Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “… and this new star is bright enough to cast its own shadows. So it is clear that the Tree has created it as a fourth holy object to be worshipped and propitiated in its name. …”

  “Nonsense, it’s only a wandering star like those we’ve seen before, and one day it will be gone. It’s not like our own stars that move, which never vary from their fixed courses, showing that they each have a holy purpose. …”

  “Still, it moves. …”

  “Not anymore,” a new voice cut in. “It suddenly stood still in the sky five sleeps ago and changed its color. Now it grows brighter and brighter every day. …”

  “I’ve been telling you, it’s a Sign. …”

  A few people had begun to notice him as he made his way across the cave. He was supposed to be treated as if he were invisible. As if he didn’t exist. But people couldn’t help themselves. The talk stopped, and an uneasy silence took its place. People unconsciously moved a little closer to one another, barring access to the fire. They studiously avoided looking at him. Torris was doing the same. He looked straight ahead, as if they were the ones who were invisible. But he couldn’t avoid hearing the person who lost all self-control and burst out, “It’s an omen, that’s what it is! A Sign that we must propitiate the Tree by offering the heretic as a sacrifice.”

  There was a low muttering of agreement. “Cast him into the outer dark,” someone said.

  Torris tightened his lips. Claz had stopped short of that. The prescribed penalties for each degree of heresy had been passed down through the ages and were law.

  He hurried his steps a little and escaped down the dank passageway, where he had found a cramped hollow to sleep in.

  His little fire still flickered, sending greasy smoke into the corridor. He’d cooked his meager supper of bark hoppers on it and tethered the two captured stovebeasts nearby. He piled more wood on the fire and was debating with himself whether or not to sleep in his airsuit when a sodden sleep overtook him.

  He woke in the middle of the night, hearing voices down the corridor coming closer. Angry voices.

  They stopped outside his cubbyhole. A hand thrust aside the skin he’d hung to conserve heat and ripped it down. The small space was suddenly crowded with a half dozen men, all of them shouting at him.

  They hauled him violently to his feet. A fist smashed into his mouth, catching him unawares. He only had time to think, They can’t do that; you’re not supposed to touch a Shunned person.

  They hustled him down the passageway, handling him roughly. One of them was leading the way with a torch. Someone growled, “We’re taking you to see Claz, murderer,” and Torris, confused, could only think, You’re not supposed to talk to a Shunned person either. His mouth was bleeding, and his head was spinning. He tried to wipe away the blood on his chin, but two young bruisers were pinning his arms.

  He could recognize some of them now. They were all unattached young men of an age to band together for a bride raid. A couple of them were part of the same catechism class that had made the ill-fated Climb with him and Brank.

  People usually slept at this hour, but the commotion had roused a couple handfuls of the curious. More people were straggling into the common chamber, staring after Torris as he was dragged toward Claz’s cubicle.

  Claz was waiting for them, along with two elders—Igg the lame Spearmaker and Cleb the Chronicler, Brank’s father. All three of them were looking grim and bleary-eyed, as though they’d been roused from a sound sleep and weren’t too happy about it. A few small objects were spread across the horizontal root Claz used for a table and bench: some scraps of quilted fabric from an airsuit, a bone toggle for fastening a helmet, and a glove. Claz was holding an arrow, and Torris could see that the arrowhead was flecked with dried blood.

  “His skeleton was picked clean,” Claz said without preamble, “but this was lodged between the ribs.”

  He held out the arrow as if it were something distasteful. Torris could see that it was his, one of the arrows that Claz had inscribed with a blessing for success in the Climb.

  “What was left of him came to rest at the bottom of the Tree in the middle of the night. The body must have been caught in the branches many miles above, until the carrion creatures that were feeding on it finally dislodged it. It was Brank, no question about it.”

  He gestured at the scraps of airsuit fabric, and Torris could see that some of them were festooned with the colored beads that were Brank’s trademark. Cleb made a wordless sound in his throat, but Claz ignored it.

  “And this,” Claz continued with naked fury, “is your arrow. No question about that either!”

  Torris stood dumbstruck. There was nothing he could possibly say. One of the surly guardians who was holding him gave him an angry shake.

  “If it hadn’t been for Uz here,” Claz was saying with a nod at Torris’s captor, “the murder might never have been discovered.” He’d mastered his anger, and now his tone was merely severe. “He happened to be wandering about in the middle of the night with his idle companions, for what purpose I don’t know, and I will have a talk with them about that.”

  “We were just …” Uz started to mumble, but a glance from Claz silenced him.

  “You are not needed here,” Claz said. “Go.”

  Reluctantly, the two who were holding Torris released him and left with their friends. Claz stared at Torris for a long time in silence as if he were something strange and remarkable, like a two-headed tree snake. Finally he spoke one word.

  “Why?”

  Torris struggled to say something, but nothing would come out of his mouth. What was the point? He could tell them that Brank had been stalking him, but then he would have to tell them that Brank was stalking Ning too, and where would that lead? Nowhere. Or could he reveal Brank as a criminal who had violated every sacred precept when he stole another Climber’s supplies and destroyed what he couldn’t carry off? That Brank had attempted to kill a Dreamer freshly emerged from his calyx, when one of his judges was Brank’s enraged father? Or try to explain that Brank was attempting to rape and kill an impious woman from another Tree? That wasn’t even an offense. What did all that count against an arrow with his name on it in the rib cage of a murdered Climber?

  Claz and the two elders whispered together in a corner for long minutes while Torris stood and stared at the ice walls with their network of root filaments. At last they turned and looked at him impersonally, the way one might regard a used-up stovebeast that had to be gotten rid of.

  His knees went weak, but he managed to stay upright. Claz said sorrowfully, “I expected much from you, Torris. My disappointment is all the greater.”

  “Get on with it, Claz,” Igg said impatiently, breaching protocol.

  Claz thumped his staff on the ground twice. “You have committed an unspeakable murder,” he said. “It is the will of the tribe that you be expelled from the Tree.”

  There were three days of purification rites. Torris was confined to his little cubbyhole, with two or three guards always stationed just outside, as much to keep impulsive people from getting at him as to keep him from getting out. His guards would not talk to him, but they’d talk at him when hostility and frustration got the better of them.

  “I’d like to put my spear through you, unbeliever! Brank was a friend of mine.”

  “Shut up, Uz. Claz said not to talk to him. He’s still Shunned.”

  “Igg said it too,” Uz grumbled. “He told me he’d like to talk to him with his spear.”

  He was fed once a day, an undercooked haunch of meatbeast or a bone with enough scraps of flesh still on it to make a meager meal. He had to be kept alive until the day of his expulsion, he heard one guard explain to the other, so that his sacrifice could proceed properly and remove the stain of apostasy from the tribe. There were rules about that handed down from priest to priest since time out of mind.

&nb
sp; They didn’t bother to provide him with water; the cloudy drippings he was able to lick from the ice walls of his niche were considered to be sufficient to sustain him.

  The traffic past his little cul-de-sac was uncommonly heavy for this little-used branch of a side tunnel. Everyone wanted to get a look at the heretic who was to be sacrificed, the first casting-out in years. The guards kept them moving, but Torris noticed that when Uz was on duty he tended to be lenient to those who had come to heap abuse on the heretic.

  His father and his two mothers were not among those who filed past. His father’s tenure as Facemaker would be shaky now, and a couple of likely aspirants for that position had already declared themselves—younger men whose qualifications Parn had always dismissed. He could not risk having Firstmother lose her self-control and attempt to speak to Torris as he hustled her past.

  On the third day, they let him put his airsuit on and gave him a skin of air. He took the more robust of the two stovebeasts with him; it was near the end of its endurance now, but it would last long enough to see him through till his air gave out.

  They prodded him with the butts of their spears and herded him down the corridor without speaking. The common cave was strangely deserted; they’d left some children behind to tend the central fire, but everybody else would be waiting out by the launch point to witness his expulsion.

  It was the same low hillock that was traditionally used by departing bride raiders. There hadn’t been an expulsion since Torris had been a small child. A lone flutterbeast was hovering motionless in the sky, too far away for arrows. It couldn’t possibly know what was about to happen, but some instinct had brought it here, perhaps from its hunting ground at the crown of the Tree.

  The ground was trampled for many man-lengths around the hillock, the packed snow turned into dirty ice by all the footprints. The hillock itself was barely a man-length in height, but it was the highest point around.

  Torris’s jailers hustled him forward. The crowd parted easily to let them through. If any of them was shouting imprecations at him, Torris couldn’t hear it; all sound was damped by the eerie silence of Outside.

  The scene was lit by the unnatural brightness of the new star, now brighter than either the red giant or the white dwarf. It hung motionless overhead, in the same spot where it had stopped abruptly a dozen sleeps ago, burning fiercely against the black sky. It was a frightening sight, and perhaps that was the reason the crowd seemed so subdued.

  Torris tried to drag his feet, hoping to see his father and mothers somewhere in the crowd yet knowing that they wouldn’t be there. His guards pushed him along relentlessly.

  Two of the tribe’s biggest men were waiting with a fur blanket at the crest of the hillock. Claz and the two elders were there too, but Claz didn’t attempt to address the crowd in finger talk or no-air talk. He’d probably done that earlier.

  He nodded at the blanket men, and they stretched it tightly between them. They held it as close to the ground as possible; there could be no swinging it back and forth in the low gravity to build up momentum.

  Torris’s captors pushed him down on the blanket, holding him down briefly to prevent him from bouncing. When all motion was stopped, they stepped back. Torris had a moment to contemplate the ominous new star overhead. He spotted­ the hovering flutterbeast, which seemed to have taken an interest in the proceedings. Then someone handed him an arrow. His hand closed unwillingly around it. It was the bloodstained arrow that had killed Brank. It was an unclean object and was to be sent into eternity with him. Torris lay there rigidly, and then someone gave him his bow, forcing his hand around it when he was slow in taking it. The bow was an unclean object too.

  Claz nodded again. The blanket men gave a mighty heave, and Torris went sailing into space. He twisted his head to see the scene below, which was rapidly dwindling. He could not make out individual people anymore, just a circular muddle against the snow. He turned to locate the flutterbeast. It was moving now, spitting reaction mass to try to intercept him.

  Then the new star suddenly winked out, and he was plunged into darkness.

  CHAPTER 18

  6,000,000,000 A.D.

  The Oort Cloud

  “Okay, the drive’s off,” Chu said. “We’re coasting. Don’t worry, Nina. Your tree’s safe. We’re still a couple of astronomical units away from it. Let’s have a look at your bat.”

  He zoomed in on the fluttering midge until it filled the screen, still blurry but its shape plainly visible.

  “You’re right, princess. It does sort of resemble a bat, but of course it’s not flying. Those appendages that look like wings are just twitching reflexively. There! That’s how it maneuvers in a vacuum! Did you see that little jerk when it changed trajectory? It somehow jettisoned a blob of reaction mass. What kind, I can’t guess.”

  A gasp had escaped Joorn. “Life!” he breathed. “Some kind of animal life in naked space!”

  “Let’s have a look at what it’s after,” Chu said. He jiggled verniers on his board until he captured the other speck. This time they all gasped. Magnified, the speck had the unmistakable shape of a human being.

  “How …” Joorn choked. “After six billion years! How could they survive as human beings? The early hominids came and went after only a few million years. After six billion years …”

  “A space-dwelling hominid?” Chu suggested.

  “He’s a man,” Nina said firmly. “And he’s not adapted for space. At least not completely. He’s wearing some kind of homemade spacesuit. It looks quilted, and I think I can see embroidery on it. And his helmet’s not rigid—it’s sort of like a hood, with a glassy mask. And that thing that looks like a bat is going to eat him.”

  They watched in horror as the winged creature adjusted its course several times to intersect the man’s trajectory.

  “He has nothing that he can use for reaction mass to throw, not even an air tank,” Joorn said grimly.

  “That thing on his back that looks something like a bagpipe must be where he gets his air,” Chu said. “Very primitive.”

  “Isn’t there something we can do?” Nina pleaded.

  “Not from here, baby,” Joorn said. “We’re still planetary distances away.”

  “What’s that he’s holding?” Chu asked. “It looks like a stick. What the … He’s bending it. It’s a bow!”

  The distance was too great for them to see the flight of the arrow, but there was a jolt that stopped the beast’s motion as something invisible impacted it and sent it spinning. Gouts of what must have been blood spurted into space, contracting into a swarm of perfectly spherical globules that followed the twisting creature as it disappeared into the void.

  “Well, he can take care of himself, but he can’t breathe in a vacuum,” Joorn said. “How long will it take till we get to him?”

  The computer matched trajectories and velocities. Chu read the answers off his board. “About six and a half hours, if his air holds out that long. There’ll have to be a forty-five second burn at eight G’s at the end. The ship can’t take that, and neither can the passengers. We’ll have to deploy one of the lifeboats. They can do an easy eight G’s on a chemical burn.”

  Joorn started to get up. “I’ll get Martin,” he said. “We’ll get a boat ready. Nina, you better find your mother. We’re finally going to have work for an anthropologist. She’d never forgive me if she missed out on first contact.”

  Chu stopped him. “Stay where you are, Skipper. You’re needed to take the helm. You can’t do eight G’s, and you know it. I’m two generations behind you and still as fit as an ox. Martin and I will take the boat. And Irina can wait here with you till we deliver her first specimen. Bringing an armed aborigine back might be dicey.”

  Joorn reluctantly acquiesced. “Don’t take any chances, Chu. And that includes your last-minute burn. Irina can line up her assistants and figure out a first
contact protocol. I think the best she was hoping for was some kind of surviving six-billion-year-old algae in the ruins of an asteroid settlement.”

  Chu closed out his board and got up. “Where will I find Martin?” he asked.

  “He’ll be with the dolphins,” Joorn said. “They’ll be getting into their excursion pods now that the drive’s off. But the outside inspection can wait. I’ll let them know.”

  “Okay,” Chu said. “He’s probably already in his spacesuit by now. Ring him up and tell him to meet me in the boat lock next to the dolphin pool.” He hurried out, with a nod to the guards at the door.

  Nina slid out of her chair. “I’ll go find Mother.”

  Joorn was absorbed in his control panel and indicator displays. Without looking up he said, “Tell her she can watch the show from the observation deck. I’ll have a larger-than-life feed going on there, and if Chu transmits any close-ups from the boat, I’ll include those too.”

  Nina was already at the door. A guard opened it for her and said, “Do you want an escort, miss?”

  “What for?” she said, and hurried off down the corridor.

  CHAPTER 19

  He was tumbling, with no way to stop it except to vent air, and he wasn’t going to do that. Torris watched the stars swoop by in great circles—the two little sisters, the red stepsister, and a sprinkling of the lesser stars that ordinarily wheeled by in a stately circle that marked a full day. The red star looked different from out here in the void, away from the thin miasma provided by the Tree. He could see now that it was not merely a brilliant point of light like other stars but a tiny circle, and that frightened him.

  The tumbling wasn’t bad enough to make him dizzy. It had resulted from the fact that the arrow he had loosed was several hand spans above his center of mass. He hadn’t wanted to risk trying to aim it from waist level. But the slight pooling of blood in his head and feet made him feel a little odd.