The Eye was always above the equator; currently it hovered over a spot about halfway between Africa and South America, whose coasts echoed each other’s shape in a way that made their tectonic history obvious even to nonscientists. The low-lying terrain along both coastlines had huge bites taken out of it, frequently with rocky islands jutting out in the centers of the bites: central peaks of big impact craters. Archipelagoes reached out into the Atlantic but trailed off well short of joining the two continents.
The geography of New Earth, though beautiful to look at, made little impression on Kath Two, since she had been studying it her whole life and had spent years tromping around on it. For now, her attention was captured by the giant machines in which the view was framed. Surrounding her, and just visible in her peripheral vision, was another of those ubiquitous tori, spinning around to provide simulated gravity for the staff who lived here with their families, looking after the tether and the elevator terminal. Inward of that were the sixteen orifices where the tether’s primary cables were routed into the frame of the Eye. Each of those cables, though it looked solid from a distance, was actually made of sixteen more cables, and so on and so forth down to a few fractal iterations. All of these ran parallel between the Eye and Cradle. Webbing them together was a network of smaller diagonal tendons, arranged so that if one cable broke, neighboring ones would take the force until a robot could be sent out to repair it. Cables broke all the time, because they’d been hit by bolides or simply because they had “aged out,” and so if you squinted your eyes and looked closely enough at the tether, you could see that it was alive with robots. Some of these were the size of buildings, and clambered up and down the largest cables simply to act as mother ships for swarms of smaller robots that would actually effect the repairs. This had been going on, to a greater or lesser extent, for many centuries. This end of the cable had beanstalked downward from the Eye while the other had grown in the opposite direction, reaching out away from the habitat ring and from Earth, acting as a counterbalance.
Cradle was much too small to be picked out at this distance. Even if it had been large enough to see, her view of it would have been blocked by the elevator, which was on its final approach, and expected to reach the terminal in about half an hour. It had a general resemblance to an Old Earth wagon wheel, with sixteen spokes reaching inward from its rim to a hotel-sized spherical hub where the people were. Watching it approach produced the mildly alarming illusion that it was going to come crashing through the dome. In that case, two domes would have been destroyed in the collision, since the hub was capped by a dome similar to this one where passengers could relax on couches and gaze up at the view of the approaching Eye and the habitat ring spreading out to either side of it. But of course it slowed down and stopped short of contact. Through the glass, now just a stone’s throw away, she could see the new arrivals unbuckling their seat belts, gathering their things, and floating toward the exits. Most of them were wearing military uniforms, or else the dark, well-designed clothing that she associated with comersants and politicos. Not really her crowd. But Doc had invited her, which was all the credentials anyone really needed.
Through the flimsy internal partitions she could hear several dozen arrivals making their way to Quarantine. These were eventually bound either for the Great Chain or the much smaller torus that encircled this end of the tether. Through the dome she could see housekeeping robots, and a few human staff, making their sweep through the hub’s lounge. After a few minutes, a green light came on above a door, and she joined a flow of a few dozen departing passengers.
Within minutes she was ensconced in a small private cabin in the elevator’s hub, where she would spend the four-day journey to the tether’s opposite terminus. A chime warned her when the elevator began to accelerate downward, but it moved at a speed that was extremely modest by the normal standards of space travel, so she felt no need to strap in. She climbed into her bed and slept.