by MadMaxAU
“We’ll slot you within a few weeks,” Carl said evenly, clearly summoning up strength from some reservoir. “First we thaw your replacement, so you can brief her. We’ll have to square it with the sleep slot committee, argue over whether the replacement should be a Percell or an Ortho—the usual. Should take less than a month. We’ll start as soon as you get JonVon and the mechs in shape.”
She didn’t take her eyes away from Saul. “I’ll assign my personal mech, Wendy, to give JonVon permanent manual function.”
“The details don’t matter. You’ve won. That’s what counts.”
She nodded, unable to speak.
He stood silently in the curling moist fog and cold for a long time. “The people I most cared about, they’re all slipping away . . . .” Then he shrugged. “Y’know . . . I’m going to miss you two.”
PART 4
THE ROCK IN THE
DESERT
What nature doesn’t do to us,
Is done by our fellow man.
Tom Lehrer
SAUL
2092
The world came back slowly, and not too pleasantly. It tingled, deep down at the roots of his nerves, and then everything began to itch.
He could not scratch.
Later, as the tickling finally began to fade, there came his first real sensation of deep cold.
It was a fevery chill, this slow returning to awareness. Like a sickness—a bad one in which the mind is disabled, scattered, and yet some core part of a man knows that it wants to think—to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.
It was also like a nightmare, with blurred images, fragments of voices murmuring and fading, beyond recall or meaning. Only he dreamer knew that this time there would be no quick, relieved awakening.
There was one way out of this dream—a long, slow ride to the end.
The first time Saul felt certain that he wasn’t imagining things came as a blank whiteness overhead slowly swam into focus. His eyelids fluttered with hesitant feedback—actually responding to his will.
Shut, he commanded. The light closed off to a muted, rosy hue.
Open! he ordered desperately, afraid the world had gone away again. But nerves flashed and muscles fired on cue. A torrent of light poured in again.
It’s cold. . . Cold as the High Priest’s heart.
And Saul remembered a dry, freezing morning in the Judean hills, the scent of century old cedars and the chill of a hope dying.
Flames licked the sky in the direction of Gan Illana. There was more burning on Mount Herzl. But in Jerusalem the Armies of The Lord advanced in song, led on one side by a swarm of golden crosses, on another by the Mahdi and all of the Salawite mullahs. And in the center, chanting Hebrew psalms and carrying the Rebuilt Ark, the Kahanim priests of the new Sanhedrin. The faithful surged around the ruins of smashed buses, chanting in joy and carrying bricks and mortar.
Unable to move anything but his eyelids, Saul seemed to see it all again, played out against the pale white ceiling. It was a memory of smoke, and the acrid odor of superstition.
U.N. “peacekeepers” stood watch as the Architects planted the flags of three faiths on the Temple Mount and proclaimed the land holy in three tongues. The hover tanks had not moved to stop the riots. The world press hardly covered the slaughter of those resisting the new theocracy.
To the world it was a great day. “Peace” had come at last to the broiling navel of the world. Billions looked on it as a miracle as representatives of three great religions joined together in a holy cause.
To build a Temple to the Ultimate.
To fulfill prophecy.
To erect a place to speak to God.
Even after the fires had dimmed, after the Levites, Salawites, and Tribulationists had sealed the land, smoke still rose up to Mount Zion where he had watched. The pungent, sweet smell of roasting, sacrificial lambs.
The scent of Leviticus climbed once more into Heaven, curling under the nostrils of the Lord.
Saul closed his eyes again, and slept.
When next he awoke there was motion. A figure moved into view. He blinked, trying to focus.
It was an older face. Sterner. But he recognized it.
Saul felt his lips being moistened. He worked his mouth and managed to whisper one syllable.
“C . . . Carl?”
The visage overhead nodded. “Yes, Saul. It’s me. How are you feeling?”
Saul lifted his eyebrows. The lazy man’s shrug conveyed more than words could at this point. Carl Osborn responded with a smile, not a particularly friendly smile, but ironic. “Good. Your unslotting is proceeding normally. You should be up and about soon.”
Soul’s voice felt dry. Dusty. “Is . . . is there peace now?”
Carl blinked, then shook his head. “Most wakers ask what date it is. Or, if they’ve already been out, they ask if we’ve beaten the gunk. But not you. Not Saul Lintz.”
There was no antagonism in the remark. Saul managed to answer Carl’s wry smile with one of his own. “Okay, then. What . . . . what’s the date?”
Carl nodded. “Eight years before the new century.”
So, Saul thought. Thirty years. That was a long nap.
“Aphelion . . .” he breathed.
“Not far from it,” Carl agreed. “We’re thirty a.u. out. You should see the sun. It’s not much brighter than the moon in a desert night.”
Where no person has gone before.
“The Nudge Launchers?” Saul asked. “Are they . . .”
Carl frowned. “We’ll get ‘em built.”
Saul read a lot in that expression. It answered his first question. No peace. But we’re still here, so it can’t be all bad.
His body felt as if it were made of lead, but he managed to turn his head. “So who’s is charge now? . . . Kuyamato? Trugdorff? . . .Johannson?”
Carl shook his head. “They’re all dead, or dead-slotted.”
“Then who?”
Carl made a restless shrug. “I’m operations officer. If anyone’s in charge, I am.”
Saul settled back, slowly absorbing this.
He is older, harder. I wonder how many more years Carl has spent awake, while I slept.
“So do you need a doctor?” Frankly, he wouldn’t have expected to be revived, if it were up to Carl.
“Yeah, that’s right, Saul. We need a doctor. And Earth suggested it might be a good time to let you have another look at the diseases. Some seem to have mutated.”
Carl hovered over him for another moment. His lips pressed together. “I ought to be honest with you, Saul. The biggest reason I had you taken off ice was because we need Virginia.”
“Virginia,” Saul breathed. Remembering.
Carl nodded, his mouth tight. “Rest, Saul. You won’t be called on to do much. Not right away. I’ll check in on you later.”
Saul said nothing as the tall man slipped out of his peripheral vision. The years still had to be unsorted. Dreams that he had not quite experienced felt like water behind an overfilled dam. Faces riffled like shuffling cards.
Faces of women—Miriam, Virginia, Lani Nguyen. Faces of comrades—Nicholas Malenkov, dying in his arms.
And the ghost of Simon Percell. Through the fibercloth walls, through the ice mountain that surrounded him, Saul felt he could almost hear a soft, ironic laughter. It stayed with him when he fell into a deep, natural sleep.
Twice more he stirred briefly. The first time when a tech he recognized from the crew of the Edmund—now a middle aged woman with a strange, greenish stain on one side of her face—greeted him mildly and offered him a drink. He had to ask her to speak slowly because she seemed to have picked up a queer accent.
An oddly handsome man without any hair at all was his caretaker the next time. A burn on one cheek seemed more like a brand than anything an accident might produce. Saul thought it wise to forbear comment.
Wait. Absorb. Learn.
The slot tenders were not as busy as they once had been. T
he pace was casual, but under it all, the tension was still there. In the hushed conversations he overheard, there were words, phrases, that he could not follow. He was allowed to sit up, the next time the watch shift changed, and he saw that there was some sort of ceremony as new slot tenders took charge
No. There is no peace.
He saw on the wallboard that two recuperation lights shone. One for him. One for Virginia. She had kept her promise, and followed him down the River of Time.
Clever girl, Saul thought. I knew you could do it.
I can’t wait to tell you how much I really love you . . . however old you are by now.
With that wry thought, Saul slept again, and knew that he would be stronger when next he awakened.
CARL
Kepler’s Laws seemed almost biological now. Carl stared at the orbital display and sighed. Following a long ellipse out from the sun’s sting felt a lot like aging.
You start with a hot, fevered time when movement is rapid, life burgeons. Spring, a swelling heat, and ripe, quick summer. It passes. Things calm, raw reality seeps in, you slow and cool and come to terms with the fundamental hostility of the universe. Like growing old.
Simple Newtonian dynamics explained it all. The eccentric, moody Kepler had deduced the basic laws governing elliptical motion in a classic, brute force manner: staring at the data until order seemed to ooze out, the eye bringing forth structure where another’s would see only a hash of numbers. Carl respected that ability far more now, after years of dealing with mountains of data, faithfully delivered by the interlocking systems of Halley Core.
He stepped Halley’s orbit forward on the big screen, watching the long ellipse advance, the scale swelling as the warm realm of the inner planets dwindled, circles sucked into the vortex of the sun. They were far past Saturn now, turning with an aching lethargy toward aphelion, beyond Neptune. Gravity’s weakening tug nudged the ice mountain feebly, the sun’s gossamer apronstrings.
He still came to Central every few days to check, to touch the consoles and renew his faith that this long night must have an end.
Like growing old.
How old am I, anyway? Two years serving under Ould Harrad, after Saul and Virginia went into the slots. I was damned glad to slide into that chilly sleep myself. Worn out and depressed.
Then another shift under Lieutenant Morgan a decade later. Less harrowing, sure, but boring. I got heavily into the sense-stim, just to blot out the monotony of ice and dark. Must’ve run through every tape in the library a dozen times. JonVon was a help, rearranging and blending sensations and dramas. Some odd, delightful effects there . . . Still, much more than two years and I would’ve been ready for the rubber room.
Now it’s been—what? four more years? seems longer! —since Calciano woke me to take his place. The guy was pretty damned near gone, too.
He examined his reflection in a nearby blank screen, the gray flecks at the temples. Well, Virginia liked ‘em older . . . . Maybe now I can compete. I was a little hard to take, I guess. Brash and idealistic and pretty abrasive, I’m sure. Now, though . . .
He shook his head. Whatever he was becoming as a man . . . well, it was secondary. His main focus was on being a commander, or what passed for one these days. Plugging away, keeping the factions working together with minimal friction. He’d love to slip back into that dreamy cold sleep, let go, ride home free . . . .
But there was no one left in the slots he would trust with the important aphelion maneuvers ahead. On the display they were a mere finger’s width from the turnaround, a lonely blue pinprick.
He’d had the time to bone up on Halley’s Comet, something he had skipped when applying for this mission. It had seemed irrelevant: Halley was another iceball, bound for the outer system and zones of space nobody had ever seen. That was enough for an ambitious youngster of twenty five.
He had been chagrined to find he was even pronouncing the name wrong. Astronomers and space workers called it Halley with a short a; ground huggers of his native North America used a long a, as if it were “Hailey.” But the discoverer had pronounced it with a w in the middle, so it should sound like “Hawley.” Carl imagined a haughty Englishman enunciating the name with one eyebrow arched, his lips turned into an amused, condescending smile.
They were riding the comet on its thirty first passage since an ancient Chinese first recorded seeing the splash of shimmering light in the sky—a span that dwarfed the long years Carl had spent, and humbled the empires of Man. The fourth recorded apparition, in 11 B.C., came close to the birthdate of Jesus of Nazareth, and some said it must have been the Star of Bethlehem.
We could use some salvation now, Carl thought, and thumbed off the display. And where’s that goddamn Jeffers?
As if called, the hatch creaked and Jeffers appeared, his long rusty beard flowing over his skinsuit neck yoke like a lurid moss. The man had argued that letting body hair grow was only sensible, providing much-needed natural insulation. Carl had countered that it got in the way of suit fixtures and fouled the helmet placements, but he knew why Jeffers liked it: the image of Methuselah, of wisdom, of the old hermit in the woods.
“How’d it go?” Jeffers asked. If anything, his southern drawl had thickened with the years. They were all trying to keep alive whatever links they had to distant, vibrant Earth.
Carl shrugged. “I sent the weekly transmission yesterday. Got the usual short response today, thirteen hours twelve minutes later.”
“Any shows?”
“Here.” Carl hit a key and an index scrolled forward. He stopped at a NEWS entry and shifted to realtime. “Feast your eyes.”
A woman announcer grinned at them, her torso paint aswirl with technicolor curves. Her nipple ornaments glittered as she took a deep breath and said enthusiastically. “Arrested on two counts of public foreplay today were Starlet Angela Xeno and Compassatino Rilke, line player for the Visigoths.” A 3D picture of a smiling couple, half nude. “Insiders say the incident was publicity for the Visigoths’ upcoming tube match against the Wasters. Tuning to— “
Carl snapped it off. “There’re three new porno sestinas, too, if you want them.”
Jeffers made a face. “Naw, gettin’ so I can’t take that stuff anymore.”
“Me neither.” He never had, but it was a good idea not to disparage the tastes of people you had to work with; another small fact he had learned.
“When’s Malcolm comin’?”
“Any minute now.”
Central was one of two common meeting grounds between the factions. They all had to run into each other in the harvesting bins of Hydroponics, but Central was the obvious spot for real negotiations.
Jeffers slid into a webbing, stretching. “Just got back from the surface. A man can hardly move anything out there. Lotsa mechs are down for repairs and the rest drag around like they’s drugged.”
Carl nodded. Every month it got slightly worse. The persistent cold, the malfs, the difficulty of making new parts or repairs… “I wonder if there’ll be some of those titanium-cylinder manifolds in the Care Package.”
“Hope so.” Jeffers frowned. “I still wonder how they got all those parts and supplies into such a small package.”
“They’ve gotten better at high boost, I suppose. It’s been over Thirty years, after all.”
Earth had undoubtedly made great progress in propulsion of high-quality loads for the Mars and asteroid bases. Still, it had been a surprise to be told, three years ago, that Control was sending a cargo of much needed parts and supplies, boosting them out under enormous acceleration. They would arrive before aphelion, and could help crucially in the Nudge. Even with three decades of Earthside’s improvements, a package like that was expensive—but nothing, of course, compared with the investment already sunk into the Halley Mission.
“I ran that optical sighting through JonVon, got a measurement,” Jeffers said. “The Care Package is riding a fusion torch. Big orange plume behind it.”
“Already
decelerating?”
“Yeah, but not much. Guess they’re going to slam on the brakes right at the end.”
With rendezvous two years away, the Care Package still had to shed four kilometers per second to come alongside Halley. News of it had been a real morale boost. Carl hoped its arrival would lift them all, bring back some of the spirit the mission had enjoyed in its first days.
“Major Clay—our new contact guy—said he had included a bottle of 1986 Malescot St. Exupery Margaux.”
“Hot damn! I can’t pronounce it, but I’ll sure as hell help drink it.”
“A bottle of the best from Halley’s twen cen apparition, he
“Great. Just fine.”
Jeffers was plainly pleased at this fragment of news. Carl had saved details of the Care Package, dealt them out one at a time to keep enthusiasm up. An extravagant gesture, shipping old grape juice across the solar system—but Earth, despite its madnesses, did understand something of the psychology out here. It was a masterful touch.
One hell of an improvement over the hysteria under Ould Harrad—one month I’m a hero, the next I’m a Percell freak. And under Criswell they didn’t answer at all. If it weren’t for Phobos Base relaying newslink on the sly, we couldn’t have proved Earth was even inhabited Sounds like things are settling down now though.
He rubbed his face, massaging some of the ache away. He tapped in instructions and the walls lit. Best to put on something pretty, calm, warm. Ah, here. Sunny day breaking over Hong Kong Free State.
The swarming masses of junks and flyers always pleased him. A baking sun had just lifted free of green, artificial hills to the east. A rainbow grinned, upside down beneath the vapor fall of a floating luxury home. Heat shimmer made the distant alabaster spires dance.
The hatch clanked again and Malcolm appeared. He was lean, and his face was set in a perpetual dark glower, black eyes peering out distrustfully. Without a word Malcolm settled into a webbing and nodded. “We want more from Hydro.”