by MadMaxAU
“That’s why the level of violence is so low, even though you hate each other so much,” he ventured.
Sergeov nodded. “Everybody will die together, anyway. But we need workers to keep things going as long as possible. Nobody wants to go by cold, by starvation.”
“Nobody ‘cept maybe Ould Harrad,” one of the others ventured.
“Ould Harrad!” Saul blinked. “Then he’s— “
“Become a wild eyed mystic,” Sergeov explained. “How you think a Percell like Osborn ever became an officer? Not for his pretty looks and Ortho loving ways, I tell you!”
The other two Ubers laughed. “No. Ould Harrad started talking to God. Resigned his commission. Lunatic is tool of Quiverian, now. Spiritual leader of the Arcists,” he said sarcastically.
Saul could believe the last. It was a wonder the stark silence of the long watches had not driven more of them farther toward the fringe of human experience.
Sergeov shrugged. “Let us go now. I take you back to Central. I must talk to Osborn anyway. Clear up some stupid accusations of that crybaby Malcolm.”
Saul did nut move, though. He was staring, blinking, down a cross tunnel toward a phantom light that wavered to the distance
The others turned and saw it too. One Uber hissed, “Clape. It’s th’ Ol’ Man himself!”
Saul drifted toward the shape, curious. Then he saw that there were two, no, three of the ghostly figures, moving along the walls like great spiders, picking through the wall growth.
A hand gripped his arm and pulled.
“We go now,” Sergeov grunted.
“What are they?” Saul asked in wonder. For a moment he thrilled to the thought that they might be an as yet unknown form of Halley Life—huge and highly structured creatures.
“Now, Saul Lintz. Those can be dangerous.”
Saul blinked again, and realized that the slowly approaching creatures were shaped as men, but their outlines were fuzzy, fringed, as it were, with a cloudy, milky edge of shimmering fronds.
“Ingersoll?” he wondered aloud.
“Old Man of the Caves,” Sergeov agreed. “And some of other mad ones who joined him. Come now, Lintz, or we leave you.”
Saul nodded and began backing away with them. There would be time to study mysteries. Patience would pay off better, in the end, than impetuous curiosity.
Anyway, his palms were sweaty and his mouth drier—as he watched the ghostlike shapes grazing through the Halleyform forest—than they had been during the fight with Sergeov’s Uber warriors. Saul hurried along with his escorts, promising himself that he would be back when he knew better the rules of this strange place and time.
The halls near Central—still fibercloth lined, still scoured at intervals with ultraviolet and microwaves and kept clean by a few mechs that had survived the decades—seemed like an oasis not just from another century but from a different world.
“My business is with Osborn,” Sergeov told Saul. “Take my advice, Lintz. Be careful which faction you join, after recuperation. A few Ortho groups are not vicious baboons.”
Saul had heard Sergeov’s radical Percells described in pretty nasty terms, as well. Where there was tribalism, he had long decided, there was no way to avoid criminality.
“Some groups accept both Percells and Orthos.” he told Sergeov. “It’ll have to be one of those, if we join any faction at all.”
“We . . .” The legless Uber leader thought. “Ah, you and the Herbert woman.”
“Another Ortho lover— “one of the others began, but a sharp look from Sergeov shut him up.
“There is one last thing,” Saul said as the Percells were turning to go. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a silvery tool.
“I want some blood and tissue samples for my new medical inventory, if you fellows don’t mind. The Survivors and the Plateau Three bands have already contributed, and I’m sure you’ll be; happy to cooperate.”
The Uber with the bad teeth snarled and reached for his knife. But one more time the Russian cut him off. Sergeov’s eyes seemed to glitter as he presented his arm to Saul. And a silent message seemed to say that he would expect a favor of his own, someday.
If I had not once worked with Simon Percell, Saul thought as he took samples from the other two, would Otis have even saved my life this afternoon?
On the Ubers’ chests the Sigil stood out starkly, red against blue, a tribute to a man long dead at his own hand, who might have seen some of what was to come, but could never have imagined how far it would all go.
He visited for some time with Virginia in her recuperation unit, checking her progress carefully and reassuring her that the slot pallor was fading nicely. He kissed her and gave her a mild sedative for her insomnia. Then Saul went down to his lab.
The samples from the Ubers went through the same preliminary analysis as he had performed on his other subjects. The first results seemed to be just the same.
Oh, there were different accumulations of microfauna in their blood and sputum. The Percells’ immune systems seemed slightly less damaged, not as overstressed as the colony’s remaining Ortho complement. That was no surprise. The expedition had started out less than one quarter Percell. Now the ratio among those healthy enough to be awake was even or better in favor of the genetic augments.
But the story was still the same. We’re all dying, he thought. At last he found the courage to insert a sample just taken from Virginia.
Saul swallowed. She was fresher, but he could read the signs. Even in her case, right out of the slots, the inevitable was well under way.
“Well,” he whispered. “Maybe I can find some patterns be adjust the cyanutes some more.”
He did not hold out much hope for that approach though. That breakthrough had made it possible for people to live here. But Comet Life was adapting. More and more forms avoided the special sugar coating that had enabled his little gene crafted creatures to do their extra job so well.
The old question still raised itself, every day, nearly every hour he was awake. He must have slept with it over the long years in the slots.
How is it possible for Halley Life to live in us? How is it Ingersoll and the other cave dwellers can eat the stuff and survive?
Why are we so much alike?
Oh, that simulation he and Virginia had worked out with JonVon, so long ago, had shown how basic similarity had come about. Science had long known that organic chemistry would come up with the same amino acids, the same purines and pyrimidines under a wide variety of circumstances. Life would generally start out the same anywhere.
But the similarities went far beyond that. It was almost as if men were not the first creatures from Earth to invade the comet. As if there had been earlier waves, and the present war was one among distant cousins.
Long ago, in the late twentieth century, a famous astronomer had even proposed that comets were a source of epidemics on Earth. His theory was that primeval viruses floated down into the atmosphere whenever the world passed through a big cometary tail. This, he thought, explained ancient myths calling objects like Halley apparitions of doom. Evil stars.
Saul had laughed on reading such baroque nonsense. But that was long ago. Now . . . well, he did not know what to think. Nothing, none of it, made any sense at all.
The computer winked a code at him, over and over.
F4 D$56.
More data wanted.
“Certainly.” He nodded amiably. “A most worthy request.”
Tomorrow he would go out and try to persuade Quiverian’s Arcists to cooperate.
Then he remembered. He hadn’t tested his own blood, yet.
One more datum for a baseline. He stepped over to the treatment table, drew and prepared the samples, and returned to run them through the fluorescent separator analyzer. Numbers and graphs flickered in three dimensions and many colors. Depictions grew on all sides of him, programmed to highlight differences from the mean of the prior samples.
All around
Saul, the displays were suddenly ablaze. Winking highlights, bright anomalies. He blinked. Nearly everything was different!
“Um,” he said concisely. Saul blinked at the figures.
There was the array of lymphocyte counts . . . all types: within normal range.
Nobody else’s sample said that. Only his.
Electrolyte balance . . . nominal.
His was the only one that said that!
Metabolic processes . . . nominal.
“Stupid machine,” Saul grumbled. He smacked the side of the unit, keyed on an autotest, then another. Only green lights winked from the control panel. The machine claimed it was working well.
“I’m aberrant because I’m normal?” He stared at the columns of figures. They all insisted that he was anomalous. Strange. Unusual.
And nearly all of the differences were toward the Earthly human norm. Except for one.
Foreign infecting agents . . .
He looked at the estimate and whistled.
According to the bioassay, he should be dead.
Dead? Saul laughed. The damned machine seemed to think his blood was a froth of dangerous invaders. His bodily fluids were aswarm with horrible, nasty things, the smallest fraction of which should have killed him long ago!
And yet the other displays said: Nominal . . .
Nominal . . .
nominal . . .
nominal . . .
“Crazy damn machine,” he muttered.
But then Saul remembered . . . fighting the Uber in the hallway . . . the surprise on both of their faces when he—barely out of the slots—began twisting the other man’s arms back, back ....
“Visual microscopic display,” he commanded. Time to get to the bottom of this. Something was wrong here, and the best way to find out what had broken down in his biocomputer would be to do an old-fashioned histological survey himself. “Screen One, subject blood sample magnification ninety.”
The holistank rippled and cleared, showing a straw colored sea crowded with drifting globs of pink, white, yellow. A jostling of multishaded forms, whirling, jouncing, fluttering in the saline tide.
Saul shook his head, stared, shook his head again
His mouth started working, without making a sound, in blank amazement and silent prayer.
CARL
Carl studied the main screen in disbelief. He had just finished another useless conversation with Major Clay, the marvelous wooden man who fielded all questions sent Earthside with a bland yet rock hard calm. Earth wasn’t sending advice, information, or even much sympathy—that was certain. Major Clay sidestepped every question. With each passing year, they papered over their fear by increasing the entertainment channels they sent in the weekly squirt. That left less time for real communication.
So Carl had thumbed off impatiently before the transmission time had elapsed. It was doubly irritating that he could never really hang up on Major Clay, because the delay from the speed of light was now five hours. Not conducive to snappy comebacks, he had thought.
Time to prepare for the meeting. He idly thumbed over to RUNNING READOUT, expecting to see the usual situation report, but didn’t get the usual five colored status chart. Instead, he caught a trickle of JonVon’s momentarily exposed inner flow. Incredibly, it was another poem. As he read, Carl began to smile.
Plateau Threes are simple, plain
can’t flutter free of Percell’s pain
Take us home! Or near sun’s warm!
Close to Earth and safe from harm.
Only ole JonVon’s got the charm
to hide a riddle
in the middle: gold!
Treat us as miners,
Major.
And Martian Way, ah
they see their day
to come—to smack a planet red
(Carefully, about the head.)
To make it run with fluids bled
From Halley’s pitted blue iced dead.
Worms, like sticky pearls
Orbits, in liquid whorls
Ubers strut, pale hard jaws jut
Slice the Orthos!
If they could. All
for converging clammy good
Out by Neptune
on some ice-and-iron moon
(Or else to slip the knife
of bugs and lice to Earth. Drop
a rocket
in their pocket. Eh?)
Sad sure Arcists want to
Loop forever
Aren’t they clever?
High pitched bray and rusty rattle
Brows furrowed, they sing like cattle:
Keep the blue green pearl free
of us, our pus
Unclean, you see.
Suicide is as much a right
As going gladly into that Good Night.
Carl laughed. Incredible! This was not the first evidence he’d seen that JonVon was noodling away at poetry in slack moments. But of late the bio organic idiot savant had been getting uncanny. Or maybe it only proved that poetry wasn’t really a higher level activity after all. This was jagged, lurching, bitter stuff, reeling from rhyme to rhyme, with an occasional glancing collision with reason.
What was the gold JonVon was hiding? He wondered if JonVon had showed this to Virginia yet. She was still recuperating from the slots, but spent a few hours each day linked to her cyber-friend. What if the machine eventually turned out to be a better poet? Carl smiled.
And how did JonVon get such retailed information about the noxious factions Carl had to juggle? Maybe I should turn this job over to a subroutine
Meetings, always meetings. Through the hatch came Andy. Carroll, slot thin and glowering.
“Those Arcists have gone on strike again!”
“Wildcat?”
“No, Malcolm called them in. I just got a hail from him.”
“How come?”
“He says their Hydro share was low this week. His pickup team just returned with no fruit, not many vegetables.”
Carl frowned. “That shouldn’t have happened. I checked the output—“
“Sergeov got some of theirs, I’m pretty sure.” Andy balled a fist and smacked it into his palm.
“Stole it gain?”
A nod. “He’s got some way of slipping the stuff out after it’s been counted and allotted. I can’t figure it.”
Mildly Carl said, “That’s your department.”
Andy was young, only recently awakened, but he had caught on to the nuances of the situation quickly. His black eyebrows shot up. “I cover every entrance. No way a man or woman could get in there.”
Carl nodded sympathetically. “Uh huh. What about half a man?”
“Wh . . . oh. You figure Sergeov can get through other ways?”
“With no legs . . . check it out.”
Andy brooded, his pale features compressed into a mask of fretful concern. “I don’t see how, but okay.”
Carl sighed and stretched in the webbing. “Now you know what this job’s like.”
“Yeah. They’re a bunch of goddamned children!”
“You’ve been out—what? Two months?”
“Right. Still— “
“It’ll take a while to see where the hate comes from. Just try to ignore the worst, work around it.”
“I’m convinced that Malcolm is stalling.”
“He often is. What else’s he got to negotiate with? But you mean seriously, this time?”
“I think so. I checked the Nudge pods they supposedly finished three months ago—down at the south pole. They look as though they’re set up right, but I pulled off a few cowlings. Inside there’re connections missing, tanks not racked—it’s a mess.”
“Sure it’s Malcolm’s fault?”
“I think they’re sabotaging the pods.”
“They smash anything?”
“No, just took stuff apart.”
“Smart. Any obvious damage, we’d howl. This way, you might very well have accused Malcolm to his face of shirking the
work.”
Andy blushed. “Well, actually, that’s what I did.”
A pause. “Oh?”
“I . . . I know I should’ve got hold of you first, but—I was so damn hopping mad! I called Malcolm and started in on him.” Andy stopped, embarrassed.
“And?”
“He hung up on me before I even got three sentences out.”
“Then he probably thinks he’s got some complaint with us, too.” Don’t sound too casual, Carl reminded himself. Don’t let Andy onto what you know…that there’s simply no way the Nudge accelerators would be done in time anyway.
Carl said, “Who has the most to gain if you and Malcolm tear at each other’s throats?”
“Hell, hardly anybody, seems to me.”
“Doesn’t have to be more than a few.”
“Well . . . oh yeah. Quiverian. He’s the one keeps spouting that Arcist crap. You think he’s trying to slow down work on the Nudge?”
“It fits. The radical Arcists don’t want any possibility of cometary material getting near Earth. No orbits near enough to make a good rendezvous, nothing. Preserving Earth’s biosphere is it for them. They don’t care what happens to us.”