Ark [Forward Collection], Page 3

  Hagen’s morning-pale eyes were steady on hers. A lock of silver-black hair had fallen over his forehead in a distinct curl.

  “You’re sure?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “You’re young,” he said. “You could still have a family, a whole lifetime.” He frowned.

  She wanted to tell him that she no longer saw anything down that avenue. Couldn’t imagine herself loving someone as dearly as Hagen had loved Alicia, or touching hand to belly in anticipation of a flutter kick from a growing fetus, or even silver haired and lined, spraying orchids to keep their leaves moist in some distant greenhouse.

  “A lifetime on a ship,” she said finally. “Sounds like a pale version of life to me.”

  Hagen scratched the back of his neck with one hand. “Is that why? You don’t want to live on a ship?”

  She shook her head and reached for another flower, one of the common white Phalaenopsis that she had once bought at the grocery store. The top of the labellum was touched with pink.

  “When the asteroid hits, it will shred our atmosphere,” she said. “Finis is too large for it to be much of an encumbrance. The only thing that will slow it down will be Earth’s crust. It’ll likely hit water, though we can’t be absolutely certain. Its current path will take it away from Svalbard, regardless—somewhere on the Southern Hemisphere, so we won’t see the impact zone even at a distance. But it will send a catastrophic dust cloud into the air that will obscure the sun. It might rain fire. Everything will burn and shrivel and darken and break apart.”

  She tilted her head.

  “It’s the story of this planet in reverse,” she said. “We were born out of—coalescing matter, chaos, here, all lava and earthquakes and thunder.” She smiled a little. “It will be like . . . seeing the birth of the world. Can you imagine anything more beautiful, more worth witnessing, than that?”

  Hagen’s hand reached over the white flower with its thick petals. His fingers hooked around hers.

  Samantha lay on the floor of Dan’s room, bobbing her head to the music. Dan was sitting on the narrow bed next to Josh, who was rolling a joint in his lap. Averill, cradling a glass of wine against her chest, was crouched next to Dan’s record collection in a stack on the floor. There were only four of them, but they filled the room, the warmth of their bodies staving off the cold from the drafty window.

  Samantha felt like she was in college again. The skunk smell of weed, the rough carpet under her head. The sight of an old sock lying forgotten under Dan’s bed. Their rooms at the little compound were like single dormitories, too, some of the beds lofted so cheap dressers could fit beneath them, the group bathrooms all beige tile and unfamiliar hair curled in the shower drains. It was like time running backward.

  “The older ones belonged to my grandmother,” Dan said. “She took good care of them.”

  “How many can you bring?” Josh said, his voice sounding thick from the smoke. He passed the joint to Dan, who traded it for a box of crackers and stuck it between his lips.

  “I can’t believe you’re even bringing the record player,” Averill said absently as she pulled a Radiohead album from the stack and flipped it over to look at the track listing.

  “We all get the same amount of square footage,” Dan said. “The rest of you have photo albums and knickknacks and erotic paperbacks . . .”

  “Why”—Josh ate a cracker, then passed the box to Samantha—“did you look at me when you said that?”

  “Why did you look bashful when I said that?”

  Dan offered her the joint, which she took, because there were two weeks left on Earth and there seemed no reason not to.

  She drew a tentative breath of smoke. It tasted like dirt. She coughed and stuck her hand in the cracker box after passing the joint to Averill.

  “Anyway, because I have neither photo albums nor knickknacks,” Dan said, “I am bringing albums. I’ve already picked the ones I want most, but I also want you guys to have your favorites, if we’re all going to be listening together for, oh, the rest of our lives. So everybody pick one.”

  It was generous, Samantha thought. Unspeakably generous, in fact, to give away their most precious commodity—space—to friends he had made only a few months before. She ignored the prickling behind her eyes as she turned her attention to the records spread over the floor.

  “The question is,” Averill said, “do you pick the album with the song you love most, or do you want a band with a more consistent oeuvre to represent yourself?”

  “Ugh,” Dan said. “Don’t say the word ‘oeuvre’ in my room.”

  The cracker was bland but salty, and it made Samantha’s mouth feel dry. The weed was settling in now, making her head feel like it was being squeezed between two giant palms.

  “Don’t be that guy,” Samantha said. She closed her eyes. “You know, the one who says he’ll bring Ulysses as one of his desert-island books.”

  “I like Ulysses,” Josh said.

  “Nobody likes Ulysses,” Dan said, wrinkling his nose. “She’s right, just pick an album you love. Even if it’s not the best one by some objective standard.”

  They all went quiet for a few seconds. Smoke curled around the lamp in the corner. Samantha craned her neck to see the records spread out around Averill, who sat cross-legged now, surrounded by old album covers with worn corners.

  “Fine,” Josh said. He rolled over on the bed and flopped to the floor next to Averill. He sorted through the stacks until he found what he was looking for, an album with a photograph of a woman smiling on it with red lipstick, her arm flung over her forehead. “Hotels. My wife and I—”

  “May she rest in peace.” Averill held up her wineglass in acknowledgment. Josh’s wife had died in a car accident five years before.

  “May she rest in peace,” Josh said solemnly. “My wife and I met at a dance in college, and ‘Into the Hudson’ was the first song we danced to.”

  Dan sang the first few bars in a surprisingly high falsetto, making everyone laugh. Samantha closed her eyes and felt the room turn around and around.

  “By that logic, I choose the Argument’s ‘You’re in a Cult.’” Averill retrieved the album, with its illustrated white peaks that looked oddly like the Svalbard horizon, from where it rested at the foot of the bed. “My brother Oliver made me listen to it when he drove me to school. I hated it. But after he died it was all I could listen to.”

  Samantha sorted through the music around her. Most of it was older, the records from Josh’s grandmother: stacks of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones. Averill had started stacking the records by band name, so she flipped through the Pink Floyds, the red writing on a white wall, the light passing through a prism and scattering into a rainbow. She found the man shaking hands with his twin self, the latter self on fire, and held it up as her selection.

  “Wish You Were Here,” she said. “Pink Floyd. It was my dad’s favorite, because it was his mom’s favorite. He used to play the title song over and over.” She twirled a finger in the air. “Made him cry, sometimes.”

  Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she smiled.

  “How’d your dad die again?” Averill asked.

  “Suicide,” Samantha said. “Couple years after my mom. I think he was just . . . done.”

  She thought of what she had told Hagen earlier, that he had been dying since his wife passed away, and his body hadn’t caught on yet. When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.

  Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.

  Averill stopped the record that was playing, a neo-folk song called “Spite, Thirst, Money,” by NICU. She eased the needle away from the grooves of it, slid it back into its jacket, replacing it with Metallica.

  Samant
ha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there. If the Ark itself was all the time capsule they needed, its inhabitants living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, and then dying with them.

  Two Days Left

  “So many samples,” Dan moaned. “And no one will ever see them again.”

  They were sitting in the lab, on the stools. The equipment they needed for the Ark had been packed away and taken to the ship, which was perched on a massive aircraft carrier just beyond the bay—former military, from God knew what country; it didn’t matter anymore. Samantha’s bag was packed, sitting at the end of her bed. Dan had brought the record player into the laboratory because he played music constantly now, like he didn’t want to hear his own grief.

  Reality was setting in, Samantha thought. She had heard Averill sobbing in the shower that morning. Josh kept stopping in the middle of sentences, in the middle of steps, in the middle of thoughts. Now that she didn’t have any pressing work to do, Samantha went every day to see Hagen, who was steady as ever, tending to his plants.

  He told her about them as she helped him. About the Rhizanthella gardneri, which grew underground in Western Australia. And the Caleana major, which looked like a white bird in flight, its petals frayed at the edges, featherlike. Anguloa uniflora, which curved around its center column like cupped hands keeping a match from going out. There was no end to the flowers’ variety, and he listed them with increasing frequency, every day, showing pictures when he had no living example to present to her. She didn’t know why, of all the last words he could have chosen, he chose these, and he chose her to say them to. But she listened.

  “Let’s each do one more,” Samantha said.

  “What?” Averill said. “Why? It’s not like any more samples can be stored.”

  “So?” Samantha shrugged.

  “All right,” Josh said. “I mean, the computers are still hooked up.”

  They each claimed a cart of living samples, stored in their little glass containers, afloat in life-sustaining fluid. Samantha peered into each one, searching for flowers. There was no point in pretending she wasn’t partial to them now, and no value in it either.

  She saw a hint of blue and slid her fingers between the containers to pull up the right one. She grinned when she saw the little flowers—tiny, really, not even the size of her fingernails, and light sky blue. Or likely, she thought, considering what Hagen had told her, just a very specific shade of purple.

  She carried the container to her lab station, flipped on the work light, and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer screen. The plant was simple: waxy, thick leaves at the base, with a somewhat fragile center column, like a vine. The flowers branched off at the top, in clusters of blue and white. Each one had three petals that came to teardrop points and three sepals, blue and white spotted. At the bottom was a small labellum with furry edges, also blue, though darker than the petals and sepals that framed it. In the center of each flower was a dusting of yellow pollen.

  It looked like an orchid, but she would have to verify that with the microscope. She opened the container and used a pair of long scissors to clip one of the flowers from its stem. This would be delicate work—orchid seeds were already tiny, and these orchids were the smallest she had ever seen, if indeed they were orchids. She picked up the delicate metal tools at her station that reminded her of the dentist’s office—the one that scraped between your teeth in particular.

  The others were already talking about their discoveries, Averill bending over something that resembled a cherry blossom, Dan squinting at a vine with veiny leaves, and Josh poking at some variation of a protea that had not yet been logged. Samantha set about preparing a slide, then dragged the heavy microscope over and plugged it in.

  She had seen enough seeds in Hagen’s greenhouse to identify an orchid seed’s telltale lack of endosperm, the starchy tissue in most seeds that provided nutrition after fertilization. An orchid likely didn’t have it, meaning most of their seeds would come to nothing, failing to find the right fungus to aid in their growth.

  Samantha let out a little yelp.

  “What?” Dan asked from across the room.

  “It’s an orchid,” she said.

  “Cool,” Josh said. “What kind?”

  “No idea,” she said. She slid over to the computer and selected Orchidacae, logging all the plant’s details: height, number of petals, number of sepals, appearance of leaves and central column, color. The screen then presented her with a row of photographs, close-ups of flowers with relative sizes noted beneath.

  “Huh,” she said.

  “What?” Averill, seated at the next station, frowned at her.

  “I’m not sure, but . . . I don’t think I have a match,” she said. “Second opinion?”

  Averill abandoned her station and went through the same steps Samantha had: looking at the tissue sample on the microscope, measuring the plant with a ruler, tapping the container with the tip of her pencil as she counted petals and sepals, noting symmetry, labellum, pollen, column, country of origin (Brazil).

  She, too, sat back from the computer screen at the end and frowned. By then, Dan and Josh had left their own samples and were staring at the container from either side, the work light casting odd shadows on their faces.

  “It’s new,” Averill said finally, saying out loud what Samantha had been thinking but couldn’t dare say herself.

  “It can’t be new,” she said. “That’s just. I mean.”

  “Think about it. We had only discovered, like, ten percent of all plant species at the start of this project. And orchids are one of the most diverse groups, so . . .” Averill gestured at the container. “It’s new.”

  Samantha sat down on an empty lab stool.

  “It’s new,” she said.

  For some reason, she felt heavier now.

  That evening, when the others were at dinner, Samantha took the container from the laboratory and put it in an insulated bag, the kind they used to transport hot food. She put on her boots and her coat, her gloves and her scarf, her hat and her goggles. She zipped herself up and fastened all the straps and buttons and walked out into the snow.

  It was dark, and her way was lit by floodlights casting wide circles of yellow onto the packed snow. The path to Hagen’s greenhouse was well trod now from her frequent visits, but she had still taken her snowshoes with her, just in case she needed to wade back. The wind whistled around her, but otherwise all she could hear was the scuffle of her own feet over the ice.

  She hugged the container tight to her chest as she walked, breathing heavily, though the walk wasn’t taxing. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn’t explain. She pushed through the outer door of the greenhouse and set down the container, gingerly, before removing her outerwear and tossing it in a pile in the corner.

  Hagen had heard her come in, evidently, because he was standing in the greenhouse when she carried the container in. He wore a lumpy gray sweater, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more rumpled than usual, its curls sticking up in the back.

  “Hi,” she said. “I need you to verify something for me.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking confused. She unzipped the insulated bag and took out the plant in its glass sleeve.

  “I thought the identification had stopped, since we can’t transport anything new to the Ark,” he said.

  “Officially, it has,” she said. “But you know us horticulturists—we love a good last hurrah.”

  “It seems to me,” he said, “that you need some less boring hobbies.”

  “Hilarious,” she said. “Have a look, would you?”

  Hagen took the container from her and carried it back to his worktable, which was littered with plant cuttings. He had taken to making little bouquets and putting them all around his small cabin. She had seen them the day before when she used his bathroom and drank a small tumbler of whiskey in his living roo
m as he talked to her about plants, plants, always plants, never the people and things they had both lost, or would soon lose.

  She forced herself to sit at his desk while he looked the plant over under his own work light, clipped to the shelf above the worktable. He was silent as he evaluated the plant and then disappeared into his cabin, returning a few minutes later with a book. He searched it for a while and then disappeared again. This time he was gone for so long that she lost her patience and peeked into the cabin, attached by a heavy door to the greenhouse. He was sitting at the computer in his office, searching.

  The lump in her throat was swelling like she had swallowed a distended seed pod. The longer he was gone, the more certain it became that she had found something new, and the more twisted and strange she felt. She thought of the Naomi, stocked with cans of food and bottles of water and spare fuel for the journey. The map next to the steering wheel of the boat, marked with the spot in the middle of the nothingness that she had chosen to put down the anchor and watch the apocalypse.

  Hagen finally came back, his glasses dangling from pinched fingers. He was smiling, but then, Hagen was always smiling a little, his cheek creased with it, eyes crinkled with it. She had gotten used to that smile.

  “What shall we call it?” he said. “The Samantha orchid?”

  She scowled at him.

  “So it’s true,” she said. “It is new.”

  “It appears to be,” he said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, I could never claim absolute certainty about anything in science, really, but—” He frowned at her then. “Why do you seem angry? You’ve just found a new species, in the last forty-eight hours of human occupancy of Earth. That is—”

  “Amazing, I know.” She pushed her hands into her hair. The seed pod in her throat swelled yet again, and she was a flower, blooming—

  Bursting into tears.

  “Oh dear.” Hagen’s lumpy sweater was against her face, her head nestled beneath his chin, and he held her tightly.

  “There is so much left for you to see.” His hand moved in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. “Don’t you know that?”