“Nonetheless, it’s work. Now go.”
Noah stood in a corner of an Embassy conference room, which held eleven people and two aliens. Someone had tried to make the room festive with a red paper tablecloth, flowers, and plates of tiny cupcakes. This had not worked. It was still a utilitarian, corporate-looking conference room, filled with people who otherwise would have no conceivable reason to be together at either a conference or a party. Lisa Guiterrez circulated among them: smiling, chatting, trying to put people at ease. It wasn’t working.
Two young women, standing close together for emotional support. A middle-aged man in an Armani suit and Italian leather shoes. An unshaven man, hair in a dirty ponytail, who looked homeless but maybe only because he stood next to Well-Shod Armani. A woman carrying a plastic tote bag with a hole in one corner. And so on and so on. It was the sort of wildly mixed group that made Noah, standing apart with his back to a wall, think of worshippers in an Italian cathedral.
The thought brought him a strained smile. A man nearby, perhaps emboldened by the smile, sidled closer and whispered, “They will let us go back to New York, won’t they?”
Noah blinked. “Why wouldn’t they, if that’s what you want?”
“I want them to offer us shields for the spore cloud! To take back with us to the city! Why else would I come here?”
“I don’t know.”
The man grimaced and moved away. But—why had he even come, if he suspected alien abduction or imprisonment or whatever? And why didn’t he feel what Noah did? Every single one of the people in this room had caused in him the same shock of recognition as had Ambassador Smith. Every single one. And apparently no one else had felt it at all.
But the nervous man needn’t have worried. When the party and its ceiling-delivered speeches of kinship and the invitation to take a longer visit aboard the Embassy were all over, everyone else left. They left looking relieved or still curious or satisfied or uneasy or disappointed (No energy shield offered! No riches!), but they all left, Lisa still chattering reassuringly. All except Noah.
Ambassador Smith came over to him. The Deneb said nothing, merely silently waited. He looked as if he were capable of waiting forever.
Noah’s hands felt clammy. All those brief, temporary lives on sugarcane, each one shed like a snakeskin when the drug wore off. No, not snakeskin; that wasn’t the right analogy. More like breadcrumbs tossed by Hansel and Gretel, starting in hope but vanishing before they could lead anywhere. The man with the dirty ponytail wasn’t the only homeless one.
Noah said, “I want to know who and what you are.”
The ceiling above Smith said, “Come with me to a genuine celebration.”
A circular room, very small. Noah and Smith faced each other. The ceiling said, “This is an airlock. Beyond this space, the environment will be ours, not yours. It is not very different, but you are not used to our microbes and so must wear the energy suit. It filters air, but you may have some trouble breathing at first because the oxygen content of World is like Earth’s at an altitude of twelve-thousand feet. If you feel nausea in the airlock, where we will stay for a few minutes, you may go back. The light will seem dim to you, the smells strange, and the gravity less than you are accustomed to by one-tenth. There are no built-in translators beyond this point, and we will speak our own language, so you will not be able to talk to us. Are you sure you wish to come?”
“Yes,” Noah said.
“Is there anything you wish to say before you join your birthright clan?”
Noah said, “What is your name?”
Smith smiled. He made a noise that sounded like a trilled version of “meehao,” with a click on the end.
Noah imitated it.
Smith said, in trilling English decorated with a click, “Brother mine.”
Marianne was not present at the meeting between Elizabeth and Smith, but Elizabeth came to see her afterward. Marianne and Max were bent over the computer, trying to account for what was a mitochondrial anomaly or a sample contamination or a lab error or a program glitch. Or maybe something else entirely. Marianne straightened and said, “Elizabeth! How nice to—”
“You have to talk to him,” Elizabeth demanded. “The man’s an idiot!”
Marianne glanced at the security officer who had escorted Elizabeth to the lab. He nodded and went outside. Max said, “I’ll just… uh… this can wait.” He practically bolted, a male fleeing mother-daughter drama. Evan was getting some much-needed sleep; Gina had gone ashore to Brooklyn to see her parents for the first time in weeks.
“I assume,” Marianne said, “you mean Ambassador Smith.”
“I do. Does he know what’s going on in New York? Does he even care?”
“What’s going on in New York?”
Elizabeth instantly turned professional, calmer but no less intense. “We are less than nine months from passing through the spore cloud.”
At least, Marianne thought, she now accepts that much.
“In the last month alone, the five boroughs have had triple the usual rate of arsons, ten demonstrations with city permit of which three turned violent, twenty-three homicides, and one mass religious suicide at the Church of the Next Step Forward in Tribeca. Wall Street has plunged. The Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street was occupied from Tuesday night until Thursday dawn by terrorists. Upstate, the governor’s mansion has been attacked, unsuccessfully. The same thing is happening everywhere else. Parts of Beijing have been on fire for a week now. Thirty-six percent of Americans believe the Denebs brought the spore cloud with them, despite what astronomers say. If the ambassador gave us the energy shield, that might help sway the numbers in their favor. Don’t you think the president and the UN have said all this to Smith?”
“I have no idea what the president and the UN have said, and neither do you.”
“Mom—”
“Elizabeth, do you suppose that if what you just said is true and the ambassador said no to the president, that my intervention would do any good?”
“I don’t know. You scientists stick together.”
Long ago, Marianne had observed the many different ways people responded to unthinkable catastrophe. Some panicked. Some bargained. Some joked. Some denied. Some blamed. Some destroyed. Some prayed. Some drank. Some thrilled, as if they had secretly awaited such drama their entire lives. Evidently, nothing had changed.
The people aboard the Embassy met the unthinkable with work, and then more work. Elizabeth was right that the artificial island had become its own self-contained, self-referential universe, every moment devoted to the search for something, anything, to counteract the effect of the spore cloud on mammalian brains. The Denebs, understanding how good hackers could be, blocked all Internet, television, and radio from the Embassy. Outside news came from newspapers or letters, both dying media, brought in the twice-daily mail sack and by the vendors and scientists and diplomats who came and went. Marianne had not paid attention.
She said to her enraged daughter, “The Denebs are not going to give you their energy shield.”
“We cannot protect the UN without it. Let alone the rest of the harbor area.”
“Then send all the UN ambassadors and translators home, because it’s not going to happen. I’m sorry, but it’s not.”
“You’re not sorry. You’re on their side.”
“It isn’t a question of sides. In the wrong hands, those shields—”