Ark (21 page)

With a stronger smile and in a stronger voice, she added, “I’m sure the chaps would thank you for the opportunity. It’s good for them to have a bit of fun. Relieves the tedium.”

Out she went, cell phone at her ear. There was a spring in her step.

~ * ~

5

AIRPORT SERVICE WAS RESTORED AROUND
the middle of the second week. As soon as it was possible to take off, Henry called. He was terse. The car would come by for me in an hour. Bring clothes for two climates. We were going to visit a factory of Ng Fred’s in Mongolia, then make a couple of other stops. There was much to be done, and it had to be done quickly.

In Hsi-tau, after a night’s sleep, Henry and Daeng and I boarded a small high-winged propeller plane. The pilot was Mongolian— epicanthic eyelids, leathery blank face, horseman’s physique. We flew west along the border between China and Mongolia—brown mountains dusted with snow, little brown dust storms on the floor of the desert. A sepia sun shone through a scrim of dust particles. The plane was brown, too. The instruments were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet and the instrument panel itself was marked CCCP. Apparently the plane was Red Army surplus, therefore an antique that had been maintained by Russian mechanics. We turned north toward the mountains, into Mongolia. Suddenly the plane was being knocked around the sky by wind shear. The flimsy aircraft pitched and yawed and plunged and climbed. I am as fatalistic as the next woman, but the prospect of crashing on this moonscape and lying in the wreckage with a couple of broken bones until I died of thirst and shock made me reach for an airsickness bag. There was none.

At last we landed bumpily in a small flat valley between two low mountains. A spring bubbled from one of the mountainsides. Its waters, the color of weak tea, flowed into a trough and then into a catch basin. I walked over and washed my face.

Henry had vanished. The pilot, working alone, was tying down the plane, which was rocking in the wind that whistled down the narrow valley. There was absolutely no other sign of life.

Daeng said, “Follow me, please.”

The ground was rough. Stones rolled under my foot. I turned my ankle and gasped. Daeng, pretending not to hear, led me into a cleft in the mountainside. After only a few steps we were in darkness. Daeng produced a flashlight, and walking backward, shone it at my feet. We turned a corner. Bright lights switched on. A squat Mongolian who had been standing guard in the dark let us in. He wore night-vision goggles and carried an automatic rifle. An ornamental hatchet, ancient weapon of the horde, was tucked into his belt.

I followed Daeng through the dazzling light down a long corridor, then down a long steel ladder to a gallery that ran along all four walls of an enormous cavern. A sphere that looked to be about a hundred feet in diameter hung from the ceiling. I recognized it from the engineers’ drawings as a component of the spaceship. Henry and Ng Fred, as tiny from the distance as toy soldiers, stood below it. We went down in an elevator and joined them. Up close, the sphere seemed enormous—much larger than I thought it would be when I saw the designs that the three engineers had shown to Henry a few months before.

Ng Fred seemed happy enough to play tour guide. As he talked, we walked across the factory floor together. It was a long walk. The place looked to be at least a square mile in extent.

I said, “Did you make this cavern?”

“I wish I had,” Ng Fred said. “It’s an old mine. The Russians rebuilt it as an underground factory when they were running Mongolia. They didn’t have time to use it much before the Soviet Union fell apart. After they left it was just sitting here, so we bought it.”

Henry disappeared again, cell phone pressed to his ear. A gondola dangled from cables. Ng Fred, affable as ever, and I got into it and were lifted inside the sphere.

Dozens of workers, all of them young Chinese women, clung to the sphere’s curved interior surface—installing wiring, plumbing, insulation, and other things I couldn’t identify. They wore harnesses that were suspended from long cables.

Why women?

“They’re just better than men at this kind of work,” Ng Fred replied. “What they’re putting together here is the most sophisticated flying machine ever assembled by human beings, but most of the work is done with bare fingers and thumbs. Men’s fingers are too big. The detail and the repetitiveness drive men crazy. But the ladies have no problems. To them it’s the same as making running shoes or sewing on buttons or assembling wristwatches. That’s the kind of work most of them used to do in other factories. They’re faster and better than machines. Don’t ask me why or get political about it. It’s just a fact of nature.”

“Where do you find the workers?” I asked.

“In my other factories, mostly. Some recommend their sisters or cousins.”

“And you have enough left over to run the other factories?”

“There are lots of sisters and cousins in China,” Ng Fred said. “For this job, we accept only very healthy women twenty-five or younger who weigh ninety pounds or less and have an IQ in the 110s. A lower score means the worker is not smart enough, a higher one that she’s too smart. If they gain five pounds, they go on a diet. If they can’t lose the weight, they’re history.”

The women were young and lithe and agile and completely absorbed in their work. Most were too far away for me to make out their faces. Almost the only noise was the whir of power tools or the occasional tap of a hammer. There was little or no chatter. They were making steady, visible progress. Watching them was like waiting for the hand of a clock to move. Each little job had its frozen moment. Then the minute hand moved. Everything changed ever so slightly, and when the hand moved again would change once more.

I asked Ng Fred what he was going to do with the sphere after the women had completed it.

“They’ll take it apart, then put it back together again,” he said. “Then they’ll do it all over again. They’ve already done this once.”

“Why?”

“Training. They have to be able to assemble it with their eyes closed. It’s like a prefabricated house. Each part is numbered and is added in a predetermined sequence. Next time they’ll do it while wearing space suits. Then they’ll do that again. Finally they’ll do it for real—in orbit, in zero gravity. By that time, they should be able to do it without thinking, or almost.”

I said, “Why use women instead of men, apart from the fact that their fingers are smaller and they’re more patient?”

“Those factors are reason enough,” Ng Fred said. “But they weigh less than men and eat less than men, so we can lift more of them into orbit as payload and take care of them better at less expense.”

“How many women equal how many men in ounces and pounds?”

“Do the math. The average Chinese male at age twenty-five weighs around a hundred and thirty pounds. These women weigh ninety pounds or less. For a hundred workers, that’s a total difference between male and female of plus or minus four thousand pounds. The dividend is forty-four more women than men for the same dead weight.”

Henry arrived from wherever he had been and listened in on the rest of Ng Fred’s lecture. Fred painted with a broad brush. First, a large space shuttle would be placed in orbit with the materials for a bare-bones sphere in its cargo bay. Fifty women would live in a second shuttle and assemble the sphere. When the sphere could support life, they would move inside it while completing its construction. The shuttle would return to Earth to pick up another load. Another sphere and another work crew would be placed in orbit nearby. The combined crew would assemble the second sphere. When that task was completed, the first crew would return to Earth. Another would take its place and continue their work, joined in time by a third crew.

As more spheres were constructed and equipped, the number of workers would be increased because there would be living space for them in the spheres. Construction crews would be rotated. Some of them would assemble spheres. Others would load cargo. Finally, the ship would become a unity through the connection of several spheres. The propulsion system would be installed. The fusion plant would be loaded and activated. At that point, the flight crew would be ferried to the ship, along with any others who might be taking the voyage. The frozen embryos that were going to replace
H. sapiens
would be loaded into a sphere of their own, inside a device that would keep them alive and intact, theoretically forever, at a temperature of approximately minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit.

“What happens to the women who built the ship?” I asked.

“The best of them would go along, to maintain the ship,” Ng Fred said.

“That should foster competition.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Do they know the truth about the flight?”

“They know it will be a long flight—longer than a human life. Before liftoff they will know everything. We don’t lie to our people.”

“How many will remain aboard?”

“A hundred or so.”

“What about the rest?”

“They’ll go home,” Ng Fred said. “There’s no room for them.”

“How do you replace workers as they die?”

“That will be taken care of.”

“How? Are you going to breed them to the flight crew?”

“We’re going to let them make their own arrangements,” he said. “Polyandry is the likeliest outcome. Would you be affronted by that?”

“Not in the least,” I replied.

Like most of the women I knew, I had been practicing polyandry all my life without calling it by its proper name.

We spent the night underground. The guest rooms were utilitarian: small, ship-shape, each with its own shower and toilet, computer, and refrigerator. A fact sheet in several languages was provided. The purified water for the scores of people who worked and lived here came from the mountainside spring and was continually recycled, as was the vast amount of urine produced by the workers. The refrigerator contained only juices and bottled springwater. The factory was a drug-, alcohol-, and tobacco-free zone. A fusion reactor, one of Henry’s smaller models, provided electrical power. The sheer efficiency of the whole installation calmed the mind and lifted the spirit. This surprised me. I had always despised the collective, and here I was, admiring with all my heart the only one I had ever seen close up.

That night we dined with the workers in their cafeteria. Chinese songs played on the sound system—greatest post-Mao hits. After dinner, Ng Fred sang along in a jovial bass-baritone. I joined in with my quavering alto on the two or three songs I knew. Daeng and a tall, anorexic man in a chef’s toque came out to listen. The workers hesitated to join in.

“Sing, sing!” boomed Ng Fred, waving his arms like a conductor.

Daeng and the chef added their voices. Daeng sang countertenor beautifully in perfect Mandarin, no surprise, and the chef’s tenor wasn’t bad, either. Henry did not utter a sound, but regarded the four of us with guileless affection. Never in my life had I been happier, and while the music and the company had something to do with this, the factory was the real reason for my joy.

Those pretty little women, hanging as if weightless from spiderwebs inside that sphere and doing their work in silence, had gladdened my heart. There really was going to be a ship, and if we had time on our side and a little luck, life really was going to go on.

~ * ~

6

HENRY AND NG FRED STAYED
up all night, talking about technical matters. The next morning, Henry cut the trip short—a phone call from Amerigo, he said. Something urgent. Would I mind a stopover?

Amerigo came aboard the Gulfstream in Milan. His face was grim. His charm was absent.