“You know what, though? It’s all entertainment. Real or made up. It’s stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.”
“Well,” Ty said, “maybe we can continue the discussion in my bar if we get out of this. But the bottom line for now, if I’m hearing you right, is that, narrative-wise, Red is killing us.”
“We have been a little distracted,” Arjun said, showing a bit of defensiveness for the first time.
“By what Red did, you mean,” Ty said. He was referring to the insertion of the peloton, Marge’s glorious return, and the lovey-dovey stuff between their delegation and the Diggers.
Arjun did not out-and-out disagree, but the look on his face was a bit impatient, the smart teacher working with the slow pupil. “More by what they’ve been doing. For a while now.”
“Well,” Ty said, “as a mere bartender, I wouldn’t know about anything other than what is on the news feeds. So tell me. What have they been doing?”
“What do you know about the Kulak?”
“What any civilian lacking a security clearance would know,” Ty answered carefully. “People are assumed to be living in the fist part of it.”
“Kulak” was Russian for “fist.” In this context it denoted an irregular lump of nickel-iron some thirty kilometers across. A hundred and fifty years ago, Red had moved it from the Kamchatka boneyard to a position above the Makassar Strait, where it had orbited ever since. Like a loosely clenched fist, it had a cavity down the middle, a tunnel now presumed to be lined with rotating habitats. Red’s answer to the Great Chain.
“Then there’s the rigging and spars whatnot surrounding that,” Ty went on. For the fist, viewed from a distance, seemed to be tangled in a sparse web of cables, like a seed in a spiderweb. Above and below—to the nadir and zenith sides—these converged on hard points to which the long cables extending down to Earth’s surface and up to the counterweight—the Antimakassar—were attached.
Sonar Taxlaw, a few meters away, had been engaged in a public display of affection with Einstein, but withdrew slightly and turned her head to listen.
Ty had grown accustomed to her ways. It was because he had said “spars.” That was between Sonar and Taxlaw in the Encyclop?dia Britannica, and thus belonged to her domain of knowledge. During their hike over the mountains and down the other side, she had turned out to be well informed, at least by troglodyte standards, about space exploration and the sun. So it had been easy to bring her up to speed on the last five thousand years’ off-planet developments. She now began to drift toward Ty. Einstein followed her as if his eyes were connected to her butt cheeks with fishhooks.
Oblivious to all this—for he had his back to it—Arjun was regarding him coolly, expecting more. Ty went on: “The part on the surface—their answer to Cradle—we don’t know much about. They’ve been building it under the sea.”
“They call it the Gnomon,” Arjun informed him. Then he spelled the word out.
“What does it mean?”
“It used to be the thing that stood up in the middle of a sundial, to cast the shadow. Aligned with the Earth’s axis.”
Ty considered it. “Interesting choice of words.”
“It’s big, Ty. Much bigger than Cradle. There’s a reason they’ve been building it in the ocean. Partly to hide it from us. And partly because it’s too large to construct on terra firma.”
“How big are we talking about exactly?”
“There is only so much I’m at liberty to say,” Arjun said. Then he drew out a tablet and began tapping at it, pulling up a world map, panning and zooming toward the mess of islands between Southeast Asia and Australia. “But just look at this and tell me what you see.” He handed it to Ty.
“Southeast Asia!” exclaimed the Cyc, who had drawn close enough to see all of this over Arjun’s shoulder. “Is there anything you would care to know of it? Or of Sulawesi? Or of Sri Lanka?”
The Ivyn regarded her with fascination.
“I don’t need to look,” Ty said. “I know what’s there. The equator runs through all of that and rarely crosses over the land, and Red never stops whining about it.”
“Not true! Sumatra . . .” said the Cyc.
“A big island to be sure,” Ty said, “but not a continent. Do you remember, Sonar, what I told you about how the Eye works? What Cradle does?”
“Touches the equator,” she returned.
“And only the equator. Which is great if you control Africa and South America. Which Blue does. But most of Red’s territory lies north or south of the line.”
Sonar wasn’t going to be talked down so easily. “Singapore is close,” she said, “and that is connected to Asia.”
“The former location of Singapore is close, yes. But not on the equator. It’s one or two degrees north. Cradle can’t dock there.”