Seveneves - Страница 110

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“I pronounce it,” she said, then slowly rotated her hand until her thumb was pointed up.

DINAH PEELED THE DEMOLITION CHARGE AWAY FROM THE WINDOW. She had no idea what Aïda had just said. Nor did she especially care. It would be the usual histrionic Aïda stuff.

Several minutes remained on the countdown timer. She could have simply turned it off. But she felt like going for a walk. Whatever had just happened in the Banana looked unpleasant. She was tired of being cooped up with these people — even the ones she loved. She felt no great compulsion to rejoin them.

She unclipped the carabiner and let go of the lazily spinning torus. Her momentum carried her toward the wall of the crevasse. Long accustomed to movement in zero gee, she timed a slow somersault and planted her feet on the wall to kill her speed, then turned on the magnets in her boots and began hiking up the crevasse wall. The weak gravity made directions arbitrary. Walking “vertically up” a cliff was little different from walking “horizontally along” the canyon floor.

A tone sounded from the speakers in her helmet, alerting her that a voice connection had been made.

It was Ivy. “Going for a stroll?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, we just realized something.”

“Oh?”

“We all voted — except for you.”

“Mmm, good point.” Dinah glanced down at the countdown timer. The screen was getting more difficult to read, since she was nearing the terminator — the knife-sharp line between sunlight and shadow — and the bright canyon wall above her was reflecting from the screen. Tilting it for a better view, she saw that it was just about to drop through the sixty-second mark. “It’s okay, I still have a minute to make my decision.”

“Well, do you want to know what the rest of us agreed on?”

“I trust you. But sure.”

“We’re all going to try to have babies just like you, Dinah.”

“Very funny.” Dinah crossed over the terminator, and the sun rose. She raised her free hand and flipped down the sun visor on her helmet.

“Moira’s working on it now.”

“Is that why Aïda was being such a drama queen about it?”

“Exactly.”

Thirty-five seconds.

“What did you really decide?”

“One free gene change for each mommy.”

“Oh yeah? So what are you going to do? Make really smart little straight arrow bitches?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Just an intuition.”

“What about you, Dinah?” Dinah could hear the beginnings of anxiety in her friend’s voice. She looked down into the crevasse, saw humanity’s cradle welded helplessly into place, imagined for a moment throwing the demolition charge down on it, like a vindictive goddess hurling a lightning bolt.

She was thinking of Markus. Of the kids she should have had with him. What would they have been like?

Markus had been kind of a jerk in some ways, but he knew how to control it.

Really — she now understood — what had prompted her to slam the table and get up and storm out of the Banana a few minutes ago had not been Aïda at all. Aïda was provocative, yes. But more infuriating had been a slow burn that had started with Camila, and her remarks about aggression. Remarks that Dinah now saw as aimed not so much at Dinah as at Markus. She wished she could grab Camila by the scruff of the neck and sit her down in front of a display and make her watch the way Markus had spent the last minutes of his life.

Markus was a hero. It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She’d couched what she’d said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way — a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as she’d been raised, couldn’t help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression.

It was this that had made her so flustered that she’d had to leave the meeting.

“Dinah?” Ivy said.

“I’m going to breed a race of heroes,” Dinah said. “Fuck Camila.”

“It’s going to be. . interesting. . sharing confined spaces with a race of heroes for hundreds of years.”

“Markus knew how to do it,” Dinah said. “He was a jerk, but he had a code. It’s called chivalry.”

She gave the demolition charge a toss straight up.

“Did you just vote yes?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, watching it dwindle against the stars. The red lights of the LED timer glittered like rubies.

“We’re unanimous,” Ivy said. Dinah understood that Ivy was announcing it to the other women in the Banana.

For the first and last time, Dinah thought.

The red light had shrunk to a pinprick. Like the planet Mars, she thought, except sharper and more brilliant. Then, silently, it turned into a ball of yellow light that darkened as it spread.

Part Three

THE HABITAT RING CIRCA A+5000

FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER

KATH TWO WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY PATCHES OF ORANGE-PINK light cavorting across the taut fabric above her. A very old instinct, born on the savannahs of Old Earth, read it as danger: the flitting shadows, perhaps, of predators circling her tent. During the five thousand years of the Hard Rain, that instinct had lain dormant and useless. Here on the surface of New Earth, just beginning to support animals big and smart enough to be dangerous, it was once again troubling her sleep. Her shoulder twitched, in the way that it did sometimes when you were half awake, and not sure whether you were really moving or dreaming of it. She had thought of reaching under her pillow for the weapon. But coming fully to, she found that her arm had not really moved, other than the twitch. Through the thin padding beneath her head she could still feel the hard shape of the katapult.

By then it had become obvious that the moving light on the tent had nothing to do with large predators. It was too dappled and volatile. Not even birds could move so. Its twinkling and swirling were mysterious, but its hue told her it was the first light of the day. This meant that she had slept a little too long and was in danger of missing the dawn breezes that she had hoped would bear her into the sky.

She stumbled out of her little tent, feeling yesterday’s hike in the muscles of her legs. That was surprising. She thought she had trained well. But even in the largest space habitat, you couldn’t go downhill for all that long. On an actual planet, you could go on losing altitude for days. And, as it turned out, those long downhill runs were what really killed your legs. Yesterday she had shed almost two thousand meters, descending from a range of hills toward a blue, water-filled crater thirty kilometers across. She had stopped a few clicks short of its rim, where the ground dropped away toward a swath of grassland between her and the shore. The break in the slope had been subtle, but Kath Two’s throbbing knees had made it obvious enough. She had taken a dozen or so strides down it, gauging its angle in her blistered soles, sensing the air’s currents with her lips, her hair, and the palms of her hands. Then she had turned around and trudged back up to an inflection point that would have been invisible had the low evening sun not been grazing it, casting a sharp terminator on the ground.

Where wind streamed over bent ground, it stretched. The stretching had been faint in the dying wind of yestereve, but she had known that it would become more pronounced in the morning, as the sun rose and the air fled from its warmth. So she had dropped her pack and made her camp.

The source of the dappled light, as she now saw, was sunlight sparkling from waves on the lake below, shooting rays through the branches of trees, perhaps a hundred meters down the slope from her, that were beginning to stir in the morning breeze, making soft noises, as when a sleeping lover exhales.

She bent down, pulled the katapult out from under the sack of laundry she’d been using as a pillow, felt it thrum as it recognized her fingerprint. After a short walk and a careful look around — for she did not actually wish to use the katapult — she squatted and urinated in the largest open space that was handy. Only in the last few decades had the ecosystem here matured to the point where TerReForm — her employer — could seed it with predators. And that was always somewhat hit-or-miss. On the mature ecosystems of Old Earth, predators and prey had, according to the histories, evolved to some kind of equilibrium. On the remade ones of New Earth, you never knew. You couldn’t assume that all the predators around here were getting enough to eat; and even if they were, they might view Kath Two as a bit of tempting variety to add to their diet.

Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity. But regardless of whether you considered Survey to be a purely scientific corps with ad hoc liaisons to the military — merely for logistical convenience and situational awareness — or viewed it as an elite scout unit working hand-in-glove with Snake Eaters, its stated mission was to observe and report on the growth of New Earth’s ecosystem. Not to kill the animals that the human races had gone to so much trouble to invent and import. During her two-week stint on the surface, she had grown used to the katapult and stopped seeing it as remarkable that she was carrying a weapon. But the awareness that she was going home today made her see all of this through the eyes of the sophisticated urbanites she might be mingling with tomorrow: habitat ring dwellers who would never believe that only a short time earlier Kath Two had been in a place where one did not pee without carefully looking around first, did not venture into the open without a weapon in hand.

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