Children of the Comet (6 page)

CHAPTER 10

6,000,000,000 A.D.

The Oort Cloud

Torris methodically piled his gear in the fork of two twigs next to the calyx. He topped the pile with his bow and quiver after a short regretful pause. The only thing he retained was the little stovebeast, because it was inside his airsuit and he would freeze to death in minutes without it.

“I'll camp nearby where I can see the Dream nest,” Ning said. “Don't worry, Tor-ris. Have a good Dream, and may the Tree give you wisdom.”

“The Tree does not speak to everyone,” he said. “Sometimes the Dream makes no sense, but the old men always say they have never forgotten it.”

She laughed, then remembered that this was supposed to be a solemn moment. “Yes, some of our young men have Dreams like that too, but then the elders try to interpret it, each with his own opinion. I've noticed that the opinions are usually opinions they've had all along.”

Torris tried to give her a stern look, but that didn't work with Ning. He turned his attention to the calyx, a swelling green structure three times the height of a man. It was ready to receive a Dreamer. Small pollinating creatures were already swarming around the flaring invitation at the top.

“Here, Tor-ris,” she said, handing him a small woven bag. “It is a gift of pollen from our Tree.”

He took the bag, giving her a quizzical look.

“Our priests gave me the offering when they knew I was going to attempt a crossing. They say it is a pious act to give a gift of pollen from one Tree to another. And the Tree thanks the donor with a more powerful Dream for a more ordinary dusting from a few grains received at random from insects.”

Torris had already dusted his suit from another calyx growing on the branch, but he took the bag and thanked her. Then, impatient to begin, he took a nicely calculated leap to the calyx's portal at the top.

The pollinating insects scattered, scurrying in all directions. He carefully pried the portal open, wide enough for him to squeeze himself inside, following the instructions that Claz had given him. It occurred to him, in an unseemly instant of amusement, that he had become a pollinating insect himself. The portal closed above him, but there was still a dim haze of green light seeping through the fleshy walls.

He worked his way downward to the tiny chamber below. He could tell at once that it was warm inside and that there was air—moist air, he could surmise from the moisture that condensed on his faceplate. He overcame an unworthy moment of fear and raised the Face to take a sniff. The air was rich and fragrant, thicker than the kind of air you got from drilling for air pockets in the cambium.

He squirmed out of his airsuit and set the stovebeast free. The furry little animal immediately started climbing upward on its stubby limbs. It was going to have a feast on the insects swarming outside.

He dusted himself with the pollen that Ning had given him and settled down in the nest made by overlapping sepals. He was already beginning to feel sleepy.

He was the Tree. He didn't know how long he had been the Tree; he seemed to have existed for eternity, in a swirl of stars and blackness where stars grew and shrank and changed their colors and sometimes exploded. He was aware of commensal life on and within himself, fluttering in his branches, flourishing on his bark, burrowing shallowly to drink his air and water and the heat of his growth. But their microscopic needs were hardly noticeable in his vastness. He had hosted them as long as he could remember.

Down below, where he drank the ice that nourished him, was a new kind of life that lived between his roots, tiny creatures that had arrived less than a million years ago. One of them was within him now, in the ovule where he gave birth to his seeds. It had brought him a surfeit of pollen—pollen from a Brother Tree—and it was hastening meiosis. He and his brothers had taught these odd new mites from beyond to do that when they had first arrived out of the void, rewarding them with hallucinations that they seemed to find pleasurable.

He turned his ponderous attention to the mite that had climbed from his roots and entered his calyx. He could see it clearly from a height, stretched out on a bed of sepals, having removed its skin, which was made from the skins of other commensal animals, and it had lost its own consciousness and entered his.

To his mild surprise, it seemed to be himself, too dizzy with hallucinogens to sort out the mingled perceptions. He saw himself through an undulating haze. He tried to get back to his body, but the Tree wasn't through with him yet.

He woke up suddenly and completely, perfectly aware of where he was. He had no idea of how long he'd been unconscious, but he was weak and very hungry. The pale light seeping through the pellucid walls had a pinkish cast, so it had been at least a day, maybe more.

At last he was able to move. He got up stiffly and looked around. A central bulge on the receptacle floor seemed to have grown thicker while he slept, and the sweetish smell that had put him to sleep was fading, and that was all. There was sudden movement above and an occlusion of light. He looked up and saw a stovebeast inching its clumsy way downward. Whether it was his or another he couldn't tell.

He swept the little beast up, and it quickly attached itself to the small of his back. He could feel its warmth spreading through his aching spine. It seemed chubbier than before. He climbed into his airsuit and sealed its Face. When he poked his head through the calyx into airlessness, the Treescape was suffused with pink and the first of the Sisters was rising. So it was daybreak of whatever day it was.

His belongings were where he'd left them. He bundled them into his sleeping sack and slung it over his shoulder. For some obscure reason, he didn't feel like stowing his bow away with the rest of his possessions and strung it, carrying it along with his spear. He still had one of his original arrows with Claz's rune on it, along with three more he'd whittled during the Climb, and he was pleased with himself for this evidence of his frugality.

He looked around for Ning's camp and saw what looked like a low-hanging bundle of meatbeast carcasses through the leaves. He set off in that direction with a low-gravity shuffle.

The hanging bundle came into view, with Ning's sleeping sack under it. At first, focused on the sleeping sack, he didn't see the airsuited figure standing off to the side. Then, with a shock, it penetrated his consciousness.

It was someone from his own tribe. Even at a distance, he could tell that it was Brank's airsuit, with its splash of ostentatious beadwork spread across the upper shoulders and down the arms. Brank's back was to him, but Torris could tell that he had an arrow trained on the shadowy form visible through the translucent integument of the sack. Brank had caught Ning during her morning wash, when she was out of her airsuit and unable to emerge into a vacuum. Otherwise she would have had an arrow through him.

Brank seemed to be enjoying himself, taunting her by moving his bow around, aiming the arrow at various parts of her body and pantomiming what he was going to do.

Torris saw it all in a horrified flash and started running forward without thinking. He realized his mistake instantly as he lost contact with the branch and found himself levitating helplessly. It seemed an eternity before his feet found purchase again and he was able to push himself forward with an occasional one-handed assist from a reachable stem.

Brank wasn't aware of the motion behind him yet. At any moment, he could turn his head and get off a quick shot. But he was preoccupied by the game he was playing with Ning, who didn't dare move. She wouldn't have been able to get into her airsuit quickly enough anyway. It was part of the game.

Torris's bow was already strung. He was able to reach around and draw an arrow out of his quiver and fit it to the bowstring without slowing the shallow shuffle that was moving him forward.

He burst through some trailing leaves and branches, bringing the bow up. In the same instant, Brank must have become aware of the minute vibrations that had reached him. He whirled around and loosed the arrow he had been saving for Ning.

Torris would have been unable to dodge, but Brank's aim had been bad, or perhaps he hadn't had time to aim at all. The arrow whizzed past Torris's head, only a finger's width away, and buried itself in a branch.

Torris raised his bow, took deliberate aim, and shot Brank through the chest. Brank took a few teetering steps, his arms flailing, and fell over the edge of the branch he'd been standing on. Torris, feeling weak and drained, fell to one knee and looked down. Brank's body was twisting, falling with nightmarish slowness in the negligible gravity of the comet. Somewhere in the first few miles of its descent, it would probably lodge in a clot of branches. Something prompted Torris to look into his quiver. The arrow he'd drawn had been the last of the ten marked and sanctified arrows that Claz had given him.

He tottered on unsteady legs to Ning's sleeping sack. She was naked and struggling in its cramped interior to get into her airsuit. More quickly than Torris would have expected, she heaved herself out of the sack and was standing before him, her bow cocked and an arrow pointed at his heart.

“Have you killed him?” she said in lip talk.

“Yes,” he said.

She lowered her bow and slid the arrow back into its quiver. “He came early, before I was clad against the vacuum,” she said. “He told me with his arrow for a pointer that I was not to move. He kept me thus while he thought things over. I know that he was trying to think of how to get into the air sack with me and use me for his pleasure. But he did not dare. He knew I would kill him as soon as he was out of his own airsuit. So he decided on this other way. He told me that he would have as much pleasure from it. There are such men. He was tiring of his amusement when you arrived. But I thought I would try to stay alive as long as possible, in case something might distract him. I might be able to scramble into my airsuit quickly enough to get to him with my knife, even with an arrow in me.”

“He's gone,” Torris said. “Food for the scavengers.”

“Show me,” she said.

He took her to the place where Brank had fallen. Together they peered over the edge. Brank's body was floating some tens of man-lengths down. It still hadn't picked up much speed. His bow hovered over him like a judgment.

“You have done well, Tor-ris,” she said. “Why so glum?”

He could not share her fierce joy. He stared after the drifting corpse in horror. He was damned forever. He had violated the deepest of taboos. He had killed another Climber. When he returned to his tribe, he would be an outcast, a pariah.

CHAPTER 11

4,250,000,000 A.D.

Galaxy 3C-295

“Time to start losing weight, is it?” Joorn quipped.

“Almost,” Alten said. “There's still a few more days till turnaround. I'd better go over the numbers one more time.”

Joorn patted his belly in mock dismay. Not that he had much of a belly to speak of. At the age of ninety-five—almost halfway through a normal human lifespan—his stomach was still as flat and hard as it had been at eighty.

“Again?” he said. “Last week you told me I personally outmassed the entire Virgo Cluster. I can't imagine what the ship and all its people weighs by now.”

Alten frowned. “There's something fishy about Karn's data. According to my original calculations, turnaround time should have been a week ago.”

Joorn became serious. “Did you adjust for the new estimates for the expansion of the Universe in the last one and three-quarter billion years?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And the rate of increase of the expansion discovered by Karn's bright young men?”

Alten showed his exasperation. “Father, be serious.”

“Well, then, it's the zig zag.”

“We don't zig zag. You know that. We'd keep losing gamma. We have to keep accelerating in a straight line, with one course correction at the halfway point to allow for the change in position of the Milky Way relative to our signposts.”

“So our signposts do the zig zagging.”

“You could put it that way. The galaxies rush apart not because they're rushing apart but because the Universe is expanding. And expanding faster than the speed of light at the magic boundary—something that Karn and Oliver choose to ignore, brilliant as they're supposed to be. Relativity still holds at the local level. The Milky Way and the Local Group remain gravitationally bound to the Virgo Cluster, as distant as they are from it—or, as some of the ancient diehards liked to put it, the Local Group was actually a ‘part' of the greater Virgo Cluster.”

Joorn glanced at the forward viewscreen. It was filled with a Doppler-adjusted representation of a brilliant galaxy, 3C-295, less than two hundred thousand light-years away, closer than the Magellanic Clouds had once been to the Milky Way.

“Let's take a look at our flag post galaxy the way it really is,” Joorn murmured. “Right now, we're seeing it as a co-moving object.”

His fingers danced over the console, and the screen showed them a vertical smear of mashed multicolored light that was squeezed between the two blind spots that almost filled the screen fore and aft. “I'm cheating a little bit,” he said. “We're seeing it as a rattlesnake might see it—otherwise the red shift would be too extreme.”

Alten nodded. “From here we draw a straight line to the Milky Way, which we can see now. After more than four billion years of expansion and galactic drift since we left Earth, the signposts we started out with are scattered on either side of the line, so we ignore them. The Milky Way itself has drifted along with its co-moving companions, of course, but I'm allowing for that, and we can make another small adjustment when we're within spitting distance.”

“So what's your problem?”

Alten frowned. “There's something wrong. We should have passed 3C-295 a week ago. I tried to tell Karn about it, but he just told me to recheck my figures. I did that and got the same answer. Karn told me you can't argue with the navigation data and to talk to Oliver about it.”

“And?”

“I got the usual runaround. A ship can't have two captains and two navigators and all that. Karn has his team of dedicated cosmologists, and they're fully competent. You've got only me. Maybe it's time for you to retire as captain. After more than twenty years of running ship operations, Oliver can handle the final run.”

Joorn's lips tightened. “Karn might have something to say about that. We had a deal.”

“I'll talk to some of the new cosmology grads. They're the new generation. Karn's ‘young men' are all middle-aged now and ossified in their thinking. Their idea of how to arrive at a truth is to get a pronouncement from Karn. Maybe it's time for that whole crowd to retire and let the new generation take over.”

“Except me, of course,” Joorn said with a smile.

“Father, they worship you. The legendary captain who led the exodus to the promised land, planted the human race in another galaxy, and now is leading them back to the galaxy of their fathers.”

“That's a little fulsome, my boy,” Joorn demurred. “The Universe is winding down; the galaxies are flying farther and farther apart, isolating themselves; the skies everywhere are getting darker. Fewer and fewer stars are being born, and more of the remaining ones are turning into cinders or black holes incapable of contributing to the rebirth of a stellar population.”

He looked Alten squarely in the eye. “But there's life in the old cosmos yet, a few more billion years of it. And the human race is going home.”

Alten grew thoughtful. “I'll talk to some of the new people. The demographics of the ship are changing. The generation that's grown up on board knows nothing about Rebirth or 3C-273, or the half a lifetime it took to get there. It's just legend, like Earth itself. They grew up with the notion of returning to the Milky Way, not settling 3C-273 or joining Karn on a wild goose chase. Politically, they're likely to side with us old-timers in the Homegoing movement. We still outnumber Karn's aging disciples—they were just more ruthless than us. But the new people aren't intimidated by them. Neither are the Endgamists they kidnapped when we took off in such a hurry. Karn's tough guys don't look so tough anymore.”

“And if it turns out that we've really overshot our turnover slot?”

“We can still make it up at this point by adding another fraction of a G to our deceleration mode.” He grinned. “We'll all just be a little overweight for the rest of the trip.”

“You better make it soon. If we've miscalculated, we'll shoot right past the Milky Way on the way to infinity.”

Alten got up. “I'll get on it right away. Get ready to cut off the Higgs drive at short notice.”

“Don't overlook Karn's people either. They've had over twenty years to become disaffected. You might seek out that cosmology apprentice who was so worried about sterilizing Rebirth with the Higgs exhaust—what was his name? Daniel something.”

Alten paused on the way out to take a last look at the distorted galaxy on the display, squeezed to a thin line between the fore and aft blind spots compressing the narrowing starbow. To an observer in 3C-295, if such a thing were possible,
Time's Beginning
and everyone in it, including himself, would seem to be a wafer-thin disc in the direction of its flight. The thought never failed to astonish him. He didn't feel at all like a paper cutout. Funny, but he felt normal. Yet eons were ticking by in mere seconds as he paused to look back at his father, fiddling worriedly with dials at the console. Once the ship turned over and began to decelerate, the blind spots would start to shrink and the rainbow hoops of stars would expand again. By the time they reached the vicinity of Sol, the Universe would have regained its multicolored glory.

The display abruptly disappeared. His father had found it too unsettling. Alten couldn't blame him. It was a reminder that the ship had been pushed to within a sliver of its limits and that Karn wanted to push it still further.

“Keep her on course, Skipper,” he said at the door.

Joorn yawned and rubbed his eyes. It was ship's night, and all the interior lights had dimmed themselves hours ago. He had been at the console for fourteen hours straight.

“Why don't you knock off and get some sleep, Skipper,” said his first officer, a young physics apprentice named Chu. “I can handle it.”

Chu was a promising aspirant from the ranks of the new generation who had been born during the homeward flight, and he was both bright and impatient. He had been twiddling his thumbs for the last two hours.

“Alten should have been back by now,” Joorn said. “And I can't seem to raise him on his talkie.”

“He's wise,” Chu said. “He probably has it turned off.”

“What do you mean?” Joorn had confided in Chu, telling him all about Alten's suspicions and about what they were going to have to do if they proved correct. He was grooming Chu to captain the ship himself someday, and in any case, with turnaround almost upon them, Chu needed to be au courant.

“Oliver's guys have been acting antsy the last few days. As if something's up. They broke up a meeting of the physics club two days ago. They'd been eavesdropping on our chatter, and something was making them nervous. Those antiquated tough guys and the silly tabards they wear! They even roughed up a couple of our guys for talking back. We couldn't believe it! It was sort of like the way my dad describes the old days, when we started out from Rebirth. I get hassled once in a while too. Oliver Twisty—that's what some of our guys call him—isn't too happy about my being first officer. He wants to put in his own man.”

“I wonder if Alten made contact with Daniel,” Joorn said.

“Oh, the guy you mentioned? Daniel Petrocelli, one of the Old Guard physicists who doesn't dance to Oliver's tune anymore. I don't know if that was a good idea. They might be watching him. I think he was starting to come around. He was coming to the physics club meetings for a while like some of the others that age, the tired-out gaffers who want to stop gallivanting around the Universe with Karn and settle down. Then he stopped coming. Maybe he just got scared. Or maybe he's a fink.”

Joorn tapped in to the running estimate of the deceleration needed to come to a stop at the Milky Way if Alten's original estimate was correct. It still was only a hair over one gravity, but as he watched, a digit four places past the decimal point ticked over.

“I think we'd better …” he began.

The door to the control room was flung wide open, and a dozen men crowded into the compartment. Chu started to get up, but he was immediately surrounded by shadowy figures.

“Stay where you are, and don't move, Mr. Chu,” Oliver's voice ordered. One of the figures brandished a pipe for emphasis.

Joorn didn't try to get up. He swiveled around in his seat and said, “What do you want, Oliver? And where's Alten?”

“Alten's locked up where he can't cause any trouble,” Oliver said. “He won't be harmed as long as he behaves himself. I can't say the same for that turncoat, Petrocelli.”

“What's going to happen to Petrocelli?” Joorn said evenly.

“He's going to be hanged when we get around to it,” Oliver said. He smiled humorlessly, a flash of white teeth in the dim lighting. “Fortunate that we're going to maintain our one-G acceleration, isn't it?”

“On what charge? And who made you the law aboard my ship?”

“What charge?” Oliver savored the question. “Why, consorting with the enemy.”

Joorn had trouble containing his fury. “Enemy? My son? Me?”

“Control yourself, Captain Gant. Captain no more, I'm afraid. I'm captain now.”

“What does Professor Karn have to say about this?

“Professor Karn will be informed in due course. At the moment he's busy, thinking great thoughts.”

Joorn put all the authority he could muster into his voice. “Professor Karn and I made an agreement when we left Rebirth. He'll have the ship when we disembark at Sol.”

Oliver laughed. “The professor never intended to keep that agreement. He's not willing to lose the built-up gamma factor we've reached so far. He's an old man, and he's afraid he won't live to achieve his dream if he does. We've been feeding you doctored data for two decades. You would have figured it out sooner or later. Now it's too late.”

“Not yet!” Joorn heaved himself out of his chair and lunged for Oliver. A titanium pipe caught him in the midsection and drove the air out of him. He sank back in his chair, gasping and nauseous. He was dizzily aware that Chu had tried to get up to help him and that Oliver's thugs were beating him senseless.

“Careful, Captain,” Oliver said. We don't want to hurt you. Professor Karn wouldn't like it. We might need you again.”

Chu was being dragged from his chair now, limp and bloody, but conscious. Oliver nodded at one of his cohorts, a middle-aged, pot-bellied man who'd been standing to one side while the others worked Chu over.

“Okay, Shenk, why don't you try the second seat on for size?” Oliver said. “I'll be with you in a minute. Don't touch anything. We're still at one G. I don't think the captain here did anything yet to start the turnover procedure.”

A pair of Oliver's aging thugs had a rubber-legged Chu on his feet, supporting him on either side. Two others bracketed Joorn and started to pull him upright. He shook off their hands and stood up by himself. Oliver motioned, and the two started herding Joorn toward the door after Chu and his captors.

“Put them in the lockup with the others,” Oliver said. “Nobody talks to them. If anybody gets too curious, lock them up too.”

The passageways were practically empty this time of night. The few people they passed, most of them solitary or in twos, glanced at them, but nobody tried to approach the odd procession. Joorn thought there was a kind of hush in the atmosphere, but perhaps he was imagining it.

Wherever they were taking him, it couldn't be too far; Chu was in no condition to stay on his feet long, and he doubted they'd want to carry him. He kept looking around, but he saw no way to get control of the situation.

Then he thought he saw an opportunity—a slim one, but maybe the only chance he'd get. They were headed toward the door of what looked like a storeroom, and for some reason a small crowd had gathered there—not more than twenty or thirty people. A big redheaded young fellow, with two or three other youngsters of his generation joining in, was arguing with the tabard-bedecked quartet who were stationed in front of the door.