Seveneves - Страница 159

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But since having rampant sex with everything that moved wasn’t really an option today, she sought other outlets for her surging physical energy. The hike from the meadow down to the sea was longer than it had appeared and she ended up ranging far in front of the others, obliging Beled to push himself hard just to keep her in sight. She could not see him because he was behind her, but she could sense his footfalls through the ground. She could hear his breathing and the faint clicking of the ambots that he carried on his person, and when the wind was from behind she could smell the institutional wipes that he had been using for hygiene, and the detergent that had been used to clean his uniform, the lubricant in his kat, his most recent meal. Her ranging so far out in front of the others was partly a way to burn off a physical energy that threatened to make her crazy but as much an effort to get into a place where she was not taking in an equal amount of sensory data from everyone in the group. One was enough.

She stormed through a hedge of whippy plants that had been seeded in a dune above the beach and broke out onto the wet sand. Waves were breaking half a kilometer out and washing up toward her in fizzing sheets. The smell in her nostrils spoke of an incalculable density of marine life, akin to what she had scented when she had stood on the top of the bridge in Cradle, but much more finely resolved now. This despite the chemically induced suppression of her amygdala. Without Hope’s drugs in her system she might have spiraled into a sort of panic attack. As it was she felt her body overheating and looked down at her bare arms as if expecting them to crack open like sausages on a grill. Dropping from a run to a stride, she marched straight down the beach peeling off clothes as she went and depositing them in a ragged career over her footprints. Soon, but not soon enough, the surf was washing her ankles, then her shins. She dropped to her knees and let herself topple forward into an onrushing wave that caught her fall and let her down easy. Naked, she was floating facedown in the water, whose icy cold only made the exposed parts of her skin — buttocks and shoulder blades — feel as if they were under a broiler.

Pressed for a rational explanation of why she was lying facedown in the Pacific, eyes open, gazing at a starfish, she could not have answered. But it was having an effect. Her heart, which had been thumping out of control, dropped to something much closer to a normal rate, and a surprising amount of time passed before she felt obliged to plant her hands and knees in the sand, push herself up on all fours, and suck in a breath of air.

She got her legs under her and squatted, then pivoted so that her back was to the sea. Her legs and buttocks were still submerged, cooling off from the run.

Beled Tomov was standing a few meters away, surf washing around his ankles, breathing heavily, looking as though a dip in the icy Pacific might do him some good. But this was not his intent. He had been ready to pull Kathree out if she had gone too long without breathing.

They looked at each other, Kathree’s gaze saying I would do you right now, right here and his saying I know and hers saying I know that you know.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked.

That was unexpected.

“Just now,” he explained, “when your head was under.”

“You mean, in the water?”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“You haven’t been listening, have you?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been listening so hard it’s driving me out of my mind.”

“To the conversation, I mean.”

“No. Everyone talks too loud.”

He considered it. Then he turned a little to one side and stretched out one arm, drawing her attention to a rocky headland that interrupted the beach a few hundred meters away. “There,” he said.

The thermal spike in her body had finally subsided, so she pulled her clothes back on and they walked along the beach toward the headland: an abrupt, almost artificial-looking rampart of shattered rock, held together by the roots of trees and scrub. It divided the beach like the blade of a shovel.

She did not even know why they had been going to the sea. Was someone going to pick them up there? Was there even a plan? Or had they simply run away until they could run no farther?

“The Diggers believe,” Beled said, “in the existence of people who live beneath the sea. The Pingers. Supposedly there have been contacts. At specific places along the coast of Beringia.” He nodded in the direction they were going.

“As in face-to-face contacts?”

Beled shrugged: a movement that, given the size of his shoulders, could almost be picked up on a seismograph. “I fancied you might have heard something while your head was under the water,” he said. “They use a tech called sonar.”

Her disordered brain was a little while putting this all together. She knew a little about sonar. Survey used it to map the bottoms of lakes and to count fish. “No coincidence that we are traveling with someone of that name?”

Beled nodded. “She has been telling us about them, but much of it sounds more legend than fact.”

“Where do they live? Submarines?”

He shrugged again. “No one seems to know. Apparently they are good at holding their breath.”

The headland could not be skirted without a boat. They ended up cutting back inland so that they could get past it. This required gaining a couple of hundred meters in altitude and bushwhacking through vegetation that had grown thick on the south-facing slope.

When they reached a place from which they could look down toward the sea, it became obvious that they were on the edge of an impact crater a kilometer or so in diameter. The headland that had blocked their passage down the beach was part of its rim; this curved out into the Pacific, forming one side of a bay. A mirror image of it, as they could now see, formed the opposite side. The bolide that had formed the crater had struck very close to the shore. The central impact peak was a sharp rocky islet just a stone’s toss from the beach, precisely centered between the twin headlands. It was easy enough for the eye to fill in the missing shape of the rim. Out in the water between the headlands, it must be slung in a submerged arc. And indeed it was possible to see waves breaking as they tripped over it. On the landward side, the rim blended into the natural slope. The impact had hollowed out a bowl whose steepness now forced Beled and Kathree to make an awkward, skidding descent into the cove below. The beach there was more rocky than sandy, and many of the rocks had the translucency of wave-worn beach glass.

They could hear the remainder of the party on the slope high above, catching up with them.

The middle of the beach — just opposite the sharp little island — seemed like the natural place to make camp. A little heap of glassy stones had been made there — just big enough to make it clear that this was no natural deposit, but an intentional act. “Their signal,” Beled explained. “We should build a fire now.” He began ranging along the beach picking up driftwood. Kathree, drawn somehow by the cairn, squatted there to wait for the others. She could hear Sonar Taxlaw chattering as she negotiated the slope above, running circles around the others, whose footfalls and breathing were audible.

“Their history is divided into three Deluges. The First Deluge was of rock and fire. It chased them into the deepest trenches of the sea, where it never fully dried out, even after the rest of the oceans had boiled off. They bred a race capable of living in confined spaces. The Second Deluge was of ice and water.”

“The Cloudy Century!” Einstein said.

“Yes, when you dropped comets on them for hundreds of years. They noticed that seas were expanding, growing away from the trenches where they had been holed up, expanding their range. They transformed themselves into a race that could swim in the sea.”

“When you say they transformed themselves,” asked Arjun, “do you mean genetic engineering or—”

“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need! They began to explore the seafloor. They found a lot of industrial junk that had been washed into the oceans during the Hard Rain and sunk to the bottom. There is nothing of metallurgy that is a mystery to them.”

“Which is why you trade with them?” Ty ventured. “Because you are short on metal?”

“And they are short on things we have,” Sonar affirmed.

“You said there were three Deluges,” Einstein reminded her. “The Third Deluge?”

“Is now,” said the Cyc. “A Deluge of life, beginning with microorganisms and culminating with you.”

“Meaning, the Spacers,” Ty guessed.

“Yes. And the only Spacers they know about are the ones who dropped a lot of rocks into the Torres Strait and built the thing at Makassar.”

“How is all of this being imparted to you?” asked Arjun.

“Imparted?”

“Have you, Sonar, actually had face-to-face conversations with Pingers?”

“Me personally?!” she asked, sounding amazed and horrified by the very idea. “Oh no, just looked down on them from up here.”

“So you lurk up above while more senior members of your clan go down to the beach and talk to the Pingers.”

“Talking is difficult. Communication is mostly through the written word. They didn’t have paper until we gave them some of ours. We use slates and chalk.”

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