“But they were good times.”
Virginia felt moved by his intensity, even as she focused in on it, enlarging the channel capacity and sensitivity of the link. Saul was easier to probe than any subject she had had before. Except, maybe, for the littlest children.
And for some reason it was not unpleasantly disorienting, this time. To the contrary, it was pleasant, if a little frightening. The man was… well, strong.
“Go on, Saul. The simulation’s running well. I’d like to hear more about those days. You started telling Carl and me about your early work on cures for sickle cell and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and lupus.”
“Cures!” Saul laughed, and the cellos were joined by a bitter choir of cymbals. “Yeah, I did. Fortunately, most of our later efforts worked better. Some of the early `successes’ were only partial.”
Virginia knew that. She had already gone into the expedition’s records and expunged all trace of her own infirmity. Of course, it couldn’t affect her duties in any way—in fact the authorities would likely approve of it. But she had erased the data anyway. It just wasn’t anyone else’s damn business.
Virginia smoothed down her own emotions and concentrated on solving the mystery of this oddly open channel to Saul’s subsurface feelings. I’m learning more today than I did in a year, back home, she thought.
She felt JonVon’s central presence pull up alongside, imitating her actions, learning by “watching” how she played the channels, adjusted resonances. Smoothly, at her command, her machine surrogate slipped in to take over. Soon she was able to pull back for a minute and check the biology simulation, their ostensible reason for being here.
It surged on, piling intricacy onto complexity. Now the scale had zoomed back again to enclose an entire field of lattice openings, each with its own fringe of huge, blue-white molecules waving out into the electric stream, like cilia around gaping mouths.
She tried to keep the conversation going. “But you weren’t with Percell when…”
“When he made his fatal error? Those poor monstrosities? No. Perhaps I should have been. I might have done more good than I did by going back to Haifa to join the struggle. By then it was too late, of course. The old Sabras and the kibbutzim had risen, and been crushed by the Levites and their ‘peacekeeping’ mercenaries. Miriam and the little ones…”
The sudden wash of feelings was overpowering and direct. Virginia ’s eyes fluttered and teared as she remembered scenes of grisly horror…seemed almost to see burning settlements, forests in flame… felt the thalamic surge of anguish and guilt.
Furious, she commanded JonVon to stop creating these images. The machine had no business interfering like this!
I am only enhancing, Virginia,
JonVon announced coolly over their private channel, dryly delivering news that stunned her even more than the glittering scene of a temple rising on an ancient hill. Virginia ’s mouth was suddenly dry. But…
I am not interpolating or simulating any of this. Amplified, these are direct images from the subject.
Her hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically, forcing the machine to automatically disable her fingertip controls. Her breath came in ragged, audible gasps as the truth struck hard.
“He nalulu ehaeha!”
Distantly, she felt the waldo gloves being pulled from her hands, her shoulders lifted in strong arms.
“Are you all right, Virginia ?” Saul was speaking aloud. “I didn’t mean to come on so strong. I thought you did this sort of thing all the time.”
She blinked, looking up at his concerned face. “Y-you knew what I was up to?”
He laughed. “Who wouldn’t, with you and your cybernetic familiar skulking around at the edges of my mind, poking and probing?”
He shook his head. “Honestly, Virginia, what you’ve done here is astonishing. It felt… direct! I Thought-to-thought contact. It’s been in so many stories and films, even after Margan supposedly proved it impossible, years ago, but…”
Virginia was still numb. “It is. It’s supposed to be… impossible, I mean. I use JonVon to mediate, to guess and pattern, to simulate. But I never expected…”
Now Saul’s expression was serious. “You mean that was your first time?”
Virginia had to smile. “Yes, my first. But don’t worry, Saul. You were a perfect gentleman.”
That did it. He rocked back and howled, and she joined in. They laughed together. The tension seemed to evaporate and for a long moment neither of them seemed to take any notice of the fact that he was still holding her.
This feels so good, she thought at last.
“Hmmm?” he said, tapping his helmet. “I only got a little of that, but I’m pretty sure I agree with whatever it was.”
She looked up at him. “Oh, Saul. I’d known you had a sad life. But it’s different feeling it, almost remembering it myself.”
Yet another image flickered at the edge of vision, a woman. She was no great beauty, certainly—mousy dark hair framing an ordinary face—but her smile was warm, and there was a brimming glow. Behind her were two smaller faces, a boy and a girl.
Miriam? Your children?
Yes. A pain softened by time. Love undiminished.
And in her own heart, another pain, still fierce. Love unanswerable.
“You don’t hate me… for what the gene treatments did to you?” Saul asked.
Virginia looked up quickly and met his eyes. She shook her head. “I did, long ago. You and Simon Percell. Then I met some of the other Percells… those for whom your lupus cure worked completely.
“I studied. I learned that without the treatments I would have been stillborn or horribly crippled… not merely—lacking. It was just the luck of the draw that I…”
“It’s all right.” Saul drew her near and she closed her eyes. “We both still have our work now. Good work. And that does give us a piece of the future too, Virginia.”
“Yes, our work… and maybe a little more.” She felt warm. Virginia lifted her face to him. Saul had to push aside the wires of his helmet in order to kiss her.
I’ve never done anything like this while linked, before. She thought amid the tidal swell of feeling. I wonder what Jon Von will make of it.
Above them, unheeded, the simulation had panned back again, taking in a wall of clay and a salty, electric-bright current.
Bright shapes had begun emerging from the rust-colored crevices. They flitted about in the hot stream—now coated and armored against the battering molecules—and set out into a multicolored world, consuming one another, growing, and making little replicas of themselves.
CARL
At first he thought it was nothing important.
Carl wiped the green and brown gunk off the distillation pipes and moved on. The gas-gathering zone of Shaft 3 was a long dark tunnel, its phosphors giving everything a lime-green cast.
The plumbing looked okay—magnetic motors humming, pipes gurgling, a smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur compounds. Excess vapors were condensed here from the miles of tunnels now threading Halley Core. Bioinventory showed a surplus of useful fluids and was talking about storing it. The boiloff would probably lessen as the more-volatile ices were used up, and also there would be less heat-making activity during the long cruise out. Everything looked pretty damn good.