The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  Jeffers beamed. “Damn right.”

  Carl held up his hand. “One more thing. Earth Command is very strong on this plan. It has made acceptance a condition for getting the Care Package.”

  That got to them. The high-speed rocket carrying supplies was the centerpiece of their fresh hope. They had to have it.

  Carl realized that the hardest part had been won.

  He explained further with some graphics JonVon had whipped up with only minutes’ warning. The Council listened with glacial but growing acceptance. At least it seemed the idea was possible.

  Complicated, yes. Difficult and risky, yes. But possible.

  And perhaps the only possibility.

  Carl remained standing. He kept his mood grave but sympathetic, determined but flexible. And one by one, the factions voiced their own narrow views.

  The Plateau Threes disliked throwing away hard-won Halley…but they were used to taking their lead from him.

  The Ubers grumbled, but admitted they had no other option.

  Jeffers and the few Percell spacers who had clung to their dream of Mars terraforming were overjoyed. They would get to work near Mars, perhaps start the greening of that arid rustworld.

  The Arcists weren’t totally happy. They distrusted Carl. But this option kept Halley far from Earth. And the sanction of Earth Control lent it weight.

  Through it all Carl felt the dark undercurrent of Percell and Ortho running, but muted now by the constricted, bleak future they faced. The largest part of the crew belonged to a group he called the survivors— because in the end, that was all they cared about.

  Quite sensible, he thought ruefully. And I’m their natural ally… even though I don’t believe we’ll ever really get out of this alive…

  He watched the sloop run before the wind, her sails big-bellied and impossibly white, her bow cutting the water sharp and sure.

  And gradually, reluctantly, the factions came around.

  The Council broke up at last with grudging agreement. They would try to reach Mars.

  Carl sat down at last, feeling a sudden fatigue sweep over him.

  The Arcists are right. They can’t trust me. I know this Mars business isn’t going to pan out right, but it’s politically necessary right now. Necessary in order to prevent a civil war. In order to get the Care Package. The hard truths can come later.

  He shook his head.

  I’m turning into a goddamn diplomat. I don’t think like a spacer anymore, not even like an engineer. Christ!—I’ll be wearing black tie and tails next. And when I look in the mirror thetongue I see will be forked.

  VIRGINIA

  The machinery was starting to look old. The original glossy finish had faded long ago, until it was hard to read the names of the equipment manufacturers anymore. They had been rubbed nearly illegible after thirty years of faithful scrubbing.

  Ozymandias, my secret hideaway. Virginia glanced over in the back corner of the lab, where little Wendy sat patiently, drawing a small trickle of power from a wall socket. The tiny maintenance mech peeped once and started to rise, but when Virginia said nothing it settled down once more.

  Funny, how you didn’t notice things for a while, and then they suddenly hit you. It had been almost two years, Earth time, since Virginia had been thawed and returned to duty, yet in all that time she had not once paid the slightest attention to Wendy. She had been too busy.

  Now she contemplated the little mech, bemused.

  Thirty years. She’s cleaned and tended and guarded my sanctuary, keeping things just as I left them.

  Maybe Saul is right. Maybe I do good work.

  She smiled.

  Watch it, girl. Keep this up and you really will start to imagine yourself a goddess, like those poor creatures— barely human anymore— who followed Ingersoll down into the deepest caverns, who bow to my mechs and address them by my name.

  The last two years had been so busy, for her, for Saul, and for Carl. It struck her that she had not taken any time to stop and think about what had happened to all of them.

  A fine trio, we are. None of us were important at all, back when Captain Cruz lived, and everyone was one big, happy research expedition. Carl was just a petty officer, I was a junior Artificial Intelligence tech, and Saul was a doctor with a strange passion for bugs.

  Now poor Carl is whatever passes for commander, these days. I’m the Spider Woman, sending out her web of drones to keep the tunnels patched and the gunk controlled. And Saul…

  She paused, pondering. Of usall, he’s the one who’s changed the most. Lord, I hope I don’t lose a good man to godhead.

  He had been so preoccupied lately. Almost obsessed. Reluctant to link with her in the intimate touch of neural amplification. As if he were hiding something from me… or protecting me from something he felt I’d never understand.

  Finally, it had come to a head. Last week she had lashed out, shouting at him in her frustration. Since then, he had left a few terse messages for her, her mechs had seen him in the halls, but for all intents and purposes they might as well have been on different planets.

  All around her the holo displays glowed faintly. Even some of the units that had gone blank over her long sleep were replaced, now that she and Jeffers had gotten the autofac working properly up on A Level. For perhaps the first time since her awakening, no red warning lights glowed.

  She found her gaze lingering on the Kelmar bio-organic machine that she had spent half her personal weight allowance to bring aboard… ages ago. The heart of her bio-cybernetic computer.

  “JonVon,” she whispered. “I need some distraction from my troubles.”

  There were things she used to do, for amusement, which she had not had time for in years. But now—

  “Let’s see just how rusty I am at visual simulation,” she said, low, and pressed the Kelmar’s thumb ident. A display lit up.

  So, Virginia. Will it be more than routine stuff, today?

  She shook her head. “Let’s have some fun, like we used to.”

  Virginia spent a few moments flicking switches and calibrating before slipping on the worn disk of her neural tap. She had grown so used to direct data flow, controlling or programming distant mechs as if they were parts of her own body, that it took her a few minutes to get back into the experimental, “synthetic” mode that had once been her own special way of interacting with JonVon.

  But JonVon remembered. She had only to desire it, and a rainbow of light burst forth… an artist’s palette of brilliance.

  I forgot about the colors! How could I have stayed away from this for so long?

  Virginia constructed pink clouds over a placid, blue-green sea. She drew seven multihued balls and juggled them in make-believe hands, something she never would have been able to do on the “real” plane.

  We’re in good form today, Virginia.

  She smiled. “Yeah, we are, JonVon. I’m going to have to go down into you and find out what you’ve done to your simulation software.”

  I have been busy. During my illness I was too distracted to tell you about it. However, there have been some interesting results. I am an open book to you, whenever you re ready.

  “Later. Right now I Just want to play a little while.”

  It wasn’t only in visual simulation that JonVon had made progress. Only her trained ear caught the little signs in his words, phrasing, and timing, that this was still far from an intelligent being. Otherwise, the voice might easily have been that of a living person.

  She toyed with the images, making the broad, moonlit sea open up before her. A school of flying fish. Diatoms sparkling in the churned wake of a mysterious shadow, just below the surface.

  It felt good. Here within the machine, there were none of the muddy, confusing crises that beset them all on the outside. Here nothing could frighten her. It was too much like home.

  Lord, how I miss Hawaii.

  She crafted a porpoise in the waters, which chattered and splashed her playfully. The simula
tion was so vivid that she almost seemed to feel the droplets.

  How long has it been since Saul and I made love linked this way?

  She quashed the thought.

  Will we be attempting a personality molding today, Virginia?

  She shook her head. “No, JonVon. After so long, I’m not ready to try that again quite yet. I’ll tell you what, though. Let’s run a simulation of the gravitational sling maneuver Earth Control sent up. The one Carl got the Council to vote for last week. Do you scan the copy I inserted yesterday?”

  Yes, Virginia. Do you want a chart? Numbers? Or a full-sense simulation with extrapolation?

  “Full sense, JonVon. I want to ride the comet… to see what it’ll look like forty years from now, when we pop open the sleep slots and find ourselves nearing home.”

  Home, she thought. Eighty years changed. Will they even remember us?

  Virginia felt she could almost sense the rush of supercooled electrons as her counterpart made its preparations.

  Ready to commence simulation, Virginia. Please name starting conditions.

  “Begin with the Nudge, with the equatorial flinger launchers engaged under Earth Control’s program.”

  She settled back as the clouds and sea vanished. The porpoise, too, faded in a last-minute chittering of defiance.

  Blackness settled in, conveying a sense of depth that stretched outward, to where stars glittered in their myriads. And below the starscape an image formed… white-streaked gray against sable. It was the by-now-familiar scene of dusty ice on the comet’s surface.

  JonVon showed her the new launchers, optimistically depicted as completed at Halley’s equator. It’ll be some chore, building new accelerators to replace the ones the Arcists seized. We couldn’t ever do it without the Phobos technologies.

  Arrayed in a ring around the equator of the prolate spheroid, the narrow-barreled guns began firing— throwing pellets of native nickel-iron away into space at large fractions of the speed of light— slowly, imperceptibly changing the momentum of the ancient iceball they were anchored in.

  There was no sensation of movement, but Virginia identified with the tiny, simulated figures jumping, waving their arms on the surface. It was a nice touch for JonVon to put them in. For it would look like this— jubilant spacesuited workers leaping in joy when they finally began nudging the comet into a new orbit.

  Using gentle signals as natural as moving an arm, Virginia let her sense of presence float upward to watch the simulation better. As the Nudge went on, she followed the icy core’s changing path through the vacuum.

  Aphelion, four years from now, and bit by bit Halley s ancient orbit was changing. The launchers stole slightly from its angular momentum, causing it to begin its long sunward fall a few days before it normally would have. The comet’s inward velocity was small at first, but it grew.

  Virginia knew this simulation wasn’t intrinsically any more accurate than the ones Carl had used, only more vivid. She wanted everything represented in images. It just wasn’t the same in graphs and numbers.

  She rode the comet. The stars turned slowly as the time scale expanded and years flickered past. She and Halley fell together toward the cusp at the center of the solar system.

  Ancient ices sublimed under the growing warmth. First carbon monoxide, as the core swept in past the orbit of Jupiter, and later carbon dioxide. The escaping vapors lifted black, powdery dust to meet the growing sunshine. A thin haze began to form.

  The rendering was vivid. Virginia watched the faint, glimmering dust and ion tails begin to take shape, like ghostly banners unfurling in the growing light.

  On at least ten score occasions the spinning ball of ice had fallen this way, since that time when it had passed too close to Jupiter and been snared into the middle solar system. Since then it had been tethered to the sun on a shorter leash than most comets.

  Space was roomy, vast, and since that one near-brush with the giant planet’s gravity the comet had never met another physical object it could not absorb. Dust grains, little bits of rocky flotsam, they all had blundered into Halley’s streaking path and paid the price.

  But the Nudge had seen to it that there would be another meeting. Something smaller than Jupiter, but much too large to absorb, would pass improbably close this time, while Halley Core hurtled inward.

  And there it was! A pinprick of reddish light, just ahead.

  Mars, Virginia thought. Right on time. Ready for a little carom action?

  JonVon recognized a rhetorical question. Anyway, the machine was too busy to answer as the close encounter drew near.

  This was Earth Control’s compromise, its plan to rescue them without risking infection to the homeworld.

  I must admit, I didn’t expect even this much out of them.

  Sure, public pressure, Earthside, was a major reason for the Care Package, which was now only months away from rendezvous with their little isolated outpost of humanity. Nevertheless, after all these years Virginia had grown cynical over just how much Earth Control really cared.

  I’d have expected them to order us to commit suicide “honorably” and quietly, like good little plague carriers should.

  The red planet loomed. Virginia asked JonVon to zoom in on the details, slowing the action as she and the comet approached rendezvous.

  She swept ahead of Halley to look over the planet. The icy south pole of the dead world came into view first.

  Red sands blew over Cydonia. The long-dormant Shield Volcanoes were pimples that poked nearly through the thin atmosphere, tufted on their flanks by thin, dry clouds.

  Phobos rose around the small world’s limb. The little moonlet was a pockmarked stone, aglitter with lights, that rolled by Virginia and then set over the sharp, ocher horizon.

  Nice people, she thought of the folk of Phobos Station. Toobad they’ve never been allowed to become a real colony. Maybe we can help them, there.

  She looked back and saw the comet nearing, as the men and women on Phobos would see it thirty-eight years from now.

  It ought to be quite a show for those folks… Halley sweeping by almost close enough to touch. Mars has to pass through the thick of the tail for its faint gravity to catch our aeroshell lifeboats. And yet the planet and comet can’t be allowed to come so close to each other that the turbulence will knock our boats off course.

  In the simulation, Halley was putting up a grand display. Nothing like the spectacle would show closer to the sun, of course; but the twin tails had started to unfurl, and the coma glowed like a fuzzy cloud of fireflies.

  The simulation was excellent. JonVon even depicted the lights of Phobos winking off as workers battened down and covered up.

  For a few days there would be too many meteoroids to risk venturing out into the open. A small price to pay, though, for a chance to rescue three hundred souls. At least Virginia hoped they would feel that way.

  Three hundred people quarantined on Mars… that really might be enough to start a colony. Ithad never been one of her dreams to settle a rust-red desert, but the plan beat the alternatives. And it’ll be nice to,feel gravity again, to walk, and maybe even swim in a dome-covered pool.

  It’s not Maui, but I could get used to the idea of being a Martian.

  The separation narrowed. Halley’s surface seemed to fizz as hot spots threw fountains of gas and dust into space, adding to the coma’s brilliance.

  Is it a trick of perspective? Or are we really going to pass as near as it looks?

  Sparks flew off as tiny objects separated from the comet’s head in soundless explosions.

  The life rafts. Armored against the dust and heat, the aeroshell-covered sleep slots would split way from Halley. Tiny, mech-controlled rockets increased the spacing, guiding the hibernating colonists toward their first fiery encounter with the red planet’s atmosphere.

  Virginia backed away further, giving the simulation space.

  All Earth will be watching this. The folks on Phobos won’t be the only ones havi
ng quite a show.

  Halley’s cloudy coma seemed to touch the planet. Virginia blinked.

  Something’s wrong. How can it…

  The coma began to warp out of shape, compressed by sonic shock waves as the globe of gas encountered the planet’s sparse atmosphere. Ionized gas bowed outward and away from the weak Martian magnetic field.

  The sparkling dot of the core itself, a trillion tons of ice, pulled forward, unimpeded by anything so tenuous as gas or magnetism. It fell ahead of its cloud, and began to glow still brighter.

  NO…

  Gaseous bow shock waves multiplied into expanding cones. Sensing that she wanted to follow the action, JonVon slowed the encounter as Halley Core scattered the tiny lifeboats like pollen grains and sped on toward closest passage.

  Closest passage…

  The nucleus split apart! Then again. Four chunks streaked inward at an angle, their path through the Martian atmosphere now incandescent. Then they struck the little world.

  One piece seemed to glance off the limb of the planet, like a hammer striking glowing sparks off into space. Plumes of dust roiled where the mile-wide bit had briefly touched down.

  A large fragment scored a direct hit on Olympus Mons, shearing off the left side of the great volcano in a titanic, blinding explosion.

  Simulation or not, Virginia blinked away the afterimage from that flash. By the time she could watch again, the series of searing blasts had turned into spreading orange clouds. The thin atmosphere rippled and swirled like a shallow pond into which bullets had been fired.

  Quakes shook the ancient sands. Under Mars the permafrost buckled and melted. Virginia imagined she could sense magma stirring.

  She was too stunned to do more than watch, unbelieving. She sought out the little aeroshells and found one, two, tumbling away toward the sun. Others glowed briefly as they hit the rolling dust clouds, flared, and went out.

  Some had simply disappeared.

  It was supposed to be a gravity carom! A near passage! Earth Control never said anything about this!