by MadMaxAU
She toyed with the images, making the broad, moonlit sea open up before her. A school of flying fish. Diatoms sparkling in the churned wake of a mysterious shadow, just below the surface.
It felt good. Here within the machine, there were none of the muddy, confusing crises that beset them all on the outside. Here nothing could frighten her. It was too much like home.
Lord, how I miss Hawaii.
She crafted a porpoise in the waters, which chattered and splashed her playfully. The simulation was so vivid that she almost seemed to feel the droplets.
How long has it been since Saul and I made love linked this way?
She quashed the thought.
Will we be attempting a personality molding today, Virginia?
She shook her head. “No, JonVon. After so long, I’m not ready to try that again quite yet. I’ll tell you what, though. Let’s run a simulation of the gravitational sling maneuver Earth Control sent up. The one Carl got the Council to vote for last week. Do you scan the copy I inserted yesterday?”
Yes, Virginia. Do you want a chart? Numbers? Or a full sense simulation with extrapolation?
“Full sense, JonVon. I want to ride the comet . . . to see what it’ll look like forty years from now, when we pop open the sleep slots and find ourselves nearing home.”
Home, she thought. Eighty years changed. Will they even remember us?
Virginia felt she could almost sense the rush of supercooled electrons as her counterpart made its preparations.
Ready to commence simulation, Virginia. Please name starting conditions.
“Begin with the Nudge, with the equatorial flinger launchers engaged under Earth Control’s program.”
She settled back as the clouds and sea vanished. The porpoise, too, faded in a last minute chittering of defiance.
Blackness settled in, conveying a sense of depth that stretched outward, to where stars glittered in their myriads. And below the starscape an image formed . . . white streaked gray against sable. It was the by now-familiar scene of dusty ice on the comet’s surface.
JonVon showed her the new launchers, optimistically depicted as completed at Halley’s equator. It’ll be some chore, building new accelerators to replace the ones the Arcists seized. We couldn’t ever do it without the Phobos technologies.
Arrayed in a ring around the equator of the prolate spheroid, the narrow-barreled guns began firing— throwing pellets of native nickel iron away into space at large fractions of the speed of light— slowly, imperceptibly changing the momentum of the ancient iceball they were anchored in.
There was no sensation of movement, but Virginia identified with the tiny, simulated figures jumping, waving their arms on the surface. It was a nice touch for JonVon to put them in. For it would look like this— jubilant spacesuited workers leaping in joy when they finally began nudging the comet into a new orbit.
Using gentle signals as natural as moving an arm, Virginia let her sense of presence float upward to watch the simulation better. As the Nudge went on, she followed the icy core’s changing path through the vacuum.
Aphelion, four years from now, and bit by bit Halley s ancient orbit was changing. The launchers stole slightly from its angular momentum, causing it to begin its long sunward fall a few days before it normally would have. The comet’s inward velocity was small at first, but it grew.
Virginia knew this simulation wasn’t intrinsically any more accurate than the ones Carl had used, only more vivid. She wanted everything represented in images. It just wasn’t the same in graphs and numbers.
She rode the comet. The stars turned slowly as the time scale expanded and years flickered past. She and Halley fell together toward the cusp at the center of the solar system.
Ancient ices sublimed under the growing warmth. First carbon monoxide, as the core swept in past the orbit of Jupiter, and later carbon dioxide. The escaping vapors lifted black, powdery dust to meet the growing sunshine. A thin haze began to form.
The rendering was vivid. Virginia watched the faint, glimmering dust and ion tails begin to take shape, like ghostly banners unfurling in the growing light.
On at least ten score occasions the spinning ball of ice had fallen this way, since that time when it had passed too close to Jupiter and been snared into the middle solar system. Since then it had been tethered to the sun on a shorter leash than most comets.
Space was roomy, vast, and since that one near brush with the giant planet’s gravity the comet had never met another physical object it could not absorb. Dust grains, little bits of rocky flotsam, they all had blundered into Halley’s streaking path and paid the price.
But the Nudge had seen to it that there would be another meeting. Something smaller than Jupiter, but much too large to absorb, would pass improbably close this time, while Halley Core hurtled inward.
And there it was! A pinprick of reddish light, just ahead.
Mars, Virginia thought. Right on time. Ready for a little carom action?
JonVon recognized a rhetorical question. Anyway, the machine was too busy to answer as the close encounter drew near.
This was Earth Control’s compromise, its plan to rescue them without risking infection to the homeworld.
I must admit, I didn’t expect even this much out of them.
Sure, public pressure, Earthside, was a major reason for the Care Package, which was now only months away from rendezvous with their little isolated outpost of humanity. Nevertheless, after all these years Virginia had grown cynical over just how much Earth Control really cared.
I’d have expected them to order us to commit suicide “honorably” and quietly, like good little plague carriers should.
The red planet loomed. Virginia asked JonVon to zoom in on the details, slowing the action as she and the comet approached rendezvous.
She swept ahead of Halley to look over the planet. The icy south pole of the dead world came into view first.
Red sands blew over Cydonia. The long-dormant Shield Volcanoes were pimples that poked nearly through the thin atmosphere, tufted on their flanks by thin, dry clouds.
Phobos rose around the small world’s limb. The little moonlet was a pockmarked stone, aglitter with lights, that rolled by Virginia and then set over the sharp, ocher horizon.
Nice people, she thought of the folk of Phobos Station. Too bad they’ve never been allowed to become a real colony. Maybe we can help them, there.
She looked back and saw the comet nearing, as the men and women on Phobos would see it thirty eight years from now.
It ought to be quite a show for those folks . . . Halley sweeping by almost close enough to touch. Mars has to pass through the thick of the tail for its faint gravity to catch our aeroshell lifeboats. And yet the planet and comet can’t be allowed to come so close to each other that the turbulence will knock our boats off course.
In the simulation, Halley was putting up a grand display. Nothing like the spectacle would show closer to the sun, of course; but the twin tails had started to unfurl, and the coma glowed like a fuzzy cloud of fireflies.
The simulation was excellent. JonVon even depicted the lights of Phobos winking off as workers battened down and covered up.
For a few days there would be too many meteoroids to risk venturing out into the open. A small price to pay, though, for a chance to rescue three hundred souls. At least Virginia hoped they would feel that way.
Three hundred people quarantined on Mars . . . that really might be enough to start a colony. It had never been one of her dreams to settle a rust-red desert, but the plan beat the alternatives. And it’ll be nice to ,feel gravity again, to walk, and maybe even swim in a dome covered pool.
It’s not Maui, but I could get used to the idea of being a Martian.
The separation narrowed. Halley’s surface seemed to fizz as hot spots threw fountains of gas and dust into space, adding to the coma’s brilliance.
Is it a trick of perspective? Or are we really going to pass as near as it looks?
Sparks flew off as tiny objects separated from the comet’s head in soundless explosions.
The life rafts. Armored against the dust and heat, the aeroshell-covered sleep slots would split way from Halley. Tiny, mech-controlled rockets increased the spacing, guiding the hibernating colonists toward their first fiery encounter with the red planet’s atmosphere.
Virginia backed away further, giving the simulation space.
All Earth will be watching this. The folks on Phobos won’t be the only ones having quite a show.
Halley’s cloudy coma seemed to touch the planet. Virginia blinked.
Something’s wrong. How can it . . .
The coma began to warp out of shape, compressed by sonic shock waves as the globe of gas encountered the planet’s sparse atmosphere. Ionized gas bowed outward and away from the weak Martian magnetic field.
The sparkling dot of the core itself, a trillion tons of ice, pulled forward, unimpeded by anything so tenuous as gas or magnetism. It fell ahead of its cloud, and began to glow still brighter.
NO...
Gaseous bow shock waves multiplied into expanding cones. Sensing that she wanted to follow the action, JonVon slowed the encounter as Halley Core scattered the tiny lifeboats like pollen grains and sped on toward closest passage.
Closest passage . . .
The nucleus split apart! Then again. Four chunks streaked inward at an angle, their path through the Martian atmosphere now incandescent. Then they struck the little world.
One piece seemed to glance off the limb of the planet, like a hammer striking glowing sparks off into space. Plumes of dust roiled where the mile wide bit had briefly touched down.
A large fragment scored a direct hit on Olympus Mons, shearing off the left side of the great volcano in a titanic, blinding explosion.
Simulation or not, Virginia blinked away the afterimage from that flash. By the time she could watch again, the series of searing blasts had turned into spreading orange clouds. The thin atmosphere rippled and swirled like a shallow pond into which bullets had been fired.
Quakes shook the ancient sands. Under Mars the permafrost buckled and melted. Virginia imagined she could sense magma stirring.
She was too stunned to do more than watch, unbelieving. She sought out the little aeroshells and found one, two, tumbling away toward the sun. Others glowed briefly as they hit the rolling dust clouds, flared, and went out.
Some had simply disappeared.
It was supposed to be a gravity carom! A near passage! Earth Control never said anything about this!
Carl never said anything about this.
Unconsciously she willed her simulated self away from light— away from the burning, sunlit face of the rocky crucible.
Mars fell back as she fled outward along its shadow. Seen from dark-face, the planet was a thin crescent of red wind, tinged in fire. From one side of the crescent, a rosy pyre bloomed: the god of war answering heaven’s violence in reawakened volcanoes.
Unbeckoned, unwelcome, a line from Shelley came to mind.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Virginia disengaged, her hands shaking as she tore off the contact disk. In her mind, though, the scene continued. Imagination went on simulating what was intended for thirty eight years hence, picturing the sun as it would rise on the morning following this encounter, to shine over a steamy, cloudy day on Mars.
And later, for just a little while, there would be rain.
SAUL
“Smelly chemicals snoozed
Through the primordial ooze,
Carbon, oxy, lime
Phosphorous and time
That’s how began the Blues.”
It was an old biologists’ drinking song from the twentieth century. Saul had learned it in England, during a rainy winter at Cambridge. It seemed appropriate that it should come to mind now, as an earthenware bottle lolled and sloshed in his lap and he sat in the dimly lit corridor outside his lab, trying a Polynesian remedy for what ailed him.
Keoki had given him the jar of homemade hooch saying, solemnly, “You need drunk, Saul.” And, of course, the fellow was right.
“Things were oh so clean,
Decently marine,
Then virus climbed aboard,
At first a chewing horde,
With a voracious gene.”
There was a refrain to the ditty, to a jazzy, hip beat.
“Dat dere ole virus
Conspired on us
And brought us to our knees.
Sent us a fever
Subtler than a cleaver
Infect me if you please.
Come play with me,
An anthology
On informative disease.
Might as well play host
Don’t give up the ghost
When your cells are in a squeeze.”
Saul nodded, sagely. “There. You see? They knew about symbiosis even back in th’ eighties, when they weren’t even sure yet they were in the Hell Century. Goes to show there’s never anythin’ new, under th’ sun.”
Nobody was there to hear him, of course. He had finally sent Keoki back . . . the big Hawaiian’s wives must be worried about him, by now. Saul had assured his friend he would go right to sleep, and so Keoki had left, charging him to try to cheer up.
In fact, sleep wasn’t in prospect, right now. Saul sat and nursed the bottle. He had never felt so far away from home.
Strictly speaking, in four years we’ll be at aphelion and headed back to Earth again. But orbital dynamics was not on Saul’s mind, right now.
She’ll never approve, he told himself.
Oh, yeah? Well, how do you know unless you ask her?
Truth be told, he was simply afraid…afraid of what Virginia might think of his latest experiments. Miracle cures where one thing. Experiments with animals and plants, fine.
But among the gifts from Earth had been data on the force-growth of human bodies. It was like Houdini being challenged by a new lock, or a painter by a blank canvas. The need was there . . . the dare irresistible.
How do you know what Virginia would say? Maybe you don’t have to sleep in a cold, lonely lab.
Saul shivered, and knew that he was just too much of a coward to test it.
Ah, but what if he could give his love a gift? A gift of the very thing she most wanted in the world? The thing she had reconciled herself never to have?
One night, weeks ago, as she lay in exhausted slumber, he had taken the samples he needed.
From Lani Nguyen— trustful Lani— he had acquired the secret cache of human sperm and ova she had smuggled with her from Earth. He had all the materials he needed, now.
But since then, he had remained indecisive. Until tonight.
He had spent all day laboring in the Arcist enclave down at the south pole— as Colony Doctor he was neutral in all disputes— and had returned depressed. Life was miserable and cold, down in those warrens. Their fusion pile sputtered and barely put out enough power to maintain their greenhouses. Worse, Joao Quiverian had his own factions to deal with— fanatics that made his own Arcism seem moderate, whose loathing of anything associated with Percells seemed to know no bounds.
Keoki was right . . . I needed drunk.
Another ditty passed through Saul’s mind. One about the fifth Irish Civil War. It was a sad song of fratricide, but nobody had ever written anything better for either drinking or pity.
He was humming to himself when a flicker of movement made him look to the left. He squinted at the faint line of phosphors, diminishing in the distance, and saw that several were being occulted by dim shapes approaching down the narrow hallway.
Nobody was supposed to ever come this way. It was part of his agreement with the clans. Then who. . . ?
He blinked. Felt a chill.
Weirders . . .
They drifted into view . . . manlike shapes, but tufted all about like slime-covered sea creatures. The assemblage of native forms each ca
rried was different. In one case there was nothing of the original man left but the eyes. In the other, there was still a face visible through the symbiotic tangle.
This is synergism taken farther than even I can stomach it, Saul thought queasily.
Several times, since that day when the ex spacer turned mystic, Suleiman Ould Harrad, left the upper levels to go down and join these creatures, small notes had appeared tacked to Saul’s door. He had filled every request, often leaving bottles of his sera outside. Each wakeshift, when he arose, the packet was gone. In its place lay a small sample of some strange lifeform Saul had never seen before.
It was a trade, medicine for more pieces to the puzzle that was Halley. It suited Saul fine, for he had wanted to find a way to treat the weird denizens of Far Gehenna, anyway. Since Ould Harrad had gone down to join them, they had seemed to become better organized, less suspicious and violent when someone from a more “normal” clan crossed their path.
He blinked, however, when both emissaries bowed low.
“We c come and beseech ch your help p.”
The stuttering voice took Saul by surprise.
“I I didn’t know any of you could still talk!”
The one with the face shook its head. “Some c cannot. But that does not mean we no longer think k.”