The requirement for a steel-spined authoritarian culture was obvious. Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable. Had these people been living in, for example, the agricultural paradise of the Nile Delta, they might have been able to get away with some mazy religious dogma as the basis for that system. But instead they had been trapped within a large machine that would kill them all if allowed to go on the fritz, and so they had been obliged to develop a culture in which engineering became their dukh. Their finite supply of tungsten, stockpiled by wise Rufus, had to be stretched and husbanded so that their descendants thousands of years in the future would be able to manufacture lightbulbs to grow plants to make food and air. And so on and so forth in every particular of how these people lived their daily lives. Thirty people—the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One—were, at any given time, Cycs. Another thirty were toiling as their apprentices. Others played specific roles such as breeder mom, glassblower, acupuncturist, filament winder, potato nurturer, pump fixer. Structurally, culturally, it was very like a Bronze Age theocracy, but without any trace of God or the supernatural.
To that point it was not radically different from the subcultures of many First and Second Millennium space habitats, which—at least for a little while—gave Ty the idea that he could get a quick handle on Digger culture. But that fantasy soon evaporated. Those early Spacers had been living in cramped conditions, yes, and they had been just as dependent upon technology as the Diggers in their Hole. So of course there were some common features in the two cultures. But Spacers had always been able to look outside to see what the situation was, and—at least after a couple of thousand years of hunkering down in especially large rocks—to venture forth and do something about it. Even in their most desperate hours they had always expected to reinherit the Earth. The Diggers’ only way of knowing their situation and their fate was to listen to loud noises, tally them on acid-free, 100 percent cotton paper, and, every few years, compare the tally with a similar one made by some ancestor a couple of hundred years previously. For the first four thousand years, hope of a better future must have been seen as sheer folly. Worse than that, as an active betrayal of Digger principles, since people with hopes were apt to become profligate in spending resources and taking risks.
Which all made for a picture of those first four millennia that was as clear as it was bleak. But change would come hard to a society like that one. What was most interesting to Ty was what had begun to go on within that society when they’d punched the spoil adit to the surface and begun to expand their underground domain. Their day-to-day lives would not have changed much, but they’d have had at least the abstract possibility that their civilization might expand, that more people might be able to breed.
All of that had occurred more than a thousand years ago. The Hole had grown to the point where it could support a population of two thousand; then, around 4700 when the atmosphere had become breathable, they’d been able to take it up to ten thousand. All still beneath the surface, however, since there’d been little for them above it.
At some point the Committee—which was what they called their ruling council—must have become aware that vast numbers of humans were living in space and actively prosecuting the TerReForm. They could simply have walked out onto the surface and sent out some kind of an SOS at that point. Instead they had made a positive decision to conceal themselves, to hide their spoil dumps, to shun communication with the Spacers. The central question, then, was why they had made such a choice. Sonar Taxlaw wasn’t much help in explaining it. When Ty or the others asked questions, she offered nonresponsive answers that told of a subterranean culture in which such things were never spoken of.
It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent.
BETWEEN EINSTEIN’S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRAIN, GEOGRAPHICAL folklore stored in the Cyc’s encyclopedic mind, and Beled’s digital map, they knew generally where to go at any particular moment. What made it difficult was negotiating obstacles in the terrain and steering clear of large animals. The latter group might, in theory, include Red military patrols, but they had no reason to believe that they were being pursued yet. Why would Red bother? Marching some Blue prisoners back in chains might score them some points with their new Digger friends, but having chased them off into the darkness was nearly as effective. Perhaps more so given the importance to the Diggers of the meme of Spacers as cowards.
Ty considered explaining to the Cyc that if her group of Diggers had turned up on the west side of 166 Thirty making the same preposterous territorial claims, Red, instead of approaching them with music and nuggets of space iron, would simply have vaporized them. But burdening the poor girl with that awareness wasn’t going to help.