A shimmer appeared, hung in the air. Then a tanned Virginia stepped through it and waved. “Hi, snookums. Surf’s up. You interested?”
Little Angelique laughed, and the baby squealed with glee. Lani’s second delivery had been, in Saul’s words, “boringly normal.” Both children seemed to accrete weight as Virginia watched; they massed more every day, and ate like firestorms.
Carl gestured downwheel, toward the verdant wilderness of Stormfield Park. “Think we could ever put a lake in here?”
“And then drive waves across it?” Lani asked shrewdly.
He nodded. “Angelique will probably want to copy her aunt.”
“Come now,” Lani said. “There are some things we can’t manage, you know.”
Carl grinned. “Wanna bet?”
Virginia remembered the fall into Jupiter’s gravity well. It had been a time of tension and remorse.
Her tailoring of the subliming winds had canted Halley’s of orbit, added velocity. The divergence from their original path widened steadily as the launchers hammered away unendingly.
It was only a minor deflection in astronomical terms. But it was crucial.
They had come in behind Jupiter’s sweeping path, not in front. They whipped through the proton sleet of the enormous magnetic belts, saw the splotchy face of Io hurl lurid volcanic greetings.
By passing behind the giant world, momentum was added to Halley, not subtracted. Instead of arcing back to the inner solar system, the comet head sped on even faster, shooting outward from the sun. The blazing giant squatted now behind the swiftly fleeing mote, its rays and influence dimming daily.
As they swung out from banded Jupiter, Virginia had studied carefully the faces of the crew who watched the viewscreens. They had looked at one another, realizing the enormity of what they faced.
Now, years later, the bleak resignation of those days had ebbed. It would be centuries before they reached the truly rich realm, where iceworlds clustered in great bee-swarm halos. Vast distances separated them, but in interstellar space such voyages required little energy.
Those faraway iceballs beckoned, fresh supplies of metals and volatiles. There would be a next generation, and a next. They deserved those resources; they deserved opportunity, hope.
Carl, Lani—indeed, all of them—were caught in the coils of slow diminishment.
Saul, though, perhaps could last forever unless some accident claimed him. And even if he died, there were his clones. She would always have a Saul.
Anger, frustration, despair—she came to know these as temporary illuminations of the individual soul, lightning flashes across an abiding dark. Humans had a reaction time evolved from the need to grapple, fight, feed, flee. They were no more conditioned to the slow sway of worlds than a mayfly would be to the Roman empire.
Halley’s crew became accustomed to their destiny and slowly, imperceptibly to themselves, withdrew into their human-centered nooks and crannies. Virginia enjoyed downfacing into their timescale, watching Angelique grow in startling spurts. As confidence in the new techniques grew, others soon joined the first child, and played in tunnels and shafts swept ritually clean of dangerous Halleyforms.
As Halley slowed, climbing out of the shallow sloping trough of the sun’s gravitational well, her attention turned away from science—though she continued to collect data, formulate theories, argue with Saul and the others—and moved on to larger issues.
As Descartes had once done, she was forced to do. She wondered what she could deduce from basic principles. Cogito, ergo sum? But who was the I who made the statement?
To use the jargon of science, she was a new phylum, no longer a vertebrate but biocybernetic. She was a wedding of the organic and the electronic, with a dash of sapient consciousness. By strict definition, a phylum should emerge through evolution by sexual gene sorting and speciation. But once intelligence had appeared. that aeons-long process was outmoded. A new phylum could emerge and develop by design.
The Virginia who now resided in chilled synapses and holo-graphic arrays was not strictly human any longer. Still, she had myriad human signatures and defects, facets and flaws. She could no more ignore the vexations of Saul and Carl and Jeffers and Lani than she could forget her childhood, her father’s rough affection.
Yet she was more. The joy that Carl and Lani felt brought her occasional pangs; Saul’s wistful nostalgia for her embodiment gave real pain. But though she understood and felt all this, she came to see it as a subset of the larger issues that confronted her. These frail people were bound up in the true passing life that the laws of natural selection had decreed-their deaths were written into their bones. Even Saul, her fellow immortal, rode the hormone tide. They felt deeply and thought upon the mortal questions.
In the Oort Cloud there circled beneath a sheen of unblinking stars a trillion cometary nuclei, more land than ever promised any ragged band of wanderers. The colonists would have Carl as their Joshua—an irony that had undoubtedly already occurred to Saul—and he would lead them forth.
But while Virginia would help them, and tend to their needs as best she could, she also had her own unique destiny as the first in a new kind.
If she represented a new phylum, the first law must be survival. That was why she now looked upon the attack from Earth as an unplanned, fortunate outcome of mankind’s stupidity. Earth could have had her, could have overcome its fears and welcomed the new phylum. But now she was embarked upon a new course, one eventually to her advantage.
She needed time to think, to explore.
The old species of Homo sapiens on Earth would inevitably spread, first into the solar system, then perhaps beyond. They had already shown their hostility to the strangeness encased in the iceworlds. Their fears would take centuries to abate.
Virginia knew, even if her human cargo did not, that there would never be a return to the kingdom of the Hot. Human societies, once grown apart, seldom can meet again on even, friendly terms. Far worse for two phylums.
She had time for poetry, for endless Byzantine pathways of contemplation. She even thought that she could glimpse the way it must be, when they reached the great cloud of worlds which drew them out.
The human species would have a divided destiny now, strands that could progress for a while along separate courses. There would be less pain if they remained aloof.
She calculated the probable evolution of Carl Osborn’s new species of Man, and of her own phylum, and was pleased. Reproduction, adaptation—these problems were vast, but she felt herself equal to them.
And as for Planetary Humanity… By her calculations, the new phylum and the old species would not meet again for four thousand years. Good. There was time enough to think about it.