Seveneves - Страница 101

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“They were defeated a long time ago. Months.”

“When you say that, do you mean that there was some kind of a conflict? A war?” Doob asked.

Aïda shrugged. “There was some fighting.” She didn’t see it as important. “Call it a war if you wish. More like some brawls. The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.”

Silence ensued. Aïda waited for them to respond. When no one did, she shrugged. “What were we going to do? Smash our arklets into each other? There is no way to have, like, actual violence in this setting! So we just had a war of words.” She held her hands up in front of her, making them into little pantomime mouths, aimed at each other, thumb-jaws flapping up and down. “Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.” She chuckled, put one hand to her cheek, rubbed her eye. “Look, it is very complicated and I cannot explain everything right now — how it all came out.”

“But you said that J.B.F.’s faction was defeated,” Michael said. Of all the people in the Hammerhead, he seemed most committed to the proposition that there was a reasonable and logical explanation for all of this.

“Her and Tav, yes.”

“By which you mean, you defeated them with words. Ideas. A social media campaign.”

“We were more persuasive,” Aïda said. “I was more persuasive. Arklet by arklet, they came over to my side. The White Arklet held out for a while, then they gave up.”

“What became of them?”

“J.B.F. is fine. Tav, not so good.”

“He’s the one you mentioned. The twelfth one who might as well be dead.”

“I am afraid so, yes.”

“So getting back to the earlier question,” Doob said, “the number you quoted is for the entire Swarm. Both factions.”

Aïda, finally seeming to understand what they were getting at, sat up straighter and got a more serious look on her face. “Yes. There are no other survivors whatsoever. Of the eight hundred, eleven remain.”

There was a long silence as the four in the Hammerhead took this in. They had all harbored fears that the Swarm might go terribly wrong, but this was worse than anything they had imagined.

Finally Doob raised his hands in front of him, palms up, and shrugged. “What happened?”

“Agriculture crashed.” Aïda turned her head and stared off-camera for a few moments. “I mean, I could say many things, but that is basically it. Between the CMEs, algae blights, lack of water. . very few arklets produce food anymore.”

“What have you been eating?”

Aïda snapped her head around, as if surprised by the question, and looked quizzically into the camera. “Each other. Dead people, I mean.”

There was a long silence during which Doob, Bo, Michael, and Steve all exchanged looks.

The terrible thing was that they had considered doing the same thing, many times. Every freeze-dried corpse that they jettisoned was a big collection of protein and nutrients that, from a certain point of view, could seem mouthwatering.

Seeming to read their minds, Aïda went on: “And you?”

“You mean, have we resorted to eating dead people? No,” Doob said.

“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

No one had anything to say to that. After a few moments had gone by, Aïda continued. “But Endurance is better stocked with MREs and so on. Plenty of water. You would not have gone there.”

“No, we did not go there,” Doob said. He could tell from the body language of the others in the Hammerhead that they were too shocked to be entrusted with speaking at the moment.

“As for us,” Aïda said, “you should also know that supplies were conserved. Even as people died and we lost arklets. We moved what we had into the arklets that survived. Our twenty-six arklets are well stocked.”

“With everything except food,” Doob said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have enough water to match our trajectory?”

“Yes,” Aïda said. She was a beautiful young woman, Doob thought, with a fierceness about her that helped explain her success in the social media campaign against Tav and J.B.F. “We have performed all of the calculations. If we jettison mass and pack all we have into a heptad, we can make the rendezvous around the time of your next apogee. But we will need to know your exact params.”

“We will discuss your proposal,” Doob said, “and make any necessary preparations.” He looked over at Steve Lake, who severed the connection just as Aïda was about to say something.

THEY SAT IN THE BANANA AND DISCUSSED IT AS IF THERE WAS ANYTHING really to discuss. They all registered their rote shock and disgust at what the Swarm had been reduced to. It all sounded hollow to Luisa. Finally she spoke up. It was what Luisa did. They expected it of her. They relied on it.

“Seven billion died. Next to that, this is small. And God knows we’ve all thought about eating the dead, so let’s not pretend to be shocked that they actually did it. The real reason we’re all freaked out by this is that our hopes have been dashed. We thought that the Swarm was going to contain hundreds of healthy people, lots of food, lots of good company. Oh, intellectually we knew it wouldn’t be the case, but we were all hoping for it. Now we learn it’s eleven carrion eaters. Are we going to leave them to die? No. We’re going to make room for them and for their heptad full of scarce vitamins.”

“I am terrified of the woman Aïda,” Michael Park said.

Luisa sighed. “Let me throw out an idea, which is that you’re terrified because you wonder, at some level, whether you could turn into Aïda if you got hungry enough.”

“Still — to let her on board Endurance—”

“And J.B.F. too,” Tekla said. She and Moira were sitting next to each other as they always did, hands clasped, fingers intertwined.

“I hoped I would never see Julia again,” Camila put in. “I know it is small and selfish of me, but. .”

“I understand all of your misgivings,” Ivy said, “because I share them. The question, now, is whether those misgivings are going to have any effect on the decision we make. Are we really going to let one-third of the surviving human race die because Aïda’s creepy and we hate J.B.F.? Obviously not. So, we transmit our params and our burn plan. And during the remainder of this orbit we make arrangements to accommodate some new arklets.”

THE REMAINDER OF THE ORBIT WAS BUSY INDEED, TO THE POINT where they broke out hoarded rations and upped their calorie intake to fuel their brains and their bodies. In the middle of that ten-day stretch, however, was an intermission. Dinah and Ivy had wordlessly agreed to spend it together in what Doob had once called the Woo-Woo Pod, and what they now called the Kupol.

After the Break, when Rhys had reengineered Izzy and Ymir into a single moving sculpture of metal and water, he had moved this module to a different location in the Stack and then let the living ice flow around it, completely surrounding its inboard hemisphere and later building up in a protective brow that shielded part of its windowed half. It projected from the side of Endurance like an eyeball and gave people a place to go when they wanted to look at the universe. As such it had no legitimate function from an engineering point of view. In fact it was a liability, since it got hit by little rocks from time to time, depressurized, and had to be repaired. Anyone in it was getting directly exposed to cosmic radiation, and so it was a no-go zone when they were passing through the Van Allen belts, which was often. But people loved it anyway, and kept patching it up when it was broken, and went there when they wanted to be alone or when they wanted to share some special time with another person. Putting it there had been one of Rhys’s best moves as a designer, and Dinah silently thanked him whenever she used it. Doob’s old term for it had begun to seem a little tasteless after the Hard Rain. For a little while, people had instead referred to it as the Dome. But dom had a different meaning in Russian, and so they’d settled on Cupola or Kupol, whose meanings in English and Russian respectively were not too far apart. In the latter language it carried a vaguely religious connotation, having to do with cathedral domes.

Ivy and Dinah didn’t have to worry too much about cosmic rays during the intermission, because they had so arranged it that the Kupol was on Endurance’s nadir side, facing toward Earth. And Earth was close enough to fill their view. Useless as the planet might be for the support of life, it still acted as a very effective cosmic ray absorber. Nothing was getting through that, short of another mysterious Agent that could pass all the way through a planet and keep on going. So, Dinah and Ivy hovered in the middle of the sphere, arms linked so that they wouldn’t drift apart, and sucked bourbon from plastic bags, and looked at their old planet for the last time. In their six years of hurtling around this world, they’d grown accustomed to the steep angle that Izzy’s orbital plane made with the equator, and the views it afforded them of the high latitudes. Because of the changes they had lately been making to Endurance’s plane, however, they were now confined to a belt around the tropics.

Not that it mattered a hell of a lot with Earth in its current state. The sky was still on fire, streaked with the bluish-white incandescence of the Hard Rain. The ground, where they could see it through smoke and steam, was a mottled terrain of dully glowing lava: some of it the hot impact craters of recent big meteorites, some of it spewing up out of the Earth’s fractured crust. Oceans were dark at night, hazed with steam in daylight, their coasts difficult to make out, but clearly shallower than they had been. Florida was reaching out toward the Keys but being battered down and chipped away by bolides, and washed away by tsunamis, even as it did so. A year and a half ago, a big rock had torn the lid off the long-dormant Yellowstone supervolcano. That had been cloaking most of North America with ash ever since then; glimmers of yellow light in the northern extreme of their view hinted at a vast outpouring of magma. A long-suppressed habit told Dinah, absurdly, that she should go and turn on her radio in case Rufus was transmitting. This made the tears come, and that in turn made Ivy’s tears come, and so they spent the last half of the intermission, from perigee onward, gazing at Earth through water. It didn’t really affect the view much. But Dinah tried to register the memories as best she could. Humans would not again look on Earth from such a close vantage point for thousands of years.

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