Seveneves: A Novel (55 page)

“We’ve been hearing a little about Spencer’s ability to disconnect from SAN.”

Zeke nodded. “Confirmed. I was there for one such incident. We had a very strange conversation. I think they were testing the waters to see whether I might be recruited. She spoke to me as if I were already on her side—as if it were unthinkable that I wouldn’t be. It’s a pretty good persuasive technique—she had me going for a little bit. But once I got out of there and slept on it, I saw how crazy it was.”

“Did you have the sense that this was a one-off? Or was she working her way down a list of possible recruits?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say there was a list,” Zeke said, “but not a long list.”

Ivy nodded. She didn’t have to spell it out: J.B.F. might have recruited some others—others they didn’t know about yet.

“It tallies with what I saw,” Doob said, and glanced at Luisa for a
confirming nod. “I think she is just being opportunistic. She reaches out to people, draws them into conversations, drops hints, probes for vulnerabilities.”

“Is she nuts?” Ivy asked Luisa.

“In a sense it doesn’t matter,” Luisa said. “If she’s making trouble, she’s making trouble. Tracing that to a diagnosable psychiatric condition doesn’t really change anything.”

“It might change the approach that we take.”

“She was narcissistic to begin with,” Luisa said. “This isn’t a formal diagnosis, mind you. But according to what we heard from you and Dinah, her trip up to Izzy was pretty traumatic. She lost her husband and her child and blood was spilled along the way. It doesn’t take a trained professional to guess that she is suffering from some level of PTSD. Connected with that we might expect her to have a dark, paranoid vision of the world. But she may have been that way to begin with.”

“She’s cagey,” Ivy said. “As long as all she’s doing is talking to people, there’s not much I can or should do.”

“Agreed,” Luisa said. “She is building a political base among the Arkies. If you take some action against her, with your sole pretext being that she’s talking to a lot of people, then you’ve given her just what she wants. But some outreach on your part to the Arkies might be a good idea.”

Ivy sighed. “The only answer to politics is more politics,” she said, “and that’s where I’m most useless.”

“Deeds, not words,” Zeke said. “That’s what really matters. And when
Ymir
pulls in, you and Markus will have accomplished something that’s going to make J.B.F. and her clique look puny.”

“I MAY BE OUT OF MY DEPTH HERE,” JULIA SAID, AFTER A LONG AND
thoughtful pause, “but we seem to have a striking coincidence that is staring us right in the face.”

“Go on, Madam President,” Camila urged her. “It might be obvious to you, but I for one cannot see it.”

Julia looked at Katherine Quine. “As I understand it, the key elements of the proposed Mars ship are a heptad, for the humans to live in during the voyage, and a triad, for bulk storage of propellants and whatnot. And this matches up quite neatly with our strengths.” She managed a self-deprecating chuckle. “I say ‘our.’ What do I mean by that? I suppose I’m going out on a limb by imagining that there might be some sort of a natural alliance between the Arkie Community and the Martians. A sort of ragtag rebel coalition, if you will. Here in this heptad we have rapidly assembled a social hub for advocacy of concerns relevant to the AC. In a sense we have our own heptad now. And in a like sense, you, Ravi and Jianyu, have developed your triad into an intense focus of Martian advocacy. You have your own triad. So the two largest components of the Mars expedition have already been acquired. They just need to be put together.”

Ravi was nodding. “Two of the engineers on the MIV team are keen on it. They helped build
New Caird
and are eager to tackle a new problem. Of the two, one might even come with us. Paul Freel. He has been a strong advocate of Mars colonization since long before Zero.”

Katherine had been listening intently, and now broke in: “I don’t mean to sound a skeptical note, Madam President, but in what sense do you really ‘have’ this heptad, or do our friends here ‘have’ the triad where they live? It might be true in the sense of having majority rule. But—”

“But what does ownership really mean in this context? Hmm, yes, it is a very profound question, Dr. Quine, and I’m glad you raised it. So many things we took for granted before, such as property rights and individual liberty, are clouded by Markus’s declaration of PSAPS. Or martial law, if we want to call a spade a spade. But as a first step toward answering your question, I would suggest that the ability to come and go at will is inextricable from ownership—that’s what it would really mean to ‘have’ an arklet, or a triad, or a heptad.”

“Well, in that sense we’re really all subject to the collective dictates
of the swarm,” Katherine said. “Parambulator is what decides where we go when.”

“It truly is one of the most insidious instruments of social control ever devised,” Julia said.

Katherine looked mildly aghast. “But without it, we have a disaster.”

“That is what makes it so insidious,” Julia said. “One can always justify it by making the safety argument. We will all be slaves of Parambulator until and unless someone decides that some things are more important.”

Jianyu was looking alert and curious. “If someone did decide that,” he said, “it would change nothing unless the arklet in question was switched over to manual control.”

“It’s my understanding that this can be done at any time,” Julia said. “Was I misinformed?”

“No,” Jianyu answered, “but it would show up very prominently on Parambulator. It would set off alarms all over the Situational Awareness Network.”

“In that case,” Julia said, “we shall have to deal with the SAN when and if the time comes to take decisive action.”

IVY’S GRANDMOTHER, A GUANGZHOU-BORN, HONG KONG–RAISED
woman who spoke only a few words of English, had ruled the family from a mother-in-law apartment over a garage in Reseda. Enthroned on a duct-taped La-Z-Boy and swaddled in crocheted afghans, she had handed down a series of diktats, pronunciamentos, and fatwas that had taken on the force of law within her family of three dozen direct descendants and in-laws scattered across the San Fernando Valley. While not indifferent to money, love, security, and other common psychological drives, she seemed to have been motivated by another need that was obscure and hence mysterious to most of those who paid fealty to her. Anglos might have Orientalized this as “face” or Confucian respect for one’s elders.
Ivy came to understand it as a simple need for attention. Anyone who entered or left the house had to check in with Grandmother. And it was not enough just to poke one’s head in the door and say hello or goodbye; one had to sit down in the rattan side chair next to the La-Z-Boy and spend a few minutes and say a few words. Grandmother had no power to enforce this regulation other than finding arcane and baroque ways to wreak long-term revenge on those who flouted it.

Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn’t that at all. She was like Ivy’s grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise. If you sent her off to an arklet and ignored her, you became an enemy of her and of her network. She wielded no power other than that. But, ignored long enough, she could become a mighty foe. Her status as an ex-president—and not just any old ex-president, but the one who had overseen the construction of the Cloud Ark and even used nuclear weapons to protect it—gave her credibility among the Arkies. It had become common to think of those as scattered and demoralized, just waiting for a leader to bring them identity and purpose. Ivy had lost track of whether that was an accurate perception or a self-perpetuating myth spread by J.B.F. In any case, it had taken on the force of reality.

She was sitting across the table from Tekla, wondering whether it would be productive to explain all of these thoughts to her. Would this Russian heptathlete care about, or understand, Ivy’s dead Cantonese grandmother in Reseda?

Maybe. But Tekla came from a tradition in which details were hoarded and dispensed on a need-to-know basis. Presented with too much information, she became baffled, bored, and finally irritated. Toward those who talked too freely, she felt the same sort of contempt as a businessman might feel toward a spendthrift. She just wanted to know what her job was.

The same quality made it difficult to get inside Tekla’s head. But that was okay. In a big organization with a military-style chain of command, you didn’t have to be everyone’s friend and treasured colleague. Markus understood as much, which was why he had ended up running the place. More Ivy’s speed had been the boutique operation that had been Izzy at Zero. Markus would have been terrible at that.

“This thing with Julia is a distraction. Nothing more,” Ivy said. “Much more important things demand my focus. Making a big deal out of it will backfire—give her more power than she deserves. But we can’t ignore what she is doing.”

Tekla was nodding. Good.

“I want you to go and visit her heptad,” Ivy continued. “You will go there in your capacity as Markus’s security chief. Do you understand? It is an official visit. You will explain that there have been problems with the Situational Awareness Network that could have dangerous consequences unless they are fixed. Beyond that, I just want you to listen to her. Because I think that she will try to bring you over to her side. It’s what she does with everyone. You would be a prize catch.”

“If she does as you predict,” Tekla said, “what should be my response?”

It was a measure of Ivy’s naïveté that she didn’t even follow Tekla’s question at first. Then she understood that Tekla was suggesting she might pretend to become one of Julia’s followers. She was volunteering to become a mole in Julia’s network.

Tekla stolidly watched Ivy’s face as Ivy figured it out.

“I would suggest taking no immediate action,” Ivy said. Which, in truth, was Ivy being not so much cagey as timid.

“Of course,” Tekla said, “to show eagerness is poor tactics, it will only arouse her suspicion.”

Ivy said nothing. Tekla explained, “I know many people with such minds.”
And you obviously don’t, honey
.

“My suggestion is that you report to me in person first and then we will come to a decision.”

“We?”

“I. I will come to a decision.”

“It is good that we meet here. In the Banana,” Tekla said.

“You like it?”

Tekla looked nonplussed. “It is not that I like it. The Banana is more secure.”

“From bolides, you mean.”

Tekla shook her head. “From Grindstaff.” Then she stood up—carefully, so as not to fly up and bang her head on the ceiling—and departed, leaving Ivy alone with a head full of questions. Had she really just embarked on the project of setting up an internal espionage network within the Cloud Ark? How was she going to explain that to Markus? Would he be horrified, or impressed? In either case, how would she feel about his reaction? When the hell was Dinah going to get back so that they could discuss this kind of thing over distilled spirits?

And what had Tekla meant by that last comment, that the Banana was more secure from Grindstaff? It was old, pre-Zero, and so its connection to the SAN was retrofitted and kludgy. Tekla seemed to be suggesting that if Spencer could hack the SAN to the extent of disconnecting Julia’s arklets from it, then maybe he could also hack it to the extent of placing other parts of the Cloud Ark—including the Farm, the Tank, and Markus’s office—under surveillance.

I know many people with such minds,
Tekla had said. She was talking about Russian military and intelligence types, accustomed to the byzantine thoughtways of those professions. Perhaps Tekla herself had once been groomed as an intelligence asset. If Tekla really did become a mole in Julia’s network, then how could Ivy be sure that she was a straight-up mole, loyal to Ivy, and not a double agent, loyal to Julia?

THE SCRAPE WITH THE ATMOSPHERE HAD LEFT
YMIR
TUMBLING
slowly as it hurtled away from the Earth on its new orbit. Calculating
exactly what that orbit was took them fifteen or twenty minutes, and told them that they had fewer than four hours in which to take actions needed to save their lives.

If all had gone perfectly, the nuclear burn would have slowed
Ymir
down to the point where a rendezvous with Izzy could then have been achieved with a few small additional delta vees. They had hoped this might happen, but not seriously expected it. The best they could really hope for was to shed some velocity and reduce the height of their apogee.

That figure—the distance separating the Earth and the ship at the top of her orbit—was directly related to how much velocity she had at the bottom. Because
Ymir
had “fallen” in from an extremely high apogee, far beyond the moon’s former orbit, she had come in screaming hot for her skip off the atmosphere. Every bit of velocity that was killed by the huge nuclear retro-rocket burn, or by friction with the air, translated into a lower altitude at the succeeding apogee, which—depending on how the numbers had worked out—would occur weeks, days, or hours later.

The answer, once they had run the numbers, turned out to be hours.

In one sense,
Ymir
had missed her target by a mile; the total delta vee she had achieved had been less than a third of what they’d hoped for. And yet this had been enough to bring her apogee down from far beyond the moon’s orbit to a figure only about thrice the altitude at which Izzy circled the Earth.

Likewise, the period—the amount of time it took to complete an orbit—had dropped from seventy-five
days
to a mere eight
hours
. The lesson being that huge alterations in those figures could be purchased for comparatively small amounts of delta vee.

Bringing
Ymir
the rest of the way down to Izzy’s orbit, on the other hand, would require twice as much delta vee as they’d wrung out of the “burn” just completed.

Long before worrying about that, however, they would have to survive the next eight hours.

Ymir
’s apogee might have been radically altered, but her perigee altitude was unchanged—meaning that it was still dangerously low. If they took no action, the next go-round would therefore bring them roaring and bouncing across the top of the atmosphere again.

On one level, raising the perigee a bit, so that they’d never have to worry about the atmosphere again, was an easy task. They could do it with a small but precisely calibrated burn at apogee. In a normal space mission, such a thing would have been straightforward. Here, it was complicated by two factors. First of all, their success in lowering the apogee, and shortening the period, had imposed a tight deadline—four hours after perigee—when that burn needed to occur.

The second complication was the ship’s slow tumble. This meant that their nuclear rocket engine was never pointed in the right direction, save by lucky accident. During the big burn at perigee, they had wanted the nozzle pointed forward, so that it would serve as a huge retro-rocket. The upcoming burn at apogee was intended to speed her up a bit, and so they needed the nozzle pointed aft. But as long as she tumbled, it was aimed in no particular direction.

So their task now was to stabilize
Ymir
’s attitude by using her thrusters to push back against the unwanted rotation. And, as they had discovered the first time they’d tried it, her thrusters were small and weak compared to the momentum of the big ice shard. In aerospace lingo, they lacked control authority.
Ymir
was like a truck skidding on a patch of oil, responding only faintly to the steering wheel. That problem had been alleviated somewhat by the large expenditure of mass during the burn. Many tons of ice had been hurled out the nozzle in the form of steam.
Ymir
was lighter and more wieldy as a result. Calculating exactly
how much
more wieldy she was, and what it meant for the thrusters’ control authority, was, in itself, a significant task that consumed another half an hour just for a rough estimate.

The result was not encouraging. In the three hours remaining, there was simply no way that
Ymir
’s attitude control thrusters—designed for tiny adjustments over long spans of time—could neutralize her tumble. The tumble wasn’t especially fast—the crew in the command module could barely sense that they were rotating—but it was enough to make the next rocket burn impossible. And if they couldn’t make that burn in three hours, they’d scrape the atmosphere again in an additional four, and again eight hours after that. They might survive one more ride like the first one, but they couldn’t survive two.