David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Saul,” she whispered.

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

“Virginia, is it really you?”

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

She spoke aloud.

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

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

“Hello, Carl,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that possible?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Carl.”

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

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

“It’s as me as I’m going to get!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should do something,” Lani said.

“We can’t. They’re on their own.”

“We could lose both of them!”

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

“Carl?”

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

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

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

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

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