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Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate. The Great Chain had been likened more than once to the ancient board game of Monopoly. Some stretches of the loop were more high-rent, others less so. The pattern was interrupted in several places by special links, or short series of links, placed there to serve industrial and civic requirements, such as making the transit system work.

One of those was the Ramp Link, whose purpose was to make connections, every five minutes, with the On Ramp and the Off Ramp. Since the Great Chain was moving at about five hundred meters per second with respect to the nonrotating frame of the Eye, persons wishing to get from the latter to the former needed to be accelerated to a fairly spectacular velocity — almost Mach 1.5—before they could set foot on the Ramp, or any other, Link. And those wishing to dechain, as the expression had it, needed to be decelerated by the same amount. The acceleration and the deceleration were handled by machines built into a place on the rim of the “iris” of the Eye. Though some efforts had been made to camouflage their essential nature, they were really just guns for shooting humans, albeit humans strapped into comfortable, pressurized bullets.

Outside of the Great Chain, the rest of the Eye was lightly infested with human beings, heavily so with robots. Most of it existed in microgravity, since the entire contraption — Great Chain, tethers, and all — was in geosynchronous orbit, hence free fall, around Earth. As you moved away from its center, toward the two extremities of the Eye where the tethers emerged, you might begin to notice tidal forces, which would show up as very mild gravity-like tugs. These shifted whenever the Eye adjusted its orbit to move around the habitat ring, and people who spent a lot of time there could always feel in their bones when a move was under way, like Old Earthers predicting the weather in their knees.

The skeleton of the Eye was a simple space frame built in the Amalthean style, which was to say that it had been carved and shaped from existing material (Cleft) as opposed to fabricated from scratch. Aesthetically, it meant that the big structural elements had a rough-hewn, space-battered look about them, a bit like a log cabin with all the knots and bark still visible. Vacancies between the big structural elements had been filled in with giant machines, most notably several immense rotating masses whose purpose was to stabilize the whole Eye gyroscopically. The nooks and crannies between the machines had been caulked with pressurized spaces where humans could move about. Some of those rotated to produce simulated gravity; they were like miniature, torus-shaped space colonies pinned to a much bigger structure. Docking ports tended to cluster near those.

As Kath Two’s eyes closed into sleep, she was gazing at the usual ring-shaped formation of iridescent sparkles, so densely packed that they blended into each other on the varp. The Eye was a slightly larger white dot between twelve and one o’clock; it would have been difficult to see were it not for the long white line representing its tether system, which ran from just above Earth’s surface all the way through the big white dot and beyond to the Big Rock.

Their flivver’s trajectory, a sharp green ellipse, projected from where they were now (near Earth) all the way out to slightly beyond the ring before curving back in to intersect the Eye.

Through her eyelids she could see indistinct patterns, reminding her a little of the first thing she’d seen this morning: the flickering lights on the walls of her tent. But then the varp figured out that her eyes were closed and shut off the display.

When she opened her eyes, the varp noticed it and came back to life, rendering the display again. Generally it looked the same, but the Eye had moved a little bit, and the dot representing the flivver had covered most of the distance to the habitat ring. Zooming in, she could see the two habitats between which they were going to pass, and the much smaller rendering of the whip station between them, exercising its long hair-thin flagellum in preparation for their arrival. She must have slept for something like ten hours. Moirans were notorious for it. Remembering the looks she had exchanged earlier with Beled, she felt, then stifled, mild embarrassment over the fact that she had spent most of the journey snoring away.

She unstrapped and floated over to the zero-gee toilet at the end of the flivver’s cabin. When she emerged a few minutes later, she saw that Rhys was asleep, loosely strapped in before the control panel. Beled was still in his acceleration couch. He too had slipped on a varp, and she guessed from the way he was moving his hands and wiggling his fingers that he was working, as opposed to playing. He was probably filling out his Survey report. Which was what Kath Two ought to be doing.

They represented a civilization that had, during the Fourth Millennium, executed a plan to undo the damage caused by the Agent by identifying, cataloging, reaching, corralling, and revectoring millions of rocks in orbit around Earth, while also reaching as far as the Kuiper Belt to acquire chunks of frozen water and methane and ammonia and bring them home and smash them into the ruined planet. Essentially all of this work had been accomplished by robots. So much metal had gone into their construction that millions of humans now lived in space habitats whose steel hulls consisted entirely of melted down and reforged robot carcasses. It would have been easy for them to blanket the surface of New Earth with robots and, without ever sending down a single human being, perform a kind of survey: one that was heavy on data and light on judgment. In that version of the world, Kath Two and the others would have spent their lives in habitats, working at varps and mining data. All sorts of interesting philosophical arguments could have been framed as to whether that approach was better or worse than what they were in fact doing. But philosophy didn’t really enter into it. The decision to do it this way was driven partly by politics and partly by social mores.

On the political front it boiled down to the terms of Second Treaty, which, eighteen years ago, had terminated the second Red-Blue war, sometimes called the War in the Woods to distinguish it from the earlier War on the Rocks. The treaty imposed strict limitations on the number of robots that either side could send down to the surface. For that matter, it also limited the number of humans; but the upshot was that, given those limits, human surveyors could gather more useful information about conditions on New Earth than could robots beaming data up to the ring.

On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices.

To the extent that Blue had a definable culture, it tended to view technological aids with some ambivalence, a state of mind boiled down into the aphorism “Each enhancement is an amputation.” This was not so much a definable idea or philosophy as it was a prejudice, operant at a nearly subliminal level. It was traceable to certain parts of the Epic. In many of these, Tavistock Prowse played a role; he was seen as its literal embodiment in the sense that he had actually undergone a series of amputations, and been consumed as food, after throwing in his lot with the Swarm. Blue saw itself — according to cultural critics, defined itself — as the inheritors of the traditions of Endurance. By process of elimination, then, Red was the culture of the Swarm. A century and a half ago, Red had sealed itself off behind barriers both physical and cryptographic, so not much was known of its culture, but plenty of circumstantial evidence suggested that it had different Amistics from Blue. Specifically, the Reds were enthusiastic about personal technological enhancement.