Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “Agreed,” Claz said.

  “And all this is the will of the Trees?” Shamash asked.

  “Yes,” Torris said.

  The elders, Cleb the Chronicler and Igg the Spearmaker, had remained silent. Claz had ordered them not to interfere, and Igg especially didn’t look too happy. Torris knew that Claz planned to ease Igg out. Torris, despite his youth, would replace him as elder. There would be more prestige in it. Cleb would be no problem. He was reconciled to the death of Brank. A realist, he had at once accepted Torris’s position as the mouthpiece of the star people. And as Chronicler, he needed access, no matter what his scruples.

  Shamash had made the same calculation on his own Tree. He had overcome the objections of his elders to a woman and confirmed Ning’s status as an intimate of Torris and of the race of little people whom the Trees had brought forth as their instruments. He silenced dissenters by warning them that they risked bringing doom on the tribe if they flouted the manifest will of the Trees. He and Claz were two of a kind.

  “Now then, Torris,” Shamash said with the show of deference that he always exhibited in the presence of other people, “you will come to our Tree at the next conjunction of the Sisters and join Ning in addressing our slingmakers.”

  “Yes,” Torris said soberly, “and I will bring a gift of the starsilk thread that has been granted by Joorn, the chief of their tribe.”

  “The silk of their giant web beast,” Shamash said. He always put on a good show of believing the giant web beast story. It was easier than contradicting the beliefs of his followers.

  “Yes,” Torris said. “And Ning will come to our Tree with one of her artisans and instruct Igg, our Spearmaker, in the art of constructing the giant catapults.”

  Shamash didn’t like that, but he and Torris had already wrestled over that point several times. “Agreed,” he said reluctantly.

  “One more thing,” Torris said. “The star people wish to visit your Tree again and study the ways of your people more closely. They have already spent much time with us. They will require no food or air from you but will bring their own. They will live in their own little caves, which they will bring with them.”

  That finally penetrated Shamash’s show of imperturbability. His eyes widened. “They will bring caves? How can that be?”

  “They are magical caves,” Torris said authoritatively. “They resemble nothing so much as a flat air sack, which a person may carry with him. But when he touches a certain spot and utters some magic words, it suddenly springs up like a mushroom. Inside there is air and heat and whatever they require.”

  “It’s true,” Claz said. “I have seen them.”

  “But their safety must be assured,” Torris went on. “And they will wish to talk to many more people this time, especially women. They want to know that people will not be afraid to talk to them.”

  “I will see to it myself,” Shamash said. “I will tell the women that they may talk freely. As for safety, who would dare harm an emissary of the Trees? But I will have my own guards follow them discreetly and see that nothing untoward occurs.”

  “Fine,” Torris said. He rose to his feet. “If that is all, I will go now.”

  Claz looked relieved. “Torris, you might look in on your father,” he said. “He asked about you the other day.”

  Torris did not reply. There was something in Claz’s tone that made his remark more than a suggestion, as if he were trying to reassert his priestly authority, and he didn’t want to acknowledge that. He gave a slight nod to Igg and Cleb to observe the basic necessities of courtesy and went out through the heavy curtain.

  As usual he drew the stares of the people in the communal chamber, but he was used to that now. Over by the fire, Shamash’s spearmen had finished gorging themselves on meat and set aside the remnants of their feast. They were a little tipsy from the drink and were getting bolder with the women. That didn’t go over well with the young bloods from Torris’s tribe, some of whom were loitering nearby. It hadn’t been that long since the bride raiders had faced each other with murderous intent. They’d been returned to their Trees without fulfilling their thirst for combat, and they’d chafed under the enforced truce.

  Torris recognized one of his former tormenters among the loitering malcontents; it was young Uz, one of those who’d escorted him at spearpoint to the hillock from which he’d been cast into space. Uz was having a dispute with one of the spearmen, and the voices were getting louder. Torris saw his hand hovering tentatively in the vicinity of the knife dangling from his waist.

  He hurried over to stop it before it could go further. “Uz, these men have been made welcome here by Claz.”

  Uz turned, a resentful look on his face. “They are making free with our women.”

  “They have not touched a woman. Nor will they, without the woman’s consent.” He turned a hard stare on the spearman in question. “Is that not so?”

  The fellow caught himself in the act of reaching for the woman who was serving him. She backed guiltily away, her eyes averted.

  “Forgive me, Speaker to the Starfolk,” the fellow said, his words a little slurred. “I did not mean to …”

  Uz said sullenly, “It’s not right for them to come here and make their choices.”

  Torris spoke carefully, aware of the weight his words carried. “You may do the same, Uz. It is the will of the Trees, through their instruments the Starfolk, that we may select brides from each other’s tribes as long as the women freely consent. If you wish to see which women may be courted, you and your friends may come with me at the next conjunction of the Sisters. I will see that you will be made welcome.”

  He immediately regretted making the promise. He would have to fix it up with Ning, but she would work with Shamash to smooth the way, as he and Claz had smoothed the way for her Tree’s candidates. It would be a touchy business, but the people of the two Trees were already getting used to each other. They could see that the new arrangement was better than fighting.

  Uz nodded in resignation. Torris remembered how fearful he had been aboard Time’s Beginning after he had been released from the net with the others. Uz had been almost incoherent when Torris appeared to calm the prisoners. He couldn’t fathom that the man he had seen cast out to die had returned with this tribe of beings who it was said came from beyond the stars. And he had been in mortal terror when Jonah appeared beside Torris to speak in an amplified voice that surely was the voice of the Trees. He had adjusted to the fact that Torris was not a supernatural being, but like the rest of the returned bride raid veterans, he had accepted Torris’s new authority without conscious thought.

  “As you say, Chosen One,” Uz said. “We will follow the will of the Trees.”

  He motioned to his friends, and they hurried off with him, with a lot of backward glances.

  Torris waited until they were out of sight, down the passage that led to the outside lock, then set off for the cubbyhole where Parn the Facemaker plied his trade.

  He found his father sitting cross-legged over a Face mold, carefully pouring a ladleful of heated resin into it, leaning close to make sure there were no bubbles. His father did not look up until he was sure that the cast was complete. “Yes?” he said impatiently, then he saw Torris.

  “It’s all right, Father,” Torris said. “I’m no longer Shunned.”

  His father sat looking at him. Finally he said, “Don’t stand so close in case you jar the mold before it solidifies and cause ripples, boy. Didn’t I teach you that?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “So you have been among the star people? Nobody talks of anything else these days. They were among us for many turns of the world when they returned the bride raiders, poking among us, asking questions, walking among us without weapons as if they had nothing to fear. One of them came to talk to me, a little woman, no larger than a child. She wanted to know how Faces
are made and if any sacred rituals are employed in their making. What nonsense! And what position I had in the tribe and was I equal to the elders or below them. As if I was expected to kneel to Igg, who is only a spearmaker. And she could not talk properly but kept glancing at a thing in her hand that looked something like a Face but had marks on it that kept changing. If she did not understand a word, she kept asking me to repeat it while she held up the Face-object. I could tell she was not a supernatural being but a woman. But try to tell that to ignorant people who look no farther than the ends of their noses!”

  Torris waited it out. When Parn seemed to have run down, he said, “Will you allow me to see Firstmother and Secondmother?”

  Parn’s face looked haggard and suddenly old. “Your mothers have been very distraught. But I could not allow them to talk to you when you were”—he could not make himself use the word Shunned—“not part of us. Nor speak of you when you were gone. You understand?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “It’s almost time for nightfeast. Firstmother will prepare a portion for you.”

  Torris tried not to show his surprise. When Parn had taken Secondmother, it had become her task to prepare food, though under Firstmother’s watchful eye. Secondmother had learned fast, and it hadn’t taken long before Firstmother no longer needed to instruct her.

  “You have a new brother. Secondmother needs time to take care of him until he is weaned.”

  Torris said nothing. Parn’s manner precluded any comment.

  Parn became brisk. He blew on the faceplate to check its progress. “It’s done,” he said and put it aside. He got to his feet, the joints of his knees cracking. He pushed aside the meatbeast pelt that served as a curtain and entered the living alcove, with Torris following.

  The two women were nowhere near the curtain, but it was obvious that they had been listening. There was a fire going in the far corner with two large chunks of meat roasting on a spit. They turned around as if in surprise but didn’t say anything.

  Torris scrutinized his new brother. He couldn’t see the infant’s face, which was buried in Secondmother’s breast, but the tiny body was well-formed, with strong limbs and a shaggy covering of rough black hair on his scalp.

  With a glance at Parn for permission to speak, Firstmother said, “So you have come back, my Torris, not only a man but an oracle.”

  Secondmother smiled shyly at him. In an impulsive movement, she held the baby out for his inspection. Once he would have been at a loss to know what to do, but his stay with the little people, who were always tender of each other’s feelings, had taught him much.

  “He is a fine baby,” he said.

  His father scowled. Perhaps it made him uncomfortable to see Torris cosseting the women when he himself had always preserved perfect comportment. “Tell me,” Parn said. “Is it true that there are to be no more bride raids?”

  “Yes, Father,” Torris said. “The Starfolk do not believe in killing.”

  He knew that wasn’t strictly true. The man who had stolen Nina—and wasn’t that a sort of bride raid—had been prepared to kill her when Chu and Martin didn’t surrender. And when Torris himself, acting on an instinctive understanding of the situation, had impaled the man with his improvised arrow before he could hurt the girl, the others had been grateful. It had created a bond between him and the star people. But it was all too difficult to explain.

  “It will just cause trouble,” his father said. “You can’t change the order of things.”

  “The Starfolk,” Torris said carefully, “believe that our people will prosper more working together than fighting. They propose to show us new ways to grow food so that we do not have to rely on hunting. They talk of herding meatbeasts and growing things.”

  “Blasphemy,” Parn said. “I suppose they propose to show us new ways of casting Faces too.”

  Torris knew better than to attempt to answer that one. He relied on the phrase that Claz had popularized. “It is the will of the Trees,” he said.

  Parn sighed. “Everybody is saying that these days. I suppose that we humans are mere twigs in the grip of the Trees, and they can snap us in two or make us grow.”

  “We have much to learn,” Torris said.

  The two women had been whispering together. Firstmother made her way toward them and waited diffidently for a pause in the conversation. “Come over by the fire,” she said. “The meat is sufficiently cooked now.”

  Irina had taken over one of the larger auditoriums for the infomeet report. She had expected maybe a few hundred people to show up. Most people, she thought, would watch it on their personal screens or catch up with it later on the Shipnet posting. But over a thousand people had filled the hall to overflowing, with an equal number clamoring outside to be let in. Joorn, to the dismay of the participants, had been given no choice but to announce that there would be a second live conference where questions could be asked.

  Irina’s specialists were sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs on the platform, some half dozen of them, representing the departments that had burgeoned under them. One was Nina’s friend Andrew, who had made himself the go-to expert on physical anthropology despite his youth. Another was Irina’s original assistant, Laurel, who had just published a paper tracing similarities between the dialects of Torris’s and Ning’s tribes that suggested a common point of origin about a thousand years in the past.

  “And so the field workers’ report concludes that we’ve gone about as far as we can go in acculturation without causing mischief,” Irina was saying. “We can leave the Oort cloud and continue our exploration of the Sol-Centauri system with a clear conscience. Left to their own devices, they’ll do just fine till we can check on them again. Torris and Ning, along with their priesthoods, will be the prime focal points of change, but they’re bright people—they’d have to be to survive without technology in a space environment—and they’re well on the road to developing beyond an aboriginal hunting society. I think Andrew has something more to say about that.”

  Andrew replaced her at the lectern. He looked very young but thoroughly in command of himself and his audience. Nina, sitting in the front row between Joorn and Alten, looked at him with eyes aglow.

  “Conclusions first, then the facts,” Andrew said mischievously. “Just the opposite of the way we do it in our little work groups when we’re hammering out theories. We think we can now state with reasonable confidence where Torris’s people came from, how long they’ve been here, and how they managed their miraculous survival with only an Eolithic culture.” He paused. “I say Eolithic rather than Paleolithic because they didn’t even have stones to fashion into their first tools, as the australopithecines did.”

  A hush fell over the audience. They were paying attention now.

  “Their resources were only those of the ecology of vacuum-dwelling trees—wood; ice; the bone, sinews, and hides of the animal life that the tree supported; and the sugars and other products of the tree’s metabolism. And oh yes, fire. They had fire when they started out. The australopithecines didn’t. And I can assure you that fire-hardened wood has a cutting edge.” He held up a bandaged finger. “Our experiments proved that.”

  Nina whispered to her grandfather, “Isn’t Andrew marvelous? He actually made wooden knives and spearpoints just to be sure.” She added proudly, “I helped him when Laurel and the others belittled the idea. I was the one who had to bandage his finger.”

  Joorn smiled benignly, but Alten maintained a stone-faced demeanor.

  Now Andrew was using a cursor to trace a lot of confusing lines and arrows on an electronic easel he had illuminated, but nobody was bothering to follow the animation.

  “We followed up the study of Torris’s DNA with samples from those members of his tribe we could persuade to cooperate. Some thought the DNA swabs were part of a religious ritual, sanctioned by the priest, Claz. Other DNA, I’m sor
ry to say, we acquired surreptitiously. Some say unethically. We can debate that, but no harm was done, and given the sociometric circumstances, we can say that, objectively speaking, there was no invasion of privacy. What we found jibed with our study of Torris and Ning. The antigenic distance between us and them is no more than four hundred thousand years, give or take a hundred thousand years.”

  A hand shot up. “How can that be? We come from six billion years in their past.”

  Andrew smiled. “Good question. They were derived from the same genetic stock that we were, only about four hundred thousand years ago on our time scale.”

  More hands were waving. “Time dilation,” someone offered.

  “Exactly. Torris’s ancestors got here the same way we did, only four hundred thousand years before our arrival.”

  “Have you any theories to explain that?” somebody asked belligerently.

  “We have. The relativistic math works out in any number of ways, depending on what assumptions we make about velocity and distance. What it boils down to is that Torris’s distant ancestors either were returning from a galaxy closer than the galaxy that we were returning from or that they had a faster ship capable of crowding the speed of light another decimal point or two. They found Earth and the inner planets gone—engulfed by the sun. The sun was earlier in its red-giant phase, somewhat bigger than it is at present, its hydrogen gone, but still feasting on its helium reserves. The same stellar evolution had happened in the Alpha Centauri system, now within easy reach, but the primary star there was even earlier in its red-giant stage and correspondingly bigger. Perhaps their ship was in some kind of trouble—it wouldn’t have been capable of another star hop, or perhaps it had run down its supplies. So with Earth gone, they did the only thing they could. They headed out to the Oort cloud, now augmented by Centauri’s Oort cloud, containing plenty of real estate—trillions of comets with all the ingredients needed for life. And the Trees that grew on them.”