Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  The shift in Moiran eye color was obvious and easily documented, but the same thing, mutatis mutandis, had happened with scores of other phenotypes among all the races. Selective mating had the power to wreak impressive changes over time, without any artificial meddling. In some cases, though, racial isolates had acquired genetic labs of their own. These had been used for many purposes, usually considered benign. In some cases, they had been used for Enhancement, which meant deliberate genetic manipulation for the purpose of rendering racial characteristics more pronounced—the artificial acceleration of what was happening “naturally” in the way of Caricaturization. Sometimes this led to freaks, monsters, and disasters. But often it worked. And when its results mated within isolated groups, those isolates became more and more pronounced embodiments of their races.

  The end result of all this tended to be nonviable populations clearly identifiable as inbred. So, as often as Isolation, Caricaturization, and Enhancement had taken root and run their courses, they had led either to extinction of colonies or to an ameliorative process called Cosmopolitanization, wherein formerly isolated groups had remerged with their long-lost cousins of the same race and bred back in the direction of healthy and sustainable hybridized strains.

  Not surprisingly, Cosmopolitanization had flourished as the habitat ring had been formed during the most recent millennium, suddenly creating a vast amount of new living space far more appealing than the cramped, dark tori in which people had been living for the last four thousand years. The isolates, some of whom hadn’t been heard from for centuries, some of whom could not even speak Anglisky (as the Russian-inflected English, now shared by essentially all humans, was called), emerged from their holes and recombined with their extended families in a population explosion the likes of which had not been seen since Old Earth’s twentieth century. Most of the population of most of the races had thus converged on a set of renormalized racial profiles, while preserving a few extreme tribal isolate strains, variously treasured, feared, or persecuted by others of the same race.

  Or at least that was how it was in Blue. Red had exhibited the same general trends among its Aïdan mosaic, its hundreds of millions of Camites, and the roughly 80 percent of Julians who had decided to throw in their lot with Red. The current state of affairs between the turnpikes could only be speculated at, since no communication, other than stray signals intelligence and a propaganda channel that most people ignored, had been received from that part of the habitat ring for almost two hundred years.

  FOR A FEW MINUTES THE LAST LIGHT OF THE SUN HAD BEEN STRIKING spires, statues, and carved stonework on the fronts of some fantastic old kupols mounted to the seemingly vertical cliff before her: the flank of Capitol Hill. But then suddenly it was near dark. Kath Two turned, accepting the windblast on her right side, and descended the south limb of the bridge. As much as she loved the power of the air, she felt herself scurrying the last few steps to get down into the shelter of the buildings. Capitol Hill was higher than Change Hill and so, rather than debouching into a park, as it did on its north end, the bridge here stabbed into the flank of the slope. Kath Two was plunged directly into a snarl of streets that were but indifferently illuminated by light spilling from occasional doorways and lamps that the owners of some compounds had decided to mount along the tops of their walls. “The streetscape of Bordeaux draped over the topography of Rio de Janeiro” was how the city had been described by its designer, a Julian/Moiran breed who had been born more than four thousand years after both of those cities had been annihilated.

  She had a device in her pocket that knew her exact latlong. Those numbers were, of course, useless in a city that was being dragged through the air on the end of a rope. Her reluctance to pull the thing out and look at it, however, went deeper than that. Being here had plunged her into a sort of reverie none the less compelling for being obviously the product of fantasy: namely, that she was walking around in a city on Old Earth. She didn’t want to spoil it until she was well and truly lost. So she let her feet take her through the red stone streets, trying to go uphill as much as she went downhill, using the towers of great old kupols as landmarks, when unsure of herself circling back toward the abutment of the bridge. For she had been told that the meeting place was not far from the bridge. She might have asked for directions, but the temperature had dropped, the glittering arc of the habitat ring had been obscured by high clouds, and it had begun to rain, a hissing curtain of small, warm drops. Pedestrians had all disappeared into wherever it was they knew to go. She’d been warned that Capitol Hill was deserted after dark; this seemed doubly true when a storm was brewing.

  Several times she had passed by the front of the same building, or seen it from down the length of a street. For it stood at a place where several ways angled together into a cramped asterisk of wet cobblestones, and so sudden views of it kept jumping into her peripheral vision as she ambled along the nearby alleys. That intersection was there because of a house-sized block of stone that jutted from the hillside and forced all the nearby streets to stretch around it. The stone, as she could guess, was a crumb of the moon’s mantle that had become embedded in its iron core. It might have been in there for a billion years, or it might have been a loose bolide that had slammed into red-hot Peach Pit shortly after Zero and gotten stuck in the congealing metal. Cleft and its siblings had many of those. They were usually treated as impurities in the melt. This one had been left in situ, presenting a rugged gray face to the streets that wrapped around it. Atop it, ten meters above street level, someone had constructed a round stone tower. Fanning out behind, like a ship’s hull behind its jutting prow, was a triangular building that she could guess had a nice compound in its center.

  The third or fourth time Kath Two saw this tower it was from a distance of perhaps a hundred meters. She was gazing at it straight down one of those narrow streets. On its upper story it had a row of arched windows, looking out in all directions. Warm light was shining out of those windows, and she could see people sitting at tables, drinking and talking and eating and reading. All of those activities sounded good to her, and she entertained a hope that it might be some kind of public house—not a private club.

  The entrance was not obvious, but she found it around to the right side, where a mousehole had been cut into the metal matrix in which the rock was embedded. The tunnel angled upward and curled around, becoming a spiral stair partly obstructed by rusticles the size of small trees. Actual candles burned in niches. One turn of the helix took her out of the metal and into the stone; two took her to an arch-topped door of real wood, unmarked except for a wrought-metal door knocker in the shape of a bird with a heavy curved beak. Hand-forged feathers of black iron and palladium made it grizzled. Through the door she could feel warmth and hear conversation.

  She reached for the knocker, unsure yet whether the place was meant to be public or private. Then suddenly she was conscious of the scrap of paper in her hand. She stretched it out under the light of the nearest candle.

  THE CROW’S NEST

  SOUTH CRADLE

  She pushed the door open and entered. The first thing that came into her view was a semicircular bar of old copper, a row of tap handles, a window behind looking into a busy kitchen. Music came out of a back room, not so loud as to interfere with conversation, but enough to make her nod her head slightly with its beat. She didn’t recognize the style, but she knew the type: something that had been cooked up by people isolated in a mining colony or an early habitat, people who knew how to dance.

  Tending bar was a healthy-looking Dinan man in his forties. He seemed not to know that he was quite handsome. He was polishing a glass while scanning a piece of paper with handwritten numbers on it—a bar tab. Standing there alone, facing outward at the sweep of windows with its astonishing view of Cradle, he looked like the captain of an Old Earth ship.

  A few moments after she had entered—neither so soon as to make her feel conspicuous nor so late as to make her feel neglected—he looked
up at her and raised his eyebrows slightly. Or perhaps “eyebrow” was better since, as she now saw, one side of his face had taken serious damage.

  “What are you drinking, Kath Amalthova Two?”

  THE ORIGINAL NATS HAD BEEN DEVELOPED IN THE WORKSHOPS OF Arjuna Expeditions in Seattle and launched into space shortly before Zero, where they had crawled around on the surface of Amalthea under the eye of Eve Dinah. Later, during the first two years of the Epic, the original design had been modified to work on, and in, ice. Every child knew the story of how such nats had been used, first to bring Ymir to rendezvous with Izzy, then to merge those two objects into Endurance. As such, nats resonated more strongly in Blue culture than in Red, but they were used on both sides of the turnpikes. Or to be more precise, both cultures used a vast family tree of species and subspecies of nat, all descended from the first Arjuna model and all sharing, to a greater or lesser degree, the code base originally created by programmers like Larz Hoedemaeker and Eve Dinah. The number of different uses to which nats, and swarms thereof, had been put over the millennia was uncountable. They were as ubiquitous and as various as hammers and knives had been pre-Zero.

  Like hammers and knives, they could be used for constructive or destructive purposes. In the latter category was a whole taxonomy of nats designed to be projected at high speed out of gunlike devices. Most of these were designed to fold up into a compact form, like a dart or bullet, so that they could be accommodated in magazines, bandoliers, and the like, and fed into the breeches of firing mechanisms.

  Only a single gun, in the sense of a traditional pre-Zero firearm, had survived the Hard Rain and found its way to Cleft. This was, of course, the revolver that Julia had removed from Pete Starling’s shoulder holster and secreted on her person until the moment when she had attempted to shoot Tekla with it. Camila had interceded, probably saving Tekla’s life, and suffered burns that had left her scarred and in pain for the remainder of her days. Later, the same weapon had fallen into the hands of Aïda. She had issued it to a member of her band who had fired the Last Bullet from the Last Gun to kill Steve Lake. The weapon was now in the collection of the historical museum on the Great Chain. Whether and how it was put on public display was a reliable barometer of the state of Red-Blue relations.

  Since the metalworking technology needed to make new guns had also been destroyed, and since many generations had passed on Cleft before anyone had even conceived a need for gunlike objects, the entire armaments industry, when it had finally gotten rebooted, had done so from a clean slate. The results owed more to Tasers, several of which had made their way to Cleft, than to traditional firearms. The latter had been designed to project a dumb lump of metal at high speed and been optimized over time to deliver high rates of fire. But spraying dumb lumps of metal around the cramped interior of a space habitat was not a good fit for any use that could be conceived of by the engineers who, hundreds of years after the arrival on Cleft, began to think once again about how to make projectile weapons. During the intervening centuries, violence had generally been a matter of grappling, punching, and the use of hand weapons such as metal rods, with really dangerous stuff like knives and swords used only in a few cases by people who had gone well off the political or psychological rails. The first new projectile weapons were made specifically for use against those. The maximum range was perhaps ten meters, so the projectiles didn’t have to travel with high velocity. They had to be smart in the sense that if they missed the target—if they struck anything that was not a human being—they should become as nondestructive as possible. This generally meant that they would deploy what amounted to tiny drag chutes and slow themselves down as quickly as possible, while preparing to fragment against, as opposed to penetrating, whatever they hit. On the other hand, any projectile fortunate enough to reach its target should try to do something useful, which generally meant incapacitating, injuring, or killing it. Clearly, all of these decisions were well above the pay grade of dumb lumps of metal and so nats were used instead. These were not as dense as lead, so they had a low ballistic coefficient and could not travel very far. Again, however, in the context of a space habitat this was a good thing.

  After a sort of dark age during which the Cleft colony had lacked the resources needed to advance the art of robotics, and contented themselves with fixing, and making copies of, the original models, new engineering resources had begun going into this branch of technology. The bolder programmers were daring to meddle with code files that had last been checked in by Eve Dinah. Mechanical engineers were figuring out how to reboot ancient CAD software and examine the digital blueprints created by Larz. Their initial efforts were fairly simple, such as making a nat that would automatically throw out a drag chute after it had traveled a certain distance without hitting anything. More effort went into the projectors than the projectiles. Police and military users tended to be Teklans, whose Anglisky contained more Russian loan words than that of other races, and borrowed many characters from the Cyrillic alphabet. “Katapult” was their preferred term for the device that threw the projectile nats. They shortened it to various affectionate terms such as “kat” and “katya.” The second half of the word, “pult,” seemed to have a connection to “pulya,” pronounced with a long U as in “pool,” which was the Russian word for “bullet.” After a brief, awkward phase of trying to combine the term “nat” with “pulya” in various ways, meaning something like “bullet-robot,” they had just settled for “pulya,” which was sufficiently precise in a universe that no longer included any actual old-school bullets. Other words from the antediluvian gun world made it through unchanged, such as “shoot” and “shot,” but officers giving the command to shoot tended now to say “pul,” recalling what skeet and trap shooters had once called out when they wanted a clay pigeon to be thrown.

  Use of the term “pulya” without any modification tended to irritate knowledgeable interlocutors in exactly the same way as pre-Zero gun nuts had reacted to laypersons who used the word “bullet.” This reflected the fact that pulyas came in an even vaster range of sizes and types than old-school ammo. There were only so many things that could be done with a lump of lead. A far wider range of options lay open to the pulya engineer. An alternative term, “ambot,” was also used. This was all context dependent. Grunts, who tended to see these things as necessary burdens to be hauled around in bulk, loaded into kats, unjammed from firing mechanisms, etc., tended to use “pulya,” but once the projectile had actually been fired and begun to execute its program, it tended to be called an “ambot.” When speaking of bulk supplies, people would say “botmo” in the same way that “ammo” had been used on Old Earth.

  The sort of person who needed to be shot at by the authorities because he or she was committing violence, or threatening to, with edged weapons, was unlikely to submit meekly to advances in the technologies used to enforce civil order. Directly they began to develop countermeasures, which, of course, then needed to be surmounted by the engineers in turn. If an ambot, for example, could be fooled into believing that it had missed its target or struck something that was not a human, it could be rendered nearly harmless. Camouflage changed its purpose from fooling the human eye to fooling the electronic brains of ambots. Armor was no longer made to stop extremely fast pieces of lead. Its purpose now was to protect the wearer from the invasive strivings of ambots. Warriors became living, moving fortresses under siege of multiple ambots that often used swarm tactics to find a way inside before their batteries ran down. The old tactical calculus of projectile warfare changed in other ways too. Katapults and botmo that had been captured by the enemy, or that had simply fallen to the floor and been picked up, could be rendered inert and useless by digital means. Some of them would try to find their way back to their masters, and so battle zones in which a lot of botmo had been expended tended to look as though they were infested by army ants as spent ambots attempted to swarm back toward the combatants who had fired them.

  In any event, the authoriti
es had enjoyed a monopoly over the production and use of such weapons until sometime in the Second Millennium, when the number of widely separated habitats, and resulting political fragmentation, led to a situation in which the civil authorities from Habitat A might actually have cause to shoot at those of Habitat B. The number of different types of katapults and ambots, and of the defensive measures used against them, exploded. No complete catalog of types had existed for thousands of years. Here and there one might stumble across a museum display in which a few dozen or even a few hundred types of ambots had been rendered inert and mounted to a wall with explanatory plaques beneath them explaining in what millennium they had been invented, by whom, and in which habitat they had been used to prosecute this or that disturbance. But everyone knew implicitly that such displays only included samples that had at random made their way into a particular collector’s drawer.