Perhaps sensing what was going on between Kath Two and Beled, Rhys focused on his task somewhat more intently than was really needed. The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called “air space” around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called “space space.” Kath Two, keeping half an eye on the brief and businesslike conversation between Rhys and Parambulator (which, to her eyes, had nothing whatsoever in common with whatever was meant by “punching it in”—but this was just how Dinans liked to express themselves), saw that they would pass through the twenty-kilometer-wide gap between habitats named Saint-Exupéry and Knutholmen. Midway between them was a whip station. Almost every habitat of significance was bracketed between two of these installations. The whip stations were small habitats, crewed by half a dozen or so humans who got rotated out every few months so they would not go crazy from boredom. Their job was to look after thousands of flynks: the latest generation of a lineage of robots that went all the way back to Rhys Aitken’s work aboard Izzy. He had been working with fingernail-sized nats. The ones on whip stations performed the same functions, but they were much bigger. The chains that they formed had the mass and momentum of pre-Zero freight trains, capable of undulating and cracking like a whip, or reaching out at distant targets like the fly on the end of a fishing line. Some wear and tear was involved. Flynks could have been inspected and repaired by other robots, but Blue’s overall cultural bias in favor of having humans in the loop had led to much of the work being done by flesh-and-blood crew members. In any case, supposing those people had been doing their job, keeping their fleet of flynks ready for use, and assuming that no other space travelers had already reserved that time slot on that whip station, the flivver carrying Kath Two, Rhys, and Beled would, in something like twelve hours’ time, rendezvous with the tip of an aluminum bullwhip that would then snap it into a circular orbit with a slightly higher radius than that of the ring. A few hours later, they would dock at Port 65 in the Quarantine Section of the outer limb of the Eye.
The Eye observed whatever time was local on the part of Earth lying directly below it. Currently, it was about eight in the morning there. She could look forward to some serious jet lag—another term from the pre-Zero era that had become embedded in the language despite the obsolescence of its literal meaning. According to one convention, they should switch over to Eye time now, so that they could begin adjusting. But they had all finished long days on New Earth and were too exhausted at this moment to maintain the pretense that it was first thing in the morning for them. They would have plenty of time to adjust in Quarantine. Kath Two reserved a Moiran-friendly bed and meal plan at Port 65, then plummeted into sleep.
THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter.
An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever.
The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants.
Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.