Seveneves: A Novel (84 page)

After a sort of dark age during which the Cleft colony had lacked the resources needed to advance the art of robotics, and contented themselves with fixing, and making copies of, the original models, new engineering resources had begun going into this branch of technology. The bolder programmers were daring to meddle with code files that had last been checked in by Eve Dinah. Mechanical engineers were figuring out how to reboot ancient CAD software and examine the digital blueprints created by Larz. Their initial efforts were fairly simple, such as making a nat that would automatically throw out a drag chute after it had traveled a certain distance without hitting anything. More effort went into the projectors than the projectiles.
Police and military users tended to be Teklans, whose Anglisky contained more Russian loan words than that of other races, and borrowed many characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. “Katapult” was their preferred term for the device that threw the projectile nats. They shortened it to various affectionate terms such as “kat” and “katya.” The second half of the word, “pult,” seemed to have a connection to “pulya,” pronounced with a long U as in “pool,” which was the Russian word for “bullet.” After a brief, awkward phase of trying to combine the term “nat” with “pulya” in various ways, meaning something like “bullet-robot,” they had just settled for “pulya,” which was sufficiently precise in a universe that no longer included any actual old-school bullets. Other words from the antediluvian gun world made it through unchanged, such as “shoot” and “shot,” but officers giving the command to shoot tended now to say “pul,” recalling what skeet and trap shooters had once called out when they wanted a clay pigeon to be thrown.

Use of the term “pulya” without any modification tended to irritate knowledgeable interlocutors in exactly the same way as pre-Zero gun nuts had reacted to laypersons who used the word “bullet.” This reflected the fact that pulyas came in an even vaster range of sizes and types than old-school ammo. There were only so many things that could be done with a lump of lead. A far wider range of options lay open to the pulya engineer. An alternative term, “ambot,” was also used. This was all context dependent. Grunts, who tended to see these things as necessary burdens to be hauled around in bulk, loaded into kats, unjammed from firing mechanisms, etc., tended to use “pulya,” but once the projectile had actually been fired and begun to execute its program, it tended to be called an “ambot.” When speaking of bulk supplies, people would say “botmo” in the same way that “ammo” had been used on Old Earth.

The sort of person who needed to be shot at by the authorities because he or she was committing violence, or threatening to, with edged weapons, was unlikely to submit meekly to advances in the
technologies used to enforce civil order. Directly they began to develop countermeasures, which, of course, then needed to be surmounted by the engineers in turn. If an ambot, for example, could be fooled into believing that it had missed its target or struck something that was not a human, it could be rendered nearly harmless. Camouflage changed its purpose from fooling the human eye to fooling the electronic brains of ambots. Armor was no longer made to stop extremely fast pieces of lead. Its purpose now was to protect the wearer from the invasive strivings of ambots. Warriors became living, moving fortresses under siege of multiple ambots that often used swarm tactics to find a way inside before their batteries ran down. The old tactical calculus of projectile warfare changed in other ways too. Katapults and botmo that had been captured by the enemy, or that had simply fallen to the floor and been picked up, could be rendered inert and useless by digital means. Some of them would try to find their way back to their masters, and so battle zones in which a lot of botmo had been expended tended to look as though they were infested by army ants as spent ambots attempted to swarm back toward the combatants who had fired them.

In any event, the authorities had enjoyed a monopoly over the production and use of such weapons until sometime in the Second Millennium, when the number of widely separated habitats, and resulting political fragmentation, led to a situation in which the civil authorities from Habitat A might actually have cause to shoot at those of Habitat B. The number of different types of katapults and ambots, and of the defensive measures used against them, exploded. No complete catalog of types had existed for thousands of years. Here and there one might stumble across a museum display in which a few dozen or even a few hundred types of ambots had been rendered inert and mounted to a wall with explanatory plaques beneath them explaining in what millennium they had been invented, by whom, and in which habitat they had been used to prosecute this or that disturbance. But everyone knew implicitly that such displays only included
samples that had at random made their way into a particular collector’s drawer.

“Disturbance” was used a lot more often than “war,” even for relatively large events such as the conflicts that had occurred over the last few centuries between Red and Blue. Because space habitats were so vulnerable, prosecuting an actual war in the sense of a twentieth-century, Old Earth total war was unthinkable. Nuclear weapons had not been reinvented because there was no need for them. A rock thrown across the ring at a space habitat would kill as many people as a hydrogen bomb. The same strategic calculus therefore applied as on Old Earth during and after the Cold War, namely that on no account would Red and Blue risk actual, open war with each other but that many small conflicts could happen in places where they might be passed off, by the majority of the news-reading populace, as too minor to worry about. The only two conflicts that were denoted, in retrospect, as wars were ones that had taken place the old-fashioned way, on the surface of the planet: the War on the Rocks, 4878–4895, and the War in the Woods, 4980–4985.

When Kath Two walked into the Crow’s Nest and was greeted by the Dinan with the damaged face, it was 5003, so about twenty years after the high-water mark of the War in the Woods. The Dinan looked to be about forty years old. The scars on his face had been there for a long time.

“One of those,” she said, nodding at a nearby tap handle adorned with a handwritten label identifying it as cider.

“Coming right up,” he said. “Since I have you at a disadvantage, my name’s Ty Lake.”

“Short for Tycho or . . .”

“Tyuratam. Bit of a mouthful.”

His accent was that of an Indigen. So, from this brief exchange she was able to surmise quite a bit about his history. His parents had probably been Sooners, which was to say, people who had been so eager to escape from the settled life of space habitats that they had
found ways of getting down to the surface of New Earth just as soon as the TerReForm had rendered it marginally inhabitable. Doing so was a violation of First Treaty, which had ended the War on the Rocks a few decades earlier, and so it was discouraged. Comings and goings from the bigger and older habitats of the ring were easily monitored by the authorities, and so Sooners tended to depart from liminal zones on the edges of boneyards and near the two turnpikes. On the Blue side, Dinans were strongly overrepresented among Sooners. Teklans tended to be the coplike authorities given responsibility for chasing them down and breaking up their human-smuggling rings, leading to stereotypical depictions in popular culture of Dinans as charismatic pirates and Teklans as humorless straight arrows. Or at least that had been the case until the Sooners’ transgressions had led to the War in the Woods, in which the predominantly Teklan armed forces had been obliged to rescue many Dinan adventurers. Depictions nowadays were a little more nuanced and made the older ones seem campy.

Thus Kath Two could reasonably guess that Ty’s parents had been Sooners and had established themselves on the surface long enough to have at least one native-born son. The connection back to boneyards meant that Sooners tended to be people with a certain amount of skill in making things, and so many of the early Sooner communities had been soundly constructed on an engineering level even if their political culture had been a little on the rough and ready side. Ty, presumably, had grown up in that environment and found himself, in his late teens or early twenties, embroiled in the War in the Woods. Some ambot of some type—no point in worrying about the details—had found its way through his armor (assuming he was even wearing any) and done damage to his face. This was the sort of thing ambots tended to be good at. In combat it was frequently more useful to disable than to kill, and so ambots fought like chimpanzees, aiming for the face, the hands, and the genitals. Faces were easy to recognize and hard to spoof, so those were a favored target. Ty
might have suffered these injuries in many different circumstances, e.g., a Red-on-Blue raid between two rival Sooner communities, but there was something about his posture and his manners that suggested a connection to the military, and so she guessed he had been officially recruited to fight for the Blue side, and suffered his injury in a straight-up battle between organized military formations.

He obviously ran this place. This was clear from the way he was treated by staff and customers alike. In and of itself it wasn’t unusual for a retired veteran to open a bar. That was so normal as to border on stereotype. It was a little less easy to explain how such a person could end up in control of this particular bit of real estate, which was probably worth more than some entire space habitats.

The brand name on the tap handle, combined with the fact that it was handwritten, both implied that this beverage had been produced from apples plucked from trees growing in the soil of New Earth. Under the terms of Second Treaty, which had terminated the War in the Woods, the only people allowed to live on the surface and do things like tend orchards were the descendants of Sooners, now renamed Indigens. The fact of this cider’s being on tap here proved, or else was a very well-crafted marketing campaign intended to create the impression, that Ty Lake maintained close connections with at least one Indigen community and that he was importing its produce directly from its Registered Indigen Zone, or RIZ. This made it a desirable luxury good, since most food was produced, far more cheaply and reliably, in habitats. Drinking beverages or eating food produced in a RIZ was for wealthy connoisseurs. Perhaps to allay any concerns Kath Two might be having on that score, Ty said, “On the house,” as he set the glass on its coaster.

“That is kind of you,” Kath Two said, as her eye strayed to the black slate above the bar and noticed a shocking figure quoted in the way of price.

“On the contrary,” Ty said. “Normal courtesy for a fellow member of my Seven.”

So, Tyuratam Lake was their Dinan.

It made sense, if the Seven was going to be doing anything on the surface, anything that might involve a RIZ.

“You’re a bit early,” Ty said. “Some of the others are here.” He tossed his head back. This looked like one of those bars that went on forever, rambling into annexes and back rooms in a way that no architect would countenance, unless they were a very sly architect indeed. So, she inferred he was making reference to some kind of back room or snuggery that she would never be able to find on her own. “Came up the back way,” he added.

“There’s a back way?”

“There’s always a back way.”

“Doc?”

“Showed up half an hour ago.”

For the most important living architect of the TerReForm to walk into the front door of a crowded bar on Capitol Hill would be to create all manner of unnecessary distractions. Doc would be recognized. People would want to demonstrate how important they were by walking up to him and introducing, or reintroducing, themselves. It would become tiresome and it would wear him out. People would talk about it, perhaps even to the point of fouling up whatever mission the Seven was being organized for. Of course Doc had used the back way.

“Anyone else?” she asked.

“Besides the nurse? Just the big fella.”

So Beled had arrived too. Or so she guessed until several minutes later, when Beled walked in through the same door that Kath Two had used. He looked around the place in a manner that made it obvious he had never been here before.

Quickly he picked out Kath Two’s face. He did not react, but moved toward her directly. Kath Two had taken the last available bar stool, but Beled cut through the crowd, which was easy for him
since people tended to get out of his way, and stood behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth on her back. He ordered a popular brand of inexpensive beer from another member of the staff: a breed, probably Camite/Julian, female, somewhat exotic. Ty had drifted away and resumed whatever he’d been doing with the bar tab. Kath Two checked her timepiece and guessed that Ty was getting ready to clock out so that he could take them back to the room where they would have the meeting. As the woman behind the bar handed the beer from her tiny hand into Beled’s huge mitt, Kath Two pivoted toward him, tinked her glass against his, and said, “To the Seven.”

Beled was busy for a moment thanking the barmaid in somewhat over-formal style, but then nodded and joined Kath Two in a drink. Kath Two explained what she knew of Tyuratam Lake and Beled spent the next several minutes appraising the Dinan from a distance, drawing who knew what conclusions.

Presently Ty finished his paperwork and slipped around the corner of the bar, catching Kath Two’s eye as he did so. She could see that for him to extract himself from the society of the Crow’s Nest was no insignificant thing, since many knew him and wanted to say hello. But he seemed to have learned a sort of posture and gait that made him look too busy to brook interruption.

Kath Two found it hard to keep up with Ty’s meandering course through the various rooms and corridors, and ended up allowing Beled to step in front of her so that he could break trail. Because Beled was much taller and wider than she was, this made it difficult for her to see what was ahead of them. But at length she became conscious of being in a long down-sloping corridor with a stone floor, and stone walls paneled over with wood to make them seem warmer. Various doors led off of it, but one stood at the end, and this Ty opened for them. She saw warm light spilling out, glancing off the polished rock between Beled’s legs and the wood paneling around his shoulders.