by MadMaxAU
But the modified cyanutes, the subtly tuned microwave scanners, all of their clever devices could only slow down the long erosion, the declining spiral. Halley Life, too, was adaptable, and much more at home here. It was a war of attrition that men could only lose.
I should have known that Akio would hardly take his own advice, Saul thought to the chilly domain of sleep slot 1. It had been a mistake to come down here so soon after leaving Recuperation Hall, to look in on old friends. A rude shock to have it brought home so clearly that three decades had passed.
Until now his last memory of the Japanese physician had been of glossy black hair framing smiling almond eyes under wire-rimmed glasses. But that image—as fresh as last week—was jarringly crushed down here among the chilled caskets. One was labeled with Akio Matsudo’s name. The figure behind the frosted glass was almost unrecognizable.
A thin fringe of gray wisps rimmed a pate turned speckled with age spots and scarred from bouts with skin infections. Those onceplump cheeks were now the hollowed inheritance of a man grown old fighting the inevitable the implacable And there was no hint of laughter anymore in the lines rimming poor Akio’s sleep-shut eyes.
The charts at the foot of every slot told the story of each hibernating occupant, red symbols denoting medical reasons for internment, black trim meaning storage without real hope of recovery or resuscitation, and blue marking a crewman or woman who was simply “off duty” for this span of years.
At first glance the situation looked serious, but not impossible. There were plenty of blue folders. However, a quick scan of the colors did not tell the true story. Akio, for instance, had a blue folder.
A tired, sick old man, he thought on reading his friend’s folder. It wasn’t just the lingering infections, or malnutrition from decades of eating only the narrow range of foods grown in the colony’s agro domes. Osteoporosis had so weakened the man’s bones that there was no way he would ever walk his beloved western Japanese hills again. Electrical bone stimulation had not made up for year after year in near weightlessness.
The Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel hung in cavern Gamma, frozen and broken down. So far, nobody had had the energy to fix it.
Saul read a random sample of blue folders and pored over slot readings. Slowly, he came to a chilling realization.
No more than ten percent of the colony was well in any real sense of the word.
Is Carl really that good a liar? He wondered how Osborn was able to maintain the fiction that the mission could ever be completed. Or is everyone pretending for the sake of their sanity
He saw no way there’d be even a fraction of the manpower needed to build and operate the “flinger” launchers—the mass drivers that were supposed to alter Halley’s orbit come aphelion.
And without the Nudge, they all might as well go to sleep for good, because there would be no homecoming for any of them.
His thoughts were clouded as he left sleep slot 1. Still a bit weak from his long hibernation, Saul stretched long unused muscles by glide-walking the long tunnels downward and southward, an area he had not visited yet since his internment.
In this area nearly all the passages were coated in luxuriant green layers of Halleyviridis fungoid. The stuff was too slick to allow good purchase for his vel stick slippers, but offered a sure grip when he used his bare toes as he had seen others do.
It actually made movement much easier. He found he didn’t need the almost hidden wall cables, for instance. Grabbing a tuft of growth in passing gave him all the added leverage he needed to move along swiftly.
Saul wondered for sometime without paying close attention to where he was going, thinking about the strangeness he and Virginia had awakened too.
Earth appeared to have completely written off Miguel Cruz’s grand odyssey. Oh, they still maintained contact, after a fashion, sending up entertainments and dribbles of technical data from time to time. Saul had extracted a promise from Carl Osborn to bring him more fully up to-date soon—the distant, somewhat aloof spacer had been imprecise about when. Apparently, most of the awake colonists lived day to day, and took a detached view toward time.
Soon, though, Saul knew he would have to resume his duties as expedition doctor. And the burden of hopelessness that had worn down Akio Matsudo would be his.
Most sorry of all had been those poor Orthos down in Quadrant 9, with their pitiful children—scabrous, wild eyed, stick figures barely human in aspect, always hungry and frail as leaves.
Perhaps the EarthBirth Laws were wise. Gravity runs strong in our genes.
But there was more to it than that. Yesterday he had examined five of the Ortho kids. All seemed to suffer from the same enzyme deficiency. He already had it mapped to the seventh chromosome. In a few weeks he should be able to track it down and . . .
And what, Lintz? Are you contemplating meddling, again? Just emerged into a new world, and already you’re coming up with ideas how to change it?
The glow of phosphor panel, was crowing sparse. Saul tried to take his bearings and realized that he had not been paying close enough attention. He was lost.
In the old days that would have been impossible. But by now all the old intersection “street signs” were obscured, completely covered over by the soft, native carpeting. Instead, where shaft met tunnel, there were deeply incised “clan markings” —filled in with a pitchlike substance that seemed to repel the Halleyforms. The marks denoted the boundaries of the various human bands. He looked around for one of these.
Apparently only Central, the sleep slots, and the hydroponics domes were neutral territory, now. And the deep, inner regions of Halley Core, of course. But only madmen ever went down that way, he had heard.
In one of the faction areas nearest Central he had seen what had become of the fibercloth that had once lined the tunnels and shafts of Halley Colony. The material had been turned into clothing and tentlike, “purple proof” habitats, suspended from the ceilings the bigger chambers.
Every sleeping hall maintained a round the clock watch for the most deadly of the comet lifeforms. Nevertheless, every year or so another poor victim fell to the feared native foragers.
Animals would be an ideal solution, he thought as he scraped away at the mosslike growth, hoping for a clue to where he was. On Earth we tamed other creatures and used them to fight vermin for us. Should be able to do that here.
Of course, that idea had been tried. Over the decades others had thawed dogs and cats and monkeys from the colony’s small collection of slot-stored animals. But none of the poor creatures had proved able to adapt even as well as the humans.
But what about changing the Earthbreed animals . . . altering them to fit into this strange environment?
He knew it hadn’t been attempted. Nobody else had the skill—or the arrogance—to try it. Already his mind was turning over ideas, genes of expression and regulation, ways of adapting creatures to work with an alien environment instead of against it.
Those poor, pathetic children, he thought.
Saul pulled out his chemically sterilized handkerchief and blew his nose. As he approached a new intersection, he saw one of the pitch filled clan marks, at last. He glided to a stop and contemplated the symbol: a large “U” crowned with a halo.
As he stood there, a voice spoke, as if out of nowhere.
“Clape. Look a’ what we have here! Lost, boss?”
Saul grabbed the wall growth and swiveled to see that a man with a blue tinted face looked down at him from the overhanging shaft opening. Saul had to blink, for this was distinctly the oddest-looking person he had seen since awakening.
The fellow wore bangles of hammered native platinum and a short-sleeved fibercloth tunic. And as he drifted to the floor, Saul saw nasty-looking metal claw/hooks on his toes. In his free hand the man held loops of rope woven of some native growth.
Saul nodded. “I guess I am lost, at that. I thought I was on M Level near Shaft Five, but— “
The other man laughed, showin
g open gaps amid rotting teeth. He leaped forward and landed closer to Saul, the movement exposing a large tattoo on his chest. It was a symbol Saul recognized, the Sigil of Simon Percell.
“What a savor, Hum? Free labor bum!” The man ginned, fingering the rope.
A second blue face emerged from the overhead shaft and grinned. “Green hydro labor, for a favor.”
Saul shook his head and smiled. Their glassy-eyed stress made him nervous. “I’m sorry, I’m fresh out of the slots, so I’m not up on the dialect yet.”
“Clack!” The first Percell rolled his eyes. “A virgin wool! Well, baby Earth blue, I remember how to talk land cant. Are you one of Simon’s diamonds? Or normal ape crape?”
Saul raised his hand, smiling ruefully. “Guilty as charged. I’m what I suppose you’d call an Ortho. Is that a problem? Have I wandered into territory that’s exclusively Perc— “
The fellow’s hands moved in a blur. A loop of rope snaked out abruptly over Saul’s shoulders and was pulled taut. “Hey!”
Another followed the first. Saul tugged back, but managed only to tighten the nooses. “I said I was just thawed! Just point me back toward Central and I won’t bother you— “
This time both men laughed. “It’s simple, pimple,” the first Percell began. Then the second broke in.
“Oh, give the ape a break, Stew. He lacks track.” There was a trace of sympathy in the second man’s eyes. Just a trace. He faced Saul.
“There’s rules fellow. Capture without harm or blood spilled isn’t vendetta, it’s fair coup. You work for us in Hydro for ten megaseconds—that’s about four months, old style—with maybe time off for good behavior.”
The first Percell laughed again, this time a high pitched set of yelps that cut off in a fit of coughing. He spat a pink stained gobbet onto the wall.
“That cough sounds pretty bad,” Saul said. How long have you been bringing up bloody phlegm?”
The blue faced man shook his head angrily. None o’ your business! Come on an ‘limp, chimp,” Stew said, and jerked Saul’s tether hard.
Until that moment Saul had felt almost detached, as if this were more comic than serious. But now he felt a part of himself getting very, very mad.
I should have just played along until I learned more, he thought. But the last time he had been jerked at the end of a rope like this it had been on a miserable day in Jerusalem, when he had been passed, handcuffed, from one newly installed theocracy bureaucrat to another—half of them misquoting Leviticus to his face and the rest reading apparently randomly chosen passages from Revelations and the Koran. It had been a blessed relief when the ferchochteh finally sentenced him to six months cutting timber on a labor gang, and then expelled him forever from his native land.
“I think not, yoksh,” he said evenly as the blue faced man jugged again. Getting a grip on the wall growth with his toes and one hand, Saul yanked back hard with the other.
Maybe it was the unexpectedness—Saul’s eyelids were still slot blue, after all—but the man on the ceiling yelped and tumbled from his high perch, past the floor, and on down into the shaft below. His cry diminished as he bounced softly against the walls, struggling for a hold as he fell. Saul transferred his grip to the other rope.
“Stew” wasn’t going to be surprised as easily. He grinned and pulled taut his own tether. Most of the fancy, rhythmic dialect was gone when he spoke.
“Poor Earth baby. Just unslotted and weak as an Ortho toddler. What do you know about tunnel fighting?”
“Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Saul told him, and kicked off from his anchoring point on the wall. He landed beside the surprised Percell, where the rope fell slack, and immediately started shrugging out of the loosened bonds.
“It sounds to me like you’ve got a tuberculinlike infection,” he said mildly, distracting his tormentor for a moment with his driest
bedside manner. “Also, how long have you had that parech skin infection? Don’t the microwave treatments help anymore?”
Stew’s blank amazement lasted only a few seconds. “I— “ He blinked, howled, and launched himself at Saul.
Saul’s knees carne up just in time, knocking the Percell’s toeclaws past him. A sharp pain lanced his left leg before he was able to lock into an embrace too close for the deadly implements to be used. Their hands met and gripped each other, fingers interlaced. Stew dug his toe claws into the wall growth and started pressing Saul back.
Wind whistled between their teeth. The detached part of Saul clinically noted the particularly foul stench of the other man’s breath. It was automatically compiled with a list of his other symptoms to be used later—if there was a later—in studying the disease.
You’re too old for this, he told himself as they grunted, face to face. And it’s much too soon out of the slots!
Thinking that, he was nearly as surprised as the wiry Percell when the straining war of muscles began to break, away from him. His opponent’s arms began quivering, giving way. Saul pressed his advantage.
“I…get…it…” Saul gasped s he wrenched the fellow’s arms back, making him cry out. “You guys…must be what they…call Ubers.” He got the man turned around, arms twisted painfully behind him.
“Hoosh, some superman,” Saul commented. With a grunt he tossed his opponent down into the shaft, just in time to strike his returning partner as the other Percell’s head came over the top. Together they tumbled shouting, down the shaft again. Saul drifted against a wall and held on with one hand until the gentle gravity brought him to the floor again. His heart pounded and he saw spots. His scratched leg hurt like hell.
“Assholes,” he whispered, preferring the explicit Anglo-Saxonisms of his youth, in this case, over the more subtle Yiddish he had learned only later in life. He gathered his breath and braced himself as sounds told of their return.
This time they were more careful. The two sprang to opposite sides of the hall to face him, both clearly angry. In their hands shone bright metal knives.
So much for capture by the rules, Saul thought. Maybe I should have accepted ten megaseconds in Hydro after all.
And yet, somehow, he didn’t regret a thing. “Come on, twerps,” he said, waving them forward. They started to comply.
“Stop this!”
He and the Percells looked up as one. A third blue tinted head emerged from the overhead shaft and Saul had to groan. Even on an adrenaline high, he wasn’t idiot enough to think he could take on three of the bastards.
But the newcomer didn’t direct his ire at Saul. He turned to the other Ubers.
“Why did you cut this man?” he shouted in a clear tone of command. To Saul the voice seemed familiar . . . a once thick accent softened and covered over by years of dialect.
The first two Ubers looked away. “Clape. The mape fought us, Sergie—“
“Dap the crap!” The leader drifted down one green lined wall. Truncated legs that were little more than nubs tipped with hooks turned him quickly as he pointed at Saul. “Do not you know who this is?”
They only blinked, and then stared blankly as the legless leader turned to face Saul for the first time, and bowed in an ornate gesture of respect. “I greet you, uncle of the new race.”
The shock of Slavic hair was nearly gone now, and the space-tanned skin had been converted into one big tattoo. But years were nothing to recognition. Saul laughed out loud.
“Oh. Hi, Otis. It’s good to see you, too. What have you been doing with yourself…besides turning blue, I mean?”
Inside, though, his heart still raced as he began to realize what a close call he’d had. Saul could only think, Oy.
The trip back to Central, under Uber escort, was almost anticlimactic, skim running along velvety, moss lined halls and passing the checkpoints of various clans with elaborate but apparently routine ritual.
Even to Saul it was obvious that they were taking a long way back, dropping deep into the comet to move northward before beginning to climb bac
k up again. “Why are we going so far out of the way?” he asked when they had descended to tunnels he had never seen before—twisty paths following soft veins of primordial snow.
Sergeov shrugged. “Quiverian.”
Saul stopped. “Joao? I’d heard he was awake now, as well. But why are you avoiding him?”
The first Uber, the Percell named Stew, spat down a nearby shaft. “He’s th’ darkest Arcist. Th’ ape we hate.”
Saul shook his head, looking at Sergeov. “Explain please, Otis.”
The Uber leader smiled. “The old race had some superior individuals—like you and Simon Percell. Quiverian, too. He leads most rabidly anti Percell band of Orthos, these days. Those who understand that, they are dinosaurs, and so want to stamp out us new mammals.”
Saul thought he understood. The term Arcist, once denoting equatorial environmentalism on Earth, had evolved and shifted here on Halley. Now it meant the most radical Ortho human faction, as Uber stood for those Percells who believed there could be no compromise with unmodified human beings.
There was clearly intense hatred and rivalry, and yet it was also obviously under control. All factions were clearly too weak, much too dependent on one another, to wage open war.
“I’m puzzled, Otis,” he said as they resumed their journey. Down here the tunnels seemed to have been hewn by hand, rough and winding, following paths of least resistance through the rocky ice. “If you feel that way, why aren’t you having children, like some of the Ortho bands?”
One of Sergeov’s men snarled angrily, and Saul realized he had brought up a taboo topic. Sergeov cut back the blue faced fellow with a sharp word. He turned back to Saul.
“We have a few. Came out better than Orthos’ pitiful little wretches. One, we hope, can maybe someday learn to read and write.” His face was briefly contorted in painful recollection. “We do not experiment anymore. What is point, when everyone is doomed anyway, eh? Those Orthos in Quadrant Nine, they are immoral to bring babes up just to suffer, to die.”
So, Saul thought. They do know the truth.