Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  The hanger’s bright orifice grew huge, like a chilly sun falling out of the sky. One by one the vehicles slipped into its lee and bounced and skidded to a stop on its deck. From a distance this appeared level. In fact it was angled slightly upward, so that the aircraft climbed a gentle ramp as they rolled into it. This helped them kill their excess velocity. Her glider bounced twice before the ramp took its weight. Then gravity—real and simulated—came down like a fat hand on her back, and she felt a rush of blood to the head as the glider slowed sharply.

  Visually, she was at rest now. In truth, she was contained in a revolving object: one extremity of a bolo four thousand kilometers long. Even though its revolution, seen from a distance, had looked ponderous, the bolo as a whole was wheeling fast enough to produce two gees of simulated gravity. That plus the one gee of real gravity she was feeling from New Earth added up to a massive amount of down force pressing her into the water-filled ballast sacs that made up the glider’s belly.

  A human-sized grabb, untroubled by the weight, dragged her glider off to the side, making way for other aircraft coming in for a landing behind. All told, the hanger collected eight aircraft during this pass. Besides Kath Two’s, two others were piloted by humans. Each was of a different design; both were powered. The other five were robot gliders, looking similar to Kath Two’s, but solid rather than inflatable. As soon as the last of these was stowed, the hanger’s tailgate constricted and closed behind them. Its stride complete, the hanger was already swinging back, gaining altitude “heel” first, rising back up toward space.

  It was much too large a volume to be pressurized. What little air it had scooped up during its dip into the atmosphere rapidly leaked out. So Kath Two was effectively in outer space now. Knowing this, the fabric of the suit had contracted against her skin to supply the back pressure that was no longer provided by the atmosphere. It was porous, and so the only thing really between her skin and the void was Space Grease. The combined effects of that and the nat mesh fooled her skin and muscles into believing that they were under a nice thick blanket of air—the way humans were meant to live. The only part of the outfit that was pressurized like an old-fashioned space suit was the helmet.

  Dangling above the middle of the hanger’s landing deck were four flivvers of various sizes and designs—the latest iterations of a vehicle type that had been in existence since before the onset of the Hard Rain. During the series of landings just completed, these had been kept up and out of the way. As soon as the door of the hanger closed, one of them—a medium-sized, four-passenger model—was lowered to the ramp by winches. It came to rest about ten meters away. Incongruously for a space vehicle, it seemed to have wheels. It was, in fact, resting on a low, wheeled sled that was designed to roll up and down the ramp.

  Green lights beside the flivver’s airlock door told her that all was well on the other side. Kath Two had about ten minutes to reach it. That would be plenty of time if she didn’t pass out. She issued a command that allowed the glider’s body to deflate. She felt rather than heard the air escaping and the water draining. The soft top of the fuselage parted over her shoulders, back, butt, and thighs. Meanwhile she was wriggling her arms in from the insulated sleeves where they had been spread like a pair of wings. This was good exercise, given that they weighed three times as much as normal.

  By the time that was all done, the glider was just a wrinkled cross of fabric, flat on the deck. Kath Two disconnected herself from its air scrubber and its urine collection system, then unplugged the power and data from her collar. She gathered her arms under her and began to belly-crawl toward the flivver, sliding one knee, then the other forward along the deck plates, like a lizard. A big siwi corkscrewed out and kept pace with her, tracking her vital signs, ready to supply extra air or other forms of assistance if needed. But Kath Two made adequate progress. She probably could have crawled on hands and knees, as one of the other human pilots was doing, but she saw no need.

  Something strange caught her eye, and she went to the effort of rotating her head slightly just to verify it was real: the third pilot was actually walking upright. He was trudging along with short deliberate strides, carefully judging his balance and the loads he was placing on his joints, while somehow managing to keep enough blood in his brain to remain conscious.

  Kath Two could never have stood up, let alone walked, under three gees. The same was true of most of her race. This man, however, was a Teklan. That was obvious from his size, as well as his coloration and the shape of his head, which were visible through his helmet. It was hinted at by his musculature and by the style of the suit he was wearing—heavier, partly armored, slung about with load-bearing straps made to support various burdens. His scabbards, holsters, and bandoliers were vacant. Even without any of those clues, however, she could have guessed his race from the fact that he had chosen to perform the feat of walking when he could have more safely and more easily crawled.

  Had it not been for the racial bond that joined Moirans and Teklans, Kath Two might have rolled her eyes and muttered a joke about it. Teklans didn’t need blood in their brains to keep dutifully trudging forward. Something along those lines. But that kind of stereotyping could just as well have been turned back on her. The Teklan had piloted his vehicle into the hanger under power. The thing had engines. Why not use engines if you belonged to a civilization that knew how to make them? Kath Two, on the other hand, had reached the same destination in an unpowered glider, using skill and wit to draw energy from the atmosphere. She could have turned pilot’s duties over to an algorithm anytime she wanted. Instead, she had chosen to do most of it herself. In its own way, this was no less an act of pointless bravado than what the Teklan pilot was doing right now. She had been testing and sharpening a set of skills that was important to her. Mutatis mutandis, this Teklan was doing the same.

  Kath Two got to the airlock with time to spare. Its floor was padded as a courtesy to people who, like her, were experiencing it through all the body’s boniest parts. She rolled heavily onto her back, slightly bumping the pilot who had reached it on hands and knees, and connected her air tube to a socket on the airlock wall. New air flooded her helmet. The Teklan entered and allowed himself to collapse onto a bench. The outer hatch closed and locked. The air pressure rose and the nat mesh reduced its fierce clutch on her body. It became no tighter than an athletic jersey as the pressure approached one standard habitat atmosphere—a thinnish concoction of gases similar to what humans of Old Earth had breathed in places like Aspen, Colorado.

  The inner hatch opened. Crawling now on hands and knees, Kath Two followed the others into the main cabin, where four acceleration couches were waiting. They climbed into three of them, strapped in, and made themselves comfortable. They were now lying on their backs, legs elevated. At some point their suits’ systems had found their way onto the flivver’s voice network—she knew as much from the fact that she could hear the other two breathing as heavily as she was. But no one said anything. Talking would become a lot easier in a few minutes. True to form, the Teklan, with a controlled exhalation, heaved his meaty arms up off the rests, grabbed his helmet, and pulled it off. He let its weight rest on his stomach and allowed his arms to thud back onto the couch. Kath Two got a vague peripheral glimpse of platinum hair and cheekbones, as expected, but didn’t feel like turning her head. Instead she looked at a display screen mounted above her face, focusing as well as she could with her eyeballs flattened into their sockets by gees.

  They had entered the hanger in level flight, traveling at a hundred kilometers per hour. In the minutes since then, the centripetal force that had obliged her to crawl on the floor like a lizard had been accelerating them upward and forward, steadily pumping kinetic energy into them and everything around them, whirling them up to the immense velocities more typical of space travel. Compared to the baroque, fire-breathing systems that their ancestors had used to the same purpose, there was nothing to it. The bolo was mechanically identical to the sling used by
David to slay Goliath. The flivver was the stone nestled in its pocket.

  The bolo had made about a quarter of a revolution, so they were now traveling directly away from the surface of the Earth—aimed toward the distant ring of habitats that they and the three billion other members of the human races called home.

  Seen on a video window in the display above, the hanger’s tailgate dilated, showing a disk of black sky. A tattoo of metallic clunks let them know that the brakes on the sled had been released. Driven down the ramp by centripetal force, it built speed all the way to the lip of the hanger deck and then stopped short with a sneeze from its shock absorbers. The flivver jerked free of the sled. From its occupants’ point of view, it seemed to fall off the edge of the deck and into space. En route it picked up a bit of a tumble, which was killed by quick firings of its thrusters.

  They became weightless. Kath Two took her helmet off but kept her head nestled in the couch’s rest for a minute while her inner ear adjusted. Meanwhile she was groping in a compartment in her armrest for a varp, which was what people normally used in place of flat-panel display screens when they wanted to interact with some kind of app. It was an old enough word that most people had forgotten it was an acronym for something like Vision Augmentation Retro-Projector. Styles varied, but the baseline model looked like a heavy-framed pair of glasses. Mounted in that frame were cameras that could see the way her hands were moving, a microphone that could hear her speech, and other cameras that could track her gaze. A number of glowing figments appeared in her peripheral vision as she slipped them on, and she was able to reach out and activate one of them to launch Parambulator. This gave her a schema of the flivver’s situation in the universe: in the center, a blue disk representing New Earth, under a gray film of atmosphere. Well outside of that, the orbital track of the bolo’s center, the twin trajectories of its two hangers snaking around it. This was what they had just left behind. A blinking green dot showed their current location on their new orbit, a fat ellipse whose apogee coincided with the circle of habitats that hung above the planet at geosynchronous altitude. Over the next twelve hours they would coast up to that height, then strap back into the couches and use other means to effect a delta vee that would sync them up with whichever habitat they decided upon.

  The world in which essentially all three billion humans lived, as depicted from “above” (high over the North Pole, looking “down” on the whole system) was a hair-thin ring some eighty-four thousand kilometers across—roughly seven times the diameter of the blue-and-white planet in its center. The objects that made up the ring, though they seemed big to the humans who lived in them, were evanescent particles compared to the ring’s overall scale. Imagine the thinnest possible jewelry chain, a nearly invisible trace of platinum around a woman’s neck. Make a perfect circle of that same chain ten meters in diameter, and that gives a picture of the ring’s thinness in comparison to its overall size. It was more easily viewed in artificial renderings like the one on Kath Two’s varp, where the points that made up the ring—the individual habitats—were drawn as unrealistically large, color-coded pips.

  Seen that way, the circle was chopped into eight arcs of roughly equal size, each subtending about forty-five degrees. At long zoom, these were glinting and luminously iridescent, with much shorter gray arcs—the boneyards, they were called—sticking them together.

  At a closer zoom, the pointillistic nature of the image became obvious, and the system began helpfully to superimpose labels and numbered meridians. There were more than nine thousand active habitats distributed among those eight segments. The boneyards contained another several hundred—mostly obsolete ones being cut up for scrap—as well as unused fragments of the moon and the odd captured asteroid, there to serve as raw material for new construction.

  Any object that was not inhabited—because it wasn’t finished yet, because it was abandoned, or because it was just a rock—was rendered as a gray dot. This accounted for the dull appearance of the eight boneyards.

  Sparkling with pure colors were the eight much longer arcs between them. Seen from a distance, each arc had a predominant color. Encoded in those colors was the history of their building, and in turn that of the human races during the last thousand years—the Fifth Millennium, the Millennium of the Ring. Prior to that—during the first four thousand years of the Hard Rain—space had been so dirty that the human races had been obliged to hunker down in the shelter of massive nickel-iron bodies such as Cleft, whose orbits were, of course, similar to that of the moon whose core had once comprised them—nine times farther away from Earth than the habitat ring was now. As Dubois Harris had foreseen, the orbit of the former moon had been a fine place—the only place, really—to restart a civilization, as long as hellfire was raining down on Earth. But to the extent that the human race, as a whole, was capable of having a plan, it was to return to Earth eventually. The Hard Rain diminished, gradually at first, and then, during the Fourth Millennium, more steeply as fleets of robots, issuing from their nickel-iron fastnesses like bats from caverns, began to sweep the skies clean, policing the rubble cloud, herding specks and pebbles together, and spiraling them down into disciplined orbits at geosynchronous altitude. Most of the work was accomplished using the pressure of sunlight, a weak form of propulsion that took hundreds of years to have its effect.

  At the dawn of the Fifth Millennium, about a thousand years ago, the first new habitat in geosynchronous orbit had been constructed. It was called Greenwich because it was positioned above Old Earth’s prime meridian. In the way of neighbors, it at first had nothing but rubble and worn-out robots. As soon as Greenwich was complete, however, construction of more habitats had spread outward from it. The human races and their robots had begun burning their way through the ring of raw material in both directions, consuming it like fire on a fuse.

  Greenwich had been a joint project of all seven human races. The same was true of its first neighbors: Volta, then Banu Qasim to the east, Atlas and Roland to the west, later more in both directions. All of these were, therefore, colored white in the display that Kath Two was seeing in her varp.

  Greenwich was one of eight equidistant points plotted around the ring. The other seven, proceeding west, acquired the names Rio, Memphis, Pitcairn, Tokomaru, Kyoto, Dhaka, and Baghdad. In due course, each of them was seeded with a new habitat as well as the production capabilities needed to manufacture more yet. As the centuries went by, their inhabitants likewise burned their way through the raw materials lying to their western and eastern sides, building new habitats at a pace to match the growth of their populations.

  It was self-evident that if that process went on long enough, the arc of habitats reaching west from, say, Greenwich would make contact with that growing east from Rio. The increasingly narrow bands of unused material and recyclable junk between segments became the boneyards, and might have disappeared altogether had they not been so useful—in the early going, as materials depots, later as political buffers and as liminal zones, akin to frontiers, to which people could escape when they had learned that the close-packed life of space habitats was not for them. The one halfway between Greenwich and Rio was called Cape Verde. Other boneyards, proceeding westward from Cape Verde, were Titicaca, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Kamchatka, Guangzhou, and Indus. Completing the circle, the one between Baghdad and Greenwich was called Balkans. Some were bigger than others. Guangzhou, which formerly had separated the Aïdan and Camite segments, had been used up entirely as the populations to either side had grown.

  When pronouncing her Curse, Eve Aïda had said much that was true. It had become clear within the first few generations after the Council of the Seven Eves that the seven races were going to be around forever. They were as permanent in the human picture as toenails and spleens. Though no official policy had ever been proclaimed to that effect, they had tended to vote with their feet. Rio had become predominantly Ivyn. Moirans had flocked to Memphis, and Teklans to the next one around the arc in that direction, whi
ch was Pitcairn.

  Baghdad, flanking Greenwich on the other side, had been settled by Dinans. Proceeding east from Baghdad, Dhaka had filled up with Camites. Aïdans and Julians had found a way of expressing their perpetual sense of alienation from the other races by opting for the Antipodean habitats of Kyoto and Tokomaru respectively; closing the ring, this brought the Julians, on their eastern end, up against the Teklans’ western extremity, separated only by the Hawaii boneyard, which was relatively large, if only because the Julian race was not numerous enough to make much headway in using its resources.

  The levels of racial purity varied. Greenwich had been founded by all of them together, and so it would forever be the most diverse part of the ring. Baghdad and Rio, flanking it, also tended to have a lot of residents who were not, respectively, Dinans or Ivyns. That three-segment arc was, therefore, fairly cosmopolitan. The other races, in general, tended to be more inward looking, so their segments were not as thoroughly mixed. Anomalous outposts speckled the ring: a habitat containing fifty thousand Julians located spang in the middle of the Dinan segment, for example.

  Eve Moira had employed a color-coding scheme to keep track of the lab samples from which all the races had spawned. It was purely the result of what she’d had lying around in the way of office supplies: an assortment of colored test-tube stickers and felt-tipped pens. Nevertheless, it had become a universal convention.

  Blue: Dinah

  Yellow: Camila

  Red: Aïda

  Orange: Julia

  Cyan: Tekla

  Purple: Moira herself

  Green: Ivy

  White: no particular race

  The same code was used to render the dots that made up the ring. So, a predominantly Dinan habitat would be colored blue, and so on. Because they were so tiny and so numerous, the dots all merged into an iridescent, sparkling arc on the screen. But general trends could be seen. Whether or not it had been a deliberate choice on Eve Moira’s part, colors in the cool part of the palette—blue, green, purple, cyan—were linked to the four Eves she was personally closest to, while warm colors—red, yellow, orange—were saved for the others.