Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “Don’t knock it, Delbert,” Joorn said. “Hawking didn’t.” He kept his eyes on the displays.

  “Jackass,” Karn said. “Brego, I mean. He was still making threats even after we took the ship. As if he could possibly organize his dullard clods into an effective force and—”

  “Alten, start focusing the mirror assembly,” Joorn cut in.

  “Right,” Alten said. The skinny fellow stopped scribbling and stared worriedly at the screen that showed the patch of sky they had come from. Rebirth’s sun was just a star like any other now, a little brighter than most.

  “Don’t worry, Daniel,” Joorn said without taking his eyes off the screens. “We’re safely out of range.”

  His fingers moved over the keys like a pianist playing by ear. The floor gave a shudder, and then everyone’s weight, which had been only about a tenth of Earth-normal during the outward swing, began to increase.

  It would be a year at constant one-G acceleration before they reached the upper limit, brushing the speed of light itself. By then the ship would outweigh whole galaxies, and eons would pass in hours. The stars ahead and behind would have dopplered into blind spots as the rainbow hoops of the starbow compressed themselves first into a thin halo, then squeezed themselves out of existence.

  And a mere thirty years later, they would be home.

  CHAPTER 10

  6,000,000,000 A.D.

  The Oort Cloud

  Torris methodically piled his gear in the fork of two twigs next to the calyx. He topped the pile with his bow and quiver after a short regretful pause. The only thing he retained was the little stovebeast, because it was inside his airsuit and he would freeze to death in minutes without it.

  “I’ll camp nearby where I can see the Dream nest,” Ning said. “Don’t worry, Tor-ris. Have a good Dream, and may the Tree give you wisdom.”

  “The Tree does not speak to everyone,” he said. “Sometimes the Dream makes no sense, but the old men always say they have never forgotten it.”

  She laughed, then remembered that this was supposed to be a solemn moment. “Yes, some of our young men have Dreams like that too, but then the elders try to interpret it, each with his own opinion. I’ve noticed that the opinions are usually opinions they’ve had all along.”

  Torris tried to give her a stern look, but that didn’t work with Ning. He turned his attention to the calyx, a swelling green structure three times the height of a man. It was ready to receive a Dreamer. Small pollinating creatures were already swarming around the flaring invitation at the top.

  “Here, Tor-ris,” she said, handing him a small woven bag. “It is a gift of pollen from our Tree.”

  He took the bag, giving her a quizzical look.

  “Our priests gave me the offering when they knew I was going to attempt a crossing. They say it is a pious act to give a gift of pollen from one Tree to another. And the Tree thanks the donor with a more powerful Dream for a more ordinary dusting from a few grains received at random from insects.”

  Torris had already dusted his suit from another calyx growing on the branch, but he took the bag and thanked her. Then, impatient to begin, he took a nicely calculated leap to the calyx’s portal at the top.

  The pollinating insects scattered, scurrying in all directions. He carefully pried the portal open, wide enough for him to squeeze himself inside, following the instructions that Claz had given him. It occurred to him, in an unseemly instant of amusement, that he had become a pollinating insect himself. The portal closed above him, but there was still a dim haze of green light seeping through the fleshy walls.

  He worked his way downward to the tiny chamber below. He could tell at once that it was warm inside and that there was air—moist air, he could surmise from the moisture that condensed on his faceplate. He overcame an unworthy moment of fear and raised the Face to take a sniff. The air was rich and fragrant, thicker than the kind of air you got from drilling for air pockets in the cambium.

  He squirmed out of his airsuit and set the stovebeast free. The furry little animal immediately started climbing upward on its stubby limbs. It was going to have a feast on the insects swarming outside.

  He dusted himself with the pollen that Ning had given him and settled down in the nest made by overlapping sepals. He was already beginning to feel sleepy.

  He was the Tree. He didn’t know how long he had been the Tree; he seemed to have existed for eternity, in a swirl of stars and blackness where stars grew and shrank and changed their colors and sometimes exploded. He was aware of commensal life on and within himself, fluttering in his branches, flourishing on his bark, burrowing shallowly to drink his air and water and the heat of his growth. But their microscopic needs were hardly noticeable in his vastness. He had hosted them as long as he could remember.

  Down below, where he drank the ice that nourished him, was a new kind of life that lived between his roots, tiny creatures that had arrived less than a million years ago. One of them was within him now, in the ovule where he gave birth to his seeds. It had brought him a surfeit of pollen—pollen from a Brother Tree—and it was hastening meiosis. He and his brothers had taught these odd new mites from beyond to do that when they had first arrived out of the void, rewarding them with hallucinations that they seemed to find pleasurable.

  He turned his ponderous attention to the mite that had climbed from his roots and entered his calyx. He could see it clearly from a height, stretched out on a bed of sepals, having removed its skin, which was made from the skins of other commensal animals, and it had lost its own consciousness and entered his.

  To his mild surprise, it seemed to be himself, too dizzy with hallucinogens to sort out the mingled perceptions. He saw himself through an undulating haze. He tried to get back to his body, but the Tree wasn’t through with him yet.

  He woke up suddenly and completely, perfectly aware of where he was. He had no idea of how long he’d been unconscious, but he was weak and very hungry. The pale light seeping through the pellucid walls had a pinkish cast, so it had been at least a day, maybe more.

  At last he was able to move. He got up stiffly and looked around. A central bulge on the receptacle floor seemed to have grown thicker while he slept, and the sweetish smell that had put him to sleep was fading, and that was all. There was sudden movement above and an occlusion of light. He looked up and saw a stovebeast inching its clumsy way downward. Whether it was his or another he couldn’t tell.

  He swept the little beast up, and it quickly attached itself to the small of his back. He could feel its warmth spreading through his aching spine. It seemed chubbier than before. He climbed into his airsuit and sealed its Face. When he poked his head through the calyx into airlessness, the Treescape was suffused with pink and the first of the Sisters was rising. So it was daybreak of whatever day it was.

  His belongings were where he’d left them. He bundled them into his sleeping sack and slung it over his shoulder. For some obscure reason, he didn’t feel like stowing his bow away with the rest of his possessions and strung it, carrying it along with his spear. He still had one of his original arrows with Claz’s rune on it, along with three more he’d whittled during the Climb, and he was pleased with himself for this evidence of his frugality.

  He looked around for Ning’s camp and saw what looked like a low-hanging bundle of meatbeast carcasses through the leaves. He set off in that direction with a low-gravity shuffle.

  The hanging bundle came into view, with Ning’s sleeping sack under it. At first, focused on the sleeping sack, he didn’t see the airsuited figure standing off to the side. Then, with a shock, it penetrated his consciousness.

  It was someone from his own tribe. Even at a distance, he could tell that it was Brank’s airsuit, with its splash of ostentatious beadwork spread across the upper shoulders and down the arms. Brank’s back was to him, but Torris could tell that he had an arrow trained on the s
hadowy form visible through the translucent integument of the sack. Brank had caught Ning during her morning wash, when she was out of her airsuit and unable to emerge into a vacuum. Otherwise she would have had an arrow through him.

  Brank seemed to be enjoying himself, taunting her by moving his bow around, aiming the arrow at various parts of her body and pantomiming what he was going to do.

  Torris saw it all in a horrified flash and started running forward without thinking. He realized his mistake instantly as he lost contact with the branch and found himself levitating helplessly. It seemed an eternity before his feet found purchase again and he was able to push himself forward with an occasional one-handed assist from a reachable stem.

  Brank wasn’t aware of the motion behind him yet. At any moment, he could turn his head and get off a quick shot. But he was preoccupied by the game he was playing with Ning, who didn’t dare move. She wouldn’t have been able to get into her airsuit quickly enough anyway. It was part of the game.

  Torris’s bow was already strung. He was able to reach around and draw an arrow out of his quiver and fit it to the bowstring without slowing the shallow shuffle that was moving him forward.

  He burst through some trailing leaves and branches, bringing the bow up. In the same instant, Brank must have become aware of the minute vibrations that had reached him. He whirled around and loosed the arrow he had been saving for Ning.

  Torris would have been unable to dodge, but Brank’s aim had been bad, or perhaps he hadn’t had time to aim at all. The arrow whizzed past Torris’s head, only a finger’s width away, and buried itself in a branch.

  Torris raised his bow, took deliberate aim, and shot Brank through the chest. Brank took a few teetering steps, his arms flailing, and fell over the edge of the branch he’d been standing on. Torris, feeling weak and drained, fell to one knee and looked down. Brank’s body was twisting, falling with nightmarish slowness in the negligible gravity of the comet. Somewhere in the first few miles of its descent, it would probably lodge in a clot of branches. Something prompted Torris to look into his quiver. The arrow he’d drawn had been the last of the ten marked and sanctified arrows that Claz had given him.

  He tottered on unsteady legs to Ning’s sleeping sack. She was naked and struggling in its cramped interior to get into her airsuit. More quickly than Torris would have expected, she heaved herself out of the sack and was standing before him, her bow cocked and an arrow pointed at his heart.

  “Have you killed him?” she said in lip talk.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She lowered her bow and slid the arrow back into its quiver. “He came early, before I was clad against the vacuum,” she said. “He told me with his arrow for a pointer that I was not to move. He kept me thus while he thought things over. I know that he was trying to think of how to get into the air sack with me and use me for his pleasure. But he did not dare. He knew I would kill him as soon as he was out of his own airsuit. So he decided on this other way. He told me that he would have as much pleasure from it. There are such men. He was tiring of his amusement when you arrived. But I thought I would try to stay alive as long as possible, in case something might distract him. I might be able to scramble into my airsuit quickly enough to get to him with my knife, even with an arrow in me.”

  “He’s gone,” Torris said. “Food for the scavengers.”

  “Show me,” she said.

  He took her to the place where Brank had fallen. Together they peered over the edge. Brank’s body was floating some tens of man-lengths down. It still hadn’t picked up much speed. His bow hovered over him like a judgment.

  “You have done well, Tor-ris,” she said. “Why so glum?”

  He could not share her fierce joy. He stared after the drifting corpse in horror. He was damned forever. He had violated the deepest of taboos. He had killed another Climber. When he returned to his tribe, he would be an outcast, a pariah.

  CHAPTER 11

  4,250,000,000 A.D.

  Galaxy 3C-295

  “Time to start losing weight, is it?” Joorn quipped.

  “Almost,” Alten said. “There’s still a few more days till turnaround. I’d better go over the numbers one more time.”

  Joorn patted his belly in mock dismay. Not that he had much of a belly to speak of. At the age of ninety-five—almost halfway through a normal human lifespan—his stomach was still as flat and hard as it had been at eighty.

  “Again?” he said. “Last week you told me I personally outmassed the entire Virgo Cluster. I can’t imagine what the ship and all its people weighs by now.”

  Alten frowned. “There’s something fishy about Karn’s data. According to my original calculations, turnaround time should have been a week ago.”

  Joorn became serious. “Did you adjust for the new estimates for the expansion of the Universe in the last one and three-quarter billion years?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And the rate of increase of the expansion discovered by Karn’s bright young men?”

  Alten showed his exasperation. “Father, be serious.”

  “Well, then, it’s the zig zag.”

  “We don’t zig zag. You know that. We’d keep losing gamma. We have to keep accelerating in a straight line, with one course correction at the halfway point to allow for the change in position of the Milky Way relative to our signposts.”

  “So our signposts do the zig zagging.”

  “You could put it that way. The galaxies rush apart not because they’re rushing apart but because the Universe is expanding. And expanding faster than the speed of light at the magic boundary—something that Karn and Oliver choose to ignore, brilliant as they’re supposed to be. Relativity still holds at the local level. The Milky Way and the Local Group remain gravitationally bound to the Virgo Cluster, as distant as they are from it—or, as some of the ancient diehards liked to put it, the Local Group was actually a ‘part’ of the greater Virgo Cluster.”

  Joorn glanced at the forward viewscreen. It was filled with a Doppler-adjusted representation of a brilliant galaxy, 3C-295, less than two hundred thousand light-years away, closer than the Magellanic Clouds had once been to the Milky Way.

  “Let’s take a look at our flag post galaxy the way it really is,” Joorn murmured. “Right now, we’re seeing it as a co-moving object.”

  His fingers danced over the console, and the screen showed them a vertical smear of mashed multicolored light that was squeezed between the two blind spots that almost filled the screen fore and aft. “I’m cheating a little bit,” he said. “We’re seeing it as a rattlesnake might see it—otherwise the red shift would be too extreme.”

  Alten nodded. “From here we draw a straight line to the Milky Way, which we can see now. After more than four billion years of expansion and galactic drift since we left Earth, the signposts we started out with are scattered on either side of the line, so we ignore them. The Milky Way itself has drifted along with its co-moving companions, of course, but I’m allowing for that, and we can make another small adjustment when we’re within spitting distance.”

  “So what’s your problem?”

  Alten frowned. “There’s something wrong. We should have passed 3C-295 a week ago. I tried to tell Karn about it, but he just told me to recheck my figures. I did that and got the same answer. Karn told me you can’t argue with the navigation data and to talk to Oliver about it.”

  “And?”

  “I got the usual runaround. A ship can’t have two captains and two navigators and all that. Karn has his team of dedicated cosmologists, and they’re fully competent. You’ve got only me. Maybe it’s time for you to retire as captain. After more than twenty years of running ship operations, Oliver can handle the final run.”

  Joorn’s lips tightened. “Karn might have something to say about that. We had a deal.”

  “I’ll talk to some o
f the new cosmology grads. They’re the new generation. Karn’s ‘young men’ are all middle-aged now and ossified in their thinking. Their idea of how to arrive at a truth is to get a pronouncement from Karn. Maybe it’s time for that whole crowd to retire and let the new generation take over.”

  “Except me, of course,” Joorn said with a smile.

  “Father, they worship you. The legendary captain who led the exodus to the promised land, planted the human race in another galaxy, and now is leading them back to the galaxy of their fathers.”

  “That’s a little fulsome, my boy,” Joorn demurred. “The Universe is winding down; the galaxies are flying farther and farther apart, isolating themselves; the skies everywhere are getting darker. Fewer and fewer stars are being born, and more of the remaining ones are turning into cinders or black holes incapable of contributing to the rebirth of a stellar population.”

  He looked Alten squarely in the eye. “But there’s life in the old cosmos yet, a few more billion years of it. And the human race is going home.”

  Alten grew thoughtful. “I’ll talk to some of the new people. The demographics of the ship are changing. The generation that’s grown up on board knows nothing about Rebirth or 3C-273, or the half a lifetime it took to get there. It’s just legend, like Earth itself. They grew up with the notion of returning to the Milky Way, not settling 3C-273 or joining Karn on a wild goose chase. Politically, they’re likely to side with us old-timers in the Homegoing movement. We still outnumber Karn’s aging disciples—they were just more ruthless than us. But the new people aren’t intimidated by them. Neither are the Endgamists they kidnapped when we took off in such a hurry. Karn’s tough guys don’t look so tough anymore.”

  “And if it turns out that we’ve really overshot our turnover slot?”

  “We can still make it up at this point by adding another fraction of a G to our deceleration mode.” He grinned. “We’ll all just be a little overweight for the rest of the trip.”