THE MECHANISM THAT ARIANE HAD SUMMONED WAS CALLED A Thor. It consisted of a big rock—the head of a god-sized maul—with a very long and lightweight “handle” capable of reaching all the way to the surface even while the “head” was just grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The whole thing spun like a thrown hammer, which was to say that the long handle flailed in a large circle around the head.
At the end of the handle was the capture booth, large enough to accommodate three people if they stood close together. During descent and ascent it was enclosed within an outer shell designed to survive the rigors of passage through the atmosphere. The handle would stride down out of space in the same general style as the hanger bolo that Kath Two and Beled had recently used, except that instead of pausing in the upper atmosphere to collect aircraft, this one would spear all the way down to the surface and grab whatever happened to be standing in the target zone—which it would paint beforehand with lasers so that the passengers would know where to stand. The head of the hammer would subsequently pivot forward into the atmosphere, catch air, and slow down, levering the handle sharply upward and catapulting the payload into a much higher orbit. The head would detach itself and fall downrange as a meteorite. This, of course, made it a single-use device, used only in emergencies, and even then when the need was so extreme that it was considered worth the risk of dropping a bolide on some basically random spot downrange.
So it could be assumed that a fresh crater now decorated the interior of North America somewhere to the east of here, and that Ariane and her captive were en route to a safe haven in the Red segment of the ring. What awaited them there could only be guessed at, but for Ariane it was probably going to be a substantial reward, a medal, and a promotion to some high rank in Red’s military intelligence branch.
Doc never spoke another coherent word. Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.
The old Digger looked better after a few hours, aside from some symptoms indicative of a concussion. The younger one got his leg splinted. Both were in a murderous frame of mind toward the three remaining captives. But it seemed that the majority of the Diggers were taken aback by what had happened, and were advocating a more level-headed approach to future relations between their tribe and the sort of civilization that could produce things like Ariane’s Thor and Beled’s and Langobard’s weaponized ambot swarms.
As a way of demonstrating their own technological prowess, or perhaps simply to blow off steam, the Diggers detonated a lump of some kind of home-brewed explosive in the open space between the glider and the fresh graves. Evidently this was meant as a warning for Bard and Beled, who were presumed to be watching from nearby cover.
Ty, Einstein, and Kath Two were fitted with hinged collars of bent steel. When these were closed around the neck, loops in the free ends came into alignment so that a chain could be run through them, locking them shut while stringing all the captives together. At one end, the chain was terminated by an ancient padlock that was too large to pass through the loops on Kath Two’s collar. The other end was then affixed, by means of a bolt, to a large wooden stake that an especially burly Digger had pounded into the ground with a stone-headed maul that looked like a miniature Thor.
Just uphill of this, and out of the prisoners’ reach, other Diggers constructed a little cairn. They topped it with another lump of explosive. They attached wires to the lump for detonation and ran them down to the main Digger camp, which was under the wings of the glider some fifty meters away.
“What just happened?!” Einstein wanted to know, as soon as the Diggers had left them alone. “I mean, that was obviously a Thor. I’ve heard of them. But . . .” and he threw his hands up in the air.
“Ariane is a mole,” Ty said. Then he corrected himself: “Was a mole. Now she’s probably a hero. A Red hero.”
“Red sent the Thor down to, what do you call it, extract her.”
“Yeah. Her and, more to the point, a living, breathing biological sample.”
Kath Two, at one end of the string, climbed into a sleeping bag and fell asleep. Ty did not expect her to wake up for a long time. He and Einstein moved down-chain as far as they could, to leave her in peace, and squatted on their haunches. The Diggers had left them firewood and kindling. Without discussion, they began laying a fire. It became clear that Einstein had done it before, and so Ty just let him do it. The young Ivyn had very particular ideas about fires.
“Where did you learn how to fight like that?” Einstein asked him. “Are you part Teklan or something?”
“Fighting isn’t about knowing how,” Ty said. “It’s about deciding to.”
“Well, I was frozen, man.”
“Look, these are times when the decisions that our Eves made five thousand years ago control our actions to a degree that renders us basically helpless. You were meant to stand back and observe and analyze.”
“And you were made to be a hero,” Einstein said.
“A hero would have saved Memmie.”
“But no one could have seen that coming! The way that woman just went crazy on her . . .”
“We’ll be asking ourselves that for a long time.” Ty sighed and looked over to the encampment where the Diggers were going about life as if nothing had happened. Some of them were roasting kebabs that they had cut from the carcass of a big herbivore killed down in the woods. There were a lot of kids under ten years old, but few teenagers. Half of the women looked pregnant. “Play your role, Einstein. You’re the Ivyn in our group now that Doc’s gone. What do you see?”
Einstein seemed reluctant to speak, so Ty prompted him: “I see a population explosion.”
Einstein snapped into focus and nodded his head.
“You’ve never heard of these people,” Ty went on, “even though your RIZ is just on the other side of these mountains and your people patrol up here all the time.”
“Rufus MacQuarie’s mine was far to the north,” Einstein offered. “These people must have just come out into the open recently.”
“Look for the oldest child down there and that probably tells you the date.”
“But the atmosphere’s been breathable for three hundred years! Why would they wait until now?”
Ty nodded toward the center of the Digger camp: the big bed of coals, the meat roasting over it.
“Food?” Einstein said.
“Food and fuel,” Ty confirmed. “They’ve been down in their hole living on God only knows what—cave tofu or something—since the beginning of the Hard Rain. Every so often maybe they would sample the air outside. When it became breathable they probably went out and had a look around. But it was still a wasteland, not capable of supporting life. It’s only in the last few years that TerReForm has seeded that part of Beringia with animals big enough to be worth the effort expended in hunting them. That was the starting gun—the signal for them to come out.”
“And to begin having kids as fast as they could, apparently.”
“Apparently. Now, Einstein, what does that tell you about gender roles?”
“Well, to begin with, they don’t have an Eve, they have an Adam—Rufus—so it could easily be more pat—patree—”
“Patriarchal.”
“Thanks. And then if all the women are expected to make lots of babies—”
“That tells you something,” Ty said. “Now, here’s the big question that is kind of staring us in the face. You’re a Digger, okay? You’re not stupid. All you have to do is pop your head out of your cave on a clear night and look into the southern sky and you can see the habitat ring. And over time you can see the Eye moving back and forth across it and you can see new habitats lighting up as they are built. You can see bolos coming in low across the sky and TerReForm aircraft flying right overhead and showers of ONANs coming down straight from the ring. And you’re no ignorant s
avage. Your folk have maintained a reasonably advanced engineering culture. Those compound bows. That lump of explosive. So you wouldn’t have interpreted all of that as gods or angels or any of that.”
“They’ve known,” Einstein said. “From the first—”
“For centuries,” Ty said, nodding. “As long as they could breathe outside.”
“For that long, they have known that billions of humans were living in the sky,” Einstein said. “But they didn’t make any attempt to signal.”
“More than that. They hid from us!” Ty said. “Efforts were made, you know, to find the MacQuarie mine several decades ago. These people must have made some kind of decision that they didn’t want to be found.”
“Why would they do that?”
“That’s what I am asking. Fear? Anger?”
“The old guy really hates us. ‘Cowards who ran away’ is what he considers us.”
“It’s what he called us,” Ty allowed. “And he called us that really loudly. He wasn’t really talking to us, I think.”
Einstein nodded. “I see what you mean. He was talking to the people behind him.”
“If I’m squatting in my mine shaft eating cave tofu when I know perfectly well that there are lots of humans up in geosync living in better conditions, then I need some kind of powerful incentive to stay in my cave. To conceal my presence.”
“Some kind of dukh or I dee—”
“Ideology,” Ty said with a nod. “I should have seen all this. God damn me for not seeing it a few minutes quicker.”
“Seeing what?”
“That only a mind virus, a shared hallucination, could explain the suddenness of their appearance aboveground.”
“Doc didn’t see it either,” Einstein said. He was only trying to make Ty feel better, but then he looked slightly appalled at himself for having spoken ill of his dead kinsman.
“No,” Ty said, “he sure didn’t. Now, what have we learned about how these people think?”
“They have, what do you call it, a chip on the shoulder.”
Ty nodded. “It was supremely important to the leaders that they put on a show of dominance under the gaze of their flock. Which they did. Then Doc did the thing with the Srap Tasmaner. A gesture of reconciliation but also a way of shaming them for being such complete assholes. Maybe not a bad move when dealing with people who have been acculturated to be more reasonable, to get along with each other.”
“People like us. People who have had to coexist in habitats forever.”
“But to them it was a challenge to their authority in front of their flock and so they had to make an extreme reaction. To dehumanize us.”
“We are the aliens,” Einstein said.
“Yes,” Ty said. “We are the bug-eyed monsters now.”
“And the longer Bard and Beled are out lurking in the darkness—”
“The easier it gets for them to paint us as such,” Ty said. “And that’s why they have us isolated. The leaders don’t want us talking to their flock—letting them see we’re only human.”
“But hang on a sec,” Einstein said. “That means that the leaders must know we are not really bug-eyed monsters.”
Ty had no response. Certain aspects of the situation were not really adding up. He considered it as they got the fire going and let themselves be hypnotized by the flames.
After the beginning of the Hard Rain, no fire—in the sense of open burning of solid, carbon-rich fuel—had been constructed by humans—by Spacers, anyway—for 1,735 years. It had taken that long to build a habitat large enough to grow trees, with enough atmosphere to handle the oxygen demand of a fire and to absorb the resulting smoke. Ancient digitized Boy Scout manuals had been consulted. It had worked the first time. The four pyro-pioneers responsible—all Dinans—had stood around it, staring into the flames as Ty was doing now, and probably thinking about all that had happened since the last time humans had smelled woodsmoke.
He and Einstein had not even started in on the topic of Ariane.
She was the worst nightmare of any Julian trying to live an honest life in Blue: someone ostensibly Blue who turns out to be a Red mole. How long had she been insinuating herself into intelligence, working her way up the ranks? Or had she only just decided to switch sides? In either case, she was up in the Red part of the ring now with the woman she had abducted. What must the Diggers make of that? Did they even know that there were two kinds of Spacers?
And what was Red intelligence learning from that woman? Had Ty not watched her murder Remembrance in cold blood, he’d have felt sorry for her.
THREE PERSONS APPROACHED FROM THE MAIN DIGGER CAMP UNDER the glider’s wings: a warrior with a steel-headed lance; a middle-aged, prematurely grizzled man with a grim look about him; and another whom Ty took for a boy until they drew closer and he saw that it was a short-haired teenaged girl, even more diminutive than was typical among these people. She carried herself oddly, keeping her head tilted down and turned to one side, looking at the world through the corner of her eye, though this might have been necessitated by the fact that she was following close behind the grizzled man and needed to peek around his rib cage in order to see where she was going. Scampering over obstructions that he took in stride, she seemed to take two steps for his every one. She looked like nothing so much as a squirrel trying to keep pace with a dog.
As they drew within speaking range the graybeard stopped the spearman with a nod, then took another pace forward. The girl faltered. Noting this, the graybeard made a gesture that encouraged her to venture a bit closer. She cringed up against his backside and peered out through his armpit.
“I am Donno,” announced the graybeard. “To me you may speak, but no others save the Psych here.” Or at least that is what Ty thought he heard.
“I am Tyuratam Lake,” Ty said. “And this is Einstein. The woman there is Kath Two; she is unlikely to join the conversation.”
“Tyuratam,” said the Psych in a husky voice, “a city in Central Asia, close to the Soviet space launch facility of Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Einstein, a theoretical physicist of the early twentieth century, before Zero.”
Donno heard the Psych out but did not look at her or make any sign of recognition. His attention was fixed on Ty. The words of the Psych were just a buzzing in his ear. “When Kath Two awakens, you will tell her the rule I have just proclaimed,” Donno said, “and see to it that she abides by it.”
“I will tell her the rule,” Ty said, “and she will keep her own counsel as to abiding by it. Over her I wield no authority. It is not how our society is organized.”
Donno looked as though he didn’t believe a word of what Ty had just said. “You are Dinan.”
So, they knew about the Seven Eves. How had they come by that knowledge? Abducting stragglers, interrogating them? Or had they been in covert contact with some Spacer?
“Yes,” Ty said.
“You are the leader of the group.”
Ty said nothing. It seemed unlikely to work for him to explain that it was complicated.
“What did you do with Marge?” Donno asked.
“Who is Marge?”
“The woman who was taken up by the thing that reached down out of space.”
Ty was tempted to make the irritable point that Donno had just answered his own question. Instead he just stared back, wondering where to begin.
“The other mutant—a Julian?”
“Yes.”
“She attacked you with your own weapon. You were surprised.”
“Indeed I was, Donno.”
“She betrayed you?”
“Yes.”
“Is she of the western people?”
To Donno, that would suggest the Spacers living in the part of Beringia west of 166 Thirty.
“Red is what we call them.”
Donno nodded as if he’d heard it before. “You are Blue, then.”
“Yes, we are Blue. We avoid using Thors.”
“Thor: a Germanic deity of imme
nse strength, associated with lightning, armed with a hammer,” the Psych said.
“Is your name short for Encyclopedia?” Einstein asked her.
Donno threw Einstein a killing look. Einstein was oblivious to it; he was looking at the girl with fascination and then some.
“Yes,” she answered before Donno could stay her by raising his hand. She dodged away as if expecting to be cuffed, then smiled back at Einstein.
Ty had just been rendered almost dizzy by a clear and sharp image from the Epic: a photograph that Rufus had emailed to Dinah shortly before the White Sky, depicting the library that he and his friends had assembled in their underground fastness. Proudly displayed in its center was a row of identically bound volumes called the Encyclopædia Britannica.
This girl—the Cyc, not the Psych—had read it. She had physically handled those old books. Or perhaps handwritten copies of them.
“He is Ivyn,” Donno said, nodding at Einstein. It wasn’t a question. Then, his initial flash of anger having cooled, he took a more careful look at the kid from the RIZ.
“His eyelids look that way because of epicanthic folds,” said the Cyc, who had been conducting an unnecessarily close inspection of the Ivyn’s face.
“Shut up,” Donno told her. Then he turned his attention back to Ty. “The Red Julian—”
“Ariane,” Ty said.
“She was a spy within your ranks?”
“So it would seem.”
“Interesting. Rufus’s library has some novels about such things, in the decades before Zero, but I never thought I would lay eyes on a real mole.”
It was an unusually long-winded and revealing statement from Donno, and seemed to invite a witticism about moles and living underground, but Ty thought better of following up in that vein.
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