The Heart of the Comet

SAUL

The world came back slowly, and not too pleasantly. It tingled, deep down at the roots of his nerves, and then everything began to itch.

He could not scratch.

Later, as the tickling finally began to fade, there came his first real sensation of deep cold.

It was a fevery chill, this slow returning to awareness. Like a sickness—a bad one in which the mind is disabled, scattered, and yet some core part of a man knows that it wants to think—to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.

It was also like a nightmare, with blurred images, fragments of voices murmuring and fading, beyond recall or meaning. Only he dreamer knew that this time there would be no quick, relieved awakening.

There was one way out of this dream—a long, slow ride to the end.

The first time Saul felt certain that he wasn’t imagining things came as a blank whiteness overhead slowly swam into focus. His eyelids fluttered with hesitant feedback—actually responding to his will.

Shut, he commanded. The light closed off to a muted, rosy hue.

Open! he ordered desperately, afraid the world had gone away again. But nerves flashed and muscles fired on cue. A torrent of light poured in again.

It’s cold… Cold as the High Priest’s heart.

And Saul remembered a dry, freezing morning in the Judean hills, the scent of century-old cedars and the chill of a hope dying.

Flames licked the sky in the direction of Gan Illana. There was more burning on Mount Herzl. But in Jerusalem the Armies of The Lord advanced in song, led on one side by a swarm of golden crosses, on another by the Mahdi and all of the Salawite mullahs. And in the center, chanting Hebrew psalms and carrying the Rebuilt Ark, the Kahanim priests of the new Sanhedrin. The faithful surged around the ruins of smashed buses, chanting in joy and carrying bricks and mortar.

Unable to move anything but his eyelids, Saul seemed to see it all again, played out against the pale white ceiling. It was a memory of smoke, and the acrid odor of superstition.

U.N. “peacekeepers” stood watch as the Architects planted the flags of three faiths on the Temple Mount and proclaimed the land holy in three tongues. The hover tanks had not moved to stop the riots. The world press hardly covered the slaughter of those resisting the new theocracy.

To the world it was a great day. “Peace” had come at last to the broiling navel of the world. Billions looked on it as a miracle as representatives of three great religions joined together in a holy cause.

To build a Temple to the Ultimate.

To fulfill prophecy.

To erect a place to speak to God.

Even after the fires had dimmed, after the Levites, Salawites, and Tribulationists had sealed the land, smoke still rose up to Mount Zion where he had watched. The pungent, sweet smell of roasting, sacrificial lambs.

The scent of Leviticus climbed once more into Heaven, curling under the nostrils of the Lord.

Saul closed his eyes again, and slept.

When next he awoke there was motion. A figure moved into view. He blinked, trying to focus.

It was an older face. Sterner. But he recognized it.

Saul felt his lips being moistened. He worked his mouth and managed to whisper one syllable.

“C… Carl?”

The visage overhead nodded. “Yes, Saul. It’s me. How are you feeling?”

Saul lifted his eyebrows. The lazy man’s shrug conveyed more than words could at this point. Carl Osborn responded with a smile, not a particularly friendly smile, but ironic. “Good. Your unslotting is proceeding normally. You should be up and about soon.”

Soul’s voice felt dry. Dusty. “Is… is there peace now?”

Carl blinked, then shook his head. “Most wakers ask what date it is. Or, if they’ve already been out, they ask if we’ve beaten the gunk. But not you. Not Saul Lintz.”

There was no antagonism in the remark. Saul managed to answer Carl’s wry smile with one of his own. “Okay, then. What… what’s the date?”

Carl nodded. “Eight years before the new century.”

So, Saul thought. Thirty years. That was a long nap.

“Aphelion…” he breathed.

“Not far from it,” Carl agreed. “We’re thirty a.u. out. You should see the sun. It’s not much brighter than the moon in a desert night.”

Where no person has gone before.

“The Nudge Launchers?” Saul asked. “Are they…”

Carl frowned. “We’ll get ’em built.”

Saul read a lot in that expression. It answered his first question. No peace. But we’re still here, so it can’t be all bad.

His body felt as if it were made of lead, but he managed to turn his head. “So who’s is charge now?… Kuyamato? Trugdorff?…Johannson?”

Carl shook his head. “They’re all dead, or dead-slotted.”

“Then who?”

Carl made a restless shrug. “I’m operations officer. If anyone’s in charge, I am.”

Saul settled back, slowly absorbing this.

He is older, harder. I wonder how many more years Carl has spent awake, while I slept.

“So do you need a doctor?” Frankly, he wouldn’t have expected to be revived, if it were up to Carl.

“Yeah, that’s right, Saul. We need a doctor. And Earth suggested it might be a good time to let you have another look at the diseases. Some seem to have mutated.”

Carl hovered over him for another moment. His lips pressed together. “I ought to be honest with you, Saul. The biggest reason I had you taken off ice was because we need Virginia.”

“Virginia,” Saul breathed. Remembering.

Carl nodded, his mouth tight. “Rest, Saul. You won’t be called on to do much. Not right away. I’ll check in on you later.”

Saul said nothing as the tall man slipped out of his peripheral vision. The years still had to be unsorted. Dreams that he had not quite experienced felt like water behind an overfilled dam. Faces riffled like shuffling cards.

Faces of women—Miriam, Virginia, Lani Nguyen. Faces of comrades—Nicholas Malenkov, dying in his arms.

And the ghost of Simon Percell. Through the fibercloth walls, through the ice mountain that surrounded him, Saul felt he could almost hear a soft, ironic laughter. It stayed with him when he fell into a deep, natural sleep.

Twice more he stirred briefly. The first time when a tech he recognized from the crew of the Edmund—nowamiddle-aged woman with a strange, greenish stain on one side of her face—greeted him mildly and offered him a drink. He had to ask her to speak slowly because she seemed to have picked up a queer accent.

An oddly handsome man without any hair at all was his caretaker the next time. A burn on one cheek seemed more like a brand than anything an accident might produce. Saul thought it wise to forbear comment.

Wait. Absorb. Learn.

The slot tenders were not as busy as they once had been. The pace was casual, but under it all, the tension was still there. In the hushed conversations he overheard, there were words, phrases, that he could not follow. He was allowed to sit up, the next time the watch shift changed, and he saw that there was some sort of ceremony as new slot tenders took charge.

No. There is no peace.

He saw on the wallboard that two recuperation lights shone. One for him. One for Virginia. She had kept her promise, and followed him down the River of Time.

Clever girl, Saul thought. I knew you could do it.

I can’t wait to tell you how much I really love you… however old you are by now.

With that wry thought, Saul slept again, and knew that he would be stronger when next he awakened.

CARL

Kepler’s Laws seemed almost biological now. Carl stared at the orbital display and sighed. Following a long ellipse out from the sun’s sting felt a lot like aging.

You start with a hot, fevered time when movement is rapid, life burgeons. Spring, a swelling heat, and ripe, quick summer. It passes. Things calm, raw reality seeps in, you slow and cool and come to terms with the fundamental hostility of the universe. Like growing old.

Simple Newtonian dynamics explained it all. The eccentric, moody Kepler had deduced the basic laws governing elliptical motion in a classic, brute-force manner: staring at the data until order seemed to ooze out, the eye bringing forth structure where another’s would see only a hash of numbers. Carl respected that ability far more now, after years of dealing with mountains of data, faithfully delivered by the interlocking systems of Halley Core.

He stepped Halley’s orbit forward on the big screen, watching the long ellipse advance, the scale swelling as the warm realm of the inner planets dwindled, circles sucked into the vortex of the sun. They were far past Saturn now, turning with an aching lethargy toward aphelion, beyond Neptune. Gravity’s weakening tug nudged the ice mountain feebly, the sun’s gossamer apronstrings.

He still came to Central every few days to check, to touch the consoles and renew his faith that this long night must have an end.

Like growing old.

How old am I,anyway? Two years serving under Ould-Harrad, after Saul and Virginia went into the slots. I was damned glad to slide into that chilly sleep myself. Worn out and depressed.

Then another shift under Lieutenant Morgan a decade later. Less harrowing, sure, but boring. I got heavily into the sense-stim, just to blot out the monotony of ice and dark. Must’ve run through every tape in the library a dozen times. JonVon was a help, rearranging and blending sensations and dramas. Some odd, delightful effects there… Still, much more than two years and I would’ve been ready for the rubber room.

Now it’s been—what? four more years? seems longer! —since Calciano woke me to take his place. The guy was pretty damned near gone, too.

He examined his reflection in a nearby blank screen, the gray flecks at the temples. Well, Virginia liked ’em older… Maybe now I can compete. I was a little hard to take, I guess. Brash and idealistic and pretty abrasive, I’m sure. Now, though…

He shook his head. Whatever he was becoming as a man… well, it was secondary. His main focus was on being a commander, or what passed for one these days. Plugging away, keeping the factions working together with minimal friction. He’d love to slip back into that dreamy cold sleep, let go, ride home free…

But there was no one left in the slots he would trust with the important aphelion maneuvers ahead. On the display they were a mere finger’s width from the turnaround, a lonely blue pinprick.

He’d had the time to bone up on Halley’s Comet, something he had skipped when applying for this mission. It had seemed irrelevant: Halley was another iceball, bound for the outer system and zones of space nobody had ever seen. That was enough for an ambitious youngster of twenty-five.

He had been chagrined to find he was even pronouncing the name wrong. Astronomers and space workers called it Halley with a short a; ground-huggers of his native North America used a long a, as if it were “Hailey.” But the discoverer had pronounced it with a w in the middle, so it should sound like “Hawley.” Carl imagined a haughty Englishman enunciating the name with one eyebrow arched, his lips turned into an amused, condescending smile.

They were riding the comet on its thirty-first passage since an ancient Chinese first recorded seeing the splash of shimmering light in the sky—a span that dwarfed the long years Carl had spent, and humbled the empires of Man. The fourth recorded apparition, in 11 B.C., came close to the birthdate of Jesus of Nazareth, and some said it must have been the Star of Bethlehem.

We could use some salvation now, Carl thought, and thumbed off the display. Andwhere’s that goddamn Jeffers?

As if called, the hatch creaked and Jeffers appeared, his long rusty beard flowing over his skinsuit neck yoke like a lurid moss. The man had argued that letting body hair grow was only sensible, providing much-needed natural insulation. Carl had countered that it got in the way of suit fixtures and fouled the helmet placements, but he knew why Jeffers liked it: the image of Methuselah, of wisdom, of the old hermit in the woods.

“How’d it go?” Jeffers asked. If anything, his southern drawl had thickened with the years. They were all trying to keep alive whatever links they had to distant, vibrant Earth.

Carl shrugged. “I sent the weekly transmission yesterday. Got the usual short response today, thirteen hours twelve minutes later.”

“Any shows?”

“Here.” Carl hit a key and an index scrolled forward. He stopped at a NEWS entry and shifted to realtime. “Feast your eyes.”

A woman announcer grinned at them, her torso paint aswirl with technicolor curves. Her nipple ornaments glittered as she took a deep breath and said enthusiastically. “Arrested on two counts of public foreplay today were Starlet Angela Xeno and Compassatino Rilke, line player for the Visigoths.” A 3D picture of a smiling couple, half-nude. “Insiders say the incident was publicity for the Visigoths’ upcoming tube match against the Wasters. Tuning to.”

Carl snapped it off. “There’re three new porno sestinas, too, if you want them.”

Jeffers made a face. “Naw, gettin’ so I can’t take that stuff anymore.”

“Me neither.” He never had, but it was a good idea not to disparage the tastes of people you had to work with; another small fact he had learned.

“When’s Malcolm comin’?”

“Any minute now.”

Central was one of two common meeting grounds between the factions. They all had to run into each other in the harvesting bins of Hydroponics, but Central was the obvious spot for real negotiations.

Jeffers slid into a webbing, stretching. “Just got back from the surface. A man can hardly move anything out there. Lotsa mechs are down for repairs and the rest drag around like they’s drugged.”

Carl nodded. Every month it got slightly worse. The persistent cold, the malfs, the difficulty of making new parts or repairs… “I wonder if there’ll be some of those titanium-cylinder manifolds in the Care Package.”

“Hope so.” Jeffers frowned. “I still wonder how they got all those parts and supplies into such a small package.”

“They’ve gotten better at high-boost, I suppose. It’s been over Thirty years, after all.”

Earth had undoubtedly made great progress in propulsion of high-quality loads for the Mars and asteroid bases. Still, it had been a surprise to be told, three years ago, that Control was sending a cargo of much-needed parts and supplies, boosting them out under enormous acceleration. They would arrive before aphelion, and could help crucially in the Nudge. Even with three decades of Earthside’s improvements, a package like that was expensive—but nothing, of course, compared with the investment already sunk into the Halley Mission.

“I ran that optical sighting through JonVon, got a measurement,” Jeffers said. “The Care Package is riding a fusion torch. Big orange plume behind it.”

“Already decelerating?”

“Yeah, but not much. Guess they’re going to slam on the brakes right at the end.”

With rendezvous two years away, the Care Package still had to shed four kilometers per second to come alongside Halley. News of it had been a real morale boost. Carl hoped its arrival would lift them all, bring back some of the spirit the mission had enjoyed in its first days.

“Major Clay—our new contact guy—said he had included a bottle of 1986 Malescot St. Exupery Margaux.”

“Hot damn! I can’t pronounce it, but I’ll sure as hell help drink it.”

“A bottle of the best from Halley’s twen-cen apparition, he…”

“Great. Just fine.”

Jeffers was plainly pleased at this fragment of news. Carl had saved details of the Care Package, dealt them out one at a time to keep enthusiasm up. An extravagant gesture, shipping old grape juice across the solar system—but Earth, despite its madnesses, did understand something of the psychology out here. It was a masterful touch.

One hell of an improvement over the hysteria under Ould-Harrad—one month I’m a hero, the next I’m a Percell freak. And under Criswell they didn’t answer at all. If it weren’t for Phobos Base relaying newslink on the sly, we couldn’t have proved Earth was even inhabited Sounds like things are settling down now though.

He rubbed his face, massaging some of the ache away. He tapped in instructions and the walls lit. Best to put on something pretty, calm, warm. Ah, here. Sunny day breaking over Hong Kong Free State.

The swarming masses of junks and flyers always pleased him. A baking sun had just lifted free of green, artificial hills to the east. A rainbow grinned, upside down beneath the vapor fall of a floating luxury home. Heat shimmer made the distant alabaster spires dance.

The hatch clanked again and Malcolm appeared. He was lean, and his face was set in a perpetual dark glower, black eyes peering out distrustfully. Without a word Malcolm settled into a webbing and nodded. “We want more from Hydro.”

Carl sighed. “You know the terms.”

“It’s not enough. We’re all losing body weight.”

For a nasty instant Carl was tempted to say, Try eating some of your kids. The ones you insisted you had a “right” to have. But he kept his face impassive and said, “We’re getting as much out of Hydro as we can, you know that. Look over the numbers.”

“But we’re growing, and the agreement doesn’t allow for that.”

“Those kids were your choice.”

“Look, we been over this,” Malcolm said evenly. “Normal people get sick easier. We got to keep a larger population in case there’s another plague.”

Jeffers, who had been chewing his lip all this time, burst out, “You just want to take over, is all. Couple decades, you’ll outnumber us Percells.”

Malcolm said stiffly, “The normal people will keep to our own zone.”

“We see you guys around in Three C—you movin’ m there? Jeffers asked.

“No.” Malcolm sniffed derisively. “We can’t stand the smell.”

“Delicate li’1 bastards, aren’t you?”

Carl said mildly, “Stop trading insults. We’ve got things to negotiate.”

“Those kids are bastards, y’know—you’ve got some kinda mass breeding program going, don’t you?” Jeffers asked sharply.

Malcolm reddened. “That’s no business of you Percells.”

“You treat women like breeding stock.”

“Cut it,” Carl said firmly. Malcolm was sensitive about the fact that their children were stunted, victims of Halleyform intrusions into the womb and development problems in low-G. They seldom lived long. Reproducing in such a hostile biological environment was simply a bad gamble, and the Orthos had lost.

He let the men stare sourly at each other for a moment and then went on, “We’ve got to do something about the slot problem. The medical inventory is even worse than I’d thought. There aren’t enough fresh crew left. Nowhere near enough to do the remaining work of setting up the Nudge.”

Jeffers asked, “How’s that possible? There’re hundreds.”

“Were hundreds.” In the first ten years they had cycled most of the mission crew through, before they got the green gunk and viroids really under control. If the thawed-out ones got sick—and a lot did—they were popped back into the slots. For replacements they pulled fresh sleepers.

“Killing off normal people, that’s what you were doing,” Malcolm said.

Carl sighed. “Forget that crap. We did what we had to. Orthos got sick fast, that’s all.”

“Not the way I heard it. We.”

Jeffers spat out, “You unfroze twenty years after rendezvous! You know nothin’ about the hard time.”

“I can read records! And the oldsters tell us. I know you unfroze normal people more often than you had to.”

“Because the Ortho faction wanted to keep their numbers up. It was their idea,” Carl explained. “Look, I was there, you weren’t. Until Calciano handed things over to me, every commander was an Ortho. I’m not going to try to crack through that bonehead bias of yours anymore. Just listen, okay?”

Malcolm nodded reluctantly. The man kept a certain tattered dignity about him, despite his grimy uniform and matted hair. Usually he made some show of being clean and neat. The Orthos must be having a hard time of it lately.

There were internal disputes, too. The Ortho-run tunnels had as wide a range of fanatics as the Percell zones, maybe more. Malcolm was hard to take sometimes, but he was the only one all Orthos trusted to speak for them—much the same position Jeffers served among Percells.

Carl could respect Malcolm’s position, but could only pity the stupidity of the people he had to represent. Many Orthos would never compromise with Percells now, after all that had happened, the wasted blood and bile. Very well—but cooperation on some tasks was essential.

We need more help to Hydro, Carl said. “Equipment keeps breaking down and the only way to make up is with labor.”

“You want more work from us?” Malcolm said resentfully.

“Right. But it can’t eat into the Nudge program.”

“Impossible. We’re stretched too far as it is.”

“Orbits wait for nobody,” Jeffers said. “We got to have the launchers ready by aphelion or else there’ll none of us see Earth again.”

Carl nodded. “And I doubt we could survive an extra ten years.”

Malcolm’s lean mouth set in a determined line. “I get it. You want to unslot a bunch of our people, then work them to death.”

“That’s not it at all.” Carl had anticipated this reaction, but not so soon. He’s edgy, suspicious. I don’t envy him, having to deal with Quiverian and Ould-Harrad and the Arcists. Of course, Jeffers doesn’t have it easy either, coping with Sergeov and the radical Percells.

Carl said calmly, “I think we’ll get by if you simply stop trying to produce children. That will free more women to work full time.

“Uh-uh. We got a right to reproduce.”

Carl thought bitterly, Now youunderstand how we felt about the EarthBirth Laws. He put the thought aside—a dim dispute from another life—and leaned forward earnestly. “Look, think this through. We have.”

The hatch clanged. Carl looked up in surprise to see Saul Lintz gingerly making his way into the center of the console banks. “Saul, this is a parley. You’re not invited. And frankly, I think you’re too weak to.”

“Nonsense. I heard where you were and decided to come have a look. You’re the, ah, Ortho leader?” Saul peered at Malcolm as if trying to place him from the past.

As the two made introductions, Carl thought. Could he use Saul to persuade Malcolm? Saul’s prestige in suppressing the Black Year plagues carried weight. How much did Lintz know of what had happened? He would have to step carefully here.

“Oh, I understand the problems,” Saul said to Malcolm. “I tapped into the running inventory, projections, the maintenance programs. What I want to know,” he said carefully, looking at Jeffers and Carl, “is why the Nudge Launchers have been reprogrammed.”

Damn. “It’s preliminary, since only a few of the launchers have been built yet. We’ve sharpened our analysis.”

“No, that’s not it. They’re set to bring us nowhere close to Earth, after the Jupiter slingshot.” Saul looked at Carl steadily.

“Look, I was going to sit down and go over this with you in detail as soon as you—” Carl sighed. “Okay. Here, I’ll play the squirt from Earth, same as we got it years ago. You might as well have the full story.”

It wasn’t hard to find. He had replayed it incessantly, and so had many of the Orthos, he imagined.

The main screen glowed, fluttered. NEWS.

A burly announcer looked mirthful, shrugged comically, and said, “Remember that trag ex-ed on Halley’s Comet? How they went balloka and started checking out from the bugs they found? Well, here’s how they looked when Orbital got ’em in sights again.”

A dry chuckle. The screen showed a silvery profile swimming in blackness—the Edmund.

“Some of the nonbuggy ones jumped into their mother ship and flew home. Only nobody’s nonbuggy out there now, so Fed said—you know what Fed said, right?”

The leering, wide-eyed face of the announcer swelled, smiled broadly with impossibly white teeth, then dwindled as down-tonal sound effects rose and—the screen flared with brilliant blue light.

“Scintillatin’ sendoff, yes! All gone-free for you and me, to keep bugs out of the hurly-clime. Went up clean, too, one big fuse.”

Carl snapped it off. “Welcome to the coming new century,” he said sardonically.

“Good… Lord…” Saul was dazed. His gray pallor slowly reddened and he blinked rapidly. “They… they weren’t going to take any chances.”

Malcolm said bitingly, “Why should they? Even if Earth quarantined the Edmund, how could they be sure?”

Jeffers said levelly, “You sound like you’re agreein’ with what they did.”

“I can understand it.” Malcolm eyed Jeffers with open dislike.

“Only good thing,” Jeffers said cuttingly, “is that Linbarger and those Ortho assholes all bought it.”

Saul gritted his teeth, as if swimming up from some personal memory that had overwhelmed him. Carl suspected which one: the old Zionist associations were broad enough to be triggered by anything like this.

“I expected some strong measures…but to…”

Carl said flatly, “You wanted to know—okay, there it is. We can’t go back to Earth. Ever. They’ll never believe we’re not disease carriers, and they’ll be damned right, too.”

Saul’s eyes seemed to swell in his papery, pale face, sensing possibilities. “Then… where can we…”

“That’s what we have to decide. We’re aiming for a close pass of Jupiter on the inbound, and we can slingshot ourselves just about anywhere from there.”

Saul said distantly, “I see.”

Carl watched Saul carefully during the rest of the meeting. The man listened mutely, lost in his own dark introspections.

Malcolm was balky, reluctant. He gave ground grudgingly, agreeing to a slight increase in the labor hours in Hydroponics, swearing he could give no more without consulting all the Ortho factions. Jeffers made similarly hedged promises on behalf of the Percell groups.

Carl himself spoke for the ex-spacers—mostly Plateau Three types—and the Hawaiians. What would I do without those diehard idealists? he thought, watching the give and take of the meeting. There aren’t nearly enough of them…

He moved into the verbal crossfire, working them around to a livable compromise. He used hard-won skills to cajole Malcolm into doing what it seemed to him anyone rational would immediately agree to—but by now he was used to it, resigned to the obdurate mulishness of the human species.

And this was only a minor sticking point. Eventually they’d have to get Quiverian and Sergeov to sit down, too, representing the extremes. And all this bickering over mere Hydro, too the deeper issues of finishing the Nudge Flingers would be far worse. It resembled the never-ending news from the Middle East. Even with Saul’s lost Israel broken into squabbling theocracies, the region was still rife with more microscopic factions, unending rivalry, bitterness, stupidity. Nobody could see beyond their noses. No, Halley was all too representative of humanity.

After the meeting he sat and watched the sun set in vivid ruby splashes over Hong Kong. He wondered idly if the place existed anymore; there had been reports of a small nuke war somewhere near there, twenty years ago. He would have to check sometime. Or maybe he didn’t really wish to know. The city simmering in its rosy sunset looked better if you thought it could still he there.

At last he roused himself and went down to sleep slot 1. The thawing was proceeding normally; he had kept track by remote throughout the day. Suited and encased, he came into the foggy kingdom of eternal chill. He did not rush into the prep room, though. The team was not quite through yet…

Carl stopped. at Lani Nguyen’s slot. Frost filmed it and he checked the fluid lines automatically. He had come here often to stare into that blissful, milky, floating refuge—and to envy them all. He peered through the slowly churning fluids at the watery form inside. Did he see a face gazing out?

I miss you, Lani. I was a young idiot when I knew you. Not that an older idiot would do any better. That night after Cruz died… We know how it should have worked out, don’t we? He smiled wanly. Youshould sleep safely to the end. But we’ll need you soon, too. And pray that unslotting doesn’t give those plagues lying dormant in you the crucial edge they need…

He could contain his impatience no longer. He went into the prep room and stood aside as the technicians finished their hours of careful labor. His eyes followed every feeder line, each stimulating circuit, all the myriad details that spelled the difference.

She’s still as wonderful. Just looking at her makes my heart feel as though a hand is squeezing it.

He stood aside as they unwrapped the nutrient gauze from Virginia’s almond skin.

That luscious color belongs on beaches, not in ice.

He had waited so long for this … And had thought a thousand times of violating his pledge, of reviving Virginia without Saul. What could they do about it except complain? He had even come down here once, at the nub end of a lonely, half-drunken evening … Invaded the realm of frost and started the warmup, let it run on for two hours before finally facing the fact that he couldn’t do it. Not merely because she would be enraged, would surely see through his invented explanations… but because he knew he could not live with having done it.

But now all that was past. The long years dropped away, done.

He stepped forward to see her again.

VIRGINIA

Long ago, Virginia had wondered what it would be like if she ever really succeeded…if ever she fooled them all, and actually made a machine that could think.

How would awareness seem to the new entity? Would it appear suddenly, as great Athena was supposed to have come into her wisdom, springing self-aware from the brow of Zeus?

Would it be like a child growing up? A long, slow, tedious/thrilling process of rote and extrapolation? Of trial and error and skinned knees?

Or would it happen as humanity had done it—evolving by quirk and happenstance from the feral reflexes of microbes, all the way up to the hubris to challenge gods?

Most often of all, she had imagined that it would be like this. A slow gathering of scattered threads. A learning anew of what was already known.

An awakening.

All the blurry images came together into a single shape that swam in front of her eyes—a complete mystery. A blob.

Then, with no transition at all, she knew it as a face… one that ought to be familiar.

“Carl?” she tried to ask. But her facial muscles would only twitch a little, a promise of returning volition, but not much more.

The figure overhead blurred, unfocused, and finally went away. Virginia slept. And for the first time in a long while, she dreamed.

The white walls were sharp and clear when next she opened her eyes.

Recuperation room, she thought. I wonder how long it’s been.

There was a rustling tap tap tap of a databoard nearby. Virginia laboriously turned her head, and saw a man in a faded, threadbare hospital gown perched crosslegged on a webbing, looking intently into a portable display and rubbing his chin slowly with one hand. His eyelids were slot-blue and he looked so thin.

“Saul,” she whispered.

He looked up quickly. In a single motion he put aside the databoard and was by her side, bringing a squeeze bottle to her lips.

She sipped until he drew it away. Then she worked her mouth. “H… h-how… ?”

“How long?” Saul took her hand. “About thirty years. We’re getting near aphelion. Carl told me you left little watchdog programs throughout the data systems that kept popping up, promising bloody hell if you were awakened before me.”

Virginia smiled weakly. “I told you…I’d…m-manage it.”

He laughed. “And I’m so very proud of you.’

The richness of his voice made her blink. Saul was still only partially recovered from his own slotting, and yet something else was different about him.

Her preslotting memories were coming back clearly. There was a little more gray at Saul’s temples, maybe, and yet could it be an illusion that he actually looked younger than before?

Oh, I must be a mess, she thought. Ihad better do some hard eating to put some meat back on, after three decades.

But if slotting drops years off you, I must learn to conquer my fear of it!

“How am… I… doing?”

“A doctor’s joy.” He grinned. “A marvelous piece of womanly engineering. Recovering nicely, and soon to be put to work, by orders of his Grand Poobah-dom, Commander Osborn.”

Virginia shook her head.

“C-commander… ?”

Saul nodded. “Lieutenant Commander, actually. Commission from Earth. They had to. Only two officers left alive, and they hardly count. Ensign Calciano’s in the slots after a ten-year shift in which he seems to have become convinced he was the Flying Dutchman. Ould-Harrad’s resigned his commission and gone off to join the Revisionist-Arcists over in Gehenna…”

At Virginia’s puzzled expression, Saul squeezed her hand.

“It’s a different world, Virginia. So much has changed. Back on Earth, things have gone from very bad to better to incomprehensible. And out here they’re… well…” He shrugged. “Outs here they’re just plain weird.”

“But Carl… ?” She started to rise, but he pushed her gently back against the pillow. Even Halley gravity was a weight for her.

“Enough talk. Now you rest. Later I’ll explain what I’ve been able to discover. We’ll try to figure out a place for ourselves in this strange new world.”

Virginia let herself relax.

We… she thought, liking the way the word sounded in his voice. Yes, we will.

She was starting to drift off when she felt Saul gently pull his hand away. Virginia looked up and saw that he was fumbling with a handkerchief and staring into space with a screwed up, half-orgasmic squint. It ended deep inside the square of cloth in a muffled sneeze.

“Oh, darling,” she sighed. “Out of the slots only a few days, and already you have a cold!”

He looked at her sheepishly, then he smiled.

“So nu? What else is new?”

SAUL

Everybody seemed to be dying.

In fact, the more Saul learned about this aging colony, the more it seemed a mystery to him that anyone was left alive at all.

Oh people had adapted, found ways to cope. Human beings were good at that. Since thirty years ago, when Akio Matsudo had finally given firm orders and seen Saul strapped into his slot, the tools he had left behind had been added to, improved.

But the modified cyanutes, the subtly tuned microwave scanners, all of their clever devices could only slow down the long erosion, the declining spiral. Halley-Life, too, was adaptable, and much more at home here. It was a war of attrition that men could only lose.

I should have known that Akio would hardly take his own advice, Saul thought to the chilly domain of sleep slot 1. It had been a mistake to come down here so soon after leaving Recuperation Hall, to look in on old friends. A rude shock to have it brought home so clearly that three decades had passed.

Until now his last memory of the Japanese physician had been of glossy black hair framing smiling almond eyes under wire-rimmed glasses. But that image—as fresh as last week—was jarringly crushed down here among the chilled caskets. One was labeled with Akio Matsudo’s name. The figure behind the frosted glass was almost unrecognizable.

A thin fringe of gray wisps rimmed a pate turned speckled with age spots and scarred from bouts with skin infections. Those onceplump cheeks were now the hollowed inheritance of a man grown old fighting the inevitable the implacable And there wasno hint of laughter anymore in the lines rimming poor Akio’s sleep-shut eyes.

The charts at the foot of every slot told the story of each hibernating occupant, red symbols denoting medical reasons for internment, black trim meaning storage without real hope of recovery or resuscitation, and blue marking a crewman or -woman who was simply “off duty” for this span of years.

At first glance the situation looked serious, but not impossible. There were plenty of blue folders. However, a quick scan of the colors did not tell the true story. Akio, for instance, had a blue folder.

A tired, sick old man, he thought on reading his friend’s folder. It wasn’t just the lingering infections, or malnutrition from decades of eating only the narrow range of foods grown in the colony’s agro domes. Osteoporosis had so weakened the man’s bones that there was no way he would ever walk his beloved western Japanese hills again. Electrical bone stimulation had not made up for year after year in near weightlessness.

The Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel hung in cavern Gamma, frozen and broken down. So far, nobody had had the energy to fix it.

Saul read a random sample of blue folders and pored over slot readings. Slowly, he came to a chilling realization.

No more than ten percent of the colony was well in any real sense of the word.

Is Carl really that good a liar? He wondered how Osborn was able to maintain the fiction that the mission could ever be completed. Or is everyone pretending for the sake of their sanity.

He saw no way there’d be even a fraction of the manpower needed to build and operate the “flinger” launchers—the mass drivers that were supposed to alter Halley’s orbit come aphelion.

And without the Nudge, they all might as well go to sleep for good, because there would be no homecoming for any of them.

His thoughts were clouded as he left sleep slot 1. Still a bit weak from his long hibernation, Saul stretched long-unused muscles by glide-walking the long tunnels downward and southward, an area he had not visited yet since his internment.

In this area nearly all the passages were coated in luxuriant green layers of Halleyviridis fungoid. The stuff was too slick to allow good purchase for his vel-stick slippers, but offered a sure grip when he used his bare toes as he had seen others do.

It actually made movement much easier. He found he didn’t need the almost hidden wall cables, for instance. Grabbing a tuft of growth in passing gave him all the added leverage he needed to move along swiftly.

Saul wondered for sometime without paying close attention to where he was going, thinking about the strangeness he and Virginia had awakened too.

Earth appeared to have completely written off Miguel Cruz’s grand odyssey. Oh, they still maintained contact, after a fashion, sending up entertainments and dribbles of technical data from time to time. Saul had extracted a promise from Carl Osborn to bring him more fully up-to-date soon—the distant, somewhat aloof spacer had been imprecise about when. Apparently, most of the awake colonists lived day to day, and took a detached view toward time.

Soon, though, Saul knew he would have to resume his duties as expedition doctor. And the burden of hopelessness that had worn down Akio Matsudo would be his.

Most sorry of all had been those poor Orthos down in Quadrant 9, with their pitiful children—scabrous, wild-eyed, stick figures barely human in aspect, always hungry and frail as leaves.

Perhaps the EarthBirth Laws were wise. Gravity runs strong in our genes.

But there was more to it than that. Yesterday he had examined five of the Ortho kids. All seemed to suffer from the same enzyme deficiency. He already had it mapped to the seventh chromosome. In a few weeks he should be able to track it down and…

And what, Lintz? Are you contemplating meddling, again? Just emerged into a new world, and already you’re coming up with ideas how to change it?

The glow of phosphor panel, was crowing sparse. Saul tried to take his bearings and realized that he had not been paying close enough attention. He was lost.

In the old days that would have been impossible. But by now all the old intersection “street signs” were obscured, completely covered over by the soft, native carpeting. Instead, where shaft met tunnel, there were deeply incised “clan markings” —filled in with a pitchlike substance that seemed to repel the Halleyforms. The marks denoted the boundaries of the various human bands. He looked around for one of these.

Apparently only Central, the sleep slots, and the hydroponics domes were neutral territory, now. And the deep, inner regions of Halley Core, of course. But only madmen ever went down that way, he had heard.

In one of the faction areas nearest Central he had seen what had become of the fibercloth that had once lined the tunnels and shafts of Halley Colony. The material had been turned into clothing and tentlike, “purple-proof” habitats, suspended from the ceilings the bigger chambers.

Every sleeping hall maintained a round-the-clock watch for the most deadly of the comet lifeforms. Nevertheless, every year or so another poor victim fell to the feared native foragers.

Animals would be an ideal solution, he thought as he scraped away at the mosslike growth, hoping for a clue to where he was. On Earth we tamed other creatures and used them to fight vermin for us. Should be able to do that here.

Of course, that idea had been tried. Over the decades others had thawed dogs and cats and monkeys from the colony’s small collection of slot-stored animals. But none of the poor creatures had proved able to adapt even as well as the humans.

But what about changing the Earthbreed animals… altering them to fit into this strange environment?

He knew it hadn’t been attempted. Nobody else had the skill—or the arrogance—to try it. Already his mind was turning over ideas, genes of expression and regulation, ways of adapting creatures to work with an alien environment instead of against it.

Those poor, pathetic children, he thought.

Saul pulled out his chemically sterilized handkerchief and blew his nose. As he approached a new intersection, he saw one of the pitch-filled clan marks, at last. He glided to a stop and contemplated the symbol: a large “U” crowned with a halo.

As he stood there, a voice spoke, as if out of nowhere.

“Clape. Look a’ what we have here! Lost, boss?”

Saul grabbed the wall growth and swiveled to see that a man with a blue-tinted face looked down at him from the overhanging shaft opening. Saul had to blink, for this was distinctly the oddest-looking person he had seen since awakening.

The fellow wore bangles of hammered native platinum and a short-sleeved fibercloth tunic. And as he drifted to the floor, Saul saw nasty-looking metal claw/hooks on his toes. In his free hand the man held loops of rope woven of some native growth.

Saul nodded. “I guess I am lost, at that. I thought I was on M Level near Shaft Five, but.”

The other man laughed, showing open gaps amid rotting teeth. He leaped forward and landed closer to Saul, the movement exposing a large tattoo on his chest. It was a symbol Saul recognized, the Sigil of Simon Percell.

“What a savor, Hum? Free labor bum!” The man ginned, fingering the rope.

A second blue face emerged from the overhead shaft and grinned. “Green hydro labor, for a favor.”

Saul shook his head and smiled. Their glassy-eyed stress made him nervous. “I’m sorry, I’m fresh out of the slots, so I’m not up on the dialect yet.”

“Clack!” The first Percell rolled his eyes. “A virgin wool! Well, baby Earth blue, I remember how to talk land cant. Are you one of Simon’s diamonds? Or normal ape crape?”

Saul raised his hand, smiling ruefully. “Guilty as charged. I’m what I suppose you’d call an Ortho. Is that a problem? Have I wandered into territory that’s exclusively Perc.”

The fellow’s hands moved in a blur. A loop of rope snaked out abruptly over Saul’s shoulders and was pulled taut. “Hey!”

Another followed the first. Saul tugged back, but managed only to tighten the nooses. “I said I was just thawed! Just point me back toward Central and I won’t bother you.”

This time both men laughed. “It’s simple, pimple,” the first Percell began. Then the second broke in.

“Oh, give the ape a break, Stew. He lacks track.” There was a trace of sympathy in the second man’s eyes. Just a trace. He faced Saul.

“There’s rules fellow. Capture without harm or blood spilled isn’t vendetta, it’s fair coup. You work for us in Hydro for ten megaseconds—that’s about four months, old style—with maybe time off for good behavior.”

The first Percell laughed again, this time a high-pitched set of yelps that cut off in a fit of coughing. He spat a pink-stained gobbet onto the wall.

“That cough sounds pretty bad,” Saul said. How long have you been bringing up bloody phlegm?”

The blue-faced man shook his head angrily. None o’ your business! Come on an ’limp, chimp,” Stew said, and jerked Saul’s tether hard.

Until that moment Saul had felt almost detached, as if this were more comic than serious. But now he felt a part of himself getting very, very mad.

I should have just played along until I learned more, he thought. But the last time he had been jerked at the end of a rope like this it had been on a miserable day in Jerusalem, when he had been passed, handcuffed, from one newly installed theocracy bureaucrat to another—half of them misquoting Leviticus to his face and the rest reading apparently randomly chosen passages from Revelations and the Koran. It had been a blessed relief when the ferchochteh finally sentenced him to six months cutting timber on a labor gang, and then expelled him forever from his native land.

“I think not, yoksh,” he said evenly as the blue-faced man jugged again. Getting a grip on the wall growth with his toes and one hand, Saul yanked back hard with the other.

Maybe it was the unexpectedness—Saul’s eyelids were still slot-blue, after all—but the man on the ceiling yelped and tumbled from his high perch, past the floor, and on down into the shaft below. His cry diminished as he bounced softly against the walls, struggling for a hold as he fell. Saul transferred his grip to the other rope.

“Stew” wasn’t going to be surprised as easily. He grinned and pulled taut his own tether. Most of the fancy, rhythmic dialect was gone when he spoke.

“Poor Earth baby. Just unslotted and weak as an Ortho toddler. What do you know about tunnel fighting?”

“Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Saul told him, and kicked off from his anchoring point on the wall. He landed beside the surprised Percell, where the rope fell slack, and immediately started shrugging out of the loosened bonds.

“It sounds to me like you’ve got a tuberculinlike infection,” he said mildly, distracting his tormentor for a moment with his driest bedside manner. “Also, how long have you had that parech skin infection? Don’t the microwave treatments help anymore?”

Stew’s blank amazement lasted only a few seconds. “I—” He blinked, howled, and launched himself at Saul.

Saul’s knees carne up just in time, knocking the Percell’s toeclaws past him. A sharp pain lanced his left leg before he was able to lock into an embrace too close for the deadly implements to be used. Their hands met and gripped each other, fingers interlaced. Stew dug his toe-claws into the wall growth and started pressing Saul back.

Wind whistled between their teeth. The detached part of Saul clinically noted the particularly foul stench of the other man’s breath. It was automatically compiled with a list of his other symptoms to be used later—if there was a later—in studying the disease.

You’re too old for this, he told himself as they grunted, face to face. And it’s much too soon out of the slots!

Thinking that, he was nearly as surprised as the wiry Percell when the straining war of muscles began to break, away from him. His opponent’s arms began quivering, giving way. Saul pressed his advantage.

“I…get…it…” Saul gasped s he wrenched the fellow’s arms back, making him cry out. “You guys…must be what they…call Ubers.” He got the man turned around, arms twisted painfully behind him.

“Hoosh, some superman,” Saul commented. With a grunt he tossed his opponent down into the shaft, just in time to strike his returning partner as the other Percell’s head came over the top. Together they tumbled shouting, down the shaft again. Saul drifted against a wall and held on with one hand until the gentle gravity brought him to the floor again. His heart pounded and he saw spots. His scratched leg hurt like hell.

“Assholes,” he whispered, preferring the explicit Anglo-Saxonisms of his youth, in this case, over the more subtle Yiddish he had learned only later in life. He gathered his breath and braced himself as sounds told of their return.

This time they were more careful. The two sprang to opposite sides of the hall to face him, both clearly angry. In their hands shone bright metal knives.

So much for capture by the rules, Saul thought. Maybe I should have accepted ten megaseconds in Hydro after all.

And yet, somehow, he didn’t regret a thing. “Come on, twerps,” he said, waving them forward. They started to comply.

“Stop this!”

He and the Percells looked up as one. A third blue-tinted head emerged from the overhead shaft and Saul had to groan. Even on an adrenaline high, he wasn’t idiot enough to think he could take on three of the bastards.

But the newcomer didn’t direct his ire at Saul. He turned to the other Ubers.

“Why did you cut this man?” he shouted in a clear tone of command. To Saul the voice seemed familiar… a once-thick accent softened and covered over by years of dialect.

The first two Ubers looked away. “Clape. The mape fought us, Sergie—”

“Dap the crap!” The leader drifted down one green-lined wall. Truncated legs that were little more than nubs tipped with hooks turned him quickly as he pointed at Saul. “Do not you know who this is?”

They only blinked, and then stared blankly as the legless leader turned to face Saul for the first time, and bowed in an ornate gesture of respect. “I greet you, uncle of the new race.”

The shock of Slavic hair was nearly gone now, and the space-tanned skin had been converted into one big tattoo. But years were nothing to recognition. Saul laughed out loud.

“Oh. Hi, Otis. It’s good to see you, too. What have you been doing with yourself…besides turning blue, I mean?”

Inside, though, his heart still raced as he began to realize what a close call he’d had. Saul could only think, Oy.

The trip back to Central, under Uber escort, was almost anticlimactic, skim-running along velvety, moss-lined halls and passing the checkpoints of various clans with elaborate but apparently routine ritual.

Even to Saul it was obvious that they were taking a long way back, dropping deep into the comet to move northward before beginning to climb back up again. “Why are we going so far out of the way?” he asked when they had descended to tunnels he had never seen before—twisty paths following soft veins of primordial snow.

Sergeov shrugged. “Quiverian.”

Saul stopped. “Joao? I’d heard he was awake now, as well. But why are you avoiding him?”

The first Uber, the Percell named Stew, spat down a nearby shaft. “He’s th’ darkest Arcist. Th’ ape we hate.”

Saul shook his head, looking at Sergeov. “Explain please, Otis.”

The Uber leader smiled. “The old race had some superior individuals—like you and Simon Percell. Quiverian, too. He leads most rabidly anti-Percell band of Orthos, these days. Those who understand that, they are dinosaurs, and so want to stamp out us new mammals.”

Saul thought he understood. The term Arcist, once denoting equatorial environmentalism on Earth, had evolved and shifted here on Halley. Now it meant the most radical Ortho human faction, as Uber stood for those Percells who believed there could be no compromise with unmodified human beings.

There was clearly intense hatred and rivalry, and yet it was also obviously under control. All factions were clearly too weak, much too dependent on one another, to wage open war.

“I’m puzzled, Otis,” he said as they resumed their journey. Down here the tunnels seemed to have been hewn by hand, rough and winding, following paths of least resistance through the rocky ice. “If you feel that way, why aren’t you having children, like some of the Ortho bands?”

One of Sergeov’s men snarled angrily, and Saul realized he had brought up a taboo topic. Sergeov cut back the blue-faced fellow with a sharp word. He turned back to Saul.

“We have a few. Came out better than Orthos’ pitiful little wretches. One, we hope, can maybe someday learn to read and write.” His face was briefly contorted in painful recollection. “We do not experiment anymore. What is point, when everyone is doomed anyway, eh? Those Orthos in Quadrant Nine, they are immoral to bring babes up just to suffer, to die.”

So, Saul thought. They do know the truth.

“That’s why the level of violence is so low, even though you hate each other so much,” he ventured.

Sergeov nodded. “Everybody will die together, anyway. But we need workers to keep things going as long as possible. Nobody wants to go by cold, by starvation.”

“Nobody ’cept maybe Ould-Harrad,” one of the others ventured.

“Ould-Harrad!” Saul blinked. “Then he’s.”

“Become a wild-eyed mystic,” Sergeov explained. “How you think a Percell like Osborn ever became an officer? Not for his pretty looks and Ortho-loving ways, I tell you!”

The other two Ubers laughed. “No. Ould-Harrad started talking to God. Resigned his commission. Lunatic is tool of Quiverian, now. Spiritual leader of the Arcists,” he said sarcastically.

Saul could believe the last. It was a wonder the stark silence of the long watches had not driven more of them farther toward the fringe of human experience.

Sergeov shrugged. “Let us go now. I take you back to Central. I must talk to Osborn anyway. Clear up some stupid accusations of that crybaby Malcolm.”

Saul did nut move, though. He was staring, blinking, down a cross tunnel toward a phantom light that wavered to the distance.

The others turned and saw it too. One Uber hissed, “Clape. It’s th’ Ol’ Man himself!”

Saul drifted toward the shape, curious. Then he saw that there were two, no, three of the ghostly figures, moving along the walls like great spiders, picking through the wall growth.

A hand gripped his arm and pulled.

“We go now,” Sergeov grunted.

“What are they?” Saul asked in wonder. For a moment he thrilled to the thought that they might be an as-yet-unknown form of Halley-Life—huge and highly structured creatures.

“Now, Saul Lintz. Those can be dangerous.”

Saul blinked again, and realized that the slowly approaching creatures were shaped as men, but their outlines were fuzzy, fringed, as it were, with a cloudy, milky edge of shimmering fronds.

“Ingersoll?” he wondered aloud.

“Old Man of the Caves,” Sergeov agreed. “And some of other mad ones who joined him. Come now, Lintz, or we leave you.”

Saul nodded and began backing away with them. There would be time to study mysteries. Patience would pay off better, in the end, than impetuous curiosity.

Anyway, his palms were sweaty and his mouth drier—as he watched the ghostlike shapes grazing through the Halleyform forest—than they had been during the fight with Sergeov’s Uber warriors. Saul hurried along with his escorts, promising himself that he would be back when he knew better the rules of this strange place and time.

The halls near Central—still fibercloth-lined, still scoured at intervals with ultraviolet and microwaves and kept clean by a few mechs that had survived the decades—seemed like an oasis not just from another century but from a different world.

“My business is with Osborn,” Sergeov told Saul. “Take my advice, Lintz. Be careful which faction you join, after recuperation. A few Ortho groups are not vicious baboons.”

Saul had heard Sergeov’s radical Percells described in pretty nasty terms, as well. Where there was tribalism, he had long decided, there was no way to avoid criminality.

“Some groups accept both Percells and Orthos.” he told Sergeov. “It’ll have to be one of those, if we join any faction at all.”

“We…” The legless Uber leader thought. “Ah, you and the Herbert woman.”

“Another Ortho lover— “one of the others began, but a sharp look from Sergeov shut him up.

“There is one last thing,” Saul said as the Percells were turning to go. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a silvery tool.

“I want some blood and tissue samples for my new medical inventory, if you fellows don’t mind. The Survivors and the Plateau Three bands have already contributed, and I’m sure you’ll be; happy to cooperate.”

The Uber with the bad teeth snarled and reached for his knife. But one more time the Russian cut him off. Sergeov’s eyes seemed to glitter as he presented his arm to Saul. And a silent message seemed to say that he would expect a favor of his own, someday.

If I had not once worked with Simon Percell, Saul thought as he took samples from the other two, would Otis have even saved my life this afternoon?

On the Ubers’ chests the Sigil stood out starkly, red against blue, a tribute to a man long dead at his own hand, who might have seen some of what was to come, but could never have imagined how far it would all go.

He visited for some time with Virginia in her recuperation unit, checking her progress carefully and reassuring her that the slot pallor was fading nicely. He kissed her and gave her a mild sedative for her insomnia. Then Saul went down to his lab.

The samples from the Ubers went through the same preliminary analysis as he had performed on his other subjects. The first results seemed to be just the same.

Oh, there were different accumulations of microfauna in their blood and sputum. The Percells’ immune systems seemed slightly less damaged, not as overstressed as the colony’s remaining Ortho complement. That was no surprise. The expedition had started out less than one-quarter Percell. Now the ratio among those healthy enough to be awake was even or better in favor of the genetic augments.

But the story was still the same. We’re all dying, he thought. At last he found the courage to insert a sample just taken from Virginia.

Saul swallowed. She was fresher, but he could read the signs. Even in her case, right out of the slots, the inevitable was well under way.

“Well,” he whispered. “Maybe I can find some patterns be adjust the cyanutes some more.”

He did not hold out much hope for that approach though. That breakthrough had made it possible for people to live here. But Comet-Life was adapting. More and more forms avoided the special sugar coating that had enabled his little gene-crafted creatures to do their extra job so well.

The old question still raised itself, every day, nearly every hour he was awake. He must have slept with it over the long years in the slots.

How is it possible for Halley-Life to live in us? How is it Ingersoll and the other cave dwellers can eat the stuff and survive?

Why are we so much alike?

Oh, that simulation he and Virginia had worked out with JonVon, so long ago, had shown how basic similarity had come about. Science had long known that organic chemistry would come up with the same amino acids, the same purines and pyrimidines under a wide variety of circumstances. Life would generally start out the same anywhere.

But the similarities went far beyond that. It was almost as if men were not the first creatures from Earth to invade the comet. As if there had been earlier waves, and the present war was one among distant cousins.

Long ago, in the late twentieth century, a famous astronomer had even proposed that comets were a source of epidemics on Earth. His theory was that primeval viruses floated down into the atmosphere whenever the world passed through a big cometary tail. This, he thought, explained ancient myths calling objects like Halley apparitions of doom. Evil stars.

Saul had laughed on reading such baroque nonsense. But that was long ago. Now… well, he did not know what to think. Nothing, none of it, made any sense at all.

The computer winked a code at him, over and over.

F4-D$56.

More data wanted.

“Certainly.” He nodded amiably. “A most worthy request.”

Tomorrow he would go out and try to persuade Quiverian’s Arcists to cooperate.

Then he remembered. He hadn’t tested his own blood, yet.

One more datum for a baseline. He stepped over to the treatment table, drew and prepared the samples, and returned to run them through the fluorescent separator-analyzer. Numbers and graphs flickered in three dimensions and many colors. Depictions grew on all sides of him, programmed to highlight differences from the mean of the prior samples.

All around Saul, the displays were suddenly ablaze. Winking highlights, bright anomalies. He blinked. Nearly everything was different!

“Um,” he said concisely. Saul blinked at the figures.

There was the array of lymphocyte counts… all types: within normal range.

Nobody else’s sample said that. Only his.

Electrolyte balance… nominal.

His was the only one that said that!

Metabolic processes… nominal.

“Stupid machine,” Saul grumbled. He smacked the side of the unit, keyed on an autotest, then another. Only green lights winked from the control panel. The machine claimed it was working well.

“I’m aberrant because I’m normal?” He stared at the columns of figures. They all insisted that he was anomalous. Strange. Unusual.

And nearly all of the differences were toward the Earthly human norm. Except for one.

Foreign infecting agents…

He looked at the estimate and whistled.

According to the bioassay, he should be dead.

Dead? Saul laughed. The damned machine seemed to think his blood was a froth of dangerous invaders. His bodily fluids were aswarm with horrible, nasty things, the smallest fraction of which should have killed him long ago!

And yet the other displays said: Nominal…

Nominal…

nominal…

nominal…

“Crazy damn machine,” he muttered.

But then Saul remembered… fighting the Uber in the hallway… the surprise on both of their faces when he—barely out of the slots—began twisting the other man’s arms back, back …

“Visual microscopic display,” he commanded. Time to get to the bottom of this. Something was wrong here, and the best way to find out what had broken down in his biocomputer would be to do an old-fashioned histological survey himself. “Screen One, subject blood sample magnification ninety.”

The holistank rippled and cleared, showing a straw-colored sea crowded with drifting globs of pink, white, yellow. A jostling of multishaded forms, whirling, jouncing, fluttering in the saline tide.

Saul shook his head, stared, shook his head again.

His mouth started working, without making a sound, in blank amazement and silent prayer.

CARL

Carl studied the main screen in disbelief. He had just finished another useless conversation with Major Clay, the marvelous wooden man who fielded all questions sent Earthside with a bland yet rock hard calm. Earth wasn’t sending advice, information, or even much sympathy—that was certain. Major Clay sidestepped every question. With each passing year, they papered over their fear by increasing the entertainment channels they sent in the weekly squirt. That left less time for real communication.

So Carl had thumbed off impatiently before the transmission time had elapsed. It was doubly irritating that he could never really hang up on Major Clay, because the delay from the speed of light was now five hours. Notconducive tosnappy comebacks, he had thought.

Time to prepare for the meeting. He idly thumbed over to RUNNING READOUT, expecting to see the usual situation report, but didn’t get the usual five-colored status chart. Instead, he caught a trickle of JonVon’s momentarily exposed inner flow. Incredibly, it was another poem. As he read, Carl began to smile.

Plateau Threes are simple, plain

can’t flutter free of Percell’s pain

Take us home! Or near sun’s warm! 

Close to Earth and safe from harm.

Only ole JonVon’s got the charm

to hide a riddle

in the middle: gold!

Treat us as miners,

Major.

And Martian Way, ah

they see their day

to come—to smack a planet red

(Carefully, about the head.)

To make it run with fluids bled

From Halley’s pitted blue-iced dead.

Worms, like sticky pearls

Orbits, in liquid whorls

Ubers strut, pale hard jaws jut

Slice the Orthos!

If they could. All

for converging clammy good

Out by Neptune

on some ice-and-iron moon

(Or else to slip the knife

of bugs and lice to Earth. Drop

a rocket

in their pocket. Eh?)

Sad sure Arcists want to

Loop forever

Aren’t they clever?

High-pitched bray and rusty rattle

Brows furrowed, they sing like cattle:

Keep the blue-green pearl free

of us, our pus

Unclean, you see.

Suicide is as much a right

As going gladly into that Good Night.

Carl laughed. Incredible! This was not the first evidence he’d seen that JonVon was noodling away at poetry in slack moments. But of late the bio-organic idiot savant had been getting uncanny. Or maybe it only proved that poetry wasn’t really a higher-level activity after all. This was jagged, lurching, bitter stuff, reeling from rhyme to rhyme, with an occasional glancing collision with reason.

What was the gold JonVon was hiding? He wondered if JonVon had showed this to Virginia yet. She was still recuperating from the slots, but spent a few hours each day linked to her cyber-friend. What if the machine eventually turned out to be a better poet? Carl smiled.

And how did JonVon getsuch retailed information about the noxious factions Carl had to juggle? Maybe I should turn this job over to a subroutine.

Meetings, always meetings. Through the hatch came Andy. Carroll, slot-thin and glowering.

“Those Arcists have gone on strike again!”

“Wildcat?”

“No, Malcolm called them in. I just got a hail from him.”

“How come?”

“He says their Hydro share was low this week. His pickup team just returned with no fruit, not many vegetables.”

Carl frowned. “That shouldn’t have happened. I checked the output—”

“Sergeov got some of theirs, I’m pretty sure.” Andy balled a fist and smacked it into his palm.

“Stole it gain?”

A nod. “He’s got some way of slipping the stuff out after it’s been counted and allotted. I can’t figure it.”

Mildly Carl said, “That’s your department.”

Andy was young, only recently awakened, but he had caught on to the nuances of the situation quickly. His black eyebrows shot up. “I cover every entrance. No way a man or woman could get in there.”

Carl nodded sympathetically. “Uh-huh. What about half a man?”

“Wh… oh. You figure Sergeov can get through other ways?”

“With no legs… check it out.”

Andy brooded, his pale features compressed into a mask of fretful concern. “I don’t see how, but okay.”

Carl sighed and stretched in the webbing. “Now you know what this job’s like.”

“Yeah. They’re a bunch of goddamned children!”

“You’ve been out—what? Two months?”

“Right. Still.”

“It’ll take a while to see where the hate comes from. Just try to ignore the worst, work around it.”

“I’m convinced that Malcolm is stalling.”

“He often is. What else’s he got to negotiate with? But you mean seriously, this time?”

“I think so. I checked the Nudge pods they supposedly finished three months ago—down at the south pole. They look as though they’re set up right, but I pulled off a few cowlings. Inside there’re connections missing, tanks not racked—it’s a mess.”

“Sure it’s Malcolm’s fault?”

“I think they’re sabotaging the pods.”

“They smash anything?”

“No, just took stuff apart.”

“Smart. Any obvious damage, we’d howl. This way, you might very well have accused Malcolm to his face of shirking the work.”

Andy blushed. “Well, actually, that’s what I did.”

A pause. “Oh?”

“I… I know I should’ve got hold of you first, but—I was so damn hopping mad! I called Malcolm and started in on him.” Andy stopped, embarrassed.

“And?”

“He hung up on me before I even got three sentences out.”

“Then he probably thinks he’s got some complaint with us, too.” Don’t sound too casual, Carl reminded himself. Don’t let Andy onto what you know…that there’s simply no way the Nudge accelerators would be done in time anyway.

Carl said, “Who has the most to gain if you and Malcolm tear at each other’s throats?”

“Hell, hardly anybody, seems to me.”

“Doesn’t have to be more than a few.”

“Well… oh yeah. Quiverian. He’s the one keeps spouting that Arcist crap. You think he’s trying to slow down work on the Nudge?”

“It fits. The radical Arcists don’t want any possibility of cometary material getting near Earth. No orbits near enough to make a good rendezvous, nothing. Preserving Earth’s biosphere is it for them. They don’t care what happens to us.”

“But there are still possibilities that offer no conceivable threat to Earth. Give ourselves a shorter-period orbit with the Nudge, pack everybody into slots.”

“And hope a decade or two sobers up everybody Earthside?”

Andy’s face was so open it was almost painful to read. “It’s… We’ve got to have hope, don’t we?”

“Sure,” Carl said, trying to get some hearty optimism into his voice. “Sure.”

Andy pursed his lips, absorbed with his dreams. Maybe it’s not dumb optimism, Carl thought. Maybe we’ll get a break. I’m just getting tired of wishing.

Hethought of showing Andy the poem and then decided to forget it. Andy might very well find the mixture of bile and gallows humor unsettling Let him marinate for a year or so first.

And who knows? Perhaps some archaeologist will find that poem and pronounce it the great work of our sad, luckless expedition. They might put it on a plaque beside the main outer lock, to label the mountainous ice museum that swung through their sky, marking a great failed idea. With us, swimming permanently in our slimy slot fluids, as the prime exhibits.

It wasn’t an absurd notion.

VIRGINIA

—Huh? Did you say something, Virginia?—

Jeffers’s voice crackled over her comm as she concentrated on bringing her two balky mechs over an ice mound at the same time. It was always a delicate exercise, for the big machines had enough strength to bound completely away from the rubble-strewn surface. These repair-drone models had no onboard propellants to bring them back, in case of a miscalculation.

“Um, don’t pay any attention, Jeff. It’s just JonVon acting up again. As soon as we’ve finished with this project I’m going to give him a good memory purging.”

—Sounds like he’s picked up a bit of your hand for scribbling. If he’s been writin’ poems for thirty years, you may be in for some competition, child.—

Jeffers sounded amused, and Virginia laughed. But within she was beginning to get worried. Something was wrong with her bio-organic computer counterpart. In some skills JonVon seemed more subtle, more capable than when she had been slotted, decades ago—a natural result of programming him for slow, steady self-improvement. But in other ways the machine/program now behaved erratically, uncertainly, spontaneously giving forth these bursts that seemed irrelevant, untraceable.

Trash-strewn snowfields stretched away toward the row of agro domes around the entrance to Shaft 1. Huge mirrors hung from spidery ice towers nearby, concentrating the sun’s distant spark to turn the domes into bright blazes against the grainy ice.

Beneath the glassy domes, green masses waved gently under artificial breezes. A few workers drifted languidly among the plants, tending the colony’s staff of life. Since awakening from slot sleep, she had had little time to learn about the hydroponics procedures that had been developed, by trial and error over the long decades. But she could tell already that the process could use a lot of automating.

Her mechs arrived where Jeffers’s spacesuited figure awaited her, standing beside a toppled crystal structure. Broken shards of glassy ice were everywhere.

Virginia gasped. “This is terrible! Who wrecked Jim Vidor’s sculpture?”

The statue had been dedicated to Captain Cruz and the dream so many members of the expedition had shared. It had depicted a spacesuited figure, ragged and weary but perseverant, holding out sparkling gifts on his return to a blue globe, the Earth.

Virginia remembered how proud Jim Vidor had been of it, just before his slotting so long ago. It had been a beautiful work, crafted in six shades of ice, traced in native crystal. But now the carved spacer lay crumpled on its side, and the blue planet was crushed.

Deep under the surface, in her lab, Virginia tensed on her webbing as she looked at the vandalism through the mech’s eyes. “Who…?”

Jeffers’s voice was tense. —Dunno. I’d guess some of Sergeov’s Ubers did it.—

“But why?”

The spacer shrugged. —Cruz was an Ortho.—

That seemed explanation enough to him. Virginia felt her skin flush, just then ashamed to be a Percell.

“Has Jim ever seen this?”

—Naw. Matsudo brought him out in 2073 or so, and Lintz’s cyanutes fixed his first disease. But then they had to slot him again a year or so later with a real bad blood infection. I guess in a way it’s a blessing, at that. He’ll never see how bad it’s all gotten since then. Jim was an Ortho. But I liked him a lot.—

“Yeah,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say. She stepped her mechs around the shattered moment to join Jeffers. Come on Let’s see if we can work a miracle or two.”

—Right, pretty Hawaiian lady.—Jeffers reached up and pulled several narrow envelopes off a rack carried by one of the mechs. —This way to the Elephants’ Graveyard.—

They rounded a rocky hummock and Virginia sighed. No mere statistics could have prepared her for the scene before her now. Machines, laid out row upon row, in orderly ranks that stretched nearly to the curved horizon, all frozen, unmoving, locked in a rigor of uselessness and disrepair.

“Where do we start?” she asked in dismay.

Jeffers clapped his gloved hands together and lifted off the ice a couple of meters in his nervous excitement.

—Who cares! For three years I’ve been pokin’ way at the hardware, fussin’ in the autofactory, scragging prototype spares. But I keep hittin’ software glitches, ROM blocs, clapes I just couldn’t grok! Frustrated everythin’ I tried.—

He landed facing her mech.

—But now, in just two weeks, you’ve sorted out things that had me dead stopped!—

Her mech lifted a metal hand, exactly mimicking Virginia’s gesture down within her darkened lab. “Now hold on, Jeff. I said this was just a first cut. No promises…”

But the man had already jetted over to a spindly repair-bot… a sophisticated androidlike machine designed for the maintenance of other devices, but now frozen itself in a locked rigor of uselessness.

—Let’s start with this puppy. I already did a physical workover on it.—

Virginia watched nervously as the spacer sorted through the envelopes, selected one, tore it open, and drew forth a gleaming sliver. He pried open an access panel and slipped the reprogramming crystal into the back of the machine.

—Arise!—he commanded, stepping back with a theatrical wave of his arms.

Virginia held her breath. For an instant, it seemed that the frost coating the rigid mech would bind it into immobility. A part of her wondered, Can a statue come to life?

But then the frost cracked, puffing away in tiny, silent explosions as amorphous ice changed state directly into gas. With a wavering delicacy, the machine unfolded. In an unlimbering of stiltlike, mantis legs, it stood up and turned to face Jeffers. Eye cells gleaming, it extended a long arm strong enough to snap the man in two. A many-fingered hand opened, like a blooming flower.

Jeffers laid the stack of envelopes into the sure, deft grasp.

—The Armies of the Dead arise this mornin’!—He laughed. —Come on, angel face. We got some heavy-duty resurrectin’ to do!—

Virginia forgave the man his marginal blasphemy. His excitement was infectious. Almost as much as the deadly illnesses and the manpower shortage, this gradual decline in the colony’s mech force had contributed to the pervasive mood of hopelessness, the impossibility of achieving anything real.

Oh, it won’t make enough of a difference, whatever we accomplish out here. Nothing can replace missing human beings.

But we just may be able to make life a bit easier around here.

Jeffers was a dervish on the ice, hurrying from drone to roboid to waldo mech. Virginia thought she had no illusions; still, she grew amazed and more hopeful as they moved along the silent rows of the graveyard, swapping program slivers, lubricating, energizing.

It was thrilling to watch. Long-dead machines, frozen rigid for years, shuddered and stood up. Others rolled by on grapple wheels, or floated free of their moorings. Data channels clicked, beeped, twittered with well-ordered computer code.

Their efforts began to multiply as reprogrammed repair-bots moved out on their own, taking over whole rows of disabled mechs. What had been a small cluster of activity spread outward like ripples from a spring-thawed pool.

As dust drifted away from long-quiescent machines, their headphones carried sounds of wonder and growing excitement from the agro domes. Crowds began to gather, staring out at what had heretofore been a silent, frozen army. Airlocks opened, and spacesuited figures spilled onto the snow to stare at the milling mechanical crowd.

Jeffers cried out as a huge lifter mech puffed away on a burst of ionized hydrogen to hover nearby, its green and blue lights glittering. Shadows spread past them as it moved over to moor beside the long-unused supply depot.

The headphone-channel monitors cut in to dampen an overload of cheering from the onlookers.

More and more people appeared on the ice, in spacesuits not used in years, wearing once-white tabards now ratty from age. Some threw away caution and leaped in excitement, to arc high overhead for tong minutes while others jeered happily.

Virginia laughed. Halley’s north pole had become a festival —bumping into mechs, which uncomplainingly swerved to avoid more-violent collisions. Percells pirouetted with Orthos. Spacers talked excitedly with Arcists. Someone piped music over D-channel, and the weird, twisting dance of near-zero gravity filled the sky.

It doesn’t take much… just a little good news.

From one agro dome, a dozen spindly children stared… some slack-jawed and barely seeing, but a few clapping their hands and tugging at the sleeves of nearby adults, pointing excitedly at the boisterous celebration.

A figure appeared beside Virginia’s mech and reached up to tug on the machine’s arm. Virginia felt it at her own elbow and looked down.

“Oh. Hi Carl!” She felt like a little girl, and it was good to see him smile again, under the glossy faceplate of his grimy suit. “How did you know which mech was me?”

—Osborn to Herbert, channel AF. How did I know, Virginia? It was easy. I just watched the way each mech walked, and picked the one with the sexiest moves.—

She felt herself blush, and was glad that out on the surface none of it would show. “You always did have a gift for bullsh.”

Suddenly, Virginia was interrupted by an awful sound. It was the blood-chilling wail of a suit-rupture alarm, interrupting every channel, cutting through the celebration, and stopping all chatter in mid-breath.

“Oh my gosh. Where… ?” She whirled her mech to look. Already several of the most sophisticated models were charging toward a crowd of spectators, drawn now into a cluster near one of the agro domes.

“I can’t tell,” she started to say to Carl. But then she realized that he was already gone-launched in a propellant spray toward the site of the commotion.

The alarm cut off abruptly, dropping to a low, mournful drone that denoted cessation of life functions.

Somebody had died.

Virginia started moving toward the crowd, then stopped, feeling foolish. Of course she did not have to take this particular mech over there to get a closer look. With a tongue click and a pulsed subvocal command, she transferred her point of view to a tall, spidery drone standing over the cluster of muttering humans.

She was looking down, then. Carl and Jeffers bent over a spacesuited figure sprawled prone on the ground. The suit was slit open down to bone. Red foam still spread from the gaping opening like a gruesome fog.

Keoki Anuenue and some of his big Hawaiians arrived. They started pushing the crowd back, ordering unnecessary mechs away. The suddenly subdued crowd drifted off, all of the festival mood taken out of them like a noisy stream turned to rock-hard ice.

“He Kiai,” she sent to the dark-faced Polynesian who tried to usher off her observer mech. The man blinked in surprise. Then he shrugged.

—Ua make oia, wahine.—

Virginia did not need to be told that the figure on the ice was dead. Obviously, it was pointless even to think of slotting.

Her mouth went dry as she saw the slim-bladed vibro-knife lying next to the corpse. Whoever had done this—taking advantage of the confusion and excitement she and Jeffers had brought about—had left his calling card alongside his handiwork.

She sorted through the comm automatically, searching for the channel and encryption Carl and Jeff were using. At last she found the right combination.

—… going to be hell to pay for this. Quiverian and Ould-Harrad are sure to capitalize on it.—

—Shit. Malcolm might have been an officious bastard, and an Ortho chauvinist. But at least he wasn’t an Arcist. I could work with him. You know who’s gonna get blamed for this, of course…—

They turned the victim over. The face of poor Malcolm stared up at her, bloated and bug-eyed from decompression.

Virginia shut down quickly and pulled out of the mech. She opened her real eyes and found herself back in her own small, safe realm deep under the ice. She removed her neural tap and groaned as she sat up, rubbing the raw area at the back of her head.

Oh yes, she thought. There will be hell to pay over this.

Virginia got up and went to the tiny, hooded water tap to dampen a towel and wipe her face.

Her scalp still hurt. She lifted her hair and bent over between the mirrored surfaces of two holo tanks to examine the neural-tap-contact area. An angry red rash was spreading, and the standard treatments didn’t seem to be working, this time. Saul had told her that he felt he might be able to come up with a new approach, but he had not been able to hide from her his anxious uncertainty.

It didn’t take a genius to see that they were all dying.

She thought of the giddy celebration above, so brief, so quickly shattered.

It was nice to feel hope, for a few minutes, at least.

Color flashed above her. She looked up as letters coalesced in the computer’s main display tank. Ohno. It was another of JonVon’s eerie, spontaneous attempts at versification… another sign that decay had not limited itself to men and moving machines.

Lost amid the struggles,

Cached in canted rhythms,

Beneficence still dwells,

Cast from forgotten Home.

The figures moved single file across the pitted landscape, linked together by knotted ropes. They stepped carefully, slowly, as they pushed and dragged their burdens over hummocks and crater rims.

It was a silent exodus—shapes in grimy, patched spacesuits, struggling with massive bundles, nearly weightless but cumbersome with inertia—helping each other through fields of fine, black dust, probing to avoid places where it was several meters thick. Elsewhere, they had to brave slick, icy patches and even a few dangerous fields of explosive, amorphous ice.

From Virginia’s vantage point, atop one of Halley’s highest equatorial prominences, the horizon of their tiny world was an arc only a mile or so away… close enough almost to touch. Those below would have to cover only twenty kilometers or so, between the northern base and the caves on the comet’s other pole. And yet, watching the Arcist migration, she felt as if she were witnessing something biblical. The self-styled refugees scrambled, heaved, and turned to help one another as they carried their possessions toward the new homes that their leaders had promised them.

They had been offered mechs to help, but it was widely known that the sophisticated roboids had been rebuilt by Jeffers and reprogrammed by Virginia… both Percells. The Arcists’ suspicious natures won over convenience, so they refused all but the simplest machines.

Three spacesuited men stood on the prominence alongside Virginia’s new mech, also watching the Arcists depart. Carl and Jeffers touched helmets and spoke to each other in private, gesturing at the line of shuffling figures. On her other side, Saul leaned against her mech’s flank, humming an absent tune, low and atonal.

The biblical flavor of the scene was heightened by the figure leading the single-file caravan. There, in front, using a staff as he strode in long, slow steps, was Suleiman Ould-Harrad—once Lieutenant Colonel in the Space Service, now a mystic and spiritual adviser to the Arcist clans. The tall black man had dyed his suit deep midnight blue, and his tabard was white with a single black star.

Behind him, carrying huge burdens or drawing giant, floating sledges, followed scores—from oldsters too long out of the slots to wide-eyed children, spindly and staring from inside plastic survival bubbles.

—At lest thirty more Orthos joined then after Malcolm’s assassination, —Carl muttered, perhaps unaware that Virginia could pick up his words through vibrations in the ice. —We have no way of knowing who actually did it, but I can tell you who profited.—

Jeffers nodded.

—I wish I knew how Quiverian did it.—

They fell silent as the caravan drew past them.

On Virginia’s other side, Saul held the tactile pads of her mech, and occasionally squeezed. She felt it deep underground, lying on her web-couch.

A trio of suited shapes detached themselves from the migration and skim-floated upslope toward Carl. The one in the lead wore a tabard showing the gold splash of the Arc of the Living Sun. Joao Quiverian spoke on the preagreed channel and code.

—We will expect to continue participating in the vegetable hydro domes, and take our per capita share of power from the fusion pile.—

Carl shrugged. —If you work on the Nudge motors, as you’ve promised, we have no reason to deny you your rights. Go ahead and live at the south pole, if being near the rest of us makes you feel unclean.—

Obviously Carl felt more relieved to have Quiverian’s fanatics out of his hair than anything else.

—Unclean and dangerous.—Quiverian nodded as if he had completely missed Carl’s sarcasm. —We shall be better able to work on the Nudge Launchers, since they are to be situated at the south pole, anyway. All that is required is that we are given materials and supplies, and left alone.—

—My crews remain in charge of the launchers themselves,—Jeffers insisted. Quiverian merely shrugged.

—Just do not come into our homes.—

Virginia noted the mood of all the participants. None of them think any of it really matters, or there’d be more yelling going on.

Jeffers shrugged. —We’re all welcome to outfit our own tombs however we want.—The others all seemed to agree with his somber assessment.

Except for Saul, who suddenly barked in laughter. They all turned to look at him.

—Excuse me. Don’t mind me,—he said, waving with one hand. But everyone could see, through his faceplate, that he was fighting down a fit of hilarity.

Carl frowned until Saul’s expression had settled down to a mere controlled smirk. Then he turned back to Quiverian. —Go on, then. Go south in peace.—

The three Artists swiveled and departed. In turn, Carl and Jeffers strode off toward the nearby tunnel lock.

Saul brought the mech’s hand to his faceplate, pantomiming a kiss. —I must go too, darling. Don’t wait up for me.—

“But, but… I thought you’d come down now. We could spend some time together. Saul, you’ve been away for nearly a week.”

—Oh, now, Virginia. We talk several times a day.—

“Through one of my mechs!” A robot foot kicked up dark dust near his leg. “It’s not the same!”

He nodded, grinning infuriatingly.

—I know. I miss you too. Terribly. It’s just…—

He shook his head.

—It’s just that I have to verify something. It’s too damn important to wait. And I can’t tell anybody yet… not even you… not until I know for sure if…—

His voice trailed off as he backed away toward the airlock. Virginia knew the look on his face, that faraway, scientific look. He was already somewhere else.

“Until you know what?” she asked. “What is all this, Saul?”

He shrugged.

—Until I know for sure if I’m crazy… or if I’m…—

The last word was a mumble, something in one of Saul’s foreign languages.

“What?”

But he only blew her a kiss then, and spun about to lope toward the tunnel entrance.

The part of her that was above the surface, linked to a machine of metal and ceramic, watched him until the doors closed, leaving her locked out in the chilly night.

Deep under the ice, the rest of her was no less in darkness.

SAUL

He found Lieutenant Commander Osborn up at Greenhouse 3. Carl stood before a forty-meter dome window, wearing stained, patched spacesuit without tabard. The spacer held a battered helmet in the crook of his arm and looked out onto the garbage-strewn plain of dirty ice.

What a mess, Saul thought, looking over the tattered warehouse tents, the broken mooring mast where that unlucky ship Edmund Halley had once been tethered. At last Saul realized what was bothering him most. It was too dim here in the greenhouse.

He looked up at the spider-thin towers holding one of the huge concentrator mirrors-salvaged from the space tug Delsemme’s great solar sail. Two guy wires had snapped. A whole quadrant of the big collector drooped.

Out on the surface, a single figure picked desultorily through the debris, presumably looking for material from which to make repairs. He seemed not to be in any hurry.

Within, things weren’t much better. The four men and three women on this shift tended the slowly moving belts of drip-irrigated sweet potatoes, clearing debris from the plastic tracks and cleaning the nutrient-spray jets. It was vital duty, but they moved without apparent enthusiasm.

Three of the newly reprogrammed mechs followed the workers around, but nobody seemed even interested in training them in the new hydroponics procedures. The belts ground on; plants drooped in the dim illumination.

Saul was shaken when he recognized the sigil on the workers’ clothes—the staircase and star that stood for Plateau Three.

Spacers!. They’re the last people I’d expect to give up.

Saul saw the expression on Carl Osborn’s face as the man gazedout over the icefield. Isuppose you can’t blame him if he’s lost hope, too, Saul thought. He’s obstinate, and made of strong stuff. But everyone has a limit.

He’s run the same simulations I have. He knows what’ll happen if things go on this way.

Even if everyone pitched in and cooperated, with all the mechs in the world, there would still be nowhere near enough manpower to set up the Nudge Launchers properly, let alone do all the work needed to keep things from going to hell. I’m surprised he even goes through the motions, believing that.

Saul smiled. He planned on changing Carl’s mind about the future.

This time, I swear, we won’t misunderstand each other. Saul hoped that his good news would make Carl forgive even Virginia’s poor choice in men.

I never thought of it before, but with that touch of gray at the sides, and that cool gaze, he sort of resembles Simon Percell!

“Yes?” Carl said as he approached. “You told me you were going to do a bioinventory of the colony. You’ve got a report already?”

“That’s right.” Saul nodded. “But I don’t think you’re going to be very ready to believe it.”

Carl lifted his shoulders. “Bad news doesn’t frighten me anymore.”

Saul couldn’t help letting out a short, sharp laugh. The sound was abrupt, unexpected in this solemn place. Carl’s eyes narrowed.

“You misunderstand me.” Saul grinned. “Either I have gone mad—in which case the news is neutral to good from your point of view—or I have made a discovery which bodes very well, indeed.”

Carl stood quite still. His body remained in a spacer’s crouch, arms forward, knees bent. Only a twitch of his cheek betrayed a hint of feeling, but it was enough for Saul.

Is hope, then, so very painful? He may hate me, but he knows I have pulled rabbits out of hats before.

Saul reminded himself not to be too quick to judge. To a man who has seen the face of Death, and learned resignation, hope is often the most frightening thing of all.

“Explain, please,” the younger man said softly.

“Come with me to my lab,” Saul told him “Even with graphic displays, I’m not sure I can make it clear. But I have to share this. It may be the Infinite’s ultimate joke on a man who had the unrepentant gall to try to play God.”

“I see,” Carl told him after half an hour. “You’ve found infestations of cometary flora and fauna in every single living crew member, in every clan, even in the few people we never unslotted at all.”

Saul nodded. “Even Virginia’s bio-organic computer, JonVon, seems to be suffering from an infection. The thing’s not really alive, of course, but something’s gotten into it. I’m working to find a way to treat it.”

Carl shrugged. “I’ve tried hard to get it through the Ubers’ and Arcists’ heads that their war hardly matters, anymore. Percell, Ortho, everybody isdying.”

He started to get up. “You may have done us a service at that, Saul. Write me up a concise report for distribution. It may help us all make peace with each other, in the time we have left.’

Saul stopped him with a gesture. “Sit down, please. I’m not finished yet.”

Carl settled back into the webbing, reluctantly.

“So what else is there?”

“Remember that bioanalysis I performed on my own body?”

“Sure.” Carl nodded. “Except for your reproductive system—and that perpetual sniffle of yours—you’re fairly healthy. I’m sorry you’re sterile, Saul. And I’m glad for you that the comet bugs seem to be killing you slower than most.”

“Carl, they aren’t killing me at all.”

The other man snapped a cold look at Saul. “Don’t be an ass! Your chart showed an asymptotically increasing.”

“Increasing variety of infesting organisms, same as everybody else. By normal logic I can’t keep fighting all these infections much longer. Sooner or later one will wreck my immune system, opening me wide to all the others. Is that the pattern you’re thinking of?”

Carl nodded. “I’ve studied a lot of medical biology, over my last five duration years.”

“I guess you had to, since Svatuto quit as your doctor.”

“Right. And since Earth stopped giving advice that was worth a tinker’s damn.” Carl grimaced, remembering bitterly. “During my shifts I’ve seen guys live for years with green-tinted skins and low fevers, fighting on like champions… only to fall to pieces—literally—when that last straw hit.”

Saul shrugged. “That was them.”

“And you’re different?” Carl sneered. “You’resomehow especially blessed?”

Saul wanted to laugh. Blessed? Oh, Miriam, what has the almighty done to your simple Saul?

He paused and took a breath. “I want to tell you about something. Let me talk to you about symbiosis.”

Imagine a virus… a simple bundle of nucleic acid packaged inside a protein shell… a killer, a smart bomb with only one job—replication.

Suppose this virus finds a vector, and penetrates the skin and outer membranes of a multicelled organism… perhaps a human being At that point, its job has only begun. From there it seeks its real prey, not the man so much as a single one of his trillion cells.

Seeking might not be the proper word. For a virus is only a pseudo-lifeform. It doesn’t propel itself after vibrations or chemical traces, as protists and bacteria do. A virus only drifts, suspended in water or blood or lymph or mucus—until it strikes the surface of an unlucky cell.

Now suppose one of these little bits of half-life is lucky. It has evaded the victim organism’s defenses. No antibodies manage to latch on to it and carry it away. It isn’t engulfed and destroyed by the immune system’s strike forces. The fortunate virus survives to bump against a likely cell in just the right way, triggering adherence.

It sticks to the cell wall, a simple capsule of protein, ready to inject its contents into the prostrate prey. Once inside, the viral RNA will take over the vast, complex chemical machinery of the cell, forcing it to forge hundreds, thousands of duplicates of the original virus, until, like an overstretched balloon, the ravaged cell bursts. The new viral horde spills forth, leaving only wreckage behind.

There is the virus, stuck to the outer wall… poised to inject this tyrannical cargo into the prostrate prey…

Prostrate, yes. But helpless?

For a long time an argument raged among physicians, biologists, and philosophers. A small minority kept asking the same question over and over again.

“Why does the cell let this catastrophe happen?”

Biological heretics pointed out how difficult it was to seize and penetrate the intricate barriers of a cell wall. So much was involved, and it would seem so simple for a cell merely to refuse access.

What about the fantastic number of steps needed to turn the machinery of the cell into a slave factory, forcing the ribosomes and mitochondria to perform tasks totally alien to their normal functions?

“All the cell needs to do is interrupt any one of these steps, and the process is stopped, cold!” the unbelievers declared. “There must be a reason. Why does the cell allow itself to be such easy prey?”

Classical biologists sniffed in disgust. Animals develop new ways to fight viruses all the time, they said. But viruses evolve methods around every obstacle. The balance is always struck across a knife edge of death.

But the dissenters insisted, “Death is nothing but a side effect. Disease is not a war between species. More often, it is a case of failed negotiation.”

“You’re losing me,” Carl told Saul.

Saul drummed his fingers on the desktop and searched for the right words. “Hmmm. Let’s try an example. You know what mitochondria are, right?”

Carl inclined his head and spoke in a hollow voice. “They’re organelles… internal parts of living cells. They regulate the basic energy economy… take electro-chemical potential from burning sugars and convert it into useful forms.”

“Very good.” Saul nodded, impressed. Carl had, indeed, been studying over the long, hopeless years. No scholar, he had probably mastered the material by brute force. “And you know the widely held theory over where the mitochondria came from?”

Carl closed his eyes. “I remember reading something about that. They resemble certain types of free-living bacteria, don’t they?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Some people think they were once independent creatures. But long ago one of their ancestors got trapped inside one of the first eukaryotes.”

Saul nodded. “About a billon years ago… when our ancestors were only single cells, hunting around in the open sea.”

“Yeah. They think one of our ancestors ate the ancestral mitochondria. Only, for some reason it didn’t digest it that time. It let the thing stay and work for it, instead.

Carl looked up at Saul, seriously. “This is what you mean by symbiosis, isn’t it’? The early mitochondria provided more efficient energy conversion for the host cell. And in return, it never had to hunt for food again. The host cell.”

“—Our ancestor.”

“—took care of that from then on.”

“And when one divided, so did the other, passing the arrangement down to each daughter cell. The partnership was inherited, generation by generation.” Saul nodded. “The same seems true of chloroplasts, the organelles in plant cells that do the actual work of photosynthesis. They’re kin to blue-green algae. And many other cellular components show signs they may have once been independent creatures, too.”

“Yes. I do remember reading about that.” Carl seemed interested for the first time. Saul remembered some of the conversations they’d had back in the early days, before their differences had yawned like gulf between them. He wondered if Carl missed them s much as he did.

Probably more. After all, I have Virginia.

“The same holds for the entire organism, Carl. A normal human being has countless species of creatures living in him, depending on him as he depends on them. From gut bacteria that help us digest our food, to a special type of mite that lives only at the base of human eyelashes, scouring them, eating decayed matter and keeping them clean.”

Saul spread his hands. “None of these symbiotic animals can live independently of man anymore. Nor can we very easily do without them. They’re almost as much parts of the colony organism called Homo sapiens as human DNA itself.”

Carl blinked, as if trying to absorb this new leap. “It’s like a quantum field in physics, then. The boundaries of what I call ‘me’ are… are…”

“Are amorphous. Nebulous. Difficult to define. You’ve got it! They’ve found that married couples share much the same suite of intestinal flora, for instance. Make love to a woman, and you exchange symbionts. In a sense, you become partly the same creature by sharing elements that grow and participate in each other.”

Carl frowned. And Saul realized that he was skirting a touchy subject. He hurried on.

“But here is my main point. Carl. Probably few, if any, of these symbionts simply settled into their niches without an initial struggle. Evolution doesn’t work that way… at least not usually.”

“But—”

“Every symbiont, from digestion helper to follicle cleaner, started out as an invader, once upon a time. Every synergism began in a disease.”

“I don’t…” Carl frowned in concentration. “Wait. Wait a minute.” His brow was knitted with tight furrows. “You spoke of disease as negotiation between a host and an invading.”

“— Visiting—”

“— species. But… but even if that’s the case, this negotiation takes place over the bodies of uncounted dead of both sides!” Carl looked up, eyes flashing. “True, they may come to a modus vivendi someday, but that doesn’t help the individuals who die, often horribly, broken on the wheel of evolution.”

Saul stared, unable to hide his surprise. In his most pensive moments, Carl Osborn seemed to have come upon a new facility with words. With tempering, an awkward youth had turned into something of a poet.

“Well said.” Saul nodded. “And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here on Halley. Some die abruptly. Others fight the interlopers to a standstill. Some even profit a little from some side effect of their infestation.”

Carl slapped the desktop with a loud report and swiveled to face Saul fully.

“All very well and good, Saul. If— if— there were only one or two diseases, and if we had generations, with millions of people, in which to work all this out.”

“But that’s not the case! Say you’re like that green-colored character up in Hydroponics Two.”

“Old McCue? The one whose skin parasite seems to feed him nutrients made from sunlight?”

“Yeah. Great stuff. But— to quote from your own report— the man’s mind has also been reduced to the level of a moron by a peptide byproduct of that very same fungoid parasite!”

The younger man breathed heavily.

“I’m glad you read my studies,” Saul answered.

Carl snorted. “Besides Jeffers, and Virginia’s computer, you’re the only one who writes anything worth reading, anymore. I’m sure you’ll be more famous than ever, when you send your reports to Earth.”

That made Saul wince. How had he managed to make Carl misunderstand him again? “It’s not like that.”

“Oh? Then how is it, Mr. Great Man of Biology? Tell me! I’ve shown you 1 know plenty, for an amateur. Convince me! Tell me how the hell all these fancy theories about symbiosis are going to make one slice of difference to a tiny, overwhelmed colony, every member of which is a total, certain goner!”

The pause lasted. Saul waited until the other man’s breathing had settled— until Carl had slipped back into the webbing on his side of the desk, glaring at him.

“I already told you, but you weren’t listening,” he said softly. “There is one person on this planetoid who’s in no danger at all. Someone with attributes that make him safe in a totally new way.

“That person is me, Carl.”

For the first time, the full point of the conversation seemed to hit the spacer. He stood up.

“You?”

“Me.” Saul nodded. “My sneezing, my perpetual dripping are only surface features of that ‘negotiation process’ we spoke of. And it seams my immune system is a perfect diplomat. Except for the damage to my reproductive cells, my body has taken all comers almost without trouble. It accepts or rejects every new lifeform in short order, and each one soon finds its own niche.”

There was another silence.

“I am quite serious, Carl.”

“But… how?”

“How?” Saul shook his head. “I only know part of it, as yet. For one thing, I’ve inherited a rare enzyme that some have called N Complex. A dozen or so others on Halley have it too.”

“And are they…”

“More disease resistant? Seems so. But also, there’s something else, something in my blood that got there back when I worked with Simon Percell.”

“Yes?” Carl’s voice was flat now, his expression guarded.

“It’s called a reading unit. We only used the things for a couple of years, until we found better ways to strip and analyze DNA in vivo. Nearly forgot completely about the little things… until I saw them floating around down there, where they’d taken over my spermetic cells.”

Saul shook his head. “Don’t know how they got into me, really. Must’ve stuck myself one day while doing a gene analysis. But however they got there, my body’s using them, somehow.

“Now I think I know why I was so lucky, three decades ago, when I developed the new cyanutes. I didn’t really develop them. My body did.”

The longest silence of them all followed this.

At last Carl spoke.

“I’ve also read psychology, Saul. You know, of course, that claims of invulnerability are symptoms of paranoia?”

Saul shrugged. “I am, in almost every basic sense, completely healthy. Completely. The only one in the colony. You don’t believe me?”

“Of course not! What do you take me for?”

Saul held out his hand. “Take it,” he said casually. After a moment’s hesitation, Carl’s callused fingers wrapped around Saul’s, still soft from so long in the slots.

Carl’s grim smile faded into intense concentration as Saul squeezed, talking on, casually.

“Diseases, microgravity deconditioning, slot fatigue…they’ve pounded all of you down until a drugged Cub Scout could beat any of you with one hand tied.”

Carl’s brow beaded. Obstinately, grunting, he tried to match Saul’s grip.

‘You know you can’t t knish the Nudge Launchers in time, even with all of Virginia’s mechs to help. You need people, and you don’t have ’em, Carl. Two hundred slotted for good, another hundred feeble as kittens—”

He let go and Carl sagged back with a ragged sigh, his eyes wide.

“I didn’t show you this to rub your nose in your weakness, Carl. I only want you to believe it when I say there may be a way. A way to give similar immunity to many, maybe even most of the members of this expedition.

“Carl, we just may not be doomed, after all.”

He said no more. There was no point in talking any longer. When the other man had questions, he would ask them. Let it have time to sink in, he thought.

Right now, Carl’s face was like a statue’s. He stood up— rocky, unsteady— staring at Saul even as he backed away, shaking his head. With one hand he touched the doorplate, spilling phosphor light into the darkened room.

From the hallway, Carl kept staring at him until the door had shut again, cutting off the view, but not the image.

After a moment Saul looked up at the ceiling.

Oh, I know you, Ado-shem, he thought at the bearded, fierce-eyed God of Abraham. Thismorning I opened your gift, tore off the wrapping paper, and looked inside. And just now I showed its frightening beauty to a man who was once a friend.

It looks, at just, like a fine gift. Like the rock that flowed with water for the Hebrew children in the desert. But you and t know that inside the box is another box and another, and more ad infinitum.

And I’m still no closer to an answer to the basic questions, am I!? Where did Halley-Life come from? Did comets seed the Earth, long ago? Or are we only the latest invaders of this little worldlet? How could all of this have happened in the first place?

There was no reply, of course.

He smiled upward, through half a mile of rocky ice, at the stars.

Oh, yes. You will have your joke.

CARL

Carl and Virginia sat stiffly in nearby web-chairs. The G-wheel had broken down years ago and subtle side effects of constant low-gravity were showing. The lounge was deserted except for them, its vivid wall weather running unnoticed. A drowsy camel slowly bobbed along the brow of a distant sand dune.

“What I mean is, do you think he’s got all his marbles?” Carl asked flatly.

“Of course Saul is perfectly all right,” she answered indignantly, tension visible in her body language.

I’ve got to remember, she really loves the jerk, Carl thought. Okay, be diplomatic. “I’m worried about his… health.”

Virginia wasn’t having any of it. “You mean you think his discovery is a delusion.”

“Well, it is extreme.” Carl threw his hands into the air and boomed out, “I, Saul Lintz, am a godlike immortal. Immune! Impervious! Kneel, mere mortals!”

“That’s not his attitude.”

“Well, let’s say he comes over as a quiet megalomaniac.”

“He was describing a theory.”

“With himself as prime evidence.”

“Well, yes. Who else aboard has the N-constellation?”

“Good question. You could check the DNA log for the corpsicles.”

Virginia’s eyes shifted a fraction sideways for just an instant, but by now he could read her pretty well. “You already have, right?”

She nodded, knitting her fingers together and staring into them. “There are three others.”

“Good. Easy way to test his theory, right’? Unslot ’em and see if they catch a bug.”

“Saul said the same thing when I told him yesterday.”

“Hmmmm. I wonder why he didn’t mention that little fact to me.”

“He’s been busy. I suppose he wants to think things through a little more before… experimenting.”

“Or maybe— just maybe— he wants to do everything himself. Big Saul saves all.”

Virginia flared. “You have no right to say that!”

He held up his hands. “Okay, maybe so. Let’s say I’ve been dealing with a lot of crazies these years. I’ve gotten used to doubting everything.”

She bit her lip. Containing her anger? Or keeping in the suspicion that maybe I’m right?

“If Saul’s inoculations work,” she said in measured tones, “we will be able to save ourselves. The expedition will succeed. You must put your faith in him. You are going to okay his initial test treatments of volunteers, aren’t you?”

Carl shrugged. “My authority is limited. The ‘tribes’ contribute their labor. I handle routine management and make up a maintenance roster. Cap’n Bligh I’m not. I don’t see where I could stop him from recruiting… volunteers.” He had almost said suckers.

“Good. You’ll see, Carl. This is our hope.”

Hope? He was tempted to tell Virginia about the side effect of Saul’s wondrous symbiosis— Saul’s sterility. But if Saul had already told her, it would make him look mean.

Carl paused. Above her shoulder a caravan of scruffy tan camels plodded tirelessly across a vast sandy waste, heading for a green dab of palms halfway to the hard-edged horizon. Red-garbed traders swayed atop each, peering directly toward Carl with unveiled suspicion. Their images wavered with the heat, making the ponderous caravan ripple like a dream. Psychologically effective, no doubt, but Carl’s feet still felt cold.

“Something bothering you, Virginia?”

“JonVon’s… sick.”

“I’d heard. Is it— he— malfing?”

“He’s an organic matrix, remember. Saul thinks he’s got some infestation of Halleyforms. I hope Saul can find a cure.”

She started outlining the problem, the analogy between JonVon’s nonliving organics versus ordinary flesh and blood, and how JonVon could “catch a cold” in a more than metaphorical fashion. Carl listened, looking into her eyes for a long time. He still felt the old tug, that slow warm yearning that would come swelling up in him if he let it. Her pensive, expectant mouth, the regal cast to the high cheekbones…

“Is JonVon immortal, same as Saul is supposed to be?” Carl asked.

“Saul might make him so. If a cure is found. If Saul is right about himself…”

“I still think it’s all baloney.”

She said primly, “We must test those three from the slots immediately.”

She seems so sure. Could Lintz be right?

Virginia was too honest to let love blind her totally. She would have given some sign if she doubted Saul…

“Okay, assuming a real miracle, we’ll need to activate more farm area. We’ll want to pull nearly everybody out of the slots. Maybe— who knows?—Saul can cure some of those with black borders.”

“Even Commander Cruz?”

The thought struck Carl hard. “Could be,” he said to cover his confusion. Reviving senior officers… I won’t be such a big cheese around here. But it would be great to work with the captain again, with somebody who really knew how to get things done…

“It’ll be a hell of a rush, with only a few years to go to aphelion.”

Virginia brightened. “We can do it. I know we can.”

“Damn right.” And Carl forced a hopeful smile.

Why not be optimistic? It couldn’t hurt, after all that’s happened. At worst Saul Lintz is proven as a fool. At best… well, at best we may even finish the Nudge Launchers, move Halley, actually get on with the mission.

But Carl knew that even miracles have their unwelcome consequences. What will hope do to the tribes? he wondered.

That’s when real infighting is going to come, over where we target this old iceball to fall thirty years from now.

VIRGINIA

Virginia wiped at her eyes. Without any gravity to speak of, tears upwelled and clung in quivering beads held together by surface tension. You had to shake your head or blot them. It was that or wear little saltwater lenses and watch the world refracted through your pain.

“Is he going to be all right?” she asked. Her voice trembled like a little girl’s, but Virginia wasn’t ashamed. Lots of people cared as much for certain objects as for human beings. And JonVon was a lot more than a Raggedy Ann doll.

“I think…” Saul’s voice faded in and out. His head was immersed in the holo tank, a cubic meter of neatly squared simulation that looked like an aquarium filled with some bizarre concoction, a chef’s nightmare of bright bits and pieces. It was a color-coded depiction of the intricate chemistry of a colloidal-stochastic computer, and on this deep level all of her expertise was useless. Virginia might be a fair programmer, but she knew next to nothing about molecules, or what made pseudoliving things ill.

Saul mumbled. She could not follow what he was doing with his hands, deep inside the holo, but whatever he discovered seemed to satisfy him. He sat back. “Display off;” he told the diagnostic computer.

“Well?” Virginia’s legs tensed nervously and she had to grip the carpeting with her toes to prevent being cast free of the floor. “Well? Tell me. I can take it.”

Saul took her hand and his blue eyes seemed to shine. She gasped as she read the answer in them. “He’s going to be all right!” She yipped, whirled around, and threw herself into his arms. “You fixed him!”

Oh, what an understanding man, she thought, to hold her close and laugh while her teary eyes perforce left trails on his cheek and she snuffled happily on his neck. Oh, how warm and strong and kind.

His hand stroked her hair, near the dressing on the back of her neck where his new medications had fought down her rash. A week ago anyone brushing her near there would have sent her quailing in pain. But it didn’t hurt anymore at all. The infection was nearly gone.

It was nice to be touched again.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” she said at last as she took his handkerchief and sat up on his lap to blow her nose.

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, that shows how much you know. I am one. Carrying on like this over a machine.”

He brushed her loose black hair back into place. “Then. I’m an idiot too. I was nervous as hell about this. So was Carl.”

Virginia sniffed. “Carl’s worried because JonVon’s far and away the best computer we have left. Carl can’t run the Nudge without him.”

“So? That’s plenty enough reason.”

“I suppose so. But still, he didn’t really care.” Virginia’s fists tightened. Actually, what made her mad at Carl was something else. She was still seething, a bit, over what he had said about Saul.

I’ve always like Carl, she thought. A lot. But he can be so damned pigheaded. It’s been weeks since Saul started sharing serums made from his own blood, and only now, after one incredible cure after another, is Carl finally admitting that a miracle has really happened.

Of course that was unfair. Carl had lived for so long with the eroding despair, with the assumption that all was lost, that hope would take some getting used to.

They would all have to do some adjusting.

Much had changed since the Arcist exodus. Now, thanks to Saul’s cures, more and more people were being pulled from the sleep slots, treated, and put to work building and testing the devices that would be needed when Halley’s Comet was to be turned from drifting iceball into spaceship.

Of course, Saul’s methods couldn’t repair impossible damage, or raise the irreversibly dead. But they hoped to bring the colony’s active population up to two hundred or so, more than half the number originally planned when the Edmund and four sail tugs were cast forth from Earth.

Already the moribund launcher sites down south were humming. The Arcists seemed to be working with Jeffers’s technicians— and even with Sergeov’s Uber Percells— in a new atmosphere of cooperation.

If only it can last, she wished. Somehow, though I want it to, I can’t believe it will.

“Let me see your arm,” she insisted. When Saul held it out she traced the tracks of numerous healing punctures. “Which one was from when you drew blood for JonVon’s serum?”

He laughed. “How should I know, Ginnie? I’ll tell you, though. I admit that this was my hardest case, so far. I never knew bio-organics processors were so complicated.” His expression turned thoughtful. “Actually, the infection agent was subtle, a prionlike, self-replicating molecule that somehow got inside JonVon’s cool-case during the years we were asleep. If it had been allowed to go on much longer…” He shrugged.

“But you caught it in time.” Virginia was still nervous enough that it came out as a question, in spite of her confidence in Saul.

He smiled. “Oh, our surrogate son will be fine. Using symbiosis methods, I turned the molecule into a variant JonVon can use in his self-correcting systems. It actually seems to make him a little faster. You’ll have to evaluate the effects yourself, of course.”

Virginia had blinked when Saul referred to JonVon as their “surrogate son.” Of course now Saul was just like her, unable to have any more children of his own. She realized a little guiltily that this made her feel even closer to him. They would comfort each other, now.

Oh, we’ll have our problems. As time passes, our relationship will never be perfect. That only happens in storybooks.

But a line of verse came to her, quite suddenly, as some of her poems had more and more often, lately. It was haiku.

Saul’s gaze was distant. “Actually, some of the techniques for working with colloidal organics seem applicable to biological cloning. Working on JonVon gave me some ideas.”

She laughed and tousled his hair, now turning astonishingly brown at the roots— though Saul had told her he wasn’t actually getting “younger,” only “perfect for a middle-aged man.”

“You’re always getting ideas. Come on, Saul. I want to talk to JonVon.”

She pushed off toward the webbing by her control station and gathered up her hair with one hand. She peeled back the dressing, uncovering her neural tap.

“Uh, you might want to wait.”

Her eyes flashed. “Is that an order, Doctor?”

He shrugged, smiling. “I guess you’d only do it the moment my back was turned, anyway.”

She grinned. “It’s been weeks. Much too long for an unrepentant dataline junkie like me.”

She lay back on the webbing. Her little assistant mech, Wendy, whirred up and presented the well-worn tapline, which locked into place with a soft snicking sound. She felt Saul slip alongside her as she settled back and closed her eves to the familiar throbbing along the direct line to her brain.

How are you, Johnny? she queried, shaping the subvocal words carefully, as one spoke to a child who has been ill.

HELLO, VIRGINIA. I HAVE SOME POETRY FOR YOU.

The words shimmered in space above their heads, as well as echoing along her acoustic nerve. She could tell, just from the clarity of the tones, that things were much, much better.

Not yet, Johnny. First I want to run a complete diagnostic on you.

ALL RIGHT, VIRGINIA. INITIATING “MR FIXIT” SUBPERSONA.

Saul had never seen this simulated personality before He laughed as a crystal-clear image formed, of a man in grimy overalls, wiping his hands on a cloth. Behind the workman scurried assistants, dashing about carrying stethoscopes and voltmeters and giant wrenches over a great scaffolding. Within, a huge, cumbersome machine clanked and throbbed. Steam hissed and a low humming permeated everything.

A clipboard appeared out of nowhere. The master mechanic smiled as he put on a pair of bifocals and scanned the list.

WE’RE CHECKIN’ IT OUT, MISS. PRELIMINARY RESULTS LOOK PRETTY GOOD.

OVER-ALL SYSTEMS STATUS HAS RETURNED TO NOMINAL. SELF-CORRECTION ROUTINES NOW OPERATING ON “TELL-ME-THRICE” BASIS, RELAXED FROM QUINTUPLE CHECKING REQUIRED DURING THE EMERGENCY. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE REPORTS THAT PROGRAMS ARE RUNNING AT NORMAL OR BETTER EFFICIENCY.

WE SEEM TO HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS IN ONLY ONE AREA, NOW.

Well? What is it? she inquired.

Mr. Fixit looked at her over the rims of his glasses.

I HAVE SOME POETRY FOR YOU VIRGINIA

Her head jerked in surprise. The same exact words…

Something was going on here.

“What is it, Ginnie?” Saul asked, feeling some of her concern over his own link.

“Nothing, probably…” Virginia muttered. She concentrated on sending probes down several avenues at once to find out for herself what was behind this.

It felt so smooth! Was it just in comparison with JonVon’s former, wounded state? Or did it seem easier than ever to cruise these channels in the data streams? It was almost as if she could enter in true thought, instead of using simulations the computer provided to mimic the experience. Blocs of memory were represented by metaphors-card catalogs, filing cabinets, mile-long bookshelves-and rows of wizened storytellers…

There. She came upon a barrier. Something guarded behind a high abates and tightly locked gate. A blockage. A big accumulation of data, hidden away, inaccessible.

“I think he’s just a little constipated,” she said. Saul barked a sudden laugh, and cut it off just as quickly when he sensed her seriousness.

It’s big. What has JonVon got stuffed up in here?

She poked away at the jam with metaphorical levers that were actually carefully crafted mathematical subroutines.

Try a Kleinfeldt Transform… a rotation mapping… yes.

A resorting routine manifested itself as a key that kept changing shape until it slipped into the lock, and turned. Light streamed forth.

Well I’ll be a blue-nosed mongoose!

“Five hundred terabytes of poetry!” She gasped aloud. “And half of it is flashed as triple-A-priority data!”

“Poetry? Priority data?” Saul asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.” Then Virginia stopped. “Oh!”

Amazed, she turned toward Saul and opened her eyes. He looked back at her.

“JonVon knew he was sick! And so he isolated part of himself, in order to save important information for me. He used a sub-cache I’d already double-guarded… my poetry!”

She looked back up at the ceiling, staring. “Five hundred terabytes… the overflow spilled into everything JonVon did. No wonder Carl kept stumbling over apparently random poems while he was doing routine calculations.”

Saul’s voice was bemused. “But poetry!”

She nodded. “Let’s see what this urgent scribbling is all about.”

Presentus with a sample selection of triple-A-priority poetry, please, she asked Mr. Fixit.

The dungareed figure shrugged.

THANKS, MISS. IT WAS GETTIN’ CROWDED IN HERE.

He vanished, and suddenly words flowed.

To Virginia it was one of the weirdest versifications she had ever seen. It was as if the machine had interweaved poetry with some sort of document. She was beginning to be concerned that this was a sign of yet another, until now hidden, illness. But then she heard Saul laugh out loud and clap his hands.

“Of course!” he cried. “The urgent data has been shuffled in among the poems in order to protect it.”

“Yessss.” She nodded, seeing what he meant. “But… but what is the data? What was so important that it had to be hidden away in my special file for safety”

“Look at the date, dear. Only seven years ago. This stuff was sent from home! And at a glance there seem to be volumes, libraries of the stuff!”

She was confused. “Carl said nothing about this.”

“He didn’t know. Ould-Harrad was in charge then, and Carl was still in the slots. Ould-Harrad must’ve just ignored it. He was starting to get all mystical even then.”

“But Earth Control has been so stingy with help—-”

“Who said anything about Earth Control?” Saul laughed again. “Here, I’ll bet I can sift through and find the cover letter.”

“The cover letter?”

But Saul was already at work. He sent commands so quickly, so deftly, that Virginia felt a strange contradiction, a touch of jealousy at someone else being so familiar with her domain, combined with pride that he had learned so well. Pages, sheaves, volumes, flickered past in an automatic sort that pulled the data from reams and reams of poetry.

A few flickering lines of verse caught her eye. Not half bad, she thought. JonVon improved, even when he was sick. If it were sent Earthside, some of it might get published… yet another fallen Turing test.

“Here! Here it is,” Saul announced. “It’s a letter in video form.”

There was a multicolored blur, and then a new image flickered before them. She knew t once that it was not another JonVon simulation. This was a real, recorded transmission.

A woman with close-cropped hair sat at a console, wearing a tight skinsuit. Her face had that high-cheeked puffiness that came from a long time spent living in low gravity. She was made up in an odd manner, lightninglike strokes of color streaking her forehead from her temples in a fashion that must have been current when the message was sent.

Behind the woman there was a broad window-wall showing a scene of vast, reddish deserts, observed from high altitude. Puffy clouds of sand blew in storms across immense wastelands. Somehow, Virginia knew that this was not a weather-wall depiction, but the real thing.

“Halley Colony,” the woman intoned. Her accent was one Virginia could not quite place, but the tension in her voice was unmistakable. “Halley, this is Phobos Base calling. We have listened to your story, heard the agony of your lost hopes, which are ours as well. We note the callous treatment you have received, and are ashamed.

“To a few of us, this crime has gone beyond forbearance. We take this risk, in transmitting to you these tokens of our good will, because not to do so would be to join the soullessness of a generation too smug and comfortable to care about past promises. Too lost in their pleasures to remember.”

The woman paused. Her anxiety was apparent in the whiteness of her knuckles as her hands held the edges of the console.

“If you love us, do not answer or bother to thank us in any way. Do not mention this to Earth Control. These gifts are evidence that a few, on Earth and in space, have not forgotten our kinfolk, those who voyage through the cold reaches and down the river of despair.

“May the Almighty guide you to your destinies, people of the Comet… people of deepest space.”

The image flickered and was gone. There followed a steady flow of indexes, texts, designs, patents, music. Saul scanned the lists, excitedly, but for a few moments Virginia could only blink, again looking out through tears. She seemed still to hear the Phobos woman’s voice, echoing within her mind.

“JonVon was right,” Virginia whispered, though at the moment Saul was too involved, shouting over one title after another pouring forth from the broken logjam of the computer’s memory, to pay close attention.

“JonVon was right. This belonged under poetry. There was no other place for it.”