David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“But Carl… ?” She started to rise, but he pushed her gently back against the pillow. Even Halley gravity was a weight for her.

“Enough talk. Now you rest. Later I’ll explain what I’ve been able to discover. We’ll try to figure out a place for ourselves in this strange new world.”

Virginia let herself relax.

We… she thought, liking the way the word sounded in his voice. Yes, we will.

She was starting to drift off when she felt Saul gently pull his hand away. Virginia looked up and saw that he was fumbling with a handkerchief and staring into space with a screwed up, half-orgasmic squint. It ended deep inside the square of cloth in a muffled sneeze.

“Oh, darling,” she sighed. “Out of the slots only a few days, and already you have a cold!”

He looked at her sheepishly, then he smiled.

“So nu ? What else is new?”

Everybody seemed to be dying.

In fact, the more Saul learned about this aging colony, the more it seemed a mystery to him that anyone was left alive at all.

Oh people had adapted, found ways to cope. Human beings were good at that. Since thirty years ago, when Akio Matsudo had finally given firm orders and seen Saul strapped into his slot, the tools he had left behind had been added to, improved.

But the modified cyanutes, the subtly tuned microwave scanners, all of their clever devices could only slow down the long erosion, the declining spiral. Halley-Life, too, was adaptable, and much more at home here. It was a war of attrition that men could only lose.

I should have known that Akio would hardly take his own ad vice, Saul thought to the chilly domain of sleep slot 1. It had been a mistake to come down here so soon after leaving Recuperation Hall, to look in on old friends. A rude shock to have it brought home so clearly that three decades had passed.

Until now his last memory of the Japanese physician had been of glossy black hair framing smiling almond eyes under wire-rimmed glasses. But that image—as fresh as last week—was jarringly crushed down here among the chilled caskets. One was labeled with Akio Matsudo’s name. The figure behind the frosted glass was almost unrecognizable.

A thin fringe of gray wisps rimmed a pate turned speckled with age spots and scarred from bouts with skin infections. Those onceplump cheeks were now the hollowed inheritance of a man grown old fighting the inevitable the implacable And there wasno hint of laughter anymore in the lines rimming poor Akio’s sleep-shut eyes.

The charts at the foot of every slot told the story of each hibernating occupant, red symbols denoting medical reasons for internment, black trim meaning storage without real hope of recovery or resuscitation, and blue marking a crewman or -woman who was simply “off duty” for this span of years.

At first glance the situation looked serious, but not impossible. There were plenty of blue folders. However, a quick scan of the colors did not tell the true story. Akio, for instance, had a blue folder.

A tired, sick old man, he thought on reading his friend’s folder. It wasn’t just the lingering infections, or malnutrition from decades of eating only the narrow range of foods grown in the colony’s agro domes. Osteoporosis had so weakened the man’s bones that there was no way he would ever walk his beloved western Japanese hills again. Electrical bone stimulation had not made up for year after year in near weightlessness.

The Edmund Halley’s gravity wheel hung in cavern Gamma, frozen and broken down. So far, nobody had had the energy to fix it.

Saul read a random sample of blue folders and pored over slot readings. Slowly, he came to a chilling realization.

No more than ten percent of the colony was well in any real sense of the word.

Is Carl really that good a liar? He wondered how Osborn was able to maintain the fiction that the mission could ever be completed. Or is everyone pretending for the sake of their sanity.

He saw no way there’d be even a fraction of the manpower needed to build and operate the “flinger” launchers—the mass drivers that were supposed to alter Halley’s orbit come aphelion.

And without the Nudge, they all might as well go to sleep for good, because there would be no homecoming for any of them.

His thoughts were clouded as he left sleep slot 1. Still a bit weak from his long hibernation, Saul stretched long-unused muscles by glide-walking the long tunnels downward and southward, an area he had not visited yet since his internment.

In this area nearly all the passages were coated in luxuriant green layers of Halleyviridis fungoid. The stuff was too slick to allow good purchase for his vel-stick slippers, but offered a sure grip when he used his bare toes as he had seen others do.

It actually made movement much easier. He found he didn’t need the almost hidden wall cables, for instance. Grabbing a tuft of growth in passing gave him all the added leverage he needed to move along swiftly.

Saul wondered for sometime without paying close attention to where he was going, thinking about the strangeness he and Virginia had awakened too.

Earth appeared to have completely written off Miguel Cruz’s grand odyssey. Oh, they still maintained contact, after a fashion, sending up entertainments and dribbles of technical data from time to time. Saul had extracted a promise from Carl Osborn to bring him more fully up-to-date soon—the distant, somewhat aloof spacer had been imprecise about when. Apparently, most of the awake colonists lived day to day, and took a detached view toward time.

Soon, though, Saul knew he would have to resume his duties as expedition doctor. And the burden of hopelessness that had worn down Akio Matsudo would be his.

Most sorry of all had been those poor Orthos down in Quadrant 9, with their pitiful children—scabrous, wild-eyed, stick figures barely human in aspect, always hungry and frail as leaves.

Perhaps the EarthBirth Laws were wise. Gravity runs strong in our genes.

But there was more to it than that. Yesterday he had examined five of the Ortho kids. All seemed to suffer from the same enzyme deficiency. He already had it mapped to the seventh chromosome. In a few weeks he should be able to track it down and…

And what, Lintz? Are you contemplating meddling, again? Just emerged into a new world, and already you’re coming up with ideas how to change it?

The glow of phosphor panel, was crowing sparse. Saul tried to take his bearings and realized that he had not been paying close enough attention. He was lost.

In the old days that would have been impossible. But by now all the old intersection “street signs” were obscured, completely covered over by the soft, native carpeting. Instead, where shaft met tunnel, there were deeply incised “clan markings” —filled in with a pitchlike substance that seemed to repel the Halleyforms. The marks denoted the boundaries of the various human bands. He looked around for one of these.

Apparently only Central, the sleep slots, and the hydroponics domes were neutral territory, now. And the deep, inner regions of Halley Core, of course. But only madmen ever went down that way, he had heard.

In one of the faction areas nearest Central he had seen what had become of the fibercloth that had once lined the tunnels and shafts of Halley Colony. The material had been turned into clothing and tentlike, “purple-proof” habitats, suspended from the ceilings the bigger chambers.

Every sleeping hall maintained a round-the-clock watch for the most deadly of the comet lifeforms. Nevertheless, every year or so another poor victim fell to the feared native foragers.