Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

“Anyone else?” she asked.

“Besides the nurse? Just the big fella.”

So Beled had arrived too. Or so she guessed until several minutes later, when Beled walked in through the same door that Kath Two had used. He looked around the place in a manner that made it obvious he had never been here before.

Quickly he picked out Kath Two’s face. He did not react, but moved toward her directly. Kath Two had taken the last available bar stool, but Beled cut through the crowd, which was easy for him since people tended to get out of his way, and stood behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth on her back. He ordered a popular brand of inexpensive beer from another member of the staff: a breed, probably Camite/Julian, female, somewhat exotic. Ty had drifted away and resumed whatever he’d been doing with the bar tab. Kath Two checked her timepiece and guessed that Ty was getting ready to clock out so that he could take them back to the room where they would have the meeting. As the woman behind the bar handed the beer from her tiny hand into Beled’s huge mitt, Kath Two pivoted toward him, tinked her glass against his, and said, “To the Seven.”

Beled was busy for a moment thanking the barmaid in somewhat over-formal style, but then nodded and joined Kath Two in a drink. Kath Two explained what she knew of Tyuratam Lake and Beled spent the next several minutes appraising the Dinan from a distance, drawing who knew what conclusions.

Presently Ty finished his paperwork and slipped around the corner of the bar, catching Kath Two’s eye as he did so. She could see that for him to extract himself from the society of the Crow’s Nest was no insignificant thing, since many knew him and wanted to say hello. But he seemed to have learned a sort of posture and gait that made him look too busy to brook interruption.

Kath Two found it hard to keep up with Ty’s meandering course through the various rooms and corridors, and ended up allowing Beled to step in front of her so that he could break trail. Because Beled was much taller and wider than she was, this made it difficult for her to see what was ahead of them. But at length she became conscious of being in a long down-sloping corridor with a stone floor, and stone walls paneled over with wood to make them seem warmer. Various doors led off of it, but one stood at the end, and this Ty opened for them. She saw warm light spilling out, glancing off the polished rock between Beled’s legs and the wood paneling around his shoulders.

“Welcome to the Bolt Hole,” Ty said.

Kath Two followed Beled into the room and then collided with his backside, bouncing off him and taking a step back. He had come to a dead stop upon entering and dropped into a slight crouch, one foot ahead of the other and pointed straight ahead. Sidling around him, Kath Two followed his gaze, and his toe’s azimuth, across the room.

The Bolt Hole was a cozy little place with an oval table just big enough for seven. Doc was seated nearest the door, flanked by Memmie and by his robot. Across from him was Ariane Casablancova. Seated at the far end of the table, facing the door, was the man that Ty must have meant when he had spoken of “the big fella.” Because of his position behind the table, all that was visible were his head, shoulders, and arms. The arms seemed long and quite heavily constructed. What really drew attention, though, was the architecture of the big fella’s skull. His head looked like the head that a normal person’s head would develop into if they kept growing beyond adulthood into some more pronounced phase of development. Thick reddish-brown eyebrows did little to conceal a prominent ridge of bone above the eyes. When Kath Two first saw him he was draining a pint glass, which looked even smaller in his hand than it had in Beled’s; but when he set it down to expose the lower half of his clean-shaven face, she saw the set of his jaw, and the size of his teeth, and understood that the seventh member of the Seven was not just any Aïdan but a Neoander.

EVE AÏDA HAD FOUNDED SEVEN STRAINS OVER THE COURSE OF THIRTEEN separate pregnancies. The failure rate had been so high because the alterations she had demanded from Eve Moira had been so extreme. She had been willing to accept some unsuccessful pregnancies, given that she saw herself as having plenty of time until menopause compared to all the other Eves save Camila. And Camila she did not see as a competitor, given that Camila wanted to raise a race of people who were not inclined to compete with anyone.

The Eves, confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, at least until such time as the memory chips on which it was all archived began to fail: a decay that had begun on a small scale but that would take decades to have any serious effect.

Aïda began to research human genetics. To the extent that her genome was the final expression of a long historical process — a dense and cryptic encoding of everything that her ancestors had learned by managing to survive long enough to reproduce — this meant learning about the history of human evolution as well. Her genome, like that of all the other Arkies, had been sequenced and evaluated before she had left Earth. A copy of the report had been provided to her. It contained information as to what parts of the world her ancestors had come from. Much of this was what you would expect for an Italian woman, but there were details she hadn’t known, such as some genetic connections to Northern African Jews, to an isolated tribe in the Caucasus, and to the Nordic peoples. Based on certain genetic markers it was also clear that, like many Europeans, she was part Neanderthal.

Later analysis, by historical scholars, of the bread crumb trails left by Aïda in computer logs suggested that she had spent almost as much time studying the genomes of the Four, whom she saw as her direct competitors, as her own. And of the Four, she spent as much time learning about Moira’s genome as Dinah’s, Tekla’s, and Ivy’s combined. This was because Moira was of African descent, and Aïda had become fascinated by the idea that Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider. For every African who was a great athlete there was presumably another who was miserably uncoordinated, but no one paid any notice to the latter. Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aïda swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account. The very existence of Moirans, as a race, was a result. Rather than try to follow all of Aïda’s machinations in detail, base pair for base pair, Eve Moira had chosen to tinker with those aspects of the genome that controlled epigenetics, making her children into Swiss Army knives.

Tekla had been an easier target, where Aïda was concerned, since she had stated so forthrightly what she considered desirable in a future race. It was easy enough to see that the children of Tekla were going to be strong, disciplined, formidable fighters. And one did not have to be a military genius to understand that fighting, for the foreseeable future — several millennia of being bottled up in space colonies — was going to be up close and personal. To the extent that violence was going to be an ongoing factor in human history, it was going to be a style of violence that relied on size, strength, and toughness. If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else. Aïda was not about to see her children dominated by the sons and daughters of Tekla.