The Heart of the Comet

SAUL

The vulpine’s tongue lolled as it flapped gently through the forest, legs splayed to keep its wing membranes taut, catching crosscurrents in the air as it hovered in search of prey.

LeGrand Cavern was a riot of color, a wilderness of broad, delicate leaves and verdant creepers. At intervals along the green-lined walls, vent tubes dripped condensation that dispersed in a soft fog, lying glistening droplets on the gently waving foliage. Bright purple, orange, and yellow fruits—massive and juicy—hung from slender, threadlike stems.

Fibrous vines laced the heart of the chamber, looping from column tree to keystone root to the next column tree, making a dense, three-dimensional jungle in what had once been an empty ice cathedral.

Saul watched the vulpine sniff, flap closer to a thick patch of Demicasava leaves, and shove in its long snout to worry whatever was hiding there.

In a sudden explosion, a skin-fowl hen burst from the thicket, furiously beating featherless wings just ahead of the vulpine’s snapping jaws. The bird dove into the notch of a keystone root, leaving the disappointed vulpine to whimper in frustration, nosing for a larger opening that wasn’t there.

Life goes on, Saul thought, smiling. A game played in earnest by pieces that only dimly perceive their places in the whole.

He filled his lungs with the rich, living smells. Alot has been accomplished, since the aphelion war. Ought to be, in more than thirty years. Man and environment, adapting to each other.

Le Grand Cavern was one of three “natural” chambers in which new twists to Halley’s ever-more-complicated ecosystem were tested. In other vaults, humans and mechs tended less riotous, more orderly life-mixes… orchards and farms and lobster pens. But this canyon was one of Saul’s favorite spots, where various experiments sorted themselves out and where startling new solutions appeared.

The vulpine—a construct based on fox genes, but modified so extensively as to be nearly unrecognizable by now—snuffed after another scent and let out a sharp yip. It flapped around one of the giant column trees, which crisscrossed the chamber at every angle like spokes or massive braces.

The trees served other purposes than just supporting the walls of Le Grand Cavern, but that role would become crucial over the next few months, as Halley’s Comet zoomed sunward toward its most perilous, and possibly last, perihelion passage.

He touched the trunk of the nearest, a bole a meter across that shone bright, cool light from narrow strips of bioluminescent bark. Power from the colony’s fusion generators ran directly into the genetically engineered giants. Some of the electricity went into feeding the trees’ life functions. The rest emerged as a soft glow that suffused the chamber from all directions, driving photosynthesis.

The trees had been a delightful surprise when Saul had awakened from another decade-long slumber, year ago. Clearly, the colonists had been busy. The craft of life-tailoring and ecosystem management had been carried much further by the watches since aphelion.

Of course, atany time there had always been two or three of Saul’s cloned near-duplicates around to help. In a sense, Saul had had a hand in most of the wonders of this chamber—through his younger versions who shared so many of his memories and skills. It could, in fact, be said that he had invented the column trees…

And yet there was an unrepentant individualist within him who rejected the idea out of hand. No matter how metaphysical I get, I know who “me” is. He watched the vulpine and inspected the shining column tree with a trace of envy. They were beautiful.

He had cheered at the hen’s escape. The skin-fowl had been one of his own designs.

A low vibration traveled up the trunk of the column tree to his hand. Already Halley trembled with more and more quakes as heat from the ever-closer sun seeped downward into the icy crust. Distant booms told of patches of amorphous ice suddenly changing state, exploding off the surface, blowing dust, rocks, boulders into space in great clouds of vapor. Each day the rumblings grew louder.

Already, the hazy, ionized cloud of the coma had formed, cutting off radio reception from the rest of the solar system. The spectacular twin tails waved, waxing ever brighter, primping for the real show at perihelion.

The column trees, keystone roots, and other preparations would be tested hard, during the coming weeks. Carl thinks we haven’t got much of a chance, Saul thought But then, Carl always was a gloomy haymisheh.

Saul smiled, inhaling the rich, thick scent of life.

Somehow, even if the Hot tears us to bits and spills us all into vacuums embrace, I’d still not bet against us.

A small purple creature buzzed by his ear and landed on the lip of an orchid. The flower was almost unchanged from a variant that grew in misty forests on Earth, but the lavender-colored pollinator was like nothing ever seen on the heavy green world. It was a distant cousin of the fearsome native forms that had terrorized the humans, back in the early days—now thoroughly altered to fit a harmless, useful niche.

Saul made a mental note: Work on fixing the flavor of the honey the thing makes. He had tried the stuff recently. It was too sweet. Now a sour variant, that would be popular…

A rustle in the leaves…Saul looked up and caught sight of small shape scuttling along the bright rim of the nearby column. It lifted a tiny, glowing eye at the end of a stalk, regarded him briefly, then peeped and scurried over to stand, quivering, before him.

“Saulie,” its tiny voice piped.

He held out his hand and the little machine ran up his arm like a trim spider the size of a Chihuahua. Its sticky feet prickled his skin with every step.

“Hello, little Ginnie,” he said, greeting the tiny mech. “How’s your big sister?”

The eyecell winked. “She’s fine, Saulie. Virginia says she wants to talk to you. No hurry, she says.”

He smiled. Virginia could have spoken directly through the little mech. After all, she “lived” everywhere in the complex cybernet under the ice. But the vast program that held her main essence had decided, for some reason, to do that as seldom as possible. Oh, there was a little bit of her in every one of the machines, from these little “Ginnies” all the way up to medical-drones that could play Scrabble and gossip. But if you wanted to talk to Virginia, you generally had to do it from some particular place she chose.

“Okay. Tell your mistress I’ll talk to her at Stormfield Park.”

The little robot hummed, consulted, and replied.

“Your mistress, too, Saulie!”

He laughed out loud. This model certainly wasn’t one capable of teasing him with double entendres. Virginia herself must have been listening in.

“You’re cute,” he told it. “Tell you what, why don’t we get together when Mama’s not looking, you and I?”.

“Beast!” A small pincer arm dropped down and tweaked his arm.

“Ouch!” But the mech darted off before he could snatch at it, and was gone in a flash of waving foliage.

I could craft a creature to catch you, he thought. If we had forever, you with your machines and me with my animals… what games we could play.

If we had forever.

Saul let out a sigh. He swiveled, braced his feet against the great tree, and launched himself through the interweaving latticework of trunks—laced with strips of brightly glowing bark—toward an exit that was something of a cross between a classical cerametal airlock and the valve of a giant living heart.

Stormfield park was crowded. As more and more people emerged from the slots, the population had begun approaching levels planned back when Captain Cruz and Bethany Oakes had launched forth with four sail tugs and the old Edmund Halley to challenge the unknown.

The chamber was smaller than LeGrand Cavern. It had quite a few column trees crisscrossing it, but these were arrayed more primly, the growth less a riot, more manicured.

At one end of the cylindrical area, the centrifugal wheel from the old Edmund had been refurbished and put back to work, rotating slowly, like a Ferris wheel. Two quadrants were still enclosed, containing laboratories for weight-dependant processes. But the rest was now open-sided and planted with oak and dwarf maple trees. It was like a strip of old Earth, bent into a circle and set inside a vast, surreal vault.

The wheel’s centrifugal force was equivalent to only a twentieth of Earth’s pull, but it was enough. People went there to practice the arcane act of “walking”…of sitting under a tree and watching things fall.

Ass he approached the rolling boundary, Saul heard a rare, treasured sound. Children laughed and flew past him toward the ring, skidding in the soft sand of a landing area as the great cylinder rolled around and around.

They looked so much better. Still, the gangling forms seemed barely human. Only a few could speak.

After aphelion, all of the poor, warped creatures had been slotted, and no more had been born. The wars had burned out the long rivalry between Ortho and Percell, and at last reason prevailed. Until the problems of fetal and postnatal development in the cometary environment were solved, it was considered heartless to bring babes into the world.

The reasons why humans had so much more difficulty than other animals were complex, but Saul and his assistants had solved the problem more than ten years ago. Theoretically, this park could be echoing with the giggles of healthy children.

But with perihelion coming, there was another reason to delay. Children deserved a future. Right now, few really believed there would be one.

Saul swam through a shimmering boundary and stepped nimbly aboard the rolling lawn. As he braced and absorbed rotational momentum, a holographic image formed behind him, cutting off his view of the rest of the hall. Suddenly, it was if he were in a park on Earth. City spires topped forested rise in one direction. Out the other way, one caught a glimpse of the bright sparkle of a sunlit sea.

Lest we forget.

Twice more, over the long years, bursts of technical data had arrived, sent by nameless benefactors in the inner solar system. Display projections like these—distant descendants of the weather walls—were among the most stunning of he gifts…proofs that not all of those who dwelt under the Hot had forgotten kinship, or mercy.

It was partly for them that Saul was working on the suspension-hibernation organelles. Such people deserved the stars.

He strolled under the limbs of the dwarf trees, past old friends who nodded amiably, and others he still barely knew from out-of-sync duty spans.

It was much like a visit to the park during his younger days. Of course, no one was fooled. Where on Earth, after all, would one see a person with blue-dyed skin playing chess with a human-shaped thing covered in green fungoid and yellow, symbiotic lichen?

Diversity, experimentation. It’s how we’ve learned to live.

He stepped past the statue of Samuel Clemens, for whom the park had been named, and came up to a curtain of water…or rather, near-perfect holographic image of rainbow-diffracting droplets, sprayed from alabaster bowls. The illusory fountain parted without dampening him, and he stepped into a hidden, private glade.

Under a drooping willow canopy, a diminutive oriental tea house lay surrounded by rhododendrons. Saul sat down, crosslegged, before a clear pool, and watched the carp within beat the denudated water frothy with their swishing tails.

It was peaceful here. The rumbling of the great wheel’s bearings, the hushed blowing of the air fans…these were sounds that he knew, intellectually, must exist somewhere. But they had long ago faded way in habituation, like the beating of his heart, into a background barely ever recalled.

“Hello, Saul.”

He looked up as she stepped out of the tea house, a loose kimono flapping about tanned legs, her sandals clicking on the sandy path. She was drying her black hair with towel.

It always did it to him, meeting her like this. Her body had long ago gone into the ecosystem. And yet, she walks in beauty.

“Hello to you, too,” he said. “How’s the water?”

She smiled and settled down to the grass not five feet away. “Fine. A little choppy. But there was a five-foot swell, and peak. Good surfing.”

Their eyes met. Silent laughter. What is Illusion? Saul wondered. And what is reality?

The difference was plain in only one way. She lay as near and clear as an outstretched hand. But he could not touch her, and never would again.

“You look well,” she offered.

He shrugged. “Gettin’ older all th’ time.”

“Even with the perfect symbiotic system?” she teased.

“Even with the perfect symbiotic system, yeah. Of course, one really has to wonder if it matters. Or if time and age are worth worrying about.” He watched her carefully, for although she could control images almost perfectly, her face hid no more from him than it ever had. She was mysterious. And an open book to him.

“It might matter.” Her gaze was distant. “We might make it.”

“Even past perihelion?” He looked at her skeptically.

She was watching the fish the real water she could not touch or disturb in any way except with light and shadow. “Perhaps. If we do, a whole new set of challenges present themselves. Over the last thirty years I’ve come to realize that time could stretch to eternity for me. If so…”

He sighed, feeling he could read her thoughts. “My clones have most of my memories, and my good taste in women. They all love you, Virginia.”

She smiled. “My drones all love you, too, Saul.”

Their eyes met again, irony and tightly controlled loss.

“So nu?” He stretched. “You wanted to tell me something?”

She nodded, and in simulation took a deep breath. “Old Hard Man is dead.”

Saul rocked back. “Suleiman? Ould-Harrad?”

“What did you expect? He never went back into the slots, after the aphelion wars…kept watch all that time to make sure we stuck to out agreement, no encounters with any planet but Jupiter outbound. He was very old, Saul. His people mourn him.”

Saul looked down and shook his head, wondering what Halley would be like without the mystic of the lower reaches.

Who would there be with the nerve to remind Saul Lintz that he was not, after all, anything even faintly resembling the real Creator?

“He left you a bequest,” Virginia went on. “It’s waiting for you, in Deep Gehenna.”

“I’ve never been down there.” Saul felt a queer sensation. Was it fear? He had forgotten what that emotion was, but it might be something akin to what he was experiencing.

“Neither have I,” Virginia whispered. None of her mechs had ever ventured down into the deepest reaches of the comet nucleus, where the strangest things took refuge in the total darkness. She shook herself.

“A guide will be waiting for you at the base of Shaft One, at zero five thirty hours, tomorrow. I—”

She looked up, her eyes unfocusing for a moment. “I’ve got to go now. Carl and Jeff need a simulation run, a big one. It’ll take a lot of core.” She smoothed her kimono over her tanned legs. “Time to doff this body and strip down to bare electrons.”

He stood up along with her. They faced each other. His hand reached out.

“Don’t;” she whispered, her voice gone tense and soft. “Saul…”

His fingers stroked just short of contact with the smoothness that seemed to be her cheek. For an instant, the very tips shone with a flare of pink, and he felt, almost…

“Come again soon.” She sighed. “Or just call and talk to me.”

Then, in a flourish of silk, she was gone.

His new gibbons, Simon and Shulamit, clung to him as he followed the guide—a man who had once been named Barkley and had managed greenhouses for Earth-orbital factories, before being exiled on a one-way mission into deep space. Now, Barkley was his own greenhouse…his own habitat. He wore an ecosystem in green and orange fibers, and fed on this and that…a little light here, a bit of native carbonaceous matter there…

Some types of symbiosis scare even me, Saul thought as they navigated a labyrinth of narrow, twisty passages that took them deeper and deeper into the ice. Faint as Halley’s gravity field was at the surface, Saul could feel its pull fade and finally disappear from sensibility. This was the core, the center. Down here the first grain had formed, four and a half billion years ago, beginning a process of accretion as more and more bits gathered, fusing and growing into a ball of primordial matter. The stuff of deep space.

They squeezed through the thick, oily flaps of a lock-leaf plant… vegetation that acted much like an airlock, for it would react to a leak by plastering leaf atop leaf until air was sealed in on the uncracked side. It was an effective technique, but Saul still found it uncomfortable as they wormed through the sticky mass. The gibbons shuddered, but bore it uncomplainingly.

Here, energy from the fusion piles was rationed, scantily used. In the pale light of his glow-bulb, the passages glittered as he remembered them from the earliest days, with the dark, speckled beauty of native carbonaceous rock and clathrate snow. Saul’s nose twitched at the almondlike scent of cyanide and nitrous oxides… made pleasant by the gene-crafted symbionts in his blood, but stronger than he ever remembered.

He stopped to take samples at a few places along the way. Each time his guide waited patiently, unperturbed.

The traces are getting richer the deeper we go… as I’ve suspected for years now.

It made little sense, of course. Why should the protolife forms pervade the primitive material more and more thickly down here, where the periodic waves of warmth from successive sun passages never penetrated? It was a mystery, but there it was. True, the more complex forms had developed higher up, but the basic stuff was thickest toward the core.

He sighed. Questions. Always questions. How could life be so kind—and so cruel—as to offer up wonders to solve, and give so little time, so few clues?

Their journey resumed, passing narrow clefts where an occasional, green-coated figure could be seen tending a garden of giant mushrooms, or sitting before a small, glowing console, working for the colony, but where she or he chose.

Saul felt enclosed. The ice was heavy, massive all around him. It was oppressive, dank, dark. We’re close, very close to the center, he felt.

“We have arrived.” Barkley swam to one side. Saul looked dubiously at narrow tunnel, barely a man’s width cross. He cleared his throat.

“Stay here, Simon, Shulamit.”

The midget gibbons blinked unhappily. He had to peel them off and plant them on the wall. They watched him wide-eyed as he stooped and crawled into the musty passage.

The claustrophobic feeling grew as he crept. The walls and floor had been rubbed icy and smooth by countless pilgrimages. Somehow, the tunnel felt much colder even than the passages outside. It was only a few meters, but by the time a soft light appeared ahead, Saul was feeling a sharp tension.

When he reached the opening, he simply stared for a few moments.

Four tiny glow-phosphors glimmered above the corners of a carved stone bier. Upon this lay a man-shaped figure. Suleiman Ould-Harrad.

Saul floated out into the chamber. No gravity tugged at him. He was completely weightless.

He grasped one horn of the altarlike bier. The symbiotic Halleyforms had dropped away, leaving Ould-Harrad looking like an old, old man who had gone to his rest after more years than he would have chosen. The eyes, closed in final sleep, nevertheless gave an impression of severe dedication—to his people and to the deity who had so disappointed, yet nurtured him.

Saul paid his respects, remembering.

At last. he looked around. Virginia had spoken of a “bequest.” And yet the chamber wasbare empty save the Blow-bulbs, the corpse, and the carved bier.

“Wait a minute…” Saul muttered. He swiveled upside down and peered closer at the stone. “I… I don’t believe it.”

He fumbled at his belt and pulled forth his rarely used flashlight. Its sharp beam momentarily blinded him and he turned it down while blinking away spots.

Then Saul touched the stone in wonder, his hand bright under the narrow light, stroking faint but clearly symmetrical outlines. His voice was hushed.

“This is what Suleiman found, when he sought his Truth at the heart of the comet. This…”

This was a scientific discovery, and more.

This was astonishment.

He traced the ribs of an ancient sea creature, fossilized n sedimentary rock. Saul stared at the patterned ribcage, at the rough-edged, half-opened mouth, gaping as if caught in mid-chase, frozen in hungry pursuit…and at once he knew that the form he was touching had to be older, vastly older, than even the sun itself.

All around him, the close press of trillions of tons of rock and snow was as nothing to the sudden weight of years.

CARL

Lani’s breath sighed like the soft brush of stone against rough fiber. A weary warrior on the soft battlefield, Carl thought lazily. He snuggled against her, spoon fashion, and she wormed backward in her sleep, seeking him. It was in such seemingly slight, unconscious gestures that people truly knew each other, he thought. Much could be disguised between people, but not the elemental seeking of flesh for comfort and closeness. A delicate sheen of sweat glistened on Lani’s forehead and her legs stirred, fanned, finding him. Then she settled with a small shiver, her breath slipped back into a regular sighing, and she descended into sleep again.

He pushed off gently and drifted out of bed. It was time to make his rounds, but there was no need for her to stir.

His legs and arms reminded him of yesterday’s labors with a sweet tingling pain. Even in barely perceptible gravity, he now felt a hitch there, a tightening there … I’ve lost track, but I must be well past forty, he thought as he brushed his teeth. The mirror agreed: delicate crow’s feet spreading from the eyes, jowly lines, more lightening at the temples. All badges for tours of duty.

In the last thirty years he had been awake about a third of the time. The crises had come and gone, though none that matched the troubles on the outbound orbit. Each time of Lazarus Carl made things right again. He stuck out his tongue at himself in the mirror. And they, gave you the credit. Nobody noticed that you just got them to think out loud until the answers were obvious.

He pulled on a fresh blue coverall, relishing the crisp feel of the soft, native-grown fabric. He had always been messy before, seldom noticing that clothes were dirty until a chance breath informed his nose. It was through such seeming details that Lani transformed his world. They resolutely and precisely divided household chores, so there was no less work for him to do over-all…yet somehow everything seemed in order now, neat and clean.

Yeah, she’s civilized me. He bent and gave her soft kiss. She murmured and burrowed farther into her pillow as he left.

The tunnels were more crowded now than anytime he could remember since the beginning of the Nudge. All through the long dark years a skeleton watch had remained—more crew awake than originally planned, of course, because the Nudge was never finished. There were flinger tubes to polish and realign, launchers to outfit with new shocks and focusers. A steady hail of maintenance, as parts broke or simply wore out. The north-pole launchers had fired right up to the last minute, when the outgassing ice and flying dust made operations impossible. They had to. The outbound Jupiter flyby demanded a large velocity change.

Now the launchers lay snug in their pits, buried thirty meters down, awaiting revival. For they had more bullets to spit at the stars, more momentum to impart… if anyone survived the next few months.

As if we’ll ever really see Jupiter.

Carl sped down Shaft 3, checking every detail along the way. It was an old habit from the days before gene-crafted animals patrolled to eat unwanted Halleyforms. He stopped to pet a pair of hybrid mongoose-ferrets. Saul had tailored for Halleyform policing. They crawled over him, nuzzled at his hand, discovered it was not suitable foodstuff, and lost interest.

He entered Central and gave the screens the usual daily once-over. They were only six weeks from perihelion now, and with every advancing kilometer the comet accelerated them toward almost certain doom. Carl called up the few remaining views available from weathered relays on the surface.

Worse today. Much worse.

He selected a camera looking toward the dawn line. Far away, ivory streamers boiled from promontories that caught the sunrise. The sun slit the sky from the ice, a spreading line of chewing brilliance. Golden fingers stretched between the horizon hills and lit the first smoke of morning. Where the slanted sun found fresh ice, gouts of pale blue and ruddy-green erupted. High above waved plasma banners, auroras already more vast than any seen by Amundsen or Peary.

They had spun Halley again, to even the thermal load. Jeffers had mounted an array of absorbent panels to partially control the outgassing and use it for some crude navigation, but in this howling chaos it was impossible to get even a good fix on the stars and tell how they were doing.

Sailing into the storm, he thought. And no compass to steer by.

Halley was no more a ball of ice. Instead it resembled a snowy land mysteriously pocked and acned, all trace of man erased. Countless centers of more-active gas sublimation had riddled the dusty plains, ripping free to join the high vacuum. Layers of heavier particles smeared the hollows. Occasional brown patches of dust suddenly blew away, joining the swooping upward lift of the bright yellow-green coma, visible to Carl as a diffuse haze that stretched across the sky. As he watched, a slow darkening rippled through the gauzy glow, an outward wave from some eruption of dust on the sunward side.

“Pretty bad,” Jeffers said at his elbow. He had grown even leaner in the sleep slots, his skin sallow. “Particle per sec is up three times over what it was last week.”

“It’ll rise almost exponentially from now on,” Carl said. He gave this as a fact when it was only Virginia’s prediction; she had been so accurate lately there hardly seemed a distinction any longer.

“Lost the last of the velocity meters.”

“Not surprising.”

“Just clean blew away.”

“Temperature.”

“The night side’s at two hundred eighty Kelvin atop the dust beds. Dayside’s ’bout fifteen degrees higher. Clapein’ big gradient.”

The thermal load was crucial. As the surface warmed steadily, heat seeped into the core. Over most of Halley, the dust layers would act as a thermal blanket, but only for so long. “What’s the reading at the ice level?”

“Looks to be about eighty degrees colder than the surface.”

“Plenty.”

“Yeah, for now.”

Ice was elastic. The warmer surface expanded, stretched—and cracked. The unrelenting pounding of the launchers had undoubtedly stressed the ice far down into Halley. With the warming would come relieving pressures, fracturing. How much? No numerical simulation could tell them. Halley was already honeycombed by the insect burrowing of humankind. It might crack open entirely, a last wheeze belching forth all the puny human parasites that had afflicted it.

As they watched, pearly gout broke the crusted surface and exploded into a swirling cyclone symphony of excited colors: pea green, violet, sulfur yellow.

“Vidor woke up yet?”

“I ordered him started, but it’ll be another day.”

“Well, no rush anymore. His castle’s gone.”

Jeffers pointed to a slumped mass near the dawn line. The ornate, corbelled, and stranded artwork had been Vidor’s masterwork in ice, sculpted three years after the equatorial battle. For its task—structural support for Shaft 20—it could have been a square box, an igloo. Vidor had added parapets, towers, silvery arabesques, scalloped walls, and blue-white, airy bridges. Now…

“He won’t expect it to still be here.” A sand castle lasts only until the next tide.

“How many you bringin’ out?”

“Everybody,” Carl said. “Except the ones so dead there’s no real hope of saving them, of course.”

Jeffers twisted his mouth around in a familiar, skeptical line. “The med-techs can handle those new treatments?”

“Virginia’s got mechs helping. Speed-trained them with that experimental method of hers.”

“What’d you decide ’bout the ones with partial brain damage?”

“They won’t be much use, but they deserve revival.”

“Yeah. They paid for their tickets, might as well see the finale.”

Some had opposed his decision, but he had swept their objections aside. The rational argument was that with the maximum possible crew awake, they could deal with crises better. Carl’s private motivation, though, was entirely emotional. If Halley split, cracked, burst into a gaudy technicolor plume, at least they would all live out each moment, and face the end as they had begun an expedition. A crew.

That’s something, he thought. Beats sleeping to oblivion.

He frowned. What was that poem Virginia had pointed out to him?

I really shouldn’t think of the program as Virginia, but it’s impossible not to. JonVon doesn’t exist anymore. And what was that poem she quoted yesterday?

Right. Damn right.

“Sir?”

Carl turned, not recognizing the voice.

It was Captain Miguel Cruz.

“Uh…” Carl stared at the man, unchanged from his memory. The jaw was still as solid, assured. The eyes looked out steadily, inspiring confidence. Even the blue tint from slot sleep could not disguise that.

Still, something about the man looked awkward, blocky. Cruz wore shoes, and stood as if gravity mattered.

“I wanted to report for duty,” Cruz said. “I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’m sure. there’s something I can.”

“No, no, you—rest. Just rest,” Carl said quickly. He hadn’t realized the warmings had come so far. Someone should have warned him!

Cruz spoke with a faint accent… Earth speech. “Sir, I’d prefer to be on duty. Perhaps—”

Carl shook his head, embarrassed. “Look, Cap’n, don’t call me sir. I’m Carl Osborn, you may remember me, a spacer. I—”

“Of course I recognize you. I’m somewhat conversant with events since my death,” Cruz said with a faint smile. “I’ve read the log—it’s incredible—and… I think calling you ‘sir’ is quite appropriate.”

Carl stared at the man for a long moment, not knowing what to say. Despite his harrowing illness, Cruz looked… young. Unseasoned. “I… thought, sir, that after you’ve had a few days to recover, you could reassume command.”

Cruz looked at the flurry of data and views of the surface on a dozen screens nearby. “It would take me months to even understand what’s going on. Your tools, techniques, and… Coming here, I saw a woman in Shaft Two who looked like a flying fungus!”

“That’s a weirder, sir,” Carl said. “They live about two klicks down Shaft Two in their own biosphere.”

“But that green stuff—it was even in her hair!”

“It’s a symbiont that retains fluids and increases oxygen processing—I don’t know the details.”

Cruz shook his head. “Incredible. As I said, I haven’t a clue about how things are.”

“But I was hoping…”

“I see,” Cruz said with dawning perception. “Now that we’re back in the inner solar system, you thought perhaps I could help negotiate something with Earth?”

“No sir, we’ve realized that’s a dead end. I only… well, you’re the captain!”

Cruz’s smile was distant, reflective, as though he peered at something far away. “I was the captain of the Edmund, and for a brief time, while we tunneled in here and lived. But now Halley is a ship itself. It’s been sailing under her true captain for decades now. I…I am a passenger.”

“No, sir, that’s not.”

“Someday I aspire to become a ship’s officer. Not captain, however. And I shall not forget who held the helm for so long.”

Cruz held out a hand. Carl blinked, then slowly brought forth his and shook it.

All along he had hoped Saul’s wunderkinder could revive Cruz. Now they had done it, at the very last minute… and it was no panacea after all. He should have seen that. Cruz was right. Miguel Orlando Cruz-Mendoza was no older than the day he had died, but Halley was seventy years transformed by the hand of that clawing, cantankerous, blissfully ingenious and flagrantly stupid lifeform that was too stubborn to stay at home and forget about riding iceballs into oblivion.

To his own amazement, Carl realized he was already evaluating his former captain, weighing his potential place in the crew. Agood man, he thought. I’llput him to work.

Hours later he found himself returning from an inspection of some farm caverns and the new modular hydroponics spirals. They were cleverly arranged to extract waste heat from recycled sewage, which fed in overlapping helices around the outside. Ultraviolet poured from an axial cool-plasma discharge, and the huge plants had yearned inward toward it He admired the Promethean task of relocating the surface domes into the core, and was making his way back through Shaft 4 when a slow, grumbling crump jarred him away from his thoughts. It seemed to come from the walls themselves.

He tapped into his private line. “Jeffers!”

—I’m on it. Acoustics are pickin’ it up ever’where.—

“An explosion?”

—No pressure drop. I think it came from the surface.—

Carl called up a quick index-display of the remaining surface cameras. Most showed views of gossamer, upside-down Niagaras—roiling founts of vapor soaring from the ice and whipping in long arcs up into a shifting, gauzy sky. Solar ultraviolet ionized the gas. The sun’s particle pressure then turned these fountains outward, bending the flow into the ghostly streamers of the coma.

Above the far horizon a block of grainy ice tumbled end over end, a kilometer up in the sky. Nearby a huge jagged hole yawned, itself a source of fresh volatiles, green and ruby strands snaking from the pit in twisting filaments.

“Seismic outblow? Or maybe a patch of amorphous ice changing state suddenly.”

When the stressed crust ice gave way, it could rip free entirely. That instantly transferred the sun’s heating to fresh deposits, which hollowed new channels and in time would further deepen the cracks.

Jeffers said, —Yeah, looks it. Virginia was right ’bout that, too.—

“She said it wouldn’t happen very much until perihelion.”

—Well, I guess this’s just a taste of it.—

Carl nodded to himself and cast off. He passed parties of Weirds, swathed in green and purple growths, who scarcely took notice of him. They were checking the old seals for intrusions by older Halleyforms, which they would scrape away and replace with mutated, human-friendly forms the Sauls had worked out.

Further on he met two Saul clones, gently coasting a revived sleep slotter to one of the warmer bins. They nodded in unison and called to him, “Only twenty more probables left.” Carl laughed.

They were fully developed adults now, with minds of their own. They even had the same gestures and accent. But somehow he couldn’t think of them as anything but Saul substitutes. The fact that Saul had successfully cloned himself, while attempts at duplicating other crew members had failed, meant that his odd symbiotic adaptation was crucial. Quite possibly, only he could be copied in the Halley environment. So down through these last few decades, the multiSauls had been invaluable for their resistance to random new ailments, and their curious internal discipline. Saul had used JonVon’s memory-transfer apparatus to instill whole chunks of his own expertise into his clones.

What he had learned might have enabled others to raise natural children without fear. It would have been good, hearing peals of childish laughter in the shafts. But the long fall to perihelion had dampened any such idea. No one could bear the knowledge that the promise of childhood might never blossom.

Carl’s comm buzzed and Virginia said, —You were doubting my prognosis?—

“That blowout came a little early, don’t you think?”

—No. After all, I deal in probabilities, sir, not predictions. If you want, why don’t you call up Lefty d’Amario? He can check my calculations.—

Somehow the old tingle still ran through him when the coquettish flavor laced through her voice. “Okay, I’m nor griping. No need to get huffy. You monitoring those stress meters Jeffers implanted all over?”

—Of course. I can always spare a nanosec or two.—

“And?”

—Minor tremors here and there. Some faulting along Shaft Two. Nothing to get perturbed about.—

“Great. You been filling in Cap’n Cruz?”

—You are captain, Carl. Everybody keeps telling you, even if you don’t like it.—

“I didn’t ask for the job.”

—Nobody else could handle what’s coming.—

He felt a sudden spurt of the old anger. “What’s coming is death, Virginia.”

—I know no such thing.—The voice was prim, circumspect.

“You did the simulations yourself.”

—Number-crunching isn’t reality. I should know, eh, friend Carl? There may be variances in the cross-correlation matrices.—

“Don’t give me all that. Halley’s scraping in too close, and she’s been too battered to stand this. The only question is whether we’ll fry or boil when this iceberg blows apart.”

—There are many unpredictables. But also some measures we can take.—

Carl had been smoothly coasting down a tunnel, automatically checking for cracks. This remark made him stop. “What can we do?”

—Pipe some of the surface heat inward, to offset some of the stress arising from the temperature differentials. In other words, reverse the outflow system and spread the surface heat into lower, cooler ice.—

“And if some inside ice vaporizes? The pressures—”

—We vent it. It will aid in shielding from the sun.—

“Ah.” He felt a flush of hope. “How come you didn’t mention this before?”

—I just thought of it. I’m only a machine.—

Faintly, he heard the soft roar of surf, the whisper of trade winds, a distant rumble of ocean squalls gathering. Virginia’s metaphorical world within the network. Somewhere a voice laughed, “Ke Pii mai nei ke kai!”

So she had company, somehow. He smiled. “Look, I’ll call a meeting. We should look into—”

She laughed. —Same old Carl. One minute you’re grousing about everything, but give you a problem to work on and—bingo!—

He flushed. She had always had an uncanny ability to stay one move ahead of him. He pushed off along a tunnel that led home.

—There’s plenty of time to figure out the engineering, Cap’n. Go on about your business. —The tinkling chuckle, ringing in his ears. —Lani’s waiting.—

And she was. She embraced him silently and they spun lazily in the middle of the room, oblivious. Carl had at last mastered the art of putting business aside once he came back to their small apartment, and this time he did so again, even though the implications of Virginia’s remarks were enormous. He was tempted to tell Lani, but then he held back. Hope had been kindled among them so many times over the decades, only to be snuffed out by the brute certainty of some unyielding astronomical fact. So he banished all the fretful chorus of thoughts and simply kissed her.

“My!” She breathed deeply. “Pretty torrid for midday—particularly after a hard night.”

“We do our best.”

“I go on shift soon. Let’s have a quick lunch.”

“Great.” He launched himself for their tiny kitchen, made workable only because they could use the walls and ceiling.

“There’s some hard copy on your printer, by the way,” Lani said, fetching some sauce used on the braised vegetables and mute-chicken from the evening before. “From Virginia.”

“Oh?’

He kicked over to the printer. Usually it was used only for emergencies or entertainments, not ordinary ship’s business.

It was a poem.

Carl studied it, frowning. “She’s getting better.”

Lani came over and read it slowly. “I’m always surprised anew,” she said softly. “Virginia truly is in there, somewhere.”

Carl shook his head. “She’s not in anything, really. She’s everywhere. The system has expanded far beyond just JonVon’s banks. She’s Halley now.”

Lani suddenly turned and embraced him. “We’re all Halley.” He breathed in the aromatic warm musk of her and felt an easing of old pains. Whydid it take me so long to see that this fine woman could be a whole world to me? And what if I never had seen it?

He felt Virginia around them all, sensed the entire community of Halley as a matrix threaded through the ancient ice. They were no longer buried inside, going for a ride. No Percells, no Orthos. They were a new, beleaguered society, a new way for a versatile primate to stretch further, to be more than it was. They were not merely in the center of the old dead ice, they were the heart of the comet.

“Yeah, I suppose we are,” he said.

VIRGINIA

It was a show that humans had never seen before, and quite likely never would again. The steady hammering of the launchers for over three decades had altered the infalling ice mountain’s orbit, shifting the nodes of the stretching ellipse. Earth’s orbit clung to the sun, deviating from a circle by less than two percent. But Halley’s eccentricity had been ninety-six percent even before the machines of men began their persistent nudging. Now the curve tightened with each passing hour, bringing a searing summer. Halley had never plunged this close to the eroding Hot.

The tunnels and shafts made excellent acoustic pipes. As ice around and surged against new frictions, the groans echoed deep into the core, waking sleepers—though there were few of those, as the crucial hour approached.

Plunging fifty kilometers nearer with every second, Halley rushed toward its ancient enemy. Each past encounter had stripped a skin of ice from the comet, but now it rumbled and wrenched with new forces that sought to break it on the anvil of its sun.

Virginia watched the howling, blinding storm through electronic eyes. As each camera died from the stinging blast of dust and plasma, she deployed another from deep vaults. The sun loomed twice as large as seen from Earth. But from the surface there was no incandescent disk to see. Halley spun, but saw no sunrise. Instead, a white-hot corona simmered overhead. A patch of seething brightness marked where the Hot’s outpouring met the ion flood exploding from Halley, and victory inevitably went to the Hot. Cracked, ionized, the gases turned, deflected aside, and swept around the small iceworld in a magnetized blanket. This roiling atmosphere had no loyalty to its parent, but instead raced outward.

Halley’s twin tails now unfurled across a span greater than Mercury’s orbit. The twisting, glimmering plasma banner held less water than many of Earth’s larger ponds, but the sun’s blaring light made it the most visible object in the solar system. Advanced inhabitants of a nearby star could have picked the nearly straight, shimmering curtains out from the central star. The dust tail, in contrast, was a curved reddish band, broken by dark lanes, sparkling with pebbles and micron-sized grains.

But those riding the parent ice mote could not see the most beautiful tail ever to grace a comet in all history. As it sped deeper into its star’s gravity well, the glowering coma of unbearable luminescence spread and devoured the whole sky. Blinded now, Halley could not even see its nemesis. The sky glared down everywhere.

Virginia had calculated this effect carefully, for it was the key. If she had allowed Halley to remain spinless, the sunward face would have soared toward the four-hundred-degree temperature that a solid body would have at this distance from the sun. Now, she watched heat-flux monitors buried tens of meters in the ice. As the warmth seeped deeper, she spun the iceworld faster to smooth out the effect, allowing the night side to radiate into the black of space.

But the black was fading. Soon the comet’s own summer air reflected sunlight down onto the shaded face of Halley from all sides, and temperatures rose faster as perihelion approached.

“How’s it look?” Carl watched Central’s screens with Lani at his side. “We’ve already blown off twenty meters of ice!” he said sharply. “How long’ll it take to rip us apart?”

Virginia sensed his rising level of conflict. He was a man who solved problems, and in this great crisis he had no role. Like the others, he was a helpless passenger on his own ship.

“We are safe,” she said reassuringly, using a thread of alto tones that made her voice richer than the original had ever been.

“The shaft seals?”

“Intact,” Virginia said, displaying views of the steel-capped lids in place two hundred meters inside each shaft. Beyond them, giant plugs of ice barred the Hot’s way.

“Stop worrying,” Lani said gently, putting a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “We might as well enjoy the view.”

Virginia thought later that it was particularly ironic that Lani’s words were punctuated by a long, rolling boom that penetrated into Central. The spherical room vibrated, creaking. Equipment popped free of holders.

“A cave-in,” Virginia announced, throwing an image onto the central screen. A milling mass of snow and ice jutted through tunnel walls, falling with aching slowness.

“Damn!” Carl said, his voice tight. “Where?”

“Site Three C, as our projection suggested.”

“Pressure.”

“Sealed tightly. No incursions.” Virginia analyzed Carl’s voice patterns and found a high level of tension. If only he would listen to Lani more…

The basic human reaction to events of immense size was to hunker down.

Virginia had noted this in the final days before perihelion. Her mechs roved the honeycombed tunnels, testing for leaks and sudden fountains of vagrant heat. Seldom did they meet anyone. Even Stormfield Park was deserted now, the carousel stopped.

People did their jobs, served their shifts—and holed up with a few loved ones, watching the gaudy maelstrom outside through the video displays. Jeffers had developed a new kind of light pipe that could snake out from a deeply buried camera, and thus reduce risk, but still high-pressure vents opened and gushers of foaming, red-rich mud flooded many of Virginia’s observation stations.

She reserved a tiny piece of Core Memory for her “office.” There she sat amid a hum of machinery, feeling the reassuring rub of a chair, the flickering of consoles. I wish I could spare enough Core to go for a swim, she thought. I can feel my own tensions, too…

As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand years had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well-springs.

Thus, the gathering background chorus of tremors, the crump of a crumbling wall, the low gravelly mutter of strained ice—all these sounds drove the crew inward. Not into solidarity, but to the fleshy reassurance and consolations of fellow spacers, or weirders, or Hawaiians. Like sought like for what might be the final hours.

Except for one lonely figure, who seldom left Central.

“Saul,” she said to him as an amber plume spouted from the surface, throwing streaks of lacy light across the familiar, lined face. He had been sitting by the display a long time, his mind far away as he rolled a small stone in his hand, over and over. “Saul?”

“Ah—oh, yes?” His lined face looked up from the bit of rock.

“I’m sure you could watch elsewhere.”

He shrugged. “Stormfield’s closed. I’m not needed in sick bay right now. There’s no place else I particularly want to be.”

“I am sure Carl and Lani would welcome you. They are awake, watching.”

He raised a hand. “No, I’ll let them be. Don’t want to push in where I’m just a fifth wheel.”

“You worry over that old stone a lot,” she said to change the subject. He had been turning it over in his hands for hours.

He looked at the dark gray lump. “It’s from Suleiman’s bier. I’ve carried it around for weeks, studying it. But that’s… that’s not what I was thinking about right now.”

His gaze drifted over to the refrigerated unit holding sixteen liters of superchilled organic processor. Virginia thought she understood.

“You are with me no matter where you are in Halley, Saul.”

He blinked, nodded. “I know… it’s just…”

“Just that here the physical proximity of my organic memory is reassuring?”

He smiled the old wry smile, slightly puckered lips and crinkled eyes together conveying an irony that was never far from his own image of himself, she knew. “I’m that obvious?”

“To the one who loves you, yes.”

“There are times I wish…”

“Yes?”

“I could have found a way to clone you.”

“So you would know me—or someone like me—in the flesh?”

“Memory only makes some things worse.”

“There…” She felt no real hesitancy, and in any case with her speed the indecision would take only milliseconds, but she had to maintain the nuances of a living persona. “… There are our recordings.”

He chuckled dryly. “You know how many times I’ve played them.”

A hint of shyness, yes. “I could… augment them.”

“No!” He slammed a fist into his web-chair. “I want the real thing, the real… you.”

“It would be.”

“When we recorded ourselves, it was a lark, like couples taking Polaroid pictures of themselves in the bedroom. We never intended that only one of us would play them back.” He shook his head. “This way, without you—the real you…”

“But I am me. More real than any holo-image! And if I enter into the sensory link, it is an older and probably wiser Virginia whom you will meet. Me.”

Saul had resisted this suggestion before, for reasons she did not fully understand. But now, perhaps out of the pressing loneliness that danger brings, he lifted his head and stared directly into her opticals. “I… it would?”

She knew she would not guarantee that it would be some genuine Virginia, fixed in amber. She was not the personality that had flooded into the cramped JonVon persona and inundated it. Slow evolution and self-actuated advances had brought her a vast distance since those years. But Saul did not have to know that nor did anyone, and it would be of comfort to him.

“Come to me, Saul.”

He put aside the stone and reached for the neural tap. To her surprise, she felt nervous.

Perhaps for her it would be a returning, too.

Shortly before perihelion the sun stopped its retreat to the south and began rising again. As the disk grew, it swept toward the equator. There was perpetual noon as the comet shuddered and erupted beneath the unending blaze. The southern hemisphere, gutted and gouged for months, now cooled as the north came under ferocious attack.

Sublimating water and carbon dioxide carried heat away from the fast-spinning mote. Its surface cracked in many places, following the weakening imprints Man had stamped upon it for seven decades. Fresh volatiles sublimed and exploded. Sharp chunks weathered to stubs within minutes, as though sandblasted. Pebbles rose and formed hovering sheets which momentarily shielded the ice beneath, then were blown away to join the gathering dust tail.

At the north pole, so far spared the worst, the clawing sun bit deep. Since the times of great plagues, some factions had buried the irrecoverably dead deep in the ice near the pole. Now the Hot found them.

By chance, the sight was visible over a light pipe that surfaced in a sheltered nook at the exact north pole. Exploding gases beneath lifted the wrapped mummies and hurled them skyward. Blistering heat released ionized oxygen from the ice, and the bodies burst into flame, lighting the landscape with momentary orange pyres. The torches were thrown, tumbling and flaring, up and out against the immense, unknowing forces. They hung in the sky for long moments, like distant glittering castles, and then winked out, plunging forever into the river that rolled out from the sun.

“Goddamn! We’re past it!”

Carl’s amazed face intruded on a 3D design study she was changing. He had used override to break into her mainstream persona.

“Yes. You can rejoice,” she said warmly.

“How’d you do it?”

“Vector mechanics, nothing tougher than that.”

“You were marvelous!” Lani said beside Carl, her eyes wide with wonder at being alive. Virginia realized distantly that they really had expected to die.

“I told you the probabilities,” Virginia said. “Surely you—”

“We figured you were just cheering us up!” Carl laughed.

“I made the calculation accessible, Carl, you dope.” Virginia sent some light chuckles to follow this sentence, reflecting that if anyone had actually checked her, they would’ve found she had in fact reported a survival probability of three to one when it had really been only fifty-two percent. But she had been sure no one would do the entire complicated calculation. In thirty years, everyone had come to rely on her, just as they counted on Saul’s bio-miracles.

Lani was bright-eyed, expectant. “When can we go outside? I want to grow some crops in the sun again.”

“Nearly half a year,” Virginia said seriously. She had found that people took statements more to heart if they were laced with sharper vowels and a few bass tones.

“Never mind, we’ll have plenty to do inside,” Carl said, slapping Lani on the rump affectionately.

Virginia knew exactly what he had in mind. It was implicit in his entire psychological profile, true, but her intuition told her more. Carl had bottled himself up emotionally for decades, and that had been crucial in the survival of Halley Core. Now time and circumstance had worked its curious magic and he was free. The youthful Carl could not—did not—respond to Lani’s quiet gifts. This weathered, wiser Carl could, and would, and should.

Somewhere in the compacted recesses of organic memory, a twinge of humor and irony kindled. He’s getting what he needed, even if it isn’t what he wanted. Virginia made a note to cycle Lani in for a “routine” physical within forty days.

The prickly storm swelled. Though they had survived the worst at perihelion, a residue of heat still leaked inward. Virginia sent men and women and mechs to seal tunnels which collapsed, whole zones of shafts whose walls began to sputter and evaporate.

Warmed in vacuum, ice sublimates directly into vapor without becoming liquid. As Halley’s scarred skin blew away, Virginia began her grand experiment.

Teams of hardened mechs ventured forth from the eroded shaft mouths. They dispersed slabs of amorphous silicates, grit and grime dried and filtered and compacted through the years of mining. Quickly they spread huge fields of linked, slate-black sheets oil well-chosen spots near Halley’s equator. They were too heavy for the subliming vapors below to push them away, and the mechs made doubly sure by hammering cables to anchor the slabs.

The effect came with aching slowness. Halley spun now with a day of only three hours. At a precisely calculated moment, the silicate shields blocked sunlight from the ice. Over that zone, outpouring gas ebbed. Other areas continued, and this difference in thrust, combined over the turning face of Halley, began to minutely alter its orbit. Astronomers had long noted this “rocket effect” on rotating comets that temporarily exposed fields of dust, but it had always been spontaneous and temporary. Now it was done by design.

Virginia deployed her mechs remorselessly. Some overheated and failed, others were crushed between the large sheets as they butted and swayed in the sun-driven gale of gas. At her command, they could tilt the slabs end-on, so the protected areas suddenly leaped to life, spurting amber-tinged plumes. Deftly, resolutely, she played a dynamic symphony with the furious hurricane forces that buffeted the mechs and their cargoes. For days, and then weeks, she cupped the outraged steam of Halley to new purposes. Unbalanced thrusts aligned along the comet’s orbit, a persistent hand that swept them along a new orbit.

Four months beyond perihelion, Virginia waited for the inevitable. She had deployed fresh arrays of infrared and microwave radars, concentrated along the expected cone of the sky.

The first was slow and tiny, a marvel of stealth technology. She got a glimpse of broad, transparent vanes that radiated away the sun’s heat. Only her phased-array microwave net, operating at ten gigahertz, picked up its faint shadow. She had spread the gossamer wire receivers over a volume spanning a hundred kilometers, to get high definition. If it had been faster she might not have been able to integrate the diverse signals in time. As it was, she crisped the snub-nosed thing ten kilometers away from Halley.

Behind it, a few moments later, came something large and lumbering. It used the sun for background cover, superimposing itself on a vibrant-blue solar flare that had sprouted only an hour before from a large magnetic arch.

She caught it with a laser burst, feeling a chill run through her mind. She would never have caught the slight, giveaway ripple of ultraviolet that betrayed the incoming warhead… except that she was monitoring the flare, as part of their ongoing research program. Jeffers had been right when he insisted on retaining the dedicated science diagnostics; it paid to keep learning.

The third was fast, closing at a hundred kilometers a second, still boosting with a light-ion drive. Virginia wondered why they had left the electrostatic accelerator on, since it made the projectile much more visible. She fired at it with the newly resurrected launchers, and in the two-second delay waited confidently for a kill signature.

None came. Her phased-array net told her why. The thing was maneuvering sideways, dodging the slugs of iron. Evidently it could pick up the microwave hum of the launchers and see the pellets as they came.

She immediately fired all her harnessed laser banks.

They, too, missed. By then only four seconds remained and she did not even have time to sound alarms in the tunnels of Halley.

Desperate, she drove the power level of the of the gigahertz net up a terawatt and shifted the system from RECEIVE to TRANSMIT. The array had never been used this way. For a brief instant it could have sent a hail to a civilization across the galaxy itself, if anyone along the beam happened to be looking. The spider-web dishes could probe and pinpoint. Virginia fired a pulse of electromagnetic energy at the precise dot that swam in her triangulated worldview.

They had safe-armed this warhead. As the electromagnetic tornado burst upon it, the chip-mind aboard fired the compressing explosives before they could evaporate. The equivalent of twenty megatons of blistering fusion energy flowered in the black sky above Halley, raising a flash-burn of ivory fog from the weathered ice.

Throughout the battle Virginia had alerted no one. The men and women and families went on about their lives, untroubled. Only when workers on the surface wondered about the sudden flare of brilliance did she call Carl and deliver the news that their great battle had come and gone in the time it took Carl to put down his cup of coffee.

CARL

“Any signs of others?” Carl asked tensely.

“None;” Virginia said. “I have extended my search to a light-hour all around us, and find nothing.”

Lani came coasting into Central, her face drawn and pale. “I heard your announcement, Virginia. How close did they get?”

“As the Duke of Wellington said after Waterloo…” Virginia’s voice shifted to a heavy, aristocratic British accent, “‘It was a damned near thing.’”

“And they’ll try again, if we continue on our planned trajectory;” Carl said soberly. “They won’t tolerate us using the Jupiter encounter to loop us into the inner solar system. They’ve got years to shoot at us, remember. When we come back inward, they’ll strike again. That attack may fail, too. And the next one. But eventually…”

“Those murderers! Lani cried. “We were willing to accept quarantine, but that wasn’t enough for them! Just to protect themselves from any chance of exposure to Halleyforms, they’d kill us all.”

Carl felt the inevitability of what he had to say, the end of so many hopes. “Time to face facts. We can’t come back in from the cold.”

Lani frowned. “But that means…”

“Right. We’ve got to choose a trajectory that’ll take us outward after Jupiter. It’s the only way to stay out of Earth’s reach.”

Virginia asked, “You think that will be enough to make Earth stop?”

Carl shook his head. “We’ll have to hope so. We’ll chart a course that takes us far into the outer solar system.”

Lani looked at him, biting her lip, silent.

“Somehow,” Virginia said slowly, “I don’t believe they will be content with anything less than a departure orbit.”

Lani’s eyes widened. “What? Leave the solar system entirely?”

“Effectively.” Virginia said sympathetically, “They will then be convinced that Halleyforms will never reach Earth.”

Carl nodded. “No point to chasing us. Too expensive, anyway.”

“What’ll we do out there?” Lani asked incredulously.

“We’ll live. We’ll die.” Carl stared, unseeing, at the main screen where numbers rippled. “Into the Oort Cloud…” he said distantly. “There are supposed to be trillions of iceworlds there, asteroid-sized. That’s what Halley was, before some nudge, maybe from a passing star, tumbled it into the inner system.”

Lani asked doubtfully, “And once we’re there? Can we use those for resources?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll have hundreds of years to think about it on the way out.”

Lani settled into a webbing, her face composed. “We’ll all be dead before then, even with sleep slotting.”

Carl felt an odd, distant resignation. Somehow he had known that he would never leave this place. They were consigning not only themselves, but all further Halley generations as well, to an outer darkness of limitless unknowns. Fleeing into the abyss.

Lani said, “I suppose we must… plan for what we can do, not what we’d rather do.”

Life’s a series of overcoming dooms, one at a time, Carl thought. He knew they could do it, too, if they simply refused to give in to despair. If we have something to live for.

SAUL

Half of Stormfield Park had been turned into a nursery. The old centrifugal wheel had been reinforced to spin faster, providing a full tenth of an Earth gravity to help young bones grow strong. That was hard on some of the older generation, but still they came often, when off work, to listen to the high, piping voices shrieking in play and laughter.

Saul felt that way as he walked carefully along the grass-lined, curving path at the rim of the wheel-park, where holograms gave the illusion of a cityscape just beyond a low hedge, with skies spotted with warm, moist clouds. Mothers and nursery workers tended their growing crowd of boisterous charges nearby, watching their games, admiring the infants’ clear-eyed, long-limbed beauty.

The children had saved Halley Colony… if in no other way than by lightening the spirits of those who now knew they would never see Earth, Mars, the asteroids, or any unfamiliar human face ever again.

We are the first starship, Saul had come to realize, two orthree centuries ahead of schedule.

Oh, Halley was still tied to old Sol’s apron strings, but their ship home was irreversibly on course toward the outer cloud now, where trillions of iceballs drifted in the not-so-entirely-empty range between the stars. Alien ground. They would live or die on their ingenuity, and on whatever they had taken with them.

On that subject Saul had just completed an important study, an inventory of the genetic pool available for the coming generations. The question was an important one, for it might mean the difference between the colony’s survival or a long, slow decline into degeneracy and death.

There’s plenty, enough heterozyqosity, he had decided A broad cross section of the types that populate old Earth. It should provide enough variety. Especially with the mutation rate we can expect. The bigger problem will be maintaining a large enough population.

Halley had enough resources, for now, to keep the colony going into the indefinite future. Deuterium mined from the ice would fire the fusion piles—now relocated out on the surface to minimize waste heat—until they managed the skill to put together a proton-power generator from one of the Phobos designs. Their skill at recycling and ecological management was already impressive, and would grow.

If husbanded carefully, the trillion tons of ice and hydrocarbons might keep a couple of hundred humans at a time—along with their plants and animals—alive for a hundred generations or so.

Just enough time. For in a couple of thousand years, the comet’s hurtling velocity would ebb as it approached its new aphelion, out where the Hot was only the brightest star. And out there, drifting slowly, were hundreds of billions of other great lumps of primordial matter left over from the birth of the solar system. Once their present near-hyperbolic velocity had leaked away to mere meters per second, there ought to be plenty of chances to snag other comet heads.

Saul stopped at a point where the guardrail hedge opened at the rim of the curving wheel. He was still thinking about the images Virginia had shown him, just a few minutes ago, in the little glade beneath her tea house… a simulation of those days, so long from now, when the men and mechs of Halley would nudge their tired, depleted old home near fresh new ice-specks in the great blackness. Perhaps they would seize two, three, or more, and drift apart again on their new colonies.

And from there? Virginia’s simulation projected no limits. The Oort Cloud was vast, and humans were noted settlers.

And our own sun’s Oort Cloud brushes against the comet shoals of other stars…

The image she had presented was daunting. She already contemplates in terms of aeons… it’s going to take me a lot longer to get used to thinking that way. My own style of immortality is different. It retains the feel of Time as no friend.

He passed Lani Nguyen-Osborn, sitting on a park bench under a dwarf maple, nursing her new son. Her eldest child—little Angel Angelique—played in the grass nearby.

Lani smiled and waved. Saul grinned. They had spoken only an hour ago when he was on his way to see Virginia. He was due to have dinner with Carl’s family later tonight. In the meantime, he still had work to do.

The vista of an Earthy city cleared as his section of the wheel approached ground level. He stepped through the break in the guard hedge into the microgravity of Halley’s caverns, and let himself drift into the soft sand braking embankment. A cloud of particles puffed outward as he landed, then slowly settled to the floor.

He launched off toward the exit leading to his laboratory. The half-living sphincter lock cycled him through to the tunnels with a soft, moist sigh.

The gene-pool survey had been very good news—even if it had reminded him that neither he nor Virginia would ever contribute. All of his clones were sterile, and her physical body had long ago become part of the ecosphere.

Perhaps it was for the best, at that. For his clones would be round as the generations came and went. The decedents of Carl and Lani and Jeffers and Marguerite would be mixing their genes, sorting and restoring until a new species of humanity emerged. If all of those “Saul Lintz” models also kept having children, over the centuries, it would muck up the process.

Heaven forbid! He laughed at the thought. He had long ago come to terms with the irony of his situation…the clever design of his blessing and his curse.

Now, though, another bit of research occupied him. Something even more significant. More amazing.

Down at the end of one little-used corridor, Saul spoke a code phrase in Aramaic and a door hissed open. He slipped past the gene-crafted guard-cockatrice into his private lab. He had his neural tap socketed into place before his frame even settled horizontally onto the webbing.

Program… Rock of Ages… hecommanded his personal computer. Colors shimmered and steadied.

The image on the central holo tank was of that deep, secret room down at the heart of the Weirder domain, where Suleiman Ould-Harrad had met his faith, in his own way. The horned, carved-stone bier rotated in the holographic image.

To the right, another display showed a sample taken from that ancient rock—symmetrical fossil ribs tracing the outlines of a creature of a very ancient sea.

More screens rippled with data, with microscopic closeups, with detailed isotopic profiles.

For a year now. Saul had been in touch again with Earthside specialists. With Halley confirmed to be on a near-hyperbolic trajectory, the hysteria had dampened on Earth. Guilt and shame played on what passed for news channels, these days. Some of the gifts the colonists had beamed back had also deepened the feeling that contact should be maintained until the planets merged with the roiling noise of the sun and all talk between brethren ended in the hiss of static.

The Earth scientists had worked on his data, confirming in detail what he had already worked out in general.

Nearly five billion years ago—in one of the gassy, dust-rich spiral arms that laced the Milky Way like filmy pinwheel spokes—a young, massive, hot star had raged through its short life and exploded in the titanic outburst of a supernova. In so doing, it had seeded nearby space with glowing clouds of heavy elements, from carbon and oxygen to plutonium and osmium… all cooked up while the blue giant had coursed through its brief but glorious youth. Save hydrogen and helium, all the elements that made up the planets—and human beings—had originated in that way, from great outbursts of primeval heat and light.

This supernova not only spewed great gouts of heavy matter into space. It also drove mammoth shock waves, which compressed the interstellar gas and dust, forming eddies and whirling concentrations.

A Jeans Collapse—named for a great twentieth-century astronomer—was triggered. Here and there amid the shocked, metal-enriched clouds, whirlpools condensed, flattened, formed glowing centers…suns.

And round those new stars, tiny fragments coalesced, from rocky bodies nearer in, to great gas worlds, to distant, vast swarms of tiny lumps of frozen vapor…

All geochemistry had, until now, been dated from the supernova that triggered the formation of the solar system. Never had any matter originating outside that event come into human hands. Until now, that is.

The rock Suleiman Ould-Harrad had found under the heart of Halley had none of the isotopic ratios scientists were familiar with. It came from a completely different episode of creation.

Joao Quiverian would have loved this, Saul thought. He mourned the loss of a good mind to the madness of those long, hopeless years.

And Otis Sergeov, as well. I do hope we’ve learned a lesson.

The final data unfolded before him, the confirmation of several years’ guesswork and labor.

Proved. The stone came from ocean sediments laid down long before Earth had begun to swirl and form out of cosmic debris. The little animals whose fossils he had traced had swum in seas of a world not very unlike the Earth, with chemistry not so very different. But they had lived before the sun was even a star to wink in their cloud-flecked skies.

Saul read snatches from the message from Earth.

Radiation damage to constituent crystals indicates close proximity to the explosion. Not more than a quarter of a lightyear away from a supernova.

He picked up a chunk of the stone, wearing smooth now from being handled. The planet that this had come from must have circled a smaller star that had the misfortune to be near the giant when it exploded, blowing it to bits and scattering its pieces into the smoke rings of the spiral arms.

Were there watchers, that night? he wondered. Might intelligence have looked up, knowing what was coming, making frantic plans, or resigned peace?

The odds were against it. Probably the planet had only animals and vegetation, and the end came swiftly, without anticipation. That did not make the event any less awesome, or less biblically terrible.

All the native creatures, from microbes to plants to clever little animals… all had died in the very process that most directly led to Earth’s own adventure.

What a universe, he thought.

It was almost a side issue, now, that this also helped explain the presence of life on Halley Almost unbelievingly, at first, Earth’s scientific minds had finally concluded that bits of the bio sphere of the blasted planet must have been carried off in the shock wave, to freeze in the cold of space. Bits of rock—and even once-living matter—would serve as ideal seeds around which the gases of the outer fringes of a new solar system might coalesce. Halley, apparently, had condensed around a lump of the old planet, the way raindrops gather around drifting dust motes in Earth’s fecund sky.

No wonder the traces got richer the deeper one went into the comet. There had been a matrix already, around which the pre-biotic compounds of the pre-solar nebula gathered during those early days.

Saul wondered how many other comets had formed around such seeds. Not many, he imagined. We were just lucky, I guess, he thought ironically.

Or were the old stories of comet-borne disasters really true? Could it be that the Earth had always been “freshened,” from time to time, with new doses of the ancient biology, floating down into the atmosphere each time a comet passed close by? That would help explain why the lifeforms were so compatible. Earth’s life kept incorporating new bits and pieces from the storehouse of deep space.

In a sense, the old destroyed planet still lived. Fragments of pre-ancient organic code floated in all of them, and especially in the colonists of Halley. After all the death and fear of the early days, it was ironic that it would turn out to be of benefit in the long run, contributing to the diversity they would need over the centuries ahead.

Perhaps the people of Halley were not even “human” any longer, not in the classical sense. Not in the way Earthmen were developing, preparing for their own explosion into the galaxy.

They will go to the stars. Hopping from bright pinpoint to bright pinpoint, dwelling down where gravity curls space tightly and suns cook heavy, rocky worlds.

We, on the other hand, will travel more slowly. But we will have the real universe… the spaces in between.

Remembering the simulation Virginia had shown him, Saul smiled.

Over the neural tap he felt a soft brush of presence. Listening in again, my darling? he projected.

Yes. He smiled. For when this body he wore was long gone, his memories would ride another clone… and continue loving Virginia. The Wandering Jew and the Lady in the Machine… they would be a resource for the people, serving for as long as anyone wanted them around.

Immortality is service, he thought.

They held each other in cool, electron arms. And both of them imagined that they heard, faint and ghostly, in the distance, low confirming laughter.

VIRGINIA

Lani bounced the baby on her knee, provoking squeals of terror and delight. Carl beamed at the gleeful pair and kept pumping methodically at his exercise machine. They had to spend half their time in the G-wheel to keep the children’s calcium buildup normal. A tenth of a G was heavy, but imposed no real hardship.

“Want to visit Aunt Ginnie?” Lani asked the baby’s older sister, who nodded with a thumb in her mouth.

A shimmer appeared, hung in the air. Then a tanned Virginia stepped through it and waved. “Hi, snookums. Surf’s up. You interested?”

Little Angelique laughed, and the baby squealed with glee. Lani’s second delivery had been, in Saul’s words, “boringly normal.” Both children seemed to accrete weight as Virginia watched; they massed more every day, and ate like firestorms.

Carl gestured downwheel, toward the verdant wilderness of Stormfield Park. “Think we could ever put a lake in here?”

“And then drive waves across it?” Lani asked shrewdly.

He nodded. “Angelique will probably want to copy her aunt.”

“Come now,” Lani said. “There are some things we can’t manage, you know.”

Carl grinned. “Wanna bet?”

Virginia remembered the fall into Jupiter’s gravity well. It had been a time of tension and remorse.

Her tailoring of the subliming winds had canted Halley’s of orbit, added velocity. The divergence from their original path widened steadily as the launchers hammered away unendingly.

It was only a minor deflection in astronomical terms. But it was crucial.

They had come in behind Jupiter’s sweeping path, not in front. They whipped through the proton sleet of the enormous magnetic belts, saw the splotchy face of Io hurl lurid volcanic greetings.

By passing behind the giant world, momentum was added to Halley, not subtracted. Instead of arcing back to the inner solar system, the comet head sped on even faster, shooting outward from the sun. The blazing giant squatted now behind the swiftly fleeing mote, its rays and influence dimming daily.

As they swung out from banded Jupiter, Virginia had studied carefully the faces of the crew who watched the viewscreens. They had looked at one another, realizing the enormity of what they faced.

Now, years later, the bleak resignation of those days had ebbed. It would be centuries before they reached the truly rich realm, where iceworlds clustered in great bee-swarm halos. Vast distances separated them, but in interstellar space such voyages required little energy.

Those faraway iceballs beckoned, fresh supplies of metals and volatiles. There would be a next generation, and a next. They deserved those resources; they deserved opportunity, hope.

Carl, Lani—indeed, all of them—were caught in the coils of slow diminishment.

Saul, though, perhaps could last forever unless some accident claimed him. And even if he died, there were his clones. She would always have a Saul.

Anger, frustration, despair—she came to know these as temporary illuminations of the individual soul, lightning flashes across an abiding dark. Humans had a reaction time evolved from the need to grapple, fight, feed, flee. They were no more conditioned to the slow sway of worlds than a mayfly would be to the Roman empire.

Halley’s crew became accustomed to their destiny and slowly, imperceptibly to themselves, withdrew into their human-centered nooks and crannies. Virginia enjoyed downfacing into their timescale, watching Angelique grow in startling spurts. As confidence in the new techniques grew, others soon joined the first child, and played in tunnels and shafts swept ritually clean of dangerous Halleyforms.

As Halley slowed, climbing out of the shallow sloping trough of the sun’s gravitational well, her attention turned away from science—though she continued to collect data, formulate theories, argue with Saul and the others—and moved on to larger issues.

As Descartes had once done, she was forced to do. She wondered what she could deduce from basic principles. Cogito, ergo sum? But who was the I who made the statement?

To use the jargon of science, she was a new phylum, no longer a vertebrate but biocybernetic. She was a wedding of the organic and the electronic, with a dash of sapient consciousness. By strict definition, a phylum should emerge through evolution by sexual gene sorting and speciation. But once intelligence had appeared. that aeons-long process was outmoded. A new phylum could emerge and develop by design.

The Virginia who now resided in chilled synapses and holo-graphic arrays was not strictly human any longer. Still, she had myriad human signatures and defects, facets and flaws. She could no more ignore the vexations of Saul and Carl and Jeffers and Lani than she could forget her childhood, her father’s rough affection.

Yet she was more. The joy that Carl and Lani felt brought her occasional pangs; Saul’s wistful nostalgia for her embodiment gave real pain. But though she understood and felt all this, she came to see it as a subset of the larger issues that confronted her. These frail people were bound up in the true passing life that the laws of natural selection had decreed-their deaths were written into their bones. Even Saul, her fellow immortal, rode the hormone tide. They felt deeply and thought upon the mortal questions.

In the Oort Cloud there circled beneath a sheen of unblinking stars a trillion cometary nuclei, more land than ever promised any ragged band of wanderers. The colonists would have Carl as their Joshua—an irony that had undoubtedly already occurred to Saul—and he would lead them forth.

But while Virginia would help them, and tend to their needs as best she could, she also had her own unique destiny as the first in a new kind.

If she represented a new phylum, the first law must be survival. That was why she now looked upon the attack from Earth as an unplanned, fortunate outcome of mankind’s stupidity. Earth could have had her, could have overcome its fears and welcomed the new phylum. But now she was embarked upon a new course, one eventually to her advantage.

She needed time to think, to explore.

The old species of Homo sapiens on Earth would inevitably spread, first into the solar system, then perhaps beyond. They had already shown their hostility to the strangeness encased in the iceworlds. Their fears would take centuries to abate.

Virginia knew, even if her human cargo did not, that there would never be a return to the kingdom of the Hot. Human societies, once grown apart, seldom can meet again on even, friendly terms. Far worse for two phylums.

She had time for poetry, for endless Byzantine pathways of contemplation. She even thought that she could glimpse the way it must be, when they reached the great cloud of worlds which drew them out.

The human species would have a divided destiny now, strands that could progress for a while along separate courses. There would be less pain if they remained aloof.

She calculated the probable evolution of Carl Osborn’s new species of Man, and of her own phylum, and was pleased. Reproduction, adaptation—these problems were vast, but she felt herself equal to them.

And as for Planetary Humanity… By her calculations, the new phylum and the old species would not meet again for four thousand years. Good. There was time enough to think about it.