The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  A decisive woman. She had hardly left his side since, except for the fourteen-hour shifts, of course. And although he worried, Saul could not say he was anything but glad.

  It’s her choice, he thought. And Carl Osborn will just have to learn to live with it.

  For as long as the three of them lasted, at least.

  Yesterday he had helped slot Jim Vidor, feverish and raving. At least that time they were able to get the poor fellow in in time. Lani Nguyen had watched raggedly. For lack of any real attention from Carl, she had taken up briefly with Jim. Now she was as alone as before.

  His wrist beeper pulsed. The mechs in the recuperation chamber were signaling him.

  Enough loafing, he thought. Somebody must have wakened, at last. One of the first six.

  Put on a happy face, he reminded himself as he started stepping into isolation garments. While slipping on antiseptic booties he touched the bandage covering his left ankle.

  The scar was almost healed now. He still wasn’t sure how he had been cut, during that frantic struggle with the purples in sleep slot 1. At first he had been certain it was a bite from one of the horrible native worms, but after what happened to Peltier, and Ustinov, and Conti, he figured it couldn’t have been. There had been a swelling and soreness, then it had gone away.

  Just a scrape, I suppose. A man like me won’t die of a purple bite, anyway. And there’s too little gravity here to be hanged.

  His nose itched.

  I’ll probably die in a sneezing fit.

  Saul finished dressing. He put on an isolation helmet and passed into the booth with a flashing green light over the entrance.

  Someone had indeed awakened. It was Bethany Oakes, the first person decanted after Captain Cruz’s death. The assistant expedition leader had been a tough case. Her thawing had not been easy.

  Hibernation wasn’t a natural human function. Inducing it involved complex, massive doses of drugs that dropped the body into a slumbering, near-death state—reducing metabolism an pH, cooling tissues down to a bare degree above freezing. The process was anything but routine, even after decades of use in space flight. To prove it for interstellar travel times had been one dream of Miguel Cruz-Mendoza. It was supposed to be another gift from the Halley Expedition to the people of Earth.

  Working alone, with equipment that might or might not still be polluted with Halleyforms, Malenkov had chosen the slow-thaw method, allowing the patient to throw off sleep-center suppression naturally. The decision had been questionable. It might be safer, but it left the possibility that the decanted would awaken with no one left alive to greet them.

  Bethany Oakes was still an ample woman. Three weeks’ hibernation under an IV drip wouldn’t change that much. But her eyelids were already dark with the blue heaviness of slot stupor. As Saul approached, they fluttered open. Her pupils contracted unevenly in the light.

  He dimmed the wall panels and picked up a squeeze tube of electrolyte-balance fluid to wet her lips. Her tongue flicked out, drawing in the sweetness.

  Good, he thought. The sipping reflex was a rule-of-thumb test Nicholas had taught him. A sign of good progress.

  In the hazel eyes, an apparent struggle—a mind climbing laboriously out of the cold.

  “S-Saul… ?” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Yes, Bethany. It’s me, Saul Lintz.” He bent forward.

  “Are we. …” She swallowed, and smiled thinly. “Are we at aphelion yet?”

  Saul blinked. Of course, the expedition’s second-in-command hadn’t been scheduled to be unslotted for thirty-three years, when the comet would have nearly reached its farthest point from the sun, when the colony would be briefly busy again preparing for the rocket maneuver that would send them hurtling past Jupiter toward rendezvous with the waiting harvesters, nearly four more decades beyond that.

  How could he tell her that it had been more like thirty-three days!

  He shook his head, wishing he had better news, and wondering how to tell it.

  Saul smiled in his best bedside manner. “No, Betty, not quite…”

  PART 3

  WHEN SPRING LAST CAME TO GEHENNA

  January 2062

  Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from come strong principle.

  —Melbourne

  Positions of Inner Planets and Comet Halley

  February 2062

  VIRGINIA

  What a difference a mere three weeks made!

  Virginia wondered as she glide-walked past hurried, bustling workers. Had it been only that long? Only twenty-five days since the remnants of the First Watch had gathered, weary and haggard, to note the passing of the year 2061?

  An ebullient New Year’s Eve it had not been. Even with the wall holos set to their cheeriest summer scenes, it still felt like the winter of Ragnarok. They had huddled near the farthest end of the mammoth Central Complex Lounge—four poor survivors—and toasted from Carl’s carefully hoarded supply of Lacy Traces liqueur.

  The bottle had gone quickly. There seemed little point in saving anything.

  All attempts at conversation had lapsed. The vids from Earth were too depressing to watch—snappy scenes of commercial consumption or, even worse, an awful melodrama about the Scott expedition to the South Pole… no doubt somebody’s stupid idea of a gesture in their honor.

  At her suggestion, Saul and Carl had tried to play their first game of chess since the death of Captain Cruz—or since Saul and Virginia had taken up shared residence together. But it wasn’t like before. The two men had hardly exchanged a word or a glance, and the play was savage. When Saul’s wrist comp called him away to tend the thawing sleepers again, Lani and Virginia had shared a look of relief.

  She would never forget that gloomy evening for as long as she lived.

  That had been less than a month ago. Now… well, things were different. At least superficially, they were much better. One at least heard voices in the cool hallways again, and people were trying to find solutions.

  Virginia was also getting better at moving about in Halley’s soft gravity. She skim-glided quickly, grabbing the fiber floor with velcroed slippers and pulling along a wall cable on her way toward Control Central.

  It was still a new experience, coming this way without a mind fogged from lack of rest, or a body nearly limp from fatigue. A full seven hours’ sleep was like a sinful luxury.

  Yesterday, her shift had coincided with Saul’s. They’d had a chance to make love for the first time in a week, and slept side by side, linked through her electronic familiar, touching in the dim glow of JonVon’s status lamps. Saul had to leave early to get ready for today’s test of his new invention, but Virginia had awakened feeling his warmth still on the webbing beside her, his musty, now-familiar scent on her arm.

  Someday, when I have some free time again, I’ll have to find out what JonVon’s making of our dreams. Saul and I are getting closer all the time, our shared, enhanced senses more and more vivid. I wonder—is it possible that I might have been right, after all? Is it possible to simulate human mental processes so well that you can achieve “telepathy” of a sort?

  If so, can we give Earth at least one present, before we all die?

  This morning she had stopped just before leaving her cubicle, hesitating by the slide door, and turned back to pick up a stylus. On the face of a memory pad she had scribbled quickly… not a poem—not yet—but a sketch for one.

  Hoku welo welo,

  Oh, unforgiving Comet—

  Ua luhi au,

  I am very tired—

  The mixed verse had reminded her of her homesickness. She missed Kewani Langsthan, the only other Hawaiian on the first shift, who had lost an arm to an explosion on A Level, on Christmas Eve, and had to be slotted immediately when the stump went infected.

  No Hawaiian was among the replacements. She didn’t know whether to regret it or to be glad that her countrymen were being spared this terrible time.

  Anyway, the news from the island
republic was not good. The last time she had had time to listen to the Earthcasts, tensions had been rising. Nations of the Arc of the Living Sun had accused Governor Ikeda’s government of “unecological projects.”

  Ever since that evening months ago, when she had briefly shared Saul’s memories of his lost homeland, she had suffered from a deep, lingering fear for her own people’s precarious renaissance.

  Haalulu kuu lima

  My hand shakes—

  E awiwi… Ka la

  Be quick, oh Sun—

  The sketch had disappeared into JonVon’s stochastic well of memory. Perhaps she would call it up again to work on it, if she had time, or remembered. Meanwhile, her pet machine would echo with her musings. Unlike the prim processors of Earth—or the stolid mission mainframe the techs had begun crating to move down from the Edmund to Central—JonVon did not simply file things away. He…it…was programmed to “remember” from time to time, untriggered and unpredictably, and to “ponder” new correlations.

  She herself had no time to devote to the protect with which she had planned to while away the years. But JonVon would always have at least a small corner of memory devoted to it, gathering and organizing data for when, at last, she could turn her attention back to the question of intelligence itself.

  I must remember to ask him what he has learned, now and then.

  And here we are, she thought on coming to a double hatch with a burning amber light overhead. The entrance to Central Control… command post for the invading hordes from Earth.

  Before entering, she had to submit to another damned cleaning. A bulky mech towered beside the hatchway.

  “Please present all surfaces for ultrasonic exposure,” it directed, holding forth a flat, humming plate and a vacuum hose.

  She sighed and stepped forward, turning before the double-tubed, jury-rigged machine. Harmonics from high-frequency sound waves stroked her skin in multiple octaves, all the way down to a low, grumbling growl that made her teeth grate.

  She knew all the override codes, of course. But it would be better to submit to these measures, as half-ass and useless as they had to be. Somebody was bound to find out if she got into the habit of bypassing regs for her own convenience.

  The low tingling told of bits of debris being shaken loose from her clothing and skin, to be sucked away into the vacuum inlet. Of course, this wouldn’t really stop people from tracking around cometary germs. Saul had said that the only long-term effect of the procedure would be to destroy all their clothes and eventually wreck everybody’s hearing.

  The tingling stopped and the vacuum hose shut off. Virginia imagined a puff of air, cotton fibers, and skin cells-all sighing out into space far above, where the stars shone unblinking on a stark icescape.

  “Prepare eye protection, please.”

  She grimaced and drew the goggles from her waistband.

  “Lay on, MacDuff,” she muttered, and scrunched her eyes shut as the hallway seemed to fill with actinic brilliance.

  This was sheer idiocy, she knew. The UV lamps were their best weapon against the Halleyforms, but there were only about two dozen left, and they were burning out at a rate of one or more a day! There were already numerous cases of sunburn and skin rash.

  The uncomfortable glare cut off and she breathed in relief.

  “You may pass,” the mech pronounced.

  “Thanks,” she answered sarcastically s the softly hissing door opened, letting her into a bustle of activity.

  Voices tinged with anxiety…human torsos that disappeared into hooded data-speech shells… hands working switches or mech-waldo controls. Yes, there’s quite a difference that three weeks can make.

  But the undercurrent of dark fear was still with them. If anything, it had grown.

  Over in a far corner, a half-dozen forms clustered in low-G crouches around a holo map. Virginia recognized Dr. Oakes and her chief aides. Another damn strategy meeting.

  Olakou na alii… They are the chiefs, heaven help us.

  I wish Saul didn’t have to go down to the inner chambers to test his new machine today. I miss him so, already.

  Virginia stepped up behind Walter Schultz, the man now operating mech-control 1. She was still early, but the fellow clearly needed to be relieved. His shoulders were hunched under the isolation hood, and his hands clenched whitely on the waldo-teleoperator controls.

  She knew what he was going through. Mech operators had it almost as bad as the men in the corridors. They weren’t in direct physical danger, of course, but the hours were worse, and the intense mental effort just as draining. From the displays she saw that Walter was handling four big ’bots all by himself. He needed a break.

  It wouldn’t be a good idea to pull him back too abruptly, though. Two days ago she had tapped Walter’s shoulder while he was linked. The man had whirled on her, pupils dilated, roundly cursing her as a “meddling Percell bitch.”

  He had apologized later, but the phrase stuck in her mind.

  I’ll tell him I’m here over an open comm line. But her hand hesitated just over the panel microphone. From under the isolation hood she heard Schultz sniffling. It was hard to tell if the man had a cold or if he was crying.

  These days, it could be either.

  “Virginia!” a high voice called out behind her. “Virginia. Would you come over here please, dear?”

  Other than Saul, only one person spoke to her that way. She turned and nodded to the brown-haired, matronly woman motioning to her from the other side of the room.

  “Yes, of course. Dr. Oakes.” She glide-walked quickly toward the big holo tank where the acting section leaders stood staring gloomily at the big display.

  The current chief of Cometary Science Section, Masao Okudo, moved pointedly away from her end of the table, as did Major Lopez, the senior awakened military man. Virginia ignored the slight. It was part of the general undercurrent of resentment against her, as well as Carl and Saul and Lani. As if the First Watch had somehow been criminally incompetent in letting all this come about.

  She had always found humans to be irrational creatures, deep down—herself included, of course. Many resented the choices that had been made, of who should be unslotted as part of the Crisis Management Team. “Why me?” was a refrain she had heard repeatedly, muttered in anger or wailed out loud as one after another of the wakers was injured fighting the crud in the halls, or fell ill to some unknown bug.

  Carl had to make those hard choices, after Captain Cruz died. The wakers blamed him. And it didn’t help at all that he was a Percell.

  I suppose the only thing keeping him and Saul and me from being completely ostracized is the fact that we’re indispensable.

  Bethany Oakes, at least, seemed immune to any such feelings. She smiled as kindly as ever as she shook Virginia ’s hand.

  “Thank you for coming over, dear. We are having a bit of a disagreement over a technical matter, and I was wondering if perhaps you could help us with the expertise you picked up during those frightful weeks you and the others faced this emergency all alone.”

  Virginia nodded. “I’ll help any way I can.”

  Dr. Oakes smiled back with moist, small lips. Virginia couldn’t help noticing that her face was puffy, and she wore makeup that seemed skewed, somehow.

  Oh fates, you are mean bitches. You had to take Captain Cruz—our Columbus, our Drake—right at the very start, didn’t you? He made an expedition out of a spill of exiles and misfits, and now he’s gone. This nice woman is simply no substitute.

  Dr. Oakes turned to Lefty d’Amaria, the head of Virginia ’s own department, Computations and Mechanicals. Lefty, at least, gave Virginia a quick smile, which she returned gratefully. Alas, the man gripped the table-edge uncertainly, and his brow was speckled with perspiration.

  “There’re two problems we… we wanted to consult you about, Ginnie. The first has to do with how to fight the stuff out in the halls.”

  She opened her hands. “Dr. Matsudo and Dr. Lintz have be
en studying the gunk. I’ve had less experience with it than any of the other survivors of the First Watch.”

  D’Amaria nodded. “Yes, in person. But you’ve fought it through mechs, helping Osborn and his crews. What we want to know is if you think it might be possible to retrofit the surface mechs for work in the shafts.”

  “Well, we’ve already reworked some of them—ship-utility robots, mostly.”

  “No.” D’Amaria shook his head. “We’re thinking about the big ones. The real surface mechs.”

  Virginia blinked. Were things already so desperate? Surface mechs had never been meant to work in tunnels. The thought of those great-limbed behemoths and spidery cranes cramming their way down here, under the ice, was enough to make her cringe.

  “I… I don’t know for sure. We’d have to unlimber some of the factory gear…”

  “A couple of factory-team crew are being warmed now,” Lopez told her. “Jeffers and Yeomans and Johanson are already awake.”

  Virginia nodded. “But even with the factory running, it’d be a mess. In order to fit lifters or pushers into the shafts, we’d have to do more than just remove their legs and rollers. I’d have to burn new patterns into read-only memory. With the facilities at hand, it’d be a patch job, and I’m not sure it could be reversed.”

  Okudo nodded. “Fine, fine. Then you are saying it can be done.”

  Virginia blinked. “But it’s crazy! We’d never he able to set up the Nudge Launchers at aphelion without surface mechanicals. And without the Nudge. Halley’s orbit can’t he shifted. We’ll never be able to go—”

  “Will you shut your stupid Percell mouth?” Major Lopez hissed quickly, baring his teeth. The Space Corps officer’s eyes seemed to burn, and he pulled back only slowly when Dr. Oakes cleared her throat pointedly. He glanced at the acting mission commander, and then back at Virginia. “Excuse me. I mean will you keep your voice down? Please?” His sarcasm was evident.