Seveneves. Neal Stephenson
love to count down, I know your ways.”
“It’s where the gravity of the sun and the Earth balance,” Dinah said, “and people sometimes call it a gateway because it’s an easy place to effect a switchover between a geocentric and a heliocentric orbit. This even happens naturally sometimes: an asteroid in a heliocentric orbit will wander close to L1 and get captured by the Earth. Or, going the other way, there’s a case where an Apollo upper stage orbiting around the Earth passed near L1 and got ejected into a heliocentric orbit for a number of years. Later it came back through the same gateway—only to get ejected again.”
Luisa nodded. “Like changing from the D to the A train at Columbus Circle, in New York terms.”
“A lot of people have used the analogy of a switching yard or a train station to describe it, yeah,” Dinah said.
“So you think Sean and his crew are headed that way.”
“Once they get all their—” Dinah paused.
“Their shit together?” Luisa suggested.
“Thank you, yes,” Dinah said with a smile. “They need to get to a higher orbit than we are in now if they are going to reach L1. That means burning their engines, expending a lot of fuel in just a few minutes, and then coasting for a few weeks. They’ll have to pass through the Van Allen belts and soak up a lot of radiation. No avoiding it, unfortunately. L1 is four times farther away than the moon.”
“Or what used to be the moon,” Luisa said under her breath.
“Yeah, which means that in a few days Sean and his crew are going to be farther away from Earth than any humans who have ever lived. When they get to L1—which will take five weeks—they’ll have to execute another burn that will switch them from the D to the A train—place them into a heliocentric orbit. And from there they can plot whatever course is going to get them to the comet.”
Luisa had gotten a bit sidetracked by the first part of what Dinah had said. “Farther away from Earth than anyone in history,” she repeated. “I wonder if there might be a certain feeling of jealousy at work in Fyodor’s reaction, knowing that after all the time he has spent in space—”
“Some rich whippersnapper is going to show up and make his accomplishments look minor,” Dinah said, nodding. “Could be. Fyodor’s got the Russian granite face, you can’t tell what’s going on inside.”
“Anyway,” Luisa said, “they go and fetch the big ball of ice and then reverse all of those steps to come back to what by that point will hopefully be the Cloud Ark.”
“Not exactly,” Dinah said. “And that’s where things get interesting.”
“Oh, I thought they were already pretty interesting!” Luisa said.
Dinah was limited, here, in what she was allowed to say. “Maneuvering a space vehicle—which is designed and engineered to be what it is—around the solar system is one thing. Moving a huge raggedy-ass ball of ice is another.”
“It’s going to take a long time,” Luisa said, nodding. “And it might not work.”
“Yeah. Look, I just make robots.”
“All of which will be making the trip?”
“Yes,” Dinah said. “They’ll be needed on the comet’s surface, for anchoring cables and netting. It’s a big chunk of ice. It’s brittle. We don’t want it to fall apart like a dry snowball when thrust is applied.”
“A dry snowball,” Luisa repeated. “Is that a thing, where you come from?”
“The Brooks Range? Yeah. Terrible place to make snowballs.”
“Unless you’re the kid sister,” Luisa said, “and everyone’s throwing them at you.”
“No comment on that.”
“In Central Park,” Luisa said, “the snowballs were wet and they were hard.”
DAY 90
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