Children of the Comet (5 page)

CHAPTER 8

6,000,000,000 A.D.

The Oort Cloud

Torris wasn't ready to die. Knowing it was futile, he managed, with a convulsive effort, to contort his body upward and grasp the rope above his trapped ankle. Even as he felt the snare loosen—too late—he had an upside-down view of the woman's face through her clouded helmet as she drew back the bowstring and revised her aim upward. She was shaking her head sadly, as if to reproach him.

Before she could loose the arrow, there was a commotion in the leaves above. A flutterbeast had been lurking there, probably hoping to snatch any prey caught by the web spinner.

Startled, the woman spun around and let the arrow fly just as the creature swooped to rake her with its claws. Her aim was off, and the arrow went clear through one of the outspread wings. But it had thrown the flutterbeast off too, and she was able to duck in time. The beast sailed past her, brushing against Torris in the process. It collided with a section of branch and twisted around to launch itself again from the new platform.

By that time, Torris had his feet under him and turned himself into a projectile that bowled the woman over and sent her weapon flying. He had a close-up look through the faceplate at a striking face, dark eyes huge with surprise, and features sharper and more angular than those of the women of his own tribe.

And then, without a moment to spare, he rolled the two of them into a crevice in the branch and squeezed them as deep into the cleft as was possible.

It was barely deep enough. The creature's claws scrabbled at them, only inches away. The huge flat snout pressed against the opening, and the creature had edged a bulbous eye in place to peer malevolently at them. Torris stabbed at it with his knife, and it withdrew.

They huddled together for what seemed like hours before the flutterbeast decided to give up. Even so, they waited another long interval before they risked emerging. The dark-eyed woman surveyed their surroundings with the painstaking thoroughness of a hunter, then crept out on the branch to retrieve her bow. Torris did nothing to stop her.

Torris found his own spear and bow and donned his backpack again. The woman retrieved her kit from where she had stowed it. They exchanged a wary look, then started climbing together to a safer neighborhood.

Her name was Ning. She was a huntress, a concept that Torris at first found hard to grasp. But she made him understand that in the Tree that she came from, women hunters were not uncommon. They banded together in sororities of five or six women and generally hunted in pairs or small parties. They were women without men, or women whose men were lazy, or incompetent or abusive, or whose men had died. The hunting parties included girls as young as nine or ten who were taught by their mothers or grandmothers and taken along on hunts to help with the butchering or carrying the kill home. Ning was unusual in that she had been taught to use a bow at an early age by her father, who wasn't too stiff-necked to partner with his mate and who was proud of his little girl's prowess. When Ning's father was killed by a flutterbeast, her mother and grandmother had taken her with them into a hunting association. She was only a little older than Torris, but she already had a reputation as an extraordinarily gifted hunter who often hunted alone, as a few men did.

The inhabitants of Ning's Tree had been watching the slow drift of the two Trees toward each other for years, and their young men were just as eager as those of Torris's tribe for a chance at a bride raid. It would be years more before the Trees were close enough to make the leap possible.

But Ning was audacious enough—or reckless enough—to brave the deadly gap. Game had been scarce lately in the upper branches of her own Tree. She announced, to much shaking of heads and not a little resentment from the young men, that she was going to make the attempt.

Torris gathered that she had launched herself from a springy branch in the upper reaches of the Tree, timing its slow rotation to give her an extra boost, with no witnesses to see her off. She had taken along a large sack of explosive seed pods and a bladder of heat chemicals from a slaughtered stovebeast to trick them into bursting.

Even so, she had spent days adrift in the void without food or water, having decided to trade them for extra air, judiciously setting off a seed pod from time to time for a course correction or additional thrust.

But she'd won her crazy gamble. She landed, weak and hungry but still alive. She replenished her supplies, and after a day's rest started hunting. She bagged a wild meatbeast right away and without pause started hunting again. Like Torris, she took the butchered carcass with her in a sling between her forays. Her lunatic plan was to tie four or five carcasses together and catapult them toward her Tree with a gigantic slingshot spliced together from lengths of animal sinew. She actually planned to ride the carcasses back. This time, she told Torris, she'd have something to eat on the way back.

They made camp together, still a little wary of each other, and spent what was left of the red starlight with their heads pressed together, exchanging helmet talk. Her dialect was different from that of Torris's tribe, but they found that, with a little patience, they were perfectly able to make themselves understood. By the time they made camp, Torris had already grasped the basic outlines of her story through nothing more than finger talk and a little lip reading. Interestingly enough, though the spoken words often differed, their finger talk was almost identical.

Now she was telling Torris that she had realized after a few days that someone was stalking her too.

“I thought you were my stalker,” she said in her faint helmet voice. It sounded as if she were talking to him from the other end of an ice cave.

“And I thought you were
my
stalker,” he said with a laugh. Then, more soberly, “I think I know who it is.”

“When I caught a glimpse of him in the distance, he had a suit like yours, with patterns of beads instead of embroidery, and it was insulated in squares like yours instead of being sensibly padded in triangles. One night when I was asleep, he stole some of my supplies, including a spare airbag and one of my carcasses. What he didn't steal, he wantonly destroyed.”

“That's him all right,” he said.

“I sent an arrow after him,” she said fiercely, “but I missed. But I scared the lifelight out of him from the way he danced. Now he knows I'll kill him. He won't bother us again.”

They shared a hasty meal in a joint shelter, then set up their sleeping sacks side by side—back to back so that they could keep a lookout in both directions. Ning seemed to fall asleep almost immediately, as far as Torris could tell. At least he felt no movement after a minute or two. Torris himself tossed uncomfortably, beset by confusing thoughts. He tried in vain not to think about Ning. For one thing, she was about the same age as Secondmother. That was troubling. She was not from his tribe, which made her fair game, yet he couldn't seem to sort out his feelings.

In the morning, she was cheerful and he was glum. They joined their air sacks together for another shared meal, collected their gear, and resumed their climbing. Torris wondered if being in the company of someone else during a Climb was a mortal sin, even if the other person was not another Climber pursuing a Tree dream, was not a male, and was not even a member of the tribe. It was indubitable that being with someone who could share food, survival chores, and hunting was a help within the meaning of the taboo. In the end, he decided to leave the question to Claz. There might be some kind of penance or purification rite.

It occurred to him that he could choose not to tell Claz anything, but he dismissed the idea. He also could separate himself from Ning, but he found he didn't want to do that. Ning herself seemed to take it for granted that they would stay together. She was headed to the top of the Tree herself, hoping for better hunting. And besides, there was the problem of the stalker. They hadn't seen him again, but that didn't mean anything. There was always the danger that he was watching from a distance, waiting for a chance to separate them.

They climbed for another two days without incident. Ning bagged another meatbeast, a big torpedo-shaped male with vestigial fins and oversized tusks that made it especially valuable, and Torris was given the job of dragging it along.

She was the one who raised the question of the Tree dream. “Why do you climb, Tor-ris?” she said during one of their rest pauses. “I climb to find better hunting, but that is not what drives you, right? You are content to let me do the hunting, but at the same time, I think you would be happy to live on mushrooms and hoppers while climbing, and there is something that bothers you about accepting help from me.”

Reluctantly, not knowing if he was violating another taboo, he explained that the Climb was a rite of manhood and that each Climber must face it alone.

“But not a rite of womanhood, is that not so?” she said with a peculiar smile that had a hint of mockery in it.

For some ridiculous reason the question made him feel defensive. “No,” he admitted.

She knew all about Tree dreams, but the ritual was different in her tribe, she said.

“The Dream is for boys, yes. But it is a joyous occasion for his kin, and we have a Dream ceremony in which even the women and girls are allowed to share. We don't believe that a boy should be left to have his Dream alone, helpless in his delirium, when any predator—animal or human—can come along and harm him. At the very least, he is accompanied by his father or an uncle or some trusted older man who can watch over him, and to whom he can tell his Dream when he returns to his senses. More often, his family makes the Climb with him.” Again there was that mocking smile. “Sometimes there is even a woman or two along to take care of the men's comfort and feeding.”

He tried to digest the strange new ideas but failed. He felt a vague sense of unease.

“The Trees give us our laws, and we know these laws by our Dreams,” he finally said lamely, quoting the catechism that Claz had taught him.

“Don't trouble yourself about it, Tor-ris,” she said. “Soon I will have enough meatbeast carcasses and I will leave your Tree and go back to my own people. Perhaps we will meet again one day when our Trees come closer and you can join your young men on a bride raid.” She gave him a smile, a mischievous one this time. “Unless our young men go on a bride raid first. For now, Tor-ris the Pious, you are welcome to your Dream, and you can return to your cave to tell it to your priest.” He didn't know how to reply to that. She didn't seem to be angry with him. He settled for saying, “We still have an hour of light left. We'd better start climbing again.”

CHAPTER 9

3,500,000,000 A.D.

Quasar 3C-273

The klaxon hoot of the emergency override woke him up. Joorn glanced bleary-eyed at the clock face on his personal screen. It was about an hour too early to get up.

“Permission granted,” he said, and the screen blinked to show him the close-up features of an elderly man who seemed to have a bloody nose. He recognized the face of one of his older shipmates—Stefan, the man's name was, the one who'd been awaiting a housing assignment down below in the growing residential area of New Brussels. Of course! Stefan would be one of those who knew his code, and someone who wouldn't abuse it.

“Captain,” he said, “you'd better come quick. Something's happening here, and it's …”

Then there were rough hands yanking Stefan away from the screen, and Joorn got a longer view of a shipboard double cabin, with Stefan in disarrayed nightclothes being manhandled by somebody wearing an infinity tabard over his shirt. Over by the bulkhead, two more men in tabards were restraining Stefan's frightened-looking wife.

A large hand appeared, and Joorn's screen went blank. He tried to revive it and found it wasn't working anymore.

He dressed quickly and went out into the corridor. People in their nightclothes were milling about and being systematically rounded up and herded in groups by more young men in tabards toward the passages leading to the public facilities. Some of them were brandishing the titanium pipes or using them to poke and prod, but Joorn didn't see anyone actually being struck.

No one molested him. He'd had the foresight to snatch his old uniform jacket from the hook by the door where it had been retired, and perhaps they had no orders concerning him.

He headed down the corridor where he knew Stefan was billeted. He was challenged only once by a young bully-boy who detached himself from his compatriots and floated into his path with his hand up.

“Hold it right there, mister!”

He drew himself up as well as anyone could while hanging in midair and used the sharp-edged voice of authority he'd honed in some forty years of giving orders.

“What's your name, fellow?” he barked. “Who do you report to? Don't you recognize your captain?” For a moment, he was afraid it wasn't going to work, but then, after a doubtful glance at the jacket and its insignia, the young cockerel backed down.

Joorn continued, and when he found Stefan's corridor, it was already clear of people. A door hung open halfway down, and Joorn aimed himself for it. He landed feetfirst inside the doorway and found Oliver waiting for him along with a trio of bully-boys.

“Glad you could make it, Captain,” Oliver said.

“What's going on, Oliver, and where's the person who lives here?” Joorn demanded.

“The old man is fine. He's been taken to a holding area, where he'll be safe until it's over. When the boys here saw that he'd succeeded in contacting you, they thought they'd better let me know. I shouldn't have overlooked you.”

“Where's Professor Karn?”

“He's in the comm center, negotiating with the Council. They get their people back, and we get ours. Including yours. The professor insisted on that. I told him you could only get in the way, but I guess that you and him go way back. We should be ready to leave this system within a week.”

Joorn turned to go. One of the enforcers stepped in his way. The other two closed in on either side of him.

“Don't do anything foolish, Captain,” Oliver said.

“I want to see Karn.”

“All in good time, Captain. For the time being, we're going to lock you in your cabin for your own safety.”

The two henchmen took over. One of them gripped him by the upper arm. Joorn shook him off, but the man only grabbed him again, more firmly this time. They escorted him unsmilingly through a maze of corridors that were already emptying, as more and more of the habitat's occupants were caught in the roundup. Some of the people recognized him, or recognized the uniform, but were too intimidated to call out to him.

When they arrived at his quarters, one of his keepers went inside to make sure the cabin was empty. Then they thrust him inside and closed the door. Joorn heard an electronic click. He tried the knob, but it wouldn't turn. His comm screen wouldn't work either, and he was unable to rouse it. He poured himself a drink and sat down. After a couple of hours, the door opened. A pair of briefly glimpsed men in tabards pushed Alten inside and closed the door again.

“So they got you too,” Joorn said.

Alten smiled crookedly. “I saw Karn himself. He apologized but said we'd be a distraction. He said to tell you not to worry; it would all be over soon. Enough Homegoers have already been repatriated to make us the majority. He needs them for grunt labor during the trip, if nothing else. You'll be released as soon as we're under way. He'll need your help with the Higgs drive.”

“Do the geniuses doing this realize that if they turn on the Higgs drive before we're clear of the inner system, they'll kill everything on Rebirth's surface, including the colonists?”

Alten looked genuinely shocked. “They're not that crazy.”

Joorn unclenched his teeth. He hadn't realized how tightened up he was. “You said something about making ‘us' the majority,” he said. “Does that mean you're with us?”

“Father, I was never against you. And I still think Karn is a great man.”

“A great physicist, maybe. As a leader of men, he has his deficiencies. Especially in the honesty department.”

Alten was rummaging through Joorn's kitchen alcove. “Have you got anything to eat around here? I don't think the commissary's going to be open for a while.”

An invisible sea of Higgs bosons surrounded
Time's Beginning
, stretching out to infinity. Matter/antimatter pairs winked in and out of existence—an illusion caused by their restless jiggling back and forth through the extra dimension at the intersection of the Universe with an adjoining brane. The Higgs field had detected the sea but had not yet begun to trap the antimatter particles before they could disappear. When that happened, there would be limitless fuel, stolen from the energy of the vacuum. It would violate the bookkeeping of the Universe, but that would be the problem of the adjacent cosmos.

Joorn was standing in front of a bank of instruments, Alten beside him. Karn was standing well back, giving them space.

Farther back, next to a bulkhead, Oliver had stationed himself with some of his young men. They didn't seem to be the same contumelious types as the bullies who had rounded up the habitat dwellers, and none of them were wearing the infinity tabards. There were no titanium pipes visible. Instead they were wielding data pads and paying close attention. One skinny fellow with an intense manner was taking notes on paper, on a loose sheaf that kept getting away from him.

Oliver was showing his impatience. “What are you waiting for? We've had the Higgs field focused on the decay products and ready to zap hadronic photons for at least five minutes now.”

“Shut up, Miles,” Karn said.

“But—”

“Don't distract the captain.”

Oliver simmered silently, his narrow face darkening, but he subsided. The apprentices stopped tapping at their data pads, looking uneasy, then resumed after a moment.

Joorn took his time, his eyes darting from one display to another, comparing streams of data, then, at measured intervals, punching in a command.

“Okay, we've got our Higgs parent particles,” Joorn drawled, “and the Feynman diagrams say they're decaying into two protons faster than you can blink. Now the trick is to freeze them before they can disappear and bat them one hundred and eighty degrees to bounce them off the mirror assembly.
Voil
à
!
Hadronic photons! Photons with actual mass, billions of times heavier than they ought to be.”

The skinny fellow with the pencil was scribbling as fast as he could. The others were peering earnestly at the blur of symbols streaming by on the displays.

“The God Particle,” Karn said with mock reverence. “That's what they called it in the twenty-first century. And what Neocreationists like Brego are still calling it. Remember the old bull sessions in the dorm, Joorn?”

“Don't knock it, Delbert,” Joorn said. “Hawking didn't.” He kept his eyes on the displays.

“Jackass,” Karn said. “Brego, I mean. He was still making threats even after we took the ship. As if he could possibly organize his dullard clods into an effective force and—”

“Alten, start focusing the mirror assembly,” Joorn cut in.

“Right,” Alten said. The skinny fellow stopped scribbling and stared worriedly at the screen that showed the patch of sky they had come from. Rebirth's sun was just a star like any other now, a little brighter than most.

“Don't worry, Daniel,” Joorn said without taking his eyes off the screens. “We're safely out of range.”

His fingers moved over the keys like a pianist playing by ear. The floor gave a shudder, and then everyone's weight, which had been only about a tenth of Earth-normal during the outward swing, began to increase.

It would be a year at constant one-G acceleration before they reached the upper limit, brushing the speed of light itself. By then the ship would outweigh whole galaxies, and eons would pass in hours. The stars ahead and behind would have dopplered into blind spots as the rainbow hoops of the starbow compressed themselves first into a thin halo, then squeezed themselves out of existence.

And a mere thirty years later, they would be home.