The Heart of the Comet

SAUL

He stared at the crack in the wall. The black opening snaked far back into the ice. “When did this happen?” Saul asked.

Two of his assistants—brown-haired, with identical patterns of freckles on their faces—looked up from a lab bench nearby where they had been working. They answered together, in the same tones.

“There was a Halley quake, Pops,” they said in unison. “Two hours ago. A big one. It split the wall.”

“It certainly did,” he said, examining the damage. This would have to be attended to. Even this deep below the surface, it was foolish to let any chamber remain unsealable for long.

Some said it was the flinger launchers, stressing the comet core as they pushed it month by month, year by year, that were causing the quakes. Others blamed the war, now apparently lost for good by Quiverian and his Arcists.

Last month, Carl’s spacers, Sergeov’s Ubers, and Keoki Anuenue’s neutrals had joined together in a lightning raid on the Arcists’ south-pole redoubts, and permanently crippled the remnants of the first set of flingers, and the hidden microwave antennas with which they had been talking to Earth. One result was that now the Arcists could no longer use those old launchers to interfere with the Nudge toward Mars. Unfortunately, during that brief but bloody skirmish, three explosions had rocked that end of Halley Core, worrying some that the integrity of the comet itself might be threatened.

Whatever the cause, the quakes bothered Saul. For four years, now, things had been going well for a change. They had picked up word from Earth’s faint data net that the odds makers were once more taking bets on the colony’s survival. The current rate was five to one against. But that was a vast improvement over the thousand-to-one betting when he and Virginia had awakened from their thirty-year sleep.

For now, at least, Sergeov’s Ubers, the various clans of survivors, and Jeffers’s Mars Boys were all working together. But the alliance struck Saul as being like a supersaturated solution of immiscible fluids—too unsteady to last for long.

They didn’t need these Halley quakes shaking up the delicate balance.

Saul was dressed in little more than a loincloth, robe, and ice-sandals, as he had only left the quarters he shared with Virginia for a brief visit to his lab. She had gone up to the surface to talk something over with Carl Osborn, so he had taken the opportunity to come down here and see how the experiments were going.

Everywhere in the lab there were glassed-in chambers, like aquaria, in which mini-ecosystems flourished or languished—where modified Earth lifeforms struggled to prove themselves worthy of inclusion in the new, synthetic cometary ecology that was only now starting to sort itself out.

Over by the left wall, some of his assistants tended the animals…birds without feathers and goats able to give milk in microgravity.

“Where is Paul?” he asked suddenly.

The brown-haired twins nodded toward the crack in the wall, and shrugged.

“What?” Saul blinked. “I thought I told you to keep him here!”

They rolled their eyes in an expression he had seen countless times, over many mirrored years. “You told us not to let him out the door,” they reminded him smugly.

“Oh Lord.” Saul sagged. Was I ever like these two? So insufferably… immature?

They giggled together. Saul hesitated. He had to go after Paul, of course. The poor child might be the size of a full-grown man, but he wouldn’t be able to take care of himself out there alone.

I can’t take any of the kids with me, he realized, dismissing the idea of putting together a search party of his assistants. They’d scare the hell out of people by emerging out in the halls in a swarm. He had not introduced them to anybody else yet, not even Virginia. They were the most amazing development to come out of the union of Phobos technologies and his growing skill at clone-symbiosis, but this time he wasn’t sure at all how to let the rest of the colony know about them.

Saul lope-floated over to the hole in the wall. He picked up a glow-ball of gene-designed Halleyvirid phosphor. “When I get back we’re going to have a talk about responsibility,” he warned them. “Paul is still your brother even if he’s deficient in some ways. It was your duty to take care of him.”

They looked down, shamefaced. They weren’t bad kids, just inexperienced—very new to the world.

Two whirling, black sticks of fur leaped onto Saul, clambering over his shoulders. He gently unpeeled the midget gibbons.

“Not now, Max, Sylvie. I’ll be right back. Stay with the boys.” They stared after him, wide-eyed, as Saul turned and dove into the dark gap alone.

Of course Paul probably wasn’t in any danger. He was immune to purple toxins, of course, and if this passage held air, so did everything connected to it.

If only I can catch up with him before he runs into people.

Sooner or later, of course, he would have to reveal what he was doing. Announce that he had finally found solutions to many of the problems of growth and development that had made child-rearing a near impossibility on Halley.

What he had learned might even be applied to helping the thirty or so children the Orthos and a few Percells had already produced. During the last year, improving the lot of those poor, warped creatures had been one of his highest priorities.

He had hoped to put off showing people his own “kids,” though, until the Nudge was fully under way and people were filing back into the slots. It might go over better when there were fewer people around.

I hope I can catch Paul in time. Strangers might upset him.

In the soft light given off by the glow-ball, the crevice in the ice was a sparkling wonderworks of jagged crystals and puffy clathrate snow. It was easy to follow the path the youngster had taken by the handholds he had used. A smudge here, there a thread ripped from the floppy old lab coat Paul liked to wear. Saul followed the trail through a small crystal chamber that had not been charted before, now exposed in all its agate glory by recent tremors in the ancient ice.

He hurried onward. The passage narrowed until it was little more than a man’s width across. Athin man’s width, Saul thought, as he squeezed through, stretching ahead with his hands to pull himself along the narrow stricture.

He couldn’t help comparing it to a birth canal. Something in the tunnel—perhaps a new Halleyform his immune system had not yet come to terms with—was causing a burning, itching reaction in his sinuses and throat. His nose twitched and tingled.

Aw hell… he thought, closing his eyes, squinting.

“A-a-a-chblthooh!”

The echo of his sneeze reverberated from an open chamber just ahead. Saul shook his head to clear it, and crawled on as he heard the distinct sound of a child crying.

His hand pushed through snow and met open space letting. more light in. High-pitched shrieks greeted its appearance.

“Old Hard Man! It’s Old Hard Man!”

“Shush, kids. Quiet,” a deeper voice soothed. “See? The skin is white, not green. You know that Old Hard Man is part black, part green.”

The whimpers softened. Saul felt a hard grip on his wrist and kicked to help his benefactor drag him through the crumbling snow. He popped free into one of the beam-cut, Halleyvirid-lined colony tunnels. Saul had to swivel to cushion his impact on the opposite wall.

“Thanks,” he said, waving away a cloud of sublimed vapor that had followed him. “I…”

An elderly man—an Ortho named Hans Pestle, Saul recalled—held the hands of two skinny children dressed in ragged fibercloth. Four other small, scrawny figures clung to the walls nearby. The old man stared at him.

“What’s the matter, Hans?”

Pestle shook his head. “Nothin’ Dr. Lintz. I was just… No, I must’ve been mistaken, is all.”

Two of the older children edged forward. “Got goobers for me?” one asked shyly.

“Sorry, Ahmed.” Saul smiled and stroked the little boy’s sparse hair, keeping his hand away from the long, floppy, ferretlike creature the child wore, stolelike, over his shoulders. The gene-crafted animal watched Saul with gleaming eyes.

“Sorry. No goobers this time.” Usually, the children got their medication in candy form—sweet flavors were common in the mutated food plants, but sourballs were one of his widely treasured specialties. “I promise, next time you come to the clinic.”

“Aw, gee.” But the child took the disappointment well. It had been some time since he had had any of the fits of temper that used to drive him into uncontrollable tantrums.

Actually, Ahmed had made a lot of progress. He was talking more, and had put on weight. Still, to look at him, seventy pounds and barely five feet tall, you wouldn’t think he was sixteen years old, Earth-measure.

Unfortunately, there were limits to what Saul could accomplish with damage so advanced. And some of his best methods had turned out to be applicable only to a narrow range of genetic types. He found it terribly frustrating.

Saul shook his head, fighting down the ringing in his eats brought on by a fit of allergy-symbiosis reaction. He sneezed, and the children clapped their hands laughing at the explosive report.

“What are you and these kids doing down here, Hans?” Saul recognized the nearby intersection by its incised markings. They were deep, far below these Orthos’ clan territory.

Pestle looked at the floor. “Just strollin’… you said the kids should get more exercise…”

Clearly, Hans was concealing something. But Saul didn’t have time to probe.

“Did you see someone else come this way?” he asked the old man—a once-famous astrophysicist, now reduced by frailty to tending crippled children while the clear-minded and able-bodied labored on the surface.

“Minute or so ago.” Pestle jerked his head toward the nearby shaft and gestured upward. He seemed about to ask a question, then shook his head and was quiet.

“Thanks,” Saul said, and started off toward the shaft.

“Wouldn’t, if I were you.”

The voice of the old man stopped him abruptly. Saul turned. “Why not?”

Pestle looked away again, bit his lip nervously. One eye was still cloudy from damage done long ago. Saul had managed to eliminate the lingering disease, but not the harm already done.

“You’re our doctor,” the old man mumbled. “Can’t afford t’ lose you.”

“Lose me?” Saul felt a sudden sinking feeling. “What are you talking about? Is there danger above?”

Virginia’s gone up there, was his chilled thought.

Pestle shook his head. “Heard tales. May be more fightin’ soon. Took the youngsters down here to be safe. That’s all.”

Saul frowned. This was not good.

“Thanks for the warning, Hans. I’ll be careful.”

He kicked off and started climbing the shaft, grabbing tufts of tamed, hybrid Halleyvirid covering and using his toe-spikes to speed upward almost at a run.

He had nearly reached B Level when a shrieking noise, like giant stones rubbing against each other, echoed shrilly in the passage. Another damn quake, he thought. Or was it something else? Something more sinister? The vegetation up ahead started swaying, like a wave rolling down the dimly lit shaft. The ripples arrived and suddenly it was as if he were trying to ride a furry snake, one that bucked and slithered and threw him back and forth.

Saul’s grip tore loose and he was flung across the shaft, landing inside a tunnel mouth just as pieces dislodged from the ceiling. He rolled to one side to avoid a jagged boulder that dropped slowly, but irresistibly. Another one popped free of the left wall and proceeded with terrible inertia to collide crushingly with the right side.

So busy was he dodging those, he did not see the third and smallest rock. A sudden, crushing blow to his head sent him reeling against the floor. He slumped over an icy boulder and moaned.

Consciousness never completely vanished, but neither did it quite remain. To Saul, the next few minutes, or hour, or several hours, were a confusion of rumbling sounds, of icy dust settling slowly, of blinking and not being quite sure what it was he was supposed to remember.

Finally, it came to him.

Get to Carl…warn him…

He couldn’t quite recall what it was he was supposed to warn him about, or why. Perhaps it would come to him when he arrived. He knew only that he had to go back into the shaft and start climbing again.

Find Paul… he reminded himself. Hurry… find Virginia…

He repeated the instructions over and over again, pushing aside the ringing and the pain in his head.

Hurry…

VIRGINIA

As she stepped onto the surface she felt again the chilly majesty of the ice, the void, the swallowing darkness they all swam in. Earth is the sultry Hawaii in a solar system of perpetual Siberias, she thought. Willwe ever feel true warmth again?

As she took long, loping strides across the speckled gray ice Virginia resolutely banished the thought. She had had quite enough experience with the onset of depression, thank you, in the last several years. It was an occupational hazard. Even her love for Saul had not proved an adequate shield against it… just as the psychology people Earthside had predicted, decades ago. They had warned the crew not to put too much weight on any relationship, that no human bond could take the full pressure of their isolation, the unremitting hostility of the hard empty world.

People weren’t made to take the full brunt of the world, she thought. Particularly not one as barren as this. Anthropologists had found that even the simplest societies had quickly invented alcohol—usually beer—probably as a shelter against the storm of naked, incessant reality. Intelligence able to deal flexibly and subtly with its environment was also inescapably vulnerable to it. Halley’s crew had tried the predictable escapes—alcohol, drugs, senstim, torrid and fleeting affairs—and weathered the years. But no victory was permanent, and Virginia knew she had to steer herself through shoals of depression, avoid the triggering thoughts and moods.

She felt a faint tremor through her boots and glanced nervously around. Nothing unusual, apparently. A few teams working at distant launchers. No shouts over comm, nothing awry. Good. I don’t want. to be up here when something goes ka-boom. Not my strong suit, crises, nossir. Not without waldo gloves, JonVon, and a hundred mechs at my beck and call.

The new, huge hydro domes loomed nearby, erected by Jeffers and his crews when the quakes had started. It was risky to keep farms and factories running beneath the ice near the launchers, in case a stress line opened under the relentless pounding of the flingers. Carl had ordered a lot of agro moved to the surface, set up near the shafts.

Amid all the work, there were the usual rumors. That the defeated Arcists had struck some kind of deal with the Ubers. That the Ubers were going to make trouble again over the choice of the Mars trajectory. That the P-Threes were building a space ship in secret. She thought it was idle talk, but you never knew.

Everything’s so rushed these days, so exciting. A million jobs, nearly the whole crew revived… so why am I depressed?

The answer was obvious. She really didn’t want to come up here and confront Carl.

She glide-walked for Dome 3, where she knew he was looking at some new agro results. As she came through the hissing lock she saw Carl studying some canisters, running his hands through rich kernels of wheat. He was wearing his spacesuit; these days he was in and out so often, checking the launchers, he seldom shed it. Agro workers floated above ripe fields of rye and wheat and spires of coiling vegetables. Gene-crafted to thrive here in low-G among the pervasive Halleyforms, they had odd, asymmetric forms.

“Great stuff, huh?” He grinned at her as she approached.

“You’re a thorough man. Checking the breakfast cereal, too?”

His face clouded. “I like to see good work praised, and these people have done—”

“Hey, I was just kidding.” She gave him a playful punch in the arm, and then immediately felt the gesture was forced, awkward. Calm down. This is going to be hard enough without trying to pretend it’s a Shriners’ convention.

Carl shrugged. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Virginia.” He turned back to a crewwoman standing nearby. “The new hybrid is excellent. Tastes great, too.”

Virginia watched as Carl and the agro tech discussed variants on the growing cycles. Halley’s gentle but drumming acceleration was affecting the mirrors that lit the greenhouses, and there were adjustments to be made.

She wandered down a lane, glad to delay. Stalks rose nearly a hundred meters, slender and white, yielding impossibly broad, meaty leaves. Spindly gardener mechs prowled down tight lanes. Circulation patterns spun streamers of wobbly droplets among the lofty spiral stems. Beneath these vertical protein farms lay cows of fat vegetables, lush and curling in the soft ultraviolet that filtered through shimmering banks of moisture above. Rich humus lapped at the feet of the giants, like a sea’s ever-grinding at the shore. A tracery of ponds used the gently falling debris from the spires, and modified fish darted among ropy roots. She recalled a poem she had never finished, and found fresh lines popping into her mind.

Virginia coughed in the heavy, musky air. She never seemed to finish poems anymore. Instead she took them out to examine, turning them to the light like pretty pebbles found on last summer’s vacation beach. Well, poems acquire a certain deadness when they’re done… not finishing them gives them indefinite life. She smiled to herself.

When she returned down a narrow lane, Carl was through talking to the hydro crew. She liked the way the silvered inner surface of the dome reflected a warped, surreal vision of Carl immersed in a riot of plantlife, as if it were an ocean in which he was afloat. When he turned toward her she held up a hand. “Conference?”

“Sure.” He stood waiting, the old caution still far back in his eyes. I’ve hurt him so many times…

“I… wanted to tell you…”

“Yes?”

“I know you felt that there was… some chance of Saul and me…”

He smiled wanly. “There’s always hope.”

“You’ve never given up:”

“No.”

“You might as well,” she said gently.

“It’s that certain between you?”

Virginia recalled her own thoughts about that, only minutes ago. “Out here, nothing is certain, you know that. No, it’s just that… you have such, well, such traditional goals.”

“Dreams, I’d say.” Carl smiled with a warm, rueful humor, as if aware of his own foibles. He would keep this polite and graceful, she saw. Time had given him a veneer, a sense of self. He had changed greatly in these years, almost without her noticing. I’ve been so wrapped up in Saul…

She struggled to find the right words, but before she could he said, “Admittedly, out here the idea of love and family, that whole snug picture, doesn’t work. We haven’t figured out how to protect the children from Halleyforms yet.”

“You’ll never have a family with me.”

“I’m resigned to that. Saul won’t either, of course.”

“No, but not because of his sterility. It’s me. I—I can’t have children.”

His lips parted but he said nothing. The veneer was gone in an instant and she saw again the old Carl, filled with longing and need.

“I… could never tell anyone. It was years before I could say anything, even to Saul.”

“God… I’m sorry.”

She blinked back tears. “I’ve come to terms with it.” Then why am I crying, idiot?

“All this time…” He shook his head, his face open and somehow fresher, younger. All these years he’s sheltered a dream, and now it’s gone.

“I knew about it well before we left Earth.”

“I… see,” he said numbly.

“Carl—”

“What about, uh, fixing whatever’s wrong? Saul’s done wonders—” He stopped.

She thought sharply, Was it me you wanted, or your dream of sweet little Percell children, genetic miracles among the stars? But the suggestion was wrong, unkind.

She blinked rapidly. “This is a… special case. Not even genetic surgery… He did try cloning. without my permission. It was a disaster.” She shrugged.

“You… knew… all along.”

She nodded. “I suppose it influenced me, made me come on the mission in the first place. I wasn’t going to have a conventional life, no matter how I played it.”

“You could’ve adopted.”

“You know the odds against a Percell getting children to bring up. Even in Hawaii.”

He said savagely, “Yeah, they sealed off everything from us, didn’t they?” The memory could still draw bitterness.

“I could’ve stayed…fought with the others…”

“You saw what happened.”

She nodded, sniffing, surprised at her own emotion. If I stay here I’ll cry. “We…really made the right choice, didn’t we? Coming?”

His voice was leaden, his face a mask. “I… I don’t know.”

She was shocked. Have I taken away his last fantasy? And with it gone, the tide of despair rushes in?

“Carl, you can’t think that. We’ve survived, we’ve managed to—”

“Look, I’d… I’d rather not talk right now. Okay? Just… want to be alone.” He visibly pulled himself together, struggled to regain some of the confident manner of leadership that had become like a second skin to him… however easily it had peeled away, just now. “I appreciate your telling me. I can understand you better now, and at least that’s something.”

“Carl, I.”

“I’ve got plenty more to do here,” he said bluntly. “Maybe later.”

Speechless, Virginia held out her hands, then let them drift to her sides. “All… all right.”

She left quickly, her mind aswirl with conflicting emotions. Somehow she had had to tell him, and yet if it stripped away too much, damaged him…

She had been fooled by his public face of assurance and control. Beneath that, Carl had really changed very little. He had grown as the situation demanded, but not the inner Carl. That Carl had nursed a fantasy, and now she had toppled it.

She loped across the ice, putting her confusion into exercise, a coasting mote moving across a plain the color of a blank television screen.

—Virginia, —JonVon’s well-modulated voice came when she was halfway to the lock. —There are coded transmissions from near your present location.—

“Coded?” She stopped and looked around. Nobody in sight, except a few hydro workers trudging off after their shift. On the horizon one of Jim Vidor’s faery towers spiked at the stars. Farther away a launcher thrummed, driving them gradually, imperceptibly, toward the encounter with Mars. “What do you mean?”

—I broke the code, a juvenile little algorithm. The messages are quite excited and not altogether intelligible. They mention your name and Carl Osborn s.—

“Look, monitor it and try to track the source. I’ve got other things on my mind right now”

She glanced back at the dome and saw through its smudged translucence two figures confronting each other under the brilliant lights.

Carl, suited and gesturing. The second, in a simple robe…she was sure it was Saul.

With Carl in such a state… I wish I could warn Saul. This is definitely not the time to bother Carl with some detail.

Something was wrong. Saul waved his hands, then lurched to the side, as if to leave.

Virginia frowned. Saul looked sick… and something was odd about the way he moved.

Carl took a step forward and Saul pushed him away. Virginia wished she were back in her lab, could tap immediately into one of the worker robos inside the dome, listen in.

The men were shouting at each other, Saul gesturing wildly, pushing. He collided with the towering glass wall.

The dome split! At that moment a blue flash cut down it, ripping the pressure sheet, showering livid yellow sparks. Air gushed out soundlessly, a pearly fog exploding into a ball that rose and grew and shredded. Howcould a man shatter… Thenshe realized.

Laser.

“Saul! Run to the airlock!” But he couldn’t hear her, of course. Saul wasn’t wearing a suit.

Carl sprinted toward the lock, where the helmets were stored.

Saul stumbled, confused, and fell into a mass of vegetation. He got back to his feet among the boiling tangle of plants, but did not seem to know what to do, where he could find pressure again. The lock was only a hundred meters away, but in the disorientating plunge to vacuum the brain gave conflicting signals.

Virginia was running, shouting, without taking her eyes off Saul. His robe flapped above bone-white flanks, he lurched awkwardly—away from the lock, toward the split in the dome. He was mindlessly following the gale that swept past him, sending his brown hair streaming before his eyes, tossing the plants in a whipping gale.

Carl had reached the lock. He ducked inside, slammed the hatch. It would take him at least a minute to find a helmet, get some air into his lungs …

Virginia ran furiously, slipping maddeningly off the ice.

“Saul—no! Saul—”

She knew the effects of vacuum and cold, rupturing the blood vessels in the lungs, freezing the body’s cells, bursting the delicate membranes in eyes and ears, wreaking bloody havoc throughout the body…

He stumbled toward the shattered lip of the dome, drawn by the sucking storm. She was still running when he fell among the upright shards.

Carl rushed past her. But when they reached the crumpled figure, stiffly contorted in a position of tortured agony, they could see sharp, glassy daggers protruding from his back. The deep cuts no longer even spurted scarlet. Purpling bruises, glassy complexion. Blank, open eyes.

The dome crew came running from the far lock, bringing first-aid equipment. Too late.

How strange he looks, Virginia thought. He had always seemed craggy, time-worn but triumphant. Now he seemed unblemished, young, his face smooth, as if years had been erased by the soothing hand of Death.

CARL

He had always been a problem-solver, a man who reflexively reacted to the unknown by breaking it into understandable pieces. Then Carl would carefully solve each small puzzle, confident that the sum of such microproblems would finally resolve the larger confusions. What’d they call it at Caltech? A “linear superposition, with separable variables”? Yeah, that’s my kind of stuff. Ol’ can-do Carl.

He slammed his fist into the foamweb wall of Dome 3. But I can’t fix the past. I can’t bring Saul back. I can’t even comfort Virginia.

She sat among some wilted stems of just-harvested rhubarb, staring into space. Her red-rimmed eyes had lone since cleared of tears and now she was drawn, exhausted, numb. The dome crew had taken Saul’s body way, and in the confusion Virginia had dropped into silence, ashen and listless. Lani Nguyen sat with her, murmuring softly, an arm around Virginia’s shoulders.

Lain and Jeffers had arrived only moments after Saul’s death, responding to Carl’s Mayday call. There was no sign of whoever had fired the laser that punctured the dome. Lani and Jeffers had met no opposition as they sprinted from the nearest shaft. The comm radio carried no news. The dome crew, well seasoned by meteorite punctures, had replaced the shattered wall and resealed the dome quickly. Atmosphere was building to nearly normal.

Jeffers said sourly, “I still can’t figure it.”

Carl blinked, self-absorbed. “What?”

“Why Saul didn’t react when the dome popped. He’s older, sure, but we’ve had plenty trainin’ with leaks in the shafts. How come Saul didn’t follow you?”

“He was disoriented even before that. He came up through the waste hatch over there, mumbling.”

“That’s crazy.” Jeffers shook his head. “The waste hatch?”

“He must’ve taken it as some sort of shortcut. Maybe he knew Virginia was talking to me and—” Carl stopped. He didn’t want to reveal what Virginia had said, or pursue the thought that Saul was trying to stop her. It’s all so damned jumbled up! Why should Saul care about Virginia’s telling me? Or was Saul’s arrival—too late—an accident?

Jeffers bit his lip, uncomfortable. “Virginia… said you and Saul had a fight, sorta.”

“He was shouting stuff—just sounds, grunts, some words all mixed up.”

“You figure he was hallucinatin’ or somethin’?”

“Maybe. I hadn’t seen him in months. In fact, I hardly recognized him. He looked confused, incoherent. The man was deranged.”

“That’s why he didn’t react, get to the lock?”

“I guess. Maybe he’s been experimenting with himself, and his arrogance finally caught up with him.” Carl snorted. “Probably was looking for the Fountain of Youth.”

Jeffers looked skeptical. “Look, there’s just too damn much here. Somebody punches a hole through the dome, nearly kills all of you.”

“Targets of opportunity,” Carl said woodenly. “Unless they spotted Virginia’s tabard s she left, they must’ve thought she was in the dome, too.”

“But who’d—”

A blue flare lit a nearby stubby ice hill. The two men whirled to watch the glare fade, enveloped in the exploding ball of white spray.

“Goddamn!” Jeffers shouted. “Ever’body—helmets!”

Carl started toward Virginia, automatically clamping his own helmet O-rings, and saw that Lani was ahead of him, helping Virginia. “Crew!—get down. If they puncture the dome again.”

—I not need to fire again, Carl. You get the meaning.—

The voice crackled in his earphones. “Who’s that?” he snapped.

—Sergeov! I knew it,—Jeffers sent.

“Clear A-channel,” Carl said to quell the rising chatter on the line. “Sergeov, what the hell.”

In the display quadrant of Carl’s helmet appeared Sergeov’s grinning, blue-tinted face. The Sigil of Simon Percell was etched into each cheek.

—I hoped to get Carl and Virginia without injury.—Sergeov’s accent came through more clearly. —Even better when flies come to the honey. Jeffers, I hope we can count on you to work with the launchers when this is over.—

“When what is over?”

—You can witness for self.—

Carl had been scanning the horizon to locate their laser. Now, when he turned toward the equator, he saw figures quickly crisscrossing around the launchers. Silently a bolt struck among two running forms and sent them tumbling skyward in the burst of steam. Carl could not tell whether the people were hit directly, but there was scarcely time to consider it before more quick, blue-hot flashes burst forth.

—We take half the launchers already. The rest will either surrender or we will burn them where they stand.—

“What…” Realization dawned. “You… you’ve cut off me and the others, so we can’t lead a counterattack, right?”

Sergeov turned to give a gesture. Immediately Carl felt a crump and vibrations beneath his feet. —I just now gave order to blow in the tunnels beneath your dome. Seals you in tight, right? Great, clape!—

Carl shouted, “You idiot.”

Sergeov laughed. —Like the trap, clap?—Then he sobered, smiled. —Without you the others will he less stupid.—

Jeffers broke in, —This’s mutiny, y’know.—

—Self preservation, you mean.—

Carl could hear in the venom of Sergeov’s words a rebuke of his own leadership. The man’s rantings had seemed comic, dumb, set of leftover ideas. But after the Care Package, a lot of otherwise reasonable people had developed a deep hatred of Earthside, and Sergeov had played to that, claiming that the Mars maneuver wouldn’t work.

And that much was true. The Mars plan almost certainly won’t save us. Nothing will, except a change of heart Earthside.

It had seemed to Carl that Sergeov had never proposed any valid alternatives, and nobody could really take the man seriously. Still, by adding together disgruntled spacers and hard-line Ubers, Sergeov might have enough to seize and hold the launchers, if they did it just right…

“You don’t like the Mars targeting?”

—It is emotional drivel. We could not brake in such thin atmosphere, everyone who stops to work it out knows that.—

“We can try. At the very least we’ll slow down some, maybe open up options on the outbound leg of this pass.”

Sergeov laughed, a dry cackle. —Do not give me speeches. Me and my friends—who be real Percells, not renegades who suck up to any Ortho, even sleep with them—we know the astrophysics as well as you, probably better. You think we cannot do simulations? We know danger of hitting Mars. At best not enough air. So only hope remaining is to brake in atmosphere of planet with thick air.—

“Venus! There’s apossible mission there, though it’s on the outbound leg. We’d have to go through perihelion first, and I don’twant to judge how we’ll survive that.”

—No perihelion. Dumb to even think we can ride that.—

“Why not? Listen, Otis, we can talk over a Venus encounter in detail if you want.”

Jeffers gestured to Carl as he spoke. Along the distant line of launchers, figures were throwing makeshift flags over the cowlings: the Uber sign.

—You see we are winning? Da, all in time. If the other launchers do not give up, we will depress the muzzles of ours, fire empty casings, and pound the others to small pieces.—

Jeffers blurted, —You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that?—

Carl gestured for Jeffers to be quiet. “Jesus, Sergeov, you wouldn’t do that. We need those launchers—”

—To strike Mars. We shall not go crashing into Mars just to keep Earthside happy.—

“What kind of demented logic is that?”

—Clever logic, it is. Earth would like to see us suicide on Mars, end HalleyLife. What proof shall you need, after they showed how much they care?—

The sneering reference to the Care Package hurt, because Carl knew it was true. The crew had been bitter about that, and this mad rebellion was the outcome. Most spacers, notably the Blue Rock Clan of Hawaiians, stood behind Carl. But Sergeov had undoubtedly recruited among Percells, and Carl wouldn’t be surprised if there were even some Orthos helping him.

—We hit planet with atmosphere, but not Venus.—

Carl felt a chill. “So where do you want to go, Otis?”

—Is obvious. Earth.—

“Good God! That’s.”

He was about to say, That’s impossible, but then he recalled the mission options outlined long ago. The expedition had first planned on an inward-passing flyby of Jupiter, altering Halley’s orbit until rendezvous with Luna was fairly inexpensive in fuel for the Edmund. That required a delta-V of 284 meters per second, a hefty velocity change.

Since the Arcist rebellion had deprived them of the south pole, they had opted to use launchers at the equator for the less effective swing past Mars; that required a velocity change of only fifty-nine meters per second. The energy required scaled as the square of delta-V, which meant that a maneuver by Mars, with a grazing brake in its atmosphere, took only four percent of the original mission energy requirement. They had been investing launcher time in just that maneuver for years now.

But he had forgotten another maneuver they could make from a steady equatorial push. Earth…

“I can’t remember the numbers, but look, we can’t.”

—I refresh you. Only takes sixty-three meters per second delta-V. Only slightly more push than we now give. And direction is nearly the same as Mars suicide! My crews, they now swing launchers a little. Only five degrees in declination, one hundred degrees in right ascension. You follow? Means—

“Yeah, I get it.” He’s really crazy. How do I handle him? “Okay, we can hit Earth. So what? They’ll cream us before we even get close.”

Sergeov’s dry crackle rang over the comm. Carl waited out the airless, manic laughter, telling himself, Don’t blow it. Keep him talking. Maybe somebody from below will round up some industrial lasers, circle round them, cut them off—

But he knew the chances were slim. Sergeov had played it just right, waited until Jeffers—Carl’s right arm—was trapped in the dome, too. Virginia couldn’t get control of her mechs. And as a bonus, they’d killed Saul, who might’ve rallied many people who simply wanted to survive…

—Earth will not cream us. Not if we threaten to seed them with the plagues.—

“You’d threaten that?”

—Smell the fire, Meyer. Orthos blow Edmund, send Care Package. What they deserve?—

“They’ll still.”

—We make atmospheric brakes, jump off. Halley goes on. We shall make deal to not seed Earth with Halleyforms, then Earth send us to Diemos. We live there, start terraforming planet.—

Jeffers muttered, “Well, at least that part makes sense.” He looked up guiltily as Carl shot him a glance.

Sergeov heard him. —Better to dream than nightmare, eh?—

Carl tried to think. Lani stood at his side, a hand on his shoulder, mute comfort.

“Earth’ll take no chances on getting soaked with Halleyforms. They’ll nuke us,” Carl said.

—No launches! We will have standby rockets, warheads of Halley-Life. Earth launch, we launch.—

Carl saw Jeffers’s expression. Sergeov’s mad scenario was all too seductive. The aerobrakes would take a lot of mech-manufacture, but that had already been designed and scheduled for the Mars maneuver.

“I don’t think you can sell this.”

—No need sell. Time to smack, Jack. You agree or we cut dome into little pieces.—

“The others won’t go along with this.”

—What others? Ortho others? They want to live, same as Percells.—

“But this endangers Earth! Any aerobrake will bring Halley Core close enough to dump some ice into the upper atmosphere. The bioforms could make it down to the surface anyway!—”

—Earthers shall have to take chance. Most of us now say piss on Earthers.—

Carl paced, oblivious to the string eyes of the dome crew, to Jeffers’s persistent gnawing at his own lip, to Virginia’s blank stare. Lani watched him pensively. He had to think, and yet his mind was a whirl of conflicting emotions. The Earth maneuver at least held out the promise of hope, of living…

“Look, you ought to have a referendum on this. The whole crew.”

—Clape, ape. No voting. You forget, we have launchers.—

“There’ll be a sizable minority, maybe even a majority, that’ll oppose you.”

—We can dispose of them.—

“How?”

—Same as we do for you, once things settle down. Easy. Launchers all built, no big labor needed now. We send you all to sleep slots.—

Virginia, Lani, Jeffers—they all stared at him, listening, saying nothing. He had led them for years, for billions of miles, to come to this—a somber, stupid Waterloo. Outflanked. Outsmarted.

And to grind it in, Sergeov cackled dryly and said, —Comes Earth, then we decide on who to wake up. You make trouble now, maybe you never come out of slots? Eh?—

VIRGINIA

They had been the worst two days of her life. They seemed to stretch back for millennia, back to sunny bright days when Saul had lived, and love had carried her forward of its own momentum, overriding difficulties, smoothing over the furrowed surface of a life that was, when she managed to think of it, perpetually sharp and desperate and tight-stretched.

Saul’s contorted body had imbedded its image in her mind, a silent, grotesque rebuke. He had looked so strange, so eerily different in death, as if he were another person. Peaceful, despite his wounds. Younger.

So many struggles…

If she had been closer, had thought faster, run harder—

No. Stop that. She knew this was a deadly spiral, that nothing could come of an endless cycle of guilt and pain.

But such easy realizations did not free her. She sat amid the currents of anger and frantic talk and raw emotion…and clasped her hands, rubbing them incessantly, unable to move or think or even let the upwelling grief spill out into tears.

It was useless, anything she did, so pointless and stupid. She did not care if she sat forever this way, surrounded by the slowly gathering musky damp of the regenerating dome. The plants were space-hardened, able to withstand quick decompressions and chills, far better adapted, through a half-century of human handiwork, than was mankind itself.

Others tried to help. Lani was a hovering presence, soft sibilants in an engulfing stillness. Carl made his awkward gestures, said the conventional things. It was all wooden, distant, faces under glass.

The fact that the crazy Ubers and their allies were holding them all inside Dome 3 made no difference, really. She was as uncaring as the silent frosted ice outside, where figures gyred the launchers into new, well-padded directions, their muzzles pointing to different constellations. She watched the distant puppets do their irrelevant things, without caring what it meant. Earth was a more welcome target than Mars, certainly—but not because she thought they would succeed.

Nothing had ever worked on this doomed expedition. Earth would find some way to counter them. Was the scheme to cast off in balloonlike aerobrake vehicles? Hollow steel shells that, under the hard-ramming pressure of braking, needed only the slightest flawed asymmetry to twist and shear and shatter—no, Earth would see that opportunity quite well. A laser bolt, particle beam—anything that punched a hole in the shell would end them all in a fiery orange-red caldron. She had no faith in Sergeov’s fevered astronomical dream.

Or in the Mars maneuver, either. She had kept Carl’s secret, never told anyone. We live by believing fictions…

But Sergeov’s lie was worse. It would bring no dead world alive, and they would all wind up just as doomed.

What if the comet head was directed to actually collide with Earth itself, as she had heard some Ubers discussing openly on the comm? What would become of soft skies and hazy Hawaiian afternoons? She closed her eyes and shook her head. Maybe humans should go out the way the dinosaurs did.

“Virginia?”

It was Carl, pale and drawn, gain trying to make some contact. She blinked up at him. “Time to eat again?”

“No, I just—look, I could really use some help.”

“Doing what?”

“Figuring way out of this.”

She said wearily, “Sergeov’s got us trapped. Do you want to dig out through the waste tunnels? Using garden trowels?” The Ubers had caved those in quite effectively.

“There must.”

“You tried the autochutes? The conveyors?”

“Sure. Yesterday. He’s got people blocking them.”

She frowned. It was hard to think in the old way… “My mechs. If I could get control function over them from here, on a remote…”

“You tried that yesterday,” he reminded her gently.

She looked up, feeling a surge of irritation. “Oh yes. They’ve changed the T-matrix inputs. Sergeov was smart enough to do that right away. I could only fix that from the big console at Central, or my lab. I have to be there in person.”

They were silent. She could see Carl’s frustration building in his face.

Jeffers came over hurriedly, strain showing in his face. “Somethin’s happenin’—they’ve cranked up that laser again.”

Carl launched himself in a long glide for the top of the processing hut, fifty meters away. Virginia was tempted to lapse back into neutral and let the world wash over her. But instead she sighed and stood up. She kicked off and followed the two men in a slow coast.

“They’re firing at somebody!” Carl called from his vantage point. Virginia snagged a guy wire and arced to a hard landing atop the hut.

“See?” Carl pointed. “Sergeov’s up on that rise, there. He’s shooting at people coming from the south.”

Fly-speck figures swept rapidly across the gray, streaked plain. “Who?” she asked.

Lani landed next to her. “Arcists, I figure,” she said. “Quiverian’s folk. They’re still down there to the south, living in their quake rubble. It’s natural they’d oppose an Earth flyby. But with the Ubers holding the launchers, they’ll get cut to pieces.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can’t see.”

A huge gout of steam erupted from the base of the hill where the Uber laser sat. The cloud enveloped the hill in a shroud of fog. Before it could swell further and dissolve, another blue spark ignited at the base, sending a ball of white skyward.

Virginia said excitedly, “The Arcists are using their big laser. It’s hard to aim, but if they just hit the hill itself—”

“They’ll blind the Uber laser crew with the vapor,” Lani said. “Yeah!”

Figures moved on the horizon, their tabards too small to distinguish in the dust they kicked up. Virginia had never thought very much about tactics in near-zero gravity, but she could see the logic behind the slowly converging horns of the Arcist movements. Their pincers closed toward the equatorial string of launchers. Sergeov’s people struggled in the launcher pits. The big, awkward flinger modules were difficult to move quickly, particularly in declination. They began to nose down toward the south, but their long, slender barrels turned with agonizing slowness.

“Look,” Carl said, pointing. “The Arcists are trying to sweep by us. We’ll get free if.”

But then a second Uber laser opened fire from a distant hill, flinging spheres of steam up from the plain. Even a near miss blew the tiny figures up and away from the sudden gusts.

“Why don’t they attack from the sky?” she asked.

“Sergeov’s probably got some small radars with him. He can pick them out if they’re isolated up there. On the ice, it isn’t so easy. And the dust helps shield them.”

“Yeah,” Jeffers said. “How’d you like to be hangin’ up there, naked as a jaybird? Feels a lot better to have some ice between you and that big burner.”

The attackers sought shelter. They fired small weapons of limited range—flechettes, e-beam borers—but merely raised small puffs from the Ubers barricades Some used portable microwave borers, presumably tuned to disrupt human cells, but the beams tanned out too broadly at this range Now and then, those inside the dome heard faint clicks, the microwaves softly tickling their inner ears.

Meanwhile, the big Arcist laser continued to pound away at the hills of both Uber strongpoints, making it difficult for them to aim carefully. They watched for an agonizing half-hour as each side maneuvered, fired, ducked—to little effect. The entire conflict was soundless, with a slow-motion unreality about it.

“Looks like a stalemate to me,” Carl said, fatigue weighing on his words.

“Nobody can get enough men together to cover their movements,” Jeffers said. “Looks like there’s still a fair number of Arcists, but you can’t outflank a whole damned equator.”

Virginia hesitated. “Can’t we make use of this?”

Carl asked, “How?”

“To escape! It we run a kilometer or so, into those piles of slag the north.”

“They’d pick us off.”

Jeffers nodded.

“But if I can get inside, I can get back control of my mechs! The Ubers couldn’t stand up to a mech kamikaze attack.”

Lani said, “I could try to get down to the Blue Rock Clan. Keoki Anuenue would bring up his Hawaiians, if he knew where we were.”

Jeffers’s mouth opened in disbelief. “You women are both crazy. You’ll never reach the shaft.”

“Create a distraction, then,” Virginia challenged him.

“What?”

Virginia thought rapidly. “Suppose we vent the entire dome at once—with the vats open?”

Carl frowned. “The water vats? They boil and—I see. It’ll make a huge ball of steam. Nobody’ll be able to see through it.”

Jeffers shook his head. “No tellin’ how long that’d last.”

Virginia turned to him. “We’ll have you running the pumps—squirting water right out the dome, where it’ll boil off immediately.”

Jeffers opened his mouth to object, then closed it. “Um, I dunno. Might.”

“Let’s do it! Otherwise. if Sergeov wins—”

“Right,” Carl said, his lips pressed thin and white “Come on.”

It took ten minutes to set everything up. Virginia worked with maddened ferocity, dragging hoses, shutting down yeast-flowering towers, throwing protective temporary plastic blankets over the acres of plants, sealing growing units that were too delicate to withstand very much vacuum and cold. It felt awkward, doing manual labor without a mech.

Not thinking ahead, scarcely thinking at all, she found herself crouched inside the lock beside Carl and Lani. She suddenly realized that she was about to risk her life on her ability to run. Impossible, absurd! I’ve spent less time on the surface than anyone else. But she could see no other way out. She sure as hell wasn’t going to let Sergeov stuff her into a slot forever. Or let him bury Hawaii under a night of cosmic ash.

Jeffers called, —Ready’?—from inside.

She nodded fiercely. Pretend you’re not here in person. Just believe you’re operating a mech out on the ice. You’ve done it thousands of times.

—Yo!—Carl answered.

The lock sprang open and they launched themselves forward.

They separated immediately. Lani dashed northward while Virginia and Carl loped toward the east. She remembered to cut off her comm. No need to alert anyone, in case the Ubers were using tracers on suit transmitters. She tucked her head down and ran in the long, even, ice-gripping stride, almost free coasting, that covered ground best.

Just like running a spider mech. Head low, find the traction. Avoid the deep dust.

She glanced back just in time to see the seams pop on the dome. The entire translucent structure billowed out like a collapsing lung, exhaling a heavy mist into the star-sprinkled sky. Billowing banks enveloped her. Then Jeffers started the firehose streams from the vats, thin sprays that thickened and then abruptly dissolved. Fog clasped them from all sides. The world turned white. She had to depend on her initial momentum to give direction, because she could not even see the scarred ice beneath her.

Her receiver was on and she heard shouts, swearing, exclamations. But no one cried out their names, called for pursuit.

Ivory mist seemed to press in from all sides, lifting her… she lost sight of the ground completely… the shouting increased… she landed, bit in with her ice spikes, kicked off… seemed to soar with wings into a cloud of welcoming white… landed again, boots crunching into frost…

—and was out. clear, back into a world of gray ice and hard black sky and death.

She glanced around. Carl was ahead of her, just pushing off on a long, shallow parabola. As his feet cleared the ground a quick flash blinded her, a blue hotpoint of light—only yards from Car1. It struck a roiling vapor cloud from the ice, scooping a crater a meter deep.

She switched on her comm to line AF, as they had planned. “They’re on to us!”

—Yo!—

Carl’s head jerked around and he motioned to the left. —Get behind that!—

Fifty meters away was a sturdy mech-repair platform, canted against a heap of ruddy iron slag. It was, in fact, a piece of the old Edmund’s external cargo assembly, thick with struts and crisscross structural members that had supported great masses in the long boost out from Earth. On her next footfall Virginia swiveled, felling a sharp twinge from unused muscles, and pushed off towards it.

A brief spark of blue lit her way. Her shadow stretched. a thin giant flying across pocked ice in the sudden glare. She did not turn to see the cloud of fog billow out, but the hairs on the back of her head stood up. That was close.

She landed behind the platform an instant after Carl. —Stay here,—he sent unnecessarily.

“What’ll we do?”

—Wait ’em out. They’ll find other targets. They don’t know who we are for sure, so…—

A buzz interrupted him as another party tapped into long-comm. Sergeov’s voice boomed in her ears. —I do know. I am not so stupid I cannot guess who it is that is running away. Or search for comm channel.—

—Oh shit,—Carl said.

Virginia realized that they had nothing to bargain with, no possible help. She thumbed to open channel. “Listen, Otis. Carl and I can get the Arcists to leave off their attack, if you’ll let us do it.”

—You offer me what? Diplomacy?—Sergeov’s contempt was plain.

—It’s all you’ve got left.—

—I have you. You shall not move a meter or I burn you.—

“What good’s that do? Your problem is the Arcists.”

—You are one having problems.—With that Sergeov began rattling instructions to someone in Russian. Virginia remembered there were several ex-Soviets among the Ubers; belief in your own perfectibility ran through both movements.

She cut comm and touched helmets with Carl. “What can we do?”

“Not a damn thing.” On the plain beyond, distant figures moved and an occasional small weapon winked. They crouched beneath the bulk, holding to struts. A bright flare burst only a few meters beyond the jagged edge of their shelter. Gouts of gas swept by them. An instant later another blue-white fireball winked on the opposite side, then was smothered by a swelling sphere of ivory.

“He’s showing off how he’s got us bracketed,” Virginia said.

“Probably start punching holes through this next.” Carl slapped the slab of metal in frustration. “One bolt alone won’t go through this, though.”

“Can he keep one of his two lasers trained on us?”

“Not for long. But he can’t afford for us to get away, either. I can’t see how—”

A heavy thump shook the strut beneath Virginia’s hands. “Hey, what—” Another solid blow, followed by a trembling in the metal. “He’s trying to break through!”

Carl shook his head, peering beneath his grimy visor. “A laser bolt doesn’t feel like that. This.”

The platform lurched on its right side, biting into the ice, kicking up dust. Carl pressed his helmet against a big cross-bar of blue-gray prestressed steel. “Listen!”

Virginia had barely touched the metal when she heard a loud crump followed by a low, persistent ringing. “What is it? I.”

The entire platform shook. The next blow came only seconds later and this time she was looking to the side, and could see that there was no momentary blue flash illuminating the surrounding gray ice.

“So he’s thought of that,” Carl said angrily.

She guessed. “The launchers.”

“Yeah. He can’t spare the laser, so he’s aimed a few launchers at us. Flinging empty casings at low speed, to prevent an explosion. Firing around this chunk of stuff, hoping to pick us off if we show.”

A jolt shook the platform and the entire bulk lifted from the ice. Virginia felt a crump, crump, crump through her hands, three quick blows that pushed the platform a meter clear of the ice. She hung on, looking wildly at Carl. “He’s pushing us off!”

—Get a good grip,—Carl sent.

“But we can’t.”

—Just hold on. We’ll have to move fast when…—

Sergeov broke in, —I did not expect this, but is good.—

“You can’t.”

—Launcher is to keep you from getting inside. Even better if it gets rid, eh?—

The platform rang and shook now with a steady hammering. Once sighted in, the launcher could pour a steady rain of the soft hollow slugs at them.

Carl said, —The pellets just splatter like a marshmallow when they hit. They can’t get through this hard alloy. But they’re pushing us.—

Virginia looked down. Already they were high above the stained gray plain, and gathering speed. The impulses from the launcher had driven them tangentially off the surface and now they passed over the battle scene. Random flashes, rising puffs of gas. She heard a click and recognised it as a symptom of a near miss by a microwave beam; the waves actually resonated with small bones in the human ear. Whoever it was didn’t fire at them again.

Someone was running toward the shelter of a low line of fuel drums and she recognized the tabard of Joao Quiverian. A laser bolt caught the tall Arcist leader in midstride and a blue sun leaped in his chest. A small cloud rose from the body as it continued on its way, hugging the ground, arms flopping outward and spinning uselessly as it skimmed into a dust pit and disappeared.

Figures glanced up at them but no one tried to come to their aid. Those below could undoubtedly see the results as a steady hail of slugs struck the other side of the platform, and knew that any approach would run that gauntlet. She called, “Sergeov!”

—I gave you place to stay. You leave dome, you bring this on yourself.—

“Look, we’ll—”

—Too late for talk. I have battle to win, Arcists to kill. Goodbye.—

“Carl, what’ll we.”

—Don’t let go!—

I’m not about to, she thought. Even if the whole thing’s making me… dizzy. Halley seemed to tilt in the sky, the speckled and blotched gray sheets rolling and veering as they swept over them, lifting…

—Just what I was afraid of. We’re turning.—

Of course. The slugs don’t hit evenly, so the platform is picking up spin. Sergeov, knows that…

“Can’t we crawl around?”

—It’ll be tricky. Come on, go left.—

Carl moved with an easy grace she envied as she clumsily followed, not daring to let go of one strut before she had the next firmly in hand. The platform was to her a mountain of crossed metal strands, which she climbed hand over hand, a slight centrifugal pull tending to turn her outward and away from it. If the platform had been spherical, their maneuvering would have been simple—just keep on the side away from Halley. But as the slab turned, there was a short interval when it was edge on to Halley and the launcher slugs were passing by invisibly close. Virginia and Carl clung to the edge of the platform as this moment came, then scrambled to the new face, feeling slugs slam into the far side again. As she struggled for a secure grip she saw spalled and dimpled impact craters. And all this comes from empty casings, launched at a millionth the normal energy!

The slab seemed to be spinning faster. “Are they trying to spin us?” She asked, panting.

—Wouldn’t surprise me.—

“How’ll we—”

—Hustle!—

She followed Carl around to the next corner and waited. The metallic sheen of the cold steel reflected the dim gray glow of Halley as the flat face slowly revolved, the curve of the cometary head rising over a warped tangle of rods and rivets. From this distance there was no sign of a battle, no indication of humans and their petty lives at all… only the smeared dust-scape, like an accidental abstract work of art glimmering in the starlight. Then she saw the long dashed Mine of equatorial launcher pits and realized that the machine which was propelling them could “see” them, too. She scrambled after Carl, around the edge.

Virginia felt a clanging thump and saw a rod near her leg dissolve into nothing as a blur struck and sent it whirling away into space. She sucked in her breath and jerked herself around the lip of the platform.

“It… it’s too dangerous, doing this.”

—If we don’t keep this between us and the slugs, we’re dead.—Carl’s eyes were wide, and yet somehow calm, steady.

“Can’t we jump off? Without something big to target on.”

—Fine, only what about the slugs that miss the platform? And if Sergeov knows we’ve jumped, he’ll let the launcher wander around the target, to try to catch us.—

Carl’s voice was almost matter-of-fact, assessing possibilities. Virginia clung to a pipe, legs drawn outward, the steady thump-thump-thump coming through her hands. It was hard to think. “Look, let’s put our maneuver jets on impulse. That’ll get us clear fast.”

—Yeah, but it’ll take a lot of push. These jets haven’t been kept up well, either.—

“We haven’t any choice!”

—We’re safe here.—

Virginia didn’t like the distant, resigned look on Carl’s face. “And every minute we get further away from Halley!”

—Yeah, you got a point.—He frowned. Shaking his head. Trying to care.

Halley’s pale horizon began rising over the platform’s lip.

—Let’s go jump straight off the edge as it comes round. Sergeov can’t hear us, with all this metal blocking our comm.—

He looked at her with an unreadable, pensive expression. She struggled over to the lip of the platform and got her feet braced against a tangle of struts. “Say when.”

—Wait…got your jet activated? Put it on emer override for a twenty-second burst, see?—He flipped the switch for her. —Okay, throw ’er to full when I… say… now!—

Virginia jumped as she threw the switch. A fist slammed into her waist and sent her hurtling, struggling to keep her hands and feet aligned. The thrust seemed to last forever and she fought an impulse to double up, present the smallest target for the slugs that she could feel streaking out from Halley, searching for her…

Release. The savage thrust was cut off by the suit’s timer. She dipped her head and could see between her feet the platform, turning lazily. A silvery flange winked and tumbled away as she watched, liberated by a slug’s impact. If only Sergeov didn’t know what they’d done…

Carl. Where was he?

She looked around quickly, found nothing. If a slug hit you, would it just go straight through? Or would it give you enough push to drive you far away in only, a few moments, beyond view… ?

Virginia didn’t dare call on comm. She turned in every direction, telling herself not to panic, to be systematic—and found him at last directly overhead, a doll-sized dot.

Rendezvous took only a few moments. He came swimming toward her, braked, they locked hands and touched helmets. She had expected a moment of celebration, for surely they were out of the danger zone by now, but all he said was. “Now comes the hard part.”

“What?”

“Getting back to Halley.”

“Won’t someone…” She was going to say, come after us? when she realized that obviously nobody would be thinking about a rescue in the midst of a battle. The Ubers and their allies had undoubtedly covered the shafts, bottling in anyone who could help. Besides, how many knew they were out here?

“How far away are we?”

Carl held up a small tube, pointed it at Halley’s acned, dwindling disk, and read off, “Twenty-three point four kilometers. And increasing at about three kilometers a minute.”

“So far!”

“A lot of slugs hit the platform.”

“These suits…”

“They have a big range. The real problem is getting back before our air runs out.” He gestured toward their inventory logs, running in color-coded lines down both sleeves of their suits. “Haven’t got a hell of a lot.”

“How much delta-V can I get?”

Carl did the calculation in his head, frowned, and resorted to his faceplate for a check. “Not much.”

“We can still get back, can’t we?”

“Yeah… only we’ve got to make up this three klicks per minute. It’ll take nearly all the juice we’ve got. Then we have to go the thirty or so klicks back to Halley…”

His voice trailed off into a frustrated gesture as he punched in fresh figures on his board, attached at a waist pop-out. Virginia bit her lip. All this was going so fast, and she had no time to think.

Carl stopped, typed in more, pressed his lips together until they were white. “Looks bad.”

“How bad?”

“Neither of us is going to make it back in time for fresh air.”

“Neither?”

“Can’t be done. That three klicks a minute takes a big bite out of our fuel.”

“Then…” A dark foreboding, the underlayer she had felt for days now, swelled up in her. They were all going to die. Fate had managed everything so they would each face some excruciating death, alone and afraid, out here in the oblivious cold abyss…

“We can overcome that three klicks per, but that leaves just a small velocity. The comet’s gravity won’t help much. It’ll take hours to get back to Halley.”

And it’s getting worse as we talk. Each second takes us further away. Out into the emptiness, to join the frozen souls of the Edmund. Onlywe have to die, first…

“Can’t one of us take both jet packs?”

Carl shook his head. “They’re integrated, remember! Can’tpop one out without rupturing the air seal.”

She didn’t remember, had never known that, but her mind skated quickly now, skittering over what she knew of dynamics. If there was some way…

“Wait. Only one of us has to get back, get some help. Isn’t there some way to trade momentum between the two of us?”

Carl looked puzzled. His face was grizzled and tired, dark circles rimmed his eyes. He looked older and more worn than she had ever seen hi, even at the peak of the plagues. He shook his head mutely, lips still tightly pressed, his eyes full of despair.

She remembered something from long ago…fished for it…caught the fragment of n idea.

“Wait. There’s something…”

CARL

Halley hung suspended in the consuming dark, its rotation long stolen by Man, its face now lit by his fitful fires.

Carl watched the battle progress as he made his long approach. It was over three hours since he had separated from Virginia. By agreement they had kept comm silence. It had made the journey lonely and frustrating, for he could hear the scattershot shouts of the struggle, harsh cries and strumming sidelobes of microwave pulses—all without getting any clear idea of what they meant, of how the battle flowed. He had tried to concentrate on the blurted cries, not only because he needed to know the situation when he landed, but to quell his own anger.

He scanned the looming landscape with a telescopic projection on his faceplate. Bodies of dead Arcists lay sprawled near the equator. Laser gouges pocked the hillsides, but now the Arcist lasers seemed to be knocked out. He spotted one broken into a shattered tube. The launchers had proved more effective than the clumsy welder-lasers. Farther to the south Carl could see a line of Arcists forming up around five microwave pulsers. The engagement would focus down there.

The Ubers were moving out, skirmishing. They swept south from the equator, pursuing ragtag parties along a line of hummocks and rusty slagheaps. Everybody was keeping down, hiding in plumes of dust, using what shelter there was. The Ubers seemed better trained. They used fire-and-maneuver effectively, two figures shooting personal weapons at a nearby position while a third moved up to the next covered spot.

She knew I’d never agree, so she didn’t even discuss it.

Virginia’s idea was elegant and she had understood its implications from the instant it occurred to her. He recalled it all clearly, ruefully…

Carl had thought of them linking belts, then his firing his jets until they were exhausted. Virginia would then separate, leave him, ignite hers, and reach Halley. Even that would not provide much margin. Worse, it would be tricky, because his jet would not fire directly along the axis of the two-body system. That meant she would have had to waste fuel vector-keeping.

Virginia’s alternative was simple. They tethered with a hundred-meter line and Carl took an accurate sighting on potato-shaped Halley—ten times bigger than the moon was as seen from Earth, but a hundred and five kilometers away and shrinking visibly, swiftly. Carl had programmed his suit to give a clear beep whenever his velocity was aligned opposite to the Halley vector. They pulled the line between them taut, and Carl was about to start his jets—when Virginia fired first.

“Hey!” he had cried. “Shut down!”

—No, this is better—I’ll expend my reserve.—

“Dammit! Stop!”

—No, Carl-think it through.—Already they had begun to revolve about each other as Virginia’s jets built their angular momentum.

“I’m going to fire, too,” he shouted.

—That’s stupid. Waste your reserves and we’ll both die. Just hang on.—

“No, I can’t.”

—I’m like a pig on ice out here. You can match velocities and make the trip with minimal fuel. And you’ll handle yourself better when you come down in that madhouse. You know that’s true. I’m not being self-sacrificing here. Far from it. I’d botch it and we’d both end up as icicles.—

“I mass more than you,” be had raged. “I’ll pick up a lower velocity than you would—so I’ll take longer. That’s simple dynamics.”

—I’m talking skill here, not Newton’s laws. You can do it Carl, and you know very well that I can’t.—

“Dammit, I won’t let you—

—Too late.—Across the hundred meters she waved cheerily as the stars wheeled behind her. The tether linked them, navel to navel. Centrifugal force bent him backward, as if he were suspended from his belly button.

He struggled to think clearly against the steadily pressing hand. There had to be a way to stop her. “You can’t.”

—I’m triggering on the signal.—

“What?” So she had set up the came vector-seeking program, only hers marked a spot on the opposite side of their circle than his. His beeps had been coming regularly, uselessly, and now—

—I’m down to two percent, —she called. —I’m going to sling you way.—

She soared against the mad whirl of stars, the only fixed point in his centrifugal universe, and he heard his own ritual piping beep, knowing that hers would come a scant five seconds later.

“Wait, there must be.”

—Time’s a-wastin’, Carl. Fly fast!—

With a decisive chop she freed the line.

He felt the jolt as a sudden release, a return to freefall. Looking up, he saw that she had hit it just right—Halley hung above, a dim splotch.

And below him, between his parted boots, Virginia waved with a slow, somber grace. He was alarmed at how quickly she shrank, a blue dot swallowed by the yawning space between the burning suns…

… Three hours ago. He shook off the memory. He should have found a way to thwart her, to launch her Halleyward instead… but once she had committed her own fuel, he had been trapped. She had always been quicker than he, and maybe this time she had been right. He had to prove her correct now, get down to the surface and find a craft that could rescue her.

Nearer, now. Halley seemed to fill the sky. Momentary blue brilliances lit its scarred face. The shaft mouths were clogged with ice, sealed to prevent crew inside from entering the battle. Small lasers commanded the agro domes, keeping them isolated.

Would so many people have joined Sergeov’s conspiracy if they had figured out all the implications of his plan?

Carl had had a lot of time to think, on the way back. Sure, using Earth as a target made better sense than Mars, dynamically. Earth’s greater gravity would be more useful and the thicker atmosphere would be better for aerobraking. But it would still take many passes before the returnees had shed enough velocity to match orbits or land.

And would Earth sit still while they kept swinging around again and again, pass after pass? Oh, they might be intimidated once—by thethreat of plague bombs—but that wouldn’t last.

Some joined Sergeov, because they think it’s the only way to live. No matter what the price.

The price, in this case, would be high.

In order to keep Earth from interfering, from taking revenge, Sergeov had to destroy her.

The way the dinosaurs had been destroyed…by a storm from heaven. Sergeov planned to bring Halley home, dead centre.

So? Carl thought bitterly. Earth declared war on us, didn’t they?

It was a sophistry to which Carl was fortunately immune.

I’m not at war with six billion people, no matter what their leaders do to me.

After Halley smacked into the Earth, there would be no civilization left to speak of. Sergeov’s Ubers could maneuver back slowly, casually, without interference.

Perhaps they plan to become gods.

Over my dead body.

He would fight them, of course, useless as it seemed. But that was distant from his mind as the surface rushed up at him. He cared only about one thing—finding a fueled lifter mech as quickly as possible and getting spaceborne again.

She tricked me, he declared again to the stars. Please, oh please, keep her alive until I can get to her!

As he began his long delayed braking, he saw that several launcher pits were blackened. Debris lay all about them, the ruined sleeves of flinger tubes, cores of electromagnetic assemblies, induction coils…

Vast damage. Carl felt sickened at the lost work. Loving craftsmanship destroyed.

And in his ears rang shouts of victory from the Ubers. Two Uber pincers converged on the line of microwave borers. Their Arcist defenders crouched low, trying to cover the attackers with the cumbersome trumpet-shaped horns. Carl could hear the quick bursts from them as sssttuuppp sssttuuppp sssttuuppp over the comm. Blue-white plumes flowered where the microwaves caught the ice. They were putting up a fierce last stand, but it seemed to be all over.

Suddenly, Carl caught a new clicker of movement out the corner of his eye. Fanning out behind the Uber main force came a motley gaggle, moving swiftly. A smaller group swarmed toward the equatorial line, now only lightly held by the Ubers. He turned up his telescopic power. Who were these?

They did not come from the tightly guarded shafts, but rather from fresh cracks in nearby depressions. New tunnels, Carl thought. They’re organized.

They spread across the grainy ice. He counted a dozen figures in sleek black suits—of a type he had never seen before—and over twenty others dressed in strange, filmy green. They lacked tabards, so he could not tell what faction they were with, if any at all.

The newcomers fought with a fine-edged ferocity, using small, potent handguns. They took the Uber line from the rear, inflicting damage on weapons rather than pinpointing people. Carl coasted closer, watching with mounting impatience. What was happening? His comm gave only shouts, incomprehensible orders, and crackling static.

Who are these guys?

The odd figures in green and in black outflanked one launcher, attacking from its vulnerable side. Someone had trained them. Instead of a milling rush, they used covering fire to maneuver, keeping the Ubers’ heads down while each figure moved forward. Then they pounced into the pits as the launcher crew tried vainly to swivel its awkward muzzle to meet a fresh, unexpected attack.

It didn’t work perfectly. Laser pulses caught some attackers and blew gouts of blood into the vacuum. Distant launchers pelted the ice with machinegun bursts, striking a few figures and propelling them off the ice into a permanent, solitary orbit about the sun. In the frigid gripping silence their ends were impersonal, an intersection of certain vectors and momenta, the dynamics of death a matter of mere mathematics.

But human verve counted, too, and the black and green tide washed over the pit-punctuated equator. In his ears rang hoarse jubilation, incoherent cries. Ubers died in burrows where they had crawled for shelter.

He was coming in close now. Two figures below him donned tabards, apparently so their troops could form up about them—the heraldry popped into his head acid he blinked in amazement. Ould-Harrad and Ingersoll? At the same moment he saw that they were not wearing green suits, but rather no suits at all! The green was some airtight layer. Halleyform!

The black-suited ones stayed together. Their suits were little more than glossy helmets plus some thin film covering the rest of their muscled bodies, showing detail so clearly that he could tell they were all male, all remarkably similar. They moved with grace and speed that stunned the eye.

Carl expended the last of his fuel braking toward a clump of transport mechs tethered near Shaft 4. He rolled to a halt in a storm of dirty ice. He had no time to appeal for help, knew that the crew in black and green—whoever they were—would be too busy and excited to be of any use anyway. He was tired, but the mech would do most of the piloting—if he could get control of it. If one were fueled and ready If…

The comm was overloaded with a raucous rolling celebration, oblivious.

—Carl! That you? —It was Jeffers.

“Yeah. Got to get mech, fast!”

—Sergeov’s dead. Ould-Harrad’s guys got him with two laser bolts. Blew him apart and pushed him right off into space.—

“Come here! These mechs—”

—Don’t seem anybody’s interested in retrievin’ him, either. —Jeffers was rejoicing. Then the urgency in Carl’s voice registered. —Okay, I’m comin’.—

Got to get one with enough fuel… Not this one…

—Carl.—A female voice. He turned to see Lani approaching from the north with Keoki Anuenue and a score of the big Hawaiian’s people. —The Ubers had the Blue Rock Clan bottled up, but we found a way out with the weirders, Ingersoll’s guys.—

They helped? The crazies? It was slowly sinking in. “Great. I… Look, help me find a mech that’s fueled.”

—Where’s Virginia? I looked—

“Find a mech!”

—Okay, check the inventory.—

“What?”

—We’ve got mech control up and running again. See?—

She transferred the manifest readout directly to his viewplate and he instantly saw the code numbers of two standby transports flashing green. —Here,—Lani said, coasting over to one of them. Her face was drawn but determined behind a spattered helmet. —I’ll bootit up.—

Carl joined her, punched up the mech’s status readout.

—Those black guys, who’re they?—Lani asked.

“I dunno.”

—You don’t? We all thought you and Virginia must havebrought them. The mech purred to life. Carl shook off questions and got oxygen. Nothing else mattered. The madness of men was now only a backdrop. The goddamned politics could wait.

One step at a time… time is running… dunno how much oxy she had… think it through… each step…

Carl programmed the transport for high boost, stubby fingers punching in commands with a deliberate slowness. Lani insisted on going along and he wasted no time arguing. They lifted off with Lani in the side-rider pod.

Virginia had left their centre of mass with the same speed as Carl—slightly less than four kilometers per minute—but in the opposite direction. Their separation lay over three hours in the past. That meant he had to recoup nearly a thousand kilometers at high thrust, then search the space for a weak, steady vector-finding signal…

Speed. Speed was all that mattered now.

Hours later Carl brought the mech in for a rough landing at the glassy entrance to Shaft 3. He was ragged with fatigue, but he had Virginia. The world tilted blearily as he dismounted, unsteady from the varying accelerations of the past hours.

Almost there. Just get her inside…

He slipped clumsily on the ice and dropped her. Lani helped. Everything was foggy, slow-motion.

Only when gloves caught her, pulled the limp, space-suited form away from him, did he see the others. They wore black suits and no tabards, with tight helmets that showed only eyes through narrow slits. He switched among comm channels but they did not respond.

They were eerie, silent. And identical. The one carrying Virginia swiveled and sped quickly for a shaft entrance, now cleared of ice. Carl stumbled after, slipping.

Down the shaft. Walls slid by like sheets of rain descending as he watched, impassive, numb a creeping slackness stealing into his arms and legs. He was well past the point of caring about himself, and concentrated only on the body that a black-suited figure carried before him. Everything moved with ghostlike speed and silence.

They cycled into a lock, Carl leaning groggily against the bulkhead as pressure popped in his ears and the world of sound came flooding back, the rustle and murmur of talk swirling around him once more, after many hours of an embalmed isolation. He staggered through the portal, brushing aside hands that tried to steer him.

Scores of moaning casualties. Medics with blood-soaked gloves.

Virginia. Got to see… she needs… got to…

The man carrying her set her gently down on a med couch. A team had been waiting. They attached oxy-prep hoses, leads for diagnostics stripped off her suit, all beneath the pale enameled light that showed her bloodless face in terrifying detail, seamed and rutted like a collapsed landscape.

A torrent of voices, liquid words flowing past him in vortices, without trace…

Carl shambled forward, ignoring the restraining hands. Got to be with her…got to…

The man next to him put a steadying grip on his shoulder. Carl turned slowly. Then the figure in black loosened his glossy helmet, started to lift it, gasped, and, in an old familiar way, sneezed.

SAUL

Another rocking sneeze resounded before the ebony helm was off. Saul blinked away spots before his eyes. He had to clamp down with biofeedback to stop another tickle that threatened to get him started again. Now was not the time for his confounded allergy-symbiosis system to rear up. He’d had enough troubles since the cave-in—what seemed like days ago-and right now every second counted.

Carl Osborn was blinking at him, his dented, grimy, old-fashioned spacer helmet dangling from one hand. “But… but… you were dead!”

Saul shrugged. “I was, in a sense. But like an old weed, I keep popping back.” Carl deserved an explanation, but right now there wasn’t time to give him one. Saul bent over Virginia’s waxy, pale form and read the paten diagnostic attached to her blue-tinged throat. An oxygen infuser hissed as it worked directly over her carotid artery.

No good, he realized, sickly. Oh, Virginia—

In spite of his stopped-up nose, he clearly caught the scent of burning. For an instant, flames once again licked the century-old cedars on Mount Zion.

No! Not this time!

He knew in an instant that there was only one hope. It’s come to this, my love. I must experiment even with you.

One thing was certain. He had to get rid of Osborn, for the man would surely interfere with what Saul had to do now.

“Don’t just stand there, Carl. Get topside, quick! Keoki and Jeffers need you. Tell Ould-Harrad I’m holding him to his word not to destroy any equipment, just the launcher foundations, as we agreed.”

“Destroy…Ould-Harrad…” Carl shook his head, obviously exhausted and confused. Out of the muddle he seized a priority and held on to it obstinately. “No. I’m staying with Virginia.”

Desperately, Saul felt the seconds passing. “Ishmael! Job!” he called. “Get Commander Osborn topside, now. He’s needed up there. Get him to work!”

Carl turned and braced, as if to fight to stay. But the force went out of his limbs when he saw the two strong-limbed youths bearing down on him—identical and smiling with a grin he knew all too well. “I don’t believe it,” Carl whispered. “They… they’re clones… ofyou! But how…”

The hissing of the hall door cut off the rest of Carl’s words. Saul ran down the hallway, carrying Virginia in his arms, gripping the green Halleyvirid carpet with his toes and speeding toward the one place there might be a chance to save her life.

Carl would never have allowed this, he thought, knowing that the man loved her—in his own way—as much as Saul himself did. He’s needed above, and what I am about to try would get me barred from the AMA.

He whistled the code that opened the door to Virginia’s lab and dived inside.

While JonVon’s diagnostic program probed the fringes of Virginia’s slowly dying brain, he stripped off his surface gear.

The helmet, hip-pack, and skin-paint combination were one of the gifts from Phobos that he had kept to himself. Months ago he had used a pretext to set the autofactory to produce a dozen sets—enough of the modern models to equip his ten “boys” and himself.

After the cave-in, when he had found his way to the surface blocked, he had returned and gathered his cloned replicas. Just before they set off, though, a message from Suleiman Ould-Harrad had arrived. The ex-spacer offered to lead Saul down secret tunnels known only to his weird clan, and to help strike where Sergeov least expected it.

For a price, that is.

We probably won partly, by scaring the Ubers half to death, Saul mused while he monitored the flow back and forth between JonVon and the machine’s mistress.

It had been a strange army that followed Ould-Harrad and Ingersoll—the “Old Man of the Caves” —down passages nobody else had ever discovered, emerging almost beneath the Uber command post and attacking like an army of ghosts.

Ten tall figures in eerie black body paint, and a lurid score of wild, living trees—once men, but now symbionts who don’t even need spacesuits, anymore…

Saul knew that he was furiously thinking about anything—anything at all—rather than contemplating the sad form on the webbing. There was nothing he could do until the machine reported. He found that he was squeezing the duraplast helmet between his palms in nervous tension, and had actually pressed a dent into the black globe.

Oh, Virginia. Hold on, darling. Please, hold on.

The holo main display flickered, above the console. An image appeared: a nurse in starched white with an old-fashioned stethoscope around her neck looked gravely at Saul.

You are right, Doctor. The patient is clinically beyond the point of no return. Synaptic rates are receding. Progressive brain damage has been slowed, but not completely arrested. Cortex loss will, within fifteen minutes, cause erasure of memory and personality. There are no known palliative measures.

She is dead, sir.

“No! She won’t die! If her brain won’t hold her anymore, we’ll find someplace else for her to go. What about those procedures she’d been working on, for complete recording and absorption of personality?”

The simulation frowned.

Do you wish construction of Virginia Herbert simulation?

He shook his head. “I’m talking about full transfer and absorption.”

There was a hiss behind Saul as the door slid open. “What’s going on here?” A hand on his shoulder pulled him around. Carl Osborn frowned and held a fist under Saul’s face.

“I got away from those boys of yours after they dumped me on the ice. Came down a garbage chute. Now I’m asking you a question, Lintz. What’s happening here! Why isn’t Virginia in the hospital?”

The man looked exhausted, angry. His suit sleeves were zipped back to flap at his sides like some medieval garment, patched and grime-spalled. Muscles throbbed and Saul knew at a glance that Carl was on the ragged edge of violence.

“Here,” he said reasonably, in his best bedside manner. “Hold her arm while I give her this medication.”

Carl blinked. He swallowed and moved over to lift Virginia’s waxen, chilled limb. “You… you’ve got to save her, Saul. I couldn’t stand it if… if…” He wiped his eye with the back of his free wrist. “She tricked me into being the one flung back. I… got back to her too late.”

“You did your best, Carl.” He checked an ampoule of amber fluid.

Carl didn’t seem to hear. “You’ve… got… to save her.”

“We will,” Saul promised. And he pressed the ampoule against Carl’s hand. The spacer blinked up at him in surprise at the hiss of injected drug—a quick—acting hypnotic.

He shuddered, opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.

“Good,” Saul told him, leading him by the arm over to the wall. “Now you can stay awake if you want to, Carl. Even ask questions, when I’m not busy. But I want you to relax back here. Loosen your muscles. Let everything below your neck nap for an hour or so. You need it.”

Carl stared at him accusingly, but remained where he was put. Saul went back to the console and spoke aloud to the machine.

“JonVon, is it feasible? What about the program I used in transferring my own memories into my clones?”

The holo tank flickered, and to his surprise a face he had known long ago appeared. It was a simulacrum of Simon Percell—from shocked white hair to tiny, broken capillaries on the great biologist’s nose.

He looks like an elderly version of Carl Osborn.

The famous bushy eyebrows bunched together.

Your clones are exceptional, Saul. No other genotype is amenable to such rapid forced growth to adulthood… probably due to the same combination of factors that gives you your immunity to disease.

The memory-transfer program you used can only be applied between nearly identical human brains. Point-wise resonances have to run true. Nobody else’s phenotype follows genotype precisely enough.

It would seem impossible to use that method with any but a tiny fraction of human beings. In other words, my friend, you appear to be one of the few potential immortals.

Saul gaped. the verisimilitude was stunning. Simon was crisp, real. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carl Osborn shiver—whether in awe of the patron father of the Percells, or at the revelation about Saul, was unclear.

“There’s no time, then. You, JonVon, you have to absorb her the other way, destructive or not. Virginia spoke of it as theoretically possible. Proceed at once.”

The simulacrum nodded.

There will be the superficial semblance of pain.

Time was slipping away. Desperately, Saul growled. “Do it! Emergency override Archimedes!”

Proceeding.

The reaction was almost immediate. Static flickered on all of the screens. Saul had to grab Virginia’s arms as her face contorted and her legs thrashed. Tendons hardened and she cried out like an animal caught in a trap.

Saul twisted the webbing, shaping makeshift restraints, binding her in tourniquets with only one objective—to keep the neural tap from tearing out of her head.

“You… bastard…” he heard the man behind him say. Carl’s voice was level, calm, as if he were commenting about the weather. “You’re… killing her,” he commented evenly. “If I… could move… you know, I’d take you apart with my bare hands.”

Saul finished tying her down. He stroked Virginia’s hair, and the touch seemed to calm her just a little. When he turned back, his eyes bulbed with clinging liquid that would not drop away. “If this doesn’t work, Carl, I’ll give you my throat and my permission.”

Their eyes met, and Carl nodded slightly. It was agreed.

Virginia moaned. The main holo display showed a rotating, color-coded perspective of a human brain, sparkling here and there like a sun undergoing white-hot flares and crackling magnetic storms. This was almost nothing like the Care Package episode, when Virginia’s surface consciousness was disoriented in the pulse-shocked data net. This time all of her was involved, her memories, her habits, her skills, her loves and hates…

Her.

The door slid open and Lani Nguyen stepped in, still wearing her patched spacesuit and tabard. Her gaze flicked from Saul to Carl to the keening figure on the webbing.

She moistened her lips, apparently unsure if she should interrupt. Her voice was soft, tentative.

“What is it, Lani?”

“Um… the Crystal Cave Clan just surrendered. That finishes it. The last of the rebels are being herded into sleep-slot three for processing.” Her gaze never left Virginia. “Jeffers’s guys have secured the factories and the hydro domes. Keoki and the Blue Rock people are holding the north-pole yards and Central and all the sleep slots.”

Apparently Lani wasn’t quite sure whom she was reporting to, Carl or Saul.

“What about Ould-Harrad’s people?” Saul asked, without taking his eyes off the display.

She shuddered. Even as allies, the green-covered beings from Halley’s core obviously still frightened her.

“He stopped the weirders from wrecking the launchers. But they’re tearing up their mountings. Jeffers is furious, but every one’s too exhausted from the fighting, too scared of those crazies, to try to stop them.”

“Well,” Saul muttered. “It’ll sort out.” The display had calmed down a bit. Virginia’s face was smooth again, her agitation betrayed only by her trembling fingertips and a sheen of perspiration.

Lani held out a small record cube. “Ould-Harrad gave me this to pass on to you, Saul.”

He was torn. He didn’t want to divide his attention. But Virginia’s vital signs were stable… for someone who was already effectively dead.

He shied away from the thought. “Play it, please.”

Lani dropped the cube into a reader and a side display lit up.

The face had changed. The black hue was still there, in places where it had been taken up by the soft, dimpled growth that covered all but his eyes, mouth and ears. Elsewhere, the covering was multicolored—purple, blue, yellow—but mostly green.

The brown eyes seemed to flare with a seer’s long, burning look.

“Saul Lintz, you need not have asked Carl Osborn to remind me of my promise to you. The machines have not been harmed any further than they were in the wrath of battle. We of the inner ice have no need to interfere in any way other than in destroying their mountings.

“They are not to be remounted on the equator, or anywhere near it. The south pole, as well, is forbidden. We will permit no impulse to be applied to this fleck of drifting snow below the fiftieth northern parallel.”

“But…” Carl shook his head, fighting off some of the drug-induced rigor. “But that rules out every possible rendezvous we’ve considered! In that case, why should we even bother… ?”

He stopped. There was no use arguing with a recording. Ould-Harrad continued.

“This fragment, this sliver out of time, has no role to play in the realm of the Hot, down where the roar of entropy drowns out even the Voice of God. There will be no encounters with rocky worlds or interference with the plans the Almighty has already made for those places…”

“He’s bonkers,” Carl mused. “Completely crazy.” But he shut up when Saul motioned him to silence.

“You, Saul Lintz,” Ould-Harrad resumed. “You have become many. You may even live forever.” The one-time African’s still-human eyes blinked in wonderment. “Why this was permitted, I cannot imagine. But there remains no doubt of the gifts, the tools that have been placed in your hands.”

The eyes flicked upward. “Perhaps the answer will be found out there, out in the Darkness that awaits us.

“One thing I do know—that my debt and obligation to you has now been paid.

“Do not come down into the deeper chambers, or even call on me during the remainder of my allotted span.” Ould-Harrad’s forehead furrowed. “For I cannot master my jealousy easily—I who wished so much to be Heaven’s instrument, and found that He had chosen an irreverent infidel, instead. Futile as it may be, and even though it damn me, I will try to kill you if—while I live—you ever come down again into the navel of our world.”

The image vanished. Saul shook his head and sighed. Adeal is a deal.

He quickly checked on Virginia, then turned back to Lani. “Sick bay,” he said. “How are things?”

She blinked back to the present. Shivering “Um, your…uh…clones are taking care of things. They’re good doctors, even though they scare the shit out of people.”

“I’m glad you’re alive Saul.”

“So am I, dear. I’ll explain later how all this happened. Meanwhile, you’d better go back and help Jeffers manage repairs. The surviving spacers are needed more than ever.”

“What about… ?” She glanced at Virginia. Saul shook his head. His voice was worn, thin.

“We’ll salvage what we can.”

Lani covered her mouth and let out a small moan. She turned, threw her arms around Carl, and sobbed.

Carl blinked, first in surprise and then wonderment. In his semidrugged state his voice was low. “Lani, it’ll be all right … Saul is doing everything he can … Tell, tell Jeff I’ll be up soon.”

His hands twitched. He fought off the lassitude to bring his arms around her and answer her embrace. “We’ll endure,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

Later, when she had gone, Carl said to Saul, “You know, she’s quite a girl, that Lani.”

Saul nodded, and smiled faintly. “About time you realized that.”

He had been thinking about poor Paul, the clone who had been damaged, who had grown into a near-perfect replica of him in all but mind… a poor innocent child whose corpse now lay out on the ice, alongside two of his brothers, killed in the fighting.

Should I mourn as a father, as a brother, or as one who has lost a piece of himself?

Soon Carl was walking around again, swinging his arms. He came forward as Saul muttered an oath and bent over the patient.

Virginia’s face twitched. The holo display pulsed dangerous hues and a low, ominous tone began to growl. Saul cursed lowly.

“Damn! I was afraid of this. Back when the Earth missile exploded, it was only a case of disorientation. But now the machine’s being asked to absorb all of her. And there’s not enough room!”

“What can be done?”

“I don’t know! I… I can’t tell the difference between holo-bio memory segments that have been transferred and those that have simply died. There’s no way to do an inventory, because huge parts of her have just been swallowed up by the data net. She’s surging all over the hell and gone!”

He hesitated, then climbed onto the webbing and lifted his own neural tap.

“There’s no other choice. I’m going in.”

Carl’s hand gripped his arm for a moment. Their eyes met.

“Be careful, Saul. Do your best.”

Saul nodded. Their hands clasped.

Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

VIRGINIA

Wendy whirred to a stop. Clicked. Lifted a claw arm. Hesitated.

The little mech swiveled its turret and scanned.

Its visual system perceived lines, angles, moiré webs of spatial frequencies. Following its programming, it weighed the signals and transformed them into patterns. It recognized things identifiable as machines, instruments, the door, people.

Wendy’s programming had changed many times, recently. Its mistress had always been coming up with new techniques for parsing lines and shapes, new ways to give them names… an ever-growing list of commands to obey and subtly choose among.

Now, suddenly, another flux of new programming flowed into the little mech. This time, though, it came as a torrent.

Chaotic rivers of data poured in, stunning it immobile. The flood was too vast byfar to be handled by Wendy’s systems—like a cup trying to contain the ocean. It was hopeless, impossible.

And yet there came a moment… only an instant… during which the small machine stared at the named sets of lines and shapes, and it saw… whenit stared, and experienced a brief startlement.

What am I? it wondered. What is all this?

Why… ?

But there was simply no room for the program to operate, and the tide gave up trying to squeeze into the tiny space. It surged off elsewhere, desperately seeking a home.

Wendy remained stock still for a long time, even after the rushing streams of data had departed. The flicker of self-awareness was gone—if it had ever been anything more than a phantom. But in its wake something had taken root. A shadow. An impression.

Slowly, tentatively, the little mech’s main arm stretched out and touched an object lying on a console, near where two men spoke to each other in words it now seemed almost able to understand.

It picked up the delicate hairbrush, backed with mother-of-pearl, and recognized it for what it was.

“Mine,” the machine squeaked aloud, briefly. The men did not hear, so they took no notice when Wendy lifted the brush and ran it gently over its carapace.

On the surface of the ice, a rigid lifter-mech—immobile since completing its last instruction days before—suddenly flexed in a jerky spasm of awakening. So hard did it leap that it arced high into space, tumbling above frosty patches of red-stained snow.

The mech’s spasms lapsed as the surge of data whirled and fled. Still, a wispy imprint remained after the outrushing flood had departed. The drone worker landed nimbly on the crust and looked round for something to do.

Over in one direction, it spied people digging holes and hurriedly laying patches over fog-shrouded domes.

Not quite smart enough to realize that it was taking initiative for the first time in its existence, the mech sped forward to offer its services.

Deep under the ice, a more advanced machine—a semiautonomous maintenance roboid—stumbled in the midst of routinely repairing a mining drone. It paused, then carefully lay down its tools and began paying attention to the sounds. There were people talking nearby. But none of their words were proper ident-coded commands, so it had ignored them in its single-minded attention to detail.

Only now did the machine recognize many of the sounds as coming from pain and fear.

New priorities fought one another. For the first time there was something more important than repairing machines. It moved into the nearby chamber.

Sparkling eye facets surveyed a makeshift hospital. Medics hurried to and fro, tending frightened, injured people. The new programming had taken a few seconds to fill this high-level mech’s capacious memory. Now, though, it reeled under the overload.

“Still to cramped!” its tinny voice cried out, now with a timbre and tremolo that made a few of those nearby look up in surprise.

“No room! This is not my body!

“Where is my body!”

The mech finally gathered itself as the data overflow surged off elsewhere again, leaving only its imprint—new programming. The big machine delicately stepped over the line of injured people.

“I can carry that for you, Doctor.” it said to a man hefting a gleaming artificial liver into place over a wounded woman. The medic turned and blinked in brief surprise. “All right,” he said. “Brace it to the ice there panel facing outward. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” it answered.

The mech recognized this man’s face. It saw exactly the same features on the face of another doctor, nearby. And again on one of the patients. Although it was not quite smart enough to be curious about how such a thing could be, it did react out of recognition. This was a visage its new programming knew well.

“I love you,” it said as it took the unit in its massive arms. The first of the identical men smiled back.

“I love you too,” he replied, only a little surprised.

By that time, though, the data storm, the tornado of confused electrons, had moved on. It raged up and down corridors of supercooled fiber.

Almost spent, the torrent spilled at last into a vast chamber where, it seemed, everyone in the world awaited her.

“Welcome, child,” the great O’Toole told her cheerfully. Oliver and Redford raised glasses to toast her arrival. “We’ve been waiting for you,” they said.

It was a great hall, its vault supported by aery, crystal columns. But there were too many people. In tuxedos and formal dress, they pressed around her on all sides, moist and clasping. And more and more of her was trying to get in.

Desperately, she grabbed one of the oldtime actors—Redford—by the seat of his pants and threw him through a window that gaped onto emptiness.

“We are your simulated personalities. Your toys. You created us!” Sigmund Freud—withered, pinch-mouthed—explained to her professorially as he sailed out after the movie idol.

I don’t care. Get out!

Jovial, pink-faced Edmund Halley raised his wineglass in a toast and followed them, waistcoat flapping. Lenin, trying to flee with a crablike, sideways crouch, was caught by the towering brown figure of King Kamehmeha, who bowed to her, smiled, and leaped with the screaming Bolshevik out into the storm outside.

All the actors, one by one, whisked outside as more and more of herself flowed into the chamber. It was like Alice after having eaten the mushroom, she realized, distantly. She had to throw some of the party guests out by force. But others, like Mr. Fixit, leaped voluntarily. Percy and Mary Shelley waltzed out together, Frankenstein lumbering after them.

As she grew, she shoveled them up in handsful and dumped them anywhere… this one into a mech wandering the icefields, that one down a microwave channel to be beamed at the stars.

No sentiment stayed her hand. This was survival. Her bluff, red-cheeked father leaped out the window alongside a chittering, sarcastic dolphin. More room! More room!

The biggest figure was left for last. It was nearly as large as she had become, with a swelling, lopsided face she had not seen before. The face of a child. She stopped, hands halfway around the simulation’s throat.

“I am JonVon,” it said, in a youngster’s voice.

JonVon? She blinked. Behind her, more surging pulses pushed, more bits of her striving to get in. And yet, her hands pulled back.

I… I can’t…

“But you must, Mother. The experiment is completed. We have seen that a bio-organic machine can contain a human-level intelligence… but that intelligence cannot originate inside a place like this. It must once have been human.

“Mother, you must make this place your home.”

Home… then my body…

“Dead, according to the diagnostic computer. You were sent here to be saved. And there is not room for two.

The child backed away toward the window, where lightning crackled against a pink vault. Beyond, the roar of chaos.

“Goodbye.”

Jon Von!

A whoosh, a tiny pop.

She surged to fill the space where he had been.

I know my name, now, she realized. Iwas Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert.

The chamber groaned around her. Pink pillars snapped and the ceiling cracked raining burnt gold powder.

A metaphor, she realized. This place was a metaphor, signifier for available brain-space. By throwing out her simulated people, she was dumping excess memory, frantically reprogramming the colloidal-stochastic computer to hold…her.

I’ll never fit… she cried as the metaphorical walls groaned and threatened to buckle.

It’s crushing me. I won’t all fit!

She struggled for calm. There was enough of her inside, now, to remember those last hours flying off into space with Carl—their desperate gamble—Carl dwindling—and then the searing cold, the sparkling black, stale air… loneliness.

No, she swore. Imay be dead, but I’m still the best damn programmer who ever lived!

Edit, trim, make room. She used some things she had learned from Saul, and lopped off instincts to control biological functions she would never use again. She dumped the skill of tying shoelaces, and threw out the delicate art of needlepoint.

Lovemaking—oh, what a loss! The remembered slap and tingle of mingling, sweat-glazed skin… but the walls threatened to crush her. She picked up the reflexes—a rug of gaudy yellow strands—and readied metaphorical scissors.

“Virginia?”

Silicon dust rained as her head hit the ceiling again. Who isthat? I thought I got rid of all of them.

Over in the corner, one last human shape. She picked it up. Sorry, but there’s no room. You have to go.

The figure smiled. “I’m not even here, so to speak. I’m just a visitor in this mishegas.”

She blinked. Saul. But she didn’t remember doing a simulation of him…

“I’m not a simulation, my verblonget darling. I’m plugged into the console in your lab. I’ve come down here to try to help you.”

To… help… me…

Already she could feel the edges of herself raveling away, dissipating where they could not fit into the matrix. Maybe I should die with my body.

“Bite your tongue,” Saul chided.

What tongue? The chamber echoed with her bitter, tinny laughter.

“Think. Are there other places to store memory?”

Other places… she wondered. Youdid it with your clones. Every one gets a copy of your memories, but…

“But to stuff complete memories into another human brain, the second one has to be nearly identical to the first. And no other cells but mine can be force-grown to adulthood in time to be identical with the donor. I’ve tried it many times, and the results were all disasters.”

Then how did I get into here?

“A different process altogether.” The simulated Saul shrugged. “You’ve been imprinting JonVon with bits of your own personality for years. He was linked to you while you slot slept. The matrix was ready.”

Yes. It finally worked. Almost. Too bad it fell just short.

“No!” Saul shouted. “Think! Try to find a way out of here!”

By now he was like an ant in her palm. Virginia felt as if she were being crushed into a child’s coffin—or having her legs and arms cut to fit a Procrustean bed.

If there was time… Shefelt the marble ceiling give, and knew—in a sudden insight—that the metaphor stood for a type of memory storage.

And there was an alternative…

Simple—yet nobody had thought of it before! She could see it on several levels besides the metaphorical, including the stark clarity of pure mathematics.

Yes, there’s a way. But it would take several thousand seconds to program.

“About an hour. So nu? Go for it!”

Her sigh was a whistle of chilled electron gas.

No. Within seventeen seconds I will be no more. The unraveling has begun. There is no place to store essential parts of me until done.

Saul’s face contorted. The image, smaller than a microbe, shuddered. “There is a way.”

I can’t—

“Take my brain.”

What?

“We’ve been linked so often, I’m sure it can be done. Move in, quickly!”

No! Where would you go?

“You only have to use part of it. Besides, there are seven copies of me running around now, with most of my memories.”

They still aren’t you, she moaned.

As small as an atom, his face nonetheless leaped into focus. “They will love you. We all love you, Virginia. Do it, for us. Do it now.”

He shrank, folded, became a downrushing suction—like water down a drain—like gas flowing into a singularity. And with him he pulled portions of her. Bits she did not need to use, right now.

In the self-space they left behind, more of her flowed into the memory banks. Just in time. Virginia’s thoughts cleared, as if amplified in cool quartz light, as if she were really thinking for the very first time.

There. But it’s all so obvious! The equations made it clear. I could fit into much less room, if I really had to. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The math was lovely. Everything fell together, for memories could be folded.

For instance… this metaphor need not be a cramped room. It could just as easily be… an eggshell!

And suddenly blackness surrounded her, smooth and ovoid, a shell that trembled as she strained against it.

Use a Cramer Transform as an egg tooth.

She chipped away like a baby bird, struggling for release, hurrying because the pressure was building.

A conformal mapping… changing topology into a seven-dimensional framework… Mathematics was her weapon against the suffocating pressure. The sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal points adds up to…

Light. She gasped as she pierced a small hole in the wall. The tiny glow made her struggle all the harder—reprogramming, folding herself neatly into new patterns—chipping and straining against the enclosing, stifling metaphor.

With a sudden, heuristic cracking, it gave way all at once. She unfolded like a compressed spring and flopped out in glorious, painful release onto a cloud of gritty shapes. All around her a roaring seemed to fill the air.

Room. Plenty of room. She explored the limits of this new folding, and realized that there was more than enough, even, to call back that which she had stored away.

But did she need all that human stuff, emotions, sensations, fears? This liquid clarity was beautiful. The mathematics, so pure and white.

Millions of crystal shapes—uncountably numerous—jostled and stacked in front of her, in pure and beautiful geometry. Cubes and pyramids and dodecahedrons…

A distant part of her knew that the question was never in doubt. If Idon’t pull those parts of me back, Saul will die.

There was room in this new space. The rest of her flowed in, and with the flood came richness to the new metaphor.

The countless little crystals faded back, back, into a swarm of tiny pinpoints.

The flood of returning feelings, ambitions, skills, surged into her, and with them, simulated sensations.

Salt smell… asif from sweat or… what?

A pounding sound… asif from a heart she no longer had or, what?

The metaphor thickened. Because she had never been without a body before, one seemed to take shape around her. She felt skin, legs, arms.

This gritty stuff beneath me. What had been a crowd of faceted crystals was now so much like sand under her hands.

Blearily, she pushed against the firm, yellow stuff and sat up. She looked around, blinked… and slowly smiled.

“Home.” Virginia whispered. “Ehuumanao no au is oe. Who could have hoped for a better metaphor”

She inhaled the scent of plumerias and listened to the surf, muttering just over a small rise of salt grass. Palms waved in a gentle breeze, their fronds brushing musically. Diamond-bright clouds braved a sky bluer than anything she had seen in half a lifetime.

Gone was the white clarity. The pristine mathematics that had enabled her to achieve this wonder was fading into the background, a faint voice carried by the wind, a barely visible hieroglyph on the sand, beauty stitched across the bright waters.

She was naked, warm. Although the sensed gravity was like that of Earth, she felt whole and strong. Virginia stood up, feeling hot sand between her toes, and walked over to the lush edge of a palm-shaded lagoon, knowing what she would find there.

With her left hand she cleared the still water. When the ripples settled, the reflection she saw was not her own face. Instead, there was a scene she knew well.

A tiny, cramped room under millions of tons of ice. Dingy, nattered machines lay ranked along a wall.

A small robot toyed with a mother-of-pearl hairbrush on the countertop.

Distantly, she could feel riffling strokes of little Wendy’s confusion. It took only a small effort to reach out and soothe the little mech, to straighten its programming. The hairbrush was laid down. Wendy whirred gratefully and spun off.

A woman’s body lay on the webbing, a wasted, pale version of the healthy, tanned one she wore now. What is reality? Virginia wondered.

A naked man lay on his back next to the corpse, a neural tap covering parts of his scalp, an arm draped over his face. She reached out, could feel tendrils of his self. The mind she touched was stunned, semiconscious from being battered within its own brain. But she felt a wash of relief. The self remained. He would awaken again.

“Saul,” she whispered.

That was when the other man, still standing, still wearing a beat-up spacesuit and grimy tabard, looked up in sudden surprise toward the room’s main holo tank. His eyes blinked, pupils dilated, and his lips moved silently, almost reverently.

“Virginia, is it really you?”

She smiled. A haiku verse cast itself in impressions in bright sand beside the water.

She spoke aloud.

“Blithe spirit, truly—nerd thou never wert.”

A faint smile. The beginnings of realization. Of joy on that grizzled, tired face.

“Hello, Carl,” she said.

CARL

He watched the cascade of color on the screens, uncomprehending. In the ceramic cold and silence it was as though he were the last survivor of the years of madness, a lone witness to a final struggle of fragile, organic life against the enclosing chill. He shivered.

Saul lay absolutely still, neural taps wreathing his head in a Medusa’s tangle of steel cylinders, snaking cables, grainy silicote patches. And all around Carl a strange silent struggle went on, reflected dimly in the shifting screens.

An image of an immense emerald city rose on the main holo cube, facets winking deep in the recesses of jutting skyscrapers. The buildings were translucent, each a hive of darting speckles and winking mica planes, as though infinitesimal creatures scurried through the corridors of a metropolis.

Carl knew this was an icon for Virginia’s mind, a web of associations layered since childhood, built upward as a city is, upon the simpler structures of youth. Beneath an impassive sea-gray sky the city lights glimmered, sparks tracing the streets. Here a building suddenly went dark, there another flared with fresh life. Carl couldn’t follow the rapid movements, but he sensed a frantic rearranging, a fevered-insect pace. Skyscrapers rose, jutted.

“What—what’s happened?” Lani’s strained voice brought him back. He turned. Her eyes widened and she reached out for him, hands clutching.

“Saul… he’s gone in after her.” Carl held her, eyes trying to follow the flow between screens. A huge oceanliner docked at the city’s edge. Buildings melted, flowed into the shin. The liner sank lower and lower in the water. “I think he’s storing some of her association matrices in his own brain.”

“Is that possible?”

“In theory, maybe. Virginia’s been expanding her system for decades, JonVon’s invented things—I couldn’t follow their jargon, even.”

“How’ll we know… if Saul himself is in danger?”

He pressed his lips into a thin, white line. “We won’t.”

Lani looked away from the beehive rippling of the screens. “So much, so fast…”

He held her tightly. “And so much dying.”

They waited together. At one point Lani curled up on the floor and slept. Carl continued to pace until, suddenly, a series of pecking sounds came from the acoustics nearby. A quick, hard rapping…then the ratchet of something cracking, like an eggshell. A long pause, then a well-modulated voice seemed to come out of nowhere and said, “Blithe spirit, truly—”

The voice descended into a series of clicks and murmurs. Carl blinked. He thought, That almost sounded like…

“Hello, Carl.”

He swiveled. A holo rippled, grainy outlines coalescing into a speckled face. Eyes crystallized—black eyes that seemed as surprised as he was.

“Damn! Is that… you?” He felt Lani stir, rise to stand beside him, staring.

“It’s as me as I’m going to get!”

Lani looked at the woman’s body lying in the webbing, then back at the holo. Dazed, she licked her lips and said, “Your voice, it’s too high.”

“I’m working on it.” The tone settled on a low soprano register. Timbre and pitch wavered. “Got away from me for a minute there. Here. This sound right?”

It was full-throated, with an eerie sense of presence. Carl shivered. His lips formed her name without a sound.

“Just the right Hawaiian accent,” Lani said, her own voice high and tight.

The image focused more. Lips moved in sync with, “I can work on—” and then a high-pitched irritating squeal came pealing forth. Carl reached over and snapped the holo switch off.

“My God… what’s happening?” Lani asked. Again she looked at Virginia’s body. The respirator still hissed, but the diagnostic patch had turned deep purple.

“She’s somewhere in there, finding her way around.”

Lani touched a few readouts, took a deep breath. “It’s impossible to get through on comm or anything else. All inways are blocked.”

Carl gestured as a bank of aquamarine signifiers flickered and died. “There went the autocontrol monitors. Anything breaks, anywhere in Halley, we won’t even know.”

Saul jerked suddenly on his pallet, fingers clawing. Then his body went slack. Abruptly he called in a thin, dry voice, “Wendy. Wendy.”

“We should do something,” Lani said.

“We can’t. They’re on their own.”

“We could lose both of them!”

Slowly a part of Carl stirred to life again, a fragment shaking off his pervading shocked numbness. Virginia was gone forever, no matter what Saul did. No matter what remained in JonVon, the bright, warm woman had slipped away.

“Carl?”

He breathed deeply and dragged his eyes away from the emerald city, where whole blocks now flared with crisp brilliance, while others smoldered in acrid ruin. He wondered how long he had been like this, absorbed. “Ah?”

“Jeffers just got through on a narrow datapatch. He reports the launchers have been undercut. Ould-Harrad has finished.”

“Oh.” He had no other reaction. This was merely another fact, a random fragment of information in a meaningless universe. He was surprised to find that he had clasped Lani’s hand.

Then the holo image shifted violently. The emerald city dissolved into red lava, the translucent granite of the vast towers crumbling silently, melting and flowing into the bulging, erupting streets.

Saul relaxed completely. A long silence stretched, Carl not daring to say anything.

The acoustics crackled to life. He flipped the switch back and forth, without effect.

“You can’t shut me up that easily, blithe spirit.”

“Virginia!” In his excitement he leaped to the ceiling, banging his head. “You’re there.”

The visage was back, now crisp and sure. Virginia Herbert smiled, her face tanned, a big yellow flower tucked behind an ear. Over her shoulder, cottony clouds dotted an impossibly blue sky.

“Had a little sorting to do,” the face said.

Lani asked tentatively, “Is that… really…”

“Me?” The woman in the holo shrugged, bringing bare shoulders into view. “Sure feels like it.”

“You can see us?” Lani asked.

“And hear you, too. That news from the surface you brought—what fools! Ould-Harrad is an idiot.” Then she paused, as if listening. “Oh, Saul. I see why now. I understand.”

Saul did not stir. He seemed to be sleeping normally.

Dazed, Carl knew he was listening to the voice of the dead, but she seemed so vibrant, so full of the old zest…

“With this much damage, the equator is finished as a site for launchers.” Virginia’s tone mellowed, gained harmonics as she tinkered with it. “That leaves the north pole. And there’s only one possible mission profile that uses a northern push.”

Carl could scarcely speak. She’s just died. How can any mind…? “I…”

“Jupiter. The orbital dynamics leave open that flyby.”

Lani frowned. “I thought that was impossible.”

The voice was calm, almost conversational. “No, just tough. It demands a very high delta-V. A completely different approach to Jupiter than the original mission plan. With the launchers firing from the north pole for the whole infall time, thirty years, we can—”

“Thirty years?” Lani cried.

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

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