by MadMaxAU
“For the first time, ladies and gentlemen—for the first time we have found definite signs of life beyond Earth.”
PART 2
IN THE HOT BREATH OF
THOSE DAYS
When beggars die, there are no comets seen—
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
—Wm. Shakespeare
VIRGINIA
The great, tumbling ice mountain hurtled outward into the void. Behind it, smaller and fainter with every passing watch, the Hot fell away into the eternal blackness.
Briefly, the sun’s blazing furnace had scrubbed and gouged and broiled away at the snowy worldlet—had cracked and charged its temporary atmosphere, sending waving flags of ionized gas flapping in the interplanetary breeze.
But then quick summer passed. The flames were left behind again, still bright, but growing more harmless hour by hour. The savage exuberance of perihelion passage was fast fading from memory.
Autumn was marked by a gentle fall of dust. Tiny bits, carried away from the surface in the waning blow of escaping gas, had never quite reached escape velocity, even from the comet’s feeble pull. Gradually, they drifted back again, laying a dark, talclike patina over the icefields and rocky outcrops. The flickering snake of the plasma tail had already vanished, and now the foreshortened dust tail—so like shimmering angels’ banners not long ago—dissipated as the ancient comet streaked past Mars and on, toward the orbit of Jupiter.
Virginia found it beautiful. The dark regolith was laid bare, here and there, exposing a slumbering icy substrate. Although a thin coma of shimmering ions still hung overhead tenaciously, the vault already showed more stars than the dark, tropical nights back home.
I’ll bet the view is even more spectacular in person, she thought. One day I really must go up to the surface myself.
She could feel the soft webbing holding her to her link-couch, in a cave laboratory deep under millions of tons of primeval matter. But otherwise it was almost as if she were up on the comet’s Surface, in person. The holographic images brought her a nearly perfect sensation of being out on the ice.
She was wearing—teleoperating—a Class III surface mech, moving its spindly, spider legs as she would her own, looking with its swiveling eyes, feeling the faint brush of drifting gas molecules as a wind on her face. Her fingertips moved gently in their waldo grips as she sent a chain of mental commands to the host mech on the ice, making it turn.
The method had first been tried back in the late twentieth century, and had seemed quite promising at the time . . . until several famous disasters led to near abandonment of direct mind-machine interfaces. It turned out to require a special kind of personality to control a mech in this way, without letting random thoughts and a hundred human reflexes interfere, sometimes catastrophically. This had been discovered the hard way, during those early, naive applications to aircraft and factory equipment. To this day, spacers like Carl Osborn tended to distrust the technique, preferring voice and touch controls.
That was then, though. This is now.
One of the reasons for her presence on this mission was the fact that such extensive use was to be made of mentally controlled robots for the first time in decades.
Vasha Rubenchik is a real genius, Virginia thought as she deftly rode the mech over a small rise. The Russians were idiots to exile him out here, whatever his political opinions. I’ve never felt a mind-to-robot link this good before.
Too bad Vasha was already in the slots, or Virginia would have praised him for deftly tailoring the neuroelectric and holographic connections so well to her specifications. This alone was almost sure to win patent royalties for both of them, when the data were sent back. The boodle would accumulate in their accounts while they slept through most of the seven and a half decades ahead.
Although money wasn’t her top priority, Virginia had seen how useful it could be, especially when one wanted to work in areas frowned upon by the powers that be.
She could hardly wait until things had settled down a bit and there was free time to try some of these new techniques in experiments with JonVon.
As if summoned, a voice hummed along her acoustic nerve.
I AM PREPARED TO ENGAGE IN NEW PROBLEMS WHENEVER YOU WISH, VIRGINIA. THE MISSION MAINFRAME IS USING ONLY 15% OF MY CAPACITY, RIGHT NOW . . . . WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ASSUME A SIMULATED PERSONALITY?
Oh, great, she thought. All I’d need, while I’m controlling a mech out on the surface, would be to let you construct Olivier, or O’Toole, or some other old movie heartthrob . . . and. have them come charging around, blowing in my ear.
She had chosen pre-vid actors to use in personality-sim experiments partly out of romantic atavism, and partly because they were less familiar to people these days—better to use in blind Turing tests on unsuspecting subjects. The simulations had fooled almost everybody, on Earth, even though they still were nothing like what she was sure they could be.
OR I COULD BRING FORTH SHELLEY. YOU LIKE HIS POETRY.
Virginia subvocalised clearly, crisply:
Not now, JonVon. Mother is busy. If you haven’t enough to do, helping the colony mainframe, go to some of those secondary problems I assigned you.
VERY WELL. I’LL CONTINUE SNEAKING THROUGH THE COLONY RECORDS AND SNOOPING WHAT PEOPLE BROUGHT ALONG IN THEIR PERSONAL WEIGHT ALLOTMENTS. YOU EXPRESSED CURIOSITY ABOUT THAT.
Virginia hesitated, then agreed. Okay. You do that. Just don’t leave any traces.
Of course it was a bit unethical to use her special tools and skills to snoop into other folks’ private matters. But then, Virginia had always believed people tended to try to keep too much secret.
Anyway, it broadened the number of people to think about. The dozen crew members still warm and moving about were hardly enough for even minimal gossip over the sixteen months of First Watch. In the need to conserve consumables, everyone else had already been put into cold sleep, leaving the first shift to apply finishing touches to the habitats and other facilities.
Well, Ginnie, you volunteered to be on First Watch. You knew it would be one of the busiest.
Yes, but there are opportunities, as well. Later, she thought. Later, after things have settled down, I’ll have my chance. Long, delicious stretches of work time.
Her mech finished its slow scan of the surface as the mouth of Shaft 2 came into view.
Scarred, scratched, and littered, the north polar region looked nothing like a pristine remnant of Creation Crates of supplies lay tethered to the ice or bound up under fibercloth “tents” for later use. Debris lay everywhere.
Farther off stood six high, peaked pyramids of dark tailings from shaft excavations, crudely separated into heaps of primordial nickel-iron, platinum and iridium-rich ores, and carbonaceous gunk . . . much like Alberta tar sands. At some point later, long after she had returned to the slots, the watch crews would start processing the piles into useful things, like Nudge Driver housings.
To take us home again. Not for the first or last time, she wondered what Earth would be like when they returned. If all their grand schemes would turn out to have mattered. Would she find Hawaii, Earth, recognizable? Friendlier? Or would it be an alien world, altered beyond recognition?
Halley swoops
in centuries
in intervals—
One human span apart
Halley scoops
up changing times
up nations’ lives—
Hmm. Thank heavens she was too busy right now, or she might be tempted to record that bit of doggerel. Still, perhaps something could be done with it.
SHALL I STORE OR ERASE IT, THEN, VIRGINIA?
She started, then subvocalised quickly, JonVon, I thought you’d signed off. Those were private musings.
A brief pause told of vigorous cross-correlation checks.
PRIVATE MUSINGS—REFLECTIONS—FANTASIES . . .
Enough! And JonVon was instantly quiet.
Irritated, Virginia took
hold of her thoughts and concentrated on maneuvering the mech back toward the work site. The spider’s legs swung, one at a time. Surface vibrations translated into sounds so she “heard” the mech’s feet crunch across the dark powder.
During the early work, so much vapor had been churned out here that some of the gases actually condensed again, instead of escaping into space. Sparkling snows had flash-frozen around the heat-and-gas-release ducts leading up from Central. Broad, rainbow-colored flows spilled over the feet of the Shaft 2 portal.
The airlock itself was more than just a drab, functional construct. Far from that, Virginia saw it as a work of art. Structural braces had been press-formed in high, faery arches. The footing anchors looked like gnarled gargoyles’ fists, gripping the ancient stuff of Halley.
Only a few crucial parts were made of precious refined metal, salvaged from the robot freighters. The supports and body of the building were cleverly sculpted from refrozen, crystalline, water ice.
It was one reason why Virginia liked working out on Quadrant 2, where Jim Vidor had been in charge of the construction crew. The man was an artist.
“We build the best when we are forced to improvise,” Virginia said softly to herself.
A carrier wave cut in, followed quickly by a woman’s voice
—What was that, Virginia? Did you say something? —
Virginia’s head turned a little too quickly, causing the mech to slew awkwardly as it struggled to follow. At last a slim, spacesuited figure came into Virginia’s field of view, standing over a row of dark shapes tethered to the ice.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Lani. I was just admiring what Jim and his guys did in melt-carving this airlock.”
Lani Nguyen’s spacesuit had been trimmed of its heavy armor, now that summer had passed and dust pebbles were no longer being blasted outward by subliming gas. A white cloth tabard covered the suit’s chest area, depicting the head of a smiling unicorn—a symbol that would identify Lani to workers too far away to make out her face. Right now the sharp sun reflected in her opaqued visor, anyway, hiding her soft, half-Asian features.
—Yes, pretty. But not entirely safe, in my opinion. Next shift, Jeffers is supposed to break out the factory gear and start processing some of that iron and carbon stacked out here. I’ll sleep a lot quieter in my slot knowing there’s a real stress-filament hatch up here, capping the air in. —
Virginia sighed softly. “Yes, I suppose so. Still, I hope they leave some of these crystal structures in place. It would be a shame if the only marks we left were scars on every inch of this little world.”
She heard Lani sniff but politely withhold further comment.
Virginia knew that, to a spacer, talk of “preserving nature” was nothing more than Luddism. It was all very well to try to save what was left of poor, depleted Earth, but to apply such ideas to the vast resources out here struck spacers as thickheaded.
Dumb or not, though, a majority of Earthlings felt that way. And Virginia was not sure, quite yet, if she disagreed.
She walked her mech back over to the stacked equipment and helped the Amerasian girl unload a new crate of fibercloth tunnel liner. Carl Osborn was due up here in a little while to work with Lani on a new link from Shaft 2 to Shaft 1. Lani had asked Virginia to come up—in proxy, of course—to help whip a balky autonomous mechanical into shape for the upcoming operation.
This mech is working just fine, Virginia thought. The model’s certainly smart enough to have done Lani’s bidding without my direct control. I wonder what her real reason was for asking me up here.
Together they pushed the crate toward the gaping airlock doors, providing fingertip support for the bulky cargo against Halley Core’s faint tug. It was then that Lani spoke again, in a voice of labored casualness.
—As long as you’re up here, Virginia, I want to thank you for helping arrange to put me on First Watch. —
Virginia started, and nearly dropped her end of the crate as they lowered it to the floor of the airlock.
“Uh, you’re welcome, Lani. I—I don’t really think I made much difference, though.”
That was certainly the truth. Three weeks ago, while a hundred temporarily awakened men and women scrambled about like ants preparing for the long winter, Lani had hinted something to Virginia about influencing shift scheduling. She wanted to remain awake on the first year-and-a-half detail, after nearly everyone else was cooled down.
A number of crew members seemed to share this belief, that Virginia had some sort of a secret back door into the mission mainframe computer aboard the Edmund. Some had made even more blatant requests. She had been politely, noncommittal to them all. People took that sort of answer better than an outright refusal.
To be honest, in all the running around, Virginia had forgotten about Lani’s shy entreaty until now.
They had to push down on the crate to set it against the other equipment, Halley’s pull was so molasses slow.
—I’m really grateful. I just couldn’t go down there to sleep . to pass so much time . . . with my mind in such a spin. There are things . . . things I have to work out. —
Although she had half-turned away as she spoke, Lani’s face was now visible under her helmet visor. The young woman could easily have been Hawaiian, with her faintly Eurasian features and healthy, taut skin. Right now, though, Spacer Second Class Nguyen seemed troubled, her mouth working as she sought words to express herself.
Well, it’s only to be expected, Virginia thought. They told us back on Earth that we would all have to take turns being each other’s therapists, ministers, listeners. And then they loaded the expedition down with exiles, cripples, and refugees.
Like me. She sighed. Be honest with yourself, Ginnie, are you any less confused than this poor girl?
She waited, and at last Lani spoke again.
—Virginia, I was wondering. Um, what do you think of the Birth and Childhood Laws? —
Virginia was glad that a mech couldn’t show her sudden surprise.
“Well, uh, they don’t seem all that fair… though I guess there are arguments on both sides. I don’t suppose you like them much, Lani. After all, you’re a . . .”
—A spacer. Yes. —Lani nodded. —My parents were California Techno-Liberals. They told me stories, ever since I was a little baby, about how mankind’s future was out in space. How someday humanity would move out here and get rich and happy and generous again. Only the dreary stay-at-home types would live on Earth. —
Virginia shifted uncomfortably. The mech responded with the same pelvis cant.
“Your parents were right, Lani. Space is saving humanity. Even reactionaries and Arcists know that. Why do you think Hawaii invested so heavily in this expedition? Those dreams will come true, someday.
“I guess it’s just that the Hell Century is still fresh in everyone’s memory. That’s why so many countries are so suspicious. Space has to serve Earth first, until the recovery is complete. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure you’ll live to see your Third Plateau.”
The mech’s vision system adjusted to the shadows. Through the other woman’s faceplate she saw Lani’s head shake.
—Probably too late for me, though. I’ll have to go live on Earth to have my babies, and no male spacer will give up the Black to stay dirtside with me. —
There it was, laid out like an open wound. Virginia’s palms felt clammy on her waldo controls. If there was any subject she would prefer not to discuss, this was it.
She said with feigned lightness, “Isn’t that an exaggeration?”
Lani looked up. Her dark eyes were sad.
—Look at the figures, Virginia. All spacers store sperm or ova in banks on Earth. Most breed by proxy . . . except those who are Percells, and can’t find surrogate parents for their offspring. They’re even worse off than us Orthos. —
Virginia felt a wash of savage irony. At least the girl had something to store away. She had a ticket into the future.
What have I, but my machines
? Virginia thought.
“The radiation levels you live in make that necessary, don’t they, Lani?” A truism, of course.
Lani shrugged.
—If they’d let us build real space colonies, instead of just factories and life-support huts in orbit, we spacers could marry and raise families together. As it is, those women spacers who go home and reclaim their plasm have to stay there with their children. Nearly all of us have to marry Earthers, since no man like Car… since hardly any man of space would give up the Black without a fight. —
Virginia tried to pull the conversation back into the abstract, where she was much more comfortable. “That’s a tough situation, Lani. But the laws themselves . . :”
—The Birth and Childhood Laws are a crock! You know they’re just reactionary measures against anything new and frightening to the masses! They don’t want to lose control of us out here! They’re terrified of change! —
Virginia quashed her first reaction—to tell the girl not to teach her grandmother to suck eggs. What, in all the world, had a healthy Ortho girl to teach her about life? About bitterness and the dark shadow of persecution? There was only one man out here Virginia cared to listen to, or who had the right to say anything on those matters.
Something of this must have been conveyed in the host mech’s six-legged stance. The spacesuited woman straightened up and shook her head.
—I’m sorry I shouted, Virginia. —
“That’s all right, Lani. Come on, let’s get that last crate. You know that hell hath no fury like a petty officer confronted with a job undone. We want to be finished before His Nibs, Spacer First Class Carl Osborn, arrives.”