Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

“An electromagnetic communications device—” Sonar began, but Ty cut her off.

  “The thingamajibber you use to talk to Denali. I’m going to tell them we have a second chance.”

  “A second chance to do what?”

  “To make friends with the natives of this planet.”

  THEY CRESTED A PASS IN THE COASTAL RANGE THE FOLLOWING DAY and began making their way down toward the sea. When the going became easy enough to allow for something like normal conversation, Ty asked, “How many Cycs are there in total?”

  Sonar’s little head snapped around, like a bird’s, to regard him curiously. She would never look you directly in the eye, but she would lurk in your peripheral vision and sneak peeks all day long.

  “I know,” Ty said. “As many as there are volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But I don’t know what that number is, because we no longer have copies of it lying around.”

  “Well, there are the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One,” Sonar said. “The Ten are the Micropædia. Many short articles. The Nineteen are the Macropædia: longer, more in-depth articles. The One is the Propædia, the Outline.”

  “Which category do you belong to?”

  Einstein, walking ahead of them down the slope, wheeled around. “She already told us she was volume seventeen!” Normally good-natured, he was being unusually chippy all of a sudden. He returned his attention to the rocky terrain in front of him, displaying a flushed neck beneath his ponytail.

  “Excuse me,” Ty said. Then, turning back to the Cyc, he asked, “Is that just luck of the draw? Or—”

  “No!”

  Of course not.

  “The older Cycs started me on smaller books, to evaluate me.”

  “When? At what age did they start you?”

  “When it was decided that I was not a breeder.”

  Einstein turned around again, this time so suddenly that he lost his footing and fell on his ass. The reaction was so outsized that Ty had to look away from it lest he break out laughing. But this brought Langobard into his line of sight, and the Neoander was in similar trouble. The two men had to stop walking and turn their backs on each other for a few moments just to keep their composure.

  “If I can just anticipate some questions that I believe may be uppermost in young Einstein’s mind,” Langobard said, “would it be untoward of me to inquire what, precisely, makes you ‘not a breeder’?”

  The Cyc shrugged, staring down the mountain toward the Pacific Ocean as if she had not given the topic very much thought recently. “I know not. Of mean stature? Nothing special to behold? On the spectrum?”

  “For context,” Ty asked, “how many young women out of ten are designated as breeders?”

  “Four, maybe?”

  “So being a nonbreeder is more common than being a breeder,” Ty said, for Einstein’s benefit.

  “Of course, now that we have come out of the Hole, and we have more space, more people are breeding,” Sonar said. “I speak of how it was ten years ago.”

  She had earlier told them that she was sixteen. “Okay. So they think they know enough about you at the age of six to make that determination. They start you out on easier books. Then what?”

  “If you can read at all, you just start reading the whole Cyc.”

  “And so that’s why you know stuff about radio, and epicanthic folds, and other topics not in volume seventeen.”

  “Yes. You have to read the whole thing. By ten, they decide whether you are Micropædia or Macropædia quality.”

  “Is one of those more prestigious than the other?”

  “Of course!” Sonar exclaimed, without bothering to say which was which.

  “I’ll bet the Micropædia is just like memorizing a bunch of trivia,” Einstein essayed. Somewhat dangerously, in case he guessed wrong. But love had made him impetuous.

  “Yes, you have to be able to hold more in your head to be one of the Nineteen,” Sonar said, favoring Einstein with a warm gaze.

  “So, did you have to kill the previous Sonar Taxlaw in single combat or something?” Ty asked, and immediately thought better of it, since in general Diggers did not seem to have a well-developed sense of humor. Einstein threw him a mean look.

  “No, not in this case,” the Cyc said politely, leaving open the question of in what cases the Diggers did actually employ such methods. “My mentor was Ceylon Congreve.”

  “Now, that is a lovely and distinguished name!” Langobard exclaimed. “Volume three?”

  “Four,” she said, with a note of surprise in her voice, as if not quite able to believe that someone could not know this.

  “Do the original paper copies still exist?” Ty asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Sonar said, “but we handle them only on ceremonial occasions. We work with handwritten copies.”

  “Rufus must have squirreled away a lot of paper.”

  “Tons of it,” said the Cyc. “Acid-free, one hundred percent cotton.”

  During their nighttime escape over the mountains, they’d had little time for such conversations, and so their knowledge of Digger culture was still spotty. Some reasonable guesses could be made simply from the known history of the Hard Rain. The phase known as the Cooling Off had not begun until some thirty-nine hundred years after Zero, when the human races’ efforts to police the lunar rubble belt had finally paid off with a sharp falloff in the number of bolides striking the surface. Until then, the Diggers had been obliged to maintain a small, steady population in the space that Rufus had provided. Expansion of the Hole had been limited by the fact that it was a sealed system, with no place to put spoil—the quantities of loose material created by digging. As anyone knew who had ever dug a hole in the ground with a shovel, the size of the dirt pile—the spoil—was always larger than the volume of the hole. They’d been able to dump some spoil down a deep and otherwise useless shaft, but once this had been filled, they’d been unable to expand their living space for as long as the Hard Rain had made a direct connection to the outside too dangerous to be contemplated. So during that phase—well over three thousand years—they had devoted all of their energies to maintaining a community of several hundred people. Hence the rigid controls on breeding. Thanks to their Cycs, they knew everything about contraception, but they had no ability to manufacture things like condoms and pills, so that lore was mostly useless. The limitations on breeding were enforced by moral strictures, by segregation of the sexes, and by surgical sterilization. This, like all of their surgery, was performed without chemical anesthesia once they’d run out of drugs, which occurred fairly soon after Zero. Apparently they had gotten rather good at acupuncture and at biting down on things.

  The reduction in the intensity of the Hard Rain would have been obvious to them on one level, since they could hear the impacts through the walls of the Hole. On another level it was easy to miss, since even dramatic changes spanned generations. But they had kept meticulous records of the frequency and intensity of strikes and so they recognized the downward trend in the late Fourth Millennium. When it was adjudged safe, they drilled an adit—a horizontal tunnel—out the side of the mountain until it broke out of a slope that they guessed was steep enough to have shed ejecta, preventing the buildup of rocky debris that now covered most of Earth’s surface to a considerable depth. That much had been true, but the debris at the base of the mountain had piled higher than they had expected—almost high enough to block the opening of their adit. Anyway, it had worked well enough that they had been able to push spoil out of it and thus begin expanding the Hole. The atmosphere was still far from breathable, so they’d been obliged to keep it sealed when they were not actively dumping stuff out of it, to prevent fumes from seeping in and poisoning the atmospheric system that they had looked after so meticulously for nearly four thousand years. This system, it seemed, was similar in principle to those used on space habitats. Carbon dioxide was removed by a combination of chemical scrubbers and green plants. Both of these required energy: the scrubber chemical had to be heated
to drive off the CO2 it had absorbed, and the plants required light. Since they were cut off from the sun, they got their energy geothermally, using works that Rufus and the others of his generation had sunk deep into the roots of the mountain. The maintenance of this system had been the full-time occupation of everyone in the Hole for the entire time they’d been down there. When they had neared the end of their stock of light-emitting diodes they had revived the art of making lightbulbs, consulting the Cyc for particulars, blowing artisanal glass envelopes and winding the filaments by hand. Likewise with many other things they had found themselves in need of.

  Ty, not really an expert on technology, made little headway in trying to imagine the particulars. Someone of a more technical bent might have devoted weeks to debriefing Sonar Taxlaw and extracting every last detail about how they had managed to get along with just the stuff available to them underground. More important for present purposes was to get a general understanding of the Diggers’ culture, and why they behaved as they did.

  The requirement for a steel-spined authoritarian culture was obvious. Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable. Had these people been living in, for example, the agricultural paradise of the Nile Delta, they might have been able to get away with some mazy religious dogma as the basis for that system. But instead they had been trapped within a large machine that would kill them all if allowed to go on the fritz, and so they had been obliged to develop a culture in which engineering became their dukh. Their finite supply of tungsten, stockpiled by wise Rufus, had to be stretched and husbanded so that their descendants thousands of years in the future would be able to manufacture lightbulbs to grow plants to make food and air. And so on and so forth in every particular of how these people lived their daily lives. Thirty people—the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One—were, at any given time, Cycs. Another thirty were toiling as their apprentices. Others played specific roles such as breeder mom, glassblower, acupuncturist, filament winder, potato nurturer, pump fixer. Structurally, culturally, it was very like a Bronze Age theocracy, but without any trace of God or the supernatural.

  To that point it was not radically different from the subcultures of many First and Second Millennium space habitats, which—at least for a little while—gave Ty the idea that he could get a quick handle on Digger culture. But that fantasy soon evaporated. Those early Spacers had been living in cramped conditions, yes, and they had been just as dependent upon technology as the Diggers in their Hole. So of course there were some common features in the two cultures. But Spacers had always been able to look outside to see what the situation was, and—at least after a couple of thousand years of hunkering down in especially large rocks—to venture forth and do something about it. Even in their most desperate hours they had always expected to reinherit the Earth. The Diggers’ only way of knowing their situation and their fate was to listen to loud noises, tally them on acid-free, 100 percent cotton paper, and, every few years, compare the tally with a similar one made by some ancestor a couple of hundred years previously. For the first four thousand years, hope of a better future must have been seen as sheer folly. Worse than that, as an active betrayal of Digger principles, since people with hopes were apt to become profligate in spending resources and taking risks.

  Which all made for a picture of those first four millennia that was as clear as it was bleak. But change would come hard to a society like that one. What was most interesting to Ty was what had begun to go on within that society when they’d punched the spoil adit to the surface and begun to expand their underground domain. Their day-to-day lives would not have changed much, but they’d have had at least the abstract possibility that their civilization might expand, that more people might be able to breed.

  All of that had occurred more than a thousand years ago. The Hole had grown to the point where it could support a population of two thousand; then, around 4700 when the atmosphere had become breathable, they’d been able to take it up to ten thousand. All still beneath the surface, however, since there’d been little for them above it.

  At some point the Committee—which was what they called their ruling council—must have become aware that vast numbers of humans were living in space and actively prosecuting the TerReForm. They could simply have walked out onto the surface and sent out some kind of an SOS at that point. Instead they had made a positive decision to conceal themselves, to hide their spoil dumps, to shun communication with the Spacers. The central question, then, was why they had made such a choice. Sonar Taxlaw wasn’t much help in explaining it. When Ty or the others asked questions, she offered nonresponsive answers that told of a subterranean culture in which such things were never spoken of.

  It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent.

  BETWEEN EINSTEIN’S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRAIN, GEOGRAPHICAL folklore stored in the Cyc’s encyclopedic mind, and Beled’s digital map, they knew generally where to go at any particular moment. What made it difficult was negotiating obstacles in the terrain and steering clear of large animals. The latter group might, in theory, include Red military patrols, but they had no reason to believe that they were being pursued yet. Why would Red bother? Marching some Blue prisoners back in chains might score them some points with their new Digger friends, but having chased them off into the darkness was nearly as effective. Perhaps more so given the importance to the Diggers of the meme of Spacers as cowards.

  Ty considered explaining to the Cyc that if her group of Diggers had turned up on the west side of 166 Thirty making the same preposterous territorial claims, Red, instead of approaching them with music and nuggets of space iron, would simply have vaporized them. But burdening the poor girl with that awareness wasn’t going to help.

  They holed up in a pocket of shelter beneath a leaf of rock about the size of a football field that had been driven like a blade into the southern slope of a coastal mountain. There they consumed a day recovering from their exertions and waiting out a snowstorm, while communicating in short bursts with a transmitter on the Denali habitat. Blue military dropped a pod through the storm. Kath awakened long enough to announce that it had landed just down the slope from them. Bard stomped out there, his huge feet acting like snowshoes, and returned a quarter of an hour later dragging it behind him. He then stood for a few minutes contemplating Kath. Her sickness had abated, but she woke up now only to eat, eliminate, or make delphic pronouncements.

  The pod contained food, fuel, ammunition, robots, and equipment for snow travel that stood them in good stead during the next day, as they descended out of the mountains toward the southern coast. Much of this happened under cover of the heavy clouds that almost always blanketed this part of the world, and so if anyone was watching them, it had to be directly—by actually following them around—or with flying robots. But now they had flying robots of their own that could alert them to the presence of both. Since those remained quiet, they felt reasonably certain that they were not being tracked, except by large canids who tended to make their presence obvious by howling a lot. Because of them, the next night was a restless one, and led to an early departure and a final day of hiking that rapidly developed into a pell-mell descent out of the Alpine zone and toward the Pacific.

  During their lunch break, they spied a trio of single-person gliders—inflatables like the one Kath Two had taken on her Survey mission—dipping and darting along the coast from the general direction of Qayaq. As these carried Blue markings and were transmitting Blue codes, Beled felt comfortable divulging their position. Minutes later the gliders had touched down in an expanse of heather a few hundred meters bel
ow them. Their occupants climbed out, eviscerated their cargo holds, and began to deflate their gliders so that they could be rolled up. Most of that work ended up being done by a Teklan, shorter and more lithe than Beled. This left the other two new arrivals free to approach. One of them was a Camite whose gait and posture were more expressive of male than of female characteristics, and so Ty made a mental note to employ male pronouns until and unless the Camite requested otherwise. He wore one of the utilitarian coveralls employed by Survey personnel, with red cross patches on the chest and shoulder, marking him as a medic. The other was a middle-aged Ivyn dressed in civilian clothes marginally more posh than might be expected in the wilderness of Beringia, but suited to the conditions.

  Regarding them from a more sheltered position overlooking the meadow, Ty had mixed feelings. Any assistance was, of course, welcome. He had known better than to expect a thunderous show of force. Blue’s high political councils, having been caught badly off guard, and having lost the first round to their Red counterparts, would still be assessing the situation and thinking about their options. For public consumption, they were probably characterizing the Seven as a plain vanilla Survey team that had fallen victim to an ambush. They didn’t want to undercut that story now by sending in an undeniably military force.

  The name printed on the Camite’s uniform was Hope, which probably meant that, like many Camites, he only used one name. Bent under a medical pack, he went directly to Kath. Beled and Bard were descending to the meadow to help the Teklan pack up the gliders.

  The Ivyn singled out Ty from a distance and approached him. The family name on his uniform was Esa and he introduced himself as Arjun. The former was an acronym frequently seen in the background of shots in the Epic, standing for “European Space Agency.” It had become a common name. Ty considered asking Arjun flat out who he was and what he did for a living that caused him to show up in circumstances like these. But he knew it would get him nowhere. The man would have some bland answer cued up. He was probably some kind of high-powered intelligence analyst with five advanced degrees.