David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“Hello, little Ginnie,” he said to the very unmachinelike, colony-made machine as it reached out an arm and stroked his leg. The device was another hybrid of Earth-based and homegrown research—a mixture of new designs sent up by their secret benefactors, the mechanical brilliance of Jeffers and d’Amario, and Virginia’s hypermodern approach to personality-based programming.

“I love you, Saul,” the childlike voice said softly. The little artificial persona was an edited replica of Virginia’s own. Sometimes, as now, it led to embarrassment. Keoki coughed, grinning behind his hand.

Saul felt particularly unnerved since, at the moment, Virginia was mad at him. Can’t even really blame her, he thought.

“Hello, Lani,” he said to the young woman who followed the robot. She enveloped him in a warm embrace.

“You are looking wonderful,” he said, holding her back at arm’s length.

She blushed, turning slightly away as if to hide the scars the zipper Pox had left on her once-smooth cheek.

“You’re a magnificent liar, Saul. Almost as good as you are a doctor.”

But to him she did look wonderful. For he well recalled when Lani Nguyen had been slotted. At the time it had seemed as pointless as storing a corpse. Now the pallor of deepsleep had almost left her face, and the blue eyelids only made her half-oriental features seem all the more sultry and mysterious.

Virginia should never have told me about Lani Nguyen’s secret cache of human sperm and ova. I’ve almost questioned her about it several times, since her unslotting… to find out where it’s hidden.

Ah, but if I had that plasm in my hands, I might be too tempted …

“When can I go back on duty, Saul? I want to join the crews mounting the Nudge Flingers, before all the really important work is already done.”

A spacer to the last, he thought. “Even if the Nudge does begin in a month or so, Lani, it’ll be years in progress with lots of motors left to build. You’ll do your turn, don’t worry. Right now, though, your job is to rest, get up-to-date.”

She nodded. The little capuchin monkey transferred from Keoki’s shoulder to hers and she scratched it.

“I’ll try to be patient, Saul. Anyway, I’ve got to thank you for assigning me to Blue Rock Clan for my recuperation. I’ve been to some of the other groups to try to visit people…” She blinked, remembering. “Saul, how can people, professional people, with college degrees, act so… so…” She groped for the right word.

“So meshuggenuh?” he suggested.

Lani laughed—clear and bell-like. “Yeah. So meshuggenuh.”

Anuenue put an arm around her shoulder. “We’ve been very glad to have Lani. Any of the clans of the Survivor faction would welcome her as a permanent member.”

Lani blinked. “I… I guess I’ll have to choose one, won’t I? I’m still not used to thinking like that.”

Saul didn’t like it any better than she did. He had hoped that the factionalism of the last thirty years would break down, once more of those slotted in the early days were treated with his serum and released. As the active population of the comet burgeoned, a majority would be made up of those who remembered Earth most recently, whose memories were fresh with Captain Cruz’s stirring speech from the framework of the Sekanina, and the hopes they had all shared.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. The newly revived—disoriented, weak, and afraid—found themselves in a world as much different from the Halley Colony they remembered as that early settlement had been from placid Moon Base 1. They quickly gravitated to groups they might be comfortable with, adopted their ideologies, and became clansmen.

Saul did not mention to Lani that there were three people seemed exempt from this pattern. For different reasons, he, Virginia, and Carl Osborn were all isolated—respected, perhaps, but comfortable nowhere.

Lani shrugged. “Well, I sure won’t go down south and join Quiverian and his radical Orthos.”

“Arcists,” Keoki corrected, like a patient language teacher, instructing her in the right dialect.

“Yeah, Arcists,” she repeated. “And when I got a hall pass and tried to visit some of my Percell friends over in Uber territory, Sergeov told me to get my little Ortho ass the hell out of there! The Mars boys aren’t much nicer, even if Andy Carroll and I once were pals.

“So what choice do I have? That Plateau Three crowd up on B Level is mixed Ortho-Percell, but the PeeThrees have got this gleam in their eyes, you know what I mean, Saul? They aren’t so much spacers anymore as missionaries! They don’t seem to care if they live or die, so long as Halley’s trillion tons of ice gets delivered, according to Captain Cruz’s plan.”

Saul smiled. “It looks to me as if you’ve found a home right here, Lani.”

“That’s right,” Keoki affirmed. “Just let us know. We’ll paint you a new tabard and hold a ceremony.”

Lani nodded, but she briefly bit her lip. “I—I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve had a chance to talk to Carl.”

She lowered her eyes, knowing how transparent she must seem, but unashamed of it in front of her two friends. There was very little more that could be said.

“I’ll see about getting you some light duty topside soon,” Saul assured her. Lani nodded, gratitude in her eyes.

The little capuchin chirped. The black gibbons, Max and Sylvie, swiveled and looked back down the hallway, their hackles rising.

Keoki peered, his hand drifting toward his belt knife. “Somebody’s coming.”

Men and women started emerging from labs and sleeping caves, nervously gripping staves made from meteoric iron. A pair grabbed the heavy vacuum door and began shutting it. Then they heard a high-pitched whistle—two upsweeps and a trill, repeated twice.

Keoki relaxed only a little. “Treaty call,” he said. “ E wehe i ka puka, he told the men, and they ceased pushing. The door stayed half-open. A light appeared down the tunnel, and two smallbrown figures tumbled to a halt just twenty feet short of the entrance, tongues lolling from narrow mouths rimmed with needle sharp teeth.

I should never have let Quiverian talk me into giving him otters, Saul thought, regarding the agile creatures. They’re just too dangerous.

But if he had disallowed the Arcist leader’s request, Saul might have lost his carefully maintained neutral status. It had been hard, serving as middleman, negotiating a treaty so that the emigrants to the south pole still cooperated with Carl Osborn’s crews. The otters had been just one more price.

To his surprise, though, the figure that emerged behind the grinning animals was not Joao Quiverian, or even one of the Arcist leader’s principal assistants. Wild white hair and beard floated like a halo around a face as dark brown as the rich carbonaceous veins lining the icy hall.

“… Kela ao ,” Anuenue breathed in amazement. “It is Ould-Harrad.”

Those intense, brown eyes were now rimmed by deep creases. The former spacer officer was dressed in a flapping brown gown of salvaged fibercloth that made him look even more like an ancient patriarch. He gestured with one hand.

“Saul Lintz.”

Lani gripped Saul’s arm and Keoki Anuenue moved as if to stop him, but he shrugged them aside. “Keep Max and Sylvie back;” he said, and cast off down the hallway.

The otters clung to Ould-Harrad’s robe, eyeing Saul ferally. Saul did not feel particularly safe for having been their “creator,” in a sense. In near weightlessness, the creatures were fearsome beasts.

If Joao Quiverian was leader of the radical Arcists, Ould-Harrad was their spiritual guide, their priest. The flame of his guilt complex seemed to drive him hotter than anyone else here on this ancient star mote.