People did their jobs, served their shifts—and holed up with a few loved ones, watching the gaudy maelstrom outside through the video displays. Jeffers had developed a new kind of light pipe that could snake out from a deeply buried camera, and thus reduce risk, but still high-pressure vents opened and gushers of foaming, red-rich mud flooded many of Virginia’s observation stations.
She reserved a tiny piece of Core Memory for her “office.” There she sat amid a hum of machinery, feeling the reassuring rub of a chair, the flickering of consoles. I wish I could spare enough Core to go for a swim, she thought. I can feel my own tensions, too…
As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand years had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well-springs.
Thus, the gathering background chorus of tremors, the crump of a crumbling wall, the low gravelly mutter of strained ice—all these sounds drove the crew inward. Not into solidarity, but to the fleshy reassurance and consolations of fellow spacers, or weirders, or Hawaiians. Like sought like for what might be the final hours.
Except for one lonely figure, who seldom left Central.
“Saul,” she said to him as an amber plume spouted from the surface, throwing streaks of lacy light across the familiar, lined face. He had been sitting by the display a long time, his mind far away as he rolled a small stone in his hand, over and over. “Saul?”
“Ah—oh, yes?” His lined face looked up from the bit of rock.
“I’m sure you could watch elsewhere.”
He shrugged. “Stormfield’s closed. I’m not needed in sick bay right now. There’s no place else I particularly want to be.”
“I am sure Carl and Lani would welcome you. They are awake, watching.”
He raised a hand. “No, I’ll let them be. Don’t want to push in where I’m just a fifth wheel.”
“You worry over that old stone a lot,” she said to change the subject. He had been turning it over in his hands for hours.
He looked at the dark gray lump. “It’s from Suleiman’s bier. I’ve carried it around for weeks, studying it. But that’s… that’s not what I was thinking about right now.”
His gaze drifted over to the refrigerated unit holding sixteen liters of superchilled organic processor. Virginia thought she understood.
“You are with me no matter where you are in Halley, Saul.”
He blinked, nodded. “I know… it’s just…”
“Just that here the physical proximity of my organic memory is reassuring?”
He smiled the old wry smile, slightly puckered lips and crinkled eyes together conveying an irony that was never far from his own image of himself, she knew. “I’m that obvious?”
“To the one who loves you, yes.”
“There are times I wish…”
“Yes?”
“I could have found a way to clone you.”
“So you would know me—or someone like me—in the flesh?”
“Memory only makes some things worse.”
“There…” She felt no real hesitancy, and in any case with her speed the indecision would take only milliseconds, but she had to maintain the nuances of a living persona. “… There are our recordings.”
He chuckled dryly. “You know how many times I’ve played them.”
A hint of shyness, yes. “I could… augment them.”
“No!” He slammed a fist into his web-chair. “I want the real thing, the real… you.”
“It would be.”
“When we recorded ourselves, it was a lark, like couples taking Polaroid pictures of themselves in the bedroom. We never intended that only one of us would play them back.” He shook his head. “This way, without you—the real you…”
“But I am me. More real than any holo-image! And if I enter into the sensory link, it is an older and probably wiser Virginia whom you will meet. Me.”
Saul had resisted this suggestion before, for reasons she did not fully understand. But now, perhaps out of the pressing loneliness that danger brings, he lifted his head and stared directly into her opticals. “I… it would?”
She knew she would not guarantee that it would be some genuine Virginia, fixed in amber. She was not the personality that had flooded into the cramped JonVon persona and inundated it. Slow evolution and self-actuated advances had brought her a vast distance since those years. But Saul did not have to know that nor did anyone, and it would be of comfort to him.
“Come to me, Saul.”
He put aside the stone and reached for the neural tap. To her surprise, she felt nervous.
Perhaps for her it would be a returning, too.
Shortly before perihelion the sun stopped its retreat to the south and began rising again. As the disk grew, it swept toward the equator. There was perpetual noon as the comet shuddered and erupted beneath the unending blaze. The southern hemisphere, gutted and gouged for months, now cooled as the north came under ferocious attack.
Sublimating water and carbon dioxide carried heat away from the fast-spinning mote. Its surface cracked in many places, following the weakening imprints Man had stamped upon it for seven decades. Fresh volatiles sublimed and exploded. Sharp chunks weathered to stubs within minutes, as though sandblasted. Pebbles rose and formed hovering sheets which momentarily shielded the ice beneath, then were blown away to join the gathering dust tail.
At the north pole, so far spared the worst, the clawing sun bit deep. Since the times of great plagues, some factions had buried the irrecoverably dead deep in the ice near the pole. Now the Hot found them.
By chance, the sight was visible over a light pipe that surfaced in a sheltered nook at the exact north pole. Exploding gases beneath lifted the wrapped mummies and hurled them skyward. Blistering heat released ionized oxygen from the ice, and the bodies burst into flame, lighting the landscape with momentary orange pyres. The torches were thrown, tumbling and flaring, up and out against the immense, unknowing forces. They hung in the sky for long moments, like distant glittering castles, and then winked out, plunging forever into the river that rolled out from the sun.
“Goddamn! We’re past it!”
Carl’s amazed face intruded on a 3D design study she was changing. He had used override to break into her mainstream persona.
“Yes. You can rejoice,” she said warmly.
“How’d you do it?”
“Vector mechanics, nothing tougher than that.”
“You were marvelous!” Lani said beside Carl, her eyes wide with wonder at being alive. Virginia realized distantly that they really had expected to die.
“I told you the probabilities,” Virginia said. “Surely you—”
“We figured you were just cheering us up!” Carl laughed.
“I made the calculation accessible, Carl, you dope.” Virginia sent some light chuckles to follow this sentence, reflecting that if anyone had actually checked her, they would’ve found she had in fact reported a survival probability of three to one when it had really been only fifty-two percent. But she had been sure no one would do the entire complicated calculation. In thirty years, everyone had come to rely on her, just as they counted on Saul’s bio-miracles.