by David Brin
Here, energy from the fusion piles was rationed, scantily used. In the pale light of his glow-bulb, the passages glittered as he remembered them from the earliest days, with the dark, speckled beauty of native carbonaceous rock and clathrate snow. Saul’s nose twitched at the almondlike scent of cyanide and nitrous oxides… made pleasant by the gene-crafted symbionts in his blood, but stronger than he ever remembered.
He stopped to take samples at a few places along the way. Each time his guide waited patiently, unperturbed.
The traces are getting richer the deeper we go… as I’ve suspected for years now.
It made little sense, of course. Why should the protolife forms pervade the primitive material more and more thickly down here, where the periodic waves of warmth from successive sun passages never penetrated? It was a mystery, but there it was. True, the more complex forms had developed higher up, but the basic stuff was thickest toward the core.
He sighed. Questions. Always questions. How could life be so kind—and so cruel—as to offer up wonders to solve, and give so little time, so few clues?
Their journey resumed, passing narrow clefts where an occasional, green-coated figure could be seen tending a garden of giant mushrooms, or sitting before a small, glowing console, working for the colony, but where she or he chose.
Saul felt enclosed. The ice was heavy, massive all around him. It was oppressive, dank, dark. We’re close, very close to the center, he felt.
“We have arrived.” Barkley swam to one side. Saul looked dubiously at narrow tunnel, barely a man’s width cross. He cleared his throat.
“Stay here, Simon, Shulamit.”
The midget gibbons blinked unhappily. He had to peel them off and plant them on the wall. They watched him wide-eyed as he stooped and crawled into the musty passage.
The claustrophobic feeling grew as he crept. The walls and floor had been rubbed icy and smooth by countless pilgrimages. Somehow, the tunnel felt much colder even than the passages outside. It was only a few meters, but by the time a soft light appeared ahead, Saul was feeling a sharp tension.
When he reached the opening, he simply stared for a few moments.
Four tiny glow-phosphors glimmered above the corners of a carved stone bier. Upon this lay a man-shaped figure. Suleiman Ould-Harrad.
Saul floated out into the chamber. No gravity tugged at him. He was completely weightless.
He grasped one horn of the altarlike bier. The symbiotic Halleyforms had dropped away, leaving Ould-Harrad looking like an old, old man who had gone to his rest after more years than he would have chosen. The eyes, closed in final sleep, nevertheless gave an impression of severe dedication—to his people and to the deity who had so disappointed, yet nurtured him.
Saul paid his respects, remembering.
At last. he looked around. Virginia had spoken of a “bequest.” And yet the chamber wasbare empty save the Blow-bulbs, the corpse, and the carved bier.
“Wait a minute…” Saul muttered. He swiveled upside down and peered closer at the stone. “I… I don’t believe it.”
He fumbled at his belt and pulled forth his rarely used flashlight. Its sharp beam momentarily blinded him and he turned it down while blinking away spots.
Then Saul touched the stone in wonder, his hand bright under the narrow light, stroking faint but clearly symmetrical outlines. His voice was hushed.
“This is what Suleiman found, when he sought his Truth at the heart of the comet. This…”
This was a scientific discovery, and more.
This was astonishment.
He traced the ribs of an ancient sea creature, fossilized n sedimentary rock. Saul stared at the patterned ribcage, at the rough-edged, half-opened mouth, gaping as if caught in mid-chase, frozen in hungry pursuit…and at once he knew that the form he was touching had to be older, vastly older, than even the sun itself.
All around him, the close press of trillions of tons of rock and snow was as nothing to the sudden weight of years.
CARL
Lani’s breath sighed like the soft brush of stone against rough fiber. A weary warrior on the soft battlefield, Carl thought lazily. He snuggled against her, spoon fashion, and she wormed backward in her sleep, seeking him. It was in such seemingly slight, unconscious gestures that people truly knew each other, he thought. Much could be disguised between people, but not the elemental seeking of flesh for comfort and closeness. A delicate sheen of sweat glistened on Lani’s forehead and her legs stirred, fanned, finding him. Then she settled with a small shiver, her breath slipped back into a regular sighing, and she descended into sleep again.
He pushed off gently and drifted out of bed. It was time to make his rounds, but there was no need for her to stir.
His legs and arms reminded him of yesterday’s labors with a sweet tingling pain. Even in barely perceptible gravity, he now felt a hitch there, a tightening there … I’ve lost track, but I must be well past forty, he thought as he brushed his teeth. The mirror agreed: delicate crow’s feet spreading from the eyes, jowly lines, more lightening at the temples. All badges for tours of duty.
In the last thirty years he had been awake about a third of the time. The crises had come and gone, though none that matched the troubles on the outbound orbit. Each time of Lazarus Carl made things right again. He stuck out his tongue at himself in the mirror. And they, gave you the credit. Nobody noticed that you just got them to think out loud until the answers were obvious.
He pulled on a fresh blue coverall, relishing the crisp feel of the soft, native-grown fabric. He had always been messy before, seldom noticing that clothes were dirty until a chance breath informed his nose. It was through such seeming details that Lani transformed his world. They resolutely and precisely divided household chores, so there was no less work for him to do over-all…yet somehow everything seemed in order now, neat and clean.
Yeah, she’s civilized me. He bent and gave her soft kiss. She murmured and burrowed farther into her pillow as he left.
The tunnels were more crowded now than anytime he could remember since the beginning of the Nudge. All through the long dark years a skeleton watch had remained—more crew awake than originally planned, of course, because the Nudge was never finished. There were flinger tubes to polish and realign, launchers to outfit with new shocks and focusers. A steady hail of maintenance, as parts broke or simply wore out. The north-pole launchers had fired right up to the last minute, when the outgassing ice and flying dust made operations impossible. They had to. The outbound Jupiter flyby demanded a large velocity change.
Now the launchers lay snug in their pits, buried thirty meters down, awaiting revival. For they had more bullets to spit at the stars, more momentum to impart… if anyone survived the next few months.
As if we’ll ever really see Jupiter.
Carl sped down Shaft 3, checking every detail along the way. It was an old habit from the days before gene-crafted animals patrolled to eat unwanted Halleyforms. He stopped to pet a pair of hybrid mongoose-ferrets. Saul had tailored for Halleyform policing. They crawled over him, nuzzled at his hand, discovered it was not suitable foodstuff, and lost interest.
He entered Central and gave the screens the usual daily once-over. They were only six weeks from perihelion now, and with every advancing kilometer the comet accelerated them toward almost certain doom. Carl called up the few remaining views available from weathered relays on the surface.
Worse today. Much worse.
He selected a camera looking toward the dawn line. Far away, ivory streamers boiled from promontories that caught the sunrise. The sun slit the sky from the ice, a spreading line of chewing brilliance. Golden fingers stretched between the horizon hills and lit the first smoke of morning. Where the slanted sun found fresh ice, gouts of pale blue and ruddy-green erupted. High above waved plasma banners, auroras already more vast than any seen by Amundsen or Peary.
They had spun Halley again, to even the thermal load. Jeffers had mounted an array of abso
rbent panels to partially control the outgassing and use it for some crude navigation, but in this howling chaos it was impossible to get even a good fix on the stars and tell how they were doing.
Sailing into the storm, he thought. And no compass to steer by.
Halley was no more a ball of ice. Instead it resembled a snowy land mysteriously pocked and acned, all trace of man erased. Countless centers of more-active gas sublimation had riddled the dusty plains, ripping free to join the high vacuum. Layers of heavier particles smeared the hollows. Occasional brown patches of dust suddenly blew away, joining the swooping upward lift of the bright yellow-green coma, visible to Carl as a diffuse haze that stretched across the sky. As he watched, a slow darkening rippled through the gauzy glow, an outward wave from some eruption of dust on the sunward side.
“Pretty bad,” Jeffers said at his elbow. He had grown even leaner in the sleep slots, his skin sallow. “Particle per sec is up three times over what it was last week.”
“It’ll rise almost exponentially from now on,” Carl said. He gave this as a fact when it was only Virginia’s prediction; she had been so accurate lately there hardly seemed a distinction any longer.
“Lost the last of the velocity meters.”
“Not surprising.”
“Just clean blew away.”
“Temperature.”
“The night side’s at two hundred eighty Kelvin atop the dust beds. Dayside’s ’bout fifteen degrees higher. Clapein’ big gradient.”
The thermal load was crucial. As the surface warmed steadily, heat seeped into the core. Over most of Halley, the dust layers would act as a thermal blanket, but only for so long. “What’s the reading at the ice level?”
“Looks to be about eighty degrees colder than the surface.”
“Plenty.”
“Yeah, for now.”
Ice was elastic. The warmer surface expanded, stretched—and cracked. The unrelenting pounding of the launchers had undoubtedly stressed the ice far down into Halley. With the warming would come relieving pressures, fracturing. How much? No numerical simulation could tell them. Halley was already honeycombed by the insect burrowing of humankind. It might crack open entirely, a last wheeze belching forth all the puny human parasites that had afflicted it.
As they watched, pearly gout broke the crusted surface and exploded into a swirling cyclone symphony of excited colors: pea green, violet, sulfur yellow.
“Vidor woke up yet?”
“I ordered him started, but it’ll be another day.”
“Well, no rush anymore. His castle’s gone.”
Jeffers pointed to a slumped mass near the dawn line. The ornate, corbelled, and stranded artwork had been Vidor’s masterwork in ice, sculpted three years after the equatorial battle. For its task—structural support for Shaft 20—it could have been a square box, an igloo. Vidor had added parapets, towers, silvery arabesques, scalloped walls, and blue-white, airy bridges. Now…
“He won’t expect it to still be here.” A sand castle lasts only until the next tide.
“How many you bringin’ out?”
“Everybody,” Carl said. “Except the ones so dead there’s no real hope of saving them, of course.”
Jeffers twisted his mouth around in a familiar, skeptical line. “The med-techs can handle those new treatments?”
“Virginia’s got mechs helping. Speed-trained them with that experimental method of hers.”
“What’d you decide ’bout the ones with partial brain damage?”
“They won’t be much use, but they deserve revival.”
“Yeah. They paid for their tickets, might as well see the finale.”
Some had opposed his decision, but he had swept their objections aside. The rational argument was that with the maximum possible crew awake, they could deal with crises better. Carl’s private motivation, though, was entirely emotional. If Halley split, cracked, burst into a gaudy technicolor plume, at least they would all live out each moment, and face the end as they had begun an expedition. A crew.
That’s something, he thought. Beats sleeping to oblivion.
He frowned. What was that poem Virginia had pointed out to him?
I really shouldn’t think of the program as Virginia, but it’s impossible not to. JonVon doesn’t exist anymore. And what was that poem she quoted yesterday?
Do not go gentle into that good night
Right. Damn right.
“Sir?”
Carl turned, not recognizing the voice.
It was Captain Miguel Cruz.
“Uh…” Carl stared at the man, unchanged from his memory. The jaw was still as solid, assured. The eyes looked out steadily, inspiring confidence. Even the blue tint from slot sleep could not disguise that.
Still, something about the man looked awkward, blocky. Cruz wore shoes, and stood as if gravity mattered.
“I wanted to report for duty,” Cruz said. “I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’m sure. there’s something I can.”
“No, no, you—rest. Just rest,” Carl said quickly. He hadn’t realized the warmings had come so far. Someone should have warned him!
Cruz spoke with a faint accent… Earth speech. “Sir, I’d prefer to be on duty. Perhaps—”
Carl shook his head, embarrassed. “Look, Cap’n, don’t call me sir. I’m Carl Osborn, you may remember me, a spacer. I—”
“Of course I recognize you. I’m somewhat conversant with events since my death,” Cruz said with a faint smile. “I’ve read the log—it’s incredible—and… I think calling you ‘sir’ is quite appropriate.”
Carl stared at the man for a long moment, not knowing what to say. Despite his harrowing illness, Cruz looked… young. Unseasoned. “I… thought, sir, that after you’ve had a few days to recover, you could reassume command.”
Cruz looked at the flurry of data and views of the surface on a dozen screens nearby. “It would take me months to even understand what’s going on. Your tools, techniques, and… Coming here, I saw a woman in Shaft Two who looked like a flying fungus!”
“That’s a weirder, sir,” Carl said. “They live about two klicks down Shaft Two in their own biosphere.”
“But that green stuff—it was even in her hair!”
“It’s a symbiont that retains fluids and increases oxygen processing—I don’t know the details.”
Cruz shook his head. “Incredible. As I said, I haven’t a clue about how things are.”
“But I was hoping…”
“I see,” Cruz said with dawning perception. “Now that we’re back in the inner solar system, you thought perhaps I could help negotiate something with Earth?”
“No sir, we’ve realized that’s a dead end. I only… well, you’re the captain!”
Cruz’s smile was distant, reflective, as though he peered at something far away. “I was the captain of the Edmund, and for a brief time, while we tunneled in here and lived. But now Halley is a ship itself. It’s been sailing under her true captain for decades now. I…I am a passenger.”
“No, sir, that’s not.”
“Someday I aspire to become a ship’s officer. Not captain, however. And I shall not forget who held the helm for so long.”
Cruz held out a hand. Carl blinked, then slowly brought forth his and shook it.
All along he had hoped Saul’s wunderkinder could revive Cruz. Now they had done it, at the very last minute… and it was no panacea after all. He should have seen that. Cruz was right. Miguel Orlando Cruz-Mendoza was no older than the day he had died, but Halley was seventy years transformed by the hand of that clawing, cantankerous, blissfully ingenious and flagrantly stupid lifeform that was too stubborn to stay at home and forget about riding iceballs into oblivion.
To his own amazement, Carl realized he was already evaluating his former captain, weighing his potential place in the crew. Agood man, he thought. I’llput him to work.
* * *
Hours later he found himself returning from an inspection of some
farm caverns and the new modular hydroponics spirals. They were cleverly arranged to extract waste heat from recycled sewage, which fed in overlapping helices around the outside. Ultraviolet poured from an axial cool-plasma discharge, and the huge plants had yearned inward toward it He admired the Promethean task of relocating the surface domes into the core, and was making his way back through Shaft 4 when a slow, grumbling crump jarred him away from his thoughts. It seemed to come from the walls themselves.
He tapped into his private line. “Jeffers!”
—I’m on it. Acoustics are pickin’ it up ever’where.—
“An explosion?”
—No pressure drop. I think it came from the surface.—
Carl called up a quick index-display of the remaining surface cameras. Most showed views of gossamer, upside-down Niagaras—roiling founts of vapor soaring from the ice and whipping in long arcs up into a shifting, gauzy sky. Solar ultraviolet ionized the gas. The sun’s particle pressure then turned these fountains outward, bending the flow into the ghostly streamers of the coma.
Above the far horizon a block of grainy ice tumbled end over end, a kilometer up in the sky. Nearby a huge jagged hole yawned, itself a source of fresh volatiles, green and ruby strands snaking from the pit in twisting filaments.
“Seismic outblow? Or maybe a patch of amorphous ice changing state suddenly.”
When the stressed crust ice gave way, it could rip free entirely. That instantly transferred the sun’s heating to fresh deposits, which hollowed new channels and in time would further deepen the cracks.
Jeffers said, —Yeah, looks it. Virginia was right ’bout that, too.—
“She said it wouldn’t happen very much until perihelion.”
—Well, I guess this’s just a taste of it.—
Carl nodded to himself and cast off. He passed parties of Weirds, swathed in green and purple growths, who scarcely took notice of him. They were checking the old seals for intrusions by older Halleyforms, which they would scrape away and replace with mutated, human-friendly forms the Sauls had worked out.