David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Good , he thought. The sipping reflex was a rule-of-thumb test Nicholas had taught him. A sign of good progress.

In the hazel eyes, an apparent struggle—a mind climbing laboriously out of the cold.

“S-Saul… ?” Her voice was barely audible.

“Yes, Bethany. It’s me, Saul Lintz.” He bent forward.

“Are we. …” She swallowed, and smiled thinly. “Are we at aphelion yet?”

Saul blinked. Of course, the expedition’s second-in-command hadn’t been scheduled to be unslotted for thirty-three years, when the comet would have nearly reached its farthest point from the sun, when the colony would be briefly busy again preparing for the rocket maneuver that would send them hurtling past Jupiter toward rendezvous with the waiting harvesters, nearly four more decades beyond that.

How could he tell her that it had been more like thirty-three days!

He shook his head, wishing he had better news, and wondering how to tell it.

Saul smiled in his best bedside manner. “No, Betty, not quite…”

What a difference a mere three weeks made!

Virginia wondered as she glide-walked past hurried, bustling workers. Had it been only that long? Only twenty-five days since the remnants of the First Watch had gathered, weary and haggard, to note the passing of the year 2061?

An ebullient New Year’s Eve it had not been. Even with the wall holos set to their cheeriest summer scenes, it still felt like the winter of Ragnarok. They had huddled near the farthest end of the mammoth Central Complex Lounge—four poor survivors—and toasted from Carl’s carefully hoarded supply of Lacy Traces liqueur.

The bottle had gone quickly. There seemed little point in saving anything.

All attempts at conversation had lapsed. The vids from Earth were too depressing to watch—snappy scenes of commercial consumption or, even worse, an awful melodrama about the Scott expedition to the South Pole… no doubt somebody’s stupid idea of a gesture in their honor.

At her suggestion, Saul and Carl had tried to play their first game of chess since the death of Captain Cruz—or since Saul and Virginia had taken up shared residence together. But it wasn’t like before. The two men had hardly exchanged a word or a glance, and the play was savage. When Saul’s wrist comp called him away to tend the thawing sleepers again, Lani and Virginia had shared a look of relief.

She would never forget that gloomy evening for as long as she lived.

That had been less than a month ago. Now… well, things were different. At least superficially, they were much better. One at least heard voices in the cool hallways again, and people were trying to find solutions.

Virginia was also getting better at moving about in Halley’s soft gravity. She skim-glided quickly, grabbing the fiber floor with velcroed slippers and pulling along a wall cable on her way toward Control Central.

It was still a new experience, coming this way without a mind fogged from lack of rest, or a body nearly limp from fatigue. A full seven hours’ sleep was like a sinful luxury.

Yesterday, her shift had coincided with Saul’s. They’d had a chance to make love for the first time in a week, and slept side by side, linked through her electronic familiar, touching in the dim glow of JonVon’s status lamps. Saul had to leave early to get ready for today’s test of his new invention, but Virginia had awakened feeling his warmth still on the webbing beside her, his musty, now-familiar scent on her arm.

Someday, when I have some free time again, I’ll have to find out what JonVon’s making of our dreams. Saul and I are getting closer all the time, our shared, enhanced senses more and more vivid. I wonder—is it possible that I might have been right, after all? Is it possible to simulate human mental processes so well that you can achieve “telepathy” of a sort?

If so, can we give Earth at least one present, before we all die?

This morning she had stopped just before leaving her cubicle, hesitating by the slide door, and turned back to pick up a stylus. On the face of a memory pad she had scribbled quickly… not a poem—not yet—but a sketch for one.

The mixed verse had reminded her of her homesickness. She missed Kewani Langsthan, the only other Hawaiian on the first shift, who had lost an arm to an explosion on A Level, on Christmas Eve, and had to be slotted immediately when the stump went infected.

No Hawaiian was among the replacements. She didn’t know whether to regret it or to be glad that her countrymen were being spared this terrible time.

Anyway, the news from the island republic was not good. The last time she had had time to listen to the Earthcasts, tensions had been rising. Nations of the Arc of the Living Sun had accused Governor Ikeda’s government of “unecological projects.”

Ever since that evening months ago, when she had briefly shared Saul’s memories of his lost homeland, she had suffered from a deep, lingering fear for her own people’s precarious renaissance.

The sketch had disappeared into JonVon’s stochastic well of memory. Perhaps she would call it up again to work on it, if she had time, or remembered. Meanwhile, her pet machine would echo with her musings. Unlike the prim processors of Earth—or the stolid mission mainframe the techs had begun crating to move down from the Edmund to Central—JonVon did not simply file things away. He…it…was programmed to “remember” from time to time, untriggered and unpredictably, and to “ponder” new correlations.

She herself had no time to devote to the protect with which she had planned to while away the years. But JonVon would always have at least a small corner of memory devoted to it, gathering and organizing data for when, at last, she could turn her attention back to the question of intelligence itself.

I must remember to ask him what he has learned, now and then.

And here we are , she thought on coming to a double hatch with a burning amber light overhead. The entrance to Central Control… command post for the invading hordes from Earth.

Before entering, she had to submit to another damned cleaning. A bulky mech towered beside the hatchway.

“Please present all surfaces for ultrasonic exposure,”it directed, holding forth a flat, humming plate and a vacuum hose.

She sighed and stepped forward, turning before the double-tubed, jury-rigged machine. Harmonics from high-frequency sound waves stroked her skin in multiple octaves, all the way down to a low, grumbling growl that made her teeth grate.

She knew all the override codes, of course. But it would be better to submit to these measures, as half-ass and useless as they had to be. Somebody was bound to find out if she got into the habit of bypassing regs for her own convenience.

The low tingling told of bits of debris being shaken loose from her clothing and skin, to be sucked away into the vacuum inlet. Of course, this wouldn’t really stop people from tracking around cometary germs. Saul had said that the only long-term effect of the procedure would be to destroy all their clothes and eventually wreck everybody’s hearing.