Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  Elsewhere on the Great Chain was a block-long historical museum, stacked by era, with one floor for each millennium, beginning with the pre-Zero world on the ground floor and proceeding upward. Of course, very few physical artifacts remained from pre-Zero, so that floor consisted mostly of pictures and reconstructed environments. But the Arkies had been allowed to bring a few possessions into space with them, and some of those had survived the Epic and the ensuing five thousand years. So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people’s intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world—the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest—were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished.

  It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched—and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain.

  There was no telling, of course, what was going on in the Red zone between the turnpikes. Signals intelligence shining out into space from their part of the habitat ring suggested that the Aïdans were at least as advanced, in their use of mobile communications, as people here. Because they were also quite good at encryption, there was no way of telling what they were saying to one another. But Blue, for its part, had made a conscious decision not to repeat what was known as Tav’s Mistake.

  It was unfair, of course, for billions of people to focus blame on one representative of his culture who had died in a bad way five thousand years ago. The Epic, however, tended to have this effect on people’s thinking. In the same way that certain people of Old Earth, raised on the Bible, would have referred to masturbation as the Sin of Onan, those of the modern world tended to classify personal virtues and failings in terms of well-known historical figures from the era of the Cloud Ark, the Big Ride, and the first generations on Cleft. Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. The actions that he had taken at the beginning of the White Sky, when he had fired off a scathing blog post about the loss of the Human Genetic Archive, and his highly critical and alarmist coverage of the Ymir expedition, had been analyzed to death by subsequent historians. Tav had not realized, or perhaps hadn’t considered the implications of the fact, that while writing those blog posts he was being watched and recorded from three different camera angles. This had later made it possible for historians to graph his blink rate, track the wanderings of his eyes around the screen of his laptop, look over his shoulder at the windows that had been open on his screen while he was blogging, and draw up pie charts showing how he had divided his time between playing games, texting friends, browsing Spacebook, watching pornography, eating, drinking, and actually writing his blog. The statistics tended not to paint a very flattering picture. The fact that the blog posts in question had (according to further such analyses) played a seminal role in the Break, and the departure of the Swarm, only focused more obloquy upon the poor man.

  Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before Zero understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range, as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, Blues called it Tav’s Mistake. They didn’t want to make it again. Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinctive pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine. To the extent that Blue’s engineers could build electronics of comparable sophistication to those that Tav had used, they tended to put them into devices such as robots. Cleft’s initial population had been eight humans and hundreds of robots (thousands, if nats were counted as individuals). Both numbers had expanded since then. Only in the last century had the human population pulled even with that of non-nat robots.

  The end result, for a young woman in a bookstall above a tube station on the Great Chain, was that she was dwelling in habitats, and being moved around by machines, far beyond the capabilities of Old Earth. She was being served and looked after by robots that were smarter and more robust than their ancestors—the Grabbs and so on that Eve Dinah had programmed on Izzy. And yet the information storage capacity of her tablet, and its ability to connect, were still limited enough that it made sense for her to download books over a cable while that was easy, and to make room for them in the tablet’s storage chips by deleting things she had already read.

  That sorted, she rode transit to the Off Ramp, where she climbed into a capsule, facing backward, and felt deceleration push her back into her couch as it was flung off the Great Chain into a tube lined with electromagnetic decelerators.

  Back now in the zero gee environment of the Eye’s nonrotating frame, she began to navigate its internal companionways, pushing herself along lighted tubes marked with the icon of Cradle: a pair of mountains enclosed within a semicircular dome. This led her, within a few minutes, to a transit station where she and two random strangers climbed into a four-person bubble that presently went into motion and began to whoosh at greater and greater speed down a long and perfectly straight tube. They were traveling from the rim of the great Eye’s iris out to its inner vertex, the one closest to Earth, a distance of some eighty kilometers, and so hand-over-handing their way down a shaft wasn’t an option. Kath Two, who had been awake now for something like sixteen hours, felt herself dozing off.

  She jerked awake near the end of the trip, convinced that she had heard her name being spoken.

  The pod had a video screen on its front bulkhead, and one of the other passengers, to pass the time, had begun playing back a segment of the Epic that must have taken place around twenty years after Zero. This could be guessed from the visible signs of aging on the faces of the surviving Eves, and from the fact that the first generation of their offspring were adolescents. This segment of the Epic told the story of how a personal rift between Eve Dinah and Eve Tekla had been mediated and settled by some of the youngsters, led by Catherine Dinova. It was frequently pointed to as one of the first moments when the children of the Eves had begun to think and take action for themselves. Lines of dialogue from it were quoted frequently in modern-day discussions.

  Kath Two wondered, as she always did, whether the people of the Epic would have said and done some of what they had, had they known that, five thousand years later, billions of people would be watching them on video screens, citing them as examples, and quoting them from memory. Over the first few decades on Cleft, the cameras had died one by one. Depending on how you felt about ubiquitous surveillance, the result had either been a new Dark Age and an incalculable loss to history, or a liberation from digital tyranny. Either way, it signaled the end of the Epic: the painstakingly recorded account of everything that the people of the Cloud Ark had done from Zero onward. After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support.

  A tone sounded, warning the passengers of deceleration, and the pod eased to a stop
in the terminal. Even after it had come to rest, however, they experienced a mild sense of gravity. It was too faint to be perceived other than as an annoying tendency for objects not otherwise constrained to drift “downward,” where “down” in this part of the Eye meant “toward the Earth.” To prevent that drift from getting out of hand, some floors of lightweight decking had been constructed. But the gravity was still so faint that you could fly around by pushing off against anything solid. Kath Two collected her bag, strapped it to her back, and glided out into the terminal. The other travelers from her pod seemed to know where they were going and so she followed them “down” through staggered gaps in those decks. This part of the Eye was bare bones in an almost literal sense; it was where the massive structural limbs that held the whole thing together converged to a sharp point, aimed forever at Earth. The metal was honeycombed with tunnels and cavities engineered for various purposes. The carbon cables that held Cradle suspended above Earth’s atmosphere some thirty-six thousand kilometers below diverged here and ran taut through long sheltered passageways all the way to the other end of the Eye, where they came together again and emerged to connect with the Big Rock beyond. The passageways and chambers used by humans were tiny by comparison.

  Set into the very point of the Eye was a glass dome, half a dozen meters in diameter. From it you could look straight down the bore of the tether—which was actually a tubular array of sixteen smaller tendons—and see the Earth. From this distance, the planet looked about as big as a person’s face seen from across a small table. An Old Earther, seeing it from here, might think at first that nothing had ever changed. It still had the same general look: blue oceans, white icecaps, green-and-brown continents partly obscured by swirling white vortices of weather. Those continents stood in roughly the same places as the old ones, for not even the Hard Rain could make much of a dent in a tectonic plate. But the landforms had been radically resculpted, with many inland seas, and deep indentations in coastlines, created by large impacts. New island chains, frequently arc shaped, had been created by ejecta and by volcanic activity.

  The Eye was always above the equator; currently it hovered over a spot about halfway between Africa and South America, whose coasts echoed each other’s shape in a way that made their tectonic history obvious even to nonscientists. The low-lying terrain along both coastlines had huge bites taken out of it, frequently with rocky islands jutting out in the centers of the bites: central peaks of big impact craters. Archipelagoes reached out into the Atlantic but trailed off well short of joining the two continents.

  The geography of New Earth, though beautiful to look at, made little impression on Kath Two, since she had been studying it her whole life and had spent years tromping around on it. For now, her attention was captured by the giant machines in which the view was framed. Surrounding her, and just visible in her peripheral vision, was another of those ubiquitous tori, spinning around to provide simulated gravity for the staff who lived here with their families, looking after the tether and the elevator terminal. Inward of that were the sixteen orifices where the tether’s primary cables were routed into the frame of the Eye. Each of those cables, though it looked solid from a distance, was actually made of sixteen more cables, and so on and so forth down to a few fractal iterations. All of these ran parallel between the Eye and Cradle. Webbing them together was a network of smaller diagonal tendons, arranged so that if one cable broke, neighboring ones would take the force until a robot could be sent out to repair it. Cables broke all the time, because they’d been hit by bolides or simply because they had “aged out,” and so if you squinted your eyes and looked closely enough at the tether, you could see that it was alive with robots. Some of these were the size of buildings, and clambered up and down the largest cables simply to act as mother ships for swarms of smaller robots that would actually effect the repairs. This had been going on, to a greater or lesser extent, for many centuries. This end of the cable had beanstalked downward from the Eye while the other had grown in the opposite direction, reaching out away from the habitat ring and from Earth, acting as a counterbalance.

  Cradle was much too small to be picked out at this distance. Even if it had been large enough to see, her view of it would have been blocked by the elevator, which was on its final approach, and expected to reach the terminal in about half an hour. It had a general resemblance to an Old Earth wagon wheel, with sixteen spokes reaching inward from its rim to a hotel-sized spherical hub where the people were. Watching it approach produced the mildly alarming illusion that it was going to come crashing through the dome. In that case, two domes would have been destroyed in the collision, since the hub was capped by a dome similar to this one where passengers could relax on couches and gaze up at the view of the approaching Eye and the habitat ring spreading out to either side of it. But of course it slowed down and stopped short of contact. Through the glass, now just a stone’s throw away, she could see the new arrivals unbuckling their seat belts, gathering their things, and floating toward the exits. Most of them were wearing military uniforms, or else the dark, well-designed clothing that she associated with comersants and politicos. Not really her crowd. But Doc had invited her, which was all the credentials anyone really needed.

  Through the flimsy internal partitions she could hear several dozen arrivals making their way to Quarantine. These were eventually bound either for the Great Chain or the much smaller torus that encircled this end of the tether. Through the dome she could see housekeeping robots, and a few human staff, making their sweep through the hub’s lounge. After a few minutes, a green light came on above a door, and she joined a flow of a few dozen departing passengers.

  Within minutes she was ensconced in a small private cabin in the elevator’s hub, where she would spend the four-day journey to the tether’s opposite terminus. A chime warned her when the elevator began to accelerate downward, but it moved at a speed that was extremely modest by the normal standards of space travel, so she felt no need to strap in. She climbed into her bed and slept.

  THE ELEVATOR WAS A HOLLOW CYLINDER TEN STORIES HIGH, WITH A glass dome at each end, one aimed up at the Eye and the other aimed down at Earth. The floors beneath those domes were made of glass, so that the light shone through from end to end. The outer walls were windowless and heavily shielded against cosmic radiation, but on the inside, the cabins and lounges had windows onto the atrium. Or at least the more expensive cabins did; Kath Two’s was at the periphery, hard up against the outer wall, with no windows other than a tiny porthole onto a ring-shaped corridor. Which was fine with her. At the beginning of the journey they were in near weightlessness, but as the days went on, gravity would increase, reaching one normal gee at Cradle. She could tell when she woke up that she had not slept for long, since gravity was still quite faint, perhaps comparable to what had once existed on the moon.

  She wandered up and down the atrium looking for a place where she could sit and read her book. Several bars and restaurants fronted on it, but these were not places for Kath Two, as she could tell just from the look of the people and the prices quoted on the menus. Comfy-looking chairs and couches were distributed around the glass floor of the atrium, and a coffee bar stood along one edge, so she ended up there.

  After an hour or so, Beled Tomov turned up and sat in her general vicinity but made no move to interrupt her reading. When she came to a good stopping place, she looked up and happened to notice Ariane Casablancova sitting on the opposite side of the atrium, working on a tablet.

  So they had five of the Seven: Doc, Memmie, Ariane, Beled, and Kath Two. The only two missing were the Dinan and, somewhat more problematically, the Aïdan.

  Kath Two and Beled ran into Doc and Memmie later when they wordlessly agreed to go to the least expensive of the eateries and get some food. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Doc was not surrounded by students, scholars, and TerReForm bigwigs. He was just sitting at one end of the room carefully eating soup. Memmie was at his elbow, reaching in frequently to tuc
k his napkin back into his collar. Neither of them reacted when Kath Two and Beled took seats at the same table, but after a few minutes Doc said, “Lieutenant Tomov, it is good to see you again. Greetings,” and the two of them exchanged salutes in their respective racial styles.

  Lieutenant, obviously, was a military and not a Survey rank, and so this confirmed the unsurprising fact that Beled’s relationship to Survey was, at best, ambiguous. Much more interesting was the fact that he and Doc had already met.

  “I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued.

  “All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”

  “I was thinking more of the advancement of your career, Lieutenant. In your future dossier, this will stand out as a highly anomalous episode. Depending on who is reading that dossier, it might help you or hurt you.”

  “I don’t concern myself with such matters,” Beled returned.

  “Some would call that unwise, but I tend not to favor the company of such. You, on the other hand, will do nicely.”

  “May I ask why I was so honored?”

  Doc’s eyes moved briefly to Kath Two. “Kath here will be worried that it’s because she shared an indiscretion with you. Drew you into it. Or perhaps she is a little bit exasperated with you for having passed it on in your report.”

  Kath Two shook her head no, but did not wish to interrupt Doc. Beled, however, seemed to take it in.

  Doc continued. “None of that really counted. You are a known quantity, now, not only to me but also to Kath Two and to Ariane, which is somewhat useful. But even without all of that, you would have been a fine choice. Not everything must be for a reason. Never mind what our Julian friends say.”

  He had noticed Ariane Casablancova approaching them, somewhat tentatively, with a tray of food. He made an almost subliminal gesture with his eyes toward Memmie, who stood up and fetched an extra chair from an adjoining table. Ariane joined them. Kath Two felt vaguely uncomfortable. A day earlier this woman had held and wielded power over her, had known things about her that would normally have been private matters. What was she to Kath Two now? Presumably an equal member of the Seven.