Seveneves: A Novel (92 page)

On broken terrain, Doc on his grabb made better time than anyone, with the possible exception of Einstein, who was a gifted scrambler. The two of them would surge ahead and then Beled would put on a loping burst and catch up, obeying some kind of instinct to take point. Langobard seemed more inclined to hang back and act as a rear guard, which meant he spent more time in the company of the slower Ariane. Sometimes he simply picked her up and carried her over rough patches. The valley had been flat higher up, but they had to negotiate a steeper transition down to the altitude where vegetation had been seeded by the ONANs. It then became easier going, though they had to find open trails among the dense low shrubs
that had taken root in the ashy soil. Their feet and their noses told them that the ground had been preseeded with some kind of microorganism that had presumably been designed to convert volcanic ash—which tended to have toxic stuff like sulfur in it—to a more wholesome kind of soil.

Einstein had played his cards close to his chest until they had deplaned. Since then, he had been providing Doc, and anyone else close enough to eavesdrop, with his own kind of speculative backstory for the thing they were going to visit.

“You’ll see when we get there,” he said more than once, perhaps betraying some uncertainty as to the correctness of his theory—a word he knew but pronounced to rhyme with “story.”

The phrase “I looked it up” was in frequent use by Einstein. He had no idea who Doc was, and just saw him as a very old man who was willing to answer questions. To answer them, but also to ask them in a way that was challenging without being brusque.

“They had these wheeled vehicles—”

“Cars?”

“No, the big box-shaped ones.”

“Trucks, or lorries,” Doc said.

“My theory is that this ’fact used to be one of those.”

“But a minute ago,” Doc observed, in the mildest possible tone of complaint, “you were saying it got hurled over the mountains by a tsunami.”

“Yeah.”

“That would imply that it had been bobbing around somewhere in the ocean.”

“That’s my theory.”

“Would it not have sunk to the bottom? The boxes were not airtight. Sooner or later it would have filled up with water.”

“The inside of what used to be the box is all coated with black residue,” Einstein offered, also pronouncing that word incorrectly.

“What conclusion do you draw from that?”

“I looked it up, and these trucks were used to carry all kinds of goods. Not just heavy stuff but bags of potato chips, athletic shoes, toys. My theory is that this was one of those. It was near the waterfront when it got hit by one of the earliest tsunamis, a small one that dragged it out into the ocean. And it didn’t sink, see, because—”

“Because it was full of bags of potato chips or something,” Doc said.

“Right, and it didn’t burn, at least not right away, because it was in the water. But then later it got caught up in a really big tsunami, like the one that created Antimer, which heaved it right up over the mountains and slammed it down . . . right over there. We should almost be able to see it.”

“Whereupon its contents burned, leaving the black residue,” Doc said, gently emphasizing the pronunciation.

“Yeah, and the paint burned off and the tires and all of the other stuff that wasn’t steel.”

“Would it not then have rusted away, during five thousand years?”

“I looked it up,” Einstein said. “The place was very dry. And this truck was probably buried. Yeah, it rusted some. But it was preserved until the Cloudy Century.”

Einstein must have looked that up too; the Cloudy Century was roughly 4300–4400, after the oceans had been reinstated but while everything was still quite hot.

“Then, after rivers began flowing again, erosion exposed it. And yeah, the exposed parts are rusted all right. Some parts are of a different metal though.”

“Aluminum,” Doc said.

But Einstein’s discourse was trailing off as he kept looking at the device that was supposed to tell them their latitude and longitude. He was giving every appearance of being lost.

Finally he made a decisive move about fifty meters down-valley,
penetrating a bank of tall shrubs. The others followed him. Visibility was poor and so they heard his reaction before seeing the ’fact. “What the—?!”

“What is it?” Ty demanded.

“Someone dug it up!” Einstein exclaimed.

They found themselves standing around the rim of a pit perhaps half a dozen meters in diameter, and the same in depth. Marks in the soil made it obvious that this had been excavated with shovels, and vague footprints proved they had been wielded by humans and not robots. At the deepest part of the excavation, the gray soil had been stained red with rust. But the bottom of the pit was otherwise vacant; whatever had been rusting there was entirely gone. Only a few scraps of hard black plastic, and fragments of steel that had been altogether converted into rust, proved that Einstein hadn’t been lying to them all along.

Ty let himself down carefully into the hole, prodded in the wet, rusty mush with his toe, then reached into it and pulled something out. After shaking off lashings of mud, he underhanded it out of the pit to Beled, who picked it out of the air. It was a bent black cylinder.

“The day is not lost,” Ty announced. “All of us will get to handle an actual ’fact. That, my friends, is a five-thousand-year-old radiator hose.”

A few emotions were competing for the mental energies of the Seven: utter confusion about who had dug this hole, and why. Empathy for the deeply embarrassed Einstein, who had promised them an entire truck. Disappointment that the only things left of it were a rust stain and a radiator hose. A mild sense of alarm at the idea that inexplicable persons with shovels were somewhere about. Swamping all of these, however, like a tsunami cresting over the mountains, was the awareness that they were in the presence of a real artifact from before Zero. As they had established on the flight up here, Doc had seen such things three times in his life, not counting museum exhibits. None of the others had ever seen one at all.

And so they all stood there in silence for several minutes, passing it from hand to hand, thinking about it: the factory where it had been manufactured, the engineers who had designed it, the workers who had assembled the vehicle, the driver who had piloted it around, and the day that the Hard Rain had begun. As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

Beled, after handling the ’fact for a minute and gazing at it inscrutably, handed it off to Kath Two. He withdrew from the edge of the pit and began circling it restlessly. After a minute he called out to the others, but not in a voice of alarm.

About ten meters away, at a break in the slope that afforded a bit of a view down the valley, a sort of totem had been erected: a length of aluminum tubing, white with oxidation, projecting vertically out of the ground to a height about equal to that of a person. At its top, lashed on with a few scraps of copper wire, a circular object: a steel hoop mostly obscured by marred and pitted black stuff, a crossbar through its middle with loose wires dangling from orifices.

“Steering wheel,” Ty said. “The plastic coating burned but the steel rim held it together.”

“Who put it here?” Ariane asked. She was the last to arrive, and had to insinuate herself among taller members of the Seven in order to get a clear view. As a result she nearly tripped over a long, low mound of disturbed earth. The steering wheel totem had been erected at one end of it.

“Whoever buried the driver,” Ty answered.

Doc looked at Einstein. “Were you aware of the existence of human remains?”

Einstein held his hands up. “You have to understand, the truck came down like a dart. Nose first.”

“Naturally,” Doc said. “All the weight was in the engine block. The box, as we have established, was filled with something light.”

“The only part that was sticking out was maybe this much of the
bumper, and some of the box.” Einstein was holding his hands about a meter apart. “The place where the human was—”

“The cab,” Ty said.

“—was deep underground. You have to understand, all this digging—”

“Came as a complete surprise to you. Yes, we understand that,” Doc said.

“When were you last here?” Langobard asked.

“Two years ago,” Einstein said. “But you have to understand: if someone from my RIZ had gone up here with shovels and dug up a whole truck, I’d have heard about it.”

“Where’s the incentive?” Ariane asked.

Everyone looked at her.

“As it was—in situ—the truck was priceless. Legally or not, tourists would have paid any amount of money to come and view it. To dig it up makes sense—so that tourists could get a full view of it. But—”

“But instead it has been completely dismantled,” Doc said, “and everything of value taken away.”

“Of value?! I don’t understand what you mean by that word,” Ariane said.

“The Diggers were after the engine block,” Doc said, as if this would answer her question—which it by no means did. But after a few moments she had a thought.

“Ah,” Ariane said, “you think it was looters.”

Bard was right with her. “You think,” he supposed, “that the engine block is now sitting in a display case in the private gallery of some wealthy collector on Cradle.”

“That is not an unreasonable supposition,” Doc admitted, in a tone that, however, made it clear that no such idea had actually crossed his mind. “But it strikes me as unusual for looters to go to so much trouble to give a ceremonial burial to the driver.”

“If it was not valuable as loot—as a collector’s item—then what possible value could the engine block have had?” Kath Two asked.

“It was valuable,” Doc said, “as iron. As a several-hundred-kilogram sample of pure metal that could be melted down and cast into other shapes.”

“Is there anything in the universe
less
valuable than iron?” Bard scoffed. “We have been living inside of giant chunks of it for five thousand years.”

“
We
have,” Doc agreed, and with a small movement of his hand caused his grabb-chair to withdraw from the grave site and begin picking its way back toward the excavation. Remembrance threw an unreadable look over her shoulder and followed him.

They reconvened and viewed the pit through fresh eyes. Ty pointed out a place where the gray ash was freckled with tiny red-brown spots, and guessed that someone had worked there with a hacksaw, sprinkling iron sawdust on the ground, and that the tiny flakes had rusted. Slipping the ash between his fingers he produced a few bright sparks of clean metal. Bard found a scarred wedge of dense wood, battered on its fat end with many hammer blows, and guessed it had been used to part the engine block into pieces that could be more easily carried. Beled, continuing to circle the perimeter, came up with a pole of hard wood somewhat more than a meter long, neatly rounded at one end, snapped off sharp at the other. “They broke one of their shovels,” he said. Holding the pole before him, he rotated it until he was able to see an inscription that had been stamped into the wood. “Srap Tasmaner,” he announced.

“Let me see that,” Doc said.

Beled handed it to him. Doc gazed at it for a while without speaking. The longer he looked at this seemingly trivial piece of debris, the more he drew attention to himself, until the others were all standing there silently watching him. His deeply hooded eyes were downcast and it was difficult to tell whether he was focusing all of his mental powers on the thing, or fast asleep.

Finally he rotated the pole until its sharp end was pointed downward, and used it to scratch a letter into the dirt.

                       
C

“You read this, Beled, as a letter S, but as you probably learned in school, it was once used to represent a number of sounds including the one we write as K.”

He wrote a K beneath the C.

“The next few letters are familiar and we write them the same way in Anglisky.”

                       
CRA

                       
KRA

“You misread the fourth letter as a defective P. A natural mistake since we no longer use the old glyph F, which it resembles. Instead we use the Cyrillic phi.”

                       
CRAF

                       
KRAФ

“The next two letters are TS, for which we have a more wieldy one-letter substitute in Anglisky.”

                       
CRAFTS

                       
KRAФЦ

“The next three are the same in English and Anglisky.”

                       
CRAFTSMAN

                       
KRAФЦMAN

“Craftsman,” Beled said, reading the bottom row. “But what of the R at the end?”

                       
CRAFTSMAN
^®

“When it’s enclosed in a little circle, it’s not a letter to be pronounced at all, but a sign that this is a sort of commercial trademark. Or I should say ‘was.’ It was a trademark five thousand years ago, apparently.”

About halfway through this lecture on ancient and modern orthography, Ariane had become intensely focused, and for the last part of it had been holding one hand over her mouth. “I have seen its like in the Epic!” she exclaimed through her fingers. “
New Caird
’s landing on
Ymir
. Vyacheslav went out the airlock to clear ice from the docking port. He used a shovel just like this one.”

“You are saying—” Kath Two prompted Doc.

“I am saying that this shovel handle is itself a five-thousand-year-old ’fact that could fetch a high price on Cradle,” Doc said, lifting it up and brushing the dirt from its broken end. Ariane snapped a picture of it and thumbed at her tablet. “It was thrown away,” Doc continued, “because it was of no use to its owners, who knew that they could get wooden poles anywhere in Beringia just by cutting down a tree.”

“What sort of people think that iron is valuable and five-thousand-year-old artifacts are garbage?” Kath Two asked. She was interrupted by a faint high-pitched beeping sound that was emanating from all of them at once.