Seveneves: A Novel (106 page)

The first three Pingers had come ashore on the islet and were inspecting the photograph, which Einstein was holding now in front of his chest, part invitation and part shield. Sonar Taxlaw, not so encumbered, faced off uncertainly against the female Pinger, who suddenly stepped forward and embraced her.

On the beach, Cantabrigia Five exchanged a satisfied look with Esa Arjun and glanced toward the sky.

“CAL SENT MORE THAN ONE PHOTO TO EVE IVY DURING THE WEEKS
leading up to the Hard Rain,” said Esa Arjun. “A total of seventeen, including that one.” He nodded at the picture. Somewhat the worse for wear, it was leaning against the inner wall of
Ark Darwin
’s fuselage at the end of the table where he and Ty were eating lunch.

He and Ty and Deep. Deep was the Pinger who had approached Ty and befriended him with a nonverbal joke about his dry suit. He was seated a couple of chairs away at the same table. It wasn’t really clear whether he thought of himself as part of this conversation.

“Can he understand what I’m saying?” Arjun asked.

“He’s getting better. We sound like tuba music to them.”

“Is his name really what you say it is?”

“It’s the closest I can get to pronouncing it,” Ty said, “and he answers to it.”

Deep had been tearing into a raw fish filet, served on a platter with some seaweed garnishes. He seemed then to realize that he was
being talked about, and tensed up in a way that seemed very human. At a loss for words, he grabbed his cup of cider and raised it to them. They raised theirs in return, and all drank.

“I think he’s some kind of technician or scientist,” Ty said. “All that stuff in his harness.”

“Yes,” Arjun said, eyeing the Pinger curiously. “Optics. Electronics. They preserved more technology than the Diggers were able to.”

“They had more space,” Ty pointed out, “and they could scavenge whatever sank to the bottom.” He turned his attention back to Arjun. “Anyway, you were saying about the seventeen photos?”

“Yes. Most of them were of a type referred to, in those days, as selfies. Now, technically, this was a criminal violation of military secrecy. Very strange given that Cal was otherwise so attentive to duty.”

“Yes,” said Ty, casting his mind back to scenes from the Epic. “I remember Eve Ivy agonizing about that when Eve Julia ordered Cal to nuke Venezuela.”

“That’s a perfect example. So, this lapse—if that’s what it was—has attracted some attention from scholars. All seventeen of the photos were eventually recovered from Ivy’s phone. An obscure sub-sub-sub-discipline of historical scholarship grew up around them.”

“The kind of thing only Ivyns would care about,” said Ty.

“Cloistered in some library on Stromness. Exactly.”

Ark Darwin
was still riding at anchor outside the cove, and its fuselage was still flooded. This made it a perfect setting for what was happening now: a diplomatic conference between the Pingers and a delegation of important Blue officials who had been pod-dropped, straight from Greenwich, a few hours after the conclusion of the battle above the beach.

Einstein, Sonar Taxlaw, and all the other Blues had evacuated the cove and gone aboard the ark. Beled had been the last to depart; before climbing into the waiting boat, he had freed the captured Neoander and left him enough provisions to keep him in good stead until he could be rescued by his own people. And his own people had
shown up in force a few hours later. But according to the deal they themselves had struck with the Diggers, their claim was to the land surface only. And
Ark Darwin
wasn’t on the land. So, a growing Red military encampment was spreading around the shore of the cove, facing their Blue counterparts across a few hundred meters of salt water.

The ark’s flooded hull was chilly, and obliged the Blue diplomats to dress warmly. Ty, Deep, and Arjun were in a dry space higher up and farther forward, a sort of half-exposed mezzanine where folding tables and chairs had been set up to act as a mess hall for the growing complement of Blue personnel—as well as any Pingers who felt like wading up the ramp. They were eating hot soup and quaffing a funky but quite palatable cider from the northern slope of Antimer.

“Now,” said Arjun—enjoying, as only an Ivyn could, the opportunity to wax professorial—“what you must be wondering about these people is—”

“How the hell they survived. With only one submarine.”

Arjun nodded. “It turns out that if you look at the work of those scholars I mentioned—the most recent of whom died two centuries ago—there are clues.”

“But if the selfies were taken before the Hard Rain even began,” Ty protested, “how could there be clues as to what happened after?”

“I mean clues that Cal went out of his way to plant in the background of the photos. Clues intended for Ivy’s eyes only. Hints that he had more of a chance than one might imagine.”

“Go on.” Ty sat back and reached for his cup of cider.

“
We
know all about the Cloud Ark program, because it’s where
we
came from. It is our history. We have all of the records in our archives. Well, what Cal was hinting at, with these photos, is that there was another program, perhaps as large, that we never heard about.”

“A program to keep people alive under the sea?” Ty asked.

“Exactly. There are, in the background of these photos, detailed bathymetric charts of some of the deepest undersea canyons in the
world’s oceans. There are documents—binders on a shelf—whose titles suggest that they are about such preparations. Other clues as well—it’s all public research, I’ll send you the information if you want it.”

“Okay,” Ty said, just to be cordial. He knew that he would never read those research papers. “But the bottom line is that Deep’s people”—he nodded at their tablemate—“didn’t survive just because Cal got lucky.”

“They have an Epic of their own that, for all we know, might compare to ours,” Arjun said.

Sonar and Einstein had been making their way down the food service line and now approached, eyeing the two vacant seats at the table. Arjun took this as his cue to excuse himself. Deep said goodbye to him with a courteous bob of the head. Within moments Ty and his Pinger friend had been joined by the young Ivyn and the Cyc. For a minute or two, the new arrivals did nothing but eat ravenously, the only conversation being Sonar asking the names and origins of the various foods—all new to her—on her tray. Ty handled those inquiries so that Einstein could be left free to stuff his face. After a while this became a source of amusement even to Sonar Taxlaw, who just watched the boy eat, and transferred some of her food to his tray when he began to run low.

“Sometime, you’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” Ty remarked.

“What—” Einstein began, before food got in the way.

“—what’s like?” Sonar said, completing his sentence.

“Finding someone so completely. The way you two did.”

“That’s never happened to you?” Einstein asked. He wasn’t being rude. It had simply never occurred to him that he could have had experiences of which Tyuratam Lake knew nothing.

“No. It’s never happened to me.”

Einstein had begun to approach the point of satiation. He sat back in his chair and cast his gaze over the wreckage of his lunch, looking for any morsels that deserved more attention.

“I have a question for you,” he said.

“Fancy that,” Ty returned.

“What’s the Purpose? People keep mentioning it.”

“I wish I knew.”

“Very funny, but you know what I’m talking about. Roskos Yur mentioned it. Cantabrigia Five mentioned it. Purpose with a capital P.”

“My answer remains the same,” Ty said. “No one has ever told me. I have to make guesses, based on what I see from people who act like they know what it is.”

“People like the owners of your bar?”

“Evidently.”

“And what is your guess?”

Sensing another pair of eyes on him, Ty glanced over toward Deep, who was chewing vigorously, trying to reduce a stubborn wad of seaweed to submission. But he seemed to be following the conversation.

Ty shrugged. “Humans have always—”

He was about to say
deluded themselves
but didn’t want to make a poor impression on Deep.

“—preferred to believe that there was a purpose to the universe. Until the moon blew up, they had theories. After Zero, the theories all seemed kind of stupid. Fairy tales for coddled children. No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive. Like ants when their nest has been destroyed. On those rare occasions when we thought about the big picture, it wasn’t really that big—Red versus Blue or what have you. There was surprisingly little thinking about the Agent. Where it came from. Whether it was natural or artificial, or even divine.”

Einstein, the Cyc, and Deep were all nodding as if to say
Go on, go on!

But he had nothing to go on with.

“Some people—some Red, some Blue, and some ambiguous folks like the Owners of my bar—maybe even some of those kind
of people”—he nodded at Deep—“seem to think they know something.”

“Do they?” asked Sonar Taxlaw.

“I have no idea,” said Ty. “But from what I’ve seen, they’re not stupid. Even if they are—”

He paused, groping for words.

“Even if they are,” Einstein repeated,
“what?!”

“It’s a way—the Purpose is a way—of saying there’s something bigger than this crap we’ve spent the last week of our lives dealing with.”

“Red versus Blue crap?”

“Yes. And even though no one is sharing anything with me—
yet
—I like the feeling of that. People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently—and generally better—than people who serve other masters.”

“So it is like believing in God.”

“Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”

Einstein and the Cyc nodded and looked thoughtful. But also, or so it seemed to Ty, a little let down.

“Sorry I didn’t have an answer to your question,” Ty said.

“What are you going to do next? Now that your Seven is disbanded?” asked Sonar.

“Go back to my bar.”

“On Cradle?”

“On Cradle. Once, an astonishing wonder of technological prowess. Now a quaint, outmoded precursor to the vastly superior Gnomon.”

“I’d like to see it,” Sonar said.

“We have rooms. Apartments where people can stay, around the courtyard in the back.”

“They must be expensive.”

“They are free,” Ty said.

“How do you get one of those free rooms?” Einstein asked.

“Beats me. The Owners hand them out to people who serve the Purpose.”

“Very important people, then.”

Ty shrugged. “They can’t kill you for asking. You’re right about the Seven. That’s gone. Our Ivyn died. You took his place.”

Einstein cackled nervously. “I’m no replacement for Doc!”

“You don’t have to replace him. Not in that sense. But look what you did. You made first contact with these guys.” He nodded at Deep. “And first contact of another kind with the Diggers.”

Both Einstein and Sonar Taxlaw blushed deeply.

“The Cyc came along and replaced Memmie. That’s not a traditional Seven. But if we can pry Beled and Kathree apart, and if we can round up a Julian and a Camite who don’t hate each other, we’ll have ourselves a Nine. The first Nine ever assembled.”

Ty was just running his mouth, letting the cider talk. Sonar, however, was taking it all seriously. “But only one of the Aïdan subraces will be represented,” she pointed out.

“Bard is plenty.”

“You should include the other four,” Einstein said.

“That makes thirteen. An unlucky number. And a bit of a crowd, frankly.” But the youngsters across the table from him were looking heartrendingly sincere. Ty broke eye contact. “I’ll bet I could talk the Owners out of a few free rooms, for such a momentous occasion.”

“Are you really going to ask them?!” Sonar exclaimed.

“Nah. As an ancient saying has it, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. You are all welcome at the Crow’s Nest.” Ty looked over at Deep. “Just go easy on the cold baths, man. The plumbing in that place has seen better days, and I’m the only one who knows how to fix it.”

THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK CAME TO ME CIRCA 2006, WHEN I WAS
working part-time at Blue Origin and became interested in the problem of space debris in low Earth orbit. Researchers in that field had raised concerns over the possibility of a chain reaction smash-up that might create so many fragments of orbiting shrapnel as to render space flight practically impossible. My studies in that area turned out to be of little direct relevance to the company, but the novelist in me scented an idea for a book. During the same period I had also become aware of the immense amount of usable matter present in near-Earth asteroids. Thus by late 2006 I had come up with the basic premise of
Seveneves
. So the first acknowledgment goes to Blue Origin, which was founded circa 2000 by Jeff Bezos under the name Blue Operations LLC and where I had many interesting early conversations with him and other people involved with the company, including Jaime Taaffe, Maria Kaldis, Danny Hillis, George Dyson, and Keith Rosema. It was from Keith that I first heard the idea for the multilayered emergency shelter bubble that appears in this book under the name of Luk. Some of the Baikonur material is very freely adapted from the reminiscences and photographs of George Dyson, Esther Dyson, and Charles Simonyi.

Hugh and Heather Matheson provided background on mining—the industry, the culture, and the lifestyle—which helped me in
creating Dinah. If I have stretched truths in my treatment of the MacQuaries’ mine in Alaska and their use of ham radio, it is my fault and not theirs. For the record, Hugh recommended that Rufus’s operation be situated in the Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota, or in the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, Idaho, but I put it in Alaska anyway, to get it farther from the equatorial zone.

Chris Lewicki and the staff of Planetary Resources supplied valuable suggestions during an informal visit that I made to their offices in November 2013. Numerous members of their engineering staff were more than generous with their time on that occasion. (Later Chris mentioned to me that he and other members of the company had been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone was producing science fiction in which the asteroid mining company was, for once, the good guys.)

Marco Kaltofen helped me flesh out the technical details of
Ymir
’s “steampunk” propulsion system and read over the relevant sections of the first draft with a careful eye. Seamus Blackley also supplied useful input during this phase. Having invoked those people’s good names, I’ll reiterate that if I’ve taken liberties—accidentally or on purpose—with scientific fact, it should be blamed on me and not on them.

Tola Marts and Tim Lloyd helped sketch out and visualize some of the details of the space hardware described in the book, a project that is still ongoing. Readers may be comforted to know that, thanks to Tola, various aspects of the Eye and the associated tether systems have been designed with appropriate engineering safety factors.

Kris Pister’s work on small swarming robots, which I have been following on and off for several years, was formative in the discussion of Nats.

Karen Laur and Aaron Leiby contributed time and effort to envisioning a game based on TerReForm, and though those efforts were stymied by the usual difficulties in obtaining capital, they did help sharpen my thinking about various aspects of the story. As part of a different prospective game project, Tim Miller
of Blur Studio, with input from Jascha Little, Zoe Stephenson, Russel Howe, and Jo Balme, came up with ideas and concept art (produced by Chuck Wojtkiewicz, Sean McNally, Tom Zhao, and Joshua Shaw of Blur) for a number of different robots. Ed Allard devoted many hours of his time to prototyping the same game. Again, this work hasn’t led to an actual game yet, but it had the side effect of helping me put flesh on the bones of the story. Thanks also to James Gwertzman for introducing me to Ed and for his advice and feedback on this front.

Ben Hawker of Weta Workshop read the manuscript and pointed out that Cradle would be rusty, a detail that had somehow escaped me; hasty last-minute alterations ensued.

Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan, by dint of their connection with the Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore Initiative, had much useful background to supply on the genetic challenges associated with reviving species from small breeding populations.

While the first two parts of the story are a tale of straight-up global disaster and hastily improvised technology, I always viewed the third part of it as an opportunity to showcase many of the more positive ideas that have emerged, over the last century, from the global community of people interested in space exploration. Many of the big hardware ideas in the latter part of the book have been kicking around in the literature for decades and will be recognized as old friends by longtime readers of hard science fiction.

Particular recognition and thanks are owed to Rob Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited. Following in the footsteps of the late Robert L. Forward, Rob has worked on a number of ideas in the realm of “big space machines.” One of these is the Hoytether, a hugely scaled-up version of which has found its way into this book as the basic design scheme of the tether connecting the Eye to Cradle. Another is the Remora Remover, which, in principle, is the same device as the Lamprey. Rob is also coauthor of a 2000 study on high-altitude rotating tethers, based on early work by Forward and others, that serves as the basis
for the glider-to-orbit transfer described in the opening pages of the third part of this book. He deserves credit for all of those contributions as well as thanks for having given the manuscript a close read.

The first phase of Kath Two’s journey, from ground to hanger, is inspired by conversations that I have had with Chris Young and Kevin Finke about current trends in the technology of gliders. It is from talking to them, flying with them, and following leads provided by them that I came to understand the fact that the atmosphere contains all the energy we need to fly, and that the only thing preventing us from implementing something like Kath Two’s glider is commitment of resources to development of sensors and software—perhaps combined with a few improvements in the treatment of motion sickness.

Arthur Champernowne read an early draft and raised questions about the dynamic stability of the Eye-Cradle tether, which I have, with due respect, elected to ignore completely—but technically sophisticated readers might like to know that it would exhibit all manner of interesting wiggles whose management I have decided to postpone for later work. In the version that Arthur read, the flivver carrying Kath Two made its final insertion to geosynchronous orbit using a plain old-fashioned rocket burn. Arthur objected to that, not on technical but on aesthetic grounds. This finally pushed me over the brink into using an idea I had been carrying around in the back of my head for a while: having the flivver rendezvous with the end of a cracking whip. The scientific literature on this topic, though sparse, dates back to the Victorian era. The earliest technical reference that I have been able to find on the physics of moving chains is a paper by John Aitken during the 1870s, though he attributes some of its content to his friends the Thomson brothers, William (later Lord Kelvin) and James. Aitken’s work lay fallow until the 1920s, when it was picked up and used by M. Z. Carriére in a paper about the physics of whips. Subsequent work published by W. Kucharski (1940) and R. Grammel and K. Zoller (1949) filled out the picture. It is an interesting, underexplored topic in classical physics. I talked about it in a
sparsely attended lecture at the Oxford Union in June of 2014, and have intentions of publishing more about it, but nothing definite as of this writing (December 2014).

Finally, I would like to express gratitude to my agents, Liz Darhansoff of Darhansoff & Verrill and Richard Green of ICM Partners, and my editor, Jen Brehl, for displaying adaptability as I devoted seven years to trying to figure out just what exactly I wanted to do with this idea.