Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  But legal structures, police, government agencies, and so on still existed and still enforced the law. The law stated that Sean, by virtue of majority ownership of Arjuna Expeditions, still controlled it. And through overlapping relationships with other space entrepreneurs, he still had enough pull to get himself launched to Izzy. So that counted as wealth of a sort.

  Having settle
d that in her mind, she focused her attention back on what Sean was saying.

  “Cloud Ark as distributed swarm: fine. I get it. Sign me up. Much safer than putting all our eggs in one basket. What makes it safer? The arklets can maneuver out of the way of incoming rocks. Other advantages? They can pair up to make a bolo, and spin around each other to make simulated gravity. Keeps people healthier and happier. How do they do this? By flying toward each other and grappling their tethers together. What happens when they want to break up the bolo, and go solo? They decouple the tethers and go flying off in opposite directions, unless they use their engines to kill that centripetal motion. What do all of these activities have in common?”

  They’d gotten used to Sean’s habit of asking, then answering his own questions, so were caught off guard now that he actually seemed to be expecting an answer.

  Dinah and Ivy had been joined by Konrad Barth, the astronomer; Larz Hoedemaeker; and Zeke Petersen. The latter finally rose to the bait.

  “Use of the thrusters,” he said.

  Sean nodded. “And what happens when we are using the thrusters?”

  Dinah had an advantage, since she already knew that Sean was concerned about mass balance. “We’re dumping mass. In the form of used propellant.”

  “We’re dumping mass,” Sean said, nodding. “As soon as the Cloud Ark runs out of propellant, it loses the ability to do all of the things that make it a viable architecture for long-term survival. It becomes a big sitting duck.”

  He let them roll that around in their heads for a bit, then went on: “Mind you, almost everything else that we do up here can be done with minimal effect on mass balance. We can recycle our urine to make drinking water and our poo to make fertilizer. Very few of our activities involve just releasing mass into space in a way that we can’t get it back. This is the exception. I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.”

  Ivy and Dinah looked at each other in a way that foretold a one-on-one, after-meeting tequila session.

  So, Dinah thought, Ivy had been wondering about this too, in the back of her mind. Worrying about it. Trying to read the tea leaves during those teleconferences down to the ground.

  It was something to do with Pete Starling, she now saw. Which meant that it was somehow related to J.B.F.

  Zeke was one of those open-faced, basically optimistic team players one saw frequently in the junior officer ranks of the military. “This is so obvious, in a way,” he pointed out. “They have to have thought of this.” Which was Zeke’s way of saying I’m sure that this is all being handled by people above our pay grade.

  “You would think,” Sean said, nodding.

  Konrad shifted in his chair uneasily and thrust his bearded face into his hand. Unlike Zeke, he was not the sort to place the sunniest interpretation on the problem.

  “If the world were run by scientists, engineers,” Sean said, “then this would be a no-brainer. We have to go get more mass. Stockpile it so we don’t run out.”

  “It’s got to be water. You’re talking about a comet core,” Dinah said.

  “It’s got to be water,” Sean agreed. “You can’t make rocket fuel out of nickel. But with water we can make hydrogen peroxide—a fine thruster propellant—or we can split it into hydrogen and oxygen to run big engines.”

  “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop in what you just said,” Ivy muttered. Then she spoke up more clearly: “But the world isn’t run by scientists and engineers—is that where you’re going with this?”

  Sean turned his hands palm up and shrugged theatrically. “I’m not a people person. People keep telling me this. Some who are people persons might be focusing on that angle.”

  “The people angle,” Konrad said, just clarifying.

  “Yeah. The seven billion people angle. Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What’s the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.”

  Zeke winced. Konrad rolled his eyes, then glanced at the ceiling and pretended he hadn’t heard this.

  The idea Sean was playing with here was so monstrous in a way that it was almost inconceivable: that everything they were doing up here was a lullaby for the seven billion down below. That it could not actually work. That they were just putting on a show of getting ready. That the people of the Cloud Ark would live only a few weeks longer than the ones left behind.

  As such, Ivy and Dinah and Konrad and Zeke ought to have been freaking out at this point.

  But none of them—not even Zeke—reacted very much.

  “You’ve all thought it too,” Sean said. “Even an Asp-hole like me can see it in your faces.”

  “Okay, maybe we’ve all thought it,” Dinah admitted. “How could you not think it? But, Sean, what you might not have seen, being based on the ground, is how serious everyone up here is about making this work. If it were just a Potemkin village, we’d be seeing different stuff.”

  Sean held his hands up, palms out, placating her. “Can we just agree that there might be a range of views down on the ground? And that some people, perhaps highly placed, see its primary function as an opiate of the masses? Like the video you pop into your car’s DVD player to keep the kids quiet during a long drive.”

  “People like that are not going to be our friends when it comes to getting the resources we need,” Ivy said.

  “Their strategy is always going to seem a little off-kilter, a little beside the point. Opaque. Frustrating.”

  They were definitely talking about Pete Starling.

  Sean continued. “To the extent that such people control launch sites and policy, we have a problem. Fortunately, they don’t control everything.”

  They were now talking about Sean Probst, and his loose circle of billionaire friends who knew how to make rockets.

  “There’s a lot about this Cloud Ark thing that I, and my associates, don’t know yet. We can’t sit around waiting for perfect knowledge. We have to act immediately on long-lead-time work that addresses what we do know. And what we do know is that we need to bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition.”

  Konrad well understood the timing of such missions. “How long, Sean?”

  “Two years,” Sean said.

  “Well,” Ivy said, “I guess you’d better get on it, then. How can we help?”

  “Give me all of your robots,” Sean said. He turned to look at Dinah.

  “SINCE WE HAVE DECLARED OPEN SEASON ON BULLSHIT . . .” DINAH began as soon as she had gotten Sean Probst alone in her shop.

  Sean held both of his hands up like a fugitive surrendering to the FBI. “Where would you like to begin?”

  “You said that you have identified some comets. That you were narrowing down the list. That’s crap. You wouldn’t have come up here without a specific plan.”

  “We’re going after Greg’s Skeleton.”

  “What?”

  “Comet Grigg-Skjellerup. Sorry. Somebody’s offspring called it Greg’s Skeleton and the name stuck.” Sean always referred to children as offspring.

  She’d heard of it. “How big is that?”

  “Two and a half, three kilometers.”

  “That’s a lot of arklet fuel.”

  Sean nodded. He crossed his arms over his body and looked around the shop.

  “Hard to move something that big.”

  Still no answer.

  “You’re going to jam a nuke into it and turn it into a rocket, aren’t you?”

  He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consi
der it worthy of an extended answer.

  “We got really lucky on the timing,” he remarked.

  “You’re going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?”

  “Dinah, I need to share something with you in confidence.”

  “Well, it’s about fucking time is all I can say.”

  DAY 73

  Doob had almost been to space once, about ten years ago. An acquaintance of his who had made a lot of money in hedge funds had dropped twenty-five million dollars on a twelve-day trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule. It was traditional for the customer to designate a backup—a sort of understudy—who would take his place in the event of some illness or mishap. Since the backup might be swapped in at any time up to shortly before launch, they had to go through all the same training as the customer. And that was really the point, as far as the hedge fund man was concerned. An introvert, he needed someone who could act as a connection to the general public and put an appealing face on the whole thing. So he had selected Doc Dubois as his understudy. They’d set up a website and a blog, and arranged for photographers to follow Doob’s progress through the training program, with occasional glimpses of the hedge fund man in the background. In effect, Doob had acted as a publicity decoy. No one made any bones about this. Doob had been more than happy to do it. The training had been great fun, the hedge fund man had been generous in his spending on the website, and Doob had been able to produce a lot of good video explaining fun facts about spaceflight.

  And there had even been the small chance that he might go. A week before the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing his wife and kids with him, video crew in tow. They had watched in a certain amount of amazement as the launch vehicle, a fantailed Soyuz-FG, had been towed horizontally across the steppe on a special train, complete with smoke-belching locomotive, to the launch pad. And this really was little more than a pad, a concrete slab on the almost lunar surface of the Kazakh steppe with a few pieces of apparatus around it to hoist the rocket up off the train and pump fluids into it. The contrast with the NASA way of doing things was stark to the point of being somewhat hilarious. Doob’s youngest son, Henry, eleven years old at the time, had failed to pay attention to the elevation of the mighty rocket to its vertical position because he was distracted by the sight of a couple of stray dogs copulating a hundred meters away from ground zero. The launch bunker, shockingly close to the pad, had a little vegetable patch out in front of it where the technicians were growing cucumbers and tomatoes; they explained that the concrete wall soaked up sunlight during the day and helped keep the vegetables warm at night.