The walls were pale yellow. The usual collection of malfunctioning audiovisual equipment purported to show live video streams of people on the ground, in theory enabling them to teleconference with colleagues in Houston, Baikonur, or Washington.
When the meeting began at A+0.0.4 (zero years, zero days, and four hours since the Agent had acted upon the moon), nothing was working, and so the occupants of Izzy had a few minutes to talk among themselves while Frank Casper and Jibran Haroun wiggled connectors, typed commands into computers, and rebooted everything. Relatively new arrivals to Izzy, Frank and Jibran had made the mistake of letting on that they were good at that sort of thing, so they always got saddled with it. Both of them were more comfortable with it anyway than with making chitchat.
“Primordial singularity” were the first words Dinah heard upon gliding into the room. Gravity here was only one-tenth of that on Earth, and “walking” wasn’t the right word for how people moved around — it was halfway between that and flying, a sort of long, bounding gait.
The words had been spoken by Konrad Barth, a German astronomer. It was clear from how the others reacted that Ivy, who was sitting directly across the table from him, was the only other person in the Banana who had the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“And that is?” Dinah asked, since that sort of thing had become her role. Others tended to be so worshipful of Ivy, or so reluctant to show ignorance, that they wouldn’t ask.
“A small black hole.”
“Why ‘primordial’?”
“Most black holes are formed when stars collapse,” Ivy said. “But there’s a theory that some of them were created shortly after the Big Bang. The universe was lumpy. Some of the lumps might have been dense enough to undergo gravitational collapse. They could form black holes that instead of weighing what a star weighs could be a lot smaller.”
“How small?”
“I don’t think there’s a lower limit. But the point is that one of them could zip through space invisibly and punch all the way through a planet and out the other side. There used to be a theory that the Tunguska event was caused by one, but it’s been disproved.”
Dinah knew about that, because her dad liked to talk about it: a huge explosion in Siberia, a hundred years ago, that had knocked down millions of trees out in the middle of nowhere.
“That was a big deal,” Dinah said, “but not enough to blow up the moon.”
“To blow up the moon would take a bigger one, going faster,” Ivy said. “Look, it’s just a hypothesis.”
“But it’s gone now?”
“It would be long gone now. Like a bullet through an apple.”
It struck Dinah as odd that they were talking about such an event so matter-of-factly. But there was no other way to address it. Emotions were not large enough to encompass such a thing. Besides, it was just a visual effect so far, like something seen in a movie with the sound turned off.
“Is it going to affect the tides?” asked Lina Ferreira. As a marine biologist, Lina would naturally be somewhat concerned about the tides. “Since those are caused by the moon’s gravity?”
“And by the sun’s,” Ivy added with a nod and a little smile. Which was why she was in charge of Izzy and Dinah wasn’t. She was willing to correct a Ph.D. marine biologist in front of a roomful of people, but she could carry it off in a way that didn’t sting. “But the answer is, probably surprisingly little. The moon’s mass is still all there, close to where it was before. It’s just spread out a little. But the pieces still have the same collective center of gravity, still in the same orbit as the moon had before. Your tide tables will still pretty much work.”
Dinah’s facial expression was blank, but she was enjoying Ivy’s ability to talk about science with a kind of little-nerd-girl sense of wonder even in spite of the disturbing subject matter. This was why Ivy always got the media interviews, while Dinah had to be dragged out of her den of robots and told, over and over again, to smile. The tone of voice was the giveaway; when Ivy was giving orders or reading PowerPoint slides, she went clipped and military, but when she talked about science her face opened up and her voice went into a vaguely Mandarin singsongy lilt.
“Where are you getting all this?” Dinah asked, drawing startled or disapproving glances from a few who worried that she was being too brusque with the boss. “It’s only been, what, four hours?”
“There’s a lot of noisy comment thread traffic, as you’d expect, and a few ad hoc email lists sort of congealing out of that,” Ivy explained.
A blue screen appeared on the lightweight monitor stretched above one end of the long table, and was replaced by a NASA logo. “Okay, got it,” muttered Jibran, who made a sideways bound toward a chair.
Then they were looking at the familiar environs of the ISS Flight Control Room, which was at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The director of mission operations was sitting in front of the camera stroking his iPad. He didn’t seem to be aware that the camera was on. A few moments later they heard a door open off camera. The DMO, who was ex-military, stood up out of habit. He reached out and shook hands with a woman who entered from stage right: NASA’s deputy administrator, the number two person in the whole org chart and a rare sight at such meetings. She was a retired astronaut named Aurelia Mackey, dressed for business in the environment of D.C., where she spent most of her time.
“Are we on?” she asked someone off camera.
“Yes,” said several people in the Banana.
Aurelia looked a little startled by that. Both she and the DMO were looking a little stunned to begin with, of course.
“How are you all today?” Aurelia said, in an absolutely rote, businesslike voice, as if nothing had happened. Running on autopilot while her brain caught up with events.
“Fine,” said some people in the Banana, mixed in with a few nervous chuckles.
“I’m sure you are all aware of the event.”
“We have a good view of it,” Dinah said. Ivy shot her a warning look.
“Of course you do,” Aurelia admitted. “I would love to have an extended conversation with you all about what you have seen and what you are experiencing. But this is going to have to be brief. Robert?”
The DMO peeled his eyes off the iPad and sat forward in his chair. “We’re expecting an increase in the number of rocks floating around up there.” He meant loose chunks of the moon. “Not huge because most will be gravitationally bound. But some may have escaped. So other missions are suspended while you batten down the hatches. Make preparations for impacts.”
Everyone in the Banana listened silently, thinking about what that would mean for them. They would tighten precautions, dividing Izzy up into separate compartments so that damage to one wouldn’t suck the air from all. They would review procedures. Lina’s biology experiments might take a hit. Dinah’s robots would enjoy a holiday.
Aurelia spoke into the camera. “All spaceflight operations are suspended until further notice. No one is coming up and no one is going down.”
Everyone in the Banana looked at Ivy.
AS SOON AS THEY GOT INTO IVY’S TINY OFFICE, WHERE SHE FELT IT was okay to let tears come into her eyes, they slipped into their Q code.
Q codes were ham radio slang. Dinah had learned them from Rufus. They were three-letter combinations, beginning with Q. To save time in Morse code transmissions, they were substituted for frequently used phrases such as “Would you like me to change to a different frequency?”