by David Brin
Carlnever said anything about this.
Unconsciously she willed her simulated self away from light— away from the burning, sunlit face of the rocky crucible.
Mars fell back as she fled outward along its shadow. Seen from dark-face, the planet was a thin crescent of red wind, tinged in fire. From one side of the crescent, a rosy pyre bloomed: the god of war answering heaven’s violence in reawakened volcanoes.
Unbeckoned, unwelcome, a line from Shelley came to mind.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Virginia disengaged, her hands shaking as she tore off the contact disk. In her mind, though, the scene continued. Imagination went on simulating what was intended for thirty-eight years hence, picturing the sun as it would rise on the morning following this encounter, to shine over a steamy, cloudy day on Mars.
And later, for just a little while, there would be rain.
SAUL
“Smelly chemicals snoozed
Through the primordial ooze,
Carbon, oxy, lime
Phosphorous and time
That’s how began the Blues.”
It was an old biologists’ drinking song from the twentieth century. Saul had learned it in England, during a rainy winter at Cambridge. It seemed appropriate that it should come to mind now, as an earthenware bottle lolled and sloshed in his lap and he sat in the dimly lit corridor outside his lab, trying a Polynesian remedy for what ailed him.
Keoki had given him the jar of homemade hooch saying, solemnly, “You need drunk, Saul.” And, of course, the fellow was right.
“Things were oh so clean,
Decently marine,
Then virus climbed aboard,
At first a chewing horde,
With a voracious gene.”
There was a refrain to the ditty, to a jazzy, hip beat.
“Dat dere ole virus
Conspired on us
And brought us to our knees.
Sent us a fever
Subtler than a cleaver
Infect me if you please.
Come play with me,
An anthology
On informative disease.
Might as well play host
Don’t give up the ghost
When your cells are in a squeeze.”
Saul nodded, sagely. “There. You see? They knew about symbiosis even back in th’ eighties, when they weren’t even sure yet they were in the Hell Century. Goes to show there’s never anythin’ new, under th’ sun.”
Nobody was there to hear him, of course. He had finally sent Keoki back… the big Hawaiian’s wives must be worried about him, by now. Saul had assured his friend he would go right to sleep, and so Keoki had left, charging him to try to cheer up.
In fact, sleep wasn’t in prospect, right now. Saul sat and nursed the bottle. He had never felt so far away from home.
Strictly speaking, in four years we’ll be at aphelion and headed back to Earth again. But orbital dynamics was not on Saul’s mind, right now.
She’ll never approve, he told himself.
Oh, yeah? Well, how do you know unless you ask her?
Truth be told, he was simply afraid…afraid of what Virginia might think of his latest experiments. Miracle cures where one thing. Experiments with animals and plants, fine.
But among the gifts from Earth had been data on the force-growth of human bodies. It was like Houdini being challenged by a new lock, or a painter by a blank canvas. The need was there… the dare irresistible.
How do you know what Virginia would say? Maybe you don’t have to sleep in a cold, lonely lab.
Saul shivered, and knew that he was just too much of a coward to test it.
Ah, but what if he could give his love a gift? A gift of the very thing she most wanted in the world? The thing she had reconciled herself never to have?
One night, weeks ago, as she lay in exhausted slumber, he had taken the samples he needed.
From Lani Nguyen— trustful Lani— he had acquired the secret cache of human sperm and ova she had smuggled with her from Earth. He had all the materials he needed, now.
But since then, he had remained indecisive. Until tonight.
He had spent all day laboring in the Arcist enclave down at the south pole— as Colony Doctor he was neutral in all disputes— and had returned depressed. Life was miserable and cold, down in those warrens. Their fusion pile sputtered and barely put out enough power to maintain their greenhouses. Worse, Joao Quiverian had his own factions to deal with— fanatics that made his own Arcism seem moderate, whose loathing of anything associated with Percells seemed to know no bounds.
Keoki was right… I needed drunk.
Another ditty passed through Saul’s mind. One about the fifth Irish Civil War. It was a sad song of fratricide, but nobody had everwrittenanything better for either drinking or pity.
He was humming to himself when a flicker of movement made him look to the left. He squinted at the faint line of phosphors, diminishing in the distance, and saw that several were being occulted by dim shapes approaching down the narrow hallway.
Nobody was supposed to ever come this way. It was part of his agreement with the clans. Then who… ?
He blinked. Felt a chill.
Weirders…
They drifted into view… manlike shapes, but tufted all about like slime-covered sea creatures. The assemblage of native forms each carried was different. In one case there was nothing of the original man left but the eyes. In the other, there was still a face visible through the symbiotic tangle.
This is synergism taken farther than even I can stomach it, Saul thought queasily.
Several times, since that day when the ex-spacer turned mystic, Suleiman Ould-Harrad, left the upper levels to go down and join these creatures, small notes had appeared tacked to Saul’s door. He had filled every request, often leaving bottles of his sera outside. Each wakeshift, when he arose, the packet was gone. In its place lay a small sample of some strange lifeform Saul had never seen before.
It was a trade, medicine for more pieces to the puzzle that was Halley. It suited Saul fine, for he had wanted to find a way to treat the weird denizens of Far Gehenna, anyway. Since Ould-Harrad had gone down to join them, they had seemed to become better organized, less suspicious and violent when someone from a more “normal” clan crossed their path.
He blinked, however, when both emissaries bowed low.
“We c-come and beseech-ch your help-p.”
The stuttering voice took Saul by surprise.
“I-I didn’t know any of you could still talk!”
The one with the face shook its head. “Some c-cannot. But that does not mean we no longer think-k.”
Saul nodded, hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… well, you never show yourselves. The others fear you so.”
“As we fear them. But you are Ssssaul. The Doc-c. We c-come to you with hurt.”
Saul was about to ask them to come into the lab when the lead weirder opened a gap in its foliage and brought forth a small brown bundle. Whimpering sounds came from it.
“C-can you fix-x-x?”
The otter had a broken leg. It writhed and bit at the one holding it, to no apparent effect.
“Of course,” Saul said as he stood up and pressed the thumb-code plate by the door. “Bring her in. This shouldn’t take long.”
Except for Lani and an occasional mech, nobody else but him had ever crossed this threshold. Saul was sure that nobody stranger ever would again.
But then, he had never been very good at predicting.
It was an hour after the Weirders had left that he found himself standing beside the master cloning chamber, with his mind made up. There were sound scientific reasons to proceed with the experiment. The colony needed it. Humanity needed it.
He nodded. “JonVon, I want to set up a secret data base.”
CARL
If he squinted against the sun’s hard knot of yellow, the icescape lay before him like
a land of dreams. Armies of men and mechs surged across the slashed, stained territory. They towed long cylinders of buffed steel and alabaster aluminum oxide, or swiveled great clumps of electrical gear, or tugged transformers that, made to operate in cold vacuum, looked more like crusty brain coral than loops of gleaming copper and iron.
The laboring gangs sped across ice that was gouged and split, great troughs dug deeply into it, cut and formed and hammered. At regular spacings Jim Vidor had erected spindly towers by melting, force-forming, and refreezing water into crystalline struts, levels, braces.
Cobwebbed strands connected jutting, orange-tinged fingers of flash-wedded crystals. Ice had little shear strength, and well only under compression. It was impossible to believe that the arabesques were merely functional. Still, Carl had no doubt that Vidor, if pressed, would be able to come up with an explanation for each extruded, delicate strand, every corbelled arch, all the spindly weaving art of it.
Carl had not asked. Humans could not stick remorselessly to the narrow and practical; anyone of skill yearned to express something deep and abiding through his craftsmanship. Perhaps it was the impulse to leave an idiosyncratic, quirky dab of self on the most enduring things they made. Probably it was something deeper, tied to the spirit that had brought a lone tribe of primates so far out from their own warm, moist world.
Carl remembered the opening lines of a poem Virginia had shown him months before. Somehow they had stuck with him.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair.
Omens for good sailing. The poem had something to do with beaches and oceans, and Virginia had sensed some resonance in him for those images. Voyaging out here, sailing against gravity’s tide, resembled the grand old days of seagoing craft. They had tapped a fraction of the sun’s raw photon wind to control the comet’s outgassing, in the first months after landing. Then they ran before that wind, using sunlight only to yield electricity. The crucial time was coming now, when their iceworld craft had to be pushed into a fresh orbit, a new course charted.
He smiled at himself. Clinging to the sea analogy, eh? All because you’re deep in your bones a spacer, and can’t forget it. Ever since losing the Edmund, you’ve been yearning for a ship. This chunk of ice and iron is all you’ve got left.
It was so obvious, Virginia had seen it. She had told him that poetry was a consolation, and to his surprise he had found himself enjoying some of the stuff she transferred into his display. That would’ve been utterly impossible for the brash, self-involved spacer he had been thirty-five years ago. He’d aged only seven years in that time, but that span had a weight of its own. His younger self now seemed distant, almost implausibly blind.
I hope Virginia can’t see too well into me. She’ll find out soon enough how much all this hope and euphoria are false, based on an unavoidable lie …
He didn’t like to recall that. He shook his head and moved across the ice, taking long strides, surveying the work. Keep busy. Don’t think too much; it’s not your strong suit.
Carl circled around a gang of laboring mechs to reach the long trench of Launcher 6. A completed flinger filled the scooped-out, obliquely descending trough. Two engineers were testing a flywheel made from Halley iron.
The machines would deliver momentum at a precisely calculated rate and angle. At first they would fire parallel to the equator, to slow and finally halt Halley’s fifty-hour spin. After that, the launcher would pivot about an axis buried in the trench, bringing it nearly perpendicular to the equator, in line with Halley’s center of mass. Then would begin the long stuttering bursts which would, delivered over years, add minute increments of momentum to Halley’s slow, stately swerve at aphelion. All the launchers, pulsing endlessly, would sum up to the Nudge.
—Real pretty, uh?—
Carl saw Jeffers approaching with an easy, practiced lope. His suit tabard was a crossed pliers and wrench in a cube, stained and spotted.
“Beautiful. Is it tested out? Ready for horizontal mounting?”
—Sure. Sets in there jest fine, any angle you want. Mechs’ll get it duty-mounted soon’s testing’s over.—
Jeffers grinned happily. He was the mainstay of the Nudge, finding solutions to problems with a quick, expert savvy. He worked eighteen-hour shifts without a sign of fatigue. The factory at A Level, humming away now with robos making replacement parts for launchers and rockets, wouldn’t exist without Jeffers. Carl remembered when the man had put in the minimum, wrapping himself in holotapes or pornstims, blotting out the reality of where he was. Work was what he had needed. To Carl, that alone was reason enough to do all this, even if his friend surely suspected that it was all a farce …
—Every crew’s ahead of schedule. Even puttin’ in extra time, without me askin’.—
“We’ve finally got something to work for.” Carl said it without meeting Jeffers’s eye.
—Damn right.—
A manager-mech approached, an extra dome perched atop its carapace in a makeshift kluge. Virginia’s add-ons worked marvelously, making the mechs and robos far more versatile, but they weren’t elegant. The mech winked its lamp to attract their attention and sent,—Launcher 6 complete. Human tech Osaka states that the device is ready, for formal testing.—
Jeffers nodded.—Fire the sucker!—
Warning gongs sounded over the comm line. Everywhere on the surface, teams stopped work and climbed out of pits to watch. Their suits were scratched, worn, discolored, patched with homemade parts.
A ping ping ping of warmup rippled over the comm frequencies, thin ringing echoes of the charging now under way in the trench. Carl peered at the tip of the launcher, which jutted free of the ice nearby, pointing at the sky.
He felt prickly excitement, gathering tension. If they’d made some mistake in the design, in assembly…
A small tremor came through his feet. A rattle in the microwave, a skreee—and the unit discharged.
Simultaneously, a vague haze appeared et the mouth of the launcher. He wondered what was wrong, until he suddenly realized that the firing rate of the flinging tube was several capsules per second— and he was seeing the blur of their passing.
That was all. No roar, no belching smoke. The launchers were designed to operate with near-perfect efficiency, to generate as little waste heat as possible. If even a fraction of a percent of the launching energy seeped into the surrounding ice, it would evaporate away the structural support, producing dislocations, unbalancing the carefully configured momentum-matching of the accelerator segments. Long before the ice was gone, the ratcheting instability of the drive tubes would jerk and thrash them into twisted steel.
But the flinger functioned smoothly. A cheer rose across the comm lines. People raised their arms in victory salutes as far as Carl could see, dancing on the grimy ice, leaping high into the blackness. Only the mechs continued stoically about their tasks, oblivious that humans had at last clasped the helm of this ice ship. Halley was no longer just a tumbling dirty snowball in the long night. She was now a spacecraft.
Jeffers was babbling excitedly, repeating operating parameters as he read them off his helmet display. Carl could follow some of the rapidfire reciting— kilo-amperes surging in low-impedance circuits, voltages building to sharp peaks and then collapsing as each slug passed, leaching the energy of inductive electric and magnetic fields. Energy poured into the capsules, electrodynamic momentum flowing like a fluid at the speed of light.
Only electrical acceleration was efficient enough to avoid the waste-heat problem, to avoid slowly melting the comet itself. For the moment there were ample piles of iron at the north pole, mined in the first year of the expedition, but deep beneath each launcher was a mech mining operation, where in constricted caverns the robots dug and processed more of the comet’s natural, ancient metal.
A factory on A Level made lightweight buckets of a special superconducting polymer. These were loaded with iron and other heavy wastes. Each metal-filled do
llop became a bullet. Conveyors fed these with unrelenting precision into the flinger barrel, where the surging voltages clasped each pellet and flung it to enormous speeds— ten thousand kilometers per second, nearly three percent of the speed of light. Launcher 6 was a cosmic machine gun, firing slugs that would reach the nearest stars in a few centuries.
We could have built starships, if we’d only had the nerve, Carl thought. Maybe someday.
Such was the mass of Halley that even these enormous speeds were barely sufficient for the task of piloting. Carl tuned in to an engineering frequency and herd a staccato braaap braaap braaap as each pellet picked up its miniboosts in the flinger column. Launcher 6 was the first of fifty-two that would soon ring Halley, stuttering forth their kilogram pellets for five years. Aphelion, when the comet head paused like a ballet dancer at the peak of his leap, was the most efficient time to divert Halley. Fully ten millionths of the comet’s entire mass had to be ejected. That demanded dozens of mechs supervising the mining and smelting of iron, minirobots to toil beside the endless conveyor belts, subroutines and expert programs to catch every snag, each hitch in the unending stuttering fever of the Nudge.
“Goddamn,” Carl said. “It works.” He felt a rush of relief and realized he had been clenching his hands.
The cheering went on. Even this demonstration, which would run for a mere few hours, was slowing Halley’s primordial spin, minutely altering its long gliding ellipse.
—Runnin’ smooth, too,—Jeffers said, grinning happily.
—Come on down to Launcher Five. I’ve got a nice li’1 pivot rigged there, keeps the flinger tube from comin’ unglued. We figured—
Jeffers stopped abruptly as a geyser of steam boiled from an ice tower nearby. Vidor’s intricate cross-hatching of blue and ivory exploded in a shower of fog and glinting, tumbling remnants.