A compulsion for privacy was hardly unusual for a Julian living and working in Blue. The Julian part of the ring, centered on the Tokomaru habitat, was the least populous of the eight segments. Ninety-five percent of it lay on the Red side of the turnpike. Only a tiny sprinkling of habitats projected east of Kiribati into the Blue zone, and in those the Julians had been diluted by the more numerous and aggressive Teklans, whose segment lay just on the far side of the Hawaii boneyard. Thus the Julians had maintained enough of a presence in Blue that they could live and work in it without being seen as aliens, or immigrants. Many of them were “dukhos,” playing approximately the same role in modern society as priests had done pre-Zero.
The destruction of Old Earth and the reduction of the human population to eight had done for the idea that there was a God, at least in any sense remotely similar to how most pre-Zero believers had conceived of Him. Thousands of years had passed before anyone, even in the most remote outposts of human settlement, had dared to suggest that religion, in anything like its traditional sense, might be or ought to be revived. In its place a new set of thoughtways had grown up under the general heading of “dukh,” a Russian word referring to the human spirit. Dukh-based institutions had developed under the general term of “kupol,” a word that harked back to the glass bubble that had served as a kind of interfaith chapel and meditation room on Endurance. Modern-day kupols all traced their origins back to that structure, which Dubois Harris had called the Woo-Woo Pod. When people nowadays watched scenes from the Epic that took place in it, they were in the backs of their minds thinking of their local kupols and the people who staffed them. A professional member of a kupol’s staff was generally called a dukho, a truncation of the Russian word “dukhobor,” meaning one who wrestled with spiritual matters. Kupols, like churches of old, were supported by contributions from their members. Some, as on the Great Chain, were richly endowed, magnificent buildings. Others, like the one in the Q, were just quiet rooms where people could go to think or to seek help from what amounted to social workers. Dukhos tended to trace their lineage back to Luisa, who had played a similar role during the Epic, and some of the better-educated ones drew explicit connections between their kupols and the Ethical Culture Society, where Luisa had gone to school in New York. But Luisa, of course, had not produced a race. The dukho profession had ended up being dominated by Julians. The Julian habitat of Astrakhan, which hovered anomalously in the middle of the Dinan segment, had become a sort of hothouse for the production of dukhos of various denominations. Kath Two was able to establish that Ariane had originated from there, but little else. It was fine. There were ample reasons for Ariane to keep to herself and lead a quiet life.
MOST OF THE GIANT NICKEL-IRON MOON CORE FRAGMENT NAMED Cleft had been melted down and reshaped into what was now the Eye. The engineers had not been able to bring themselves, however, to destroy the part of it immediately surrounding the place where Endurance had come to rest at the end of the Big Ride, and where the bodies of Doob, Zeke Petersen, and other heroes of the Epic had been interred directly into iron catacombs. That patch of the asteroid—the deep, shielded declivity where the first several generations of the new human races had lived out their entire lives—had come to be known as Cradle.
Everyone had, of course, seen the chapter from the Epic where Doob had gone out on his last space walk with Eve Dinah, looked up at the walls of iron rising from the valley floor, and foreseen that one day a ceiling of glass would be built over the top, turning the “Vale of the Eves” into a huge greenhouse where children would be able to float about unencumbered by space suits, eating fresh greens from terraced gardens. It was probably the biggest tearjerker in the whole Epic, and a perennial favorite. All of Doob’s predictions had, of course, come true. Cradle had ended up supporting a population of several thousand, until later generations had been obliged to push outward.
Cradle’s main defect had been a lack of simulated gravity, which had obliged those early generations to construct what amounted to glorified merry-go-rounds on which children could take turns being centrifuged in order to foster bone growth. Subsequent habitats—spinning tori mounted to the walls of the cleft—had actually been more crowded and confined than Izzy itself, and many generations had lived cramped lives in them with only occasional opportunities for R & R in Cradle’s sunny open volumes. In time they had learned to make bigger and better habitats, and Cradle had been abandoned for many centuries, an occasional destination for historians or curiosity seekers.