Seveneves - Страница 114

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The inner hatch opened. Crawling now on hands and knees, Kath Two followed the others into the main cabin, where four acceleration couches were waiting. They climbed into three of them, strapped in, and made themselves comfortable. They were now lying on their backs, legs elevated. At some point their suits’ systems had found their way onto the flivver’s voice network — she knew as much from the fact that she could hear the other two breathing as heavily as she was. But no one said anything. Talking would become a lot easier in a few minutes. True to form, the Teklan, with a controlled exhalation, heaved his meaty arms up off the rests, grabbed his helmet, and pulled it off. He let its weight rest on his stomach and allowed his arms to thud back onto the couch. Kath Two got a vague peripheral glimpse of platinum hair and cheekbones, as expected, but didn’t feel like turning her head. Instead she looked at a display screen mounted above her face, focusing as well as she could with her eyeballs flattened into their sockets by gees.

They had entered the hanger in level flight, traveling at a hundred kilometers per hour. In the minutes since then, the centripetal force that had obliged her to crawl on the floor like a lizard had been accelerating them upward and forward, steadily pumping kinetic energy into them and everything around them, whirling them up to the immense velocities more typical of space travel. Compared to the baroque, fire-breathing systems that their ancestors had used to the same purpose, there was nothing to it. The bolo was mechanically identical to the sling used by David to slay Goliath. The flivver was the stone nestled in its pocket.

The bolo had made about a quarter of a revolution, so they were now traveling directly away from the surface of the Earth — aimed toward the distant ring of habitats that they and the three billion other members of the human races called home.

Seen on a video window in the display above, the hanger’s tailgate dilated, showing a disk of black sky. A tattoo of metallic clunks let them know that the brakes on the sled had been released. Driven down the ramp by centripetal force, it built speed all the way to the lip of the hanger deck and then stopped short with a sneeze from its shock absorbers. The flivver jerked free of the sled. From its occupants’ point of view, it seemed to fall off the edge of the deck and into space. En route it picked up a bit of a tumble, which was killed by quick firings of its thrusters.

They became weightless. Kath Two took her helmet off but kept her head nestled in the couch’s rest for a minute while her inner ear adjusted. Meanwhile she was groping in a compartment in her armrest for a varp, which was what people normally used in place of flat-panel display screens when they wanted to interact with some kind of app. It was an old enough word that most people had forgotten it was an acronym for something like Vision Augmentation Retro-Projector. Styles varied, but the baseline model looked like a heavy-framed pair of glasses. Mounted in that frame were cameras that could see the way her hands were moving, a microphone that could hear her speech, and other cameras that could track her gaze. A number of glowing figments appeared in her peripheral vision as she slipped them on, and she was able to reach out and activate one of them to launch Parambulator. This gave her a schema of the flivver’s situation in the universe: in the center, a blue disk representing New Earth, under a gray film of atmosphere. Well outside of that, the orbital track of the bolo’s center, the twin trajectories of its two hangers snaking around it. This was what they had just left behind. A blinking green dot showed their current location on their new orbit, a fat ellipse whose apogee coincided with the circle of habitats that hung above the planet at geosynchronous altitude. Over the next twelve hours they would coast up to that height, then strap back into the couches and use other means to effect a delta vee that would sync them up with whichever habitat they decided upon.

The world in which essentially all three billion humans lived, as depicted from “above” (high over the North Pole, looking “down” on the whole system) was a hair-thin ring some eighty-four thousand kilometers across — roughly seven times the diameter of the blue-and-white planet in its center. The objects that made up the ring, though they seemed big to the humans who lived in them, were evanescent particles compared to the ring’s overall scale. Imagine the thinnest possible jewelry chain, a nearly invisible trace of platinum around a woman’s neck. Make a perfect circle of that same chain ten meters in diameter, and that gives a picture of the ring’s thinness in comparison to its overall size. It was more easily viewed in artificial renderings like the one on Kath Two’s varp, where the points that made up the ring — the individual habitats — were drawn as unrealistically large, color-coded pips.

Seen that way, the circle was chopped into eight arcs of roughly equal size, each subtending about forty-five degrees. At long zoom, these were glinting and luminously iridescent, with much shorter gray arcs — the boneyards, they were called — sticking them together.

At a closer zoom, the pointillistic nature of the image became obvious, and the system began helpfully to superimpose labels and numbered meridians. There were more than nine thousand active habitats distributed among those eight segments. The boneyards contained another several hundred — mostly obsolete ones being cut up for scrap — as well as unused fragments of the moon and the odd captured asteroid, there to serve as raw material for new construction.

Any object that was not inhabited — because it wasn’t finished yet, because it was abandoned, or because it was just a rock — was rendered as a gray dot. This accounted for the dull appearance of the eight boneyards.

Sparkling with pure colors were the eight much longer arcs between them. Seen from a distance, each arc had a predominant color. Encoded in those colors was the history of their building, and in turn that of the human races during the last thousand years — the Fifth Millennium, the Millennium of the Ring. Prior to that — during the first four thousand years of the Hard Rain — space had been so dirty that the human races had been obliged to hunker down in the shelter of massive nickel-iron bodies such as Cleft, whose orbits were, of course, similar to that of the moon whose core had once comprised them — nine times farther away from Earth than the habitat ring was now. As Dubois Harris had foreseen, the orbit of the former moon had been a fine place — the only place, really — to restart a civilization, as long as hellfire was raining down on Earth. But to the extent that the human race, as a whole, was capable of having a plan, it was to return to Earth eventually. The Hard Rain diminished, gradually at first, and then, during the Fourth Millennium, more steeply as fleets of robots, issuing from their nickel-iron fastnesses like bats from caverns, began to sweep the skies clean, policing the rubble cloud, herding specks and pebbles together, and spiraling them down into disciplined orbits at geosynchronous altitude. Most of the work was accomplished using the pressure of sunlight, a weak form of propulsion that took hundreds of years to have its effect.

At the dawn of the Fifth Millennium, about a thousand years ago, the first new habitat in geosynchronous orbit had been constructed. It was called Greenwich because it was positioned above Old Earth’s prime meridian. In the way of neighbors, it at first had nothing but rubble and worn-out robots. As soon as Greenwich was complete, however, construction of more habitats had spread outward from it. The human races and their robots had begun burning their way through the ring of raw material in both directions, consuming it like fire on a fuse.

Greenwich had been a joint project of all seven human races. The same was true of its first neighbors: Volta, then Banu Qasim to the east, Atlas and Roland to the west, later more in both directions. All of these were, therefore, colored white in the display that Kath Two was seeing in her varp.

Greenwich was one of eight equidistant points plotted around the ring. The other seven, proceeding west, acquired the names Rio, Memphis, Pitcairn, Tokomaru, Kyoto, Dhaka, and Baghdad. In due course, each of them was seeded with a new habitat as well as the production capabilities needed to manufacture more yet. As the centuries went by, their inhabitants likewise burned their way through the raw materials lying to their western and eastern sides, building new habitats at a pace to match the growth of their populations.

It was self-evident that if that process went on long enough, the arc of habitats reaching west from, say, Greenwich would make contact with that growing east from Rio. The increasingly narrow bands of unused material and recyclable junk between segments became the boneyards, and might have disappeared altogether had they not been so useful — in the early going, as materials depots, later as political buffers and as liminal zones, akin to frontiers, to which people could escape when they had learned that the close-packed life of space habitats was not for them. The one halfway between Greenwich and Rio was called Cape Verde. Other boneyards, proceeding westward from Cape Verde, were Titicaca, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Kamchatka, Guangzhou, and Indus. Completing the circle, the one between Baghdad and Greenwich was called Balkans. Some were bigger than others. Guangzhou, which formerly had separated the Aïdan and Camite segments, had been used up entirely as the populations to either side had grown.

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