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“A program to keep people alive under the sea?” Ty asked.

“Exactly. There are, in the background of these photos, detailed bathymetric charts of some of the deepest undersea canyons in the world’s oceans. There are documents — binders on a shelf — whose titles suggest that they are about such preparations. Other clues as well — it’s all public research, I’ll send you the information if you want it.”

“Okay,” Ty said, just to be cordial. He knew that he would never read those research papers. “But the bottom line is that Deep’s people”—he nodded at their tablemate—“didn’t survive just because Cal got lucky.”

“They have an Epic of their own that, for all we know, might compare to ours,” Arjun said.

Sonar and Einstein had been making their way down the food service line and now approached, eyeing the two vacant seats at the table. Arjun took this as his cue to excuse himself. Deep said goodbye to him with a courteous bob of the head. Within moments Ty and his Pinger friend had been joined by the young Ivyn and the Cyc. For a minute or two, the new arrivals did nothing but eat ravenously, the only conversation being Sonar asking the names and origins of the various foods — all new to her — on her tray. Ty handled those inquiries so that Einstein could be left free to stuff his face. After a while this became a source of amusement even to Sonar Taxlaw, who just watched the boy eat, and transferred some of her food to his tray when he began to run low.

“Sometime, you’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” Ty remarked.

“What—” Einstein began, before food got in the way.

“—what’s like?” Sonar said, completing his sentence.

“Finding someone so completely. The way you two did.”

“That’s never happened to you?” Einstein asked. He wasn’t being rude. It had simply never occurred to him that he could have had experiences of which Tyuratam Lake knew nothing.

“No. It’s never happened to me.”

Einstein had begun to approach the point of satiation. He sat back in his chair and cast his gaze over the wreckage of his lunch, looking for any morsels that deserved more attention.

“I have a question for you,” he said.

“Fancy that,” Ty returned.

“What’s the Purpose? People keep mentioning it.”

“I wish I knew.”

“Very funny, but you know what I’m talking about. Roskos Yur mentioned it. Cantabrigia Five mentioned it. Purpose with a capital P.”

“My answer remains the same,” Ty said. “No one has ever told me. I have to make guesses, based on what I see from people who act like they know what it is.”

“People like the owners of your bar?”

“Evidently.”

“And what is your guess?”

Sensing another pair of eyes on him, Ty glanced over toward Deep, who was chewing vigorously, trying to reduce a stubborn wad of seaweed to submission. But he seemed to be following the conversation.

Ty shrugged. “Humans have always—”

He was about to say deluded themselves but didn’t want to make a poor impression on Deep.

“—preferred to believe that there was a purpose to the universe. Until the moon blew up, they had theories. After Zero, the theories all seemed kind of stupid. Fairy tales for coddled children. No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive. Like ants when their nest has been destroyed. On those rare occasions when we thought about the big picture, it wasn’t really that big — Red versus Blue or what have you. There was surprisingly little thinking about the Agent. Where it came from. Whether it was natural or artificial, or even divine.”

Einstein, the Cyc, and Deep were all nodding as if to say Go on, go on!

But he had nothing to go on with.

“Some people — some Red, some Blue, and some ambiguous folks like the Owners of my bar — maybe even some of those kind of people”—he nodded at Deep—“seem to think they know something.”

“Do they?” asked Sonar Taxlaw.

“I have no idea,” said Ty. “But from what I’ve seen, they’re not stupid. Even if they are—”

He paused, groping for words.

“Even if they are,” Einstein repeated, “what?!”

“It’s a way — the Purpose is a way — of saying there’s something bigger than this crap we’ve spent the last week of our lives dealing with.”

“Red versus Blue crap?”

“Yes. And even though no one is sharing anything with me—yet—I like the feeling of that. People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently — and generally better — than people who serve other masters.”

“So it is like believing in God.”

“Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”

Einstein and the Cyc nodded and looked thoughtful. But also, or so it seemed to Ty, a little let down.

“Sorry I didn’t have an answer to your question,” Ty said.

“What are you going to do next? Now that your Seven is disbanded?” asked Sonar.

“Go back to my bar.”

“On Cradle?”

“On Cradle. Once, an astonishing wonder of technological prowess. Now a quaint, outmoded precursor to the vastly superior Gnomon.”

“I’d like to see it,” Sonar said.

“We have rooms. Apartments where people can stay, around the courtyard in the back.”

“They must be expensive.”

“They are free,” Ty said.

“How do you get one of those free rooms?” Einstein asked.

“Beats me. The Owners hand them out to people who serve the Purpose.”

“Very important people, then.”

Ty shrugged. “They can’t kill you for asking. You’re right about the Seven. That’s gone. Our Ivyn died. You took his place.”

Einstein cackled nervously. “I’m no replacement for Doc!”

“You don’t have to replace him. Not in that sense. But look what you did. You made first contact with these guys.” He nodded at Deep. “And first contact of another kind with the Diggers.”

Both Einstein and Sonar Taxlaw blushed deeply.

“The Cyc came along and replaced Memmie. That’s not a traditional Seven. But if we can pry Beled and Kathree apart, and if we can round up a Julian and a Camite who don’t hate each other, we’ll have ourselves a Nine. The first Nine ever assembled.”

Ty was just running his mouth, letting the cider talk. Sonar, however, was taking it all seriously. “But only one of the Aïdan subraces will be represented,” she pointed out.

“Bard is plenty.”

“You should include the other four,” Einstein said.

“That makes thirteen. An unlucky number. And a bit of a crowd, frankly.” But the youngsters across the table from him were looking heartrendingly sincere. Ty broke eye contact. “I’ll bet I could talk the Owners out of a few free rooms, for such a momentous occasion.”

“Are you really going to ask them?!” Sonar exclaimed.

“Nah. As an ancient saying has it, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. You are all welcome at the Crow’s Nest.” Ty looked over at Deep. “Just go easy on the cold baths, man. The plumbing in that place has seen better days, and I’m the only one who knows how to fix it.”

Acknowledgments

THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK CAME TO ME CIRCA 2006, WHEN I WAS working part-time at Blue Origin and became interested in the problem of space debris in low Earth orbit. Researchers in that field had raised concerns over the possibility of a chain reaction smash-up that might create so many fragments of orbiting shrapnel as to render space flight practically impossible. My studies in that area turned out to be of little direct relevance to the company, but the novelist in me scented an idea for a book. During the same period I had also become aware of the immense amount of usable matter present in near-Earth asteroids. Thus by late 2006 I had come up with the basic premise of Seveneves. So the first acknowledgment goes to Blue Origin, which was founded circa 2000 by Jeff Bezos under the name Blue Operations LLC and where I had many interesting early conversations with him and other people involved with the company, including Jaime Taaffe, Maria Kaldis, Danny Hillis, George Dyson, and Keith Rosema. It was from Keith that I first heard the idea for the multilayered emergency shelter bubble that appears in this book under the name of Luk. Some of the Baikonur material is very freely adapted from the reminiscences and photographs of George Dyson, Esther Dyson, and Charles Simonyi.

Hugh and Heather Matheson provided background on mining — the industry, the culture, and the lifestyle — which helped me in creating Dinah. If I have stretched truths in my treatment of the MacQuaries’ mine in Alaska and their use of ham radio, it is my fault and not theirs. For the record, Hugh recommended that Rufus’s operation be situated in the Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota, or in the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, Idaho, but I put it in Alaska anyway, to get it farther from the equatorial zone.

Chris Lewicki and the staff of Planetary Resources supplied valuable suggestions during an informal visit that I made to their offices in November 2013. Numerous members of their engineering staff were more than generous with their time on that occasion. (Later Chris mentioned to me that he and other members of the company had been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone was producing science fiction in which the asteroid mining company was, for once, the good guys.)

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