Seveneves: A Novel (29 page)

“Doob? You still with me?” Luisa asked. “I was going to say ‘Earth to Doob, Earth to Doob,’ but it doesn’t apply anymore.”

“Sorry,” he said. He had gone into a reverie thinking about that huge crevice on the side of Cleft, imagining what it must look like from the inside. “What was your question again?”

“Venezuela,” she said. “Did you do any of your ‘abduction runs’ there?”

“No,” he said. “Closest I came was Uruguay. Which isn’t that close. And by that time I was pretty burned out.”

“Why were you burned out?”

Typical Luisa!

“Overscheduling?” she went on. “That is, was it physical burnout? Or more emotional/spiritual?”

“I had just had it,” he said. “It’s hard. Taking young people—the best and the brightest—away from their families.”

“But it was for a good purpose, right?”

“Luisa, where are you going with this?”

“Are you aware of what is going on offshore of Kourou?” she asked in return.

“No,” he said flatly.

“You’ve checked out,” she said.

“I talk to my family every day. But other than that? Yes, Luisa, I have checked out of planet Earth. Nice place. Lovely people. But I have to focus on what comes next.”

“So say we all,” she said. “But one could argue that things happening in Old Earth’s final three weeks could have repercussions on New Earth.”

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Apparently not a single one of the seventy-five Venezuelans who were picked in the Casting of Lots has actually been sent into space,” she said.

“You know that the overall ratio has ended up being something like one in twenty,” Doob said. Meaning that for every twenty candidates chosen in the worldwide Casting of Lots and brought to the training centers, only one had found a place up here in the Cloud Ark. Not a figure to be proud of. But it was the best they’d been able to do, and they hoped to bring the number down to more like one in fifteen, or even one in ten, with a last-minute surge of launches.

“Yes. And the Venezuelans know that too. So they’re saying that three or four of their seventy-five ought to have made it up here by now.”

“Statistically, that is not a valid—”

“These people do not look like statisticians.”

“Politics.” Doob sighed.

Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”

“And I’ve been in enough faculty meetings at Caltech to know how right you are,” Doob said. “But I meant it in a different way. The way that the Venezuelans ran their selection program was overtly political. In most countries they took the Casting of Lots idea with a grain of salt. There was a random element, yes—but they also filtered for ability. The Venezuelans chose not to do that. So, they ended up sending in kids from the boondocks, truly chosen at random. Many of whom had fine personal qualities. If I had my way, we’d get some of them up here. But I’m not the one who is choosing. The people who
are,
are choosing on the basis of math ability and things like that. So it makes me sad that other people are in line ahead of the Venezuelans, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Three weeks ago, boat people started squatting on Devil’s Island,” Luisa said, “refusing to move.”

“Isn’t that a penal colony?” Doob asked. “Why would anyone—”

“It used to be a French prison, yes,” Luisa said. “Hasn’t been for a long time. Hardly anyone lives there. But it’s right under the flight path for launches out of Kourou. So, whenever there’s a launch, they evacuate it.”

“It must be evacuated all the time then, given the amount of traffic.”

“For the last two years, yes. But then a bunch of people showed up there and camped out and refused to move.”

“I’m guessing that the French and the Russians went right on launching.” In fact, Doob
knew
as much, since he saw arklets and supply ships coming up from Kourou all the time.

“Yes. So the occupation was more of a symbolic gesture at that point.”

“These squatters were Venezuelans, I take it.”

“Yes. It is a fairly easy cruise along the coast from Venezuela to French Guiana—a few hundred kilometers.”

Something was itching in Doob’s memory. “Does this have anything to do with the supply vessel that failed to show up yesterday?”

“And the day before. There’s been a two-day interruption, going on three, in launches out of Kourou.”

“A few squatters on Devil’s Island can’t explain that,” Doob said. Then he added, as a joke, “Unless they have surface-to-air missiles.”

Luisa said nothing.

“Are you shitting me?” Doob said.

“It’s not so much the ones on Devil’s Island as the ones in the blockade,” Luisa said. She handed her tablet to Doob. She’d pulled up what looked like an aerial photograph, probably shot out the window of a helicopter. In the foreground was the European Space Agency launch complex, which he’d seen before. It was separated from the Atlantic by a couple of kilometers of flat ground, banded with low, scrubby beach vegetation. In the distance was a trio of small islands, a few miles off the coast; he assumed that Devil’s Island was one of them.

The waters between the beach and the islands were choked with vessels: mostly small, but a few rusty freighters as well, a full-sized oil tanker that looked the worse for wear, and some ships that he could have sworn were military.

“When was this taken?” Doob asked.

“A few hours ago,” Luisa said.

“Are those naval vessels?”

“The Venezuelan navy is coming out to
maintain order,
” Luisa said.

“And you weren’t kidding about the surface-to-air missiles?”

“The pirates who showed up in that oil tanker claimed that they had Stingers, and that they would use them against the next rocket that lifted off from Kourou.”

“That is nuts,” Doob said.

“Politics,” Luisa said. “But we always knew it was going to happen, right?”

“Good morning, Doctors,” said a new voice: that of Ivy Xiao, entering the module to begin her own “morning” exercise routine.

“Good morning, Doctor,” said Luisa and Doob in unison, though for Doob it was afternoon.

“Did I hear the P-word?”

“Yes,” Luisa said. “We were just talking about you, honey.”

Doob was appalled. But Ivy laughed delightedly.

Ivy had been replaced, something like eight months ago, by Markus Leuker, the Swiss fighter pilot, mountain climber, and astronaut. Or, to put it more precisely, a new position had been created that made Ivy’s post redundant. Izzy was no longer just Izzy; it was the combination of the Cloud Ark fleet plus the vastly enlarged complex that Izzy had turned into. As such, a new leadership structure was required. The person at the top of that structure would shortly become the most powerful leader in human history, in the sense that 100 percent of all people alive would be under his or her authority. It was an altogether different job from being the first among the twelve equals who had been manning the International Space Station of two years ago.

Nevertheless, Ivy could have done it. Everyone who really knew her agreed on that much.

They had replaced her anyway. It was partly a matter of global politics. Placing overall command of the Cloud Ark under a representative of the United States, Russia, or China would have been seen as a provocation by the two countries that had “lost.” So it had to be someone from a small country. Preferably one that was seen as politically independent. This narrowed the list of candidates down to basically one: Markus Leuker. The dark horse being Ulrika Ek, the Swedish Arkitect and project manager, who had been launched up to Izzy at the same time as Markus—but on a different vehicle, in case
one of them crashed. No one had ever really expected Ulrika to get picked, however. The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man.

Ivy had failed, in the eyes of the Russians and of many in the NASA hierarchy, by not taking a firmer hand with Sean Probst. That wasn’t the only complaint they had about her, but it was the one around which everything else had crystallized. Once everyone had begun to see her as the overly book-smart, well-meaning but week-kneed technocrat, everything she did had been viewed through that lens. Dinah’s rescue of Tekla had been examined under what doctors called “the retrospectoscope” and been deemed a failure on Ivy’s part to enforce necessary discipline. New arrivals to the Cloud Ark, prepped by Internet comment threads and television pundits to see Ivy as a weak leader, began finding ways to make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The success of the Bolo One test, which in other circumstances might have bolstered her, came to be viewed as an almost literal handoff of authority from Ivy to Markus. Presented with some choice opportunities to say supportive things about Ivy, Ulrika had declined to do so, and it wasn’t clear whether that was mere absentmindedness or an attempt to cement her position as number two.

In any case it was all squarely in the realm of Politics. Doob had avoided bringing it up around Ivy, not wanting to raise an awkward topic, and so he found it horrifying when Luisa went straight to it, and fascinating when Ivy laughed.

People.

“What is on your docket for today?” Luisa asked.

“Looking at spreadsheets,” Ivy said. “Trying to figure out the consequences of losing Kourou.”

“That is one monkey wrench we didn’t need,” Doob said.

“To be sure,” Ivy said, “but in a weird way, I’m almost . . .” and she trailed off.

“Glad? Relieved?” Luisa guessed.

“It’s like the starting gun finally went off,” Ivy said. “We’ve been prepping for this for almost two years. Awaiting the disaster. Waiting for all hell to break loose. And now it has. Just not in the way we expected.”

“What
were
you expecting?” Luisa asked.

“That we’d get hit by a bolide and take a lot of casualties,” Ivy said. “Instead something unexpected happened. Which is good training, in a way.”

“How’s your sweetie?” Luisa asked.

Doob shut off his treadmill and unbuckled the padded belt that connected him to the bungee cords. He was the only man in a room where two women were talking about one of their boyfriends. He knew his cue to make himself scarce.

“He went dark on me two days ago,” Ivy said. “Which means he’s probably underwater.”

“I’m sure he’ll pop up for air soon,” Luisa said. “Can he send email when the submarine is submerged? I know nothing about it.”

“There are ways—” Ivy said, but by that time Doob was floating out of the module.

He made his way aft down the Stack to H2, then clambered down a spoke into the rotating torus T2, which Rhys Aitken had been sent up to build. Gravity in it was one-eighth of Earth-normal. Originally designed as a space hotel for tourists, it had never been quite up to the requirements placed on it by the Cloud Ark project, and so Rhys had been put in charge of building a larger one, concentric with T2, and inevitably called T3. Never one to rest on his laurels, he had invented a completely new system for building it. Unsurprisingly to Dinah, this had consisted of assembling a long loop of high-tech chain and setting it in motion around T2, then adding stuff onto it incrementally. It spun around the same hub at the same RPMs, but because it was bigger, its simulated gravity was a little stronger, about equal to that on the moon. It housed the closest thing the Cloud Ark had to
a bridge: a segment of T3 about ten meters long, used by Markus as his headquarters. Attempts had been made to dignify it with names such as “command center,” but at the end of the day it was just an upgraded version of the Banana: a conference room with some television screens and power feeds for tablet computers.

Izzy didn’t have a helm. It didn’t have controls as such. No big wheel to turn for steering it through space, no throttle. Just a bewildering assortment of thrusters controlled through a web interface that could be pulled up on any tablet, provided you had the right password. So, the control room, the bridge, the command center could be anywhere. People had ended up calling the room Markus had chosen the Tank. Adjoining it on one side was a smaller office that served as Markus’s sanctum sanctorum. Next to the Tank on the other side was a larger room with a number of cubicles, bizarrely like a suburban office park, where people supporting Markus could sit and work. It had been called the Cube Farm for about ten minutes and was now simply called the Farm. Adjoining the Farm on the other side was a maze of cramped rooms where one could obtain food or use the toilet.

Doob had found that the Farm was frequently the least crowded place on Izzy, just because it didn’t occur to people to go there. The gravity was good for his bones and the availability of coffee and toilets were obvious pluses. So he tended to swing by a couple of times a day, get a beverage, see what was happening, and, if things were quiet, grab a vacant carrel and do some work.

He got there at about dot 2. The walls of the Farm, and of the adjoining Tank, were lined with projection screens, known in NASA-speak as Situational Awareness Monitors. They acted as windows onto various parts of the Cloud Ark and its environs. One was showing the Earth below them, another the cloud of debris that had been the moon, another the approach of a supply module from Cape Canaveral getting ready to dock, another the progress of a bolo coupling drill being conducted by some newly arrived Arkies several kilometers
aft. Some just displayed statistics and bar charts. The biggest, at the far end of the Farm, was occupied mostly by a grainy video feed from some part of the Earth where it was dark. A label superimposed at the bottom identified it as
KOUROU, FRENCH GUIANA
. Once Doob had that information to work with, he could make out the general scene: a galaxy of lights from the thousands of boats that had joined the “People’s Justice Blockade,” and in the background the much more orderly precincts of the spaceport, where an Ariane stood on one pad and a Soyuz on the other, ready to launch, but still unable to do so because of the threat of those Stingers.