The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Virginia’s feet left the floor as she smacked the tabletop. “Cardinal Teresa, off! I don’t need logic or appeals to my better nature. I need a reason why…”

  A last image appeared, drawn from deep within—an early simulation, seldom called up for the pain it brought. A smiling man with a small gray beard and eyes that crinkled as they smiled warn-fly down at her.

  “Anuenue, little rainbow. Reasons do not help at a time like this, daughter. Feelings have a logic all their own.”

  Virginia buried her face in her hands. She floated against a storage cabinet and slowly settled toward the floor.

  “I was happy, Daddy. I really was, in all this hell. I was happy”

  A slender, lambent, transparent hand reached down, as if to touch her. The voice was strong with gentle wisdom.

  “I know, darling. I know.”

  CARL

  —E Alulike!—the strawboss urged. And the crew pulled together filling the chosen comm channel with their chant.

  —Ki au au, Ki au au

  Huki au au, Huki au au!—

  The Hawaiians heaved at the hawser as the main cargo unit of the Edmund Halley lifted out of the vessel’s body. Massive and immense as it was, the section climbed swiftly toward the top of the spindly A-frame, where a spacesuited figure gestured in exaggerated semaphore.

  —Easy, easy. Okay, you Indonesians and Danes over there, you draw radially!—

  Carl had not seen Jeffers so happy since the man had been unslotted. The man had hated work in the tunnels, preferring by far the hard glimmer of space and the oily tang of metal and machines.

  Carl couldn’t really blame him, at that. Almost anything beat the doom and gloom down below. That was a major reason why he had pushed for the Newburn rescue attempt. He was convinced that the benefits to morale would do more for general health than all of Akio Matsudo’s traditional therapy and Saul Lintz’s laboratory concoctions.

  He adjusted his visor to magnification 4 and looked toward Scorpio, where the comet’s fading dust tail was now barely a faint glow in the infrared. A few speckles told of grains big enough to reflect light still from the diminishing sun. One of the biggest of those speckles, he knew now for certain, was the slot tug Newburn.

  If she had not existed, we would have had to invent her.

  There came a cheer over the open-background comm as the storage unit met Halley’s surface with a soft puff of vapor. Jeffers wrung his hands over his head in nonchalant triumph. Carl had to smile.

  This was his favorite of the three shifts working to refurbish and strip down the Edmund. Sure, he felt at home with Sergeov’s purely Percell team. But the mixed volunteers were the most cheerful lot.

  Especially the Danes and Hawaiians. They didn’t seem to give a hoot if a man was an Ortho or a Percell… or a Denebian Glebhound… just as long as he wasn’t a purple or a goddamn Arcist.

  Virginia is Hawaiian, he remembered. No wonder she was such an unrepentant Orthophile. Ortho-lover. Obviously, she didn’t see anything wrong with shacking up with one.

  The thought lingered and made him feel a bit guilty as Lani Nguyen passed by, carrying a nickel-iron brace that would have crushed her anywhere with gravity, even on the moon.

  —Hey, handsome—she sent. —You busy for the next three months?—

  “What’ve you got in mind?” he said, leering back amiably. And she managed to put a little wag into her walk as she passed. Her unicorn tabard grinned back at him.

  Oh, hell, Carl reminded himself, there are some good Orthos.

  Lani had volunteered for the rescue mission in a flash. Good old Lani. She was so patient with him, never rebuking him at all for showing up at her cubicle every now and then, looking for company, then disappearing or keeping things strictly comradely for weeks at a stretch.

  If only she were more what I’m looking for. More intellectual. More sensual. A Percell.

  More like Virginia, in other words.

  Only one Arcist was on duty right now. Each faction had a “watcher” to keep an eye on the others’ shifts… an unofficial designation, to be sure, but one more and more common at important functions such as slottings and unslottings.

  Helga Steppins viewed the proceedings carefully, using a laser transit to double-check everything done by Jeffers’s crew. As Carl approached, she stepped to one side warily, as if he could infect her through two spacesuits and three meters of vacuum.

  “You know, it’d be a lot easier to get at the Edmund’s science cluster if you’d let us remove the hydroponics modules first,” he told her. “It’d probably save two days.”

  The taciturn, blond Austrian woman shook her head.

  —Stupid trick, Osborn. We both know the launch date is set by when the fuel is ready. That’s at least next Tuesday.—

  He balled his fists in disgust over this obstinacy. “Why, in the name of the Black, would I want to trick you? You people are the ones to insist on an insanely huge fuel reserve for a simple three-month rendezvous and return! We’ll have a stripped ship, and we don’t need more than six kilometers per second delta-V!”

  The Arcist woman shrugged. —Safer if the tanks are topped off. Only au idiot sets sail without proper stores.—

  “But…

  —You don’t like it? Complain to that Percephile, Ould-Harrad.—

  Carl snorted. Ould-Harrad? A Percell lover? Ha!

  “Look, if we lower just the number-one hydroponics module now…”

  —No!—She whirled on him, gripping the laser transit tightly. —The whole colony depends on that farm!—

  “But the new dome is almost ready. All the fittings…”

  Steppins swiveled back to face the Edmund again, as if afraid that Carl’s intent was only to distract her while Jeffers and the Hawaiians spirited the entire torch ship away.

  —You Percells don’t fear the Halley diseases as much as we human beings do. We won’t go into why, since you keep denying all responsibility for the sicknesses. But it is sufficient to know that we will not let the hydro be polluted! Both the big and small hydroponics modules stay attached until the new dome is completely checked out…and by an Ortho specialist!—

  Carl fumed. He knew what his alternatives were. He could give Jeffers the go-ahead anyway… and maybe spark a miniwar among the factions.

  Or he could run below and complain to the spineless Mauritanian in command.

  Or he could go down and lend a hand.

  “Use a purple during your next erotic rest break,” he suggested, and kicked off toward the workers before she could reply.

  “Hey, Lani!” he called. “Let me help you with that thing.”

  SAUL

  “I’m getting so I don’t even care about the danger of dying anymore, Saul. It’s the itch I can’t stand. All day, all night, in spite of the topicals Akio Matsudo gives me. I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to ask ’Kio if I can borrow his great-grandfather’s seppuku knife and really scratch!”

  Marguerite von Zoon lay facedown on the taut webbing, trying to keep still as the masked and gowned treatment-room techs picked away at her skin with tweezers and little glassine vials, sampling the fungoids that were turning her body into a battlefield.

  A quarter of her skin was broken and cracked. Pink, half-open wounds and dark-domed blisters erupted in ugly patches. Here and there, the flesh had split open in nasty ulcerated sores, glistening with sickening dampness.

  Saul worked his team as quickly as possible, knowing how hard this must be for her. Marguerite was an intensely private person—a true exile who had left Earth only in order to save her family from punishment for political crimes. Whatever it stated on some piece of paper, only a bureaucrat would try to say that she had “volunteered” to come out here to become food for gnawing alien cells.

  And yet Marguerite’s cheerfulness was legendary. The discomfort had to be severe for her to be complaining at all.

  Saul stepped up beside her as soon as the
techs had finished. “Marguerite, I’m going to bring up the new beamer and try that experimental subdermal scrub now. Try not to move unnecessarily.”

  She nodded curtly. Only a damp sheen on her forehead and her flexing palms betrayed her nervousness. Saul guided a wheeled hospital mech into position, canting the broad plate of a synthetic aperture microwave array over her prone form.

  I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saulthought. But none braver than this good woman.

  She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.

  Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications… always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley. By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.

  Secretly, Saul feared it was already too late even for that. There was no guarantee that cooling down to a degree above freezing would stop these vicious, multicolored, funguslike growths, once they were this deeply established.

  A third of the awake crew—and even a few of the slotted corpsicles—have these creeping skin disorders. They worry Akio worse than the Crump Mumps or even the Red Clap. They’re the biggest reason why I may not be able to go out with the Edmund after all. Osborn and the others may have to take their chances without a doctor.

  And there was one more cause for his hurry to make the new treatments work.

  Yesterday, while they were making love, he had fund a fine lacelike webbing of green strands spreading under Virginia’s shoulder blades and issuing across her back. He hadn’t said anything to her, yet. But his motive was stronger than ever to find a cure.

  The machines had finished moving into place. “All right, Marguerite,” he told his patient. “Now remember, hold still.”

  “Yes, Saul.”

  Her hands clenched the table’s rails. Saul turned to the hulking, spiderlike medical-mech. “Access five—” he began. But he had to stop as a sudden wave of dizziness swept over him. He managed to lift the collar of his gown just in time to contain a violent sneeze.

  Saul’s head rang. The dull body aches that he had managed to put out of his mind for half an hour or so returned in force now. It was a long moment before he could look up, blinking through drifting blue spots, and address the machine again.

  “Access… five-two-seven Jonah.”

  A receptivity light winked across the mech’s plastic panel. He continued, “Play sixty milliwatts in preprogrammed fungoid RNA resonant spectrum A dash two-nine-four, focused on foreign subdermal growth, patient’s right inner rear thigh, five hundred seconds, safety factor beta.”

  They had adapted a unit designed for magnetic resonance and ultrasound inspection of internal injuries. The sophisticated mech would be able to aim and evaluate the focused radar far quicker than any human operator.

  “Preparing to project,” the machine announced flatly.

  Saul’s best assistant, Keoki Anuenue, was watching a data tank, supervising the procedure. Not only was Keoki a skilled laboratory technician, he was also one of the strongest men Saul had ever known. Three days ago, he had had a chance to see the big Hawaiian in action, when there had been a cave-in up on Level B.

  A particularly nasty variety of vermin had lodged a beachhead in the utilities shaft leading to Airlock 1, their main lifeline to the Edmund Halley. The major cooling vent—essential for keeping the ice around them from melting—was nearly chocked off with an ocher variant of worm bigger than the purple horrors.

  Saul and Keoki had arrived on B Level just as the halls erupted in loud screams and alarm Klaxons. Most terrifying of all was the grinding groan and squeal of collapsing ice. The cable Saul had been climbing broke loose and whipped from the wall like a tortured snake, flinging him away just as a block of dark, mottled crystal pierced through the fibersheath lining and smashed the side of the shaft.

  Keoki Anuenue caught Saul and planted him into a safe niche, then turned and leaped up toward the glittering stone boulder that had seven men and women trapped in the utility tunnel. They had minutes, at best. Keoki went at saving them the only way possible.

  He braced his back against the tattered plastisheath, planted his feet on the iceblock, and heaved. It must have massed a hundred tons not counting the rubble lying atop it. “Kei make nei mai…” Keoki had grunted as the boulder, unbelievably, grumbled and started to move.

  A blast of fetid dankness flowed through the gap. The Hawaiian’s face was a beaded torrent in the humid air, his neck tendons bunched like knotted ropes. Saul had no time to stop and think. He dove into the narrow opening.

  Along with a dozen other odors, the air was filled with the scent of almonds. If any of their suits had been punctured, even the blood cyanutes wouldn’t have protected the trapped crewmen much longer from the rich vein of cyanide that had been broken open by the falling rock.

  Saul had wriggled in though quite aware that he wasn’t wearing a suit at all. He tried not to think about the big man behind him, struggling with enough mass to crush a building, on Earth… prodigious even at half a milligee.

  Thus had begun a hellish race to drag the survivors out. No one ever told Saul how long the ordeal took. All he knew was that Keoki Anuenue could have let go after one, or two, or three had been pulled free.

  But Keoki did not. A figure carved in stone, he held the ragged, primeval mountain until Saul verified that the last two trapped crewmen were dead—and stopped briefly to take a ten-cc sample of pasty, reddish fluid from a crushed, pulped thing the size of an anaconda. Only after Saul had wriggled out of the utility tunnel—to see the relief party come jetting up the shaft at last—did the silent giant finally ease slowly back in a groan of ice and flesh.

  All Keoki had said, when Virginia’s mechs moved in to take his burden away from him, was a mumbled phrase Saul remembered as clearly as his own name:

  “Ua luhi loa au…”

  Strange, magical words—a phrase ripe with secret strengths, the mysteries of exotic gods.

  Later, Virginia told Saul that it meant, simply, “I’m very tired.”

  That had been just a few days ago. The hall battles continued slowly tapering down. Diseases took their toll. And preparations for the Newburn rescue mission neared completion. One did not dwell on past heroics to any benefit. Let the billions following the “war news” on their vid sets, back on Earth, keep score. Here, people were simply too busy.

  Keoki stood by his monitor screen and motioned to Saul. All appeared in readiness.

  Saul stepped back and gave the spidery medical-mech the go-ahead command: “Five-two-seven Jonah, commence.”

  An oval spot of light, about five inches by three, appeared on Marguerite von Zoon’s right thigh—only a soft laser spotter beam depicting where the machine’s synthetic aperture was now projecting invisible, finely modulated microwaves from Saul’s slapped-together treatment device.

  Rube Goldberg science, he thought ruefully. This was much more difficult than using those giant beamers in the passageways to blast the bigger comet lifeforms.

  There, we can just pour energy into the animals’ major cells through protein resonance bands. Don’t have to be too accurate in choosing the right frequency. Whatever misses just spills over into heat. Shove in enough power and the cells tear themselves apart.

  Here, though, he couldn’t use that kind of overkill. In this microwave scrub of Marguerite’s skin, he wanted to wreck only the invader cells. Not only must the machine be tuned not to disrupt any of the patient’s own tissue, he could not even allow much waste heat.

  They had to finely adjust each scrub beam to a narrow set of frequencies, and play the atoms like beads on a string, tapping and tapping again until the overstrained molecular threads fell apart
. Tuning had to be orders of magnitude more exact than for the weapons being used by the hall crews.

  Marguerite’s thigh quivered, from tension certainly. She shouldn’t feel more than a faint warmth… at least in theory.

  Saul looked back to make sure Keoki had not read anything untoward in the patient’s vital signs. But the big Hawaiian watched the tank placidly, showing no sign of concern. He hummed softly, placidly, rocking in his spacer’s crouch.

  That was when Saul saw Colonel Suleiman Ould-Harrad slip into the treatment room.

  Oh, heaven help us. Now what is it?

  The spacer officer sought through the dimness until his gaze finally lighted on Saul. Saul’s initial resentment evaporated as he saw Ould-Harrad’s expression—his lined face a mask of exhaustion mixed with open dread.

  “I’ll be right back, Marguerite.”

  “Take your time, Saul. I am not going anywhere.”

  He touched her shoulder for encouragement. “Watch her carefully, Keoki.”

  “Sure thing, Doctor.”

  Saul passed through a disinfectant haze in the decon airlock and removed his helmet as the outer door cycled open. The acting expedition leader waited, absently rubbing the back of one hand with the other.

  ‘Colonel Ould-Harrad? How may I help you?”

  “There is something that I…” Ould-Harrad shook his head and suddenly looked away. “I know you have no reason to wish to help me, Lintz. I would understand if you told me to go straight to hell.”

  Saul shrugged. “Jerusalem est perdita.” Jerusalem is lost. “The past hardly matters now. We’re all in this mess together. Why don’t you tell me what ails you, Colonel? If you want to keep it quiet, we can arrange treatment outside of sick call…”

  He trailed off as Ould-Harrad shook his head vigorously.

  “You misunderstand me, Doctor. I need your advice in a non-medical area… a matter of most grave urgency.”

  Saul blinked.

  “Is it something new?”

  The tall Mauritanian bit his lip. “There are so few left with level heads, anymore. My people are collectivists, and so I cannot deal with emergencies as Captain Cruz did. I need consensus. I must seek advice.”