Children of the Comet (7 page)

“We demand to see them!” he was yelling. “You had no right to lock them up!” There were mutters of agreement from the crowd. The quartet of guards, beefy men from Oliver's generation, were looking uncomfortable and fingering their titanium pipes.

By that time, some in the crowd had become aware of the approaching entourage. Several of them recognized Chu and yelled out to him. Chu raised his bloodied head and responded with what was evidently a slogan of the younger generation: “Screw the Trogs!” Joorn assumed it meant troglodytes. The crowd started to take up the chant, and things began to look ugly.

It was now or never. Joorn eyed his guards. They were thoroughly distracted, not paying any attention to him. All four were of Oliver's generation: overweight, jowly, and out of shape. Joorn was older than any of them, but he had kept himself fit. He whirled and pushed one of his unwanted escorts with both hands as hard as he could. The man toppled over and hit the floor. Joorn didn't wait to see if he'd hit his head. With the momentum of the same whirling motion, he chopped the other man in the face, just below the nose, with the edge of a clenched fist. The other two dropped Chu and were on him in a second. The titanium pipes came out, and Joorn never saw the one that hit him alongside the head.

Joorn came to, his head throbbing and his vision blurred. He was lying on some kind of hard surface—the lid of a plastic crate. A woman was sponging his head and the side of his face. He was aware of blood trickling down into the collar of his uniform.

“Don't try to move yet, Captain,” the woman said.

He ignored her and sat up. It was too quick, and there was a moment of dizziness. It passed, and his vision cleared.

He was in a dim, smallish room crowded with irregular piles of goods. About two dozen people were interned with him, sitting on crates or standing around. The men were mostly young, with close-cropped beards or scraggly attempts at them. The women, fewer of them, were in the same age group but more kempt.

Alten's face swam into view. He leaned over Joorn and said, “Take it easy, Father. How do you feel?”

“Rotten. What happened?”

“After they dumped you and Chu inside with the other unreliables? They started arresting people outside and shoving them in here with us. They stopped that business pretty quick. I think they're afraid to open the door now. The crowd's growing.”

The redheaded agitator who'd been haranguing the Karnites loomed behind Alten. He moved closer. He had a black eye and a split lip. “They're spreading the word outside. We're not going to let the Trogs get away with this, Captain. Not this time. Their day is past.” He grinned and his lip started bleeding again. “We've even got some of them on our side.”

“Like Petrocelli,” Alten said grimly.

Joorn raised himself on one elbow and looked around. “Where's Chu?”

“He's right over there, Captain Gant,” said the woman who was sponging the blood off his contusions. “We think he has a couple of cracked ribs, but he'll be all right. No, don't try to get up.”

Joorn craned his neck to see Chu. The first officer was lying on a crate a short distance away. His head was wrapped in makeshift bandages that looked like ripped-up sheets. A couple of women were attending to him. They had his shirt off, and one of the women was winding a bandage around his torso.

“What did they do to Petrocelli?” Joorn said.

“They roughed him up pretty good,” Alten said. “Then they took him away someplace. They kept telling him he was going to get a one-gravity necktie. They must have had a tag on him all along because they were all over us about five minutes after we met. So he didn't have a chance to say too much, and he was very nervous. But I got the impression that he wanted to come over to the Homegoer side.”

“Yeah,” the big agitator put in. “That's what we thought too. He was very cagey with us after the physics club raid, but we thought he was one of those who'd come around in the end. He was one scared little guy, but he had guts.”

“This is Leonard Ryan,” Alten said. “His specialty is multiverse theory. When he's not busy stirring up trouble.”

Ryan grinned at Alten. “I'm working with your boy on a paper on quantum chromodynamics. We're going to stir up a lot of trouble there too.”

“We're applying QCD to the problem of the Higgs boson and hadronic photons,” Alten explained.

“Karn double-crossed us,” Joorn told them. “He never had any intention of dropping us off at Sol. Oliver and a flunky named Shenk are up in the control room right now. They're kidnapping us all over again.”

Ryan grew serious. “I know Shenk. He tried to present some kindergarten version of string theory at the physics club, and when the reviewers turned him down, he got Oliver to force a presentation. He doesn't know a black hole from a hole in the ground, and he doesn't know anything about the Higgs field except that it works when you press the right button.”

“He especially doesn't know what would happen to a planet if a Higgs drive got within sneezing distance when a ship was decelerating,” Alten said grimly.

“Nothing that hasn't already happened to Earth during the sun's red giant phase, Alten,” Ryan reminded him.

“That's moot,” Joorn said. “Oliver doesn't plan to decelerate. We may zip past the Milky Way altogether if we don't make a course correction now. The question is: How do we stop them?”

“We can take them, Captain,” Ryan said.

“We're locked up,” Joorn said savagely. “Besides, we may outnumber them, but we're not exactly a fighting force, are we?”

He looked around pointedly at the people in the storeroom. There was Chu with his bloody bandages, not to mention himself. There was a preponderance of young men and women, most of them students—impractical and ideal­istic, some of them showing signs of mistreatment by the thugs outside and doubtless intimidated by them. And there was a handful of bewildered oldsters, would-be Earthbound returnees who'd been swept up in the confusion of Oliver's takeover.

“Listen,” Ryan said urgently, “by now those goons out there have sent for reinforcements. The crowd's getting out of hand.”

Joorn listened to the noise outside. It was getting louder. There was a dangerous rumble, punctuated by angry shouts.

They were throwing things now. Joorn heard a thunk as something breakable hit the storeroom door. After a moment in which the beleaguered guards must have done something retaliatory, there was a surge in crowd noise.

“They're getting panicky,” Ryan said. He turned his head and called, “Any moment now, people! Take your positions.”

Joorn watched in amazement as a number of the young people, including the two women who'd been doing the nursing, separated from the prisoners and flattened themselves against the bulkhead on either side of the door, as if they'd rehearsed. To his further surprise, a couple of the Earthborn oldsters conferred briefly and joined them.

After a minute or two, the door handle rattled and the door sprang open. A couple of people from the crowd were propelled inside with enough force to send them sprawling. The men who had pushed them followed, brandishing their lengths of pipe. On their heels came the other two guards, manhandling two more struggling protesters.

There was no time for them to react. They were immediately engulfed by the people who'd been hiding on either side of the door. Their titanium pipes were plucked from their hands before they knew it, and they found themselves face down on the floor with enough feet on their backs and necks to keep them from getting up. The mild young woman who'd been nursing Joorn was holding one of the titanium pipes and eyeing it speculatively when Ryan reached her side, saying, “No, Maryann, no.”

In moments the room was flooded with people from outside. There were lots of hugs and a few tears. Ryan's voice cut through the din.

“Come on, people, we've got to get out of here before the reinforcements arrive!”

The crowd broke up and swirled through the door. Ryan was nodding to people here and there, and Joorn saw a couple of them improvising a stretcher from the lid of a storage bin and loading Chu onto it. Then Ryan was at Joorn's side.

“Can you walk, Captain?”

“I can walk,” Joorn said tightly.

Ryan nodded again, and a couple of his stalwarts helped Joorn to his feet and supported him. They joined the crowd that was now pouring out the door.

“Where are we going?” Joorn said.

“The control room,” Ryan replied.

The corridors were filling with people as the crowd went swarming by. The corridor lights were still dimmed for the night, but doors to living compartments were opening as they passed and bleary-eyed people, some of them still struggling into their clothes, were adding to their numbers.

“The word's out,” Ryan said.

It wasn't far to the control room, and they only encountered one of Oliver's corridor patrols. There were only three of them, sloppy fellows with their best years behind them, if they had ever had any best years. They were deep in some halfhearted argument raised only to dispel after-hours boredom, and when they saw the mob surging toward them, they looked at each other and took off without further discussion.

The door to the control room was locked or barricaded, but a couple of Ryan's hefty young stalwarts kicked it open in short order. Some kind of advance squad rushed with them into the control room, while others held back the crowd.

Joorn tried to break loose from his attendants, but they held on to him. “Not yet, Captain,” one of them said. “Wait till we know it's safe.”

There was the sound of what might have been a scuffle inside the control room. Joorn thought he recognized Oliver's voice before it was abruptly silenced.

Then he saw Alten being escorted inside by one of Ryan's tough-looking physics students. Immediately afterward, Oliver and his hapless assistant, Shenk, were led out by more of Ryan's men. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they looked very angry. Shenk had a honey of a welt on his forehead.

A roar went up from the crowd. A few people tried to get at them, but Ryan's men cleared a path and bore them off down the corridor. Then the goons who had beaten Chu appeared, also with their hands tied behind their backs. They were being handled more roughly, pushed, pulled, and prodded by their captors. One of them, who had evidently put up too much of a fight, was unconscious or otherwise incapacitated, and was being dragged unceremoniously along.

Another angry roar came from the crowd, but Ryan's men got their prisoners safely through the crowd and disappeared down the corridor with them.

“What's happening?” Joorn said, and tried again to break free.

“Wait a minute,” one of the men said. “We'd better find something to hang on to.” The two of them helped him to a side wall and saw that he had a support to grasp.

And then he didn't have to ask what was happening, because all of a sudden he had no weight. Around him, people were floating off the floor and hovering like a cloud of gnats. Others were doing their best to cling to the floor.

The cloud had itself sorted out after a minute or two. “Okay, Captain,” one of his escorts said. They carried Joorn expertly between them on a midair trajectory that got them through the door without brushing against anything.

Alten was sitting in Chu's seat, busying himself with the control panel. Joorn's attendants deposited him carefully in the captain's seat and strapped him in.

Alten turned to him and said, “Shenk didn't have time to bollix anything up. He and Oliver were still arguing about what to do when our boys dragged them out of their chairs. We'll get our weight back in a couple of hours, when turnover's complete and we can turn on the engines again.”

He brought up an image on the screen. It was a computer fiction showing a beautiful spiral galaxy—the Milky Way as it had looked nearly five billion years ago when his father and a shipfull of hopefuls had left it to find a new home for the human race elsewhere in the Universe. The computer added crosshairs to show that
Time's Beginning
was on target.

Alten replied to Joorn's unspoken question. “No, we didn't slip too far past the turnover point. A fraction of added G on the last leg of the trip should compensate for it. We'll hardly feel it.”

He tapped keys again, and the image shrugged and became distorted. Now it was an elliptical galaxy, bright with the combined stellar populations of the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, and the Magellanic Clouds.

“We'll only be a few million years late,” Alten said. “The Sun will have swallowed the Earth long since and begun to regurgitate what's left of it. It'll be late in its red giant phase. But there'll still be hundreds of millions of years till it shrinks to the white dwarf stage, and more years still till the white dwarf cools enough to stop giving useful heat. Plenty of time for life to start again. Particularly if there's already terrestrial life in the outer system to reseed a solidifying Earth. Surely human beings would have brought life with them past the orbit of Jupiter—if only inadvertently—in the centuries after
Time's Beginning
left. And I'm not just talking about microbes. If I remember my ancient history, when you and Karn set off on your hegira there was already talk of growing bioengineered trees on comets to provide lumber for habitats and other space construction. Wasn't there a scientist named Bernal in the early twentieth century—long before they knew about DNA—who pointed out that trees adapted to vacuum could grow to heights of hundreds of miles in microgravity?”

Joorn had stopped listening. He was studying the new Milky Way that would be born sometime in the next billion years. His face showed something like bliss.

“Home,” he said.

CHAPTER 12

6,000,000,000 A.D.

The Oort Cloud

Torris found it hard to get used to the idea of sharing a sleeping sack with another, as pleasurable as it might be, but he was learning the hard way not to mention it to Ning.

“What, Tor-ris the Pious,” she said, snuggling up against him, “do your people mate in the open, like beasts?”

“Of course not,” he said, offended. “People have their niches and corners, and sometimes hang skins over them, or even build a shelter of wood and foliage there, with their own fire or tethered stovebeast to supplement the heat from the communal fire. But men and women don't go hunting together, and so we don't have that custom.”

She continued to tease him. “And don't you have the custom of privacy either?”

There was no word for privacy in Torris's language, but he was learning to use Ning's. It seemed to mean something like being out of the sight or hearing of other people.

He took another tack. “I'm just used to keeping my airsuit on when I sleep. In case there's a leak in the night. Or some danger, like a Brank sneaking up on you. You of all people should understand that. You almost died.”

“But Brank is dead,” she said, tracing the stubbled outline of his jaw with a fingertip. “And the large beasts are too stupid to find a way to get at us in this little hiding place we hollowed out for ourselves.”

He gave up. “The red star has long been up. We should get moving.”

They struggled into their airsuits, a tangle of limbs in the enclosed space. “We didn't hunt all day yesterday,” Ning said, as though it was his fault. “And the day before that there wasn't a trace of game.”

“This place is hunted out,” Torris said. “We've stayed in one spot too long. We need to start climbing again.”

“Ah, Tor-ris, are you so anxious to be rid of me?” she said accusingly. “A few more kills and I'll have enough carcasses to leave your Tree.”

Torris didn't know how to reply to that. He knew that he should have started the climb down the trunk long ago, but a part of him wanted to keep things the way they were forever. Besides, though he tried not to admit it to himself, he was afraid to face Claz. “Don't be ridiculous,” he said gruffly. “Here, let me borrow your bone-scraping adze. I'll whittle some more arrowheads along the way.”

They climbed for the rest of the day still without seeing any large game, though there were signs that a herd of meatbeasts had passed that way some time ago. Torris occupied himself during their rests by scraping away at a dried meatbeast scapula with Ning's adze, and by nightfall he had produced the first of the new arrowheads for her.

They spent the night in an abandoned treehopper burrow after enlarging the opening so that they could fit through it. It was a snug fit, but it had a satisfactory bend to keep them out of the reach of any large predators, and there was a little rill that the hoppers had drunk from, mostly dried up but still producing a trickle of sap. It could not compare with their previous nest, but it would do for a temporary stopping place.

In the morning it was Ning who wanted to go on, and he who wanted to stay and rest for a few days.

“Oh Tor-ris, my lazy one, you are just trying to put off the day of my leaving,” she said, “but there is no point in setting up a camp here. It is no better than the last spot was for finding game. They have wisely gone on to the great savannah at the top of the Tree, where you can see for miles around and where they can see predators coming and we can see them from a distance. You can have your love camp there just as well.”

His ears burning, Torris packed up their belongings and prepared for the upward trek. In the end, it took four more days, with an unsatisfactory stop each night, three of which they slept practically in the open, back to back in their own sleeping sacks.

He knew he was getting close to the top of the Tree when the light filtering through the overhead canopy started to get brighter and he could catch an occasional glimpse of a patch of sky through gaps in the branches. Ning must have come to the same conclusion. She started to climb faster, leaving him farther and farther behind, dangling the unwieldy bundle of carcasses—now bulking several times his own mass—beneath him.

Suddenly he realized that she had stopped climbing. She had come to an abrupt stop, her body above the waist hidden by a swath of leaves. Her feet were doing an impatient little dance, searching for a place to stand. He had the impression that she was shouting within her helmet, but of course he couldn't hear anything. Her excitement was revealed by her feet; she was shaking a boot at him—the only way she could communicate.

He dropped the bundle of carcasses, after first hitching the end of the tether to a branch. He levered himself upward to stand beside her. When he poked his head through the canopy of leaves, he saw splendor.

They were near the center of a vast, flat circular expanse that went on for miles and miles. There was the illusion that it was one continuous solid surface when the eye strayed beyond the immediate area. Within a few arms' lengths, though, you could see that it was a carpet composed of countless twigs and leaves that had been grazed level to look almost like a flat landscape—a kind of landscape that Torris had never seen before.

For there were animals aplenty to graze it. Torris gasped at the fantastic sight. There were hundreds—no, thousands, if Torris had been able to put words to such a concept—of wild meatbeasts and other large grazing animals dotting the plain, another concept that was beyond his vocabulary. The meatbeasts that his tribe pursued in its hunting grounds just a few miles above the root caves where they lived were isolated prey that had strayed from the small herds they belonged to. Or at most, there might be a chance stumbling on four or five beasts together. But these animals numbered more than the stars in the sky—the only way he had of expressing large numbers. Moreover, they were fatter and more complacent than the scrawny beasts that sustained Torris's people. Their great numbers had made them unwary.

He touched helmets with Ning. She must have been holding her breath too because he heard a sharp intake of air before she was able to speak.

“Tor-ris, so many, so many. Just there for the taking.”

He knew what she was thinking. With a few hours' work, she would have more carcasses than she ever dreamed of to take back to her Tree.

And she knew what he was thinking too. She laid a gloved hand on his arm. “Don't be sad, Tor-ris mine,” she said. “There is much to do before I leave. You must help me build my catapult—an even bigger one than I had thought of making before. That will take many days. And we must learn how to move among them without alarming them.”

“We're not the only ones who see easy hunting here. Look!”

In the distance he could see a black speck that resolved itself into a flutterbeast emerging from the foliage below. It was handicapped here in this open space without a tangle of branches for it to careen off of, with no way for it to get above its prey. It chose its victim and began flapping awkwardly along the ground toward it.

The herd didn't seem to be particularly alarmed. They moved aside without haste to clear a path for the floundering monster. It made a final clumsy leap and engulfed the chosen meatbeast with its great membranous wings. Torris had thought that here in the weak fraction of gravity so far above the Tree's comet, the meatbeast would have time enough to scoot from under its attacker, but the flutterbeast had managed to get only a few feet above its prey and was able to get its wing claws hooked into the animal in mid-hover.

The flutterbeast settled down to gnaw at its catch. The rest of the herd gave it a moderately wide berth and continued placidly grazing.

“I think we've already learned,” Torris said.

They crawled up the branch they were standing on and pulled their feet through the top layer of vegetation. Torris cautiously stood up and found that the surface growth supported his weight. He might have expected as much; the meatbeasts in the distance seemed to have no trouble walking around without breaking through, and they weighed many times more than he did. For that matter, even the flutterbeast, huge as it was, had managed to skate over the top growth on its belly.

Ning spoke to him in finger talk. “We had better make camp before dark. That grove over there looks like a likely spot.”

She pointed at what looked like a cluster of small trees, no taller than a dozen men standing on one another's shoulders would have been. It was one of a dozen such clusters that dotted the plain, places where growing branches, following the Tree's imperative to grow straight upward, had burst through the surface layer of growth and somehow had escaped being clipped by the grazing beasts until they were tall enough to escape being munched on.

She helped him haul up the bundle of carcasses that he had left hanging on the tether. It had grown enormous by now, the dozen or so slaughtered animals outweighing even a flutterbeast. Torris could have hauled it up by himself; he'd been climbing for days while managing to cope. Its weight was no problem—things tended to keep going in the microgravity, even in an upward direction, once you got a rhythm going of strategic tugs. It was its mass that made the bundle so awkward.

The thing breached the surface in a shower of broken twigs and leaves that hung in the air before starting imperceptibly to settle. They managed to drag it a few feet, and then, the underlying fuzz being too fragile to support its weight, it sank out of sight. They hauled it up to the surface, got it nicely balanced with great effort, managed to drag it a little farther, and the same thing happened again.

“This isn't going to work,” Torris said. “It's past the weight limit for this scrub.”

“You give up too easily, Tor-ris. It's just a question of dividing it into two bundles. Or four. Or whatever it takes. Men always want things to be easy.”

She helped him untie the packed carcasses and make smaller bundles. In the end, dividing the mass into four parts turned out to be enough. But it was Torris who saw that the trick was to spread the carcasses out to make flat bundles so that there would be more area supporting the same weight. “Yes, just like a man, always figuring out a way to do less work,” she said dismissively. “It will not be so easy to improve the catapult I have worked out in my head, you will see.”

But even two trips to the grove, unsnagging the bundles as they went, was enough to wear them out. “I think that little group of four trees is shelter enough for tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow I will show you how to use them as a support to make a little cave out of animal skins.”

He was startled. “Will it hold air?”

She laughed. “Yes. And the heat from two stovebeasts. And both of us.”

The dwarf trees were good for one thing: they kept curious meatbeasts from investigating the sheltered space and trampling them. And they protected Torris and Ning from the improbable event of some errant flutterbeast somehow dropping on them from above. But Torris resigned himself to sleeping in the open for tonight. Alone.

In the morning, Ning wasted no time. After a hasty breakfast of thawed raw meat in her sleeping sack, she emerged and made preparations for a foray into the thick of the herd. It was possibly an hour's difficult hike, given the insubstantial footing.

“You will help me butcher them when I return,” she said. “In the meantime”—she measured a space in the circle of trees with her eyes—“skin five of the other carcasses. You will have to take them one at a time to thaw their outer surfaces in your sleeping sack.” She cocked her head. “Does your tribe know how to skin a carcass in one piece?”

“Of course,” he said indignantly. “We are not savages.”

“No,” she said. “Perhaps in some ways you are not savage enough.”

With that she gathered up her bow and quiver and set off at an easy lope. Torris followed her with his eyes, admiring her grace and marveling at the ease with which she gauged the ability of the fragile gorse to resist the impact of her boots and hold her trifling weight.

She returned a few hours later, balancing a dead meatbeast on top of her helmet, its legs waggling skyward. Her progress was slower coming back because she had the meatbeast's added weight pressing on the soles of her boots. A foot would disappear into the gorse every once in a while. When that happened, she would stand stock-still, balanced on the other foot. She'd free the trapped boot very carefully, then place it flat on the supporting furze and resume walking with a deliberate, flat-footed gait.

She dumped the dead beast triumphantly at his feet. “How many animals have you skinned?” she asked.

“Three so far.”

“Skin this one too, while it's still warm. We'd better butcher it right away. It will save time and heat later.”

They took the time to seal themselves into a sack and eat a quick meal of scraps. Ning was ravenous. That done, she sat cross-legged and began to sew skins together. She was delighted to use the spool of web beast silk he gave her. “It makes a better airtight seal than animal sinew,” she said. “They spin cocoons for themselves and their young with it. If one one is lucky enough to kill the creature inside and recover the material intact, it is a very useful piece of gear.”

No one in Torris's tribe had ever done such a thing. “A dangerous enterprise,” he said, impressed.

“Not if you know what you're doing,” she said.

She sent him down beneath the gorse to gather wood for the frame while she sewed skins together. He had a serrated arrowhead that was adequate to the task of sawing off branches. The branches didn't have to be particularly thick, she explained, but they had to be the length of a man. And they had to be straight; that was important. She would need eight of them, she told him, counting the number off on her fingers as if he were a child.