Seveneves - Страница 143

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The template, and the general set of expectations, for communities of this type had been set beginning around five hundred years after Zero, when Cradle had become sufficiently crowded that there had simply been no choice but to spread outward from it. The first outlying habitats had been only a few kilometers away on Cleft. In fact, nearly all settlement had been confined to Cleft until early in the Second Millennium, when the industrial base had developed to the point where other rocks could be colonized. Many more such communities had been depicted in fictional entertainments than had actually existed. This didn’t matter, though. As the almost totally factitious and romanticized Old West had been to American culture of the twentieth century, so those yarns were to the people of the habitat ring. So in the rare cases when actual settlements of that type were constructed de novo, as here, they tended to be built so as to meet the expectations of people who their whole lives had been watching fiction serials about their Second Millennium precursors.

Even so, there were some surprises. Not so much the fact that it was female-owned. That wasn’t uncommon in the adult entertainment industry, and anyway some selection bias was at work — they had chosen to sit down in this place because it didn’t feel as creepy to Kath Two and Ariane as some of the others. More unexpected was the fact that as many as half of the people in there were Indigens. Those who weren’t — ones who had come across the water from the ice slab floating offshore — were identifiable by haircut, clothing, and bearing. But their numbers were matched by shaggier and more colorful characters whose professions and reasons for being in Qayaq could only be guessed at. It was safe to assume that many of these had come up the coast from a RIZ about twenty kilometers away to engage in trade or other forms of intercourse. But Qayaq itself was bigger and more crowded than they had expected, suggesting growth in population and commerce exceeding the limits set by Treaty. Sheltered by mountains and hidden most of the time under dense clouds, an illicit city was growing up here. If it was happening here, it was happening elsewhere in the Blue part of the world. Red had to know about it. Cloud cover alone couldn’t keep such a place secret. Why did Red not file diplomatic protests, then? Because Red was probably doing the same thing, perhaps on an even larger scale, and Red and Blue had come to a tacit agreement not to make trouble.

How many humans lived on the surface? The official numbers for the Blue part of it were about a million, mostly concentrated around Cradle sockets. Maybe the real numbers were much greater.

When they were finally approached, it was by a young Ivyn man with long hair and a wispy beard. Had he been spotted in the same location five thousand or, for that matter, ten thousand years ago, he would have passed for one whose ancestors had crossed from Asia over the original Beringia and flooded into North and South America. He had the wit to understand that the visitors were looking at him warily but the grit to walk to them anyway. He kept his hands casually down to his sides, palms slightly out, as if he had caught himself in the instant before throwing them up and exclaiming “What the fuck are you people doing here?” He was alert and mildly amused. As he drew closer it became clear that he was taller than he’d seemed at first; they’d been misled by his slight build and his stooped posture.

They might have asked the same question — what the fuck are you doing here? — of this young Ivyn. Judging from his clothes — five-year-old fashions from Chainhattan customized with bits of fur, bone, and animal skin — he was an Indigen with commercial links to Qayaq. Maybe the smartest kid in his RIZ, the child of eccentric Ivyn dreamers, looking for things to do with his brain. He’d been hanging out at the bar with some Dinan chums, but all of them had seemed more embarrassed than stimulated by the nude dancers.

“You guys headed over the mountains?” he asked. He had noted their clothing: brand new, high quality, extremely warm.

It seemed like a simple icebreaker to everyone except Ty, who said, “We don’t need a guide,” before any of the others could answer.

That set the kid back just a little. “A guide,” he repeated, as if Ty had just brought a peculiar but somewhat interesting idea into the conversation. “No, I didn’t really take you for people who would hire a guide.” Meaning adventurous — and, by Treaty, illegal — tourists from the ring.

This left open the question of what he did take them for, and so it was a little awkward until he went on: “If you’re going to the other side of the mountains, I could show you something.”

“Something special? One of a kind? Something you show to people all the time?” Ty asked.

The kid looked shy. “I have been there twice before. It’s interesting.”

“Been there with paying customers?” Ty asked. “Because—” but he was interrupted by a hand on his arm from Ariane.

“He called it interesting,” she said. “He is not motivated by money.”

“Very well,” Ty said.

“What is your name?” Ariane asked him.

The kid put up his deflector screens and said, “Einstein.”

Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.

“What makes this thing so interesting?”

“It’s a fact,” Einstein said.

“I don’t understand,” Kath Two said. “It’s a fact that it’s interesting or—” but then she stopped, because she had figured it out. An apostrophe belonged before that word. He meant that it was an artifact. A surviving object from the pre-Zero world.

“I would go see that,” Ty allowed.

THEY UNDERSTOOD EINSTEIN A LITTLE BETTER THE NEXT DAY when Kath Two flew all of them over the mountains in a glider and they saw just how difficult it must have been for foot travelers like him to have reached the site of the artifact. It raised the question of how he had ever found it in the first place. “Blind luck after getting hopelessly lost in a whiteout” seemed the most likely answer, but perhaps his people had combed the inland slopes of these mountains in a systematic way.

They were traveling in the same type of glider they had used on the leg from the Cayambe socket to Magdalena. Because it had no engines, it could fly through the Ashwall without mechanical damage, and because it traveled more slowly than a jet, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about Kath Two’s windshield getting fogged by abrasion from microscopic bits of rock. They did have to be somewhat concerned about the fact that she could not see where she was going as they flew through the densest part of the cloud. But she knew the altitudes of the nearby peaks and stayed well above them. Once the view had cleared a little bit, she was able to take advantage of the ash, which worked in the air somewhat like a drop of ink in swirling water, making currents and vortices obvious.

Einstein seemed exotic to the Seven in that he had been born on the surface and had never left it. This was his first journey in an aircraft of any kind. Seeing the mountains from above demanded some mental adjustments, which he made quickly. And in any case he knew the latitude and longitude of the artifact. After they had passed over the crest of the mountains and gotten into clear air, he directed Kath Two toward a high valley slung between the coastal range and a subsidiary crest beyond. Its upper reaches were devoid of life, but farther down the slope, tundra and low scrub were beginning to take hold. That these had been seeded from space was obvious from their regular spacing. Robot pods had fallen out of the sky in precise geometric formations and slammed into the ground in a hexagonal array before breaking open to spill their seed on the ground. Some wag in the bureaucratic bowels of TerReForm had dubbed these things ONANs: Orbital Neo-Agricultural Nacelles. As the years went by and the ecosystem spread out from the ONANs, the hexagonal pattern disappeared into the natural chaos of life. But in a place like this where plants grew slowly it would still be visible centuries from now.

Kath Two made a few passes up and down the length of the valley and identified a stretch of smooth seasonal riverbed, paved with frozen ash-paste, where she thought she could land and take off. The glider’s energy storage devices had been charged up the night before and were still at 100 percent. So she made another long orbit to bleed off velocity and then landed while traveling in an uphill direction. She made a gentle touch first, just to verify that the riverbed was in fact frozen solid, then set the glider down decisively. The wingtips dragged at the very end and there was some concern that one of them might strike a protruding rock, but she was able to avoid this and bring the craft to a full stop without damage. Beled and Bard climbed out first, and jogged in opposite directions to the two wingtips. After picking these up off the ground they were able to rotate the glider by walking clockwise in a large circle. Kath Two told them when to stop.

Ty got out and opened a cargo hatch on the side, releasing a couple of siwis that began moving across the ground in their distinctive elbowing style of locomotion, as well as a couple of buckies that began rolling about seeking high ground from which to establish observation posts and communications links. Their main objective now was to get the glider tied down so it wouldn’t blow away in a stray gale. The siwis were essentially earth sciences robots, good at digging and tunneling. In a few minutes’ time, with a bit of guidance from Doc, they were able to plant anchors in some sturdy-looking boulders flanking the riverbed. Ty and Bard ran ropes from those to the ends of the glider’s wings and made it fast while Beled stalked restlessly around the perimeter. Kath Two and Ariane deployed the grabb that Doc used to get about in places like this. It served the same function as a wheelchair, only with legs, so that it could pick its way along terrain where even able-bodied humans would have difficulty making headway. Meanwhile Memmie got him bundled up and ready. Einstein watched it all and asked only a few hundred questions, most of which were cheerfully answered by Doc himself. Einstein would have seen much of this sort of technology on videos in the RIZ, but this was his first direct experience of it.

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