Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

“If you want to think of Marge as a prize,” Einstein responded. Searching the boy’s face in firelight, Ty couldn’t tell whether this was deadpan humor or just more social cluelessness. It didn’t matter though.

“The Pingers!” Einstein called out, as if it were obviously the next topic.

“Sonar Taxlaw said they were sea people — before Donno shut her up,” Ty said.

“Do you think he beats her?” Einstein asked.

It was such an emotional can of worms that Ty considered it carefully before answering. Once in his life, before the war, he had fallen for a girl as quickly as Einstein had for Sonar Taxlaw. That one brief experience with stupid blind love sufficed to make it possible for him to acknowledge its reality and respect its power.

“I think,” he said, “that their society is comfortable with corporal punishment to the point where what keeps people like her in line is the fear of it. Not the reality. I think there’s nothing you can do about it and that if you do so much as look sideways at Donno he will kill you. But you can probably get away with small gestures of kindness toward the Cyc — assuming you’re ever allowed near her again. If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead.”

“Why?”

“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs. Now, let’s get back to the Pingers. Name mean anything to you?”

“No. You?” said Einstein. Ty’s peroration had affected him terribly and reduced him to monosyllables.

“I have a vague recollection,” Ty said, “but I would have to look it up to be sure.”

“‘Sea people’ suggests boats,” Einstein said. “But—”

“But we’d have noticed those.”

“Maybe it’s a contingent of Diggers that hides in the thick forests along the coast,” Einstein tried.

“Donno claimed all the land, though,” Ty said, “and said the Pingers had jurisdiction over the oceans.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one,” Ty said. He was lying.

This ended the evening’s conversation. They rolled out sleeping bags and bedded down. Ty slept surprisingly well. He woke up once, to the howling of wild canids. The volcanic eruptions that had been making the Ashwall so thick seemed to have abated, for the stars had come out and the habitat ring was now visible in the southern sky, the Eye shining somewhere above the Galápagos. The canids had spied it too, apparently.

He crawled out of his bag to take a leak, then checked on Kath Two. She was shivering, her forehead hot, but not to a point that he considered alarming.

They had taken his timepiece away from him, but he guessed it was about three in the morning — twelve hours, perhaps, since the Thor had touched down. Ariane and Marge would be reaching a Red habitat around now. For according to the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics, transfer time to geosync was always about twelve hours. He wondered if they were going to the Red capital of Kyoto, or to some military habitat, or even to the Kulak, hovering above the Makassar Strait. The booth would be crowded with the two of them in it. He could only speculate on what Marge’s state of mind must have been. The confrontation over the Srap Tasmaner most people would have considered strange, and violent — the stuff of bizarre post-traumatic nightmares. She couldn’t have seen her gunpoint abduction by Ariane coming. But all that was perfectly normal compared to what had happened next. It was unlikely Marge had looked into the sky and seen the Thor approaching. All she would have known was that suddenly she was trapped in a small booth with an armed mutant and experiencing powerful gee forces for the first time in her life. A few minutes later she’d have known weightlessness. Probably not how Marge had seen her day shaping up when she had rolled out of the sack this morning. Had Ariane begun to interrogate her straightaway? Or played nice with her? Or perhaps just jabbed her with a dose of tranquilizer to tide her over for twelve hours?

To Marge, the Thor just would have been unutterably bizarre. To Ty or any other Spacer, it was clearly an act of war — the most egregious violation of Treaty that he had heard of in twenty years. Though, come to think of it, he’d picked up enigmatic snatches of conversation, exchanged between persons of import in the Crow’s Nest, hinting at dark doings in the South Seas. Presumably there was a reason that they — whoever they were — had chosen Beled Tomov as the Teklan member of the Seven. Beled whose back was cratered with scars that could only have resulted from pitched battle with whip-cracking Neoanders. Likewise there was apparently more to Bard than met the eye.

And Ty? He too was a veteran of ground combat with the scars to prove it. But there were many others who might have been chosen in his stead — ones better suited to leading an expedition and making first contact with what to the Spacers was an alien race from another planet. No, Ty had been chosen because of where he worked and who owned it. Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.

With all of that in his mind he somehow slipped back into sleep and did not awaken until the sun was up. The spear carrier came within range and tossed them three ration packets from the glider’s stores. Einstein woke up and consumed his as only a teenaged boy was capable of doing. Ty ate at a more measured rate while keeping an eye on Kath Two. She had awakened long enough to remove the lid from her meal and pick at some of the blander offerings. But this led directly to vomiting, dry heaves, and a return to sleep.

They passed the day in a desultory long-range staredown with the Diggers, who grew fewer and more aggrieved as the hours wore on.

“Do you have a theory yet?” Einstein asked him as they were consuming the midday ration-toss.

“About what?”

“The Pingers.”

Ty, having naught else to do, let his mouth run. “The girl’s name. Sonar. I can think of a weird coincidence related to that.”

“Yes?” Einstein was all ears for anything related to Sonar Taxlaw.

“It’s a technology they used before Zero. Undersea radar based on sound waves. They would send out pulses of sound called pings.”

“You think the Pingers live under the sea?”

“It all fits. Except. .”

“Except what?”

“Where the hell did they come from?”

“Survivors? Like the Diggers?”

“I don’t see how it’s possible,” Ty said.

None of the scouts who went out looking for Bard and Beled returned. It was beginning to raise the question of who was really holding whom hostage. The ones who’d gone missing had friends, parents, and children who soon became desperate to know what had become of them and began asking awkward questions of those in command. Late in the afternoon, the Diggers were reinforced by a band of some twenty additional warriors coming up the valley, carrying dead animals on long sticks. The Diggers all held a parley around their cookfire. After they had eaten their fill, Donno came up alone, using a short spear as a walking stick or a wizard’s staff. The sun had gone down, so Ty heard him before he saw him.

“We carry out an exchange,” Donno announced, “and you people get out of here without further casualties.”

Is that what you call murdering people? Ty wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Very well. How would you like to proceed?”