Seveneves. Neal Stephenson
“It’s still a miracle to me that you can make sense of that.”
She turned around to discover Rhys Aitken, poised in the hatchway that connected her shop to the SCRUM: the Space Commercial Resources Utility Module, which was the large can-shaped object that connected Izzy’s forward end to Amalthea. Along its sides, the SCRUM sported several docking ports where other modules could be connected. Owing to various delays and budget cutbacks, only one of those ports was currently in use, and Rhys was now hovering in it. Tucked under one of his arms was a bundle, wrapped in a blanket.
She sniffled, suddenly aware that she was a mess. “How long have you been there?”
“Not long.”
She turned her back on him, grabbed a towel, and dried her eyes and nose. Rhys filled the time with some gentle patter. “I couldn’t stand watching the announcement any longer, so I tried to make myself useful. Discovered something marvelous. Water runs downhill. All right, I already knew that, actually. There’s a section of the torus, underneath the deck plates, where condensation tends to collect—it’s been a maintenance issue, something we’ve been keeping an eye on.
“So, I brought you something,” he concluded.
She turned and looked at the bundle under his arm. “A dozen roses?”
“Perhaps next week. Until then—” and he held it out.
She took it from him. Like everything else up here it was, of course, weightless, but she could tell by its inertia that it had some heft.
She peeled back the blanket and heard a crinkling, crackling noise, then saw underneath it a layer of the metallized Mylar sheeting that they used all over Izzy as thermal shielding. The object beneath that was lumpy and irregular. And it was cold. She peeled away the Mylar to reveal a slab of ice. It was oval and lens shaped: a frozen puddle.
“Perfect,” she said.
A few drops of water spun away from it, gleaming like diamonds in the shaft of sunlight spearing in through her little window. She captured them using the same towel she’d just used to dry her face. But not before pausing, just a moment, to admire their brilliance. Like a little galaxy of new stars.
“You’d said something about a cryptic message from Sean Probst.”
“All of his messages are that way,” she said, “even after they’ve been decrypted.” Sean Probst was her boss, the founder and chairman of Arjuna Expeditions.
“Something about ice, anyway,” Rhys went on.
“Hang on, let’s get this in the airlock before it melts any more.”
“Right.” Rhys pushed himself to the far end of the shop, where a round hatch, about half a meter in diameter, was set into the curved wall. “I see green blinkies all about, so I’ll just open this?”
“Fine.”
He actuated a lever that released the latching mechanism, then pulled the hatch open to reveal a little space beyond. This was the airlock that Dinah used when she needed to bring one of her robots inside for maintenance, or send one back out onto Amalthea. Human-rated airlocks were big—they had to accommodate at least one person in a bulky space suit—and complicated and expensive, partly because of safety requirements and partly because they were designed by government programs. This one, by contrast, had been prototyped in a few weeks by a small team at Arjuna Expeditions, and was meant for smaller equipment. It was roughly the dimensions of a big garbage can. To save space on the inside, it protruded from the side of the module, jutting into space like a stubby, oversized fire hydrant. At its far end was a dome-shaped hatch that Dinah could open and close from inside her shop using a mechanical linkage of pushrods and levers straight out of a Jules Verne novel. At the moment, of course, that hatch was closed, and the airlock was full of air that had gone chilly, since the sun had not been shining on its outside until a few minutes ago.
Dinah gave the chunk of ice a gentle push and it glided across the shop to Rhys. “Up and under!” he called, and caught it.
“What?”
“Rugby,” he explained, and slid the ice into the airlock. “Have you got a Grabb or something that can come round and fetch this?”
“In a minute,” she said. “It’ll keep in there for now.”
“Right.” He closed the inner door and dogged it shut. Then he turned back and looked at Dinah, and she looked at him, and they appraised each other for a few moments.
“So water condenses and puddles at this one place in the torus,” she said, “which you can reach by pulling up a deck plate?”
“Yes.”
“And it freezes?”
“Well, normally, no. I may have helped it freeze by fiddling with certain environmental controls.”
“Ah.”
“Just trying to save energy.”
She was floating in the opposite end of the shop, near the hatch where it connected to the SCRUM. She looked through and verified that no one was around. Some of them, she knew, were in a meeting in the torus, and others were doing a space walk.
“Now, technically …” she began.
“Technically, this is wrong,” he said. She admired the self-aware bluntness. “It is wrong because when you open the outer hatch and put that piece of ice out in space, where your robots can muck about on it, it is going to sublimate.”
Sublimation was essentially the same thing as evaporation, skipping the liquid phase; it just meant a process by which a solid, exposed to vacuum, gradually turned into vapor and disappeared. Ice tended to do this pretty quickly unless it was kept extremely cold.
“So Izzy is going to lose water,” Dinah said, “which is a scarce and valuable resource.”
“It’ll never be missed,” Rhys said blithely. “This isn’t the old days. Now that those people have made that announcement, rockets will be coming up here thick and fast.”
“Still, what Sean wants me to do is an Arjuna Expeditions project. A commercial thing. A private thing. And that water is a shared—”
“Dinah.”
“Yes?”
“Snap out of it, love.”
A long silence followed, concluded by a big sigh from Dinah. “Okay.” Rhys was right. Everything was different now.
“Now, what is it he wants, and how does ice enter into it?”
Her mild annoyance at his curiosity finally gave way. Maybe he could help. She turned her head toward the window and nodded at the familiar bulk of Amalthea, a few meters away. “That’s been my career, and my family’s career,” she said. “Working with minerals. Hard rock. Metallic ore. All of the robots are optimized for crawling around on a big piece of iron. They use magnets to stick to it. Their tools use plasma arcs or abrasive wheels to work it. Now, Sean’s basically telling me to shelve all of that. The future is ice, he says. That’s all he wants to hear about. All he wants me to work on.”
“There’s lots of it on Earth,” Rhys pointed out, “but you never think of it as a mineral.”
She nodded. “It’s an annoyance you have to clear out of the way.”
“Your colleagues down on the ground? Also working on ice?”
“Judging from email traffic, this is a company-wide directive,” she said. “They’re buying ice by the truckload, dropping it on the floor of the lab, refrigerating the building—fortunately it’s winter in Seattle; they only need to drop the temperature a few degrees. They’re all buying long underwear at REI so that they can work in a refrigerator.”
“What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze?”