Ark

56

When the moon had gone into totality, when the Earth’s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling bloodred color bloomed, Lily Brooke had heard the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd’s murmur of awe, children saying, “Look at that!” in a variety of languages. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.

Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth’s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky.

She sat with Nathan Lammockson on her scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from Ark Three, spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of the raft. She’d tried to make Nathan comfortable with a heap of blankets. In the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea.

Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future.

“The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough molding, and we’ll come through it, smarter and stronger then ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that…” He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. “Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim…” His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.

“Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.”

“They just swim…”

A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.

“I got you here, didn’t I? I kept you alive.”

“Yes, Nathan.” She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. “Yes, you did that.”

But if it had been the Ark, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.

“I kept you alive. We’ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they’ve got to learn…”