by David Brin
Further on he met two Saul clones, gently coasting a revived sleep slotter to one of the warmer bins. They nodded in unison and called to him, “Only twenty more probables left.” Carl laughed.
They were fully developed adults now, with minds of their own. They even had the same gestures and accent. But somehow he couldn’t think of them as anything but Saul substitutes. The fact that Saul had successfully cloned himself, while attempts at duplicating other crew members had failed, meant that his odd symbiotic adaptation was crucial. Quite possibly, only he could be copied in the Halley environment. So down through these last few decades, the multiSauls had been invaluable for their resistance to random new ailments, and their curious internal discipline. Saul had used JonVon’s memory-transfer apparatus to instill whole chunks of his own expertise into his clones.
What he had learned might have enabled others to raise natural children without fear. It would have been good, hearing peals of childish laughter in the shafts. But the long fall to perihelion had dampened any such idea. No one could bear the knowledge that the promise of childhood might never blossom.
Carl’s comm buzzed and Virginia said, —You were doubting my prognosis?—
“That blowout came a little early, don’t you think?”
—No. After all, I deal in probabilities, sir, not predictions. If you want, why don’t you call up Lefty d’Amario? He can check my calculations.—
Somehow the old tingle still ran through him when the coquettish flavor laced through her voice. “Okay, I’m nor griping. No need to get huffy. You monitoring those stress meters Jeffers implanted all over?”
—Of course. I can always spare a nanosec or two.—
“And?”
—Minor tremors here and there. Some faulting along Shaft Two. Nothing to get perturbed about.—
“Great. You been filling in Cap’n Cruz?”
—You are captain, Carl. Everybody keeps telling you, even if you don’t like it.—
“I didn’t ask for the job.”
—Nobody else could handle what’s coming.—
He felt a sudden spurt of the old anger. “What’s coming is death, Virginia.”
—I know no such thing.—The voice was prim, circumspect.
“You did the simulations yourself.”
—Number-crunching isn’t reality. I should know, eh, friend Carl? There may be variances in the cross-correlation matrices.—
“Don’t give me all that. Halley’s scraping in too close, and she’s been too battered to stand this. The only question is whether we’ll fry or boil when this iceberg blows apart.”
—There are many unpredictables. But also some measures we can take.—
Carl had been smoothly coasting down a tunnel, automatically checking for cracks. This remark made him stop. “What can we do?”
—Pipe some of the surface heat inward, to offset some of the stress arising from the temperature differentials. In other words, reverse the outflow system and spread the surface heat into lower, cooler ice.—
“And if some inside ice vaporizes? The pressures—”
—We vent it. It will aid in shielding from the sun.—
“Ah.” He felt a flush of hope. “How come you didn’t mention this before?”
—I just thought of it. I’m only a machine.—
Faintly, he heard the soft roar of surf, the whisper of trade winds, a distant rumble of ocean squalls gathering. Virginia’s metaphorical world within the network. Somewhere a voice laughed, “Ke Pii mai nei ke kai!”
So she had company, somehow. He smiled. “Look, I’ll call a meeting. We should look into—”
She laughed. —Same old Carl. One minute you’re grousing about everything, but give you a problem to work on and—bingo!—
He flushed. She had always had an uncanny ability to stay one move ahead of him. He pushed off along a tunnel that led home.
—There’s plenty of time to figure out the engineering, Cap’n. Go on about your business. —The tinkling chuckle, ringing in his ears. —Lani’s waiting.—
And she was. She embraced him silently and they spun lazily in the middle of the room, oblivious. Carl had at last mastered the art of putting business aside once he came back to their small apartment, and this time he did so again, even though the implications of Virginia’s remarks were enormous. He was tempted to tell Lani, but then he held back. Hope had been kindled among them so many times over the decades, only to be snuffed out by the brute certainty of some unyielding astronomical fact. So he banished all the fretful chorus of thoughts and simply kissed her.
“My!” She breathed deeply. “Pretty torrid for midday—particularly after a hard night.”
“We do our best.”
“I go on shift soon. Let’s have a quick lunch.”
“Great.” He launched himself for their tiny kitchen, made workable only because they could use the walls and ceiling.
“There’s some hard copy on your printer, by the way,” Lani said, fetching some sauce used on the braised vegetables and mute-chicken from the evening before. “From Virginia.”
“Oh?’
He kicked over to the printer. Usually it was used only for emergencies or entertainments, not ordinary ship’s business.
It was a poem.
Nature knows nothing of death.
Not in the cat’s lazy smug meeeeooow
Not in the antelope’s mad kick
As the lion makes its meal.
Neither in the tidal lifting of a sluggish sea
By a star’s dumb gradients,
Or a flower’s nod, an insect’s frantic dance.
Live isall the world ever says.
Of alternatives it is mute.
Only in us and our unending forward tilt
Can death live.
Each sharp moment is free.
And all that could happen
Might yet be.
Carl studied it, frowning. “She’s getting better.”
Lani came over and read it slowly. “I’m always surprised anew,” she said softly. “Virginia truly is in there, somewhere.”
Carl shook his head. “She’s not in anything, really. She’s everywhere. The system has expanded far beyond just JonVon’s banks. She’s Halley now.”
Lani suddenly turned and embraced him. “We’re all Halley.” He breathed in the aromatic warm musk of her and felt an easing of old pains. Whydid it take me so long to see that this fine woman could be a whole world to me? And what if I never had seen it?
He felt Virginia around them all, sensed the entire community of Halley as a matrix threaded through the ancient ice. They were no longer buried inside, going for a ride. No Percells, no Orthos. They were a new, beleaguered society, a new way for a versatile primate to stretch further, to be more than it was. They were not merely in the center of the old dead ice, they were the heart of the comet.
“Yeah, I suppose we are,” he said.
VIRGINIA
It was a show that humans had never seen before, and quite likely never would again. The steady hammering of the launchers for over three decades had altered the infalling ice mountain’s orbit, shifting the nodes of the stretching ellipse. Earth’s orbit clung to the sun, deviating from a circle by less than two percent. But Halley’s eccentricity had been ninety-six percent even before the machines of men began their persistent nudging. Now the curve tightened with each passing hour, bringing a searing summer. Halley had never plunged this close to the eroding Hot.
The tunnels and shafts made excellent acoustic pipes. As ice around and surged against new frictions, the groans echoed deep into the core, waking sleepers—though there were few of those, as the crucial hour approached.
Plunging fifty kilometers nearer with every second, Halley rushed toward its ancient enemy. Each past encounter had stripped a skin of ice from the comet, but now it rumbled and wrenched with new forces that sought to break it on the anvil of its sun.
Virginia watched the howling, blindin
g storm through electronic eyes. As each camera died from the stinging blast of dust and plasma, she deployed another from deep vaults. The sun loomed twice as large as seen from Earth. But from the surface there was no incandescent disk to see. Halley spun, but saw no sunrise. Instead, a white-hot corona simmered overhead. A patch of seething brightness marked where the Hot’s outpouring met the ion flood exploding from Halley, and victory inevitably went to the Hot. Cracked, ionized, the gases turned, deflected aside, and swept around the small iceworld in a magnetized blanket. This roiling atmosphere had no loyalty to its parent, but instead raced outward.
Halley’s twin tails now unfurled across a span greater than Mercury’s orbit. The twisting, glimmering plasma banner held less water than many of Earth’s larger ponds, but the sun’s blaring light made it the most visible object in the solar system. Advanced inhabitants of a nearby star could have picked the nearly straight, shimmering curtains out from the central star. The dust tail, in contrast, was a curved reddish band, broken by dark lanes, sparkling with pebbles and micron-sized grains.
But those riding the parent ice mote could not see the most beautiful tail ever to grace a comet in all history. As it sped deeper into its star’s gravity well, the glowering coma of unbearable luminescence spread and devoured the whole sky. Blinded now, Halley could not even see its nemesis. The sky glared down everywhere.
Virginia had calculated this effect carefully, for it was the key. If she had allowed Halley to remain spinless, the sunward face would have soared toward the four-hundred-degree temperature that a solid body would have at this distance from the sun. Now, she watched heat-flux monitors buried tens of meters in the ice. As the warmth seeped deeper, she spun the iceworld faster to smooth out the effect, allowing the night side to radiate into the black of space.
But the black was fading. Soon the comet’s own summer air reflected sunlight down onto the shaded face of Halley from all sides, and temperatures rose faster as perihelion approached.
“How’s it look?” Carl watched Central’s screens with Lani at his side. “We’ve already blown off twenty meters of ice!” he said sharply. “How long’ll it take to rip us apart?”
Virginia sensed his rising level of conflict. He was a man who solved problems, and in this great crisis he had no role. Like the others, he was a helpless passenger on his own ship.
“We are safe,” she said reassuringly, using a thread of alto tones that made her voice richer than the original had ever been.
“The shaft seals?”
“Intact,” Virginia said, displaying views of the steel-capped lids in place two hundred meters inside each shaft. Beyond them, giant plugs of ice barred the Hot’s way.
“Stop worrying,” Lani said gently, putting a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “We might as well enjoy the view.”
Virginia thought later that it was particularly ironic that Lani’s words were punctuated by a long, rolling boom that penetrated into Central. The spherical room vibrated, creaking. Equipment popped free of holders.
“A cave-in,” Virginia announced, throwing an image onto the central screen. A milling mass of snow and ice jutted through tunnel walls, falling with aching slowness.
“Damn!” Carl said, his voice tight. “Where?”
“Site Three C, as our projection suggested.”
“Pressure.”
“Sealed tightly. No incursions.” Virginia analyzed Carl’s voice patterns and found a high level of tension. If only he would listen to Lani more…
The basic human reaction to events of immense size was to hunker down.
Virginia had noted this in the final days before perihelion. Her mechs roved the honeycombed tunnels, testing for leaks and sudden fountains of vagrant heat. Seldom did they meet anyone. Even Stormfield Park was deserted now, the carousel stopped.
People did their jobs, served their shifts—and holed up with a few loved ones, watching the gaudy maelstrom outside through the video displays. Jeffers had developed a new kind of light pipe that could snake out from a deeply buried camera, and thus reduce risk, but still high-pressure vents opened and gushers of foaming, red-rich mud flooded many of Virginia’s observation stations.
She reserved a tiny piece of Core Memory for her “office.” There she sat amid a hum of machinery, feeling the reassuring rub of a chair, the flickering of consoles. I wish I could spare enough Core to go for a swim, she thought. I can feel my own tensions, too…
As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand years had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well-springs.
Thus, the gathering background chorus of tremors, the crump of a crumbling wall, the low gravelly mutter of strained ice—all these sounds drove the crew inward. Not into solidarity, but to the fleshy reassurance and consolations of fellow spacers, or weirders, or Hawaiians. Like sought like for what might be the final hours.
Except for one lonely figure, who seldom left Central.
“Saul,” she said to him as an amber plume spouted from the surface, throwing streaks of lacy light across the familiar, lined face. He had been sitting by the display a long time, his mind far away as he rolled a small stone in his hand, over and over. “Saul?”
“Ah—oh, yes?” His lined face looked up from the bit of rock.
“I’m sure you could watch elsewhere.”
He shrugged. “Stormfield’s closed. I’m not needed in sick bay right now. There’s no place else I particularly want to be.”
“I am sure Carl and Lani would welcome you. They are awake, watching.”
He raised a hand. “No, I’ll let them be. Don’t want to push in where I’m just a fifth wheel.”
“You worry over that old stone a lot,” she said to change the subject. He had been turning it over in his hands for hours.
He looked at the dark gray lump. “It’s from Suleiman’s bier. I’ve carried it around for weeks, studying it. But that’s… that’s not what I was thinking about right now.”
His gaze drifted over to the refrigerated unit holding sixteen liters of superchilled organic processor. Virginia thought she understood.
“You are with me no matter where you are in Halley, Saul.”
He blinked, nodded. “I know… it’s just…”
“Just that here the physical proximity of my organic memory is reassuring?”
He smiled the old wry smile, slightly puckered lips and crinkled eyes together conveying an irony that was never far from his own image of himself, she knew. “I’m that obvious?”
“To the one who loves you, yes.”
“There are times I wish…”
“Yes?”
“I could have found a way to clone you.”
“So you would know me—or someone like me—in the flesh?”
“Memory only makes some things worse.”
“There…” She felt no real hesitancy, and in any case with her speed the indecision would take only milliseconds, but she had to maintain the nuances of a living persona. “… There are our recordings.”
He chuckled dryly. “You know how many times I’ve played them.”
A hint of shyness, yes. “I could… augment them.”
“No!” He slammed a fist into his web-chair. “I want the real thing, the real… you.”
“It would be.”
“When we recorded ourselves, it was a lark, like couples taking Polaroid pictures of themselves in the bedroom. We never intended that only one of us would play them back.” He shook his head. “This way, without you—the real you…”
“But I am me. More real than any holo-image! And if I enter into the sensory link, it is an older and pr
obably wiser Virginia whom you will meet. Me.”
Saul had resisted this suggestion before, for reasons she did not fully understand. But now, perhaps out of the pressing loneliness that danger brings, he lifted his head and stared directly into her opticals. “I… it would?”
She knew she would not guarantee that it would be some genuine Virginia, fixed in amber. She was not the personality that had flooded into the cramped JonVon persona and inundated it. Slow evolution and self-actuated advances had brought her a vast distance since those years. But Saul did not have to know that nor did anyone, and it would be of comfort to him.
“Come to me, Saul.”
He put aside the stone and reached for the neural tap. To her surprise, she felt nervous.
Perhaps for her it would be a returning, too.
Shortly before perihelion the sun stopped its retreat to the south and began rising again. As the disk grew, it swept toward the equator. There was perpetual noon as the comet shuddered and erupted beneath the unending blaze. The southern hemisphere, gutted and gouged for months, now cooled as the north came under ferocious attack.
Sublimating water and carbon dioxide carried heat away from the fast-spinning mote. Its surface cracked in many places, following the weakening imprints Man had stamped upon it for seven decades. Fresh volatiles sublimed and exploded. Sharp chunks weathered to stubs within minutes, as though sandblasted. Pebbles rose and formed hovering sheets which momentarily shielded the ice beneath, then were blown away to join the gathering dust tail.
At the north pole, so far spared the worst, the clawing sun bit deep. Since the times of great plagues, some factions had buried the irrecoverably dead deep in the ice near the pole. Now the Hot found them.
By chance, the sight was visible over a light pipe that surfaced in a sheltered nook at the exact north pole. Exploding gases beneath lifted the wrapped mummies and hurled them skyward. Blistering heat released ionized oxygen from the ice, and the bodies burst into flame, lighting the landscape with momentary orange pyres. The torches were thrown, tumbling and flaring, up and out against the immense, unknowing forces. They hung in the sky for long moments, like distant glittering castles, and then winked out, plunging forever into the river that rolled out from the sun.