Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  Aïda screamed with laughter and clapped her hands.

  “What on earth is she doing?” Julia asked.

  “That’s a demolition charge,” Ivy said. “It’s going to kill us all ten minutes from now if she doesn’t take it off the window.” She turned to survey the room.

  “Well, what is her point?” Julia demanded.

  “I think my friend is trying to tell us that if we can’t settle this in ten minutes, the human race doesn’t deserve to go on existing,” Ivy said.

  They all sat silently for perhaps half a minute before Moira said: “How’s this: every woman decides what is going to be done with her eggs.”

  Hearing no objection, she continued: “Oh, let me be clear. If it’s a real disease—something on the books, defined in the medical literature as such—then I will fix it. With no distinctions made between physical and mental disorders. No matter how many of those conditions each of you may be suffering from, I will fix them all before taking any other action. However.” And she smiled, and held up an index finger. “Once all that is done, each of us gets a free one.”

  “Free what?” Tekla asked.

  “One alteration—one improvement—of your choice, applied to the genome of the fertilized ovum that will grow into your child. And your child only. You cannot force it on any of the others. So, Camila, if you think it would improve the human race to get rid of its aggression, why then, I will search through the scientific literature for a way to reach toward your goal genetically. And likewise for the rest of you, and whatever changes you happen to think will improve the human condition. Your child, your choice.”

  They all considered it, glancing at one another from time to time, each trying to gauge the others’ reactions.

  Ivy glanced at the timer outside. “Are there any questions? We have eight minutes remaining.”

  Luisa said, “I don’t think we need eight minutes.”

  Ivy looked each of them in the eye, then turned toward the window and gave a thumbs-up.

  Dinah’s eyes, seen through the glass of the window and the dome of her space suit’s helmet, pivoted to focus on that. She nodded.

  Moira smiled and put her thumb up. This too was noted by Dinah.

  Then Tekla. Then Luisa, Camila, Julia.

  All eyes were on Aïda. She would not look back at them. She was, at bottom, very shy. “Whatever,” she mumbled.

  “She needs to see your vote,” Ivy said.

  “Really? You mean that I could single-handedly destroy the entire human race, simply by not putting my thumb up in the next seven minutes?”

  Tekla pulled a folding knife from a pocket on her coverall and flicked the blade open. She kept it low, down in her lap, and pretended to clean a fingernail with it. “Either that,” Tekla said, “or population of human race suddenly goes from eight to seven, and we have unanimous decision.”

  Smiling, Aïda thrust her hand out, thumb down.

  “I pronounce a curse,” she said.

  Luisa let out an exasperated sigh.

  “This is not a curse that I create. It is not a curse on your children. No. I have never been as bad as you all think that I am. This is a curse that you have created, by doing this thing that you are about to do. And it is a curse upon my children. Because I know. I see how it is to be. I am the evil one. The cannibal. The one who would not go along. My children, no matter what decision I make, will forever be different from your children. Because make no mistake. What you have decided to do is to create new races. Seven new races. They will be separate and distinct forever, as much as you, Moira, are from Ivy. They will never merge into a single human race again, because that is not the way of humanity. Thousands of years from now, the descendants of you six will look at my descendants and say, ‘Ah, look, there is a child of Aïda, the cannibal, the evil one, the cursed one.’ They will cross the street to avoid my children; they will spit on the ground. This is the thing that you have done by making this decision. I will shape my child—my children, for I shall have many—to bear up under this curse. To survive it. And to prevail.”

  Aïda swept her gaze around the room, staring with her deep black eyes into the face of each of the other women in turn, then looked into the window and locked eyes with Dinah.

  “I pronounce it,” she said, then slowly rotated her hand until her thumb was pointed up.

  DINAH PEELED THE DEMOLITION CHARGE AWAY FROM THE WINDOW. She had no idea what Aïda had just said. Nor did she especially care. It would be the usual histrionic Aïda stuff.

  Several minutes remained on the countdown timer. She could have simply turned it off. But she felt like going for a walk. Whatever had just happened in the Banana looked unpleasant. She was tired of being cooped up with these people—even the ones she loved. She felt no great compulsion to rejoin them.

  She unclipped the carabiner and let go of the lazily spinning torus. Her momentum carried her toward the wall of the crevasse. Long accustomed to movement in zero gee, she timed a slow somersault and planted her feet on the wall to kill her speed, then turned on the magnets in her boots and began hiking up the crevasse wall. The weak gravity made directions arbitrary. Walking “vertically up” a cliff was little different from walking “horizontally along” the canyon floor.

  A tone sounded from the speakers in her helmet, alerting her that a voice connection had been made.

  It was Ivy. “Going for a stroll?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, we just realized something.”

  “Oh?”

  “We all voted—except for you.”

  “Mmm, good point.” Dinah glanced down at the countdown timer. The screen was getting more difficult to read, since she was nearing the terminator—the knife-sharp line between sunlight and shadow—and the bright canyon wall above her was reflecting from the screen. Tilting it for a better view, she saw that it was just about to drop through the sixty-second mark. “It’s okay, I still have a minute to make my decision.”

  “Well, do you want to know what the rest of us agreed on?”

  “I trust you. But sure.”

  “We’re all going to try to have babies just like you, Dinah.”

  “Very funny.” Dinah crossed over the terminator, and the sun rose. She raised her free hand and flipped down the sun visor on her helmet.

  “Moira’s working on it now.”

  “Is that why Aïda was being such a drama queen about it?”

  “Exactly.”

  Thirty-five seconds.

  “What did you really decide?”

  “One free gene change for each mommy.”

  “Oh yeah? So what are you going to do? Make really smart little straight arrow bitches?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Just an intuition.”

  “What about you, Dinah?” Dinah could hear the beginnings of anxiety in her friend’s voice. She looked down into the crevasse, saw humanity’s cradle welded helplessly into place, imagined for a moment throwing the demolition charge down on it, like a vindictive goddess hurling a lightning bolt.

  She was thinking of Markus. Of the kids she should have had with him. What would they have been like?

  Markus had been kind of a jerk in some ways, but he knew how to control it.

  Really—she now understood—what had prompted her to slam the table and get up and storm out of the Banana a few minutes ago had not been Aïda at all. Aïda was provocative, yes. But more infuriating had been a slow burn that had started with Camila, and her remarks about aggression. Remarks that Dinah now saw as aimed not so much at Dinah as at Markus. She wished she could grab Camila by the scruff of the neck and sit her down in front of a display and make her watch the way Markus had spent the last minutes of his life.

  Markus was a hero. It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She’d couched what she’d said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way—a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as sh
e’d been raised, couldn’t help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression.

  It was this that had made her so flustered that she’d had to leave the meeting.

  “Dinah?” Ivy said.

  “I’m going to breed a race of heroes,” Dinah said. “Fuck Camila.”

  “It’s going to be . . . interesting . . . sharing confined spaces with a race of heroes for hundreds of years.”

  “Markus knew how to do it,” Dinah said. “He was a jerk, but he had a code. It’s called chivalry.”

  She gave the demolition charge a toss straight up.

  “Did you just vote yes?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, watching it dwindle against the stars. The red lights of the LED timer glittered like rubies.

  “We’re unanimous,” Ivy said. Dinah understood that Ivy was announcing it to the other women in the Banana.

  For the first and last time, Dinah thought.

  The red light had shrunk to a pinprick. Like the planet Mars, she thought, except sharper and more brilliant. Then, silently, it turned into a ball of yellow light that darkened as it spread.

  Part Three

  THE HABITAT RING CIRCA A+5000

  FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER

  KATH TWO WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY PATCHES OF ORANGE-PINK light cavorting across the taut fabric above her. A very old instinct, born on the savannahs of Old Earth, read it as danger: the flitting shadows, perhaps, of predators circling her tent. During the five thousand years of the Hard Rain, that instinct had lain dormant and useless. Here on the surface of New Earth, just beginning to support animals big and smart enough to be dangerous, it was once again troubling her sleep. Her shoulder twitched, in the way that it did sometimes when you were half awake, and not sure whether you were really moving or dreaming of it. She had thought of reaching under her pillow for the weapon. But coming fully to, she found that her arm had not really moved, other than the twitch. Through the thin padding beneath her head she could still feel the hard shape of the katapult.

  By then it had become obvious that the moving light on the tent had nothing to do with large predators. It was too dappled and volatile. Not even birds could move so. Its twinkling and swirling were mysterious, but its hue told her it was the first light of the day. This meant that she had slept a little too long and was in danger of missing the dawn breezes that she had hoped would bear her into the sky.

  She stumbled out of her little tent, feeling yesterday’s hike in the muscles of her legs. That was surprising. She thought she had trained well. But even in the largest space habitat, you couldn’t go downhill for all that long. On an actual planet, you could go on losing altitude for days. And, as it turned out, those long downhill runs were what really killed your legs. Yesterday she had shed almost two thousand meters, descending from a range of hills toward a blue, water-filled crater thirty kilometers across. She had stopped a few clicks short of its rim, where the ground dropped away toward a swath of grassland between her and the shore. The break in the slope had been subtle, but Kath Two’s throbbing knees had made it obvious enough. She had taken a dozen or so strides down it, gauging its angle in her blistered soles, sensing the air’s currents with her lips, her hair, and the palms of her hands. Then she had turned around and trudged back up to an inflection point that would have been invisible had the low evening sun not been grazing it, casting a sharp terminator on the ground.

  Where wind streamed over bent ground, it stretched. The stretching had been faint in the dying wind of yestereve, but she had known that it would become more pronounced in the morning, as the sun rose and the air fled from its warmth. So she had dropped her pack and made her camp.

  The source of the dappled light, as she now saw, was sunlight sparkling from waves on the lake below, shooting rays through the branches of trees, perhaps a hundred meters down the slope from her, that were beginning to stir in the morning breeze, making soft noises, as when a sleeping lover exhales.

  She bent down, pulled the katapult out from under the sack of laundry she’d been using as a pillow, felt it thrum as it recognized her fingerprint. After a short walk and a careful look around—for she did not actually wish to use the katapult—she squatted and urinated in the largest open space that was handy. Only in the last few decades had the ecosystem here matured to the point where TerReForm—her employer—could seed it with predators. And that was always somewhat hit-or-miss. On the mature ecosystems of Old Earth, predators and prey had, according to the histories, evolved to some kind of equilibrium. On the remade ones of New Earth, you never knew. You couldn’t assume that all the predators around here were getting enough to eat; and even if they were, they might view Kath Two as a bit of tempting variety to add to their diet.

  Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity. But regardless of whether you considered Survey to be a purely scientific corps with ad hoc liaisons to the military—merely for logistical convenience and situational awareness—or viewed it as an elite scout unit working hand-in-glove with Snake Eaters, its stated mission was to observe and report on the growth of New Earth’s ecosystem. Not to kill the animals that the human races had gone to so much trouble to invent and import. During her two-week stint on the surface, she had grown used to the katapult and stopped seeing it as remarkable that she was carrying a weapon. But the awareness that she was going home today made her see all of this through the eyes of the sophisticated urbanites she might be mingling with tomorrow: habitat ring dwellers who would never believe that only a short time earlier Kath Two had been in a place where one did not pee without carefully looking around first, did not venture into the open without a weapon in hand.

  During the minutes since she had awakened, the sparkling light had warmed to brassy gold. Everything in the scene was a combination of exceptionally complex and unpredictable phenomena: the wavelets on the lake, the shapes into which the branches of the trees had grown during the century or so since this ground had been seeded by pods hurtling down out of space, tumbling like dice on jumbled ejecta from the myriad bolide strikes of the Hard Rain, finding purchase in crevices prepped by rock-munching microbes. The branches and the leaves responded to the currents of the wind, which were themselves random and turbulent in a way that surpassed human calculation. She thought about the fact that the brains of humans—or of any large animals, really—had evolved to live in environments like this, and to be nourished by such complex stimuli. For five thousand years the people of the human races had been living without that kind of nourishment. They had tried to simulate it with computers. They had built habitats large enough to support lakes and forests. But nature simulated was not nature. She wondered if humans’ brains had changed during that time, and if they were now ready for what they had set in motion on New Earth.

  And then, because she was a Moiran, she wondered if all that had to do with the fact that she had overslept. Her previous Survey missions had been quick insertions lasting a few days. And they had typically sent her to less developed biomes: the fringes of the TerReForm process, where the seeding of the ground had occurred more recently, and less complexity struck the eye, nose, and ear. This mission, however, had lasted long enough that she could feel it changing her.

  Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city. Here that meant gazing up into the sky.

  Yesterday had been overcast, with little movement in the air. She might have been hard-pressed to find and organize the energy she would need to get home. But matters had changed during the night. The air was moving. Not strongly enough, yet, that she could feel it on her face, but enough to stir the leaves at the tops of the trees and to wobble the heavy heads of the tall grass. Above, it must be moving more strongly, for yesterday’s sheet of clouds had been shredded to tufts and tissues, purplish-gray on the bottom and pink-orange on their eastern faces. The sky be
tween them, however, was perfectly clear, and still dark enough that she could see a few bright stars and planets. And, to the south—for she was in the northern hemisphere—an orderly ring of brilliant points erupting from the eastern horizon and arching across the vault of the sky until it plunged into the shadow of the world, off to the west. From here she could see nearly half of the ten thousand or so habitats in the ring. Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.

  It was time to go there.

  She had pitched her little shelter on a flat lozenge of soft grass some distance back from the brow of the hill where the wind would soon be bending. She struck her camp, shouldered her pack one last time, and carried it a short distance to the break in the slope she had noticed yesterday. She popped the clasp on the hip belt and let it drop to the ground.

  Unrolling the deflated wings and the tail structure was as easy as giving each a swift kick. Smaller bundles had been stuffed between them: a foot-operated pump and a hard sphere, somewhat larger than Kath Two’s head.

  She devoted a few minutes to stomping the pump. The wrinkles began to disappear from the splayed runs of fabric, and it began to look like a glider.

  The sun had cleared the opposite rim of the crater. The tops of the wings began gathering its energy and feeding it to built-in air pumps that would pressurize the wing and tail tubes beyond what could be achieved with muscle power.

  She got dressed. Which began with getting naked, and cold. She was glad she had worked up a sweat operating the pump.

  The hard sphere was a glass bubble with an opening at the bottom large enough to admit Kath Two’s head. At the moment, though, it was stuffed with a roll of gray fabric. She withdrew this and kicked it out on the ground. It was as long as she was tall. Rolled up in it had been a semirigid funnel with straps dangling from its edge. Stuffed into the funnel were two packets. One of the packets was tiny, just a pill that would stop up her bowels for a day. She swallowed it. The other was a heavy and distressingly cold sac of gel. Kath Two bit off one corner and then smeared the gel all over herself, wincing at its chilly touch. It was an emollient, rumored to be very complicated, and it had an official name. But everyone called it Space Grease. The stuff would never be sold as a cosmetic; it lay heavy on her skin, and she could practically feel her pores clogging.