Neal Stephenson - Seveneves

She made it down to the beach, keeping well clear of Cantabrigia Five, who was speaking into a camera, and Arjun, who was just watching and mumbling into his varp.

Several more Pingers had waded up into the shallows. One of them — a male, strapped with more gear than the others — had approached Ty, and seemed to be trying to communicate with him. Ty was grinning, but he kept cupping a hand around his ear and shaking his head. The Pinger reached out, gently took Ty’s wrist, and plucked at the black stuff of his dry suit. Ty responded by mimicking the same gesture on the slick skin of the Pinger’s arm. Both of them laughed. The Pinger’s teeth were white and they were sharp.

The first three Pingers had come ashore on the islet and were inspecting the photograph, which Einstein was holding now in front of his chest, part invitation and part shield. Sonar Taxlaw, not so encumbered, faced off uncertainly against the female Pinger, who suddenly stepped forward and embraced her.

On the beach, Cantabrigia Five exchanged a satisfied look with Esa Arjun and glanced toward the sky.

“CAL SENT MORE THAN ONE PHOTO TO EVE IVY DURING THE WEEKS leading up to the Hard Rain,” said Esa Arjun. “A total of seventeen, including that one.” He nodded at the picture. Somewhat the worse for wear, it was leaning against the inner wall of Ark Darwin ’s fuselage at the end of the table where he and Ty were eating lunch.

He and Ty and Deep. Deep was the Pinger who had approached Ty and befriended him with a nonverbal joke about his dry suit. He was seated a couple of chairs away at the same table. It wasn’t really clear whether he thought of himself as part of this conversation.

“Can he understand what I’m saying?” Arjun asked.

“He’s getting better. We sound like tuba music to them.”

“Is his name really what you say it is?”

“It’s the closest I can get to pronouncing it,” Ty said, “and he answers to it.”

Deep had been tearing into a raw fish filet, served on a platter with some seaweed garnishes. He seemed then to realize that he was being talked about, and tensed up in a way that seemed very human. At a loss for words, he grabbed his cup of cider and raised it to them. They raised theirs in return, and all drank.

“I think he’s some kind of technician or scientist,” Ty said. “All that stuff in his harness.”

“Yes,” Arjun said, eyeing the Pinger curiously. “Optics. Electronics. They preserved more technology than the Diggers were able to.”

“They had more space,” Ty pointed out, “and they could scavenge whatever sank to the bottom.” He turned his attention back to Arjun. “Anyway, you were saying about the seventeen photos?”

“Yes. Most of them were of a type referred to, in those days, as selfies. Now, technically, this was a criminal violation of military secrecy. Very strange given that Cal was otherwise so attentive to duty.”

“Yes,” said Ty, casting his mind back to scenes from the Epic. “I remember Eve Ivy agonizing about that when Eve Julia ordered Cal to nuke Venezuela.”

“That’s a perfect example. So, this lapse — if that’s what it was — has attracted some attention from scholars. All seventeen of the photos were eventually recovered from Ivy’s phone. An obscure sub-sub-sub-discipline of historical scholarship grew up around them.”

“The kind of thing only Ivyns would care about,” said Ty.

“Cloistered in some library on Stromness. Exactly.”

Ark Darwin was still riding at anchor outside the cove, and its fuselage was still flooded. This made it a perfect setting for what was happening now: a diplomatic conference between the Pingers and a delegation of important Blue officials who had been pod-dropped, straight from Greenwich, a few hours after the conclusion of the battle above the beach.

Einstein, Sonar Taxlaw, and all the other Blues had evacuated the cove and gone aboard the ark. Beled had been the last to depart; before climbing into the waiting boat, he had freed the captured Neoander and left him enough provisions to keep him in good stead until he could be rescued by his own people. And his own people had shown up in force a few hours later. But according to the deal they themselves had struck with the Diggers, their claim was to the land surface only. And Ark Darwin wasn’t on the land. So, a growing Red military encampment was spreading around the shore of the cove, facing their Blue counterparts across a few hundred meters of salt water.

The ark’s flooded hull was chilly, and obliged the Blue diplomats to dress warmly. Ty, Deep, and Arjun were in a dry space higher up and farther forward, a sort of half-exposed mezzanine where folding tables and chairs had been set up to act as a mess hall for the growing complement of Blue personnel — as well as any Pingers who felt like wading up the ramp. They were eating hot soup and quaffing a funky but quite palatable cider from the northern slope of Antimer.

“Now,” said Arjun — enjoying, as only an Ivyn could, the opportunity to wax professorial—“what you must be wondering about these people is—”

“How the hell they survived. With only one submarine.”

Arjun nodded. “It turns out that if you look at the work of those scholars I mentioned — the most recent of whom died two centuries ago — there are clues.”

“But if the selfies were taken before the Hard Rain even began,” Ty protested, “how could there be clues as to what happened after?”

“I mean clues that Cal went out of his way to plant in the background of the photos. Clues intended for Ivy’s eyes only. Hints that he had more of a chance than one might imagine.”

“Go on.” Ty sat back and reached for his cup of cider.

“ We know all about the Cloud Ark program, because it’s where we came from. It is our history. We have all of the records in our archives. Well, what Cal was hinting at, with these photos, is that there was another program, perhaps as large, that we never heard about.”

“A program to keep people alive under the sea?” Ty asked.

“Exactly. There are, in the background of these photos, detailed bathymetric charts of some of the deepest undersea canyons in the world’s oceans. There are documents — binders on a shelf — whose titles suggest that they are about such preparations. Other clues as well — it’s all public research, I’ll send you the information if you want it.”

“Okay,” Ty said, just to be cordial. He knew that he would never read those research papers. “But the bottom line is that Deep’s people”—he nodded at their tablemate—“didn’t survive just because Cal got lucky.”

“They have an Epic of their own that, for all we know, might compare to ours,” Arjun said.

Sonar and Einstein had been making their way down the food service line and now approached, eyeing the two vacant seats at the table. Arjun took this as his cue to excuse himself. Deep said goodbye to him with a courteous bob of the head. Within moments Ty and his Pinger friend had been joined by the young Ivyn and the Cyc. For a minute or two, the new arrivals did nothing but eat ravenously, the only conversation being Sonar asking the names and origins of the various foods — all new to her — on her tray. Ty handled those inquiries so that Einstein could be left free to stuff his face. After a while this became a source of amusement even to Sonar Taxlaw, who just watched the boy eat, and transferred some of her food to his tray when he began to run low.

“Sometime, you’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” Ty remarked.

“What—” Einstein began, before food got in the way.

“—what’s like?” Sonar said, completing his sentence.