by David Brin
“That’s what we have to decide. We’re aiming for a close pass of Jupiter on the inbound, and we can slingshot ourselves just about anywhere from there.”
Saul said distantly, “I see.”
Carl watched Saul carefully during the rest of the meeting. The man listened mutely, lost in his own dark introspections.
Malcolm was balky, reluctant. He gave ground grudgingly, agreeing to a slight increase in the labor hours in Hydroponics, swearing he could give no more without consulting all the Ortho factions. Jeffers made similarly hedged promises on behalf of the Percell groups.
Carl himself spoke for the ex-spacers—mostly Plateau Three types—and the Hawaiians. What would I do without those diehard idealists? he thought, watching the give and take of the meeting. There aren’t nearly enough of them…
He moved into the verbal crossfire, working them around to a livable compromise. He used hard-won skills to cajole Malcolm into doing what it seemed to him anyone rational would immediately agree to—but by now he was used to it, resigned to the obdurate mulishness of the human species.
And this was only a minor sticking point. Eventually they’d have to get Quiverian and Sergeov to sit down, too, representing the extremes. And all this bickering over mere Hydro, too the deeper issues of finishing the Nudge Flingers would be far worse. It resembled the never-ending news from the Middle East. Even with Saul’s lost Israel broken into squabbling theocracies, the region was still rife with more microscopic factions, unending rivalry, bitterness, stupidity. Nobody could see beyond their noses. No, Halley was all too representative of humanity.
After the meeting he sat and watched the sun set in vivid ruby splashes over Hong Kong. He wondered idly if the place existed anymore; there had been reports of a small nuke war somewhere near there, twenty years ago. He would have to check sometime. Or maybe he didn’t really wish to know. The city simmering in its rosy sunset looked better if you thought it could still he there.
At last he roused himself and went down to sleep slot 1. The thawing was proceeding normally; he had kept track by remote throughout the day. Suited and encased, he came into the foggy kingdom of eternal chill. He did not rush into the prep room, though. The team was not quite through yet…
Carl stopped. at Lani Nguyen’s slot. Frost filmed it and he checked the fluid lines automatically. He had come here often to stare into that blissful, milky, floating refuge—and to envy them all. He peered through the slowly churning fluids at the watery form inside. Did he see a face gazing out?
I miss you, Lani. I was a young idiot when I knew you. Not that an older idiot would do any better. That night after Cruz died… We know how it should have worked out, don’t we? He smiled wanly. Youshould sleep safely to the end. But we’ll need you soon, too. And pray that unslotting doesn’t give those plagues lying dormant in you the crucial edge they need…
He could contain his impatience no longer. He went into the prep room and stood aside as the technicians finished their hours of careful labor. His eyes followed every feeder line, each stimulating circuit, all the myriad details that spelled the difference.
She’s still as wonderful. Just looking at her makes my heart feel as though a hand is squeezing it.
He stood aside as they unwrapped the nutrient gauze from Virginia’s almond skin.
That luscious color belongs on beaches, not in ice.
He had waited so long for this … And had thought a thousand times of violating his pledge, of reviving Virginia without Saul. What could they do about it except complain? He had even come down here once, at the nub end of a lonely, half-drunken evening … Invaded the realm of frost and started the warmup, let it run on for two hours before finally facing the fact that he couldn’t do it. Not merely because she would be enraged, would surely see through his invented explanations… but because he knew he could not live with having done it.
But now all that was past. The long years dropped away, done.
He stepped forward to see her again.
VIRGINIA
Long ago, Virginia had wondered what it would be like if she ever really succeeded…if ever she fooled them all, and actually made a machine that could think.
How would awareness seem to the new entity? Would it appear suddenly, as great Athena was supposed to have come into her wisdom, springing self-aware from the brow of Zeus?
Would it be like a child growing up? A long, slow, tedious/thrilling process of rote and extrapolation? Of trial and error and skinned knees?
Or would it happen as humanity had done it—evolving by quirk and happenstance from the feral reflexes of microbes, all the way up to the hubris to challenge gods?
Most often of all, she had imagined that it would be like this. A slow gathering of scattered threads. A learning anew of what was already known.
An awakening.
All the blurry images came together into a single shape that swam in front of her eyes—a complete mystery. A blob.
Then, with no transition at all, she knew it as a face… one that ought to be familiar.
“Carl?” she tried to ask. But her facial muscles would only twitch a little, a promise of returning volition, but not much more.
The figure overhead blurred, unfocused, and finally went away. Virginia slept. And for the first time in a long while, she dreamed.
The white walls were sharp and clear when next she opened her eyes.
Recuperation room, she thought. I wonder how long it’s been.
There was a rustling tap tap tap of a databoard nearby. Virginia laboriously turned her head, and saw a man in a faded, threadbare hospital gown perched crosslegged on a webbing, looking intently into a portable display and rubbing his chin slowly with one hand. His eyelids were slot-blue and he looked so thin.
“Saul,” she whispered.
He looked up quickly. In a single motion he put aside the databoard and was by her side, bringing a squeeze bottle to her lips.
She sipped until he drew it away. Then she worked her mouth. “H… h-how… ?”
“How long?” Saul took her hand. “About thirty years. We’re getting near aphelion. Carl told me you left little watchdog programs throughout the data systems that kept popping up, promising bloody hell if you were awakened before me.”
Virginia smiled weakly. “I told you…I’d…m-manage it.”
He laughed. “And I’m so very proud of you.’
The richness of his voice made her blink. Saul was still only partially recovered from his own slotting, and yet something else was different about him.
Her preslotting memories were coming back clearly. There was a little more gray at Saul’s temples, maybe, and yet could it be an illusion that he actually looked younger than before?
Oh, I must be a mess, she thought. Ihad better do some hard eating to put some meat back on, after three decades.
But if slotting drops years off you, I must learn to conquer my fear of it!
“How am… I… doing?”
“A doctor’s joy.” He grinned. “A marvelous piece of womanly engineering. Recovering nicely, and soon to be put to work, by orders of his Grand Poobah-dom, Commander Osborn.”
Virginia shook her head.
“C-commander… ?”
Saul nodded. “Lieutenant Commander, actually. Commission from Earth. They had to. Only two officers left alive, and they hardly count. Ensign Calciano’s in the slots after a ten-year shift in which he seems to have become convinced he was the Flying Dutchman. Ould-Harrad’s resigned his commission and gone off to join the Revisionist-Arcists over in Gehenna…”
At Virginia’s puzzled expression, Saul squeezed her hand.
“It’s a different world, Virginia. So much has changed. Back on Earth, things have gone from very bad to better to incomprehensible. And out here they’re… well…” He shrugged. “Outs here they’re just plain weird.”
“But Carl… ?” She started to rise, but he pushed her gently back against the pillow. Even Halley gravity wa
s a weight for her.
“Enough talk. Now you rest. Later I’ll explain what I’ve been able to discover. We’ll try to figure out a place for ourselves in this strange new world.”
Virginia let herself relax.
We… she thought, liking the way the word sounded in his voice. Yes, we will.
She was starting to drift off when she felt Saul gently pull his hand away. Virginia looked up and saw that he was fumbling with a handkerchief and staring into space with a screwed up, half-orgasmic squint. It ended deep inside the square of cloth in a muffled sneeze.
“Oh, darling,” she sighed. “Out of the slots only a few days, and already you have a cold!”
He looked at her sheepishly, then he smiled.
“So nu? What else is new?”
SAUL
Everybody seemed to be dying.
In fact, the more Saul learned about this aging colony, the more it seemed a mystery to him that anyone was left alive at all.
Oh people had adapted, found ways to cope. Human beings were good at that. Since thirty years ago, when Akio Matsudo had finally given firm orders and seen Saul strapped into his slot, the tools he had left behind had been added to, improved.
But the modified cyanutes, the subtly tuned microwave scanners, all of their clever devices could only slow down the long erosion, the declining spiral. Halley-Life, too, was adaptable, and much more at home here. It was a war of attrition that men could only lose.
I should have known that Akio would hardly take his own advice, Saul thought to the chilly domain of sleep slot 1. It had been a mistake to come down here so soon after leaving Recuperation Hall, to look in on old friends. A rude shock to have it brought home so clearly that three decades had passed.
Until now his last memory of the Japanese physician had been of glossy black hair framing smiling almond eyes under wire-rimmed glasses. But that image—as fresh as last week—was jarringly crushed down here among the chilled caskets. One was labeled with Akio Matsudo’s name. The figure behind the frosted glass was almost unrecognizable.
A thin fringe of gray wisps rimmed a pate turned speckled with age spots and scarred from bouts with skin infections. Those onceplump cheeks were now the hollowed inheritance of a man grown old fighting the inevitable the implacable And there wasno hint of laughter anymore in the lines rimming poor Akio’s sleep-shut eyes.
The charts at the foot of every slot told the story of each hibernating occupant, red symbols denoting medical reasons for internment, black trim meaning storage without real hope of recovery or resuscitation, and blue marking a crewman or -woman who was simply “off duty” for this span of years.
At first glance the situation looked serious, but not impossible. There were plenty of blue folders. However, a quick scan of the colors did not tell the true story. Akio, for instance, had a blue folder.
A tired, sick old man, he thought on reading his friend’s folder. It wasn’t just the lingering infections, or malnutrition from decades of eating only the narrow range of foods grown in the colony’s agro domes. Osteoporosis had so weakened the man’s bones that there was no way he would ever walk his beloved western Japanese hills again. Electrical bone stimulation had not made up for year after year in near weightlessness.
The Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel hung in cavern Gamma, frozen and broken down. So far, nobody had had the energy to fix it.
Saul read a random sample of blue folders and pored over slot readings. Slowly, he came to a chilling realization.
No more than ten percent of the colony was well in any real sense of the word.
Is Carl really that good a liar? He wondered how Osborn was able to maintain the fiction that the mission could ever be completed. Or is everyone pretending for the sake of their sanity.
He saw no way there’d be even a fraction of the manpower needed to build and operate the “flinger” launchers—the mass drivers that were supposed to alter Halley’s orbit come aphelion.
And without the Nudge, they all might as well go to sleep for good, because there would be no homecoming for any of them.
His thoughts were clouded as he left sleep slot 1. Still a bit weak from his long hibernation, Saul stretched long-unused muscles by glide-walking the long tunnels downward and southward, an area he had not visited yet since his internment.
In this area nearly all the passages were coated in luxuriant green layers of Halleyviridis fungoid. The stuff was too slick to allow good purchase for his vel-stick slippers, but offered a sure grip when he used his bare toes as he had seen others do.
It actually made movement much easier. He found he didn’t need the almost hidden wall cables, for instance. Grabbing a tuft of growth in passing gave him all the added leverage he needed to move along swiftly.
Saul wondered for sometime without paying close attention to where he was going, thinking about the strangeness he and Virginia had awakened too.
Earth appeared to have completely written off Miguel Cruz’s grand odyssey. Oh, they still maintained contact, after a fashion, sending up entertainments and dribbles of technical data from time to time. Saul had extracted a promise from Carl Osborn to bring him more fully up-to-date soon—the distant, somewhat aloof spacer had been imprecise about when. Apparently, most of the awake colonists lived day to day, and took a detached view toward time.
Soon, though, Saul knew he would have to resume his duties as expedition doctor. And the burden of hopelessness that had worn down Akio Matsudo would be his.
Most sorry of all had been those poor Orthos down in Quadrant 9, with their pitiful children—scabrous, wild-eyed, stick figures barely human in aspect, always hungry and frail as leaves.
Perhaps the EarthBirth Laws were wise. Gravity runs strong in our genes.
But there was more to it than that. Yesterday he had examined five of the Ortho kids. All seemed to suffer from the same enzyme deficiency. He already had it mapped to the seventh chromosome. In a few weeks he should be able to track it down and…
And what, Lintz? Are you contemplating meddling, again? Just emerged into a new world, and already you’re coming up with ideas how to change it?
The glow of phosphor panel, was crowing sparse. Saul tried to take his bearings and realized that he had not been paying close enough attention. He was lost.
In the old days that would have been impossible. But by now all the old intersection “street signs” were obscured, completely covered over by the soft, native carpeting. Instead, where shaft met tunnel, there were deeply incised “clan markings” —filled in with a pitchlike substance that seemed to repel the Halleyforms. The marks denoted the boundaries of the various human bands. He looked around for one of these.
Apparently only Central, the sleep slots, and the hydroponics domes were neutral territory, now. And the deep, inner regions of Halley Core, of course. But only madmen ever went down that way, he had heard.
In one of the faction areas nearest Central he had seen what had become of the fibercloth that had once lined the tunnels and shafts of Halley Colony. The material had been turned into clothing and tentlike, “purple-proof” habitats, suspended from the ceilings the bigger chambers.
Every sleeping hall maintained a round-the-clock watch for the most deadly of the comet lifeforms. Nevertheless, every year or so another poor victim fell to the feared native foragers.
Animals would be an ideal solution, he thought as he scraped away at the mosslike growth, hoping for a clue to where he was. On Earth we tamed other creatures and used them to fight vermin for us. Should be able to do that here.
Of course, that idea had been tried. Over the decades others had thawed dogs and cats and monkeys from the colony’s small collection of slot-stored animals. But none of the poor creatures had proved able to adapt even as well as the humans.
But what about changing the Earthbreed animals… altering them to fit into this strange environment?
He knew it hadn’t been attempted. Nobody else had the skill—or the arroga
nce—to try it. Already his mind was turning over ideas, genes of expression and regulation, ways of adapting creatures to work with an alien environment instead of against it.
Those poor, pathetic children, he thought.
Saul pulled out his chemically sterilized handkerchief and blew his nose. As he approached a new intersection, he saw one of the pitch-filled clan marks, at last. He glided to a stop and contemplated the symbol: a large “U” crowned with a halo.
As he stood there, a voice spoke, as if out of nowhere.
“Clape. Look a’ what we have here! Lost, boss?”
Saul grabbed the wall growth and swiveled to see that a man with a blue-tinted face looked down at him from the overhanging shaft opening. Saul had to blink, for this was distinctly the oddest-looking person he had seen since awakening.
The fellow wore bangles of hammered native platinum and a short-sleeved fibercloth tunic. And as he drifted to the floor, Saul saw nasty-looking metal claw/hooks on his toes. In his free hand the man held loops of rope woven of some native growth.
Saul nodded. “I guess I am lost, at that. I thought I was on M Level near Shaft Five, but.”
The other man laughed, showing open gaps amid rotting teeth. He leaped forward and landed closer to Saul, the movement exposing a large tattoo on his chest. It was a symbol Saul recognized, the Sigil of Simon Percell.
“What a savor, Hum? Free labor bum!” The man ginned, fingering the rope.
A second blue face emerged from the overhead shaft and grinned. “Green hydro labor, for a favor.”
Saul shook his head and smiled. Their glassy-eyed stress made him nervous. “I’m sorry, I’m fresh out of the slots, so I’m not up on the dialect yet.”
“Clack!” The first Percell rolled his eyes. “A virgin wool! Well, baby Earth blue, I remember how to talk land cant. Are you one of Simon’s diamonds? Or normal ape crape?”
Saul raised his hand, smiling ruefully. “Guilty as charged. I’m what I suppose you’d call an Ortho. Is that a problem? Have I wandered into territory that’s exclusively Perc.”