Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

  “I never thought I would lay eyes on someone like you,” he tried.

  “All these thousands of years, you’ve thought we were dead!” Donno said. “Well, you thought wrong.”

  “Before everything went to hell down there,” Ty said, “the old man—”

  “Pop Loyd.”

  “Pop Loyd stated that we were not welcome here.”

  “He spoke truthfully,” Donno said.

  “I don’t mean to be stupid,” Ty said, “but this is important and so I am sure you will agree with me that it is something I need to understand very clearly. Your group—do you have a name for it?”

  “The human race,” Donno said.

  “Very well then, the human race is laying claim to this territory and doesn’t wish people like us—descendants of the Seven Eves—to be here at all.”

  “Not without our remit. That is correct.”

  “What is the territory you are laying exclusive claim to?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This valley? This mountain range? All of Beringia?”

  “The entire land surface of the planet Earth,” Donno said, shaking his head and uttering the words very clearly and slowly. “Your people abandoned it. It’s ours.”

  That was a bit of a conversation stopper, at least where Ty was concerned. Einstein, however, blurted out the inevitable adolescent-Ivyn question: “What about the oceans?”

  “You will have to take that up with the Pingers,” Donno said.

  “Pingers?”

  Donno looked at Einstein as if he were some kind of imbecile.

  “The sea people,” said the Cyc. “They live—” but Donno raised his hand again and she went silent.

  So did everyone else. Which was how Donno seemed to prefer it. He now had a few moments’ leisure to look about. He nodded toward Kath Two. “Is she sick?”

  “No,” Ty said. “Her kind sometimes sleep for long periods.”

  “Moiran, judging from her coloration?”

  Ty was dying to know how the Diggers had come by their knowledge, rudimentary as it was, of the Spacers. But this was no time to ask. “Yes,” he said.

  Donno was now literally counting on his fingers. He got as far as five. “The two fighters?”

  Ty nodded. “The big one is Teklan.”

  “And the ape-man?”

  “A subrace of the Aïdans, called a Neoander.”

  Donno nodded. “We have seen his like in the west.” He extended two more fingers. “So in your group was one of each race—and?” He nodded at Einstein. “A spare Ivyn, for when the old one died?”

  “A local guide,” Ty corrected him. “We were a Seven, yes. That is a grouping that we create on special occasions, when we need a formal delegation.” What he said next was guesswork, but he needn’t worry about being contradicted at this point. “The old Ivyn who is now dead—Doc, we called him—suspected that you were down here. He came down to investigate, and he did so as part of a Seven. Befitting its importance.”

  This seemed to throw Donno off balance. Clearly he was not the sort of man who much cared what other people thought. But it had now entered his mind for the first time that the events of some hours ago could be seen in another light: one that was hardly flattering to the Diggers. He could see this but he was hardly receptive to it. “No doubt you see us as a bunch of savages. You do not even view your incursion on our lands as the aggressive act that it was. Coming here with your armed warriors, your glider, your Thor.”

  “Donno, how many Spacers do you imagine are on the surface of Earth right now?”

  “We are not ignorant. We know they are all over what you call Beringia.”

  “They are all over the world,” Ty said.

  “This, if it is true, does not change our position,” Donno said.

  “Your positions are strong and firmly stated,” Ty said, after a longish interval during which he simply could not think of anything to say. “May I ask then why it is you have come here to parley with me?”

  “Your warriors are taking ours,” Donno complained.

  “As one who knows something of warriors,” Ty said, “you can well imagine how this all looks to them.” He closed his hand around the chain and gave it a little shake.

  Again, it was the wrong thing to say. The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people. Ty needed to get that fact through his head.

  “I understand that we are in a state of war,” Donno said, “and that there are prisoners of war on both sides.”

  “How would you like to proceed, then?”

  “Nonviolently,” Donno said, “which is more than I can say of some of the others.” He nodded across to the other campfire.

  “I await your proposal, then,” Ty said.

  “We await yours,” Donno spat back, and turned to stalk away so abruptly that the Cyc had to scamper out of his path. The big galoot with the spear likewise turned to go. The Cyc was a little slower to disengage, however. She stayed where she was, maintaining visual lock on Einstein’s epicanthic folds.

  “What’s your name?” Einstein asked her.

  “Sonar Taxlaw!” shouted Donno. “Come!”

  “Now you know it,” she said. She turned away with some reluctance and scurried down toward the glider. But even after she had rejoined her kin around their campfire, they could see her face, a pale moon aimed in their direction.

  “Where to start?” Ty asked.

  He was really talking to himself. But it seemed to jar Einstein out of a reverie. Einstein sighed and somehow pulled himself together. “‘We have seen his like in the west.’ Donno said that. About Bard.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I guess the Diggers must have sent some scouts out across 166 Thirty. They would not have been aware that they were crossing a border. See, it is nothing more than an imaginary line.”

  Ty couldn’t help laughing. “Einstein, if we ever get out of this, I’m going to send you to charm school.”

  “Huh?”

  “Etiquette classes for Ivyns. How to talk to people of other races.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. I interrupted you. Go ahead.”

  “Those scouts must then have seen some Red border troops. Neoanders.”

  “And if you were in their moccasins, what would you think when you first laid eyes on a Neoander?”

  “Bug-eyed, no. Monster, yes.”

  Ty nodded. “With due respect for Bard and his kin, it would have been better if the first Spacers they encountered had been Dinans.”

  “What of the Neoanders?” Einstein asked.

  It took Ty a moment to follow. “Hmm. If they saw the Diggers while the Diggers were seeing them, they’d have reported it.”

  “Red knew about the Diggers. Maybe a long time ago.”

  “Knew, or at least suspected,” Ty agreed. He could feel parts of his brain relaxing as the mystery dissolved. “They put their intelligence assets to work on it. Ariane started sniffing around for clues. Used her connections to Survey for all they were worth. Pulled strings to get assigned to the Seven. And brought home the prize.”

  “If you want to think of Marge as a prize,” Einstein responded. Searching the boy’s face in firelight, Ty couldn’t tell whether this was deadpan humor or just more social cluelessness. It didn’t matter though.

  “The Pingers!” Einstein called out, as if it were obviously the next topic.

  “Sonar Taxlaw said they were sea people—before Donno shut her up,” Ty said.

  “Do you think he beats her?” Einstein asked.

  It was such an emotional can of worms that Ty considered it carefully before answering. Once in his life, before the war, he had fallen for a girl as quickly as Einstein had for Sonar Taxlaw. That one brief experience with stupid blind love sufficed to make it possible for him to acknowledge its reality and respect its power.

  “I think,” he said, “that their
society is comfortable with corporal punishment to the point where what keeps people like her in line is the fear of it. Not the reality. I think there’s nothing you can do about it and that if you do so much as look sideways at Donno he will kill you. But you can probably get away with small gestures of kindness toward the Cyc—assuming you’re ever allowed near her again. If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs. Now, let’s get back to the Pingers. Name mean anything to you?”

  “No. You?” said Einstein. Ty’s peroration had affected him terribly and reduced him to monosyllables.

  “I have a vague recollection,” Ty said, “but I would have to look it up to be sure.”

  “‘Sea people’ suggests boats,” Einstein said. “But—”

  “But we’d have noticed those.”

  “Maybe it’s a contingent of Diggers that hides in the thick forests along the coast,” Einstein tried.

  “Donno claimed all the land, though,” Ty said, “and said the Pingers had jurisdiction over the oceans.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “I don’t have one,” Ty said. He was lying.

  This ended the evening’s conversation. They rolled out sleeping bags and bedded down. Ty slept surprisingly well. He woke up once, to the howling of wild canids. The volcanic eruptions that had been making the Ashwall so thick seemed to have abated, for the stars had come out and the habitat ring was now visible in the southern sky, the Eye shining somewhere above the Galápagos. The canids had spied it too, apparently.

  He crawled out of his bag to take a leak, then checked on Kath Two. She was shivering, her forehead hot, but not to a point that he considered alarming.

  They had taken his timepiece away from him, but he guessed it was about three in the morning—twelve hours, perhaps, since the Thor had touched down. Ariane and Marge would be reaching a Red habitat around now. For according to the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics, transfer time to geosync was always about twelve hours. He wondered if they were going to the Red capital of Kyoto, or to some military habitat, or even to the Kulak, hovering above the Makassar Strait. The booth would be crowded with the two of them in it. He could only speculate on what Marge’s state of mind must have been. The confrontation over the Srap Tasmaner most people would have considered strange, and violent—the stuff of bizarre post-traumatic nightmares. She couldn’t have seen her gunpoint abduction by Ariane coming. But all that was perfectly normal compared to what had happened next. It was unlikely Marge had looked into the sky and seen the Thor approaching. All she would have known was that suddenly she was trapped in a small booth with an armed mutant and experiencing powerful gee forces for the first time in her life. A few minutes later she’d have known weightlessness. Probably not how Marge had seen her day shaping up when she had rolled out of the sack this morning. Had Ariane begun to interrogate her straightaway? Or played nice with her? Or perhaps just jabbed her with a dose of tranquilizer to tide her over for twelve hours?

  To Marge, the Thor just would have been unutterably bizarre. To Ty or any other Spacer, it was clearly an act of war—the most egregious violation of Treaty that he had heard of in twenty years. Though, come to think of it, he’d picked up enigmatic snatches of conversation, exchanged between persons of import in the Crow’s Nest, hinting at dark doings in the South Seas. Presumably there was a reason that they—whoever they were—had chosen Beled Tomov as the Teklan member of the Seven. Beled whose back was cratered with scars that could only have resulted from pitched battle with whip-cracking Neoanders. Likewise there was apparently more to Bard than met the eye.

  And Ty? He too was a veteran of ground combat with the scars to prove it. But there were many others who might have been chosen in his stead—ones better suited to leading an expedition and making first contact with what to the Spacers was an alien race from another planet. No, Ty had been chosen because of where he worked and who owned it. Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.

  With all of that in his mind he somehow slipped back into sleep and did not awaken until the sun was up. The spear carrier came within range and tossed them three ration packets from the glider’s stores. Einstein woke up and consumed his as only a teenaged boy was capable of doing. Ty ate at a more measured rate while keeping an eye on Kath Two. She had awakened long enough to remove the lid from her meal and pick at some of the blander offerings. But this led directly to vomiting, dry heaves, and a return to sleep.

  They passed the day in a desultory long-range staredown with the Diggers, who grew fewer and more aggrieved as the hours wore on.

  “Do you have a theory yet?” Einstein asked him as they were consuming the midday ration-toss.

  “About what?”

  “The Pingers.”

  Ty, having naught else to do, let his mouth run. “The girl’s name. Sonar. I can think of a weird coincidence related to that.”

  “Yes?” Einstein was all ears for anything related to Sonar Taxlaw.

  “It’s a technology they used before Zero. Undersea radar based on sound waves. They would send out pulses of sound called pings.”

  “You think the Pingers live under the sea?”

  “It all fits. Except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “Where the hell did they come from?”

  “Survivors? Like the Diggers?”

  “I don’t see how it’s possible,” Ty said.

  None of the scouts who went out looking for Bard and Beled returned. It was beginning to raise the question of who was really holding whom hostage. The ones who’d gone missing had friends, parents, and children who soon became desperate to know what had become of them and began asking awkward questions of those in command. Late in the afternoon, the Diggers were reinforced by a band of some twenty additional warriors coming up the valley, carrying dead animals on long sticks. The Diggers all held a parley around their cookfire. After they had eaten their fill, Donno came up alone, using a short spear as a walking stick or a wizard’s staff. The sun had gone down, so Ty heard him before he saw him.

  “We carry out an exchange,” Donno announced, “and you people get out of here without further casualties.”

  Is that what you call murdering people? Ty wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Very well. How would you like to proceed?”

  “Well,” Donno said, beginning to sputter a bit, “we need to be able to communicate with them! But everyone we send out disappears!”

  “Would you like me to do it?”

  “Then you’ll just run away.”

  “It is not necessary to talk face-to-face,” Ty said.

  “You have radios?” Donno asked suspiciously.

  Radio. A queer old word. The Diggers had searched them all, made sure they had no communication devices.

  “No,” Ty said. He leaned back and reached into an open ration pack, took out a piece of bread, tore off a bit of it. Dual sparks, all around, shone in the retinas of grizzled crows. They’d brought a dozen of them on the glider, in modular cages made for traveling. The Diggers had inadvertently released them, and they’d been hanging around the campsite ever since. They knew what Ty was doing and were already jockeying for position, smacking one another with their wings and squawking. Ty held out his hand with the piece of bread on it, and almost before he’d unfurled his fingers the morsel had been pecked out by a crow who was now regarding him intently. “Beled. Bard,” he said. The normal procedure was to display a picture of the recipient, but these birds had some ability to rec
ognize names and map them onto faces, and during spare moments on the journey, the Seven had been training them. “Our hosts wish to negotiate an exchange of prisoners.”

  Ty closed his hand and waved the bird away. It flapped off into the gloom screaming the message. He looked at Donno and enjoyed the consternation on the Digger’s face. “We should hear back soon,” he said.

  Donno turned without a word and strode back to the Digger campfire.

  Half an hour passed. It became fully dark. The canids began howling. Ty looked up into the sky expecting to see the habitat ring coming out. So did all the Diggers. But the ring was not the only bright thing in the sky tonight. There was also a meteor shower. A strangely orderly one. It seemed to be headed directly for them.

  Donno came running back, accompanied by more spearmen, all in an ugly mood. “Is this an attack force?!” he demanded. “Coming to rescue you?”

  “So,” Ty said, “you know what those are?”

  “The pods you use to fall out of orbit, when you want to land a person quickly. Now, answer my question.”

  “This is Blue territory,” Ty said, then held up a hand to suppress Donno’s inevitable protest. “According to Treaty. If Blue forces were coming to rescue us, they would simply fly over the mountains from Qayaq—much easier than dropping people forty thousand kilometers from the habitat ring.” He was willing himself to maintain eye contact with Donno and to keep his voice as relaxed and conversational as he could manage. The spearmen had fanned out to form a ring around their little camp, aiming the points of their weapons inward. Einstein really didn’t like that, and Ty could hear links of chain clicking through the loops on the younger man’s collar as he edged closer.

  “Who are they, then?” Donno demanded.

  “By process of elimination,” Ty said, “they are Red.”

  “But you said you consider this Blue territory!”

  “Yes. You might be interested to know,” Ty said, “that this makes it a breach of Treaty, and an act of war.”

  Donno stood gobsmacked. Ty was tempted to say Welcome to the modern world! but instead he added, “You might wish to keep this in mind, if you sign a treaty with them.”