It was a dangerous thing to say. They had spoken of his wife, once or twice, in the last visit. She had died of the same disease that had claimed Samantha’s mother’s life, cancer of the pancreas. There was a photograph of her on Hagen’s desk. She had her head turned to the side, and she was laughing at a joke someone else was telling, her crooked teeth showing. She had been plain, but her face held the eye nonetheless—the high arch of her nose, the permanent crease in her full lower lip, the deep creases in her forehead, the constellation of age spots on her cheek.
“Ah.” Hagen’s smile was gentle—good, she hadn’t overstepped. “Yes, I suppose I see what you mean.”
She finished piling the soil around the small plant, pressing lightly around the roots so they would settle into their new home. The thick green leaves at the base of the stem hung over the edge of the clay pot, stiff but still flexible. She had tied a stick to the stem to keep it straight. There were no buds for flowers yet, and maybe they would come before the plant died or maybe not.
“My favorite,” Hagen said, “is her favorite, I suppose. Ophrys speculum. The mirror orchid. Would you like to see it?”
He led her to the second row of flowers, to a plant on the waist-high table he had set up against the wall there. The one in question was in bloom. The flowers were almost alien in appearance, the lip three lobed and glazed, with a fringe of red hair around the edges. The center of the lip looked almost blue.
“It is cunning,” Hagen said, touching his finger to the center of the lip. “It has evolved to look this way in order to lure in one particular pollinator, a wasp, Dasyscolia ciliata. The male wasp lands, hoping to mate, and picks up the flower’s pollen in the process. Even the scent is similar to the female wasp’s pheromones.” He smirked. “Alicia loved this, the improbability of such a specific, perfect cooperation between species. In evolution, she saw the mechanics of a god. Her faith was rarely at odds with her scientific mind—a point on which we disagreed, of course, as I have long been an atheist.”
“You have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”
He touched the flower gently for another moment, smiling still.
“An orchid is not self-reliant,” he said. “It doesn’t carry endosperm in its seeds, so it requires a symbiotic relationship with a fungus in order to survive. But it finds those relationships everywhere. On almost every continent, in almost every climate. On trees, on rocks, even underground. A temperamental plant, but somehow, in contradiction to that, a resilient one.” He shrugged. “I suppose when I say that I am impartial, what I really mean is that I am partial—but to all orchids. They were not high on the priority list for gene storage, of course. They don’t provide sustenance, after all, and thus were deemed unnecessary for the initial launch. Which is fair, I suppose. But still…”
He looked at Samantha.
“What is necessary?” he said. “I’m no longer sure. I think that she was necessary, for me.”
“You feel like you’ve been dying all this time, too, then,” Samantha said. “It’s just that your body hasn’t caught on yet.”
“Indeed.” He gave her a strange look.
Samantha leaned close to the mirror orchid to see the line of hair that outlined the labellum. It was less like a flower and more like a beetle or a cockroach, she thought. Or it would be, if not for the swell of blue in its center, more reflection than pigment.
“I’m not going to leave with the Ark,” she said, not looking at him. She had kept the secret of the Naomi all this time, from Dan and Averill and all the other lab orphans, from the director of the Ark Project every time she checked in about Samantha’s medication and feminine-product needs for the trip aboard the Ark Flora after its launch, from the application she had submitted to get this job in the first place, though she had known what she would do then too. She had known, perhaps, since she first saw Finis through the telescope in that field, next to her father, with the smell of insect repellant clinging to them both.
“I’m going to steer a boat out,” she said. “I know how to drive one; I have since I was a kid. I’ll keep to calm waters, see as much of the peninsula as I can. And put down my anchor to watch the world end.”
Hagen’s face was inscrutable.
“I’ve spent my free days getting the boat ready. She’s capable enough for the task, I think. I call her Naomi—my mom’s name.”
She made herself stop. If she went on, she would find herself talking about how she wasn’t suicidal, never had been, not even in the throes of grief. Instead, it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.
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.