David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Nobody was supposed to ever come this way. It was part of his agreement with the clans. Then who… ?

He blinked. Felt a chill.

Weirders…

They drifted into view… manlike shapes, but tufted all about like slime-covered sea creatures. The assemblage of native forms each carried was different. In one case there was nothing of the original man left but the eyes. In the other, there was still a face visible through the symbiotic tangle.

This is synergism taken farther than even I can stomach it, Saul thought queasily.

Several times, since that day when the ex-spacer turned mystic, Suleiman Ould-Harrad, left the upper levels to go down and join these creatures, small notes had appeared tacked to Saul’s door. He had filled every request, often leaving bottles of his sera outside. Each wakeshift, when he arose, the packet was gone. In its place lay a small sample of some strange lifeform Saul had never seen before.

It was a trade, medicine for more pieces to the puzzle that was Halley. It suited Saul fine, for he had wanted to find a way to treat the weird denizens of Far Gehenna, anyway. Since Ould-Harrad had gone down to join them, they had seemed to become better organized, less suspicious and violent when someone from a more “normal” clan crossed their path.

He blinked, however, when both emissaries bowed low.

“We c-come and beseech-ch your help-p.”

The stuttering voice took Saul by surprise.

“I-I didn’t know any of you could still talk!”

The one with the face shook its head. “Some c-cannot. But that does not mean we no longer think-k.”

Saul nodded, hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… well, you never show yourselves. The others fear you so.”

“As we fear them. But you are Ssssaul. The Doc-c. We c-come to you with hurt.”

Saul was about to ask them to come into the lab when the lead weirder opened a gap in its foliage and brought forth a small brown bundle. Whimpering sounds came from it.

“C-can you fix-x-x?”

The otter had a broken leg. It writhed and bit at the one holding it, to no apparent effect.

“Of course,” Saul said as he stood up and pressed the thumb-code plate by the door. “Bring her in. This shouldn’t take long.”

Except for Lani and an occasional mech, nobody else but him had ever crossed this threshold. Saul was sure that nobody stranger ever would again.

But then, he had never been very good at predicting.

It was an hour after the Weirders had left that he found himself standing beside the master cloning chamber, with his mind made up. There were sound scientific reasons to proceed with the experiment. The colony needed it. Humanity needed it.

He nodded. “JonVon, I want to set up a secret data base.”

If he squinted against the sun’s hard knot of yellow, the icescape lay before him like a land of dreams. Armies of men and mechs surged across the slashed, stained territory. They towed long cylinders of buffed steel and alabaster aluminum oxide, or swiveled great clumps of electrical gear, or tugged transformers that, made to operate in cold vacuum, looked more like crusty brain coral than loops of gleaming copper and iron.

The laboring gangs sped across ice that was gouged and split, great troughs dug deeply into it, cut and formed and hammered. At regular spacings Jim Vidor had erected spindly towers by melting, force-forming, and refreezing water into crystalline struts, levels, braces.

Cobwebbed strands connected jutting, orange-tinged fingers of flash-wedded crystals. Ice had little shear strength, and well only under compression. It was impossible to believe that the arabesques were merely functional. Still, Carl had no doubt that Vidor, if pressed, would be able to come up with an explanation for each extruded, delicate strand, every corbelled arch, all the spindly weaving art of it.

Carl had not asked. Humans could not stick remorselessly to the narrow and practical; anyone of skill yearned to express something deep and abiding through his craftsmanship. Perhaps it was the impulse to leave an idiosyncratic, quirky dab of self on the most enduring things they made. Probably it was something deeper, tied to the spirit that had brought a lone tribe of primates so far out from their own warm, moist world.

Carl remembered the opening lines of a poem Virginia had shown him months before. Somehow they had stuck with him.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair.

Omens for good sailing. The poem had something to do with beaches and oceans, and Virginia had sensed some resonance in him for those images. Voyaging out here, sailing against gravity’s tide, resembled the grand old days of seagoing craft. They had tapped a fraction of the sun’s raw photon wind to control the comet’s outgassing, in the first months after landing. Then they ran before that wind, using sunlight only to yield electricity. The crucial time was coming now, when their iceworld craft had to be pushed into a fresh orbit, a new course charted.

He smiled at himself. Clinging to the sea analogy, eh? All because you’re deep in your bones a spacer, and can’t forget it. Ever since losing the Edmund, you’ve been yearning for a ship. This chunk of ice and iron is all you’ve got left.

It was so obvious, Virginia had seen it. She had told him that poetry was a consolation, and to his surprise he had found himself enjoying some of the stuff she transferred into his display. That would’ve been utterly impossible for the brash, self-involved spacer he had been thirty-five years ago. He’d aged only seven years in that time, but that span had a weight of its own. His younger self now seemed distant, almost implausibly blind.

I hope Virginia can’t see too well into me. She’ll find out soon enough how much all this hope and euphoria are false, based on an unavoidable lie …

He didn’t like to recall that. He shook his head and moved across the ice, taking long strides, surveying the work. Keep busy. Don’t think too much; it’s not your strong suit.

Carl circled around a gang of laboring mechs to reach the long trench of Launcher 6. A completed flinger filled the scooped-out, obliquely descending trough. Two engineers were testing a flywheel made from Halley iron.

The machines would deliver momentum at a precisely calculated rate and angle. At first they would fire parallel to the equator, to slow and finally halt Halley’s fifty-hour spin. After that, the launcher would pivot about an axis buried in the trench, bringing it nearly perpendicular to the equator, in line with Halley’s center of mass. Then would begin the long stuttering bursts which would, delivered over years, add minute increments of momentum to Halley’s slow, stately swerve at aphelion. All the launchers, pulsing endlessly, would sum up to the Nudge.

—Real pretty, uh?—

Carl saw Jeffers approaching with an easy, practiced lope. His suit tabard was a crossed pliers and wrench in a cube, stained and spotted.

“Beautiful. Is it tested out? Ready for horizontal mounting?”

—Sure. Sets in there jest fine, any angle you want. Mechs’ll get it duty-mounted soon’s testing’s over.—

Jeffers grinned happily. He was the mainstay of the Nudge, finding solutions to problems with a quick, expert savvy. He worked eighteen-hour shifts without a sign of fatigue. The factory at A Level, humming away now with robos making replacement parts for launchers and rockets, wouldn’t exist without Jeffers. Carl remembered when the man had put in the minimum, wrapping himself in holotapes or pornstims, blotting out the reality of where he was. Work was what he had needed. To Carl, that alone was reason enough to do all this, even if his friend surely suspected that it was all a farce …