David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

And look at me, she thought ruefully. I used up most of my mass-carry lugging along computer hardware everybody Earthside has given up as hopeless, a dead end.

She said nothing. Better to let him work a few moments, float up from the deeps. She walked among the tangle: twisted translucencies, shining chem lines, retorts, knots of cabling, a gurgle and rush of microbio diagnostics. I’m glad I’m not a chemist. Chilled electrons are simpler to move around.

“A few more minutes, Virginia. I’ll be right with you.”

Saul did not even look up as he jotted, thumbed his scanner, frowned. She strolled down one long lane, trying to read the indices on counters and follow the compact, involuted logic of the lab. Here Saul could dismantle genes like Tinkertoys, shuffle molecules like floppy cards. It always struck her as bizarre, how such innocent looking tubes and solutions could reach out, pluck human lives into new paths, seal off others. As if this sleeping machinery hid a monstrous, weighty force.

We keep doing that. Humans imbued their own devices with a separate presence and power, ceaselessly projecting their emotions onto inanimate templates. Illogical—and the worst sinners in this were the supposedly objective, dispassionate scientists.

Look how I shape my software to resemble my thought processes, she mused. Imprinting myself in JonVon’s chilled organic lattices.

Making tier way here this afternoon. she had been struck by how the expedition was like this—separate rooms, immensely powerful ideas sealed off from each other, all contributing yet each isolated. Men and women pocketed into cylinders and cubes and spheres. They moved through the silent, cramped geometry of the Edmund, eager to go down and burrow their own niches in another hollowed world.

She wondered if the crew would communicate any better once they were down in Halley Core. Many of them had been working during the entire year-long cruise out, but she had been sleep slotted for ten months. Before launch, funding problems had cut the staging schedule for the expedition down to the bone; there hadn’t been time to know or even meet most of the crew.

She had studied the siting plans for Halley Core. It looked fine as a schematic, a diagram, an Earthside blueprint—but soon now they would each live in a Euclidean maze, encased. The faint grumbling of the G-wheel only underlined their impacted artificiality. She felt deeply these insides and outsides, sections and barriers.

So to counter that, she had come here. Plucked up her courage, finally. Reached out.

She fidgeted down one lab lane, up another. Each moment was a partition, dividing a troubled past from a gaping, empty future—both huge stretches of time pressing in on the thin wedge of a nervous rickety now.

Stop this aimless inspection. Face what you came here for.

But it was hard to jump the hurdle, and brave the sheer blind drop beyond.

“Saul.”

He swam up from fuzzy depths. “Uh, what, yes?” He blinked lines etching around his withdrawn eyes. “Sorry…”

“What… what are you finding?”

Even as she said it she winced. That’s right—dodge away. Ask him about his work, for chrissakes.

“Something damned odd.” Saul shook his head, as if he half suspected an error. His pencil rolled along the grainy, stained calluses of his hand.

“What?”

“Contaminants, I think. Earth junk in the samples. That damned Quiverian…” He stopped, his gaze caught by something on the screen. “Just a sec, maybe this…”

Virginia watched on the magnifier as he guided microprobes to divide and extract tiny samples from several oblong, mottled masses. How he could tell one brown blur from another was a mystery. At his level, experiment became an art, unfathomable. Micromanipulators translated his minute movements into surgical grace, his touch tracing out the mad jumble of ancient crystals, the snakelike clench and coil of slippery, gaudy hydrocarbons. Deft fingers and a probing mind. Mozart and Picasso had been equally incomprehensible.

He worked steadily in silence, sucked back into his murky mysteries. Okay, take it easy, she thought. Don’t press. Not that you’ve been all that brave, eh? Anyway, males are slow when they have to switch hemispheres.

She relaxed and watched his “weather wall.” Each crewman’s contract gave him the right to choreograph his environment. Saul had chosen well. A metallic-blue river wandered down to an emerald marsh beneath a swarm of flapping white birds that skimmed the shimmering surface. The images were firm, precise n glistening leaped up where a bird dipped a wing into the water and slewed to a landing. Beyond, scattered stubs of islands dotted a pale summer day. New England, probably Massachusetts.

Yes, she had read that he had been at Harvard once. And summer, of course. Choose a time that brought a comfortable warmth, something to ward off the chill of ancient ice soon to surround them. It was late afternoon on the walls of the lab and the slow slant of sunlight proceeded. A storm front nuzzled at the horizon, winds whipped the velvet shadows that pooled beneath gnarled trees. She felt a reassuring heat from the scene, even though she knew it was her own wools that did the work. Saul wore a cotton two-parter, blue with white stripes, an ample Renaissance collar its only indulgence. She could see he was a man who cared little for clothes, would go naked if temperature and society permitted.

As she watched pensively, he shook his head irritably, gave an umpf and snapped off the screen.

“Done?”

“Yes, with nothing to show for it.” He drummed fingers on the desktop.

“What were you looking for?”

“Some contaminant I thought I saw. It was… no, nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re worried about something.”

He leaned back, let his face relax. “No… well, no more than usual.”

“We’re going to be. on First Watch together,” she ventured. “Plenty of time to work on our own research then.”

He nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. Sixteen months of peace and quiet carving ice and tending corpsicles.”

“Another few weeks, we’ll start slotting people.”

He nodded, distracted. Then he said abruptly, “I’m a poor host. Something from the bar?”

“You have alcohol ration left?”

“In this lab? I can make anything I want. I have my own beer, if you’d care to risk it.”

“Of course.” She felt a need to break through, to reach him. His face was complex, a slate time had written all over, the mouth and eyes at battle with each other. His eyes seemed to peer at something far away—a problem coming slowly into focus, perhaps—unrelenting intellect. His lips betrayed this concentration, though. They twisted into an ironic curve, yet were full and sensuous, with a hint of passion and power. The cool mind that ruled the eyes did not know of this lower, submerged force. The contradiction warred across his face, complex with stubble, pale here and mottled there, a shiny brow with a curve that caught a reflected yellow beam from the New England sunset. He popped caps from two long-necked brown bottles with relish, suddenly seeming like a balding and wiry tradesman.

Virginia bit her lip as they both sat. Now that she had braved the first moments and taken the step she had considered a hundred times, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“You’re here because of our conversation the other day, aren’t you?” he said. Suddenly his expression was gentler, opening outward from his self-immersion. His eyes met hers.

“Ah, well, yes.” She might as well attribute it to that.

“What was it your mother had?”