Seveneves - Страница 2

A lump of nickel and iron like Amalthea could be smelted into structural materials for the construction of orbiting space habitats. Doing so on anything more than a small pilot scale would require the development of new technology. Using human miners was out of the question, since sending them up to orbit and keeping them alive was expensive. Robots were the obvious solution. Dinah had been sent up to Izzy to lay groundwork for a robot laboratory that would eventually host a staff of six. The budget wars in Washington had reduced that number to one.

Which was how she actually liked it. She had grown up in remote places, following her father, Rufus; her mother, Catherine; and her four brothers to a series of hard rock mines in places like the Brooks Range of Alaska, the Karoo Desert of South Africa, and the Pilbara of western Australia. Her accent betrayed traces of all those places. She’d been home-schooled by her parents and a series of tutors they’d flown in, none of whom had lasted more than a year. Catherine had taught her the finer points of piano playing and napkin folding, and Rufus had taught her mathematics, military history, Morse code, bush piloting, and how to blow things up, all by the age of twelve, when, by family voice vote over dinner, she had been deemed too smart and too much of a handful for life at the minehead. She had been sent off to boarding school on the East Coast of the United States. For her family — though she’d never had an inkling of it until then — was well off.

At school she had developed into a gifted soccer player and parlayed this talent into an athletic scholarship to Penn. During her sophomore year she had blown out her right ACL, terminating her serious athletic career, and turned her attention in a more serious way to the study of geology. That, plus a three-year relationship with a boy who liked to build robots, combined with her background in the mining industry, had made her into a perfect candidate for the job she had now. Working hand in glove with robot geeks on terra firma — a mixture of university researchers, freelance members of the hacker/maker community, and paid Arjuna Expeditions staff — she programmed, tested, and evaluated a menagerie of robots, ranging in size from cockroach to cocker spaniel, all adapted for the task of crawling around on the surface of Amalthea, analyzing its mineral composition, cutting bits off, and taking them to a smelter that, like everything else up here, was specially adapted to work in the environment of space. The ingots of steel that emerged from this device were barely large enough to serve as paperweights, but they were the first such things made off-world, and right now they were weighing down important papers on billionaires’ desks all over Silicon Valley, worth far more as conversation pieces and status symbols than as commodities.

Rufus, a die-hard ham radio enthusiast who still communicated in Morse code with a dwindling circle of old friends all over the world, had pointed out that radio transmission between the ground and Izzy was actually rather easy, given that it was line-of-sight (at least when Izzy happened to be passing overhead) and that the distance was nothing by ham radio standards. Since Dinah lived and worked in a robot workshop, surrounded by soldering gear and electronics workbenches, it had been a simple matter for her to assemble a small transceiver following specifications provided by her dad. Zip-tied to a bulkhead, it dangled above her workstation, making a dim static hiss that was easily drowned out by the normal background roar of the space station’s ventilation systems. Sometimes it would beep.

A spacewalker gazing at Dinah’s end of Izzy, a few minutes after the Agent had fractured the moon, would have seen, first of all, Amalthea: a huge, gnarled twist of metal, still dusty in some places with space debris that had fallen into its evanescent gravitational field over the aeons, gleaming in others where it had been rubbed clean. Scurrying over its surface was a score of different robots, belonging to four distinct “species”: one that looked like a snake, one that picked its way along like a crab, one that looked like a sort of rolling geodesic dome, and another that looked like a swarm of insects. These provided sporadic illumination from the blue and white LEDs that Dinah used to track them, from the lasers with which they scanned Amalthea’s surface, and from the blinding arcs of purplish light with which they would sometimes slice into it. Izzy was then in Earth’s shadow, on the night side of the planet, and so all was dark otherwise, except for white light spilling out from the little quartz window beside Dinah’s workstation. This was barely large enough to frame her head. She had straw-colored hair cut short. She had never been especially appearance conscious; back at the minehead her brothers had mocked her to shame whenever she had experimented with clothes or cosmetics. When she’d been described as a tomboy in a school yearbook she had interpreted it as a sort of warning shot and had gone into a somewhat more girly phase that had run its course during her late teens and early twenties and ended when she had started to worry about being taken seriously in engineering meetings. Being on Izzy meant being on the Internet, doing everything from painstakingly scripted NASA PR interviews to candid Facebook shots posted by fellow astronauts. She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time.

As usual, she was focused on the screen of her computer, which was covered with lines of code governing the behavior of her robots. Most software developers had to write code, compile it into a program, and then run the program to see whether it was working as intended. Dinah wrote code, beamed it into the robots scurrying around on Amalthea’s surface a few meters away, and stared out the window to see whether it was working. The ones closest to the window tended to get most of her attention, and so there was a kind of natural selection at work, in that the robots that huddled closest to their mother’s cool blue-eyed gaze acquired the most intelligence, while the ones wandering around loose on the dark side never got any smarter.

At any rate her focus was either on the screen or on the robots, and so it had been for many hours. Until a string of beeps came out of the hissing speaker zip-tied to the bulkhead, and her eyes went momentarily out of focus as her brain decoded the dots and dashes into a string of letters and numbers: her father’s call sign. “Not now, Pa,” she muttered, with a guilty daughter’s glance at the brass-and-oak telegraph key he had given her — a Victorian relic purchased at great price on eBay, during a bidding war that had placed Rufus into pitched battle against a host of science museums and interior decorators.

LOOK AT THE MOON

“Not now, Pa, I know the moon’s pretty, I’m right in the middle of debugging this method. .”

OR WHAT USED TO BE IT

“Huh?”

And then she brought her face close to the window and twisted her neck to find the moon. She saw what used to be it. And the universe changed.

HIS NAME WAS DUBOIS JEROME XAVIER HARRIS, PH.D. THE FRENCH first name came from his Louisiana ancestors on his mother’s side. The Harrises were Canadian blacks whose ancestors had come up to Toronto during slavery. Jerome and Xavier were the names of saints — two of them, just to be on the safe side. The family straddled the border in the Detroit-Windsor area. Inevitably, he had been dubbed Doob by his friends at school when they had still been too young to understand that “doobie” was slang for a marijuana cigarette. The overwhelming majority of people called him Doc Dubois now, because he was on TV a lot, and that was how the talk show hosts and the network anchormen introduced him. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning rod for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.

In academic settings, such as when he was keynoting astronomical meetings and writing papers, he was, of course, Dr. Harris.

The moon blew up while he was attending a fund-raising reception in the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum. At the beginning of the evening it was a fiercely cold bluish-white disk rising above the Chino Hills. Lay observers would fancy it a good night for moon watching, at least by Southern California standards, but Dr. Harris’s professional eye saw a thin border of fuzz around its rim and knew that aiming a telescope at it would be pointless. At least if the objective were to do science. Public relations was another matter; operating more in his Doc Dubois persona, he occasionally organized star parties where amateur astronomers would set their telescopes up in Eaton Canyon Park and aim them at crowd-pleasing targets such as the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. Tonight would be a fine night for that.

But that wasn’t what he was doing. He was drinking good red wine with rich persons, mostly from the tech industry, and being Doc Dubois, the affable science popularizer of television and of four million Twitter followers. Doc Dubois knew how to size up his audience. He knew that self-made tech zillionaires liked to argue, that Pasadena aristocracy didn’t, and that society wives liked to be lectured to, as long as the lectures were brief and funny. And he knew that his job was to charm these people, nothing more, so that they could later be handed off to professional fund-raisers.