“I see.”
She felt suddenly embarrassed. Somehow, all that had come out without her having planned it. “I wasn’t very good at those things. I used to tell myself it was because my mother died and there was no one to tell me. So I concentrated on math, on computers.”
“And if you hadn’t. you could be a perfectly happy housewife somewhere, children yanking on your apronstrings.”
She smiled impishly, crushing a sudden inner pain by old reflex. “To hell with that.”
“Precisely.”
Besides, I didn’t have that option, she thought. “There’s a quid for every quo.” That’s it—cryptic and ironic. Show him I’m not just a simple schoolgirl who became a computer whiz because of adolescent angst.
But Saul’s face had become pensive, his eyes reflecting some inward turning. “I love you all, you know.”
“You…”
His voice was very low. “All the Percells. You… you’re paying for our…”
“Your what?”
“Our sins.”
“But you’re not!Imean, we’re not! I—You did no wrong! It’s others who—”
He waved a hand, silencing her. “I’m sorry. I… sometimes I remember how it used to be. What we hoped for, worked for. That’s all gone now. That’s a major reason I signed on. To run away from a whole host of failures.”
“But you’re not—”
“No, let’s stop. It’s… those days are impossible to forget, but pointless to remember. Better to let them go.”
“Saul, I—I respect you so—”
But he waved his hands energetically in front of his face, banishing all talk. “Tell you what, I’ll get you a refill and… and…”
Abruptly, he turned aside and sneezed.
“Damn! Can’t get rid of this thing.”
“Take an anti.”
“I have.”
Another cross he’ll have to bear, she thought. Living in a snowball, sniffling all the time.
Percells didn’t have to put up with runny noses. The gene tailors, while they were splicing away anemia and lupus and the other target diseases, had trimmed the complex of coding molecules that had given viruses their free ride, and humanity a million years of colds and flu.
“Well then… let me make some tea.”
He smiled wanly, his steel-blue eyes still distant, thinking of something far back in a past she could not fathom “Yes, fine. My mother…she did that. Then came the chicken soup.” He laughed, but not his eyes.
CARL
He suppressed a guffaw. The crucial step, the insertion of the sleepslot modules into the head of the comet, didn’t seem at all like the climax of a dangerous, five-year voyage by sailship, a prodigious engineering feat, a modern marvel. Instead, it looked to him like the coupling of monstrous genitalia.
The slender slot tug Whipple glided forward, nose down. Stripped of its solar sails and antennae, it was the uniform ruddy color chosen to maximize its thermal balance during the years in flight from Earth orbit. The sleep-slot payload rode forward, its extra shielding against cosmic rays filling a bulging, rounded knob, slightly thicker than the main body.
Below, Shaft 4 gaped. The surrounding ice was freshly exposed from the scratchings and abrasions of mechs—creamy, virgin ice which had not seen the harsh glare of sunlight since the time the planets and comets first formed.
Carl started to chuckle and coughed to cover it. Over the hiss of suitcomm nobody could tell the difference, probably. He blinked, but the pornographic illusion would not go away. I must be a lot more tired out than I thought.
—Needs a li’l of three-degree realign at sixty azimuth,— Jeffers sent.
“Right. Got it,” Carl replied. Jeffers’s data was integrated as he spoke, and then Carl’s helmet screen leaped into activity. A graphics view turned, green lines against black ground, showing how the Whipple looked along all three axes. Then the desired view came, an overlay in orange cocked at an angle along two axes. Carl punched in corrections.
A cluster of higher-ups were watching by TV, he knew, and Ould-Harrad stood on the surface below, cold-eyed and critical. They would certainly send back an edited version in the squirt to Earthside. Plenty of eyes to catch a mistake. Watch Carl Osborn snag ninety-odd souls halfway in, maybe.
Carl shook his head. To hell with that. Just watch the vectors, do the job. Can’t let nerves scramble your synapses, as Virginia would say.
He fired four jets just behind the Whipple’s central engine housing. The pulsed ruby-red against the black. Each cut off in sequence as the orange image on his faceplate merged with the green.
—Cleared.—
—Here goes,— Andy Carroll sent. Andy sat forward in the small bubble cabin of the ship, and had nominal control. Jets flared a pale blue along the aft beams.
The Whipple glided smoothly in, clearing the yellow protective liners with ease.
—On the money!— Andy yelled. —Picking up the guide.—
The sleep-slot knob drove cleanly in, catching in the railings that would keep it from going astray once inside. Over suitcomm Carl heard shouts of celebration and even some handclapping leaking through from an open channel back in the Edmund’s lounge.
The sleep-slot module separated, descended. The sail tugs were as slim and weight-wise as classic nineteenth-century windjammers. Their slender, silvery frames carried sleep slots, supplies, and a robot crew—all in cylindrical modules fitted snugly along a tubular frame, the spine for the great spread wings that cupped the solar wind. Those gossamer sheets were now furled, awaiting humdrum service as mirrors for the surface greenhouses. That left the naked frame, a great beast now stripped by reductionist logic to a skimpy skeleton.
And somewhere out there the Newburn sails on, Carl thought about the missing fourth tug. Lost, a victim of the cold percentages.
—Reversin’ her!— Andy backed his ship out carefully. It would slip down a different path, into its own chamber. Jeffers now commanded the mechs inside to draw the sleep-slot module downward through nearly a kilometer of shaft, into the vault that had been prepared for it.
Carl turned up his bonephone: Beethoven’s Fifth Violin Sonata, the last movement a liquid rush of piano notes. A reward. Lugging big masses around was standard stuff, but it felt different when there were ninety lives at stake. He needed to ease off, relax. The main show was over, but he still had hours of work to go.
The graceful, fluid sway of chamber music seemed to Carl natural for working in zero G. He could never understand Jeffers or Sergeov, who listened to that raucous, heavy-handed Clash Ceramic stuff while they worked. He vectored down beckoning to the distant dot that was Colonel Ould-Harrad.
Carl slowed above Shaft 6 to accompany the African officer, who was space-able but less used to making speed through tunnels. A mistake could cram you into the wall with bone-splintering impact. It took years for Earthsiders’ bodies to really believe that lack of weight didn’t mean absence of inertia.