Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  He realized that he had dozed off. Opening his eyes and focusing, with some effort, on the screen, he saw that nearly an hour had passed since apogee. They were falling toward Earth for the last time.

  His phone rang. Held at arm’s length it was blurry, but some vestigial part of his brain could still recognize the smear of pixels as a snapshot of Bo, taken years ago. He swiped it on and answered it.

  “We are being contacted by the Swarm,” Bo said.

  “Are we really?” he answered. Suddenly he was awake. “What does J.B.F. want?”

  “It’s not J.B.F. It’s someone named . . .” Bo paused. “A-ida. Or something. Two dots on the i.”

  Doob tried to place the name. Aïda. He had a vague memory of her from his early days on the Cloud Ark. An Italian girl. Young. Arkie, not GPop. Socially a little weird. Hyperacute in a way that could be exhausting.

  “It’s pronounced ‘I-yeeda,’” he told Bo.

  “Anyway, they send congratulations on the successful completion of our maneuver, and request a parley. Should I wake up Ivy?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Doob said. “Let her sleep.”

  He hated to think this way, but the Swarmers well knew what time it was, and which shift Ivy slept on, and that she was sleeping now. Rousting her out of bed would send the wrong message, making the crew of Endurance seem overeager.

  Which might have been an excess of caution—a J.B.F.-style exercise of byzantine thinking—he reflected, as he pushed himself up the middle of the Stack. This had become a dingy place, sort of yellowed and shiny with human exhalations, condensed on its ice-cold walls and never really scrubbed off. He was glad he couldn’t see it very well.

  They knew so little about the Swarm. From the straggler arklets they’d picked up over the last three years, they knew that J.B.F. had moved swiftly to consolidate her power, exploiting the crisis of the first coronal mass ejection—which had killed something like 10 percent of the population—to set up her own version of martial law. From there the trains had run more or less on time, albeit with a steadily dwindling population, until about a year ago, when some Arkies had begun to rebel and the Swarm had divided into two Swarms, coexisting with each other—as they had little choice—but not talking.

  The people of Endurance had paid surprisingly little attention to matters Swarm related, because, in the end, it didn’t really matter that much. The die had been cast on the day of the Break. Not so much on the level of politics as on physics. Those who had stayed behind on Izzy had committed themselves to following Doob’s plan, his life’s work: the Big Ride. You were either aboard Endurance, simultaneously trapped and protected by her mass, or you weren’t. If you were, there was no getting off. If you weren’t, you had to find a way to survive as part of the Swarm, which meant moving to a completely different orbit and following a plan that was incompatible, on an orbital mechanics level, with the Big Ride. Once those orbits had diverged, the only way to reconnect was by effecting a big delta vee. That meant spending a lot of water that you were never going to get back. Less water meant less shielding from coronal mass ejections, limited food production, and hobbled maneuvering when bad rocks came at you. Getting a whole Swarm to agree on that course of action was impossible, and might actually have been a bad idea, since Endurance couldn’t accommodate a lot of refugees. Her mission plan was predicated on her ability to absorb significant bolide strikes without taking serious damage. A bunch of naked arklets following in her wake would soon get beaten to death. So on a physics level alone, the Break had been irrevocable, even had the two groups badly wanted to get together.

  But apparently what was left of the Swarm had been watching Endurance. Biding their time, waiting to see whether she would win through.

  This Aïda person must understand Doob’s plan. She knew what was at stake now. If the remnants of the Swarm could rejoin Endurance in the next ten days, before she disappeared into the maelstrom of the debris cloud, they had a hope of reaching the comparative safety of Cleft. Otherwise they were condemned to circle Earth in some relatively clean and safe orbit as their population and their water supply dwindled.

  Doob swam into the Hammerhead. Three other people were in here: Bo, Steve Lake, and Michael Park, a former Arkie, a gay Korean-Canadian from Vancouver who had found six different ways to make himself indispensable.

  “Aïda Ferrari, according to our records,” Bo said, before he asked. “A leader of the anti-J.B.F. faction. Sounds like J.B.F. lost.”

  Steve seemed busy. It was good to see him active. He had come down with some kind of long-running bowel complaint, an imbalance in the bacteria that lived in his gut. He had kept the dreadlocks, but they were now bigger than he was. He must weigh less than a hundred pounds. But his fingers still flew over the keys of his laptop.

  Bo had already turned her attention back to the business of running the ship, but Michael explained, “Steve’s getting a video feed going. No one’s done it in years.”

  He meant that no one had recently been doing it over the old-school S-band radios used for long-range communication between space vehicles. Of course, on the short-range mesh network that the Arkitects had set up to knit the Cloud Ark together, people did it all the time using Scape. But depending on where they were in their orbit, the remnants of the Swarm might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Endurance, far out of mesh range, and so they had to use the same sort of pre-Internet technology that the Apollo astronauts had used to send television signals back from the moon.

  Eventually Steve did get it going, and then they were treated to a full-face image, in blocky pixels, of a dark-eyed woman with a fine-featured head that had been buzz-cut a few weeks ago and little tended since.

  Once Steve did him the favor of throwing it up on a big screen where he could actually see it, Doob saw the obvious signs of malnutrition that had been affecting everyone on Endurance. He was mildly surprised by that. They had tantalized themselves by imagining the Swarm as a cornucopia of agriculture. But maybe it was low on water. The woman’s gaze was downcast, which, as everyone understood, meant that she was focusing on the screen of a tablet below the camera. Once she understood that the link was up and running, she raised her chin and seemed to stare directly into the Hammerhead with a pair of huge dark eyes. The low quality of the video made these seem pitch black, with no distinction between iris and pupil, and starvation had given them a sort of hot gleam.

  “Aïda,” the woman said, by way of self-introduction. “I see you, Dr. Harris.” She began to smile, offering a glimpse of bad teeth, then thought better of it. Her eyes changed direction momentarily to someone or something off-camera, then came back to them. She raised her tablet up closer to the camera so that she could look at the feed from Endurance. Her hand passed briefly in front of the lens and they caught a glimpse of dirty, ragged fingernails, the frayed and shiny cuff of a sleeve. Faint murmurs in the background suggested that other people were in the same arklet with her, off-camera. She was in zero gee, therefore, not part of a bolo. Her eyes were exploring the feed on her tablet, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The Hammerhead had not existed at the time of the Break, so it was a new thing to her. “Steve Lake,” she muttered, as she recognized him.

  “Bo,” Bo said.

  “Michael,” Michael said.

  “Who is in charge?” Aïda asked. “Is Ivy . . .”

  “Ivy’s still alive and she is still the commander as per CAC,” Doob said. “She’s off shift. We can wake her up if you need to speak to her urgently.”

  “No. Not necessary,” Aïda said, recoiling slightly and narrowing the eyes just a bit. The distance between her and Endurance introduced a time lag in the video, which made conversation halting and awkward.

  “How many do you have?” Doob asked.

  “Eleven.”

  Doob, accustomed to working professionally with extremely large numbers, couldn’t quite process one so small. Eleven. One plus ten.

  A thought
came to him. “Do you mean eleven arklets?” That would imply scores, maybe a hundred people.

  Aïda looked amused. “Oh no, of arklets we have many more. We have twenty-six.”

  “Ah. So what is it you have eleven of?”

  “People,” Aïda said.

  “Aïda,” Bo said, “just to be clear. So there is no misunderstanding. You are speaking for the entire Swarm. And you are saying that, of the entire Swarm, there are eleven survivors.”

  “Yes. Plus one . . .”

  “One what?”

  A look of amusement came over Aïda’s face. She broke eye contact. It almost seemed that she rolled her eyes a little. Doob was reminded, hardly for the first time, that the Arkies had been sent up as teenagers. “It is complicated. Let’s just say there is one more who might as well be dead.”

  Those in the Hammerhead still could not quite process it. Something occurred to Michael: “We know that the Swarm broke up into two factions. One led by J.B.F. You were part of the opposing group?”

  “Yes.” Aïda laughed. Again she reminded Doob of a teenager going through the pretense of talking to a clueless parent about something they would never understand.

  Michael, a little wrong-footed, went on haltingly: “And so when you say that there are eleven . . . plus one who is, I take it, in a bad way . . . anyhow, are you referring just to the anti-J.B.F. faction?”

  “They were defeated a long time ago. Months.”

  “When you say that, do you mean that there was some kind of a conflict? A war?” Doob asked.

  Aïda shrugged. “There was some fighting.” She didn’t see it as important. “Call it a war if you wish. More like some brawls. The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.”

  Silence ensued. Aïda waited for them to respond. When no one did, she shrugged. “What were we going to do? Smash our arklets into each other? There is no way to have, like, actual violence in this setting! So we just had a war of words.” She held her hands up in front of her, making them into little pantomime mouths, aimed at each other, thumb-jaws flapping up and down. “Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.” She chuckled, put one hand to her cheek, rubbed her eye. “Look, it is very complicated and I cannot explain everything right now—how it all came out.”

  “But you said that J.B.F.’s faction was defeated,” Michael said. Of all the people in the Hammerhead, he seemed most committed to the proposition that there was a reasonable and logical explanation for all of this.

  “Her and Tav, yes.”

  “By which you mean, you defeated them with words. Ideas. A social media campaign.”

  “We were more persuasive,” Aïda said. “I was more persuasive. Arklet by arklet, they came over to my side. The White Arklet held out for a while, then they gave up.”

  “What became of them?”

  “J.B.F. is fine. Tav, not so good.”

  “He’s the one you mentioned. The twelfth one who might as well be dead.”

  “I am afraid so, yes.”

  “So getting back to the earlier question,” Doob said, “the number you quoted is for the entire Swarm. Both factions.”

  Aïda, finally seeming to understand what they were getting at, sat up straighter and got a more serious look on her face. “Yes. There are no other survivors whatsoever. Of the eight hundred, eleven remain.”

  There was a long silence as the four in the Hammerhead took this in. They had all harbored fears that the Swarm might go terribly wrong, but this was worse than anything they had imagined.

  Finally Doob raised his hands in front of him, palms up, and shrugged. “What happened?”

  “Agriculture crashed.” Aïda turned her head and stared off-camera for a few moments. “I mean, I could say many things, but that is basically it. Between the CMEs, algae blights, lack of water . . . very few arklets produce food anymore.”

  “What have you been eating?”

  Aïda snapped her head around, as if surprised by the question, and looked quizzically into the camera. “Each other. Dead people, I mean.”

  There was a long silence during which Doob, Bo, Michael, and Steve all exchanged looks.

  The terrible thing was that they had considered doing the same thing, many times. Every freeze-dried corpse that they jettisoned was a big collection of protein and nutrients that, from a certain point of view, could seem mouthwatering.

  Seeming to read their minds, Aïda went on: “And you?”

  “You mean, have we resorted to eating dead people? No,” Doob said.

  “Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

  No one had anything to say to that. After a few moments had gone by, Aïda continued. “But Endurance is better stocked with MREs and so on. Plenty of water. You would not have gone there.”

  “No, we did not go there,” Doob said. He could tell from the body language of the others in the Hammerhead that they were too shocked to be entrusted with speaking at the moment.

  “As for us,” Aïda said, “you should also know that supplies were conserved. Even as people died and we lost arklets. We moved what we had into the arklets that survived. Our twenty-six arklets are well stocked.”

  “With everything except food,” Doob said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have enough water to match our trajectory?”

  “Yes,” Aïda said. She was a beautiful young woman, Doob thought, with a fierceness about her that helped explain her success in the social media campaign against Tav and J.B.F. “We have performed all of the calculations. If we jettison mass and pack all we have into a heptad, we can make the rendezvous around the time of your next apogee. But we will need to know your exact params.”

  “We will discuss your proposal,” Doob said, “and make any necessary preparations.” He looked over at Steve Lake, who severed the connection just as Aïda was about to say something.

  THEY SAT IN THE BANANA AND DISCUSSED IT AS IF THERE WAS ANYTHING really to discuss. They all registered their rote shock and disgust at what the Swarm had been reduced to. It all sounded hollow to Luisa. Finally she spoke up. It was what Luisa did. They expected it of her. They relied on it.

  “Seven billion died. Next to that, this is small. And God knows we’ve all thought about eating the dead, so let’s not pretend to be shocked that they actually did it. The real reason we’re all freaked out by this is that our hopes have been dashed. We thought that the Swarm was going to contain hundreds of healthy people, lots of food, lots of good company. Oh, intellectually we knew it wouldn’t be the case, but we were all hoping for it. Now we learn it’s eleven carrion eaters. Are we going to leave them to die? No. We’re going to make room for them and for their heptad full of scarce vitamins.”

  “I am terrified of the woman Aïda,” Michael Park said.

  Luisa sighed. “Let me throw out an idea, which is that you’re terrified because you wonder, at some level, whether you could turn into Aïda if you got hungry enough.”

  “Still—to let her on board Endurance—”

  “And J.B.F. too,” Tekla said. She and Moira were sitting next to each other as they always did, hands clasped, fingers intertwined.

  “I hoped I would never see Julia again,” Camila put in. “I know it is small and selfish of me, but . . .”

  “I understand all of your misgivings,” Ivy said, “because I share them. The question, now, is whether those misgivings are going to have any effect on the decision we make. Are we really going to let one-third of the surviving human race die because Aïda’s creepy and we hate J.B.F.? Obviously not. So, we transmit our params and our burn plan. And during the remainder of this orbit we make arrangements to accommodate some new arklets.”

  THE REMAINDER OF THE ORBIT WAS BUSY INDEED, TO THE POINT where they broke out hoarded rations and upped their calorie intake to
fuel their brains and their bodies. In the middle of that ten-day stretch, however, was an intermission. Dinah and Ivy had wordlessly agreed to spend it together in what Doob had once called the Woo-Woo Pod, and what they now called the Kupol.

  After the Break, when Rhys had reengineered Izzy and Ymir into a single moving sculpture of metal and water, he had moved this module to a different location in the Stack and then let the living ice flow around it, completely surrounding its inboard hemisphere and later building up in a protective brow that shielded part of its windowed half. It projected from the side of Endurance like an eyeball and gave people a place to go when they wanted to look at the universe. As such it had no legitimate function from an engineering point of view. In fact it was a liability, since it got hit by little rocks from time to time, depressurized, and had to be repaired. Anyone in it was getting directly exposed to cosmic radiation, and so it was a no-go zone when they were passing through the Van Allen belts, which was often. But people loved it anyway, and kept patching it up when it was broken, and went there when they wanted to be alone or when they wanted to share some special time with another person. Putting it there had been one of Rhys’s best moves as a designer, and Dinah silently thanked him whenever she used it. Doob’s old term for it had begun to seem a little tasteless after the Hard Rain. For a little while, people had instead referred to it as the Dome. But dom had a different meaning in Russian, and so they’d settled on Cupola or Kupol, whose meanings in English and Russian respectively were not too far apart. In the latter language it carried a vaguely religious connotation, having to do with cathedral domes.