The reasons why humans had so much more difficulty than other animals were complex, but Saul and his assistants had solved the problem more than ten years ago. Theoretically, this park could be echoing with the giggles of healthy children.
But with perihelion coming, there was another reason to delay. Children deserved a future. Right now, few really believed there would be one.
Saul swam through a shimmering boundary and stepped nimbly aboard the rolling lawn. As he braced and absorbed rotational momentum, a holographic image formed behind him, cutting off his view of the rest of the hall. Suddenly, it was if he were in a park on Earth. City spires topped forested rise in one direction. Out the other way, one caught a glimpse of the bright sparkle of a sunlit sea.
Lest we forget.
Twice more, over the long years, bursts of technical data had arrived, sent by nameless benefactors in the inner solar system. Display projections like these—distant descendants of the weather walls—were among the most stunning of he gifts…proofs that not all of those who dwelt under the Hot had forgotten kinship, or mercy.
It was partly for them that Saul was working on the suspension-hibernation organelles. Such people deserved the stars.
He strolled under the limbs of the dwarf trees, past old friends who nodded amiably, and others he still barely knew from out-of-sync duty spans.
It was much like a visit to the park during his younger days. Of course, no one was fooled. Where on Earth, after all, would one see a person with blue-dyed skin playing chess with a human-shaped thing covered in green fungoid and yellow, symbiotic lichen?
Diversity, experimentation. It’s how we’ve learned to live.
He stepped past the statue of Samuel Clemens, for whom the park had been named, and came up to a curtain of water…or rather, near-perfect holographic image of rainbow-diffracting droplets, sprayed from alabaster bowls. The illusory fountain parted without dampening him, and he stepped into a hidden, private glade.
Under a drooping willow canopy, a diminutive oriental tea house lay surrounded by rhododendrons. Saul sat down, crosslegged, before a clear pool, and watched the carp within beat the denudated water frothy with their swishing tails.
It was peaceful here. The rumbling of the great wheel’s bearings, the hushed blowing of the air fans…these were sounds that he knew, intellectually, must exist somewhere. But they had long ago faded way in habituation, like the beating of his heart, into a background barely ever recalled.
“Hello, Saul.”
He looked up as she stepped out of the tea house, a loose kimono flapping about tanned legs, her sandals clicking on the sandy path. She was drying her black hair with towel.
It always did it to him, meeting her like this. Her body had long ago gone into the ecosystem. And yet, she walks in beauty.
“Hello to you, too,” he said. “How’s the water?”
She smiled and settled down to the grass not five feet away. “Fine. A little choppy. But there was a five-foot swell, and peak. Good surfing.”
Their eyes met. Silent laughter. What is Illusion? Saul wondered. And what is reality?
The difference was plain in only one way. She lay as near and clear as an outstretched hand. But he could not touch her, and never would again.
“You look well,” she offered.
He shrugged. “Gettin’ older all th’ time.”
“Even with the perfect symbiotic system?” she teased.
“Even with the perfect symbiotic system, yeah. Of course, one really has to wonder if it matters. Or if time and age are worth worrying about.” He watched her carefully, for although she could control images almost perfectly, her face hid no more from him than it ever had. She was mysterious. And an open book to him.
“It might matter.” Her gaze was distant. “We might make it.”
“Even past perihelion?” He looked at her skeptically.
She was watching the fish the real water she could not touch or disturb in any way except with light and shadow. “Perhaps. If we do, a whole new set of challenges present themselves. Over the last thirty years I’ve come to realize that time could stretch to eternity for me. If so…”
He sighed, feeling he could read her thoughts. “My clones have most of my memories, and my good taste in women. They all love you, Virginia.”
She smiled. “My drones all love you, too, Saul.”
Their eyes met again, irony and tightly controlled loss.
“So nu?” He stretched. “You wanted to tell me something?”
She nodded, and in simulation took a deep breath. “Old Hard Man is dead.”
Saul rocked back. “Suleiman? Ould-Harrad?”
“What did you expect? He never went back into the slots, after the aphelion wars…kept watch all that time to make sure we stuck to out agreement, no encounters with any planet but Jupiter outbound. He was very old, Saul. His people mourn him.”
Saul looked down and shook his head, wondering what Halley would be like without the mystic of the lower reaches.
Who would there be with the nerve to remind Saul Lintz that he was not, after all, anything even faintly resembling the real Creator?
“He left you a bequest,” Virginia went on. “It’s waiting for you, in Deep Gehenna.”
“I’ve never been down there.” Saul felt a queer sensation. Was it fear? He had forgotten what that emotion was, but it might be something akin to what he was experiencing.
“Neither have I,” Virginia whispered. None of her mechs had ever ventured down into the deepest reaches of the comet nucleus, where the strangest things took refuge in the total darkness. She shook herself.
“A guide will be waiting for you at the base of Shaft One, at zero five thirty hours, tomorrow. I—”
She looked up, her eyes unfocusing for a moment. “I’ve got to go now. Carl and Jeff need a simulation run, a big one. It’ll take a lot of core.” She smoothed her kimono over her tanned legs. “Time to doff this body and strip down to bare electrons.”
He stood up along with her. They faced each other. His hand reached out.
“Don’t;” she whispered, her voice gone tense and soft. “Saul…”
His fingers stroked just short of contact with the smoothness that seemed to be her cheek. For an instant, the very tips shone with a flare of pink, and he felt, almost…
“Come again soon.” She sighed. “Or just call and talk to me.”
Then, in a flourish of silk, she was gone.
His new gibbons, Simon and Shulamit, clung to him as he followed the guide—a man who had once been named Barkley and had managed greenhouses for Earth-orbital factories, before being exiled on a one-way mission into deep space. Now, Barkley was his own greenhouse…his own habitat. He wore an ecosystem in green and orange fibers, and fed on this and that…a little light here, a bit of native carbonaceous matter there…
Some types of symbiosis scare even me, Saul thought as they navigated a labyrinth of narrow, twisty passages that took them deeper and deeper into the ice. Faint as Halley’s gravity field was at the surface, Saul could feel its pull fade and finally disappear from sensibility. This was the core, the center. Down here the first grain had formed, four and a half billion years ago, beginning a process of accretion as more and more bits gathered, fusing and growing into a ball of primordial matter. The stuff of deep space.