Seveneves: A Novel (86 page)

Their Neanderthal heritage had been fabricated out of whole cloth, yet it was taken more or less seriously by everyone—it was a
sort of consensual historical hallucination. Aïda and some of her more bloody-minded descendants might have hoped it would instill fear of, or at least respect for, the fighting prowess of this subrace. Some Neoanders reveled in that. Many of them, however, preferred a revisionist view of Neanderthal history that painted them as highly intelligent (their brains were larger than those of “modern” humans), artistically gifted, and essentially peaceful proto-Europeans. Neoanders of a more intellectual bent held seminars about it. More practical-minded ones tried to live it. There was no better place to live it, Kath Two had to admit, than Antimer, which had a temperate European-style climate. And so it was entirely plausible that a group of Neoanders who had been sent down by Red as shock troops would, within a generation or two, end up running vineyards in that fuzzily defined border zone near the line of demarcation and, once the vines had reached maturity, trying to sell wine on the ring. The early market would be high-end connoisseurs and restaurants and so they would need a member of the clan who cleaned up well, had good manners, and knew how to wear clothes, to establish commercial contacts in places like Cradle.

This entire picture, or something close to it, was summoned up in the minds of Kath Two and, presumably, Ty and Beled and the others as soon as the words were spoken. But Ty’s remark—
That’s one explanation for our not having met
—and Bard’s nonanswer—
Did you have another possible explanation in mind?
—were still lodged there awkwardly. Was Ty meaning to question Bard’s story? The look on Ariane’s face, as she regarded the Neoander, was not what you would call warm. But of course the Julian would be suspicious, would look for other explanations than what lay on the surface.

Ty seemed to have noticed this too; his eyes were jumping back and forth between Ariane and Bard.

Bard looked up at Ty and smiled, his huge upper lip pulling back to expose the row of yellowish enamel boulders planted in his upper jaw. “I’ll bet that as our Seven spends time together, Tyuratam and I
will have all sorts of opportunities to tell colorful stories about what our families have gotten up to during their decades on the surface.”

Which didn’t answer the question. But it was charming, and it deflected the issue by making the point that Tyuratam Lake’s background, should he choose to discuss it with them, was likely to be at least as complicated as that of Langobard. Perhaps a bit of guilt-tripping there too, implicitly asking them why they were so curious about the Neoander when other members of the Seven might be worthy of some scrutiny too.

Ariane sat back in her chair and pretended to look at her fingernails. She was not the least bit satisfied. Trying for a minute to think like a Julian, Kath Two imagined how it must look to her: a creature selectively bred by crazy people to be capable of killing with his bare hands, who at the same time was extraordinarily crafty in his social interactions.

“I am what I am,” Ty said.

“And what is that?” Ariane asked.

“A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances.” He nodded at Bard. “Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?”

No one admitted to being thirsty.

“For beverages, I meant,” Ty added. “I’m sure we are all thirsty for knowledge.”

Doc liked that. “Knowledge in general, Tyuratam?”

“Oh, I’d be living on Stromness if I were a knowledge-in-general man,” Ty said. “A collector of facts. No, I take a more utilitarian stance.”

“Meaning that you would like to know why we are here,” Doc said.

Ty seemed to find the question overly blunt, and raised the ridge of scar tissue that had once been a honey-colored eyebrow. “If you’d enjoy saying something about it, I’d enjoy listening,” he admitted. “If not, well, I’m willing to come along for the ride—up to a point.”

Doc now looked across the table toward Ariane, in a way that
made tumblers click inside of Kath Two’s head. He was handing control of the meeting to Ariane. It might be going too far to say that she was in charge, but she was probably in communication with whoever was.

“Most of our operations will be on the surface,” she said. “You might have inferred as much from the fact that we have gone out of our way to involve Indigens”—she glanced at Ty and Bard—“and Survey personnel.” She nodded at Kath Two and at Beled. The last gesture elicited another one of those sardonic snorts from Ty—pointing out, apparently, just how implausible it was that a man fitting the profile of Lieutenant Tomov could possibly be taken seriously as a member of Survey. Ariane gave Ty a cool look, as if to say
Don’t start,
then continued: “And I need hardly belabor the longstanding connection with the surface embodied by Doc and Memmie.”

Conspicuously absent from the list, now, was Ariane herself, but if she was aware of the omission, she didn’t show it. Everyone was left to make what guesses and assumptions they might about how her career—whatever it might be—was connected with the surface.

“Discretion is important,” Ariane continued, “which is why we will tend to operate out of Cradle and use atmospheric or surface transportation.” Meaning airplanes and things that crawled on the surface of New Earth as opposed to rocket ships, bolos, and Aitken-Kucharski devices like giant whips. “Whenever possible, we will enter and exit Cradle on foot—via the subterranean passages that are afforded by sockets.”

“When’s the next—” Kath Two started to ask.

“Cayambe,” Ariane said. “Two days from now.”

“We are going to travel from Cayambe to Beringia on the surface?” Kath Two asked.

Ty and Bard both looked at her curiously.

“I haven’t said anything about Beringia,” Ariane pointed out.

“But it’s obviously where we’re going,” Kath Two said. “It’s where Beled and I—and a lot of other people—were sent on Survey. It’s
where I saw what I saw, and told Beled about it. This whole thing was precipitated by that, wasn’t it?”

“It has been brewing for longer. Years,” Ariane said. “But you’re not wrong.”

“Ty’s from that part of the world—I can tell by his accent. Bard is from south of there, on Antimer,” Kath Two went on.

“We will head north from the Cayambe Socket, yes,” Ariane said.

“North a hell of a long way,” Ty pointed out.

“We are not prevented from using air transport,” Ariane reminded him.

“If we can get a big enough glider,” Kath Two put in, “the mountain wave will take us right up the Andes, the Sierras, and the Cascades in a day or two.”

“I am fairly confident,” Ariane said, “that we can get a big enough glider.”

THE UNDERSURFACE OF CRADLE, ONLY VISIBLE TO PEOPLE STANDING
on the ground—more specifically, on the equator—looking up at it, was flat and generally egg-shaped, elongated in the direction of its east-west movement. On closer inspection its mostly smooth surface was interrupted from place to place by small hatches, carefully engineered protrusions, orifices, and other details. These were distributed around that otherwise featureless surface in a way that suggested orderly minds at work, addressing complications posed by the asymmetries of the city above.

In several places along the equator of New Earth, ground had been cleared and flattened, and reinforced concrete pads laid. These had the same size and shape as Cradle’s undersurface, and were equipped with their own hatches and orifices matching those on Cradle. Cradle could be neatly set down into one of these sockets whenever the Eye happened to be directly overhead. There it might reside for hours or days, taking on or discharging supplies, and otherwise
communing with the surroundings. But it never stayed for long, since it had to follow the movements of the Eye, which always had urgent business elsewhere on the ring.

At such times, a traveler who knew nothing of orbiting tethers and the like, emerging from the woods or cresting some nearby hill, and coming into view of Cradle, would perceive it as a normal, which was to say stationary, city. The bucket handle arching high over its top was a heavy hint that something was a bit odd about it. Other than that, however, it would look, in that context, like a somewhat isolated hill fort.

Some of the more well-established sockets had begun to accumulate suburbs: ring-shaped towns that would come to life whenever Cradle was in residence. Most of them had the feel, and shared the purposes, of military bases, scientific installations, and frontier outposts. It had always been envisioned that many such would be built in time, creating a ring around the equator to match the habitat ring far above it, and that once New Earth was opened for general settlement they would grow into important cities. To visit one now, centuries before its glorious peak, was something of an acquired taste—a little like walking around a building site after foundations have been laid and a few walls framed. Builders, dreamers, and people of imagination enjoyed such places; others saw nothing.

Cayambe and Kenya had been the first two sockets, built in the most likely sites on South America and Africa respectively. Each numbered around ten thousand souls.

Cayambe’s namesake was a volcano at the intersection of the Andes and the equator, in what had once been the country of Ecuador. It had, of course, taken a beating during the Hard Rain, and resumed erupting for a while, but had now been dormant for about seven hundred years. In any case the Cayambe Socket had been built well clear of its most active vents, placing the volcano’s summit, which was once again snow covered, far enough away that it could be admired from any windows on Cradle that happened to be aimed in the right direction.

The Crow’s Nest’s tower afforded views in almost all directions, and so Tyuratam Lake, standing behind his bar two days later, polishing a glass with a towel, was able to look up between two tap handles and see the summit glide into view and then seemingly rise upward from the horizon as Cradle was lowered gingerly into its socket. Klaxons sounded all over Cradle and across the earthbound ring city that was now coming into view beyond its windscreens. Out of habit Ty stuffed the towel into the pocket of his trousers, letting it dangle down his leg, and reached out to steady himself against the bar. The underside of Cradle and the matching surface below it had been designed so that a disk of air would be trapped between them during the final meter of the descent, and act as a cushion. This was allowed to escape through a picket fence of vents, aimed upward around the periphery of Cradle, and so final docking was, as usual, signaled by a roar of escaping air and plumes of condensed humidity jetting upward into the blue sky over the Andes. The mildest of lurches caused stored glasses and tableware to clink together in cabinets all over the bar.

The klaxons and the vents went silent at the same time. Through the bar’s windows, which Ty had left cracked open, he could hear the customary smattering of applause rising up from the stony streets of Capitol Hill. He checked his timepiece. A few politicians and generals, who had leaned back from their breakfasts to observe the docking and admire the profile of Cayambe Volcano, bent forward again, picked up their forks, and resumed their conversations. Cradle had just become the largest city on New Earth, and was scheduled to remain so for twenty-four hours. Its system of windscreens, built to shield the city from the blast created by its movement through the atmosphere, now seemed more like a barbican, thrown up in some past age to defend an old city, but now merely a historical curiosity and a dividing line between neighborhoods.

Other than keeping a curious eye on all comings and goings
through Cradle’s eight gates, Quarantine made no effort to control the mingling of populations. Cradle’s visits were so brief that to stop, examine, and question everyone passing between it and the sockets would have rendered the whole visit pointless.

Thanks to this relaxed policy, the time it took for an average pedestrian to get from the nearest of the eight gates to the Crow’s Nest was nine minutes. The first customer showed up in seven, breathing somewhat heavily, and requested a beer. Ty did not recognize him, but the next two faces that came in the door, thirty seconds later, were familiar. During the next quarter of an hour, the place filled up with a mixture of regulars (from Cradle and Cayambe alike) and curiosity seekers. Ty’s staff, well accustomed to these surges, began to open up back rooms. Extra cooks came up through one of the back entrances and began to make use of
mise en place
that had been prepped the night before.

Everything, in other words, ran smoothly. Which was how Ty liked it. The ability of the Crow’s Nest to accommodate a socket surge with no intervention from Ty, other than polishing a glass, was, in a sense, his life’s work. He had done every job it was possible to do in this place, from floor mopper on upward, and learned over time to select and delegate the work to others who could do it better. He had advanced, in other words, to higher levels of mental activity while always doing enough of the floor mopping and glass polishing to remain in physical contact with the business of the bar and in human contact with the staff. His real job—the job that the Owners paid him for—was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.

He was also a judicious
manipulator
of the human condition in the sense of occasionally throwing people out, telling others to settle down in a manner so smooth and humorous that they didn’t know they’d been told, and making certain others feel welcome when they seemed ill at ease. All of that was as fundamental to the operation of a bar as mopping the floor. Others on his staff could do such things almost as
well as he. Ty had, in other words, developed the Crow’s Nest into a sufficiently healthy and robust organism that it was possible for him to disappear for weeks, sometimes even months, without inflicting serious damage. In some ways, his occasional “vacations” actually did more good than harm, in the sense that when he came back he would commonly find that certain members of the staff had risen to the occasion and become more complete and effective human beings in his absence. He was quite certain that he could walk away from the bar forever now and that it would not really miss him. But he was unlikely to do any such thing because it was literally his home—he lived in an apartment on the court behind it—and because the Owners preferred that he stay. And the Owners were among the very few members of all the human races about whose opinions Tyuratam Lake actually gave a damn. They had pointed out to him that even a year’s leave of absence, should he choose to take one, would benefit the Crow’s Nest, in the sense that he would return to it with fresh eyes and immediately see how beneficial changes might be made.