Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

Doob had a pretty good idea why. Tav was hoping he’d get picked. If he worked hard enough, popped up on enough news feeds, garnered enough followers on Twitter, maybe some important person would decide that the Cloud Ark needed a professional communicator — the first, or the last, journalist. To Doob it seemed like long odds. A lot of people with Ph.D.s and even Nobel Prizes were ahead of Tav in line. But you never knew. And he couldn’t fault the guy for trying.

He bent forward and retrieved the envelope from the deck. It was a centimeter thick. It was labeled PARO, BHUTAN in neat block letters. The flap had never been opened. He was supposed to have spent the last couple of hours reading its contents, familiarizing himself with the task to be performed. Instead of which he had been looking out the window at the steamy green plains and lazily braided rivers of Bangladesh.

Hoping to make the most of the two or three minutes it would take to get the chopper’s door open, he plucked it up off the floor, tore it open, and pulled out a sheaf of pages. This was enough to wake Tav up, but not enough to make him move. He gazed at Doob and watched him read.

“If it’s wearing red, yellow, or both, it’s a lama,” he said. “Bow to it.”

“Isn’t that a camel from South America?”

“With one L. A holy man. Put the palms of your hands together and make a little bow.”

“I don’t believe in—”

“It’s not gonna kill you, is it? If he’s got a big yellow scarf over his left shoulder, he’s the king. Bow lower in that case.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

Sitting next to Doob was Mario, their photographer: a man in his thirties with a short, dark mustache, a New York accent, and no expectation whatsoever of being picked for the Cloud Ark. On the flight over he had divided his time between reading his own copy of the same dossier and playing a video game on his phone. He had been on many more of these than Doob or Tav. Getting into the spirit of things, he pocketed his phone and piped up: “People are going to hand you things. Some of them might be really crusty and old and funny smelling. Those things are probably really important. Really important.”

“Then why are they—”

“Because they believe you are going to take it all up into space and preserve it.”

“Oh.”

“So if anyone hands you anything, even if you have no idea what on God’s green Earth it might be, look impressed, bow, take it carefully, admire it, and then hand it off to the helper kid.”

“Helper kid?”

“People have been deputized to follow you around and help you carry all of the priceless national treasures that are going to be bestowed on you. They’ll look after the stuff and bring it all back here to the chopper so you can keep your hands free for making those little bows and shaking hands with the king or whatever. As soon as we get back to the aircraft carrier, we’ll throw it overboard.”

“Done this before, have you?”

“This is my seventy-third abduction run. Let’s go.” Mario stood up, carefully, letting his cameras and bags swing free, patting each one as it settled into place. Tav and Doob were undoing their seat belts and watching him for cues. Mario took two steps toward the door, which the pilot had just swung open. Cold damp air, scented with pine and coal smoke, was pouring in.

Doob almost rear-ended Mario as he stopped suddenly and turned around to look him in the eye. “One other thing.”

“Yes?” Doob said.

“What is about to happen is going to be incredibly fucking sad. Like maybe the saddest thing you have ever seen. Try to hold it together.”

Mario held Doob’s gaze until Doob nodded and said, “Thanks.” Then he turned around and bolted for the door so that he could get some good pictures of Dr. Harris emerging from the chopper.

Dr. Harris paused in the open hatchway. Spread out in front of him were at least two dozen people in red and yellow clothing, drawn up in readiness to extend greetings.

He put his palms together in front of his chest and bowed. In front of him, Mario’s shutter began to whirr. Behind him, faint digitized clicks spilled out of Tav’s phone as he live-tweeted it.

THE KING DROVE HIM UP THE MOUNTAIN IN HIS PERSONAL LAND Rover, Doob riding shotgun in the passenger seat on the left — for Bhutan, as it turned out, was a drive-on-the-left country. Mario sat in the back angling to get both of them in the photo, and Tav sat next to Mario muttering voice memos into his phone. The king apologized for today’s murky weather, which was blocking potentially spectacular views of high mountains all around.

“But I suppose that is a very small matter in the larger scheme of things,” he concluded.

They had stopped at an intersection in the town of Paro to let three boys kick a soccer ball across the road in front of them. Piled up on the road behind them was a small motorcade of lama-packed Toyotas.

“So much joy they take in this simple game,” the king mused. “They know, of course. All of them know about the disaster that is to come. When they are thinking of it, it makes them sad. But at other times, they are as you see them — oblivious.”

The boys got out of their way and the king eased forward into the intersection. The town had a surprisingly Alpine look to it, with deep brown weather-beaten structures of wood built on stone foundations.

“Until a few days ago,” the king went on, “they might have consoled themselves by imagining that they would be the ones chosen.”

“In the Casting of Lots,” Doob said.

“Yes.” The king shot him a keen look. “I was responsible for choosing, you know.” He glanced back at Tav. “That is off the record.”

“No, Your Highness, I did not know that,” Doob said.

“We received guidelines, I suppose you could call them. Saying that it was not a literal casting of lots. The choice is best not left to chance — we must send only the finest candidates. Bhutan has only two places in the Cloud Ark. It would be foolish to waste them on someone unable to represent our people. So, it was a selective process.”

“Most people have come to the same conclusion,” Doob said. “A pool of promising candidates is identified and then the choice is made from among them by some process which might be random — just so no one person carries the entire responsibility.”

“When you are a king you sometimes have such responsibilities whether you want them or not. In this case, though, I was able to involve some of the lamas. There are precedents for such a selection procedure in the way that certain reincarnate lamas are identified — the drawing of lots from an urn is sometimes used.”

Tav couldn’t resist asking from the backseat: “What does the doctrine of reincarnation have to say about the situation we are faced with now?”

The king smiled. “Mr. Prowse, this is only a journey of ten kilometers. I am taking it slow. If we had a road trip ahead of us of ten thousand kilometers — an enjoyable thought — I might be able to impart enough information to you about what reincarnation means to my people that we would be able to have an intelligent conversation about it.”

“Fair enough. Sorry,” Tav said, glancing up from the screen of his phone when his brain detected a pause in the king’s speech. “You have to understand, my job is to communicate with geeks. People who like math. So I was trying to imagine—”

“When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?”

“Yes.”

They turned off what Doob guessed was the main road and onto a fork that wound through a wooded hamlet above the river. This hooked onto a bridge that took them across a fast-running, cold-looking stream, green and milky with rock flour carried down from melting glaciers thousands of meters above their heads. Doob still couldn’t get over the fact that in a little more than a year those glaciers would be gone, the rock beneath them exposed for the first time in millions of years, and no scientist would be there to record it.