Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  This was the first time Ariane had come out and admitted that she’d read the report, and so it pulled Kath Two up short.

  She was distracted by a large Teklan entering the café with a green bracelet on his wrist. But it wasn’t Beled. Just another surveyor, recently arrived, perhaps part of the same dragnet.

  Obviously Beled had filed a very complete report, including his conversation with Kath Two on the flivver. From another type of person she might have found this an irritating indiscretion, but for a Teklan it was to be expected.

  “I didn’t mention it in my report,” Kath Two said, “because in my judgment it was only my imagination, not a genuine, reportable Survey event.”

  “If you don’t object to my going all juju—” This was a self-deprecating term for Julian-style cognition.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Perhaps your initial impression was correct, and it was, in fact, caused by a large animal—a human—passing between you and the sun. A mistake committed by someone who was watching you furtively. And when he—I’ll call him a he—noticed his shadow on your tent, he realized he’d blundered, and withdrew down the slope into the woods, and watched you from there.”

  “It is entirely possible,” Kath Two said. Out of politeness she refrained from adding that it was the kind of thing that could only have been spun from a Julian mind.

  “How has your sleep been since then?”

  “Very sporadic and jet laggy, which is why I’m here. I think it is possible that I might have started to go epi on the last day, but now that I’m back in civilization my system is confused, and the shift is being aborted.” Here, Kath Two might have reached up to feel her own face had she been sitting across the table from a Moiran friend. Do I look different? But Ariane would have no way of knowing the answer.

  Kath Two added, “I’ve been sleeping with Beled. I think that is helping pull me back.”

  “Very well. I hope your adjustment—whether or not it includes becoming Kath Amalthova Three—is a smooth one.”

  “Am I free to leave?”

  “It’s not my decision. Your status remains indefinite.”

  “Afraid I’ll blab about it?”

  “It’s not for me to be afraid about such things. My personal advice? Don’t blab about it. But you know your rights. You can’t be detained just because you think you might have seen a camouflaged gawker in the middle of nowhere.” Ariane seemed to consider her next move before adding, “Otherwise you’d see a lot more Survey people bottled up in this café.”

  ARIANE WAS RIGHT ABOUT DOC. HE HAD LEFT HIS HOME IN THE misty campus of Stromness—a habitat in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring, consisting entirely of university—and was en route to Cradle. Along the way he was spending a bit of time on the Great Chain. So when Kath Two finally took the obvious step of getting in touch with him directly, he responded within a few minutes and told her where he could be found.

  At about the same time, the diode on Kath Two’s wristband turned green, informing her that she was free to leave. She went to the room she’d been sharing with Beled to find that he had already departed. She gathered up her sterilized possessions and went to the exit, where the robot that was the door inspected her wristband. Apparently it liked what it saw, because it unlocked itself and allowed her to pass through. At the same moment the wristband sprang free and went dark. On her way out she tossed it into a bin.

  Half an hour’s floating along Eye passageways took her to the On Ramp, where she piled onto a capsule along with two dozen other visitors, strapped herself in, and was fired like a bullet down a gun barrel whose muzzle, at just the right moment, synched up with an arrival platform on the Great Chain. One gee of simulated gravity took effect as they were swept up into the rotation of the circular city. Attendants, stationed near the capsule’s exit door, helped the new arrivals onto the platform and looked each one in the eye to make sure they were all right. People who weren’t accustomed to sudden shifts in gravity were apt to suffer from dizzy spells or worse. Most of the attendants were Camites. This was a considered choice, ratified by many centuries of practice. Even the most hot-blooded Dinan would be willing to admit to one of these unassuming people that he was feeling woozy. The elaborate Dinan code of chivalry obliged them to show special politeness to Camites, whom they identified as weak and childlike.

  Kath Two walked with only minor unsteadiness toward the top of a moving stairway that would take her down to the mass transit level. The ceiling above was high and arched, like a grand Old Earth train station, and its nickel-iron fretworks were atwitter with birds, a whole society of them going about its internecine trends and controversies while keeping an eye on the human traffic below. Specialized siwis, wrapped around the struts and girders like pythons around tree branches, moved along at a rate too gradual for the birds to notice, cleaning off their shit. The birds were all the same species, called the grizzled crow: a small corvid, half of whose feathers were devoid of pigment, giving it a salt-and-pepper appearance. This feature had been added by its designers simply as a visual flag so that they could be easily distinguished from rootstock crows. They moved in wheeling gray cyclones through the vaulted space overhead, but they were also comfortable shooting up and down the angled shafts that connected it to the transit level below. As Kath Two walked along the platform, a single one of those birds peeled away from a spiraling and squawking murder and dove toward her. As it hied in closer she became more and more certain that it was homing in on her face. It pulled up just short of colliding with her and, lacking a place to perch, hovered before her in ungainly style, treading air and slipping backward to match her pace. “The grove in the temperate rain forest,” it said, or as near as a crow could come to pronouncing those words, and then beat air and took off, rising toward the rafters but then banking hard down the slanted tube that would take it back into the transit. Nor was it the only grizzled crow that was completing such an errand; similar encounters were happening all around her. Perhaps a score of the birds were perched on the safety railing that surrounded the entrance to the moving stair, muttering things that they had heard from humans. One of them, who perhaps had listened to a couple making love, was producing a crow’s approximation of an orgasmic moan. Three of them were singing a popular song in unison. One was barking like a dog. A few were trying to cadge food from people who were carrying snacks. One of them just kept repeating “meet me at the train station at dot sixteen,” another “I’ll be wearing a red scarf.”

  At the bottom of the moving stair the crows were flying in and out of snug little rookeries that had been built for them at the ends of the tube cars, so that they wouldn’t foul the seats. Ten minutes on one of those cars took Kath Two to Aldebrandi Gardens. This was a series of six consecutive blocks that had been constructed as botanical preserves. Each consisted of a rectangular slab of ecosystem covered by a lofty arched glass roof under which simulated Earth landforms had been built. The temperature and humidity of each had been tuned to simulate a different part of Old Earth. Plants and other organisms, sequenced from digital records, had been cultivated here, and supplemented later with birds, insects, and small animals. Creatures fostered and studied here had later been disseminated to factories in other parts of the ring where they’d been propagated in vast numbers and used to seed New Earth.

  Starting at the hot end, Kath Two walked through a Southeast Asian jungle so humid that moisture condensed on her face before she could even begin to perspire. No sky was visible beneath its triple canopy, but when she stepped through the next airlock into Chihuahuan desert, she was treated to a direct view up through its ceiling into space, and blasted with sunlight bounced in by a robotic mirror mounted outside. Hanging up there in the center of the Great Chain was a little habitat called Surtsey. For during Kath Two’s stay in Quarantine, the Eye had moved on from Akureyri, passed the even larger habitat of Sean Probst at twenty degrees west, and was now entering a sort of boundary zone on the edge of the Cape Verde boneyar
d. She knew nothing of Surtsey, but it looked like a placeholder habitat, a sort of construction shed that would be used as the basis for something planned a minute or two west of here. Her skin and hair dried out instantly under the sun, and by the time she reached the end of the block, she almost wished she’d stayed below in the tunnels, where she needn’t have worried about cactus spines and rattlesnakes.

  The next ecosystem was Fynbos, the characteristic environment of the Cape of Good Hope, cooler but no less sunny, a riot of scrappy flowering plants, a favorite of picnickers and birdwatchers from elsewhere in the Great Chain. It was a little too crowded for her taste, and so she marched straight down its length, trying not to be distracted by its many small charms, and entered the next block. This was almost more aquarium than terrarium, being a simulation of Old Earth Louisiana bayou. A plank walkway snaked among its moss-covered trees, carrying her over teeming reptile-infested waters to the airlock at its far end, where she stopped to pull a jacket out of her knapsack and don a pair of gloves.

  Eight-hundred-year-old Douglas firs filled the next block from end to end. This one had been engineered to simulate the temperate rain forest of pre-Zero British Columbia, so its roof had been equipped with filters that damped the sun down to a steady silver glow that seemed to come from all directions. The lack of shadows made it seem brighter, in its way, than the unobstructed sunlight in the Chihuahuan biome. Ferns, moss, and epiphytes grew on fallen logs so thickly that they seemed to have been sprayed from a hose. A skein of faint paths ran through it. Kath Two followed one of them to the Kupol Grove: a relatively open space near the center, ringed by particularly enormous trees, where she found Doc, four of his students, his aide, and his robot sitting on moss-covered rocks and logs.

  Dr. Hu Noah and most of his students were Ivyn. In Doc’s case it was difficult to tell, since extreme old age tended to obscure racial differences. He’d lost his hair long ago, and his skin was blotchy from years spent down on the surface doing research in unfiltered sunlight. Limp skin dangled from his sharp cheekbones like wet laundry from the edge of a rock, and eventually joined into a system of wattles mostly concealed by a scarf wrapped around his neck. That, and other touches meant to keep him comfortable, had been seen to by his nurse, a stocky Camite wearing a knapsack full of medical supplies. Curled at Doc’s feet like a sleeping dog was a grabb with a display panel in its back showing live readouts of his vital signs, which it was monitoring through a bundle of wireless connections. A pole projected vertically from its back to about the level of Doc’s waist, where it forked to a pair of handlebars. It was a smart cane. When he grabbed the handlebars it would help him stand up. It would then steady his locomotion even on the roughest terrain, adding its six legs to his two.

  Doc’s students ranged in age from twenty to seventy. Kath Two had never met any of them before. There was nothing unusual in that; the TerReForm was the largest project ever undertaken by the human race, and 99 percent of it still lay in the future. She recognized the oldest one’s face from pictures in scientific journals.

  She felt awkward. Walking into the clearing and making herself known to these people had required a kind of courage. There was a class system within TerReForm. Doc was at its apex. Survey personnel were not so much at its bottom as on its wild fringes. Not so much looked down upon as looked at askance, seen as not entirely serious.

  But they were polite. All except Doc greeted her with the Ivyn variant of the salute, an understated gesture that incorporated a suggestion of a bow. Doc held both of his hands out so that she could take them carefully in hers. He squeezed with surprising strength and she squeezed back.

  Then suddenly they were alone. Whether by prearrangement or because the other Ivyns had sensed something, they all withdrew. Even the nurse stepped away and contented herself with a stroll around the clearing, holding her hand up from time to time to check Doc’s readouts on a palm-sized device.

  “You’re coming to Cradle with me,” he announced. “There is need of a team.”

  “A new research project?” she asked.

  Doc’s eyes closed for a moment in disagreement, then sprang open, gazing at her directly. “A Seven,” he corrected himself.

  “Hmm. And I’m to be—”

  “One of us, yes.”

  Doc said this as if it were obvious. But it wasn’t, not to Kath Two. A Seven—a group consisting of one person from each race—was usually assembled for some ceremonial purpose, like dedicating a new habitat or signing a treaty. Not Kath Two’s thing at all. And even if it had been, she was confused by the suggestion that she was to be in the same Seven as Doc. Because usually, when a Seven was being assembled, some effort was made to have all the members be of like status. And this was decidedly not the case between her and Doc. The gap in age, fame, and eminence was almost too wide to measure.

  What could possibly make Kath Two special enough to deserve such an honor?

  Her confusion lasted for only a few moments before she saw it, so obvious: it was something to do with what she had seen on the surface.

  She saw faint amusement around Doc’s eyes as he watched her figuring it all out. This turned to a mildly apprehensive look as he perceived that Kath Two was getting ready to blurt something. And that alone caused her to stifle it. She said nothing. They would talk of it only when Doc felt it was time.

  “You’ve never been to Cradle before,” he said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, it should be a new kind of adventure for you then.”

  “I’ll try not to look like a tourist.”

  “Look like whatever you please,” he said. “We’ll be too busy to worry much about such things.”

  “When do we—”

  “Twelve hours, give or take,” he said, and looked over to the Camite. “Is that about right, Memmie?”

  Memmie nodded. “Cabins have been booked on the elevator departing at twenty-two thirty.”

  Kath Two hadn’t met Memmie before, but had heard about this person of indeterminate gender who kept Doc alive and looked after many of his affairs. “Memmie” was short for Remembrance, a common Camite name. At the moment Memmie seemed to be presenting as female, with a saronglike wrap around the waist of a coverall that was otherwise utilitarian in the extreme, appearing to consist entirely of cargo pockets. Some neck jewelry and a turbanlike head covering completed the ensemble. Her use of the passive voice—“Cabins have been booked”—was racially typical. Memmie, of course, had done the booking, made the other arrangements, and looked after the significant fund transfers needed to book a number of elevator cabins on short notice. But getting her to say that this had been her doing would have been like extracting teeth from her jaw. Some saw it as a becoming habit of humility; others saw it as irritatingly passive-aggressive. Kath Two had no opinion. She had a few free hours on the Great Chain and needed to make the most of them.

  “See you there,” she said.

  “I shall look forward to it,” Doc answered.

  KATH TWO DESCENDED TO THE TRANSIT LEVEL AT THE END OF THE block and took the tube around the ring to a district of midrise blocks full of stores, markets, kupols, restaurants, and theaters, and spent the day drifting around, looking at things, buying little except for small items of clothing and toiletries she imagined she might need on the next leg of her journey. Square meter for square meter, this was the finest shopping district in the human universe, drawing its stock from every habitat visited by the Eye, attracting the sophisticated and well-heeled natives of the Great Chain as well as tourists from whichever habitats were currently in reach.

  She was feeling a kind of vague ambient pressure—enhanced, no doubt, by the advertising that walled her in on all sides—to buy clothes, or try on jewelry, or get a hairstyle that would make her fit in better on Cradle. That was a place for people more important than Kath Two: brisk, poised paragons in uniforms or smart outfits, speed-walking down corridors in murmuring clusters, exchanging glances across lobbies. Kath On
e had been much more susceptible to those kinds of social influences and would have been emptying her bank account at this moment, trying to silence the little voice in her head telling her she wasn’t pretty or stylish enough. But Kath One had died at the age of thirteen and been replaced by Kath Two, whose brain had a rather different set of emotional responses. It wasn’t that she was unafraid. Everyone was afraid of something. Kath Two was afraid that she would make the wrong choices, and make a fool and a spectacle of herself, if she tried to dress up to Cradle’s standards. Better to lurk, observe, and merge, as she did when flying in a glider.

  On her way back down to the tube, she happened to pass by a bookstall, where she picked up a paper copy of one of her favorite history books and downloaded a whole series of novels set on Old Earth. The paper copy was an extravagance, something she would add to her little library the next time she made it to one of her caches. For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn’t even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family. All of which was fine for the people of the other races. But until a Moiran “took a set,” such permanent arrangements were unwise, placing husband, children, coworkers, and friends at risk of waking up one day to find that their wife, mother, colleague, or pal had effectively died and been replaced by someone else. So rather than renting apartments, young Moirans opted for storage caches in places they were wont to visit. Sometimes it was a shelf in a friend’s closet, sometimes a locker in a Survey or military base, sometimes a commercial niche in a big city with a robot doorkeeper that would ID you. Abandoned caches were legion, their contents forever being sold at auction.

  Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.