Seveneves: A Novel (95 page)

“Ariane,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“You don’t seem to realize,” she said, “that this changes everything.” She let the katapult drop away from the woman’s head for a moment, then swung it up and aimed it at Ty. It gave off the characteristic
whang
of an ambot being shot out of its muzzle and then she put it back against the woman’s head.

Ty felt the impact like a punch in the rib cage and recoiled from it instinctively. But even before he could recover from that, the ambot had entrenched itself in his clothes, extruded a couple of needle-sharp probes into his side, and begun jamming his nervous system. Having been hit by these before, he knew that the best he could hope for was to strike the ground with something other than his face, so he released his grip on the shovel handle, and on the old Digger, and went down.

Had he been able to speak, he’d have told Kath Two not to worry about him—to do something about Ariane. But his teeth were banging together too hard to form words, and it was all he could do to keep his breathing muscles working.

The old man staggered away, fell to his knees, and found the shovel handle on the ground right in front of him. He grabbed it with one hand, planted it, grabbed it with the other, and used it to lever himself back up. He advanced on Ty, who was just lying on the ground in spasms. Ty was then aware of a dark shape above him, and looked up to see Kath Two standing over him, facing the old man, raising an arm instinctively to defend herself. The shovel handle struck that arm with a thud and sent Kath Two stumbling away, crying out in pain. The man then raised the pointed end of the stick above Ty.

“Iniquitous mutant!” he cried. Then he added something that was drowned out by the
whang
of a katapult. Kath Two, using her own sidearm, had shot him in the belly from point-blank range. The stick dropped from the man’s hands and added to Ty’s inventory of minor aches and pains as it came down point first on his chest. The man toppled next to Ty, going down hard and banging his head on a rock.

Suddenly Ty was in the clear, at least neurologically. Einstein, kneeling above him with a bone-handled knife, had pried the ambot off him, and now used the knife’s steel pommel to smash it to bits against a rock.

Kath Two was down on one knee moving her damaged arm about in slow motion, her mouth frozen in the O of a suppressed scream.

Ty’s gaze was drawn to movement in the clouds above Kath Two’s head: a glowing rod levering down out of the sky. Visually it was a near match for what had just happened with the shovel handle, except that in this case the object was kilometers in length and incandescing as if it had just been pulled from the bed of coals at the foundation of a bonfire.

He understood now. He swiveled his head sideways so that he
could look down the slope. In a clear patch a stone’s throw away—about three hundred meters downhill of the glider—the ground was glowing ruby red where it was being painted from above by lasers: three bright spots forming an equilateral triangle, and a grainy circle centered in that. The light washed briefly over Ariane’s head and shoulders as she shoved her hostage into the middle of the circle.

The glowing stick came straight down on top of them, enveloping them in its hollow end, and then sprang back up into the sky, leaving nothing save a trail of footprints that terminated in the center of a perfectly circular depression in the ground. Around that was a penumbra of vegetation that had been toasted by radiant heat. In the moments before the device was drawn back up through the cloud cover they were able to see the booth that had scooped up Ariane and her hostage, telescoping back up inside the red-hot tube in preparation for its departure from the atmosphere.

THE MECHANISM THAT ARIANE HAD SUMMONED WAS CALLED A
Thor. It consisted of a big rock—the head of a god-sized maul—with a very long and lightweight “handle” capable of reaching all the way to the surface even while the “head” was just grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The whole thing spun like a thrown hammer, which was to say that the long handle flailed in a large circle around the head.

At the end of the handle was the capture booth, large enough to accommodate three people if they stood close together. During descent and ascent it was enclosed within an outer shell designed to survive the rigors of passage through the atmosphere. The handle would stride down out of space in the same general style as the hanger bolo that Kath Two and Beled had recently used, except that instead of pausing in the upper atmosphere to collect aircraft, this one would spear all the way down to the surface and grab whatever happened to
be standing in the target zone—which it would paint beforehand with lasers so that the passengers would know where to stand. The head of the hammer would subsequently pivot forward into the atmosphere, catch air, and slow down, levering the handle sharply upward and catapulting the payload into a much higher orbit. The head would detach itself and fall downrange as a meteorite. This, of course, made it a single-use device, used only in emergencies, and even then when the need was so extreme that it was considered worth the risk of dropping a bolide on some basically random spot downrange.

So it could be assumed that a fresh crater now decorated the interior of North America somewhere to the east of here, and that Ariane and her captive were en route to a safe haven in the Red segment of the ring. What awaited them there could only be guessed at, but for Ariane it was probably going to be a substantial reward, a medal, and a promotion to some high rank in Red’s military intelligence branch.

Doc never spoke another coherent word. Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.

The old Digger looked better after a few hours, aside from some symptoms indicative of a concussion. The younger one got his leg splinted. Both were in a murderous frame of mind toward the three remaining captives. But it seemed that the majority of the Diggers were taken aback by what had happened, and were advocating a more level-headed approach to future relations between their tribe and the sort of civilization that could produce things like Ariane’s Thor and Beled’s and Langobard’s weaponized ambot swarms.

As a way of demonstrating their own technological prowess, or perhaps simply to blow off steam, the Diggers detonated a lump of some kind of home-brewed explosive in the open space between the glider and the fresh graves. Evidently this was meant as a warning
for Bard and Beled, who were presumed to be watching from nearby cover.

Ty, Einstein, and Kath Two were fitted with hinged collars of bent steel. When these were closed around the neck, loops in the free ends came into alignment so that a chain could be run through them, locking them shut while stringing all the captives together. At one end, the chain was terminated by an ancient padlock that was too large to pass through the loops on Kath Two’s collar. The other end was then affixed, by means of a bolt, to a large wooden stake that an especially burly Digger had pounded into the ground with a stone-headed maul that looked like a miniature Thor.

Just uphill of this, and out of the prisoners’ reach, other Diggers constructed a little cairn. They topped it with another lump of explosive. They attached wires to the lump for detonation and ran them down to the main Digger camp, which was under the wings of the glider some fifty meters away.

“What just happened?!” Einstein wanted to know, as soon as the Diggers had left them alone. “I mean, that was obviously a Thor. I’ve heard of them. But . . .” and he threw his hands up in the air.

“Ariane is a mole,” Ty said. Then he corrected himself: “
Was
a mole. Now she’s probably a hero. A Red hero.”

“Red sent the Thor down to, what do you call it, extract her.”

“Yeah. Her and, more to the point, a living, breathing biological sample.”

Kath Two, at one end of the string, climbed into a sleeping bag and fell asleep. Ty did not expect her to wake up for a long time. He and Einstein moved down-chain as far as they could, to leave her in peace, and squatted on their haunches. The Diggers had left them firewood and kindling. Without discussion, they began laying a fire. It became clear that Einstein had done it before, and so Ty just let him do it. The young Ivyn had very particular ideas about fires.

“Where did you learn how to fight like that?” Einstein asked him. “Are you part Teklan or something?”

“Fighting isn’t about knowing how,” Ty said. “It’s about deciding to.”

“Well, I was frozen, man.”

“Look, these are times when the decisions that our Eves made five thousand years ago control our actions to a degree that renders us basically helpless. You were meant to stand back and observe and analyze.”

“And you were made to be a hero,” Einstein said.

“A hero would have saved Memmie.”

“But no one could have seen that coming! The way that woman just went crazy on her . . .”

“We’ll be asking ourselves that for a long time.” Ty sighed and looked over to the encampment where the Diggers were going about life as if nothing had happened. Some of them were roasting kebabs that they had cut from the carcass of a big herbivore killed down in the woods. There were a lot of kids under ten years old, but few teenagers. Half of the women looked pregnant. “Play your role, Einstein. You’re the Ivyn in our group now that Doc’s gone. What do you see?”

Einstein seemed reluctant to speak, so Ty prompted him: “I see a population explosion.”

Einstein snapped into focus and nodded his head.

“You’ve never heard of these people,” Ty went on, “even though your RIZ is just on the other side of these mountains and your people patrol up here all the time.”

“Rufus MacQuarie’s mine was far to the north,” Einstein offered. “These people must have just come out into the open recently.”

“Look for the oldest child down there and that probably tells you the date.”

“But the atmosphere’s been breathable for three hundred years! Why would they wait until now?”

Ty nodded toward the center of the Digger camp: the big bed of coals, the meat roasting over it.

“Food?” Einstein said.

“Food and fuel,” Ty confirmed. “They’ve been down in their hole
living on God only knows what—cave tofu or something—since the beginning of the Hard Rain. Every so often maybe they would sample the air outside. When it became breathable they probably went out and had a look around. But it was still a wasteland, not capable of supporting life. It’s only in the last few years that TerReForm has seeded that part of Beringia with animals big enough to be worth the effort expended in hunting them. That was the starting gun—the signal for them to come out.”

“And to begin having kids as fast as they could, apparently.”

“Apparently. Now, Einstein, what does that tell you about gender roles?”

“Well, to begin with, they don’t have an Eve, they have an Adam—Rufus—so it could easily be more pat—patree—”

“Patriarchal.”

“Thanks. And then if all the women are expected to make lots of babies—”

“That tells you something,” Ty said. “Now, here’s the big question that is kind of staring us in the face. You’re a Digger, okay? You’re not stupid. All you have to do is pop your head out of your cave on a clear night and look into the southern sky and you can see the habitat ring. And over time you can see the Eye moving back and forth across it and you can see new habitats lighting up as they are built. You can see bolos coming in low across the sky and TerReForm aircraft flying right overhead and showers of ONANs coming down straight from the ring. And you’re no ignorant savage. Your folk have maintained a reasonably advanced engineering culture. Those compound bows. That lump of explosive. So you wouldn’t have interpreted all of that as gods or angels or any of that.”

“They’ve known,” Einstein said. “From the first—”

“For centuries,” Ty said, nodding. “As long as they could breathe outside.”

“For that long, they have known that billions of humans were living in the sky,” Einstein said. “But they didn’t make any attempt to signal.”

“More than that. They hid from us!” Ty said. “Efforts were made, you know, to find the MacQuarie mine several decades ago. These people must have made some kind of decision that they didn’t want to be found.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what I am asking. Fear? Anger?”

“The old guy really hates us. ‘Cowards who ran away’ is what he considers us.”

“It’s what he
called
us,” Ty allowed. “And he called us that really loudly. He wasn’t really talking to us, I think.”

Einstein nodded. “I see what you mean. He was talking to the people behind him.”

“If I’m squatting in my mine shaft eating cave tofu when I know perfectly well that there are lots of humans up in geosync living in better conditions, then I need some kind of powerful incentive to stay in my cave. To conceal my presence.”

“Some kind of dukh or I dee—”

“Ideology,” Ty said with a nod. “I should have seen all this. God damn me for not seeing it a few minutes quicker.”

“Seeing what?”

“That only a mind virus, a shared hallucination, could explain the suddenness of their appearance aboveground.”

“Doc didn’t see it either,” Einstein said. He was only trying to make Ty feel better, but then he looked slightly appalled at himself for having spoken ill of his dead kinsman.

“No,” Ty said, “he sure didn’t. Now, what have we learned about how these people think?”

“They have, what do you call it, a chip on the shoulder.”

Ty nodded. “It was supremely important to the leaders that they put on a show of dominance under the gaze of their flock. Which they did. Then Doc did the thing with the Srap Tasmaner. A gesture of reconciliation but also a way of shaming them for being such complete assholes. Maybe not a bad move when dealing with people
who have been acculturated to be more reasonable, to get along with each other.”

“People like us. People who have had to coexist in habitats forever.”