Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  Without the slightest hesitation, Torris drew one of the pencil-­thin table legs from the bundle tucked under his arm, fit it to his little bow, and let it fly. It caught Oliver in the throat, and the nail gun went flying. The force of the impact lifted Oliver­ off his feet and pinned him to the corridor wall.

  Before anyone could react, Torris sent another table leg through the man who had been standing beside Oliver. The man stared stupidly at the thing sticking out of his chest. Dead or dying, he was flung back to crash into the knot of men behind him.

  Now Torris seemed to consider whom to shoot next. He chose a man with a knife who had made the mistake of taking a step toward Nina. The slim metal rod caught him precisely in the center of the forehead as Nina rolled away from him.

  There was no surge toward Chu’s party. Oliver had been the only one of them who had a weapon that could kill at a distance. They broke into a panic and started to flee toward a corridor exit in the opposite direction. Torris sent the last of his metal shafts after them. It caught the rearmost runner between the shoulder blades.

  Before the escaping mob could reach the exit door, it opened and a swarm of men wearing cloth brassards around their upper arms spilled into the corridor.

  “Ryan!” Chu said. “Talk about timing!”

  Martin was bending over Nina with the knife the dead man had dropped, sawing through Nina’s bonds. Torris was looking down at them, not saying anything but eyeing the knife longingly. The ropes parted, and Martin raised his head and saw him standing there.

  “All right, my skinny friend,” he said, reaching up to hand Torris the knife. “I guess you’ve earned it.”

  Ryan’s men were outnumbered two to one by Oliver’s demoralized band, but they were rounding them up without encountering any resistance. Ryan himself, wearing one of the security brassards, walked over to where Oliver’s body was pinned to the wall and said, “Jesus!”

  Martin helped Nina to her feet. She was shaky now that it was over but exhibiting admirable self-control.

  “Where’s Karn?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see him.”

  Ryan joined them. “We’re still looking for him,” he said. He glanced cautiously at Torris. “Is that what the human race looks like now?”

  “I wouldn’t try to take that bow away from him,” Martin said.

  “It was amazing,” Nina said. “When I got away from that awful man for a minute, he had about two seconds to figure out what was happening. But he didn’t hesitate at all. If he had, I’d be dead.”

  She glanced with a shudder over to where the corridor wall had been stitched with nails when Oliver had dropped the nail gun.

  “He had to choose sides,” Ryan said. “He decided Martin and Chu were the good guys.”

  “Don’t forget about me,” said a computer-generated voice from the dolphin tank.

  Nina ran over to the tall figure and impulsively threw her arms around his hips. Her head just about came up to his waist.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you, whatever your name is!” she said.

  “It’s Tor-ris,” Jonah’s enhanced voice supplied.

  Torris, for all his strangeness, reacted the way any human male would. He looked unmistakably embarrassed and uncomfortable. He tentatively reached out to pat her head but thought better of it and jerked the hand back as if it were about to get burned.

  Nina clung for a moment, then let go. “I’d better find Mother. She must be terribly worried. She was waiting on the observation deck with her graduate student, Laurel, for me to give them my account of the first sighting.”

  “Father will be worried too,” Martin said.

  “Tell him I’m all right.”

  She waltzed out, giving a wide berth to the swarms of security volunteers who were cuffing the prisoners and lining them against the wall. Ryan did not try to stop her.

  “We’d better get him to the dolphin pool right away,” Chu said. “I don’t know when we’re going to regain weight.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “So he’s safely ensconced with our finny friends?” Joorn said.

  “Yes,” Chu said. “Along with Irina and her graduate student, Laurel. And two extremely earnest young women and a rather excitable young man who’ve decided they’ve found their life’s work. Irina says we’re going to have to revamp our entire educational system to accommodate those who want to change their fields of study.”

  “They’ll have their work cut out for them,” Joorn agreed.

  “She says we’ll need anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, paleontologists, ethnologists, and probably a host of disciplines for which names haven’t been invented yet.”

  Alten, pausing as he rose to relinquish the first officer’s seat to Chu, nodded. “Yes, and not just the descriptive sciences. Let’s not forget a few other fields of inquiry that have suddenly become terribly important. Things like cosmological physics, planetary nebulae, and stellar evolution. Exactly how long before a red giant with the remaining mass of our Sol uses up the last of its remaining helium, and so forth.”

  “You’ll have to argue it out with Irina. I wouldn’t touch that ‘descriptive sciences’ crack with a ten-foot polemic.”

  “I got that one from Nina. She uses it a lot in her arguments with Irina about her future career.”

  “Well you better brace yourself. She’s getting awfully interested in those so-called ‘descriptive sciences.’ You may lose your daughter to her mother’s disciplines.”

  “All right with me.” Alten got out of the way as Chu took his seat at the controls.

  “By the way, Nina is still down there with them,” Chu said. “She and Torris seem to be making progress understanding each other.”

  “Ear,” Torris repeated. “Mouth,” he said, tapping each in turn. He was floating on his back, half-submerged, in the medium he now knew was called water in the dwarfs’ language. They seemed to have only one word for it, not the many words used in his own language to describe its various aspects.

  The young girl he had saved with his makeshift arrow nodded vigorously. She urged him on with a smile of approval and sat back waiting.

  He thought for a moment, then told her the equivalent words—first in the exaggerated lip movements of no-air talk, and then, when she didn’t respond, out loud. He’d tried finger talk, but that was a total failure. Her people seemed to be used to always having air to speak in.

  Her name was Nina. He’d practiced till he could pronounce it to her satisfaction. It was hard to judge her age. He hadn’t decided how much of her small stature was because she belonged to a race of chunky dwarfs. But he could tell that she was still a child, several years younger than Secondmother, despite the fact that she seemed to be on an equal footing with the grown-ups who were examining him and jabbering away in their incomprehensible language.

  One of them, a young woman, was talking now, pointing at him and sounding excited. These people talked more to one another than they attempted to talk with him. In some ways, it was easier to communicate with Jonah, whom he now knew was not a beast but a person despite his form.

  His real name was not Jonah but a string of whistles, which Torris was able to imitate—albeit an octave or two lower—to Jonah’s evident approval. Jonah was wearing the necklace with the talking medallion, and he only had to hear a word once to get it right from then on. About a dozen of Jonah’s water-dwelling­ tribe were splashing about nearby, whistling back and forth, but Torris hadn’t been able to identify any other names yet.

  Now Nina was talking to the group of adults, showing them the marks she had made on something that looked like a square of flat resin, almost like a Face. They all had something to say about it, and they kept glancing over at Torris. Then Torris’s stovebeast waddled over on its stubby limbs, looking for someone to attach itself to. They all shrank from it e
xcept for one woman who had the same hair and eyes as Nina. But Nina reached out to pat the furry little beast, forgetting how hot it was, and snatched her hand back before touching it again. The stovebeast pressed against her, recognizing her. Nina was the one who had taken charge of it when they’d first arrived in this enormous cave with its unthinkable expanse of water. She’d fed it fragments of something that must have been a form of meat because the stovebeast lapped it up eagerly. Torris was relieved; it hadn’t been fed for some time and he didn’t know when he’d need the little creature again. This Nina, he decided, had a good heart—warm hands in his tribe’s idiom. Torris wondered how you’d say that in their language.

  The huge cave had been filling up with people, many times more of them than there were in Torris’s entire tribe. They kept their distance and just stared, chattering among themselves. Then something unimaginable happened. A huge disembodied voice spoke, seemingly from the roof of the cave. Torris didn’t know what it was saying, but it had the even tones of unquestioned authority, like a priest delivering dogma.

  All the chattering people began looking for something to hold on to. The waterbeasts, Jonah’s friends, became suddenly alert. They’d been restrained in their play, trying—though not always successfully—to avoid breaking the surface tension of the water. Now they seemed expectant and a little careless. One of them leaped ten feet into the air, drawing a huge blob of water with it.

  Then, like magic, Torris suddenly felt the return of the crippling weight he’d experienced in the little traveling cave with Chu and Martin.

  He grabbed the basin rim he’d been leaning on and let the water support him, the way it had when he’d been in that weird rolling container with Jonah, a container he now realized was a sort of spacesuit for Jonah, with arms and grasping fingers that Jonah could operate from inside.

  All across the expanse of the now-flat lagoon, the myriad little gouts of water that Jonah’s friends had inadvertently stirred up and sometimes caused to detach and float in the air, collapsed and pelted down on the surface. The huge globule that had risen to the ceiling of the cave with the swimmer still in it dropped abruptly and deposited its accidental passenger with a splash. Torris could tell from the chirps and whistles that the others thought that was funny. They’d begun some kind of a game, splashing and leaping clear out of the water, now that it was safe to do so.

  The enormous splash had soaked Torris’s interrogators, who had leaped back in dismay, dabbing futilely at themselves, except for Nina and the woman who looked as if she might be Nina’s mother. They thought it was funny too, and they both were laughing. Nina turned to Torris and said something, smiling mischievously. He didn’t understand the words, but he smiled back out of politeness.

  Then Nina got to her feet, wrung out the loose folds of her garment as best she could, and exchanged a few words with her mother. Her mother nodded. Nina turned to Torris and with words and gestures made him understand that she had to leave but would be back.

  He watched her thread her way through the crowd of spectators, moving carelessly in the strange way these odd little people had of walking, clumping along as though their feet were glued to the ground at each step.

  The other interrogators were crowding forward again with their unintelligible questions, but he ignored them for the moment and submerged himself up to his neck to relieve his unnatural weight. Jonah nudged him underwater, and he patted him absentmindedly on his snout and got another nudge back. It occurred to him that he had more in common with Jonah and his tribe than with these two-legged creatures who looked like people but could move about freely out of the water.

  Except for little Nina. He had the beginnings of human language in common with her. He furrowed his brow, trying to remember one of the phrases she’d used several times in parting, to fix it in his new vocabulary.

  Whatever it meant, he could tell that it signified a casual farewell, not the formal goodbye that in Torris’s language meant a long separation.

  Jonah seemed to know what he was thinking. Or perhaps he’d figured it out from the experimental sounds Torris was mumbling to himself. He lifted his head above water and squeaked in a recognizable if high-pitched imitation of human speech: “Bye now, Torris. See you later.”

  “Well what have you learned so far, young lady?” Joorn asked. He was lounging in the row of supernumeraries’ seats, taking his ease now that Chu had taken the con and Alten had replaced him in the first officer’s chair.

  “He’s really bright, Grandfather,” Nina said enthusiastically. “It’s only been a couple of hours, but he’s already learned over a dozen words and tried to teach me the equivalents in his own language, complete with a lot of context I don’t understand yet and a lot of gestures and body language that I do.”

  “How is it that you’ve taken the lead among all those professionals and budding graduate students your mother’s brought into it?”

  Nina blushed. “They’re just getting started, Grandfather. I’m sort of the icebreaker. Torris is only comfortable talking to me so far. He thinks he has some sort of connection to me because he saved my life. I gather that among his people that implies some kind of mutual obligation.”

  “He must be a Confucian, then, mustn’t he?” Chu said, looking up from the controls with a smile. “When you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for that person from then on.”

  “Jonah’s been a big help,” Nina said earnestly. “He’s been recording everything and feeding it into a sort of three-way dolphin dictionary. His ‘Rosetta’ file, whatever that means. And Torris has been amazing. I think he knows more words in Delphinese than he does in English. You should hear him and Jonah chirping away to each other. I think he also feels some sort of connection to Jonah, maybe because he spent so much time in that tank with him.”

  “Martin can help too, when he gets off his shift after we’re steady on course,” Chu said. “We got a bit of a head start with Jonah in the lifeboat. Of course we’re just engineering stiffs, not linguists.”

  “Laurel’s already starting to make progress,” Nina said, steadfastly defending the ad hoc forensic team. “She’s specializing in ethnology, you know. Even with so little to go on, she says she sees similarities with the customs of some primitive tribes on old Earth. Torris climbing to the top of his comet’s Tree, for instance. He told me very eloquently about it in pantomime and then mimicked going to sleep by resting his face on his hands and closing his eyes. Laurel says that the Australian Aborigines used to have a coming-of-age ritual called a ‘walkabout,’ where they wandered in the desert and didn’t come back until they’d had some sort of mystic dream.”

  “Isn’t that stretching it a bit, sweetheart?” Alten said from the second seat.

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re so … so unimaginative when it comes to Mother’s field!” Nina said. Alten raised an eyebrow but had the good sense to say nothing.

  Undeterred, Nina went on: “And then there was Andrew …”

  “Andrew?” Joorn said, raising an eyebrow of his own.

  Nina blushed again. “Andrew Nordraak. He’s a little older than me … well, a lot older, but he’s very nice. He’s studying to be a paleoanthropologist, you know, the study of prehuman hominids, millions of years before man, like Australopithecus afarensis and aethiopicus.”

  “Australopithecus? Aethiopicus?”

  Nina became defensive. “Well, it’s very interesting, at least when Andrew explains it. He says that Torris’s divergence from our kind couldn’t possibly be the product of six billion years of evolution. It took only a few million years for the first hominids to evolve from an apelike ancestor. And only a few hundred thousand years for Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals to develop from Homo erectus. He said he’d be willing to bet that less than a half million years separates us from Torris’s people.”

  “It’ll take some DNA testing and molecular taxonomy studies to determin
e that, won’t it?” Alten said mildly.

  “Good for you, Daddy,” Nina said. “You’re getting there. That’s exactly what we plan to do as soon as we can get Torris to trust us enough to submit to the blood tests and tissue samples.”

  “We?” Joorn said.

  “You’re making fun of me, Grandpa.”

  “Not at all,” Chu interceded. “He’s proud of you for making yourself part of the team. We’re going to need all the good minds we can get to unravel this puzzle.” He turned to Joorn. “This Andrew has a point, Captain. Where did Torris’s people come from? They didn’t spend six billion years evolving on their Bernal trees. They would have evolved themselves out of existence. After all, the Others came and went in six billion years, leaving the galaxy to us.”

  Alten lifted his head, his interest aroused. “The sun became a red giant less—far less—than a billion years ago. Perhaps whatever remained of the human race migrated to the Oort cloud and after who knows how many generations sank back into a preindustrial society.”

  Nina was shaking her head, and Chu answered for her. “Doesn’t work, mate. It’s still too many years before that happened. Whatever migrated to the comets would have been as far beyond us and Torris’s people as Homo habilis was from the one-celled creatures that were swimming in the oceans at the dawn of life in the Precambrian.”

  Nina found the courage to contradict her father. “He’s right, Daddy. Torris’s people evolved from people like us less than half a billennium ago.”

  Joorn became thoughtful. “Half a billennium is enough time for the Trees and their human population to have spread through the entire Oort cloud, both ours and Alpha Centauri’s. Torris has shown the ability of his people to survive in naked space with Stone Age technology, supported by the ecology of these Bernal trees that we see everywhere. Hell, there may be a human population of billions or trillions just surrounding this one star system. To say nothing about the Oort clouds of the other stars in the neighborhood.”