Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “I still am—in a way,” Alten said. “And Martin’s attending his classes in Higgs field theory. I can’t object to that, can I?”

  Nina tugged at Joorn’s hand. “Are you talking about Uncle Delbert?” she chimed.

  Joorn tried not to show his surprise. Alten was not as successful. “What is this ‘Uncle Delbert’ business?” he said.

  “He said I could sit at the back of his class in quantum point motion if I was quiet.” She giggled. “He calls it quantum jitters. And afterward he stayed to explain quantum field theory, and he gave me a copy of his book. He said that he and Grandpa were best friends when they were Martin’s age.”

  Joorn and Alten exchanged a worried look, but Nina was already lost in dreamy contemplation of the Milky Way again.

  “I don’t trust him,” Alten said. “He’s up to something.”

  “What could he do?” Joorn shrugged. “We reached our terminal velocity a long time ago, and we’ve been coasting ever since, albeit at almost the speed of a photon. We did it just in time to avoid zipping past our target as Karn had planned. Now it’s just about time for Chu to start decelerating so that we can enter the Sun-Alpha Centauri system at nonrelativistic speeds. There would be no point in Karn and Oliver trying anything after we shed enough delta-v.”

  “Karn’s had a long time to brood.”

  “He’s bitter,” Joorn agreed. “He’s still lobbying the council to live up to my original bargain with him and let him and his followers have the module with the Higgs drive after we get settled. But Ryan won’t have any of it. He’s said more than once that Karn’s mutiny when we discovered Oliver’s deception back at the 3C-295 flag post canceled his original bargain with me.”

  “The trouble is that half the council is too young to remember the mutiny. To them it’s just an old story told by their fuddy-duddy parents—probably nothing more than an exaggeration of a policy dispute with the Homegoing faction. Karn is playing on their sympathy. He’s presenting himself as the bold dreamer once again, the iconoclast who’s being deprived of his dream by his political enemies. And some of them are buying it. They have no memory of Earth. Or of Rebirth, for that matter. Time’s Beginning is their Universe. And I’m sure that some of them even entertain secret fantasies of going with Karn on his journey to nowhere.

  “We won Time’s Beginning fair and square,” Alten continued. “Karn and Oliver lost, and they’d better get used to it. Lord knows, we can put all the ship’s resources, including the Higgs drive, to good use. After we find a congenial world—hopefully in the Sol-Centauri system itself—and don’t see any need to go star-hopping again, we might decide to give him the Higgs module anyway. Then, for all we care, that whole bunch could take off for the end of the Universe in any direction they choose. The so-called edge is the same distance from anywhere, if you subscribe to the theory that the Universe is just a three-dimensional skin of a brane that’s a closed system, like a higher dimensional version of a sphere. So there’d be no need for them to use up more lifetime by retracing their steps to our former starting point in 3C-273. They’d have to start building gamma from scratch here in the Local Group, true, but that was the bargain they made with you on Rebirth, like it or not.”

  “Karn may not see it that way. He’s obsessed about getting old. He lost a big chunk of lifetime getting to 3C-273 and back. He’s afraid he’ll die before he gets to see his Valhalla.”

  “Nonsense. I spoke to Dr. Hahn at the parole committee just last week, and Karn’s telomere treatments are going just fine. He’ll live to be two hundred, like everybody else. And if he doesn’t—well, that was the same chance he took when we started out six billion years ago.”

  “I’d better have a talk with Karn before this gets out of hand. There’s no way I’m going to accept Miles Oliver as my first officer. Chu’s perfectly willing to go back to his old job, and we’ve still got some tricky maneuvers to go through before we’re home free. I don’t like this business of Oliver lobbying the council. And I don’t want him thinking that there’s the slightest chance that we’d ever trust him again.”

  “I’ll get together with Ryan,” Alten said. “Have him speak to the council’s younger members.”

  At that moment, they suddenly became weightless, and everybody automatically grabbed for a handhold. Irina reached for her daughter’s shoulder and steadied her. Joorn was abruptly aware that the subtle thrumming of the Higgs drive had ceased.

  “Chu’s preparing for turnaround,” he said.

  Nina wriggled free of her mother’s grasp and found a handhold of her own. She turned to her grandfather and said hopefully, “Are we there yet?”

  Karn hadn’t aged well. His face was gaunt and wintry, and he was starting to acquire a stoop. When Joorn entered he was sitting at a keyboard facing a hugely magnified display that was splashed over an entire wall. As soon as he was aware of Joorn, he stabbed at his keyboard and the wall display winked out. “It’s been quite a long time since you’ve deigned to visit me, Joorn,” he said. “What brings you here today?”

  “We need to have a talk, Delbert.”

  “What for? The last time I saw you, you made it painfully clear that we no longer have anything to talk about.”

  Joorn’s retinal memory retained the flash of enlarged numbers he’d seen in the fraction of a second before Karn succeeded in erasing the display. It was a star table of some sort, and he’d managed to catch the labels “Tau Ceti” and “Epsilon Eridani,” two of the sunlike stars that were closest to Sol, where Earth had planted colonies before mankind had discovered the existence of the Others. What was interesting about them was that they obviously came from a table of relativistic time dilation values for travel from Sol at a constant one-G acceleration and deceleration. Joorn had made trips to both those stars as a young starship pilot in the early years after the Higgs drive made starflight possible. The figures were roughly the same for travel to any nearby star—about a year to boost to near-lightspeed and another year to deboost, with the sliding scale that got you to those velocities amounting to only about three years of lifetime for a trip to any star within a hundred light-years. Any star at all. The subjective time added after reaching terminal velocity was insignificant for any of those destinations.

  “Planning a trip, Delbert?” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Estimating how much lifespan you’ll spend if you maroon the rest of us on one of the habitable planets of our former neighbors. Habitable six billion years ago, that is. Of course both Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani have the virtue of being somewhat smaller than Sol, and so are below the mass threshold for turning into a red giant that swallows its children.”

  “Can’t an old man dream? Or isn’t that allowed either?”

  “Don’t try to play the self-pity card, Delbert. It doesn’t become you.”

  “No self-pity, just realism. I’ve always faced facts, and the fact is that you and that Ryan crowd have the upper hand. Even if you somehow had a change of heart and decided to live up to our original bargain after getting your flock safely settled on the available real estate, it would be too late for me. I’m resigned, Joorn. I’m just playing make-believe here.”

  “Miles Oliver doesn’t seem to think it’s make-believe. He’s acting as though he thinks he has a realistic chance of replacing Chu as first officer. Supposedly to hone his piloting skills in case we ever change our minds about letting your crowd have the ship. I suspect his daydream is to make the Homegoers walk the plank so he doesn’t have to slow down for us.”

  “Miles Oliver!” Karn almost spat the words. “That insolent puppy! I think he’s become unhinged. He thinks my grand vision of reaching the end of time belongs to him now, and he’s surrounded himself with the most unsavory elements of the old party. They treat me as a sort of mascot and don’t listen to anything I have to say. I gather I’ll be allowed along on th
e trip if I behave myself.” The contempt in Karn’s voice was palpable.

  Joorn was startled at Karn’s vehemence. “Are you trying to tell me that you and your star pupil have had a falling-out?”

  “Miles has become a megalomaniac. It’s now a psychopathological condition. Twenty years of frustration will do that. And the dullards he keeps around him only encourage his fantasies.”

  “What about you, Delbert? Wasn’t there a touch of megalomania about your scheme to hijack the ship when the majority voted to settle down at Rebirth?”

  “Maybe. It was a gamble. Maybe I was ruthless. Maybe I overreached. But I never lost sight of the realities. When the majority took back the ship, I knew it was all over. All that lovely accumulated velocity was gone. Paid back to the cosmic accounts. And now I’m resigned to being a doddering old physics teacher.”

  “You, Delbert? Doddering? Never. What are you really up to?”

  “Joorn, I swear …”

  “Are you proselytizing Nina?

  “I’m just nudging her along in physics. She’s a bright little girl. She has real potential. And maybe someday she’ll be fired by a grand vision of her own. I have no control over that. And neither do you.”

  “And what about Martin?”

  “He attends my classes, period. He knows I’m the best teacher of Higgs field physics around. He needs my help to achieve his ambition of being chief drive engineer. He’s a nice boy, and he’s very smart, but he was born with a monkey wrench in his hand.”

  “If I thought for one minute—”

  “Relax, Joorn. I have no designs on your grandchildren. Alten was another matter.” He shook his head sadly. “He could have been my intellectual heir. Instead of Oliver.”

  “You be careful, Delbert. I’m keeping an eye on you.”

  “You’d be better advised to keep an eye on Oliver.”

  Karn swung back to his keyboard. The wall display sprang back to life. He was making no effort to conceal it. The relativistic comparisons were gone. It was all visuals now, a breathtaking close-up of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, still recognizable despite its distortion. Karn was zooming in on one of its star systems now. It was dominated by a bloated red giant, but there was a healthy-looking orange star too, possibly a K-5, and two white dwarfs. Joorn searched and after a moment found a dim outlying red dwarf that had to be Proxima. He watched the image a few moments more, then turned and left.

  CHAPTER 16

  5,999,999,999 A.D.

  The Oort Cloud

  Ryan had posted a couple of guards outside the door to the control room, a pair of hefty fellows of his own generation who were perhaps showing a little bit of bulge at the waistline but otherwise looked quite fit. One of them smiled at Nina and said to Joorn, “Bringing the young lady along for a firsthand look, Captain?”

  “Try and keep her away,” Joorn said. “Why all the security, Talbot? I thought we’d agreed that we were past the need for all that now that we’re down to less than a tenth of a light.”

  Talbot shrugged. “I guess Ryan doesn’t want to take any chances at this stage. The intelligence boys may have stumbled onto something. There are still Karnite fanatics around, and they’re not exactly rational people.”

  “I’m sure their teeth are pulled, but of course President Ryan has to consider all the possibilities,” Joorn acknowledged.

  The door slid open in response to some kind of a signal from Talbot, and Joorn and Nina stepped through. There were two more guards just inside, and Joorn was dismayed to see that they were equipped with wooden billy clubs from the homegrown forest maintained in an adjacent habitat by the carpentry shop. Joorn remembered the earnest debate at the last general ship’s meeting.

  There were those who thought that clubs fashioned from wood were an extravagance when there was plenty of cheap titanium pipe available. And an opposing side with long memories who wanted no reminder of the kind of tactics employed by the Karnite thugs when they had seized the ship years ago. Then there was the civility crowd who thought the ship’s security unit should have nothing to do with any kind of clubs, wood or titanium.

  “Morning, sir.” A sandy-haired young man wearing a grad student’s chevron offered a sloppy salute that he must have copied from one of the old Earth videos.

  “You’ve got things well in hand, I see,” Joorn said.

  “Yes, sir. Security thought it would be a good idea to secure the control room before the Higgs drive was turned off. You see, the thought was that some opposition elements might get to feeling desperate when—”

  “Yes, yes, Talbot filled me in. When did the order come through?”

  “First dog watch, sir.”

  “Very good. Carry on.”

  Nina caught sight of Chu and ran across the control room to where he was seated. She stopped short of him while she decided whether he could be interrupted. When he held out his arms for a hug, she gave it to him and slid into the adjacent seat, her hands in her lap away from any knobs or buttons.

  “Are you going to tell me about the trees, Uncle Chu?” she asked.

  “You bet, sweetheart,” Chu said. “There’s one only a few light-months away—just as soon as I can zoom in on it.”

  Joorn studied his granddaughter with approval. She’d shot up quite a bit in the ten thousand years since deceleration had begun. She was now a composed young lady of thirteen, taking her first formal classes in astrophysics, well ahead of her classmates, and promising to overtake her brother, Martin.

  He slid into the captain’s chair and, after a nod from Chu, started to punch himself in.

  “Where do we stand?” he asked.

  “Everything’s nominal,” Chu said. “The program’s ready to go. We’ll switch to the secondary drive without a hitch.”

  “Where’s Martin? I’d have thought he’d want to be here.”

  “He’s babysitting the conjugate mirror assembly with the engineering crew. He thought he ought to be there when it goes off-line.”

  Joorn nodded. “Good boy.”

  “Boy no longer,” Chu said.

  Nina was fidgeting. “What about the trees?” she asked.

  Chu’s hands flew over the keys that operated the imaging system. On the viewscreen blurred specks bounced and jiggled until one of them grew into a recognizable shape as the focus seemed to race toward it, technically faster than light, though that was an effect of the computer choosing successively from millions of foci per second.

  “Ah, there we are. Do you know where that is, Nina?”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied with thirteen-year-old certitude. “That’s in the Oort cloud.”

  “Right. Actually two Oort clouds mingled together to become one. The Alpha Centauri system had its own Oort cloud, just like Sol, extending outward a couple of light-years. The two Oort clouds may actually have brushed against each other at their boundaries.”

  “It was Oort all the way, pussycat,” Joorn offered, quoting the tired old classroom joke.

  “I know all that!” Nina said scornfully. “It’s from Astronomy One.”

  Chu reprimanded Joorn with a cocked eyebrow and continued. “Then, a couple of thousand millennia ago, the net drift of the Centauri system toward the solar system resulted in a quadruple star system, with the three Centauri stars and our sun doing a complicated dance together. And the two Oort clouds became one huge Oort cloud, an enormous egg-shaped cloud containing trillions and trillions of comets surrounding the quadruple system.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Nina was impatient. “Egg-shaped, not spherical, because it would become gravitationally stretched when the clouds interpenetrated. And because the clouds are counter-rotating in relation to each other, there’ll be a tremendous confusion of the cometary traffic.” She tossed an unruly mop of dark hair. “But not a lot of comets colliding or capturing one another beca
use on average they’re so far apart. Please, Uncle Chu!”

  Joorn grinned proudly at Chu over Nina’s head.

  Chu ignored him and went on patiently. “Now we come to the trees. In the very early twentieth century, the 1920s in fact—”

  “Six billion years ago,” Nina interrupted.

  “Yes, six billion, more or less,” Chu said dryly. “Give or take a few years, of course. In the 1920s, a scientist named Bernal speculated that if you could breed trees to live in vacuum and plant them on comets, they could grow to an enormous size. In fact, in the absence of any appreciable gravity, they could grow to heights of hundreds of miles. Quite a stretch …” He paused to give Joorn time to groan. “… at a time when his fellow scientists were arguing that space travel itself would never be possible! There were plenty of comets, and they could provide the growing Trees with all the water and trace elements they needed. What was especially remarkable about Bernal’s fantastic vision was that nothing was known about DNA at the time. Genetic engineering, as we understand the term, hadn’t even been imagined. Bernal was talking about good old-fashioned Gregor Mendel–style plant breeding.”

  Nina’s agile imagination had already made the leap. “So the Oort cloud is actually one huge forest in space.”

  “By now it is,” Chu said. “The trees have had six billion years to grow and evolve. By now they’ve had an eternity to spread throughout the entire Oort cloud. And, probably, the Oort clouds of all the nearby stars as well—Barnard’s Star, Sirius, Tau Ceti, Delta Pavonis, and beyond. In the fullness of time, I don’t doubt that they’ll fill the entire galaxy.”

  Nina’s young face showed that she was trying to digest that. “Sort of like the Others did,” she said in a hushed voice. “Except that trees don’t think or communicate with each other.”

  “Oh but they do, in their own way,” Joorn submitted. “Didn’t you learn that in your biology class? Biology’s just as fascinating as astrophysics, you know.”