She jerked awake near the end of the trip, convinced that she had heard her name being spoken.
The pod had a video screen on its front bulkhead, and one of the other passengers, to pass the time, had begun playing back a segment of the Epic that must have taken place around twenty years after Zero. This could be guessed from the visible signs of aging on the faces of the surviving Eves, and from the fact that the first generation of their offspring were adolescents. This segment of the Epic told the story of how a personal rift between Eve Dinah and Eve Tekla had been mediated and settled by some of the youngsters, led by Catherine Dinova. It was frequently pointed to as one of the first moments when the children of the Eves had begun to think and take action for themselves. Lines of dialogue from it were quoted frequently in modern-day discussions.
Kath Two wondered, as she always did, whether the people of the Epic would have said and done some of what they had, had they known that, five thousand years later, billions of people would be watching them on video screens, citing them as examples, and quoting them from memory. Over the first few decades on Cleft, the cameras had died one by one. Depending on how you felt about ubiquitous surveillance, the result had either been a new Dark Age and an incalculable loss to history, or a liberation from digital tyranny. Either way, it signaled the end of the Epic: the painstakingly recorded account of everything that the people of the Cloud Ark had done from Zero onward. After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support.
A tone sounded, warning the passengers of deceleration, and the pod eased to a stop in the terminal. Even after it had come to rest, however, they experienced a mild sense of gravity. It was too faint to be perceived other than as an annoying tendency for objects not otherwise constrained to drift “downward,” where “down” in this part of the Eye meant “toward the Earth.” To prevent that drift from getting out of hand, some floors of lightweight decking had been constructed. But the gravity was still so faint that you could fly around by pushing off against anything solid. Kath Two collected her bag, strapped it to her back, and glided out into the terminal. The other travelers from her pod seemed to know where they were going and so she followed them “down” through staggered gaps in those decks. This part of the Eye was bare bones in an almost literal sense; it was where the massive structural limbs that held the whole thing together converged to a sharp point, aimed forever at Earth. The metal was honeycombed with tunnels and cavities engineered for various purposes. The carbon cables that held Cradle suspended above Earth’s atmosphere some thirty-six thousand kilometers below diverged here and ran taut through long sheltered passageways all the way to the other end of the Eye, where they came together again and emerged to connect with the Big Rock beyond. The passageways and chambers used by humans were tiny by comparison.
Set into the very point of the Eye was a glass dome, half a dozen meters in diameter. From it you could look straight down the bore of the tether—which was actually a tubular array of sixteen smaller tendons—and see the Earth. From this distance, the planet looked about as big as a person’s face seen from across a small table. An Old Earther, seeing it from here, might think at first that nothing had ever changed. It still had the same general look: blue oceans, white icecaps, green-and-brown continents partly obscured by swirling white vortices of weather. Those continents stood in roughly the same places as the old ones, for not even the Hard Rain could make much of a dent in a tectonic plate. But the landforms had been radically resculpted, with many inland seas, and deep indentations in coastlines, created by large impacts. New island chains, frequently arc shaped, had been created by ejecta and by volcanic activity.