Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  “Disturbance” was used a lot more often than “war,” even for relatively large events such as the conflicts that had occurred over the last few centuries between Red and Blue. Because space habitats were so vulnerable, prosecuting an actual war in the sense of a twentieth-century, Old Earth total war was unthinkable. Nuclear weapons had not been reinvented because there was no need for them. A rock thrown across the ring at a space habitat would kill as many people as a hydrogen bomb. The same strategic calculus therefore applied as on Old Earth during and after the Cold War, namely that on no account would Red and Blue risk actual, open war with each other but that many small conflicts could happen in places where they might be passed off, by the majority of the news-reading populace, as too minor to worry about. The only two conflicts that were denoted, in retrospect, as wars were ones that had taken place the old-fashioned way, on the surface of the planet: the War on the Rocks, 4878–4895, and the War in the Woods, 4980–4985.

  When Kath Two walked into the Crow’s Nest and was greeted by the Dinan with the damaged face, it was 5003, so about twenty years after the high-water mark of the War in the Woods. The Dinan looked to be about forty years old. The scars on his face had been there for a long time.

  “One of those,” she said, nodding at a nearby tap handle adorned with a handwritten label identifying it as cider.

  “Coming right up,” he said. “Since I have you at a disadvantage, my name’s Ty Lake.”

  “Short for Tycho or . . .”

  “Tyuratam. Bit of a mouthful.”

  His accent was that of an Indigen. So, from this brief exchange she was able to surmise quite a bit about his history. His parents had probably been Sooners, which was to say, people who had been so eager to escape from the settled life of space habitats that they had found ways of getting down to the surface of New Earth just as soon as the TerReForm had rendered it marginally inhabitable. Doing so was a violation of First Treaty, which had ended the War on the Rocks a few decades earlier, and so it was discouraged. Comings and goings from the bigger and older habitats of the ring were easily monitored by the authorities, and so Sooners tended to depart from liminal zones on the edges of boneyards and near the two turnpikes. On the Blue side, Dinans were strongly overrepresented among Sooners. Teklans tended to be the coplike authorities given responsibility for chasing them down and breaking up their human-smuggling rings, leading to stereotypical depictions in popular culture of Dinans as charismatic pirates and Teklans as humorless straight arrows. Or at least that had been the case until the Sooners’ transgressions had led to the War in the Woods, in which the predominantly Teklan armed forces had been obliged to rescue many Dinan adventurers. Depictions nowadays were a little more nuanced and made the older ones seem campy.

  Thus Kath Two could reasonably guess that Ty’s parents had been Sooners and had established themselves on the surface long enough to have at least one native-born son. The connection back to boneyards meant that Sooners tended to be people with a certain amount of skill in making things, and so many of the early Sooner communities had been soundly constructed on an engineering level even if their political culture had been a little on the rough and ready side. Ty, presumably, had grown up in that environment and found himself, in his late teens or early twenties, embroiled in the War in the Woods. Some ambot of some type—no point in worrying about the details—had found its way through his armor (assuming he was even wearing any) and done damage to his face. This was the sort of thing ambots tended to be good at. In combat it was frequently more useful to disable than to kill, and so ambots fought like chimpanzees, aiming for the face, the hands, and the genitals. Faces were easy to recognize and hard to spoof, so those were a favored target. Ty might have suffered these injuries in many different circumstances, e.g., a Red-on-Blue raid between two rival Sooner communities, but there was something about his posture and his manners that suggested a connection to the military, and so she guessed he had been officially recruited to fight for the Blue side, and suffered his injury in a straight-up battle between organized military formations.

  He obviously ran this place. This was clear from the way he was treated by staff and customers alike. In and of itself it wasn’t unusual for a retired veteran to open a bar. That was so normal as to border on stereotype. It was a little less easy to explain how such a person could end up in control of this particular bit of real estate, which was probably worth more than some entire space habitats.

  The brand name on the tap handle, combined with the fact that it was handwritten, both implied that this beverage had been produced from apples plucked from trees growing in the soil of New Earth. Under the terms of Second Treaty, which had terminated the War in the Woods, the only people allowed to live on the surface and do things like tend orchards were the descendants of Sooners, now renamed Indigens. The fact of this cider’s being on tap here proved, or else was a very well-crafted marketing campaign intended to create the impression, that Ty Lake maintained close connections with at least one Indigen community and that he was importing its produce directly from its Registered Indigen Zone, or RIZ. This made it a desirable luxury good, since most food was produced, far more cheaply and reliably, in habitats. Drinking beverages or eating food produced in a RIZ was for wealthy connoisseurs. Perhaps to allay any concerns Kath Two might be having on that score, Ty said, “On the house,” as he set the glass on its coaster.

  “That is kind of you,” Kath Two said, as her eye strayed to the black slate above the bar and noticed a shocking figure quoted in the way of price.

  “On the contrary,” Ty said. “Normal courtesy for a fellow member of my Seven.”

  So, Tyuratam Lake was their Dinan.

  It made sense, if the Seven was going to be doing anything on the surface, anything that might involve a RIZ.

  “You’re a bit early,” Ty said. “Some of the others are here.” He tossed his head back. This looked like one of those bars that went on forever, rambling into annexes and back rooms in a way that no architect would countenance, unless they were a very sly architect indeed. So, she inferred he was making reference to some kind of back room or snuggery that she would never be able to find on her own. “Came up the back way,” he added.

  “There’s a back way?”

  “There’s always a back way.”

  “Doc?”

  “Showed up half an hour ago.”

  For the most important living architect of the TerReForm to walk into the front door of a crowded bar on Capitol Hill would be to create all manner of unnecessary distractions. Doc would be recognized. People would want to demonstrate how important they were by walking up to him and introducing, or reintroducing, themselves. It would become tiresome and it would wear him out. People would talk about it, perhaps even to the point of fouling up whatever mission the Seven was being organized for. Of course Doc had used the back way.

  “Anyone else?” she asked.

  “Besides the nurse? Just the big fella.”

  So Beled had arrived too. Or so she guessed until several minutes later, when Beled walked in through the same door that Kath Two had used. He looked around the place in a manner that made it obvious he had never been here before.

  Quickly he picked out Kath Two’s face. He did not react, but moved toward her directly. Kath Two had taken the last available bar stool, but Beled cut through the crowd, which was easy for him since people tended to get out of his way, and stood behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth on her back. He ordered a popular brand of inexpensive beer from another member of the staff: a breed, probably Camite/Julian, female, somewhat exotic. Ty had drifted away and resumed whatever he’d been doing with the bar tab. Kath Two checked her timepiece and guessed that Ty was getting ready to clock out so that he could take them back to the room where they would have the meeting. As the woman behind the bar handed the beer from her tiny hand into Beled’s huge mitt, Kath Two pivoted toward him, tinked her glass against his, and said, “To the Seven.”<
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  Beled was busy for a moment thanking the barmaid in somewhat over-formal style, but then nodded and joined Kath Two in a drink. Kath Two explained what she knew of Tyuratam Lake and Beled spent the next several minutes appraising the Dinan from a distance, drawing who knew what conclusions.

  Presently Ty finished his paperwork and slipped around the corner of the bar, catching Kath Two’s eye as he did so. She could see that for him to extract himself from the society of the Crow’s Nest was no insignificant thing, since many knew him and wanted to say hello. But he seemed to have learned a sort of posture and gait that made him look too busy to brook interruption.

  Kath Two found it hard to keep up with Ty’s meandering course through the various rooms and corridors, and ended up allowing Beled to step in front of her so that he could break trail. Because Beled was much taller and wider than she was, this made it difficult for her to see what was ahead of them. But at length she became conscious of being in a long down-sloping corridor with a stone floor, and stone walls paneled over with wood to make them seem warmer. Various doors led off of it, but one stood at the end, and this Ty opened for them. She saw warm light spilling out, glancing off the polished rock between Beled’s legs and the wood paneling around his shoulders.

  “Welcome to the Bolt Hole,” Ty said.

  Kath Two followed Beled into the room and then collided with his backside, bouncing off him and taking a step back. He had come to a dead stop upon entering and dropped into a slight crouch, one foot ahead of the other and pointed straight ahead. Sidling around him, Kath Two followed his gaze, and his toe’s azimuth, across the room.

  The Bolt Hole was a cozy little place with an oval table just big enough for seven. Doc was seated nearest the door, flanked by Memmie and by his robot. Across from him was Ariane Casablancova. Seated at the far end of the table, facing the door, was the man that Ty must have meant when he had spoken of “the big fella.” Because of his position behind the table, all that was visible were his head, shoulders, and arms. The arms seemed long and quite heavily constructed. What really drew attention, though, was the architecture of the big fella’s skull. His head looked like the head that a normal person’s head would develop into if they kept growing beyond adulthood into some more pronounced phase of development. Thick reddish-brown eyebrows did little to conceal a prominent ridge of bone above the eyes. When Kath Two first saw him he was draining a pint glass, which looked even smaller in his hand than it had in Beled’s; but when he set it down to expose the lower half of his clean-shaven face, she saw the set of his jaw, and the size of his teeth, and understood that the seventh member of the Seven was not just any Aïdan but a Neoander.

  EVE AÏDA HAD FOUNDED SEVEN STRAINS OVER THE COURSE OF THIRTEEN separate pregnancies. The failure rate had been so high because the alterations she had demanded from Eve Moira had been so extreme. She had been willing to accept some unsuccessful pregnancies, given that she saw herself as having plenty of time until menopause compared to all the other Eves save Camila. And Camila she did not see as a competitor, given that Camila wanted to raise a race of people who were not inclined to compete with anyone.

  The Eves, confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, at least until such time as the memory chips on which it was all archived began to fail: a decay that had begun on a small scale but that would take decades to have any serious effect.

  Aïda began to research human genetics. To the extent that her genome was the final expression of a long historical process—a dense and cryptic encoding of everything that her ancestors had learned by managing to survive long enough to reproduce—this meant learning about the history of human evolution as well. Her genome, like that of all the other Arkies, had been sequenced and evaluated before she had left Earth. A copy of the report had been provided to her. It contained information as to what parts of the world her ancestors had come from. Much of this was what you would expect for an Italian woman, but there were details she hadn’t known, such as some genetic connections to Northern African Jews, to an isolated tribe in the Caucasus, and to the Nordic peoples. Based on certain genetic markers it was also clear that, like many Europeans, she was part Neanderthal.

  Later analysis, by historical scholars, of the bread crumb trails left by Aïda in computer logs suggested that she had spent almost as much time studying the genomes of the Four, whom she saw as her direct competitors, as her own. And of the Four, she spent as much time learning about Moira’s genome as Dinah’s, Tekla’s, and Ivy’s combined. This was because Moira was of African descent, and Aïda had become fascinated by the idea that Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider. For every African who was a great athlete there was presumably another who was miserably uncoordinated, but no one paid any notice to the latter. Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aïda swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account. The very existence of Moirans, as a race, was a result. Rather than try to follow all of Aïda’s machinations in detail, base pair for base pair, Eve Moira had chosen to tinker with those aspects of the genome that controlled epigenetics, making her children into Swiss Army knives.

  Tekla had been an easier target, where Aïda was concerned, since she had stated so forthrightly what she considered desirable in a future race. It was easy enough to see that the children of Tekla were going to be strong, disciplined, formidable fighters. And one did not have to be a military genius to understand that fighting, for the foreseeable future—several millennia of being bottled up in space colonies—was going to be up close and personal. To the extent that violence was going to be an ongoing factor in human history, it was going to be a style of violence that relied on size, strength, and toughness. If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else. Aïda was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla.

  She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism. Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement—which had affected all the races to some extent—had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wetware. The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals.

  The creation o
f the new race had happened incrementally, over centuries. By the time Neoanders existed it was too late to bother with the trifling ethical question of whether it was really a good thing to have created them. During their slow differentiation from the other races they had developed a history and a culture of their own, of which they were as proud as any other ethnic group.

  Not surprisingly, much of that history was about their relationship with Teklans, which was, as foreordained, largely combative. At its most simple-minded and stupidly reductionist bones, the Teklan side of the story was that Neoanders were dangerous ape-men brought into existence by a crazy Eve as a curse upon the other six races. The Neoander side had it that Teklans were what Hitler would have produced if he’d had genetic engineering labs, and that it was a damned good thing that Eve Aïda had had the foresight to produce a countervailing force of earthy, warm, but immensely strong and dangerous protectors.

  Much of this combative relationship had become irrelevant as the tactical landscape had become dominated by katapults and ambots, and physical strength had become less important to the outcome of fights. But the old primordial animus remained, and explained why Beled’s immediate response, upon entering a room that contained a Neoander, was to make himself ready for hand-to-hand combat.

  Doc chose to ignore this. If he even notices, Kath Two thought, but she was pretty sure Doc noticed everything. “Beled, Kath, I do not believe you have met Langobard.”

  It was a fairly common Aïdan name.

  “Bard for short,” Langobard offered.

  “Langobard, may I present Beled Tomov and Kath Amalthova Two.”

  Bard rose to his full height, which was not all that impressive, while performing the Aïdan version of the salute, which was done with both hands. He then reached out across a seemingly impossible distance with his right, offering to shake. Beled was still reluctant to move, and so Kath Two stepped forward and extended her hand. She had never made physical contact before with a Neoander. Even in Red they had become somewhat scarce, as many of the existing population had moved down to New Earth to become Indigens. In Blue they were rarely seen at all. Langobard took her hand with elaborate delicacy, swallowing it up in a meat paw with fingers the size of baby arms, and giving it the gentlest of squeezes. He was clean-shaven and carefully groomed, wearing a good suit of clothes that actually fit—prompting her to wonder where such a person would find a tailor. He had a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Charmed,” he said, with a little nod that only emphasized the size and mass of his head. And after she had nodded back, he released her hand, no worse for wear, and stretched it out toward Beled. “Lieutenant Tomov? Pleasure to meet you. What’s it going to be? Punch in the face? Handshake? Or a big warm hug?” He swung his hand back while extending the other arm, displaying a wingspan much greater than his height, as though offering to embrace Beled across the table. This, at least, broke the tension enough that Beled finally collected himself into a less minatory posture, saluted, and extended his hand in return. The Teklan’s hand gripped the Neoander’s just a few centimeters away from Kath Two’s face. She could hear the knuckles cracking as they tested each other’s strength. Standing on the far side of this spectacle was Ty, watching it with an expression that was not all that easy to read, given that the damaged side of his face was toward her. But she thought she detected a certain level of wry amusement, perhaps a little dampened by awe.