Seveneves: A Novel (93 page)

They had all been issued earpieces so that they could communicate if they became separated. Most had removed these and pocketed them, or simply draped them around their necks, but Beled still had his in. He pressed one hand to his ear and held the other in front of him, as if checking a timepiece. But he was actually looking at a small flat screen that was strapped to his wrist. He then pivoted to gaze up the valley in the direction from which they had come, but the view was blocked by foliage and terrain.

“Large animals moving in their vicinity have been detected by the buckies,” he said, “and one of them has gone silent.”

“Yesterday,” Doc said, “when young Einstein here proposed we make a junket into the mountains to have a look at an artifact, I was resistant to the idea at first. I saw it as a mere diversion, of a touristical nature. I gave my assent to the idea because I saw it as an opportunity to carry out a dry run for the procedures we would be using later, when we got started for real. I see now, however, that it is the main event.”

THE DIGGERS HAD ERECTED ANOTHER TOTEM NEXT TO THE GLIDER
’
S
side door: a circular hoop of bent branches, thrust into the air on a pole made from a debarked sapling about five meters tall. The Seven recognized it as a more naturalistic version of the steering wheel totem that had been placed at the driver’s grave. Did it have some meaning to these people? It was difficult, now, not to read it as a glyph symbolizing the Agent’s penetration of the moon. But it also looked like the Greek letter phi, which had made its way into the Anglisky alphabet as a substitute for both F and PH. As such it could have been an initial for just about anything—Fire? Fear? Philosophy?

Before they had moved from the site of the dig, Bard, Beled, and Ty had scouted the vicinity, spiraling out from it in larger and larger circles until satisfied that no one was nearby. They had found footprints and other signs that someone had been through very recently—perhaps watching them as they had tried to make sense of the disappearance of the truck.

As they had retraced their steps up the valley, then, they had spied sentinels, perched in places that were meant to be conspicuous, atop boulders and rubble mounds flanking the streambed, leaning on lances whose steel heads gleamed softly in the blue-gray light sifting down out of the overcast sky. Others carried strange-looking contraptions of cables, pulleys, and bent steel, which Beled identified as
powerful bows. From this distance it was difficult to say much about their appearance. More than a few were redheads; the men tended to be bearded; they wore clothing that in some cases was out-and-out camouflage, in others was just meant to blend in with natural backgrounds.

When they had passed between the first pair of sentries, Beled, on point, had held up his hand, signaling that they should stop. The obvious concern had been that by going any farther they would begin placing these people to their rear, effectively allowing themselves to be surrounded. But the sentries, apparently understanding this, now began to move up the slope abreast of them, leaving them a clear exit.

Or at least a clear pedestrian exit. By the time the Seven and their young guide came in view of the totem raised above the glider, it had been surrounded by perhaps two dozen Diggers. They had pulled all the equipment cases out of the cargo hatch, laid them out on the ground in neat rows, and begun going through their contents. Some of them were making lists of what they found, taking inventory of what they seemingly thought of as their new property.

“I take it you have never seen or heard of such people, Einstein,” Doc said.

“Rumors. But not this many. We just thought they were strays from other RIZes.”

“Well, as you can see, they are something else,” Doc said. He raised his voice slightly, addressing the whole group. “Now that we’ve had some time for the shock to wear off, I think you all understand what we are looking at. These people are not descendants of the Seven Eves. They are rootstock. Their ancestors survived the Hard Rain and somehow found a way to live belowground until quite recently. Most likely they are cousins of yours, Tyuratam Lake.”

It took Ty a few moments to understand that Doc was alluding to events five thousand years in the past. “By way of Rufus MacQuarie?” he said.

Doc blinked in assent. “Dinah’s father, as is well documented in
the Epic, went belowground with some like-minded persons. Efforts have been made, during the last century, to find their underground home and learn what became of them. All unavailing.”

“Perhaps they didn’t wish to be found,” Ty said.

“How long have you known of this?” Ariane asked.

“How long have
you
known of it, Ariane?” Doc returned. “Did the unusual orders you were given not fill you with a certain amount of curiosity?”

“Of course! But I never—”

“Many of us have wondered, have speculated. The first solid evidence that I know of emerged about a year ago. Prior to that there were rumors, as Einstein says, but they could be more easily explained by supposing that some renegade Sooners were running around in the boondocks, living as they pleased. Or that they were forward scouts sent by Red to probe Blue territory. Indeed, Survey found examples of both.” Doc’s eyes strayed toward Beled, who met his gaze. “Red has made surprisingly deep incursions into central Asia, for example. Lieutenant Tomov may bear witness to that, if you can draw him out on the subject. Like many who have fought, he finds it tiresome to converse with ones who haven’t.”

“So you have been engaged in a systematic investigation for at least a year” was the only thing about all of that that Ariane seemed to find interesting.

“As have you, Ariane. It is just that you didn’t know it until now. I myself was not really sure until—” Doc looked over at Memmie, who had taken custody of the shovel handle and fallen into the habit of employing it as a walking staff. Doc got a faintly mischievous look on his face. “Until I held in my hands the Stick of Srap Tasmaner.”

“How much do we know about them?” Langobard asked.

“As of this moment,” Doc said, “the eight of us know a hundred times as much about these people as all other Spacers put together.”

“Spacers?”

Again the mischievous look. “In our discussions—our
entirely
hypothetical
discussions—we found ourselves needing some term that we could use to denote the descendants of the Seven Eves—the inhabitants of the ring—as opposed to people like this. We settled on Spacers.”

“That makes it sound even more like all of this was foreordained,” Ariane said.

Her reproachful tone was getting on all of their nerves. Nonetheless they were surprised when it was Remembrance who said something. Perhaps the Camite felt emboldened by possession of a stick large enough to give the Julian a sound whack or two. More likely she was offended by Ariane’s accusatory tone, which hinted that Doc had been less than honest. Planting the Srap Tasmaner for balance on the uneven ground and turning to face Ariane, she said: “Of note here is that we are making first contact with a race of cousins hidden from us for five millennia. Some would find that remarkable.”

“And I
do,
Memmie!” Ariane said, after a few moments spent recovering from her shock at being spoken to this way by a Camite. “But in order to handle the situation well I think we need to know the larger context.”

“Any well-informed Spacer knows the context,” Memmie returned, sweeping her free hand up across the sky. “It is only a certain type of mind that scorns what is known by all and treats secrets as jewels.”

After this Ariane seemed to feel that further conversation would not be to her advantage. It was only the ten millionth such conversation that had taken place during the long, fraught, weirdly personal relationship between Julians and Camites, so Ariane knew her cue to shut up and look aggrieved.

There had been very little discussion, as yet, of the possibility of violence. Body language and shared glances among Ty, Bard, and Beled suggested that they had all been thinking about it. Einstein did them the favor of blurting it out: “What do you guys think? Can we take ’em?”

“Yes” was the answer from all three.

“But archery is a concern,” Ty added.

“A factor is how much they know about us and our armaments. Have they been scouting us for years?”

Beled aimed the question at Doc, as if he would somehow know. The look on Ariane’s face was something like
See, I knew it!
but Doc merely looked amused. “If so,” Doc said, “they have rarely if ever seen us use our weapons, and so they are unlikely to know how those work.”

“Well, they have taken all of our buckies offline,” Beled remarked, with another glance at the screen on his wrist.

“They appear to have retained some knowledge of how technology works,” Doc pointed out. “Even if they don’t have the ability to manufacture their own buckies, they can recognize them for what they are. So of course they would disable those.”

“It is a hostile act,” Beled muttered.

“If we let their archers come within range,” Ty pointed out, “then they will have us. We should consider
that
a hostile act.”

“Then we should not go much farther,” Bard said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Ty replied.

They had approached now to within about a hundred meters of the glider and had the full attention of the Diggers surrounding it. Four of them had claimed the high places around it, where buckies had been stationed earlier, and two more had clambered up onto the tops of the wings. The strangely orderly looters had ceased their activities and pressed forward to see what was going to happen. At least three of them were children, and there were as many women as men.

“Mixed messages,” Bard said, and made a gesture that caused his fellow Spacers to stop where they were.

“Let me have a go at this,” Ty said, “if it’s true they are related to me.” He strode forward several paces beyond Beled, stopped, and then pantomimed drawing back an arrow and shooting it in a high trajectory. He then pointed at the archers.

Immediately one of the Digger men, near the center of the group, turned to face the others and backed several paces away from them, swiveling his head to get a picture of how the formation might look from the Spacers’ point of view. He shouted something that, from this distance, could not really be heard above the sound of the wind on the rocks. The archers and the sentinels eventually responded, though not crisply. They clambered down from the high places and, on further exhortation from the leader, set their bows down and backed away from them.

The leader turned to face Ty and held out his hands, palms up.

Ty set his katapult on a nearby rock.

A second man now separated himself from the Digger group and began making his way forward, making reasonable headway but steadying himself on a pair of walking sticks. His head was bald and his beard was gray. When he drew abreast, the leader, who was somewhat younger, began ambling forward, matching the older man’s pace.

Doc set his grabb chair into motion. Memmie, out of habit, paced him, but after she had taken several steps forward, he stayed her with a hand gesture. “I will take that, however,” he said, and extended his hand toward the stick. She gave it to him and he tucked it under one arm.

Ty waited for Doc to catch up, and then began to advance by his side.

Some of the Diggers seemed keen to follow the action and began to creep forward, touching off internal controversies, and prompting Beled and Bard to move ahead as well. Through a sort of nonverbal negotiation, the two sides arrived at a deal where a total of eight Diggers—the two out in front, plus six more trailing in an echelon behind—ventured out into the open space to match the eight Spacers. Among the Diggers were some warrior types, keeping a close eye on Bard and Beled, but women and a child too. On the Spacer side, Ty and Doc were out front, with Memmie a few paces behind.
Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two maintained some distance while Bard and Beled, who were conspicuously armed, remained in the deeper background, split out to either side, respecting an unspoken agreement that they would stay out of weapon range as the Diggers’ archers were doing.

The two formations drew up within speaking distance, and looked at each other for a spell.

To the Spacers, the Diggers were familiar looking from old videos: they were rootstock humans such as populated the Epic. Genetically they were homogeneous. They were white people with blond or red hair, and eyes that seemed to have gone pale in the darkness of their caves. Their skin was fair by nature, but freckled by exposure to the aboveground sun. They were smaller than rootstock humans, but not so much so that any one of them would have seemed dwarfish on a busy street in the Chain. Except for Teklans and Neoanders, who had occupational reasons for needing to be large, the descendants of the Eves had also lost stature, particularly during the First Millennium. They had been slow to gain it back, even during the Fifth, when by and large they’d had plenty of room to stand up straight. These Diggers—at least the limited sample standing close enough for Ty to evaluate them—did seem uncommonly stocky, however.

For their part, the Diggers had more to gawk at, since it could be guessed from their reactions that they had seen little or nothing of Spacers. Ty looked unremarkable to them. Doc was interesting largely because of his age and his means of getting around. Kath Two, Memmie, and Einstein might have looked strange more because of their coloration than any genetic alterations. Something was definitely odd about Ariane’s facial structure. Beled, and particularly Bard, were to them monsters.

After a minute of sizing them up, the older Digger stomped forward a couple of paces and spoke in the pre-Zero English that all
Spacers knew from the Epic: “Cowards who ran away, you are trespassing on a world that is no longer yours to call home. Begone.”

“This is going well,” Ty remarked to Doc.

“He is putting on a show of strength for the others,” Doc said. “Best let him. If you would, please?”

He issued a command that caused his grabb’s legs to fold, bringing it as low to the ground as it could go, and extended a hand. Ty took his arm and steadied him as he stepped off the robot and found footing on the ground. He planted the stick with his other hand, then cautiously let go of Ty. Then he advanced a step. All of these actions produced murmurs among the Diggers. Perhaps they had seen Doc initially as some kind of cyborg, but now understood that he was just a very old man. He walked several paces until he found a flat spot that suited him, then planted the stick.