David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Existence. Life. Awareness.

The words were often used as synonyms, but he knew that actually they were all three very different things. Three stages in Creation.

Did the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest make a sound?

Could that question even have been asked before all three stages had come about?

Existence supposedly began nearly twenty thousand million years ago—in a hot flux of quarks and leptons when time itself whirled, as if blindfolded, and stabbed out at something that it thereby named the Future. The universe could have taken a myriad of other forms by happenstance—by tiny variations in chance and dimension. Had even one of the basic physical constants been a fraction off, life would never have erupted out of clay-catalyzed chemistry, billions of arbitrary intervals later.

But Life did erupt… self-organizing, self-replicating, and other -organizing. Life had a tendency, from the very beginning, to alter its surroundings, its environment.

But that was not the end of it. Then there came the third creation. There came awareness …

The midget gibbons flew down the tunnel ahead of Saul, chirping at each other and swinging lithely from cables stapled to the moss-covered ice. At an intersection they pivoted and regarded Saul, wide brown eyes blinking in question.

“Patience, children,” he told them. “Let Papa read the tunnel signs. We’re supposed to meet a Ginnie at Blue Stone Cave.”

The two small apes hung nearby while he swam over to the meeting of two corridors. A thick green fuzz covered the old shaft and tunnel codes, but below the obscured markings were deep incisions, exposing dark, glittering, icy conglomerate, painted with a substance poisonous to Halleyforms.

An arrow to the right, piercing a large S.

S for survivors.

“Yes, this is the way.” He adjusted his backpack. “Come on, Max. Come on, Sylvie.”

The two minigibbons landed on his shoulders. He pushed off following the phosphorescent glow of the lichenoids.

Two years, he thought. It’s been two years since, all at once, the universe seemed to let up on us. Since the litany of bad news turned around.

I wonder how mach longer this good spell will last.

Everyone seemed to credit his serums and Virginia’s miracle mechs for the turnaround in the colony’s fortunes. But Saul knew that part of the problem, before, had been pure and simple loneliness.

Things had not been the same since that afternoon in Virginia’s lab, when JonVon’s illness-wrought memory blocks tumbled down, and they discovered that they had not been forgotten after all.

There had been no more messages from their secret benefactors. But that didn’t matter. Even more important than the techniques they had received had been the boost to morale, knowing that someone back home still cared.

Even the officials back on Earth seemed to have relented. The colony was buzzing about the “Care Package” that was nearing rendezvous with Halley—sent at high velocity by an Earth Control apparently guilt-racked over its past neglect.

No wonder Jeffers s teams are getting so much done, down at the south pole. Virginia estimates they’ll actually be ready to begin the Nudge this month.

If this peace among the clans lasts, that is…

The passage lightened ahead. Max and Sylvie launched themselves from his back and sped along a wall cable, rushing toward a chattering greeting.

“Who is it, Hokulele? Who’s coming?” a deep voice asked from beyond a stone arch. “Oh, quiet down, you silly monkey, can’t you see it’s only Max and Sylvie? Come on in, Dr. Lintz!”

Keoki Anuenue’s grin was broad and his grip strong as he hauled Saul into a wide chamber that looked half ice palace, half mad scientist’s laboratory. Cavelike crannies led off in all directions, bordered by glittering, faceted structures of hardened crystal. People could be seen moving in some of the rooms, working at various tasks. A few stopped and waved at Saul.

In the chamber’s center there protruded a great boulder of some bluish metal agglomerate, an odd formation that had given the group that lived here its name.

Everywhere was the soft verdance of lush plant life. Here a lawnlike expanse of cloverlike Trifolium halleyense, there a shock of mutated marigolds, growing out of night soil into spindly shapes that never would have been possible on the homeworld.

“Great to see you again, Doc,” Anuenue said. “My people are always glad when you visit.”

Saul had given up trying to get Keoki to call him Saul, like everyone else did. That the big Hawaiian was now older than he—his once jet-black hair had turned silver and his eyes were deeply etched by smile lines—hardly seemed to matter to him.

“Hi, Keoki. You’re looking well.”

“How could I not? I was never really sick, like so many others, but those treatments of yours have me feeling I could climb a wave all the way to Molokai!”

His laugh was infectious. Saul reached up and petted the little capuchin monkey on his friend’s shoulder, who hid behind Anuenue’s head and glared suspiciously at the gibbons. “And how is Hokulele? Does she still have a big appetite?”

Keoki laughed. “There hasn’t been a purple sighted anywhere near Blue Rock Cave for weeks. She has to live off table scraps, these days, and she hates it!”

“Well.” Saul smiled. “I’m sure motherhood will keep her busy enough.”

“You can tell?” Anuenue held up the little monkey. “Ua huna au is mea… Iwasn’t sure I should tell you, since you wanted us to be careful before letting any Earth species become independent of your cloning chambers. But Virgil Simms was visiting from Central, and he brought his male with him.”

Saul waved a hand. “No matter. The modified capuchins are a success, obviously. We ought to see if they breed true.”

The data from Earth had been the key. For although science was still a dull affair, back home, some progress could not be avoided. Saul would never have been able to develop the cloning machines himself, even using parts from a dozen scavenged sleep slots. But by implementing designs released from JonVon’s unclogged memories, he had been able to build astonishing devices.

Using samples taken from their still-frozen “zoo” of test animals, he could now force-grow a monkey or ape from blast cell to fetus to adult in a month. A month.

It was, frankly, almost beyond his comprehension as a biologist. Saul was grateful that half of the process could be run by JonVon, without his having to understand it. He could turn most of his attention to modifying the original genes—an art at which his skill was not obsolete—giving them an artificial inheritance to thrive in the new ecosystem that was coming into being under Halley.

Anuenue was trading monkey faces with Max and Sylvie, making Hokulele insanely jealous.

“I still can’t really understand why you chose gibbons for your own watchdogs, Doc. Without a prehensile tail, they’re almost as clumsy as a man.”

“I have a weakness for apes,” Saul began. “They have their.”

“Saul!” two feminine voices called out, almost in unison. He looked overhead and saw a young woman in roughly sewn fibercloth over-alls drop down from a shaft to alight on the blue rock. A spindly machine fell after her and she caught it deftly, placing it gently on the floor. The whirring, spiderlike mech whizzed ahead of Lani to reach Saul first.

“Hi Saulie!” The machine spoke with Virginia’s voice, but in a slightly higher register, a simpler tone. It was easy to tell that Virginia herself wasn’t “present” —was not operating this particular mech herself—and Saul was just a little disappointed.