Jeffers said, —Yeah, looks it. Virginia was right ’bout that, too.—

“She said it wouldn’t happen very much until perihelion.”

—Well, I guess this’s just a taste of it.—

Carl nodded to himself and cast off. He passed parties of Weirds, swathed in green and purple growths, who scarcely took notice of him. They were checking the old seals for intrusions by older Halleyforms, which they would scrape away and replace with mutated, human-friendly forms the Sauls had worked out.

Further on he met two Saul clones, gently coasting a revived sleep slotter to one of the warmer bins. They nodded in unison and called to him, “Only twenty more probables left.” Carl laughed.

They were fully developed adults now, with minds of their own. They even had the same gestures and accent. But somehow he couldn’t think of them as anything but Saul substitutes. The fact that Saul had successfully cloned himself, while attempts at duplicating other crew members had failed, meant that his odd symbiotic adaptation was crucial. Quite possibly, only he could be copied in the Halley environment. So down through these last few decades, the multiSauls had been invaluable for their resistance to random new ailments, and their curious internal discipline. Saul had used JonVon’s memory-transfer apparatus to instill whole chunks of his own expertise into his clones.

What he had learned might have enabled others to raise natural children without fear. It would have been good, hearing peals of childish laughter in the shafts. But the long fall to perihelion had dampened any such idea. No one could bear the knowledge that the promise of childhood might never blossom.

Carl’s comm buzzed and Virginia said, —You were doubting my prognosis?—

“That blowout came a little early, don’t you think?”

—No. After all, I deal in probabilities, sir, not predictions. If you want, why don’t you call up Lefty d’Amario? He can check my calculations.—

Somehow the old tingle still ran through him when the coquettish flavor laced through her voice. “Okay, I’m nor griping. No need to get huffy. You monitoring those stress meters Jeffers implanted all over?”

—Of course. I can always spare a nanosec or two.—

“And?”

—Minor tremors here and there. Some faulting along Shaft Two. Nothing to get perturbed about.—

“Great. You been filling in Cap’n Cruz?”

—You are captain, Carl. Everybody keeps telling you, even if you don’t like it.—

“I didn’t ask for the job.”

—Nobody else could handle what’s coming.—

He felt a sudden spurt of the old anger. “What’s coming is death, Virginia.”

—I know no such thing.—The voice was prim, circumspect.

“You did the simulations yourself.”

—Number-crunching isn’t reality. I should know, eh, friend Carl? There may be variances in the cross-correlation matrices.—

“Don’t give me all that. Halley’s scraping in too close, and she’s been too battered to stand this. The only question is whether we’ll fry or boil when this iceberg blows apart.”

—There are many unpredictables. But also some measures we can take.—

Carl had been smoothly coasting down a tunnel, automatically checking for cracks. This remark made him stop. “What can we do?”

—Pipe some of the surface heat inward, to offset some of the stress arising from the temperature differentials. In other words, reverse the outflow system and spread the surface heat into lower, cooler ice.—

“And if some inside ice vaporizes? The pressures—”

—We vent it. It will aid in shielding from the sun.—

“Ah.” He felt a flush of hope. “How come you didn’t mention this before?”

—I just thought of it. I’m only a machine.—

Faintly, he heard the soft roar of surf, the whisper of trade winds, a distant rumble of ocean squalls gathering. Virginia’s metaphorical world within the network. Somewhere a voice laughed, “Ke Pii mai nei ke kai!”

So she had company, somehow. He smiled. “Look, I’ll call a meeting. We should look into—”

She laughed. —Same old Carl. One minute you’re grousing about everything, but give you a problem to work on and—bingo!—

He flushed. She had always had an uncanny ability to stay one move ahead of him. He pushed off along a tunnel that led home.

—There’s plenty of time to figure out the engineering, Cap’n. Go on about your business. —The tinkling chuckle, ringing in his ears. —Lani’s waiting.—

And she was. She embraced him silently and they spun lazily in the middle of the room, oblivious. Carl had at last mastered the art of putting business aside once he came back to their small apartment, and this time he did so again, even though the implications of Virginia’s remarks were enormous. He was tempted to tell Lani, but then he held back. Hope had been kindled among them so many times over the decades, only to be snuffed out by the brute certainty of some unyielding astronomical fact. So he banished all the fretful chorus of thoughts and simply kissed her.

“My!” She breathed deeply. “Pretty torrid for midday—particularly after a hard night.”

“We do our best.”

“I go on shift soon. Let’s have a quick lunch.”

“Great.” He launched himself for their tiny kitchen, made workable only because they could use the walls and ceiling.

“There’s some hard copy on your printer, by the way,” Lani said, fetching some sauce used on the braised vegetables and mute-chicken from the evening before. “From Virginia.”

“Oh?’

He kicked over to the printer. Usually it was used only for emergencies or entertainments, not ordinary ship’s business.

It was a poem.

Carl studied it, frowning. “She’s getting better.”

Lani came over and read it slowly. “I’m always surprised anew,” she said softly. “Virginia truly is in there, somewhere.”

Carl shook his head. “She’s not in anything, really. She’s everywhere. The system has expanded far beyond just JonVon’s banks. She’s Halley now.”

Lani suddenly turned and embraced him. “We’re all Halley.” He breathed in the aromatic warm musk of her and felt an easing of old pains. Whydid it take me so long to see that this fine woman could be a whole world to me? And what if I never had seen it?

He felt Virginia around them all, sensed the entire community of Halley as a matrix threaded through the ancient ice. They were no longer buried inside, going for a ride. No Percells, no Orthos. They were a new, beleaguered society, a new way for a versatile primate to stretch further, to be more than it was. They were not merely in the center of the old dead ice, they were the heart of the comet.

“Yeah, I suppose we are,” he said.

It was a show that humans had never seen before, and quite likely never would again. The steady hammering of the launchers for over three decades had altered the infalling ice mountain’s orbit, shifting the nodes of the stretching ellipse. Earth’s orbit clung to the sun, deviating from a circle by less than two percent. But Halley’s eccentricity had been ninety-six percent even before the machines of men began their persistent nudging. Now the curve tightened with each passing hour, bringing a searing summer. Halley had never plunged this close to the eroding Hot.