The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  The two small apes hung nearby while he swam over to the meeting of two corridors. A thick green fuzz covered the old shaft and tunnel codes, but below the obscured markings were deep incisions, exposing dark, glittering, icy conglomerate, painted with a substance poisonous to Halleyforms.

  An arrow to the right, piercing a large S.

  S for survivors.

  “Yes, this is the way.” He adjusted his backpack. “Come on, Max. Come on, Sylvie.”

  The two minigibbons landed on his shoulders. He pushed off following the phosphorescent glow of the lichenoids.

  Two years, he thought. It’s been two years since, all at once, the universe seemed to let up on us. Since the litany of bad news turned around.

  I wonder how mach longer this good spell will last.

  Everyone seemed to credit his serums and Virginia’s miracle mechs for the turnaround in the colony’s fortunes. But Saul knew that part of the problem, before, had been pure and simple loneliness.

  Things had not been the same since that afternoon in Virginia’s lab, when JonVon’s illness-wrought memory blocks tumbled down, and they discovered that they had not been forgotten after all.

  There had been no more messages from their secret benefactors. But that didn’t matter. Even more important than the techniques they had received had been the boost to morale, knowing that someone back home still cared.

  Even the officials back on Earth seemed to have relented. The colony was buzzing about the “Care Package” that was nearing rendezvous with Halley—sent at high velocity by an Earth Control apparently guilt-racked over its past neglect.

  No wonder Jeffers s teams are getting so much done, down at the south pole. Virginia estimates they’ll actually be ready to begin the Nudge this month.

  If this peace among the clans lasts, that is…

  The passage lightened ahead. Max and Sylvie launched themselves from his back and sped along a wall cable, rushing toward a chattering greeting.

  “Who is it, Hokulele? Who’s coming?” a deep voice asked from beyond a stone arch. “Oh, quiet down, you silly monkey, can’t you see it’s only Max and Sylvie? Come on in, Dr. Lintz!”

  Keoki Anuenue’s grin was broad and his grip strong as he hauled Saul into a wide chamber that looked half ice palace, half mad scientist’s laboratory. Cavelike crannies led off in all directions, bordered by glittering, faceted structures of hardened crystal. People could be seen moving in some of the rooms, working at various tasks. A few stopped and waved at Saul.

  In the chamber’s center there protruded a great boulder of some bluish metal agglomerate, an odd formation that had given the group that lived here its name.

  Everywhere was the soft verdance of lush plant life. Here a lawnlike expanse of cloverlike Trifolium halleyense, there a shock of mutated marigolds, growing out of night soil into spindly shapes that never would have been possible on the homeworld.

  “Great to see you again, Doc,” Anuenue said. “My people are always glad when you visit.”

  Saul had given up trying to get Keoki to call him Saul, like everyone else did. That the big Hawaiian was now older than he—his once jet-black hair had turned silver and his eyes were deeply etched by smile lines—hardly seemed to matter to him.

  “Hi, Keoki. You’re looking well.”

  “How could I not? I was never really sick, like so many others, but those treatments of yours have me feeling I could climb a wave all the way to Molokai!”

  His laugh was infectious. Saul reached up and petted the little capuchin monkey on his friend’s shoulder, who hid behind Anuenue’s head and glared suspiciously at the gibbons. “And how is Hokulele? Does she still have a big appetite?”

  Keoki laughed. “There hasn’t been a purple sighted anywhere near Blue Rock Cave for weeks. She has to live off table scraps, these days, and she hates it!”

  “Well.” Saul smiled. “I’m sure motherhood will keep her busy enough.”

  “You can tell?” Anuenue held up the little monkey. “Ua huna au is mea… Iwasn’t sure I should tell you, since you wanted us to be careful before letting any Earth species become independent of your cloning chambers. But Virgil Simms was visiting from Central, and he brought his male with him.”

  Saul waved a hand. “No matter. The modified capuchins are a success, obviously. We ought to see if they breed true.”

  The data from Earth had been the key. For although science was still a dull affair, back home, some progress could not be avoided. Saul would never have been able to develop the cloning machines himself, even using parts from a dozen scavenged sleep slots. But by implementing designs released from JonVon’s unclogged memories, he had been able to build astonishing devices.

  Using samples taken from their still-frozen “zoo” of test animals, he could now force-grow a monkey or ape from blast cell to fetus to adult in a month. A month.

  It was, frankly, almost beyond his comprehension as a biologist. Saul was grateful that half of the process could be run by JonVon, without his having to understand it. He could turn most of his attention to modifying the original genes—an art at which his skill was not obsolete—giving them an artificial inheritance to thrive in the new ecosystem that was coming into being under Halley.

  Anuenue was trading monkey faces with Max and Sylvie, making Hokulele insanely jealous.

  “I still can’t really understand why you chose gibbons for your own watchdogs, Doc. Without a prehensile tail, they’re almost as clumsy as a man.”

  “I have a weakness for apes,” Saul began. “They have their.”

  “Saul!” two feminine voices called out, almost in unison. He looked overhead and saw a young woman in roughly sewn fibercloth over-alls drop down from a shaft to alight on the blue rock. A spindly machine fell after her and she caught it deftly, placing it gently on the floor. The whirring, spiderlike mech whizzed ahead of Lani to reach Saul first.

  “Hi Saulie!” The machine spoke with Virginia’s voice, but in a slightly higher register, a simpler tone. It was easy to tell that Virginia herself wasn’t “present” —was not operating this particular mech herself—and Saul was just a little disappointed.

  “Hello, little Ginnie,” he said to the very unmachinelike, colony-made machine as it reached out an arm and stroked his leg. The device was another hybrid of Earth-based and homegrown research—a mixture of new designs sent up by their secret benefactors, the mechanical brilliance of Jeffers and d’Amario, and Virginia’s hypermodern approach to personality-based programming.

  “I love you, Saul,” the childlike voice said softly. The little artificial persona was an edited replica of Virginia’s own. Sometimes, as now, it led to embarrassment. Keoki coughed, grinning behind his hand.

  Saul felt particularly unnerved since, at the moment, Virginia was mad at him. Can’t even really blame her, he thought.

  “Hello, Lani,” he said to the young woman who followed the robot. She enveloped him in a warm embrace.

  “You are looking wonderful,” he said, holding her back at arm’s length.

  She blushed, turning slightly away as if to hide the scars the zipper Pox had left on her once-smooth cheek.

  “You’re a magnificent liar, Saul. Almost as good as you are a doctor.”

  But to him she did look wonderful. For he well recalled when Lani Nguyen had been slotted. At the time it had seemed as pointless as storing a corpse. Now the pallor of deepsleep had almost left her face, and the blue eyelids only made her half-oriental features seem all the more sultry and mysterious.

  Virginia should never have told me about Lani Nguyen’s secret cache of human sperm and ova. I’ve almost questioned her about it several times, since her unslotting… to find out where it’s hidden.

  Ah, but if I had that plasm in my hands, I might be too tempted …

  “When can I go back on duty, Saul? I want to join the crews mounting the Nudge Flingers, before all the really important work is already done.”

  A spacer to the last, he
thought. “Even if the Nudge does begin in a month or so, Lani, it’ll be years in progress with lots of motors left to build. You’ll do your turn, don’t worry. Right now, though, your job is to rest, get up-to-date.”

  She nodded. The little capuchin monkey transferred from Keoki’s shoulder to hers and she scratched it.

  “I’ll try to be patient, Saul. Anyway, I’ve got to thank you for assigning me to Blue Rock Clan for my recuperation. I’ve been to some of the other groups to try to visit people…” She blinked, remembering. “Saul, how can people, professional people, with college degrees, act so… so…” She groped for the right word.

  “So meshuggenuh?” he suggested.

  Lani laughed—clear and bell-like. “Yeah. So meshuggenuh.”

  Anuenue put an arm around her shoulder. “We’ve been very glad to have Lani. Any of the clans of the Survivor faction would welcome her as a permanent member.”

  Lani blinked. “I… I guess I’ll have to choose one, won’t I? I’m still not used to thinking like that.”

  Saul didn’t like it any better than she did. He had hoped that the factionalism of the last thirty years would break down, once more of those slotted in the early days were treated with his serum and released. As the active population of the comet burgeoned, a majority would be made up of those who remembered Earth most recently, whose memories were fresh with Captain Cruz’s stirring speech from the framework of the Sekanina, and the hopes they had all shared.

  But it hadn’t worked out that way. The newly revived—disoriented, weak, and afraid—found themselves in a world as much different from the Halley Colony they remembered as that early settlement had been from placid Moon Base 1. They quickly gravitated to groups they might be comfortable with, adopted their ideologies, and became clansmen.

  Saul did not mention to Lani that there were three people seemed exempt from this pattern. For different reasons, he, Virginia, and Carl Osborn were all isolated—respected, perhaps, but comfortable nowhere.

  Lani shrugged. “Well, I sure won’t go down south and join Quiverian and his radical Orthos.”

  “Arcists,” Keoki corrected, like a patient language teacher, instructing her in the right dialect.

  “Yeah, Arcists,” she repeated. “And when I got a hall pass and tried to visit some of my Percell friends over in Uber territory, Sergeov told me to get my little Ortho ass the hell out of there! The Mars boys aren’t much nicer, even if Andy Carroll and I once were pals.

  “So what choice do I have? That Plateau Three crowd up on B Level is mixed Ortho-Percell, but the PeeThrees have got this gleam in their eyes, you know what I mean, Saul? They aren’t so much spacers anymore as missionaries! They don’t seem to care if they live or die, so long as Halley’s trillion tons of ice gets delivered, according to Captain Cruz’s plan.”

  Saul smiled. “It looks to me as if you’ve found a home right here, Lani.”

  “That’s right,” Keoki affirmed. “Just let us know. We’ll paint you a new tabard and hold a ceremony.”

  Lani nodded, but she briefly bit her lip. “I—I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to Carl.”

  She lowered her eyes, knowing how transparent she must seem, but unashamed of it in front of her two friends. There was very little more that could be said.

  “I’ll see about getting you some light duty topside soon,” Saul assured her. Lani nodded, gratitude in her eyes.

  The little capuchin chirped. The black gibbons, Max and Sylvie, swiveled and looked back down the hallway, their hackles rising.

  Keoki peered, his hand drifting toward his belt knife. “Somebody’s coming.”

  Men and women started emerging from labs and sleeping caves, nervously gripping staves made from meteoric iron. A pair grabbed the heavy vacuum door and began shutting it. Then they heard a high-pitched whistle—two upsweeps and a trill, repeated twice.

  Keoki relaxed only a little. “Treaty call,” he said. “E wehe i ka puka, he told the men, and they ceased pushing. The door stayed half-open. A light appeared down the tunnel, and two smallbrown figures tumbled to a halt just twenty feet short of the entrance, tongues lolling from narrow mouths rimmed with needle sharp teeth.

  I should never have let Quiverian talk me into giving him otters, Saul thought, regarding the agile creatures. They’re just too dangerous.

  But if he had disallowed the Arcist leader’s request, Saul might have lost his carefully maintained neutral status. It had been hard, serving as middleman, negotiating a treaty so that the emigrants to the south pole still cooperated with Carl Osborn’s crews. The otters had been just one more price.

  To his surprise, though, the figure that emerged behind the grinning animals was not Joao Quiverian, or even one of the Arcist leader’s principal assistants. Wild white hair and beard floated like a halo around a face as dark brown as the rich carbonaceous veins lining the icy hall.

  “…Kela ao,” Anuenue breathed in amazement. “It is Ould-Harrad.”

  Those intense, brown eyes were now rimmed by deep creases. The former spacer officer was dressed in a flapping brown gown of salvaged fibercloth that made him look even more like an ancient patriarch. He gestured with one hand.

  “Saul Lintz.”

  Lani gripped Saul’s arm and Keoki Anuenue moved as if to stop him, but he shrugged them aside. “Keep Max and Sylvie back;” he said, and cast off down the hallway.

  The otters clung to Ould-Harrad’s robe, eyeing Saul ferally. Saul did not feel particularly safe for having been their “creator,” in a sense. In near weightlessness, the creatures were fearsome beasts.

  If Joao Quiverian was leader of the radical Arcists, Ould-Harrad was their spiritual guide, their priest. The flame of his guilt complex seemed to drive him hotter than anyone else here on this ancient star mote.

  As he approached, Saul wasn’t entirely sure of his own safety. For although the Arcist faction seemed to accept his neutrality, this man was his own force.

  “Colonel Ould-Harrad.” He nodded, stopping ten feet away. Saul let his feet slowly come to rest on the floor, toes clutching the soft, hybrid, green covering.

  “Do not call me that,” the African intoned with an upraised hand. “I am not an officer, nor spacer, nor Earthman any longer.”

  Saul blinked. He had last glimpsed Ould-Harrad during than Great Exodus—his white spacesuit tabard centered with a single, jet-black starburst—leading the Arcist exiles on their trek while Quiverian and his crew covered the rear. During Saul’s brief, subsequent visits to the antipodes, their paths had never crossed. Still, he remembered something the man had said, so long ago, in his lab aboard the Edmund.

  “He whom Allah chooses to touch, bears the ridges of those fingerprints, ever afterward…”

  “Very well, Suleiman.” Saul nodded. “I see the otters are doing well.”

  Ould-Harrad glanced down at the creatures. His hand gently stroked their glossy fur, gene-adapted for life in icy halls instead of the salt spume of the sea.

  “One more time, you have proven me wrong about you, Saul Lintz. For the role you have played in bringing these fine creatures forth cannot have been evil.”

  Saul couldn’t t help it. He felt a wash of relief at Ould-Harrad’s words, as if he had been worried about that very thing, and the man had the power to absolve. He is very good at this prophet shtick, Saul observed.

  “Did Joao lend them to you while you came up north?”

  Ould-Harrad’s eyes seemed to flash.

  “They are no longer his to lend. That is one reason why I have sought you out. To tell you that there are only three monkeys, down in the south antipodes, to watch for purples and guard the people as they sleep. You must replace these otters.”

  “Oh? Where are you taking them?”

  “You deserve to know.” Ould-Harrad paused with a faraway look in his eyes. “For years I have gone out onto the surface and meditated under the stars, as mystics have since time immemorial, praying and hoping for a sign
. I found that they were hypnotic, those glittering lights in the blackness. After a long time I thought that I had, indeed, begun to hear God’s voice.

  “But it could not have been.”

  “Why not?” Saul was curious.

  Ould-Harrad’s voice was filled with pain. “Because all that came to me was laughter!”

  Saul knew that this was more than mere madness. He could almost feel the intensity of the man’s soul torment. “I think I understand,” he said quietly. He did not add that he saw nothing inconsistent in the man’s experience. Who ever said the Creator must be sober? The universe is for laughing, or we must weep.

  Ould-Harrad nodded. For a long moment there were no words. Then he raised his eyes again.

  “There was another thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “I… I can no longer be a party to the schemes of Quiverian and his banal crew, they.”

  “The Arcists?”

  “Yes.” The beard floated as Ould-Harrad shook his head. His voice was barely audible. “The wars we brought with us from Earth are as the fog of summer, that will fall away and be forgotten with the coming of winter. I have come to realize that arguments over where to target this great, frozen teardrop miss the point entirely.”

  “Where will you go, then?”

  Ould-Harrad’s gaze dropped briefly to the floor. “I must go down…into the ice. Below where anyone has gone—except for Ingersoll, whom they now call the Old Man of the Caves, and those poor creatures who followed him. I will live on what grows, along their trail. I will minister to them, if they still live. And I will think.”

  Saul nodded. Within Ould-Harrad’s world view, a hermitage made sense, obviously. He made no effort to dissuade the man. “I wish you luck. And wisdom.”

  Ould-Harrad nodded. He looked down at his pets. “I am beginning to comprehend one aspect, at least… this thing you preach— this symbiosis. I did not understand at first, but now…”

  He paused. “You are not doing evil, Saul Lintz. For that reason I warn you. Beware of Quiverian. He plans something. I know it. You, in particular, he wishes harm. And Carl Osborn.”