To the right, another display showed a sample taken from that ancient rock—symmetrical fossil ribs tracing the outlines of a creature of a very ancient sea.
More screens rippled with data, with microscopic closeups, with detailed isotopic profiles.
For a year now. Saul had been in touch again with Earthside specialists. With Halley confirmed to be on a near-hyperbolic trajectory, the hysteria had dampened on Earth. Guilt and shame played on what passed for news channels, these days. Some of the gifts the colonists had beamed back had also deepened the feeling that contact should be maintained until the planets merged with the roiling noise of the sun and all talk between brethren ended in the hiss of static.
The Earth scientists had worked on his data, confirming in detail what he had already worked out in general.
Nearly five billion years ago—in one of the gassy, dust-rich spiral arms that laced the Milky Way like filmy pinwheel spokes—a young, massive, hot star had raged through its short life and exploded in the titanic outburst of a supernova. In so doing, it had seeded nearby space with glowing clouds of heavy elements, from carbon and oxygen to plutonium and osmium… all cooked up while the blue giant had coursed through its brief but glorious youth. Save hydrogen and helium, all the elements that made up the planets—and human beings—had originated in that way, from great outbursts of primeval heat and light.
This supernova not only spewed great gouts of heavy matter into space. It also drove mammoth shock waves, which compressed the interstellar gas and dust, forming eddies and whirling concentrations.
A Jeans Collapse—named for a great twentieth-century astronomer—was triggered. Here and there amid the shocked, metal-enriched clouds, whirlpools condensed, flattened, formed glowing centers…suns.
And round those new stars, tiny fragments coalesced, from rocky bodies nearer in, to great gas worlds, to distant, vast swarms of tiny lumps of frozen vapor…
All geochemistry had, until now, been dated from the supernova that triggered the formation of the solar system. Never had any matter originating outside that event come into human hands. Until now, that is.
The rock Suleiman Ould-Harrad had found under the heart of Halley had none of the isotopic ratios scientists were familiar with. It came from a completely different episode of creation.
Joao Quiverian would have loved this, Saul thought. He mourned the loss of a good mind to the madness of those long, hopeless years.
And Otis Sergeov, as well. I do hope we’ve learned a lesson.
The final data unfolded before him, the confirmation of several years’ guesswork and labor.
Proved. The stone came from ocean sediments laid down long before Earth had begun to swirl and form out of cosmic debris. The little animals whose fossils he had traced had swum in seas of a world not very unlike the Earth, with chemistry not so very different. But they had lived before the sun was even a star to wink in their cloud-flecked skies.
Saul read snatches from the message from Earth.
Radiation damage to constituent crystals indicates close proximity to the explosion. Not more than a quarter of a lightyear away from a supernova.
He picked up a chunk of the stone, wearing smooth now from being handled. The planet that this had come from must have circled a smaller star that had the misfortune to be near the giant when it exploded, blowing it to bits and scattering its pieces into the smoke rings of the spiral arms.
Were there watchers, that night? he wondered. Might intelligence have looked up, knowing what was coming, making frantic plans, or resigned peace?
The odds were against it. Probably the planet had only animals and vegetation, and the end came swiftly, without anticipation. That did not make the event any less awesome, or less biblically terrible.
All the native creatures, from microbes to plants to clever little animals… all had died in the very process that most directly led to Earth’s own adventure.
What a universe, he thought.
It was almost a side issue, now, that this also helped explain the presence of life on Halley Almost unbelievingly, at first, Earth’s scientific minds had finally concluded that bits of the bio sphere of the blasted planet must have been carried off in the shock wave, to freeze in the cold of space. Bits of rock—and even once-living matter—would serve as ideal seeds around which the gases of the outer fringes of a new solar system might coalesce. Halley, apparently, had condensed around a lump of the old planet, the way raindrops gather around drifting dust motes in Earth’s fecund sky.
No wonder the traces got richer the deeper one went into the comet. There had been a matrix already, around which the pre-biotic compounds of the pre-solar nebula gathered during those early days.
Saul wondered how many other comets had formed around such seeds. Not many, he imagined. We were just lucky, I guess, he thought ironically.
Or were the old stories of comet-borne disasters really true? Could it be that the Earth had always been “freshened,” from time to time, with new doses of the ancient biology, floating down into the atmosphere each time a comet passed close by? That would help explain why the lifeforms were so compatible. Earth’s life kept incorporating new bits and pieces from the storehouse of deep space.
In a sense, the old destroyed planet still lived. Fragments of pre-ancient organic code floated in all of them, and especially in the colonists of Halley. After all the death and fear of the early days, it was ironic that it would turn out to be of benefit in the long run, contributing to the diversity they would need over the centuries ahead.
Perhaps the people of Halley were not even “human” any longer, not in the classical sense. Not in the way Earthmen were developing, preparing for their own explosion into the galaxy.
They will go to the stars. Hopping from bright pinpoint to bright pinpoint, dwelling down where gravity curls space tightly and suns cook heavy, rocky worlds.
We, on the other hand, will travel more slowly. But we will have the real universe… the spaces in between.
Remembering the simulation Virginia had shown him, Saul smiled.
Over the neural tap he felt a soft brush of presence. Listening in again, my darling? he projected.
Yes. He smiled. For when this body he wore was long gone, his memories would ride another clone… and continue loving Virginia. The Wandering Jew and the Lady in the Machine… they would be a resource for the people, serving for as long as anyone wanted them around.
Immortality is service, he thought.
They held each other in cool, electron arms. And both of them imagined that they heard, faint and ghostly, in the distance, low confirming laughter.
VIRGINIA
Lani bounced the baby on her knee, provoking squeals of terror and delight. Carl beamed at the gleeful pair and kept pumping methodically at his exercise machine. They had to spend half their time in the G-wheel to keep the children’s calcium buildup normal. A tenth of a G was heavy, but imposed no real hardship.
“Want to visit Aunt Ginnie?” Lani asked the baby’s older sister, who nodded with a thumb in her mouth.