The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  He should call JonVon, he knew, put the picture on all TV monitors, alert the crew. But for the moment he paused and savored it for himself.

  They were heading back, now. Homeward. Halley’s slow sluggish orbit would blunt, turn, warp. For better or worse, they would glide down the gravity mountain, toward a destiny they could not see. It was an end to their long, inert obedience to gravity’s rule. Halley had become a ship.

  —At last we’re doin’ somethin’! —Jeffers called.

  Carl shouted in sudden joy, all doubts banished. “Sun, here we come!”

  PART 6

  WITH THE FORCE OF A STONE

  Year 2100

  What all the wise men promised

  Has not happened,

  And what the damned fools said

  Has come to pass.

  —Melbourne

  SAUL

  He stared at the crack in the wall. The black opening snaked far back into the ice. “When did this happen?” Saul asked.

  Two of his assistants—brown-haired, with identical patterns of freckles on their faces—looked up from a lab bench nearby where they had been working. They answered together, in the same tones.

  “There was a Halley quake, Pops,” they said in unison. “Two hours ago. A big one. It split the wall.”

  “It certainly did,” he said, examining the damage. This would have to be attended to. Even this deep below the surface, it was foolish to let any chamber remain unsealable for long.

  Some said it was the flinger launchers, stressing the comet core as they pushed it month by month, year by year, that were causing the quakes. Others blamed the war, now apparently lost for good by Quiverian and his Arcists.

  Last month, Carl’s spacers, Sergeov’s Ubers, and Keoki Anuenue’s neutrals had joined together in a lightning raid on the Arcists’ south-pole redoubts, and permanently crippled the remnants of the first set of flingers, and the hidden microwave antennas with which they had been talking to Earth. One result was that now the Arcists could no longer use those old launchers to interfere with the Nudge toward Mars. Unfortunately, during that brief but bloody skirmish, three explosions had rocked that end of Halley Core, worrying some that the integrity of the comet itself might be threatened.

  Whatever the cause, the quakes bothered Saul. For four years, now, things had been going well for a change. They had picked up word from Earth’s faint data net that the odds makers were once more taking bets on the colony’s survival. The current rate was five to one against. But that was a vast improvement over the thousand-to-one betting when he and Virginia had awakened from their thirty-year sleep.

  For now, at least, Sergeov’s Ubers, the various clans of survivors, and Jeffers’s Mars Boys were all working together. But the alliance struck Saul as being like a supersaturated solution of immiscible fluids—too unsteady to last for long.

  They didn’t need these Halley quakes shaking up the delicate balance.

  Saul was dressed in little more than a loincloth, robe, and ice-sandals, as he had only left the quarters he shared with Virginia for a brief visit to his lab. She had gone up to the surface to talk something over with Carl Osborn, so he had taken the opportunity to come down here and see how the experiments were going.

  Everywhere in the lab there were glassed-in chambers, like aquaria, in which mini-ecosystems flourished or languished—where modified Earth lifeforms struggled to prove themselves worthy of inclusion in the new, synthetic cometary ecology that was only now starting to sort itself out.

  Over by the left wall, some of his assistants tended the animals…birds without feathers and goats able to give milk in microgravity.

  “Where is Paul?” he asked suddenly.

  The brown-haired twins nodded toward the crack in the wall, and shrugged.

  “What?” Saul blinked. “I thought I told you to keep him here!”

  They rolled their eyes in an expression he had seen countless times, over many mirrored years. “You told us not to let him out the door,” they reminded him smugly.

  “Oh Lord.” Saul sagged. Was I ever like these two? So insufferably… immature?

  They giggled together. Saul hesitated. He had to go after Paul, of course. The poor child might be the size of a full-grown man, but he wouldn’t be able to take care of himself out there alone.

  I can’t take any of the kids with me, he realized, dismissing the idea of putting together a search party of his assistants. They’d scare the hell out of people by emerging out in the halls in a swarm. He had not introduced them to anybody else yet, not even Virginia. They were the most amazing development to come out of the union of Phobos technologies and his growing skill at clone-symbiosis, but this time he wasn’t sure at all how to let the rest of the colony know about them.

  Saul lope-floated over to the hole in the wall. He picked up a glow-ball of gene-designed Halleyvirid phosphor. “When I get back we’re going to have a talk about responsibility,” he warned them. “Paul is still your brother even if he’s deficient in some ways. It was your duty to take care of him.”

  They looked down, shamefaced. They weren’t bad kids, just inexperienced—very new to the world.

  Two whirling, black sticks of fur leaped onto Saul, clambering over his shoulders. He gently unpeeled the midget gibbons.

  “Not now, Max, Sylvie. I’ll be right back. Stay with the boys.” They stared after him, wide-eyed, as Saul turned and dove into the dark gap alone.

  Of course Paul probably wasn’t in any danger. He was immune to purple toxins, of course, and if this passage held air, so did everything connected to it.

  If only I can catch up with him before he runs into people.

  Sooner or later, of course, he would have to reveal what he was doing. Announce that he had finally found solutions to many of the problems of growth and development that had made child-rearing a near impossibility on Halley.

  What he had learned might even be applied to helping the thirty or so children the Orthos and a few Percells had already produced. During the last year, improving the lot of those poor, warped creatures had been one of his highest priorities.

  He had hoped to put off showing people his own “kids,” though, until the Nudge was fully under way and people were filing back into the slots. It might go over better when there were fewer people around.

  I hope I can catch Paul in time. Strangers might upset him.

  In the soft light given off by the glow-ball, the crevice in the ice was a sparkling wonderworks of jagged crystals and puffy clathrate snow. It was easy to follow the path the youngster had taken by the handholds he had used. A smudge here, there a thread ripped from the floppy old lab coat Paul liked to wear. Saul followed the trail through a small crystal chamber that had not been charted before, now exposed in all its agate glory by recent tremors in the ancient ice.

  He hurried onward. The passage narrowed until it was little more than a man’s width across. Athin man’s width, Saul thought, as he squeezed through, stretching ahead with his hands to pull himself along the narrow stricture.

  He couldn’t help comparing it to a birth canal. Something in the tunnel—perhaps a new Halleyform his immune system had not yet come to terms with—was causing a burning, itching reaction in his sinuses and throat. His nose twitched and tingled.

  Aw hell… he thought, closing his eyes, squinting.

  “A-a-a-chblthooh!”

  The echo of his sneeze reverberated from an open chamber just ahead. Saul shook his head to clear it, and crawled on as he heard the distinct sound of a child crying.

  His hand pushed through snow and met open space letting. more light in. High-pitched shrieks greeted its appearance.

  “Old Hard Man! It’s Old Hard Man!”

  “Shush, kids. Quiet,” a deeper voice soothed. “See? The skin is white, not green. You know that Old Hard Man is part black, part green.”

  The whimpers softened. Saul felt a hard grip on his wrist and kicked to help his benefactor drag him through the
crumbling snow. He popped free into one of the beam-cut, Halleyvirid-lined colony tunnels. Saul had to swivel to cushion his impact on the opposite wall.

  “Thanks,” he said, waving away a cloud of sublimed vapor that had followed him. “I…”

  An elderly man—an Ortho named Hans Pestle, Saul recalled—held the hands of two skinny children dressed in ragged fibercloth. Four other small, scrawny figures clung to the walls nearby. The old man stared at him.

  “What’s the matter, Hans?”

  Pestle shook his head. “Nothin’ Dr. Lintz. I was just… No, I must’ve been mistaken, is all.”

  Two of the older children edged forward. “Got goobers for me?” one asked shyly.

  “Sorry, Ahmed.” Saul smiled and stroked the little boy’s sparse hair, keeping his hand away from the long, floppy, ferretlike creature the child wore, stolelike, over his shoulders. The gene-crafted animal watched Saul with gleaming eyes.

  “Sorry. No goobers this time.” Usually, the children got their medication in candy form—sweet flavors were common in the mutated food plants, but sourballs were one of his widely treasured specialties. “I promise, next time you come to the clinic.”

  “Aw, gee.” But the child took the disappointment well. It had been some time since he had had any of the fits of temper that used to drive him into uncontrollable tantrums.

  Actually, Ahmed had made a lot of progress. He was talking more, and had put on weight. Still, to look at him, seventy pounds and barely five feet tall, you wouldn’t think he was sixteen years old, Earth-measure.

  Unfortunately, there were limits to what Saul could accomplish with damage so advanced. And some of his best methods had turned out to be applicable only to a narrow range of genetic types. He found it terribly frustrating.

  Saul shook his head, fighting down the ringing in his eats brought on by a fit of allergy-symbiosis reaction. He sneezed, and the children clapped their hands laughing at the explosive report.

  “What are you and these kids doing down here, Hans?” Saul recognized the nearby intersection by its incised markings. They were deep, far below these Orthos’ clan territory.

  Pestle looked at the floor. “Just strollin’… you said the kids should get more exercise…”

  Clearly, Hans was concealing something. But Saul didn’t have time to probe.

  “Did you see someone else come this way?” he asked the old man—a once-famous astrophysicist, now reduced by frailty to tending crippled children while the clear-minded and able-bodied labored on the surface.

  “Minute or so ago.” Pestle jerked his head toward the nearby shaft and gestured upward. He seemed about to ask a question, then shook his head and was quiet.

  “Thanks,” Saul said, and started off toward the shaft.

  “Wouldn’t, if I were you.”

  The voice of the old man stopped him abruptly. Saul turned. “Why not?”

  Pestle looked away again, bit his lip nervously. One eye was still cloudy from damage done long ago. Saul had managed to eliminate the lingering disease, but not the harm already done.

  “You’re our doctor,” the old man mumbled. “Can’t afford t’ lose you.”

  “Lose me?” Saul felt a sudden sinking feeling. “What are you talking about? Is there danger above?”

  Virginia’s gone up there, was his chilled thought.

  Pestle shook his head. “Heard tales. May be more fightin’ soon. Took the youngsters down here to be safe. That’s all.”

  Saul frowned. This was not good.

  “Thanks for the warning, Hans. I’ll be careful.”

  He kicked off and started climbing the shaft, grabbing tufts of tamed, hybrid Halleyvirid covering and using his toe-spikes to speed upward almost at a run.

  He had nearly reached B Level when a shrieking noise, like giant stones rubbing against each other, echoed shrilly in the passage. Another damn quake, he thought. Or was it something else? Something more sinister? The vegetation up ahead started swaying, like a wave rolling down the dimly lit shaft. The ripples arrived and suddenly it was as if he were trying to ride a furry snake, one that bucked and slithered and threw him back and forth.

  Saul’s grip tore loose and he was flung across the shaft, landing inside a tunnel mouth just as pieces dislodged from the ceiling. He rolled to one side to avoid a jagged boulder that dropped slowly, but irresistibly. Another one popped free of the left wall and proceeded with terrible inertia to collide crushingly with the right side.

  So busy was he dodging those, he did not see the third and smallest rock. A sudden, crushing blow to his head sent him reeling against the floor. He slumped over an icy boulder and moaned.

  Consciousness never completely vanished, but neither did it quite remain. To Saul, the next few minutes, or hour, or several hours, were a confusion of rumbling sounds, of icy dust settling slowly, of blinking and not being quite sure what it was he was supposed to remember.

  Finally, it came to him.

  Get to Carl…warn him…

  He couldn’t quite recall what it was he was supposed to warn him about, or why. Perhaps it would come to him when he arrived. He knew only that he had to go back into the shaft and start climbing again.

  Find Paul… he reminded himself. Hurry… find Virginia…

  He repeated the instructions over and over again, pushing aside the ringing and the pain in his head.

  Hurry…

  VIRGINIA

  As she stepped onto the surface she felt again the chilly majesty of the ice, the void, the swallowing darkness they all swam in. Earth is the sultry Hawaii in a solar system of perpetual Siberias, she thought. Willwe ever feel true warmth again?

  As she took long, loping strides across the speckled gray ice Virginia resolutely banished the thought. She had had quite enough experience with the onset of depression, thank you, in the last several years. It was an occupational hazard. Even her love for Saul had not proved an adequate shield against it… just as the psychology people Earthside had predicted, decades ago. They had warned the crew not to put too much weight on any relationship, that no human bond could take the full pressure of their isolation, the unremitting hostility of the hard empty world.

  People weren’t made to take the full brunt of the world, she thought. Particularly not one as barren as this. Anthropologists had found that even the simplest societies had quickly invented alcohol—usually beer—probably as a shelter against the storm of naked, incessant reality. Intelligence able to deal flexibly and subtly with its environment was also inescapably vulnerable to it. Halley’s crew had tried the predictable escapes—alcohol, drugs, senstim, torrid and fleeting affairs—and weathered the years. But no victory was permanent, and Virginia knew she had to steer herself through shoals of depression, avoid the triggering thoughts and moods.

  She felt a faint tremor through her boots and glanced nervously around. Nothing unusual, apparently. A few teams working at distant launchers. No shouts over comm, nothing awry. Good. I don’t want. to be up here when something goes ka-boom. Not my strong suit, crises, nossir. Not without waldo gloves, JonVon, and a hundred mechs at my beck and call.

  The new, huge hydro domes loomed nearby, erected by Jeffers and his crews when the quakes had started. It was risky to keep farms and factories running beneath the ice near the launchers, in case a stress line opened under the relentless pounding of the flingers. Carl had ordered a lot of agro moved to the surface, set up near the shafts.

  Amid all the work, there were the usual rumors. That the defeated Arcists had struck some kind of deal with the Ubers. That the Ubers were going to make trouble again over the choice of the Mars trajectory. That the P-Threes were building a space ship in secret. She thought it was idle talk, but you never knew.

  Everything’s so rushed these days, so exciting. A million jobs, nearly the whole crew revived… so why am I depressed?

  The answer was obvious. She really didn’t want to come up here and confront Carl.

  She glide-walked fo
r Dome 3, where she knew he was looking at some new agro results. As she came through the hissing lock she saw Carl studying some canisters, running his hands through rich kernels of wheat. He was wearing his spacesuit; these days he was in and out so often, checking the launchers, he seldom shed it. Agro workers floated above ripe fields of rye and wheat and spires of coiling vegetables. Gene-crafted to thrive here in low-G among the pervasive Halleyforms, they had odd, asymmetric forms.

  “Great stuff, huh?” He grinned at her as she approached.

  “You’re a thorough man. Checking the breakfast cereal, too?”

  His face clouded. “I like to see good work praised, and these people have done—”

  “Hey, I was just kidding.” She gave him a playful punch in the arm, and then immediately felt the gesture was forced, awkward. Calm down. This is going to be hard enough without trying to pretend it’s a Shriners’ convention.

  Carl shrugged. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Virginia.” He turned back to a crewwoman standing nearby. “The new hybrid is excellent. Tastes great, too.”

  Virginia watched as Carl and the agro tech discussed variants on the growing cycles. Halley’s gentle but drumming acceleration was affecting the mirrors that lit the greenhouses, and there were adjustments to be made.

  She wandered down a lane, glad to delay. Stalks rose nearly a hundred meters, slender and white, yielding impossibly broad, meaty leaves. Spindly gardener mechs prowled down tight lanes. Circulation patterns spun streamers of wobbly droplets among the lofty spiral stems. Beneath these vertical protein farms lay cows of fat vegetables, lush and curling in the soft ultraviolet that filtered through shimmering banks of moisture above. Rich humus lapped at the feet of the giants, like a sea’s ever-grinding at the shore. A tracery of ponds used the gently falling debris from the spires, and modified fish darted among ropy roots. She recalled a poem she had never finished, and found fresh lines popping into her mind.