David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

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.”