The vulpine—a construct based on fox genes, but modified so extensively as to be nearly unrecognizable by now—snuffed after another scent and let out a sharp yip. It flapped around one of the giant column trees, which crisscrossed the chamber at every angle like spokes or massive braces.
The trees served other purposes than just supporting the walls of Le Grand Cavern, but that role would become crucial over the next few months, as Halley’s Comet zoomed sunward toward its most perilous, and possibly last, perihelion passage.
He touched the trunk of the nearest, a bole a meter across that shone bright, cool light from narrow strips of bioluminescent bark. Power from the colony’s fusion generators ran directly into the genetically engineered giants. Some of the electricity went into feeding the trees’ life functions. The rest emerged as a soft glow that suffused the chamber from all directions, driving photosynthesis.
The trees had been a delightful surprise when Saul had awakened from another decade-long slumber, year ago. Clearly, the colonists had been busy. The craft of life-tailoring and ecosystem management had been carried much further by the watches since aphelion.
Of course, atany time there had always been two or three of Saul’s cloned near-duplicates around to help. In a sense, Saul had had a hand in most of the wonders of this chamber—through his younger versions who shared so many of his memories and skills. It could, in fact, be said that he had invented the column trees…
And yet there was an unrepentant individualist within him who rejected the idea out of hand. No matter how metaphysical I get, I know who “me” is. He watched the vulpine and inspected the shining column tree with a trace of envy. They were beautiful.
He had cheered at the hen’s escape. The skin-fowl had been one of his own designs.
A low vibration traveled up the trunk of the column tree to his hand. Already Halley trembled with more and more quakes as heat from the ever-closer sun seeped downward into the icy crust. Distant booms told of patches of amorphous ice suddenly changing state, exploding off the surface, blowing dust, rocks, boulders into space in great clouds of vapor. Each day the rumblings grew louder.
Already, the hazy, ionized cloud of the coma had formed, cutting off radio reception from the rest of the solar system. The spectacular twin tails waved, waxing ever brighter, primping for the real show at perihelion.
The column trees, keystone roots, and other preparations would be tested hard, during the coming weeks. Carl thinks we haven’t got much of a chance, Saul thought But then, Carl always was a gloomy haymisheh.
Saul smiled, inhaling the rich, thick scent of life.
Somehow, even if the Hot tears us to bits and spills us all into vacuums embrace, I’d still not bet against us.
A small purple creature buzzed by his ear and landed on the lip of an orchid. The flower was almost unchanged from a variant that grew in misty forests on Earth, but the lavender-colored pollinator was like nothing ever seen on the heavy green world. It was a distant cousin of the fearsome native forms that had terrorized the humans, back in the early days—now thoroughly altered to fit a harmless, useful niche.
Saul made a mental note: Work on fixing the flavor of the honey the thing makes. He had tried the stuff recently. It was too sweet. Now a sour variant, that would be popular…
A rustle in the leaves…Saul looked up and caught sight of small shape scuttling along the bright rim of the nearby column. It lifted a tiny, glowing eye at the end of a stalk, regarded him briefly, then peeped and scurried over to stand, quivering, before him.
“Saulie,” its tiny voice piped.
He held out his hand and the little machine ran up his arm like a trim spider the size of a Chihuahua. Its sticky feet prickled his skin with every step.
“Hello, little Ginnie,” he said, greeting the tiny mech. “How’s your big sister?”
The eyecell winked. “She’s fine, Saulie. Virginia says she wants to talk to you. No hurry, she says.”
He smiled. Virginia could have spoken directly through the little mech. After all, she “lived” everywhere in the complex cybernet under the ice. But the vast program that held her main essence had decided, for some reason, to do that as seldom as possible. Oh, there was a little bit of her in every one of the machines, from these little “Ginnies” all the way up to medical-drones that could play Scrabble and gossip. But if you wanted to talk to Virginia, you generally had to do it from some particular place she chose.
“Okay. Tell your mistress I’ll talk to her at Stormfield Park.”
The little robot hummed, consulted, and replied.
“Your mistress, too, Saulie!”
He laughed out loud. This model certainly wasn’t one capable of teasing him with double entendres. Virginia herself must have been listening in.
“You’re cute,” he told it. “Tell you what, why don’t we get together when Mama’s not looking, you and I?”.
“Beast!” A small pincer arm dropped down and tweaked his arm.
“Ouch!” But the mech darted off before he could snatch at it, and was gone in a flash of waving foliage.
I could craft a creature to catch you, he thought. If we had forever, you with your machines and me with my animals… what games we could play.
If we had forever.
Saul let out a sigh. He swiveled, braced his feet against the great tree, and launched himself through the interweaving latticework of trunks—laced with strips of brightly glowing bark—toward an exit that was something of a cross between a classical cerametal airlock and the valve of a giant living heart.
Stormfield park was crowded. As more and more people emerged from the slots, the population had begun approaching levels planned back when Captain Cruz and Bethany Oakes had launched forth with four sail tugs and the old Edmund Halley to challenge the unknown.
The chamber was smaller than LeGrand Cavern. It had quite a few column trees crisscrossing it, but these were arrayed more primly, the growth less a riot, more manicured.
At one end of the cylindrical area, the centrifugal wheel from the old Edmund had been refurbished and put back to work, rotating slowly, like a Ferris wheel. Two quadrants were still enclosed, containing laboratories for weight-dependant processes. But the rest was now open-sided and planted with oak and dwarf maple trees. It was like a strip of old Earth, bent into a circle and set inside a vast, surreal vault.
The wheel’s centrifugal force was equivalent to only a twentieth of Earth’s pull, but it was enough. People went there to practice the arcane act of “walking”…of sitting under a tree and watching things fall.
Ass he approached the rolling boundary, Saul heard a rare, treasured sound. Children laughed and flew past him toward the ring, skidding in the soft sand of a landing area as the great cylinder rolled around and around.
They looked so much better. Still, the gangling forms seemed barely human. Only a few could speak.
After aphelion, all of the poor, warped creatures had been slotted, and no more had been born. The wars had burned out the long rivalry between Ortho and Percell, and at last reason prevailed. Until the problems of fetal and postnatal development in the cometary environment were solved, it was considered heartless to bring babes into the world.