Seveneves - Страница 84

“Given that, I’m all the more appreciative that you made the arduous and risky journey to meet with me in person,” Julia said. “It is my firm conviction that, centuries from now, young Martians sitting in classrooms on the Red Planet will read in their history books — or whatever they have in place of books — about this meeting and what came of it.”

Ravi Kumar raised an index finger. “Instead of educating the young in classrooms,” he said, “why not do away altogether with the traditional structure of mass education and take a personalized, individualized approach? There’s no reason to repeat Earth’s mistakes on Mars.”

“I could not agree with you more,” Julia said, “and these sorts of fresh ideas only make me more eager to find a way of getting as many people there as soon as possible. How do we get started? What would be entailed in sending a forward advance party to Mars?”

For the second time in as many minutes, Dr. Quine looked a bit unsettled. She glanced around Arklet 453. This was the central, common-space arklet of the heptad that included numbers 174—the abode of Julia and Camila — and 215—that of Spencer Grindstaff. Or at least that was what it said on the official records. Some reshuffling had occurred. All the men and women who lived in those two arklets now seemed to conceive of themselves as members of J.B.F.’s personal staff. They had taken over 453 and turned it into a sort of West Wing.

Katherine Quine said, “Presuming we had authorization to send such a mission—”

“Let me just cut you off there, if you would indulge me, Dr. Quine. What you just raised is a matter of politics. I consider that to be my ‘superpower’ and I would like to place it at the disposal of you and the other members of the Martian Community — the ones you already know of, the ones who sympathize with you in secret, and others who may sign on once it becomes clear to them what a fundamentally sensible idea the Mars trip really is. So I would propose that we assume, for purposes of this little chat, that authorization is not a problem. I would like to see you three using your own ‘superpower’ of designing this mission in a way that makes sense without letting the political dimension interfere at all. Once we have designed a coherent plan, we can then move on to questions of implementation.”

“In a perfect scenario we would dump the rock and simply take everything, all at once,” Jianyu said. It was the first time he had spoken, but he seemed to have been emboldened by Julia’s talk of superpowers.

“There are powerful forces that would have to be convinced before such a thing could happen,” Julia said. “Let’s think in terms of an advance party: lean, efficient, smart, but big enough to get the job done. That means landing on Mars and reporting back to the remainder of the Cloud Ark.”

“We’ve been talking about such a mission. We think we could do it with a bolo consisting of a heptad and a triad,” Katherine said.

“Ten arklets,” Julia said. “That doesn’t seem all that many, does it?”

“During the initial delta vee,” Ravi Kumar said, “the arklets would be stacked. Once they were on course for Mars they would form a bolo, so that the members of the expedition could experience Earth-normal gravity during the six-month journey.”

Jianyu added, “Propulsion and other components could come from the MIV kit. Most of the design work has already been done for us.”

Katherine said, “Aerobraking would be needed at the end, to slow it down. Before that, the bolo could be reeled in, the arklets could restack into a unified ship, and there would be time to survey the surface from orbit and decide on a landing place.”

Julia nodded. “And if I may put a hard question to you all, what would be the survival time of this isolated colony, once it had landed? How long before it ran out of provisions?”

This caused the three Martians to clam up and look at one another.

“I only ask,” Julia said, “because politics — my department — once again rears its ugly head here. Once your heroics have been accomplished, the burden falls to me to seal the deal, as it were. The advance party lands and sends back its joyous message. A ticking-clock element enters the picture. Which I do not mean in a negative way — this can be a powerful incentive to mobilize people’s energies, as we saw in the case of the buildup to the Hard Rain. It is at that point when I can address the people of the Cloud Ark and say, ‘Here is the opportunity — will we seize it? Or will we shrink away from it and let these brave people slowly expire?’ That is a speech that I think I could deliver to great effect. I just need to have some sense of the time element.”

“A year for sure,” Katherine said. “Beyond that, it becomes a medical question. A statistical question.”

“Statistics,” Julia repeated, and sighed. “I have been hearing a lot about that from Dr. Harris.”

“SO, YOU’RE TELLING ME WE’VE LOST TRACK OF WHO IS EVEN IN J.B.F.’S heptad?” Ivy asked.

There was silence around the big table in the Banana. Ivy had begun to hold important meetings in this old familiar space, closer to the central axis of the Stack and farther forward in Amalthea’s cone of shelter. It wouldn’t do to have the Cloud Ark’s command structure decapitated by a single unlucky bolide strike — a disaster much more likely to happen whenever they met in the big T3 spaces like the Tank and the Farm.

Present for this meeting were Doob, Luisa, Fyodor, and three handpicked members of Markus’s staff who had become a sort of executive troika: Sal Guodian, the one-man judicial system. Tekla, the head of security. And Steve Lake, the dreadlocked ginger who was responsible for network and computer matters.

“The default system for keeping track of who is where,” Sal began, “is based on the assumption that people will actually cooperate with it.”

Ivy held up a hand. “Stop. Before you go into explanations, I need a yes or no.”

“Yes,” Steve Lake said, “we have lost track of who is in J.B.F.’s heptad.”

“Thank you,” Ivy said. “And somehow the SAN isn’t helping us fill in the gaps?”

Steve said, “One of the people who is definitely in that heptad is Spencer Grindstaff.”

Ivy nodded.

Sal said, “Steve, when Markus pulled you into his office, just before the White Sky, and put you in charge of the network — replacing Spencer — you made some remark to the effect that Spencer might know of back doors into Izzy’s systems. Back doors that would be impossible for you to know about until he used them.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Almost by definition, we can’t find something like that until it’s used. Not without manually reading through every line of code.”

“You think he has a back door into the SAN?”

“We know he’s doing something,” Steve said, “because as soon as he turned up there, the arklets in J.B.F.’s heptad began dropping off the network from time to time. Whenever she’s having a meeting she doesn’t want us to know about, he turns everything off.”

Ivy considered this for a moment, then looked across the table at Tekla and nodded. Tekla rose — carefully, for the gravity was quite weak here — and went to the door. She opened it to reveal Zeke Petersen waiting outside, and waved him in.

“Thanks for joining us,” Ivy said, breaking a silence during which Zeke took a seat at the foot of the table. Ivy was at the head of it. She was looking “up” a long ski jump ramp at him, and he was doing likewise at her.

“Just like old times, Commander Xiao,” Zeke said.

“Well, I appreciate your loyalty,” Ivy said. “I know this must be awkward for you.”

“Not at all, actually,” Zeke said. “The announcement that Markus made, when he called it, at the onset of the Hard Rain — declaring all existing nations to be dissolved — I took that to heart. Julia didn’t hear that announcement. She didn’t get the memo.”

“We’ve been hearing a little about Spencer’s ability to disconnect from SAN.”

Zeke nodded. “Confirmed. I was there for one such incident. We had a very strange conversation. I think they were testing the waters to see whether I might be recruited. She spoke to me as if I were already on her side — as if it were unthinkable that I wouldn’t be. It’s a pretty good persuasive technique — she had me going for a little bit. But once I got out of there and slept on it, I saw how crazy it was.”

“Did you have the sense that this was a one-off? Or was she working her way down a list of possible recruits?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say there was a list,” Zeke said, “but not a long list.”

Ivy nodded. She didn’t have to spell it out: J.B.F. might have recruited some others — others they didn’t know about yet.

“It tallies with what I saw,” Doob said, and glanced at Luisa for a confirming nod. “I think she is just being opportunistic. She reaches out to people, draws them into conversations, drops hints, probes for vulnerabilities.”

“Is she nuts?” Ivy asked Luisa.

“In a sense it doesn’t matter,” Luisa said. “If she’s making trouble, she’s making trouble. Tracing that to a diagnosable psychiatric condition doesn’t really change anything.”

“It might change the approach that we take.”

“She was narcissistic to begin with,” Luisa said. “This isn’t a formal diagnosis, mind you. But according to what we heard from you and Dinah, her trip up to Izzy was pretty traumatic. She lost her husband and her child and blood was spilled along the way. It doesn’t take a trained professional to guess that she is suffering from some level of PTSD. Connected with that we might expect her to have a dark, paranoid vision of the world. But she may have been that way to begin with.”