Текст книги "Seveneves"

Автор книги: Neal Stephenson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 57 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 21 страниц]

The twelve in the Banana mustered a low murmur of thanks to usher the president out of whatever conference room this transmission was coming from. Someone torqued the camera around until it was pointing at Scott Spalding. He had managed to find a blazer but he was tieless, and probably would be for the remainder of his life. As a young astronaut, Sparky had been slated for an Apollo mission that had been canceled during the budget cutbacks of the early 1970s. He had stuck with the program, getting his Ph.D. during the hiatus in manned spaceflight that followed. His run of bad luck had continued when a planned mission on Skylab was scrubbed because of the spacecraft’s untimely descent into the atmosphere. His perseverance had paid off in the 1980s with a series of Shuttle missions that had turned him into a past master of the astronaut corps, equally at home fixing busted solar panels and quoting the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. After a couple of decades working at tech startups with varying levels of success, he’d been brought back to NASA a few years ago as part of some dimly conceived repurposing of the agency’s mission. Most of the people in the Banana found him likable, if somewhat opaque, and had the general feeling that he would back them up in a pinch.

Exactly what Rilke poems Sparky thought could address the world’s current predicament, it was impossible to guess. For a moment there, after the camera swung around to autofocus on his sagging and creased face, it almost seemed like some poetry might be on the tip of his tongue. Then he shook it off and found the camera’s lens with his pale eyes. “Words fail me,” he said, “so I am just going to concentrate on business. Ivy, you remain in charge. There’s no one better. Your job is to keep things running up there, communicate with us down here, let us know what you need. If after all of that you find yourself with some free time, let me know and I’ll find you a hobby.” He winked.

And from there he went down the list.

Frank Casper, a Canadian electrical engineer, and Spencer Grindstaff, an American who specialized in communications and who had been doing mysterious work for intelligence agencies, were going to work on establishing the network infrastructure needed to support the activities of the Cloud Ark. Jibran, an instrumentation specialist who was always getting roped into such problems anyway, would work with them.

Fyodor Panteleimon, their grizzled space walk specialist, and Zeke Petersen, a more boyish-looking American air force pilot who also had many hours of experience in space suits, would begin preparing for the arrival of new modules that, they were assured, were being designed and built with un-NASA-like haste and would begin arriving at Izzy in less than a month. Dinah found that time estimate to be ludicrously optimistic until she remembered that essentially all the world’s resources were being thrown at this.

Konrad Barth was simply asked to stay on after the meeting for a talk with Doob. It was obvious enough that he would soon be repurposing every astronomical gadget on the space station to the problem of looking for incoming rocks. This was a topic no one wanted to dwell on. If Izzy got hit by a rock of any size, it was all over. In that sense there really was no point in talking about it.

The life scientists were Lina Ferreira; Margaret Coghlan, an Australian woman studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body; and Jun Ueda, a Japanese biophysicist running some lab experiments about the effects of cosmic rays on living tissues. Also in that general category was Marco Aldebrandi, an Italian engineer who focused on the more practical matter of running the life support systems that kept the rest of them alive. Of those four, Lina already had a special status in that she had actually done work on swarming. It wasn’t that closely related to what she had been doing on the space station, but now she was going to have to dust it off and make it her life’s work. Sparky gave her carte blanche to hole up in a quiet place and cram her brain with papers on that topic for a little while, getting back up to speed. Margaret and Jun were told to put their more abstract research work out the airlock and work under Marco on readying Izzy for a large expansion in population.

That covered eleven of the twelve. So far, Sparky hadn’t said a word to Dinah.

Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It had always been thus. The fact that the world was ending changed nothing. As Sparky kept ticking down the list, telling each person what they would be doing in the coming weeks, she kept feeling more and more the point of focus precisely because she hadn’t been focused on yet. And when it became clear that she was last on Sparky’s list, she had a good long while, as he talked to Margaret and Jun and Marco, to wonder what that meant. Being Dinah, her first assumption was that she was considered so important that she was being saved for last. But by the time Sparky finally spoke her name, she had arrived at a different guess as to what was happening. Her heart was already thumping and her pinkies tingling, her tongue bulky in her mouth.

“Dinah,” Sparky said, “you’re indispensable.”

She knew exactly what this meant, in meeting-speak: they would put her out the airlock if they could.

“You have such a wide range of capabilities and we all admire your attitude so much.”

Sparky hadn’t said a word to anyone else about their attitude.

“Obviously, asteroid mining—which you’ve devoted so much of your career to—is a project with a long-term payoff. But we are in short-term mode now.”

“Of course.”

“I am detailing you to assist Ivy and look for ways that you can put your amazing skill set to use in supporting the activities of the others. Fyodor and Zeke can only go on so many space walks. Maybe your robots can be put to use doing things that they can’t.”

“As long as it involves cutting through iron, they’ll be awesome,” Dinah said.

“Sounds great,” Sparky said, missing the sarcasm entirely. In his own mind he was finished with the conversation, tolerating a few moments’ small talk before the after-meeting with Doob and Konrad.

Dinah thought better of herself than this. How could she let herself get into this frame of mind at such a time?

Because maybe there was actually a good reason for how she was feeling.

She was halfway through saying goodbye to Sparky when she pivoted back. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “I respect what you said about short-term mode. I get that. But if, or when, this Cloud Ark thing works, you know what’s next, right?”

Sparky was in no mood. Not so much annoyed with her as bewildered. “What’s next?”

“People need a place to live. And if the surface of the Earth is going to be burned off, we’re going to have to make those living places up here, out of stuff we can get our hands on. Asteroids. Of which we have a lot more now, thanks to the Agent.”

Sparky put his hands over his face, exhaled, and sat motionless for about a minute. When he took his hands away, she could see he’d been weeping. “I wrote half a dozen goodbye letters to old friends and family before this meeting,” he said, “and when it’s over I’m going to keep working my way down the list. Maybe I’ll write half of all the letters I want before their intended recipients get killed by the Hard Rain. The point being, I guess, that I am thinking like the dead man walking that I truly am. Which is wrong. I should be thinking about what you are thinking about. The future that you and a few others may look forward to if all of this other stuff works.”

“You really think we’re looking forward to it?”

Sparky winced. “Not in the sense of thinking that that future’s going to be great but in the sense of at least thinking about it. I don’t disagree with you. But what do you want me to do now?”

“Watch my back,” Dinah said. “Don’t let them ditch Amalthea. Don’t let them cut up all of my robots for spare parts. You want me to work on other stuff for a while, fine. But when the sky turns white and the Hard Rain begins to fall, the Cloud Ark needs to have a viable program for making things out of asteroids or else there is no way people are going to stay alive up here for thousands of years.”

“I have your back, Dinah,” said Sparky, “for what that is worth.” And his eyes strayed in the direction of the door through which the president had exited.

AT A+0, THE TWELVE-PERSON CREW OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE Station had included only a single Russian: Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Antonovich Panteleimon, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of six missions and eighteen space walks, the éminence grise of the cosmonaut corps. This was unusual. In the early years, out of the ISS’s usual crew of six, at least two had normally been cosmonauts. The addition of Project Amalthea and of the torus had expanded the station’s maximum capacity to fourteen, and the number of Russians had typically varied between two and five.

The moon had disintegrated only two weeks before Ivy, Konrad, and Lina had been scheduled to return home, to be replaced by two more Russians and a British engineer.

Since that rocket and its crew were ready to go anyway, Roskosmos—the Russian space agency—went ahead and launched it from the Baikonur cosmodrome on A+0.17.

The Soyuz spacecraft docked at Izzy’s Hub module without incident. Unlike Americans, who liked flying things by hand, the Russians had made docking into an automated process a long time ago.

The Soyuz—the workhorse, for decades, of human space launch—was a stack of three modules. At its aft end was a mechanical section containing engines, propellant tanks, photovoltaic panels, and other equipment that didn’t require an atmosphere. Its forward section was a more or less spherical vessel meant to be pressurized with breathable air, and containing enough empty space for cosmonauts to move around, work, and live. In the middle was a smaller bell-shaped section containing three couches where the space-suited occupants would ride into space and later descend back to Earth cloaked in a fiery comet tail. Accommodations in that section were extremely cramped, but it didn’t matter since it was only used briefly during launch and reentry; the orbital module, which was the larger sphere on the front, was where the cosmonauts spent most of their time. And on its nose was the mating contraption that enabled it to connect with the space station, or any other object suitably equipped.

Until a couple of years ago the Soyuz capsules had usually docked at the aft end of the Zvezda module, which had been the “tail” of the ISS. More recently a new module called the Hub had been attached to the Zvezda, extending the main axis of the space station “rearward,” and providing the axle around which the torus revolved. In order to maintain compatibility with the ubiquitous and time-tested Soyuz, the Hub had been equipped with a suitable port and hatch.

Since the other eleven were busy with the tasks that Sparky had given them, Dinah floated “aft” down the whole length of Izzy—for her shop was attached to its “forward” end—and opened the docking hatch to greet the new arrivals. She was expecting to see a few humans floating free in the orbital module of the newly arrived Soyuz. Instead she saw the head and arm of a single cosmonaut, whom she vaguely recognized as Maxim Koshelev. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass of vitamins.

“Vitamins” was a term of art used by spaceflight geeks to mean any small, lightweight stuff of extraordinary value. Microchips, medicine, spare parts, ukuleles, biological samples, soap, and food all fell under the general heading of “vitamins.” Humans, of course, were the most important vitamin of all, unless you were one of those who believed that all space exploration should be conducted by robots. Dinah had sat in many a conference where her colleagues in the asteroid mining industry had argued passionately that rockets, which were so expensive, should only be used to transport vitamins. Bulk materials such as metals and water should never be launched from the ground; they ought to be obtained from the billions of rocks that were wandering around in space already.

A sealed box of hypodermic syringes tumbled out and caromed off her forehead, followed by a vac-packed bag of lithium hydroxide gravel, a bottle of morphine, a reel of surface-mount capacitors, and a rubber-banded bundle of number two lead pencils, presharpened. Once Dinah had pawed those out of the way she was able to more fully take in the scene: Maxim, jammed in a narrow human-sized tunnel through a mass of vitamins that had been packed into the Soyuz until it couldn’t hold any more.

Someone down in Tyuratam had had the foresight to cram in a few folded-up garbage bags. Taking the hint, Dinah peeled one of them open and used it to corral all the items that had escaped so far and were threatening to go on a random walk around Izzy. Then she began raking out more. Lots of stuff escaped, but most of it went into the bag. Maxim eased himself out into the Hub for a stretch. He’d been crammed into this thing for six hours. Dinah, who was smaller, went into the space he’d vacated and began throwing vitamins out to him; he just held up a garbage bag to catch them.

After a minute she excavated a human thigh in a blue jumpsuit, then a shoulder, then an arm. The arm moved and pushed more vitamins at her, exposing a face that Dinah recognized from having scanned her Wikipedia entry half an hour ago. This was Bolor-Erdene, a woman who had once been rejected from the cosmonaut program because she was too small to fit into any of the standard space suits. She was riding in a couch that had clearly been jury-rigged for the purpose. It was strapped to a part of the orbital module called the Divan with an improvised scheme of cargo webbing that was still dusty from the roads of Kazakhstan. Dinah wondered if it was the last dirt she would ever see, then tried to suppress that thought.

So, both Bolor-Erdene and Maxim had ridden in the orbital module, which was unprecedented; humans were supposed to ride only in the reentry module aft of it.

It would have been indiscreet to point this out, but those two, by riding up front, had signed up for a one-way journey that could have turned into a suicide mission had anything gone wrong. The orbital module was jettisoned during the reentry process, and burned up in the atmosphere. Only the passengers in the reentry module could even theoretically make it back alive.

The vitamin bagging proceeded through the hatch into the reentry module and went viral as faces and arms were freed. In the three couches, where humans were supposed to ride, were the two other scheduled cosmonauts, Yuri and Vyacheslav, and the Brit, who was named Rhys.

Bolor-Erdene, Yuri, and Vyacheslav took their first chance to unstrap and move up through the orbital module into the Hub. Rhys requested that he be given a moment.

Dinah went into the Hub to greet the other four. In normal times these moments were at least a little bit ceremonious, with the new arrivals being greeted with hugs, or at least high fives, as they glided through the hatch, and photographs taken. The impending deaths of everyone on Earth cast a bit of a pall over this occasion, but Dinah felt she should at least say a few words to each of them.

Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah’s preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian.

Yuri and Maxim were coming to ISS for their third and fourth times, respectively. Vyacheslav seemed to be a last-minute substitution for a younger cosmonaut who would have been making his first trip to the ISS. Vyacheslav had done two previous stints. So, all the Russians except for Bo were old hands at this, and once they had exchanged brief greetings with Dinah they glided through the middle of the Hub, looking about curiously since some of them hadn’t seen it before, and then through the hatch into the Zvezda module, which was like home to them. They exchanged clipped remarks in Russian of which Dinah understood about 50 percent. Everyone who worked on Izzy had to have at least working knowledge of Russian.

Rhys Aitken was an engineer who had made a career of building strange new constructs, usually for wealthy clients. Until seventeen days ago, his mission had been to lay groundwork for the addition of a second, larger torus, built around a newer Hub aft of the existing one and intended for space tourists. This was part of a public-private partnership between NASA and Rhys’s employer, a British billionaire who had been one of the early movers in the space tourism industry. Rhys had a new mission now, but he was still a perfect fit for the job.

Dinah went back through the orbital module and peered through the hatch at him, lying there patiently motionless in his couch.

“First time in space?” Dinah asked him, though she already knew the answer.

“Don’t you have Google up here?” he responded. From an American it would have been simply obnoxious, but Dinah had spent enough time around Brits to take it as intended.

“You just don’t seem very eager to explore your new home.”

“I’m stretching it out. The process of discovery. Besides, I was warned not to move my head.”

“To avoid nausea. Yeah, that’s good advice,” Dinah said. “But you have to move it eventually.” A loose packet of cucumber seeds, stenciled in Cyrillic, floated past her head. She plucked it carefully out of the air. Finding herself in range, she stuck out her hand. “Dinah,” she said.

“Rhys.” He extended his hand while gazing rigidly ahead, as he’d been instructed. But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better.

“You’re going to regret that,” she said.

“Oh, my goodness,” he exclaimed.

“You have a few minutes before it all comes up. Come on out, I’ll get you a bag.”

DURING ONE OF MANY RECENT SLEEPLESS “NIGHTS,” DINAH HAD found herself worrying about transistors. Modern semiconductor technology had found a way to make them very small. So small that they could be destroyed by a single hit from a cosmic ray. This didn’t much matter down on the ground, because the stakes were lower and cosmic rays were mostly blocked by the atmosphere. But electronics that had to work in space were a different matter. The world’s military-industrial complexes had put a lot of money and brainpower into making “rad-hard” electronics, more resistant to cosmic ray strikes. The resulting chips and circuit boards were, by and large, clunkier than the sleek consumer electronics that earthbound customers had come to expect. A lot more expensive too. So much so that Dinah had avoided using them at all in her robots. She used cheap, tiny off-the-shelf electronics in the expectation that a certain number of her robots would be found dead every week. A functional robot could carry a dead one back to the little airlock between Dinah’s workshop and the pitted surface of Amalthea, and Dinah could swap its fried circuit board out for a new one. Sometimes the new one would already be dead, struck by a cosmic ray while it was just sitting there in storage. But the vitamins shipped up on the ISS supply missions always had more of them.

The only shielding from cosmic rays was matter. A thick atmosphere such as Earth’s would do the trick, or a much thinner bulwark of solid heavy material. Of course, Dinah happened to have one in the form of Amalthea itself. Any object nestled up against Amalthea’s surface would be shielded from cosmic rays coming from roughly half of the universe—the half blocked from view by the asteroid. For the same reason, the ISS was always shielded by the Earth from any cosmic rays approaching from that direction. So there was a sweet spot, on the side of Dinah’s shop that faced toward Earth but was “under” the bulk of Amalthea, where cosmic rays could only squirt in from a relatively narrow band of space. Dinah stored her spare chips and circuit boards in that general area, just to improve their odds, and she limited the amount of time that her robots spent roaming about on the side of Amalthea that faced deep space.

In clear view of her window was a hollow in Amalthea’s side, perhaps an ancient impact crater, big enough to accommodate a watermelon.

On Day 9—five days before the conference in the Banana when Doc Dubois had told them about the Hard Rain and the president had told them that they were never coming home—she had programmed several of her robots—the ones with the most effective cutting heads—to begin making that hollow deeper. Perhaps she’d had a premonition of what was about to happen. Or perhaps she was just doing her job; mining robots would need to have the ability to carry out programmed activities such as boring tunnels into rock, and it was high time she began experimenting with such tasks.

But after that conference in the Banana, she had gone back to her little shop and, as an alternative to crying all night or sticking her head out the airlock, she had altered the program that those little robots were following and told them to begin bending the tunnel, curving it gently as it delved into the asteroid. Until then, the robots had been moving directly away from her and she’d been able to look through her tiny quartz window, into the watermelon-sized hollow, and straight down the tunnel that the robots were cutting. She had to flip a welding glass down over the window when she did this because they were cutting with plasma arcs whose brilliant purple light would burn her eyes. But by the time that the five new arrivals got to Izzy on A+0.17, the robots had disappeared around the bend in the tunnel that they had made. The universe could not see them. Cosmic rays ran in straight lines, like light, and they could not negotiate that bend.

Dinah had them carve a little hollow into the side of that tunnel: a storage niche. She packaged up all of her spare chips and PC boards into a bundle. It was a small one, given how tiny and powerful modern chips were—a cube small enough to hold in one hand. Normally this would have been a bad idea—a single cosmic ray might shoot through the entire stack and kill every board at once. She handed it off to an eight-legged robot and sent that robot through the airlock and down the tunnel. Seeing through the remote eye of its video camera, manipulating a data glove connected to its grappling arms, she maneuvered it into the niche and then made it splay out its arms and go rigid so that it couldn’t drift out. Her transistors were now safe.

Rhys watched her do it. He had been on Izzy for five hours. He was too sick to do anything except lie very still. Dinah, whose shop was full of zip ties and clamps and other useful devices, had helped him wedge his head between a couple of pipes, padding them with foam to make it a little more comfortable. She had left him with a supply of barf bags and gone about her work.

“What do you call that type?” he asked.

“A Grabb,” she answered. “Short for Grabby Crab.”

“Good name, I suppose.”

“It’s the most obvious body type for something that’s meant to pick its way around on a rock. Each leg has an electromagnet on its tip, so it can stick to Amalthea, which is mostly iron. When it wants to pick up that foot, it just switches off the magnet.”

“I’m sure you’ve already thought of this,” Rhys said delicately, “but you could hollow out the whole asteroid this way. Create a shielded environment. Maybe even fill it with air.”

Dinah nodded. She was busy, placing the Grabb’s eight arms one by one, making sure each of them was stuck to a wall of the niche. It would be embarrassing if all of her vitamins floated out and got lost. “We’ve discussed it. Me and the, like, eight thousand engineers on the ground who are working on this.”

“Yes, I didn’t suppose it was a solo effort.”

“The constraint is working gas. The plasma cutters are very powerful, but they require some gas flow. Almost any gas will do. But industrial gases are rare and valuable up here, and they have this annoying habit of escaping into space.”

“But if you were hollowing something out, as opposed to working on its surface—”

“Exactly,” Dinah said. “You could seal the exits and recapture the used gas, and recycle it.”

“So you’re way ahead of me, in other words.”

Dinah’s upper face was obscured in a VR rig but a smile spread below it. “That’s the thing about space,” she said. “So many smart people are so interested in it that it’s difficult to come up with a really new idea.”

There was a pause in the conversation while she switched control to a different robot and got it moving down the tunnel.

“Moving my eyeballs oh so slightly, I see at least three other morphologies in your bestiary.”

“The Siwi is adapted from a robot that was made for exploring collapsed buildings. Which in turn was obviously adapted from a snake.”

“A sidewinder, presumably, given the name.”

“Yeah. The electromagnets are arranged around the Siwi’s body in a double helix, so by turning some on and others off, it can sort of roll diagonally along the surface with minimal power usage.”

“The thing that looks like a Buckyball seems to be using a similar trick.”

“You nailed the name. We do in fact call those Buckies. Technically speaking, it’s a thing called a—”

“Tensegrity.”

Dinah felt herself blushing. “Of course, you’d know all about those. Anyway, because it’s big and roughly spherical, it can roll in any direction by playing tricks with electromagnetics and making its struts get longer or shorter. The brains live in that sort of nucleuslike package suspended in the middle.”

“Grabbs, Siwis, and Buckies. What do you call the tiny ones?”

“Nats. Our attempt to build a swarm. Lina’s been moonlighting on it.”

There was a little gap in the conversation while both of them considered the unfortunate choice of wording.

“It’s pretty experimental still,” Dinah continued. “But the idea is that they can latch on to each other as needed, like ants making an ant-ball to cross a river. I know this must all seem pretty weird. It’s not normal engineering.”

“I’m not a normal engineer. I’ve been doing biomimetics—which is what you are doing—for a while. Except I build things that stand still.”

“Okay. You get it then.” Dinah peeled off the 3-D goggles she’d been using to see through the eyes of the Grabb. The second robot, the Siwi, had perched itself in the tunnel behind the Grabb and raised its head, cobralike, to shine light on it and shoot video. Gazing at the flat-panel screen, Dinah made the Siwi pan back and forth to inspect the Grabb’s position, ensuring there was no way those circuit boards could drift away.

“Yes. I get it,” Rhys said. Then he added, “It’s not for me to tell you your business. But you know what hermit crabs do, don’t you?”

It took Dinah a few moments to access the memory. She had never been a beach kind of person. “They use the discarded shells of other crabs as shelter.”

“Not of other crabs, but of mollusks. But yes, you have it.”

Dinah thought about it for a moment, then turned to look at him. He seemed slightly less green and sweaty than before. “I think I see where you are going.”

“Better yet,” Rhys said, “consider the foraminifera.”

“What are they?”

“The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.”

“Sort of like Ben Grimm?” she asked.

It was a throwaway reference to a comic book character, the armor-plated member of the Fantastic Four. She didn’t expect him to pick up on it. But he shot back: “To name another cosmic ray victim, yes. But without the alienation and self-pity.”

“I always wanted skin like the Thing.”

“It wouldn’t suit you nearly as well as the skin God gave you. But as a way for you to protect your robots from cosmic rays, while giving them the freedom to roam around—”

“I think I’m in love,” she said.

He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.

HOW DO YOU TELL THE WORLD THAT IT’S GOING TO DIE? DOOB WAS glad he didn’t have to say it. Instead he just stood behind the president of the United States. His job was to look serious—which wasn’t difficult—as part of a Mount Rushmore of eminent scientists lined up behind a semicircle of world leaders. He stared at the back of J.B.F.’s head as she explained it into a teleprompter. Bracketing her were the Chinese and the Indian presidents, saying the same things at the same time in Mandarin and Hindi. Fanning out into the wings were the prime ministers of Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and (acting as a sort of proxy for most of Latin America, as well as his own country) Spain; the chancellor of Germany; the presidents of Nigeria, Russia, and Egypt; the pope; prominent imams from the main branches of the Islamic faith; a rabbi; and a lama. The announcements were made simultaneously, so that as much of the human race as possible would hear the news at the same instant, and not have to await translations.

If the task had fallen to Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D., he would have said something like this: Look, everybody dies. Of the seven billion people now living on Earth, basically all will be dead a hundred years from now—most a lot sooner. No one wants to die, but most calmly accept that it’s going to happen.

A person who died two years from now in the Hard Rain would be no deader than someone who died seventeen years from now in a car crash.

The only thing that had changed now was that everyone knew the approximate time and manner of their death.