Hours pass as he struggles to keep repairing what keeps falling apart. Robots are lost unpredictably into cracks and crevices, or as tunnels suddenly close around them. One whole processor bank near the surface goes, in an electronic scream so close in sensation to pain that he perceives no difference. He loses the sense of his physical configuration; he doesn’t know exactly where all his parts are now, and matching his communications topology (which parts talk to each other) with his physical shape hasn’t been possible for hours, and without that he can’t migrate his consciousness to safer processors; he can only hope that his mind keeps running.
The sun is big, and its gravity is powerful. It takes Louie the better part of a day to roar around the back side of the sun from the Earth, finally slowly beginning his rise toward the cool depths of space again. Mercury comes and goes in a flash, Louie using its force to bend him on toward Venus and to drag him back as he goes by in retrograde. The enormous halo of the comet engulfs the entire tiny planet for an instant, and then he is beyond it and screaming up toward Venus on the twenty-eighth. A bigger planet, with its dense atmosphere, Venus is a bright white ball of light to his outer sensors. At the speed at which he’s moving, it flashes by like Mercury before it, but he feels its drag more acutely. In the last few hours he’s repaired much of the damage, found parts of himself and reconnected them, dumped the more hopeless junk into the automated factories to be recycled into replacement and repair parts.
He is going to make it. He finds it hard to believe, but it’s true. A fast swing around the Earth-moon system, making a near approach to each (and how strange to feel Louie-on-the-moon reaching out to join him, now that lag time will get back to near zero), a great thunder of his remaining engines . . and Louie settles into L-4.
L-4 is not so much a place as a description of a place; it is one of the five “Lagrange points,” or “libration points,” where the Earth and moon’s gravity work together to stabilize the orbit. L-4 is found at the point ahead of the moon in orbit where the apex of an equilateral triangle with its base running through the centers of the Earth and moon would be; thus it is as far from the Earth as the moon is.
But the halo of a comet extends far beyond its icy head; as Louie comes
to rest, the halo of gas is still swelling outward, no longer swept away by his motion, until finally it is larger than the Earth itself, though it is thinner than air in the stratosphere. From the few parts of the Earth with clear skies tonight, 2026RU (to name it physically), or Louie (to name it spiritually), looms brighter than the full moon, and fully seven times as wide.
He wishes he could stop to admire himself, but anyway it’s a few hours till Alice will see him, and those are the eyes he really wants to see through. Meanwhile, the tractors and the factory press to their tasks like maniacs; he wants the “ice Frisbees” flying as soon as he can manage.
When Carla woke up and started to talk to them, the cyberneticists at NSA had a field day, at least until they got their evacuation order. They now had two cases of a personality surviving on the net after the originating body was gone. At the least, it would have made them more likely to believe Louie—had not the comet now in Earth orbit been a powerful enough argument by itself.
Louie and Carla’s reunion is an event that the NSA offices in the center of North America, away from the storm, are desperately trying to record, though without success. There’s a serious jam in the available bandwidth that seems to be the two of them trading and integrating data, and it’s a good thing a couple of billion people have been knocked off-line, because Louie and Carla seem to be taking up ninety percent of what’s been made available by that.
Why they both want to know all the archived records of every air pollution monitoring station in Bolivia—or the last two hundred years of hourly exchange rates from the Bank of France—or precinct by precinct electoral results correlated to census data for the state of Nevada in every local, state, and Federal election—is inexplicable, but they are grabbing onto it all. In the last three seconds, Carla broke through security into DoD’s Genetic Engineering Labs, copied DNA maps from every species cataloged there, and zapped every one of them to Louie.
Whatever the hell they’re doing, it’s hard to object to it. Aside from not being able to stop them, neither the NSA in Denver, nor President Hardshaw in Charleston, would want Louie to stop the main thing he’s doing.
Satellite pictures show it best. A great, whirling disk of ice, its diameter ten times the length of the old space station
Constitution,
bursts from the halo of the comet, trailing wisps of mist, glowing brilliant white in the sun. It swings ever nearer until it is huge in the screen, passes below, broad against the Earth, plunging down toward the churning Pacific.
The white glow in the sunlight becomes orange; then a reddish disk;
then at last the disk vanishes against the Earth for a long count, before finally one sees a burst of clouds below.
Exactly as planned, Louie has begun to darken the Pacific sky.
The terminator line is just now at the peaks of the Andes in Chile and Argentina, and the sun will soon be going down across North America as well, so that it’s only about five hours till night begins to roll across the Pacific. Meanwhile, ten ice Frisbees per hour whip from Louie’s launchers, spiraling down toward the Earth from where 2026RU is at the moment in about the same longitude as Cape Town, and tearing into the thin edge of the outer air over the ocean, forming great streaks of ice crystals.
The phone rings in the beautiful old house that overlooks the sea; it’s late in the evening, and Dr. Nathan Zulu had been about to go to bed after spending some hours grading sophomore literature papers.
“Dr. Zulu, hello.”
“Who is this, please?” The video screen is dark.
The image that forms is animated, not terribly well. “My name is Louie Tynan—”
“Yes, sir!” He wonders when this strange dream began.
“I have a large favor to ask of you; could you get Alice to put on her data jack, and come out in the backyard to look at something in, oh, say, fifteen minutes?”
With the perfect, absurd logic of dreams, he points out that it’s way past her bedtime and she’s already asleep, but Louie Tynan promises that this will be brief, and anyway, just this once … .
Still mostly expecting to wake up, he goes up and gets Alice, and in her pajamas and bathrobe, her data jack plugged in, she stands in the backyard, holding her father’s hand, looking out over the big combers rolling in to St. Helena Bay. It is almost as bright as day in the light reflected by the enormous full-moon of 2026RU overhead. Only the brightest stars are visible in the glare.
Alice says nothing—she’s barely awake—and he wonders if this is all a vivid dream—
Far out to the west, a glowing bar appears in the sky, like a long, thick white line. As they watch, for two minutes or so it grows longer and wider, and its ends begin to round. Then, when it is quite low to the horizon, it glows a bright orange, and then a sharp mixture of orange and white flame, leaving a long white streak behind itself like the biggest shooting star he’s ever seen.
He feels Alice clutch his hand; she’s staring at the sky open-mouthed as the huge object descends.
Minutes later, it has become a great, burning oval in the sky, ten times as wide as a full moon—and then, in a great rush, it shatters into uncountable shooting stars. Very faintly, just as the last shooting stars fade from the sky, they hear a booming rumble.
The phone in Nathan Zulu’s pocket rings. He picks it up, and there’s Louie Tynan. “May I speak to Alice, Dr. Zulu?”
He hands the phone to her, and hears Louie’s voice asking “Did you like it?”
“It’s really
flat,
sir,” she says.
“That means ‘good,’” Nathan adds over her shoulder.
Louie laughs. “There’s a relief. I just wanted you to see that, Alice. I’m a big fan of
Innocent Age
.”
“I’m a big fan of yours,” she says, beaming.
They talk for a minute or two more, and then Tynan clicks off. Alice’s eyes are shining, and she hardly stops babbling the whole time he carries her up to her bedroom and tucks her back into bed.
It occurs to him that it’s not going to be easy to tell his daughter about Father Christmas, as his mother suggested he should do soon. She already believes in things that are a lot more impossible—because they’re true.
The next paper on the pile to be graded is “Jung: Elements of the Fantastic in Everyday Life.” Probably the boy cribbed it from somewhere. In a few minutes, Dr. Zulu is settled back in to grading. Even with the weird glow outside, and his daughter talking to comets, life goes on.
“That’s the latest and strangest of it,” Lynn says to President Hardshaw. “He just pitched one in over the South Atlantic for the hell of it. No reason as far as we can tell. But it’s not like he’s being secretive … just that he does so many things so fast that we can’t quite keep up with all of it.
“Which reminds me, he did have good news. Louie says that he’s already tried out the masers experimentally, and it looks like he’ll be able to break the crystals into oxygen and hydrogen again as well.”
“The crystals?” Hardshaw asks. She has to raise her voice slightly, because the salty rain pouring onto Charleston is beyond anything the Amazon ever got until now, but they’re no longer afraid that the buildings won’t hold.
“Well, when those ice disks burst from evaporation and the shock wave under them, twenty miles up, the water they release re-forms as ice crystals almost instantly. It’s the crystals that form the clouds that block the sun. What Louie is worried about is how to remove the crystals on the night side
of the Earth, because at night they keep heat
in.
Apparently he has some way of using a maser—a microwave laser—to blow them apart so vigorously that the hydrogen separates from the oxygen, and the hydrogen will mostly dribble off into space.”
Hardshaw nods. “All right, that’s good enough for me to fake it with if I have to.”
“And it’s not the only strange thing, Ms. President. Reports from Carla are beginning to turn up in computer bulletin boards all over the Earth—proper citations and all. She’s writing something like four scientific papers per minute, and just throwing them to the winds.”
“But is all this going to work, though?” Hardshaw asks. She takes a long sip of hot coffee. Outside, she knows the former West Virginia capital—now the temporary site of the government of the United States—is ringed in sandbags, and that two hundred Marines are fighting to keep the wall in place against the raging current in the street. Supposedly as soon as the rain lets up, even a little, that will stop running; meanwhile, semper fi and all that, they are out there in that rain so thick that to slip is to risk drowning. “Before we talk more, compliments to the Commandant and send out food and coffee for the Marines. If we have to we can let Congress starve.”
“Part of them are out there working with the Marines,” Lynn notes. “The rest can starve, though.” She turns to give the order, then gets back to the screen. “What it looks like is that somehow she—Carla Tynan, I mean—is writing up all sorts of reports on ecological impacts. The paper that caught their attention at the science branch at NSA was this one about zapping the ice crystals with masers. It looks like most of the hydrogen will go off into space, just as planned—its molecular velocity is way above escape velocity, and at that altitude about sixty percent of the available directions will carry it away. The oxygen’s another matter; that much highenergy monoatomic oxygen is going to cause a lot of ozone formation.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? I mean, won’t that repair the holes in the ozone layer?”
“According to Carla it’ll do more than that—they haven’t had time to read the full paper, but according to the abstract the ozone layer is going to be much thicker than it’s ever been. That means a much more complete shut-out of ultraviolet light, and that means that a lot of pollinating insects, who see their way to the flowers by ultraviolet, aren’t going to be able to find the flowers they’re supposed to pollinate. So she’s giving notes on what can be expected as ecological impacts during the recovery.”
“There’s definitely going to be a recovery?”
“Carla thinks so, anyway. And if you count raw processing capability, she and Louie both have brains trillions of times the size of either of ours. I don’t see that we can do much but take her word for it.”
Hardshaw leans back and finishes her coffee. She used to count cups of the stuff and try to make sure she didn’t consume too much; right now, too much doesn’t seem possible. Someone hands her a hot dog and she folds it into her jaws, swallowing all but mechanically. She glances up into the concerned face of a woman she hasn’t seen before, a gray-haired woman in a red apron; a closer look reveals that this woman is wearing the uniform of some convenience-store chain. “You okay, Ms. President?”
“I’ve been better. So you’re catering for the government of the United States?”