Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  With all of those complications it was well after midnight when they reached the town of Moses Lake and turned off the interstate to follow almost all of its traffic in the direction of the Grant County International Airport.

  That was its official name. When Doob woke up the next morning, crawled out of the tent he had shared with Henry, and stood up and looked about, he immediately dubbed the place New Baikonur. It was at the same latitude as Baikonur and it was in the same sort of steppe country.

  And like the steppe of old it was populated by nomads. Space Okies. At least ten thousand, he guessed.

  They seemed orderly enough. Long straight lines had been chalked out on the dry lakebed, apparently with the same equipment used to stripe football fields. These delineated streets and avenues that, for the most part, were being respected by newly arrived tent pitchers. Portable toilets huddled at strict intervals, though Doob’s nose told him that some were using pit latrines, or just pissing on the sagebrush.

  Henry had filled him in a little during the last hours of the drive. It had been an air force base, part of the northern line of defensive installations from which the U.S. would have defended itself against Communist aggression, had that ever been necessary. Its 13,500-foot runway suggested it might have had offensive purposes as well. It had been an alternate landing site for the Space Shuttle, never used. In any case it was ridiculously oversized for the town of Moses Lake and had tended to be used by the aerospace industry in recent decades for various training and experimental purposes. Blue Origin had used it to test a VTOL craft in 2005, operating from a trailer on the empty lakebed west of the airport where New Baikonur was arising now, and where Doob was walking about trying to track down the scent of frying bacon.

  Some giant, windowless aircraft hurtled overhead, deploying a phalanx of tires from its belly, and made a long, slow landing on the big runway, using every one of the 13,500 feet. A cargo carrier.

  He came to a broad avenue that led directly into the encampment’s center. And there was no mistaking where and what the center was: a concrete pad, still being poured one patch at a time, with a mixed assortment of cranes rising up from what he took to be its center.

  They were assembling a rocket there.

  It was a big rocket.

  It all more or less made sense. There was no cargo too big to be barged up the Columbia River and then trucked the last few miles to Moses Lake. There was no airplane that couldn’t be accommodated by that runway. There was no object that the aerospace machine shops of the Seattle area couldn’t build. And from this latitude, the same as Baikonur, a well-worn and understood flight plan could take payloads to Izzy.

  A mere four days later, Doob stood in the bed of a rusty pickup truck with a random assortment of space rednecks, hoisting a longnecked beer bottle into the sky in emulation of the rocket lifting off from the pad. They all hooted and screamed as they watched it arc gracefully downrange and take off in the general direction of Boise. And the next morning, when they had all sobered up, they got busy building another rocket.

  DAY 80

  “We talk about sending stuff to orbit as if orbit is a place, like Philadelphia, but it’s actually a lot of places, a lot of different ways to be in space. Any two objects in the universe can theoretically be in orbit around each other.

  “Most of the orbits that matter to us involve something tiny orbiting around something huge, like a satellite around the Earth, or the Earth around the sun. So, a quick way to label and classify orbits is according to ‘What is the huge thing in the middle?’

  “If the huge thing in the middle is the Earth, we call it a geocentric orbit. If it’s the sun, it’s a heliocentric orbit. And so on. Since the moon broke up, we’ve mostly focused on geocentric orbits. The moon, back when it existed, used to be in such an orbit; it revolved around the Earth. Most of its pieces still remain in geocentric orbits. A small number of those just happen to intersect the Earth’s atmosphere. When that happens, we get a meteorite.

  “So much for Orbits 101. But keep in mind there can be different levels. So, the old Earth-moon system was, as a whole, revolving around the sun in a heliocentric orbit. And if you zoom way out and look at the entire Milky Way galaxy, you can see that our whole solar system is very slowly revolving around the black hole at its center, in a galactocentric orbit.”

  The voice was that of famous astronomer and science popularizer Doc Dubois. The images accompanying it were an animation zooming in and out of the solar system. Dinah was getting snatches of it over the shoulder of Luisa Soter, a recent arrival to Izzy and hands-down winner of the “least like a traditional astronaut” competition. Born in New York City to parents who had fled political repression in Chile, she had been raised in a polyglot bohemian household in Harlem, walking through Central Park every day to the Ethical Culture School on West Sixty-Third. She’d followed that up with a succession of degrees in psychology and social work from UCLA, Chicago, and Barcelona. After a few years of work with economic refugees trying to enter Europe on leaky fishing boats, she’d been awarded a genius grant that had given her the freedom to travel the world for a few years doing research on other economic migrants.

  Two weeks ago she’d been yanked out of a Fulbright scholarship at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, given some basic training in how to live in space, strapped into a rocket, and shot up here in a tourist capsule.

  Dinah, along with everyone else, made the obvious assumption that Luisa’s job was to be the first shrink and social worker in space. Judging from some interactions that had been happening as crowding and stress had gotten more intense, she was going to have her work cut out for her. A bunch of desperate people crowded aboard a pitching and rudderless fishing boat was an uncomfortably close match for the situation up here.

  Luisa had a relaxed self-confidence that made it easy for her to admit that she knew absolutely nothing about such topics as orbital mechanics. But it was more than just that; she knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

  But when everyone else was busy, Luisa was not above googling her question down to Earth and latching on to a YouTube video, as she was doing now.

  Dinah, floating behind Luisa’s shoulder, watched as the animation was replaced by a live shot of Doc Dubois and a stocky, bald white man standing next to each other on the flat pan of gray-brown dirt that she now recognized as the Moses Lake spaceport. In deep background behind them was another rocket being stacked on the pad, one stage at a time, by a tangled-looking arrangement of cranes, gantries, and cables.

  Dinah vaguely recognized the one who wasn’t Doc Dubois; he was a tech pundit who popped up frequently on television and YouTube. He turned toward the camera and spoke: “This is Tavistock Prowse, coming to you from the world’s newest spaceport here in Grant County, Washington. I’m here with a man who needs no introduction, Doc Dubois, to talk about some of the recent controversial events surrounding the Arjuna Expeditions launches, many of which are originating from the improvised launch complex that you can see directly behind us. Arjuna has prepared an animation that explains what they are all about. So pop some popcorn and pull up a chair.”

  Their image was replaced by a view of Earth that zoomed back, tilted, and panned to show it in its orbit around the sun. This was helpfully traced out by a thin, curved red line. The animation panned back. The orbits of Venus, Mercury, then Mars and Jupiter came into view. “Traditionally,” Doc Dubois said, “when we talk about asteroids, we’re talking about the asteroid belt, which is out between Mars and Jupiter.”

  A ring of dust, with a few larger clumps, was now spattered into the huge gap between those two planets’ orbits. “There’s a lot of material out there that Our Heritage might one day be able to exploit, but it’s too far away to be easily reached by any spacecraft we
have now.”

  So Doc Dubois, in keeping with his rep for staying in touch with the zeitgeist, had adopted the Our Heritage phrasing, a suddenly popular buzzword and hashtag meaning “whatever gets accomplished in the distant future by the descendants of the people who make it onto the Cloud Ark,” or, to put it bluntly, “the only reason to go on living for the next twenty-two months.”

  The animation began zooming back in, to the point where it showed nothing beyond Earth’s orbit. “But astronomers have known for a long time that not all of the asteroids are out beyond Mars. There are much smaller—but still significant—populations of asteroids in heliocentric orbits not that different from Earth’s.”

  A finer and sparser dust of particles was now drawn in, forming a sort of fuzzy halo around the red line that represented Earth’s orbit.

  “And that’s where Amalthea came from, is that correct, Doc?”

  “Yes, bringing a hunk of metal that big from all the way out between Mars and Jupiter would have taken forever. Because we found it in an Earth-like orbit, it was a little easier.”

  “And what do you mean by an Earth-like orbit?”

  “These rocks all revolve around the sun just like the Earth. Some are a little inside Earth’s orbit, some a little outside of it, some cross the Earth’s orbit twice every time they go around the sun. We used to worry about those.”

  “Now, not so much,” Tav put in.

  Doc paused, and apparently thought better of acknowledging the joke. “Because we were worried about them, we made an effort to find them and to know their exact trajectories—their orbital parameters.”

  Back to Doc and Tav, now walking across the pounded earth of the spaceport with a big truck in the background emblazoned with the Arjuna Expeditions logo.

  “In recent years, companies like Arjuna Expeditions have mapped a whole lot more of those asteroids in the hopes of mining them. What we’re seeing in the last few weeks is a concerted effort by Arjuna, and an alliance of other private space companies, to throw those efforts into high gear.”

  “What exactly is Sean Probst thinking, Doc?” Tav asked.

  “He’s not telling us. But the science of orbital mechanics doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. In Part Two of this video, you can learn more about the dance of orbiting bodies in space, and the intricate choreography needed to make an asteroid show up in the right place at the right time.”

  Luisa’s finger hovered over the link that would play the next video, but before tapping it, she turned around to look at Dinah. “Just trying to figure out what you do for a living,” she said, in an accent that came from everywhere, but mostly from New York. “You’re with Arjuna, right?”

  “Shh!” Dinah warned her jokingly. “I’m still trying to stay friends with the Russians.”

  “What’s that about?” Luisa asked.

  She was referring to a recent series of testy meetings, and sometimes out-and-out confrontations, between the Russians—still thinking and acting as a bloc under the leadership of Fyodor Antonovich Panteleimon—and the Arjuna contingent, which actually prided itself on being “disruptive.” This was a commonplace bit of biz jargon. But try explaining to a grizzled cosmonaut why being disruptive was a good thing.

  Dinah was inclined to say something like “It’s cultural,” but she felt a little intimidated about using that sort of cocktail-party banter around someone with Luisa’s credentials.

  “Look, surprises in space are almost always bad,” Dinah said. “Traditionally, every mission is planned out to the nth degree, and there’s a contingency plan for everything. You don’t improvise. You can’t improvise, because there’s nothing to improvise with.”

  “I’m just remembering the duct tape in Apollo 13.”

  “Yeah, that was one of the rare exceptions,” Dinah said, “and people are still talking about it decades later. So, to the Russians, the idea that someone can just show up unannounced, and make a claim on our resources—”

  “What resources?” Luisa asked.

  “They’re breathing our air,” Dinah said. “Taking up space, using bandwidth, you name it. Larz hitched a ride up here on the assumption he’d stay on Izzy and work for us—instead he’s taking off with Sean. And they are taking almost all of my robots.”

  “But they’re sending more, yes?”

  “Absolutely. Look, all I’m saying is that it was a surprise. And the sooner Sean and Larz get out of here, and on their way, the less likely it is that Fyodor is going to strangle them with his bare hands.”

  “On their way to where?” Luisa asked.

  “A different orbit.”

  “Heliocentric or geocentric?” Luisa asked, deadpan, then gave Dinah a wink.

  “Geocentric first. Then heliocentric,” Dinah answered with a trace of a smile.

  “But I thought we were already in a geocentric orbit.”

  “The wrong one, as far as Sean is concerned. Izzy’s orbit is angled with respect to the equator. It has to be that way so Baikonur can launch to it—Baikonur is as far north as Seattle. But when you are doing interplanetary stuff, which is what Sean has in mind—basically, whenever you want to get out of low Earth orbit—you want to be in an orbit that’s closer to the equator. Because that’s pretty much where the rest of the solar system is—including the big chunk of ice that Sean wants to grab and bring back here.”

  “Ymir,” Luisa said, pronouncing it as she’d heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean’s code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back.

  “Yeah. Not an official name. Sean doesn’t divulge much.”

  “And how do you get from one to the other?” Luisa asked. “From a geocentric orbit—that’s what we’re in now, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “To a heliocentric one?”

  “Well, first he’s going to have to do a plane change—from the angled Izzy orbit we’re in now, to one closer to the equator. He’ll rendezvous with the rest of his gear.”

  “Why didn’t they just send everything up here?”

  “Plane-change maneuvers are expensive. It’s not too bad if the only thing plane-changing is Sean and Larz and a Drop Top, but it would be ridiculously wasteful to send the whole expedition package up here only to plane-change later.” Dinah didn’t mention the other reason, which was that the biggest part of Sean’s package was so screamingly radioactive that it couldn’t be allowed anywhere near Izzy.

  “Okay. But we’re still talking geocentric, right?”

  “Correct, we’re still just a few hundred miles high.”

  “So, how do they get from the rendezvous point to a heliocentric situation?”

  “There’s a bunch of different ways to do it,” Dinah said, “but if I know Sean he’ll go through the L1 gateway.”

  “I have no idea what that is,” Luisa said, then finally lost a fight to suppress a giggle. “But once again I feel that I have been dumped into a sci-fi movie when I hear people around me talking like that.”

  “Doc Dubois probably covers it in that video,” Dinah said, nodding at Luisa’s tablet, “but the gist of it is really straightforward.” Looking around, she spied a mesh bag stuffed with clothing. She pulled it out of its niche and let it drift in the center of the cabin. “The sun,” she said. Now patting herself down, she found in her pocket a small plastic bottle of pills—antinausea medication she had fetched for one of the new arrivals. She opened it up and pulled out the ball of cotton stuffed into its top, then let the cotton drift in the air a little closer to Luisa. “The Earth, in its heliocentric orbit.” The sick crew member would have to wait for a few minutes. Dinah carefully tapped a few pills free from the bottle’s open neck and let them float for a moment while she pocketed the bottle. Then she began to arrange the pills in the space already staked out by the “sun” and the “Earth.”

  “Asteroids?” Luisa guessed.

  “These are m
ore like abstract mathematical points,” Dinah said. “They’re called the Lagrange points, or the libration points, and there’s five of them around every two-body system. Always in the same basic geometry. Two of them, L4 and L5, are way off to the sides. I’m not going to try to show you those because we don’t have room. But the other three are all along the line running between the sun and the Earth.” She pushed off and glided to the far side of the “sun” and stationed a pill there, exactly on the opposite side from where the “Earth” was. “This is L3, very far away, invisible to us because the sun’s always in the way, not that useful.”

  Gliding back toward the hovering cotton ball, she stopped herself against a bulkhead and placed a second pill out beyond it. “This is L2, outside of Earth’s orbit.” Finally, she put a pill in between the “sun” and the “Earth” but much closer to the latter. “And this is—”

  “L1, by process of elimination,” Luisa said drily, and laughed. “You space people love to count down, I know your ways.”

  “It’s where the gravity of the sun and the Earth balance,” Dinah said, “and people sometimes call it a gateway because it’s an easy place to effect a switchover between a geocentric and a heliocentric orbit. This even happens naturally sometimes: an asteroid in a heliocentric orbit will wander close to L1 and get captured by the Earth. Or, going the other way, there’s a case where an Apollo upper stage orbiting around the Earth passed near L1 and got ejected into a heliocentric orbit for a number of years. Later it came back through the same gateway—only to get ejected again.”

  Luisa nodded. “Like changing from the D to the A train at Columbus Circle, in New York terms.”

  “A lot of people have used the analogy of a switching yard or a train station to describe it, yeah,” Dinah said.

  “So you think Sean and his crew are headed that way.”

  “Once they get all their—” Dinah paused.

  “Their shit together?” Luisa suggested.