David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

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.