Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  It was a blazing ball of ice and stone, viewed from the sunward side—with a great luminous tail that stretched outward from the surrounding gaseous coma, the tail blown not by the comet’s movement but by the streaming particles of the solar wind. The comet was a breathtaking sight, glowing through the filters and lenses of the telescope. It looked like an angel, or a cosmic sign, anything but a planet killer.

  Overtaken by sudden self-doubt, Bandicut ran a new computer analysis of the comet’s orbit, urgently trying to see if it really was going to hit the Earth. His measurements were uncertain, and he could see the comet emitting jets of solar-heated gas, which were bound to affect its trajectory, even if very slightly. But he suddenly had to know: Was he doing this for nothing? Did he really have to throw away his life? Or . . . was it possible he could veer away from collision, and ride herd on the comet all the way to Earth? Instead of dying, perhaps he could return home . . .

  /// John— ///

  croaked the quarx.

  He calculated furiously, the fugue pushing back the bee-swarm of the translator-stones in his head, and he found that his results fell short of proving what he needed to know. The comet was going to make a terrifyingly close encounter with Earth . . . but would it be a collision? Was the translator right? Would the jets change the comet’s course enough to slam it into his home planet? Was it conclusive enough to die for?

  He wondered if authorities on Earth had realized the risk yet, wondered if they had called for evacuations or preparations, wondered if they had gotten his messages, wondered if they believed him even if they had. He couldn’t listen to any broadcasts while they were threading space; anyway, he doubted that they even had an antenna left on the ship. He wondered if he would know, afterward, if he had succeeded in destroying the comet. He lobbed his wondering thoughts, like glowing coals, at Charlie, but the quarx answered with stony silence; he was hunkered down, saving his strength.

  The calculations had left Bandicut breathless with indecision. Probably the translator was right . . . but what if it wasn’t? Couldn’t he wait just a little longer and see?

  The quarx stirred feebly.

  /// John . . . ///

  If he plunged into the comet, he would never know for sure. He longed for a chance to run a deep simulation in neurolink . . .

  /// John . . .

  I’m going to do something . . .

  to stretch out your . . . apparent time flow

  . . . to give you more time to . . . react . . .

  at the end. ///

  They were beyond the orbit of Mercury, outward velocity in excess of two-tenths of lightspeed. He switched to the low-power telescope and began nudging the translator into small corrections as he tried to peer through the vapor shroud surrounding the comet’s core. They needed to penetrate that vapor shroud; it was the nucleus in the center they would have to hit, in order to destroy the comet.

  The time-shift hit him, with a sudden feeling that his fingers were moving like molasses. A bitterly icy calm swept over him, even in the heat of the fugue. He’d played this game of EineySteiney dozens of times in his mind already—the sudden veers and accelerations that might be needed to zero in on the target. It always played out just right in the fever of his imagination. In real life it would be harder—orbital docking maneuvers were tricky, even at slow speeds. But he still had Charlie with him, and Charlie was the best EineySteiney player in the universe, and even if he screwed up, the quarx could do it.

  If he decided to do it. He peered at the comet and imagined Neptune Explorer moving in a nice, slow pirouette around it, escorting it to safety. He listened as the planets murmured with uncertainty at his thoughts, and broke into scattered applause.

  Now he was gazing straight out the window at the comet. It had grown, in direct view, from a pinpoint to a luminous, vapor-shrouded tennis ball.

  /// Are you . . . ready . . . John? ///

  He nodded absently. He felt a growing tingle in his mind, and a burning in his wrists, and the fugue-state was in the full flower of heat and . . . this was it . . . he felt the time-shift kick in even more powerfully . . . he watched his own eyes blink like shades rolling up and down . . . and it was dizzying, but he knew that they were falling toward the comet at a fabulous speed . . . falling . . . but not too late to veer off . . .

  The quarx suddenly convulsed, and he felt a sickening shudder.

  /// John . . . oh, mokin’ foke . . . ///

  /Punch it in, Charlie,/ he whispered. /You take it. It’s your shot./

  The comet grew astonishingly fast now, slowed time sense or no. Wisps of vapor were obscuring the stars beyond . . . in a moment they would be in whiteout, inside the vapor envelope.

  /// Ohhhhhhhhhh . . . . . ///

  He felt more than heard the wail, reverberating off the walls of his consciousness, and then he heard the quarx’s voice echoing off into a great distance. /Charlie? CHARLIE?/

  /// The con . . . . . . is yours . . . . . .

  do it . . . . . . for both of us . . . . . . ///

  He felt a gasp of breath go out; it was his own, and yet not. Something went silent inside him, and he felt a bottomless emptiness where the quarx had been, like a well into forever. /CHARRLIIIE!/ he screamed. /CHARLIE! GOD DAMN YOU!/

  The fugue snapped away, leaving him breathless but clear-headed. Was he going to destroy the comet or not? The hard ball in his stomach told him: of course, he had no choice. He could not wait and see; he and the comet were flying headlong toward each other and he had only this chance and no other.

  He stared at the growing coma, holding his terror at arm’s length. The stars were gone, there was nothing except white cloud before him, and an enormous, planet-busting nucleus of ice and rock somewhere inside it, and he was still threading space, accelerating. He wanted to curse, and weep, but his wrists were on fire, telling him that the translator was waiting, he was at the controls . . . and the retarded time-sense could give him only a precious few moments to think.

  In the whiteout he searched for the killing form of the nucleus. His fear and despair churned through him, then fled. He glimpsed his parents and brother and sister-in-law for the last time; and Dakota, hunched over her sims; and Julie, eyes wide and blue and intense; and he felt a final piercing grief . . .

  And then the dark nucleus of the comet tumbled out of the fog into view, and it was off course to the right, and they were about to miss it. The translator-stones flashed, and he gave the ship a hard kick; but the time-shift was deceptive, and he overcorrected and had to kick sharply back the other way. That was it; he had it right. He felt an upwelling of light around him as the translator-stones unfolded to transform the kinetic energy of the collision . . .

  The nucleus lunged toward him, and he knew then that he was going to die. It mushroomed into an enormous mountain blocking his way. For a timeless instant, he seemed to hang directly in front of it, as though he might hang there for a cosmic forever; then, without any sense of the movement of time, he slammed into the mountain like a hydrogen bomb. He felt the hellish light and energy of a small sun, blazing into space; he was aware of it, but coldly, dimly, aware of time frozen, aware of his body and soul bathed in the fire of a trillion-megaton explosion.

  Then the daughter-stones blossomed into cool, iridescent halos, and all consciousness was taken from him.

   Chapter 31 

  Translation

  IT WAS THE quiet of a dream, the quiet of death. He was lost in darkness, he was plunging into the core of a sun. Darkness and light, all soundless. An explosion, frozen in eternity. This was the afterlife, said a quiet part of his soul, and no one spoke up to disagree. He was surrounded by bursts of fire, concentric rings, in colors he had never known. He was falling through them, or perhaps floating motionless, and these ethereal crowns of light were falling past him.

  It was impossib
le to tell.

  Impossible to understand.

  He was submerged in a deep ocean of surprise. Never a firm believer in an afterlife, he had always assumed that if there were an afterlife, then some loved one would be there to greet him. Mom? he thought absently. But there was no Mom. There was only the fierce, strobelike movement of the rings of fire, in colors he did not know.

  He remembered a comet . . . and a creature not human . . . but his thoughts were like chunks of ice in a packed floe, vibrating with energy, but too jammed together to move.

  A little later he wondered, could this be silence-fugue instead of death? He remembered silence-fugue. But there was no feeling of madness, exactly. Time and space didn’t quite seem to exist around him, or perhaps they too were frozen. And yet he was aware of a sense of passage, and suddenly it seemed to him that time was crinkling around him, like a crystal shattering in slow motion. What did that mean?

  *Annihilation.*

  The thought appeared in his mind, unbidden, unspoken.

  He was aware of two points of light blazing close by, pulsing, one white as diamond and one coal-red out of blackness. He felt a burning pain.

  *Transformation.*

  Bewildered, he stared at flickering zigzag images, like fractals forming and disrupting, dancing at the periphery of his awareness. What? he whispered into the silence and emptiness of silence-fugue, or death.