Seveneves: A Novel (52 page)

The largest of the three swarms, though, was responsible for sculpting the interior of the big shard as it was hollowed out. By the time the journey to Izzy was finished, most of the ice would have been fed into the hoppers and blown out the nozzle, leaving a hollowed-out shell with just enough internal structure to hold the reactor in place and maintain some semblance of a nozzle bell. This was not as crazy as it sounded, for two reasons. First, it was what miners had done since time immemorial. They didn’t just hollow out mountains, since that would lead to collapse. They sculpted the mountains into structurally sound architectural systems, complete with pillars, arches, and vaults. This was just that, except that the material was ice, and the forces in general were not as large. Secondly, most of the shard’s interior was of little consequence from a structural engineering standpoint. There was a reason why airplanes and race cars had been hollow shells—all skin and no bones. Most structural forces were naturally transmitted through the outermost layer of the vehicle, so that was the best place to put the strength. Enough strength on the outside made it possible to leave the inside hollow.

Ice, of course, wasn’t the best material to work with. It was brittle. But the
Ymir
expedition had shipped out carrying a large supply of high-strength plastic cord, net, fabric, and loose fiber. And during the months that it had been coasting in from Grigg-Skjellerup, Larz’s robots had been at work converting ice into pykrete. That outer layer of visually black ice was no longer ice per se, but a synthetic material
with much better structural properties. Frozen, it could stop bullets. Melted and strained, it would separate into water, artificial fibers, and black crud from the dawn of the solar system. In any case the larger robots—the Grabbs and the Siwis—responsible for doing most of the heavy material removal on the inside could scrape to within a few meters of that outer skin without compromising
Ymir
’s structure. It was the responsibility of the third Nat swarm to clean up after them and maintain the internal pillars and webs that would keep the reactor and the hoppers suspended in the middle of the hollow shard. This swarm-based ice-sculpting algorithm had been Larz’s invention, and he’d had a couple of years in which to perfect it, but Dinah was in charge of it now, and had a lot of learning to do between now and when she became fully responsible for it.

Outnumbered by the Nats, but responsible for moving a much larger tonnage of ice, were the hundred or so Grabbs and Siwis, now mostly stationed at the ready around the shard’s interior. Most of these were general-purpose robots with some added-on bits that made them good at moving on ice, but there were also half a dozen Leatherface machines: upsized Grabbs with shovel-studded chain saws for limbs, made to move a lot of ice in a hurry. These were so good at their jobs that they tended to destroy their surroundings, so they had to move frequently. Each one had to be followed around by an entourage of smaller robots cleaning up its mess and getting it anchored to fresh locations.

In theory it was all just a big computer program that, when executed, would smoothly convert the solid hill of ice into something like a walnut with the meat removed: a thick, pockmarked outer shell with an organic internal system of ribs, veins, and webs. As with any other computer program, it might run perfectly when Dinah started it. But it might just as well go sideways, perhaps in a manner that wasn’t obvious at first. So situational awareness was going to be a big part of her task. Interesting as it might be to look out the window and watch the Earth screaming by at twenty-four thousand miles
per hour, she would need to keep her head down, searching through a roar of weak and ambiguous signals for signs that something was going awry. She liked to imagine that her days as a little girl in a mining camp, sitting in front of a radio console trying to pick out Morse code signals from far away, through static and crosstalk, might have prepared her for it in some way.

A FEW MINUTES INTO HIS SCAPE CONVERSATION WITH J.B.F., DOOB
realized that, two years ago, he had done his job too well.

He’d gone into that meeting at Camp David with the mission of getting the president to understand the exponential breakup of the moon that was going to wipe out life on the Earth’s surface. Putting on his Doc Dubois hat, he had coined the terms White Sky and Hard Rain as easy-to-grasp handles on phenomena that, truth be told, were much more complicated. Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth.

He was in a corner of the Farm that, since the departure of
New Caird,
had developed into a sort of bullpen where he and Konrad and some of the other orbital mechanics geeks hung out. The Farm had always operated something like a high school cafeteria, with different cliques habitually sitting in certain areas, and now those choices were hardening, becoming a part of Izzy’s unwritten procedure manual. Anyway, they had printed out charts and plots representing, in more or less abstract form, everything that they knew about the ongoing development of the lunar debris cloud and what it might mean for the future of the Cloud Ark. The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amazement. Because paper was going to be scarce by then, and they would view its use for such purposes in roughly the same way as Americans of the twenty-first century had viewed the use of sperm whale oil to fuel streetlamps.

But then life would get better, forests of genetically engineered trees would grow in vast rotating space colonies, paper would become plentiful, and these sad yellowed scraps would be displayed in a museum as evidence of the privations suffered by the Arkers.

Assuming they didn’t screw it up. Which was really the topic of this Scape call with Julia. She was floating in her arklet. She seemed to have adjusted to zero gee; she’d figured out how to pull her hair close to her head, the moon face had abated, she wasn’t visibly nauseated. People were drifting to and fro in the background. The only one Doob recognized was Camila. A couple of other kids were doing what looked like work: prodding and massaging their tablets purposefully, looking up from time to time to engage in brief conversations. A South Asian lad, an African girl, another girl who was probably Chinese.

Girl, kid, lad, girl. His politically correct superego, cultivated during long years of service in academia, was trying to light up his shame neurons. Doob felt no shame—he was way past that—but he was struck by just how young the Arkies were, how different they were demographically from the General Population. It gave him a vaguely troubling sense of being out of touch. It had been decades since he had been young, but he had always been one of the cool kids anyway, with a big following on Facebook and Twitter. Now he was stuck on Izzy and Julia was stuck in an arklet. The two of them were hanging out with completely different populations. GPoppers saw each other all the time and talked face-to-face. Arkies were isolated in their arklets and had to use social media to reach out. Doob hadn’t looked at his Spacebook page since the White Sky, and this call with Julia had been delayed for fifteen minutes while he’d tried to figure out the user interface on Scape—something with which Julia was obviously familiar and comfortable. She used it all the time, and if it didn’t work, one of those kids in the background would help her with it.

Another straw in the wind: while Doob had been fumbling with Scape, he had overheard a brief snatch of conversation from the other end in which the South Asian kid had addressed Julia as “Madam President.” This seemed so odd that he was tempted to bring it up in conversation. But he knew what the answer would be: It was just a courtesy. Former presidents were always addressed thus. It didn’t mean anything. Why was he making a big deal about it? He would come off as some combination of uncouth and comically hypersensitive.

“Dr. Harris, as you know, I’m something of a fifth wheel around here, and so I want you to know I appreciate your taking any time at all out of whatever it is you are busy with to touch base,” Julia began.

“Not at all, Madam . . .
Julia,
” Doob said, and then, because this was a video connection, resisted the urge to slap himself.

She found that interesting but decided to overlook it. “I feel like a camp counselor here,” she said. “Of course, I was on top of every detail of the Arkitects’ work during the run-up. But to sit in the White House looking at PowerPoints is one thing. Actually to be here is quite another.”

This was quite obviously bait. Fully aware of what a sucker he was being, Doob said, “How so?”

“Well, of course the range of cultural perspectives is vast,” Julia said, “but, modulo that, I find a lot of uncertainty. A sense that all of the Arkies’ talents and energies are bottled up—like so many genies just waiting for someone to rub the lantern. They all so keenly want to help.”

“It is, of course, less than two weeks since the Hard Rain began,” Doob pointed out. “We have five thousand or so years left to go.”

“The Arkie Community is well aware of those numbers,” Julia remarked.

The Arkie Community. Wow.
He had to admire the way she’d slipped that in.

“Julia, what’s the purpose of this call? Am I to understand that whatever answers I give you will then be somehow disseminated to the Arkie Community? Because we have an email list for such purposes. An email list that includes every living human being.”

“That list was most recently used two days ago. An eternity for bottled-up Arkies.”

“We have been just a tad busy with the
New Caird
expedition.”

“There is a lot of curiosity about that in the Arkie Community.”

“There’s a lot of curiosity about it
here
.”

“I mean about its purpose,” Julia said.

“How could its purpose be any clearer?” Doob asked. “Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie”—
which doesn’t include you, Julia
—“will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint.”

“Obtain the stupendous amount of water that will have to be expended in order to attempt the Big Ride gambit,” Julia said. “Yes, Dr. Harris, even I understand that.”

“Gambit? Really?”

“Do representatives of the GPop ever make much of an effort to reach out and acquaint themselves with the thoughts and perceptions of the AC?” Julia asked.

“The what?”

“The
Arkie Community,
” Julia explained, with the slightest roll of her eyes.

“At any given time, about ten percent of the Arkies are rotating through Izzy. You know this. It is the largest number we can accommodate.”

“I’ve talked to several who have experienced that rotation. They all report the same thing. As soon as one enters the privileged environment of Izzy, with safer conditions, more room to move about, better food, and greater exposure to senior staff, the GPop worldview seems so sensible. Which only accentuates the reentry shock upon being deposited back into one’s arklet.”

Doob bit his tongue.

Julia continued. “What about reversing the roles a little—sending members of the GPop on temporary home stays in randomly selected arklets?”

“What about it?” Doob asked. “What purpose would it really serve?”

“From a purely technocratic standpoint, perhaps none whatsoever,” Julia said. And left the rest of her thought unsaid.

“If I went on a ‘home stay’ in a random arklet, what would I learn that I can’t learn from Scape or Spacebook?”

“A great deal, since you don’t actually use those applications,” said Julia, her voice deepening in amusement.

“I’m a little busy trying to get
New Caird
home. Go ahead, tell me. What am I missing?”

Movement caught his eye across the table.

He looked up to see Luisa shaking her head. Then Luisa clamped her face between her palms, closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Doob felt his face warming, and once again resisted the temptation to slap himself.

“There is a lot of ferment in the AC around alternative strategies,” Julia said, speaking briskly and authoritatively, as befit a woman who had just been anointed the spokesperson for said Arkie Community. “A fascinating school of thought is developing around the idea of making a passage through clean space to Mars.”

“Clean space?”

“Oh, I forget you haven’t been following the relevant discussion groups. Clean space is just what Tav has been calling the translunar zone, relatively free of bolides.”

“Tav? Tavistock Prowse?”

“Yes, you should have a look at your old friend’s blog occasionally.”

Tav had been sent up to Izzy a month before the White Sky, when someone on the ground had decided that social media was going to
be the glue that would hold the Cloud Ark together and that Tav was just the man for that sort of thing.

“I’ve been busy,” Doob said. “But Tav ought to know that we have simulated and war-gamed the Mars option to within an inch of its life, and it’s just not a good idea.” He could see Julia formulating an objection that he didn’t have the patience to listen to. “Anyone who is seriously advocating we go to Mars is—” He didn’t want to say what he was thinking, which was
smoking crack,
and so he settled for “—not taking some of the practical realities into account. One solar flare at the wrong time could kill everyone.”

“Only if everyone
goes
.”

“If you’re talking about just sending a contingent to Mars, then you have to consider how much of our equipment and supplies they’ll be allowed to take with them.”

“I think many talented Arkies would volunteer to be part of a small, lean advance party. The lure of clean space is strong.”

“Well, we are not in what I guess Tav considers clean space,” Doob said. “We are in dirty space, and we have to focus on that reality, rather than woolgathering about trips to the Red Planet.”

“You needn’t remind me,” Julia began.