The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  As the polymer grew, the scale of the scene enlarged, as if a camera were drawing back. A new strand joined the first, then another, twining together in a jumbled mass. The cluster fell toward a great ocher wall that loomed from below, a rusty plain pocked with jagged holes.

  The edge of one of the black openings caught the molecular skein, one end draping into the gap. The cluster tipped for a few seconds, then toppled inside.

  “It’s a clay… something like montmorillonite, I believe. Notice how the chain slips right into the open latticework. Only a few of the shapes being synthesized in the open stream will be able to enter this way.

  “It’s an early step in the long process of selection. Some theories say it happened this way on Earth lone ago. At last the molecules are sheltered from the tumbling give-and-take of the electrified stream. Only certain radicals can get at them in there… and the shape of the cavity aligns the molecules just so. The buildup—slow and chaotic beforehand—begins now in earnest.

  “Funny it being a clay, though. I would have expected it to be.something like iron oxide. But see how the peptides actually seem to catalyze the growth of new clay layers? Amazing. I’d forgotten about that!”

  Virginia let Saul ramble on, sharing his excitement but too busy to reply unless he asked a direct question. Right now it was a challenge just integrating all the diverse elements in his complicated program.

  She was used to bright pictures and vivid simulations anyway. No, what impressed her was the intricacy of this world of molecules and currents, of clashing atoms and chiming balance. It was a maelstrom of tiny tugs and pulls computed in a eleven-dimensional matrix space, and still the diversity of forms amazed her.

  The screen showed only the most superficial part of it—the averaged sampling of JonVon’s stochastic correlator. It was the math, down below, that really kept Virginia occupied. Only occasionally did she look up to see how the images were coming along.

  Right now the simulation was following the developing molecules down into their new home. They nestled into crannies in the complex clay latticework, leaving a central passage through which fresh material entered from the outside. New pieces were added, and old ones discarded as dross to float away. The shape of the still-growing chain kept changing, now as a simple helix, elsewhere doubling back on itself, switching handedness left and right.

  Saul commented again.

  “I’m cheating a bit, here, for the sake of speed. We’ve set up initial conditions and are letting huge numbers of simulated molecules ‘evolve,’ leaving it to your wonderful machine to pick out the most successful line out of billions… coaxing the most promising to do the best it can under these conditions.

  “We’ll see if a nudge here and there can take this primitive thing and give us…”

  Virginia found her job growing easier, now that JonVon’s expert system was picking up the basic rules of this game.

  Or was it because Saul was getting better at his end?

  They lay next to each other on a broad, web-hammock in her laboratory, each linked by cable to the intricate hardware/software unit. For Virginia it was a familiar experience, wearing a delicate induction tap and playing her fingers lightly like a pianist on the pattern keys. Saul, on the other hand, was more awkward with his controls. The bulky cortex helmet he wore lacked the compact deftness of her specially designed link.

  Yet, he was getting over his clumsiness quickly. And his excitement was contagious. His subvocalised thoughts arrived directly along her, acoustic nerve.

  “This is wonderful, Virginia ! Far; far more than a mere simulation program, this construct of yours explores possibilities!”

  “JonVon’s processor is bio-organic, Saul. A matrix of pseudo-proteins in a filament mesh. Back home they dropped that approach years ago, because its point-error rate is pretty high. In fact, you’re treated like some sort of nut if you even talk about it, today.” She hoped none of her bitterness carried over into her words.

  “Hmmm. More point errors, sure. But you can pack so many circuits into a tiny area that it doesn’t matter, does it?

  Virginia felt a thrill. He understands.

  “That’s right, Saul. A stochastic processor works with probabilities, not discrete yes-or-no answers.”

  “It’s like the way Kunie describes the operation of the human preconscious! Have you read any of Kunie’s work?”

  Virginia laughed. Aloud it was a soft chuckle. In their heads, the sound of bells.

  “Of course I have! I couldn’t have gotten this far without that man’s ideas on the creative process. But I’m surprised you’ve heard of him, Saul. Conceptual heuristics isn’t anywhere near molecular biology on the library shelves.”

  There was a pause as Saul’s attention returned to the simulation. He nudged a particularly large molecular cluster out of one of the gaping clay tunnels before it could jam the flow of fresh material, a minor interference for the sake of this early trial.

  “I knew Kunie, Virginia. His family gave me a place to stay after the Expulsion…”

  The “walls” of the simulated latticework throbbed slightly, and Virginia moved gently to stabilize the model against further interference by Saul’s emotions. Without letting on, she created another pathway for his feelings—away from the model and into a small side nexus where they might be buffered, studied… touched.

  “Was that when you started working with Simon Percell?” she asked. History had never been her specialty. And Virginia knew that there had been more than one “Expulsion” from the land called Israel.

  “Good lord, no.” This time it was Saul’s turn to laugh. The tone resonated in the little buffer like low cello strings.

  “The Levites were still a small fanatic Jewish fringe in the Judean hills, and their Salawite friends were nothing more than a bunch of seething Syrian exiles, back when I worked with Simon in Birmingham.”

  While JonVon kept the simulation going, Virginia was attempting to trace the tendrils of Saul’s pain, more vivid than anything she had ever experienced in a human-to-human link before. But then Saul changed the subject again.

  “We sure could have used tools like these, back when Simon and I were working on the gamete-separation problem,” he subvocalised. “All we had then were kilobit parallel processors, gigabyte memories, and inferential sequencers that took days to analyze a single chromosome.

  “But they were good times.”

  Virginia felt moved by his intensity, even as she focused in on it, enlarging the channel capacity and sensitivity of the link. Saul was easier to probe than any subject she had had before. Except, maybe, for the littlest children.

  And for some reason it was not unpleasantly disorienting, this time. To the contrary, it was pleasant, if a little frightening. The man was… well, strong.

  “Go on, Saul. The simulation’s running well. I’d like to hear more about those days. You started telling Carl and me about your early work on cures for sickle cell and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and lupus.”

  “Cures!” Saul laughed, and the cellos were joined by a bitter choir of cymbals. “Yeah, I did. Fortunately, most of our later efforts worked better. Some of the early `successes’ were only partial.”

  Virginia knew that. She had already gone into the expedition’s records and expunged all trace of her own infirmity. Of course, it couldn’t affect her duties in any way—in fact the authorities would likely approve of it. But she had erased the data anyway. It just wasn’t anyone else’s damn business.

  Virginia smoothed down her own emotions and concentrated on solving the mystery of this oddly open channel to Saul’s subsurface feelings. I’m learning more today than I did in a year, back home, she thought.

  She felt JonVon’s central presence pull up alongside, imitating her actions, learning by “watching” how she played the channels, adjusted resonances. Smoothly, at her command, her machine surrogate slipped in to take over. Soon she was able to pull back for a minute and check the biology simulation, th
eir ostensible reason for being here.

  It surged on, piling intricacy onto complexity. Now the scale had zoomed back again to enclose an entire field of lattice openings, each with its own fringe of huge, blue-white molecules waving out into the electric stream, like cilia around gaping mouths.

  She tried to keep the conversation going. “But you weren’t with Percell when…”

  “When he made his fatal error? Those poor monstrosities? No. Perhaps I should have been. I might have done more good than I did by going back to Haifa to join the struggle. By then it was too late, of course. The old Sabras and the kibbutzim had risen, and been crushed by the Levites and their ‘peacekeeping’ mercenaries. Miriam and the little ones…”

  The sudden wash of feelings was overpowering and direct. Virginia ’s eyes fluttered and teared as she remembered scenes of grisly horror…seemed almost to see burning settlements, forests in flame… felt the thalamic surge of anguish and guilt.

  Furious, she commanded JonVon to stop creating these images. The machine had no business interfering like this!

  I am only enhancing, Virginia,

  JonVon announced coolly over their private channel, dryly delivering news that stunned her even more than the glittering scene of a temple rising on an ancient hill. Virginia ’s mouth was suddenly dry. But…

  I am not interpolating or simulating any of this. Amplified, these are direct images from the subject.

  Her hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically, forcing the machine to automatically disable her fingertip controls. Her breath came in ragged, audible gasps as the truth struck hard.

  “He nalulu ehaeha!”

  Distantly, she felt the waldo gloves being pulled from her hands, her shoulders lifted in strong arms.

  “Are you all right, Virginia ?” Saul was speaking aloud. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. I thought you did this sort of thing all the time.”

  She blinked, looking up at his concerned face. “Y-you knew what I was up to?”

  He laughed. “Who wouldn’t, with you and your cybernetic familiar skulking around at the edges of my mind, poking and probing?”

  He shook his head. “Honestly, Virginia, what you’ve done here is astonishing. It felt… direct! I Thought-to-thought contact. It’s been in so many stories and films, even after Margan supposedly proved it impossible, years ago, but…”

  Virginia was still numb. “It is. It’s supposed to be… impossible, I mean. I use JonVon to mediate, to guess and pattern, to simulate. But I never expected…”

  Now Saul’s expression was serious. “You mean that was your first time?”

  Virginia had to smile. “Yes, my first. But don’t worry, Saul. You were a perfect gentleman.”

  That did it. He rocked back and howled, and she joined in. They laughed together. The tension seemed to evaporate and for a long moment neither of them seemed to take any notice of the fact that he was still holding her.

  This feels so good, she thought at last.

  “Hmmm?” he said, tapping his helmet. “I only got a little of that, but I’m pretty sure I agree with whatever it was.”

  She looked up at him. “Oh, Saul. I’d known you had a sad life. But it’s different feeling it, almost remembering it myself.”

  Yet another image flickered at the edge of vision, a woman. She was no great beauty, certainly—mousy dark hair framing an ordinary face—but her smile was warm, and there was a brimming glow. Behind her were two smaller faces, a boy and a girl.

  Miriam? Your children?

  Yes. A pain softened by time. Love undiminished.

  And in her own heart, another pain, still fierce. Love unanswerable.

  “You don’t hate me… for what the gene treatments did to you?” Saul asked.

  Virginia looked up quickly and met his eyes. She shook her head. “I did, long ago. You and Simon Percell. Then I met some of the other Percells… those for whom your lupus cure worked completely.

  “I studied. I learned that without the treatments I would have been stillborn or horribly crippled… not merely—lacking. It was just the luck of the draw that I…”

  “It’s all right.” Saul drew her near and she closed her eyes. “We both still have our work now. Good work. And that does give us a piece of the future too, Virginia.”

  “Yes, our work… and maybe a little more.” She felt warm. Virginia lifted her face to him. Saul had to push aside the wires of his helmet in order to kiss her.

  I’ve never done anything like this while linked, before. She thought amid the tidal swell of feeling. I wonder what Jon Von will make of it.

  Above them, unheeded, the simulation had panned back again, taking in a wall of clay and a salty, electric-bright current.

  Bright shapes had begun emerging from the rust-colored crevices. They flitted about in the hot stream—now coated and armored against the battering molecules—and set out into a multicolored world, consuming one another, growing, and making little replicas of themselves.

  CARL

  At first he thought it was nothing important.

  Carl wiped the green and brown gunk off the distillation pipes and moved on. The gas-gathering zone of Shaft 3 was a long dark tunnel, its phosphors giving everything a lime-green cast.

  The plumbing looked okay—magnetic motors humming, pipes gurgling, a smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur compounds. Excess vapors were condensed here from the miles of tunnels now threading Halley Core. Bioinventory showed a surplus of useful fluids and was talking about storing it. The boiloff would probably lessen as the more-volatile ices were used up, and also there would be less heat-making activity during the long cruise out. Everything looked pretty damn good.

  But there was brown sticky stuff in the filters. Shit. It’s everywhere. Carl cleaned them carefully with a water jet and flushed his covered bucket into the outbound tube—one-way flash vaporization that dumped directly into free space.

  This odd-looking mess wasn’t supposed to be here. Prefilters should take out the big stuff and sift it for useful solids. These backup filters should catch impurities and crystallize them.

  Maybe there was something special about this particular sticky stuff. He filled a sample bottle—the bio types nagged him incessantly for traces of anything odd—and kicked off toward sleep slot 1. Malenkov should have a look at this.

  Cycling through the big lock into Central Complex, he realized that he missed Jeffers. The founding crew were all safely slotted now, making things a bit lonely for the First Watch. Captain Cruz had made him senior petty officer, which merely meant he roamed more than the others, checking—but the minor honor pleased him.

  He liked working alone, anyway—gliding smoothly and surely through the locks and shafts with Bach or Mozart weaving in his ears. Maybe I’m a natural hermit, he thought. I wonder if the crew selection people could tell that from their psychoinventory tests. He had hardly seen anyone these last few days.

  When he entered the aft port of Life Sciences the first thing he heard was loud talking.

  “He goes in now! I make no compromises,” Nikolas Malenkov’s gravelly voice cut through.

  “I want a sample to study,” Saul persisted.

  “I have taken samples.” Malenkov put his hands on his hips and leaned forward menacingly. “Epidermis and fluids only.”

  “I’ll need more than that to find out what—”

  “No! Later, we revive him, maybe! When we know what killed him. If you take samples from internal organs, that will make it harder for us to bring him back later.”

  Carl frowned. “Hey, what’s—”

  Saul wiped his nose with a handkerchief, ignoring Carl, and said, “You can’t cure him unless you know what killed him!”

  “You have smears from throat, urine, blood samples—”

  “That might not be enough. I—”

  “Hey!” Carl cut in. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

  Malenkov noticed Carl for the first time. His expression suddenly
changed from tight-lipped rage to sad-eyed dejection. “Captain Cruz.”

  Carl felt suddenly lightheaded, incredulous. “What? That’s… But I saw him just two days ago!”

  Neither of the two other men spoke—there was still steam in their argument. Virginia said quietly, “He had a fever yesterday and went to bed. When Vidor went to find him this morning he… would not waken. He died within an hour. Apparently there were no other symptoms.”

  “Fever? That’s it?”

  “It doesn’t seem he ever woke up.”

  The shock of it was only now penetrating, filling Carl with a sensation of falling. Commander Cruz had been the center, the heart and brains of the entire expedition. Without him…

  “What… what’ll we do?”

  Malenkov mistook Carl’s question. “Sleep slot him—now. There is yet little or no neural damage.”

  Dazed, Carl said, “Well… sure… but I meant…”

  Saul said, “I still feel we must have more data to study these cases—”

  “We are not certain how long he ran a high temperature. Any more time, he risks brain damage.” Malenkov waved a hand brusquely in front of Saul, erasing any objections. “Come.”

  They all went numbly to the hub of the sleep-slot complex. Carl was stunned. He tried to think, chewing his lip. The sociosavants had written extensively about how small, high-risk enterprises had to have a clearly superior, Olympian leader to avoid factionalism and weather hard times. A Drake, a Washington. Without the leader…

  In the sealed prep room Samuelson and Peltier were running checks and planting diagnostics around a body that was already wrapped in a gray shroud of web circuitry. Miguel Cruz-Mendoza’s face was calm, and still projected a powerful sense of purpose.

  Wisps of fog laced the air as the workroom dropped in temperature. Malenkov spoke to the two laboring techs through a mike and the party watched the last procedures of interment.

  “So you’d authorized slotting even before our little argument,” Saul noted calmly.

  “I wanted you should see my logic. While Matsudo is in slots, I am responsible for health of the whole expedition,” Malenkov said stiffly.