John Barnes - Mother of Storms

No, it’s just that there is so much time. He will eventually get around to going to Alpha Centauri. He may very well settle the galaxy with copies of himself. Immortals can afford patience; every pleasure he is capable of, he will have more times than an ordinary person could count in a lifetime, if that’s what Louie wants to do. Hell, if he wants to be flesh again, he can regrow a body and download some part of himself into that sometime—he has his genome recorded.

The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.

He enjoys the week of deceleration. The 2 g’s is really just an average—deceleration actually happens only during that brief instant when the iron bars, weighing a bit over eighty tons each, come shrieking into his funnel and he gives them a hard push along. The iron bars pass through in a tiny fraction of a second, for they have been kicked along by laser boosts back at their launch points that boil off ninety percent of their original mass and leave this eighty-ton remnant moving at eight AU per day (or just over thirty million miles per hour). As they pass through, Louie speeds them up, and that slows him. During that brief fraction of a second, Good Luck undergoes about 1,000 g’s of acceleration, and Louie is taking one of those jolts every couple of minutes.

Imagine that you are somehow on a freeway on a skateboard moving at fifty miles per hour; this is the equivalent of decelerating by pushing, with a long pole, against the trunks of the cars passing you. Even with all his processing capacity and speed, Louie finds it an interesting and challenging piece of work, better than flying under bridges used to be, like being a javelin catcher for a whole regiment of javelin-throwers. The Good Luck is processing just over 400 iron bars daily, and as she slows down the numbers rise.

A good thing too, because as she slows down, the iron bars are moving faster and faster relative to Good Luck , so that there is less and less time to push against them, and positioning gets trickier. Every so often there’s a “wild throw” that he has to let just go on by, unable to move far enough and fast enough laterally to intercept it. Whenever that happens, he transmits the equivalent of a catcall back at whichever wiseguy threw it; the solar system echoes with radio chatter, cheerful razzing between the wiseguys, like a good tight infield.

At least it looks like there’s going to be some time. After dropping its murderous daughter, Clem swings back into the upper reaches of the North Pacific, and then appears to stall out and zigzag, wobbling north to south and occasionally looping. From August 28, its closest approach to Japan, until September 6, when it rakes over the dead bones of Hawaii again, Clem sends out gigantic and dangerous waves, fascinates meteorologists, has as few as one and as many as eight outflow jets—but destroys very little, partly because it is where it has been before. Louie watches this from far out, hours later by radio, and breathes a slight sigh of relief—he will have that much more time.

On September 6, 56.23 astronomical units from the sun (though his route there was a long arc of almost 70 AU), Louie Tynan brings the main body of Good Luck into orbit around 2026RU. He is now just over thirty-six times farther out from the sun than he went on the First Mars Expedition, and that had been the record. He’s breaking a lot of records now that he’s dead.

As had been confirmed by a couple of impact probes he had sent on ahead, 2026RU is a cometoid, a ball of ice, about 790 miles across, with a rock and iron core about 80 miles in diameter and many large embedded nodes of chondrite, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen ice, and various rocks and metals.

It’s the kind of snowball Louie used as a kid when matters got serious—rocks and bits of iron, surrounded by hard ice, surrounded by frozen fluff.

The first couple of hundred packages have already taken up their orbits or descended to the surface, and the first robots are now crawling out on the icy surface or burrowing deep toward the stone and metal core. Within four hours, the first loads of metal are coming up to the surface to feed the hungry fabricating plants; it’s going to take a week, and Louie intends to be busy.

September 9 is a Saturday and things are going so well that Louie kids himself that he ought to get the day off, as hard as he’s been working. Clem is still stomping on the dead bones of Hawaii, sending storm surges crashing through Oahu so frequently that all evidence of Honolulu vanishes down to bare lines of foundations, with everything else washed out to sea. But there is no one there to be harmed, nothing to be damaged that isn’t already rendered worthless.

Meanwhile, out here in the darkness, the replicators, robots, and automated plants have been running flat out, after two days of feverish selfduplication, and much of the core is chewed up and re-extruded into a forest of pipes, towers, supports, girders. 2026RU is going to be the strongest comet ever built. But then, not many comets have ever had to boost at 3 or 4 g’s, and the final approach to Earth is going to require at least that much.

Originally Louie had planned to start spinning off the “ice Frisbees” and then-by climbing back down a rising column of more iron bars—to beat the Frisbees back home to direct them in. If he didn’t get there, well, Louie-on-the-moon could undoubtedly deal with it instead. But that was before Global Riot Two and his decision to kill his flesh so that he could get here in time; now anything he takes back will have to boost at the acceleration he’s using.

This led him to decide to take the whole comet back with him, or the whole comet minus a lot of stuff he’s going to throw off the back. It adds a day to the process, getting the giant engines and the fusion reactors to drive them built, threading steel through the ice and re-freezing the pathways onto the structural members, but when he’s done he’s days, not months, from Earth.

When he’s finished, the next day, the iceball has a forest of twelve-mile-high towers on one side, and most of the rest of the surface is covered with radiators, immense plates under which he circulates the fluids that will cool the 100 fusion chambers at the base of the towers.

He’s going to throw away about forty percent of the mass of 2026RU, and a great deal of Good Luck in the balance. Since he needs the water ice for when he gets to Earth, and the other volatiles are useful as refrigerants and working fluids, he’s going to throw away what he doesn’t need—most of the iron core is still there even after he’s woven everything he needed out of it, and he doesn’t really need anything from Good Luck except its processors, robots, and energy systems.

He wonders what Goddard, Von Braun, Verne, or Heinlein would have thought about a spaceship made out of ice that used iron plasma as a propellant. Probably they’d have approved of anything that was a spaceship.

Time to initiate boost draws closer, and though he’s ready enough, he’s curiously not eager to get started. It might be a while before he gets out here in person… but time means so little to him….

It’s not curiosity, even—he’s leaving relays behind here, and a couple of the wiseguys have dispatched several probes on long orbits that are going out to about 1,200 AU, boosting off and on to get there within a few years, so if there’s anything interesting out there he’ll get a look at it soon enough.

It seems silly to pay attention to this feeling, but after all he’s vastly more complicated mentally than he used to be. He probes his memories, the many memories inherited from the wiseguys, all the psychoanalytic literature. It seems strange that he still remembers emotions or that he still has them.