Heart of the Comet

by MadMaxAU

  The sleep-slot module separated, descended. The sail tugs were as slim and weight-wise as classic nineteenth-century windjammers. Their slender, silvery frames carried sleep slots, supplies, and a robot crew—all in cylindrical modules fitted snugly along a tubular frame, the spine for the great spread wings that cupped the solar wind. Those gossamer sheets were now furled, awaiting humdrum service as mirrors for the surface greenhouses. That left the naked frame, a great beast now stripped by reductionist logic to a skimpy skeleton.

  And somewhere out there the Newburn sails on, Carl thought about the missing fourth tug. Lost, a victim of the cold percentages.

  —Reversin’ her!— Andy backed his ship out carefully. It would slip down a different path, into its own chamber. Jeffers now commanded the mechs inside to draw the sleep-slot module downward through nearly a kilometer of shaft, into the vault that had been prepared for it.

  Carl turned up his bonephone: Beethoven’s Fifth Violin Sonata, the last movement a liquid rush of piano notes. A reward. Lugging big masses around was standard stuff, but it felt different when there were ninety lives at stake. He needed to ease off, relax. The main show was over, but he still had hours of work to go.

  The graceful, fluid sway of chamber music seemed to Carl natural for working in zero G. He could never understand Jeffers or Sergeov, who listened to that raucous, heavy-handed Clash Ceramic stuff while they worked. He vectored down beckoning to the distant dot that was Colonel Ould-Harrad.

  Carl slowed above Shaft 6 to accompany the African officer, who was space-able but less used to making speed through tunnels. A mistake could cram you into the wall with bone-splintering impact. It took years for Earthsiders’ bodies to really believe that lack of weight didn’t mean absence of inertia.

  They shot downward. Fiberthread walls rushed past, illuminated by regular yellow daubs of electrified phosphor paint. Carl watched Ould-Harrad’s swarthy face for signs of some reaction, but the man kept his eyes intently ahead and said nothing. Carl felt a twinge of disappointment. He had lined this shaft himself, without mechs, putting in fourteen-hour days to meet the deadline. And a pretty job, it was. Damn-all if anybody’d say word one about it, though.

  Of course, Ould-Harrad was an Ortho, and pretty hard-line about it, according to scuttlebutt. All during the voyage out the man had been distant, formal, his poker face giving away nothing. He clearly expected that young upstarts would remember their place. Not likely he’d be glad handing a menial Percell.

  Carl shrugged and turned up the Fifth Sonata. Only after some time did it occur to him that they were, after all, failing face down in a shaft that dwindled away into the distance, the phosphors converging dots . . . . Even in a micro-G, Ould-Harrad’s mental alarm bells were probably ringing.

  “Hit the brakes, the vault’s only a few hundred meters ahead,” Carl sent.

  —I see. Good-.- was the only reply.

  They slowed as the tunnel flared into a roomy chamber, already partly lined with brilliant lime-green insulation. The sleepslot module was already descending from the intersecting Shaft 4, a stubby intrusion. It nearly filled the uninsulated half of the vault. Everywhere the primitive ice gave back glinting reflections of the sweeping lamps of men and mechs. Carl had helped hack out the rough-cut walls, using big industrial lasers. Seams of carbonaceous dirt and rusty conglomerates made curly, mysterious patterns on the broad stretches of black ice, like writing by some unseen biblical hand.

  —Ahhh,— escaped from Ould-Harrad as he braked to a stop. Carl noticed that the man looked relieved. Maybe they should have gone slower.

  —C’mon,— Jeffers called on open channel. —Got to get these coffins buried.—

  Ould-Harrad’s clipped, authoritative voice was unmistakable. —I would appreciate you men not referring to the slots that way.—

  —Yessir,—Jeffers said curtly.—You bet.—

  Carl sent, “I’ll take the blue-coded mechs,” and locked his board on a dozen flitting forms. The slot-sleep equipment was nearly obscured by robotoids swarming around it, an army of gnats splitting off sections.

  Sleepers would be stored in three widely separated vaults, to minimize chances that a single accident might cripple the mission. Technical teams—Computers, Life Sciences, Mechanical Operations—were evenly spread. The boxy slots were laid outward like the arms of a starfish from the central utilities spine. The lifesupport gear was a knobby backpack on each coffin—Carl couldn’t help but think of them that way, both from appearance and because the sleepers were as near to dead as you could get and still come back.

  Each slot had to be fitted into hardplast nooks that protected them and yet allowed the interior to exchange heat with the nearby ice. The original idea had been to let the ice cool the sleepers directly, but Carl had seen the results of that at Encke. There was a lot of carbon dioxide or amorphous snow which could vaporize explosively, blowing valves and seals on the coffins. It wasn’t a snap to use volatiles in high vacuum. So the engineers had to rig buffers to save the sleepers from shudders and bumps and sudden, freezing death.

  —Pack those Orthos in tight,— Jeffers sent on short-range comm. —Don’t want ‘em feelin’ lonely.—

  Jeffers was fitting hoses into place nearby, his transmission shielded from the others. Carl triggered a self-closing clamp, finishing off his own job, and kicked clear.

  “Give it a rest. There’re are Percells in here. too.”

  —Not very damn many.— This came from Sergeov, who drifted into view from behind a silvery heat-exchange sphere. The Russian spacer was quick, deft; as Carl watched, he flipped, caught a cable from a spaghetti tangle, and inserted it into a control cabinet.

  The agility almost made you envy him. Almost. The Percell treatment had eliminated the blood disease Sergeov would have inherited from his parents . . . but it also took away his legs.

  Unforeseen side effects.

  Carl wondered how many times that cool, analytic phrase had made him bristle, his face flush, his hands knot into fists.

  Sergeov had been one of the early, lucky failures—still alive. Such survivors stirred the first misgivings The great unwashed see Sergeov’s lost legs. A dirty little question wormed its way into their minds: What couldn’t you see? What about his mind? Was he normal? Was he even human?

  If it was normal to be able to drink a full bottle of vodka and still easily balance the empty glasses on top of each other, five high—yes, Sergeov was normal.

  Better than normal. He had gone directly into space, where legs were, in fact, a drawback. All that bulky muscle and bone were useless in freefall, demanding food and oxygen and time to exercise them. Leftovers from the struggle against gravity. Sergeov had lived in orbit from the age of ten, making top wages as an assembler. His arms looked like tree trunks; Carl had seen him juggle a hapless Ortho inspector like a helpless doll, back in Earth orbit. The man had mumbled an insult, and paid with five minutes of humiliation. Yet, Sergeov was not a Plateau Three advocate; he expended his energies in blanket, burning dislike of all Earthsiders.

  “Stop yammering,” Carl said. “Come help me with these thermobuffers.”

  —Is true, however,— Sergeov said. —All for good reasons, for sure. Percells work good, so they get into space. Deepa! Orthos think we’re garbage, so we stay in space.—

  Jeffers put in, —An’ end up chauffeurin’ Orthos out beyond Neptune.—

  Sergeov grinned. His hands-noticeably large, even through vac gloves—worked swiftly among the cables, deftly quick, free of the levered counterweight of dangling legs. —Da. Not prefer serving as workboy for Orthos.—

  Jeffers said, —Damn right. When we could be doing our own work.—

  Carl asked, “Such as?”

  Jeffers whirled himself about with one arm, while the other fished free a short-bore laser. He thumbed it. A blue-white bolt lanced into the ice meters away.

  —Hey!— Sergeov cried.

  White fog exploded past them. It boiled away into the
vault, thinning, but Ould-Harrad saw. —Hey! I ordered no quick-solder work in here!—

  —Sorry.— Sergeov winked at Jeffers and called, —Was just a small one. Needed to refuse a socket joint.—

  —These are people.—

  —Am sorry.—

  Sergeov grinned as he said it. Ould-Harrad was hundreds of meters away and couldn’t see the design Jeffers had drawn with instant, practiced ease in the ice.

  “I didn’t know you were a Mars-boy, Jeff,” Carl sent.

  A female flower enclosed by the Mars symbol—a graphic depiction of a dream. Once comets could be steered into the inner solar system, they could be harvested. Even easier, an artful nudge far out beyond Neptune could smack iceballs into the Martian plains.

  Hammering Mars with cometary nuclei would build up an atmosphere, perhaps even get the volcanoes spouting again. Nature’s slow sucking would still. The parching march of aeons put to rout—a Promethean dream. Splitting a hard blue sky, flame-cloaked ice mountains would gouge the lands, rip the permafrost, and release more ancient ice below. Clouds, fog, then rain—weather unknown since the sun’s wan warming had boiled away the last mudflats in the spare Martian river valleys, billions of years back, during that false spring.

  In a century or so, a suitably adapted human might be able to breathe on the surface. The idea was old, but some Percells had seized on it. They saw Mars as the one plausible location where genetically altered humans might truly have a place. Even though still dry and cold and roiling with strange storms, Mars could become a world where their descendants, genetically engineered still further, would be the norm, while Orthos would cough out their lungs in minutes.

  —What do you think I work for?— Jeffers answered.

  “That’s crazy,” Carl sent. “Terraforming’ll take centuries. No solution to our problems.”

  —A Percell, he can expect to live in space—what? a hundred years? two hundred?— Sergeov’s broad, sweaty face beamed again with his inevitable smile.

  Jeffers sent, —Throw in couple slot sleeps, we could all see it.—

  “We’re not here to do that,” Carl said.

  —Jeffers is just looking ahead,— Sergeov said simply.

  “Too damn far ahead.”

  —Don’t be so sure,— Jeffers said evenly.

  Sergeov nudged Jeffers.—You be an Uber too? Two ideas not contradict, I think.—

  Jeffers eyed Sergeov cautiously.—Maybe. Maybe not.—

  Carl frowned. This was all going over short-range close comm, and he was glad of it. Ubers stood for ubernrenschen. Nietzsche’s supermen, evolution’s ordained next step. Planned. Designed. There would now be no slow blind stumbling upward, driven by nature red in tooth and claw. Many Percells thought they were the first step along a long, inevitable road.

  Carl had known of Sergeov’s opinions, but it shocked him to see Jeffers flirting with them.

  Sergeov persisted. —If Orthos say no to Mars terraforming, I say yes. Simple.—

  —It’s right there in the physics and chem simulations, clear as anything,—Jeffers added.—Put mechs to harvestin’ comets out past Neptune, it’ll take a century. We could sleep right through it.—

  Carl sent, “Sometimes a man can see clearer if he has his mouth shut.” He gestured at Ould-Harrad, who was jetting their way.

  —Okay, let’s break off,— Jeffers sent.

  —Is true, though. Think it over. First step to much more, maybe,—Sergeov concluded, launching himself away with a muscular shrug.

  Ould-Harrad inspected the layout plans for the mechs, then left. Carl took advantage of the chance to get off and work by himself. He had never liked politics. And their wild talk had been disturbing.

  He immersed himself in the sweet gliding grace of Beethoven. Moving through inky shadow and glaring yellow floodlight. pushing and towing, smelling the sour suit air, feeling the rrrrrrtttt of the countertorqued wrench vibrate up his arm, the sweaty pinch of his suit at shoulders and knees—Carl thought of California.

  His parents had been driving him up the coast when he told them.

  The four years at Caltech had gone by in a blur of golden sunlight and nights of study, weekend pranks and unending problem sets, labs and lectures and precious little love. He’d had no time for it. Sergeov was so sure that Percells were special—well, okay, Sergeov probably had to think that, compensating for what he’d never have. But Carl knew differently.

  He had done well because he’d worked, dammit, not because he was smarter. At Caltech he had felt a growing kinship with all the men and women who had ever put in long hours in lonely rooms. Unlike soured drudges or inexperienced kids, he did not believe for a moment that creative people idled away their time and then, when the mystical spirit moved them, knocked out brilliant ideas in bouts of furious, fevered bursts of easy inspiration.

  Doing anything well demanded endurance, steadiness, relentless drive.

  Those he had. Brilliance, no.

  So as his parents drove him up the coast he struggled with that inner truth. He had applied to Berkeley for graduate school in astroengineering and, against all his expectations, got in. They offered no scholarship, not even a teaching assistantship. That meant he was marginal. His father loyally mistook this for another symptom of the growing prejudice against Percell-made children.

  Carl knew better. Universities are sluggish beasts unmoved by the tides of public bias. The admissions committee undoubtedly had looked at his 3.3 average and seen that it was attained mostly by good grades in labs and design courses. Math and physics had put him on the ropes more than once, groggy with complex variable integration and quantum electronics.

  North of Ventura, his stepmother’s happy chatter bubbled over with enthusiasm he had always found a bit much. He had never been able to forget his mother’s slow death, and adjust to this new woman in his father’s life. So he had sat in the backseat and watched the scenery and tried to think. The tawny August hills fell away, revealing the blue denim of the sea. Route 1 slid by as he tried to explain to them his doubts. His stories of distant, intellectual battlegrounds sounded hollow when contrasted with the solid, enduring world outside. Weathered barns, their wood silvery from sun. Rows of eucalyptus, lush hillside orchards, spindly railroad trestles crossing gorges, minifusion generators sculpted into hillsides, cows standing as still :as statues in the inky shade of live oaks. All the unthinking richness of Earth.

  Morro Bay was glassy when they stopped there for the night. His stepmother ooohed and aahhhed at a sleek alabaster yacht that swept by, out beyond the bay’s protecting spit of sand. Pretty, yes. But Carl liked the moored working boats better—oily, rusted, scaly and cluttered with gear. They had argued over chowder at a wharf restaurant, his father so agitated that he drank the chardonnay quickly and ordered another bottle, red-faced.

  The next morning he awoke knowing what he had to do. Driving through the grassy foothills, turning inland to San Luis Obispo between stony low mountains, he said it—suddenly, clearly.

  And now, remembering, he saw that it was brutal, too.

  His father had shouted, You’re going to give up all this? with a sweep of a hand. Meaning Berkeley, graduate school, where Carl knew he would burrow into the books and never emerge alive.

  Oh, maybe he’d get a master’s degree, and a reasonable desk job. With incredible luck, a doctorate.

  But he’d have been a perpetual second-rate. And he’d have wasted years.

  He remembered his father’s hand chopping the air, the outraged gesture taking in the hills beyond. You’re going to give up all this?—and that all had been, in the end, Earth itself.

  Carl remembered it in grainy detail, despite the seven crowded years that had passed since. Years of learning how space really worked—not the geometric certainty of math and physics classes, where every problem had a pure solution in an orderly universe. Not the serene world of that distant, unattainable yacht. He had learned what space really was—grubby, tough, with plenty of
problems that had no solutions at all.

  It was a natural locus for Percells to gather, skating high above the clumping, festering masses who feared and despised them. Space held beauty, sure, but the places men had carved out for themselves in it were more like the rusty scows moored at Morro Bay, worn and smelly, dented and makeshift, working fine but looking like hell.

  Around him, bulky masses glided by, spotlights poked the chilly gloom. Coffins nudged into sockets in the black ice. Beethoven’s violin sang to a rippling piano across the yawning silent centuries. Carl labored on, thinking of his long years spent in space, far from Earth’s green confusions.

  SAUL

  It was hard to remember that the hall was actually a great crystal chamber, carved out of the heart of an ancient ice mountain. Nowhere could be seen the dark glittering of carbonaceous hydrate, veined with shiny seams of frozen gas. Everywhere pink fiberthread and bright yellow spray-on sealant hid the primordial stuff of Halley Core.

  To Saul Lintz it far more resembled some vast cathedral of kitsch.

  The Great Hall was the heart of Central Complex—the ant farm of rooms sculpted here deep under Halley’s surface. Tunnels led off in the six cardinal directions, color-coded amber, lime, strawberry, peach, aquamarine....and a broad vertical avenue of orange—Shaft 1—fifteen meters across and rising straight up half a mile to the comet’s cluttered north pole.

  Machines had scrubbed the atmosphere and warmed it, leaving only a faint, almondlike odor to greet people as they streamed into the Hall for the dedication.

  Now and then, when my head clears, even I can smell it.

  Saul blew his nose and quickly put his handkerchief away before anyone noticed. That was why he sat perched on an empty packing crate at the back of the chamber instead of closer to the speakers’ platform. He was stoked with antihistamines, but still his nose dripped and he felt perpetually on the verge of sneezing.