Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  When the entire ring was plotted according to this scheme, and the plot was viewed as a whole, with Greenwich at twelve o’clock and Tokomaru at six, one therefore saw a great arc of cool colors starting at about ten o’clock (the western end of the Indus boneyard) and sweeping around to about five o’clock (the eastern end of the Hawaii boneyard). A shorter arc of warm colors ran from a little before six o’clock to a little after nine. The ring’s “top”-most segment, centered on Greenwich, was frosty white, like a polar icecap flanked by purple mountains, green hills, and blue water. But on its bottom left side, the ring looked as if it were being heated by a blowtorch, glowing in the warm tones that spoke of predominantly Camite, Aïdan, and Julian populations.

  That segment was marked off, on the plot, by two red lines drawn athwart the ring. One was located at the longitude of 166 degrees, 30 minutes west, above the former Pacific island of Kiribati. This placed it near the eastern end of the Julian segment. The other was at precisely 90 degrees east, running through the habitat called Dhaka, in the exact center of the Camites’ arc. The lines were borders: not just imaginary frontiers but literal barriers that had been constructed, like turnpikes, across the ring. The warm-colored arc of habitats stretching between them, incorporating most of the Julian segment, all of the Aïdan segment, and exactly half of the Camite segment, was, to Kath Two and the others aboard this flivver, another country. The relationship between it and the larger, cool-colored segment where they lived could be described in many possible ways, of which the most succinct was war.

  THE TEKLAN, SEEING THAT KATH TWO HAD LIFTED HER HEAD FROM the rest and thereby joined the temporary society of the flivver, turned toward her. He stuck his right elbow out to the side, made a blade of his hand, palm down, and snapped it in until his thumbnail was touching the point of his chin, then, after a moment’s pause, elevated it to the level of his forehead. “Beled Tomov,” he said. But Kath Two had already known this, since it was stenciled on the outside of his suit.

  Kath Two made a similar gesture, though in the style of her race she used her left hand and kept the palm toward her, fingers curled into a loose fist. “Kath Amalthova, Two.”

  Both of them looked toward the Dinan. During the previous moments he had kept his gaze averted in a way that, as everyone understood, meant that he had been taking a leak into his suit’s urine collection system and wanted privacy. But now he looked up and performed the gesture, also left-armed, with a slight variation in the attitude of the hand, beginning with his palm toward him but flipping it over to face outward as he brought it to his forehead. “Rhys Alaskov.”

  This style of greeting was a throwback to the early days of the Cloud Ark and the first generations spawned on Cleft by the Seven Eves. People then had spent a lot of time in space suits equipped with outer visors that could be flipped up or down to compensate for sunlight. When the visor was pulled down, it concealed the wearer’s face behind a reflective metallized screen. When it was pushed up, the face could be seen. In the crowded environments of those days, the upward movement of the hand had become a signal meaning “Hello, I am available for social interaction,” and its reverse had come to mean “Goodbye” or “I wish for privacy now.” These gestures’ practical necessity had withered away as the human races had spread out into habitats where they could get privacy whenever they desired it. They lived on, however, as salutes. Beled Tomov had opted for a military style, using the right hand, the subtext being “I am not going to kill you with a concealed weapon.” In gravity, the next move might then have been to reach out for a handshake. In zero gee this usually wasn’t practical and so was rarely done. The left-handed version suggested a nonmilitary vocation, implying that the saluter’s right hand was busy doing something useful. The variations in hand position were racial and their origins were the subject of folkloric research. All agreed, however, that they were useful for signaling one’s race when far away, or when obscured in a space suit. The cues in size, shape, posture, and bearing that distinguished the races could be subtle, particularly when it was not possible to see facial features and hair color. Rhys Alaskov had the honey hair and freckled skin typical of a Dinan. Teklans too were fair. But where Rhys had an open, appealing face and an engaging manner, Beled was all cheek- and jawbones, sleek and bony at the same time, eyes so blue they were nearly white, hair like fiber-optic glass, cropped close to his skull. His affect matched his look. Kath Two was dark brown, with green eyes and woolly black hair. Close, in other words, to the way Eve Moira had looked. Among the three in this flivver, the largest contrast was therefore between her and Beled. And yet five thousand years of acculturation shaped the way they would interact. If some crisis were to arise, Kath Two and Beled would likely find themselves back to back, each instinctively seeking qualities wanted in the other. And in the absence of a crisis, they might find themselves front to front. A similar complementary relationship obtained between Dinans and Ivyns, but as it happened Rhys Alaskov was without an opposite number at the moment—that empty fourth couch.

  All of which, and more, was just subtext, passed over in a fraction of a second. Rhys pushed off gently and floated toward the nest of displays that served as the flivver’s control panel. The same functions, of course, might have been served within his varp, but it was considered desirable to make the ship’s status clearly visible to everyone in the cabin, and so that kind of information tended to be splashed up on large screens.

  Rhys was going to establish contact with whatever habitat was at their apogee, chat up whoever was “answering the phone” on the other end, and smooth the way in general. While he was floating slowly across the cabin, he said, “I trust you both had good surveys?”

  “Nominal,” Beled announced.

  Kath Two was about to make a remark in the same vein when she remembered the Indigen, or whoever it was, watching her glider from the shelter of the trees by the lake. The impression had been so fleeting. Had she imagined it? She was certain she hadn’t. But memory could play funny tricks.

  “Mine was fascinating,” Rhys said, when Kath Two failed to take the bait for a while.

  “Any irregularities?” asked Beled, just as Kath Two was saying, “What was so interesting?”

  Sensing Beled’s gaze on her, Kath Two turned his way and understood that his question had been aimed as much at her as at Rhys.

  It was in Rhys’s nature as a Dinan, however, to assume that the question was all for him. His eyes flicked between Kath Two and Beled. Knowing he was the odd man out here, he responded with a grin that was, of course, charming. “I think I can answer both questions at once.” He had reached the chair centered in the cockpit. “The canids are going epi in a huge way. They’ve become nearly unrecognizable.” He brought the controls to life with a few sweeps of his fingers, and the screens lit up all around him.

  A canid was a thing like a dog, wolf, or coyote. Rather than trying to bring back individual species, Doc—Dr. Hu Noah—had drawn inspiration from research that had emerged in Old Earth scientific journals shortly before Zero, suggesting that the boundaries among those commonly recognized species were so muddy as to be meaningless. They all could and did mate with each other and produce hybrid offspring. For various reasons these tended to group by size and shape in a way that human observers saw as being distinct species. But when humans weren’t looking, or when the environment shifted, all manner of coy-dogs and coy-wolves and wolf-dogs appeared. Coyotes began hunting in packs like wolves, or wolves went solo like coyotes. Creatures that had avoided, or eaten, humans struck up partnerships with them; family pets went feral.

  Hu Noah was 120 years old. As a young man he had been one of many scientists who had rebelled against a tradition of TerReForm thought that had passed as gospel for hundreds of years previously. Thanks in part to the young Turks’ propagandizing, this older approach had become hidebound and stereotyped as the TOT, or Take Our Time, school. The premise of TOT was that ecosystems—which on Old Earth had evolved over hundreds of
millions of years—would have to be rebuilt slowly, through a sort of handcrafting process. Which was fine, since living in habitats was safer and more comfortable anyway than the unpredictable surface of a planet. The human races could enjoy thousands of years of safe, secure habitat life while slowly re-creating ecosystems down below that would resemble those of Old Earth. The planet would become a sort of ecological preserve. Africa, whose outlines were still vaguely recognizable, though heavily reshaped by the Hard Rain, would have giraffes and lions sequenced from the ones and zeroes dating all the way back to the thumb drive around Eve Moira’s neck. Likewise with the other battered and reforged continents.

  Doc was the last surviving member of the young Turk faction that had named, then rubbished, “the TOT lot.” They were called the GID, or Get It Done, school. Their leader had been Leuk Markov, who himself had been over a hundred years old when he had become Doc’s teacher. Obviously from his name (which was taken from the surname of Eve Dinah’s boyfriend Markus), Leuk had been a Dinan, but Doc and most of his followers were Ivyns, which gave them an air of seriousness and credibility that had proved useful in pressing their agenda. They had formed a partnership with mostly Moiran philosophers who had begun questioning the TOT lot’s premises, pointing out that re-creating simulacra of Old Earth biomes, in addition to taking an unreasonably long time, reflected a basically sentimental way of thinking about nature. It was an expression of a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that the human races had carried on their backs ever since the Hard Rain. It was time to discard that. The old ecosystems would never return. Even if it were possible to bring them back, it would take so long as to not be worth it. In any event—and this was the nail in the coffin, supplied personally by Doc—it would fail anyway because the forces of natural selection were unpredictable and uncontrollable.

  The most powerful weapon in the GID school’s arsenal, however, was not philosophy. It was impatience, a failing shared to a greater or lesser degree by all the races. Second only to that was competitiveness, a quality absent in Camites but present in the other six. Anyone so motivated would of course want to Get It Done, to make the TerReForm happen in centuries rather than millennia.

  Their rise to power had, however, produced political consequences they had never imagined by giving the races something to compete for—namely, territory on the surface of New Earth.

  In the early 4820s, Leuk Markov had published papers speculating that the surface of New Earth could be made ready for permanent human habitations as early as 5050. While that was startlingly soon by the standards of the Take Our Time school, it had seemed far in the future to the average person, and so the council of scientists responsible for planning the TerReForm had seen no problem with enshrining it in the schedule, and later even moving it up to 5005—the anniversary of the landing on Cleft. But the shift in thinking had unleashed long-pent-up political forces that had led to the formation of what amounted to two different countries in the year 4830. The Aïdans, who dominated one of them, bringing many Camites and Julians under their sway, had built the turnpikes at Kiribati and Dhaka in 4855, cleaving the ring. They eventually came up with a formal name for their country, obliging the rest of the ring to come up with a name for theirs, but everyone simply called them Red and Blue.

  TerReForm had continued anyway, through ad hoc cooperation between scientists and labs straddling the Red/Blue borders. Twenty-three years later, however—practically as soon as New Earth’s atmosphere had become breathable without artificial aids—had begun the War on the Rocks, a struggle carried out partly in space but mostly on the still-nude surface of New Earth. This had been terminated in 4895 by what was now called First Treaty, which stipulated among other things how subsequent TerReForm activity was going to proceed. It had thus paved the way for the Great Seeding, which was responsible for the trees that Kath Two had been flying over this morning. In subsequent decades, larger and larger animals had been set loose on the surface as part of a planned program to jump-start whole ecosystems.

  Some of those—the ones Kath Two had been worried about this morning—were canids. When Rhys said that they were “going epi,” he meant that they were passing through some kind of epigenetic shift.

  If the Agent had blown up the moon a couple of decades earlier, Eve Moira wouldn’t have known about epigenetics. It was still a new science at the time she was sent up to the Cloud Ark. During her first years in space, when she and her equipment had been coddled in the most protected zones of Izzy and Endurance, she’d had plenty of time to bone up on the topic. Like most children of her era, she’d been taught to believe that the genome—the sequence of base pairs expressed in the chromosomes in every nucleus of the body—said everything there was to say about the genetic destiny of an organism. A small minority of those DNA sequences had clearly defined functions. The remainder seemed to do nothing, and so were dismissed as “junk DNA.” But that picture had changed during the first part of the twenty-first century, as more sophisticated analysis had revealed that much of that so-called junk actually performed important roles in the functioning of cells by regulating the expression of genes. Even simple organisms, it turned out, possessed many genes that were suppressed, or silenced altogether, by such mechanisms. The central promise of genomics—that by knowing an organism’s genome, scientists could know the organism—had fallen far short as it had become obvious that the phenotype (the actual creature that met the biologist’s eye, with all of its observable traits and behaviors) was a function not only of its genotype (its DNA sequences) but also of countless nanodecisions being made from moment to moment within the organism’s cells by the regulatory mechanisms that determined which genes to express and which to silence. Those regulatory mechanisms were of several types, and many were unfathomably complex.

  Had it not been for the sudden intervention of the Agent, the biologists of Old Earth would have devoted at least the remaining decades of the century to cataloging these mechanisms and understanding their effects—a then-new science called epigenetics. Instead of which, on Cleft, in the hands of Eve Moira and the generations of biologists she reared, it became a tool. They had needed all the tools they could get, and they had wielded them pragmatically, bordering on ruthlessly, to ensure the survival of the human races. When creating the children of the other six Eves, Moira had avoided using epigenetic techniques. She had felt at liberty, however, to perform some experiments on her own genome. It had gone poorly at first, and her first eight pregnancies had been failures. But her last, the only daughter of Moira to survive, had flourished. Cantabrigia, as Moira had named her after the university of Cambridge, had founded the race of which Kath Two was a member.

  By the time the Great Seeding was in the works, thousands of years later, epigenetics was sufficiently well understood to be programmed into the DNA of some of the newly created species that would be let loose on the surface of New Earth. And one of the planks in the Get It Done platform was to use epigenetics for all it was worth. So rather than trying to sequence and breed a new subspecies of coyote that was optimized for, and that would breed true in, a particular environment, as the TOT school would have had it, the GID approach was to produce a race of canines that would, over the course of only a few generations, become coyotes or wolves or dogs—or something that didn’t fit into any of those categories—depending on what happened to work best. They would all start with a similar genetic code, but different parts of it would end up being expressed or suppressed depending on circumstances.

  And no particular effort would be made by humans to choose and plan those outcomes. They would seed New Earth and see what happened. If an ecosystem failed to “take” in a particular area, they would just try something else.

  In the decades since such species had been seeded onto New Earth, this had been going on all the time. Epigenetic transformation had been rampant—and, since Survey was thin on the ground, largely unobserved by humans. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to
find surprising, it was known as “going epi.” Use of the phrase was discouraged for being unscientific, but Rhys Alaskov knew how to get away with it.

  Rhys brought up a rendering of the habitat ring and zoomed in on the whitish segment at its top. Their projected route was superimposed as a crisp green arc that curled through apogee near a succession of relatively small habitats just to the east of Greenwich. For the first habitats constructed in each segment—close to the seeds of Greenwich, Rio, et al.—had naturally tended to be smaller than the ones that came along later, when the construction process had hit its stride. The closer to a boneyard you got, the larger the habitats generally became. As Rhys panned and zoomed around, habitat names came and went on the screen: Hannibal, Brussels, Oyo, Auvergne, Vercingetorix, Steve Lake. The latter aroused a flicker of interest. Kath One had had an old friend living there. But the friendship wouldn’t likely have survived the transition to Kath Two.

  She brought the same thing up on her varp and zoomed out to remind herself of the current location of the Eye.

  If the habitat ring as a whole was like the dial of a clock, then the Eye, with its inner and outer tethers—one depending toward Earth, the other reaching out beyond the habitat ring—was a hand.

  Any description of the Eye had to begin by mentioning that it was the largest object ever made. Most of its material had come from Cleft. It was, in a sense, the thing Cleft had ultimately shape-shifted into. Its innermost piece was a spinning, ring-shaped city of sufficient diameter—some fifty kilometers—that even the largest space habitats could pass through its center with plenty of room to spare. This made the Eye capable of sweeping all the way around the ring, encompassing in turn each of the ten thousand separate habitats.