Cruz’s smile was distant, reflective, as though he peered at something far away. “I was the captain of the Edmund, and for a brief time, while we tunneled in here and lived. But now Halley is a ship itself. It’s been sailing under her true captain for decades now. I…I am a passenger.”
“No, sir, that’s not.”
“Someday I aspire to become a ship’s officer. Not captain, however. And I shall not forget who held the helm for so long.”
Cruz held out a hand. Carl blinked, then slowly brought forth his and shook it.
All along he had hoped Saul’s wunderkinder could revive Cruz. Now they had done it, at the very last minute… and it was no panacea after all. He should have seen that. Cruz was right. Miguel Orlando Cruz-Mendoza was no older than the day he had died, but Halley was seventy years transformed by the hand of that clawing, cantankerous, blissfully ingenious and flagrantly stupid lifeform that was too stubborn to stay at home and forget about riding iceballs into oblivion.
To his own amazement, Carl realized he was already evaluating his former captain, weighing his potential place in the crew. Agood man, he thought. I’llput him to work.
Hours later he found himself returning from an inspection of some farm caverns and the new modular hydroponics spirals. They were cleverly arranged to extract waste heat from recycled sewage, which fed in overlapping helices around the outside. Ultraviolet poured from an axial cool-plasma discharge, and the huge plants had yearned inward toward it He admired the Promethean task of relocating the surface domes into the core, and was making his way back through Shaft 4 when a slow, grumbling crump jarred him away from his thoughts. It seemed to come from the walls themselves.
He tapped into his private line. “Jeffers!”
—I’m on it. Acoustics are pickin’ it up ever’where.—
“An explosion?”
—No pressure drop. I think it came from the surface.—
Carl called up a quick index-display of the remaining surface cameras. Most showed views of gossamer, upside-down Niagaras—roiling founts of vapor soaring from the ice and whipping in long arcs up into a shifting, gauzy sky. Solar ultraviolet ionized the gas. The sun’s particle pressure then turned these fountains outward, bending the flow into the ghostly streamers of the coma.
Above the far horizon a block of grainy ice tumbled end over end, a kilometer up in the sky. Nearby a huge jagged hole yawned, itself a source of fresh volatiles, green and ruby strands snaking from the pit in twisting filaments.
“Seismic outblow? Or maybe a patch of amorphous ice changing state suddenly.”
When the stressed crust ice gave way, it could rip free entirely. That instantly transferred the sun’s heating to fresh deposits, which hollowed new channels and in time would further deepen the cracks.
Jeffers said, —Yeah, looks it. Virginia was right ’bout that, too.—
“She said it wouldn’t happen very much until perihelion.”
—Well, I guess this’s just a taste of it.—
Carl nodded to himself and cast off. He passed parties of Weirds, swathed in green and purple growths, who scarcely took notice of him. They were checking the old seals for intrusions by older Halleyforms, which they would scrape away and replace with mutated, human-friendly forms the Sauls had worked out.
Further on he met two Saul clones, gently coasting a revived sleep slotter to one of the warmer bins. They nodded in unison and called to him, “Only twenty more probables left.” Carl laughed.
They were fully developed adults now, with minds of their own. They even had the same gestures and accent. But somehow he couldn’t think of them as anything but Saul substitutes. The fact that Saul had successfully cloned himself, while attempts at duplicating other crew members had failed, meant that his odd symbiotic adaptation was crucial. Quite possibly, only he could be copied in the Halley environment. So down through these last few decades, the multiSauls had been invaluable for their resistance to random new ailments, and their curious internal discipline. Saul had used JonVon’s memory-transfer apparatus to instill whole chunks of his own expertise into his clones.
What he had learned might have enabled others to raise natural children without fear. It would have been good, hearing peals of childish laughter in the shafts. But the long fall to perihelion had dampened any such idea. No one could bear the knowledge that the promise of childhood might never blossom.
Carl’s comm buzzed and Virginia said, —You were doubting my prognosis?—
“That blowout came a little early, don’t you think?”
—No. After all, I deal in probabilities, sir, not predictions. If you want, why don’t you call up Lefty d’Amario? He can check my calculations.—
Somehow the old tingle still ran through him when the coquettish flavor laced through her voice. “Okay, I’m nor griping. No need to get huffy. You monitoring those stress meters Jeffers implanted all over?”
—Of course. I can always spare a nanosec or two.—
“And?”
—Minor tremors here and there. Some faulting along Shaft Two. Nothing to get perturbed about.—
“Great. You been filling in Cap’n Cruz?”
—You are captain, Carl. Everybody keeps telling you, even if you don’t like it.—
“I didn’t ask for the job.”
—Nobody else could handle what’s coming.—
He felt a sudden spurt of the old anger. “What’s coming is death, Virginia.”
—I know no such thing.—The voice was prim, circumspect.
“You did the simulations yourself.”
—Number-crunching isn’t reality. I should know, eh, friend Carl? There may be variances in the cross-correlation matrices.—
“Don’t give me all that. Halley’s scraping in too close, and she’s been too battered to stand this. The only question is whether we’ll fry or boil when this iceberg blows apart.”
—There are many unpredictables. But also some measures we can take.—
Carl had been smoothly coasting down a tunnel, automatically checking for cracks. This remark made him stop. “What can we do?”
—Pipe some of the surface heat inward, to offset some of the stress arising from the temperature differentials. In other words, reverse the outflow system and spread the surface heat into lower, cooler ice.—
“And if some inside ice vaporizes? The pressures—”
—We vent it. It will aid in shielding from the sun.—
“Ah.” He felt a flush of hope. “How come you didn’t mention this before?”
—I just thought of it. I’m only a machine.—
Faintly, he heard the soft roar of surf, the whisper of trade winds, a distant rumble of ocean squalls gathering. Virginia’s metaphorical world within the network. Somewhere a voice laughed, “Ke Pii mai nei ke kai!”
So she had company, somehow. He smiled. “Look, I’ll call a meeting. We should look into—”
She laughed. —Same old Carl. One minute you’re grousing about everything, but give you a problem to work on and—bingo!—
He flushed. She had always had an uncanny ability to stay one move ahead of him. He pushed off along a tunnel that led home.
—There’s plenty of time to figure out the engineering, Cap’n. Go on about your business. —The tinkling chuckle, ringing in his ears. —Lani’s waiting.—
And she was. She embraced him silently and they spun lazily in the middle of the room, oblivious. Carl had at last mastered the art of putting business aside once he came back to their small apartment, and this time he did so again, even though the implications of Virginia’s remarks were enormous. He was tempted to tell Lani, but then he held back. Hope had been kindled among them so many times over the decades, only to be snuffed out by the brute certainty of some unyielding astronomical fact. So he banished all the fretful chorus of thoughts and simply kissed her.