The Heart of the Comet

SAUL

Existence. Life. Awareness.

The words were often used as synonyms, but he knew that actually they were all three very different things. Three stages in Creation.

Did the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest make a sound?

Could that question even have been asked before all three stages had come about?

Existence supposedly began nearly twenty thousand million years ago—in a hot flux of quarks and leptons when time itself whirled, as if blindfolded, and stabbed out at something that it thereby named the Future. The universe could have taken a myriad of other forms by happenstance—by tiny variations in chance and dimension. Had even one of the basic physical constants been a fraction off, life would never have erupted out of clay-catalyzed chemistry, billions of arbitrary intervals later.

But Life did erupt… self-organizing, self-replicating, and other-organizing. Life had a tendency, from the very beginning, to alter its surroundings, its environment.

But that was not the end of it. Then there came the third creation. There came awareness…

The midget gibbons flew down the tunnel ahead of Saul, chirping at each other and swinging lithely from cables stapled to the moss-covered ice. At an intersection they pivoted and regarded Saul, wide brown eyes blinking in question.

“Patience, children,” he told them. “Let Papa read the tunnel signs. We’re supposed to meet a Ginnie at Blue Stone Cave.”

The two small apes hung nearby while he swam over to the meeting of two corridors. A thick green fuzz covered the old shaft and tunnel codes, but below the obscured markings were deep incisions, exposing dark, glittering, icy conglomerate, painted with a substance poisonous to Halleyforms.

An arrow to the right, piercing a large S.

S for survivors.

“Yes, this is the way.” He adjusted his backpack. “Come on, Max. Come on, Sylvie.”

The two minigibbons landed on his shoulders. He pushed off following the phosphorescent glow of the lichenoids.

Two years, he thought. It’s been two years since, all at once, the universe seemed to let up on us. Since the litany of bad news turned around.

I wonder how mach longer this good spell will last.

Everyone seemed to credit his serums and Virginia’s miracle mechs for the turnaround in the colony’s fortunes. But Saul knew that part of the problem, before, had been pure and simple loneliness.

Things had not been the same since that afternoon in Virginia’s lab, when JonVon’s illness-wrought memory blocks tumbled down, and they discovered that they had not been forgotten after all.

There had been no more messages from their secret benefactors. But that didn’t matter. Even more important than the techniques they had received had been the boost to morale, knowing that someone back home still cared.

Even the officials back on Earth seemed to have relented. The colony was buzzing about the “Care Package” that was nearing rendezvous with Halley—sent at high velocity by an Earth Control apparently guilt-racked over its past neglect.

No wonder Jeffers s teams are getting so much done, down at the south pole. Virginia estimates they’ll actually be ready to begin the Nudge this month.

If this peace among the clans lasts, that is…

The passage lightened ahead. Max and Sylvie launched themselves from his back and sped along a wall cable, rushing toward a chattering greeting.

“Who is it, Hokulele? Who’s coming?” a deep voice asked from beyond a stone arch. “Oh, quiet down, you silly monkey, can’t you see it’s only Max and Sylvie? Come on in, Dr. Lintz!”

Keoki Anuenue’s grin was broad and his grip strong as he hauled Saul into a wide chamber that looked half ice palace, half mad scientist’s laboratory. Cavelike crannies led off in all directions, bordered by glittering, faceted structures of hardened crystal. People could be seen moving in some of the rooms, working at various tasks. A few stopped and waved at Saul.

In the chamber’s center there protruded a great boulder of some bluish metal agglomerate, an odd formation that had given the group that lived here its name.

Everywhere was the soft verdance of lush plant life. Here a lawnlike expanse of cloverlike Trifolium halleyense, there a shock of mutated marigolds, growing out of night soil into spindly shapes that never would have been possible on the homeworld.

“Great to see you again, Doc,” Anuenue said. “My people are always glad when you visit.”

Saul had given up trying to get Keoki to call him Saul, like everyone else did. That the big Hawaiian was now older than he—his once jet-black hair had turned silver and his eyes were deeply etched by smile lines—hardly seemed to matter to him.

“Hi, Keoki. You’re looking well.”

“How could I not? I was never really sick, like so many others, but those treatments of yours have me feeling I could climb a wave all the way to Molokai!”

His laugh was infectious. Saul reached up and petted the little capuchin monkey on his friend’s shoulder, who hid behind Anuenue’s head and glared suspiciously at the gibbons. “And how is Hokulele? Does she still have a big appetite?”

Keoki laughed. “There hasn’t been a purple sighted anywhere near Blue Rock Cave for weeks. She has to live off table scraps, these days, and she hates it!”

“Well.” Saul smiled. “I’m sure motherhood will keep her busy enough.”

“You can tell?” Anuenue held up the little monkey. “Ua huna au is mea… Iwasn’t sure I should tell you, since you wanted us to be careful before letting any Earth species become independent of your cloning chambers. But Virgil Simms was visiting from Central, and he brought his male with him.”

Saul waved a hand. “No matter. The modified capuchins are a success, obviously. We ought to see if they breed true.”

The data from Earth had been the key. For although science was still a dull affair, back home, some progress could not be avoided. Saul would never have been able to develop the cloning machines himself, even using parts from a dozen scavenged sleep slots. But by implementing designs released from JonVon’s unclogged memories, he had been able to build astonishing devices.

Using samples taken from their still-frozen “zoo” of test animals, he could now force-grow a monkey or ape from blast cell to fetus to adult in a month. A month.

It was, frankly, almost beyond his comprehension as a biologist. Saul was grateful that half of the process could be run by JonVon, without his having to understand it. He could turn most of his attention to modifying the original genes—an art at which his skill was not obsolete—giving them an artificial inheritance to thrive in the new ecosystem that was coming into being under Halley.

Anuenue was trading monkey faces with Max and Sylvie, making Hokulele insanely jealous.

“I still can’t really understand why you chose gibbons for your own watchdogs, Doc. Without a prehensile tail, they’re almost as clumsy as a man.”

“I have a weakness for apes,” Saul began. “They have their.”

“Saul!” two feminine voices called out, almost in unison. He looked overhead and saw a young woman in roughly sewn fibercloth over-alls drop down from a shaft to alight on the blue rock. A spindly machine fell after her and she caught it deftly, placing it gently on the floor. The whirring, spiderlike mech whizzed ahead of Lani to reach Saul first.

“Hi Saulie!” The machine spoke with Virginia’s voice, but in a slightly higher register, a simpler tone. It was easy to tell that Virginia herself wasn’t “present” —was not operating this particular mech herself—and Saul was just a little disappointed.

“Hello, little Ginnie,” he said to the very unmachinelike, colony-made machine as it reached out an arm and stroked his leg. The device was another hybrid of Earth-based and homegrown research—a mixture of new designs sent up by their secret benefactors, the mechanical brilliance of Jeffers and d’Amario, and Virginia’s hypermodern approach to personality-based programming.

“I love you, Saul,” the childlike voice said softly. The little artificial persona was an edited replica of Virginia’s own. Sometimes, as now, it led to embarrassment. Keoki coughed, grinning behind his hand.

Saul felt particularly unnerved since, at the moment, Virginia was mad at him. Can’t even really blame her, he thought.

“Hello, Lani,” he said to the young woman who followed the robot. She enveloped him in a warm embrace.

“You are looking wonderful,” he said, holding her back at arm’s length.

She blushed, turning slightly away as if to hide the scars the zipper Pox had left on her once-smooth cheek.

“You’re a magnificent liar, Saul. Almost as good as you are a doctor.”

But to him she did look wonderful. For he well recalled when Lani Nguyen had been slotted. At the time it had seemed as pointless as storing a corpse. Now the pallor of deepsleep had almost left her face, and the blue eyelids only made her half-oriental features seem all the more sultry and mysterious.

Virginia should never have told me about Lani Nguyen’s secret cache of human sperm and ova. I’ve almost questioned her about it several times, since her unslotting… to find out where it’s hidden.

Ah, but if I had that plasm in my hands, I might be too tempted …

“When can I go back on duty, Saul? I want to join the crews mounting the Nudge Flingers, before all the really important work is already done.”

A spacer to the last, he thought. “Even if the Nudge does begin in a month or so, Lani, it’ll be years in progress with lots of motors left to build. You’ll do your turn, don’t worry. Right now, though, your job is to rest, get up-to-date.”

She nodded. The little capuchin monkey transferred from Keoki’s shoulder to hers and she scratched it.

“I’ll try to be patient, Saul. Anyway, I’ve got to thank you for assigning me to Blue Rock Clan for my recuperation. I’ve been to some of the other groups to try to visit people…” She blinked, remembering. “Saul, how can people, professional people, with college degrees, act so… so…” She groped for the right word.

“So meshuggenuh?” he suggested.

Lani laughed—clear and bell-like. “Yeah. So meshuggenuh.”

Anuenue put an arm around her shoulder. “We’ve been very glad to have Lani. Any of the clans of the Survivor faction would welcome her as a permanent member.”

Lani blinked. “I… I guess I’ll have to choose one, won’t I? I’m still not used to thinking like that.”

Saul didn’t like it any better than she did. He had hoped that the factionalism of the last thirty years would break down, once more of those slotted in the early days were treated with his serum and released. As the active population of the comet burgeoned, a majority would be made up of those who remembered Earth most recently, whose memories were fresh with Captain Cruz’s stirring speech from the framework of the Sekanina, and the hopes they had all shared.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. The newly revived—disoriented, weak, and afraid—found themselves in a world as much different from the Halley Colony they remembered as that early settlement had been from placid Moon Base 1. They quickly gravitated to groups they might be comfortable with, adopted their ideologies, and became clansmen.

Saul did not mention to Lani that there were three people seemed exempt from this pattern. For different reasons, he, Virginia, and Carl Osborn were all isolated—respected, perhaps, but comfortable nowhere.

Lani shrugged. “Well, I sure won’t go down south and join Quiverian and his radical Orthos.”

“Arcists,” Keoki corrected, like a patient language teacher, instructing her in the right dialect.

“Yeah, Arcists,” she repeated. “And when I got a hall pass and tried to visit some of my Percell friends over in Uber territory, Sergeov told me to get my little Ortho ass the hell out of there! The Mars boys aren’t much nicer, even if Andy Carroll and I once were pals.

“So what choice do I have? That Plateau Three crowd up on B Level is mixed Ortho-Percell, but the PeeThrees have got this gleam in their eyes, you know what I mean, Saul? They aren’t so much spacers anymore as missionaries! They don’t seem to care if they live or die, so long as Halley’s trillion tons of ice gets delivered, according to Captain Cruz’s plan.”

Saul smiled. “It looks to me as if you’ve found a home right here, Lani.”

“That’s right,” Keoki affirmed. “Just let us know. We’ll paint you a new tabard and hold a ceremony.”

Lani nodded, but she briefly bit her lip. “I—I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to Carl.”

She lowered her eyes, knowing how transparent she must seem, but unashamed of it in front of her two friends. There was very little more that could be said.

“I’ll see about getting you some light duty topside soon,” Saul assured her. Lani nodded, gratitude in her eyes.

The little capuchin chirped. The black gibbons, Max and Sylvie, swiveled and looked back down the hallway, their hackles rising.

Keoki peered, his hand drifting toward his belt knife. “Somebody’s coming.”

Men and women started emerging from labs and sleeping caves, nervously gripping staves made from meteoric iron. A pair grabbed the heavy vacuum door and began shutting it. Then they heard a high-pitched whistle—two upsweeps and a trill, repeated twice.

Keoki relaxed only a little. “Treaty call,” he said. “E wehe i ka puka, he told the men, and they ceased pushing. The door stayed half-open. A light appeared down the tunnel, and two smallbrown figures tumbled to a halt just twenty feet short of the entrance, tongues lolling from narrow mouths rimmed with needle sharp teeth.

I should never have let Quiverian talk me into giving him otters, Saul thought, regarding the agile creatures. They’re just too dangerous.

But if he had disallowed the Arcist leader’s request, Saul might have lost his carefully maintained neutral status. It had been hard, serving as middleman, negotiating a treaty so that the emigrants to the south pole still cooperated with Carl Osborn’s crews. The otters had been just one more price.

To his surprise, though, the figure that emerged behind the grinning animals was not Joao Quiverian, or even one of the Arcist leader’s principal assistants. Wild white hair and beard floated like a halo around a face as dark brown as the rich carbonaceous veins lining the icy hall.

“…Kela ao,” Anuenue breathed in amazement. “It is Ould-Harrad.”

Those intense, brown eyes were now rimmed by deep creases. The former spacer officer was dressed in a flapping brown gown of salvaged fibercloth that made him look even more like an ancient patriarch. He gestured with one hand.

“Saul Lintz.”

Lani gripped Saul’s arm and Keoki Anuenue moved as if to stop him, but he shrugged them aside. “Keep Max and Sylvie back;” he said, and cast off down the hallway.

The otters clung to Ould-Harrad’s robe, eyeing Saul ferally. Saul did not feel particularly safe for having been their “creator,” in a sense. In near weightlessness, the creatures were fearsome beasts.

If Joao Quiverian was leader of the radical Arcists, Ould-Harrad was their spiritual guide, their priest. The flame of his guilt complex seemed to drive him hotter than anyone else here on this ancient star mote.

As he approached, Saul wasn’t entirely sure of his own safety. For although the Arcist faction seemed to accept his neutrality, this man was his own force.

“Colonel Ould-Harrad.” He nodded, stopping ten feet away. Saul let his feet slowly come to rest on the floor, toes clutching the soft, hybrid, green covering.

“Do not call me that,” the African intoned with an upraised hand. “I am not an officer, nor spacer, nor Earthman any longer.”

Saul blinked. He had last glimpsed Ould-Harrad during than Great Exodus—his white spacesuit tabard centered with a single, jet-black starburst—leading the Arcist exiles on their trek while Quiverian and his crew covered the rear. During Saul’s brief, subsequent visits to the antipodes, their paths had never crossed. Still, he remembered something the man had said, so long ago, in his lab aboard the Edmund.

“He whom Allah chooses to touch, bears the ridges of those fingerprints, ever afterward…”

“Very well, Suleiman.” Saul nodded. “I see the otters are doing well.”

Ould-Harrad glanced down at the creatures. His hand gently stroked their glossy fur, gene-adapted for life in icy halls instead of the salt spume of the sea.

“One more time, you have proven me wrong about you, Saul Lintz. For the role you have played in bringing these fine creatures forth cannot have been evil.”

Saul couldn’t t help it. He felt a wash of relief at Ould-Harrad’s words, as if he had been worried about that very thing, and the man had the power to absolve. He is very good at this prophet shtick, Saul observed.

“Did Joao lend them to you while you came up north?”

Ould-Harrad’s eyes seemed to flash.

“They are no longer his to lend. That is one reason why I have sought you out. To tell you that there are only three monkeys, down in the south antipodes, to watch for purples and guard the people as they sleep. You must replace these otters.”

“Oh? Where are you taking them?”

“You deserve to know.” Ould-Harrad paused with a faraway look in his eyes. “For years I have gone out onto the surface and meditated under the stars, as mystics have since time immemorial, praying and hoping for a sign. I found that they were hypnotic, those glittering lights in the blackness. After a long time I thought that I had, indeed, begun to hear God’s voice.

“But it could not have been.”

“Why not?” Saul was curious.

Ould-Harrad’s voice was filled with pain. “Because all that came to me was laughter!”

Saul knew that this was more than mere madness. He could almost feel the intensity of the man’s soul torment. “I think I understand,” he said quietly. He did not add that he saw nothing inconsistent in the man’s experience. Who ever said the Creator must be sober? The universe is for laughing, or we must weep.

Ould-Harrad nodded. For a long moment there were no words. Then he raised his eyes again.

“There was another thing.”

“What was that?”

“I… I can no longer be a party to the schemes of Quiverian and his banal crew, they.”

“The Arcists?”

“Yes.” The beard floated as Ould-Harrad shook his head. His voice was barely audible. “The wars we brought with us from Earth are as the fog of summer, that will fall away and be forgotten with the coming of winter. I have come to realize that arguments over where to target this great, frozen teardrop miss the point entirely.”

“Where will you go, then?”

Ould-Harrad’s gaze dropped briefly to the floor. “I must go down…into the ice. Below where anyone has gone—except for Ingersoll, whom they now call the Old Man of the Caves, and those poor creatures who followed him. I will live on what grows, along their trail. I will minister to them, if they still live. And I will think.”

Saul nodded. Within Ould-Harrad’s world view, a hermitage made sense, obviously. He made no effort to dissuade the man. “I wish you luck. And wisdom.”

Ould-Harrad nodded. He looked down at his pets. “I am beginning to comprehend one aspect, at least… this thing you preach— this symbiosis. I did not understand at first, but now…”

He paused. “You are not doing evil, Saul Lintz. For that reason I warn you. Beware of Quiverian. He plans something. I know it. You, in particular, he wishes harm. And Carl Osborn.”

Saul did not know what to say. “I’ll be careful.”

“Care, or care not.” Ould-Harrad shrugged. “Do or do not. In the end, it is all by God’s will. We are helpless to resist.”

The otters seemed to sense something even before he moved. They leaped forth and flicked off down the long, dim hallway. Ould-Harrad turned stiffly and walked away.

He actually does seem to be walking, like onthe moon or onEarth, Saul thought as he watched the man depart. I wonder what his technique is.

He swiveled and glided back toward Blue Rock Cave, pondering the effects of personal gravity.

CARL

The blackness seemed like a solid weight a vast hand clasped about the gray, battered ice. Carl hadn’t been high above the surface for months, and the arid bleakness of it struck him fully, bringing back memories of his years when open silent vacuum meant freedom, deft movement, effortless grace.

Stars gleamed, their tiny brimming beacons of rose and sea azure and molten yellow shining like steady promises of another life— a realm filled with vibrant hues, a place beyond this bleak plain that the slow elliptical glide of orbit had drained of color.

Now the encroaching darkness meant that there was nothing between the frozen waste and the beckoning stars—no planets swarm with clouds and lightning, not even a vagrant asteroid within view.

They rode far below the ecliptic plane now, ten times farther from the disk of planets than Earth itself was from the sun. The outer solar system was vast beyond imagining. Carl looked toward the south, virtually all the solar system at his back. The sun’s dim radiance—a thousandth of that which warmed Earth—could not summon forth the full colors that marked the ice. Everywhere pools of shadow swallowed detail; most of Halley was an inky kingdom.

—Take it careful now,—Jeffers sent.

“Right,” Carl answered automatically, his reverie broken. He jetted down to alight near his friend. Together they glide-walked southward. Normally he would seek the polar cable and use a jet, be at the south pole in a few minutes. But these were not normal times.

They edged around the hummock of orange-splashed ice. Empty storage drums were moored with spiderweb-thin lines to the lump of frozen waste—garbage left from some process now decades old, forgotten. Jeffers slunk from one drum to another, careful not to expose himself to the southward side. Carl followed him. It took an effort to stay on the ice, gingerly digging his clamp-toes in for each long step. He fought down the urge to leap, to fly above the mottled snowscape.

Blithe spirit, he thought. That’s what i was once. Zipping around, all spit and vinegar. Carl Osborn, space daredevil. But now…it just doesn’t have thee same zest.

There were only a few paths that would not take them through the thick dust fields, kicking up plumes that would give their position away. Jeffers motioned to him and they sprinted across a patch of brown spill, running almost horizontally in long gliding steps, boots finding leverage on knobs and juts of ice. They reached the shelter of a chem module, a stained cylinder long sucked dry.

“They must be able to see us by now. I.”

—Shhhh! This close, they can pick up even local comm.—

Carl bent down for shelter, feeling mildly ridiculous. He glanced around the curved edge of the cylinder and took in what he could. Yes, definitely—new structures near the lips of the Nudge shafts. They looked makeshift, thrown together from old cargo canisters and struts. He could see nearly to the south pole itself. Neptune hung barely above the horizon, a faint green pinpoint.

Under high magnification, Neptune’s equatorial bands made brown concentric circles, resembling a target.

Some Ubers still wanted to fire the Nudge to make Halley a Neptunian satellite. They could harvest gases from the upper atmosphere settle on the largest moon. Carl wondered idly what it would be like to live out his days with a slumbering green giant filling the sky. Not a lot like California, no. Maybe I should’ve gone into the insurance business. But he still hoped to see Earth’s blues, and reds, and autumn browns again…

—We see you.—An alert, young voice. Carl glanced around the edge but could spot no one ahead.

“It’s Carl Osborn. I’ve come to talk.”

—Got nothing to talk about. Jeffers told you our policy.—The voice was tense but determined.

“Who is that?” Carl whispered, touching helmets with Jeffers.

—Name’s Rostok. Saul revived him about ten, eleven months ago. Now he’s Quiverian’s number-two guy down here.—

“What’s he work on?”

Jeffers made a sour face. —Mounting the electromagnetic assemblies.—

“Oh, great:” A Nudge engineer. One of those had to go lunatic.

—If you come any closer we will not be responsible for the outcome.—

“Not responsible! What kind of crap is that?”

—We declare ourselves independent of Halley Command. —The voice was tighter, clipped.

—The hell you will!—Jeffers snapped before Carl could motion him to silence.

—We already have. And no Percell is going to tell us what to do!—

Carl breathed deeply. It did no good to blow up at asinine speeches; he had learned that the hard way, through these years. Jeffers was visibly grinding his teeth; Carl signaled him to stay quiet. “What… do you want?”

—Not food,—Rostok answered smugly. —We already have enough hydro set up here to feed ourselves. Found a nice thick vein of edible Halleyforms, too. Delicious. Feed ’em heat and they grow like crazy.—

So we can’t starve them out, Cart thought automatically.

—We want—hell, we already have! —control ofthe targeting of the Nudge.—

Jeffers jumped up. —You bastards! That’s our gear, our labor that built it. Rostok, you put in couple of months. The rest of us been buildn’ the EM guns for years! I’m double-dammed if I’ll let some—uh!—

Jeffers grunted as Carl yanked him down. “I’ll do the talking.”

—Can it, Jeffers. We got the flingers, so we call the tune.—

“You have no right to determine the Nudge,” Carl said as calmly as he could.

—We got the flingers, and we represent Earth.—

“The hell you do. You represent nobody.”

—We speak for Earth. We won’t let you Percells take this plague carrier back into near-Earth orbit.—

Carl had hoped that, with the diseases checked, people would become more reasonable. Looks like it’s just given some of them the energy to be real sons of bitches again.

He opened in a reasonable tone. “That has to be decided in the Council. Look, Rostok, I’m coming out. I want to talk face to face.”

Carl stood and walked around the edge of the cylinder. Was there some movement around a jumble of crates on the horizon? He squinted, then thumbed up the telescopics. Yes—figures working at something, looking this way.

He heard mumbles on a side channel, then the clear voice of Joao Quiverian. —We warned you, Osborn.—

A sudden brilliance cut the dim sunlight. It was invisible in the vacuum but cast stark shadows where it lanced into a hummock nearby. Steam exploded, stones rattled on Carl’s helmet. A geyser burst nearby as a second laser bolt splashed the ice. Carl dived back behind the cylinder.

—That enough for you?—

Carl blinked, blinded by the glare.

Jeffers sent, —They’re usin’ those big industrial lasers—the spot welders. Cut the big girders with ’em. Can’t aim ’em much but Jeezus do they burn.

“Shit!”

—Don’t show yourself around here again.—

Another blazing burst streaked into nearby ice. Blue-white gas billowed into a swelling sphere.

“Damn,” Carl said grimly. “We can’t even use mechs against that—we’d lose too many. We need every one we’ve got for the Nudge.”

Jeffers grimaced and swore steadily. —Prob’ly smash up the flingers if we tried.—

“What the hell can we do?”

—That’s what I thought you’d know,—Jeffers said.

“Shit!”

Meetings. Carl fidgeted with his pen, shifted restlessly in his web-chair. Youcan judge the importance of a problem by how many endless meetings it generates.

He watched the wall weather as much as he could— luscious hills rising from Lake Como in northern Italy, with water-skiers cutting white Vs in waters of ancient blue— but he had to appear to be intent, giving every faction its due attention. They were grouped in loose knots around the meeting room in Central. The Arcist insurrection had reopened the issue of Nudge targeting.

A Pandora’s box, Carl thought moodily. And all this had to happen just now, before I could speak privately to the important people, gather support for what I’ve got to announce. He bit at the end of his pen, a nervous gesture he had picked up sometime in the last year. With over two hundred revived crew, there are plenty of members for each faction. And I have to let them all have their say, exhaust the energy Quiverian’s stirred up. Worst possible timing… as usual.

They had been going nearly two hours now and the groups had lined up exactly as he could have predicted.

The most popular idea was the mission’s original flight plan: a Jupiter flyby on the return to the inner solar system, but before the comet approached too close to the sun. They could swoop deep into the giant planet’s gravity well like a race car in a steep turn, stealing vital momentum.

Using the south-pole flingers, they could aim the Jovian flyby to turn Halley into a short-period comet. That would make rescue from Earthspace easier and harvesting of Halley Core possible. The Plateau Three people favored the original plan, as did the solid majority of nonaligned crew.

The Ubers— the radical Percells led by Sergeov— wanted a different variant of the Jupiter flyby. Their final goal, though, was genuinely bizarre— to abandon the inner solar system entirely, and return to the spaces out here. Fire the Nudge at a low impulse, they said, and during the flyby pass over Jupiter, rather than ahead of it. That would loop them outward again to rendezvous with Neptune. Use the Nudge again to slow Halley and get captured. Become a moon. Spread out, colonize the rock and ice of Triton. A colony of supermen, perfecting themselves beneath a sky filled with a dm green ball of methane-streaked clouds.

Two vastly different plans, but both calling for rendezvous with Jupiter in 2135. Astronomy allowed many different destinations from that one gargantuan world.

The Plateau Three spacers and Sergeov’s Ubers wereunited in their need for a Jovian flyby, but they made uneasy allies. They differed about many other things, and gave each other guarded glances.

Carl had checked the mission requirements himself, not trusting anybody’s calculations. It would take a delta-V, a change in Halley’s current velocity, of 284 meters per second in the Nudge— aimed at 72 degrees north declination from the ecliptic. Not so easy. Possible, though, using thrusters located at the south pole.

Medieval societies squabbled over rarefied points of theology… and now we argue vector targeting. Equally pointless, maybe…

The irony of the Uber-Plateau Three alliance was that now the Arcists had virtually destroyed both options.

To bring off a good Jupiter flyby on the inward-falling leg, they had to use the south-pole flingers. And the Arcists wanted above all costs to keep Earth pristine and safe from Halley contamination. If the Jupiter encounter came off badly in the crucial hours of encounter, Halley could be flung deep into the inner solar system. The Arcists would never go for a maneuver that brought Halley near the home world. To avoid that possibility, they would refuse use of the south pole unless they were in control. Quiverian and his fanatics would rather die in deep space than let anyone else handle the maneuver.

He read the signs, and knew that the situation was close to war. If something wasn’t done, soon, there would be killing. So Carl had sent a squirt Earthside as soon as he returned… and gotten confirmation. He had to offer a good option to the Council, now, before factionalism made compromise impossible.

Even if I have to fudge the truth…

He waited for a natural break in the talk. The wall weather now showed a sloop tacking in high seas, her stately turn unhindered by glistening steel-blue waves that hammered her without pity or effect. Her sails billowed triumphantly, shimmering white beneath a hard cold sky. She’ll make port, he thought. You can see it in the way she moves.

He let the talk run on for while. When the silence of confusion and doubt came, s he knew it would, he rose and began to speak. He caught and held the eyes of each faction leader in turn—Otis Sergeov hanging legless in air, arms folded adamantly; Joao Quiverian here under a truce, as solid as ever, eyes smoldering; Jeffers, who represented the Martian Way group, lean and sardonic; and the others, who had no particular politics, but did want a chance to live.

Carl spoke slowly, conveying by gesture and expression more than through words the hope he had, the plea for confidence, for solidarity before this new threat.

“This mission was planned around a planetary carom past Jupiter. That’s why we put launchers at the south pole— which are now unusable.”

That put Quiverian on the spot. The others glared at the sallow Brazilian. Of course, Carl wasn’t quoting the man precisely. He hurried on before Quiverian could interrupt.

“But the south pole Nudge isn’t our only option.” He flicked a tab on his sleeve and a chart appeared on Central’s main screen. “It would take a relatively simple Nudge to reach Earth itself. A change in velocity of only sixty-three meters per second, aimed about forty degrees south and nearly ninety degrees away from the sun would bring us home.”

The men and women stirred, varying emotions flickering across their faces. Home.

“But to do it accurately demands that we despin Halley first. We’d arc in near Earth, good for a quick jumpoff and rescue… but only after perihelion passage. We’d have to weather that terrible storm. It’s anyone’s guess how many of us would survive high summer on a comet.”

He had let the frowns and scowls build; now he defused them. Quiverian was red as a beet, opening his mouth. Carl cut him off.

“Of course, Earth Control might get a bit miffed…”

They looked at each other, blinked, and guffawed. Their laughter released some of the long-building tension. Of course Earth would never allow a plan that brought Halleyform spores that near the atmosphere. Even Quiverian relaxed slightly, when it was clear that Carl had not been serious.

“There are other alternatives to Jupiter,” Carl continued. “We could try for Venus— jump off in aeroshells, decelerate in the upper atmosphere. But that’s after perihelion again, and we might not survive slamming into that atmosphere at eighty kilometers a sec or so.”

He swept the room with a long, penetrating gaze. Cap’n Cruz would’ve done this right, he thought. Or maybe he would’ve stopped all this factionalism long ago. I’ll never be the leader he was.

“On the other hand, there is an encounter that’ll get us to a planet before perihelion, and at lower velocity— one with Mars.”

A stir of disbelief. “Mars?”

“You mean target… ?”

“I didn’t know it could even be…”

He went on swiftly, not giving anyone a chance to break in.

“Look. We can’t allow a single faction to control our destiny—”

“And we will not allow use of the south pole unless we have control!” Quiverian shouted.

Carl held his palms up, open. “Okay. That means we have to abandon the Jupiter flyby totally. The next best mission demands a pass into the inner solar system, but not coming near Earth. Instead, we can vector the Nudge to Mars. The encounter itself won’t divert Halley much— but it’ll give us a chance to jump off.”

Some engineers shook their heads. Carl kept on going, before the objections could begin.

“We’ll build aerobrakes and swoop into the Martian atmosphere. It’s thin but deep, a good target for us, especially since an encounter with any planetary atmosphere will be awful damn fast.”

A spacer asked, “We could lose enough velocity on one pass?”

Sharp question. “No. We’d have to do several maneuvers.” He ticked off fingers. “Aerobrake at Mars, divert outward to Jupiter. Aerobrake again there with a gravity assist. Pass inward to Venus, swing around, head for Mars again. By then we’ll have shed enough velocity to make a successful rendezvous brake in the Martian atmosphere. We can get out of the aero shells, come alongside Phobos.”

A long silence. They stared at him.

“But…” Keoki Anuenue muttered. “How long will all that take?”

“Twenty years.”

Gasps.

Carl rode over the babble with, “That’s twenty added to the nearly eighty we’ll have been gone. But it will be worth it to get to Phobos Base, to safety and maybe eventually, home again. I should add that this plan has the approval of Earth Command.”

A Plateau Three woman said angrily, “What’ll happen to Halley?”

Carl shrugged. “JonVon shows it wheeling off into the outer system, back to its original home in the Oort Cloud, gone for good.”

Jeffers said thoughtfully, “We could target Halley smack on Mars— give it an atmosphere!”

“Sure,” Sergeov said, “and try aerobraking at same time. Impossible!”

Jeffers began, “But—” He shut up as he noticed Carl’s signal to be quiet.

“It’s a chance to live,” Carl said emphatically. “If we try the aerobrake and guide Halley to optimize that. Anything else is suicide.”

“What can we expect at Mars?” Quiverian demanded suspiciously.

“Quarantine. Maybe Earth’ll order us isolated on Diemos. Let the medicos study us until Earth is sure these diseases are controllable.”

Another long silence. They all contemplated this new idea, letting it sink in.

“Is possible?” Sergeov asked, scowling.

Carl shrugged. “We might never be allowed into Earthspace— not that that’ll bother the Ubers, eh? Remember, though, that there are decent places to live in the small scientific colonies of the asteroids. Maybe we can even do some worthwhile pioneering on Mars itself.”

Jeffers beamed. “Damn right.”

Carl held up his hand. “One more thing. Earth Command is very strong on this plan. It has made acceptance a condition for getting the Care Package.”

That got to them. The high-speed rocket carrying supplies was the centerpiece of their fresh hope. They had to have it.

Carl realized that the hardest part had been won.

He explained further with some graphics JonVon had whipped up with only minutes’ warning. The Council listened with glacial but growing acceptance. At least it seemed the idea was possible.

Complicated, yes. Difficult and risky, yes. But possible.

And perhaps the only possibility.

Carl remained standing. He kept his mood grave but sympathetic, determined but flexible. And one by one, the factions voiced their own narrow views.

The Plateau Threes disliked throwing away hard-won Halley…but they were used to taking their lead from him.

The Ubers grumbled, but admitted they had no other option.

Jeffers and the few Percell spacers who had clung to their dream of Mars terraforming were overjoyed. They would get to work near Mars, perhaps start the greening of that arid rustworld.

The Arcists weren’t totally happy. They distrusted Carl. But this option kept Halley far from Earth. And the sanction of Earth Control lent it weight.

Through it all Carl felt the dark undercurrent of Percell and Ortho running, but muted now by the constricted, bleak future they faced. The largest part of the crew belonged to a group he called the survivors— because in the end, that was all they cared about.

Quite sensible, he thought ruefully. And I’m their natural ally… even though I don’t believe we’ll ever really get out of this alive…

He watched the sloop run before the wind, her sails big-bellied and impossibly white, her bow cutting the water sharp and sure.

And gradually, reluctantly, the factions came around.

The Council broke up at last with grudging agreement. They would try to reach Mars.

Carl sat down at last, feeling a sudden fatigue sweep over him.

The Arcists are right. They can’t trust me. I know this Mars business isn’t going to pan out right, but it’s politically necessary right now. Necessary in order to prevent a civil war. In order to get the Care Package. The hard truths can come later.

He shook his head.

I’m turning into a goddamn diplomat. I don’t think like a spacer anymore, not even like an engineer. Christ!—I’ll be wearing black tie and tails next. And when I look in the mirror thetongue I see will be forked.

VIRGINIA

The machinery was starting to look old. The original glossy finish had faded long ago, until it was hard to read the names of the equipment manufacturers anymore. They had been rubbed nearly illegible after thirty years of faithful scrubbing.

Ozymandias, my secret hideaway. Virginia glanced over in the back corner of the lab, where little Wendy sat patiently, drawing a small trickle of power from a wall socket. The tiny maintenance mech peeped once and started to rise, but when Virginia said nothing it settled down once more.

Funny, how you didn’t notice things for a while, and then they suddenly hit you. It had been almost two years, Earth time, since Virginia had been thawed and returned to duty, yet in all that time she had not once paid the slightest attention to Wendy. She had been too busy.

Now she contemplated the little mech, bemused.

Thirty years. She’s cleaned and tended and guarded my sanctuary, keeping things just as I left them.

Maybe Saul is right. Maybe I do good work.

She smiled.

Watch it, girl. Keep this up and you really will start to imagine yourself a goddess, like those poor creatures— barely human anymore— who followed Ingersoll down into the deepest caverns, who bow to my mechs and address them by my name.

The last two years had been so busy, for her, for Saul, and for Carl. It struck her that she had not taken any time to stop and think about what had happened to all of them.

A fine trio, we are. None of us were important at all, back when Captain Cruz lived, and everyone was one big, happy research expedition. Carl was just a petty officer, I was a junior Artificial Intelligence tech, and Saul was a doctor with a strange passion for bugs.

Now poor Carl is whatever passes for commander, these days. I’m the Spider Woman, sending out her web of drones to keep the tunnels patched and the gunk controlled. And Saul…

She paused, pondering. Of usall, he’s the one who’s changed the most. Lord, I hope I don’t lose a good man to godhead.

He had been so preoccupied lately. Almost obsessed. Reluctant to link with her in the intimate touch of neural amplification. As if he were hiding something from me… or protecting me from something he felt I’d never understand.

Finally, it had come to a head. Last week she had lashed out, shouting at him in her frustration. Since then, he had left a few terse messages for her, her mechs had seen him in the halls, but for all intents and purposes they might as well have been on different planets.

All around her the holo displays glowed faintly. Even some of the units that had gone blank over her long sleep were replaced, now that she and Jeffers had gotten the autofac working properly up on A Level. For perhaps the first time since her awakening, no red warning lights glowed.

She found her gaze lingering on the Kelmar bio-organic machine that she had spent half her personal weight allowance to bring aboard… ages ago. The heart of her bio-cybernetic computer.

“JonVon,” she whispered. “I need some distraction from my troubles.”

There were things she used to do, for amusement, which she had not had time for in years. But now—

“Let’s see just how rusty I am at visual simulation,” she said, low, and pressed the Kelmar’s thumb ident. A display lit up.

So, Virginia. Will it be more than routine stuff, today?

She shook her head. “Let’s have some fun, like we used to.”

Virginia spent a few moments flicking switches and calibrating before slipping on the worn disk of her neural tap. She had grown so used to direct data flow, controlling or programming distant mechs as if they were parts of her own body, that it took her a few minutes to get back into the experimental, “synthetic” mode that had once been her own special way of interacting with JonVon.

But JonVon remembered. She had only to desire it, and a rainbow of light burst forth… an artist’s palette of brilliance.

I forgot about the colors! How could I have stayed away from this for so long?

Virginia constructed pink clouds over a placid, blue-green sea. She drew seven multihued balls and juggled them in make-believe hands, something she never would have been able to do on the “real” plane.

We’re in good form today, Virginia.

She smiled. “Yeah, we are, JonVon. I’m going to have to go down into you and find out what you’ve done to your simulation software.”

I have been busy. During my illness I was too distracted to tell you about it. However, there have been some interesting results. I am an open book to you, whenever you re ready.

“Later. Right now I Just want to play a little while.”

It wasn’t only in visual simulation that JonVon had made progress. Only her trained ear caught the little signs in his words, phrasing, and timing, that this was still far from an intelligent being. Otherwise, the voice might easily have been that of a living person.

She toyed with the images, making the broad, moonlit sea open up before her. A school of flying fish. Diatoms sparkling in the churned wake of a mysterious shadow, just below the surface.

It felt good. Here within the machine, there were none of the muddy, confusing crises that beset them all on the outside. Here nothing could frighten her. It was too much like home.

Lord, how I miss Hawaii.

She crafted a porpoise in the waters, which chattered and splashed her playfully. The simulation was so vivid that she almost seemed to feel the droplets.

How long has it been since Saul and I made love linked this way?

She quashed the thought.

Will we be attempting a personality molding today, Virginia?

She shook her head. “No, JonVon. After so long, I’m not ready to try that again quite yet. I’ll tell you what, though. Let’s run a simulation of the gravitational sling maneuver Earth Control sent up. The one Carl got the Council to vote for last week. Do you scan the copy I inserted yesterday?”

Yes, Virginia. Do you want a chart? Numbers? Or a full-sense simulation with extrapolation?

“Full sense, JonVon. I want to ride the comet… to see what it’ll look like forty years from now, when we pop open the sleep slots and find ourselves nearing home.”

Home, she thought. Eighty years changed. Will they even remember us?

Virginia felt she could almost sense the rush of supercooled electrons as her counterpart made its preparations.

Ready to commence simulation, Virginia. Please name starting conditions.

“Begin with the Nudge, with the equatorial flinger launchers engaged under Earth Control’s program.”

She settled back as the clouds and sea vanished. The porpoise, too, faded in a last-minute chittering of defiance.

Blackness settled in, conveying a sense of depth that stretched outward, to where stars glittered in their myriads. And below the starscape an image formed… white-streaked gray against sable. It was the by-now-familiar scene of dusty ice on the comet’s surface.

JonVon showed her the new launchers, optimistically depicted as completed at Halley’s equator. It’ll be some chore, building new accelerators to replace the ones the Arcists seized. We couldn’t ever do it without the Phobos technologies.

Arrayed in a ring around the equator of the prolate spheroid, the narrow-barreled guns began firing— throwing pellets of native nickel-iron away into space at large fractions of the speed of light— slowly, imperceptibly changing the momentum of the ancient iceball they were anchored in.

There was no sensation of movement, but Virginia identified with the tiny, simulated figures jumping, waving their arms on the surface. It was a nice touch for JonVon to put them in. For it would look like this— jubilant spacesuited workers leaping in joy when they finally began nudging the comet into a new orbit.

Using gentle signals as natural as moving an arm, Virginia let her sense of presence float upward to watch the simulation better. As the Nudge went on, she followed the icy core’s changing path through the vacuum.

Aphelion, four years from now, and bit by bit Halley s ancient orbit was changing. The launchers stole slightly from its angular momentum, causing it to begin its long sunward fall a few days before it normally would have. The comet’s inward velocity was small at first, but it grew.

Virginia knew this simulation wasn’t intrinsically any more accurate than the ones Carl had used, only more vivid. She wanted everything represented in images. It just wasn’t the same in graphs and numbers.

She rode the comet. The stars turned slowly as the time scale expanded and years flickered past. She and Halley fell together toward the cusp at the center of the solar system.

Ancient ices sublimed under the growing warmth. First carbon monoxide, as the core swept in past the orbit of Jupiter, and later carbon dioxide. The escaping vapors lifted black, powdery dust to meet the growing sunshine. A thin haze began to form.

The rendering was vivid. Virginia watched the faint, glimmering dust and ion tails begin to take shape, like ghostly banners unfurling in the growing light.

On at least ten score occasions the spinning ball of ice had fallen this way, since that time when it had passed too close to Jupiter and been snared into the middle solar system. Since then it had been tethered to the sun on a shorter leash than most comets.

Space was roomy, vast, and since that one near-brush with the giant planet’s gravity the comet had never met another physical object it could not absorb. Dust grains, little bits of rocky flotsam, they all had blundered into Halley’s streaking path and paid the price.

But the Nudge had seen to it that there would be another meeting. Something smaller than Jupiter, but much too large to absorb, would pass improbably close this time, while Halley Core hurtled inward.

And there it was! A pinprick of reddish light, just ahead.

Mars, Virginia thought. Right on time. Ready for a little carom action?

JonVon recognized a rhetorical question. Anyway, the machine was too busy to answer as the close encounter drew near.

This was Earth Control’s compromise, its plan to rescue them without risking infection to the homeworld.

I must admit, I didn’t expect even this much out of them.

Sure, public pressure, Earthside, was a major reason for the Care Package, which was now only months away from rendezvous with their little isolated outpost of humanity. Nevertheless, after all these years Virginia had grown cynical over just how much Earth Control really cared.

I’d have expected them to order us to commit suicide “honorably” and quietly, like good little plague carriers should.

The red planet loomed. Virginia asked JonVon to zoom in on the details, slowing the action as she and the comet approached rendezvous.

She swept ahead of Halley to look over the planet. The icy south pole of the dead world came into view first.

Red sands blew over Cydonia. The long-dormant Shield Volcanoes were pimples that poked nearly through the thin atmosphere, tufted on their flanks by thin, dry clouds.

Phobos rose around the small world’s limb. The little moonlet was a pockmarked stone, aglitter with lights, that rolled by Virginia and then set over the sharp, ocher horizon.

Nice people, she thought of the folk of Phobos Station. Toobad they’ve never been allowed to become a real colony. Maybe we can help them, there.

She looked back and saw the comet nearing, as the men and women on Phobos would see it thirty-eight years from now.

It ought to be quite a show for those folks… Halley sweeping by almost close enough to touch. Mars has to pass through the thick of the tail for its faint gravity to catch our aeroshell lifeboats. And yet the planet and comet can’t be allowed to come so close to each other that the turbulence will knock our boats off course.

In the simulation, Halley was putting up a grand display. Nothing like the spectacle would show closer to the sun, of course; but the twin tails had started to unfurl, and the coma glowed like a fuzzy cloud of fireflies.

The simulation was excellent. JonVon even depicted the lights of Phobos winking off as workers battened down and covered up.

For a few days there would be too many meteoroids to risk venturing out into the open. A small price to pay, though, for a chance to rescue three hundred souls. At least Virginia hoped they would feel that way.

Three hundred people quarantined on Mars… that really might be enough to start a colony. Ithad never been one of her dreams to settle a rust-red desert, but the plan beat the alternatives. And it’ll be nice to,feel gravity again, to walk, and maybe even swim in a dome-covered pool.

It’s not Maui, but I could get used to the idea of being a Martian.

The separation narrowed. Halley’s surface seemed to fizz as hot spots threw fountains of gas and dust into space, adding to the coma’s brilliance.

Is it a trick of perspective? Or are we really going to pass as near as it looks?

Sparks flew off as tiny objects separated from the comet’s head in soundless explosions.

The life rafts. Armored against the dust and heat, the aeroshell-covered sleep slots would split way from Halley. Tiny, mech-controlled rockets increased the spacing, guiding the hibernating colonists toward their first fiery encounter with the red planet’s atmosphere.

Virginia backed away further, giving the simulation space.

All Earth will be watching this. The folks on Phobos won’t be the only ones having quite a show.

Halley’s cloudy coma seemed to touch the planet. Virginia blinked.

Something’s wrong. How can it…

The coma began to warp out of shape, compressed by sonic shock waves as the globe of gas encountered the planet’s sparse atmosphere. Ionized gas bowed outward and away from the weak Martian magnetic field.

The sparkling dot of the core itself, a trillion tons of ice, pulled forward, unimpeded by anything so tenuous as gas or magnetism. It fell ahead of its cloud, and began to glow still brighter.

NO…

Gaseous bow shock waves multiplied into expanding cones. Sensing that she wanted to follow the action, JonVon slowed the encounter as Halley Core scattered the tiny lifeboats like pollen grains and sped on toward closest passage.

Closest passage…

The nucleus split apart! Then again. Four chunks streaked inward at an angle, their path through the Martian atmosphere now incandescent. Then they struck the little world.

One piece seemed to glance off the limb of the planet, like a hammer striking glowing sparks off into space. Plumes of dust roiled where the mile-wide bit had briefly touched down.

A large fragment scored a direct hit on Olympus Mons, shearing off the left side of the great volcano in a titanic, blinding explosion.

Simulation or not, Virginia blinked away the afterimage from that flash. By the time she could watch again, the series of searing blasts had turned into spreading orange clouds. The thin atmosphere rippled and swirled like a shallow pond into which bullets had been fired.

Quakes shook the ancient sands. Under Mars the permafrost buckled and melted. Virginia imagined she could sense magma stirring.

She was too stunned to do more than watch, unbelieving. She sought out the little aeroshells and found one, two, tumbling away toward the sun. Others glowed briefly as they hit the rolling dust clouds, flared, and went out.

Some had simply disappeared.

It was supposed to be a gravity carom! A near passage! Earth Control never said anything about this!

Carlnever said anything about this.

Unconsciously she willed her simulated self away from light— away from the burning, sunlit face of the rocky crucible.

Mars fell back as she fled outward along its shadow. Seen from dark-face, the planet was a thin crescent of red wind, tinged in fire. From one side of the crescent, a rosy pyre bloomed: the god of war answering heaven’s violence in reawakened volcanoes.

Unbeckoned, unwelcome, a line from Shelley came to mind.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Virginia disengaged, her hands shaking as she tore off the contact disk. In her mind, though, the scene continued. Imagination went on simulating what was intended for thirty-eight years hence, picturing the sun as it would rise on the morning following this encounter, to shine over a steamy, cloudy day on Mars.

And later, for just a little while, there would be rain.

SAUL

It was an old biologists’ drinking song from the twentieth century. Saul had learned it in England, during a rainy winter at Cambridge. It seemed appropriate that it should come to mind now, as an earthenware bottle lolled and sloshed in his lap and he sat in the dimly lit corridor outside his lab, trying a Polynesian remedy for what ailed him.

Keoki had given him the jar of homemade hooch saying, solemnly, “You need drunk, Saul.” And, of course, the fellow was right.

There was a refrain to the ditty, to a jazzy, hip beat.

Saul nodded, sagely. “There. You see? They knew about symbiosis even back in th’ eighties, when they weren’t even sure yet they were in the Hell Century. Goes to show there’s never anythin’ new, under th’ sun.”

Nobody was there to hear him, of course. He had finally sent Keoki back… the big Hawaiian’s wives must be worried about him, by now. Saul had assured his friend he would go right to sleep, and so Keoki had left, charging him to try to cheer up.

In fact, sleep wasn’t in prospect, right now. Saul sat and nursed the bottle. He had never felt so far away from home.

Strictly speaking, in four years we’ll be at aphelion and headed back to Earth again. But orbital dynamics was not on Saul’s mind, right now.

She’ll never approve, he told himself.

Oh, yeah? Well, how do you know unless you ask her?

Truth be told, he was simply afraid…afraid of what Virginia might think of his latest experiments. Miracle cures where one thing. Experiments with animals and plants, fine.

But among the gifts from Earth had been data on the force-growth of human bodies. It was like Houdini being challenged by a new lock, or a painter by a blank canvas. The need was there… the dare irresistible.

How do you know what Virginia would say? Maybe you don’t have to sleep in a cold, lonely lab.

Saul shivered, and knew that he was just too much of a coward to test it.

Ah, but what if he could give his love a gift? A gift of the very thing she most wanted in the world? The thing she had reconciled herself never to have?

One night, weeks ago, as she lay in exhausted slumber, he had taken the samples he needed.

From Lani Nguyen— trustful Lani— he had acquired the secret cache of human sperm and ova she had smuggled with her from Earth. He had all the materials he needed, now.

But since then, he had remained indecisive. Until tonight.

He had spent all day laboring in the Arcist enclave down at the south pole— as Colony Doctor he was neutral in all disputes— and had returned depressed. Life was miserable and cold, down in those warrens. Their fusion pile sputtered and barely put out enough power to maintain their greenhouses. Worse, Joao Quiverian had his own factions to deal with— fanatics that made his own Arcism seem moderate, whose loathing of anything associated with Percells seemed to know no bounds.

Keoki was right… I needed drunk.

Another ditty passed through Saul’s mind. One about the fifth Irish Civil War. It was a sad song of fratricide, but nobody had everwrittenanything better for either drinking or pity.

He was humming to himself when a flicker of movement made him look to the left. He squinted at the faint line of phosphors, diminishing in the distance, and saw that several were being occulted by dim shapes approaching down the narrow hallway.

Nobody was supposed to ever come this way. It was part of his agreement with the clans. Then who… ?

He blinked. Felt a chill.

Weirders…

They drifted into view… manlike shapes, but tufted all about like slime-covered sea creatures. The assemblage of native forms each carried was different. In one case there was nothing of the original man left but the eyes. In the other, there was still a face visible through the symbiotic tangle.

This is synergism taken farther than even I can stomach it, Saul thought queasily.

Several times, since that day when the ex-spacer turned mystic, Suleiman Ould-Harrad, left the upper levels to go down and join these creatures, small notes had appeared tacked to Saul’s door. He had filled every request, often leaving bottles of his sera outside. Each wakeshift, when he arose, the packet was gone. In its place lay a small sample of some strange lifeform Saul had never seen before.

It was a trade, medicine for more pieces to the puzzle that was Halley. It suited Saul fine, for he had wanted to find a way to treat the weird denizens of Far Gehenna, anyway. Since Ould-Harrad had gone down to join them, they had seemed to become better organized, less suspicious and violent when someone from a more “normal” clan crossed their path.

He blinked, however, when both emissaries bowed low.

“We c-come and beseech-ch your help-p.”

The stuttering voice took Saul by surprise.

“I-I didn’t know any of you could still talk!”

The one with the face shook its head. “Some c-cannot. But that does not mean we no longer think-k.”

Saul nodded, hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… well, you never show yourselves. The others fear you so.”

“As we fear them. But you are Ssssaul. The Doc-c. We c-come to you with hurt.”

Saul was about to ask them to come into the lab when the lead weirder opened a gap in its foliage and brought forth a small brown bundle. Whimpering sounds came from it.

“C-can you fix-x-x?”

The otter had a broken leg. It writhed and bit at the one holding it, to no apparent effect.

“Of course,” Saul said as he stood up and pressed the thumb-code plate by the door. “Bring her in. This shouldn’t take long.”

Except for Lani and an occasional mech, nobody else but him had ever crossed this threshold. Saul was sure that nobody stranger ever would again.

But then, he had never been very good at predicting.

It was an hour after the Weirders had left that he found himself standing beside the master cloning chamber, with his mind made up. There were sound scientific reasons to proceed with the experiment. The colony needed it. Humanity needed it.

He nodded. “JonVon, I want to set up a secret data base.”

CARL

If he squinted against the sun’s hard knot of yellow, the icescape lay before him like a land of dreams. Armies of men and mechs surged across the slashed, stained territory. They towed long cylinders of buffed steel and alabaster aluminum oxide, or swiveled great clumps of electrical gear, or tugged transformers that, made to operate in cold vacuum, looked more like crusty brain coral than loops of gleaming copper and iron.

The laboring gangs sped across ice that was gouged and split, great troughs dug deeply into it, cut and formed and hammered. At regular spacings Jim Vidor had erected spindly towers by melting, force-forming, and refreezing water into crystalline struts, levels, braces.

Cobwebbed strands connected jutting, orange-tinged fingers of flash-wedded crystals. Ice had little shear strength, and well only under compression. It was impossible to believe that the arabesques were merely functional. Still, Carl had no doubt that Vidor, if pressed, would be able to come up with an explanation for each extruded, delicate strand, every corbelled arch, all the spindly weaving art of it.

Carl had not asked. Humans could not stick remorselessly to the narrow and practical; anyone of skill yearned to express something deep and abiding through his craftsmanship. Perhaps it was the impulse to leave an idiosyncratic, quirky dab of self on the most enduring things they made. Probably it was something deeper, tied to the spirit that had brought a lone tribe of primates so far out from their own warm, moist world.

Carl remembered the opening lines of a poem Virginia had shown him months before. Somehow they had stuck with him.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair.

Omens for good sailing. The poem had something to do with beaches and oceans, and Virginia had sensed some resonance in him for those images. Voyaging out here, sailing against gravity’s tide, resembled the grand old days of seagoing craft. They had tapped a fraction of the sun’s raw photon wind to control the comet’s outgassing, in the first months after landing. Then they ran before that wind, using sunlight only to yield electricity. The crucial time was coming now, when their iceworld craft had to be pushed into a fresh orbit, a new course charted.

He smiled at himself. Clinging to the sea analogy, eh? All because you’re deep in your bones a spacer, and can’t forget it. Ever since losing the Edmund, you’ve been yearning for a ship. This chunk of ice and iron is all you’ve got left.

It was so obvious, Virginia had seen it. She had told him that poetry was a consolation, and to his surprise he had found himself enjoying some of the stuff she transferred into his display. That would’ve been utterly impossible for the brash, self-involved spacer he had been thirty-five years ago. He’d aged only seven years in that time, but that span had a weight of its own. His younger self now seemed distant, almost implausibly blind.

I hope Virginia can’t see too well into me. She’ll find out soon enough how much all this hope and euphoria are false, based on an unavoidable lie …

He didn’t like to recall that. He shook his head and moved across the ice, taking long strides, surveying the work. Keep busy. Don’t think too much; it’s not your strong suit.

Carl circled around a gang of laboring mechs to reach the long trench of Launcher 6. A completed flinger filled the scooped-out, obliquely descending trough. Two engineers were testing a flywheel made from Halley iron.

The machines would deliver momentum at a precisely calculated rate and angle. At first they would fire parallel to the equator, to slow and finally halt Halley’s fifty-hour spin. After that, the launcher would pivot about an axis buried in the trench, bringing it nearly perpendicular to the equator, in line with Halley’s center of mass. Then would begin the long stuttering bursts which would, delivered over years, add minute increments of momentum to Halley’s slow, stately swerve at aphelion. All the launchers, pulsing endlessly, would sum up to the Nudge.

—Real pretty, uh?—

Carl saw Jeffers approaching with an easy, practiced lope. His suit tabard was a crossed pliers and wrench in a cube, stained and spotted.

“Beautiful. Is it tested out? Ready for horizontal mounting?”

—Sure. Sets in there jest fine, any angle you want. Mechs’ll get it duty-mounted soon’s testing’s over.—

Jeffers grinned happily. He was the mainstay of the Nudge, finding solutions to problems with a quick, expert savvy. He worked eighteen-hour shifts without a sign of fatigue. The factory at A Level, humming away now with robos making replacement parts for launchers and rockets, wouldn’t exist without Jeffers. Carl remembered when the man had put in the minimum, wrapping himself in holotapes or pornstims, blotting out the reality of where he was. Work was what he had needed. To Carl, that alone was reason enough to do all this, even if his friend surely suspected that it was all a farce …

—Every crew’s ahead of schedule. Even puttin’ in extra time, without me askin’.—

“We’ve finally got something to work for.” Carl said it without meeting Jeffers’s eye.

—Damn right.—

A manager-mech approached, an extra dome perched atop its carapace in a makeshift kluge. Virginia’s add-ons worked marvelously, making the mechs and robos far more versatile, but they weren’t elegant. The mech winked its lamp to attract their attention and sent,—Launcher 6 complete. Human tech Osaka states that the device is ready, for formal testing.—

Jeffers nodded.—Fire the sucker!—

Warning gongs sounded over the comm line. Everywhere on the surface, teams stopped work and climbed out of pits to watch. Their suits were scratched, worn, discolored, patched with homemade parts.

A ping ping ping of warmup rippled over the comm frequencies, thin ringing echoes of the charging now under way in the trench. Carl peered at the tip of the launcher, which jutted free of the ice nearby, pointing at the sky.

He felt prickly excitement, gathering tension. If they’d made some mistake in the design, in assembly…

A small tremor came through his feet. A rattle in the microwave, a skreee—and the unit discharged.

Simultaneously, a vague haze appeared et the mouth of the launcher. He wondered what was wrong, until he suddenly realized that the firing rate of the flinging tube was several capsules per second— and he was seeing the blur of their passing.

That was all. No roar, no belching smoke. The launchers were designed to operate with near-perfect efficiency, to generate as little waste heat as possible. If even a fraction of a percent of the launching energy seeped into the surrounding ice, it would evaporate away the structural support, producing dislocations, unbalancing the carefully configured momentum-matching of the accelerator segments. Long before the ice was gone, the ratcheting instability of the drive tubes would jerk and thrash them into twisted steel.

But the flinger functioned smoothly. A cheer rose across the comm lines. People raised their arms in victory salutes as far as Carl could see, dancing on the grimy ice, leaping high into the blackness. Only the mechs continued stoically about their tasks, oblivious that humans had at last clasped the helm of this ice ship. Halley was no longer just a tumbling dirty snowball in the long night. She was now a spacecraft.

Jeffers was babbling excitedly, repeating operating parameters as he read them off his helmet display. Carl could follow some of the rapidfire reciting— kilo-amperes surging in low-impedance circuits, voltages building to sharp peaks and then collapsing as each slug passed, leaching the energy of inductive electric and magnetic fields. Energy poured into the capsules, electrodynamic momentum flowing like a fluid at the speed of light.

Only electrical acceleration was efficient enough to avoid the waste-heat problem, to avoid slowly melting the comet itself. For the moment there were ample piles of iron at the north pole, mined in the first year of the expedition, but deep beneath each launcher was a mech mining operation, where in constricted caverns the robots dug and processed more of the comet’s natural, ancient metal.

A factory on A Level made lightweight buckets of a special superconducting polymer. These were loaded with iron and other heavy wastes. Each metal-filled dollop became a bullet. Conveyors fed these with unrelenting precision into the flinger barrel, where the surging voltages clasped each pellet and flung it to enormous speeds— ten thousand kilometers per second, nearly three percent of the speed of light. Launcher 6 was a cosmic machine gun, firing slugs that would reach the nearest stars in a few centuries.

We could have built starships, if we’d only had the nerve, Carl thought. Maybe someday.

Such was the mass of Halley that even these enormous speeds were barely sufficient for the task of piloting. Carl tuned in to an engineering frequency and herd a staccato braaap braaap braaap as each pellet picked up its miniboosts in the flinger column. Launcher 6 was the first of fifty-two that would soon ring Halley, stuttering forth their kilogram pellets for five years. Aphelion, when the comet head paused like a ballet dancer at the peak of his leap, was the most efficient time to divert Halley. Fully ten millionths of the comet’s entire mass had to be ejected. That demanded dozens of mechs supervising the mining and smelting of iron, minirobots to toil beside the endless conveyor belts, subroutines and expert programs to catch every snag, each hitch in the unending stuttering fever of the Nudge.

“Goddamn,” Carl said. “It works.” He felt a rush of relief and realized he had been clenching his hands.

The cheering went on. Even this demonstration, which would run for a mere few hours, was slowing Halley’s primordial spin, minutely altering its long gliding ellipse.

—Runnin’ smooth, too,—Jeffers said, grinning happily.

—Come on down to Launcher Five. I’ve got a nice li’1 pivot rigged there, keeps the flinger tube from comin’ unglued. We figured—

Jeffers stopped abruptly as a geyser of steam boiled from an ice tower nearby. Vidor’s intricate cross-hatching of blue and ivory exploded in a shower of fog and glinting, tumbling remnants.

—Goddamn!—

—What? What’s happenin’?—

“Laser!” Carl flattened himself against the grimy ground. “Get down everybody!”

—What the hell— who’d go and—

“Arcists!” Carl realized “They must’ve heard the successful test over comm.”

Jeffers shouted,—But why? I thought Quiverian agreed.—

“Damned if I know.”

All across the field, people were ducking for cover. An ice tower farther away dissolved silently into mist. This time Carl saw the flash of light as the beam struck.

“They’re firing from that hill— over there. South twenty-five degrees of west.”

Jeffers squinted at a distant speck atop a heap of leftover slag from one of the mining operations.

—They moved one of those big industrials. Tryin’ to hit Six, but those things, they don’t aim all that good.—

The comm rang with outrage.

A bolt gouged into ice near a crouching form and Carl heard a startled tied cry of pain.

“Takeda! Get that woman sealed and to first aid!”

Carl crouched behind a hummock and watched fierce laser bolts send fountains spurting skyward. “Bastards!”

—We gotta do somethin’.—

“I could have Virginia send some mechs around behind, outflank them…”

—Yeah, right,—Jeffers said.

“No, wait…” He checked Virginia’s channel. A hiss. It was cut off. Of course. Only an idiot would attack without cutting off the defender’s source of support.

Another wail of pain over the comm.

Carl nudged Jeffers’s shoulder. “Launcher Six-can you pivot it?”

—What?—

“Tip Six down? Aim it at the horizon?”

Jeffers looked surprised.—The safeties aren’t in. I dunno… that’s a pretty low angle.—

“Try it!”

As Jeffers crawled into the launcher trench, the ice-tower fulcrum for Launcher 5 exploded behind them, sending cables and cowlings into a slow, fluid fall to the surface. Lost components, lost construction time, hurt crew— people who were his responsibility. Carl glowered at the distant dots working around the laser cannon, a murderous anger building in him.

He tuned out the comm channels, where voices swelled and swamped one another. People called for lovers and friends, sputtering in impotent rage. Mechs asked innocently for orders. Then Virginia’s voice intruded on his private line.—What’s going on? Somebody jammed my channels. Who…?

“Get some weapons up here!”

—But, but, what’ll we use?—

“Those small lasers in Three B— that’s all we’ve got that we can move right away.”

—But won’t they just pick off anybody who comes close enough to use small lasers?—

Carl swore. She was right.

—I can send some big mechs from the north pole.—

“We’ll be toast by then!”

He whistled a search-and-contact command for Joao Quiverian and had a channel in seconds. “Quiverian! This is Osborn. You—”

The man’s voice was strained. —Those are not acting under my orders. Arcists they are, yes, but I cannot control them.—

“You expect us to believe that?”

—You must. It is the truth.—

Carl gritted his teeth. So the enemy was faceless. Anonymous. The people using those big lasers weren’t going to allow anyone else to take over the Nudge options, to try another orbit. With them it was all or nothing… and they would take all.

On the general comm, more screams as an invisible laser bolt struck a hillock and dissolved a deep pit into it. Carl saw a body roll away… someone hiding there.

He used command override on channel A. “Get those people off that slag mound by Launcher Two! All of you, take shelter down in the feeder tunnels.” A babble in reply. “And use ident codes if you want to be heard!”

He spoke a quick command in mech-talk and the noise cut off as the channel controller went over to formal mode. Now suit radios would not even work until the system passed on your code-ordering. For a moment there was only an eerie hiss. Then,—Jones, BQ code to Osaka and Osborn. Leading party of five down to shaft now.—

—Lomax, DF code, to command. Got a good view from a safe height. Everyone P-code your sitings to me. I’ll relay situation to Osborn.—

Carl nodded. A few good spacers who remembered their training were worth battalions.

—Jeffers, GH code to Osborn Got it I think.—

“Osborn, GH code. Got what?”

—Jeffers, GH. I’m tipping the launcher down. Got to turn it toward the south. You line it up, okay?—

Carl realized that the steady hammering of Launcher 6 had stopped some time ago. Now, as he watched, the assembly turned laboriously toward the distant low hills, its snout tipping downward. Carl got to his feet and swiftly moved behind the slowly swiveling launcher. The only way he could think to aim the thing was to eyeball it directly, sighting along the barrel.

Great. Real high-tech.

And the Arcists were undoubtedly watching them closely. Their objective must be this site. They had destroyed the easier targets while they were getting the range right. Launcher 6 was much harder to hit, buried in its trench. But now that it was slowly emerging…

He squatted down onto a patch of orange stain and closed one eye automatically, lining up the launcher barrel with the specks on the distant hill.

—Lomax, DF to Osborn. Got a tactical sketch of known enemy positions. Prepare to receive. They’re bunched up pretty close.—

Carl threw the picture over half his faceplate. Benchley’s rough drawing showed a main group and two wings— probably outlying spotters.

Not many of them. I count five. But they’ve got the best ground.

The Arcists were settled into a notch, taking advantage of the shelter. As he watched a bright blue flash winked— and he ducked automatically. Which was ridiculous; if he was in the full focus of the laser it would have blinded him instantly. Instead, they had aimed high. Only the fringing fields had struck him.

He checked Jeffers. Almost tipped enough…

He blinked to clear his vision; it didn’t help much. “Open her up!”

—I… I can’t just shoot that hillside with a full load! That’s a kilogram of iron at ten thousand KPS… it’d be like setting off a ten-kiloton bomb!—

Carl thought furiously. “Empty casings! They only mass a couple grams. Have you got any?”

—Uh. Yeah. I’d better go at low power, too,—Jeffers said.—Take a minute… lessee… one percent setting…—

Someone screamed. Another near miss. “We’ve got to return fire. Open her up!”

—Okay, okay.—To his relief, Carl heard the braaap braaap braaap resume. The sound was different. Lower, rougher.

—It’s not tuned for this! It’ll shake apart!—

Carl thumbed over to telescopic. All up and down the hillside, plumes of vapor spouted as pellets struck.

“A-Comm auto-override. Jeffers, left!”

—Yo.—

The small gouts of fog leaped high, several a second.

A blue flash from the hilltop, brighter this time. The enemy, too, was zeroing in. Carl turned and saw the ice not far behind him flare and suddenly explode into pearly mist.

“Higher!”

—Gotcha!—

A line of bursting fog walked tip the hillside, erratic but rising, steadily rising toward the specks who manned the big, cumbersome tube.

Two antagonists, each wrestling with weapons too big and powerful to be used deftly…like fighters flailing at each other with steel beams. The first to score a hit…

Carl wondered what would happen if the laser struck him fully. His suit would reflect some, and at this angle the beam was spread over a much larger area… still; he didn’t want to find out.

“Go right! And higher!”

The jittering gouts of fog leaped, swerved, steadied-and struck the milling specks.

Soundless destruction. Carl lay on the ice and watched the pellets pound endlessly into the targets— mere writhing dots and splintered, rolling parts of the laser— as the fog of the assault gathered, spread, and finally obscured the scene.

“Okay. You can… shut it down.”

—We get ’em?—

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

Carl felt no elation, no zest. It had all happened so fast, so abstractly. A bunch of dots moving on a hillside. Brilliant, sudden flashes of blue. Then the distant spurts as streaking casings struck ice, struck steel, struck yielding flesh and cracking bone. A science of strict geometry and easy death.

—Hey, we did it! That’ll teach the suckers!—The launcher fell silent. Jeffers leaped out of the trench, exuberant.

“So… so we did.”

He heard Virginia’s voice, and others, and with the returning babble running in his ears Carl walked slowly toward the hammered hillside, not wanting to see what was there but knowing he should. It was part of his job.

Suddenly his mind cleared and he remembered the rest of the poem, the lines that he had idly recalled only a few minutes before…a time that seemed months in the past, now.

VIRGINIA

Spacesuits were aggravating. They reminded Virginia of how out of shape she was— of the passage of years.

She struggled with the adjustment bands, loosening some and tightening others in all the wrong places. Flab! No wonder Saul’s been so…

Virginia clamped down on the thought. Anyway, she was sure their troubles had little to do with her recent lack of exercise.

Maybe nothing was meant to last, she thought. Perhaps everything good self-destructs in the end.

The image of a red world, new volcanoes bursting forth to greet the dawn…

For the first time since the abortive Arcist attack, Carl had given permission for her to come up and see him in person. Being indispensable had its drawbacks. With human guards and watch-mechs standing in layers around her lab to protect her, she had lately begun feeling like a queen ant, a slave to her own royalty.

Though a queen ant, at least, creates eggs…

Another bad thought. Why were these things all coming to the surface right now?

Because we’ve begun killing each other, here and now? Is that why I’m so depressed?

Or is it because I’m lonely, and no longer young?

Virginia finished dressing and slipped a worn tabard over her suit. She didn’t even have one of her own— had never bothered designing one. This one— depicting a sheaf of wheat above three gold balls— had belonged to Dr. Evans, a Hydroponics man firmly dead for twenty years, now. The suit matron had reregistered it to Virginia and she had decided to live with it.

I wish it weren’t necessary to come up here in person at all, she thought as she began cycling through the lock.

But this business was too important to discuss over any comm line. It wasn’t just fear of being tapped. She wanted to watch Carl’s face when she confronted him.

The outer doors opened and the scene was briefly obscured by a fog of condensing vapor. The snowflakes blew away into space and she looked out across the open icescape.

In a sense it was a bit disappointing. Her linkage with remotes had grown so good that her vision on the surface actually seemed better in surrogate than in person. Skim-walking carefully out onto the grimy crust felt somehow more removed than controlling a mech out here.

There was a fluttering sensation of nakedness, too. After all, she had many mechs, but only one body. And it was out on the surface now, under the unwinking stars.

The landscape was less scarred, out here by Shaft 6, than where her mechs and Jeffers’s factory hands had gouged and rutted the ancient comet. Here the dominant feature was a looming edifice that looked something like a cross between a glass Ferris wheel and a web spun of liquid spider’s silk.

A number of spacers were gathered at its base, gesturing from it to a point in the glittering blackness. She recognized the tabards of Carl Osborn and Andy Carroll, as well as several others— mostly members of the Plateau Three and Survivors’ factions. Virginia mumbled command phrases until she was able to latch on to the frequency they were using. It was child’s play to break their coding.

—… tell you I think the thing is just too damn small! They may have made advances since we left, sure. But even that hot fusion torch can’t have pushed more than twenty tons at that kind of acceleration for so long.—

—Yeah? Well, even if it is just twenty tons, think of all that could include. Faster logic quips for better computers and mechs. Hybrid seeds to improve our hydro. And tritium fuses! Twenty tons of stuff like that could make all the difference.—

They were talking about the Care Package, obviously. As she approached, skirting a cracked area in the ice, she heard Carl’s voice cut in.

—You’re hoping the Christmas gifts will change the Arcists’ mind Andy?—

—Or give us something to use to wipe ’em out. I don’t really care which. Anything that’ll shake them out of the south pole so we could go back to the Jupiter maneuver and save the original mission. Th’ Mars fling’s all right, as a second choice. But Captain Cruz would’ve wanted us to…—

The words stopped as Andy Carroll noticed that Carl had turned to greet Virginia.

—Osborn, open channel to Herbert. Hello, Virginia.—

His stained spacesuit was a mixture of cannibalized parts. Over it was draped a dingy white cloth emblazoned with a picture of a red crustacean. His visor cleared and she saw his face. Gray at his temples and lines on his brow had not robbed Carl of his strong-jawed, boyish charm.

—It was good of you to come up, Virginia. There is something special we’d like to ask you to do for us.—

She nodded, then remembered that she was facing the distant sun. Although it was not much more than a very bright star now, her visor might still have automatically dimmed and hidden the gesture.

“I’ll help any way I can,” she began. “But…”

—That’s great. ’Cause we’re getting concerned about the first Care Package from Earth. Don’t want anything to go wrong when it arrives.—

“What could go wrong?”

—How — bout it fallin’ into the wrong hands?—Carroll suggested.

Carl shrugged.

—Quiverian denies responsibility for that attack down at the equator. Says they were renegades, acting without sanction. Still, I see your point. I don’t think we want the Care Package coming down at the south pole by mistake. It may be better to have a mech go out and escort the cargo vessel in.—

Virginia understood. It wouldn’t do to have the rescue package hijacked. Then the Arcists would have a total lock. They’d be in complete control.

“Fine. I’ll start working with Jeffers on the details,” she said. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, though.”

—Sure. What is it?—When she shook her head and remained silent, he turned to the others.

—Be right back. guys. See if you can tune this antenna better, will you? I want a good fix on that thing as it gets nearer.—

—Right, Carl.—

He led her over behind a great pile of mine tailings. Making sure she could see him do it, he reached up and switched off his transmitter. Nodding, she did the same. He bent over to touch helmets.

“What’s bothering you, Virginia? You seem so… subdued. Is it Saul? I’d heard—”

“No,” she cut in hurriedly. His face was so close. The double layer of separating crystal seemed to pass a warm breath. “No, that’s not it, Carl.”

At least it’s not the reason why I came up here.

“But there is something the matter, between you two,” he insisted.

She nodded, a quick, short jerk. “Nothing, really. Just, well, one of those things. Time.”

“Time changes all of us, Virginia. I never did apologize to both of you for the way I behaved, so many years ago. I was an idiot.” There was an earnestness in his eyes.

“You were young, Carl. We were all younger.”

Except for Saul. With the perfect immune system, won’t he live forever? Is that, maybe, a source of friction between us?

Carl looked down for a moment, then met her eyes. “That doesn’t mean my basic feelings have altered, Virginia. If you’re ready for a change…” Carl let his sentence hang, and Virginia suddenly could see something deeper than earnestness, deeper even than the sternness of command. Her gloved hand came up, touched glass.

“Oh, Carl. You’ve hurt so much.”

He shrugged, caught between conflicting feelings.” You came up to see me because—” There was hope in his voice.

Virginia shook her head, blinking aside the weakness that threatened her determination. “Carl…” She swallowed. “Carl, I want to know why you are planning to kill us all.”

“Uh.” He stared. “How… What do you mean?”

Her hand dropped. “Oh, you were always a lousy liar, Carl. At least to me you were. The others seem to have swallowed your Judas goat act, thinking Earth really plans a rescue, all that crap about a tight flick past Mars, then on to Jupiter and Venus, then back to Mars and quarantine…”

“What are you.”

“Come to think of it, though, Jeffers and his bunch would back you even if they knew the truth, wouldn’t they?”

Carl broke contact, stepping back before she had even finished. His lips were drawn tight. When he spoke, the movements of his mouth seemed to convey a pungent if silent, bitterness. Virginia gestured at her ears. With an impatient shake of his head he brought their helmets back together jarringly.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

At least Carl did not insult her intelligence with further pretense. He knew she would have run simulations a dozen different ways before ever accusing him like this.

“What am I going to do?” Virginia asked. “First off, I’m giving you a chance to explain. I want to know why you’re fronting for this trick of Earth Control’s, sending us on a direct collision course with Mars!”

Carl’s eyes closed briefly. “There are factions back home, too. There were… tradeoffs. We had to make agreements in order to get the Care Packages.”

“So that we can smash into planet in forty years?” Virginia couldn’t help laughing bitterly.

“Forty long years, Virginia. Even with Saul’s serums, we’ll have to keep so many people awake that we’ll all be old by that time.’

“There are children, Carl.”

“Those poor babies the Orthos have been having? They hardly even merit calling human, Virginia. You know that. Anyway, they and all of us will live better and more comfortably with the goods we’ll be getting in these rockets from Earth.”

“Comfort!”

“Yes, that counts for something. But there’s a more important reason.”

“What’s that?”

“Honestly, Virginia, can’t you see that this is the only way anything good can emerge out of this entire fiasco?”

She shook her head. “What good will come of all of us dying?”

“Well, from Earth’s point of view, the end of a threat. And in that I can see the Arcists’ point of view.”

“You can?”

“Yes. Of course. They’ll do anything to protect the homeworld from Halleyforms, and you can’t blame them for that.”

“And from our point of view?”

He shrugged. “We spark life anew on a dead world, perhaps. With our deaths we can begin the long process of bringing Mars alive.”

Virginia couldn’t help sneering. “You’re beginning to sound like Jeffers.”

“Maybe I am at that.” He looked away. His voice dropped. “I might have tried to think of something else, no matter how unlikely, if…” His voice trailed off.

“If what, Carl?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“Carl! You have to talk to me.”

He shook his head. “Saul told me, a while back, that he was working on a cloning system. In ten years or so, we might be able to produce a generation of healthy children, slightly modified to be healthy and breed true in low gravity. There may actually be something to that idea some Sergeov’s Ubers talk about, of telling Earth to go to hell and trying to colonize Triton.”

Virginia blinked, realizing what might bring him over to accepting such a plan. “You mean… me, in particular, don’t you?”

“Yes. You, me, the children only you and I could have together. I…I might be persuaded to see another point of view, if that seemed possible.”

Inside Virginia’s mind and heart, winter blew. It was a numb incapacity, n unwillingness to understand this. Dimly, she knew that this was Carl’s own unique version of the neuroses they all had, by now— no worse than normal, but highly unusual. It was a curse of hypertrophied romanticism. The wistful teenager in him had, in one respect, been frozen in time.

She knew that a simple confession might solve this… a frank admission that, no matter how great the technical miracles science made available, she would never have children by any man. The universe had decided that long ago.

The numbness was too great, though, Too much like a weight of ice she could not lift, even to be kind to a dear friend.

“I won’t tell anybody about Mars, Carl.”

“You won’t?” He blinked. “But I.”

“You’ve convinced me that you’re right. It will be better this way… to die bringing life to a dead world. Better than a pointless extinction, the way we’re headed.”

She backed away and turned her transmitter back on. “Tell me when and where you want to meet the first Care Package, and give me a support team. I’ll begin running simulations for a rendezvous right away.

“I’ll be seeing you, Carl.”

She tried not to look at his eyes as she turned away, but she felt his gaze on her back as she picked a narrow, solitary path back down into her crypt, far below the cold stars.

SAUL

It was a sophisticated beast, the vehicle that had traveled so far to bring them gifts from distant Earth, and it had blazed a daring path to reach them here in only five years. Swooping three times past the sun, it had gained terrific speed, until now it streaked outward into the black depths below and beyond the solar-system plain.

During each whipping solar passage it had ridden the blazing sunlight on giant gossamer sails. Then, when distance had dimmed the fires behind it, the great sheets folded away and the machine’s own flame burst forth. Bits of antimatter met in a tiny combustion chamber, releasing energy that was an early collimated light, propelling the craft faster still.

Only three passes were needed to bring its orbit into the plane of Halley’s— but much faster than the fleeing comet. Technology made it possible, and the hot flux of reawakened public opinion demanded speed. To the popular press of a new generation, this was an errand of mercy that would brook no delay.

To others it was something else altogether— a down payment on a bribe to persuade the strange, time-cast, and infected colonists to keep to their agreement, an agreement to stay away.

Did some hope, in this way, to assuage their guilt over the burning of the Edmund Halley? Or to slake their shame over the years of silence and neglect?

Saul watched the screens, along with selected representatives of all the clans, in the cavernous Central Control Room. For once the chamber was actually full, though he would have wagered that the architects had never imagined such a crowd… glowering figures wearing tattoos and clothing woven of Halleyform lichen fiber, bearing scars from illnesses never seen on Earth and muttering to one another in strange dialects.

Even Joao Quiverian was here, frowning with arms folded in a corner, with three bodyguards and a recently cloned weasel watching ferally from his shoulder.

Representatives of all the clans were here to observe while Virginia Herbert guided the colonists’ mechanical envoy into a matching orbit with the still-decelerating Care Package.

“They’ve sure made advances. That torch is fierce,” Andy Carroll said from the ballistics console. “But it’s still not slowing down fast enough to suit me.”

“I’ll match it,” Virginia muttered drowsily. “Don’t fret, Andy. We’ve made some advances of our own.”

A black cloth covered her eyes as she lay back on the webbing by the waldo controls. The neural-tap cable snaked out from the back of her skull, and her fingers gently touched a set of knurled knobs.

Saul noticed Quiverian’s mouth purse in disapproval. To have Percells in charge of the recovery operation was obviously hard for the man to bear. But he was here on sufferance, and could hardly complain.

By rights Carl could have kept the man away, in retaliation for the mutiny he had led down south. Even though Quiverian had disclaimed any responsibility for the renegades who had attacked the equatorial launchers—had denounced them publicly—he and his Arcists were hardly trusted. As long as they were in Central they were watched constantly by a tem of Keoki Anuenue’s neural and adopted Hawaiians.

Still, with the negotiating power the contents of the Care Package were about to give him, Carl could afford to be generous.

No one was even certain what the thing contained. Saul pondered. I could list a thousand items I’d give a finger or a bicuspid for, or more. And there are hundreds of other lists, each as long as mine.

Alas, there probably isn’t even an ounce of good pipe tobacco aboard.

He smiled in faint irony. I’llsettle for the cell-differentiation tuner in that cloning system they developed on Earth ten years ago.

It had started logically enough, his program with monkeys and gibbons and subtly altered strains of wheat… searching for new elements to add to a growing synergism— a meshing of Earthborn and Halleyform life to take the place of perpetual war. But in recent months it had become something more complicated. There were aspects, now, that he was certain Carl Osborn would not approve, and that Virginia probably would never understand.

That was why he had moved his laboratory down into a secret chamber under a quadrant of Halley far from rockets and clans, and prevented even Virginia’s bodyguard mechs from following him there. It had contributed to the growing breach between them, but he had paid that price.

It had been months since he last connected with her the way they had grown accustomed, meshing their emotions— and even an occasional, machine-amplified thought— while holding each other under the faint glow of JonVon’s status lamps. He had not dared For she would surely catch traces… suspect the liberties he had taken, and their tragic results.

A squirming, horrible little thing in a glass incubator… gills and fur and swishing tail… a face—faintly human— contorted in agony and then, mercifully still at last…

“It’s a beauty,” Carl Osborn whispered. And Saul blinked, shaking himself back to the present. It was a memory he preferred not to dwell on, anyway. He looked up to see the faery craft now clearly depicted on the screens.

Spires as wispy as spider’s silk spread like the winter-bared stems of a flower—the spinnerets from which great sails had billowed during the cargo vessel’s three swooping sun-passes—arrayed round a globe that shimmered with impossible mirror brightness.

“I’m scanning that container capsule in the center,” Lani Nguyen said from the instrumentation console. “I’d wondered how they dealt with dust impacts at those speeds. It looks like their shield isn’t even material at all! It’s some sort of gravitic field, or I’m my own maiden aunt.”

“No!” Carroll muttered, and shared a glance with Carl. “A real force field? No wonder they were able to build it so light.”

Otis Sergeov, leader of the Ubermensch party of Percells, hung from the edge of a holistank to the left, with several of his tattooed comrades. “The purple-zippered thingy’s still too meppeed light. What good will two tons of Earth-shit do anyway?”

Jeffers laughed. “What would I do for a few pounds of the right machine dies, or a mile or two of warm superconducting wire? Hell, for those I’d even be willing to paint my skin blue and gibber NewTalk like an Uber, Otis.”

Sergeov’s eyes glinted, and Saul knew that being a fellow Percell would not save Jeffers, if the legless ex-Russian ever had the other man’s fate in his hands.

“Bezmoodiy govnocheest!” he muttered in his native tongue. Jeffers only laughed.

Susan Ikeda, their Earthcomm chief, reported on the latest word over the long-range radio.

“Earth Control says their four-hour estimate is on target. Probe is in the proper deceleration track.”

“Can’t be,” Carroll muttered.

“But they say…”

“Their info is four hours old! Speed o’ light, I tell you. Something’s—”

“Can it, Andy,” Carl said. For a time there was quiet in the room. Only the soft hum of the air fans and faint clicking each time somebody threw a switch. Then Lani spoke.

“It’s turning its torch, Virginia.”

“Check. About time. I’m extending the tether.”

Virginia betrayed no sign of tension, but those in the room hung in suspense. The overhead displays showed the colonists’ two-piece envoy craft, the parts connected by a taut cable less than a finger’s width in thickness and more than fifty kilometers long. Rockets flared, and the connected body began to whirl, like a slow, great bola in the starry blackness.

“Section B’s propellant now depleted,” Andy Carroll announced. “Section A is ready to receive transferred momentum in three hundred ten seconds.”

Lani turned and explained to those observing, “Our probe was a two-stage rocket. Part B provided the initial boost. Part A has saved its fuel for the final match with the Care Package.”

“Then why is part B still attached?” one of Quiverian’s people asked.

Lani moved her two fists around each other, imitating a bola. “We’re using a whirling tether to steal even more momentum from the booster stage. By flinging part B back toward Halley, we give its share of energy to the other piece, our envoy.”

The onlookers barely listened. All eyes were on the center screen, where the Care Package began to turn. What had been a hot speck at the edge of the mirror dome brightened as it swung around to face the colonists’ spinning, two-piece messenger.

The image was too blurred. Their cameras aboard the swiftly rotating section A could not keep a steady bearing on the Earth ship. Processing the quick glimpses, JonVon could barely keep up a simulated point of view.

Saul wondered if he should be helping. He knew JonVon better than did anyone but Virginia herself. At least he could help the organic computer steady the image.

But he had not offered. Frankly, he was afraid Virginia might refuse, and so make explicit what had already become tacit them.

I miss her so. I’ve wronged her by staying away… by not confessing whatI1 have done …

So he had told himself over and over again. But that had not helped him find the courage to tell her of that little warped thing, growing in the clone tank in his secret lab, an attempt at a gift for her… but which had turned out, instead, to be a cruel reminder that God sets limits even on the powers given prophets, and enforces those boundaries severely.

I have been given, into my hands, the power to craft animals and even men… but am denied any way to give the woman I love the child she so desperately wants— a thing most men take for granted.

There had to be a reason. But as yet, the Infinite had not deigned to confide it to him.

“What the unholy clape is the thing tryin’ to do?” Saul heard Jeffers mutter.

“I think…” Carl Osborn glided a step forward, his voice suddenly stark. “I think it’s trying to hit our probe.”

“Impossible!” one of the Ortho moderates from Almondstone Cavern cried. “Why would it…”

But the fierce lance of the Earth craft’s drive suddenly flared in brilliance as its aspect came nearer the camera’s view. Andy Carroll cried out, “Maneuvering! Accelerating turn!” And then all was chaos.

“Tether separated!” Lani shouted.

“I’ve lost contact with section B!” another spacer called out.

“Keep back, all of you! Let them work. Give them room!” Carl cursed as he pushed people away from the controllers. Above their heads the screens were a blur of overloaded sensors.

Carl’s eyes met his as Saul edged past the shouting crowd, worming between the locked arms of Anuenue’s Hawaiians to approach the consoles. There was a silent flicker of emotion on Osborn’s face, then the spacer jerked his head. “All right,” he told Saul. “Help them. But if you get in their way, I’ll have your ass.”

Saul nodded and jumped forward to land lightly on the webbing beside Virginia. He pulled a neural helmet from the console and put it over well-rubbed spots on his skull.

The maelstrom was even worse down in the realm of images and data streams. Without years of practice under Virginia’s tutelage, he would have been instantly lost in the noise.

He sifted, looking only for the vision-processing centers. The really important stuff— vectors and mechanical status reports and course data— he did not even touch. Probably, he would do more harm than good if he tried to help there. But he could give Carl and the others a better view of what was happening. That much was within his ability, he figured.

He called up the section of JonVon’s memory that was reserved for his own work, reciting his secret access code.

Simon says, open Kelley.

The response actually seemed to take a few milliseconds, showing how busy the processor was.

Good afternoon, Dr. Lintz. I have news to report on the state of the newest experiments. The clone chambers are operating nominally. There is—

Not now, he interrupted. Override all but basic life-function maintenance. Transfer other resources to processing incoming data into clear images and displaying them according to following formats.

He to envisioned the console before him, and “dived” in with his mind, tracing pathways and naming throbbing electronic blocks for JonVon to access. The data streams were almost total chaos to him, but working with JonVon seemed to open up possibilities. It gave him a glimpse— or so he often thought— at the wonders Virginia dealt in, as surrogates for the share of infinity that could never be hers.

Bad topic. Concentrate, you old fool!

The seared, tumbling cameras on probe A were still transmitting. If only he and JonVon could time and phase the tumble… access the probe and have it send views in quick pulses…

Yes! Clever machine. Mama taught you well.

Gradually, over the course of seconds, the blur resolved, flickered, steadied. He saw that the fiery torch of the Earth ship had been left behind, its flare no longer burning bright.

The breaking tether took it by surprise. He realized that the Earth vessel had not been able to track pieces flying in such suddenly altered directions. One of the sections was now streaking toward the Care Package at an oblique angle, even faster than before.

“It was only trying to defend itself!” someone cried out in the audience. “We must’ve activated a meteoroid defense!”

Another observer agreed. “We have to terminate this stupid interference. Let it come in as its designers planned. Anything we to will be like savages interfering in a complex machine they don’t understand. It’ll only bring disaster!”

There was a rumble of agreement, but Saul could sense, beyond current after current of settling data, the distinctive flavor of triumph from Virginia.

“Got you!” he heard her whisper, from not far away. Briefly, he turned his head and tried to look at her. But the pulsing neural tap and his natural vision system clashed, threatening him with a wave of vertigo. He closed his eyes again and concentrated on stabilizing the image for Carl.

“That’s it,” he heard the spacer mutter behind him. “Easy goes it, Andy, Virginia… try to lock gently at the base of those spinnerets. Then, Lani, help Virginia tap into the thing’s computer. Find out why it hasn’t initiated contact yet.”

“Aye, Carl,” Lani answered. Saul sensed the Earth vessel as a looming image of burnished gold and silver…a globe too mirror smooth to be any substance at all. In that surface a tiny shape wavered and grew, brightening now and then s the colonists’ robot puffed and flared to match velocities. Their little envoy was dwarfed against the curve of reflected starglow, a spindly crudity that dared to reach out and touch angelic beauty.

“Contact! We’re locked onto a spinneret,” Carroll announced.

“Pulsing a probe-to-probe communications code,” Lani reported. “We’ll see what it has to say.”

Then Virginia wailed.

“Those mad sons of bitches!”

It was as if a knife blade had come down and sliced off one of Saul’s hands. A tsunami of noise and pain tore at his moorings like a hurricane, yanking shreds of himself away into a storm of wild data. It felt like drowning, and he had no idea where up was, anymore. The hurt and chaos was overwhelming.

One thing happened then, that saved Saul’s mind. He sneezed.

The jerking explosion was so violent that the neural-tap helmet flew off his head and banged into the console. Suddenly the world was light and air and real noise— a tumult of human voices that seemed, in comparison, like the whispering of a morning breeze.

“What happened—”

“—blew up! —”

“My God, pure annihilation…!”

“Itaka, get on alert channel! Tell the surface crews to take cover at once!” Carl’s voice commanded above the panicked ferment. “Get them below before the neutrons hit!”

Hands pulled at Saul’s shoulders, attempting to drag him back. He blinked through spots and saw Andy Carroll’s limp form being cut free of his webbing. Keoki Anuenue was fumbling at the back of Virginia’s lolling neck, tugging at her neural tap while others hurried up bearing stretchers.

“No!” Saul screamed. He grabbed Keoki’s wrist so hard that the big Hawaiian gasped in surprise.

Saul croaked, “Don’t let anyone touch her. Nobody!” He picked up the helmet he had just thrown off. “Leave her alone!” Trembling, he put it back on.

In an instant he was back down under the roiling, churning tide of electrons, the roar of an explosion large enough to break a small world.

Better prepared, this time, Saul rode the surges, seeking a rock, an eddy, anywhere to stand and gather threads.

A piece of JonVon’s personality-mimicry program hurtled by, murmuring something about refusing an “Academy Award”…whatever that was. He grabbed it and linked the fragment to sub-routine for searching library data bases, and another containing information on stock-raising on the Isle of Wight.

“Virginia,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

What instinct had told him, with deeper certainty than mere knowledge, that she was lost somewhere in this maelstrom… ? That to disconnect her would be to leave her— if not a vegetable— then with something basic lost forever to chaos? Saul cast about, gathering a ragged construct, a troop of bits and flotsam, and sent scouts out, searching.

A whisper of tropical air, over there!

A scent of chrysanthemum blossoms, here!

A secret memory from childhood… of embarrassment with a neighbor boy… bring it in.

Traces, all, precipitating out of a whirling jumble. One by one, it would have taken a thousand lifetimes to recognize and even stack them all, let alone sort them into what they had been. He didn’t try. All he could do was love them.

Fear and pain… a whispered curse.

“… those mad sons of b…”

It hurtled past. But Saul reached out after it.

I love you, Virginia, he called. Blemishes and all… Stupid and blind as I am. I love you, and I’ll love you forever…

… forever…

The word echoed.

… forever… ?

Yes. Down time until even the Hot fades and all ice comes alive… l will never leave you …

… never… ?

Oh… Saul…

Oh…

“Oooh,” her real-world voice sighed beside him. “Oh, Saul…” The webbing vibrated with movement and suddenly her hand was gripping his, so hard that the welcome pin added to the free flow of tears in his eyes.

CARL

Carl gritted his teeth in irritation, but didn’t let it show. Four hours had passed since the explosion. The searing heat from the nearby blast had flash vaporized a layer of ice off one face of Halley. There had been extensive damage to mechs and diagnostic instruments on the surface, and some casualties. Data was slow coming in, but that hadn’t stopped people from jabbering and theorizing.

Joao Quiverian was getting insufferable. He used the full impact of his height, towering over the others, his voice ringing with a hollow, magisterial command.

“We have erred in a way I find unfathomable. This mishap is a direct result of our meddling with what we do not understand, rather than placing our trust in our fellow human beings. Obviously the mech somehow ignited the fusion chamber of—”

“Perdeeyn!” Sergeov swore. “Arcist idiot.”

Quiverian bore on. “— the Care Package. and—”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Carl said sharply. “Shut up, everybody!”

The knot of people turned its attention to him. “Look at these numbers.” He gestured at one of the screens. “That was a full thermonuclear blast. Not a malfunction of the fusion drive.”

Quiverian gaped. “Not… But why would they send to us…”

Sergeov’s blue-tattooed skin creased with a bitter smile. “Not to us— for us.”

Carl nodded. “I think so.”

“A… bomb?” Lani Nguyen asked wonderingly, her almond eyes widening at the thought.

Carl said flatly, “JonVon estimates the yield at several hundred megatons. Plenty of neutrons, gammas— the works. No fusion chamber I ever heard of can go off with anything like that yield.”

Quiverian said slowly, “Then they intended…to…”

“Have us take that package into our ice and then blow it up. Shatter everything inside Halley. Melt away the top kilometer, cave in the shafts everywhere else.” Carl had to control his jittering nervous energy. Back home, in gravity, the muscles were always doing some work just to remain standing, burning away minute tensions. Here, inner demands for action found no expression. You had to focus it all into other avenues-voice, expression, gesture.

“I… find that difficult to believe,” Quiverian said, suddenly uncharacteristically quiet.

“Is typical,” Sergeov said. “Earthside has been same always. Destroyed Edmund, poof!. Now us.”

Jeffers said sourly, “Yeah, askin’ us for guidance, tellin’ us to lead the package right down Shaft Three. An’ we woulda done it, if it hadn’t been for curiosity, makin’ us send out a mech to see what Daddy’d brought us.” He snorted derisively.

Carl said, “Earthside kept up their story all this time— for three years— when all along they’ve plotted to destroy us entirely.”

“To preserve their holy biosphere,” Saul said mildly as he approached.

Carl raised an eyebrow— How is she?—and Saul nodded reassuringly. Virginia had been unconscious when the med-techs bore her away on a stretcher. Carl felt relief, but in Saul’s quietly pleased expression an unsettling confirmation: Somehow, he and Virginia were back together. The crisis had done that. His own chances— which he now saw he had allowed to build beyond prudent expectations— were zero again. Saul and Virginia seemed able to survive any buffeting that chance could deal them.

“— can expect a full explanation from Earth, I am sure,” Quiverian finished. Carl realized he had missed one of the man’s pontifical declarations.

“What?”

Quiverian’s face knotted with exasperation. “I expect we have been the victims of a political faction. Someone who, under cover of their allotted cargo, included a warhead. This does not mean all Earth is opposed to us. Once we inform high Earth authorities of how this humanitarian gesture has been aborted in a most foul way, I am sure the leadership will take measures to punish and silence this cabal of.”

“Bullshit,” Carl said vehemently.

Quiverian blinked, his lips pursed, but he said nothing. One of his lieutenants began, “Look, you can’t—” but Carl cut him off.

“Look.” Carl said. “they don’t know what’s happened yet, right?”

Jeffers calculated in his head. “Lessee… ’Bout two hours each way light travel time. We should be able to pick up what they were sayin’ when the thing blew.”

Carl nodded. “Let’s pipe into their transmission.”

Carl glanced toward a wall camera and nodded. JonVon was listening, as he suspected, and immediately the room filled with the hiss of solar static. Then a tinny voice said monotonously, “Cannot copy you here emm-dot, Halley.”

Jeffers said, “They’re still sendin’ telemetry for guidin’ it in.”

The voice oscillated slightly, dispersed by its journey of three billion miles. “By our estimates, the package is nearing final matching RPX. Advise you now send it laser marker designation for Shaft Three. Automatic homing will then take over.”

Carl said “They’re still working on their approach.”

A steady blur of static. Then:

“Confirm docking? Negative on auto-servo coupling pip, but we do show counter-comm on reppledex four-over, though. Await that marker pip for none-in.”

The men and women listened to the words from a civilization now as distant in time as it was in space. The mission monitors Earthside, they knew, were trained in the jargon of 2060, to minimize confusions, but still odd terms and mannerisms from the more modern era slipped in. A glance at his thumbnail told Carl that three hours had passed since the explosion. It felt more like a year. He ordered refreshments brought in. The faction leaders listened sullenly, silently.

“Should come anytime now,” Jeffers said.

The wavering voice kept on. “Carrier cinch-by reads nominal. Coded.”

A sudden pause. The sun’s own spiky popping seemed to flood the room, bringing a reminder of the warm regions they had left so long ago, the brooding eternal voice a pressing presence.

Then vague shouts, a commotion. “UV and visible flux! It’s gone off!”

“Too early!” Somebody else cried out. “By my estimate…”

A babble of talk, a distinct thump. “Get away from that! It might’ve already docked, we don’t know.”

An argument, voices shouting one another down. “See if those infect rejects are still transmitting. Goddam, I knew we shouldn’t have safe-armed the bastard.”

Another thump. “Neg, Fred. They’re off the air.”

Faintly, someone yelled, “Those screamers are steam!”

Everyone’s eyes widened s a thin sound came, plainly from somewhere near the speaker— a hearty laugh, a cry of celebration, then the rolling sea-sound of many hands clapping.

The men and women of Halley looked at each other for a long time, silently. There seemed very little to say.

Carl cycled the doors and stepped out through the crystalline refractions of the surface lock. It was eighteen hours later. He had conferred with envoys of various factions, won agreements, soothed as best he could. By all rights he should be holed up in his bunk, getting some rest.

But that would have meant crawling away and licking his wounds, something he might well have done a few decades ago … Now it wouldn’t work, he knew. Too much had happened, too fast. If he brooded over it, he would just get depressed and accomplish nothing.

That was a standard he had slowly learned to impose on himself: What will you have when this is over? Amemory of bitter ruminations, drunken attempts to forget? Recriminations against the hand fate had dealt you? That might satisfy something inside that wanted such sour fruit. But now he knew from experience that he would feel better in the long run if he threw himself into a job, built or fixed or moved something. Let the muscles work their own logic. Then he would be able to sleep, knowing that he had at least gotten something done, kept moving, shown the bastards.

A slight puff of air followed him onto the ice. instant billowing fog. He moved at a steady ground-hugging, ice-gripping lope toward the equator. He could hook on to the cable and jet over, but this way he got more exercise.

There had been a lot of craziness to contend with, and he was glad to be out here now. Where I belong. I’m still a spacer, goddammit!

Some pop-eyed idiot had stopped him in a corridor, accused him of deliberately sabotaging the Care Package. Madness. People didn’t want to accept the cold clear reality— that their homeworld had sworn to erase them.

Well, okay. Just like I didn’t want to face the reality that nothing is ever really going to separate Saul and Virginia. It’s just a matter of scale…

The belt of launchers loomed above the horizon as he loped along, feet finding purchase on the crusty, speckled ice. They were like slender, elegant cannon, each canted at a slightly different angle from its neighbor. Weeks ago they had slowed and stopped Halley’s spin, to make alignment of their thrusts simple. Now the stars hung steadily above, and each launcher aimed exactly at the same point in the sky: Right Ascension 87°, Declination +35°.

—Yo, Cap’n.—Jeffers waved from atop Launcher 16.

“I’m not captain,” Carl said automatically.

—Might’s well be.—

“I’m just operations officer. That’s all the clans will tolerate.”

—Bunch of horses’ asses.—

“I don’t suppose I’ll be getting a promotion from Earthside now, either.”

Jeffers chuckled dryly.—Not much of one, I’d say. You through soothin’ ever’body?—

“Yeah.” Carl leaped up to the launcher cowling.

—Funny, how some of ’em can’t believe what happened.—

“It was their Great White Hope.”

—Pretty rough, when Mother Earth offers you a tit and then— boom.—

Carl smiled despite himself. From here he could see many launchers, a dashed line sketching out Halley’s equator, as if drawn by a careful high-school student for a science project. Their muzzles veered gradually to the north as his eye swept to the horizon. Each lay buried in an oil-hydraulic pad that absorbed the recoil and transmitted it to the all-too-fragile ice. Robos and mechs stood beside each narrow tube, ready to unsnag any trouble with the conveyor-belt feeders.

—They agree down below?—

Distracted by the orderly march of launchers to the horizon, Carl could not understand for a moment what Jeffers meant. “Oh, about Earthcomm?”

—Yeah, ever’body agree to shut up?—

“Not exactly.”

—Who?—

“Sergeov. Quiverian.”

—Sergeov I’d expect few people to listen to, sure. He’s good ’ol boy, straight-arrow Percell. Maybe li’l heavy-handed. But Quiverian? He’s murderin’ bastard! Who’d pay attention to—

“Some Arcists still think it must’ve been a mistake. They can’t picture Mom slaughtering her children, even if they are carrying diseases.”

—Craaaazy.—

“Right.”

Beneath the silent ebony sky these issues seemed petty, diminished. Carl could deal with them inside, encased in ice…but here, human problems and opinions seemed dirty, small, shameful. “So…I had JonVon take a few mechs and…knock out the microwave antennas.”

To his surprise, Jeffers laughed. —Damn right!—

“You…think so?”

—Course I do! We let Earth know we’re still alive, they’ll send another Care Package. Only this time they won’t tell us.—

“This will but us maybe a couple of crucial years. Maybe.” Carl nodded. “They didn’t fail utterly, of course. We lost a couple of people on the surface, and with our attention on the Care Package, we lagged a little on the nudge. We’re starting late.”

Jeffers nodded. —Damn near aphelion. Gonna be a big job, givin’ that much push to this much ice.—

“You’ve realigned the launchers already?”

—Just like you said. Gonna deliver big delta-V if we get started soon enough.—

At least the Care Package fiasco was behind them. While others mourned, Carl was relieved, in a way. It meant they had to break from Earth, ignoring their homeworld, even hiding from it for as long as possible…

Who could tell? In forty years new people might be in charge, back home. Or Phobos colony might have its independence by the time the cometary refugees came streaking in on their blazing aeroshells. Who am I kidding? Carl thought.

The tension in him wouldn’t go away. He needed something. Or someone, he thought, and shut away as quickly as he recognised it.

The launchers. They were ready, calibrated.

“You check the pin settings?”

Jeffers tapped on his board, nodded.

“Pressure manifolds? The magnet alignments?”

—All okay.—

“What are we waiting for, then?”

Jeffers looked up and slowly grinned. —Damned right!—He switched channels and spoke rapid-fire to the engineers.

Around Halley the belt stirred to life. Electromagnetic surges mounted, reached saturation, lay in wait for their release. And inside the ice, Carl knew, men and women were involved with their own lonely questions, doubts, despairs. They needed something to rouse them.

“Let ’er fly,” Carl said.

He felt it through his boots. A trembling, a gathering rush, a sudden trembling release. From the muzzle of Launcher 16 came…nothing he could see. But he could feel each slug of coated iron flee down the electromagnetic gun, fevered pulses shaking the slender tube. Machine gun aimed at the stars. Against the black oblivion above they made no mark, merely arced into its nothingness.

It was a feather’s brush against a boulder, but over time the effects would mount up.

He turned to look down the row. Each launcher flung its shots steadily skyward, the electromagnetic fringe fields sounding as a faint but persistent rata-rata-rata-rata over the comm line.

He should call JonVon, he knew, put the picture on all TV monitors, alert the crew. But for the moment he paused and savored it for himself.

They were heading back, now. Homeward. Halley’s slow sluggish orbit would blunt, turn, warp. For better or worse, they would glide down the gravity mountain, toward a destiny they could not see. It was an end to their long, inert obedience to gravity’s rule. Halley had become a ship.

—At last we’re doin’ somethin’! —Jeffers called.

Carl shouted in sudden joy, all doubts banished. “Sun, here we come!”