of safeguards or guarantees do we put in place to make sure the device isn’t activated unless we’re all convinced the world is in a near-doomsday situation?”

Earnest wanted to know just how many people they could hope to gather at short notice and send through the portal in the time it remained open. Not to mention supplies. Could they have a whole colony’s worth of people and material stashed someplace nearby, for the green light? Could they attempt to fly in people from other parts of the world, to maintain a diverse gene pool, in lieu of their original plan to build identical machines all over the planet?

“Let’s not derail into talking about logistics,” said Tanaa. “We’re still on the ethical question.”

“There is no ethical question,” said Jerome, another engineer, who wore tight braids and a collarless shirt. “As long as we all agree it won’t be used unless the world is for-certain doomed. That’s clear-cut. We have a moral imperative to prepare a safeguard.”

Milton was sitting back and letting them all argue, either waiting for them to come around to his point of view on their own, or else watching for the right opening to seize control again. Meanwhile, they were suffocating, sitting on folding chairs or beanbags, while Milton had an Aeron. Laurence flinched at the thought that history was being made in this disused server room, which was acquiring a sour-cabbage odor.

“I don’t think anybody in this room is qualified to make the decision we’re attempting to take on here,” said Sougata.

“And there’s someone somewhere else who is?” said Jerome.

“Even if there’s no disaster,” someone said, “what if the planet is uninhabitable within a few decades?”

They started talking ocean acidification, atmospheric nitrogen, food web collapse.

“What if we’re only eighty percent sure it’s the apocalypse?” someone else asked.

Laurence tried to hear the ghost of Patricia that he had been keeping in his head since they’d been separated. What would Patricia be saying if she were here? He couldn’t imagine. She didn’t even believe ethics were derived from universal principles, like
the greatest good for the greatest number
. She seemed farther away than ever, as though he’d already gone to a different planet than her. But then it hit him: They were talking about maybe condemning Patricia to death, along with billions of others, on the assumption that they were all doomed anyway. He couldn’t even picture himself starting to unspool that for Patricia.

Laurence opened his mouth to say that of course they should pull the plug, this was insane. But at that moment he caught sight of Isobel, who had stopped rocking in her chair and now looked just immobilized. Isobel’s eyes were furrowed and she was inhaling through her nose with her lips pulled inward, and you could almost believe she was about to bust out laughing. Her dishwater bob was getting shaggy and her white wrists were like saplings. Isobel looked so breakable. Laurence felt a stabbing cardiothoracic pain, like a more grinding version of a panic attack, at the thought of hurting Isobel.

Then he flipped the question around in his head: He tried to imagine how he’d feel if humanity really did run out of hope in a year or ten and they didn’t have this radical option to offer. How would he explain that to some hypothetical person, in this apocalyptic panic?
We might have had a solution, but we were too scared to pursue it.