David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“How it got here, nobody can imagine as yet. How it survived or evolved, we haven’t a clue. But what we do know now is that we appear to have stumbled on what mankind has been looking for ever since our first explorers stepped onto another world, nearly a century ago.”

He smiled. Let them make of it what they will…

“For the first time, ladies and gentlemen—for the first time we have found definite signs of life beyond Earth.”

The great, tumbling ice mountain hurtled outward into the void. Behind it, smaller and fainter with every passing watch, the Hot fell away into the eternal blackness.

Briefly, the sun’s blazing furnace had scrubbed and gouged and broiled away at the snowy worldlet—had cracked and charged its temporary atmosphere, sending waving flags of ionized gas flapping in the interplanetary breeze.

But then quick summer passed. The flames were left behind again, still bright, but growing more harmless hour by hour. The savage exuberance of perihelion passage was fast fading from memory.

Autumn was marked by a gentle fall of dust. Tiny bits, carried away from the surface in the waning blow of escaping gas, had never quite reached escape velocity, even from the comet’s feeble pull. Gradually, they drifted back again, laying a dark, talclike patina over the icefields and rocky outcrops. The flickering snake of the plasma tail had already vanished, and now the foreshortened dust tail—so like shimmering angels’ banners not long ago—dissipated as the ancient comet streaked past Mars and on, toward the orbit of Jupiter.

Virginia found it beautiful. The dark regolith was laid bare, here and there, exposing a slumbering icy substrate. Although a thin coma of shimmering ions still hung overhead tenaciously, the vault already showed more stars than the dark, tropical nights back home.

I’ll bet the view is even more spectacular in person, she thought. One day I really must go up to the surface myself.

She could feel the soft webbing holding her to her link-couch, in a cave laboratory deep under millions of tons of primeval matter. But otherwise it was almost as if she were up on the comet’s Surface, in person. The holographic images brought her a nearly perfect sensation of being out on the ice.

She was wearing—teleoperating—a Class III surface mech, moving its spindly, spider legs as she would her own, looking with its swiveling eyes, feeling the faint brush of drifting gas molecules as a wind on her face. Her fingertips moved gently in their waldo grips as she sent a chain of mental commands to the host mech on the ice, making it turn.

The method had first been tried back in the late twentieth century, and had seemed quite promising at the time… until several famous disasters led to near abandonment of direct mind-machine interfaces. It turned out to require a special kind of personality to control a mech in this way, without letting random thoughts and a hundred human reflexes interfere, sometimes catastrophically. This had been discovered the hard way, during those early, naive applications to aircraft and factory equipment. To this day, spacers like Carl Osborn tended to distrust the technique, preferring voice and touch controls.

That was then, though. This is now.

One of the reasons for her presence on this mission was the fact that such extensive use was to be made of mentally controlled robots for the first time in decades.

Vasha Rubenchik is a real genius , Virginia thought as she deftly rode the mech over a small rise. The Russians were idiots to exile him out here, whatever his political opinions. I’ve never felt a mind-to-robot link this good before.

Too bad Vasha was already in the slots, or Virginia would have praised him for deftly tailoring the neuroelectric and holographic connections so well to her specifications. This alone was almost sure to win patent royalties for both of them, when the data were sent back. The boodle would accumulate in their accounts while they slept through most of the seven and a half decades ahead.

Although money wasn’t her top priority, Virginia had seen how useful it could be, especially when one wanted to work in areas frowned upon by the powers that be.

She could hardly wait until things had settled down a bit and there was free time to try some of these new techniques in experiments with JonVon.

As if summoned, a voice hummed along her acoustic nerve.

I AM PREPARED TO ENGAGE IN NEW PROBLEMS WHENEVER YOU WISH, VIRGINIA. THE MISSION MAINFRAME IS USING ONLY 15% OF MY CAPACITY, RIGHT NOW… WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ASSUME A SIMULATED PERSONALITY?

Oh, great , she thought. All I’d need, while I’m controlling a mech out on the surface, would be to let you construct Olivier, or O’Toole, or some other old movie heartthrob… and. have them come charging around, blowing in my ear.

She had chosen pre-vid actors to use in personality-sim experiments partly out of romantic atavism, and partly because they were less familiar to people these days—better to use in blind Turing tests on unsuspecting subjects. The simulations had fooled almost everybody, on Earth, even though they still were nothing like what she was sure they could be.

OR I COULD BRING FORTH SHELLEY. YOU LIKE HIS POETRY.

Virginia subvocalised clearly, crisply:

Not now, JonVon. Mother is busy. If you haven’t enough to do, helping the colony mainframe, go to some of those secondary problems I assigned you.

VERY WELL. I’LL CONTINUE SNEAKING THROUGH THE COLONY RECORDS AND SNOOPING WHAT PEOPLE BROUGHT ALONG IN THEIR PERSONAL WEIGHT ALLOTMENTS. YOU EXPRESSED CURIOSITY ABOUT THAT.

Virginia hesitated, then agreed. Okay. You do that. Just don’t leave any traces.

Of course it was a bit unethical to use her special tools and skills to snoop into other folks’ private matters. But then, Virginia had always believed people tended to try to keep too much secret.

Anyway, it broadened the number of people to think about. The dozen crew members still warm and moving about were hardly enough for even minimal gossip over the sixteen months of First Watch. In the need to conserve consumables, everyone else had already been put into cold sleep, leaving the first shift to apply finishing touches to the habitats and other facilities.

Well, Ginnie, you volunteered to be on First Watch. You knew it would be one of the busiest.

Yes, but there are opportunities, as well. Later, she thought. Later, after things have settled down, I’ll have my chance. Long, delicious stretches of work time.

Her mech finished its slow scan of the surface as the mouth of Shaft 2 came into view.

Scarred, scratched, and littered, the north polar region looked nothing like a pristine remnant of Creation Crates of supplies lay tethered to the ice or bound up under fibercloth “tents” for later use. Debris lay everywhere.

Farther off stood six high, peaked pyramids of dark tailings from shaft excavations, crudely separated into heaps of primordial nickel-iron, platinum and iridium-rich ores, and carbonaceous gunk… much like Alberta tar sands. At some point later, long after she had returned to the slots, the watch crews would start processing the piles into useful things, like Nudge Driver housings.

To take us home again . Not for the first or last time, she wondered what Earth would be like when they returned. If all their grand schemes would turn out to have mattered. Would she find Hawaii, Earth, recognizable? Friendlier? Or would it be an alien world, altered beyond recognition?