David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

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.