David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Time to prepare for the meeting. He idly thumbed over to RUNNING READOUT, expecting to see the usual situation report, but didn’t get the usual five-colored status chart. Instead, he caught a trickle of JonVon’s momentarily exposed inner flow. Incredibly, it was another poem. As he read, Carl began to smile.

Carl laughed. Incredible! This was not the first evidence he’d seen that JonVon was noodling away at poetry in slack moments. But of late the bio-organic idiot savant had been getting uncanny. Or maybe it only proved that poetry wasn’t really a higher-level activity after all. This was jagged, lurching, bitter stuff, reeling from rhyme to rhyme, with an occasional glancing collision with reason.

What was the gold JonVon was hiding? He wondered if JonVon had showed this to Virginia yet. She was still recuperating from the slots, but spent a few hours each day linked to her cyber-friend. What if the machine eventually turned out to be a better poet? Carl smiled.

And how did JonVon getsuch retailed information about the noxious factions Carl had to juggle? Maybe I should turn this job over to a subroutine.

Meetings, always meetings. Through the hatch came Andy. Carroll, slot-thin and glowering.

“Those Arcists have gone on strike again!”

“Wildcat?”

“No, Malcolm called them in. I just got a hail from him.”

“How come?”

“He says their Hydro share was low this week. His pickup team just returned with no fruit, not many vegetables.”

Carl frowned. “That shouldn’t have happened. I checked the output—”

“Sergeov got some of theirs, I’m pretty sure.” Andy balled a fist and smacked it into his palm.

“Stole it gain?”

A nod. “He’s got some way of slipping the stuff out after it’s been counted and allotted. I can’t figure it.”

Mildly Carl said, “That’s your department.”

Andy was young, only recently awakened, but he had caught on to the nuances of the situation quickly. His black eyebrows shot up. “I cover every entrance. No way a man or woman could get in there.”

Carl nodded sympathetically. “Uh-huh. What about half a man?”

“Wh… oh. You figure Sergeov can get through other ways?”

“With no legs… check it out.”

Andy brooded, his pale features compressed into a mask of fretful concern. “I don’t see how, but okay.”

Carl sighed and stretched in the webbing. “Now you know what this job’s like.”

“Yeah. They’re a bunch of goddamned children!”

“You’ve been out—what? Two months?”

“Right. Still.”

“It’ll take a while to see where the hate comes from. Just try to ignore the worst, work around it.”

“I’m convinced that Malcolm is stalling.”

“He often is. What else’s he got to negotiate with? But you mean seriously, this time?”

“I think so. I checked the Nudge pods they supposedly finished three months ago—down at the south pole. They look as though they’re set up right, but I pulled off a few cowlings. Inside there’re connections missing, tanks not racked—it’s a mess.”

“Sure it’s Malcolm’s fault?”

“I think they’re sabotaging the pods.”

“They smash anything?”

“No, just took stuff apart.”

“Smart. Any obvious damage, we’d howl. This way, you might very well have accused Malcolm to his face of shirking the work.”

Andy blushed. “Well, actually, that’s what I did.”

A pause. “Oh?”

“I… I know I should’ve got hold of you first, but—I was so damn hopping mad! I called Malcolm and started in on him.” Andy stopped, embarrassed.

“And?”

“He hung up on me before I even got three sentences out.”

“Then he probably thinks he’s got some complaint with us, too.” Don’t sound too casual , Carl reminded himself. Don’t let Andy onto what you know…that there’s simply no way the Nudge accelerators would be done in time anyway.

Carl said, “Who has the most to gain if you and Malcolm tear at each other’s throats?”

“Hell, hardly anybody, seems to me.”

“Doesn’t have to be more than a few.”

“Well… oh yeah. Quiverian. He’s the one keeps spouting that Arcist crap. You think he’s trying to slow down work on the Nudge?”

“It fits. The radical Arcists don’t want any possibility of cometary material getting near Earth. No orbits near enough to make a good rendezvous, nothing. Preserving Earth’s biosphere is it for them. They don’t care what happens to us.”

“But there are still possibilities that offer no conceivable threat to Earth. Give ourselves a shorter-period orbit with the Nudge, pack everybody into slots.”

“And hope a decade or two sobers up everybody Earthside?”

Andy’s face was so open it was almost painful to read. “It’s… We’ve got to have hope, don’t we?”

“Sure,” Carl said, trying to get some hearty optimism into his voice. “Sure.”

Andy pursed his lips, absorbed with his dreams. Maybe it’s not dumb optimism, Carl thought. Maybe we’ll get a break. I’m just getting tired of wishing.

Hethought of showing Andy the poem and then decided to forget it. Andy might very well find the mixture of bile and gallows humor unsettling Let him marinate for a year or so first.

And who knows? Perhaps some archaeologist will find that poem and pronounce it the great work of our sad, luckless expedition. They might put it on a plaque beside the main outer lock, to label the mountainous ice museum that swung through their sky, marking a great failed idea. With us, swimming permanently in our slimy slot fluids, as the prime exhibits.

It wasn’t an absurd notion.

—Huh? Did you say something, Virginia?—

Jeffers’s voice crackled over her comm as she concentrated on bringing her two balky mechs over an ice mound at the same time. It was always a delicate exercise, for the big machines had enough strength to bound completely away from the rubble-strewn surface. These repair-drone models had no onboard propellants to bring them back, in case of a miscalculation.