“Well, there are the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One,” Sonar said. “The Ten are the Micropædia. Many short articles. The Nineteen are the Macropædia: longer, more in-depth articles. The One is the Propædia, the Outline.”
“Which category do you belong to?”
Einstein, walking ahead of them down the slope, wheeled around. “She already told us she was volume seventeen!” Normally good-natured, he was being unusually chippy all of a sudden. He returned his attention to the rocky terrain in front of him, displaying a flushed neck beneath his ponytail.
“Excuse me,” Ty said. Then, turning back to the Cyc, he asked, “Is that just luck of the draw? Or—”
“No!”
Of course not.
“The older Cycs started me on smaller books, to evaluate me.”
“When? At what age did they start you?”
“When it was decided that I was not a breeder.”
Einstein turned around again, this time so suddenly that he lost his footing and fell on his ass. The reaction was so outsized that Ty had to look away from it lest he break out laughing. But this brought Langobard into his line of sight, and the Neoander was in similar trouble. The two men had to stop walking and turn their backs on each other for a few moments just to keep their composure.
“If I can just anticipate some questions that I believe may be uppermost in young Einstein’s mind,” Langobard said, “would it be untoward of me to inquire what, precisely, makes you ‘not a breeder’?”
The Cyc shrugged, staring down the mountain toward the Pacific Ocean as if she had not given the topic very much thought recently. “I know not. Of mean stature? Nothing special to behold? On the spectrum?”
“For context,” Ty asked, “how many young women out of ten are designated as breeders?”
“Four, maybe?”
“So being a nonbreeder is more common than being a breeder,” Ty said, for Einstein’s benefit.
“Of course, now that we have come out of the Hole, and we have more space, more people are breeding,” Sonar said. “I speak of how it was ten years ago.”
She had earlier told them that she was sixteen. “Okay. So they think they know enough about you at the age of six to make that determination. They start you out on easier books. Then what?”
“If you can read at all, you just start reading the whole Cyc.”
“And so that’s why you know stuff about radio, and epicanthic folds, and other topics not in volume seventeen.”
“Yes. You have to read the whole thing. By ten, they decide whether you are Micropædia or Macropædia quality.”
“Is one of those more prestigious than the other?”
“Of course!” Sonar exclaimed, without bothering to say which was which.
“I’ll bet the Micropædia is just like memorizing a bunch of trivia,” Einstein essayed. Somewhat dangerously, in case he guessed wrong. But love had made him impetuous.
“Yes, you have to be able to hold more in your head to be one of the Nineteen,” Sonar said, favoring Einstein with a warm gaze.
“So, did you have to kill the previous Sonar Taxlaw in single combat or something?” Ty asked, and immediately thought better of it, since in general Diggers did not seem to have a well-developed sense of humor. Einstein threw him a mean look.
“No, not in this case,” the Cyc said politely, leaving open the question of in what cases the Diggers did actually employ such methods. “My mentor was Ceylon Congreve.”
“Now, that is a lovely and distinguished name!” Langobard exclaimed. “Volume three?”
“Four,” she said, with a note of surprise in her voice, as if not quite able to believe that someone could not know this.
“Do the original paper copies still exist?” Ty asked.
“Oh, yes,” Sonar said, “but we handle them only on ceremonial occasions. We work with handwritten copies.”
“Rufus must have squirreled away a lot of paper.”
“Tons of it,” said the Cyc. “Acid-free, one hundred percent cotton.”
During their nighttime escape over the mountains, they’d had little time for such conversations, and so their knowledge of Digger culture was still spotty. Some reasonable guesses could be made simply from the known history of the Hard Rain. The phase known as the Cooling Off had not begun until some thirty-nine hundred years after Zero, when the human races’ efforts to police the lunar rubble belt had finally paid off with a sharp falloff in the number of bolides striking the surface. Until then, the Diggers had been obliged to maintain a small, steady population in the space that Rufus had provided. Expansion of the Hole had been limited by the fact that it was a sealed system, with no place to put spoil — the quantities of loose material created by digging. As anyone knew who had ever dug a hole in the ground with a shovel, the size of the dirt pile — the spoil — was always larger than the volume of the hole. They’d been able to dump some spoil down a deep and otherwise useless shaft, but once this had been filled, they’d been unable to expand their living space for as long as the Hard Rain had made a direct connection to the outside too dangerous to be contemplated. So during that phase — well over three thousand years — they had devoted all of their energies to maintaining a community of several hundred people. Hence the rigid controls on breeding. Thanks to their Cycs, they knew everything about contraception, but they had no ability to manufacture things like condoms and pills, so that lore was mostly useless. The limitations on breeding were enforced by moral strictures, by segregation of the sexes, and by surgical sterilization. This, like all of their surgery, was performed without chemical anesthesia once they’d run out of drugs, which occurred fairly soon after Zero. Apparently they had gotten rather good at acupuncture and at biting down on things.
The reduction in the intensity of the Hard Rain would have been obvious to them on one level, since they could hear the impacts through the walls of the Hole. On another level it was easy to miss, since even dramatic changes spanned generations. But they had kept meticulous records of the frequency and intensity of strikes and so they recognized the downward trend in the late Fourth Millennium. When it was adjudged safe, they drilled an adit — a horizontal tunnel — out the side of the mountain until it broke out of a slope that they guessed was steep enough to have shed ejecta, preventing the buildup of rocky debris that now covered most of Earth’s surface to a considerable depth. That much had been true, but the debris at the base of the mountain had piled higher than they had expected — almost high enough to block the opening of their adit. Anyway, it had worked well enough that they had been able to push spoil out of it and thus begin expanding the Hole. The atmosphere was still far from breathable, so they’d been obliged to keep it sealed when they were not actively dumping stuff out of it, to prevent fumes from seeping in and poisoning the atmospheric system that they had looked after so meticulously for nearly four thousand years. This system, it seemed, was similar in principle to those used on space habitats. Carbon dioxide was removed by a combination of chemical scrubbers and green plants. Both of these required energy: the scrubber chemical had to be heated to drive off the CO2 it had absorbed, and the plants required light. Since they were cut off from the sun, they got their energy geothermally, using works that Rufus and the others of his generation had sunk deep into the roots of the mountain. The maintenance of this system had been the full-time occupation of everyone in the Hole for the entire time they’d been down there. When they had neared the end of their stock of light-emitting diodes they had revived the art of making lightbulbs, consulting the Cyc for particulars, blowing artisanal glass envelopes and winding the filaments by hand. Likewise with many other things they had found themselves in need of.