The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  A Jeans Collapse—named for a great twentieth-century astronomer—was triggered. Here and there amid the shocked, metal-enriched clouds, whirlpools condensed, flattened, formed glowing centers…suns.

  And round those new stars, tiny fragments coalesced, from rocky bodies nearer in, to great gas worlds, to distant, vast swarms of tiny lumps of frozen vapor…

  All geochemistry had, until now, been dated from the supernova that triggered the formation of the solar system. Never had any matter originating outside that event come into human hands. Until now, that is.

  The rock Suleiman Ould-Harrad had found under the heart of Halley had none of the isotopic ratios scientists were familiar with. It came from a completely different episode of creation.

  Joao Quiverian would have loved this, Saul thought. He mourned the loss of a good mind to the madness of those long, hopeless years.

  And Otis Sergeov, as well. I do hope we’ve learned a lesson.

  The final data unfolded before him, the confirmation of several years’ guesswork and labor.

  Proved. The stone came from ocean sediments laid down long before Earth had begun to swirl and form out of cosmic debris. The little animals whose fossils he had traced had swum in seas of a world not very unlike the Earth, with chemistry not so very different. But they had lived before the sun was even a star to wink in their cloud-flecked skies.

  Saul read snatches from the message from Earth.

  Radiation damage to constituent crystals indicates close proximity to the explosion. Not more than a quarter of a lightyear away from a supernova.

  He picked up a chunk of the stone, wearing smooth now from being handled. The planet that this had come from must have circled a smaller star that had the misfortune to be near the giant when it exploded, blowing it to bits and scattering its pieces into the smoke rings of the spiral arms.

  Were there watchers, that night? he wondered. Might intelligence have looked up, knowing what was coming, making frantic plans, or resigned peace?

  The odds were against it. Probably the planet had only animals and vegetation, and the end came swiftly, without anticipation. That did not make the event any less awesome, or less biblically terrible.

  All the native creatures, from microbes to plants to clever little animals… all had died in the very process that most directly led to Earth’s own adventure.

  What a universe, he thought.

  It was almost a side issue, now, that this also helped explain the presence of life on Halley Almost unbelievingly, at first, Earth’s scientific minds had finally concluded that bits of the bio sphere of the blasted planet must have been carried off in the shock wave, to freeze in the cold of space. Bits of rock—and even once-living matter—would serve as ideal seeds around which the gases of the outer fringes of a new solar system might coalesce. Halley, apparently, had condensed around a lump of the old planet, the way raindrops gather around drifting dust motes in Earth’s fecund sky.

  No wonder the traces got richer the deeper one went into the comet. There had been a matrix already, around which the pre-biotic compounds of the pre-solar nebula gathered during those early days.

  Saul wondered how many other comets had formed around such seeds. Not many, he imagined. We were just lucky, I guess, he thought ironically.

  Or were the old stories of comet-borne disasters really true? Could it be that the Earth had always been “freshened,” from time to time, with new doses of the ancient biology, floating down into the atmosphere each time a comet passed close by? That would help explain why the lifeforms were so compatible. Earth’s life kept incorporating new bits and pieces from the storehouse of deep space.

  In a sense, the old destroyed planet still lived. Fragments of pre-ancient organic code floated in all of them, and especially in the colonists of Halley. After all the death and fear of the early days, it was ironic that it would turn out to be of benefit in the long run, contributing to the diversity they would need over the centuries ahead.

  Perhaps the people of Halley were not even “human” any longer, not in the classical sense. Not in the way Earthmen were developing, preparing for their own explosion into the galaxy.

  They will go to the stars. Hopping from bright pinpoint to bright pinpoint, dwelling down where gravity curls space tightly and suns cook heavy, rocky worlds.

  We, on the other hand, will travel more slowly. But we will have the real universe… the spaces in between.

  Remembering the simulation Virginia had shown him, Saul smiled.

  Over the neural tap he felt a soft brush of presence. Listening in again, my darling? he projected.

  Yes, my love. You might as well get used to it. We’re in this together, for the long stretch.

  Yes. He smiled. For when this body he wore was long gone, his memories would ride another clone… and continue loving Virginia. The Wandering Jew and the Lady in the Machine… they would be a resource for the people, serving for as long as anyone wanted them around.

  Immortality is service, he thought.

  They held each other in cool, electron arms. And both of them imagined that they heard, faint and ghostly, in the distance, low confirming laughter.

  VIRGINIA

  Lani bounced the baby on her knee, provoking squeals of terror and delight. Carl beamed at the gleeful pair and kept pumping methodically at his exercise machine. They had to spend half their time in the G-wheel to keep the children’s calcium buildup normal. A tenth of a G was heavy, but imposed no real hardship.

  “Want to visit Aunt Ginnie?” Lani asked the baby’s older sister, who nodded with a thumb in her mouth.

  A shimmer appeared, hung in the air. Then a tanned Virginia stepped through it and waved. “Hi, snookums. Surf’s up. You interested?”

  Little Angelique laughed, and the baby squealed with glee. Lani’s second delivery had been, in Saul’s words, “boringly normal.” Both children seemed to accrete weight as Virginia watched; they massed more every day, and ate like firestorms.

  Carl gestured downwheel, toward the verdant wilderness of Stormfield Park. “Think we could ever put a lake in here?”

  “And then drive waves across it?” Lani asked shrewdly.

  He nodded. “Angelique will probably want to copy her aunt.”

  “Come now,” Lani said. “There are some things we can’t manage, you know.”

  Carl grinned. “Wanna bet?”

  Virginia remembered the fall into Jupiter’s gravity well. It had been a time of tension and remorse.

  Her tailoring of the subliming winds had canted Halley’s of orbit, added velocity. The divergence from their original path widened steadily as the launchers hammered away unendingly.

  It was only a minor deflection in astronomical terms. But it was crucial.

  They had come in behind Jupiter’s sweeping path, not in front. They whipped through the proton sleet of the enormous magnetic belts, saw the splotchy face of Io hurl lurid volcanic greetings.

  By passing behind the giant world, momentum was added to Halley, not subtracted. Instead of arcing back to the inner solar system, the comet head sped on even faster, shooting outward from the sun. The blazing giant squatted now behind the swiftly fleeing mote, its rays and influence dimming daily.

  As they swung out from banded Jupiter, Virginia had studied carefully the faces of the crew who watched the viewscreens. They had looked at one another, realizing the enormity of what they faced.

  Now, years later, the bleak resignation of those days had ebbed. It would be centuries before they reached the truly rich realm, where iceworlds clustered in great bee-swarm halos. Vast distances separated them, but in interstellar space such voyages required little energy.

  Those faraway iceballs beckoned, fresh supplies of metals and volatiles. There would be a next generation, and a next. They deserved those resources; they deserved opportunity, hope.

  Carl, Lani—indeed, all of them—were caught in the coils of slow diminishment.

  Saul, though, per
haps could last forever unless some accident claimed him. And even if he died, there were his clones. She would always have a Saul.

  Anger, frustration, despair—she came to know these as temporary illuminations of the individual soul, lightning flashes across an abiding dark. Humans had a reaction time evolved from the need to grapple, fight, feed, flee. They were no more conditioned to the slow sway of worlds than a mayfly would be to the Roman empire.

  Halley’s crew became accustomed to their destiny and slowly, imperceptibly to themselves, withdrew into their human-centered nooks and crannies. Virginia enjoyed downfacing into their timescale, watching Angelique grow in startling spurts. As confidence in the new techniques grew, others soon joined the first child, and played in tunnels and shafts swept ritually clean of dangerous Halleyforms.

  As Halley slowed, climbing out of the shallow sloping trough of the sun’s gravitational well, her attention turned away from science—though she continued to collect data, formulate theories, argue with Saul and the others—and moved on to larger issues.

  As Descartes had once done, she was forced to do. She wondered what she could deduce from basic principles. Cogito, ergo sum? But who was the I who made the statement?

  To use the jargon of science, she was a new phylum, no longer a vertebrate but biocybernetic. She was a wedding of the organic and the electronic, with a dash of sapient consciousness. By strict definition, a phylum should emerge through evolution by sexual gene sorting and speciation. But once intelligence had appeared. that aeons-long process was outmoded. A new phylum could emerge and develop by design.

  The Virginia who now resided in chilled synapses and holo-graphic arrays was not strictly human any longer. Still, she had myriad human signatures and defects, facets and flaws. She could no more ignore the vexations of Saul and Carl and Jeffers and Lani than she could forget her childhood, her father’s rough affection.

  Yet she was more. The joy that Carl and Lani felt brought her occasional pangs; Saul’s wistful nostalgia for her embodiment gave real pain. But though she understood and felt all this, she came to see it as a subset of the larger issues that confronted her. These frail people were bound up in the true passing life that the laws of natural selection had decreed-their deaths were written into their bones. Even Saul, her fellow immortal, rode the hormone tide. They felt deeply and thought upon the mortal questions.

  In the Oort Cloud there circled beneath a sheen of unblinking stars a trillion cometary nuclei, more land than ever promised any ragged band of wanderers. The colonists would have Carl as their Joshua—an irony that had undoubtedly already occurred to Saul—and he would lead them forth.

  But while Virginia would help them, and tend to their needs as best she could, she also had her own unique destiny as the first in a new kind.

  If she represented a new phylum, the first law must be survival. That was why she now looked upon the attack from Earth as an unplanned, fortunate outcome of mankind’s stupidity. Earth could have had her, could have overcome its fears and welcomed the new phylum. But now she was embarked upon a new course, one eventually to her advantage.

  She needed time to think, to explore.

  The old species of Homo sapiens on Earth would inevitably spread, first into the solar system, then perhaps beyond. They had already shown their hostility to the strangeness encased in the iceworlds. Their fears would take centuries to abate.

  Virginia knew, even if her human cargo did not, that there would never be a return to the kingdom of the Hot. Human societies, once grown apart, seldom can meet again on even, friendly terms. Far worse for two phylums.

  The mind, that ocean where each kind

  Does straight its own resemblance find,

  Yet it creates, transcending these,

  For other worlds, and other seas.

  She had time for poetry, for endless Byzantine pathways of contemplation. She even thought that she could glimpse the way it must be, when they reached the great cloud of worlds which drew them out.

  The human species would have a divided destiny now, strands that could progress for a while along separate courses. There would be less pain if they remained aloof.

  She calculated the probable evolution of Carl Osborn’s new species of Man, and of her own phylum, and was pleased. Reproduction, adaptation—these problems were vast, but she felt herself equal to them.

  And as for Planetary Humanity… By her calculations, the new phylum and the old species would not meet again for four thousand years. Good. There was time enough to think about it.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-99b7c3-7600-1a48-3d9b-46cd-bd21-3a2563

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 17.01.2011

  Created using: Fiction Book Designer, Fiction Book Investigator, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software

  Document authors :

  Verdi1

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/