Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

So it could be assumed that a fresh crater now decorated the interior of North America somewhere to the east of here, and that Ariane and her captive were en route to a safe haven in the Red segment of the ring. What awaited them there could only be guessed at, but for Ariane it was probably going to be a substantial reward, a medal, and a promotion to some high rank in Red’s military intelligence branch.

Doc never spoke another coherent word. Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.

The old Digger looked better after a few hours, aside from some symptoms indicative of a concussion. The younger one got his leg splinted. Both were in a murderous frame of mind toward the three remaining captives. But it seemed that the majority of the Diggers were taken aback by what had happened, and were advocating a more level-headed approach to future relations between their tribe and the sort of civilization that could produce things like Ariane’s Thor and Beled’s and Langobard’s weaponized ambot swarms.

As a way of demonstrating their own technological prowess, or perhaps simply to blow off steam, the Diggers detonated a lump of some kind of home-brewed explosive in the open space between the glider and the fresh graves. Evidently this was meant as a warning for Bard and Beled, who were presumed to be watching from nearby cover.

Ty, Einstein, and Kath Two were fitted with hinged collars of bent steel. When these were closed around the neck, loops in the free ends came into alignment so that a chain could be run through them, locking them shut while stringing all the captives together. At one end, the chain was terminated by an ancient padlock that was too large to pass through the loops on Kath Two’s collar. The other end was then affixed, by means of a bolt, to a large wooden stake that an especially burly Digger had pounded into the ground with a stone-headed maul that looked like a miniature Thor.

Just uphill of this, and out of the prisoners’ reach, other Diggers constructed a little cairn. They topped it with another lump of explosive. They attached wires to the lump for detonation and ran them down to the main Digger camp, which was under the wings of the glider some fifty meters away.

“What just happened?!” Einstein wanted to know, as soon as the Diggers had left them alone. “I mean, that was obviously a Thor. I’ve heard of them. But. .” and he threw his hands up in the air.

“Ariane is a mole,” Ty said. Then he corrected himself: “ Was a mole. Now she’s probably a hero. A Red hero.”

“Red sent the Thor down to, what do you call it, extract her.”

“Yeah. Her and, more to the point, a living, breathing biological sample.”

Kath Two, at one end of the string, climbed into a sleeping bag and fell asleep. Ty did not expect her to wake up for a long time. He and Einstein moved down-chain as far as they could, to leave her in peace, and squatted on their haunches. The Diggers had left them firewood and kindling. Without discussion, they began laying a fire. It became clear that Einstein had done it before, and so Ty just let him do it. The young Ivyn had very particular ideas about fires.

“Where did you learn how to fight like that?” Einstein asked him. “Are you part Teklan or something?”

“Fighting isn’t about knowing how,” Ty said. “It’s about deciding to.”

“Well, I was frozen, man.”

“Look, these are times when the decisions that our Eves made five thousand years ago control our actions to a degree that renders us basically helpless. You were meant to stand back and observe and analyze.”

“And you were made to be a hero,” Einstein said.

“A hero would have saved Memmie.”

“But no one could have seen that coming! The way that woman just went crazy on her. .”

“We’ll be asking ourselves that for a long time.” Ty sighed and looked over to the encampment where the Diggers were going about life as if nothing had happened. Some of them were roasting kebabs that they had cut from the carcass of a big herbivore killed down in the woods. There were a lot of kids under ten years old, but few teenagers. Half of the women looked pregnant. “Play your role, Einstein. You’re the Ivyn in our group now that Doc’s gone. What do you see?”

Einstein seemed reluctant to speak, so Ty prompted him: “I see a population explosion.”

Einstein snapped into focus and nodded his head.

“You’ve never heard of these people,” Ty went on, “even though your RIZ is just on the other side of these mountains and your people patrol up here all the time.”

“Rufus MacQuarie’s mine was far to the north,” Einstein offered. “These people must have just come out into the open recently.”

“Look for the oldest child down there and that probably tells you the date.”

“But the atmosphere’s been breathable for three hundred years! Why would they wait until now?”

Ty nodded toward the center of the Digger camp: the big bed of coals, the meat roasting over it.

“Food?” Einstein said.

“Food and fuel,” Ty confirmed. “They’ve been down in their hole living on God only knows what — cave tofu or something — since the beginning of the Hard Rain. Every so often maybe they would sample the air outside. When it became breathable they probably went out and had a look around. But it was still a wasteland, not capable of supporting life. It’s only in the last few years that TerReForm has seeded that part of Beringia with animals big enough to be worth the effort expended in hunting them. That was the starting gun — the signal for them to come out.”

“And to begin having kids as fast as they could, apparently.”

“Apparently. Now, Einstein, what does that tell you about gender roles?”

“Well, to begin with, they don’t have an Eve, they have an Adam — Rufus — so it could easily be more pat — patree—”

“Patriarchal.”

“Thanks. And then if all the women are expected to make lots of babies—”

“That tells you something,” Ty said. “Now, here’s the big question that is kind of staring us in the face. You’re a Digger, okay? You’re not stupid. All you have to do is pop your head out of your cave on a clear night and look into the southern sky and you can see the habitat ring. And over time you can see the Eye moving back and forth across it and you can see new habitats lighting up as they are built. You can see bolos coming in low across the sky and TerReForm aircraft flying right overhead and showers of ONANs coming down straight from the ring. And you’re no ignorant savage. Your folk have maintained a reasonably advanced engineering culture. Those compound bows. That lump of explosive. So you wouldn’t have interpreted all of that as gods or angels or any of that.”

“They’ve known,” Einstein said. “From the first—”

“For centuries,” Ty said, nodding. “As long as they could breathe outside.”

“For that long, they have known that billions of humans were living in the sky,” Einstein said. “But they didn’t make any attempt to signal.”

“More than that. They hid from us!” Ty said. “Efforts were made, you know, to find the MacQuarie mine several decades ago. These people must have made some kind of decision that they didn’t want to be found.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what I am asking. Fear? Anger?”

“The old guy really hates us. ‘Cowards who ran away’ is what he considers us.”

“It’s what he called us,” Ty allowed. “And he called us that really loudly. He wasn’t really talking to us, I think.”