“Might actually believe their shit?”

“Exactly.”

“So Red did broadcast it.”

Arjun nodded. “Live, to the whole ring.”

“Sorry I missed the show. We bolted before the actual contact. It seemed like as good a time as any.”

“That was a fine tactic,” Arjun replied, “and saved you a great deal of annoyance.”

“How do you mean?”

Arjun turned to look directly at him. “The Diggers,” he said, “were as receptive to Red’s overtures as they were hostile to yours.”

Ty felt something in his chest. The awareness that he had failed, and that people knew it. It was not a feeling to which he was accustomed, and he did not like it. “So,” he said, “the Diggers ate it up?”

“They signed an alliance with Red on the spot. Red recognized their claim to the entire land surface of Earth and urged Blue to follow suit.”

“Just as a matter of basic human decency,” Ty said sourly.

“Of course. The saber-rattling began the next day . . .”

Esa Arjun broke off as he noticed, and focused on, Sonar Taxlaw, who was standing next to Einstein, who was telling her how the gliders worked. Ty had grown used to it; all those two did the whole time they were awake was explain things to each other. But it was new to Arjun.

“She’s the . . .” Arjun said, and trailed off. Ty tried to put himself in Arjun’s shoes: laying eyes on a rootstock human for the first time in his life, seeing someone who was clearly human and yet not of any identifiable human race, thinking about all that her ancestors had lived through.

“Yeah,” Ty said.

Arjun managed to snap out of his reverie and looked back at Ty. “The narrative being put out is that you abducted her.”

“Of course.”

Einstein said something funny. The Cyc laughed and leaned into him affectionately. His arm found its way around her waist, the hand sliding down to the hip.

“Are those two . . .” Arjun began.

“Fucking? Not yet. But only because we’ve been on the run.”

“The Diggers, from what intelligence we’ve been able to scrape together, believe in strict gender roles and . . .”

“Not fucking. Yeah. I’ll talk to Einstein. Tell him to not fuck her.”

“But you didn’t . . .”

“Abduct her? No, she just tagged along.”

Sensing doubt, or at least curiosity, from the Ivyn, Ty continued: “And more would do the same given the chance. The transition to surface life is putting their culture through a blender. Which is why their leaders are being so reactionary.”

Arjun nodded. “And how’s your Moiran?”

Ty sighed. “She saw Doc and Memmie die, and suffered a blunt- force trauma to her arm, and was forced to draw her kat, and to use it. As soon as it happened she went into what I’m guessing is a classic POTESH.” This was military jargon for post-traumatic epigenetic shift.

“That is confirmed,” said Hope, who seemed to have finished an initial scan of Kath’s vital signs. “Higher metabolism and hyperacute senses are observable. Her microbiome is a mess; I’m tuning it up with probiotic supplements that’ll be a better fit with her new phenotype. Suggested by the nausea are big hormone shifts. Possibly predictive of some future . . .”

“Testosterone poisoning?” Ty suggested, finishing Hope’s thought. Hope responded with a diffident nod of the head.

Ty turned his attention back to Arjun. “So three billion people just learned that the Diggers exist. How are they taking it?”

“Well, obviously it is a sensational bit of news,” Arjun said. “People are intensely curious.” He turned his head again to study Sonar Taxlaw. “As am I. I admit it.”

“Does the general public know how badly the first contact went wrong?” Ty asked.

“None of the identities of your Seven are public knowledge. Certainly no one has the faintest idea that Hu Noah had anything to do with it.”

“So Red hasn’t been trumpeting that.”

“It wouldn’t be to Red’s advantage, as I see it,” Arjun said. “Now that they are allied with the Diggers, they want to make the Diggers out to be sympathetic. Revealing that they killed Hu Noah and his nurse would hardly serve that end.”

“So we are just being made out to be some sort of anonymous thug squad. The Diggers chased us off with help from Red. We abducted a hostage as we were running away.”

Arjun looked him in the eye. “No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.”

“But Blue hasn’t put out a countervailing narrative yet either.”

“It isn’t Blue’s strong suit.” Arjun sighed. “Never has been, right? We’re technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn’t always line up with what people imagine they want.”

“Are you speaking of Blue in general?” Ty asked. “Or Rio in particular?” Using the name of the Ivyn central habitat as synecdoche for its culture.

“Both. A Blue mentality that places us at the top of the decision-making pyramid. There’s a reason why the very few Aïdans who have become prominent in Blue have been musicians, actors, artists.”

“They’re supplying something our culture lacks,” Ty said.

“You were supposed to supply it,” Arjun said. Meaning, as Ty understood, the Dinan race. “And you did, during the heroic age.”

Ty could feel a not altogether cheerful smile on his face. “By actually doing things, you mean,” he said, “as opposed to pretending to do them in made-up entertainment programs.”

“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 Encyclopædia 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.