David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Is it a trick of perspective? Or are we really going to pass as near as it looks?

Sparks flew off as tiny objects separated from the comet’s head in soundless explosions.

The life rafts. Armored against the dust and heat, the aeroshell-covered sleep slots would split way from Halley. Tiny, mech-controlled rockets increased the spacing, guiding the hibernating colonists toward their first fiery encounter with the red planet’s atmosphere.

Virginia backed away further, giving the simulation space.

All Earth will be watching this. The folks on Phobos won’t be the only ones having quite a show.

Halley’s cloudy coma seemed to touch the planet. Virginia blinked.

Something’s wrong. How can it…

The coma began to warp out of shape, compressed by sonic shock waves as the globe of gas encountered the planet’s sparse atmosphere. Ionized gas bowed outward and away from the weak Martian magnetic field.

The sparkling dot of the core itself, a trillion tons of ice, pulled forward, unimpeded by anything so tenuous as gas or magnetism. It fell ahead of its cloud, and began to glow still brighter.

NO …

Gaseous bow shock waves multiplied into expanding cones. Sensing that she wanted to follow the action, JonVon slowed the encounter as Halley Core scattered the tiny lifeboats like pollen grains and sped on toward closest passage.

Closest passage…

The nucleus split apart! Then again. Four chunks streaked inward at an angle, their path through the Martian atmosphere now incandescent. Then they struck the little world.

One piece seemed to glance off the limb of the planet, like a hammer striking glowing sparks off into space. Plumes of dust roiled where the mile-wide bit had briefly touched down.

A large fragment scored a direct hit on Olympus Mons, shearing off the left side of the great volcano in a titanic, blinding explosion.

Simulation or not, Virginia blinked away the afterimage from that flash. By the time she could watch again, the series of searing blasts had turned into spreading orange clouds. The thin atmosphere rippled and swirled like a shallow pond into which bullets had been fired.

Quakes shook the ancient sands. Under Mars the permafrost buckled and melted. Virginia imagined she could sense magma stirring.

She was too stunned to do more than watch, unbelieving. She sought out the little aeroshells and found one, two, tumbling away toward the sun. Others glowed briefly as they hit the rolling dust clouds, flared, and went out.

Some had simply disappeared.

It was supposed to be a gravity carom! A near passage! Earth Control never said anything about this!

Carlnever said anything about this.

Unconsciously she willed her simulated self away from light— away from the burning, sunlit face of the rocky crucible.

Mars fell back as she fled outward along its shadow. Seen from dark-face, the planet was a thin crescent of red wind, tinged in fire. From one side of the crescent, a rosy pyre bloomed: the god of war answering heaven’s violence in reawakened volcanoes.

Unbeckoned, unwelcome, a line from Shelley came to mind.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Virginia disengaged, her hands shaking as she tore off the contact disk. In her mind, though, the scene continued. Imagination went on simulating what was intended for thirty-eight years hence, picturing the sun as it would rise on the morning following this encounter, to shine over a steamy, cloudy day on Mars.

And later, for just a little while, there would be rain.

It was an old biologists’ drinking song from the twentieth century. Saul had learned it in England, during a rainy winter at Cambridge. It seemed appropriate that it should come to mind now, as an earthenware bottle lolled and sloshed in his lap and he sat in the dimly lit corridor outside his lab, trying a Polynesian remedy for what ailed him.

Keoki had given him the jar of homemade hooch saying, solemnly, “You need drunk, Saul.” And, of course, the fellow was right.

There was a refrain to the ditty, to a jazzy, hip beat.

Saul nodded, sagely. “There. You see? They knew about symbiosis even back in th’ eighties, when they weren’t even sure yet they were in the Hell Century. Goes to show there’s never anythin’ new, under th’ sun.”

Nobody was there to hear him, of course. He had finally sent Keoki back… the big Hawaiian’s wives must be worried about him, by now. Saul had assured his friend he would go right to sleep, and so Keoki had left, charging him to try to cheer up.

In fact, sleep wasn’t in prospect, right now. Saul sat and nursed the bottle. He had never felt so far away from home.

Strictly speaking, in four years we’ll be at aphelion and headed back to Earth again. But orbital dynamics was not on Saul’s mind, right now.

She’ll never approve, he told himself.

Oh, yeah? Well, how do you know unless you ask her?

Truth be told, he was simply afraid…afraid of what Virginia might think of his latest experiments. Miracle cures where one thing. Experiments with animals and plants, fine.

But among the gifts from Earth had been data on the force-growth of human bodies. It was like Houdini being challenged by a new lock, or a painter by a blank canvas. The need was there… the dare irresistible.

How do you know what Virginia would say? Maybe you don’t have to sleep in a cold, lonely lab.

Saul shivered, and knew that he was just too much of a coward to test it.

Ah, but what if he could give his love a gift? A gift of the very thing she most wanted in the world? The thing she had reconciled herself never to have?

One night, weeks ago, as she lay in exhausted slumber, he had taken the samples he needed.

From Lani Nguyen— trustful Lani— he had acquired the secret cache of human sperm and ova she had smuggled with her from Earth. He had all the materials he needed, now.

But since then, he had remained indecisive. Until tonight.

He had spent all day laboring in the Arcist enclave down at the south pole— as Colony Doctor he was neutral in all disputes— and had returned depressed. Life was miserable and cold, down in those warrens. Their fusion pile sputtered and barely put out enough power to maintain their greenhouses. Worse, Joao Quiverian had his own factions to deal with— fanatics that made his own Arcism seem moderate, whose loathing of anything associated with Percells seemed to know no bounds.

Keoki was right… I needed drunk.

Another ditty passed through Saul’s mind. One about the fifth Irish Civil War. It was a sad song of fratricide, but nobody had everwrittenanything better for either drinking or pity.

He was humming to himself when a flicker of movement made him look to the left. He squinted at the faint line of phosphors, diminishing in the distance, and saw that several were being occulted by dim shapes approaching down the narrow hallway.