When there was a flower in the lab, everyone gathered around.
The sample had come across Samantha’s station. It was a whole plant: flower, stem, leaves, and roots, held suspended in the clear solution that preserved all the full plant samples. Most of them came to Svalbard already labeled by the scientists in the field who had collected them years before, but sometimes the labels were lost, or the higher-ups didn’t think they were correct. There were still thousands of samples in the basement beneath them, rows upon rows of plants they would soon forget when they were coasting through space. But Samantha and her coworkers were doing their best to log as many as possible.
This particular flower was yellow and round, with dozens of frilly petals around a central point. The stem was fuzzy and light green, the leaves at the base of the plant oblong and smooth. No one said anything for a while as Samantha typed in the initial parameters of her search: yellow, height: 28.2cm, leaves: five, origin: United Kingdom.
“It looks like a dandelion,” Dan said as Samantha leaned closer to the images the database had presented to her.
“So?” Averill said. “Even dandelions need to be logged.”
“Listen, we’re not going to get through all the samples before liftoff,” Dan said, “and personally, I’d rather preserve the genetic material of a rare African violet than a dandelion. Is that such a crime?”
“You can’t go picking and choosing,” Averill argued. “One man’s dandelion is another man’s African violet.”
“I don’t accept the argument that there are no objective standards of beauty or value.”
“It’s not a dandelion,” Samantha said. She pointed at the leaves at the base of the plant. “Dandelion leaves are . . . poky. This one’s leaves are smooth. See?”
“That an official horticultural term?” Josh asked from her right shoulder. “Poky?”
“Shut up,” she said. “I think I’ve found the match.”
She went through the checklist of terms associated with the species she thought she had identified. Wales, check. Shaggy stem, check. Whorl of leaves around stem, check. By the time she had reached the end, she was smiling.
“It’s a Snowdonia hawkweed,” she said. “Categorized as ‘rare.’”
“Ooh, I know about those,” Alice said from somewhere behind her, her Irish accent distinct. “Almost went extinct because of overgrazing, and then some foot-and-mouth disease killed off a bunch of sheep and wham—the flowers were back.”
“See?” Averill sounded smug. “It’s more African violet than dandelion. Told you.”
“That is not what you told me,” Dan retorted.
Samantha carried the sample over to the cart for it to be stored, her fingerprints smudging the glass.
Samantha could mark her childhood years by her favorite colors. When she was five, it had been purple; at seven, it had been green; and at ten years old, she had liked navy blue. The color of the night sky just after sunset, she had told her mother, and together they had painted Samantha’s bedroom again. Her mother had looked up a constellation chart to arrange glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls in the right positions, held in place by sticky tack.
She had been wearing a navy-blue shirt when her father took her out to Warren Field one July night. Warren Field was in the middle of the preserve, so they parked in the lot at one end and hiked together down the winding paths, slapping at mosquitos. She still remembered the sweet, medicinal smell of the repellant he had sprayed all over her before they left, telling her to close her eyes and hold her breath first.
They didn’t talk. Her father didn’t tell her why they were going into the preserve late at night, when there was no moon, to look at the stars. She had known since she was young that the more she spoke to her father, the more likely he was to take things away from her. Dessert, sometimes, or if she wasn’t so lucky, special trips he had promised her—the ice-cream parlor, the zoo, her grandfather’s house. But silence often brought a reward.
Her skin was sticky with sweat by the time they reached the field, and her father trudged through the tall grass to the middle of it, so just a fringe of trees was visible on either side of them. Then he started setting up the telescope, screwing the pieces together with his hands, stowing the cap for the lens in his back pocket. He took out his phone to get the right coordinates, and she saw his face lit up blue from beneath as he scowled at the screen. The deep lines in his forehead and the pale whiskers in his beard.
“I want you to look through the eyepiece there, and pay attention, because this thing is only gonna pass for a second,” he said. “I’ll tell you when.”
She leaned over the eyepiece and waited, careful not to lean forward and knock the telescope out of position or to lean back and miss the moment. Her back was stiff and her legs ached by the time her father said, “Five, four, three, two, one—now.”
She saw it, a streak of light, a white glow between the stars.
“See it?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “What was it?”
“Finis,” he said. “That was the asteroid that’s going to collide with Earth one day. Asteroids always make a couple swoops in their orbits, like a criminal scoping out a jewelry store before he steals its diamonds. I thought you should see it, because hopefully the next time it comes that close, you’ll already be living someplace else.”
Samantha felt a little pocket of warmth in her chest at the thought. This rare thing, Finis passing Earth, and he had given the moment to her instead of taking it himself.
He crouched down next to her. It was too dark to see all the details of his face, but she could make out the rise of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath them.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her.
He looked down at her shoes. One of her shoelaces had come untied, so he started to tie it, his thick fingers fumbling a little with the short, muddy laces.
“It’s okay,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure what he was sorry for. The dread of Finis was the only thing she knew. It was the first segment on the nightly news, the top category of every news website, and the easiest reach for every comedian.
Now that she was older, she understood that there had been other possible lives to live before Finis. Lives without evacuation plans taped to the refrigerator or emergency go-bags stashed in the hall closet. Lives full of plans, for college and houses, children and golden retrievers, retirement and last rites. Those lives had not been lived in the shadow of Finis. And he had known when he made her that they wouldn’t be possible for her.
So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread.
She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.
In the lab, the next time she was called up to draw straws, she swapped her long straw for Josh’s short one, and for the fourth time that month went to see Hagen’s orchids.
“Which one is your favorite?”
Hagen gave her a blank look.
They were potting some of the tissue samples he had brought over from the laboratory, spare ones that wouldn’t be necessary for the Ark. Samantha spread the gravel evenly at the bottom of the pot, to keep the roots from rotting if the plant were overwatered. It wasn’t until she was already finished that she realized it was probably unnecessary. There were only four weeks until the launch of the Ark, and a few days after that for the asteroid to collide with Earth, and then, if he managed to survive the collision, Hagen wouldn’t have long before he ran out of food. The plant would die from lack of sunlight before its roots rotted.
She frowned down at the pot.
“I don’t have a favorite,” Hagen said.
“You know,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “they can’t hear you.”
Hagen laughed. “I’m serious! I see value in all of them, and therefore I am impartial.”
Samantha rolled her eyes.
Hagen’s eyes wrinkled at the corners as he laughed again. They were very bright, Samantha thought. They would have been cold, like a pale winter’s morning, if he hadn’t smiled so often.
“You think I’m full of shit,” he said.
“No, it’s not that.” She picked up the little plant in the tray between them, and held it by the sturdiest part of its stem as she scooped soil in around it, centering it in the pot. “Okay, yes, a little.” She grinned. “But also, I just don’t think impartiality is so great—that’s all.”
Hagen returned to his own plant. “No?”
“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.” She paused, testing out her next thought on her tongue before she spoke it aloud. “The way you loved your wife.”
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.
“The older ones belonged to my grandmother,” Dan said. “She took good care of them.”
“How many can you bring?” Josh said, his voice sounding thick from the smoke. He passed the joint to Dan, who traded it for a box of crackers and stuck it between his lips.
“I can’t believe you’re even bringing the record player,” Averill said absently as she pulled a Radiohead album from the stack and flipped it over to look at the track listing.
“We all get the same amount of square footage,” Dan said. “The rest of you have photo albums and knickknacks and erotic paperbacks . . .”
“Why”—Josh ate a cracker, then passed the box to Samantha—“did you look at me when you said that?”
“Why did you look bashful when I said that?”
Dan offered her the joint, which she took, because there were two weeks left on Earth and there seemed no reason not to.
She drew a tentative breath of smoke. It tasted like dirt. She coughed and stuck her hand in the cracker box after passing the joint to Averill.
“Anyway, because I have neither photo albums nor knickknacks,” Dan said, “I am bringing albums. I’ve already picked the ones I want most, but I also want you guys to have your favorites, if we’re all going to be listening together for, oh, the rest of our lives. So everybody pick one.”
It was generous, Samantha thought. Unspeakably generous, in fact, to give away their most precious commodity—space—to friends he had made only a few months before. She ignored the prickling behind her eyes as she turned her attention to the records spread over the floor.
“The question is,” Averill said, “do you pick the album with the song you love most, or do you want a band with a more consistent oeuvre to represent yourself?”
“Ugh,” Dan said. “Don’t say the word ‘oeuvre’ in my room.”
The cracker was bland but salty, and it made Samantha’s mouth feel dry. The weed was settling in now, making her head feel like it was being squeezed between two giant palms.
“Don’t be that guy,” Samantha said. She closed her eyes. “You know, the one who says he’ll bring Ulysses as one of his desert-island books.”
“I like Ulysses,” Josh said.
“Nobody likes Ulysses,” Dan said, wrinkling his nose. “She’s right, just pick an album you love. Even if it’s not the best one by some objective standard.”
They all went quiet for a few seconds. Smoke curled around the lamp in the corner. Samantha craned her neck to see the records spread out around Averill, who sat cross-legged now, surrounded by old album covers with worn corners.
“Fine,” Josh said. He rolled over on the bed and flopped to the floor next to Averill. He sorted through the stacks until he found what he was looking for, an album with a photograph of a woman smiling on it with red lipstick, her arm flung over her forehead. “Hotels. My wife and I—”
“May she rest in peace.” Averill held up her wineglass in acknowledgment. Josh’s wife had died in a car accident five years before.
“May she rest in peace,” Josh said solemnly. “My wife and I met at a dance in college, and ‘Into the Hudson’ was the first song we danced to.”
Dan sang the first few bars in a surprisingly high falsetto, making everyone laugh. Samantha closed her eyes and felt the room turn around and around.
“By that logic, I choose the Argument’s ‘You’re in a Cult.’” Averill retrieved the album, with its illustrated white peaks that looked oddly like the Svalbard horizon, from where it rested at the foot of the bed. “My brother Oliver made me listen to it when he drove me to school. I hated it. But after he died it was all I could listen to.”
Samantha sorted through the music around her. Most of it was older, the records from Josh’s grandmother: stacks of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones. Averill had started stacking the records by band name, so she flipped through the Pink Floyds, the red writing on a white wall, the light passing through a prism and scattering into a rainbow. She found the man shaking hands with his twin self, the latter self on fire, and held it up as her selection.
“Wish You Were Here,” she said. “Pink Floyd. It was my dad’s favorite, because it was his mom’s favorite. He used to play the title song over and over.” She twirled a finger in the air. “Made him cry, sometimes.”
Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she smiled.
“How’d your dad die again?” Averill asked.
“Suicide,” Samantha said. “Couple years after my mom. I think he was just . . . done.”
She thought of what she had told Hagen earlier, that he had been dying since his wife passed away, and his body hadn’t caught on yet. When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.
Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.
Averill stopped the record that was playing, a neo-folk song called “Spite, Thirst, Money,” by NICU. She eased the needle away from the grooves of it, slid it back into its jacket, replacing it with Metallica.
Samantha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there. If the Ark itself was all the time capsule they needed, its inhabitants living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, and then dying with them.