Seveneves: A Novel (12 page)

“That could be you or me, honey,” Dinah said to Ivy.

“It is us,” Ivy said, “it’s just a matter of degree.”

“Do you think we’re going to end up like that?”

Ivy thought about it, shook her head. “Look, the way she’s living isn’t sustainable.”

“You think it’s a suicide mission?”

“I think it’s a gulag,” Ivy said, “a little gulag right outside your window.”

“You think she’s in some kind of trouble?”

“I think we’re all in some kind of trouble,” Ivy reminded her.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.”

“She’s lucky, remember?” Meaning that Tekla had at least found a way off the planet.

“She doesn’t look lucky,” Dinah said. “I’ve never seen anyone so isolated. Does she talk to someone on that tablet? Or is she just surfing?”

“I can ask Spencer, if you want,” Ivy said. “I’m sure he’s logging all the packets.”

Dinah knew that Ivy was only kidding, but she answered, “Nah. She deserves that much privacy at least.”

Rhys’s reaction was to become aroused. He was reasonably discreet about it. But the elapsed time between his seeing Tekla and having sex with Dinah was, generously estimating, perhaps half an hour. Not that Rhys really needed a lot of help to start his motor. And not that Dinah did either. She had always known they were going to do it.

She had known this based on the way he smelled, at least when he was not in the middle of being sick. In other times and places, the way he smelled would not have been enough. They’d have dated first,
or something. There’d have been complications having to do with existing relationships, incompatible lifestyles, fraternization policies. But here it was just automatic. And it was tremendous.

Based on what she was hearing from Internet buzz from the ground, it was also pretty universal. The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.

Actually sleeping together was another matter. Rhys didn’t seem to mind it in principle. But it was difficult logistically. Astronauts generally slept in bags that kept them from floating about at random while they were unconscious. The bags were designed for one person. NASA hadn’t gotten around to manufacturing two-person bags yet, so if they felt drowsy afterward, they would improvise, swaddling themselves together with whatever they could cobble up. But it never lasted more than a few minutes. Then he would go back to his duties, and if she felt like a nap, she would climb into a bag that she kept in her shop, sometimes peeking out the window, guiltily, at poor Tekla.

One day, after Tekla had left for work, Dinah took one of the chocolate bars she had brought up from Earth, wrote her email address on the wrapper, and handed it off to a Grabb, which she then put out the airlock. She piloted the Grabb across Amalthea’s surface to the mooring point where Tekla’s Vestibyul was cabled in place, then made it climb along the cable (which was easy, it had an algorithm for that) and clamber into the Vestibyul, where it took up position and waited, holding the chocolate bar out in a free claw.

When Tekla came back at the end of her shift, Dinah got the satisfaction of watching her unwrap the bar and eat the chocolate. She held up one hand and sort of waved through the plastic. Dinah couldn’t resolve her facial expression.

The Grabb was still in the Vestibyul, and would remain trapped there until Tekla’s next departure. Seeing Tekla float over in that direction,
Dinah turned to her computer and switched on the video feed from the Grabb. She was fascinated to see Tekla’s face, clearly resolved, float into the frame.

She didn’t look that bad. Dinah had been expecting someone who looked like a concentration camp survivor. But she appeared to be getting enough food.

Of course, she could not see Dinah. And there was no audio hookup. Since there was no sound in a vacuum, space robots didn’t come with microphones or speakers.

Tekla was just staring at the Grabb, impassive, perhaps wondering whether it could see her.

Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb’s free claw, and waved.

Tekla’s green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion.

Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?

Tekla held up the candy bar wrapper. On it, beneath Dinah’s email address, she had written
NO EMAIL
.

What did that mean? That she lacked an email address? That her tablet couldn’t receive it?

Or was she imploring Dinah not to communicate with her that way?

The Grabb had a headlamp, a high-powered white LED that she could switch on by hitting a key on her keyboard. Dinah turned it on, saw the glow on Tekla’s face, the highlights on the lenses of her eyes.

Did the Russians even use the same Morse code as Americans?

Tekla had to know it. She was a pilot.

Dinah made the light flash with the dots and dashes for M O R S E.

Tekla nodded, and Dinah could see her mouth making the word
“Da.”

Dinah signaled:

          
DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?

The faintest trace of a smile came over Tekla’s lips. It was not a warm kind of smile. More bemused.

She held up what was left of the chocolate bar, and pointed to it.

Dinah returned:

          
TOMORROW

Tekla nodded. Then she turned away, her buzz-cut blond hair glinting in the light of the LEDs, and drifted back into the middle of her onion.

“FIVE PERCENT” WAS HOW IVY BEGAN THE NEXT MEETING IN THE
Banana.

It was full to capacity: the original twelve-person crew of Izzy, the five who had come up on the Soyuz on A+0.17, and Igor, the Scout who had come in from the cold when his suit had failed. He, Marco, and Jibran had prepped for the meeting by jury-rigging some fans to blow more air through the space, so it wouldn’t fill up with carbon dioxide. This had prompted Dinah to joke that perhaps all meetings should take place in hermetically sealed rooms, so that they could only go on for so long. No one, with the possible exception of Rhys, had seen it as funny. Anyway, the roar of ventilation was even louder than it usually was in space, and so Ivy had to speak up and use her Big Boss Voice.

“This is Day Thirty-Seven,” Ivy went on. “That’s ten percent of a year. If it’s true that we had two years from Zero to the Hard Rain, then we have already burned through five percent of the time during which we can expect to receive any help from Earth. Five percent of
the time needed to turn this installation into a society and an ecosystem that is sustainable indefinitely.”

Ivy was standing with her back to the big screen, so she couldn’t see the reaction of the Arkitects down below, in some conference room at the other end of the video link. For today’s meeting, there were three of them: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, who was still the administrator of NASA; Dr. Pete Starling, the president’s science advisor; and Ulrika Ek, a Swedish woman who had worked as a project manager for one of the private commercial space startups until recent events had forced a career change: she was now coordinating the activities of several different space agencies and private companies as they worked on the Cloud Ark. Apparently, she had become the Arkitect-in-chief.

“Apparently” being the key word, since every time Dinah had any contact with the ground she was reminded of how little she understood of what was happening there. On one level she was one of the luckiest people in the human race. She was going to get to stay alive. At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues.

She’d compared notes on this with Ivy, who had confirmed that even she had little to go on, and what she did hear contradicted itself from hour to hour.

It had all become Kremlinology. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the only way for Westerners to guess what was going on there was to look at the lineup of dignitaries on Lenin’s Tomb in the May Day parade, and riddle it out from the seating chart and who shook hands with whom. Now Dinah was doing the same thing with these three faces on the screen. Sparky was no use. He’d spent so much time in space that he had developed a kind of thousand-light-year stare. He was famous for being oblivious to the political side of things.

His opposite in that respect was Pete Starling. Pete’s job was to mutter scientific explanations into the president’s ear. He’d been
doing rather a lot of it in the last thirty-seven days. He had a background running big science programs at universities, climbing the ladder from Mankato State to Georgia Tech to Columbia to Harvard in a mere ten years. Why was he sitting in on this meeting? There was little he could contribute. He must be here as the eyes and ears of J.B.F.

But why should J.B.F. care? No decisions were going to be made here; it was just a status report, a check-in.

As soon as Ivy finished her sentence, the corners of Pete’s mouth turned down. He looked at Ulrika Ek, a somewhat matronly woman in her late forties, extremely good at her job, according to Rhys. On the high-def video feed, Dinah saw the slightest deflection of her eyes, noticing the turn of Pete Starling’s head, but not exactly acknowledging it.

Ulrika clearly didn’t like him. But there was a reason she was a well-regarded project manager. “Ivy,” she said, “just for clarity, when we speak of ‘this installation’ we’re using the term in an elastic sense. Of necessity.”

Ivy turned to look at the screen. “‘Installation’ probably isn’t the right word,” she admitted. “Since it’s not installed anywhere.”

Pete Starling spoke up. “I believe that where Ulrika is going is that the Cloud Ark is a fluid concept that may paradigm-shift beyond recognition as we proceed adaptively through the next ninety-five percent of the timeline.”

Ivy’s brow furrowed. Something was going on, some kind of political tussle down on the ground. It was important to people like Pete.

“This is not efficient use of time,” Fyodor said. “I am working to extend truss to receive Pioneers.” Fyodor’s English was excellent, but when he was annoyed, as he was now, he dropped his articles. “I have eight suits outside, five inside, for unlucky number of thirteen.”

It had become common to use a form of synecdoche in which
“suit” denoted “a person qualified to perform extravehicular activities who is equipped with a space suit that still works.”

“Pioneers arrive in two weeks, this is still true? Then I need more Scouts yesterday, as saying goes.”

When Fyodor had come up to Izzy six months ago, it had been understood as a valedictory mission before getting shunted to an administrator’s job at Roskosmos. Not that he hadn’t taken his duties seriously, but he always seemed to be taking the long view, perceiving Izzy through the eyes of a future bureaucrat who would need to make it run smoothly until his retirement. That had all changed on Zero, of course. It had changed even more with the Russian invasion. No new rank or title had been bestowed on Fyodor. None was needed. All the Russians just accepted him, implicitly and without question, as their leader. And his manner had changed accordingly. He was scrupulously respectful of Ivy’s authority, but there was no question that he was the boss of all things suit related, and the authority had seemed to make him physically larger and more imposing, his creased face tougher, his voice firmer.

Sparky answered him. “Fyodor, that fuel pump has been fixed. It was just a bad sensor. So the launch is going up as scheduled . . .” He checked his wristwatch, did a mental calculation. “Fourteen hours from now. Six hours after that, you’ll have your suits.”

“And the Zavods, the Vestibyuls—the things I mentioned.”

“We have had teams of engineers working on those fixes around the clock, Fyodor.”

“I am very worried about door closing mechanisms.”

THE REMAINDER OF THE MEETING HAD TO DO WITH THE PIONEERS
who would start coming up in another two weeks, and who would live, for the time being, in rigid or inflatable habitats more accommodating than Luks. These would be docked along a series of pressurized
tubes, little different in principle from the big spiral-wound ventilation ducts seen in warehouses, that would ramify outward from attachment points in the truss. Little of it concerned Dinah and so her attention drifted to her laptop. She had other things she could be working on, and Ivy’s reminder about the 5 percent had not left her in a mood to woolgather during a long meeting.

Most of her work of late had been on ice crawlers. And, as of the most recent shipment, ice tunnelers. But she had resolved that she would not shut down her progress on the iron-mining robots. Even if she only spent fifteen minutes a day on them, it was better than suspending work altogether. She was afraid that if she ever did that the entire project would disappear.

To that end, she kept a window open in the lower left corner of her screen, showing video from Amalthea, mostly the point-of-view cameras of robots that were actually doing things. It was always there in her peripheral vision as she attended to email and scheduling spreadsheets and Gantt charts.

And at some point she noticed something that wasn’t quite right. A few minutes later, she noticed it again and put her other work on hold. She expanded the window and took control of the robot that was transmitting the video. She swiveled its camera around until she had a view of the thing that had been bothering her.

It was Tekla, floating in her Luk. She was bright blue, which meant that she had donned her cooling garment. That was normal. She did it every day as she got ready for her shift. The next step should have been to squirm feetfirst through the Luk’s flange into the Vestibyul. But she wasn’t doing that. She was going back and forth between the Vestibyul and the middle of the Luk. She would go through the flange headfirst (which was abnormal) and do something for a minute or two, then withdraw into the Luk and thumb away on her tablet for a while.

She was late. Every other day, she’d been in her suit and out on the truss by this time.