Seveneves: A Novel (98 page)

“We can’t rule out that our guys will show up in force,” Ty said, referring to Blue military. He looked south over the mountains, but didn’t see anything coming. Nor would he, of course; anything headed their way from Qayaq would be running dark. “Have you been in touch with them?”

“Yes,” Bard said. During this little pause he had been rooting a multitool out of his belt. He approached Ty, who held out the broken stake. Bard got his tool clamped around the head of the bolt and began to twist it out.

Ty nodded wearily. On one level, he had just asked a stupid question. But the Diggers’ attack—hell, for that matter, their
existence
—had taken them by surprise, and since then he’d been preoccupied with being a prisoner under conditions so primitive as to verge on slapstick. He ought to have been thinking about the larger picture.

Blue might bomb this whole valley into the Stone Age. But probably not. It was
already
in the Stone Age.

Bard and Beled had gotten a message up to Denali, which was the closest major Teklan military habitat to 166 Thirty. Everyone of consequence in Blue would now be aware that the Diggers existed,
that the initial contact had been botched, and that there was a hostage situation. The Thor would have made it clear that Red was a step ahead of them. The descent of those drop pods, a few minutes ago, would have made it clearer. The brilliant pool of light in which the Red delegation moved was as much for the benefit of long-lensed video cameras peering down from orbit as for the Diggers.

It was a fait accompli that Red would make formal contact, in about thirty seconds, with the Diggers, and that it would go a lot better than yesterday. Ariane would have prepped them, told them what to say: Yes, of course we accept your claim to the Earth’s surface. Its justice is self-evident. We have plenty of room in orbit. No need for habitations on the planet. Of course, as you’ve already learned firsthand, you can’t trust those people from Blue. We might be persuaded to install a discreet military presence just to keep them from encroaching on your territory. As long as we’re there, some cultural exchange programs might be in order. We could offer medicine. Dental care. Technical advice in rebuilding your civilization. How may we be of assistance?

“Blue isn’t coming tonight,” Ty said. “It would just play into their hands.” He nodded down at the procession, which was only a few meters away from making first contact with an equally sized group of Diggers. “But some members of that peloton might come after us. They’d look like heroes if they could march us back into camp in shackles.”

“Or carry our heads in on spikes,” Bard suggested in a casual tone.

“Shh!” Ty said, with a glance toward the newest member of their band. But the Cyc looked unconcerned.

“Sonar,” Ty said, “we are going to have to move. Get away from any patrols those guys might send out, while it’s still dark. Can you do that? Move rapidly over rough terrain, in the dark?”

“Sure,” Sonar said, a little too blithely for Ty’s taste. But before he could press her, she added: “Guess we’ll be going north then?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the main group is going south. Probably as soon as the sun is up.”

“How far south were they thinking of going?” As it was, they were less than a hundred kilometers from the southern coast of Beringia.

“To the sea,” Sonar said, as if this were self-evident.

“What’s going to happen then?”

The question seemed simple enough, but it led to an outburst of chuckles from Sonar. “They’re going to wonder what became of me, that’s what!” she said, when she could get her mirth under control.

“They’re probably wondering that already,” Einstein remarked.

“No, I mean they’ll be needing me then!”

“Why?” Einstein asked.

“It’s a riddle.”

The bolt had been removed now, freeing the end of the chain, which Ty pulled clear of his collar. He opened the thing up and tossed it on the ground. The gesture caught the eye of the Cyc, who probably saw it as a shocking way to treat valuable metal. Ty was now free, holding the massive stake fragment and managing to control a certain natural impulse to bash her head in. This was not a time for riddles.

Einstein got the chain out of his own collar, then carried it in the direction of Kath so that he could help her.

“The purpose of your expedition—before we blundered into your path, that is—was to go to the edge of the water and make contact with the Pingers,” Ty ventured.

“Pingers?” Bard asked.

Ty ignored him, maintaining his focus on the Cyc. “You, by virtue of your mastery of volume seventeen of the
Encyclopædia Britannica,
are the closest thing your folk have to an expert on the only technology capable of summoning them.”

“Oh, I’m an expert on other topics as well!” Sonar said. “Sophism, South Carolina, Pope Sylvester II . . .”

Ty decided to let the witticisms go by without positive or negative reinforcement. “What were you guys going to say to them?”

“It’s they who want to talk to us!” Sonar said. “They left us a message—a cairn on the beach. We are coming to respond.”

The ensuing silence lasted a long time: long enough for the final stanza of “Bread of Heaven” to stop reverberating from the mountain walls, long enough for the Aïdan leader’s opening greeting—written and pronounced in flawless pre-Zero English—to move through a solid paragraph of awe-inspiringly sycophantic salutations. Long enough for Bard to get the unchained Kath socketed into his backpack.

“We move south,” Ty announced. “Bard, you keep pace with the Cyc. If she slows us down, carry her. I’m going to need your radio.”

“My what?!” Bard exclaimed.

“An electromagnetic communications device—” Sonar began, but Ty cut her off.

“The thingamajibber you use to talk to Denali. I’m going to tell them we have a second chance.”

“A second chance to do what?”

“To make friends with the natives of this planet.”

THEY CRESTED A PASS IN THE COASTAL RANGE THE FOLLOWING DAY
and began making their way down toward the sea. When the going became easy enough to allow for something like normal conversation, Ty asked, “How many Cycs are there in total?”

Sonar’s little head snapped around, like a bird’s, to regard him curiously. She would never look you directly in the eye, but she would lurk in your peripheral vision and sneak peeks all day long.

“I know,” Ty said. “As many as there are volumes of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. But I don’t know what that number is, because we no longer have copies of it lying around.”

“Well, there are the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One,” Sonar said.
“The Ten are the Micropædia. Many short articles. The Nineteen are the Macropædia: longer, more in-depth articles. The One is the Propædia, the Outline.”

“Which category do you belong to?”

Einstein, walking ahead of them down the slope, wheeled around. “She already told us she was volume seventeen!” Normally good-natured, he was being unusually chippy all of a sudden. He returned his attention to the rocky terrain in front of him, displaying a flushed neck beneath his ponytail.

“Excuse me,” Ty said. Then, turning back to the Cyc, he asked, “Is that just luck of the draw? Or—”

“No!”

Of course not.

“The older Cycs started me on smaller books, to evaluate me.”

“When? At what age did they start you?”

“When it was decided that I was not a breeder.”

Einstein turned around again, this time so suddenly that he lost his footing and fell on his ass. The reaction was so outsized that Ty had to look away from it lest he break out laughing. But this brought Langobard into his line of sight, and the Neoander was in similar trouble. The two men had to stop walking and turn their backs on each other for a few moments just to keep their composure.

“If I can just anticipate some questions that I believe may be uppermost in young Einstein’s mind,” Langobard said, “would it be untoward of me to inquire what, precisely, makes you ‘not a breeder’?”

The Cyc shrugged, staring down the mountain toward the Pacific Ocean as if she had not given the topic very much thought recently. “I know not. Of mean stature? Nothing special to behold? On the spectrum?”

“For context,” Ty asked, “how many young women out of ten are designated as breeders?”

“Four, maybe?”

“So being a nonbreeder is more common than being a breeder,” Ty said, for Einstein’s benefit.

“Of course, now that we have come out of the Hole, and we have more space, more people are breeding,” Sonar said. “I speak of how it was ten years ago.”

She had earlier told them that she was sixteen. “Okay. So they think they know enough about you at the age of six to make that determination. They start you out on easier books. Then what?”

“If you can read at all, you just start reading the whole Cyc.”

“And so that’s why you know stuff about radio, and epicanthic folds, and other topics not in volume seventeen.”

“Yes. You have to read the whole thing. By ten, they decide whether you are Micropædia or Macropædia quality.”

“Is one of those more prestigious than the other?”

“Of course!” Sonar exclaimed, without bothering to say which was which.

“I’ll bet the Micropædia is just like memorizing a bunch of trivia,” Einstein essayed. Somewhat dangerously, in case he guessed wrong. But love had made him impetuous.

“Yes, you have to be able to hold more in your head to be one of the Nineteen,” Sonar said, favoring Einstein with a warm gaze.

“So, did you have to kill the previous Sonar Taxlaw in single combat or something?” Ty asked, and immediately thought better of it, since in general Diggers did not seem to have a well-developed sense of humor. Einstein threw him a mean look.

“No, not in this case,” the Cyc said politely, leaving open the question of in what cases the Diggers did actually employ such methods. “My mentor was Ceylon Congreve.”

“Now, that is a lovely and distinguished name!” Langobard exclaimed. “Volume three?”

“Four,” she said, with a note of surprise in her voice, as if not quite able to believe that someone could not know this.

“Do the original paper copies still exist?” Ty asked.

“Oh, yes,” Sonar said, “but we handle them only on ceremonial occasions. We work with handwritten copies.”

“Rufus must have squirreled away a lot of paper.”

“Tons of it,” said the Cyc. “Acid-free, one hundred percent cotton.”

During their nighttime escape over the mountains, they’d had little time for such conversations, and so their knowledge of Digger culture was still spotty. Some reasonable guesses could be made simply from the known history of the Hard Rain. The phase known as the Cooling Off had not begun until some thirty-nine hundred years after Zero, when the human races’ efforts to police the lunar rubble belt had finally paid off with a sharp falloff in the number of bolides striking the surface. Until then, the Diggers had been obliged to maintain a small, steady population in the space that Rufus had provided. Expansion of the Hole had been limited by the fact that it was a sealed system, with no place to put spoil—the quantities of loose material created by digging. As anyone knew who had ever dug a hole in the ground with a shovel, the size of the dirt pile—the spoil—was always larger than the volume of the hole. They’d been able to dump some spoil down a deep and otherwise useless shaft, but once this had been filled, they’d been unable to expand their living space for as long as the Hard Rain had made a direct connection to the outside too dangerous to be contemplated. So during that phase—well over three thousand years—they had devoted all of their energies to maintaining a community of several hundred people. Hence the rigid controls on breeding. Thanks to their Cycs, they knew everything about contraception, but they had no ability to manufacture things like condoms and pills, so that lore was mostly useless. The limitations on breeding were enforced by moral strictures, by segregation of the sexes, and by surgical sterilization. This, like all of their surgery, was performed without chemical anesthesia once they’d run out of drugs, which occurred fairly soon after Zero.
Apparently they had gotten rather good at acupuncture and at biting down on things.

The reduction in the intensity of the Hard Rain would have been obvious to them on one level, since they could hear the impacts through the walls of the Hole. On another level it was easy to miss, since even dramatic changes spanned generations. But they had kept meticulous records of the frequency and intensity of strikes and so they recognized the downward trend in the late Fourth Millennium. When it was adjudged safe, they drilled an adit—a horizontal tunnel—out the side of the mountain until it broke out of a slope that they guessed was steep enough to have shed ejecta, preventing the buildup of rocky debris that now covered most of Earth’s surface to a considerable depth. That much had been true, but the debris at the base of the mountain had piled higher than they had expected—almost high enough to block the opening of their adit. Anyway, it had worked well enough that they had been able to push spoil out of it and thus begin expanding the Hole. The atmosphere was still far from breathable, so they’d been obliged to keep it sealed when they were not actively dumping stuff out of it, to prevent fumes from seeping in and poisoning the atmospheric system that they had looked after so meticulously for nearly four thousand years. This system, it seemed, was similar in principle to those used on space habitats. Carbon dioxide was removed by a combination of chemical scrubbers and green plants. Both of these required energy: the scrubber chemical had to be heated to drive off the CO
₂
it had absorbed, and the plants required light. Since they were cut off from the sun, they got their energy geothermally, using works that Rufus and the others of his generation had sunk deep into the roots of the mountain. The maintenance of this system had been the full-time occupation of everyone in the Hole for the entire time they’d been down there. When they had neared the end of their stock of light-emitting diodes they had revived the art of making lightbulbs, consulting the Cyc for particulars, blowing artisanal glass envelopes and winding the filaments
by hand. Likewise with many other things they had found themselves in need of.