Seveneves

  “What does the Constitution say about police?” Bolor-Erdene asked. “I haven’t read it.”

  All of the others laughed, appreciating her. “No one has read the bloody thing, Bo; it is this thick when you print it out!” Markus said, holding his thumb and index finger two inches apart. “Written by committee, as you would expect.”

  “To be clear, Markus,” said Jun. “You are not suggesting—”

  “No, Jun, I am not saying we ignore it. Believe me, I am screaming at these guys every day to make it simpler, to give us the, what do you call it—”

  “Cliff’s Notes,” Tom said.

  “Yes. Before we fall off the cliff. A simple owner’s manual. But somewhere in there, a police force is mentioned. I grepped it. They will have to be citizen police at first—no professionals. I have studied your personnel records. I know that you are all trained in some sort of wrestling. Wrestling is the only form of organized violence that is actually usable aboard a space station, short of absolutely crazy shit.”

  “How about stick fighting?” Tom asked.

  “I knew you would ask because your CV mentions a little bit of escrima,” Markus said. “It is a reasonable idea. I have a question, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you see any sticks?”

  “Maybe we could grow some trees,” Bo suggested.

  “That will take a while,” Markus returned. “And so I am simply asking you this, to spend a little bit of time each day getting together in this module to practice wrestling. It might come in handy.”

  DOOB HAD SLEPT SO POORLY HE SUSPECTED HE HADN’T SLEPT AT ALL. But the clock said it was about dot 15. When he’d climbed into his sack it had said dot 9. He must have dozed off for a while. But he didn’t know when.

  His nightly videoconference with Amelia hadn’t gone well. It hadn’t gone badly—they hadn’t raised their voices, or come to tears—but at first it had been all about what had just happened in Kourou, and after that there’d been a failure to connect. He’d noticed the same thing with Henry.

  They were running out of things to say to each other. That was ghastly, but it was true. His family members were all preparing to meet their maker in two or three or four weeks. The government had been handing out free euthanasia pills to anyone who wanted them; thousands had already swallowed them and bodies overflowed the morgues. Mass graves were being dug with end loaders. Meanwhile, Doob was preparing for—to be blunt, to be honest—the greatest adventure of his life.

  He wished, at some level, that they were already dead.

  He had spoken those seemingly unspeakable words to Luisa several days ago and she had nodded. “Happens all the time,” she said, “with caregivers of terminal Alzheimer’s patients, or similar cases. An enormous sense of shame and guilt comes with it.”

  “But Amelia doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, she’s—”

  “Doesn’t matter. Seeing her, talking to her, makes you feel bad. And at some level, your brain wants the thing that makes you feel bad to go away. Simplest reaction in the world. Doesn’t make you a bad person. Doesn’t mean you have to give in to it.”

  Those thoughts had led to more tossing and turning—if those were the right words for not being able to sleep in a loose sack in zero gravity—as he had wrestled with the question of “When?” Predicting it on Day 720, plus or minus a few, had been all well and good back on Day 360. But Day 700 was now approaching its end, and the “plus or minus” thing was seriously bothering him. Lately they’d narrowed it down to “plus or minus three days,” but that was in response to political pressure. It wasn’t a legit scientific move. And it meant something different to scientists. Laypersons understood it as “certainly between 717 and 723.” Scientists would instead say that if you could repeat the experiment of blowing up the moon a large number of times, and keep track of the time-to-White-Sky separately in each case, the numbers would fall into a normal distribution, a bell-shaped curve, with about two-thirds of the instances falling within that range.

  Which meant that the remainder would fall outside of that range—and some would fall well outside of it. It was not out of the question that it could happen tomorrow—that it could be happening right now—while Doob floated in a goddamned sack.

  So when Dinah came and woke him up just after dot 15, he wasn’t angry at her. More relieved.

  Basic politeness prevented him from saying so, but she looked a wreck. Not in the sense of being over-the-top emotional. Just drained and beat up.

  “You know about Guiana?” she asked him over her shoulder as they wended their way back to the Mining Colony.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  She said nothing further until they were in her shop. Doob could see the wreckage of old-school communication all over the place: many sheets of paper taped to the available surfaces, dull pencils drifting around, loose pages from the “employee manual” with blocks of characters crossed out. “I had to tell Sean to knock it off,” she admitted. “I’m used up. Can’t do it anymore. Need to get some sleep. This shit is difficult, you have to be precise. Keying slow enough for Sean to copy the transmission is like walking slow.”

  “Walking slow?”

  “You know,” Dinah said. “Anyone can walk at a normal pace. That’s easy. But when you have to walk at half speed, like because you’re accompanying someone who has trouble getting around? It’s exhausting.”

  “Got it.”

  “When I started to beg off, he changed his topic. To that point it was all, ‘Hey, what’s going on, how many people are on the Ark?’ but when I applied a little time pressure he started talking about sensitivity analysis.”

  Doob laughed.

  “Wow,” Dinah said, looking at him keenly. “Not the reaction I expected.”

  “I’ve been awake for hours thinking about it,” Doob said.

  “So you know what he means? Because I’m just a dumb clodhopper, I had to ask him.”

  “I assume he means, how certain are we really that it’s going to happen on Day 720? And just how unstable is the system?”

  “Yep, that’s what he means.”

  “The closer we get, the more it’s like a nuclear reactor about to go critical, or, well—”

  “Pick your metaphor, I get it,” Dinah said.

  “Anything that’s that unstable can be set off by random noise in the system. Things that we inherently cannot predict. Pretty soon it’s going to be so on edge that just looking at it funny will set it off. We just don’t know which rock is going to trigger the avalanche.”

  Dinah considered it for a few moments, then broke eye contact and looked at her radio. “Sean does,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I heard that correctly,” Doob said, after a long, groping pause.

  “The Eight Ball,” she said. “That’s what Sean calls it. It’s a rock you don’t know about. One you can’t see coming. It’s too dark, too far away.”

  “Dinah, I’m confused—are we talking about a hypothetical asteroid here, or—”

  “No. A specific one. A real one. Look, Doob, you know that Arjuna Expeditions has been putting up cubesats for years. We have hundreds of eyes in the sky, drifting around taking pictures of near-Earth asteroids, cataloging them, recording their orbital parameters with as much precision as we can manage. Well, apparently he’s been lying awake at night thinking about the same stuff as you. The extreme instability of the debris cloud. Its sensitivity to any kind of perturbation. And he had the bright idea: Why not search through Arjuna’s secret database of asteroids to see whether any bad actors were going to be passing through the middle of the lunar debris cloud during the next couple of weeks, when it’s on such a hair trigger?”

  “He has that database with him?”

  “Sure, whatever, it’s just a spreadsheet.”

  “So he opened that spreadsheet and did that analysis?”

  “Yeah. Doob, listen, I’m piecing this together from circumstantial evidence. You’ve seen how spo
tty the communication is.”

  “Understood.”

  “But I think he did that analysis and found an asteroid, which he is calling the Eight Ball. I assume it’s low-albedo.”

  “Black. As eight balls are,” Doob said.

  “I don’t know anything about its size or its orbital parameters, any of that. But Sean thinks it’s going to pass right through the middle of the cloud in about six hours.”

  “Six hours?!”

  “And that it has enough kinetic energy to be, well, interesting.”

  Doob was thinking about Amelia. About those emotions that had kept him awake earlier. Predictably, everything had now been reversed and he was terrified that she and Henry and Hesper and Hadley were all about to die.

  Dinah misinterpreted this as him making astronomical calculations in his head. “I’m going to go and get six hours of sleep,” she said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Dinah,” Doob said.

  IT WAS ABOUT DOT 16, SHIFT CHANGE TIME, THE EQUIVALENT OF four in the afternoon for third shifters. So, Markus was approaching the end of what, for any normal earthbound person, would be his workday. Of course, like almost everyone else in the Cloud Ark, he worked the whole time he was awake. Even his recreational activities—such as martial arts practice in the Circus—had a larger purpose. So the “afternoon” shift change and end of his “workday” were purely formal observances. Nevertheless, he was in the habit of using this time of day for dealing with what used to be called paperwork. And as part of that he had invited to his little private office off of the Tank the Only Lawyer in Space, Salvatore Guodian. Son of a Singaporean Chinese father and an Italian countess whose parents had gone to that city-state as tax exiles, he had been educated in a school for mostly British expats, matriculated at Berkeley, dropped out after one and a half years to join a tech startup, lost his shirt, bummed around to various other startups, finally made some money, become interested in the law, essentially bought his way into law school despite not having a bachelor’s degree, worked for fifteen years at the Los Angeles, Singapore, Sydney, Beijing, London, and Dubai offices of a white-shoe law firm, been passed over for partnership, resigned, ridden his bicycle across China, moved to San Francisco, and become the general counsel of a digital currency trading firm while in his spare time volunteering for a nonprofit cyber rights organization and going out into the desert to launch very large home-brew rockets to the edge of space. Sal, as he was universally known, had been one of the first people chosen to work on the Constitution of the Cloud Ark, and so had spent a year and a half at The Hague before getting “yanked,” as the expression went, and launched up here. He was forty-seven years old but in dim light could have passed for thirty.

  As a way to deal with the exigencies of zero-gee life, and a surrender to a receding hairline, he had taken to wearing a short vacubuzz. This was the easiest thing to do with hair in space. The vacubuzzer was a machine that combined the functions of an electric trimmer and an industrial shop vac. Haircuts were self-serve and consumed about thirty seconds if you were unusually fastidious. Earplugs were recommended. In his halcyon days Sal had sported a luxuriant head of long, wavy black hair and a widow’s peak that had brought out his Italian heritage, but with a vacubuzz he looked almost purely Chinese. He spoke seven languages, and he came closer than any living human to having the entire Cloud Ark Constitution—or CAC, as he called it—in his brain. If Markus had anything to say about it—which he did—then Sal would very soon combine in one person the functions of attorney general, head prosecutor, justice of the peace, and chief justice of the supreme court.

  Sal laughed. He had great teeth. “You realize that those roles are completely incompatible. They are intended to be one another’s mutual adversaries in a lot of ways.”

  “Then you can appoint other people to fill them. Look, Sal, we are talking about a bootstrapping process. We have to start somewhere.”

  “Let’s war-game it,” Sal said. “A male Arkie from Outer Bizarristan rapes a female Arkie from Andorra. It happens in a place where we don’t have any cameras.”

  “There are very few such places,” Markus pointed out.

  “Okay, fine. It happens in an arklet. Or so the victim claims. She goes to sick bay, where medical evidence is gathered.”

  “Do we even have rape kits?” Markus asked.

  “How should I know?” Sal returned. “But we should get some. Anyway, based on that, in some countries a judge might issue a warrant enabling the police to look at the video records from that arklet. Because in some countries, Markus, people have a right to privacy and you can’t just be surveilling them all the time.”

  “And what is the situation here?”

  “It’s fascinating that you don’t even know, but I’ll tell you that the CAC recognizes certain rights that, however, may be abrogated or curtailed during periods of simplified administrative procedures and structures.”

  “PSAPS,” Markus said. “That, I know about. It is a euphemism for martial law.”

  Sal looked somewhere between pained and amused. “May I suggest you stop thinking about it that way—or, failing that, never say it out loud.”

  “But nevertheless—”

  “A better analogy might be the authority a captain wields over a ship at sea. The captain can do things, like preside over marriage ceremonies or order someone confined to quarters, that would not be acceptable if the same ship were tied up to a pier in Manhattan.”

  “Look, I do not have time now to war-game a whole prosecution of a hypothetical rape,” Markus said, glancing at his wristwatch—Swiss, naturally, and made specifically for him by a famous Geneva company, as a sort of legacy, a way of saying we existed once, and here is what magnificent things we were capable of. “I want to talk about something very basic, very fundamental, which is: How do I have authority? Or if I am replaced by Ivy or Ulrika, how does she have authority?”

  Sal didn’t quite see where he was going. “Authority meaning . . .”

  When this elicited no response other than impatient muttering, Sal tried: “Authority can mean many different things, Markus.”

  “In this case I am not speaking of moral authority or leadership qualities or any of that stuff. I do not mean the theoretical loyalty that Arkies have to the so-called captain of the ship. I mean, what happens if we go to arrest the rapist from Outer Bizarristan, and he decides to put up a fight, and his friends decide that they are going to fight with him?”

  Sal, to this point, had been viewing the conversation as an enjoyable exercise in legal theory. He now looked more serious. “You’re talking about power. What it really means. What it really is.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s an old question. A pharaoh, a medieval king, the mayor of New York City, they all have to think about the same thing.”

  “Yes,” Markus said again.

  “When you give an order, what assurance do you have that it will be carried out? That is the essential question of power.”

  “Jawohl, counselor!”

  “Normally here I would speak to you about moral authority and loyalty and all of that. But you have already ruled this out.”

  “When push comes to shove, as the English expression has it—”

  “The traditional answer has always been that the king has his guard, the mayor his chief of police, the commander his military police, or what have you. And it is their ability to physically coerce others that is the ultimate foundation of the leader’s power.”

  “Now you’re talking. And what is that for me, under the CAC?”

  “You understand,” Sal said, “that the more you actually call upon such persons to coerce, the less power you have, in a way. It is an admission of failure.”

  “Sal,” Markus said, “how long have you been up here?”

  “Two hundred and some days.”

  “How many hours have we spent talking about the CAC?”

  “I have no idea, probably a hundred hours over that time
.”

  “And of that, how much time have we spent talking about this one thing?”

  Sal checked his own watch. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “So, based on that allocation of time,” Markus said, “maybe you can see that this is not all that important to me in the big scheme of things. But it is important, Sal. When the moment comes when I have to arrest a criminal who is being protected by his comrades, I must have an answer. I must know what to do. I must be prepared. This is what I do. This is why I have this job.”

  Someone was knocking on the door to Markus’s office, which was unusual. Markus ignored it for now.

  “Under PSAPS you can deputize specific people to enforce your decisions using appropriate levels of physical coercion. Once we get out of PSAPS . . .”

  “How soon do you think that is going to happen?” Markus’s tone of voice suggested he had his own opinions on the matter.

  “If we are lucky enough to survive? It will be years,” Sal said.

  “So we must confine ourselves to PSAPS for this discussion,” Markus said. Then he hollered at the door, “Just a minute!” Then, back to Sal: “Appropriate levels of physical coercion, what does that mean? Who decides?”

  “Well,” Sal said, “if you make me attorney general, head prosecutor, justice of the peace, and chief justice of the supreme court, I guess I do.”

  “If someone gets Tased, and his heart stops, and he dies, is that appropriate?”

  “Jesus Christ, Markus, what has gotten into you?”

  “I am war-gaming,” Markus said. “Trying to be prepared. You should do it too. Not with hypothetical rape cases but with what is likely to start happening soon.” He held Sal’s gaze until Sal answered with a nod. Then he aimed his voice at the door. “All right! Come in!”

  “Door” was a landlubber term for what, on a boat or a spaceship, would be called a hatch. A convention had developed where, in a part of Izzy that had simulated gravity, it was referred to as a door. In the floaty bits, it was called a hatch.