Seveneves: A Novel (87 page)

But he suspected that the true value of the business, in the eyes of the Owners, was not the return it delivered on capital. That was probably close to zero. They might even be running a huge loss, for all he knew. Every month Ty did the books and boiled all the numbers down to a single sheet of paper that he took to the Bolt Hole and slid across the table to the Owners’ representative. They never said much about it. Once a year, a question might be asked about one of the numbers, just as a way of letting him know that they were paying attention. But the Owners really valued the Crow’s Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.

He did not care for elaborate goodbyes, particularly in a professional context where a fussy leave-taking might suggest that his going away was a big deal—implying that the staff might not be up to the job of keeping the business running. And so after a few minutes had
passed and he had exchanged looks, words, and jokes with a few leading citizens and well-known characters of Cayambe—just long enough to let it be known that he was here—he pulled the towel from his pocket, wiped his hands, and tossed it into the laundry chute beneath the bar. He lingered for a moment just to satisfy himself that the chute was not jammed. But it never was. Satisfied, he edged around the corner of the bar and walked to a table by the windows where Ariane, Kath Two, and Beled were pushing empty plates away, having just concluded a hearty breakfast. Ty himself had eaten light, an hour ago, as was his habit when he expected to spend a good part of the day airborne. “It’ll be taken care of,” he remarked, and got perfunctory thank-yous from the Moiran and the Teklan. Ariane gave him what he could only guess was meant to be some kind of penetrating look, and nodded. The busy minds of Julians exhausted Ty and he tried to avoid getting drawn into their labyrinthine ways of thinking. Perhaps this Ariane had used whatever connections she had in the intelligence world to investigate him and the Owners, and was drawing all sorts of conclusions—probably wrong ones—about what motivated him to give the Seven free drinks and meals. For it was obvious to Ty that Ariane worked in intelligence. He had seen many such people during the war and he knew their ways.

By now the others could navigate around the Crow’s Nest, but there was an expectation that he would lead the way. This derived partly from the fact that it was, after all, his establishment. But even had they been dropped into some completely random location on the surface they would have looked to him to take point because that, for better or worse, was what Dinans did. Answering to a similar racial expectation, Beled took up the rear. This was partly because his ingrained habits of courtesy and discipline obliged him to say “You first” to all the others, and partly so he would wheel about and engage any foes who might assault the rear of the formation.

Ty moved briskly to reduce the chance that he would be buttonholed
by some prematurely drunk member of the Cayambe Chamber of Comersants. Within a few moments they had passed into a section of the bar that had not yet been opened to visitors, and thence proceeded down twisting stairways scarcely wide enough to accommodate Beled’s shoulders until they reached the triangular courtyard in the center of the compound. Its tropical flowers were glowing like gems in the hard white light of the Andes. Four small cabs awaited them near the big gate that gave out onto the street. Cradle was almost devoid of four-wheeled vehicles when it was aloft, but whenever it was socketed, the place was invaded within minutes by swarms of whatever rolling stock was skinny enough to negotiate its streets. Some of these moved goods, transshipping them from the Eye to customers on the surface, or importing the produce of New Earth to Cradle. Others carried passengers on errands to the ring city and its hinterlands. One of the cabs was already occupied by Doc and Memmie, as could be inferred by the cases of Doc’s support infrastructure strapped to its roof rack and the grabb poised to scuttle after it. Bard had climbed into the second cab and was slouched down low. Neoanders were rare enough to draw notice and arouse curiosity in a manner that Ariane quite clearly did not want. He had been keeping to himself in his private room. Ariane climbed into the cab with him. It went without saying that it would be easiest for all concerned if Beled took up a whole cab by himself, and so he did that. Ty and Kath Two got into the last one.

After Doc and Memmie’s cab departed, a few minutes passed before Ariane gave her driver the go-ahead. Ty shifted impatiently in his seat, slightly jostling Kath Two. Cradle-compliant cabs did not have a lot of shoulder room.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Kath Two asked. Just making conversation. They both knew perfectly well what she was doing.

“A caravan of four, leaving the Crow’s Nest and not coming back—too conspicuous for her taste,” Ty said.

“At least there’s no question of getting lost,” Kath Two remarked. She ducked her head low so that she could peer out the window and get a look at the northern sky beyond the city. The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. She didn’t have the crazy yellow cat-eyes of some Moirans, but there was a bit of that in her ancestral tree. She knew Ty was looking at her but she didn’t let on to being self-conscious, which he approved of. She was looking, of course, at the Aitken loop that was their immediate destination. Assuming that it was still operating—and she’d have reacted differently had it gone down—it was rising up out of a mostly subterranean flynk barn on the town’s outskirts, surrounded by hangars and maintenance facilities for aircraft that ranged up and down the length of the Andes.

“You have everything you need?” Ty asked. “It’ll be a long day for you.”

“It’ll go by in no time,” Kath Two demurred, “because I’ll be busy. It’ll be long for
you
because you’ll be bored. Did you bring a book?”

“People are my books,” Ty said. “But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.”

It was meant as a light joke but he saw her face snag on it, wondering if he was trying to make a racial crack about Moirans. “An annoying habit that many people seem to have,” he added.

Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane’s anxieties, and so the one carrying Beled and the one carrying Ty and Kath Two departed in tandem and began to work their way through streets crowded with pedestrians. They could have done the first part of it more quickly on foot, but when they passed out through the vehicular gate and into the streets of Cayambe, things opened up quite a bit and they were able to use streets that had been designed specifically for four-wheelers. The place seemed dustier than Ty remembered, or maybe he was just seeing it through visitors’ eyes. Cradle sophisticates would see its menagerie of robots as comically
oversized and ramshackle, its people as a lot of jumped-up backwoodsmen. Ty’s kind of people, in other words. The sort of person whose ancestors had stayed in the habitat ring and played by the rules, patiently awaiting the moment when Doc, or some successor of his, would cut the ribbon on New Earth and allow settlers to flood in, had complicated feelings about Sooners and Indigens. On the one hand they were viewed as sharp operators. Tricksters. At the same time they were isolated bumpkins. Ty had learned early how to play both sides of the image. A stranger from the ring who took you for a wide-eyed rube would spill a lot of information before he came to understand the truth, and one who expected you to play tricks on him would let down his guard at the first show of honesty and plain dealings.

IF YOU TOOK A LARGE NUMBER OF FLYNKS—FLYING, AUTONOMOUS
chain links—and joined them together into a long chain, and connected its ends to make it into a continuous loop, and then got the whole loop moving through the air like a train composed of little airplanes, each using its stubby winglets to generate its share of the lift, then you had a thing known as an “aitrain,” pronounced the way a resident of Old New York would have said “A train.” The concept was old enough that its etymology had been obscured by time. It might have been “air train” with the first r elided, or a contraction of “Aitken train.” Sometimes, as here, it was a captive aitrain, passing continuously through a fixed installation on the ground and rising from there to a considerable altitude before reversing direction and plunging back down for another circuit. But aitrains could also fly freely in the air: a technology crazy enough that it had become associated with the Aïdan big-brains known as Jinns, or Ghenis, and tended to be used only by Red.

Presumably at Ariane’s behest, they took a circuitous route to the aitrain station, swinging wide around the hangar with the big Q on
its roof. The caravan collected itself in an unmarked hangar on the edge of the military zone, which Ty viewed as a classic example of the “not quite Survey and not quite military” style. There were no human personnel, just two copies of a specialized kind of grabb posted at each of the wingtips of a big glider, nominal capacity ten. Adequate room for a Seven, or so Ty thought until he climbed aboard and found it preloaded with mysterious equipment cases.

Kath Two made a slow walk around the glider and then climbed aboard, pulled the door shut, and crawled forward onto the couch where she would spend the journey resting on her belly. Everyone else looked away politely as she got her urine collection system squared away. In front of her was the glass dome, more than a meter in diameter, that served as the aircraft’s nose. Beled and Bard took opposite window seats in the back row of the passenger compartment. Doc sat in the front row, on the aisle, where he would have the best view forward over Kath Two’s backside and out the dome. Memmie sat in the window seat next to him and Ariane grabbed the seat across the aisle from him. Ty had his pick of a few seats in the midsection. He had noticed Ariane’s preference for always sitting next to Doc. Were he a jealous sort, or the kind of person who liked having long conversations with eminent scientists, he’d have resented the way she monopolized him. Instead he just found it kind of interesting, and wondered whether Doc would shoo her off at some point so that he could at long last talk to someone else.

The glider began moving around, presumably because Kath Two had told the grabbs holding its wingtips to take it somewhere. The nose tilted down as they descended a ramp into the flynk barn. This was a noisy warren in which thousands of identical robots were hustling around in a manner that looked chaotic and organized at the same time, much like the impression you’d get staring into a beehive. For an earthbound loop system like this one, the flynks had to be aerodynamic, so their inner skeletons were hidden beneath thin
plastic fairings, making them into blunt-nosed cylinders, like large bullets, with a little waist in the midsection to give the universal joint freedom to bend this way and that. Each of these flynks was about half a meter in diameter and two meters long and weighed about twice what a large human weighed. Lying on the floor, they were helpless, and so grabbs moved them around by getting them aimed in the right direction and then rolling them about like barrels, creating a scene that looked a little like a swarm of dung beetles going about their work. The general point of the operation seemed to be to channel the flynks in the direction of troughs where they would naturally line up. This enabled them to couple themselves together into short segments of chain. The troughs had roller bearings that made it easy for chain segments to slide forward and back, like trains in a switching yard, and in this manner chain segments could be added to or subtracted from the aitrain while it was operating. Which was to say, while the system was shooting it straight up into the air at high velocity and sucking it back in on the down leg.

In one of those “easy for machines, inconceivable for humans” operations, a coupler on the glider’s nose ended up being snapped to the tail end of a flynk chain that presently got concatenated onto the up leg. Rapidly brought up to speed while still in the confines of the flynk barn, the glider pitched upward sharply as it emerged into the light. It began to rise vertically, drawn behind the chain. Nothing was connected to the glider’s tail—the loop had been deliberately severed—and so the system had ceased being an Aitken loop. It was now a vertical bullwhip, accelerating the glider to higher and higher velocity as the
Knickstelle
at its apex propagated skyward. Lying now on his back, staring straight up over Kath Two’s shoulders, Ty could see small aerodynamic vanes that had deployed from the fuselage of the flynk ahead of them. These, like all the other vanes on all the other thousands of flynks in the chain, effected tiny adjustments to keep the whip trimmed in just the right configuration. The result,
a few moments later, was that the glider came snapping over the top just as its connection to the last flynk was severed. In a few seconds it had been hauled two thousand meters straight up and let go with a velocity of a few hundred kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, every other flynk in the chain had decoupled itself fore and aft, causing the entire chain to disintegrate into a linear cloud of identical fragments, each headed in a different direction. Each flynk, sensing that it was aloft and alone, automatically deployed large tail vanes that turned it from a bullet into a badminton shuttlecock. The flynks rapidly slowed down to their terminal velocity, turned nose down, and began to fall toward the ground. A slight canting of the vanes caused them to begin spinning like maple seeds, further slowing their descent, and in this manner the entire swarm began to descend in the direction of an empty lot adjacent to the flynk barn.

All of which had to be pictured in Ty’s mind’s eye, since they already had left it far behind. But he had seen it many times, as it was one of the basic operations carried out many times a day at any aitrain port. The same flynks, organized in a different way, might just as easily have effected a high-altitude rendezvous with an orbiting bolo, or collected an aircraft and drawn it back downward to safe haven in the barn.

The first half hour of the flight was a little unsettling to Ty’s stomach as Kath Two made a few sudden maneuvers, perhaps because she had sensed good air in one direction or bad in another. People who were accustomed to flight in powered aircraft frequently had trouble adjusting to the unpredictability of gliders, but Ty, who had done it before, understood that Kath Two was just hunting for the right way to inject them into the mountain wave hovering invisibly in the upper atmosphere above the Andes crest. He knew she had found it when the juking and jiving stopped and the back of the seat pressed him forward with palpable acceleration. They were in level, steady flight now, proceeding north at something like three hundred kilometers per hour. Kath Two’s task henceforth would be to look far
into their future with her lidar-enhanced sensorium and make small adjustments needed to dodge pockets of rough air.

Everyone became somewhat listless and fell to reading books or napping. Sitting a couple of rows behind Ty, occupying most of a pair of seats, was Beled Tomov. He was in an attitude of repose, whitish-blue eyes half closed and unfocused, but aimed generally out the window. He was probably trying to maintain a visual fix on the horizon as a way to stave off motion sickness. In any case he did not look to be in a social mood.

Over a series of meals and drinks since the initial meeting of the Seven, Ty had been able to piece together a vague picture of the mission that Kath Two and Beled had recently completed in Beringia. Apparently, Beled had been trying to maintain some kind of threadbare cover story about being Survey. Fortunately, this had now been dispensed with and Doc was openly addressing him as Lieutenant Tomov.

Military were divided into three broad groups generally known as Button Pushers, Ground Pounders, and Snake Eaters. Beled clearly was no Button Pusher. That was the only branch of the service where Ivyns, and even Camites, were present in any numbers. That narrowed it down to Ground Pounder or Snake Eater. He seemed too elite to be a Ground Pounder: the sort of regular troops who would be deployed in large formations along borders on the surface. Oh, it wasn’t out of the question. He might simply have been an unusually big and strong GP. But more likely he was a Snake Eater, which was to say a former GP who had been promoted into one of a few special-purpose branches. Those had informal names too: Queeds (Quarantine Enforcement and Detention), Feelies (Forward Intelligence), and Zerks (a contraction of Berserkers). Queeds had by far the lowest status. They were looked at somewhat askance because of their status as what amounted to riot police, called in to quell domestic disturbances but more often just posted near gates to remind people not to make trouble. Popular estimates of their intelligence and moral
fiber were none too generous. Ty could not see why such a person would have been chosen for the Seven, and so he deemed it unlikely. Forward Intelligence was a better fit, and an obvious guess since Ty already knew that Beled had very recently been called back from the surface, where he had been moving about on what sounded like a classic Feely kind of mission. Reference had been made to the fact that Beled had passed near at least one RIZ and observed its inhabitants without himself being seen, which was just the sort of thing Feelies were supposed to be good at. The only thing that prevented Ty from simply pigeonholing Beled as a classic Feely was his physique. Because of that, he must allow for the outside chance that Beled Tomov was a Zerk. But only an outside chance, because, contrary to their image in popular entertainment, Zerks were not all huge and muscular. Most of them looked reasonably normal, if unusually fit. The Zerks were not a single unitary force but a mosaic of small units, each of which was trained and equipped for a special type of activity such as fighting in space suits in zero gee, fighting underwater, being dropped from the sky in pods, or cloak-and-dagger urban shenanigans. Thus far Beled Tomov had not shown any clear signs of such specialization. The steps he was taking to avoid motion sickness suggested that he was not accustomed to airborne work. If Ty had to guess, he’d say that this man had started out as a Ground Pounder, spent a lot of time on the surface in a border zone, distinguished himself, been promoted from the ranks, and ended up in some kind of tiny Zerk unit that specialized in sneaking around on the surface.

The only one showing signs of life was Langobard. This stood to reason, since he had been confined to quarters for a few days. Ty moved back, sat next to him, and asked him about his clan’s vineyard in Antimer. It was a wholly reasonable line of inquiry from a Cradle bartender, but both men probably understood that it was just an icebreaker. Bard was more than happy to play along, and talked for a while about the volcanic soil of his homeland, how the TerReForm had converted it, in the last few centuries, from a dead mineral rubble
to an ecosystem, and how his grandparents had smuggled grapevines down from various botanical gardens in both Blue and Red and suffered through various misadventures on their way to figuring out that certain soil amendments were needed to make it work. Implicit in that story was that they must have been working with some people who weren’t Neoanders. Smuggling unauthorized plant species down to the surface would have been dicey enough, for members of that race, if done entirely within Red. On the Blue side of things, Neoanders would have been absurdly conspicuous, liable to being detained and searched by the Q even when they
weren’t
engaged in illegal activity. When Ty pointed that out, Bard said yes while shaking his head no, as if to say,
But of course, what you are saying is obvious.
He went on to explain that his people, stationed for over a decade along a border that was entirely peaceful, had over time established cordial relationships with their opposite numbers on the Blue side of the line, which had begun with swapping supplies to enliven their respective diets and progressed to picnics, athletic competitions, and other ways of relieving the boredom. The Teklans (he reported with a glance toward the slumbering Beled) had been standoffish—but his people had always had good relations with Dinans.