Seveneves: A Novel (102 page)

Ty turned away from them, gazing down into the sea before the boulder. After a few moments he turned back around. “How far does it extend?” he shouted.

“The pipe? A few score yards,” answered the Cyc. “The crater is as a horn, channeling the sound out into the deep.”

She had scarcely finished the sentence before Ty hauled off with the sledgehammer and brought it down with all his might on the steel plate. The result was a blindingly loud metallic ping, drowned out, as it faded, by a scream from Kathree, who sank to her knees in the sand with her hands clamped over her head.

“Better get her out of here,” Ty said—she could hear him through her hands. She felt Beled reaching around her from behind, crooking her in one arm below her breasts, heaving her to her feet. Which was
welcome on one level. But she was tired of being the one who had to be carried, and so she unwound herself from him, turned her back on the sea, and marched up toward the belt of scrub that marked the limit of the beach. Ty gave her a respectable head start before shouting, “Plug your ears.” She did so, and a moment later felt another ping go through her like an icicle jammed into the base of her skull. A moment later came another and another, not in a steady rhythm, but sporadic. And by the time she had climbed up to a place where she could look down over the cove, fingers in her ears, and not suffer pain from each stroke of the hammer, she had made sense of what Ty was doing.

Each of the human races had its own set of cultural traditions that it traced back to its respective Eve. These were propagated from one generation to the next by social rituals, school curricula, and youth groups. Young Teklans learned zero-gravity gymnastics with a martial arts flair, competing on obstacle courses that reproduced specific maneuvers that Tekla had performed during the Epic. Julians competed on debate teams and went on lengthy retreats intended to symbolize their Eve’s exile and ordeal in the Swarm. And so on.

Young Dinans learned Morse code. It was used very rarely.

Moirans most certainly
didn’t
learn it, and so Kathree had no idea what message Tyuratam Lake was banging out into the deep.

Everyone, of course, had watched the scene in the Epic, at the beginning of the Hard Rain, where Eve Dinah had made her final transmission to Rufus. This had trailed off with many repetitions of the code QRT, which—especially after Dinah had dissolved in sobs, and slowed her transmission speed to a crawl—had a kind of solemn fanfare-like rhythm to it, beginning with
pahm, pahm, pa-pahm
. The letter Q. Kathree recognized that pattern, at least, more frequently than you would expect in normal English sentences. So, Ty was using ancient Q codes to shorten his message. But she hadn’t a clue what he was actually saying. He belted it out over and over again, a syncopated phrase of long and short strokes that started to get under
her skin after a while. He stopped when Sonar Taxlaw waded out to the rock and assured him that, if the Pingers were about, they would surely have heard the message by now.

“How long now?” he asked. He was shouting over the rush of the surf and because he had probably gone deaf.

“Depends on how far away they are,” said Sonar Taxlaw. “Maybe a day. Maybe three.”

“Great,” Ty said, and looked up to catch the eye of Roskos Yur, who, following a timeless military instinct, pushed his sleeve back to check his timepiece.

Ty unlatched the lid of the box and began to take out pieces of equipment and to peruse instructional brochures. Kathree was too far away to see the details, and in any case it was getting dark. As the sky faded, she could see Ty sitting on the shore of the islet, facing out toward the sea, occasionally flicking on a small light and fussing with equipment. Perched next to him, swaddled in sleeping bags that Einstein had brought out to her, was the Cyc. She wore a bulky pair of headphones, occasionally turning her head toward Ty in an alert birdlike way to make some sort of comment. Esa Arjun paced slowly back and forth on the beach, just out of the waves’ reach, passing occasionally near Einstein, who just stood there gazing fretfully at his beloved. Hope had gone to ground in a small tent pitched a few meters higher up, on drier sand; a bluish flicker through its walls suggested he was working with a tablet, maybe trying to learn something about POTESH management.

So much for the lower camp where Hope, Ty, Einstein, Sonar Taxlaw, and Arjun had made themselves at home. Beled had followed Kathree uphill. Langobard and Roskos Yur later followed him. Spreading out, bushwhacking in all directions, they identified a curved brow in the slope: the line of demarcation between the crater’s inland edge and the preexisting landscape from which it had been blasted. Above it, the slope was much gentler. Indeed, the first thing one saw upon cresting the rim was a slight drop in altitude. Before
them, as they stood with their backs to the sea and their faces to the mountains, was a bog a few hundred meters in extent, with a pine forest rising up on its far side. They backpedaled a few paces and set to work establishing an upper camp just below the summit of the rim. Few words were spoken, but it was obvious that its purpose was to defend the beach if and when Red forces approached. If the foe came straight down out of the mountains, they would have to cross the bog. If they came along the beach, they would have to scale or circumvent a prong of the crater’s rim. Either way, they would be clearly visible from this vantage point.

It could be guessed that an ONAN had struck the ground somewhere nearby, several decades ago. Seed-packed siwis had slithered out of it, roaming about, mapping elevations and soil moisture, comparing notes over a mesh network. The collective had noticed the break in the slope leading down to the sea. Following a program drilled into it by some coder up on the ring, it had decided that the coastline might be stabilized here by planting some seeds that would grow up into tough, low, scrubby vegetation. And so it had all come to pass. Siwis that happened to wander away from the beach had found the flat ground beyond the rim and planted it with different species that would thrive in a wet environment. The vegetation had created a bit of a natural dam, holding back water coming down out of the mountains above them. One day it might be a lake, but for now it was a black bog, squishy and knee-deep and screened with grasses and reeds that favored that sort of ground.

Kath Two had not been a fighter. Her weapons training had given her the bare minimum of skill needed to discharge a katapult in the direction of a hungry canid. Kathree didn’t know, yet, whether that was one of the things that had shifted. In a sense it did not matter. No matter how good she might turn out to be at combat, she would never be as effective as Beled, Bard, and—judging from appearances—Roskos Yur. She was, however, finding them to be a dull, slow bunch. They failed to notice much that was obvious to her.
And it was clear that they were tired and fading toward sleep. After it had gotten fully dark, Kathree consumed three consecutive full meals from the rations that Roskos Yur had brought with him, then slipped away and climbed a short distance farther up, to the very top of the rim, from which she could look and listen inland.

When she returned, she startled Roskos Yur, whose steady breathing had been audible from a thousand paces away. He’d been asleep, or close to it.

“You should warn me when you are approaching, Kath Two!” he hissed.

“She’s dead.”

“Kath Three, then.”

“No one is coming,” she said, “at least not for a few hours.”

“Not unless they drop from the sky,” he retorted.

Langobard, ever sociable, had approached. “They will not come by air,” he said. “If they can take us out quietly, they will do so—and never say a word of it. But to make a full assault? That would clash with the narrative that they are building for the consumption of the people of the ring.”

“When are we going to begin writing our own fucking narrative?” Yur said. And there the conversation stalled.

But his question was answered an hour later when Kathree, then the rest of them, discerned a whine and a rumble coming from the direction of the water. Running lights appeared over the horizon, coming from the south over the limit of the world, but then winked out as the pilot made the decision to run dark. It was clear from the sound, and from the way it hugged the water, that this thing was neither an airplane nor a ship but the in-between thing known as an ark. They heard it sough into the water a kilometer away and switch over to the chugging engines it used to maneuver on the surface. It dropped anchor several hundred meters offshore: well away from the land, so as to respect the hair-trigger sensibilities of the Diggers, but close enough that people and gear could be ferried to and fro on small
boats. It opened its big rear cargo ramp, allowing the sea to flood its interior and float a collection of small boats and barges that had been packed aboard. On one of these, a small party came ashore. Kathree heard them conversing, mostly with Ty and Arjun, though Einstein as usual found a way to make himself part of the action.

A barge from the ark had been towed into the open water between it and the shore, and anchored. The sounds coming from it spoke of complex mechanical internals. After a few minutes it began to rumble and hum, and a fountain of glittering flynk chain, an upside-down U, grew out of its top and began to extend skyward as its velocity built and its sound sharpened into a steady keening note. Within a few minutes the aitrain had elevated to a height of perhaps a hundred meters and begun to give off a soft light, filling the cove and the beach with enough illumination for people to move about easily and read documents. Kathree could now read the name of the ark, blazoned on its fuselage near the nose:
Darwin
. It must have been sent out from a big TerReForm base—most likely Haida, which served the northern Pacific coast.

The aitrain that they had deployed on the barge was a common enough military device. As such it was probably radiating in other wavelengths besides just visible light. It was a sort of all-in-one communications hub that was interconnecting everything that had line of sight to it, as well as uplinking to Denali and other installations in the ring.

Sleep was now out of the question for Kathree, and so she made her way down the crater to the beach. When she emerged from the brush she discovered Einstein and the Cyc, standing next to each other in a crossfire of lights, facing a camera. To one side, sorting through notes, was a new arrival, a tall Moiran woman with the posture, the self-possession, and the golden eyes of a fashion model. She wore clothing suited for the chilly, damp coast of Beringia. It hung on her slender but strong frame in a way that suggested it had been made for her, probably by a clever designer on the Great Chain.

Kathree didn’t have to get any closer to understand what was happening: the tall Moiran woman was producing just what Roskos Yur had asked for. She began by talking directly into a camera for some time, then interviewed Einstein and the Cyc. It was all being beamed live to the ring.

Kathree sat alone on the beach, hugging her knees and watching the woman do what she did and wondering what events in her life had caused her to shift into what she was now, so tall, so lovely, so watchable. She did not have the manner of one who had been born beautiful, which made Kathree suspect that she had come by it through some kind of personal disaster. After she was finished doing her interviews, she shut down the lights and the cameras, approached Esa Arjun, and stood face-to-face with him for a while, just talking. Both of them had put on varps and Kathree got the idea that they were conversing about whatever it was that the devices were projecting into their eyes.

Kathree became certain that Kath Two had seen the woman broadcasting from trouble spots around the ring: habitats where general strikes or civil disorder had gotten out of hand, where Quarantine Enforcement or police had been called in to break things and hurt people.

The mere fact that Kathree was sitting still long enough to make such observations and to string such thoughts together was indicative of a coming crash—the inevitable result of how she had spent most of the day. It was about halfway between midnight and dawn, and Kathree felt herself plummeting toward sleep with the same power and inevitability as
Endurance
diving into her final pass through perigee.

Instead of which she found herself gazing at, and being gazed at by, the tall Moiran woman, who had silently drawn almost to within arm’s length of her. Kathree jumped to her feet and nearly fell over.

“Kath Amalthova Three,” the woman said, “I am Cantabrigia Barth Five.”

Five
. Wow. “You must have seen some crazy shit,” Kathree said. “I hope for your sake you have taken a set in your current form.”

Cantabrigia Five made a tiny movement of her golden eyes, by way of acknowledging the remark, but let it pass without comment. “I am what amounts to the commanding officer here,” she said.

It was neither the craziest nor the least crazy thing Kathree had heard lately, so she took it impassively. By outward appearances, Cantabrigia Five was a video journalist. But it made sense that, in a world where no police or military action could be judged successful unless it looked good to ordinary persons watching it on video screens, she was also a general.

Arjun had approached from behind Cantabrigia Five and now took up a position just to one side, peering over her right shoulder. He caught Kathree’s eye briefly and nodded.

“Over the wireless,” said Cantabrigia Five, “I just now spoke to Sergeant Major Yur and Lieutenant Tomov and Langobard, and gave them
their
instructions. These are
yours
. A small Red military force is approaching. They are still some hours away. We have intelligence that they are being guided this way by two Diggers familiar with the route. When they get here, there may or may not be a fight. If there is, do not enter into it directly. Stay clear of our buckies. Look for the Diggers. If you can prevent them from doing harm, by all means do so. But dead Diggers on a video screen is a thing we can-not afford.”

Kathree nodded. “I understand.”

Arjun apparently felt that some explanation was required. “We don’t know when, or if, the Pingers will show up. So we need to buy time.”

“Okay,” Kathree said. “What are we hoping to buy it with?”

The look on Arjun’s face suggested that the question had been impertinent. But Cantabrigia Five responded by reaching up to remove the varp she had perched atop her head. She swept it off and handed it to Kathree, who arranged it carefully on her own face. The fit was
imperfect and so she had to hold it in position with one hand to get the right focus.

“You’ll want the sound track,” said Cantabrigia Five. “It’s just not the same otherwise.”

“Sound track?” Kathree said. But a faint shift in the set of Cantabrigia Five’s face hinted that some deadpan humor was at work and that she should just play along. Groping along the sides of her head, she found the earbuds and flipped them down into position.

The varp was causing her to see a number of imaginary objects, most of which were grayed and/or blurred—it had figured out that Kathree was not its owner and so it had disabled anything personal or private. Hanging in space between her and Arjun, however, was a softly glowing red token having the apparent size of a table tennis ball, with a dimple in one side. He reached out and gave this a light tap and it flew in her direction. “Be my guest,” he said. She caught it in her hand and put her thumb into the dimple, then swooped it around in a big oval in front of her face. This caused a flat screen to make itself visible. She then drew the red ball toward her, sweeping the screen through a third dimension to define a volume about the size of a laundry basket.

Cantabrigia Five hadn’t been kidding about the sound track. It was a full orchestra, comprising some instruments that would have been familiar to Mozart and others that had been invented thousands of years after Zero. It, and a large choir, poured a three-dimensional ocean of sound into her ears, performing the Red national anthem. Not the peppy, truncated version heard at sporting events but the symphonic arrangement, calculated to make people sit still and be awed.

A nickel-iron fist seemed to be hanging in the volume of space she had just swept out above the beach. The Kulak. Stout spars jutted from it here and there: anchor points for hair-thin lines of rigging that extended in various directions, seeming to disappear in the vast distance. Moving carefully lest she turn an ankle on a cobble, Kathree
circled around it until she could peer down the hole in the center. There, she saw movement: rings of light, each of them similar to the Great Chain, stacked up the interior, each spinning at a different rate, but all protected within the lumpy shell of the asteroid, many kilometers thick. This triggered a programmed camera movement that took her by surprise and obliged her to plant her feet and steady herself by laying a hand on Cantabrigia Five’s forearm. The povv, or point of virtual view, took a slow dive down the center of the Kulak, which had now expanded far beyond the basket-sized volume to surround her. She could not control the speed of the movement but she could gaze in all directions and see through the glass roofs of the ring-shaped cities, picking out green fields where youngsters were kicking balls, blue ponds around which lovers strolled hand in hand, bustling high-rise districts, residential utopias, cozy schools, and military bases where Betas and Neoanders practiced martial arts and marksmanship under the billowing red flag.

“Is this all real, or—”

“A mix,” said Arjun, “of stuff they’ve actually built and renderings of what they imagine.”

“And has this actually been made public or—”

“Broadcast six hours ago,” he said. “It is a huge reveal.” Never before had Red divulged any pictures—real or imagined—of the inside of the Kulak.

By now the fly-through had reached the far end, and she could see space opening up around her as the povv exited from the Kulak’s maw. The familiar sight of the habitat ring became visible, sweeping around in both directions to enclose the blue Earth in its jeweled embrace. From the system of rigging woven around the iron fist, a cable descended straight to the equator. Slowly at first, then building speed, the povv descended, achieving in a few seconds what would have taken several days in any kind of realistic elevator. Even through a screen of bright clouds Kathree could pick out the complex landforms of Southeast Asia to the north and, to the south, the huge
dun slab of Australia, now joined to New Guinea by a lumpy gray-green tendril. The povv chose to zoom down on that first, coming close enough that it became possible to see a road traversing the land bridge. Then it veered and banked onto a northwesterly course, following the green, steaming spine of New Guinea to the cape at its end, where it nearly touched the equator. There, construction was visible: cleared land, buildings, excavations, a hazy web of infrastructure, glimpsed but not lingered on. The povv soared out over a turquoise sea cluttered with landforms she recognized vaguely from having seen them on maps. But after a few moments her eye was drawn to something that was flagrantly unnatural, looking as if it had been drawn in with a ruler and a pencil: the tether from the Kulak, plunging vertically into the ocean between two big islands. These, she realized, had to be Borneo and Sulawesi, and the water between them the Makassar Strait. The povv’s movement slowed, then stopped. The symphony and the choir were laboring through a slow crescendo. A change, more felt than seen, came over the display: the programmed camera movement was finished and the varp was now responding once again to Kathree’s movements. Like a giantess bestriding the strait, she could move around and look at it from different angles. For a moment nothing really happened. Then her eye picked up turbulence in the sea, around where the tether stabbed into it. The surface was welling up and foaming. The tiny wrinkles of normal surface waves were erased, replaced by vast green whorls and galactic arms of swirling foam. Bending forward she saw angry gulls wheeling about. That detail convinced her that what she was seeing was real—not a rendering. The disturbed region grew north and south, spreading away from the cable—which she knew to be on the equator—without growing east-west. The cable forked, then forked again, becoming a fan that broadened north and south to support the full length of whatever was roiling the strait.

It erupted from the surface first at the equator, then proceeded
to rip a gash in the sea that spread up and down the meridian with immense velocity. The object could hardly be observed at first for all the water draining from it, plunging in multiple Niagaras back into the sea and hurling up a storm front of spray that rose higher than the structure itself. But in a minute the Gnomon became visible. Kathree had to back away to get a picture of the whole length of it. She extended her left hand and made a counterclockwise knob-twiddling gesture, reducing the volume of the Kyoto Philharmonic’s brass section before the bass trombones and kettledrums imploded her skull.

If the designers of the Gnomon had intended to make the anti-Cradle, they could hardly have done better. It had the long wicked curve of a katana—the better to follow the curvature of the Earth—combined with the translucent delicacy of an insect’s exoskeleton. Indeed, it seemed to be unfolding, reshaping itself as it rose into the air, an origami praying mantis molting into a larger body. Its manifold corrugations and arching carapaces spoke of a million Jinns toiling in cubicles for centuries to build the strongest thing they could imagine with minimum weight.

“What’s it made of?”

“Carbon and magnesium, mostly,” said Arjun. “Two light, strong materials that can be extracted from ocean sediments.”

“Is that how they did it?”

“Yes,” said Cantabrigia Five.

“Energy intensive,” Arjun remarked. “They ran power down the tether to a production facility on the ocean floor.”

“They had workers living on the ocean floor?”

“Robots.”

“And therein lies an opportunity,” said Cantabrigia Five.

The producers of this spectacle had once again seized control of the povv and begun taking Kathree on a forced march up the length of the Gnomon, slowing down to linger on the good bits and zooming past what was repetitive. She got the idea, which was that it had
a sort of carriage that could move north-south on a giant rail and connect with the ground along a range of latitudes. That it had its own internal train lines connecting residential pods, military installations, luxury resorts for the whole family, and so much more. It was obviously rendered—stuff that hadn’t actually been built yet. Her inability to control what the povv was doing made her a little queasy. She levered the earbuds up, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the varp away from her face. Then she opened her eyes on reality: the beach, the islet, her two interlocutors. She handed the varp back. “What sort of opportunity?”

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

Kathree pondered that one for a bit. “Ah,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So there’s a reason they were so keen to make nice with the Diggers.”

“Having fucked it up spectacularly with the Pingers. Yes.” Cantabrigia Five stared at her for a little while. Her silence and her gaze were impressive, yet Kathree did not feel wholly uncomfortable.

Finally she went on: “Actions taken here today will cast long shadows into the future of New Earth. With more resources here, we might have effected a more elaborate strategy, with less uncertainty. But the mere fact of having had more would have spoiled it.”

“HOW DID YOU GUYS COME UP WITH ALL THIS?” TY ASKED.

He was squatting on the islet next to the Cyc, who was still swaddled in sleeping bags, only her hands and head exposed. She was holding an instruction manual, angling it toward the light of the flynk chain. This was still illuminating the cove, but the crew of
Ark Darwin
had dimmed it so that people could sleep. She had to focus intensely to read the words, many of which must be unfamiliar to her. Her
lips moved slightly as she parsed unfamiliar Cyrillic characters sprinkled through almost every word. Headphones buried her ears in great donuts of foam. She hadn’t heard Ty, didn’t know he was looking at her. So he had his fill of looking for a minute. She wasn’t his type, and anyway she was very young. But he was beginning to see what Einstein saw in her. Einstein had to know that there was nobody for him on his RIZ, no Indigen girl he could have an interesting conversation with. And yet if he were to somehow find his way to the habitat ring, he’d be looked on by all the smart girls there as a hillbilly.

The device in the box was a portable sonar rig. It was capable of sending out pings, but that wasn’t how they were using it. They were using it to listen. Sonar Taxlaw had virtually wrenched it from Ty’s grasp and mastered it. The arrival of
Ark Darwin
and the movements of the boats and the barge had caused her no end of annoyance, but with a little encouragement from Ty, she’d begun to see it as an interesting science experiment, a way of understanding what those technologies must sound like to Pingers and other mammals that frequented the deep.

Moving carefully on the steep, glassy surface of the islet, he edged into her peripheral vision and gave her a light tap on the shoulder. He hated to break her out of her reverie, but there were questions he needed answered. She was stunned for a moment, as if she’d just been teleported into this location from a thousand miles away, but rapidly she came around and pulled one of the headphones away from her ear. “Come again?”

“All of this.” Ty rested a hand on the battered plate atop the pipe, nodded toward the makeshift sledgehammer. “How did you come up with it? How do the Pingers know that when they want to talk to you they should build a cairn on the beach at such-and-such place?”

“We began sending out scout parties as soon as the atmosphere became breathable,” Sonar said.

“That’d be three hundred years ago,” Ty said.

“Two hundred and eighty-two.”

“Just making the point that this is old history.”

“Not that old.”

Ty heaved a sigh. “Not within living memory.”

“It is not merely an oral tradition, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Sonar said. “We maintain written records.”

“On one hundred percent cotton paper. Yes. Go on.”

“There was nothing for the scouts to eat, of course. So they could only range as far as they could go with food that they carried on their backs. But in time they discovered edible seaweed and bivalves along the coast.”