“How’s this all playing up on the ring?” Ty asked him. “Do I even want to know?”
The mere question caused Arjun to break eye contact and gaze out over the sea.
“That bad?” Ty prompted him.
“You know the Aretaics,” Arjun said.
“They made it into grand opera, eh?”
“That’s as good a description as any. I am still coming to grips with it. Of course, we rarely see content from the Red side of the ring.”
“Just the propaganda,” Ty said.
“Yes, and when we see that, we have a laugh at the overwrought style, the baroque production values, while harboring an inner sense of anxiety that some people within Blue might—”
“Might actually believe their shit?”
“Exactly.”
“So Red did broadcast it.”
Arjun nodded. “Live, to the whole ring.”
“Sorry I missed the show. We bolted before the actual contact. It seemed like as good a time as any.”
“That was a fine tactic,” Arjun replied, “and saved you a great deal of annoyance.”
“How do you mean?”
Arjun turned to look directly at him. “The Diggers,” he said, “were as receptive to Red’s overtures as they were hostile to yours.”
Ty felt something in his chest. The awareness that he had failed, and that people knew it. It was not a feeling to which he was accustomed, and he did not like it. “So,” he said, “the Diggers ate it up?”
“They signed an alliance with Red on the spot. Red recognized their claim to the entire land surface of Earth and urged Blue to follow suit.”
“Just as a matter of basic human decency,” Ty said sourly.
“Of course. The saber-rattling began the next day . . .”
Esa Arjun broke off as he noticed, and focused on, Sonar Taxlaw, who was standing next to Einstein, who was telling her how the gliders worked. Ty had grown used to it; all those two did the whole time they were awake was explain things to each other. But it was new to Arjun.
“She’s the . . .” Arjun said, and trailed off. Ty tried to put himself in Arjun’s shoes: laying eyes on a rootstock human for the first time in his life, seeing someone who was clearly human and yet not of any identifiable human race, thinking about all that her ancestors had lived through.
“Yeah,” Ty said.
Arjun managed to snap out of his reverie and looked back at Ty. “The narrative being put out is that you abducted her.”
“Of course.”
Einstein said something funny. The Cyc laughed and leaned into him affectionately. His arm found its way around her waist, the hand sliding down to the hip.
“Are those two . . .” Arjun began.
“Fucking? Not yet. But only because we’ve been on the run.”
“The Diggers, from what intelligence we’ve been able to scrape together, believe in strict gender roles and . . .”
“Not fucking. Yeah. I’ll talk to Einstein. Tell him to not fuck her.”
“But you didn’t . . .”
“Abduct her? No, she just tagged along.”
Sensing doubt, or at least curiosity, from the Ivyn, Ty continued: “And more would do the same given the chance. The transition to surface life is putting their culture through a blender. Which is why their leaders are being so reactionary.”
Arjun nodded. “And how’s your Moiran?”
Ty sighed. “She saw Doc and Memmie die, and suffered a blunt- force trauma to her arm, and was forced to draw her kat, and to use it. As soon as it happened she went into what I’m guessing is a classic POTESH.” This was military jargon for post-traumatic epigenetic shift.
“That is confirmed,” said Hope, who seemed to have finished an initial scan of Kath’s vital signs. “Higher metabolism and hyperacute senses are observable. Her microbiome is a mess; I’m tuning it up with probiotic supplements that’ll be a better fit with her new phenotype. Suggested by the nausea are big hormone shifts. Possibly predictive of some future . . .”
“Testosterone poisoning?” Ty suggested, finishing Hope’s thought. Hope responded with a diffident nod of the head.
Ty turned his attention back to Arjun. “So three billion people just learned that the Diggers exist. How are they taking it?”
“Well, obviously it is a sensational bit of news,” Arjun said. “People are intensely curious.” He turned his head again to study Sonar Taxlaw. “As am I. I admit it.”
“Does the general public know how badly the first contact went wrong?” Ty asked.
“None of the identities of your Seven are public knowledge. Certainly no one has the faintest idea that Hu Noah had anything to do with it.”
“So Red hasn’t been trumpeting that.”
“It wouldn’t be to Red’s advantage, as I see it,” Arjun said. “Now that they are allied with the Diggers, they want to make the Diggers out to be sympathetic. Revealing that they killed Hu Noah and his nurse would hardly serve that end.”
“So we are just being made out to be some sort of anonymous thug squad. The Diggers chased us off with help from Red. We abducted a hostage as we were running away.”
Arjun looked him in the eye. “No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.”
“But Blue hasn’t put out a countervailing narrative yet either.”
“It isn’t Blue’s strong suit.” Arjun sighed. “Never has been, right? We’re technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn’t always line up with what people imagine they want.”
“Are you speaking of Blue in general?” Ty asked. “Or Rio in particular?” Using the name of the Ivyn central habitat as synecdoche for its culture.
“Both. A Blue mentality that places us at the top of the decision-making pyramid. There’s a reason why the very few Aïdans who have become prominent in Blue have been musicians, actors, artists.”
“They’re supplying something our culture lacks,” Ty said.
“You were supposed to supply it,” Arjun said. Meaning, as Ty understood, the Dinan race. “And you did, during the heroic age.”
Ty could feel a not altogether cheerful smile on his face. “By actually doing things, you mean,” he said, “as opposed to pretending to do them in made-up entertainment programs.”
“You know what, though? It’s all entertainment. Real or made up. It’s stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.”
“Well,” Ty said, “maybe we can continue the discussion in my bar if we get out of this. But the bottom line for now, if I’m hearing you right, is that, narrative-wise, Red is killing us.”
“We have been a little distracted,” Arjun said, showing a bit of defensiveness for the first time.
“By what Red did, you mean,” Ty said. He was referring to the insertion of the peloton, Marge’s glorious return, and the lovey-dovey stuff between their delegation and the Diggers.
Arjun did not out-and-out disagree, but the look on his face was a bit impatient, the smart teacher working with the slow pupil. “More by what they’ve been doing. For a while now.”
“Well,” Ty said, “as a mere bartender, I wouldn’t know about anything other than what is on the news feeds. So tell me. What have they been doing?”
“What do you know about the Kulak?”
“What any civilian lacking a security clearance would know,” Ty answered carefully. “People are assumed to be living in the fist part of it.”
“Kulak” was Russian for “fist.” In this context it denoted an irregular lump of nickel-iron some thirty kilometers across. A hundred and fifty years ago, Red had moved it from the Kamchatka boneyard to a position above the Makassar Strait, where it had orbited ever since. Like a loosely clenched fist, it had a cavity down the middle, a tunnel now presumed to be lined with rotating habitats. Red’s answer to the Great Chain.
“Then there’s the rigging and spars whatnot surrounding that,” Ty went on. For the fist, viewed from a distance, seemed to be tangled
in a sparse web of cables, like a seed in a spiderweb. Above and below—to the nadir and zenith sides—these converged on hard points to which the long cables extending down to Earth’s surface and up to the counterweight—the Antimakassar—were attached.
Sonar Taxlaw, a few meters away, had been engaged in a public display of affection with Einstein, but withdrew slightly and turned her head to listen.
Ty had grown accustomed to her ways. It was because he had said “spars.” That was between Sonar and Taxlaw in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and thus belonged to her domain of knowledge. During their hike over the mountains and down the other side, she had turned out to be well informed, at least by troglodyte standards, about space exploration and the sun. So it had been easy to bring her up to speed on the last five thousand years’ off-planet developments. She now began to drift toward Ty. Einstein followed her as if his eyes were connected to her butt cheeks with fishhooks.
Oblivious to all this—for he had his back to it—Arjun was regarding him coolly, expecting more. Ty went on: “The part on the surface—their answer to Cradle—we don’t know much about. They’ve been building it under the sea.”
“They call it the Gnomon,” Arjun informed him. Then he spelled the word out.
“What does it mean?”
“It used to be the thing that stood up in the middle of a sundial, to cast the shadow. Aligned with the Earth’s axis.”
Ty considered it. “Interesting choice of words.”
“It’s big, Ty. Much bigger than Cradle. There’s a reason they’ve been building it in the ocean. Partly to hide it from us. And partly because it’s too large to construct on terra firma.”
“How big are we talking about exactly?”
“There is only so much I’m at liberty to say,” Arjun said. Then he drew out a tablet and began tapping at it, pulling up a world map, panning and zooming toward the mess of islands between Southeast Asia and Australia. “But just look at this and tell me what you see.” He handed it to Ty.
“Southeast Asia!” exclaimed the Cyc, who had drawn close enough to see all of this over Arjun’s shoulder. “Is there anything you would care to know of it? Or of Sulawesi? Or of Sri Lanka?”
The Ivyn regarded her with fascination.
“I don’t need to look,” Ty said. “I know what’s there. The equator runs through all of that and rarely crosses over the land, and Red never stops whining about it.”
“Not true! Sumatra . . .” said the Cyc.
“A big island to be sure,” Ty said, “but not a continent. Do you remember, Sonar, what I told you about how the Eye works? What Cradle does?”
“Touches the equator,” she returned.
“And only the equator. Which is great if you control Africa and South America. Which Blue does. But most of Red’s territory lies north or south of the line.”
Sonar wasn’t going to be talked down so easily. “Singapore is close,” she said, “and that is connected to Asia.”
“The former location of Singapore is close, yes. But not on the equator. It’s one or two degrees north. Cradle can’t dock there.”
“And that one detail, more than anything else, is what infuriated the Aïdans about the design of the Eye and Cradle,” Arjun put in.
Sensing Einstein behind her, the Cyc leaned comfortably back against him and started rattling off facts—her default mode of social interaction. “Aïdans,” she said. “The ABC hierarchy. Aretaics, Betas, Camites.”
“Camites are a different race,” Einstein reminded her.
“Oh yeah. The relationship of the A and the B to the C is more akin to Symbiosis.”
Ty and Einstein exchanged a wry look.
Oblivious, Sonar Taxlaw gazed down the hill toward Langobard. “Neoanders. And two more. The smart ones and the crazy ones.”
“Jinns and Extats,” Einstein said. “They don’t get out much.”
Arjun’s fascination with seeing a rootstock human had given way to impatience. He focused on Ty again. “This is old history, of course,” he said, “but never forgotten by some people. Way back when the Eye was being designed—I’m talking a thousand years ago—there were alternative schemes proposed. The one we ended up with was simplest, easiest to build with what people had back then. The Eye, the Big Rock, and a small Cradle with sockets on the equator. Great for access to South America and Africa. Almost useless, however, in the stretch of the equator under the habitats where Aïdans, half of the Camites, and most of the Julians lived.”
“What later became Red,” Einstein put in, for Sonar Taxlaw’s benefit.
“One of the reasons Red later coalesced, and built such a strong counteridentity to Blue, was their sense of grievance over this decision. We should have waited, they said. We could have had something much more useful than Cradle.” Arjun zoomed in on Indonesia and dragged out a skinny rectangle, straddling the equator and spanning most of Red’s latitudes. “If instead of Cradle we had made something in the shape of a long arc, spanning a greater distance north-south, it might have connected with Asia down here, where Singapore used to be. And here it could touch the northern cape of New Guinea. And New Guinea could be connected to Australia by dropping enough rocks into the shallows between them.”
“A long arc. Aligned with the Earth’s axis, casting a shadow on the ground,” Ty said, nodding. “A Gnomon.”
“It would have to be huge!” Einstein exclaimed.
Arjun nodded. “Plans for it were drawn up. Studies commissioned on how it might be constructed, in orbit or on the surface. It was deemed too ambitious. So wiser heads prevailed,” said Arjun, “or so it seemed at the time, and we built what we built. We can always make something bigger later, they said. But it didn’t turn out that way. Blue forgot about it. Red didn’t. Their Jinns put as much effort into thinking about it as our Ivyns put into epigenetics. As soon as they closed the border and put up the two turnpikes, they went to work. What have they been doing that whole time?”
“Smiting the Torres Strait with an unceasing storm of bolides,” said Sonar Taxlaw, pointing to the narrows where Australia’s northern cape almost poked New Guinea in the belly. “Filling it in. Damming the currents. Making a wall against those that swim in the sea.”
Arjun nodded.
Then his head snapped around to focus on the Cyc.
He stared at her intently for a moment, then looked at Ty. “Did you . . .” he began.
“Not a word,” Ty said.
“Einstein, did you tell her about Red’s illegal terraforming operation here?” And he tapped the same place on the map.
“First I’ve heard of it,” Einstein said.
“Sonar,” Arjun said, “how did you know about that?”
“The Pingers told us,” Sonar said.
“Who the hell are the Pingers?”
“The people we are going to talk to,” Sonar said.
Beled and Bard had been assisting the Teklan. Those three now approached, carrying the glider packs. They set them down and began camouflaging them under such foliage as was available in this place: scrubby brushes that had been socked into the brow of the slope to stabilize it and provide refuge for small animals. Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan’s physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater. When it became evident to the Teklan that the two larger men were better than he was at uprooting plants and moving dirt, this man left them to finish the task and approached. Tucked under his left arm was a container matching the general size and shape of those still used, in Chainhattan, to transport pizza. Dangling from that hand was a roughly cubical equipment case. With his free right hand he exchanged salutes with Ty and identified himself as one Roskos Yur. He then set the two parcels in front of Ty and backed away from them.
“Thank you,” Ty said.
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“Why,” Arjun asked, “did you want those? Do you have any idea what it cost to get them here?”
“The Cyc can explain a
long the way,” Ty said.
Arjun held his gaze on Ty for a moment, then glanced away with a diffident nod. Roskos Yur, by contrast, looked hard at him, and wouldn’t stop looking. After a few moments of this, Ty felt obliged to meet the Teklan’s eye. Now that Ty could scan this man’s insignia more carefully, he could see that he was part of a unit stationed at Nunivak: one of the forward Blue outposts, right up against the border. It was a byword for remote and isolated. It made Qayaq seem like a metropolis. Full of Snake Eaters always being sent off on crazy missions.
“That’s not really what he’s asking, sir,” said Roskos Yur. “He’s really asking, who the fuck are you?”
“Sergeant Major Yur—” Arjun said, in a tone of protest.
But Yur would not be stopped. “And don’t tell us you’re a bartender, sir.”
“The late Dr. Hu handpicked Mr. Lake for inclusion in the Seven,” Arjun pointed out.
“And now he’s ramrodding this—” Yur looked about at the group and gave out an incredulous snort. “I don’t even know how to describe it. ‘Ragtag’ makes it sound like more than it is.”
“He led them out of a difficult situation,” Arjun said.
“A difficult situation for which he’s partly responsible, sir,” Yur shot back.
“And at the moment he knows more about the Diggers, and the situation on the ground, than anyone. I assume he requested those objects for a reason, which will be explained as we go.”
Ty held up a hand. “Sergeant Major Yur doesn’t trust me because my allegiance isn’t clear to him. Fair enough.”
Yur’s face softened a little, and his gaze flicked to one side for a moment. Taking advantage of this break in the staredown, Ty turned to face Esa Arjun.
The Ivyn made the tiniest movement that was still recognizable as shaking his head no. Once he was certain that Ty had caught it, he looked at Roskos Yur. “Sergeant Major,” Arjun said quietly, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Yur snorted. “Is that a fancy way of saying it’s above my pay grade, sir?”
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