Children of the Comet (17 page)

A cry of anguish from Torris pierced the silence. “They come! They make the leap!” he shouted. He unfolded his long body and disentangled himself from the chair.

Martin and Chu were out of their own chairs in a flash and grabbed Torris before he could reach the door. He did not resist and allowed them to lead him back to his seat.

Nina tried to imagine what he was seeing. She was seeing a cloud of wriggling specks. Torris was seeing a swarm of spacesuited warriors like himself, armed to the teeth with their little bows and bone-tipped harpoons and knives of bone or fire-hardened wood. They would be violent young men, excited by the thought of blood and women.

She turned her attention to Torris's Tree. From the long interviews with Torris that she'd sat in on, she had gained a vivid picture of what life was like in the ice cave where he'd lived with his tribe—the greasy fires that kept them alive; the weird beasts they hunted for food; the young mothers, no older than herself, with the babies they had to carry in airtight sacks with a stovebeast when they ventured outside; and the little boys impatient to grow up and climb the Tree and become men. A sense of dread overtook her and would not go away.

She imagined that cloud of overexcited young men descending on them, the carnage on both sides, the babies torn from their mothers, the old men run through with spears, the fires wantonly extinguished to be restarted when the invaders had gone, the survivors creeping out of their hiding places. It was too much to bear. A line of poetry from her English classes came to her: “The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold.” Her mother had told her that things like bride raids had survived on old Earth long after mankind had achieved a technological civilization and were still going on in one form or another up to the day her grandfather and grandmother had left to find a new home in another galaxy. That had been six billion years in the past. Mankind had gone and returned, though in a bifurcated form, and now it seemed the old cruelties had taken root again, even in a dying Universe.

She withdrew into herself like Torris, unable to take her eyes off the site of the coming calamity.

Another hour went by. The coffee in front of her grew cold. Someone came by to refill her cup, took one look at her face, and removed the cup without a word.

Then there was something like a puff of steam, and she leaned forward to see more clearly. The puff resolved itself into a swarm of wriggling mites hanging in space. A collective gasp came from around her, then a babble of voices. She turned her head, afraid of what Torris might do, but he remained in his seat, his posture more tense, his lips drawn back to bare clenched teeth in an expression of utter savagery she'd never seen before.

The cloud settled down to a stable shape as the individual motes that comprised it adjusted their vectors with whatever reaction mass they'd brought with them. Alten edited out the two extraneous Trees for a tighter focus, till the viewscreen showed only the two clouds drifting slowly toward each other.

“It's the bride raiders of Torris's tribe trying to get across first,” Laurel informed them pedantically, as though an explanation were required.

Chu was halfway out of his chair, ready to take his place at the controls again. “There's no way they could change course now, even if they wanted to. And two collections of hotheads wouldn't want to. Are they headed for a collision?”

Alten was punching keys as fast as he could, a fine sheen of perspiration beading his forehead. “I've got enough data for a preliminary estimate. I give it a day and a half to two days.”

“Arrows go faster,” Chu said, “and in a straight line in space. Do I have to quote Newton's laws of motion?”

Martin looked over his shoulder at Alten. He was trying to hold a struggling Torris down. “Plenty of time to see them coming and dodge them. If you're within reach of a buddy, you can use each other for reaction mass. If not, you can sacrifice something small, like spare ordnance.” He was doing rough calculations with his engineer's brain. “They'll have to be within thirty or forty yards from each other to start shooting arrows.”

Nina was beside herself. “Isn't anybody going to
do
anything?” she shrilled. “Besides talk about Newton's law and reaction mass and how close you have to be to shoot an arrow! We can't let them
kill
one another!”

Alten appealed to her. “The ship can't get to them in two days. Unless we use the Higgs drive and kill everybody within a million miles.”

Chu stood up. “A lifeboat or a landing craft can,” he said. “And on chemical thrusters. They got our ancestors to the moon, if you recall.”

Martin had said something to Torris, who stopped struggling and untangled himself to stand by his chair, fingering his bow. He looked expectant.

“I want to go with you,” Nina said.

“You can't, sis,” Martin said gently. “But you can help. Go find your boyfriend, Andrew. The two of you can stow a cargo net. Andrew will know how to attach a sounding rocket.”

“Boyfriend? Andrew? What's going on, Nina?” Alten said.

“I was going to tell you, Daddy,” Nina said. She ran off before Alten could ask anything more.

“Good move, Martin,” Chu said.

“I'm going too,” Jonah piped up from his travel pod.

“What could a dolphin do?” Chu said. “It's outside work.”

“I'm a safety engineer, remember?” Jonah said. He departed at high speed, the little metal casters squealing.

“This is madness,” Alten said. “Look at him.” He pointed a chin at Torris. “He's just itching to get in the fight and kill a few of his opposites.”

“We're not going to kill anyone,” Chu said. “We're going to stop it.”

“I can't authorize the use of the boat,” Alten said.

“I can,” Joorn said, stirring in his chair. “Try to bring him back intact, Martin.” He turned to Irina. “I'm sorry, my dear. I know you're loath to let your only specimen of
Homo cometes
out of your sight, but Nina is right. We can't let them slaughter one another.”

“I agree, Joorn,” Irina said. “I never thought of Torris as just a specimen. He's a very brave and intelligent young man who saved Nina's life.”

Laurel looked from one person to another with a distraught expression on her face. “I don't understand,” she said. “He's a new kind of hominid, and we're learning so much! Are they going to put him in the middle of some kind of primitive feud?”

Irina patted her on the shoulder. “Don't worry, Laurel. There are going to be plenty of specimens.”

CHAPTER 26

They were almost too late. The boat came to a violent halt at four gravities, nicely parallel to the two swarms of combatants at the point where they were just beginning to intersect. They had covered the last thousand miles in less than a minute. To the drifting skirmishers, the boat must have seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Martin helped Torris to his feet. With all their inertia gone, it took only the slightest effort.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

He studied Torris with concern. The four gravities had been hard enough on him and Chu. For Torris, it could only have been a terrifying hell of utter immobility. He could only hope that no bones had been broken.

Torris didn't bother to answer. He immediately floated over to a porthole to peer outside. He'd needed only a single casual push of his toes, but he bumped up against his target with unerring accuracy. Torris was in his element.

“How far?” he said.

Martin checked with Chu. “About a mile,” he said. “With a good starting push, you could be there in a couple of minutes. We've got a net drift toward them, so we'd be right behind you. Your push wouldn't subtract much from our inertia.”

Torris nodded. Irina's linguists had taught him the words that went with the concepts, but he'd grown up knowing them in his bones.

“And your nets,” Torris said. “You will be like an enormous web beast, bigger than any creature or object they have ever seen before.”

Martin knew what Torris was thinking. “We'll try not to hurt anyone, Torris. Of course there might be some accidental casualties.”

“But it'll stop the fight,” Chu interjected. “They'll have been dazzled by a tremendous flash in the sky. When their vision clears, the ship will be there. Like an omen before a battle—a comet in the sky or an eclipse. It must give them pause.”

“They won't stop the fight,” Torris said.

Jonah's computer voice cleared its throat. “Torris is right,” it said. “It might spur them on instead. You humans have peculiar mentalities. Both sides are liable to interpret omens as omens in their favor. Remember the Bayeux Tapestry. The Norman conquest of England was preceded by the appearance of Halley's Comet in the sky. For William the Conqueror's­ troops, the dread omen was a morale booster. It applied to the other fellow.”

“You dolphins,” Chu grumbled. “We should never have programmed the encyclopedia into your database.”

“Human history is amusing,” Jonah said complacently, “if incomprehensible.”

Torris was paying no attention. Martin was helping him get ready, fastening the airsuit's new gaskets and checking out his equipment. He had two of the compact air tanks and one of the miraculous thrusters that somehow propelled you with a giant's shove when you pointed it in the opposite direction. He had a quiverful of the arrows he'd whittled aboard ship and a lightweight metal harpoon with a line that was thinner and stronger than web silk.

He turned to Martin at the airlock door and said, with obvious reluctance, “If your magic fails, Mar-tin, I will fight with my people.”

“I understand,” Martin said.

He closed the inner door behind Torris, overrode the automatic sequence, and, not waiting for full vacuum, released the latch on the outside door. He got to a porthole and pressed his face against it in time to see Torris, crouched on the sill, give a kick with his powerful legs and sail off into space.

“You better get cracking.” Chu's voice was urgent over the speaker. “I'll give you five minutes to get ready before I deploy the nets. Jonah, that goes for you too.”

“I'm already in my spacesuit, so to speak,” Jonah said. “Martin and I know the routine. We've worked together many times.”

Ten minutes later, Martin and Jonah were at opposite ends of the leading edge of the cargo net, stretching it out between them and helping it to unfold. Martin could see Jonah's pod, about a quarter-mile away, clutching a clew line at the far corner of the net in its mechanical claws, like someone unfolding a gigantic bed sheet. When he and Jonah were about three miles apart and the pod had disappeared among the stars, he gave Chu the signal.

The sounding rockets flared together, all along the luff of the net, like a row of Christmas lights. Nina's friend Andrew had spaced them about an eighth of a mile apart, a staggering exercise in the geometry of drapery for someone who had to fold and unfold tons of mesh in a working space only a few hundred feet long, with only the brainless loading robots to help him. Martin's opinion of the young man shot up.

Pulled by the rockets, the net unreeled evenly, without snagging. Martin's admiration shot up another notch. He and Jonah used their maneuvering jets to stretch the net taut between them. When it was fully unrolled, he and Jonah found themselves a good mile from the landing boat. The boat itself would anchor the net at the other end, where it necessarily narrowed to fit the sixty-foot width of the slot before it fanned out. The nets were part of the equipment of every lifeboat, which might be called upon to snare accidental—and valuable—jetsam from an orbiting ship. The thought of the original designers of
Time's Beginning
had also been that when the ship had colonized a likely planet and stocked its oceans, the nets would be useful for trawling. Martin wondered if they'd done that on Rebirth three billion years ago.

He sighted along the edge of the net and found Jonah, a tiny dot almost lost among the distant stars.

Torris was closer. As Chu had said, they would be drifting along right behind him, with the slight difference in velocity that Torris's starting leap had given him.

He located Torris, only a few hundred yards from where the two groups of bride raiders were starting to intersect but about a mile from his own position at one end of the net. He cranked up the magnification provided by his helmet and brought Torris into focus at an apparent distance of only fifty feet or so. Torris was drifting into enemy territory. And according to what Nina had told him, the ornamental beadwork on his airsuit would mark him instantly as an enemy.

That seemed to be exactly what was happening. One of the drifting warriors Martin could see beyond Torris twisted his head and saw an enemy coming from the wrong direction.

The man scrambled to fit an arrow to his bow, but fighting while hanging in space has its dilemmas. He was facing the wrong way, with no way to turn around. But he must have been a quick thinker. A couple of his friends were within arm's length, and he used one of them for leverage. He gave him a shove that sent him crashing into a third man, who in turn collided with someone else. In the meantime, the push had started a slow spin that had him briefly facing Torris.

He was ready, and he had good reflexes. He released the arrow he had nocked, and it streaked toward Torris. He had a good archer's instincts, automatically compensating for the sideways deviation of the arrow caused by his spin.

But Torris had good reflexes too. The instant that the arrow was released and its course could no longer be changed, he used the little thruster that Martin had given him and gave himself a spurt that moved him sideways, out of the way.

Without a pause he released his own arrow, compensating for his complicated vector sum without having to think about it. His opponent's arrow went sailing harmlessly by, on its way to infinity, but Torris's arrow, following its own vector product, sped unerringly toward its target.

The man never saw it coming. By that time his spin had turned him full circle, and he took Torris's arrow in the back.

The whole encounter had taken only a few seconds, but it had alerted the enemy swarm. The original chain reaction of collisions caused by the unfortunate archer was spreading, and to it was added a second chain reaction, started when his corpse was given a kick by the force of Torris's arrow.

Now it seemed that every enemy invader within a hundred yards of Torris was leveling a spear at him or struggling to align a bow shot. They had the same problem the dead man had had. Most of them had been facing the swarm of warriors from Torris's tribe, who were just starting to make contact where the two swarms were beginning to merge.

It was getting complicated. In the distance beyond Torris, Martin could see a few individual hand-to-hand battles starting to take place at the interface. And some of the more impatient fighters from both tribes were starting prematurely to hurl spears or shoot arrows. Most would never find their targets except accidentally; the distances were still too great, and by the time an arrow reached its intended victim he would have drifted, if only a few feet.

But for Torris it was very different. He was in the midst of his enemies. Already arrows and spears were starting to come his way from relatively nearby. With the help of Martin's thruster, he could still dodge them easily, but as their numbers increased, he would lose the ability to keep track of them. A further ironic threat was the shower of missiles coming from his own people. Almost all of them would penetrate the enemy swarm without hitting anything, but they were ultimately aimed in Torris's direction.

There was a more immediate threat from the spearmen. About a half dozen of them were coming his way, having borrowed reaction mass from their mates. They weren't bothering with their bows; in up-close combat, all you had to do was thrust.

When they were close enough, he aimed an arrow at the nearest target, a big man with a colorful pattern of embroidery across his broad torso. At this distance Torris could see his face plainly, his mouth contorted as he mouthed a string of insults. He wobbled in his flight as he shook his spear but not enough to spoil Torris's aim.

The arrow hit him dead center, right in the middle of the embroidery pattern. Before the impact could carry him out of reach, the man next to him shot out an arm to grab his harness and flung him backward to provide ample reaction mass.

That propelled him to within stabbing distance of Torris. But as he thrust with his spear, Torris fired a quick blast of his thruster, and the spear shaft went past him, with the man following. Torris still had an arrow in his hand that he hadn't had time to fit to his bowstring, and he raked the man's airsuit as he flew past. The arrowhead was a stubby nail made of that strange shiny stuff that was harder than bone, and it sliced the airsuit open from shoulder to waist. The man sailed into the distance, trailing frozen blood.

The others closed in, their movements cautious now. They had Torris bracketed—above, below, and on both sides. He clutched the thruster in one hand, the arrow poised for stabbing in the other. He'd have to somehow get past at least one of them.

The spears ringed him, almost within thrusting distance now. They were too close for him to use his bow.

He waited, alert for any tiny movement that would reveal their strategy. If they were going to rush him, two of them could grab two others and use them for reaction mass. And then there was the fifth man. He could serve as a fixed obstacle. In any case, there might be one slim escape route open if he could guess which one it would be. He had the thruster, but they'd seen him use it, so it wouldn't be a surprise.

He saw them confer in lip talk, their helmets turned so he couldn't see. Then he saw their bodies tense. He tensed himself, getting ready.

Then he saw a sudden flash in the sky and a huge black shape blotting out the stars. It would be Chu, giving a final blast of his maneuvering jets to get into position.

His assailants turned their heads and gaped, their spears forgotten. Torris stared too and saw an enormous web spread out across the entire sky, made barely visible by the tiny glints of starlight that sparkled here and there along its strands.

The skyful of men had lost all purposeful movement. They were transfixed, helpless to flee. Their total drift as a group was toward Torris's comet, but within that volume of space they were essentially motionless, with only limited movement. The same was true of the swarm from Torris's comet, except that their drift was in the opposite direction. The two swarms were merging now, but they would eventually have passed through each other and separated again.

Except for what was happening now!

The net loomed nearer, engulfing the two groups of fighters over a distance of miles. Then it began inexorably to draw itself tight, shrinking to a volume of only a couple of hundred feet across.

Torris found himself crammed into a crowded pocket with the five men who had just tried to kill him. They'd all lost their spears, except for one who had managed to hang on to his. Jammed between bodies as it was, however, there was no space to use it. With his helmet pressed against the mesh, Torris could see into other pockets containing dozens, perhaps scores, of spacesuited men. Presumably everybody had enough air to last out the remaining time until they could be transferred to
Time's Beginning
.

Peering around the packed bodies, he thought he could recognize some members of his own tribe from their beaded suits, in forced proximity to their enemies of less than an hour ago. The total silence of airless space was eerie under the circumstances, but he was sure that there was a lot of wailing and crying going on. It would have been deafening in a closed space with air to carry sound. They were all expecting to die or worse.

He waited a couple of hours, his limbs getting intolerably cramped. One of the men who had tried to kill him pressed his faceplate against his and attempted helmet talk.

“It was the Great World Eater that was foretold,” he said. “I saw it. But the priest did not say that it would be a web beast.”

Before Torris could reply, there was a blinding flash in the sky, so brilliant that its glare penetrated the packed net full of men and turned every cranny between their bodies into a searing outline of white light.

It lasted only a few seconds, but its sudden shock triggered a reciprocal spasm through the entire mass of men. Torris's involuntary neighbor jerked as if he'd had an electric shock, and he lost helmet contact. When Torris's vision began to return, it was dotted with dancing specks of light.