Heart of the Comet

by MadMaxAU

  “Hey! Did I miss something? Eh? Exactly what crimes was do-gooder science responsible for? I’ll tell you which! Maybe our Brazilian friend refers to foreign doctors who came in to reduce infant mortality in countries such as his. Boom! Overpopulation. To your modern Arcist, that must have been the worst horror of them all!

  Quiverian’s face colored. “Malenkov, you fat Russian hypocrite! Come out here and argue face to face like a man. You don’t have to hide; I am no Ukrainian sniper!”

  “Thank the saints for that much, at least.” Nicholas Malenkov rounded the table holding a clipboard, smiling, a hulking giant of a man who moved with the grace of a wrestler, even in the awkward Coriolis tides of the gravity wheel.

  Rescued, Saul thought gratefully and seized the chance to change the subject. “Nicholas, I hear Cruz and the engineers have preliminary results from the gas-panel experiments. Were you there?”

  The stocky Slav grinned. “They wanted at least one of us iceball lovers around when they tried it out. You, Joao, and Otis were busy. So I sat in.”

  Along with Saul and the legless spacer, Otis Sergeov, Dr. Malenkov wore a second hat as a cometologist . . . much to Joao Quiverian’s frequent protests of dismay. The big Russian spread his hands. “My friends, the results are encouraging. With only a few of the panels in place we have already altered the orbit of Comet Halley! The effect is small, but we’ve proved that controlling the comet’s outgassing can let us make orbital changes!”

  Saul nodded. “Of course, the method only works near perihelion, close to the sun.”

  “True. This run of tests showed only a small, diminishing effect. Soon surface sublimation will cease altogether. The panel project will shut down for seventy years. But next time,” Malenkov “when we are diving once more inward, toward the Hot . . . “

  The Hot. It was the first time Saul had heard the sun referred to that way . .

  “. . . then this work will prove its usefulness. With the big Nudge rockets having their maximum effect at aphelion, and the evaporation-control panels working at perihelion, we will have the means to herd this ancient iceball into almost any orbit we want!”

  Quiverian frowned darkly and shook his head. “Suppose all of this meddling works. Exactly what, Doctor, would you want to do with . . . with a herded comet?”

  Oh, no. Saul saw where the conversation was heading

  “Who cares!” Malenkov said enthusiastically. “Ideas have bounced around for more than a century, about what people might do with comets.”

  “Crackpot ideas, you mean.”

  Malenkov shrugged. “Our present plan is to arrange a loop past Jupiter in seventy years, and use big planet’s gravity to snare Halley into much more accessible orbit. Eventually, this iceball can supply cheap volatiles and help the NearEarth people create their Third Plateau in space.”

  Quiverian shook his head. “Propaganda. I have heard it a thousand times.”

  Malenkov went on unperturbed. “The possibilities are endless. When we have proven long-duration sleep slots, comets may make great space liners—to cruise the solar system in safety.”

  Saul saw that a small audience had begun to gather at the open door to the lab, attracted from nearby offices. Malenkov noticed them and waxed even more enthusiastic.

  “We might find more useful chemicals, maybe, like those Joao and Captain Cruz found on Encke. Why, there may even be some merit in that wild idea to use comets to terraform Venus or Mars! Eventually they might be made suitable for colonization.”

  “Hah!” Quiverian snorted.

  “Gentlemen,” Saul cut in. “I suggest we—”

  But Quiverian ignored him, shaking a slender, plastic-coated sample tube at Malenkov. “This is the attitude I cannot bear. The original idea was to study comets, the most pristine of all God’s handiworks. But now knowledge for its own sake doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Now you not only want to harvest this comet, but recklessly alter entire worlds before we even understand them!”

  Malenkov blinked in surprise at Quiverian’s anger. Saul knew that Nicholas had few political opinions. He was one of the most brilliant people Saul had ever met, but the man never seemed to learn that to some people a disagreement was not a chess game, not a sport for gentlemen. In this respect, he was a most unRussian Russian.

  Saul tried once more to stop this. “Joao! Nick was only talking about possibilities. In thirty years Earth will have had time to decide . . . .”

  But the angry Brazilian wasn’t listening anymore. Quiverian’s left hand clenched the core tube and his right formed a fist. “We have just emerged from the most terrible century in human history . . . the worst for our world since the holocaust of the Pleistocene . . . and now idiots want to send giant iceballs hurtling down onto planets?”

  “I never said-”

  Quiverian stepped menacingly toward Malenkov. “Tell me, Doctor. How long before the target is not Mars, or Venus, but Earth?”

  His arms chopped for emphasis, unwise in the weak pseudo-gravity. Quiverian flailed for balance and the long tube smashed onto the tabletop, splitting with a loud report. Dark brown ice, laced with black and white veins, spilled out onto the lab bench.

  “Idiot! Goyishe kopf!” Saul caught the Brazilian before his head struck the big core microscope. He swiveled quickly and pointed at the people standing by the door.

  “All of you, out! Shut that hatch and trigger the air seal. Nick, Joao, go get masks!”

  Saul pushed Quiverian off toward the emergency cupboard. Moving quickly he grabbed up a plastic recycling container and dumped its wad of crumpled printouts onto the floor. By the time Malenkov returned, fastening a small mask over his face and holding out another, Saul was sweeping slivers of swiftly melting ice into the tub.

  The Russian’s voice was muffled. “Your mask, Saul! Put it on.”

  Saul shook his head and kept working. He had complete faith in his little bloodstream symbionts—in their ability to keep him safe from cyanide and other cometary poisons. They had better, or the colony wouldn’t last long inside Halley. Right now he was more concerned about preventing contamination of the other samples than danger to himself.

  The spilled slivers seemed to give off a faintly pleasant aroma . . reminding him of the almond groves of Lake Kinneret, in the Galilee at springtime.

  “My core!” Quiverian cried out as he returned, fumbling with his face mask. “What are you doing, you meddlesome Jew`’ That was the deepest core we had taken!”

  Saul swept up the last slivers, threw the sponge into the tub, and sealed its lid. There were more than a trillion tons of ice out there under Halley, ready to be studied. This loss was no scientific tragedy.

  “Oh, but that’s not true, Joao,” Malenkov said reassuringly. The stocky. Russian sifted through the self-cooling tubes on the counter. “Why, only an hour ago my countryman, Otis Sergeov, returned with a new core, taken from a kilometer within Halley! Let me see if I can find it here “

  “Sergeov!” Quiverian cursed. “That fanatical Percell mutant? Oh, fates! There were so many fine planetologists who might have come along! Why, oh why have I been saddled such assistants—a huge Russian fool, a legless Percell, and a genetic w itch doctor!”

  Malenkov shrugged and answered amiably, as if it were the most reasonable question in the world, “I guess you’re stuck with us because those other guys didn’t come along, Joao.”

  Saul closed his eyes, and put his hands over them.

  “Yaah!” Quiverian threw himself at the door, ignoring the yellow air-alert light, and burst out through the crowd outside.

  “What is eating him?” Malenkov asked Saul after the door hissed shut again. He frowned. “Saul? What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”

  Saul uncovered his eyes at last. They were filled with tears.

  “Saul? My friend, I . . .”

  Saul slapped the console next to him and laughed out loud, unable to contain it any longer.

  “Joao is right,” he said, wipi
ng his eyes. “Comet Halley definitely deserves better than this. But it’s stuck with us.”

  Saul wasn’t surprised, a while later, when an officer came around to investigate the spillage incident. But he did blink when Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman Ould-Harrad entered, a clipboard in one hand and a trace-gas detector in the other. The dark-skinned Mauritanian was the last man Saul expected.

  Ould-Harrad’s specialty was large, massive life-support systems, the kind they were installing on Halley right now. But he must have been the only one available at the moment to investigate the accident.

  Everyone knew why Ould-Harrad was on this mission. The young officer had had friends in the Temple Mount Conspiracy, and only ties with the Mid-African royal family had won him exile instead of imprisonment for the crime of unwise associations.

  The Mauritanian had spoken no more than ten words to Saul over the last three years. The regard had been returned.

  Earth is far behind you, Saul reminded himself. And nothing can change the past. He stepped aside. “Come in, Colonel. I’ve already dictated an accident report. Go ahead and look around while I fast-fax a copy for you.”

  Ould-Harrad seemed ill at ease as he followed Saul into the lab, his broad nostrils flaring at the faint aroma of escaped cometary gases. His eyes kept flicking to the gauges of the instrument. His dour expression seemed little cheered by Saul’s obvious good health.

  “Dr. Lintz, you should not have remained here after the leakage alert was thrown.”

  Saul tapped the face of a sense-screen display. “Yes, yes. I know. But somebody had to stay and clean up the mess. Anyway, I might as well be the first guinea pig. It’s appropriate, that I should give the blood cyanutes their first field test, no?”

  The console spat out a small data pellet. Saul marked it with his namechop. He smiled up at Ould-Harrad. “If I drop dead, we all might as well climb into sleep slots and wait a few centuries to be picked up, ‘cause this expedition is over.”

  The spacer officer nodded curtly, accepting the logic. “There are rules, nevertheless. Procedures designed for collective safety and order.”

  Saul tossed the data pellet to the other man and laughed somewhat bitterly.

  “Safety and order, yes. How well I remember those words. Didn’t General Lynchon use that very phrase when his U.N. troops moved into the Judean hills?”

  Ould-Harrad shook his head. “It was a consensus operation, Dr. Lintz. The coalition government of Israel-Inshallah invited them in.”

  Saul nodded. “After the Levites and Salawites assassinated enough opposing legislators to get a majority.”

  The African’s voice was low, as if he dreaded this topic but was drawn to it like a moth toward a flame. “The world was tired of centuries of strife in a region that had never known peace.”

  “And is it better now.” The High Priest in Jerusalem reigns over a balkanized realm, with sect sniping at sect as never before.

  “And did it help the planet? From the Nile to the Euphrates, Israel-Inshallah had planted more trees than existed before in all of Africa north of the equator. Last I heard, a third of the forests were gone—chopped down to make barricades.”

  Ould-Harrad’s skin deepened darker than its already rich shade. Saul thought about pulling back. He has already been punished.

  Yes, but enough?

  “Dr. Lintz, I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Ould-Harrad shook his head. “I had nothing to do with the attempt to blow up the Great Temple. It’s true, I had friends in the Conspiracy—and in penance for that association I am on this I’ll-stared cruise—but I never wanted to bring harm to the holiest shrine of three faiths. I assure you, I would rather have torn out my.....”

  “Oh, you poor bastard,” Saul interrupted, half-pitying the fellow and laughing to crush his own painful memories. “For ten years you’ve heard but not listened, been punished but never understood. When, oh when will people like you ever come to understand that real Jews never wanted that blasted temple built in the first place?”

  Ould-Harrad’s gas sensor hung from one hand, forgotten. He stared. “A few kibbutzim, some secular humanists fought it, I know. But—”

  “But nothing!” Saul leaned forward. “The vast majority of Jews, in Israel and abroad, voted against it, argued against it, fought it every step of the way. It was compelled on us, by murderous fanatics and by an ignorant world all too eager for peace.”

  Saul almost spat the word. “Peace! It wasn’t enough to destroy my nation and my family, Colonel Ould-Harrad. They installed priests that actually had the effrontery to tell me how to be a Jew! Even Hitler did not try to do that!”

  In the faint, centrifugal tug of the gravity wheel, Ould-Harrad seemed to lose the strength to stand. He sagged into a web-chair.

  “But the leader of the New Sanhedrin is of your Cohen priestly clan! And the Lead Temple Attendant is a Levite . . . The Pope’s Legate, the other Christians and Muslims, must take second place to the oldest faith’s precedence!”

  Ould-Harrad shook his head. “My comrades objected to that humiliation—and to the removal of the beautiful mosque that stood where the temple was to go—but I don’t understand what the Jews had to complain of. Was not two millennia of prophecy being fulfilled at last?”

  Saul did not answer immediately. He looked across the room, where the picture wall depicted the onion domes of old Kiev. Sunset flared brilliant tints across the steppes beyond the city walls. New gilt crosses once again topped the tower peaks, signifying Great Russia’s return to its mystical past.

  Ten years, he thought. And still it seems impossible to make anyone understand.

  Perhaps he owed it to the man, out of charity, to try. But how could one explain that Judaism had changed over two thousand years of exile, since the Romans burned the Temple of the Maccabees to the ground, slew the priests and scattered the people to the winds?

  The remnants had wandered to strange climes, adopted alien ideas. Gradually, Hebrew farmers who pioneered the Polish and Russian plains were crowded by later peoples into cramped cities to become an urban folk. The priestly family lines—the Cohens and Levites—lost their influence. For how could they perform their rituals with no central site from which to make sacrifices to appease a terrible godhead?

  Spiritual leadership fell upon the rabbi—the teacher—a role one did not inherit, but earned through learning and wisdom.

  A role described in detail by Jesus, if the truth be told. Only he, too, had those who prophesied in his name. He, too, was followed by priests.

  After a hundred years of strife and accomplishment, the alliance led by Israel had finally begun fraying during Saul’s youth. The Hell Century took its toll even in the belt that folk called “The Green Land.” Prophets appeared on street corners, and cults proliferated.

  Islam, too, had suffered a hundred schisms, and Christianity was battered, divided.

  Then someone had a bright idea. . . an obvious solution. And, like so many obvious solutions, it was disastrously wrong.

  The Diaspora changed us, Saul thought. In exile, we became individualists, a people of books, and not of sacrifices on golden altars. We mourned the Temple. But wasn’t its burning a sign that it was time to know God in other ways?

  How would Ould-Harrad ever understand that no modern Jew wanted anybody to intercede for him? Everyone had to come to his car her own understanding with God.

  Ould-Harrad looked down at his hands. “When the conspirators blew up the Al Aqsa Mosque in protest, it was intended that the Levites take the blame, not the kibbutzim. The plan . . . they never wanted a bloodbath . . . .”

  He seemed unable to continue. Saul realized that the man was haunted by guilt and also, perhaps, by a dread that he might not ever even understand the role he had played.

  Saul blinked away a memory of smoke over the Judean hills. He shook his head, knowing that there was no way he could help this man.

  “I’m sorry,” he began softly. Then he c
leared his throat. “Is that all, Colonel? If you’re finished, I have some important experiments under way.”

  The black spacer looked up and nodded curtly. “I will report the situation under control.”

  Saul had already turned back to his microscope when he heard the door hiss behind him. He tried to return to the business that had been interrupted, first by Joao Quiverian’s persistent questioning, and then by the dolorous Ould-Harrad, but his hands seemed locked over the controls.

  “Room environment, dim lights by half,” he commanded aloud and the laboratory darkened in response.

  Work, he knew, was a way to take himself away from the memories. “Sample AR 71B dash 78 S, on screen twelve,” he said to the ever listening, semi sentient lab computer. “Let’s see if those inclusions look as suspicious now as I thought they did before Joao stank up the place.”

  The last part was not for the computer. And although he hunched over the holistank to immerse himself in mysteries, Saul found that he did not really mind at all the faint scent of ice and almonds in the air.

  VIRGINIA

  She tapped tentatively. Then, when no muffled answer came, a harder rap. This brought forth a faint, querulous grunt. When the panel finally hissed open, Virginia stepped through and stood barely inside, feeling the door suck shut behind her.

  She said diffidently, “You had sample breakage?”

  It seemed a good opening. The danger—if any—was well past before she had heard. Saul had already left the planetology department, where the sample broke, and come down here to his own bio lab. But the ripple of concern among the crew had made her at last muster the courage to seize a pretext.

  “Ummm?” Saul was studying his screens, making tiny notes in a small ledger with an old-fashioned pencil. She wondered at this eccentricity; the expedition used standard electronic markers and memory pads. He must have brought a packet of notebooks in his own small, personal weight allotment. She had heard of bringing vintage cabernet and caviar, but not pencils, for heaven’s sake.