Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

Kathree nodded. “I understand.”

Arjun apparently felt that some explanation was required. “We don’t know when, or if, the Pingers will show up. So we need to buy time.”

“Okay,” Kathree said. “What are we hoping to buy it with?”

The look on Arjun’s face suggested that the question had been impertinent. But Cantabrigia Five responded by reaching up to remove the varp she had perched atop her head. She swept it off and handed it to Kathree, who arranged it carefully on her own face. The fit was imperfect and so she had to hold it in position with one hand to get the right focus.

“You’ll want the sound track,” said Cantabrigia Five. “It’s just not the same otherwise.”

“Sound track?” Kathree said. But a faint shift in the set of Cantabrigia Five’s face hinted that some deadpan humor was at work and that she should just play along. Groping along the sides of her head, she found the earbuds and flipped them down into position.

The varp was causing her to see a number of imaginary objects, most of which were grayed and/or blurred — it had figured out that Kathree was not its owner and so it had disabled anything personal or private. Hanging in space between her and Arjun, however, was a softly glowing red token having the apparent size of a table tennis ball, with a dimple in one side. He reached out and gave this a light tap and it flew in her direction. “Be my guest,” he said. She caught it in her hand and put her thumb into the dimple, then swooped it around in a big oval in front of her face. This caused a flat screen to make itself visible. She then drew the red ball toward her, sweeping the screen through a third dimension to define a volume about the size of a laundry basket.

Cantabrigia Five hadn’t been kidding about the sound track. It was a full orchestra, comprising some instruments that would have been familiar to Mozart and others that had been invented thousands of years after Zero. It, and a large choir, poured a three-dimensional ocean of sound into her ears, performing the Red national anthem. Not the peppy, truncated version heard at sporting events but the symphonic arrangement, calculated to make people sit still and be awed.

A nickel-iron fist seemed to be hanging in the volume of space she had just swept out above the beach. The Kulak. Stout spars jutted from it here and there: anchor points for hair-thin lines of rigging that extended in various directions, seeming to disappear in the vast distance. Moving carefully lest she turn an ankle on a cobble, Kathree circled around it until she could peer down the hole in the center. There, she saw movement: rings of light, each of them similar to the Great Chain, stacked up the interior, each spinning at a different rate, but all protected within the lumpy shell of the asteroid, many kilometers thick. This triggered a programmed camera movement that took her by surprise and obliged her to plant her feet and steady herself by laying a hand on Cantabrigia Five’s forearm. The povv, or point of virtual view, took a slow dive down the center of the Kulak, which had now expanded far beyond the basket-sized volume to surround her. She could not control the speed of the movement but she could gaze in all directions and see through the glass roofs of the ring-shaped cities, picking out green fields where youngsters were kicking balls, blue ponds around which lovers strolled hand in hand, bustling high-rise districts, residential utopias, cozy schools, and military bases where Betas and Neoanders practiced martial arts and marksmanship under the billowing red flag.

“Is this all real, or—”

“A mix,” said Arjun, “of stuff they’ve actually built and renderings of what they imagine.”

“And has this actually been made public or—”

“Broadcast six hours ago,” he said. “It is a huge reveal.” Never before had Red divulged any pictures — real or imagined — of the inside of the Kulak.

By now the fly-through had reached the far end, and she could see space opening up around her as the povv exited from the Kulak’s maw. The familiar sight of the habitat ring became visible, sweeping around in both directions to enclose the blue Earth in its jeweled embrace. From the system of rigging woven around the iron fist, a cable descended straight to the equator. Slowly at first, then building speed, the povv descended, achieving in a few seconds what would have taken several days in any kind of realistic elevator. Even through a screen of bright clouds Kathree could pick out the complex landforms of Southeast Asia to the north and, to the south, the huge dun slab of Australia, now joined to New Guinea by a lumpy gray-green tendril. The povv chose to zoom down on that first, coming close enough that it became possible to see a road traversing the land bridge. Then it veered and banked onto a northwesterly course, following the green, steaming spine of New Guinea to the cape at its end, where it nearly touched the equator. There, construction was visible: cleared land, buildings, excavations, a hazy web of infrastructure, glimpsed but not lingered on. The povv soared out over a turquoise sea cluttered with landforms she recognized vaguely from having seen them on maps. But after a few moments her eye was drawn to something that was flagrantly unnatural, looking as if it had been drawn in with a ruler and a pencil: the tether from the Kulak, plunging vertically into the ocean between two big islands. These, she realized, had to be Borneo and Sulawesi, and the water between them the Makassar Strait. The povv’s movement slowed, then stopped. The symphony and the choir were laboring through a slow crescendo. A change, more felt than seen, came over the display: the programmed camera movement was finished and the varp was now responding once again to Kathree’s movements. Like a giantess bestriding the strait, she could move around and look at it from different angles. For a moment nothing really happened. Then her eye picked up turbulence in the sea, around where the tether stabbed into it. The surface was welling up and foaming. The tiny wrinkles of normal surface waves were erased, replaced by vast green whorls and galactic arms of swirling foam. Bending forward she saw angry gulls wheeling about. That detail convinced her that what she was seeing was real — not a rendering. The disturbed region grew north and south, spreading away from the cable — which she knew to be on the equator — without growing east-west. The cable forked, then forked again, becoming a fan that broadened north and south to support the full length of whatever was roiling the strait.

It erupted from the surface first at the equator, then proceeded to rip a gash in the sea that spread up and down the meridian with immense velocity. The object could hardly be observed at first for all the water draining from it, plunging in multiple Niagaras back into the sea and hurling up a storm front of spray that rose higher than the structure itself. But in a minute the Gnomon became visible. Kathree had to back away to get a picture of the whole length of it. She extended her left hand and made a counterclockwise knob-twiddling gesture, reducing the volume of the Kyoto Philharmonic’s brass section before the bass trombones and kettledrums imploded her skull.

If the designers of the Gnomon had intended to make the anti-Cradle, they could hardly have done better. It had the long wicked curve of a katana — the better to follow the curvature of the Earth — combined with the translucent delicacy of an insect’s exoskeleton. Indeed, it seemed to be unfolding, reshaping itself as it rose into the air, an origami praying mantis molting into a larger body. Its manifold corrugations and arching carapaces spoke of a million Jinns toiling in cubicles for centuries to build the strongest thing they could imagine with minimum weight.