Seveneves - Страница 126

126

Cradle was much too small to be picked out at this distance. Even if it had been large enough to see, her view of it would have been blocked by the elevator, which was on its final approach, and expected to reach the terminal in about half an hour. It had a general resemblance to an Old Earth wagon wheel, with sixteen spokes reaching inward from its rim to a hotel-sized spherical hub where the people were. Watching it approach produced the mildly alarming illusion that it was going to come crashing through the dome. In that case, two domes would have been destroyed in the collision, since the hub was capped by a dome similar to this one where passengers could relax on couches and gaze up at the view of the approaching Eye and the habitat ring spreading out to either side of it. But of course it slowed down and stopped short of contact. Through the glass, now just a stone’s throw away, she could see the new arrivals unbuckling their seat belts, gathering their things, and floating toward the exits. Most of them were wearing military uniforms, or else the dark, well-designed clothing that she associated with comersants and politicos. Not really her crowd. But Doc had invited her, which was all the credentials anyone really needed.

Through the flimsy internal partitions she could hear several dozen arrivals making their way to Quarantine. These were eventually bound either for the Great Chain or the much smaller torus that encircled this end of the tether. Through the dome she could see housekeeping robots, and a few human staff, making their sweep through the hub’s lounge. After a few minutes, a green light came on above a door, and she joined a flow of a few dozen departing passengers.

Within minutes she was ensconced in a small private cabin in the elevator’s hub, where she would spend the four-day journey to the tether’s opposite terminus. A chime warned her when the elevator began to accelerate downward, but it moved at a speed that was extremely modest by the normal standards of space travel, so she felt no need to strap in. She climbed into her bed and slept.

THE ELEVATOR WAS A HOLLOW CYLINDER TEN STORIES HIGH, WITH A glass dome at each end, one aimed up at the Eye and the other aimed down at Earth. The floors beneath those domes were made of glass, so that the light shone through from end to end. The outer walls were windowless and heavily shielded against cosmic radiation, but on the inside, the cabins and lounges had windows onto the atrium. Or at least the more expensive cabins did; Kath Two’s was at the periphery, hard up against the outer wall, with no windows other than a tiny porthole onto a ring-shaped corridor. Which was fine with her. At the beginning of the journey they were in near weightlessness, but as the days went on, gravity would increase, reaching one normal gee at Cradle. She could tell when she woke up that she had not slept for long, since gravity was still quite faint, perhaps comparable to what had once existed on the moon.

She wandered up and down the atrium looking for a place where she could sit and read her book. Several bars and restaurants fronted on it, but these were not places for Kath Two, as she could tell just from the look of the people and the prices quoted on the menus. Comfy-looking chairs and couches were distributed around the glass floor of the atrium, and a coffee bar stood along one edge, so she ended up there.

After an hour or so, Beled Tomov turned up and sat in her general vicinity but made no move to interrupt her reading. When she came to a good stopping place, she looked up and happened to notice Ariane Casablancova sitting on the opposite side of the atrium, working on a tablet.

So they had five of the Seven: Doc, Memmie, Ariane, Beled, and Kath Two. The only two missing were the Dinan and, somewhat more problematically, the Aïdan.

Kath Two and Beled ran into Doc and Memmie later when they wordlessly agreed to go to the least expensive of the eateries and get some food. Somewhat uncharacteristically, Doc was not surrounded by students, scholars, and TerReForm bigwigs. He was just sitting at one end of the room carefully eating soup. Memmie was at his elbow, reaching in frequently to tuck his napkin back into his collar. Neither of them reacted when Kath Two and Beled took seats at the same table, but after a few minutes Doc said, “Lieutenant Tomov, it is good to see you again. Greetings,” and the two of them exchanged salutes in their respective racial styles.

Lieutenant, obviously, was a military and not a Survey rank, and so this confirmed the unsurprising fact that Beled’s relationship to Survey was, at best, ambiguous. Much more interesting was the fact that he and Doc had already met.

“I hope that this assignment will not prove an inconvenience,” Doc continued.

“All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”

“I was thinking more of the advancement of your career, Lieutenant. In your future dossier, this will stand out as a highly anomalous episode. Depending on who is reading that dossier, it might help you or hurt you.”

“I don’t concern myself with such matters,” Beled returned.

“Some would call that unwise, but I tend not to favor the company of such. You, on the other hand, will do nicely.”

“May I ask why I was so honored?”

Doc’s eyes moved briefly to Kath Two. “Kath here will be worried that it’s because she shared an indiscretion with you. Drew you into it. Or perhaps she is a little bit exasperated with you for having passed it on in your report.”

Kath Two shook her head no, but did not wish to interrupt Doc. Beled, however, seemed to take it in.

Doc continued. “None of that really counted. You are a known quantity, now, not only to me but also to Kath Two and to Ariane, which is somewhat useful. But even without all of that, you would have been a fine choice. Not everything must be for a reason. Never mind what our Julian friends say.”

He had noticed Ariane Casablancova approaching them, somewhat tentatively, with a tray of food. He made an almost subliminal gesture with his eyes toward Memmie, who stood up and fetched an extra chair from an adjoining table. Ariane joined them. Kath Two felt vaguely uncomfortable. A day earlier this woman had held and wielded power over her, had known things about her that would normally have been private matters. What was she to Kath Two now? Presumably an equal member of the Seven.

Ariane had, of course, worked this all out ahead of time, and prepared for it. “Kath Two and Beled,” she said, “our first meetings were in a formal bureaucratic setting that now leads to some awkward feelings. I look forward to reacquainting myself with both of you as a colleague.”

“Noted,” said Beled.

“Thank you,” said Kath Two. But if anything she felt even more awkward now. Ariane’s little speech had not been delivered warmly. More like she was ticking her way down a checklist. In that vein, she now turned her searchlight eyes toward the other two. “Dr. Hu. Remembrance.”

“Doc,” Doc said, “and Memmie.”

“It is good to make your acquaintances in person.”

These formal and somewhat chilly conversational gambits led nowhere, and so after an awkward silence Ariane tucked into her meal.

“Doc,” Kath Two said, “may we know what the hell we are doing? What is this Seven for?”

“It looks like a Five to me,” Doc said puckishly, somewhat breaking the tension. For Memmie, Ariane, and Beled had all aimed sharp looks at Kath Two, startled by the informal way in which she had just spoken to her old professor. Doc, who clearly didn’t care, continued: “When we are Seven — which will be in a few days, on Cradle — then I will explain it once, to everyone, at the same time.”

“Fair enough,” Kath Two said. “What should we be doing in the meantime?”

“All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time.”

It was a lovely thought. Kath Two tried to be duly appreciative of the generous sentiment behind it during the remainder of the journey. But nothing of the sort really happened. She read more than she had intended to of the books she had acquired on the Great Chain. At meals, and in the recreation center, she placed herself in Beled’s eye line, just in case he was in the mood. But things were different now. Their time together in the Q had been an ideal setup for a relationship of a casual and temporary nature. It had never gone beyond sleeping in the same bed, but it might have. The knowledge that they would probably never see each other again had made it easy to shack up for a couple of nights and enjoy each other’s company in a way that would have posed too many complications had they been working together.

Now they were working together. Beled had wisely pulled back. She understood, and considered a certain amount of sexual frustration an acceptable price to pay for being prudent.

She had two meals with Ariane, and in her spare time she made desultory attempts to learn more about the Julian from network searches. Kath Two assumed that all such search activity was being monitored and logged by someone — possibly someone who was in touch with Ariane through whatever agency Ariane worked for. As time went by, Kath Two was less and less certain that that was actually Quarantine. Or perhaps another way of saying it was that Quarantine’s public face — the people who talked to you when you were traveling between space habitats — was only one avatar of something that had to be much bigger and more complicated. In the same way that Survey and military were different things, and yet drawing a sharp line between them could be difficult, so it was with police and Quarantine. And once you broadened the scope to include police, you were talking about other things besides routine law and order work. At some level, intelligence and counterintelligence were under that umbrella. Kath Two had no way of guessing where Ariane fit into that system. Searching the network too avidly for personal details about Ariane Casablancova would have been noticed, and would have been a bad idea. Not searching at all would almost have been more suspicious. So Kath Two searched a little, and found less. Low-level Q officers might be mentioned on the network from time to time, as the result of a police report or a public relations initiative, but there was nothing of the sort for Ariane — assuming that this was even her real name.

126