The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  The fellow’s hands moved in a blur. A loop of rope snaked out abruptly over Saul’s shoulders and was pulled taut. “Hey!”

  Another followed the first. Saul tugged back, but managed only to tighten the nooses. “I said I was just thawed! Just point me back toward Central and I won’t bother you.”

  This time both men laughed. “It’s simple, pimple,” the first Percell began. Then the second broke in.

  “Oh, give the ape a break, Stew. He lacks track.” There was a trace of sympathy in the second man’s eyes. Just a trace. He faced Saul.

  “There’s rules fellow. Capture without harm or blood spilled isn’t vendetta, it’s fair coup. You work for us in Hydro for ten megaseconds—that’s about four months, old style—with maybe time off for good behavior.”

  The first Percell laughed again, this time a high-pitched set of yelps that cut off in a fit of coughing. He spat a pink-stained gobbet onto the wall.

  “That cough sounds pretty bad,” Saul said. How long have you been bringing up bloody phlegm?”

  The blue-faced man shook his head angrily. None o’ your business! Come on an ’limp, chimp,” Stew said, and jerked Saul’s tether hard.

  Until that moment Saul had felt almost detached, as if this were more comic than serious. But now he felt a part of himself getting very, very mad.

  I should have just played along until I learned more, he thought. But the last time he had been jerked at the end of a rope like this it had been on a miserable day in Jerusalem, when he had been passed, handcuffed, from one newly installed theocracy bureaucrat to another—half of them misquoting Leviticus to his face and the rest reading apparently randomly chosen passages from Revelations and the Koran. It had been a blessed relief when the ferchochteh finally sentenced him to six months cutting timber on a labor gang, and then expelled him forever from his native land.

  “I think not, yoksh,” he said evenly as the blue-faced man jugged again. Getting a grip on the wall growth with his toes and one hand, Saul yanked back hard with the other.

  Maybe it was the unexpectedness—Saul’s eyelids were still slot-blue, after all—but the man on the ceiling yelped and tumbled from his high perch, past the floor, and on down into the shaft below. His cry diminished as he bounced softly against the walls, struggling for a hold as he fell. Saul transferred his grip to the other rope.

  “Stew” wasn’t going to be surprised as easily. He grinned and pulled taut his own tether. Most of the fancy, rhythmic dialect was gone when he spoke.

  “Poor Earth baby. Just unslotted and weak as an Ortho toddler. What do you know about tunnel fighting?”

  “Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Saul told him, and kicked off from his anchoring point on the wall. He landed beside the surprised Percell, where the rope fell slack, and immediately started shrugging out of the loosened bonds.

  “It sounds to me like you’ve got a tuberculinlike infection,” he said mildly, distracting his tormentor for a moment with his driest bedside manner. “Also, how long have you had that parech skin infection? Don’t the microwave treatments help anymore?”

  Stew’s blank amazement lasted only a few seconds. “I—” He blinked, howled, and launched himself at Saul.

  Saul’s knees carne up just in time, knocking the Percell’s toeclaws past him. A sharp pain lanced his left leg before he was able to lock into an embrace too close for the deadly implements to be used. Their hands met and gripped each other, fingers interlaced. Stew dug his toe-claws into the wall growth and started pressing Saul back.

  Wind whistled between their teeth. The detached part of Saul clinically noted the particularly foul stench of the other man’s breath. It was automatically compiled with a list of his other symptoms to be used later—if there was a later—in studying the disease.

  You’re too old for this, he told himself as they grunted, face to face. And it’s much too soon out of the slots!

  Thinking that, he was nearly as surprised as the wiry Percell when the straining war of muscles began to break, away from him. His opponent’s arms began quivering, giving way. Saul pressed his advantage.

  “I…get…it…” Saul gasped s he wrenched the fellow’s arms back, making him cry out. “You guys…must be what they…call Ubers.” He got the man turned around, arms twisted painfully behind him.

  “Hoosh, some superman,” Saul commented. With a grunt he tossed his opponent down into the shaft, just in time to strike his returning partner as the other Percell’s head came over the top. Together they tumbled shouting, down the shaft again. Saul drifted against a wall and held on with one hand until the gentle gravity brought him to the floor again. His heart pounded and he saw spots. His scratched leg hurt like hell.

  “Assholes,” he whispered, preferring the explicit Anglo-Saxonisms of his youth, in this case, over the more subtle Yiddish he had learned only later in life. He gathered his breath and braced himself as sounds told of their return.

  This time they were more careful. The two sprang to opposite sides of the hall to face him, both clearly angry. In their hands shone bright metal knives.

  So much for capture by the rules, Saul thought. Maybe I should have accepted ten megaseconds in Hydro after all.

  And yet, somehow, he didn’t regret a thing. “Come on, twerps,” he said, waving them forward. They started to comply.

  “Stop this!”

  He and the Percells looked up as one. A third blue-tinted head emerged from the overhead shaft and Saul had to groan. Even on an adrenaline high, he wasn’t idiot enough to think he could take on three of the bastards.

  But the newcomer didn’t direct his ire at Saul. He turned to the other Ubers.

  “Why did you cut this man?” he shouted in a clear tone of command. To Saul the voice seemed familiar… a once-thick accent softened and covered over by years of dialect.

  The first two Ubers looked away. “Clape. The mape fought us, Sergie—”

  “Dap the crap!” The leader drifted down one green-lined wall. Truncated legs that were little more than nubs tipped with hooks turned him quickly as he pointed at Saul. “Do not you know who this is?”

  They only blinked, and then stared blankly as the legless leader turned to face Saul for the first time, and bowed in an ornate gesture of respect. “I greet you, uncle of the new race.”

  The shock of Slavic hair was nearly gone now, and the space-tanned skin had been converted into one big tattoo. But years were nothing to recognition. Saul laughed out loud.

  “Oh. Hi, Otis. It’s good to see you, too. What have you been doing with yourself…besides turning blue, I mean?”

  Inside, though, his heart still raced as he began to realize what a close call he’d had. Saul could only think, Oy.

  The trip back to Central, under Uber escort, was almost anticlimactic, skim-running along velvety, moss-lined halls and passing the checkpoints of various clans with elaborate but apparently routine ritual.

  Even to Saul it was obvious that they were taking a long way back, dropping deep into the comet to move northward before beginning to climb back up again. “Why are we going so far out of the way?” he asked when they had descended to tunnels he had never seen before—twisty paths following soft veins of primordial snow.

  Sergeov shrugged. “Quiverian.”

  Saul stopped. “Joao? I’d heard he was awake now, as well. But why are you avoiding him?”

  The first Uber, the Percell named Stew, spat down a nearby shaft. “He’s th’ darkest Arcist. Th’ ape we hate.”

  Saul shook his head, looking at Sergeov. “Explain please, Otis.”

  The Uber leader smiled. “The old race had some superior individuals—like you and Simon Percell. Quiverian, too. He leads most rabidly anti-Percell band of Orthos, these days. Those who understand that, they are dinosaurs, and so want to stamp out us new mammals.”

  Saul thought he understood. The term Arcist, once denoting equatorial environmentalism on Earth, had evolved and shifted here on Hall
ey. Now it meant the most radical Ortho human faction, as Uber stood for those Percells who believed there could be no compromise with unmodified human beings.

  There was clearly intense hatred and rivalry, and yet it was also obviously under control. All factions were clearly too weak, much too dependent on one another, to wage open war.

  “I’m puzzled, Otis,” he said as they resumed their journey. Down here the tunnels seemed to have been hewn by hand, rough and winding, following paths of least resistance through the rocky ice. “If you feel that way, why aren’t you having children, like some of the Ortho bands?”

  One of Sergeov’s men snarled angrily, and Saul realized he had brought up a taboo topic. Sergeov cut back the blue-faced fellow with a sharp word. He turned back to Saul.

  “We have a few. Came out better than Orthos’ pitiful little wretches. One, we hope, can maybe someday learn to read and write.” His face was briefly contorted in painful recollection. “We do not experiment anymore. What is point, when everyone is doomed anyway, eh? Those Orthos in Quadrant Nine, they are immoral to bring babes up just to suffer, to die.”

  So, Saul thought. They do know the truth.

  “That’s why the level of violence is so low, even though you hate each other so much,” he ventured.

  Sergeov nodded. “Everybody will die together, anyway. But we need workers to keep things going as long as possible. Nobody wants to go by cold, by starvation.”

  “Nobody ’cept maybe Ould-Harrad,” one of the others ventured.

  “Ould-Harrad!” Saul blinked. “Then he’s.”

  “Become a wild-eyed mystic,” Sergeov explained. “How you think a Percell like Osborn ever became an officer? Not for his pretty looks and Ortho-loving ways, I tell you!”

  The other two Ubers laughed. “No. Ould-Harrad started talking to God. Resigned his commission. Lunatic is tool of Quiverian, now. Spiritual leader of the Arcists,” he said sarcastically.

  Saul could believe the last. It was a wonder the stark silence of the long watches had not driven more of them farther toward the fringe of human experience.

  Sergeov shrugged. “Let us go now. I take you back to Central. I must talk to Osborn anyway. Clear up some stupid accusations of that crybaby Malcolm.”

  Saul did nut move, though. He was staring, blinking, down a cross tunnel toward a phantom light that wavered to the distance.

  The others turned and saw it too. One Uber hissed, “Clape. It’s th’ Ol’ Man himself!”

  Saul drifted toward the shape, curious. Then he saw that there were two, no, three of the ghostly figures, moving along the walls like great spiders, picking through the wall growth.

  A hand gripped his arm and pulled.

  “We go now,” Sergeov grunted.

  “What are they?” Saul asked in wonder. For a moment he thrilled to the thought that they might be an as-yet-unknown form of Halley-Life—huge and highly structured creatures.

  “Now, Saul Lintz. Those can be dangerous.”

  Saul blinked again, and realized that the slowly approaching creatures were shaped as men, but their outlines were fuzzy, fringed, as it were, with a cloudy, milky edge of shimmering fronds.

  “Ingersoll?” he wondered aloud.

  “Old Man of the Caves,” Sergeov agreed. “And some of other mad ones who joined him. Come now, Lintz, or we leave you.”

  Saul nodded and began backing away with them. There would be time to study mysteries. Patience would pay off better, in the end, than impetuous curiosity.

  Anyway, his palms were sweaty and his mouth drier—as he watched the ghostlike shapes grazing through the Halleyform forest—than they had been during the fight with Sergeov’s Uber warriors. Saul hurried along with his escorts, promising himself that he would be back when he knew better the rules of this strange place and time.

  The halls near Central—still fibercloth-lined, still scoured at intervals with ultraviolet and microwaves and kept clean by a few mechs that had survived the decades—seemed like an oasis not just from another century but from a different world.

  “My business is with Osborn,” Sergeov told Saul. “Take my advice, Lintz. Be careful which faction you join, after recuperation. A few Ortho groups are not vicious baboons.”

  Saul had heard Sergeov’s radical Percells described in pretty nasty terms, as well. Where there was tribalism, he had long decided, there was no way to avoid criminality.

  “Some groups accept both Percells and Orthos.” he told Sergeov. “It’ll have to be one of those, if we join any faction at all.”

  “We…” The legless Uber leader thought. “Ah, you and the Herbert woman.”

  “Another Ortho lover— “one of the others began, but a sharp look from Sergeov shut him up.

  “There is one last thing,” Saul said as the Percells were turning to go. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a silvery tool.

  “I want some blood and tissue samples for my new medical inventory, if you fellows don’t mind. The Survivors and the Plateau Three bands have already contributed, and I’m sure you’ll be; happy to cooperate.”

  The Uber with the bad teeth snarled and reached for his knife. But one more time the Russian cut him off. Sergeov’s eyes seemed to glitter as he presented his arm to Saul. And a silent message seemed to say that he would expect a favor of his own, someday.

  If I had not once worked with Simon Percell, Saul thought as he took samples from the other two, would Otis have even saved my life this afternoon?

  On the Ubers’ chests the Sigil stood out starkly, red against blue, a tribute to a man long dead at his own hand, who might have seen some of what was to come, but could never have imagined how far it would all go.

  He visited for some time with Virginia in her recuperation unit, checking her progress carefully and reassuring her that the slot pallor was fading nicely. He kissed her and gave her a mild sedative for her insomnia. Then Saul went down to his lab.

  The samples from the Ubers went through the same preliminary analysis as he had performed on his other subjects. The first results seemed to be just the same.

  Oh, there were different accumulations of microfauna in their blood and sputum. The Percells’ immune systems seemed slightly less damaged, not as overstressed as the colony’s remaining Ortho complement. That was no surprise. The expedition had started out less than one-quarter Percell. Now the ratio among those healthy enough to be awake was even or better in favor of the genetic augments.

  But the story was still the same. We’re all dying, he thought. At last he found the courage to insert a sample just taken from Virginia.

  Saul swallowed. She was fresher, but he could read the signs. Even in her case, right out of the slots, the inevitable was well under way.

  “Well,” he whispered. “Maybe I can find some patterns be adjust the cyanutes some more.”

  He did not hold out much hope for that approach though. That breakthrough had made it possible for people to live here. But Comet-Life was adapting. More and more forms avoided the special sugar coating that had enabled his little gene-crafted creatures to do their extra job so well.

  The old question still raised itself, every day, nearly every hour he was awake. He must have slept with it over the long years in the slots.

  How is it possible for Halley-Life to live in us? How is it Ingersoll and the other cave dwellers can eat the stuff and survive?

  Why are we so much alike?

  Oh, that simulation he and Virginia had worked out with JonVon, so long ago, had shown how basic similarity had come about. Science had long known that organic chemistry would come up with the same amino acids, the same purines and pyrimidines under a wide variety of circumstances. Life would generally start out the same anywhere.

  But the similarities went far beyond that. It was almost as if men were not the first creatures from Earth to invade the comet. As if there had been earlier waves, and the present war was one among distant cousins.

  Long ago, in the late twenti
eth century, a famous astronomer had even proposed that comets were a source of epidemics on Earth. His theory was that primeval viruses floated down into the atmosphere whenever the world passed through a big cometary tail. This, he thought, explained ancient myths calling objects like Halley apparitions of doom. Evil stars.

  Saul had laughed on reading such baroque nonsense. But that was long ago. Now… well, he did not know what to think. Nothing, none of it, made any sense at all.

  The computer winked a code at him, over and over.

  F4-D$56.

  More data wanted.

  “Certainly.” He nodded amiably. “A most worthy request.”

  Tomorrow he would go out and try to persuade Quiverian’s Arcists to cooperate.

  Then he remembered. He hadn’t tested his own blood, yet.

  One more datum for a baseline. He stepped over to the treatment table, drew and prepared the samples, and returned to run them through the fluorescent separator-analyzer. Numbers and graphs flickered in three dimensions and many colors. Depictions grew on all sides of him, programmed to highlight differences from the mean of the prior samples.

  All around Saul, the displays were suddenly ablaze. Winking highlights, bright anomalies. He blinked. Nearly everything was different!

  “Um,” he said concisely. Saul blinked at the figures.

  There was the array of lymphocyte counts… all types: within normal range.

  Nobody else’s sample said that. Only his.

  Electrolyte balance… nominal.

  His was the only one that said that!

  Metabolic processes… nominal.

  “Stupid machine,” Saul grumbled. He smacked the side of the unit, keyed on an autotest, then another. Only green lights winked from the control panel. The machine claimed it was working well.

  “I’m aberrant because I’m normal?” He stared at the columns of figures. They all insisted that he was anomalous. Strange. Unusual.

  And nearly all of the differences were toward the Earthly human norm. Except for one.