Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Why hadn’t we simply launched to a higher orbit? Because our patched-together launch system wasn’t capable of dumping that much energy into a payload.

  In a few minutes, when the Daban Urnud got line of sight to the cloud of stuff that had just been flung into orbit by those two hundred missiles, they’d see a few dozen balloons salted through a nebula of radar-jamming chaff—strips of metallized poly—hundreds of miles across, and rapidly getting bigger as orbits diverged. The chaff would make long-wavelength surveillance (radar) useless. They’d have to look at us in shorter wavelengths (light) which would necessarily mean sorting through a very large number of phototypes, looking for anything that wasn’t a balloon or a strip of chaff. If we did this right, then even if they did manage to collect all of those pictures and inspect them in a reasonable span of time, they’d still see nothing—because we and all of our stuff would be hiding behind one of the balloons.

  But this implied that a lot would have to happen in the next twenty minutes. I became so preoccupied that I almost forgot Jesry’s first piece of advice: don’t miss the scupper. The first spasms in my throat seized my attention, though, and I was able to lunge forward and bite down on the rubber orifice just in time. My breakfast was vacuumed away and freeze-dried into a waste bag somewhere. I returned to the task at hand. Fortunately—and a bit surprisingly—the Big Pill didn’t come up. It must still be down in my gut somewhere, sending temperature and other biomedical data to the suit’s processors.

  After that, anyway, I felt better, and didn’t throw up again for almost ten seconds.

  By getting there first, Sammann had appointed himself Glommer, which meant that his job was to keep station under the balloon and secure the incoming payloads into a single, haphazardly connected mass. Payload number one was Jules Verne Durand. Esma towed him in and hit the brakes. Her monyafeek stopped, but Jules kept going, like a trailer jackknifing on an icy road. She had to back-thrust once more as the Laterran’s rig tried to jerk her forward. As Gratho hovered watchfully, wondering whether this was an emergence, Sammann maneuvered closer, then spun in place. A long slender probe snapped out from his monyafeek, stretched across twenty feet of space in an eye-blink, and buried itself in the mass of red fuzz surrounding Jules’s rig. “Nailed it!” Jules was now stretched between him and Esma. “Feel free to detach.”

  “De-grappling,” Esma reported. “I’ll try to find additional payloads.” Her jets flared and the probe connecting her to Jules’s fuzz-ball slid free.

  Thus did Sammann begin his work as Glommer. The rest of us were Getters, meaning we’d move around using the maneuvering thrusters, latch on to payloads that drifted near, and bring them to the Glommer. I spun my rig around to look for any incoming payloads. Humans—of whom there ought to have been eleven—were color-coded red. The tender and its little nuke plant were also red, since we’d soon die without them. In addition, there were fifty monyafeeks carrying cargo. Their fuzzballs were blue. Their contents were interchangeable—each contained some water, some food, some fuel, and some other stuff we’d need. That’s because we didn’t expect to recover all of them. When I looked around, I saw what seemed like an impossibly huge number of red and blue fuzzballs, all drifting in the general vicinity. My brain told me, flat-out, that rounding them all up was impossible. It was a disaster. But the very least I could do was head for the nearest red one and make sure that whoever it was had survived the launch and was conscious. I began to line up for a rendezvous, but I’d barely begun to move before I saw maneuvering jets flash. Jesry’s ikon came up on my display. “I’m good,” he announced impatiently, “go look for something that can’t take care of itself.”

  Beyond him, a blue payload was coming in. It was in the correct plane but its orbit was a little too eccentric, so it was losing altitude—probably doomed to re-enter and burn up in a few minutes. I got myself spun around facing “forward,” i.e., in the direction that I, and all of this other stuff, were moving in our orbits around Arbre, and then made myself “vertical,” so that the soles of my feet were pointed at Arbre and its horizon was parallel to a certain line projected across my face mask. The payload was slowly “falling” through my visual field. I used the stick to thrust backwards, slowing myself down. The payload stopped “falling,” which meant I was now in the same doomed orbit that it was. A little more maneuvering took me to within twenty feet of the thing.

  I was distracted for a moment by more visual clutter: a red payload, tumbling across my visual field from left to right, sideswiped a blue one. My eye was drawn to it. The red and the blue had stuck together. I reckoned it was one of the other cell members doing what I was doing. But if so, they weren’t using a grapnel—just holding on to the net with a skelehand, or something. The red and the blue payload had merged into a slowly rotating binary star. I saw no sign of thrusters being fired—no evidence that the person was even conscious. “I think we might have someone in trouble here—an inadvertent collision,” I reported.

  “I see what you see and am coming to investigate,” said Arsibalt.

  “I’m a little closer,” I offered, turning my head around and seeing Arsibalt on his way in. “I could—”

  “No,” he said, “go ahead and take the payload you’ve got.”

  So, to grips. But before I went to the next step, I couldn’t help looking over toward the balloon. My pursuit of this payload had taken me well away from it, but I was heartened to see a number of blues and reds converging there. Suur Vay and Fraa Osa had linked half a dozen payloads into a big lazily spinning molecule of fuzz-balls and were hauling it in, getting ready to link it to a growing complex in the shelter of the balloon.

  Arsibalt reported: “I’m closing on Fraa Jad. He has become entangled with a blue payload and he seems to be unconscious.”

  “What kind of orbital elements are you seeing?” Lio asked.

  “His e is dangerously high,” Arsibalt said, referring to the eccentricity of Jad’s orbit. “He’ll be in the soup in a few minutes.”

  “Be careful you don’t get entangled, then!” Lio warned him.

  “Rear grapnel camera on,” I said, and the view out my face-mask was obscured by a virtual display in jewel-like laser colors: a green grid with red crosshairs in the middle. This was a feed from a speelycaptor aimed out the back of my monyafeek. I checked my pitch angle and then rotated the trackball until it had incremented by a hundred and eighty degrees. The payload swung into view. It was now directly behind me. “Grapnel One fire,” I said, and felt a little kick in the tail as a small cylinder of compressed gas ruptured. The grapnel system was a long skinny tube of fabric, all telescoped in on itself like a stocking. When the gas exploded into it, the tube shot out straight and became a long rigid balloon. At its end was a warhead, rounded smooth on its tip so that it would plunge through the cloud of netting surrounding a payload, but spring-loaded with spines that sprang out when the tube reached the end of its travel, or when it smacked into something.

  Based on my imperfect view through the rear camera, I was pretty certain it had all worked. But there was only one way to be sure. “Rear grapnel camera off,” I said, and thrust forward. For a couple of seconds I don’t think my heart beat at all. Then a jerk backwards told me my grapnel had engaged the netting. I allowed myself a shout of joy, then checked the balloon again.

  Arsibalt reported, “Jad is welded to the payload. I’ll never get them apart.”

  Lio: “What do you mean, welded?”

  Arsibalt: “When he drifted into it, the blue plastic netting contacted the hot nozzle skirt on his monyafeek and melted—stuck fast. I’m attempting to grapple the two payloads as a unit.”

  Lio: “Do you have sufficient propellant to make the necessary burn?”

  Arsibalt: “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  Lio: “I’m on my way. Don’t expend all your propellant. We don’t even know if Jad is still alive.”

  “Seventeen minutes to line of sight.”

  Plenty of
time. I got myself oriented as before, with the payload trailing behind me, and thrust forward, undoing the damage I’d inflicted on my orbit a few moments earlier. It took more fuel—a longer burn—because I was moving double the mass now. Some nervousness here, because a long burn meant a large mistake, if I was doing it wrong. I kept an eye on the eccentricity readout at the bottom of my display. This was already about .005, but I had to make it less than .001 to stay in any kind of reasonable synch with everyone else.

  In my earphones I could hear others making a similar calculation. Arsibalt, I gathered, had succeeded in grappling Jad and the payload Jad was stuck to, and was trying to do what I was doing, calling out numbers to Lio, who was maneuvering into position to rescue Arsibalt if that became necessary. Meanwhile Jesry was monitoring the traffic, calculating how much propellant was going to be needed, calling out suggestions that, as the adventure went on, hardened into commands. The distraction was severe, so I reluctantly shut off my wireless link and focused on my own situation.

  Only once I’d burned my e down under .001 did I lift my hands from the controls and look around for the balloon. After a few moments’ wild anxiety when I didn’t think it was anywhere near me, I found it “above” and to my right, a thousand feet away, and slowly getting closer. A cluster of blue netting was forming up “below” it as other Cell 317ers brought in payloads. As long as I was so close, I took a look around to see if there were any others handy.

  “Fifteen minutes to line of sight.”

  I’d lost contact with Arsibalt and Lio, but several other ikons came up on my display as I drifted in range of the reticule. I turned the sound back on, not without intense trepidation, since I did not know what news I was about to hear.

  Screaming filled my ears—overloaded the electronics. I tried to remember how to turn down the volume. The tone was not that of a horror show; more like a sporting event where someone wins a close game with an improbable score just as time expires. Lio’s ikon popped up. “Calm down! Calm down!” he insisted, appalled by the lapse of discipline. Arsibalt’s ikon came up. “Sammann, prepare to grab Fraa Jad, please. He’s unresponsive.” His voice was weighed down with a kind of unnatural calm, but I sensed that if I checked his bio readouts they would reflect near-fatal excitement.

  The balloon was rapidly getting bigger. I was too high, though—too far from Arbre—so I juked northwest, killing a bit of my orbital velocity, dropping to a lower altitude. I say “juked northwest” as if it were that simple, but now that I was towing a payload on the end of a twenty-foot grapnel, such moves were much more complicated; first I had to swing around to get on the payload’s other side, then apply thrust. This slowed my convergence on the balloon.

  Sammann said, “Got him. He’s alive. Bio readouts are screwy though.”

  Everyone had been paying attention to Fraa Jad being towed in by Arsibalt. But suddenly all I heard was shouting. “Look out look out!” “Damn it!” “That was close!” and “Bad news—it’s a red!”

  Twisting my head around, I saw what they had been reacting to: a red payload had passed within a few yards of the balloon, moving at a high relative speed—fast enough to have done damage if it had been just a little bit “higher.” It had come upon them so rapidly that no one had reacted in time to head it off, grapple it, and rein it in. It passed between me and the balloon, and I got a good look at it. “It’s the nuke,” I announced. Then I said to my suit, “Grapnel disengage.”

  “Disengaged,” it returned.

  I fired a little burst to pull myself free of the blue payload. “I’m on it,” I announced, “someone grab this payload.” The nuke was moving so fast that I reverted to instincts cultivated playing the video game in Elkhazg. I fired a lateral burst that—while it didn’t solve the problem—slowed the rate at which the gap between me and the nuke was widening. Ikons were falling off my display as I shot out of range, and the sound was coming through as sporadic, disjointed packets. I was pretty sure I heard Arsibalt saying “wrong plane,” which tallied with what I was thinking: this nuke’s orbit was in a plane that differed from ours by a small angle, just because of some small error that had crept in during the chaos of launch.

  One voice, anyway, came through clearly: “Thirteen minutes to line of sight.”

  I tried another maneuver, screwed it up desperately, and, with feelings that were close to panic, watched the nuke zoom across my field of vision. A moment later, Arbre whipped beneath me, and I realized I was spinning around. My hand must have brushed the trackball and set it spinning. I devoted a few moments to getting my attitude stabilized, then spun about carefully so that I wouldn’t lose my fix on the nuke. Once I had that in hand, I glanced back toward the balloon. It was shockingly distant.

  When I looked back toward the nuke, I couldn’t see it. I’d lost it in sun-glare off the Equatorial Sea. Back-thrusting to lose altitude, I was able to find the red fuzzball again as it rose above the horizon.

  No one else was anywhere near. They’d heard me saying I had the nuke, and assumed I could handle it.

  “Calm down,” I said to myself. Doing this slowly and getting it right on the next try would get me back to my friends quicker than making three hasty, failed attempts. I got myself stabilized so that the nuke was low in my field of vision and dead ahead, and forced myself to spend thirty seconds doing nothing except tracking it, observing how its motion differed from mine.

  Definitely an error in the slant of its orbital plane. I had to fire the thrusters to match that error. Which I did—but in the process I messed up my semimajor axis and a couple of other elements in a way that would have killed me ten minutes later. Another sixty seconds’ fussing got those squared away.

  Plane change maneuvers are expensive.

  I’d been forcing myself not to look for the balloon any more. Partly because I was afraid of what I’d see—my shelter, my friends, impossibly far away. But also because it simply didn’t matter. Without the nuke, whose power would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we would all asphyxiate within a couple of hours. If I lost my nerve and retreated to the balloon without it, my empty-handed arrival would be a death sentence for the whole cell.

  I came near, but got slewed sideways at the last minute. Did a little spin move. Stopped myself, where “stopped” meant that the nuke and I were stationary with respect to each other. “Three minutes to line of sight,” said the voice. I gave the controls the tiniest nudge, saw to my satisfaction that the nuke and I were converging. Just let it happen. Tried not to breathe so fast.

  Rather than grappling the nuke, I spent a few moments maneuvering close enough that I could simply reach out with my skelehand and grab the netting. Then I turned, making my best guess as to where the balloon might be, and saw—nothing. Or rather, too much. Our decoy strategy had backfired. At this distance, I had no way to distinguish true from false. There were three balloons about the same distance from me—none closer than ten miles. Even if I were to guess right, I wouldn’t be able to reach it in three minutes. And if I guessed wrong, I’d use up so much thruster propellant in getting to it that I’d be marooned there.

  On the other hand. The orbit that I, and the nuke, were in was a stable one. I double-checked the numbers, since all our lives depended on my judgment of this. The orbit’s shape and size were such that it would not enter the atmosphere and burn up, at least not for a day or two.

  What if I simply stayed with it? My oxygen supply was down to about two hours, but I could stretch it by calming down a little. I knew for a fact that the problem, here, was in the inclination of the orbit—the angle that the nuke and I were now making with respect to the equator. Ours was a little steeper than my comrades’. Consequently, my trajectory would only coincide with Cell 317’s in two places—two points of intersection, occurring once every forty-five minutes, on opposite sides of the planet. Sort of like the proverbial stopped clock that’s right twice daily. The last time it had been right had been about fifteen minutes ago, when the nuke
had almost hit my friends, and I had gone after it. Since then, we’d been getting farther apart. But starting in another few minutes, we’d begin getting closer together again. And in half an hour, we should enjoy another near collision.

  “One minute to line of sight.”

  The key to it all: what were my friends thinking? What were they saying right now over that wireless ret? I’d heard Arsibalt’s voice saying that the nuke was in the wrong plane. They’d probably watched me drifting away, with mounting anxiety, and debated whether to send out a rescue team.

  But they hadn’t. Lio had given no such order. Not only that, they had fought off the temptation to switch on the long-range wireless.

  If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to read their minds, nor they mine. But my fraas had been raised, trained, by Orolo. They had figured out—probably sooner than I had—that in forty-five minutes the nuke would reappear on the other side of Arbre. Just as important, they were relying on me—entrusting me with their lives—to figure out the same thing and to act accordingly.