Seveneves. Neal Stephenson

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      “Aren’t you supposed to be building a torus?” she demanded, and turned around to give him her best attempt at a killing look.

      “First we have to solve this problem,” he said gently.

      She had more to say, but instead she went silent. Rhys was clowning around with his necklace again. He was in the habit of wearing a chain around his neck—nothing fancy or bulky, just a simple loop of twisted-link jewelry chain in stainless steel, which he used as a way to keep thumb drives and other important small objects from floating away. At the moment, though, he had removed all of that stuff, leaving the chain unencumbered, and he had got it spinning around his neck. It had opened up into a broad, undulating oval that didn’t touch his neck or collar anywhere, so it was just orbiting around him in free space. Dinah had seen him do this before, typically while bored in meetings. He had learned a few tricks for speeding it up and coaxing it into different shapes by blowing on it with a drinking straw or flicking it with a fingernail. It didn’t form a perfect circle, as one might expect. The moving train of links could be molded into almost any shape, and would stay that way until disturbed. When Dinah turned around and noticed he was doing it again, she was about to roll her eyes and say something like For fuck’s sake can’t you do anything useful with that brain, but the look on Rhys’s face suggested that he was up to something more than just playing around.

      The chain had been running in an elongated racetrack shape, nearly buzzing his neck on one turn, but he flicked at the straightaways and broadened it into something approaching a circle, then ducked out of it, leaving the loop spinning in midair. “Channeling the wisdom of my ancestors, if you must know,” he said.

      “You had ancestors in zero gee?”

      “Alas, no. My great-great-great-great-uncle John Aitken was an eccentric Victorian meteorologist with an even more eccentric hobby: studying the physics of moving chains. Unfortunately for him, he had to do it in his drawing room in Falkirk, where there is, I’m sorry to say, gravity. He had to approximate this sort of thing”—Rhys nodded at the whirring loop of chain—“by building exceedingly clever machines.”

      “Then he must have been a clever man indeed.”

      “Fellow of the Royal Society and friend of Lord Kelvin, since you mentioned it. Do you see where I’m going?”

      “Well, a minute ago you gave me a fat clue by suggesting that I turn off all of the motors in the Siwi train. Were I to do that, it would go completely limp and become, for all practical purposes, a length of chain.”

      “Yes,” Rhys drawled, and poked an index finger up into the chain’s path. It caught on his knuckle, hiccupped, and suddenly wrapped around his hand in a chaotic tangle.

      “That’s confidence-inspiring,” Dinah said.

      “Hold on, it turns out my uncle John knew a few things. And later on, another chap, name of Kucharski, in Berlin, worked on this stuff too.” Rhys was untangling the chain, looking for its clasp. When he found it, he undid it, converting the chain from a loop into a segment about as long as his arm. “Unfortunately there’s gravity in Berlin too, so he had to do stuff like this on tables. Hold it right there, would you please?” And he got Dinah to pinch the middle of the chain between her fingers, keeping it fixed in space. From there, he drew the two ends back toward himself, forming the chain into a skinny, elongated U. “You can let go now, gently.”

      Dinah released the chain and allowed herself to float back from it, since Rhys had taken on something of the air of a magician in performance. He let go of one of the ends, kept the other grasped between his thumb and index finger. “What happens if I pull?” he asked. “Any predictions?”

      “The whole thing will move back toward you, I guess.”

      “Let’s try it. Hold your finger up just there.”

      Dinah pointed “up” and allowed Rhys to reach out with his free hand and grasp her gently by the wrist, arranging her hand so that the finger was several inches away from the vertex of the U-shaped bend in the chain. “Here goes nothing,” he said, and began to pull the chain toward him—away from Dinah. Contrary to what she’d expected, the bend started to propagate away from Rhys, and toward Dinah, until finally the free end hurtled around, like a whip cracking, and made several quick turns around her finger, snaring her. “Gotcha,” he said, and began pulling her toward him.

      “Just like a bullwhip,” she observed, unwinding the chain from her finger too late to avoid being drawn into close, cozy contact with Rhys.

      “It is exactly the same physics,” he confirmed. “Kucharski called that thing—the traveling U-shaped bend—a Knickstelle. It means something like ‘kink place.’”

      “Chains, whips, and now kinks. I’m learning so much about your Victorian ancestors, Rhys.”

      “You probably thought this was a mere diversion,” he said.

      “Oh, no. I see your point. Rather than trying to control the Siwi chain, like a tentacle, all clenching muscles, let it relax and whip around the Luk like a smart chain.”

      This little digression into nineteenth-century physics turned out to be one of those “one step back, five steps forward” sorts of trades. It was the work of a few minutes to concatenate four more Siwis onto the existing chain, then turn off all the motors except a few that she used to fashion a U-shaped bend. Applying tension to one end of it caused the Knickstelle to propagate just as in Rhys’s demonstration, so that the end of the chain whipped lazily around the entire circumference of the Luk. Several attempts were required before the grappler at the end of the chain was able to snag a handhold on the far side, but then the Luk was securely captured in the chain’s embrace. Grabbs could scuttle along it carrying the ends of cables anchored to other parts of Amalthea, or Izzy, and thus the Luk was gradually ensnared in a loose web of hardware that Dinah used to draw it away from the position where it had been anchored, and pull it up snug against the module containing Dinah’s shop. As it came closer, the vague nimbus of white light thrown against the Luk by the LED in the airlock narrowed and sharpened, and was finally all but snuffed out as the big balloon enveloped the protruding stub of the airlock chamber. The airlock was now poking into the nested layers of the Luk like a finger prodding a balloon.

      Even after the success of the whip-cracking gambit, this took most of a day. Rhys drifted off, as was his habit. Bo, the Mongolian cosmonaut, slipped into Dinah’s shop, observed silently for a couple of hours, and then began finding ways to make herself useful. She learned how to use the data glove and the mouse-and-keyboard interface just by watching Dinah, and by the end of the day was piloting Grabbs around, and manipulating Siwis, like an old hand.

      Margie Coghlan showed up to watch the final preparations. She was an Australian physiologist who had been sent up to Izzy a few months ago to study the effects of spaceflight on human health. Dinah had always found her a little brusque, but maybe that was just an Australian thing. She brought with her a box of medical supplies and surgical equipment. All the astronauts on the ISS had medical training. Dinah and Ivy had done their time working in Houston emergency rooms stitching up trauma victims and setting bones. But Margie was the best.

      “Not exactly what you signed on for,” Dinah said.

      “None of us is getting what we signed on for,” Margie observed.

      “With the possible exception of Tekla,” said another voice. Ivy’s. She was not in Dinah’s shop—that was full now with Dinah, Bo, and Margie—but she was in the adjacent SCRUM.

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