Seveneves: A Novel (15 page)

“Some things are not always explained to me,” Larz said, “but you know that we have talked for some time about going after a comet core.”

“Sure,” Dinah said. “We’ve talked about it. But those things are huge. What are we going to do with a few gigatons of water?”

Larz just blinked and looked mildly uneasy.

“It would take forever to move something that big!” Dinah said. “It is, like, a ten- or twenty-year project! We don’t have that much time.”

“Under the old conditions, yes.”

“What do you mean, the old conditions?”

“Back in the day—before the Agent—when we talked about moving comets, we were talking about sending up a big mirror. Focusing the sun’s light on the comet core, boiling off a little water, pushing it slowly to a new trajectory. Yes. That would take a long time. Like pushing a bowling ball with a feather.”

“And what about that has changed?” Dinah asked. “Physics is physics.”

“Yes,” Larz said, “and some physics is
nuclear
physics.”

“We’re going to use nukes? I thought that was—Jesus. I don’t even . . .”

“You don’t appreciate how much things have changed down there,” Larz said.

“I guess not!”

“The Arkitects came out and said, ‘Listen, there is no way of making this work with solar cells. We can’t make enough of them, fast enough, for thousands of arklets. They are big and cumbersome.’”

“I’d been wondering about that.”

“We have to use nukes, is what they said.”

“RTGs?”

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators were the power units used to run most space probes. At the heart of each was a puck of an isotope so radioactive that it remained hot for decades. Energy could be extracted from that heat in various ways.

“Those are not nearly powerful enough,” Larz said.

LARZ GOT MESSAGES FROM THE GROUND IN THE FORM OF ENCRYPTED
email, a spate of capital letters in groups of five that looked like something straight out of an Enigma message. In the big nylon wallet that, for Larz, passed as a briefcase was a stack of pages. On each of these was printed a different grid of random capital letters. About half an hour of laborious pencil-and-paper work went into decrypting each message. Dinah couldn’t believe her eyes. People used crypto all the time to send email, of course, and it was standard practice for all Arjuna Expeditions email to be enciphered. But apparently that was no longer good enough for Sean Probst. Dinah got used to seeing Larz toiling over these sheets. He wrote a little Python script to make it easier, but he still wrote the messages out by hand.

One day, two weeks after he’d arrived, he decrypted a message with some surprising news. The boss was coming. As in, Sean Probst, the founder and CEO of Arjuna Expeditions.

“How can that even happen?” Dinah asked. “How can anyone just come up to Izzy? Don’t you need a launch vehicle? A spacecraft? A place to dock it?
Permission?!
”

These were largely rhetorical questions. Sean had made seven billion dollars from an Internet startup before throwing his energies into asteroid mining. Along the way he’d sunk a billion or two into other private space startups.

“He’s coming up alone,” Larz said, “in a Drop Top.”

It took Dinah a moment, and a quick Google search, to access the memory. Also referred to as “the Convertible,” the Drop Top was one of the more creative recent approaches to space tourism. It
was based on the idea that what tourists really wanted to experience was the direct view of the Earth, the stars, and (until it had ceased to exist) the moon. Conventional space capsules had tiny windows. What you really wanted to do was stick your head into a transparent bubble so that you could enjoy a clear view out in all directions. In other words, you wanted to be in a space suit, basically floating free in space. The Drop Top was a small, simple capsule, capable of carrying four astronauts, dressed in custom-made space suits with bubble helmets. During the ascent through the atmosphere, and the reentry, they were protected by a sturdy aeroshell. But while they were orbiting the Earth, the shell retracted, like the roof of a convertible, exposing them completely to space, and even giving them some freedom to spacewalk.

“I don’t think a Drop Top can reach an orbit this high, can it?” Dinah asked.

“Sean’s coming up alone. It is some kind of special one-passenger model—the extra mass is being used for propellant.”

“And then what? He just goes to an airlock and knocks on the door?”

“Basically, yes,” Larz said. “What will they do? Tell him to go away?”

“This whole thing is bullshit,” said Sean Probst as soon as he got his helmet off.

Dinah smiled. It was not that she was happy about the bullshit. When it came to preserving the human race and the genetic heritage of the Earth from destruction, any whiff of bullshit was bad. But she did feel a certain sense of relief. In the back of her mind she had been quietly tallying up the BS for weeks now. No one else here would speak of it, and most of them seemed smarter, better informed than she was.

She knew Sean Probst by his reputation, by his signature on her paychecks, and by the emails he sent her at three o’clock in the morning of whatever time zone his private jet had most recently taken him to. Sean yielded to no one in his knowledge of all things space related. When he walked into a space station and called bullshit, things were about to become entertaining.

One of the few appealing things about him was that he had figured out that his personality was a problem and, in classic “get it done” style, had hired a coach to make him less of an asshole. She could see that working in his face.

“Not your part of it—that’s awesome,” he admitted.

“I figured you would have said something earlier if that were not the case,” Dinah said.

Sean nodded. Done.

His arrival at the space station had been unconventional, and roundabout. There was no docking station to accommodate the Drop Top. There couldn’t possibly be, since the Drop Top didn’t even have a port or an airlock. So there’d been no way to attach it to Izzy. He had brought the little convertible in under manual control, tapping the thrusters one at a time, spitting bullets of spent propellant into space, then pausing for one, five, or ten minutes to ponder the consequences. Space nerd that he was, he knew perfectly well that orbital mechanics did not obey the rules of earthbound physics. He had enough humility, and enough spare oxygen, to take it slow. Eventually he had drifted close enough to Amalthea that a three-Siwi train with a Grabb on its head had been able to reach out and grapple a fitting on the edge of his cockpit. He had then ejected himself from the vehicle, floating free in space, and gone on a little tour of inspection, firing off occasional messages to Dinah so that she could know where he was. Since there was no direct radio connection, these had to be relayed through a server in Seattle.

He was in a tubesuit: a tourist product that in some ways was less capable, in others more so, than the government-issue ones used by
cosmonauts and astronauts. It had no legs at all, since legs were pretty useless in space. It looked like a test tube with a pair of arms and a bubble-shaped dome on the top. The arms had shoulder and elbow joints, but no hands as such. Gloves were notoriously the most troublesome parts of space suits. Instead, the tubesuit’s arms terminated in rounded-off stumps. Projecting from each of these was a skeletal hand consisting of a thumb and three fingers, actuated by steel cables that ran through airtight fittings into the arm-stumps. The occupant could slip his hand into a glovelike contraption inside the stump that would pull on the metal tendons as he moved his fingers, thereby actuating the external digits and enabling him to grab things and perform a few simple operations. There was nothing about it that couldn’t have been built by a tinkerer in an inventor’s lab in 1890, or 1690 for that matter. People who had used them reported that they worked surprisingly well—better in some ways than conventional space suit gloves, which were stiff and fatigued the hands.

There was plenty of extra room inside the stumps, and so when not using the clawlike hands he could pull his fingers free of the internal glove and let them rest on internal touchpads and joysticks where he could type and swipe to his heart’s content. The suit had some tiny thrusters that enabled the user to “fly” it around. Sean had put these to work at some length, wandering around the outside of Izzy and inspecting the work of the robots, the modifications made to the truss, and other curiosities.

Finally he had found his way to an airlock at the aft end of H2, where Dinah had let him in, and he had blurted out his opinion.

He looked like any nondescript thirty-eight-year-old nerd at a graduate physics seminar or a sci-fi convention, with stringy dishwater-blond hair stuck to his head by sweat, and a few days’ darker stubble. In his official photos he wore contacts, but today he wore thick-lensed eyeglasses. He pulled one arm, then the other, out of the suit and then pushed himself up and out through the big opening at its top where the head-dome had been attached.

“I’ve been having trouble seeing the long-term sustainability angle,” Dinah admitted. For she was not above dangling bait.

“Ya think?!” he shouted. “Has anyone done even the most basic mass balance calculation on this Cloud Ark concept?” Sean was from New Jersey.

She wasn’t sure what he meant, so she stalled for time. “People have been pretty distracted. I wouldn’t be the first to know.”

“They wouldn’t tell you!” he shouted. “Because you would see right away that it is bullshit!”

“What is?” Ivy asked, floating toward them with an interested look on her face. “And who the hell are you?”

Before Sean could explain who the hell he was, he was distracted, to put it mildly, by the appearance of a six-foot-tall Amazon with a shaved head and prominent facial scars, headed for him across H2 as if she had been launched out of a cannon. Tekla drove her shoulder into Sean’s midsection, slamming him back against a bulkhead. A moment later she was on him. She grabbed an outstretched arm and put Sean into a joint lock that looked pretty much inescapable.

By now Dinah had spent enough time with Tekla to know that she was a practitioner of Sambo, a Soviet combat martial art with many similarities to jujitsu. Out of idle curiosity, Dinah had watched a few YouTube videos featuring Sambo practitioners in action. But she had never imagined, until now, that it could be done in zero gravity.

Sean had made his entry through H2 because it had a useful assortment of airlocks and docking ports on its aft end. But, unbeknownst to him, H2 had been doing double duty as the dormitory where the surviving Scouts lived. His arrival had awoken Tekla, who was off shift at the moment and had been sleeping in her bag.

Dinah tried to imagine what this encounter must have looked like from Tekla’s point of view. Sean’s arrival was unannounced. Dinah herself hadn’t really known when, or whether, he was going to arrive until the Drop Top had swum into view outside her little window.
So, from Tekla’s point of view, this guy was an intruder. And when she’d heard Ivy say “Who the hell are you?” she had realized that his presence on Izzy was completely unauthorized.

“Oh, this is awkward,” Dinah said.

“Tap! Tap!” Sean kept saying. He was slapping Tekla’s leg with his free hand.

“Commander, would you like me to restrain him?” Tekla asked. “What are your orders?”

“He’s not dangerous,” Dinah put in.

“Let him go, Tekla,” Ivy said.

Somewhat reluctantly, Tekla relaxed her grip and allowed Sean to float free. He drifted away from her, sizing her up with a certain degree of bewilderment.

“Sean,” Dinah said, “you’ve already made Tekla’s acquaintance. I would like you to meet Ivy Xiao, commander of this installation. Ivy, say hello to Sean Probst.”

“Hello, Sean Probst,” Ivy said, then turned to look at Dinah. “Did you know he was coming?”

“I had heard rumors,” Dinah said. “But I did not think them firm enough to distract you by repeating them. I am sorry.”

Ivy looked at Sean long enough to make him uncomfortable. Tekla, hovering almost within reach, did much to help supply the hostile atmosphere that Dinah suspected Ivy was reaching for.

“The closest analogy in the law for what I am here is the captain of a ship,” Ivy said. “Do you know the etiquette, Sean, for coming aboard a ship?”

Sean calculated.

“Commander Xiao,” he said, “I humbly and respectfully request permission to come aboard your ship.”

“Permission granted,” she said. “And welcome aboard.”

“Thanks.”

“But!”

“Yes?”

“If anyone asks, you’ll please tell them a little white lie, which is that you requested permission
first,
and
then
came aboard.”

“I’m happy to do that,” he said.

“Later on we’ll evolve some sort of common law, I guess. A constitution for this thing.”

“People are working on that, actually,” Sean offered.

“That’s nice. But right now we have nothing of the sort and so we have to be mindful.”

“It is so noted,” Sean said.

“Now,” Ivy said, “you were saying something about bullshit when I interrupted.”

“Commander Xiao,” Sean said, “I have the utmost respect for your past accomplishments and for the work you have been doing.”

“Do you hear a but coming?” Ivy asked Dinah. “I hear a but coming.”

Sean stopped.

“Go on,” Ivy said. For at the end of the day, to go on was what Sean wanted, so they might as well get it over with.

HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD IN
the Banana. Beginning with the Tsiolkovskii equation, a simple exponential, he developed some simple estimates, which he then developed into an ironclad proof, that the Cloud Ark was bullshit.

Or at least that it had been bullshit until he, Sean Probst, had shown up to address the problems he had noticed. Problems that could only be handled by him personally.

It occurred to Dinah to ask herself whether Sean was really rich anymore.

Rich people no longer kept their wealth in gold. Sean’s wealth was in stock—mostly stock in his own companies. She hadn’t been following the stock market since the Crater Lake announcement, but she’d heard that it had not so much crashed as basically ceased to
exist. The whole concept of owning stock didn’t really mean much anymore, at least if you thought of it as a store of value.