Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  “That is all true but it is dangerous nonetheless,” Markus said.

  “Of course it is.”

  “It is distracting me.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “As far as bolides are concerned, the systems are working okay and Doob is keeping an eye out for anomalies. But I need to delegate to you, Ivy, this problem of the stragglers.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “We will destroy them if we have to.”

  “How would you even do that, Markus? We don’t have photon torpedoes.”

  “We have a module full of freeze-dried dead people,” Markus reminded her, “that we need to jettison anyway. And I would be happy to jettison it in the direction of any straggler that is threatening the Cloud Ark.”

  “I will keep that in mind,” Ivy said, “as a bargaining chip.”

  Luisa entered, looking a little wild, her face wet with tears.

  “Luisa?” Markus said politely. “Did you find out what was going on in the Vu-Vu Pod?”

  “A few people getting very emotional,” Luisa said, “as you would expect. Nothing dangerous. Whoever called that in as a disturbance was being a little paranoid.”

  “Thank you for investigating it.”

  “Speaking of which—you have armed guards posted outside the door to the Tank!”

  “I will speak briefly to that, because I am busy,” Markus said. “My feelings about it are basically the same as yours. But I am not here to express my personal feelings but to carry out certain operations to the best of my ability. I didn’t want to be the king of the universe. Nevertheless, now I am. Everything I have ever seen in the history of human civilization, disagreeable as it might seem, says that someone in my position needs to have security.”

  Luisa’s face suggested that she could make all kinds of objections to that. But she got the better of it, and just let out a sigh. “We will talk about it later,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Do you know what is happening down there?”

  “I can guess what is happening. It is none of my concern.”

  “Understood. But I think that the king of the universe needs to make an announcement pretty soon.”

  “I have one prepared,” Markus said.

  “Oh, yes, of course you would have one prepared. When were you thinking of delivering it? Because there are a lot of people who need to be calmed down.”

  “Is one of those people you, Luisa?” Markus asked the question clinically, but not unkindly.

  Luisa drew herself up. Ivy braced herself for a sharp reaction, but then a change came over Luisa’s face as she saw that Markus was merely asking for information. Not being snide.

  “Yes,” she answered. “A few minutes ago, Manhattan was struck by a hundred-foot wall of water. I presume that the same is true of most of the East Coast. I was listening to the service from St. Patrick’s Cathedral when it went off the air.”

  Markus nodded and changed the display on the projection screen to a live view of Earth.

  Ivy was shocked by how far the fire had spread during the few minutes she’d been in here.

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and discovered a series of messages from Cal, sent during the last several minutes.

  Hey

  You busy?

  OK I guess you got pulled away

  In case we get cut off I love you

  Will look for a mermaid like you said but no substitute 4 u

  Lost contact with Norfolk. No chain above me

  Holy crap it is getting hot

  Diving

  Bye

  And the last message in the series was a photograph snapped on his cell phone’s camera. It took Ivy a minute of panning and zooming to figure out what she was seeing. Cal had taken the photo while standing in the conning tower of his boat, looking straight up the ladder at the open hatch above him. This provided a tunnel-vision view of a disk of sky.

  The sky was on fire.

  In his other hand he was holding up his engagement ring—a simple band of polished titanium. He was holding it between his thumb and index finger, shooting the picture through the ring, making it concentric with the disk of the burning sky.

  She looked up. Someone had spoken her name.

  “Mine just faded away,” Doob told her.

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” Ivy said, the Morg’s manners triumphing over all circumstances.

  “I had been gearing up for these final goodbyes with Amelia, with my kids,” Doob said. He spoke quietly, without marked emotion, as if relating a mildly surprising anecdote. “But, you know, the communications just broke down slowly over a couple of days, and there was never really a goodbye.”

  “Very well,” Markus said, “I will make the announcement.”

  HOT ENOUGH TO BAKE TATERS ON HOOD OF THIS TRUCK

  GO INSIDE DAD

  NOT KIDDING ABOUT THERMAL EFFECTS. PAINT BUBBLING

  I AM NOT KIDDING EITHER YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE

  GOT A SPACE BLANKET TO PROTECT ME WHEN I MAKE A RUN FOR IT

  THEN FOR GODS SAKE USE IT DAD

  AH BUT THEN I CAN’T CHEW THE RAG WITH YOU ANY LONGER DINAH

  WHAT IF YOUR GAS TANK EXPLODES

  HA HA WE DRAINED IT FOR GENERATOR FUEL. WAY AHEAD OF YOU KID

  GOD U R A SMARTASS

  Dinah was keying this in, thankful that Morse code still worked when your vision was blurred by tears and your voice choked by sobs, when a voice came out of a speaker. It was Markus’s voice: “This is Markus Leuker.”

  “I know who you are,” she answered. But then she understood that Markus was speaking on the all-Ark PA system, which supposedly reached into every corner of Izzy as well as to all of the arklets. They had tested it a few times with prerecorded messages, but never actually used it. Markus considered the thing a relic of the twentieth century, and detested it; communications ought to be targeted, busy people ought not to be interrupted by disembodied voices barking from speakers.

  “The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect.”

  Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. “This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

  She keyed:

  MARKUS IS CALLING IT

  WHO SAID HE WAS BOSS?

  Rufus’s transmission was getting scratchy. Dinah wiped her eyes and looked out her window to see Earth encircled by a belt of fire. The trails of the incoming meteorites, once a pattern of bright scratches in the air, had merged into a blinding continuum of superheated air that had set fire to anything on the surface capable of burning. Since more of the rocks were coming in around the equator, the belt of radiance and fire was brightest there; but north and south of it, long swaths of the surface were aflame, and the belt was widening to envelop the high latitudes of Canada and South America.

  She transmitted:

  ABOUT TO LOSE YOU, TELL BOB AND ED AND GT AND REX I LOVE THEM. AND BEV.

  ALREADY DID BUT WILL AGAIN. CHRIST IT IS HOT

  GET INSIDE DAD

  DONT WORRY I AM RIGHT BY THE DOOR. CAN HEAR THEM ALL SINGING BREAD OF HEAVEN.

  THEN GO JOIN THE CHORUS DAD

  OKAY BOB AND ED ARE COMING OUT TO GRAB ME. BYE HONEY DO US PROUD QRT

  QRT QRT QRT QRT

  She wasn’t sure how many times she keyed that in.

  She pulled herself out of her sobs, later, by imagining what had happened: her brothers, Bob and Ed, dressed in silver fireman suits, rushing out of the mine’s entrance to haul Dad out of the old pickup truck
, wrapping him in the space blanket to keep him from being broiled by the sky, and dragging him inside. An inch-thick steel plate being slammed across the doorway, the welders going to work laying down fat fillets made to last five thousand years. Once that was done, the heavy machinery fired up, shoving tons of rock and gravel up against the steel plate to bolster it against any shock waves powerful enough to punch it out of its frame.

  Then silence, save maybe for the distant thuds of meteorite strikes, and sitting around the table to say grace and tuck into the first of fifteen thousand or so meals that the MacQuaries and their descendants would have to prepare and eat if they were ever to escape from that tomb. They had five hundred people down there, and, at least on paper, enough food-growing capacity to keep that many alive. Exactly how you made that a sustainable proposition wasn’t clear to Dinah; she hadn’t bothered Rufus for every last little detail of his plan.

  Markus’s announcement was continuing. He was telling everyone what they already knew, which was that Earth was over, and that the great dying that they had been expecting for the last two years was now in the past. Everyone knew it, but someone had to say it.

  He asked for 704 seconds of silence: one second for each of the days that had passed since Zero. About twelve minutes. All nonessential duties would be suspended during that time, and it would be the sole responsibility of the survivors to think, and remember, and mourn. After that, they must put Earth in the past, as a thing that had once been, and apply their minds to what was now.

  Drawn up into a fetal position, Dinah hovered alone in the middle of her shop, listening to weird squeals and hisses coming out of her radio’s speaker. Alone of all the people in the Cloud Ark, she knew that her family was still alive, and might go on being alive for a long time. It was not clear to her whether this was better or worse than simply knowing that they were dead. All she had to go on was DO US PROUD, her father’s final transmission. Morse code didn’t leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she’d just had with Rufus. She hoped she’d said the right things and that he’d remember it well, and that he would tell the others about it at dinner this evening.

  She tried then to mourn for all the others who had died, but it was too big. Emotionally, it was little different from reading about a great war that had happened a hundred years ago. Which maybe was Markus’s whole point. Even though the dying was still going on, they had to force themselves to think about it like the Irish potato famine, or like what had happened to the peoples of the New World when Columbus had arrived and infected them with a slew of deadly diseases. Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary. They all had 704 seconds in which to effect that detachment.

  So Dinah thought about what exactly would be entailed in doing Rufus MacQuarie proud. There was a simple answer, which had to do with doing the right thing, being honorable, upholding a few rough-and-ready ethical standards. A sort of frontier code of conduct. All of which was easy to understand if not always quite so easy to live up to. But Rufus was not a cowboy, and he certainly wasn’t a preacher. He was a miner: a delver, a demolisher, a builder, a businessman. If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future.

  “Are you about finished?”

  She turned her head to see Ivy hanging in the SCRUM, looking at Dinah through the hatch.

  “We’re only, like, two hundred seconds into the—”

  “Markus said I could skip it. He sent me on a mission. I need your help,” Ivy said.

  “Bitch.”

  “Slut.”

  “Shall we?”

  “REMEMBER WHEN THE INTERNET WAS NEW, AND SOME PEOPLE IN your life just didn’t get it?” Ivy asked. She was preceding Dinah through the seemingly endless maze of docked modules and hamster tubes, headed toward the periphery of Izzy.

  “People in my world got it pretty fast. You don’t know many miners, do you?”

  “Not in my world. We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.”

  They were hurtling through an otherwise perfectly silent space station, still only about five minutes into the twelve minutes of silence. Faces in open hatches would turn to look at them in shock, then recognize them and go back to mourning, praying, meditating, or whatever it was that they were doing.

  Dinah understood that this was terribly important but was secretly pleased that Ivy had given her dispensation to get to work.

  “How does that apply to—”

  “The system works—Parambulator and all of that—as long as every ship in the Cloud Ark is playing by those rules. Logged on to the system, communicating with the agreed-on protocols, obeying the dictates of the swarm. If even one is just hanging out and doing its own thing, well, it might as well be a meteoroid, in terms of its destructive potential.”

  “We’ve got one of those?”

  “A few of them. But one in particular that is causing havoc.”

  “Any collisions yet, or—”

  “No, but every time it draws near it triggers an explosion of red in Parambulator and a hundred arklets have to burn fuel to alter their courses. It’s like the whole Cloud Ark is turning somersaults around the movements of this one ship.”

  “What is it?”

  “Optically it’s an X-37.”

  “Fits,” Dinah said.

  “Yeah,” Ivy said.

  Translation: someone had looked at the craft through a telescope and thought it looked like a Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembled a miniature Space Shuttle. It was so miniature, in fact, that it couldn’t carry any crew; it had a cargo bay that accounted for most of its fuselage. It had been developed by DARPA in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it had become obvious that the Space Shuttle was going to be phased out and they needed a small, easily launched vehicle that could go up and, by remote control, perform maintenance tasks on the United States’ fleet of military satellites. Since then it had come in for very little actual use, but when it was used, it was for black-budget spook stuff that Dinah and Ivy wouldn’t know about. It was a footnote in history, obsolescent, not designed for the requirements of the Cloud Ark. It had probably been launched into orbit by some trigger-happy launch crew that just wanted to send up everything they could. With a sufficient amount of sifting through old emails they might be able to find some record of who had launched it, and what, if any, cargo was aboard; but for now it was easier to just go and look at the damned thing. Nearly all the engineering that had gone into it had been devoted to the problem of reentry. Most of its proudest features were therefore useless to them.

  Approaching the end of a side-stack, they were able to see through the round orifice of a port into the vehicle docked to its far side: a Flivver, or Flexible Light Intracloud Vehicle. These had begun showing up a few months ago; they were the jeeps of the Cloud Ark, the small utility vehicles used to move people and valuable stuff from one arklet to another, or between an arklet and Izzy. Because they didn’t have to operate in the atmosphere, they had the same general utilitarian look as the arklets. But the pressure hull was smaller in diameter, and instead of an inflatable outer hull the Flivver had more practical stuff: two different styles of docking ports, an airlock big enough to accommodate a human in an Orlan, a robot arm, lights, thrusters. At
Dinah’s suggestion they had studded the pressure hull with attachment points that a Grabb could latch on to; this made it possible for each Flivver to carry its own complement of Grabbs, Siwis, Buckies, and Nats, which swarmed all over it like crabs, remoras, and sea lice. Instead of being limited by the hard-engineered capabilities of the robot arm, the Flivver was constrained only by the imagination and ingenuity of the programmer inside, telling the robots what to do.

  The silvery burr of Tekla’s head poked out in front of them; apparently she’d been dispatched to assist with closing the hatch and undocking the Flivver. She’d been waiting in the adjacent DC, or docking compartment, which was just a small side module tacked on to serve as an airlock and provide a little extra space for personnel in cases like this. She drew her head back in to make space as Ivy and then Dinah cruised by her. As soon as those two were inside the Flivver, Tekla emerged and exchanged a nod with Ivy.

  “Lamprey is in airlock and is functioning,” Tekla said, and closed the hatch. Dinah had some ambivalent feelings about Tekla, but there was no one she’d rather work with in a case like this. She was all business; she got the job done without useless conversation or touch-feely stuff. Dinah closed the Flivver’s hatch and began going through the undocking sequence while Ivy, strapped into the vehicle’s pilot seat, ran down the preexcursion checklist. Befitting a craft that had been designed in a hurry to be Flexible and Light, this wasn’t that lengthy, and so Flivver 3—one of a fleet of eight—was under way before Markus’s 704 seconds of silence had quite expired. Dinah strapped into a jump seat beside Ivy’s. The Flivver’s front end dome consisted largely of windows, bolstered by a sturdy web of curved aluminum struts, so from behind Ivy looked like a bombardier seated in the glass nose of a World War II bomber. She touched the controls and made the craft rotate in a way that caused Earth to pass beneath them, and then the resemblance became stronger. Dinah was reminded of a painting Rufus had shown her, depicting a bomber flying over a burning city, red light flooding into the plane from below. The same effect held now, save that the firestorm covered most of the surface of the Earth.