by MadMaxAU
Ah, but if I had that plasm in my hands, I might be too tempted ....
“When can I go back on duty, Saul? I want to join the crews mounting the Nudge Flingers, before all the really important work is already done.”
A spacer to the last, he thought. “Even if the Nudge does begin in a month or so, Lani, it’ll be years in progress with lots of motors left to build. You’ll do your turn, don’t worry. Right now, though, your job is to rest, get up-to-date.”
She nodded. The little capuchin monkey transferred from Keoki’s shoulder to hers and she scratched it.
“I’ll try to be patient, Saul. Anyway, I’ve got to thank you for assigning me to Blue Rock Clan for my recuperation. I’ve been to some of the other groups to try to visit people . . . .” She blinked, remembering. “Saul, how can people, professional people, with college degrees, act so . . . so . . .” She groped for the right word.
“So meshuggenuh?” he suggested.
Lani laughed—clear and bell like. “Yeah. So meshuggenuh.”
Anuenue put an arm around her shoulder. “We’ve been very glad to have Lani. Any of the clans of the Survivor faction would welcome her as a permanent member.”
Lani blinked. “I . . . I guess I’ll have to choose one, won’t I? I’m still not used to thinking like that.”
Saul didn’t like it any better than she did. He had hoped that the factionalism of the last thirty years would break down, once more of those slotted in the early days were treated with his serum and released. As the active population of the comet burgeoned, a majority would be made up of those who remembered Earth most recently, whose memories were fresh with Captain Cruz’s stirring speech from the framework of the Sekanina, and the hopes they had all shared.
But it hadn’t worked out that way. The newly revived—disoriented, weak, and afraid—found themselves in a world as much different from the Halley Colony they remembered as that early settlement had been from placid Moon Base 1. They quickly gravitated to groups they might be comfortable with, adopted their ideologies, and became clansmen.
Saul did not mention to Lani that there were three people seemed exempt from this pattern. For different reasons, he, Virginia, and Carl Osborn were all isolated—respected, perhaps, but comfortable nowhere.
Lani shrugged. “Well, I sure won’t go down south and join Quiverian and his radical Orthos— “
“Arcists,” Keoki corrected, like a patient language teacher, instructing her in the right dialect.
“Yeah, Arcists,” she repeated. “And when I got a hall pass and tried to visit some of my Percell friends over in Uber territory, Sergeov told me to get my little Ortho ass the hell out of there! The Mars boys aren’t much nicer, even if Andy Carroll and I once were pals.
“So what choice do I have? That Plateau Three crowd up on B Level is mixed Ortho-Percell, but the PeeThrees have got this gleam in their eyes, you know what I mean, Saul? They aren’t so much spacers anymore as missionaries! They don’t seem to care if they live or die, so long as Halley’s trillion tons of ice gets delivered, according to Captain Cruz’s plan.”
Saul smiled. “It looks to me as if you’ve found a home right here, Lani.”
“That’s right,” Keoki affirmed. “Just let us know. We’ll paint you a new tabard and hold a ceremony.”
Lani nodded, but she briefly bit her lip. “I—I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to Carl.”
She lowered her eyes, knowing how transparent she must seem, but unashamed of it in front of her two friends. There was very little more that could be said.
“I’ll see about getting you some light duty topside soon,” Saul assured her. Lani nodded, gratitude in her eyes.
The little capuchin chirped. The black gibbons, Max and Sylvie, swiveled and looked back down the hallway, their hackles rising.
Keoki peered, his hand drifting toward his belt knife. “Somebody’s coming.”
Men and women started emerging from labs and sleeping caves, nervously gripping staves made from meteoric iron. A pair grabbed the heavy vacuum door and began shutting it. Then they heard a high pitched whistle—two upsweeps and a trill, repeated twice.
Keoki relaxed only a little. “Treaty call,” he said. “E wehe i ka puka, he told the men, and they ceased pushing. The door stayed half open. A light appeared down the tunnel, and two small brown figures tumbled to a halt just twenty feet short of the entrance, tongues lolling from narrow mouths rimmed with needle sharp teeth.
I should never have let Quiverian talk me into giving him otters, Saul thought, regarding the agile creatures. They’re just too dangerous.
But if he had disallowed the Arcist leader’s request, Saul might have lost his carefully maintained neutral status. It had been hard, serving as middleman, negotiating a treaty so that the emigrants to the south pole still cooperated with Carl Osborn’s crews. The otters had been just one more price.
To his surprise, though, the figure that emerged behind the grinning animals was not Joao Quiverian, or even one of the Arcist leader’s principal assistants. Wild white hair and beard floated like a halo around a face as dark brown as the rich carbonaceous veins lining the icy hall.
“…Kela ao,” Anuenue breathed in amazement. “It is Ould Harrad.”
Those intense, brown eyes were now rimmed by deep creases. The former spacer officer was dressed in a flapping brown gown of salvaged fibercloth that made him look even more like an ancient patriarch. He gestured with one hand.
“Saul Lintz.”
Lani gripped Saul’s arm and Keoki Anuenue moved as if to stop him, but he shrugged them aside. “Keep Max and Sylvie back;” he said, and cast off down the hallway.
The otters clung to Ould Harrad’s robe, eyeing Saul ferally. Saul did not feel particularly safe for having been their “creator,” in a sense. In near weightlessness, the creatures were fearsome beasts.
If Joao Quiverian was leader of the radical Arcists, Ould Harrad was their spiritual guide, their priest. The flame of his guilt complex seemed to drive him hotter than anyone else here on this ancient star mote.
As he approached, Saul wasn’t entirely sure of his own safety. For although the Arcist faction seemed to accept his neutrality, this man was his own force.
“Colonel Ould Harrad.” He nodded, stopping ten feet away. Saul let his feet slowly come to rest on the floor, toes clutching the soft, hybrid, green covering.
“Do not call me that,” the African intoned with an upraised hand. “I am not an officer, nor spacer, nor Earthman any longer.”
Saul blinked. He had last glimpsed Ould Harrad during than Great Exodus—his white spacesuit tabard centered with a single, jet black starburst—leading the Arcist exiles on their trek while Quiverian and his crew covered the rear. During Saul’s brief, subsequent visits to the antipodes, their paths had never crossed. Still, he remembered something the man had said, so long ago, in his lab aboard the Edmund.
“He whom Allah chooses to touch, bears the ridges of those fingerprints, ever afterward . . . .”
“Very well, Suleiman.” Saul nodded. “I see the otters are doing well.”
Ould Harrad glanced down at the creatures. His hand gently stroked their glossy fur, gene adapted for life in icy halls instead of the salt spume of the sea.
“One more time, you have proven me wrong about you, Saul Lintz. For the role you have played in bringing these fine creatures forth cannot have been evil.”
Saul couldn’t t help it. He felt a wash of relief at Ould Harrad’s words, as if he had been worried about that very thing, and the man had the power to absolve. He is very good at this prophet shtick, Saul observed.
“Did Joao lend them to you while you came up north?”
Ould Harrad’s eyes seemed to flash.
“They are no longer his to lend. That is one reason why I have sought you out. To tell you that there are only three monkeys, down in the south antipodes, to watch for purples and guard the people as they sleep. You must re
place these otters.”
“Oh? Where are you taking them?”
“You deserve to know.” Ould Harrad paused with a faraway look in his eyes. “For years I have gone out onto the surface and meditated under the stars, as mystics have since time immemorial, praying and hoping for a sign. I found that they were hypnotic, those glittering lights in the blackness. After a long time I thought that I had, indeed, begun to hear God’s voice.
“But it could not have been.”
“Why not?” Saul was curious.
Ould Harrad’s voice was filled with pain. “Because all that came to me was laughter!”
Saul knew that this was more than mere madness. He could almost feel the intensity of the man’s soul torment. “I think I understand,” he said quietly. He did not add that he saw nothing inconsistent in the man’s experience. Who ever said the Creator must be sober? The universe is for laughing, or we must weep.
Ould Harrad nodded. For a long moment there were no words. Then he raised his eyes again.
“There was another thing.”
“What was that?”
“I . . . I can no longer be a party to the schemes of Quiverian and his banal crew, they— “
“The Arcists?”
“Yes.” The beard floated as Ould Harrad shook his head. His voice was barely audible. “The wars we brought with us from Earth are as the fog of summer, that will fall away and be forgotten with the coming of winter. I have come to realize that arguments over where to target this great, frozen teardrop miss the point entirely.”
“Where will you go, then?”
Ould-Harrad’s gaze dropped briefly to the floor. “I must go down…into the ice. Below where anyone has gone—except for Ingersoll, whom they now call the Old Man of the Caves, and those poor creatures who followed him. I will live on what grows, along their trail. I will minister to them, if they still live. And I will think.”
Saul nodded. Within Ould Harrad’s world view, a hermitage made sense, obviously. He made no effort to dissuade the man. “I wish you luck. And wisdom.”
Ould Harrad nodded. He looked down at his pets. “I am beginning to comprehend one aspect, at least . . . this thing you preach— this symbiosis. I did not understand at first, but now . . .”
He paused. “You are not doing evil, Saul Lintz. For that reason I warn you. Beware of Quiverian. He plans something. I know it. You, in particular, he wishes harm. And Carl Osborn.”
Saul did not know what to say. “I’ll be careful.”
“Care, or care not.” Ould Harrad shrugged. “Do or do not. In the end, it is all by God’s will. We are helpless to resist.”
The otters seemed to sense something even before he moved. They leaped forth and flicked off down the long, dim hallway. Ould Harrad turned stiffly and walked away.
He actually does seem to be walking, like on the moon or on Earth, Saul thought as he watched the man depart. I wonder what his technique is.
He swiveled and glided back toward Blue Rock Cave, pondering the effects of personal gravity.
CARL
The blackness seemed like a solid weight a vast hand clasped about the gray, battered ice. Carl hadn’t been high above the surface for months, and the arid bleakness of it struck him fully, bringing back memories of his years when open silent vacuum meant freedom, deft movement, effortless grace.
Stars gleamed, their tiny brimming beacons of rose and sea azure and molten yellow shining like steady promises of another life— a realm filled with vibrant hues, a place beyond this bleak plain that the slow elliptical glide of orbit had drained of color.
Now the encroaching darkness meant that there was nothing between the frozen waste and the beckoning stars—no planets swarm with clouds and lightning, not even a vagrant asteroid within view.
They rode far below the ecliptic plane now, ten times farther from the disk of planets than Earth itself was from the sun. The outer solar system was vast beyond imagining. Carl looked toward the south, virtually all the solar system at his back. The sun’s dim radiance—a thousandth of that which warmed Earth—could not summon forth the full colors that marked the ice. Everywhere pools of shadow swallowed detail; most of Halley was an inky kingdom.
—Take it careful now, — Jeffers sent.
“Right,” Carl answered automatically, his reverie broken. He jetted down to alight near his friend. Together they glide walked southward. Normally he would seek the polar cable and use a jet, be at the south pole in a few minutes. But these were not normal times.
They edged around the hummock of orange splashed ice. Empty storage drums were moored with spiderweb thin lines to the lump of frozen waste—garbage left from some process now decades old, forgotten. Jeffers slunk from one drum to another, careful not to expose himself to the southward side. Carl followed him. It took an effort to stay on the ice, gingerly digging his clamp toes in for each long step. He fought down the urge to leap, to fly above the mottled snowscape.
Blithe spirit, he thought. That’s what i was once. Zipping around, all spit and vinegar. Carl Osborn, space daredevil. But now. . .it just doesn’t have thee same zest.
There were only a few paths that would not take them through the thick dust fields, kicking up plumes that would give their position away. Jeffers motioned to him and they sprinted across a patch of brown spill, running almost horizontally in long gliding steps, boots finding leverage on knobs and juts of ice. They reached the shelter of a chem module, a stained cylinder long sucked dry.
“They must be able to see us by now. I— “
—Shhhh! This close, they can pick up even local comm. —
Carl bent down for shelter, feeling mildly ridiculous. He glanced around the curved edge of the cylinder and took in what he could. Yes, definitely—new structures near the lips of the Nudge shafts. They looked makeshift, thrown together from old cargo canisters and struts. He could see nearly to the south pole itself. Neptune hung barely above the horizon, a faint green pinpoint.
Under high magnification, Neptune’s equatorial bands made brown concentric circles, resembling a target.
Some Ubers still wanted to fire the Nudge to make Halley a Neptunian satellite. They could harvest gases from the upper atmosphere settle on the largest moon. Carl wondered idly what it would be like to live out his days with a slumbering green giant filling the sky. Not a lot like California, no. Maybe I should’ve gone into the insurance business. But he still hoped to see Earth’s blues, and reds, and autumn browns again . . . .
—We see you. — An alert, young voice. Carl glanced around the edge but could spot no one ahead.
“It’s Carl Osborn. I’ve come to talk.”
—Got nothing to talk about. Jeffers told you our policy. — The voice was tense but determined.
“Who is that?” Carl whispered, touching helmets with Jeffers.
—Name’s Rostok. Saul revived him about ten, eleven months ago. Now he’s Quiverian’s number two guy down here. —
“What’s he work on?”
Jeffers made a sour face. —Mounting the electromagnetic assemblies. —
“Oh, great:” A Nudge engineer. One of those had to go lunatic.
—If you come any closer we will not be responsible for the outcome. —
“Not responsible! What kind of crap is that?”
—We declare ourselves independent of Halley Command. —The voice was tighter, clipped.
—The hell you will! — Jeffers snapped before Carl could motion him to silence.
—We already have. And no Percell is going to tell us what to do! —
Carl breathed deeply. It did no good to blow up at asinine speeches; he had learned that the hard way, through these years. Jeffers was visibly grinding his teeth; Carl signaled him to stay quiet. “What . . . do you want?”
—Not food, — Rostok answered smugly. —We already have enough hydro set up here to feed ourselves. Found a nice thick vein of edible Halleyforms, too. Delicious. Feed ‘em heat and they grow like cr
azy. —
So we can’t starve them out, Cart thought automatically.
—We want—hell, we already have! —control of the targeting of the Nudge. —
Jeffers jumped up. —You bastards! That’s our gear, our labor that built it. Rostok, you put in couple of months. The rest of us been buildn’ the EM guns for years! I’m double-dammed if I’ll let some—uh! —
Jeffers grunted as Carl yanked him down. “I’ll do the talking.”
—Can it, Jeffers. We got the flingers, so we call the tune. —
“You have no right to determine the Nudge,” Carl said as calmly as he could.
—We got the flingers, and we represent Earth. —
“The hell you do. You represent nobody.”
—We speak for Earth. We won’t let you Percells take this plague carrier back into near Earth orbit. —
Carl had hoped that, with the diseases checked, people would become more reasonable. Looks like it’s just given some of them the energy to be real sons of bitches again.
He opened in a reasonable tone. “That has to be decided in the Council. Look, Rostok, I’m coming out. I want to talk face to face.”
Carl stood and walked around the edge of the cylinder. Was there some movement around a jumble of crates on the horizon? He squinted, then thumbed up the telescopics. Yes—figures working at something, looking this way.
He heard mumbles on a side channel, then the clear voice of Joao Quiverian. —We warned you, Osborn. —
A sudden brilliance cut the dim sunlight. It was invisible in the vacuum but cast stark shadows where it lanced into a hummock nearby. Steam exploded, stones rattled on Carl’s helmet. A geyser burst nearby as a second laser bolt splashed the ice. Carl dived back behind the cylinder.
—That enough for you?—
Carl blinked, blinded by the glare.
Jeffers sent, —They’re usin’ those big industrial lasers—the spot welders. Cut the big girders with ‘em. Can’t aim ‘em much but Jeezus do they burn.
“Shit!”
—Don’t show yourself around here again. —