Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

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had filled him in a little during the last hours of the drive. It had been an air force base, part of the northern line of defensive installations from which the U.S. would have defended itself against Communist aggression, had that ever been necessary. Its 13,500-foot runway suggested it might have had offensive purposes as well. It had been an alternate landing site for the Space Shuttle, never used. In any case it was ridiculously oversized for the town of Moses Lake and had tended to be used by the aerospace industry in recent decades for various training and experimental purposes. Blue Origin had used it to test a VTOL craft in 2005, operating from a trailer on the empty lakebed west of the airport where New Baikonur was arising now, and where Doob was walking about trying to track down the scent of frying bacon.

      Some giant, windowless aircraft hurtled overhead, deploying a phalanx of tires from its belly, and made a long, slow landing on the big runway, using every one of the 13,500 feet. A cargo carrier.

      He came to a broad avenue that led directly into the encampment’s center. And there was no mistaking where and what the center was: a concrete pad, still being poured one patch at a time, with a mixed assortment of cranes rising up from what he took to be its center.

      They were assembling a rocket there.

      It was a big rocket.

      It all more or less made sense. There was no cargo too big to be barged up the Columbia River and then trucked the last few miles to Moses Lake. There was no airplane that couldn’t be accommodated by that runway. There was no object that the aerospace machine shops of the Seattle area couldn’t build. And from this latitude, the same as Baikonur, a well-worn and understood flight plan could take payloads to Izzy.

      A mere four days later, Doob stood in the bed of a rusty pickup truck with a random assortment of space rednecks, hoisting a longnecked beer bottle into the sky in emulation of the rocket lifting off from the pad. They all hooted and screamed as they watched it arc gracefully downrange and take off in the general direction of Boise. And the next morning, when they had all sobered up, they got busy building another rocket.

       DAY 80

      “We talk about sending stuff to orbit as if orbit is a place, like Philadelphia, but it’s actually a lot of places, a lot of different ways to be in space. Any two objects in the universe can theoretically be in orbit around each other.

      “Most of the orbits that matter to us involve something tiny orbiting around something huge, like a satellite around the Earth, or the Earth around the sun. So, a quick way to label and classify orbits is according to ‘What is the huge thing in the middle?’

      “If the huge thing in the middle is the Earth, we call it a geocentric orbit. If it’s the sun, it’s a heliocentric orbit. And so on. Since the moon broke up, we’ve mostly focused on geocentric orbits. The moon, back when it existed, used to be in such an orbit; it revolved around the Earth. Most of its pieces still remain in geocentric orbits. A small number of those just happen to intersect the Earth’s atmosphere. When that happens, we get a meteorite.

      “So much for Orbits 101. But keep in mind there can be different levels. So, the old Earth-moon system was, as a whole, revolving around the sun in a heliocentric orbit. And if you zoom way out and look at the entire Milky Way galaxy, you can see that our whole solar system is very slowly revolving around the black hole at its center, in a galactocentric orbit.”

      The voice was that of famous astronomer and science popularizer Doc Dubois. The images accompanying it were an animation zooming in and out of the solar system. Dinah was getting snatches of it over the shoulder of Luisa Soter, a recent arrival to Izzy and hands-down winner of the “least like a traditional astronaut” competition. Born in New York City to parents who had fled political repression in Chile, she had been raised in a polyglot bohemian household in Harlem, walking through Central Park every day to the Ethical Culture School on West Sixty-Third. She’d followed that up with a succession of degrees in psychology and social work from UCLA, Chicago, and Barcelona. After a few years of work with economic refugees trying to enter Europe on leaky fishing boats, she’d been awarded a genius grant that had given her the freedom to travel the world for a few years doing research on other economic migrants.

      Two weeks ago she’d been yanked out of a Fulbright scholarship at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, given some basic training in how to live in space, strapped into a rocket, and shot up here in a tourist capsule.

      Dinah, along with everyone else, made the obvious assumption that Luisa’s job was to be the first shrink and social worker in space. Judging from some interactions that had been happening as crowding and stress had gotten more intense, she was going to have her work cut out for her. A bunch of desperate people crowded aboard a pitching and rudderless fishing boat was an uncomfortably close match for the situation up here.

      Luisa had a relaxed self-confidence that made it easy for her to admit that she knew absolutely nothing about such topics as orbital mechanics. But it was more than just that; she knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

      But when everyone else was busy, Luisa was not above googling her question down to Earth and latching on to a YouTube video, as she was doing now.

      Dinah, floating behind Luisa’s shoulder, watched as the animation was replaced by a live shot of Doc Dubois and a stocky, bald white man standing next to each other on the flat pan of gray-brown dirt that she now recognized as the Moses Lake spaceport. In deep background behind them was another rocket being stacked on the pad, one stage at a time, by a tangled-looking arrangement of cranes, gantries, and cables.

      Dinah vaguely recognized the one who wasn’t Doc Dubois; he was a tech pundit who popped up frequently on television and YouTube. He turned toward the camera and spoke: “This is Tavistock Prowse, coming to you from the world’s newest spaceport here in Grant County, Washington. I’m here with a man who needs no introduction, Doc Dubois, to talk about some of the recent controversial events surrounding the Arjuna Expeditions launches, many of which are originating from the improvised launch complex that you can see directly behind us. Arjuna has prepared an animation that explains what they are all about. So pop some popcorn and pull up a chair.”

      Their image was replaced by a view of Earth that zoomed back, tilted, and panned to show it in its orbit around the sun. This was helpfully traced out by a thin, curved red line. The animation panned back. The orbits of Venus, Mercury, then Mars and Jupiter came into view. “Traditionally,” Doc Dubois said, “when we talk about asteroids, we’re talking about the asteroid belt, which is out between Mars and Jupiter.”

      A ring of dust, with a few larger clumps, was now spattered into the huge gap between those two planets’ orbits. “There’s a lot of material out there that Our Heritage might one day be able to exploit, but it’s too far away to be easily reached by any spacecraft we have now.”

      So Doc Dubois, in keeping with his rep for staying in touch with the zeitgeist, had adopted the Our Heritage phrasing, a suddenly popular buzzword and hashtag meaning “whatever gets accomplished in the distant future by the descendants of the people who make it onto the Cloud Ark,” or, to put it bluntly, “the only reason to go on living for the next twenty-two months.”

      The animation began zooming back in, to the point where it showed nothing beyond Earth’s orbit. “But astronomers have known for a long time that not all of the asteroids are out beyond Mars. There are much smaller—but still significant—populations of asteroids in heliocentric orbits not that different from Earth’s.”

      A finer and sparser dust of particles was now drawn in, forming a sort of fuzzy halo around the red line that represented Earth’s orbit.

      “And that’s where Amalthea came from, is that correct, Doc?”

      “Yes, bringing a hunk of metal that big from all the way out between Mars and Jupiter would have taken forever. Because we found it in an Earth-like

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