David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Doing anything well demanded endurance, steadiness, relentless drive.

Those he had. Brilliance, no.

So as his parents drove him up the coast he struggled with that inner truth. He had applied to Berkeley for graduate school in astroengineering and, against all his expectations, got in. They offered no scholarship, not even a teaching assistantship. That meant he was marginal. His father loyally mistook this for another symptom of the growing prejudice against Percell-made children.

Carl knew better. Universities are sluggish beasts unmoved by the tides of public bias. The admissions committee undoubtedly had looked at his 3.3 average and seen that it was attained mostly by good grades in labs and design courses. Math and physics had put him on the ropes more than once, groggy with complex variable integration and quantum electronics.

North of Ventura, his stepmother’s happy chatter bubbled over with enthusiasm he had always found a bit much. He had never been able to forget his mother’s slow death, and adjust to this new woman in his father’s life. So he had sat in the backseat and watched the scenery and tried to think. The tawny August hills fell away, revealing the blue denim of the sea. Route 1 slid by as he tried to explain to them his doubts. His stories of distant, intellectual battlegrounds sounded hollow when contrasted with the solid, enduring world outside. Weathered barns, their wood silvery from sun. Rows of eucalyptus, lush hillside orchards, spindly railroad trestles crossing gorges, minifusion generators sculpted into hillsides, cows standing as still :as statues in the inky shade of live oaks. All the unthinking richness of Earth.

Morro Bay was glassy when they stopped there for the night. His stepmother ooohed and aahhhed at a sleek alabaster yacht that swept by, out beyond the bay’s protecting spit of sand. Pretty, yes. But Carl liked the moored working boats better—oily, rusted, scaly and cluttered with gear. They had argued over chowder at a wharf restaurant, his father so agitated that he drank the chardonnay quickly and ordered another bottle, red-faced.

The next morning he awoke knowing what he had to do. Driving through the grassy foothills, turning inland to San Luis Obispo between stony low mountains, he said it—suddenly, clearly.

And now, remembering, he saw that it was brutal, too.

His father had shouted, You’re going to give up all this? with a sweep of a hand. Meaning Berkeley, graduate school, where Carl knew he would burrow into the books and never emerge alive.

Oh, maybe he’d get a master’s degree, and a reasonable desk job. With incredible luck, a doctorate.

But he’d have been a perpetual second-rate. And he’d have wasted years.

He remembered his father’s hand chopping the air, the outraged gesture taking in the hills beyond. You’re going to give up all this? —and that all had been, in the end, Earth itself.

Carl remembered it in grainy detail, despite the seven crowded years that had passed since. Years of learning how space really worked—not the geometric certainty of math and physics classes, where every problem had a pure solution in an orderly universe. Not the serene world of that distant, unattainable yacht. He had learned what space really was—grubby, tough, with plenty of problems that had no solutions at all.

It was a natural locus for Percells to gather, skating high above the clumping, festering masses who feared and despised them. Space held beauty, sure, but the places men had carved out for themselves in it were more like the rusty scows moored at Morro Bay, worn and smelly, dented and makeshift, working fine but looking like hell.

Around him, bulky masses glided by, spotlights poked the chilly gloom. Coffins nudged into sockets in the black ice. Beethoven’s violin sang to a rippling piano across the yawning silent centuries. Carl labored on, thinking of his long years spent in space, far from Earth’s green confusions.

It was hard to remember that the hall was actually a great crystal chamber, carved out of the heart of an ancient ice mountain. Nowhere could be seen the dark glittering of carbonaceous hydrate, veined with shiny seams of frozen gas. Everywhere pink fiberthread and bright yellow spray-on sealant hid the primordial stuff of Halley Core.

To Saul Lintz it far more resembled some vast cathedral of kitsch.

The Great Hall was the heart of Central Complex—the ant farm of rooms sculpted here deep under Halley’s surface. Tunnels led off in the six cardinal directions, color-coded amber, lime, strawberry, peach, aquamarine…and a broad vertical avenue of orange—Shaft 1—fifteen meters across and rising straight up half a mile to the comet’s cluttered north pole.

Machines had scrubbed the atmosphere and warmed it, leaving only a faint, almondlike odor to greet people as they streamed into the Hall for the dedication.

Now and then, when my head clears, even I can smell it.

Saul blew his nose and quickly put his handkerchief away before anyone noticed. That was why he sat perched on an empty packing crate at the back of the chamber instead of closer to the speakers’ platform. He was stoked with antihistamines, but still his nose dripped and he felt perpetually on the verge of sneezing.

Drat Akio and his damn tame viruses.

He looked up at the vaulted ceiling. In the two days he had been underground, supervising the transfer of the bio lab to new, larger quarters, he had not yet gotten used to the strange perspectives here.

Across the chamber, the slot tug Sekanina lay like the frail skeleton of a dissected beast. Its cargo of machinery and supplies and eighty sleeping men and women had been taken elsewhere. At one end dangled the “fishing poles” that had helped control the vessel’s gigantic, gossamer solar-light sails, apparently the only machinery not cannibalized or stored away in great tents on the polar plain.

The hall slowly filled as men and women floated in from all directions. Here, nearly a kilometer into the core, the sensible gravity was so low that anyone dropping through the overhead, orange-colored tunnel took several minutes to fall to the floor.

Experienced spacers did not like long transits. Old hands pushed off at the tunnel mouth to hurtle across the gap in seconds, swiveling at the very last to land with flexed legs.

One young bravo—trying to show off, Saul supposed—had already miscalculated. He was being treated for a broken wrist in the side chamber down Tunnel F, where Akio Matsudo and his doctors had set up the main infirmary.

People arrived in pairs and trios. They gathered in small groups to chat or merely lie back on packing crates, catching a moment’s rest.

Next to the Sekanina, a small cluster congregated, the leaders of the expedition.

Miguel Cruz-Mendoza stood at least a head taller than the others—captain and guiding force behind the decade of preparation leading to this day. The soft-spoken Chilean spacer had distinguished streaks of gray at his temples, which only added to his charismatic poise. It was bruited about, mostly in jest, that he had pushed and lobbied and pressured so hard for this mission in order to take a great leap forward in time… and thereby get away from his accumulated mistresses and women suitors.

The idea wasn’t so preposterous, at that. Saul had never known a man better skilled with the ladies. Some of his enemies credited Cruz’s success to his friendliness with certain women senators.

No matter. The captain was also the sort of leader people would follow. Many had helped prepare for the Halley Mission; however, no one but Miguel Cruz could have made this day a reality.

The captain caught Saul’s eye briefly and grinned. They had come to know each other well during the development of the cyanutes and other environmental symbionts. Saul smiled back and nodded. This was a grand day for his friend.