Lost in contemplation of the structure of Tekla’s arm, Moira was startled when a large, strongly built man slammed down into the chair next to her. She looked over to see that it was Markus Leuker. He placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and contemplated it for a moment, almost pointedly not looking at the video screens with their infinite multiangled replays of mushroom clouds and briefing rooms. Then he turned and looked at Moira, greeting her with raised eyebrows and a nod, and then giving Tekla the same treatment.

So Moira was absolved from having to answer Tekla’s question.

Markus answered it, even though no one had asked him. “I know that I am at somewhat of a disadvantage here because I am a speaker of German, and so there is certain baggage. So. Yes. The baggage is acknowledged. I see the awkwardness of it. The delicacy. But—”

“Did you know it was going to happen?” Moira asked him.

“No, it comes as a complete surprise to me.”

Moira nodded.

“But, had they asked for my opinion, I would have said yes,” Markus said.

“They are all going to die anyway,” Tekla said, nodding.

It struck Moira, just then, that Markus and Tekla were quite comfortable with each other. It made sense. Markus would not be the least bit troubled by Tekla’s sexuality; on the contrary, it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable. He was an ex–military pilot; so was she. Naturally they would tend to view certain things in the same way. For a while, during the Cloud Ark’s first year, Tekla had been a sort of itinerant laborer. It might seem strange that a space station could support a person with no particular job. But none of the Scouts had really been expected to survive, so none of them had been sent up with long-term roles in mind. Her alienation from the Russians who took the brunt of the spacewalking work had led her to try her hand at a number of different tasks. She knew the interior of Izzy as well as anyone, but she also knew how to operate the controls of an arklet, and she could put on a space suit and go out and weld things in space. Her period of wandering in the wilderness seemed to have ended when Markus had taken over. Moira was no longer precisely certain what it was that Tekla did for a living. But she now had the clear sense that Tekla was working for Markus directly, that he was trusting her to do something.

“They’re all going to die, yes,” said another voice. “But we’re not.” It was Luisa. She came up behind Tekla and wordlessly asked permission to use the chair on which the Russian had draped her arm. Tekla not only gave it but rose to her feet and pulled the chair out as a courtesy.

“We’re not all going to die, or at least that’s what I’m hoping,” Luisa went on, “and we have all just seen this happen. It’s in our memories now. And not just that. But in a few hours we’ll be taking deliveries from Kourou, reaping the benefits of having used fuel-air explosives and nuclear weapons against people who were basically defenseless. It’s in our DNA now.” Her eyes flicked toward Moira. “If you’ll pardon the poetic imagery, Dr. Crewe.”

Moira gave her a little smile and nodded.

Markus said, “So, do you disagree with it?”

“No,” Luisa said. “Let’s be clear, Markus, I have baggage too. I’m a brown Spanish speaker from South America. I devoted years of my life to hanging out with refugees on boats. And I’m a Jew. That’s my baggage, okay?”

“Understood,” Markus said.

“I’m not down there, I don’t know what advice J.B.F. was getting, what she knew that we don’t.”

“So what is your point?” Markus asked, crisply but politely.

“We have no laws. No rights. No constitution. No legal system, no police.”

Markus and Tekla looked at each other across the table. It was not a sneaky look, or a guilty look, or a conniving look. But it was a significant look.

“It is being worked on,” Markus said. He wasn’t kidding; ever since the Crater Lake Accord had been signed, a whole think tank full of constitutional scholars had been toiling away on it in The Hague, and one of them was now resident up here.

“I know it is,” Luisa answered, “and it is very important to me that atrocities such as what we’re seeing on these screens don’t somehow infect that process. This cannot be business as usual.”

Markus and Tekla, still looking at each other, seemed to arrive at a mutual decision to say nothing.

Moira’s phone vibrated. Looking at its screen she saw that she had an appointment in fifteen minutes. She excused herself from what had become a very strange kaffeeklatsch. Oh well, perhaps it had cured her of some sentimental ideas. She had walked in aspiring to somehow re-create the experience of breakfasting in a sidewalk café in Europe and instead been treated to half an hour of nuclear warfare, mass incineration of protesters, and serious ethical discourse, mixed in with a suddenly keen sexual tension between her and Tekla. Like quite a few other people on the Cloud Ark, she hadn’t had sex since she had come up here. Many whose consciences were unencumbered by the existence of doomed spouses or fiancés on the ground had figured out a way to make it happen, but many others were not getting any. This couldn’t possibly last. A couple of docked capsules had been set aside for conjugal visits, and everyone knew of quiet places around the space station where you could do it. Moira didn’t have anyone down on the ground. She had abstained for lack of anyone up here, and just because it was the least sexy place you could possibly imagine. But it was starting to get to her.

One of the items on her long-term to-do list, actually, was to come up with a policy for how to handle pregnancy aboard the Cloud Ark. Since pregnant people weren’t fundamentally that different from those who weren’t, what that really boiled down to was how to handle babies. The assumption made by the Arkitects was that this was going to be an orderly process, and that anyone who got pregnant would do so with the intent of having the embryo frozen so that it could be implanted later, when conditions were better for raising little ones. Having now spent the better part of a year up here, Moira doubted this. The Arkitects were, she felt, underestimating the cultural difference between the General Population and the Arkies.

Until a few months ago they’d been referred to as Arkers, and, in all official communications, they still were. Then someone had coined the term “Arkies,” and, in one of those only-on-the-Internet viral phenomena, it had swept across the planet in about twenty-four hours and become universal. A few sensitive Arkansas historians had registered objections, but they had been steamrolled.

The Arkies were just kids, and they had surprisingly little exposure to the GPop. The arklets they lived in couldn’t really change their positions in the swarm. Moving from one arklet to the next was nearly impossible—it was an epic journey in a space suit, requiring some fancy tricks with orbital mechanics. Small utility spacecraft, called Flivvers, were available to squire people around, but there were only so many of them, and qualified pilots were few. Markus, following suggestions from Luisa, had tried to make up for this by “stirring the pot,” meaning that about 10 percent of the Arkies at any given time were living and working aboard Izzy. But most of the time, most of them were stranded in individual arks or on triads or heptads, their only connection to the General Population being through videoconferencing (“Scape”), social media (“Spacebook”), and other tech that had been transplanted from the earthbound world. Moira would be astonished if some girls weren’t pregnant already, but no one had approached her about getting an embryo frozen.

And any normal person who followed Moira forward through Zvezda and “down” into the cold storage facility would understand why. There was nothing about this place that tickled the nerve endings that mattered to people who wanted to start families. It was clinical/industrial to a degree that was almost laughable.