And no particular effort would be made by humans to choose and plan those outcomes. They would seed New Earth and see what happened. If an ecosystem failed to “take” in a particular area, they would just try something else.
In the decades since such species had been seeded onto New Earth, this had been going on all the time. Epigenetic transformation had been rampant—and, since Survey was thin on the ground, largely unobserved by humans. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to find surprising, it was known as “going epi.” Use of the phrase was discouraged for being unscientific, but Rhys Alaskov knew how to get away with it.
Rhys brought up a rendering of the habitat ring and zoomed in on the whitish segment at its top. Their projected route was superimposed as a crisp green arc that curled through apogee near a succession of relatively small habitats just to the east of Greenwich. For the first habitats constructed in each segment—close to the seeds of Greenwich, Rio, et al.—had naturally tended to be smaller than the ones that came along later, when the construction process had hit its stride. The closer to a boneyard you got, the larger the habitats generally became. As Rhys panned and zoomed around, habitat names came and went on the screen: Hannibal, Brussels, Oyo, Auvergne, Vercingetorix, Steve Lake. The latter aroused a flicker of interest. Kath One had had an old friend living there. But the friendship wouldn’t likely have survived the transition to Kath Two.
She brought the same thing up on her varp and zoomed out to remind herself of the current location of the Eye.
If the habitat ring as a whole was like the dial of a clock, then the Eye, with its inner and outer tethers—one depending toward Earth, the other reaching out beyond the habitat ring—was a hand.
Any description of the Eye had to begin by mentioning that it was the largest object ever made. Most of its material had come from Cleft. It was, in a sense, the thing Cleft had ultimately shape-shifted into. Its innermost piece was a spinning, ring-shaped city of sufficient diameter—some fifty kilometers—that even the largest space habitats could pass through its center with plenty of room to spare. This made the Eye capable of sweeping all the way around the ring, encompassing in turn each of the ten thousand separate habitats.
Or at least that had been the original plan. In practice, its sweep was limited to the Blue part of the ring that began at Dhaka and ran westward about two-thirds of the way around the ring to the fringe of the Julian segment. At both of those locations, barriers—literal turnpikes, consisting of long splinters of nickel-iron laid directly across the ring—had been constructed by Red to physically block movement of the Eye into “their” segment. So instead of sweeping around like the hand of a clock, it bounced back and forth between the turnpikes, confining itself to Blue habitats. During the ensuing century and a half, Red had been at work on something huge that appeared to be an anti-Eye in the making, and that would presumably sweep back and forth, in like manner, over their segment. But it had never budged from its geostationary orbit above the Makassar Strait, and no one in Blue really knew how soon it might become operational.
The Great Chain, as the rotating city was called, lined a circular opening, like an iris, in the middle of the Eye. To either side of it, the Eye tapered to a point. One of those points was always aimed toward the center of Earth and the other was always aimed away from it. A cable, or rather a redundant, self-healing network of them, emerged from each of those two points. The inner one hung almost all the way down to the Earth’s surface, where a thing called Cradle dangled from it. The outer cable stretched for some distance beyond the habitat ring and terminated in the Big Rock, which served as a counterweight. By adjusting the length of the latter cable it was possible to move the whole construct’s center of gravity closer to or farther away from Earth, causing it to speed up or slow down in its orbit relative to the habitats in the ring. Thus it could sweep around like the hand of a clock, passing around each habitat along the way, or pausing for a time as needed. And when it was encircling a particular habitat it could easily exchange people and goods with it, via flivvers, or cargo shuttles, or swarms of nats, or mechanical contraptions that could snake out like tentacles.