Seveneves: A Novel Read Free Page B

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 ofpeople 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 oneof 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 knew about that, because her dad liked to talk about it: a huge explosion in Siberia, a hundred years ago, that had knocked down millions of trees out in the middle of nowhere.
    “That was a big deal,” Dinah said, “but not enough to blow up the moon.”
    “To blow up the moon would take a bigger one, going faster,” Ivy said. “Look, it’s just a hypothesis.”
    “But it’s gone now?”
    “It would be long gone now. Like a bullet through an apple.”
    It struck Dinah as odd that they were talking about such an event so matter-of-factly. But there was no other way to address it. Emotions were not large enough to encompass such a thing. Besides, it was just a visual effect so far, like something seen in a movie with the sound turned off.
    “Is it going to affect the tides?” asked Lina Ferreira. As a marine biologist, Lina would naturally be somewhat concerned about the tides. “Since those are caused by the moon’s gravity?”
    “And by the sun’s,” Ivy added with a nod and a little smile. Which was why she was in charge of Izzy and Dinah wasn’t. She was willing to correct a Ph.D.