Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  Joorn and Chu looked at each other. “Are we pulling the Trees’ strings, or are they pulling ours?” Chu said.

  Alten grew thoughtful. “We’ll learn to talk to them more directly. Very very slowly. Through computer mediation. That’s how we learned to speak Delphinese. And the dolphins to talk to us.”

  “Talking to vegetables,” Chu said. “Maybe Nina had something.”

  Ning grew impatient with their gibberish. “So, Joorn, mover of worlds, Time’s Beginning is not big enough for you. You are going to find a new home in the sky too. Where will it be?”

  “Closer to the warmth of the Stepsister. But not too close. Perhaps your children will come visit us. If your Tree will let you.”

  “They are talking it over,” she said quite seriously.

  Joorn and Chu exchanged another look. “I’m sure they are,” Alten said. “We can tell them of a place closer to the Stepsister called the Kuiper Belt. Closer, but not too close. Warmer, but not too warm.”

  It was too much for Ning. She frowned reprovingly at Alten and began to scold him. “If you are talking in riddles like a priest …” But just then, Martin came in. He spotted Ning and started toward them.

  “Hello, Ning,” he said with a boyish grin. “Congratulations on the baby. I brought you a little something I made for her.”

  He shyly held out his offering. It was a miniature hunting bow, painstakingly carved out of some limber wood like ash from the ship’s forest. It was strung with monofilament, ready to go, and obviously a working bow. There was a bundle of tiny arrows to go with it.

  Ning took the bow from him and tried its tension. She gave a nod of approval.

  “At last, a present that is useful,” she said.

  CHAPTER 35

  6,000,000,007 A.D.

  Mars Orbit

  All through the great starship, people were clustered around the outside ports to get their first naked-eye view of Mars. The main observation lounge was crowded to overflowing, as were any of the lounges that had an unshuttered window. Those who couldn’t get an outside view relied on the screens in their quarters or watched with friends. The ship was noisy with hundreds of celebratory parties, some of them beginning to get unruly.

  Joorn and his family were gathered on the captain’s veranda, along with Chu, Ryan, and a few friends. Jonah was there, with another dolphin in her own travel pod. Her human name, Jonah said, was Calypso, after the sea nymph.

  Mars loomed hugely, filling the observation wall. They were in close orbit, just outside the orbit of Deimos. The other Martian moon, Phobos, no longer existed. It had crashed into Mars eons ago, leaving an enormous crater, the largest feature on the Martian surface. It was now filled with water from the Kuiper Belt comet that had preceded them more than two years ago, the first of the rain of comets that Time’s Beginning had nudged into the inner system. Mars had seas again.

  Joorn spoke to the dolphins. “There it is, Calypso and Jonah. Your new home. In two more years, when the atmosphere is up to around a hundred millibars or so, it’ll be safe to move into it. You can’t tell from here, but spectroscopic analysis shows that the blue-green algae that we sent ahead of us is already starting to gain a foothold, and we should have a decent food chain going in about ten years.”

  “The fish, Captain, the fish!” Calypso’s computer-generated voice squeaked anxiously, together with all the pops and whistles she hadn’t yet learned to edit out.

  Joorn shook his head regretfully. “It’ll take a little longer for us to get the Martian oceans stocked with fish. Till then, you’ll have to come inshore for dinner. We’ll keep the biohatcheries going full throttle for you.”

  “Your whale cousins will have to wait even longer,” Chu added. “And then you dolphins will have to babysit the first generation.”

  Alten, stuffy as usual, said, “We’re going to have to stay in orbit anyway, until the barrage of comets stops.”

  “Like Moses, looking down on the Promised Land,” Jonah said, his beak curved in its permanent dolphin smile.

  “Still studying human history, Jonah?” Joorn said.

  “Studying it?” the dolphin replied. “I’m living it!”

  “It isn’t over yet, is it, Grandfather?” Nina said. “Human history, I mean.”

  “Not by a long shot, young lady,” Joorn said. “We’ll pick up where we left off. There once was a thriving human population on Mars, and there will be again. Old Mother Sol will continue to keep the climate salubrious for some millions of years, even in her dotage. And by the time she shrinks and Mars cools off, if we’re still around, we—those of us who want to, that is—will move back to Earth and terraform it all over again.”

  “Don’t forget Homo cometes in their trillions. And our neighbors on the Centauri planets,” Alten said soberly. “By then we’ll all have merged back into one human mainstream again.”

  Andrew, sitting on the loveseat next to Nina and opening another bottle of champagne, looked up and said, “We’ve had grand mergers before, haven’t we? We all carry a few Neanderthal genes. To say nothing of the mixing of populations after the termination of the Dark Ages let us go about our business.”

  “The procreation business,” Chu said, holding out his glass for a refill.

  “What about us?” Jonah piped up with mock plaintiveness.

  “You’re in the human mainstream, like it or not,” Chu said with a laugh. “Except for the procreation part.”

  “We’ll take care of that ourselves,” Jonah said. He added some chirps in Delphinese. Calypso replied with a long string of tweets and whistles that somehow managed to sound suggestive to human ears.

  There was a sudden flash of light on the dull, red face of Mars, bright enough to make the window wall darken. A collective gasp came from Ryan’s family, gathered together in a seating group across the room. The light flickered fitfully and died. In moments, a huge cloud of dust had boiled up and started to spread across the bulge of the planet’s surface. Then the Marscape began to twinkle around the site of the flash as incandescent fragments from the cloud continued to strike the surface.

  “What was it, Joorn, a comet?” Ryan’s wife called from the couch where she sat with her children.

  “Yes, one of the smaller ones, Kitty. It hit smack in the middle of the Valles Marineris. By the time we’re finished, we’ll have another ocean there, a long skinny one, two thousand four hundred miles from end to end.”

  “Mommy, can you make Uncle Joorn do that again?” one of the children said.

  Kitty laughed and gave him one of the petit fours that Irina had made.

  The festivities in the ship continued for some hours until night fell, when their orbit carried them past the horizon to the nocturnal hemisphere of the planet and people began to return to their quarters.

  Irina served a light supper that she had prepared earlier, and people ate from folding trays. An eerie red halo surrounded Mars, casting a somber glow onto the veranda, but nobody felt like turning on the lights. The mood was subdued. The children had been coaxed to eat, had grown cranky, and eventually had fallen asleep on the couches. Joorn brought out the brandy, and people sat around drinking and not saying much, looking thoughtfully from time to time at the silhouette of Mars blotting out the night sky. The dolphins, logy from their vodka and clam-juice cocktails, had retreated to the bottoms of their tanks, coming up about twice an hour to breathe before sinking back down.

  The little boy was the first to notice the new star in the sky. He’d been sleeping fitfully, then dropped back into a sodden doze. Now he sat up and tugged at his mother’s arm.

  “Mommy, Mommy, look! Orion’s Belt has four stars in it! It wasn’t there a minute ago.”

  Joorn jerked his head around. The others did the same. The constellation had gained another star, brighter than Rigel or Betelgeuse.

  His finger stabbed at
his shipcom, but on the bridge, Robertson was faster. “Do you see it, Skipper? It was coming in fast, from above the ecliptic, but at only about point ninety-five c’s. That means it’s been braking intermittently. It would have just turned on its Higgs drive again. We must be looking at a course correction.”

  “What’s your preliminary reading?”

  “It’ll enter the Oort cloud in about three years. It looks like it’s making a beeline for Sol. That’ll mean another two years before it gets here.”

  Alten was already punching numbers into the AI link he carried everywhere with him. “One of the five ships that left Earth after we did.”

  “Who will it be?” Nina said. “One of the two Euro-American­ ships? Or the Brazilians or Indians? Or the Islamic Federation zealots?”

  “Or a ship that Yung didn’t know about,” Chu said. “One that was launched after he left.”

  Ryan had been alerted by the AI’s security link. He walked over to join them. “Whoever it is, they seem to have decided on Sol, not the Alpha Centauri planets. It’ll be up to us to deal with them, not Yung.”

  “We’ll give them the Jovian moons,” Joorn said. “Keep Jupiter for ourselves.”

  “If we can,” Ryan said.

  “Whoever they are,” Martin said, “they’ll be people. And there will be people here to greet them.”

  “There’ll be others,” Nina said.

  Ryan nodded. The politician in him was beginning to emerge, and the others prepared themselves for a burst of his patented eloquence.

  He didn’t disappoint them. “Earth will always be a way station for the children it once sent out to the far reaches of the Universe. And there must always be people in Sol’s system to greet them, even when Sol finishes disgorging Earth and the cradle of the human race is habitable again.”

  Joorn topped him. They’d played this game before. “So there’ll always be humans in the Universe. Even billions of years from now, when the sky is empty of stars beyond our own cluster of galaxies, and the other clusters have become island Universes of their own, forever out of reach, there will be returnees­—even disappointed fanatics like Karn—who’ve ridden the expansion of the Universe and come back to their home to refresh it. They’ll find whatever dead matter remains—a burnt-out star or an evaporating black hole—and bring it back to life again.”

  Chu had grown pensive. “Yes,” he said. “We human beings were meant to be the Jokers of creation. We were dealt to the Universe as a device for reversing entropy. And maybe Karn was right, in a way. Maybe the Universe is something like a gigantic protozoan. If it keeps expanding, it’ll have to split. And maybe by that time, man will have learned how to cross over.”

  That was too much for Joorn. “Let’s leave Eternity to our successors,” he said briskly. “For now, in this billennium, there’s enough to do. The Oortians must be raised to civilization. The Earth and the outer planets—Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, with their moons and their burdens of hydrogen that haven’t completely evaporated—will have to be revivified. It’s ironic that Terra itself will have to be terraformed. And when we’re up and running again”—he nodded to Nina and Martin—“that’s for your children and grandchildren to do. We’ll send out a new generation of restless souls to ride out the billennia in their time dilation cocoons and reseed the cosmos again. Each galaxy they colonize will become a new focal point for sending its children home.”

  There was a sound of clapping hands and a hearty “Bravo, Joorn!” It was Jonah’s computer-modulated voice, and the clapping hands were a recording he’d squirreled away somewhere in his database. He leaned over the rim of his tank, dripping water on the carpet.

  “But we dolphins have our own plans,” Jonah said. “And so will the comet people. They can’t ride your starships at one-G acceleration. They’ll have to do it the slow way, on their intelligent Trees.”

  Everybody laughed. The gathering started to become lively again. Joorn poured more brandy.

  “Drink up, people,” he said. “We’ve got some work to do come morning.”

  Chu turned to the window wall and lifted a glass to the bright new star in Orion. One by one, the others followed his example.

  “Here’s to our new friends,” he said. “Whoever they are.”

  CHAPTER 36

  6,000,000,020 A.D.

  The Kuiper Belt

  Captain Goncalves had a rather imperious manner, and he was not used to looking up at the people he was talking to. But he swallowed his pride and said, “And at this distance it is not too hot, o Senhor Torris, so your comet will not melt. But there will be more visible light, so the Tree will not object. It is a place where …”

  His English failed him, even after twenty years of practice. He finished lamely with “… onde nao entra o Sol” and looked to Nina for help.

  “Literally ‘where the sun does not enter,’” Jonah piped up before Nina could answer. Nina’s Portuguese was pretty good after twenty years, but Jonah’s was better. He enjoyed tweaking Captain Goncalves, who had been painfully taught by Nina to speak to women as equals but who still, after all that time, could not bring himself to address a dolphin directly.

  Torris nodded judiciously. As the acknowledged patriarch of his own people since Claz’s death, he was willing to treat Goncalves with a measure of noblesse oblige.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. “The Stepsister will not swallow the Tree or drink its ice, as it did with with your ‘Earth’ living place long ago. The Tree knows this and has persuaded its companions, which is why they have agreed to come with us for this journey.”

  “Just so,” Goncalves said stiffly. He was willing to concede that the Bernal trees acted in a form of vegetable self-interest, like any plant, but he attributed this to clever tropisms, not the capacity to reason or communicate in any meaningful way.

  Irina, in an ill-advised attempt to smooth things over, said brightly, “It’s true, Dom Joao. Ning told me yesterday that the Trees are spreading the message through the entire Oort cloud and that some have already begun to set their sails to join our little colony in the Kuiper Belt.”

  Goncalves smiled with forced gallantry and replied, “We shall see, dona, we shall see. After all, Trees are attracted by other Trees, aren’t they? Isn’t that how forests grow?”

  They were assembled in the captain’s private lounge aboard the Henrique, the Brazilian starship named, inevitably, after Portugal’s great explorer Prince Henry the Navigator. There was an observation wall, but instead of showing an outside view, it displayed a breathtaking vista of a Brazilian rain forest. At the moment, a jaguar was running across a sunlit clearing with a small animal in its mouth.

  Tatiana, Nina’s daughter, gasped. There had been cats aboard Time’s Beginning in her childhood, but she’d never seen one this size before.

  “That’s the way Earth looked once upon a time, Tati,” Nina told her. “And maybe the way Mars will look a couple of generations from now.”

  “And perhaps Callisto and Ganymede as well,” Goncalves sniffed. “Though you Eurofolk got the tropics, and we got the temperate zone.” His tone was polite but aggrieved.

  Joorn and his family, with Chu and Jonah, had been Captain Goncalves’s guests for more than three years now, and his hospitality was starting to wear thin—though, thankfully, the spacious apartment they’d been given provided plenty of privacy.

  The Henrique was even bigger than Time’s Beginning and consequently had greater mass, which had made it a better choice for coaxing Torris’s gravitationally bound cluster of intelligent Trees to the Kuiper Belt. It also had a more advanced auxiliary ion drive for in-system work and a larger fleet of robot wardens for herding the Trees.

  Joorn had left Time’s Beginning parked in Jupiter’s orbit when they’d boarded the Henrique. Alten had stayed behind to captain it, with Robertson’s help. It was empty of colonists now and was bei
ng used for ferry work between Mars and the Jovian moons. The Henrique made a fine tugboat for hauling Trees, but Joorn did not trust Goncalves to have the tact to work with Torris and Ning—the human part of the equation. Irina and the others, who had bonded with Torris from the beginning, had jumped at the chance to work with him again, despite the length of the round trip to the Oort cloud.

  Nina had brought her daughter with her so she could show her to Ning. Tatiana and Ning’s formidable daughter, Ona, a huntress like her mother, had hit it off immediately. The two young women somehow managed to chat it up despite the language difficulties. Communication seemed to involve a lot of gesturing and giggling.

  Tatiana watched as the jaguar disappeared into the underbrush with a last twitch of its tail. “Mother, do you mind if I leave now? Ona has something she wanted to show me.”

  “Don’t let her take you hunting.”

  “She’d never do anything dangerous with me. She’s much too sensible. She just wanted to show me the herd she’s starting. She’s into animal husbandry now. It’s been taking hold on Ning’s Tree the way Daddy hoped it would when you all left the Oort all those years ago.”

  Joorn broke off talking to Goncalves to say, “It’s too bad Andrew couldn’t come with us. He always says that animal husbandry is the first step in transforming a primitive society. That and grandfathers.” He smiled. “His so-called O-Y ratio.”

  Nina annoyed Goncalves further by continuing to divert the conversation. “Andrew will have his chance to work with them again. A trip to the Trees will only be a matter of weeks now.”

  Tatiana said, “Wait till I tell Daddy what I’ve learned! I could go with him on his trips to the Kuiper Belt and help him. Do you think he’d let me?”

  She skipped off without waiting for an answer. Nina called after her, “Be careful, Tati! Find someone to make the jump with you.”