The Heart of the Comet

by David Brin

  “Thirty years?” Lani cried.

  “Correct. We’ll have to go through perihelion to do it.” The face lifted its eyebrows in amusement. “This Jupiter passage is on the outbound leg, folks.”

  Carl heard the words but they were all a cascade of sounds with little meaning. She had fought and died and now had come back, a voice echoing in the narrow confines of this room, the Virginia he knew and yet not her at all. The voice had no fear, no shock, not even a trace of sadness. What was it? He listened to her go on, felt Lani’s firm grip, and slowly the realization settled on him that the voice was right. There was still a way out, and no matter what tragedies they had suffered, what remorse they felt, time and the great blank darkness all around could heal them, and they would keep on.

  PART 7

  THE HEART OF THE COMET

  Year 2133

  Only an earth dream.

  With which we are done.

  A flash of a comet

  Upon the earth stream.

  A dream twice removed,

  Spectral confusion

  Of earth’s dread illusion.

  —Edgar Lee Masters

  Spoon River anthology

  SAUL

  The vulpine’s tongue lolled as it flapped gently through the forest, legs splayed to keep its wing membranes taut, catching crosscurrents in the air as it hovered in search of prey.

  LeGrand Cavern was a riot of color, a wilderness of broad, delicate leaves and verdant creepers. At intervals along the green-lined walls, vent tubes dripped condensation that dispersed in a soft fog, lying glistening droplets on the gently waving foliage. Bright purple, orange, and yellow fruits—massive and juicy—hung from slender, threadlike stems.

  Fibrous vines laced the heart of the chamber, looping from column tree to keystone root to the next column tree, making a dense, three-dimensional jungle in what had once been an empty ice cathedral.

  Saul watched the vulpine sniff, flap closer to a thick patch of Demicasava leaves, and shove in its long snout to worry whatever was hiding there.

  In a sudden explosion, a skin-fowl hen burst from the thicket, furiously beating featherless wings just ahead of the vulpine’s snapping jaws. The bird dove into the notch of a keystone root, leaving the disappointed vulpine to whimper in frustration, nosing for a larger opening that wasn’t there.

  Life goes on, Saul thought, smiling. A game played in earnest by pieces that only dimly perceive their places in the whole.

  He filled his lungs with the rich, living smells. Alot has been accomplished, since the aphelion war. Ought to be, in more than thirty years. Man and environment, adapting to each other.

  Le Grand Cavern was one of three “natural” chambers in which new twists to Halley’s ever-more-complicated ecosystem were tested. In other vaults, humans and mechs tended less riotous, more orderly life-mixes… orchards and farms and lobster pens. But this canyon was one of Saul’s favorite spots, where various experiments sorted themselves out and where startling new solutions appeared.

  The vulpine—a construct based on fox genes, but modified so extensively as to be nearly unrecognizable by now—snuffed after another scent and let out a sharp yip. It flapped around one of the giant column trees, which crisscrossed the chamber at every angle like spokes or massive braces.

  The trees served other purposes than just supporting the walls of Le Grand Cavern, but that role would become crucial over the next few months, as Halley’s Comet zoomed sunward toward its most perilous, and possibly last, perihelion passage.

  He touched the trunk of the nearest, a bole a meter across that shone bright, cool light from narrow strips of bioluminescent bark. Power from the colony’s fusion generators ran directly into the genetically engineered giants. Some of the electricity went into feeding the trees’ life functions. The rest emerged as a soft glow that suffused the chamber from all directions, driving photosynthesis.

  The trees had been a delightful surprise when Saul had awakened from another decade-long slumber, year ago. Clearly, the colonists had been busy. The craft of life-tailoring and ecosystem management had been carried much further by the watches since aphelion.

  Of course, atany time there had always been two or three of Saul’s cloned near-duplicates around to help. In a sense, Saul had had a hand in most of the wonders of this chamber—through his younger versions who shared so many of his memories and skills. It could, in fact, be said that he had invented the column trees…

  And yet there was an unrepentant individualist within him who rejected the idea out of hand. No matter how metaphysical I get, I know who “me” is. He watched the vulpine and inspected the shining column tree with a trace of envy. They were beautiful.

  He had cheered at the hen’s escape. The skin-fowl had been one of his own designs.

  A low vibration traveled up the trunk of the column tree to his hand. Already Halley trembled with more and more quakes as heat from the ever-closer sun seeped downward into the icy crust. Distant booms told of patches of amorphous ice suddenly changing state, exploding off the surface, blowing dust, rocks, boulders into space in great clouds of vapor. Each day the rumblings grew louder.

  Already, the hazy, ionized cloud of the coma had formed, cutting off radio reception from the rest of the solar system. The spectacular twin tails waved, waxing ever brighter, primping for the real show at perihelion.

  The column trees, keystone roots, and other preparations would be tested hard, during the coming weeks. Carl thinks we haven’t got much of a chance, Saul thought But then, Carl always was a gloomy haymisheh.

  Saul smiled, inhaling the rich, thick scent of life.

  Somehow, even if the Hot tears us to bits and spills us all into vacuums embrace, I’d still not bet against us.

  A small purple creature buzzed by his ear and landed on the lip of an orchid. The flower was almost unchanged from a variant that grew in misty forests on Earth, but the lavender-colored pollinator was like nothing ever seen on the heavy green world. It was a distant cousin of the fearsome native forms that had terrorized the humans, back in the early days—now thoroughly altered to fit a harmless, useful niche.

  Saul made a mental note: Work on fixing the flavor of the honey the thing makes. He had tried the stuff recently. It was too sweet. Now a sour variant, that would be popular…

  A rustle in the leaves…Saul looked up and caught sight of small shape scuttling along the bright rim of the nearby column. It lifted a tiny, glowing eye at the end of a stalk, regarded him briefly, then peeped and scurried over to stand, quivering, before him.

  “Saulie,” its tiny voice piped.

  He held out his hand and the little machine ran up his arm like a trim spider the size of a Chihuahua. Its sticky feet prickled his skin with every step.

  “Hello, little Ginnie,” he said, greeting the tiny mech. “How’s your big sister?”

  The eyecell winked. “She’s fine, Saulie. Virginia says she wants to talk to you. No hurry, she says.”

  He smiled. Virginia could have spoken directly through the little mech. After all, she “lived” everywhere in the complex cybernet under the ice. But the vast program that held her main essence had decided, for some reason, to do that as seldom as possible. Oh, there was a little bit of her in every one of the machines, from these little “Ginnies” all the way up to medical-drones that could play Scrabble and gossip. But if you wanted to talk to Virginia, you generally had to do it from some particular place she chose.

  “Okay. Tell your mistress I’ll talk to her at Stormfield Park.”

  The little robot hummed, consulted, and replied.

  “Your mistress, too, Saulie!”

  He laughed out loud. This model certainly wasn’t one capable of teasing him with double entendres. Virginia herself must have been listening in.

  “You’re cute,” he told it. “Tell you what, why don’t we get together when Mama’s not looking, you and I?”.

  “Beast!” A small pincer arm dropped down and tweak
ed his arm.

  “Ouch!” But the mech darted off before he could snatch at it, and was gone in a flash of waving foliage.

  I could craft a creature to catch you, he thought. If we had forever, you with your machines and me with my animals… what games we could play.

  If we had forever.

  Saul let out a sigh. He swiveled, braced his feet against the great tree, and launched himself through the interweaving latticework of trunks—laced with strips of brightly glowing bark—toward an exit that was something of a cross between a classical cerametal airlock and the valve of a giant living heart.

  Stormfield park was crowded. As more and more people emerged from the slots, the population had begun approaching levels planned back when Captain Cruz and Bethany Oakes had launched forth with four sail tugs and the old Edmund Halley to challenge the unknown.

  The chamber was smaller than LeGrand Cavern. It had quite a few column trees crisscrossing it, but these were arrayed more primly, the growth less a riot, more manicured.

  At one end of the cylindrical area, the centrifugal wheel from the old Edmund had been refurbished and put back to work, rotating slowly, like a Ferris wheel. Two quadrants were still enclosed, containing laboratories for weight-dependant processes. But the rest was now open-sided and planted with oak and dwarf maple trees. It was like a strip of old Earth, bent into a circle and set inside a vast, surreal vault.

  The wheel’s centrifugal force was equivalent to only a twentieth of Earth’s pull, but it was enough. People went there to practice the arcane act of “walking”…of sitting under a tree and watching things fall.

  Ass he approached the rolling boundary, Saul heard a rare, treasured sound. Children laughed and flew past him toward the ring, skidding in the soft sand of a landing area as the great cylinder rolled around and around.

  They looked so much better. Still, the gangling forms seemed barely human. Only a few could speak.

  After aphelion, all of the poor, warped creatures had been slotted, and no more had been born. The wars had burned out the long rivalry between Ortho and Percell, and at last reason prevailed. Until the problems of fetal and postnatal development in the cometary environment were solved, it was considered heartless to bring babes into the world.

  The reasons why humans had so much more difficulty than other animals were complex, but Saul and his assistants had solved the problem more than ten years ago. Theoretically, this park could be echoing with the giggles of healthy children.

  But with perihelion coming, there was another reason to delay. Children deserved a future. Right now, few really believed there would be one.

  Saul swam through a shimmering boundary and stepped nimbly aboard the rolling lawn. As he braced and absorbed rotational momentum, a holographic image formed behind him, cutting off his view of the rest of the hall. Suddenly, it was if he were in a park on Earth. City spires topped forested rise in one direction. Out the other way, one caught a glimpse of the bright sparkle of a sunlit sea.

  Lest we forget.

  Twice more, over the long years, bursts of technical data had arrived, sent by nameless benefactors in the inner solar system. Display projections like these—distant descendants of the weather walls—were among the most stunning of he gifts…proofs that not all of those who dwelt under the Hot had forgotten kinship, or mercy.

  It was partly for them that Saul was working on the suspension-hibernation organelles. Such people deserved the stars.

  He strolled under the limbs of the dwarf trees, past old friends who nodded amiably, and others he still barely knew from out-of-sync duty spans.

  It was much like a visit to the park during his younger days. Of course, no one was fooled. Where on Earth, after all, would one see a person with blue-dyed skin playing chess with a human-shaped thing covered in green fungoid and yellow, symbiotic lichen?

  Diversity, experimentation. It’s how we’ve learned to live.

  He stepped past the statue of Samuel Clemens, for whom the park had been named, and came up to a curtain of water…or rather, near-perfect holographic image of rainbow-diffracting droplets, sprayed from alabaster bowls. The illusory fountain parted without dampening him, and he stepped into a hidden, private glade.

  Under a drooping willow canopy, a diminutive oriental tea house lay surrounded by rhododendrons. Saul sat down, crosslegged, before a clear pool, and watched the carp within beat the denudated water frothy with their swishing tails.

  It was peaceful here. The rumbling of the great wheel’s bearings, the hushed blowing of the air fans…these were sounds that he knew, intellectually, must exist somewhere. But they had long ago faded way in habituation, like the beating of his heart, into a background barely ever recalled.

  “Hello, Saul.”

  He looked up as she stepped out of the tea house, a loose kimono flapping about tanned legs, her sandals clicking on the sandy path. She was drying her black hair with towel.

  It always did it to him, meeting her like this. Her body had long ago gone into the ecosystem. And yet, she walks in beauty.

  “Hello to you, too,” he said. “How’s the water?”

  She smiled and settled down to the grass not five feet away. “Fine. A little choppy. But there was a five-foot swell, and peak. Good surfing.”

  Their eyes met. Silent laughter. What is Illusion? Saul wondered. And what is reality?

  The difference was plain in only one way. She lay as near and clear as an outstretched hand. But he could not touch her, and never would again.

  “You look well,” she offered.

  He shrugged. “Gettin’ older all th’ time.”

  “Even with the perfect symbiotic system?” she teased.

  “Even with the perfect symbiotic system, yeah. Of course, one really has to wonder if it matters. Or if time and age are worth worrying about.” He watched her carefully, for although she could control images almost perfectly, her face hid no more from him than it ever had. She was mysterious. And an open book to him.

  “It might matter.” Her gaze was distant. “We might make it.”

  “Even past perihelion?” He looked at her skeptically.

  She was watching the fish the real water she could not touch or disturb in any way except with light and shadow. “Perhaps. If we do, a whole new set of challenges present themselves. Over the last thirty years I’ve come to realize that time could stretch to eternity for me. If so…”

  He sighed, feeling he could read her thoughts. “My clones have most of my memories, and my good taste in women. They all love you, Virginia.”

  She smiled. “My drones all love you, too, Saul.”

  Their eyes met again, irony and tightly controlled loss.

  “So nu?” He stretched. “You wanted to tell me something?”

  She nodded, and in simulation took a deep breath. “Old Hard Man is dead.”

  Saul rocked back. “Suleiman? Ould-Harrad?”

  “What did you expect? He never went back into the slots, after the aphelion wars…kept watch all that time to make sure we stuck to out agreement, no encounters with any planet but Jupiter outbound. He was very old, Saul. His people mourn him.”

  Saul looked down and shook his head, wondering what Halley would be like without the mystic of the lower reaches.

  Who would there be with the nerve to remind Saul Lintz that he was not, after all, anything even faintly resembling the real Creator?

  “He left you a bequest,” Virginia went on. “It’s waiting for you, in Deep Gehenna.”

  “I’ve never been down there.” Saul felt a queer sensation. Was it fear? He had forgotten what that emotion was, but it might be something akin to what he was experiencing.

  “Neither have I,” Virginia whispered. None of her mechs had ever ventured down into the deepest reaches of the comet nucleus, where the strangest things took refuge in the total darkness. She shook herself.

  “A guide will be waiting for you at the base of Shaft One, at zero five thirty hours, tomorrow.
I—”

  She looked up, her eyes unfocusing for a moment. “I’ve got to go now. Carl and Jeff need a simulation run, a big one. It’ll take a lot of core.” She smoothed her kimono over her tanned legs. “Time to doff this body and strip down to bare electrons.”

  He stood up along with her. They faced each other. His hand reached out.

  “Don’t;” she whispered, her voice gone tense and soft. “Saul…”

  His fingers stroked just short of contact with the smoothness that seemed to be her cheek. For an instant, the very tips shone with a flare of pink, and he felt, almost…

  “Come again soon.” She sighed. “Or just call and talk to me.”

  Then, in a flourish of silk, she was gone.

  His new gibbons, Simon and Shulamit, clung to him as he followed the guide—a man who had once been named Barkley and had managed greenhouses for Earth-orbital factories, before being exiled on a one-way mission into deep space. Now, Barkley was his own greenhouse…his own habitat. He wore an ecosystem in green and orange fibers, and fed on this and that…a little light here, a bit of native carbonaceous matter there…

  Some types of symbiosis scare even me, Saul thought as they navigated a labyrinth of narrow, twisty passages that took them deeper and deeper into the ice. Faint as Halley’s gravity field was at the surface, Saul could feel its pull fade and finally disappear from sensibility. This was the core, the center. Down here the first grain had formed, four and a half billion years ago, beginning a process of accretion as more and more bits gathered, fusing and growing into a ball of primordial matter. The stuff of deep space.

  They squeezed through the thick, oily flaps of a lock-leaf plant… vegetation that acted much like an airlock, for it would react to a leak by plastering leaf atop leaf until air was sealed in on the uncracked side. It was an effective technique, but Saul still found it uncomfortable as they wormed through the sticky mass. The gibbons shuddered, but bore it uncomplainingly.