There was no telling, of course, what was going on in the Red zone between the turnpikes. Signals intelligence shining out into space from their part of the habitat ring suggested that the A?dans were at least as advanced, in their use of mobile communications, as people here. Because they were also quite good at encryption, there was no way of telling what they were saying to one another. But Blue, for its part, had made a conscious decision not to repeat what was known as Tav’s Mistake.
It was unfair, of course, for billions of people to focus blame on one representative of his culture who had died in a bad way five thousand years ago. The Epic, however, tended to have this effect on people’s thinking. In the same way that certain people of Old Earth, raised on the Bible, would have referred to masturbation as the Sin of Onan, those of the modern world tended to classify personal virtues and failings in terms of well-known historical figures from the era of the Cloud Ark, the Big Ride, and the first generations on Cleft. Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. The actions that he had taken at the beginning of the White Sky, when he had fired off a scathing blog post about the loss of the Human Genetic Archive, and his highly critical and alarmist coverage of the Ymir expedition, had been analyzed to death by subsequent historians. Tav had not realized, or perhaps hadn’t considered the implications of the fact, that while writing those blog posts he was being watched and recorded from three different camera angles. This had later made it possible for historians to graph his blink rate, track the wanderings of his eyes around the screen of his laptop, look over his shoulder at the windows that had been open on his screen while he was blogging, and draw up pie charts showing how he had divided his time between playing games, texting friends, browsing Spacebook, watching pornography, eating, drinking, and actually writing his blog. The statistics tended not to paint a very flattering picture. The fact that the blog posts in question had (according to further such analyses) played a seminal role in the Break, and the departure of the Swarm, only focused more obloquy upon the poor man.
Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before Zero understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range, as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, Blues called it Tav’s Mistake. They didn’t want to make it again. Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinctive pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine. To the extent that Blue’s engineers could build electronics of comparable sophistication to those that Tav had used, they tended to put them into devices such as robots. Cleft’s initial population had been eight humans and hundreds of robots (thousands, if nats were counted as individuals). Both numbers had expanded since then. Only in the last century had the human population pulled even with that of non-nat robots.
The end result, for a young woman in a bookstall above a tube station on the Great Chain, was that she was dwelling in habitats, and being moved around by machines, far beyond the capabilities of Old Earth. She was being served and looked after by robots that were smarter and more robust than their ancestors—the Grabbs and so on that Eve Dinah had programmed on Izzy. And yet the information storage capacity of her tablet, and its ability to connect, were still limited enough that it made sense for her to download books over a cable while that was easy, and to make room for them in the tablet’s storage chips by deleting things she had already read.
That sorted, she rode transit to the Off Ramp, where she climbed into a capsule, facing backward, and felt deceleration push her back into her couch as it was flung off the Great Chain into a tube lined with electromagnetic decelerators.
Back now in the zero gee environment of the Eye’s nonrotating frame, she began to navigate its internal companionways, pushing herself along lighted tubes marked with the icon of Cradle: a pair of mountains enclosed within a semicircular dome. This led her, within a few minutes, to a transit station where she and two random strangers climbed into a four-person bubble that presently went into motion and began to whoosh at greater and greater speed down a long and perfectly straight tube. They were traveling from the rim of the great Eye’s iris out to its inner vertex, the one closest to Earth, a distance of some eighty kilometers, and so hand-over-handing their way down a shaft wasn’t an option. Kath Two, who had been awake now for something like sixteen hours, felt herself dozing off.