Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

Later, as Remembrance was helping him into bed and getting him tuned up for the night, he told her that tomorrow he would begin getting to know the other four members of the Seven a little better, and that he would politely decline Ariane’s assistance in doing so. Ariane would have gloried in the opportunity to furnish Doc with dossiers full of statistics, and hours of personal gossip, about Beled, Kath Two, Tyuratam, and Langobard. But Hu Noah had always felt uncomfortable with such disclosures because they raised the obvious question of what was being disclosed, by the same person, to other curious minds, about Doc.

At five o’clock the next morning, Doc was in the recreation center, walking very slowly on a treadmill, when Beled Tomov came in for his daily workout. Beled’s double take was so amusing that even Doc, who had made an art form of appearing not to know what was going on, was hard-pressed not to laugh at the poor fellow’s expense. Even Remembrance, sitting nearby and reading, felt it best to interpose her book between her face and Beled’s startled gaze for a few moments.

“Lieutenant Tomov,” Doc said, “I thought you’d never drag yourself out of bed.”

Beled remembered his manners and saluted.

“I hope you won’t think me rude if I don’t reciprocate,” Doc said, and nodded down at the treadmill’s handlebars. “I have a death grip on these.”

Beled was looking around for Ariane. Doc decided not to make any comment. “Is it your practice to warm up first?” he asked.

“It is not considered necessary,” Beled answered.

“Ah, too bad, I was thinking we might go for a stroll together,” Doc said, nodding at the empty treadmill next to him.

“That can be done,” Beled allowed, “if I may stroll at a different pace.”

“Suit yourself!” Doc said. “There is a reason I did not attempt this in the wild.”

Within a few minutes the Teklan, now stripped to nothing but a pair of briefs, was running flat-out on the treadmill next to Doc’s, his hands blades, his arms scissoring, the soles of his bare feet skimming across the textured belt of the treadmill rather than pounding it. Engineered and bred to be a match for Neoanders, Teklans were at a genetic disadvantage because they were built like modern humans and did not partake of Neanderthal DNA. Bard could sleep in, eat and drink whatever he wanted, and still be as strong as the much larger Teklan. This was all perfectly academic, since no one seriously expected Beled and Bard to get into a fight, but it was a cultural habit of long standing that Teklans measured themselves against Neoanders, and used the comparison to spur themselves to even greater diligence than would have been their habit anyway.

In a calm and level tone of voice, as though he were sitting on a couch sipping tea, Beled said, “I never thanked you for sending me on the mission just completed. I assume it was your doing. But I had no way to reach you. I thank you now.”

Doc’s eyes strayed to a regularly spaced line of scars wrapping around the small of Beled’s back, some forming deep craters in the twin pilasters of muscle bracketing his spine. Bisecting that formation was a long vertical scar running right over the lumbar vertebrae, where surgeons had gone in and done something — Doc didn’t know the details — to repair damage to the spinal column and, he supposed, add some hardware or bone grafts.

“It was the least I could do,” Doc said. “And given what happened in Tibet, I thought you might be better qualified than most to address certain. . plausible complications that might arise.”

“So we will be operating near the border,” Beled replied. His tone said that he had long ago surmised this and only wanted final confirmation.

“We will go where the investigation takes us,” Doc said.

This surprised Beled slightly, producing a hiccup in his gait, which he spent a few moments resolving.

“These wanderers,” Doc went on, “do not seem to be great respecters of borders, or of anything to do with Treaty, and so I thought it best to construct the Seven of persons of like mind.”

“Is it to be Beringia, then? Or Antimer?”

“Probably both. Antimer, of course, is closer — a short hop from Hawaii, which is today’s destination. But as the trail is warmer in Beringia, I think we shall go there first.”

HAWAII THEY REACHED BEFORE NIGHTFALL, TRAVELING AS PASSENGERS on a colossal TerReForm vehicle, not really an airplane and not really a boat, that skimmed over the surface at an altitude of no more than four meters. Ground effect vehicles of this class were called arks. They had been designed to deliver massive quantities of plant and animal biomass, nurtured at big offshore TerReForm bases such as Magdalena, to littoral destinations, where they could be slammed down into their new homes or else transferred to other vehicles for shipment inland. Only ten of them had ever been built and only six remained in service. This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.

If their theme was to travel unobtrusively, then Ark Madiba was certainly the vehicle for it, being a cavernous, reeking warren of animal pens, fish tanks, bug boxes, and racked peat pots in which exotic plants were growing in stews of manure. A ship making the same run — five thousand kilometers due west — would have taken several days. Provisions would have been needed to feed the beasts, clean the cages, and water the plants. This howling, hammering monstrosity did it in twelve hours, a span brief enough that just about any living thing could survive it without victuals beyond water and perhaps a bit of a snack. In it, the Seven basically disappeared. As the ark’s dozens of turbofans roared into life and it began to chunder across Magdalena’s harbor, the noise level rose to the point where they could do nothing but insert the earplugs they’d been issued and distribute themselves around the cargo hold in places where the stink wasn’t too bad. Doc and Memmie were given special dispensation to enjoy the journey in a tiny capsule near the cockpit, where members of the flight crew could sleep and recreate during multiday flights. The rest of them just tried to make themselves as comfortable as they could and waited for it to be over.

TerReForm had come late to Hawaii. The place was small, idiosyncratic, far away, and complicated — best left for last, after major continents had been booted up. The Hard Rain had loosened the lid on the geological hot spot that had built the islands, reawakening dormant volcanoes on existing islands while causing a seamount southeast of the Big Island to develop, ahead of schedule, into a Bigger Island. This had merged, a thousand years ago, with the former to make a Bigger Island Yet, most of which was still too hot and toxic for TerReForm to bother with. But there was a cove on its north coast, called Mokupuku after a tiny island that had once stood approximately in the same place, around which things were cool and quiet enough to be worth seeding. There, around sunset, Ark Madiba effected a sort of controlled crash landing, skidding to a halt offshore of a small TerReForm installation of the sort that were now scattered all over New Earth.

Such as these were the epicenters of the ecological earthquakes that the human races had, for about three centuries, been unleashing on the surface. Sometimes they got their deliveries straight from the sky, other times, as in this case, from arks dispatched out of the larger surface installations. Older ones were clusters of hemispherical domes because they had been constructed before New Earth even had a breathable atmosphere. Newer ones, like this, had a somewhat more welcoming appearance. But their basic purpose was to work with beasts, bugs, and plants, and so their fragrance and the overall style of their operations lay somewhere on a continuum between farm and zoo, with the odd dash of science lab. None of it would have seemed remarkable, at least on an olfactory level, to the vast majority of human beings who had lived on Old Earth in the millennia leading up to the scientific revolution, but the people who endured that voyage in the cargo hold of the great plane/boat were fortunate that the fuselage wasn’t pressurized and that ocean air could therefore filter through it.