Children of the Comet (9 page)

CHAPTER 14

The first group he encountered, with still a few hours of descent ahead of him, was a party of hunters in the lower branches. There were five of them carrying one pathetic prize among them—a starveling meatbeast that must have been the cull of its herd.

They stopped and stared at Torris but did not try to approach him. One did not speak to a returning Dreamer until he had poured out his Dream to Claz and had undergone the proper rituals. They conferred briefly among themselves, then one of them scrambled downward and disappeared among the low-lying boughs. To spread the news, Torris supposed.

He saluted them wryly and continued his descent. By the time he got to the cave mouth he was exhausted. Climbing down was just as tiring as climbing up, except that it didn't take as long, with intervals of dropping free alternating with threading one's way through the branches. He was hungry, too, not having stopped often enough to forage or to hunt.

The usual handful of people in airsuits were loitering on the trampled ground outside the entrance to the ice cave. They made way for him but kept their distance. He traversed the twisting downward tunnel and let himself through the triple animal-skin airlock into the big common chamber. The usual perpetual fire was going, keeping the place almost warm enough to melt ice, and there were perhaps two handfuls of people taking advantage of it, mostly mothers with small children. They looked at Torris, then looked away. He could hear them whispering as he passed on his way to Claz's niche, his helmet under his arm.

The priest was not there, but he could hear voices from behind the curtain of skins that covered the entrance to Claz's personal space. “Claz?” he said, announcing himself hesitantly, and let himself through.

Three heads turned in his direction as he entered. The other two scowled at the interruption, but Claz recognized Torris immediately and said, “So you're alive, boy. We lost three Climbers this turn of the stars, and when you didn't return for so long, we thought the Tree had swallowed you too.”

The two visitors frowned in concert. Torris had hoped to see Claz alone, at least through the welcoming ceremony, and their presence was disquieting at the least. They were the two recognized elders of the tribe, old enough to have streaks of gray in their beards. Torris acknowledged them with the necessary nods of deference, but his heart was sinking.

One of the two was Cleb the Chronicler, Brank's long-suffering father. Torris's heart sank still further.

“Did you see my boy Brank?” Cleb asked harshly. “Was he by any chance still alive?”

Claz thumped his walking staff. “Later, Cleb, later,” he said. He turned back to Torris. “First, Torris-postulant, did you bring me a Dream?”

“I did,” Torris said, following the ritual.

The two elders bowed their heads in compliance—Cleb unwillingly, the other in stolid conformance. Torris knew the other man well. He was Igg the Spearmaker, and Torris had endured his share of cuffs and blows from him while he was growing up. Igg had been a mighty hunter in his day—the tribe's best—but that had ended after a kick from a wounded meatbeast had lamed him. He eked out a living by making spears for the tribe and by instructing the young boys in the use of the spear. Torris had complained to his father about Igg's treatment, but his father had belittled his bruises and the other abuse. “That's just his way,” he'd said. “How would it look if the son of the Facemaker got special treatment?” Then, after a moment, “Perhaps he treats you a little worse than the other boys because he resents me. Nobody has the special skill needed to cast a clear Face, so they must come to me. But anybody can make a spear, and so there are many who choose not to let Igg tithe them.”

“You may tell your Dream,” Claz said. “Leave nothing out.”

Torris began hesitantly but soon was caught up in the telling of his Dream. Claz listened impassively, but the two elders exchanged frowns as Torris struggled to describe the strangeness of both being himself, living the Tree's slow thoughts, and somehow being the Tree itself, looking down at the tiny naked creature sprawled unconscious in its calyx, a parasite like the other life it hosted but a specimen of a promising species it had conditioned over the millennia to bring it gifts of pollen from its Brother Trees.

“Blasphemy,” Igg muttered.

“Overweening conceit, at any rate, to claim to be in some sense the Tree itself,” Cleb said in the doctrinaire tone of voice he affected when he was making his pronouncements as Chronicler.

“Do not interrupt,” Claz said sternly. Then, with a sideways glance at Torris, “I have heard such things before from some of the more imaginative returnees. And I can remember describing my own Dream in a similar way when I was a young postulant. And how can it not be? The Tree created us long ago, and how can a god not have powerful thoughts, thoughts that we cannot understand or find words for?”

He turned to Torris. “Go on, boy. You said something about bringing a bag of pollen as a gift—pollen from a Brother Tree. But did you not scrape the pollen from a calyx of the Tree itself?”

At that moment Torris realized he had made a mistake. He had been so caught up in the memory of his strange transformation that he had let that slip.

“I … er … no … that is, there was this bag of pollen that …” He trailed off. He had hoped incoherently that he could somehow imply that he had found a bag of pollen that some other Climber had left behind, but now he was entangled in his own words. How could he know that it was the pollen of another Tree? Torris, like all the primitive people who had ever been, was not used to telling outright lies. In fact, there was a term for such a person—
web talker
—and once a person had been so labeled, nobody ever took him seriously again.

Claz was looking at him oddly.

Torris blurted out: “The pollen was left by someone from the Tree-that-draws-closer.” He stopped. That would not be enough. He knew, miserably, that he had simply provided more questions for Claz to ask.

Igg, at least, had been misdirected. “A bride raider!” he exclaimed excitedly. “By the Tree of Trees, it's some impudent bride raider from a Tree we've had our eye on for half a lifetime!” He became alarmed. “There may be others! We're in great danger! I'll get the men together. We may have to fight …” Now he was perplexed. “But how was he able to cross? It's still too far!”

“Calm yourself, Igg,” Claz said. He turned to Torris. “Perhaps you had better explain yourself, boy.”

Torris's head was spinning. “It was a woman,” he said, forcing the words out unwillingly. “She brought the pollen from her own Tree. But she …”

This was getting harder. He gulped and went on. “… but she gave the pollen to me because she thought the gift would be more pleasing to our Tree than the usual scrapings and that It would reward me with a more powerful Dream. I … I …” He stopped, lost in confusion.

Cleb was indignant. “You
connived
with this … this
woman
?” he sputtered. “Why did you not kill her?”

Igg couldn't restrain himself either. “She was sent by the people of her Tree to spy on us so that their bride raiders could kill us all and take our women! They sent a woman because it was doubtful that anyone could survive such a crossing, and it was not worth risking one of their men!”

Claz kept his composure. “That seems a fair question, Torris,” he said gently. “Why did you not kill her?”

Torris's ears burned. What had he gotten himself into? “She … she caught me in a trap,” he confessed. “But she spared me. And then … and then she saved me from being eaten by a web beast. She came with me on my Climb, and we … we helped each other.”

Claz seemed sad rather than angry. “Tell the truth, Torris,” he said. “Did you violate your vow of chastity as well?”

He couldn't meet Claz's eyes. “Y … yes.”

Cleb took a new tack. Using his orotund Chronicler's voice, he said, “It's becoming clear. They sent her to steal our seed. She is a witch, and that is how she survived the crossing.”

Claz ignored him. “Tell me, Torris. How did you help this woman?”

It was over for him now. The last of his resistance crumbled. He'd have to tell Claz everything. Everything except killing Brank. He steeled himself not to let that spill out. But he raised his eyes to meet Claz's steady gaze, and the words tumbled out.

“She … she wasn't here to spy. Times are lean on her Tree. The game has been failing there. She came here hoping to score a huge kill and send the meat back to her Tree. To help her people and prove herself as a hunter.”

That was too much for Igg. “A woman hunter? This is disgraceful, Claz. Wholly unnatural, and as a participant, this boy has sunk to the lowest depths! It's an offense against all men! Word of this must never get out! It would threaten our whole way of life!”

His hand strayed toward his knife, but a glance from Claz quelled him.

“And did you hunt with this unnatural woman, Torris?” Claz continued calmly, almost kindly.

“N … no, not exactly,” Torris said. “I … snared some small game to help feed us on the way, but Ning wouldn't let me come with her on the meatbeast hunts. She said …” He blushed. “… I wasn't an experienced hunter.”

“So you made camp for this Ning and snared hoppers and such for food along the way, like any small child taken along on a hunt,” Claz said.

Torris realized too late that Claz was goading him for a purpose. He briefly flared with suppressed anger and said defensively, “I helped to make the giants' bow by which she returned to her Tree.”

Claz pounced. “What is this giants' bow?”

So Torris had to explain about Ning's catapult in detail. Claz questioned him closely and seemed to grasp some of the fine points of construction, though Torris was often at a loss for words to make his meaning clear. Claz was particularly interested in the fact that Ning was able to measure things in her head without trying them out first, and he pressed Torris hard on the details. He seemed to know what Torris was talking about when Torris described the ancient slabs of wood with pictures on them. It made Torris wonder if his own tribe had once had such slabs, and if they had been destroyed for their impiety or if were hidden.

When Torris told Claz how Ning had used the movement of the stars to take aim at her approaching Tree, Claz became inordinately interested. “Is this Ning a numberer, then?” he asked with a show of indifference.

“N … no,” Torris said. “Everyone knows a woman cannot be a numberer.”

Igg nodded, his expression hardening. “She's a witch,” he said.

Cleb was looking at Torris with distaste. “That's no excuse,” he said to Claz. “This is a clear case not only of impiety, in violating the canons of the Climb by soliciting help from another, but of making a mockery of them by pairing with an enemy of the tribe to do so. And a woman at that—a sacrilege in itself.”

Torris longed to be able to tell Cleb that his own son, Brank, had violated the sacred canons of the Climb by stealing from another Climber, and that one of the reasons he and Ning had formed their alliance was for protection. But he knew that to mention Brank was to condemn himself to perdition.

Claz looked at Torris sadly. “Wait outside, boy. I will tell you my decision when I have mulled these things over.”

The common chamber was filled with people when Torris emerged. It was the hour of the main meal now, and even many of those who had fires of their own in a niche or lean-to within the cave and did not have to depend on the central fire for cooking their food had joined the others for camaraderie. Perhaps some were there out of curiosity because word had traveled that one of the returned Climbers who had been thought dead had been with Claz and the elders for an inordinately long time. That the returnee was the son of Parn the Facemaker added spice to the curiosity.

The chatter stopped and all eyes turned to Torris. But no one spoke to him and no one would meet his eyes. He made his way to an unoccupied spot against the wall and squatted down, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. After a while they went back to their eating and chatter.

Torris looked around the cave for his father or one of his mothers but saw no sign of them. Parn must have known by now that his son had returned, but he was being strict about not speaking to him until the priest had collected his Dream— and not letting Firstmother and Secondmother out of his sight either.

He waited for what seemed like a very long time. At last Claz appeared at his niche and searched for Torris. He found him immediately, and everybody else looked at Torris too.

“The postulant will return to hear the judgment,” he announced, and disappeared behind the skin curtain.

Torris made his way across the chamber, feeling all eyes on him. This was not the usual order of things. He let himself through the curtain and found Claz and the two elders seated on the gnarled root that was used as a bench for formal judgments.

“It has been decided,” Claz said. “You are guilty of heresy. You are to be Shunned.”

CHAPTER 15

5,999,900,000 A.D.

Local Group

The Milky Way was a blaze of glory against the black of a near-empty sky as Joorn and his family watched the projected view in the observation gallery unfold. But it was no longer the beautiful spiral it had been when Joorn had left it two and a half billion years ago. It had been deformed and elongated by its encounter with Andromeda and was now an elliptical galaxy, and a rather distorted one at that.

“It's beautiful, Grandpa!” exclaimed eleven-year-old Nina. “But it doesn't look like the pictures. Is that because of the collision with Andromeda? And it isn't as colorful as I expected. Is that because so many of the larger stars turned into white dwarfs or black holes after all these years?”

Joorn tousled her hair fondly. It was pretty obvious by now that Nina had decided to follow in her father's footsteps as an astrophysicist rather than become an anthropologist like her mother, despite the growing popularity of anthropology as a career choice among girls in her age group now that they were nearing the ancestral cradle of humanity. Her brother, Martin, ten years her senior, was caught up in the practical aspects of quantum physics and the Higgs field, and he would probably end up as an engineer in the Higgs drive department.

“Well, er …” he began.

Alten took over. “Right on the button, baby,” he said. “But it wasn't exactly a collision. Galaxies are so big, and the stars so far apart, that Andromeda simply passed through the Milky Way with only a few million individual collisions of stars. And yes, when two stars whose mass adds up to more than eight solar masses collide, or even get too close, they merge—quite quickly—and become a black hole. So galaxies of a certain age tend to have a lot of black holes, and eventually the holes merge and become one great big black hole at the center.”

His wife, Irina, nudged him. “Alten, you're lecturing again.”

“I know, I know,” he said good-naturedly. “Just let me finish.” They'd been married for more than twenty years now, having met shortly after
Time's Beginning
began its homeward hegira. Joorn thought the world of his beautiful daughter-in-law and never missed an opportunity to tell Alten how lucky he was.

“But,” Alten continued while Nina gave him her worshipful attention, “there's a lot of dust in a galaxy, and it exerted a gravitational force powerful enough to pull the Milky Way out of shape. And yes, a lot of stars that are too small to become black holes eventually burn up their hydrogen, swell up into red giants, then end their lives as white dwarfs—hot dwarfs that after a few billion years cool into cinders.”

“Stars like Sol.”

“Yes, baby, like Sol. We all get old, even stars. Sol should still be a red giant when we get there, though it will already have started to shrink. But it'll take at least another few hundred thousand years or so before it becomes a white dwarf, and even then it will still be giving off light and heat as it cools because of the gravitational shrinkage.”

Martin had been fidgeting and now he interrupted. “Father, do you mind if I take off for the control room? Chu promised me he'd let me watch when he started to feather down to half a light, and we're smack in the middle of one of the nebulae that didn't get dragged along with the rest of the Large Cloud of Magellan.”

Nina cut in. “The Tarantula Nebula in Nubecula Major,” she said, showing off.

“Don't interrupt your brother, Nina,” Irina said. “It's not polite.”

“Can I?” Martin said.

“I don't want you bothering Chu,” Alten said. “He's got a lot on his mind now that he's about to start decelerating.”

“Oh for heaven's sake, Alten, don't be a stick-in-the-mud,” Joorn said. “Chu and the boy are as thick as thieves.”

“He lets me help him sometimes,” Martin said. “When he needs somebody to run through his numbers.”

Alten pretended to think it over. “Okay,” he said, “but don't touch anything unless he tells you to.”

Martin scurried off happily. Joorn and Alten looked at each other and laughed. “He'll have Chu's job one of these days,” Joorn said.

Alten became suddenly sober. “I hope so,” he said. “Would you believe it: Oliver's been lobbying for the job.”

“Oliver? But he and Karn are still under restrictions.”

“The restrictions have been loosening the last few years. Oliver and Karn still have a lot of friends aboard, even though that crowd is getting older and tamer. Besides, a new generation is growing up, one that doesn't remember our departure or the attempted mutiny.”

“They'll never rehabilitate themselves, not as long as Ryan is ship's president. And
he's
the one with all the followers these days. He's in his fourth consecutive term as ship's president, and
that's
where the politics of the ship stand.” Joorn shook his head, continuing. “Ryan's been too lenient with them. He's mellowed since the early days when he was the firebrand activist who led the counter-mutiny. I was never easy with the decision of Ryan and the ship's council to give Karn teaching privileges again. That's how he built up his band of disciples in the first place.”

“I wouldn't worry too much about it, Father,” Alten said. “Ryan knows what a pair of snakes they are. He's keeping an eye on them. But we can't afford to waste a mind like Karn's. He was the most brilliant astrophysicist of your generation back on Earth. He still is, in our little traveling bubble of a society. We need teachers like him if we're going to repopulate the Milky Way.”

“I know, I know,” Joorn said. “Delbert was my friend. That friendship's still there, in a way.” He gave Alten a wry grin. “I seem to remember that you were his disciple once upon a time.”

“I still am—in a way,” Alten said. “And Martin's attending his classes in Higgs field theory. I can't object to that, can I?”

Nina tugged at Joorn's hand. “Are you talking about Uncle Delbert?” she chimed.

Joorn tried not to show his surprise. Alten was not as successful. “What is this ‘Uncle Delbert' business?” he said.

“He said I could sit at the back of his class in quantum point motion if I was quiet.” She giggled. “He calls it quantum jitters. And afterward he stayed to explain quantum field theory, and he gave me a copy of his book. He said that he and Grandpa were best friends when they were Martin's age.”

Joorn and Alten exchanged a worried look, but Nina was already lost in dreamy contemplation of the Milky Way again.

“I don't trust him,” Alten said. “He's up to something.”

“What could he do?” Joorn shrugged. “We reached our terminal velocity a long time ago, and we've been coasting ever since, albeit at almost the speed of a photon. We did it just in time to avoid zipping past our target as Karn had planned. Now it's just about time for Chu to start decelerating so that we can enter the Sun-Alpha Centauri system at nonrelativistic speeds. There would be no point in Karn and Oliver trying anything after we shed enough delta-v.”

“Karn's had a long time to brood.”

“He's bitter,” Joorn agreed. “He's still lobbying the council to live up to my original bargain with him and let him and his followers have the module with the Higgs drive after we get settled. But Ryan won't have any of it. He's said more than once that Karn's mutiny when we discovered Oliver's deception back at the 3C-295 flag post canceled his original bargain with me.”

“The trouble is that half the council is too young to remember the mutiny. To them it's just an old story told by their fuddy-duddy parents—probably nothing more than an exaggeration of a policy dispute with the Homegoing faction. Karn is playing on their sympathy. He's presenting himself as the bold dreamer once again, the iconoclast who's being deprived of his dream by his political enemies. And some of them are buying it. They have no memory of Earth. Or of Rebirth, for that matter.
Time's Beginning
is their Universe. And I'm sure that some of them even entertain secret fantasies of going with Karn on his journey to nowhere.

“We won
Time's Beginning
fair and square,” Alten continued. “Karn and Oliver lost, and they'd better get used to it. Lord knows, we can put all the ship's resources, including the Higgs drive, to good use. After we find a congenial world—hopefully in the Sol-Centauri system itself—and don't see any need to go star-hopping again, we might decide to give him the Higgs module anyway. Then, for all we care, that whole bunch could take off for the end of the Universe in any direction they choose. The so-called edge is the same distance from anywhere, if you subscribe to the theory that the Universe is just a three-dimensional skin of a brane that's a closed system, like a higher dimensional version of a sphere. So there'd be no need for them to use up more lifetime by retracing their steps to our former starting point in 3C-273. They'd have to start building gamma from scratch here in the Local Group, true, but that was the bargain they made with you on Rebirth, like it or not.”

“Karn may not see it that way. He's obsessed about getting old. He lost a big chunk of lifetime getting to 3C-273 and back. He's afraid he'll die before he gets to see his Valhalla.”

“Nonsense. I spoke to Dr. Hahn at the parole committee just last week, and Karn's telomere treatments are going just fine. He'll live to be two hundred, like everybody else. And if he doesn't—well, that was the same chance he took when we started out six billion years ago.”

“I'd better have a talk with Karn before this gets out of hand. There's no way I'm going to accept Miles Oliver as my first officer. Chu's perfectly willing to go back to his old job, and we've still got some tricky maneuvers to go through before we're home free. I don't like this business of Oliver lobbying the council. And I don't want him thinking that there's the slightest chance that we'd ever trust him again.”

“I'll get together with Ryan,” Alten said. “Have him speak to the council's younger members.”

At that moment, they suddenly became weightless, and everybody automatically grabbed for a handhold. Irina reached for her daughter's shoulder and steadied her. Joorn was abruptly aware that the subtle thrumming of the Higgs drive had ceased.

“Chu's preparing for turnaround,” he said.

Nina wriggled free of her mother's grasp and found a handhold of her own. She turned to her grandfather and said hopefully, “Are we there yet?”

Karn hadn't aged well. His face was gaunt and wintry, and he was starting to acquire a stoop. When Joorn entered he was sitting at a keyboard facing a hugely magnified display that was splashed over an entire wall. As soon as he was aware of Joorn, he stabbed at his keyboard and the wall display winked out. “It's been quite a long time since you've deigned to visit me, Joorn,” he said. “What brings you here today?”

“We need to have a talk, Delbert.”

“What for? The last time I saw you, you made it painfully clear that we no longer have anything to talk about.”

Joorn's retinal memory retained the flash of enlarged numbers he'd seen in the fraction of a second before Karn succeeded in erasing the display. It was a star table of some sort, and he'd managed to catch the labels “Tau Ceti” and “Epsilon Eridani,” two of the sunlike stars that were closest to Sol, where Earth had planted colonies before mankind had discovered the existence of the Others. What was interesting about them was that they obviously came from a table of relativistic time dilation values for travel from Sol at a constant one-G acceleration and deceleration. Joorn had made trips to both those stars as a young starship pilot in the early years after the Higgs drive made starflight possible. The figures were roughly the same for travel to any nearby star—about a year to boost to near-lightspeed and another year to deboost, with the sliding scale that got you to those velocities amounting to only about three years of lifetime for a trip to any star within a hundred light-years. Any star at all. The subjective time added after reaching terminal velocity was insignificant for any of those destinations.

“Planning a trip, Delbert?” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Estimating how much lifespan you'll spend if you maroon the rest of us on one of the habitable planets of our former neighbors. Habitable six billion years ago, that is. Of course both Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani have the virtue of being somewhat smaller than Sol, and so are below the mass threshold for turning into a red giant that swallows its children.”

“Can't an old man dream? Or isn't that allowed either?”

“Don't try to play the self-pity card, Delbert. It doesn't become you.”

“No self-pity, just realism. I've always faced facts, and the fact is that you and that Ryan crowd have the upper hand. Even if you somehow had a change of heart and decided to live up to our original bargain after getting your flock safely settled on the available real estate, it would be too late for me. I'm resigned, Joorn. I'm just playing make-believe here.”

“Miles Oliver doesn't seem to think it's make-believe. He's acting as though he thinks he has a realistic chance of replacing Chu as first officer. Supposedly to hone his piloting skills in case we ever change our minds about letting your crowd have the ship. I suspect
his
daydream is to make the Homegoers walk the plank so he doesn't have to slow down for us.”

“Miles Oliver!” Karn almost spat the words. “That insolent puppy! I think he's become unhinged. He thinks my grand vision of reaching the end of time belongs to
him
now, and he's surrounded himself with the most unsavory elements of the old party. They treat me as a sort of mascot and don't listen to anything I have to say. I gather I'll be allowed along on the trip if I behave myself.” The contempt in Karn's voice was palpable.