Читать книгу Seveneves - Neal Stephenson, Neal Stephenson - Страница 15

When Ivy had opened the meeting on Day 37 with the words “five percent,” Dinah and most of the others on Izzy had looked around themselves and seen a lack of progress that had troubled them. Which, of course, had been Ivy’s point. On that day, twenty-six people had been in space, eight of whom were just barely surviving in temporary Luk shelters. The Banana had, with a bit of crowding, accommodated everyone.

On Day 73, when Ivy had opened another meeting in the Banana with the words “ten percent,” the situation had been transformed. There had been no question anymore of fitting Izzy’s whole population into the Banana; most of them had had to watch the meeting on video feeds. Thanks to Sean Probst and his Arjuna launches out of Moses Lake, no one quite knew what the total off-Earth population was anymore. Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was. The population had certainly gone into the triple digits at least a week before.

In the first two weeks of its operation the new shake-and-bake spaceport at Moses Lake had launched three rockets. One had crashed into a high-end vineyard near Walla Walla, destroying several acres of grapes that would have made excellent wine, had there been enough time left on Earth’s clock to age it properly. The others had made it to Izzy.

Most of Arjuna’s big payloads, though, were being launched not from Moses Lake but from sites nearer the equator, whence they could get into orbits closer to the plane of the ecliptic. At least two heavy-lift rockets, one from Canaveral and one from Kourou, had effected a rendezvous and docking maneuver in a low orbit above Earth’s tropics. Others were said to be in the works. But little was known of this project. Communication wasn’t Sean Probst’s strong suit, and his career in private enterprise had instilled a habit of playing his cards close to his vest. In this he seemed to be of one mind with the small cohort of people aboard Izzy, like Spencer Grindstaff and Zeke Petersen, who had impressive security clearances. Dinah and Ivy, comparing notes and sharing fragments of circumstantial evidence, had assembled at least a vague theory of what was going on. Ostensibly, Sean Probst was a wild card. But Arjuna had been mailing Nats to Sparky for weeks, and Sparky had been giving them top priority on launches to Izzy. It seemed, therefore, that Dinah’s results—the feedback she was sending to Arjuna about which Nats worked in space and which didn’t—were of great interest to NASA. And it was significant that at least one of Sean’s payloads had been launched from Canaveral—which was, of course, NASA’s flagship launch facility. Even more so was a launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base that added a small additional module to the growing Arjuna complex. They knew it was small because of the size of the rocket used, and they knew it was top secret spook stuff because of the precautions that had been taken on the ground—that much had been reported by ordinary citizens, who had been forced to the shoulder of Highway 101 by a long military convoy, and who had aimed long lenses at the launch pad only to find their view blocked by tarps and camo nets.

The next rocket out of Moses Lake had made an uneventful journey to Izzy. Its upper stage, lacking a place to dock, flew in formation with the space station about a kilometer “aft.” Fyodor stared at it balefully out the window and made repeated suggestions that its stores should be confiscated. Its cargo manifest was unusual:

 Spare propellant, and other consumables, that would enable Sean’s Drop Top to execute a plane-change maneuver and rendezvous with Ymir in equatorial orbit (for the word “Ymir” was now being used to denote both the spaceship that Sean was assembling and its faraway destination)

 Ice

 Fiber for combining with ice to make a stronger material called pykrete

 Several thousand Icenats: tiny robots optimized for crawling around on ice

Fyodor, and perhaps others as well, coveted the ice and the propellant. Pete Starling had begun rattling legal sabers down on the ground, threatening to seize the Moses Lake spaceport—a scheme that vanished overnight after Sean began to rattle sabers of his own, threatening to make a YouTube video exposing the Cloud Ark scheme as a poorly conceived panacea at best. It was strange, to say the least, that such open conflict could exist between the government’s left and right hands, but the world had become a strange place. Talking of it over meals or during after-work drinking sessions, Dinah and Ivy and Luisa could only speculate at the shouting matches that must be happening down on the ground between the Oval Office, the military, Arjuna Expeditions, and the Arkitects.

Dinah mostly just kept her head down and worked, programming the robots that Sean was going to take with him on his expedition. A comet core was not a solid piece of ice so much as an aggregation of shards, loosely held together by its own self-gravity—which was extremely weak. Merely touching it could cause big pieces to separate. Arjuna Expeditions had known this for many years and had put millions of dollars into inventing technology for capturing such difficult objects. Though “technology” might be too fancy a word for techniques that would have been recognizable to Stone Age hunter-gatherers: surround it with a net, draw the net closed with a loop of string.

Actually performing that feat in space was what Sean described as “an asymmetrical problem,” programmer-speak meaning that there were a lot of contingencies and detail work, so it wasn’t amenable to One Big Solution. Robots would probably end up swarming all over the surface of Comet Grigg-Skjellerup, cinching the net down and reinforcing weak spots by melting the ice, mixing the water with fiber, and letting it refreeze into pykrete. Dinah had offered to help out with that, and had been excited by the thought until Sean had brought her down to earth by pointing out some awkward realities. Communication between Izzy and Ymir was going to be limited by their one radio. They wouldn’t be able to send video. And latency was going to be significant: for a large part of the journey there would be a delay of several minutes as the signals traversed a distance comparable to that between the Earth and the sun. So programming robots on the surface of the comet would be nothing like looking out her window at the ones on Amalthea. Anything Dinah had to contribute, she had to contribute now.

In any case, Izzy’s population had dropped by two, and the level of tension and drama had fallen precipitously, when Sean and Larz had departed in the Drop Top on A+0.82. The plane-change maneuver took them to a rendezvous above the equator with Ymir. After more rendezvous operations extending over a week, and incorporating yet more payloads launched from Cape Canaveral as well as from private spaceports in New Mexico and West Texas, Ymir made a long burn of her main engine that placed her into a transfer orbit bound for L1. A few days after that, she beat the Apollo record for distance traveled from Earth.

Konrad Barth came to Dinah’s shop and knocked politely, for she happened to have her curtain drawn, and everyone knew that she and Rhys sometimes had sex on the other side of it. He entered, looked about nervously, and asked her if she knew anything about what Ymir was going to do. Before she could answer, he shook her off, took out his tablet, and tapped in his password. Then he spun it around to show her a photograph.

It took her a while to understand what she was seeing. Clearly, it was a picture of a man-made object in space. And it was a good picture, but surrounded by a glamor of pixels that spoke of considerable enhancement. Konrad had taken the picture using one of Izzy’s optical telescopes. He had turned it away from its usual objective, which was the system of fragments churning around the former center of the moon, and aimed it at this man-made object. The object was big and complicated, at a guess the largest thing humans had ever assembled in space with the exception of Izzy herself. The picture had been taken from a great distance while both Izzy and the object were moving with respect to each other, and he’d toiled with image processing software to reduce the blur. She could see clearly enough that, like Izzy, it consisted of a stack of modules that had been sent up atop different rockets and plugged together. The one on its tail sported a large nozzle bell, and was obviously its main propulsion unit. Some of the modules just looked like propellant tanks. Others looked like habitations. But far and away the most prominent, and the weirdest, part of this thing was a long spike or probe that extended from its forward end, making it ten times as long as it would have been otherwise. It was a truss, recognizably made in the same way as the new trusses on Izzy.

“Wow,” Dinah joked, “a space station with its own radio tower!”

Konrad smiled weakly. “Look at the ‘top’ of the ‘radio tower,’” he suggested. He spread his fingers on the tablet, zooming in on a thick blur of pixels at its tip. This seemed to have a roughly arrowhead-like shape, a small dark tip sitting on a thicker white base, itself resting on a dark base plate.

He was looking at her as if he expected her to understand—or as if she must be privy to secrets.

Which she was. But she couldn’t reveal them.

“I’m not a nuclear physicist,” she said, “but it’s screamingly obvious that the people aboard that ship—it’s Ymir, isn’t it—?”

“Of course.”

“—that they want to be as far away as possible from whatever that is, and so they mounted it at the end of the longest stick they could build.”

“It is something that makes a lot of neutrons,” Konrad said.

“How do you know that?”

“This thing”—he indicated the fat white layer in the middle of the sandwich, like the marshmallow in a s’more—“is probably polyethylene or paraffin, which would be good at absorbing neutrons. Gamma rays might be produced in the process, and so this base plate”—he pointed to the dark graham cracker at the bottom—“is probably lead.”

Dinah already knew what it was, because Sean had told her: the core of a large nuclear power plant, rated at a thermal output of four gigawatts, somewhat hastily reengineered for this purpose. But she had been sworn to secrecy, and so all she could do was let Konrad piece it together himself. “Well,” she said, “those are impressive precautions on what is probably a suicide mission anyway.”

“They want to be alive and capable of doing something when and if they get where they are going,” Konrad said.

“Do you suppose anyone has taken pictures like this from Earth?” Dinah asked. “Because I haven’t seen anything in the media.”

“It was concealed by a fairing until they made their transfer burn,” Konrad said. “I took this a couple of hours ago, when I had my one and only clear shot.”

They had timed that burn so that they would cross the former moon’s orbit at a time when most of the debris cloud was on the opposite side of the Earth, thus minimizing the chance of colliding with a rock.

Nevertheless, a few days after they had passed that distance, and become the longest-range travelers in human history, they stopped communicating.

Until then Ymir had been using powerful X-band radios to communicate over the Deep Space Network—a complex of dishes in Spain, Australia, and California that had been used for decades to talk to long-range space probes. Now she had gone silent. She was still out there—Konrad could still pick her up as a white dot on his optical telescope. Since she was merely coasting for thirty-seven days, not firing her engines, there was no way to tell whether the crew was still alive. A perfectly shipshape Ymir and a crumpled wad of space junk would have looked and behaved the same.

They drew some hope from the fact that nothing came back from her. Ymir had automatic systems that were supposed to phone home without human intervention. If those had continued to function while communication from humans had ceased, it would suggest that the crew were all dead or incapacitated. But the fact that all human and robotic signals had been cut off at the same time suggested that it was a radio problem—perhaps damage to the X-band antenna, or to the transmitter itself.

Ymir became tricky, then impossible to see as she approached L1, since that put her squarely between Earth and the sun. She was assumed to have reached that point on Day 126, whereupon she was scheduled to make another burn that would put her into a heliocentric orbit: an ellipse that would intersect with “Greg’s Skeleton” over a year later—sometime around A+1.175, or a year and 175 days post-Zero. Once Ymir disappeared, from their point of view, into the fires of the sun, there was nothing they could do except wait for her to reach a place where she was observable. If Ymir had suffered a catastrophic failure and been turned into a floating piece of space junk, she would probably cycle back on the return leg of the same orbit and pass close to the Earth again—though L1 was such an unstable place from an orbital dynamics standpoint that she could just as easily wander off into a heliocentric orbit, especially if she’d taken a big hit from a rock that had knocked her off course.

As the calendar progressed through the 130s and to Day 140—two weeks after Ymir ought to have passed through L1—and she did not appear on that return leg, it became clear that she must have transferred to a heliocentric orbit, whether by accident or because of a controlled burn. Assuming the latter, Sean and the other half-dozen members of the crew would have nothing to do for the next year but float around in zero gee and wait. There was nothing that could be done to speed up the journey; it was a matter of getting two orbits to graze each other.

These events, which would have seemed of world-historical significance a few months ago, now seemed like below-the-fold news compared to all that was happening in what had formerly been the sublunary realm.

The fuss and excitement surrounding Sean and Arjuna, the Moses Lake spaceport, and the voyage of Ymir had drawn attention away from the routine, faithful, grind-it-out progress being made the whole time by NASA, the European Space Agency, Roskosmos, China National Space Administration, and the space agencies of Japan and India. These organizations were staffed by conservative old-line engineers, not far removed culturally from the slide-rule-brandishing nerds of Apollo and Soyuz fame. In fact, some of them were those nerds, just a lot older and a lot crustier. They were baffled, nay, infuriated by the ease with which a few upstart tech zillionaires could command the world’s attention and go rocketing off on ill-advised, hastily planned missions of their own choosing. The departure of Sean and Larz from Izzy had occasioned a big sigh of relief, and a return to the steady and unimaginative work that these people were best at.

And anyone paying attention to the numbing details expressed in the spreadsheets and the flowcharts would see the value of that work on A+0.144, when Ivy opened a meeting in the Banana with the words “twenty percent” (for the latest projections from the astrophysical lab of Dr. Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris at Caltech, and from the other labs doing the same calculations at other universities around the world, were that the White Sky would happen on or about A+1.354, or one year and 354 days after the breakup of the moon; they were one-fifth of the way there).

The purpose of the Scouts—the first wave of what amounted to suicide workers such as Tekla, who had arrived starting on Day 29—had been to build out the improvised network of hamster tubes and docking ports that would make it possible for a much larger population of so-called Pioneers to reach Izzy. The basic distinction between a Scout and a Pioneer was that the Scout went up knowing there was no place to dock, but the Pioneer knew that, at least in theory, there would be an available port for their spacecraft, with pressurized atmosphere on the other side of it. The promise had failed in one case, with the result that half a dozen Pioneers crammed aboard a Soyuz had silently asphyxiated. The problem was traced to a defect in a hastily built docking mechanism. Three Chinese taikonauts lost their lives when the hamster tube in which they were moving was pierced by a micrometeorite and lost pressurization. But from about Day 56 onward, Pioneers were arriving at a rate of between five and twelve per day. There was a lull once all the available docking spaces were occupied, but after that it began to snowball as spacecraft began to dock to other spacecraft, and the hamster tube network was built out, and inflatable structures were deployed.

Izzy, which had been a complicated and hard-to-understand contraption even before all of this had happened, was now an utterly bewildering maze of modules, hamster tubes, trusses, and ships docked to ships docked to ships, “like a freakin’ three-dimensional domino game,” as Luisa put it. The only way to get one’s bearings, looking at a rendering of the complex, was by picking out the rugged and asymmetrical shape of Amalthea at one end and the two tori at the other. Those were “forward” and “aft,” respectively, and the axis between them was the basis for the traditional nautical directions of “port” and “starboard” as well as “zenith” and “nadir,” which were space lingo for basically “up away from Earth” and “down toward Earth.” If you arranged yourself so that your back was to the tori and your face toward Amalthea, with the “port” stuff on your left hand and the “starboard” stuff on your right, then your head would be aimed toward the zenith and your feet toward the nadir and the surface of Earth four hundred kilometers below.

That, however, was the privileged view of people outside the thing in space suits. Inside, it was still easy to get lost in the three-dimensional domino game. Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.

“IT’S JUST A CHRONOLOGICAL ACCIDENT THAT I’M HERE AT ALL,” IVY mused, during one of her and Dinah’s increasingly rare drinking sessions. All of their original stashes of booze had long since been consumed, but new arrivals were kind enough to slip them bottles from time to time.

“I disagree,” Dinah said. It wasn’t exactly a scintillating response. But she’d been caught off guard by the suddenness with which Ivy had dropped her guard.

“If the moon had blown up two weeks later, some Russian sourpuss would be in charge up here and I’d be on the ground, married and pregnant.”

“And under the same death sentence as everyone else.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that.”

Dinah reached for the bottle and refilled the shot glasses, trying to stretch out the moment. It had never been easy to get Ivy to open up, even back in the happy days before Zero.

“Look, Ivy, it’s not an accident that you were in charge of Izzy. They gave you the job for a reason. You’re the last girl in the world—or out of it—who should be suffering from impostor syndrome.”

Ivy stared at her through a somewhat amused silence. “Go on,” she finally said. “What is this impostor syndrome you speak of?” For they’d talked about it before—but usually with Dinah being the one who felt it.

“Don’t try to deflect this. What’s going on?”

Ivy glanced at the ceiling: a sort of visual signal, borrowed from the Russians, to remind Dinah that you never knew when someone was listening. Then she looked into Dinah’s eyes. But only for a moment. She was fundamentally a shy person, who preferred inspecting her shoes while baring her soul.

“You and Sean Probst made great sparring partners,” Ivy said.

“He was so fucking obnoxious! He needed someone to—” Dinah cut herself short then, because Ivy had gotten a sort of sad, wry look on her face and held up one hand to stop her.

“Agreed! Yes. Thanks for doing it,” Ivy said. “He needed someone like you around. Sometimes it almost looked like a comedy act between you two. And the way that the Russians reacted to him—Tekla first of all, of course, but later Fyodor proposing to place all Arjuna personnel under arrest and confiscate everything they’d brought up with them—that was great drama. Tabloid stories and comment threads galore down on the surface. But I barely survived it.”

“What do you mean, you barely survived?”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the conferences I had with Baikonur and Houston. People down there wanted me to take a very hard line. To do what Fyodor wanted.”

“But you didn’t,” Dinah pointed out.

Ivy met her gaze again. Then, after a moment, she gave a little nod.

“So you won,” Dinah went on.

“I won a Pyrrhic victory,” Ivy said. “I negotiated a less draconian solution. The Ymir expedition went on its way with no obvious hard feelings.”

“And how is that Pyrrhic?”

“I don’t want to make my problems yours,” Ivy said.

“Who else are you going to talk to?”

“Maybe no one,” Ivy returned, showing a flash of something like anger. “Maybe that’s what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can’t—who shouldn’t—share her problems with anyone else. It’s sort of an old-fashioned idea. But the human race might need such people going forward.”

Dinah just stared back at her. Finally, Ivy relented, and spoke in tones almost devoid of feeling: “My position as the head of the space station came under serious challenge. It made me aware of politics on the ground that have been going on for some time—but that were invisible to me until the Sean Probst controversy surfaced them. Since then, I believe that my authority has been further undermined by people on the ground, leaking things to the press, saying things in meetings.”

“Pete Starling.”

“No comment. Anyway, I think I am going to be replaced before long.”

Ivy’s eyes had reddened slightly. She made another glance at the ceiling, but the expression on her face suggested she didn’t care who might have heard her. Then she looked at Dinah and smiled. “How have you been doing, sister?” she asked in a weak voice.

“I’ve been pretty good,” Dinah said.

“Really? That’s music to my ears.”

“Bo, Larz, the others who’ve come up to work in my crew, they seem to respect what I’ve done,” Dinah said.

“I think it’s because of what you did for Tekla,” Ivy said.

“Oh really? Not just my amazing natural competence?”

“There are a lot of people on the ground who are competent in the way you mean,” Ivy said, “and we are going to be seeing a lot of them up here in the next few weeks. Believe me. I’ve read their CVs.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“But everyone kinda senses now that some other qualities are going to be needed besides just pure competence. That’s why people are deferring to you.”

Another awkward silence. Ivy seemed to be suggesting that she, Ivy, was no longer being given that kind of respect.

“That, and your amazing competence,” Ivy added.