Seveneves - Страница 106

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Dinah managed to get Doob out for one last space walk. He had been failing for days. Once they got him into the suit, though, his energy flooded back. Dinah took him out on the floor of the crevasse where he could walk, light-footed, with magnetized Grabbs latched onto his boots to keep him from floating away with every step. They rambled for about a kilometer, turning around every so often to look back at humanity’s new home. Above the spinning torus, where Moira was even now unpacking her genetics lab, Tekla was inspecting the arklets on the top level, learning which were whole, which were beyond repair, and which could be patched up for future occupancy. On the floor of the crevasse, Grabbs and Siwis were at work, rooting Endurance to her final resting place with spreading cables and struts.

Where they walked, it was dark most of the time. That was the price of being sheltered from cosmic rays and coronal mass ejections. Looking up, however, they could see sunlight gilding the edges of the crevasse above them. They talked about how to set up mirrors that would bounce sunlight downward onto the arklets, which could grow food and scrub air in their translucent outer hulls. Doob spoke of Endomement, the idea that, in time, a ceiling could be thrown over the top of the crevasse and walls built to keep in the air, whereupon a whole section of the valley could be given an atmosphere and turned into a place where children could go “outside” without the need for space suits.

Then he walked home and died.

They stored his body with the others, in a damaged arklet that would serve as a mausoleum until such time as they could cut a grave out of Cleft’s surface. That would take a long time, but the survivors all shared the conviction that, having sacrificed so much to make it here, they should be interred and not burned. Doob would share a grave with Zeke Petersen, Bolor-Erdene, Steve Lake, and all the others who had died at about the same time.

Some of those remained conscious long enough to relate the stories of what had happened to them during the conflict with the people who had come in from the Swarm, and Endurance’s final, hectic passage through storm and stone. Their accounts were recorded and archived. One day some historian would piece the story together, comparing it with data logs to figure out who had slain whom in combat and which module had gone dark when.

Aïda, of course, might have been their best source of information, had she felt like talking. But she didn’t. She had sunk into a profound depression, emerging from it at seemingly random moments to chatter about whatever stray thoughts were flitting through her head. No one wanted to talk to her. When she talked to you, she watched you too carefully with those avid, penetrating eyes, as if she saw, or imagined she saw, too deeply. It was impossible to be the object of that gaze without thinking of what she and the others had done, and without imagining that you were being sized up as food.

An epic tale was told by the three-year backlog of email, Spacebook posts, blog entries, and other ephemera that filled up all of their inboxes as soon as the network of the Swarm recombined with that of Endurance. The general arc of the story seemed to be a growing detachment from reality that had afflicted J.B.F. and some of her inner circle. Luisa likened it to the growth of spiritualism after the First World War. During the 1920s, many who had not been able to bring themselves to accept the loss of life in the trenches and the subsequent influenza epidemic had fallen prey to the belief that they could communicate with their lost loved ones from beyond the grave. They had, in effect, sidestepped grief by convincing themselves that nothing had happened.

The analogy was a loose one. The loss of life in the Hard Rain had, of course, been much worse. And few of the Arkies had adopted spiritualist beliefs per se. But after a particularly severe coronal mass ejection had slain nearly a hundred Arkies, Tav had written a blog post about the journey he had made to Bhutan with Doob and the conversation that they’d had en route with the king concerning the mathematics of reincarnation. It was a meditative piece, a secular eulogy for those who had fallen, but in retrospect it seemed to mark an inflection point in the survivors’ thinking. The Swarm had always had a sort of quasi-divine status to some, who had perhaps read too much chaos theory too superficially and were prone to believing that its collective decisions, lying beyond human understanding, partook of the supernatural.

The mishmash of techno-mystical ideation that had grown out of that one blog post was unreadable and incomprehensible to Luisa or to anyone else who read it after the fact, with a clear mind, but it seemed to have offered hope and comfort to many terrified young people trapped in arklets. Tav, to his credit, had backed away from any efforts to elevate him to prophetlike status. If anything, though, his modesty might have backfired.

“I have no idea,” Luisa said, “how anyone could read these threads and find hope in them. Or even meaning. But they did. Long enough to distract them from the real problems they were facing. And when Aïda and the others finally came to their senses and began to push back against J.B.F. and the others, the reaction was just that much more severe. Because things had gone too far by that point.”

The backlash had started in a two-triad bolo where a number of like-minded Arkies, including Aïda, had “called bullshit” on the prevailing tone and substance of official statements emanating from the White Arklet and begun to denounce Tavistock Prowse as a puppet blogger for the regime. Dubbing themselves the “Black Bolo Brigade,” they had begun to spread their insurrectionist message to other arklets in the Swarm.

That message — which made perfect sense, as far as it went — was all about the need to face reality and to implement realistic, effective steps to address the Swarm’s problems. That included, if need be, throwing themselves on the mercy of Endurance. They had demanded that J.B.F. open the books and provide a current and accurate account of all stocks of water, food, and other staples, and how those numbers were changing over time. Julia had resisted those demands until the data had finally been leaked by a turncoat on her staff. The food picture had turned out to be bleak. This had led to a variety of responses that had determined the history and politics of the Swarm ever since: among some, a further retreat into mysticism and wishful thinking, based on a belief that the Agent had been some sort of avenging angel sent by God, or by aliens so powerful that they might as well be God, to bring about the end of days and the merging of all human consciousness into a digital swarm in the sky; among others, a frank embrace of cannibalism — in the sense not of killing people for food but of eating those who had died of natural causes — as a stopgap measure until J.B.F. could be toppled and replaced by people who knew what they were doing. The first group, the mystics, had tended to rally under Julia’s banner. The cannibals had ended up under Aïda, who because of her intensity and her charisma had gradually emerged as the leader of the Black Bolo Brigade.

The one Swarm had thus fissioned into two smaller ones, neither of which was as viable, and thereby worsened the same problems that had led to the split in the first place. From there the story had been predictable enough, and had led to the events of the last few days.

Aïda still wasn’t talking, but Julia was. According to her, Aïda and the other Black Bolo survivors had calculated, in the last weeks, that their turn to cannibalism would be so repugnant to the survivors of Endurance as to render them permanent outcasts. Rather than passively await the judgment — which they foresaw as extremely pious, sanctimonious, and punitive — of Ivy and her claque, they would seize part or all of Endurance, beginning with her network, and then negotiate terms from a position of strength.

This explained, at least in a general way, everything that had happened, save possibly for the physical mutilation of both Julia and Tav.

Asked for a theory as to that, Julia shrugged. “We were criminals to them. Criminals need to be punished. It’s hard to punish people who are already starving to death in a confined space. What is really left in the executioner’s tool kit, other than attacking the body? They wanted to silence me, and so they did. And they wanted to give Tav a taste of his own medicine by uploading his physical body into theirs.”

A WEEK LATER, WHEN THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS HAD SUCCUMBED to their wounds or to radiation sickness, eight humans remained alive and healthy.

Ivy called for a twenty-four-hour pause to grieve and to take stock. She then called a meeting of the entire human race: Dinah, Ivy, Moira, Tekla, Julia, Aïda, Camila, and Luisa.

They did not know quite what to do with Julia and Aïda. For years they had dreamed, in idle moments, of one day bringing J.B.F. to justice — whatever that would mean. Then, at the last moment, she had been eclipsed by Aïda. And now it all seemed a moot point anyway. Could six women put two women in jail? What would it mean to be in jail in a place like this? Corporal punishment was at least a theoretical possibility. But Aïda had already gone there, with results that they all found sickening.

J.B.F. was a threat to no one. Aïda still possessed an air of menace. But short of locking her up in an arklet, there was nothing they could do about that save keep an eye on her. And so they did, never letting her out of their sight, never letting her get behind them.

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