Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  Martin stared numbly at him but didn’t say anything.

  Torris went on. He said diffidently, “I would like to take some of those magic tools with me, to show to our priest, Claz, so that he will believe what I tell him, and forgive my heresy. That thing that one holds that pushes you when you are drifting in space. The thing that makes heat without a fire, like a stovebeast. And a gift for Claz—one of those knives made of that shiny hard stuff that isn’t bone or wood.”

  He was becoming more and more agitated. Martin and Chu exchanged distressed glances, then turned to Joorn.

  “Can’t we do something?” Irina whispered.

  Joorn nodded. Chu said to him, “We’re pointed in the right direction, Captain. I can take us in without losing our quarter-G spin.”

  Torris calmed down immediately. He’d understood every word.

  CHAPTER 25

  Torris visited the bridge every day now, usually getting there on his own, though with the ship spinning at less than a quarter G, he tended to shuffle along like an old man. There was still a weak up and down, enough to make shipboard life fairly normal, though the vector resulting from the ship’s one-tenth-G acceleration made everybody experience a disorienting tilt. But people got used to it, and Torris, with his exquisite sense of gravity, fared better than most.

  Today there was a special sense of excitement. He had been counting the days on his fingers, and this was the day deceleration time would exactly equal the interval leading up to turnaround time. Jonah and Nina had explained it to him. Jonah was trundling along beside him in his travel tank today. The dolphin lagoon had weathered the turnaround just fine, and the slight tilt of the water’s surface was hardly noticeable. It would be a great event for the dolphins when the surface flattened out, but Jonah had chosen to accompany Torris instead of being there with his friends.

  “Soon,” Torris said. “Soon.”

  Jonah became uncharacteristically reticent for a dolphin. Usually he chattered away nonstop, especially in the water, where the chatter was laced with a liberal admixture of ultrasonics. “Patience, Torris, patience,” he squeaked, then repeated it using a word in Torris’s language that did not mean quite the same thing. It was not a word Torris wanted to hear. He had spent the last few days whittling arrows from leftover dowels he’d found in the lumber warehouse, and he had taken to carrying his quiver around with him, along with the bow.

  “I understand,” Torris said. But clearly he did not. He was not used to evasions or ambiguities.

  When they reached the control room, Torris found a few more people than usual waiting for them. Laurel had brought along a couple of new assistants, people whom Torris remembered as being especially curious about the customs of his tribe. And Martin had drafted two people from his workshop: a brute of a man who helped with the heavy stuff and a young woman named Marisa who had done the delicate work of fabricating the interface air valve.

  Faces turned in Torris’s direction, careful faces with disturbingly taciturn expressions.

  “Just in time,” Chu said, a little too heartily. “We’ll be parking in about an hour.” One of Laurel’s assistants explained unnecessarily that parking meant coming to a stop.

  “We’re rather large,” Chu said. “But we’ll be too far away for anybody to make out details or our scale without a telescope. Perhaps they’ll take us for another Tree drifting by.”

  Torris knew about telescopes. He’d been given a small one, a compact black cylinder that became miraculously longer when you pulled on it. He’d intended it as one of the gifts for Claz, but now he was having second thoughts. He’d readily discovered the secret of what a lens could do, and he thought that if he ever became the tribe’s Facemaker—a big if, because he had to get Claz’s absolution first—he might be able to cast a lens from the clear resin used for Faces. How to arrive at a meniscus to provide the necessary curvature was the problem. He speculated that the Tree’s microgravity at the comet’s surface where it was strongest might be the answer, along with the liquid resin’s natural tendency to be attracted to the sides of the mold. For now it was just a daydream, but a strong one.

  Still, Chu’s pessimistic view was disturbing. Torris scowled. “Why do we have to be so far away that they’d need a telescope to see us plainly?”

  “It’s complicated,” Chu said, resorting to the irritating word that the dwarfs liked to use. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”

  Torris was about to protest when Chu did something that made the engines stop. Torris could immediately feel the pull of artificial gravity straighten itself out. There was no longer the illusion of a tilted room.

  “We’ll coast from here,” Chu said.

  It took another two days, but Torris woke up one morning with the knowledge that the ship’s engines had fired again during the night. The dolphin lagoon was tilted, though he had slept through the turnaround.

  “We’re parking again,” he said to Jonah. “Why?”

  “It’s complicated,” Jonah said in a sardonic imitation of Chu that managed to sound like him delivered in a dolphin squeak.

  Nobody was up and around yet. The tiled shoreline was deserted, with no sign of his usual interrogators. Torris heaved himself out of the water and struggled into his airsuit, leaving the hood with its Face thrown back. The air sack lay flaccid against his spine, its new hoses dangling. He gathered up his pile of arrows and filled his quiver.

  “What are you doing?” Jonah asked.

  “I’m going to the bridge.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll have to hurry then,” Torris said, tight-lipped. He strode off without looking back, tall and straight despite the quarter-gravity.

  “Wait!” Jonah called behind him, breaking into a dolphin distress call.

  Torris forged on, not looking back. By the time he reached the first turn in the corridor, he could hear Jonah’s travel tank rolling along behind him, wheels squealing as it scurried to catch up.

  Braking had stopped by the time he got to the bridge. The dolphin pool would be flat again at the quarter-G rotation. Torris knew enough about traveling worlds by now to surmise that the one they called a ‘ship’ was probably drifting motionless with respect to the Tree.

  When he entered, he found everybody staring grim-faced at the big screen. Alten was taking his turn in the captain’s chair. Chu was sprawled out in one of the spare chairs, awake now but obviously having spent the night there. Joorn was supposed to be off-shift, but he was in the first officer’s seat next to Alten, making the small adjustments necessary to keep Time’s Beginning in tandem with the Tree. Nina and Martin were sitting together, a scanty breakfast lying untouched on the low table between them. Their mother was with them, though she usually showed little interest in ship operations per se. Nobody from her ad hoc anthropology team was there; they were probably all still asleep at this hour.

  “Sit down, Torris,” Alten said, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Me too?” Jonah squeaked, but nobody seemed to think it was funny.

  Torris lowered his gangling frame onto a chair, perching rather than sitting. It was a relief after walking more than a mile in one-quarter gravity, plus the extra G’s of deceleration. Aching legs were a new sensation to someone who’d spent his life in free fall.

  His eyes went immediately to the overwhelming view on the screen. It was the Tree, heart-wrenchingly close—almost as close as he’d seen it the day Chu and Martin had plucked him out of the void. He could see it whole, from the table-land at the top, where he and Ning had hunted game, to the comet it clutched in its roots. No one else in his tribe had ever seen it like this, except perhaps a few oldsters who had been alive at the time of the last bride raid.

  Almost as close was another Tree—Ning’s Tree—looking much the same. While he’d been away, the two Trees had closed the gap between them. The ship’s numberers,
he’d been told, had calculated that there would be no actual collision. The two Trees would soon start to drift apart, passing each other. But for a few tens of days, they would be close enough for a bride raid. When that would occur would depend on how daring the young men of both tribes were. Undoubtedly there would be a few rash fools attempting the crossing early, either making the leap alone or with a foolhardy friend for mutual protection. But tradition dictated that the main body go together to provide a force that could overwhelm the defenders with less risk. Sadly, according to the tales that had spread through the cometary belt over the aeons, the result was more likely to be a mutual slaughter.

  “I should be there,” Torris fretted.

  “Torris, we’re not as close as it looks,” Alten said without taking his eyes off the display. “You’ve seen what a telescope can do. Well, this is like a thousand telescopes. And it’s a telescope that thinks—in a way—and fills in things that it can’t actually see, like the human brain does. No matter how near it seems, we’re actually a quarter-million miles away.”

  “Daddy, he doesn’t know what a quarter-million means,” Nina said. “He can count up to twenty with his shoes off.”

  “You must let me out with the airlock,” Torris said. “With one of your magic tanks of air.” He had been stringing his bow while Alten talked.

  “Torris, don’t you understand that …” Alten began.

  “And one of those”—Torris thought hard for a moment and triumphantly came up with the word—“thrusters.”

  “And he doesn’t understand a thousand either,” Nina said. “The highest number he can even visualize is ‘two hands of a ten of fingers.’ That’s not even a hundred. You can double it if you throw in the toes. I couldn’t even attempt the word for that.”

  They spent the next few hours watching the two Trees, while Alten jiggled knobs and tapped keys to keep the ship’s position adjusted. The others kept watching the screen, though there was nothing much to see. The images looked unchanging from here, but an occasional laconic update from Alten let them know that the comets were still closing the gap.

  The Trees’ motion toward each other couldn’t be detected by the naked eye, but to the inhabitants it was probably another story. The inborn sense of motion that all primates inherit—the instinct that lets a monkey throw a stone and hit a target or a man swing a bat and hit a ball—would be letting them anticipate precisely when the Trees would reach their ultimate proximity before beginning to drift apart. Alten was using the same instincts, controlling the immense ship with his array of keys and knobs but on an inconceivably larger scale.

  To Torris, though, it seemed as if Alten and the others were doing nothing. He kept importuning Alten and getting grunts in return. Both of them were getting visibly impatient and annoyed.

  Torris appealed to Chu and Martin. “Why are we sitting here? I have my airsuit, my new arrows, my knife with the shiny blade. I am ready now. I could find my way to the airlock I think, but I don’t know how to open the doors. I could take my stovebeast, but I know it would not be enough. And I am not a child to think I could reach my Tree with a leap. I need one of your magical thrusters.”

  He moved as if to get up. Nina looked alarmed and grabbed at her mother’s arm.

  Chu struggled to suppress a yawn and sat up straight in his chair. “Alten, why don’t you forget the wide angle and show him a real close-up of his own Tree. On a scale that might show him human figures moving around. That’d be the lower branches, or a place on the ground where there are exposed roots.”

  “At that focus, the image’ll start to break up,” Alten grumbled, but he began making the necessary adjustments. “I don’t know if they’ll even be recognizable as human figures.”

  Torris leaned forward as the zoom started. His mind must have been interpreting the rapid change of scale as breakneck speed, a speed that must have seemed impossible to him. The imaginary observer slowed to a stop and seemed to be hovering less than a mile above ground. The image was blurred and it jiggled, but the tiny mites it revealed were indeed moving and could be seen to have probable human shapes.

  Torris exhaled slowly. “I can see the cave mouth,” he breathed. “There are people coming out. And there is the hill where they threw me out into the dark. There are people gathering there.”

  The others strained to see. But to those without Torris’s educated vision, the images didn’t make the same sense. Nina was the first to notice what happened next.

  “Look!” she cried. “It’s like a flea jumping. Someone’s sailing into space.”

  She pointed. It was the tiniest of specks against the deep black of night, but it must have caught the reflected light of the three bright stars that lit the sky. It twinkled as it tumbled on its flight, and as minute as it was, there was a suggestion of arms and legs.

  “He couldn’t wait,” Torris said.

  Even as he spoke, another mite flung itself into space, following the trajectory of the first.

  Alten widened the focus and drew back to show the space between the two Trees. The specks were the merest motes of dust, but they were still visible once the eye had caught them.

  Torris became agitated. “My place is with my kinfolk,” he said. “Surely Claz would forgive me.”

  Irina got Alten’s attention. “Claz is his priest,” she said. “He didn’t want to talk about it, but we got some of it out of him. He can’t go back. They’d kill him on sight.”

  For the next few hours, the people assembled in the control room watched the big screen, not talking much, sipping coffee or dozing in their seats. Nothing was happening on the big viewscreen to catch their attention. The two dust motes were still visible if you cared to search for them, periodically catching the starlight.

  A couple of Irina’s language specialists had drifted in and taken seats, and they had helped calm Torris down. It no longer seemed necessary to restrain him. He had sunk into a deep funk and was unresponsive to further attempts to communicate with him. He perched awkwardly in his seat, all legs and elbows, and kept his eyes on the screen, his face impassive.

  Nina was watching Torris’s Tree, the one on the left, but now she turned her gaze on the other Tree. The two were not visibly closer, but the image was sharper and clearer. Alten, in one of his periodic announcements, had informed them that Time’s Beginning had drifted a hundred thousand miles closer in its co-orbit since they’d begun watching, and that had made a difference in the focus.

  She thought she saw something, and after a few minutes she was sure. “Look!” she cried.

  Silhouetted against the night, just off the sharp-edged limb of the approaching comet, a silver mist was rising. After another few minutes, the skim of mist had visibly separated from the limb and continued to rise. More minutes passed, and the mist resolved itself into a cloud of sparkling dust motes. The cloud began to expand.

  A cry of anguish from Torris pierced the silence. “They come! They make the leap!” he shouted. He unfolded his long body and disentangled himself from the chair.

  Martin and Chu were out of their own chairs in a flash and grabbed Torris before he could reach the door. He did not resist and allowed them to lead him back to his seat.

  Nina tried to imagine what he was seeing. She was seeing a cloud of wriggling specks. Torris was seeing a swarm of spacesuited warriors like himself, armed to the teeth with their little bows and bone-tipped harpoons and knives of bone or fire-hardened wood. They would be violent young men, excited by the thought of blood and women.

  She turned her attention to Torris’s Tree. From the long interviews with Torris that she’d sat in on, she had gained a vivid picture of what life was like in the ice cave where he’d lived with his tribe—the greasy fires that kept them alive; the weird beasts they hunted for food; the young mothers, no older than herself, with the babies they had to carry in airtight sacks with a stovebeast when the
y ventured outside; and the little boys impatient to grow up and climb the Tree and become men. A sense of dread overtook her and would not go away.

  She imagined that cloud of overexcited young men descending on them, the carnage on both sides, the babies torn from their mothers, the old men run through with spears, the fires wantonly extinguished to be restarted when the invaders had gone, the survivors creeping out of their hiding places. It was too much to bear. A line of poetry from her English classes came to her: “The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold.” Her mother had told her that things like bride raids had survived on old Earth long after mankind had achieved a technological civilization and were still going on in one form or another up to the day her grandfather and grandmother had left to find a new home in another galaxy. That had been six billion years in the past. Mankind had gone and returned, though in a bifurcated form, and now it seemed the old cruelties had taken root again, even in a dying Universe.

  She withdrew into herself like Torris, unable to take her eyes off the site of the coming calamity.

  Another hour went by. The coffee in front of her grew cold. Someone came by to refill her cup, took one look at her face, and removed the cup without a word.

  Then there was something like a puff of steam, and she leaned forward to see more clearly. The puff resolved itself into a swarm of wriggling mites hanging in space. A collective gasp came from around her, then a babble of voices. She turned her head, afraid of what Torris might do, but he remained in his seat, his posture more tense, his lips drawn back to bare clenched teeth in an expression of utter savagery she’d never seen before.

  The cloud settled down to a stable shape as the individual motes that comprised it adjusted their vectors with whatever reaction mass they’d brought with them. Alten edited out the two extraneous Trees for a tighter focus, till the viewscreen showed only the two clouds drifting slowly toward each other.