Lani’s eyes widened. “What? Leave the solar system entirely?”
“Effectively.” Virginia said sympathetically, “They will then be convinced that Halleyforms will never reach Earth.”
Carl nodded. “No point to chasing us. Too expensive, anyway.”
“What’ll we do out there?” Lani asked incredulously.
“We’ll live. We’ll die.” Carl stared, unseeing, at the main screen where numbers rippled. “Into the Oort Cloud…” he said distantly. “There are supposed to be trillions of iceworlds there, asteroid-sized. That’s what Halley was, before some nudge, maybe from a passing star, tumbled it into the inner system.”
Lani asked doubtfully, “And once we’re there? Can we use those for resources?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll have hundreds of years to think about it on the way out.”
Lani settled into a webbing, her face composed. “We’ll all be dead before then, even with sleep slotting.”
Carl felt an odd, distant resignation. Somehow he had known that he would never leave this place. They were consigning not only themselves, but all further Halley generations as well, to an outer darkness of limitless unknowns. Fleeing into the abyss.
Lani said, “I suppose we must… plan for what we can do, not what we’d rather do.”
Life’s a series of overcoming dooms, one at a time, Carl thought. He knew they could do it, too, if they simply refused to give in to despair. If we have something to live for.
SAUL
Half of Stormfield Park had been turned into a nursery. The old centrifugal wheel had been reinforced to spin faster, providing a full tenth of an Earth gravity to help young bones grow strong. That was hard on some of the older generation, but still they came often, when off work, to listen to the high, piping voices shrieking in play and laughter.
Saul felt that way as he walked carefully along the grass-lined, curving path at the rim of the wheel-park, where holograms gave the illusion of a cityscape just beyond a low hedge, with skies spotted with warm, moist clouds. Mothers and nursery workers tended their growing crowd of boisterous charges nearby, watching their games, admiring the infants’ clear-eyed, long-limbed beauty.
The children had saved Halley Colony… if in no other way than by lightening the spirits of those who now knew they would never see Earth, Mars, the asteroids, or any unfamiliar human face ever again.
We are the first starship, Saul had come to realize, two orthree centuries ahead of schedule.
Oh, Halley was still tied to old Sol’s apron strings, but their ship home was irreversibly on course toward the outer cloud now, where trillions of iceballs drifted in the not-so-entirely-empty range between the stars. Alien ground. They would live or die on their ingenuity, and on whatever they had taken with them.
On that subject Saul had just completed an important study, an inventory of the genetic pool available for the coming generations. The question was an important one, for it might mean the difference between the colony’s survival or a long, slow decline into degeneracy and death.
There’s plenty, enough heterozyqosity, he had decided A broad cross section of the types that populate old Earth. It should provide enough variety. Especially with the mutation rate we can expect. The bigger problem will be maintaining a large enough population.
Halley had enough resources, for now, to keep the colony going into the indefinite future. Deuterium mined from the ice would fire the fusion piles—now relocated out on the surface to minimize waste heat—until they managed the skill to put together a proton-power generator from one of the Phobos designs. Their skill at recycling and ecological management was already impressive, and would grow.
If husbanded carefully, the trillion tons of ice and hydrocarbons might keep a couple of hundred humans at a time—along with their plants and animals—alive for a hundred generations or so.
Just enough time. For in a couple of thousand years, the comet’s hurtling velocity would ebb as it approached its new aphelion, out where the Hot was only the brightest star. And out there, drifting slowly, were hundreds of billions of other great lumps of primordial matter left over from the birth of the solar system. Once their present near-hyperbolic velocity had leaked away to mere meters per second, there ought to be plenty of chances to snag other comet heads.
Saul stopped at a point where the guardrail hedge opened at the rim of the curving wheel. He was still thinking about the images Virginia had shown him, just a few minutes ago, in the little glade beneath her tea house… a simulation of those days, so long from now, when the men and mechs of Halley would nudge their tired, depleted old home near fresh new ice-specks in the great blackness. Perhaps they would seize two, three, or more, and drift apart again on their new colonies.
And from there? Virginia’s simulation projected no limits. The Oort Cloud was vast, and humans were noted settlers.
And our own sun’s Oort Cloud brushes against the comet shoals of other stars…
The image she had presented was daunting. She already contemplates in terms of aeons… it’s going to take me a lot longer to get used to thinking that way. My own style of immortality is different. It retains the feel of Time as no friend.
He passed Lani Nguyen-Osborn, sitting on a park bench under a dwarf maple, nursing her new son. Her eldest child—little Angel Angelique—played in the grass nearby.
Lani smiled and waved. Saul grinned. They had spoken only an hour ago when he was on his way to see Virginia. He was due to have dinner with Carl’s family later tonight. In the meantime, he still had work to do.
The vista of an Earthy city cleared as his section of the wheel approached ground level. He stepped through the break in the guard hedge into the microgravity of Halley’s caverns, and let himself drift into the soft sand braking embankment. A cloud of particles puffed outward as he landed, then slowly settled to the floor.
He launched off toward the exit leading to his laboratory. The half-living sphincter lock cycled him through to the tunnels with a soft, moist sigh.
The gene-pool survey had been very good news—even if it had reminded him that neither he nor Virginia would ever contribute. All of his clones were sterile, and her physical body had long ago become part of the ecosphere.
Perhaps it was for the best, at that. For his clones would be round as the generations came and went. The decedents of Carl and Lani and Jeffers and Marguerite would be mixing their genes, sorting and restoring until a new species of humanity emerged. If all of those “Saul Lintz” models also kept having children, over the centuries, it would muck up the process.
Heaven forbid! He laughed at the thought. He had long ago come to terms with the irony of his situation…the clever design of his blessing and his curse.
Now, though, another bit of research occupied him. Something even more significant. More amazing.
Down at the end of one little-used corridor, Saul spoke a code phrase in Aramaic and a door hissed open. He slipped past the gene-crafted guard-cockatrice into his private lab. He had his neural tap socketed into place before his frame even settled horizontally onto the webbing.
Program… Rock of Ages… hecommanded his personal computer. Colors shimmered and steadied.
The image on the central holo tank was of that deep, secret room down at the heart of the Weirder domain, where Suleiman Ould-Harrad had met his faith, in his own way. The horned, carved-stone bier rotated in the holographic image.