Children of the Comet (24 page)

CHAPTER 35

6,000,000,007 A.D.

Mars Orbit

All through the great starship, people were clustered around the outside ports to get their first naked-eye view of Mars. The main observation lounge was crowded to overflowing, as were any of the lounges that had an unshuttered window. Those who couldn't get an outside view relied on the screens in their quarters or watched with friends. The ship was noisy with hundreds of celebratory parties, some of them beginning to get unruly.

Joorn and his family were gathered on the captain's veranda, along with Chu, Ryan, and a few friends. Jonah was there, with another dolphin in her own travel pod. Her human name, Jonah said, was Calypso, after the sea nymph.

Mars loomed hugely, filling the observation wall. They were in close orbit, just outside the orbit of Deimos. The other Martian moon, Phobos, no longer existed. It had crashed into Mars eons ago, leaving an enormous crater, the largest feature on the Martian surface. It was now filled with water from the Kuiper Belt comet that had preceded them more than two years ago, the first of the rain of comets that
Time's Beginning
had nudged into the inner system. Mars had seas again.

Joorn spoke to the dolphins. “There it is, Calypso and Jonah. Your new home. In two more years, when the atmosphere is up to around a hundred millibars or so, it'll be safe to move into it. You can't tell from here, but spectroscopic analysis shows that the blue-green algae that we sent ahead of us is already starting to gain a foothold, and we should have a decent food chain going in about ten years.”

“The fish, Captain, the fish!” Calypso's computer-generated voice squeaked anxiously, together with all the pops and whistles she hadn't yet learned to edit out.

Joorn shook his head regretfully. “It'll take a little longer for us to get the Martian oceans stocked with fish. Till then, you'll have to come inshore for dinner. We'll keep the biohatcheries going full throttle for you.”

“Your whale cousins will have to wait even longer,” Chu added. “And then you dolphins will have to babysit the first generation.”

Alten, stuffy as usual, said, “We're going to have to stay in orbit anyway, until the barrage of comets stops.”

“Like Moses, looking down on the Promised Land,” Jonah said, his beak curved in its permanent dolphin smile.

“Still studying human history, Jonah?” Joorn said.

“Studying it?” the dolphin replied. “I'm living it!”

“It isn't over yet, is it, Grandfather?” Nina said. “Human history, I mean.”

“Not by a long shot, young lady,” Joorn said. “We'll pick up where we left off. There once was a thriving human population on Mars, and there will be again. Old Mother Sol will continue to keep the climate salubrious for some millions of years, even in her dotage. And by the time she shrinks and Mars cools off, if we're still around, we—those of us who want to, that is—will move back to Earth and terraform it all over again.”

“Don't forget
Homo cometes
in their trillions. And our neighbors on the Centauri planets,” Alten said soberly. “By then we'll all have merged back into one human mainstream again.”

Andrew, sitting on the loveseat next to Nina and opening another bottle of champagne, looked up and said, “We've had grand mergers before, haven't we? We all carry a few Neanderthal genes. To say nothing of the mixing of populations after the termination of the Dark Ages let us go about our business.”

“The procreation business,” Chu said, holding out his glass for a refill.

“What about us?” Jonah piped up with mock plaintiveness.

“You're in the human mainstream, like it or not,” Chu said with a laugh. “Except for the procreation part.”

“We'll take care of that ourselves,” Jonah said. He added some chirps in Delphinese. Calypso replied with a long string of tweets and whistles that somehow managed to sound suggestive to human ears.

There was a sudden flash of light on the dull, red face of Mars, bright enough to make the window wall darken. A collective gasp came from Ryan's family, gathered together in a seating group across the room. The light flickered fitfully and died. In moments, a huge cloud of dust had boiled up and started to spread across the bulge of the planet's surface. Then the Marscape began to twinkle around the site of the flash as incandescent fragments from the cloud continued to strike the surface.

“What was it, Joorn, a comet?” Ryan's wife called from the couch where she sat with her children.

“Yes, one of the smaller ones, Kitty. It hit smack in the middle of the Valles Marineris. By the time we're finished, we'll have another ocean there, a long skinny one, two thousand four hundred miles from end to end.”

“Mommy, can you make Uncle Joorn do that again?” one of the children said.

Kitty laughed and gave him one of the petit fours that Irina had made.

The festivities in the ship continued for some hours until night fell, when their orbit carried them past the horizon to the nocturnal hemisphere of the planet and people began to return to their quarters.

Irina served a light supper that she had prepared earlier, and people ate from folding trays. An eerie red halo surrounded Mars, casting a somber glow onto the veranda, but nobody felt like turning on the lights. The mood was subdued. The children had been coaxed to eat, had grown cranky, and eventually had fallen asleep on the couches. Joorn brought out the brandy, and people sat around drinking and not saying much, looking thoughtfully from time to time at the silhouette of Mars blotting out the night sky. The dolphins, logy from their vodka and clam-juice cocktails, had retreated to the bottoms of their tanks, coming up about twice an hour to breathe before sinking back down.

The little boy was the first to notice the new star in the sky. He'd been sleeping fitfully, then dropped back into a sodden doze. Now he sat up and tugged at his mother's arm.

“Mommy, Mommy, look! Orion's Belt has four stars in it! It wasn't there a minute ago.”

Joorn jerked his head around. The others did the same. The constellation had gained another star, brighter than Rigel or Betelgeuse.

His finger stabbed at his shipcom, but on the bridge, Robertson was faster. “Do you see it, Skipper? It was coming in fast, from above the ecliptic, but at only about point ninety-five c's. That means it's been braking intermittently. It would have just turned on its Higgs drive again. We must be looking at a course correction.”

“What's your preliminary reading?”

“It'll enter the Oort cloud in about three years. It looks like it's making a beeline for Sol. That'll mean another two years before it gets here.”

Alten was already punching numbers into the AI link he carried everywhere with him. “One of the five ships that left Earth after we did.”

“Who will it be?” Nina said. “One of the two Euro-American­ ships? Or the Brazilians or Indians? Or the Islamic Federation zealots?”

“Or a ship that Yung didn't know about,” Chu said. “One that was launched after he left.”

Ryan had been alerted by the AI's security link. He walked over to join them. “Whoever it is, they seem to have decided on Sol, not the Alpha Centauri planets. It'll be up to us to deal with them, not Yung.”

“We'll give them the Jovian moons,” Joorn said. “Keep Jupiter for ourselves.”

“If we can,” Ryan said.

“Whoever they are,” Martin said, “they'll be people. And there will be people here to greet them.”

“There'll be others,” Nina said.

Ryan nodded. The politician in him was beginning to emerge, and the others prepared themselves for a burst of his patented eloquence.

He didn't disappoint them. “Earth will always be a way station for the children it once sent out to the far reaches of the Universe. And there must always be people in Sol's system to greet them, even when Sol finishes disgorging Earth and the cradle of the human race is habitable again.”

Joorn topped him. They'd played this game before. “So there'll always be humans in the Universe. Even billions of years from now, when the sky is empty of stars beyond our own cluster of galaxies, and the other clusters have become island Universes of their own, forever out of reach, there will be returnees­—even disappointed fanatics like Karn—who've ridden the expansion of the Universe and come back to their home to refresh it. They'll find whatever dead matter remains—a burnt-out star or an evaporating black hole—and bring it back to life again.”

Chu had grown pensive. “Yes,” he said. “We human beings were meant to be the Jokers of creation. We were dealt to the Universe as a device for reversing entropy. And maybe Karn was right, in a way. Maybe the Universe is something like a gigantic protozoan. If it keeps expanding, it'll have to split. And maybe by that time, man will have learned how to cross over.”

That was too much for Joorn. “Let's leave Eternity to our successors,” he said briskly. “For now, in this billennium, there's enough to do. The Oortians must be raised to civilization. The Earth and the outer planets—Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, with their moons and their burdens of hydrogen that haven't completely evaporated—will have to be revivified. It's ironic that Terra itself will have to be terraformed. And when we're up and running again”—he nodded to Nina and Martin—“that's for your children and grandchildren to do. We'll send out a new generation of restless souls to ride out the billennia in their time dilation cocoons and reseed the cosmos again. Each galaxy they colonize will become a new focal point for sending its children home.”

There was a sound of clapping hands and a hearty “Bravo, Joorn!” It was Jonah's computer-modulated voice, and the clapping hands were a recording he'd squirreled away somewhere in his database. He leaned over the rim of his tank, dripping water on the carpet.

“But we dolphins have our own plans,” Jonah said. “And so will the comet people. They can't ride your starships at one-G acceleration. They'll have to do it the slow way, on their intelligent Trees.”

Everybody laughed. The gathering started to become lively again. Joorn poured more brandy.

“Drink up, people,” he said. “We've got some work to do come morning.”

Chu turned to the window wall and lifted a glass to the bright new star in Orion. One by one, the others followed his example.

“Here's to our new friends,” he said. “Whoever they are.”

CHAPTER 36

6,000,000,020 A.D.

The Kuiper Belt

Captain Goncalves had a rather imperious manner, and he was not used to looking up at the people he was talking to. But he swallowed his pride and said, “And at this distance it is not too hot,
o Senhor
Torris, so your comet will not melt. But there will be more visible light, so the Tree will not object. It is a place where …”

His English failed him, even after twenty years of practice. He finished lamely with “…
onde nao entra o Sol
” and looked to Nina for help.

“Literally ‘where the sun does not enter,'” Jonah piped up before Nina could answer. Nina's Portuguese was pretty good after twenty years, but Jonah's was better. He enjoyed tweaking Captain Goncalves, who had been painfully taught by Nina to speak to women as equals but who still, after all that time, could not bring himself to address a dolphin directly.

Torris nodded judiciously. As the acknowledged patriarch of his own people since Claz's death, he was willing to treat Goncalves with a measure of noblesse oblige.

“Yes, I understand,” he said. “The Stepsister will not swallow the Tree or drink its ice, as it did with with your ‘Earth' living place long ago. The Tree knows this and has persuaded its companions, which is why they have agreed to come with us for this journey.”

“Just so,” Goncalves said stiffly. He was willing to concede that the Bernal trees acted in a form of vegetable self-interest, like any plant, but he attributed this to clever tropisms, not the capacity to reason or communicate in any meaningful way.

Irina, in an ill-advised attempt to smooth things over, said brightly, “It's true, Dom Joao. Ning told me yesterday that the Trees are spreading the message through the entire Oort cloud and that some have already begun to set their sails to join our little colony in the Kuiper Belt.”

Goncalves smiled with forced gallantry and replied, “We shall see,
dona
, we shall see. After all, Trees are attracted by other Trees, aren't they? Isn't that how forests grow?”

They were assembled in the captain's private lounge aboard the
Henrique
, the Brazilian starship named, inevitably, after Portugal's great explorer Prince Henry the Navigator. There was an observation wall, but instead of showing an outside view, it displayed a breathtaking vista of a Brazilian rain forest. At the moment, a jaguar was running across a sunlit clearing with a small animal in its mouth.

Tatiana, Nina's daughter, gasped. There had been cats aboard
Time's Beginning
in her childhood, but she'd never seen one this size before.

“That's the way Earth looked once upon a time, Tati,” Nina told her. “And maybe the way Mars will look a couple of generations from now.”

“And perhaps Callisto and Ganymede as well,” Goncalves sniffed. “Though you Eurofolk got the tropics, and we got the temperate zone.” His tone was polite but aggrieved.

Joorn and his family, with Chu and Jonah, had been Captain Goncalves's guests for more than three years now, and his hospitality was starting to wear thin—though, thankfully, the spacious apartment they'd been given provided plenty of privacy.

The
Henrique
was even bigger than
Time's Beginning
and consequently had greater mass, which had made it a better choice for coaxing Torris's gravitationally bound cluster of intelligent Trees to the Kuiper Belt. It also had a more advanced auxiliary ion drive for in-system work and a larger fleet of robot wardens for herding the Trees.

Joorn had left
Time's Beginning
parked in Jupiter's orbit when they'd boarded the
Henrique
. Alten had stayed behind to captain it, with Robertson's help. It was empty of colonists now and was being used for ferry work between Mars and the Jovian moons. The
Henrique
made a fine tugboat for hauling Trees, but Joorn did not trust Goncalves to have the tact to work with Torris and Ning—the human part of the equation. Irina and the others, who had bonded with Torris from the beginning, had jumped at the chance to work with him again, despite the length of the round trip to the Oort cloud.

Nina had brought her daughter with her so she could show her to Ning. Tatiana and Ning's formidable daughter, Ona, a huntress like her mother, had hit it off immediately. The two young women somehow managed to chat it up despite the language difficulties. Communication seemed to involve a lot of gesturing and giggling.

Tatiana watched as the jaguar disappeared into the underbrush with a last twitch of its tail. “Mother, do you mind if I leave now? Ona has something she wanted to show me.”

“Don't let her take you hunting.”

“She'd never do anything dangerous with me. She's much too sensible. She just wanted to show me the herd she's starting. She's into animal husbandry now. It's been taking hold on Ning's Tree the way Daddy hoped it would when you all left the Oort all those years ago.”

Joorn broke off talking to Goncalves to say, “It's too bad Andrew couldn't come with us. He always says that animal husbandry is the first step in transforming a primitive society. That and grandfathers.” He smiled. “His so-called O-Y ratio.”

Nina annoyed Goncalves further by continuing to divert the conversation. “Andrew will have his chance to work with them again. A trip to the Trees will only be a matter of weeks now.”

Tatiana said, “Wait till I tell Daddy what I've learned! I could go with him on his trips to the Kuiper Belt and help him. Do you think he'd let me?”

She skipped off without waiting for an answer. Nina called after her, “Be careful, Tati! Find someone to make the jump with you.”

Tatiana called back over her shoulder, “Oh Mother! It's an easy jump. And I'll have a thruster with me anyway.”

Goncalves was relieved to see her go. Having to deal with a young woman at what was supposed to be a serious meeting was an affront to his dignity. Ning had been bad enough, and when she had stopped coming to the meetings, leaving it to Torris, he'd been secretly glad, though she was supposed to be Torris's consort and the undisputed matriarch of her own Tree. He'd always had a sneaking suspicion that the woman, only an aborigine, was finding fault with
him
!

They wound up the meeting with the bare bones of a preliminary trade agreement, a small one. Hunters or herdsmen on the conjoined Trees would supply quantities of butchered meat in return for simple, easily manufactured radios that would allow them to talk to one another in a vacuum over short distances without having to resort to sign language, or what they called “helmet talk.”

Captain Goncalves excused himself and went off to attend to whatever minor adjustments were needed to keep the delicate gravitational dance of ship and comets in balance. The ship would be returned to full spin after Torris's departure, but Goncalves had been persuaded early in the game to reduce the pseudogravity by two-thirds—to Martian gravity—whenever Torris was aboard. At first, he'd considered it an unnecessary concession to a difficult aborigine, even more so when Ning visited.

They followed Torris down the tiled passageways to the airlock that had been assigned to them, trailed by Jonah sloshing along behind in his travel pod. Jonah had ignored Captain Goncalves's repeated requests to keep the travel pod sealed while traversing the immaculate corridors, and Joorn knew there would be more complaints about puddles of water by the
Henrique
's housekeeping staff.

They crammed themselves into the airlock and helped one another get into their suits, then cycled through, ready to make the jump together. The Tree filled the black sky, less than a hundred miles away, blotting out the stars except for those that twinkled through the branches around the edges.

Torris did not wait for them. He took a mighty leap, propelled by his powerful legs, and sailed off into space.

“He's been talking to Ning on their private circuit, telling her we're on our way,” Irina said. “He's too proud to use a thruster in front of us, but we'll catch up to him, and he'll be glad to hitch a ride.”

They joined hands in a circle, except for Nina, who accepted an offer of a lift from Jonah, then stepped off the platform together and drifted a short distance from the ship. A moment later, Joorn fired a burst from his thruster, and the linked quartet jetted off in pursuit of Torris. Nina mounted the dolphin pod and, once firmly seated, gave it a thump to signal Jonah.

“How much longer will we be stuck with
o Senhor Poderoso
?” Jonah said in her ear. The Portuguese sobriquet he'd given the captain meant something like Mr. Self-Importance. “We're about done for now, and Chu and Martin could have us home in a week.”

“Be a little patient,” she said. “Give him more time to get used to dealing with the Tree people.”

“He's had two years. He'll never be comfortable with them. He thinks they're some species of ignorant
indios
.”

“Torris is way ahead of him,” Nina said with a laugh. “Like the deal he made on the radios.”

“He'll wake up about twenty years from now. By then
Homo cometes
will be city slickers.”

“That's what Andrew thinks.”

“Do you miss him, Nina?”

“Yes, I do,” she said soberly. “Four years is a long time. From now on, we'll make these trips together. They'll only be short jaunts now. At a one-G boost, Mars is about as close to the Kuiper Belt as Dom Joao's Jovian orbit. We've got the advantage. Torris
trusts
us.”

“I miss Calypso. And the rest of my pod as well. We're not used to being apart. From now on, I'm not going to go on these trade missions alone. I've already made a little side deal with Torris and Ning.”

“You? What do you dolphins have to offer?”

“Fish!” Jonah said triumphantly. “That's the one commodity
Homo cometes
doesn't have. Once you humans have stocked the Martian seas for us, we'll start a fishing cooperative.”

Nina laughed again. “Poor Dom Joao!”

“That's progress. Keep up with it, or get out of the way. What does Andrew think comes after city life?”

“A broader urban culture. An industrial civilization. It may take hundreds of generations to spread its way from a nucleus in the Kuiper Belt through the entire Oort cloud, but eventually, with their greater numbers,
Homo cometes
will be way beyond us planet dwellers. Then, watch out, Universe!”

They fell silent. They were beginning to catch up to the little chain of people ahead of them. By twisting her head, Nina could see enough of the sky to count easily a dozen comets scattered in the libration group around the center of gravity they shared with the
Henrique
. Some of them were close enough for her to make out the dumbbell shape of the Trees they nurtured. These were the Trees that Torris had tried to tell Goncalves about, the ones that had come on their own to join the Kuiper-bound caravan.

Jonah drew level with the linked group and fired a small braking burst to keep the travel pod in tandem with them. The little armada was closing the gap with Torris now. Nina could see him a couple of hundred yards ahead, spinning around to face them. Joorn held out an arm, and Torris reached for his hand and grasped it before the group could pass him. The contact started a slow spin of the entire group, and Joorn damped it with another squirt of his thruster.

They were halfway to Ning's Tree now, headed straight for the docking area. With helmet magnification, Nina could see the white bull's eye painted on the lower trunk where it merged with the exposed root ball, a rough circle about a mile in diameter. There were three tiny figures waiting outside the landing facility, a squarish structure carpentered entirely out of wood. That would be Ning, with Ona and Tatiana.

Another half hour took them within docking distance, and they separated, using their individual thrusters to slow themselves down. Torris hung on to Joorn and borrowed braking impetus from him. Any leap done with muscle power alone wouldn't have caused any landing problems, but the momentum Torris had gained by hitching a ride would have knocked the breath out of him—or worse—when he hit the Tree trunk. Nina stayed with Jonah, and he brought her in for a gentle landing.

Torris and Ning touched helmets for a mutual greeting. They'd had the little radios that Joorn had left with them for over twenty years now and were used to using them over distances, but old habits die hard. The language that Nina and the others heard over their own proximity circuits was entirely in the old helmet talk.

Ning motioned them inside. The wooden structure had a sturdy carpentered airlock made of wood edged with a gummy gasket, not one of the old barriers of greased animal hides. It was warm inside, not much below the freezing point. A central fire was going, and there was a caged area holding about a dozen stovebeasts for the use of travelers.

Ning and Ona threw their faceplates back, and the others removed their helmets. “Did the Proud One lord it over you again?” Ning said to Torris.

“He thinks he did,” Torris said. “But little Nina kept him in check.”

Everybody laughed.

Joorn said, “He'll be coming to trade every so often in the years ahead. Try not to take advantage of him too much. We have a saying: ‘Don't kill the treehopper that lays the gold egg.'”

“What is gold?” Ona said. She was a stunning young woman with a glossy black mane, even taller than her mother. She towered over all of Joorn's people, but she did not slouch to bring herself closer to their eye level as would someone used to gravity.

“It's a metal, like the knife blades we provided your people, only softer.”

“Then it cannot be valuable.”

“It's not used for knives, Ona.”