by Ian Stewart
Prudence angled Tiglath-Pileser down into the seething sulfur fog that now enveloped lo, trying desperately to pick a clear path through the swirling maelstrom. She was flying by instinct, on wide-angle radar rendered hopelessly untrustworthy by interference, on lidar that could scarcely see beyond the ships blunt nose, and with reference to a geography—iography—that had ceased to bear any resemblance to the terrain below. The moon's rotation was changing, and so was its inclination: she couldn't trust the autopilot or the navigation software.
For a few seconds there was a freak clearing in the hellclouds, and she saw a glowing patch that had to be Prometheus. The flow rate was ridiculous, but enough of the telltale markings remained for the volcano to be unmistakable. So Colchis Regio would have to be . . . that way. Now that she had finally identified some clear landmarks, she could reset the navigation software.
The volcano's center began to bulge, a huge domed bubble, swelling before her unbelieving eyes—a dome the size of Everest, impossible to grasp. Then, in an incandescent blaze of light, Prometheus exploded. Tiglath-Pileser rocked as the shock wave, crashing through the enveloping fumes of sulfur, hit. What had once been vacuum was now an extension of the moon's rarefied atmosphere, its domain extended tenfold. Its hull encrusted with rapidly cooling streaks of magma, the tiny ship curled in toward Colchis Regio, buffeted by wave upon wave of superheated gas.
There was a groaning sound as something on the outside of the hull tore loose and spun away on the sulfur dioxide gales. She hoped it was nothing critical. There was no time to make a system status check to find out. She hoped she'd reset the navware correctly, for she was now flying blind.
A tiny speck against a backdrop of sheer insanity, Tiglath-Pileser plummeted toward the ground, locked on to what its guidance systems believed to be the control complex where Charles was holed up. What remained of the radar system claimed it could see solid rock, but for all Prudence could tell it might equally well be a pool of magma.
Juddering, shaking, teetering on its main engines, Tiglath-Pileser sank toward the quake-ridden surface. Prudence made ready to release her safety harness.
If it was solid ground below, and if she was where the computer claimed, there might still be time.
But not much.
Charles Dunsmoore staggered groggily to his feet. His suit and helmet must still have retained their integrity. Something, somewhere, had gone up with an almighty bang. Along one wall, a whole bank of wheeler apparatus had torn loose, spilling onto the floor in a twisted ruin.
His whole body hurt. One arm unusable—he assumed broken. Blood streamed from his scalp and down his face. Stuck inside the suit, there was nothing he could do to stem the flow.
His glance flicked across to Reliant Robins console. The screen was still working, and it read: orbital escape successful.
Excellent. "And the maneuver for later?"
ENGINES PRIMED. I AM PREPARED.
A smile lit his blood-spattered face: To was hot on the comet's tail, and the rest could safely be left to the automatics. His motherworld might yet survive its encounter with the cosmic intruder, but lo was now a deathtrap.
The plan required the wheeler to stay in any case, but Reliant Robin seemed resigned to its fate. Charles would have preferred a chance to escape—however unlikely—but that had been denied him. For a mad moment he wished he were a blimp. Then he could have spent what little time remained composing his deathsong and relaxing into a stoical acceptance of his fate. Instead, his hyperactive monkey brain insisted upon pursuing every conceivable avenue of escape; and when it found none, it cast its net wider to think of inconceivable ones—a triumph of hope over harsh reality.
Very well. He had chosen this gesture of self-sacrifice; now it was heading for its inevitable climax. He could wait for the air to run out, or open his helmet and end it all.
Decisions, even now.
He had no deathsong to sing—so instead he began to sing a nonsense song from his childhood about a bird that laid its eggs inside a paper bag. He had no idea what had prompted the choice. He had just gotten to the bit where the birds were being warned that bears with buns would steal their bags to hold the crumbs when a monster from his worst nightmares appeared, framed in the entrance tunnel's mouth—silver-gray, squat, streaked with yellow ocher in wild designs, with a round black skull.
His radio rang in his ears. "Screw the bloody bears, Charlie!" screamed Prudence. "We're out of here!"
Reliant Robin had done its work well. Most wheeler communications were restored now. The Poisonbluvians had opened up an infofective crack when they took control of the Fivemoon installations, and now you could drive a snark pack through it. Halfholder cast her near-eyes over an endless stream of reports from the newly reactivated communicants. Depending on their contents, she passed them to various of her fellows.
There was not a single Elder to be seen. Without exception, they had sought refuge in states of estivation. Cowards, all of them, abdicating responsibility. Now it was up to the sky divers— the New Leaders. Brave Defier of the Orthodox Morality suddenly had two problems to grapple with: the reality of government and Halfholder's passionate insistence that he should adhere to the teachings of the Lifesoul Cherisher. Only she could help the Poisonbluvians now, for only she could communicate effectively with them. Defier was convinced that the salvation of Poisonblue was a lost cause—he and Halfholder had worked out what Charles's plan must be, but it was so outrageous that in his view it had no chance of succeeding. He might as well let her have her way, and get some much-needed peace and quiet.
Halfholder seized the opportunity to consolidate her authority, and demanded access to whatever, and whomever, she might need. Defier saw no reason to deny her—it would help to assuage his guilt. So he put her in charge of Poisonbluvian affairs, and turned his mind to more pressing matters.
Halfholder lost no time in assessing the situation. Fivemoon had slipped its gravitational moorings and was in hot pursuit of the comet. The craft piloted by the alien known as Prudent Dingo of the Ticklish Pleaser had reached Fivemoon's surface— as daring an act of skydiving as any in the aeons-old records of the Compilation of Symbolic Daring. Now Halfholder was awaiting evidence of the Poisonbluvian's fate, and that of the one she had been attempting to rescue. Wheeler installations on Six-moon, Sevenmoon, and Eightmoon monitored the subtle fluctuations of the gravitational continuum around wandering Fivemoon, probing on a level that was undisturbed by the moon's mad gyrations . . . Sensitive feature-detection algorithms were brought to bear on the small-scale texture of the gravitic pseudo-manifold, looking for a rock that didn't move like a rock. So far they had analyzed over six thousand candidates, without success.
More reports came in. Fivemoon's projected course was on the very edge of what would be acceptable. Sevenmoon's Diversion Engines were being realigned to widen the window.
The most prominent of Fivemoon's volcanoes, old and new, was now a magma lake, slowly solidifying into a caldera.
Some five trillion tons of sulfur and silica were now encircling Secondhome. The plasma torus, temporarily picked out in sulfurous clouds, was already starting to break up into fractal KAM surfaces as Fivemoon fell toward the Sun.
Then came a more promising report. A speck of matter whose mass matched that of the craft piloted by the extrajovian had been ejected from Fivemoon on a polar trajectory. Its velocity had been too low for it to be a piece of volcanic ejecta; moreover, it had subsequently changed course into a plane close to the ecliptic, a maneuver that could not be undertaken without some kind of propulsion system. But now the speck's velocity had diminished below the norm for the little vessel, and it was in free fall, heading nowhere significant. Mostly down.
Possibly some of its systems were malfunctioning? It was probable. Much of the symbiaut installation on Fivemoon was now wrecked, and symbiautic technology was more reliable than the humans' false-cast machines. However, there was no point in further conjecture. Halfholder initiat
ed contact with the communicative young alien known as Nosy Dingo.
The action had shifted from Europa Base to Skylark, which was better equipped for comet watching, so the W team had commandeered an OWL to take them there. Moses had hitched a lift: he wanted to be in on any action, too.
He had scarcely gotten settled in when Halfholder made contact over the communicator. Moses listened carefully while she told him what the skydivers thought they had found, asking the occasional question.
When he was satisfied that he'd understood, he went to the captain's cubicle and told Greenberg. After a few moments' discussion, Greenberg hurried to the main cabin and Moses went to collect the W team.
Cashew Tintoretto found the news hard to believe. Moses gave her that expressionless, faintly insolent look that he always contrived when his judgment was under question. "That's what Halfholder says, Cash. Tiglath-Pileser got away."
"So why haven't we heard from them?" Cash's frustration was evident.
Moses shrugged. "There's still a lot of radio interference."
"A couple of wave bands aren't so bad anymore, now that lo's moved away," Jonas contradicted.
"Okay, so their radio's damaged. Face it. Cash, anything on board could be damaged." They stared at each other in silence for a moment, each with the same thought.
Greenberg walked into the cabin. The Skylark's senior officer looked tired, his uniform was smudged, and he hadn't shaved. "Found it," he said. "Enough usable bandwidth for broad-beam radar. There's an awful lot of junk out there, but only one bit of it has the right microspectral signal and matches the orbit that Halfholder described."
Cashew fidgeted with the cuff of her shirt. "You don't look terribly happy, Captain. What haven't you told us yet?"
"They're no longer under power. They might just be coasting, but not in that orbit. I imagine they ran out of fuel, or the engine blew, or something like that . . . Problem is, the orbit they're in is decaying—fast. There isn't time to reach them from here before they burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere."
"And there isn't time for the blimps to reach them with a wheeler spacecraft, either," said Jonas. "Too slow, they work on gravitic repulsion ..." His voice trailed off. He and Cash traded glances.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" said Cashew.
"Yes. But ..."
"But what?"
"Repulsors can only push."
Cashew pointed out of the port to Jupiter's massive banded sphere. "Sure. But there's a guy who can do an awful lot of pulling."
Jonas slapped his forehead. "True."
"So will it work?"
"Depends. How long will Tiglath-Pilesefs life support hold out—and is the orbit suitable?"
Greenberg had the answer. "Either the life support is dead already or it'll hold out a lot longer than the orbit does."
"Do you have the orbital elements?" Jonas asked.
"Yeah."
"So let's ask the navware where the three remaining Cosmian stars are, and with luck we'll be in business."
The wheeler teams on Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto had never worked so fast in their lives. The main bottleneck was repositioning the repulsion fields. Ponderously the great machines rotated in their underground shelters, the powertraps rebuilt their charges, and wheeler mathematicians calculated the finer points of projector settings.
Three synchronized repulsion beams converged on Tiglath-Pileser. Their touch, gentle at first, intensified as the sensor readings settled, and the unpowered cruiser began to move up and away from Jupiter. The first aim was to establish a nondecaying orbit; the second, which required more subtle calculations, was to find whichever such orbit was most quickly accessible from Skylark.
When all its readouts matched its own mental image of the optimal trajectory, the wheeler shut down the beams and put them back on standby Silence descended as the great masses of rotating metal ceased their high-speed revolutions.
The wheeler mathematician wondered what all the fuss had been about. It had been far too small a comet to cause significant damage. To make things worse, it was a botched job: the thing was still up there, and by the wheeler's calculations would be in renewed danger of impact in a mere twelve thousand years. Much better to shove it against one of the lifeless minor worlds like they always did. But orders were orders, however foolish. It bleeped the wheeler equivalent of a sarcastic Managers! and went back to its comfortable job of monitoring the Outer Halo. There, it could spot potential problems a quarter of a million years ahead of time.
It preferred not to function under pressure. It was better for your bearings.
While Tiglath-Pileser was being nudged into a safe orbit, Skylark was already on the move, heading for where they had been told the tiny ship would be when they got there. Finally they got close enough to resolve the ship into more than a single pixel. Tiglath-Pileser was a shambles. Its usually impeccable matte-black hull was streaked and spotted with ocher, orange, chrome yellow, and purple. The hull metal looked more like crumpled sheets of paper. One engine had been ripped away completely, and only the tangled remains of its mountings testified to its ever having existed.
Greenberg assessed the visible evidence. "No comm dish, no lidar . . . only one engine, seriously dysfunctional... No radio, no radar gear. She's been flying blind and she can't hear, either. It's a miracle the pilot got her into any kind of orbit under those conditions."
As they got closer, the vessel's state became clearer. "Hull's breached in a dozen places," said Greenberg. "Every port is shattered. It'll be a mess inside. Let's hope they got to the flare refuge, that's heavily shielded—against radiation, but it should keep out flying rocks, too."
"They'd need to be suited up," said Bailey. "They could still be alive." He didn't sound terribly convinced.
"We will soon know for certain," Moses stated. "Until then, speculation is a distraction that hinders clear thought."
Greenberg stared at him. "You're a strange one."
Moses gave him a slow, level look. "So would you be," he said. Cashew bit back tears.
"One day, Moses, you'll have to break down that reserve," Greenberg said. "It may have brought you through nightmares when you were a kid, but now it's keeping you from growing up."
No reaction.
As soon as the two ships were stationary relative to each other, five volunteers made their way across to Tiglath-Pileser. They took one look at the main airlock: jammed. A cutting laser made short work of the hull between two shattered portholes, and they disappeared inside. Brief snatches of conversation came from the speakers:
"Passages jammed with debris."
"Use the laser, cut out the panel."
Pause.
"Can you see the entrance to the flare refuge?"
"Hatch half open. Floor's buckled. Big enough gap to squeeze through, though. On our way."
Long pause. It seemed endless.
"Found them."
Cashew wanted to scream. People? Or bodies?
"Get them into 'flatables," ordered Greenberg. "Be gentle, but be quick!" He pointed to Cashew and Moses. "You two: come with me. The rest of you—wait here, I'll keep you informed."
Cargo Area B was almost empty—it had originally housed equipment for the base on Europa. It had a big airlock, and it was close to the medical unit. They watched on a wallscreen as the volunteers threaded their way out of the wrecked ship towing two sausagelike yellow shapes, giant cocoons.
It seemed to take forever for the airlock to complete its cycle. Then the inner airlock slid across. The cocoons were laid side by side on the floor. The ship's doctor ran some kind of gadget along the edge of one, causing it to split open. A paramedic did the same to the second cocoon.
The doctor bent down, and laboriously unfastened the blood-spattered helmet of the first suited figure. It was Charles, his face smeared with congealed blood. The doctor peered closely and inserted a needle into a neck vein. "Alive," he said.
Everyone stopped holding their breath, exce
pt for Moses, who had been breathing normally, displaying his customary calm. The helmet of the second suit had been released. The paramedic squatted, making a quick examination prior to removing Prudence from her suit.
"Is she—" Cashew began.
Prudence's eyes flicked open. "Bloody right she is!"
Moses burst into tears.
21
Carver Museum of Human History, 2222
Earth's night sky looked scarcely different from the one that had obsessed the ancient astronomers of pre-Egyptian civilization, but everywhere on the dark side of the planet people stared at the sky—expectant, hopeful, scared. There were still riots all over the globe, but they were running out of steam. The madness that had consumed the planet three weeks ago, when the task force had failed to change the course of the Death Comet, was beginning to die down. With death so close that it was almost tangible, people finally began to understand how insignificant everything else had been.
Two lights in the star-studded firmament converged on a collision course:
The curved horsetail of the comet, outpourings of superheated gas from a twenty-trillion-ton snowball . . .
. . . The pinpoint of lo, now visible to the naked eye.
The comet's projected trajectory lay somewhere within a window five thousand miles across—and one-third of that was occupied by a segment of planet. The most likely path skimmed the Earth's atmosphere. The comet might miss completely; it might hit the atmosphere and skip like a stone playing ducks and drakes on a pond; it might hit at a steeper angle and turn into a deadly fireball. Or it might collide head-on with the force of a billion nuclear warheads.
The magma jetting erratically from lo's tortured surface made it impossible to predict which.
In Normerica every tiny church of every sect was crammed to capacity In Asia, crowds of millions surrounded all the major temples. In Europe a hundred million atheists suddenly experienced religious conversion. And in the secret rooms of her museum, Angle Carver poured herself a quadruple slug of Wild Turkey and plugged a Karmageddon album cube into the stereo. Whatever the future might bring, she was damned sure that the most futile act any rational human could possibly engage in, when the chips were down, was to pray. Prayers were a projection of human wants onto an inhuman universe. They were more futile than whistling into a hurricane: they were begging the hurricane to take pity on you because you thought you were special. They were a plea for immunity from prosecution under the laws of nature.