anchormen introduced him. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning rod for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.
In academic settings, such as when he was keynoting astronomical meetings and writing papers, he was, of course, Dr. Harris.
The moon blew up while he was attending a fund-raising reception in the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum. At the beginning of the evening it was a fiercely cold bluish-white disk rising above the Chino Hills. Lay observers would fancy it a good night for moon watching, at least by Southern California standards, but Dr. Harris’s professional eye saw a thin border of fuzz around its rim and knew that aiming a telescope at it would be pointless. At least if the objective were to do science. Public relations was another matter; operating more in his Doc Dubois persona, he occasionally organized star parties where amateur astronomers would set their telescopes up in Eaton Canyon Park and aim them at crowd-pleasing targets such as the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. Tonight would be a fine night for that.
But that wasn’t what he was doing. He was drinking good red wine with rich persons, mostly from the tech industry, and being Doc Dubois, the affable science popularizer of television and of four million Twitter followers. Doc Dubois knew how to size up his audience. He knew that self-made tech zillionaires liked to argue, that Pasadena aristocracy didn’t, and that society wives liked to be lectured to, as long as the lectures were brief and funny. And he knew that his job was to charm these people, nothing more, so that they could later be handed off to professional fund-raisers.
He was going back to the bar for another glass of the pinot noir, fully in the Doc Dubois persona, slapping shoulders and bumping fists and exchanging grins, when a man gasped. Everyone looked at him. Doob was afraid that the poor guy had been struck by a stray bullet or something. He was frozen, poised on one leg, gazing up. A woman followed his gaze and screamed.
And Doob became one of perhaps a few million people around the dark half of the planet all looking up into the sky, in a state of shock so profound as to shut off the parts of the brain responsible for higher functions like talking. His first thought, given that they were in Greater Los Angeles, was that they were looking at a black projection screen that had been stealthily hoisted into the air above the neighboring property, and were seeing a Hollywood special effect thrown onto it by a concealed projector. No one had informed him that any such stunt was under way, but perhaps it was some incredibly bizarre fund-raising gambit, or part of a movie production.
When he came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs. Including his. The birth cry of a new age.
IVY XIAO WAS IN OVERALL COMMAND OF IZZY AND SPENT ALMOST all of her time in the torus, partly because her office was there and partly because she was more susceptible to space sickness than she liked to admit. That physical separation—Ivy back in the torus, Dinah up in the forward end, close to Amalthea—was symbolic, in many people’s minds, of a difference between them that didn’t really exist. Other contrasts were obvious enough, beginning with the physical: Ivy was four inches taller, with long black hair that she kept under control usually by braiding it and trapping the braid under the collar of her jumpsuit. She had the build of a volleyball player. Raised in Los Angeles, the only child of high-strung parents, Ivy had SATed, science faired, and spiked her way to Annapolis, then followed that up with a Ph.D. in applied physics from Princeton. Only then had the navy demanded the years of service that she owed it in return for her tuition. After learning how to pilot helicopters, she had spent most of that time in the astronaut program, in whose ranks she had risen quickly. Unlike most astronauts, who were mission specialists—scientists or engineers carrying out specific tasks after the launch vehicle had reached orbit—Ivy, with her training as a pilot, was a flight specialist as well, meaning that she knew how to fly rockets. The days of the Space Shuttle were long over, so there was no need to joystick a winged vehicle back to a runway. But docking and maneuvering spacecraft in orbit was a good clean match for someone with the motor control of a chopper pilot and the mathematical mind of a physicist.
The pedigree was intimidating, even off-putting to people who were impressed by such things. Dinah, who wasn’t, cared little one way or the other. Her informal behavior toward Ivy was interpreted by some observers as disrespectful. Two very different women in conflict with each other made for a more dramatic story than what was actually true. They were continually bemused by the efforts made by Izzy personnel, and their handlers on the ground, to heal the nonexistent rift between them. Or, what was a lot less funny, to exploit it in the pursuit of byzantine political schemes.
Four hours after the moon blew up, Dinah and Ivy and the other ten crew members of the International Space Station had a meeting in the Banana, which was what they called the longest uninterrupted section in the spinning torus. Most of the torus was chopped up into segments short enough that the brain could talk the eye into believing that the floor was flat and that gravity always pointed in the same direction. But the Banana was long enough to make it obvious that the floor was in fact curved through about fifty degrees of arc from one end to the other. “Gravity” at one end of it was aimed in a different direction from that at the other end. Accordingly, the long conference table that ran down its length was curved too. People entering into one end looked “uphill” to the opposite end, but experienced no sensation of climbing as they moved toward it. New arrivals tended to expect that anything placed elsewhere on the table would roll and slide down toward them.
The walls were pale yellow. The usual collection of malfunctioning audiovisual equipment purported to show live video streams of people on the ground, in theory enabling them to teleconference with colleagues in Houston, Baikonur, or Washington.
When the meeting began at A+0.0.4 (zero years, zero days, and four hours since the Agent had acted upon the moon), nothing was working, and so the occupants of Izzy had a few minutes to talk among themselves while Frank Casper and Jibran Haroun wiggled connectors, typed commands into computers, and rebooted everything. Relatively new arrivals to Izzy, Frank and Jibran had made the mistake of letting on that they were good at that sort of thing, so they always got saddled with it. Both of them were more comfortable with it anyway than with making chitchat.
“Primordial singularity” were the first words Dinah heard upon gliding into the room. Gravity here was only one-tenth of that on Earth, and “walking” wasn’t the right word for how people moved around—it was halfway between that and flying, a sort of long, bounding gait.
The words had been spoken by Konrad Barth, a German astronomer. It was clear from how the others reacted that Ivy, who was sitting directly across the table from him, was the only other person in the Banana who had the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“And that is?” Dinah asked, since that sort of thing had become her role. Others tended to be so worshipful of Ivy, or so reluctant to show ignorance, that they wouldn’t ask.
“A small black hole.”
“Why ‘primordial’?”
“Most black holes are formed when stars collapse,” Ivy said. “But there’s a theory that some of them were created shortly after the Big Bang. The universe was lumpy. Some of the lumps might have been dense enough to undergo gravitational collapse. They could form black holes that instead of weighing what a star weighs could be a lot smaller.”
“How small?”
“I don’t think there’s a lower limit. But the point is that one of them could zip through space invisibly and punch all the way through a planet and out the other side. There used to be a theory that the Tunguska event was caused by one, but it’s been disproved.”
Dinah
