David Brin: The Heart of the Comet

Matsudo waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Most of what you call you, is not! I have heard it before. I know you see us not as individuals, Saul, but as great, synergistic hives of cooperating species.” There was a biting edge to Matsudo ’s voice that Saul did not remember having heard before. Exaggeration was not Matsudo ’s usual style.

“Akio…

Matsudo hurried on, though. “And what it you to right Saul’ All of those organisms that share our bodies with us grew into symbiosis over millions of years. That is entirely different from throwing gene-tailored monsters into such a delicate balance on purpose!”

Matsudo flushed slightly. Saul considered trying to explain one more time—that the cyanutes were descended from creatures that had lived peacefully in man for aeons. But of course, he knew how Akio would answer. After all the changes that had been made, the ’nutes were a new species, as different from their natural cousins as men were from apes.

“Saul, the Movement to Restore and Reflect teaches us that we must think carefully before we interfere with nature The Hell Century has shown how dangerous it can be to meddle where we don’t understand.

Glancing up at the microscope screen, where his tiny test subject was still being run through its paces, Saul saw that the animal was still throbbing near the needle—harried but well.

“I…” He shook his head and went silent. Saul had an idea what was bothering his friend.

“There’s still no sign of the Newburn yet, is there?”

Matsudo shook his head, his gaze on the floor. “Captain Cruz and his officers are still looking. Perhaps when the comet has calmed down some more, when the coma and ion tail are less noisy… Fortunately, there were only forty people aboard that one. If it had been one of the other slot tugs, the Sekanina, or the Whipple, or the Delsemme—” He shrugged.

Saul nodded. No wonder Matsudo was irritable. More than three hundred men and women had been shipped from Earth five years ahead of Edmund— along with most of the expedition’s massive equipment—chilled down to near freezing aboard four slender robot freighters, riding sunlight behind gossamer sails a thousand kilometers across.

Only the “founder” team took the fast, energetically expensive track aboard the old Edmund Halley. They exhausted almost the last of their propellant to match the comet’s furious retrograde orbit. Whey they arrived the first task awaiting the torch ship’s crew was to recover the huge cylinders containing the deep sleeping majority of the mission crew.

There were disadvantages to each style of travel-torch ship or slot tug. Much of the Edmund staff had to take long turns enduring the boredom and cramped living of more than a year in space. As well, they shared the recently evident dangers of setting up the base.

On the other hand, they had some control over their fate. It was not their lot to coast for years in near-frozen sleep, relying on someone else to catch up, capture their slim barge, and finally awaken them.

Would the men and women aboard Newburn drift forever? If Cruz and his team never found the tug, might they be picked up by someone else, in some faraway age? What might they awaken to, after such a long trip down the river of time?

“It is going to be a long eighty years, Saul.” Matsudo shook his head pensively, looking at the picture wall, vivid with Halley’s Comet in its full glory against a backdrop of stars. The plasma and dust tails glittered like flapping banners, like plankton in a phosphorescent sea. “It is a long time until we see home again.”

Saul smiled, hiding his own misgivings for his friend’s sake. “We’ll sleep through most of it, ’Kio. And when we do get home, we’ll be rich and famous.”

Matsudo snorted at the thought, but he acknowledged Saul’s intent with a smile. Irony was the common trait that made them friends, in spite of all their differences.

A bell chimed and Saul looked up as the probe’s needle withdrew from the watery, saline bead. The subject cyanute floated gray and limp now. The last test had been to prove that the creatures could still easily be killed, if ever the need arose.

A creator’s prerogative? he wondered. Or are my shoulders stooped imperceptibly under one more tiny guilt?

Scavengers were already nosing up to the microscopic corpse. Saul reached over and turned the microscope off.

The place smelled of rank, unwashed man.

Virginia ’s nose wrinkled when she entered the workout gym for her mandatory exercise period.

We’re strange creatures. Mammals evolve odors that make males aggressive, and all of us nervous around one another, and then we pack a whole crowd of people together into a tin crate for a year or more, and ask them to make nice.

Actually, Virginia did not mind the smell all that much. She did not even mind men.

They just aren’t the reason I accepted exile into the twenty-second century. riding a speck of stardust and ice out into the Big Night.

Virginia had her own motives. For her, volunteering for Project Halley had little to do with herding comets for harvest.

She stripped down to her shorts and mounted a bicycle ergometer, attaching the bio-monitor straps. Virginia pushed the pedals, accelerating until the readout showed she was fulfilling Dr. van Zoon’s orders.

The workout gym was located in the Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel, where most of the crew snoozed through their sleep periods under weight. Virginia understood the need to let blood and bones feel the Old Pull now and then to keep them in shape. But these thrice-weekly sessions with straps, pulleys, and ergometers struck her as truly burnt logic.

She had considered monkeying with the med center’s data flow, inserting simulated feedback from all these exercise machines. She could do it, too. Virginia wasn’t modest about her competence in Data Intelligence. Lefty d’Amaria might be head of the department, but she was the best.

Oh, well, I guess I need this, she thought as she pushed down on the pedals. Sweat began popping out, glistening on her olive skin.

Normally, she took pride in keeping a taut physique. Back home in Hawaii, she had surfed nearly every other day. But now it seemed she had to shake off a lassitude that still hung over her after a year’s chilled sleep. Until three weeks ago she had been suspended, life functions barely ticking over at just above freezing. Perhaps it was a lingering laziness from the slot drugs that had made her so reluctant to come down to the gym.

Well, as long as I’m here, let’s do it right.

She bore down hard and pretended she was pedaling across the Lanai-Maui bridge. The omnipresent rumble of the gravity wheel faded into an imagined background of roaring wind and water. Virginia pictured that the door in front of her might let her out, blinking, into yellow sunshine and the rich scent of pineapple.

Her muscles felt warm and stretched after the workout. And it was good to spend some time after showering just brushing her long black hair. Stepping back into her drab pullover was reminder enough, though. Maui lay a hundred million miles from here.

You made your choice, girl. There are things to accomplish out here… things more important to you even than remaining in the Land of the Golden People.

She decided to take a brisk walk around the gravity wheel before returning to the freefall portion of the shi[. Virginia strode long-legged in the direction opposite to the wheel’s spin.

It seemed nobody was about. Dr. Marguerite van Zoon wasn’t chivying the spacers to visit the gym these days. Those poor folk were sweating quite enough right now, and were exempt from the Walloon physician’s obsession with exercise.