by MadMaxAU
“My!” She breathed deeply. “Pretty torrid for midday—particularly after a hard night.”
“We do our best.”
“I go on shift soon. Let’s have a quick lunch.”
“Great.” He launched himself for their tiny kitchen, made workable only because they could use the walls and ceiling.
“There’s some hard copy on your printer, by the way,” Lani said, fetching some sauce used on the braised vegetables and mute-chicken from the evening before. “From Virginia.”
“Oh?’
He kicked over to the printer. Usually it was used only for emergencies or entertainments, not ordinary ship’s business.
It was a poem.
Nature knows nothing of death.
Not in the cat’s lazy smug meeeeooow
Not in the antelope’s mad kick
As the lion makes its meal.
Neither in the tidal lifting of a sluggish sea
By a star’s dumb gradients,
Or a flower’s nod, an insect’s frantic dance.
Live is all the world ever says.
Of alternatives it is mute.
Only in us and our unending forward tilt
Can death live.
Each sharp moment is free.
And all that could happen
Might yet be.
Carl studied it, frowning. “She’s getting better.”
Lani came over and read it slowly. “I’m always surprised anew,” she said softly. “Virginia truly is in there, somewhere.”
Carl shook his head. “She’s not in anything, really. She’s everywhere. The system has expanded far beyond just JonVon’s banks. She’s Halley now.”
Lani suddenly turned and embraced him. “We’re all Halley.” He breathed in the aromatic warm musk of her and felt an easing of old pains. Why did it take me so long to see that this fine woman could be a whole world to me? And what if I never had seen it?
He felt Virginia around them all, sensed the entire community of Halley as a matrix threaded through the ancient ice. They were no longer buried inside, going for a ride. No Percells, no Orthos. They were a new, beleaguered society, a new way for a versatile primate to stretch further, to be more than it was. They were not merely in the center of the old dead ice, they were the heart of the comet.
“Yeah, I suppose we are,” he said.
VIRGINIA
It was a show that humans had never seen before, and quite likely never would again. The steady hammering of the launchers for over three decades had altered the infalling ice mountain’s orbit, shifting the nodes of the stretching ellipse. Earth’s orbit clung to the sun, deviating from a circle by less than two percent. But Halley’s eccentricity had been ninety-six percent even before the machines of men began their persistent nudging. Now the curve tightened with each passing hour, bringing a searing summer. Halley had never plunged this close to the eroding Hot.
The tunnels and shafts made excellent acoustic pipes. As ice around and surged against new frictions, the groans echoed deep into the core, waking sleepers—though there were few of those, as the crucial hour approached.
Plunging fifty kilometers nearer with every second, Halley rushed toward its ancient enemy. Each past encounter had stripped a skin of ice from the comet, but now it rumbled and wrenched with new forces that sought to break it on the anvil of its sun.
Virginia watched the howling, blinding storm through electronic eyes. As each camera died from the stinging blast of dust and plasma, she deployed another from deep vaults. The sun loomed twice as large as seen from Earth. But from the surface there was no incandescent disk to see. Halley spun, but saw no sunrise. Instead, a white hot corona simmered overhead. A patch of seething brightness marked where the Hot’s outpouring met the ion flood exploding from Halley, and victory inevitably went to the Hot. Cracked, ionized, the gases turned, deflected aside, and swept around the small iceworld in a magnetized blanket. This roiling atmosphere had no loyalty to its parent, but instead raced outward.
Halley’s twin tails now unfurled across a span greater than Mercury’s orbit. The twisting, glimmering plasma banner held less water than many of Earth’s larger ponds, but the sun’s blaring light made it the most visible object in the solar system. Advanced inhabitants of a nearby star could have picked the nearly straight, shimmering curtains out from the central star. The dust tail, in contrast, was a curved reddish band, broken by dark lanes, sparkling with pebbles and micron sized grains.
But those riding the parent ice mote could not see the most beautiful tail ever to grace a comet in all history. As it sped deeper into its star’s gravity well, the glowering coma of unbearable luminescence spread and devoured the whole sky. Blinded now, Halley could not even see its nemesis. The sky glared down everywhere.
Virginia had calculated this effect carefully, for it was the key. If she had allowed Halley to remain spinless, the sunward face would have soared toward the four hundred degree temperature that a solid body would have at this distance from the sun. Now, she watched heat flux monitors buried tens of meters in the ice. As the warmth seeped deeper, she spun the iceworld faster to smooth out the effect, allowing the night side to radiate into the black of space.
But the black was fading. Soon the comet’s own summer air reflected sunlight down onto the shaded face of Halley from all sides, and temperatures rose faster as perihelion approached.
“How’s it look?” Carl watched Central’s screens with Lani at his side. “We’ve already blown off twenty meters of ice!” he said sharply. “How long’ll it take to rip us apart?”
Virginia sensed his rising level of conflict. He was a man who solved problems, and in this great crisis he had no role. Like the others, he was a helpless passenger on his own ship.
“We are safe,” she said reassuringly, using a thread of alto tones that made her voice richer than the original had ever been.
“The shaft seals?”
“Intact,” Virginia said, displaying views of the steel capped lids in place two hundred meters inside each shaft. Beyond them, giant plugs of ice barred the Hot’s way.
“Stop worrying,” Lani said gently, putting a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “We might as well enjoy the view.”
Virginia thought later that it was particularly ironic that Lani’s words were punctuated by a long, rolling boom that penetrated into Central. The spherical room vibrated, creaking. Equipment popped free of holders.
“A cave in,” Virginia announced, throwing an image onto the central screen. A milling mass of snow and ice jutted through tunnel walls, falling with aching slowness.
“Damn!” Carl said, his voice tight. “Where?”
“Site Three C, as our projection suggested.”
“Pressure— “
“Sealed tightly. No incursions.” Virginia analyzed Carl’s voice patterns and found a high level of tension. If only he would listen to Lani more . . .
The basic human reaction to events of immense size was to hunker down.
Virginia had noted this in the final days before perihelion. Her mechs roved the honeycombed tunnels, testing for leaks and sudden fountains of vagrant heat. Seldom did they meet anyone. Even Stormfield Park was deserted now, the carousel stopped.
People did their jobs, served their shifts—and holed up with a few loved ones, watching the gaudy maelstrom outside through the video displays. Jeffers had developed a new kind of light pipe that could snake out from a deeply buried camera, and thus reduce risk, but still high pressure vents opened and gushers of foaming, red-rich mud flooded many of Virginia’s observation stations.
She reserved a tiny piece of Core Memory for her “office.” There she sat amid a hum of machinery, feeling the reassuring rub of a chair, the flickering of consoles. I wish I could spare enough Core to go for a swim, she thought. I can feel my own tensions, too…
As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand ye
ars had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well springs.
Thus, the gathering background chorus of tremors, the crump of a crumbling wall, the low gravelly mutter of strained ice—all these sounds drove the crew inward. Not into solidarity, but to the fleshy reassurance and consolations of fellow spacers, or weirders, or Hawaiians. Like sought like for what might be the final hours.
Except for one lonely figure, who seldom left Central.
“Saul,” she said to him as an amber plume spouted from the surface, throwing streaks of lacy light across the familiar, lined face. He had been sitting by the display a long time, his mind far away as he rolled a small stone in his hand, over and over. “Saul?”
“Ah—oh, yes?” His lined face looked up from the bit of rock.
“I’m sure you could watch elsewhere.”
He shrugged. “Stormfield’s closed. I’m not needed in sick bay right now. There’s no place else I particularly want to be.”
“I am sure Carl and Lani would welcome you. They are awake, watching— “
He raised a hand. “No, I’ll let them be. Don’t want to push in where I’m just a fifth wheel.”
“You worry over that old stone a lot,” she said to change the subject. He had been turning it over in his hands for hours.
He looked at the dark gray lump. “It’s from Suleiman’s bier. I’ve carried it around for weeks, studying it. But that’s . . . that’s not what I was thinking about right now.”
His gaze drifted over to the refrigerated unit holding sixteen liters of superchilled organic processor. Virginia thought she understood.
“You are with me no matter where you are in Halley, Saul.”
He blinked, nodded. “I know . . . it’s just . . .”
“Just that here the physical proximity of my organic memory is reassuring?”
He smiled the old wry smile, slightly puckered lips and crinkled eyes together conveying an irony that was never far from his own image of himself, she knew. “I’m that obvious?”
“To the one who loves you, yes.”
“There are times I wish…”
“Yes?”
“I could have found a way to clone you.”
“So you would know me—or someone like me—in the flesh?”
“Memory only makes some things worse.”
“There . . . “ She felt no real hesitancy, and in any case with her speed the indecision would take only milliseconds, but she had to maintain the nuances of a living persona. “. . . There are our recordings.”
He chuckled dryly. “You know how many times I’ve played them.”
A hint of shyness, yes. “I could . . . augment them.”
“No!” He slammed a fist into his web chair. “I want the real thing, the real . . . you.”
“It would be.”
“When we recorded ourselves, it was a lark, like couples taking Polaroid pictures of themselves in the bedroom. We never intended that only one of us would play them back.” He shook his head. “This way, without you—the real you . . .”
“But I am me. More real than any holo image! And if I enter into the sensory link, it is an older and probably wiser Virginia whom you will meet. Me.”
Saul had resisted this suggestion before, for reasons she did not fully understand. But now, perhaps out of the pressing loneliness that danger brings, he lifted his head and stared directly into her opticals. “I . . . it would?”
She knew she would not guarantee that it would be some genuine Virginia, fixed in amber. She was not the personality that had flooded into the cramped JonVon persona and inundated it. Slow evolution and self actuated advances had brought her a vast distance since those years. But Saul did not have to know that nor did anyone, and it would be of comfort to him.
“Come to me, Saul.”
He put aside the stone and reached for the neural tap. To her surprise, she felt nervous.
Perhaps for her it would be a returning, too.
Shortly before perihelion the sun stopped its retreat to the south and began rising again. As the disk grew, it swept toward the equator. There was perpetual noon as the comet shuddered and erupted beneath the unending blaze. The southern hemisphere, gutted and gouged for months, now cooled as the north came under ferocious attack.
Sublimating water and carbon dioxide carried heat away from the fast spinning mote. Its surface cracked in many places, following the weakening imprints Man had stamped upon it for seven decades. Fresh volatiles sublimed and exploded. Sharp chunks weathered to stubs within minutes, as though sandblasted. Pebbles rose and formed hovering sheets which momentarily shielded the ice beneath, then were blown away to join the gathering dust tail.
At the north pole, so far spared the worst, the clawing sun bit deep. Since the times of great plagues, some factions had buried the irrecoverably dead deep in the ice near the pole. Now the Hot found them.
By chance, the sight was visible over a light pipe that surfaced in a sheltered nook at the exact north pole. Exploding gases beneath lifted the wrapped mummies and hurled them skyward. Blistering heat released ionized oxygen from the ice, and the bodies burst into flame, lighting the landscape with momentary orange pyres. The torches were thrown, tumbling and flaring, up and out against the immense, unknowing forces. They hung in the sky for long moments, like distant glittering castles, and then winked out, plunging forever into the river that rolled out from the sun.
* * *
“Goddamn! We’re past it!”
Carl’s amazed face intruded on a 3D design study she was changing. He had used override to break into her mainstream persona.
“Yes. You can rejoice,” she said warmly.
“How’d you do it?”
“Vector mechanics, nothing tougher than that.”
“You were marvelous!” Lani said beside Carl, her eyes wide with wonder at being alive. Virginia realized distantly that they really had expected to die.
“I told you the probabilities,” Virginia said. “Surely you—“
“We figured you were just cheering us up!” Carl laughed.
“I made the calculation accessible, Carl, you dope.” Virginia sent some light chuckles to follow this sentence, reflecting that if anyone had actually checked her, they would’ve found she had in fact reported a survival probability of three to one when it had really been only fifty two percent. But she had been sure no one would do the entire complicated calculation. In thirty years, everyone had come to rely on her, just as they counted on Saul’s bio-miracles.
Lani was bright-eyed, expectant. “When can we go outside? I want to grow some crops in the sun again.”
“Nearly half a year,” Virginia said seriously. She had found that people took statements more to heart if they were laced with sharper vowels and a few bass tones.
“Never mind, we’ll have plenty to do inside,” Carl said, slapping Lani on the rump affectionately.
Virginia knew exactly what he had in mind. It was implicit in his entire psychological profile, true, but her intuition told her more. Carl had bottled himself up emotionally for decades, and that had been crucial in the survival of Halley Core. Now time and circumstance had worked its curious magic and he was free. The youthful Carl could not—did not—respond to Lani’s quiet gifts. This weathered, wiser Carl could, and would, and should.
Somewhere in the compacted recesses of organic memory, a twinge of humor and irony kindled. He’s getting what he needed, even if it isn’t what he wanted. Virginia made a note to cycle Lani in for a “routine” physical within forty days.
The prickly storm swelled. Though they had survived the worst at perihelion, a residue of heat still leaked inward. Virginia sent men and women and mechs to s
eal tunnels which collapsed, whole zones of shafts whose walls began to sputter and evaporate.
Warmed in vacuum, ice sublimates directly into vapor without becoming liquid. As Halley’s scarred skin blew away, Virginia began her grand experiment.
Teams of hardened mechs ventured forth from the eroded shaft mouths. They dispersed slabs of amorphous silicates, grit and grime dried and filtered and compacted through the years of mining. Quickly they spread huge fields of linked, slate black sheets oil well chosen spots near Halley’s equator. They were too heavy for the subliming vapors below to push them away, and the mechs made doubly sure by hammering cables to anchor the slabs.
The effect came with aching slowness. Halley spun now with a day of only three hours. At a precisely calculated moment, the silicate shields blocked sunlight from the ice. Over that zone, outpouring gas ebbed. Other areas continued, and this difference in thrust, combined over the turning face of Halley, began to minutely alter its orbit. Astronomers had long noted this “rocket effect” on rotating comets that temporarily exposed fields of dust, but it had always been spontaneous and temporary. Now it was done by design.
Virginia deployed her mechs remorselessly. Some overheated and failed, others were crushed between the large sheets as they butted and swayed in the sun-driven gale of gas. At her command, they could tilt the slabs end on, so the protected areas suddenly leaped to life, spurting amber tinged plumes. Deftly, resolutely, she played a dynamic symphony with the furious hurricane forces that buffeted the mechs and their cargoes. For days, and then weeks, she cupped the outraged steam of Halley to new purposes. Unbalanced thrusts aligned along the comet’s orbit, a persistent hand that swept them along a new orbit.