The tunnels and shafts made excellent acoustic pipes. As ice around and surged against new frictions, the groans echoed deep into the core, waking sleepers—though there were few of those, as the crucial hour approached.

Plunging fifty kilometers nearer with every second, Halley rushed toward its ancient enemy. Each past encounter had stripped a skin of ice from the comet, but now it rumbled and wrenched with new forces that sought to break it on the anvil of its sun.

Virginia watched the howling, blinding storm through electronic eyes. As each camera died from the stinging blast of dust and plasma, she deployed another from deep vaults. The sun loomed twice as large as seen from Earth. But from the surface there was no incandescent disk to see. Halley spun, but saw no sunrise. Instead, a white-hot corona simmered overhead. A patch of seething brightness marked where the Hot’s outpouring met the ion flood exploding from Halley, and victory inevitably went to the Hot. Cracked, ionized, the gases turned, deflected aside, and swept around the small iceworld in a magnetized blanket. This roiling atmosphere had no loyalty to its parent, but instead raced outward.

Halley’s twin tails now unfurled across a span greater than Mercury’s orbit. The twisting, glimmering plasma banner held less water than many of Earth’s larger ponds, but the sun’s blaring light made it the most visible object in the solar system. Advanced inhabitants of a nearby star could have picked the nearly straight, shimmering curtains out from the central star. The dust tail, in contrast, was a curved reddish band, broken by dark lanes, sparkling with pebbles and micron-sized grains.

But those riding the parent ice mote could not see the most beautiful tail ever to grace a comet in all history. As it sped deeper into its star’s gravity well, the glowering coma of unbearable luminescence spread and devoured the whole sky. Blinded now, Halley could not even see its nemesis. The sky glared down everywhere.

Virginia had calculated this effect carefully, for it was the key. If she had allowed Halley to remain spinless, the sunward face would have soared toward the four-hundred-degree temperature that a solid body would have at this distance from the sun. Now, she watched heat-flux monitors buried tens of meters in the ice. As the warmth seeped deeper, she spun the iceworld faster to smooth out the effect, allowing the night side to radiate into the black of space.

But the black was fading. Soon the comet’s own summer air reflected sunlight down onto the shaded face of Halley from all sides, and temperatures rose faster as perihelion approached.

“How’s it look?” Carl watched Central’s screens with Lani at his side. “We’ve already blown off twenty meters of ice!” he said sharply. “How long’ll it take to rip us apart?”

Virginia sensed his rising level of conflict. He was a man who solved problems, and in this great crisis he had no role. Like the others, he was a helpless passenger on his own ship.

“We are safe,” she said reassuringly, using a thread of alto tones that made her voice richer than the original had ever been.

“The shaft seals?”

“Intact,” Virginia said, displaying views of the steel-capped lids in place two hundred meters inside each shaft. Beyond them, giant plugs of ice barred the Hot’s way.

“Stop worrying,” Lani said gently, putting a hand on Carl’s shoulder. “We might as well enjoy the view.”

Virginia thought later that it was particularly ironic that Lani’s words were punctuated by a long, rolling boom that penetrated into Central. The spherical room vibrated, creaking. Equipment popped free of holders.

“A cave-in,” Virginia announced, throwing an image onto the central screen. A milling mass of snow and ice jutted through tunnel walls, falling with aching slowness.

“Damn!” Carl said, his voice tight. “Where?”

“Site Three C, as our projection suggested.”

“Pressure.”

“Sealed tightly. No incursions.” Virginia analyzed Carl’s voice patterns and found a high level of tension. If only he would listen to Lani more…

The basic human reaction to events of immense size was to hunker down.

Virginia had noted this in the final days before perihelion. Her mechs roved the honeycombed tunnels, testing for leaks and sudden fountains of vagrant heat. Seldom did they meet anyone. Even Stormfield Park was deserted now, the carousel stopped.

People did their jobs, served their shifts—and holed up with a few loved ones, watching the gaudy maelstrom outside through the video displays. Jeffers had developed a new kind of light pipe that could snake out from a deeply buried camera, and thus reduce risk, but still high-pressure vents opened and gushers of foaming, red-rich mud flooded many of Virginia’s observation stations.

She reserved a tiny piece of Core Memory for her “office.” There she sat amid a hum of machinery, feeling the reassuring rub of a chair, the flickering of consoles. I wish I could spare enough Core to go for a swim, she thought. I can feel my own tensions, too…

As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand years had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well-springs.

Thus, the gathering background chorus of tremors, the crump of a crumbling wall, the low gravelly mutter of strained ice—all these sounds drove the crew inward. Not into solidarity, but to the fleshy reassurance and consolations of fellow spacers, or weirders, or Hawaiians. Like sought like for what might be the final hours.

Except for one lonely figure, who seldom left Central.

“Saul,” she said to him as an amber plume spouted from the surface, throwing streaks of lacy light across the familiar, lined face. He had been sitting by the display a long time, his mind far away as he rolled a small stone in his hand, over and over. “Saul?”

“Ah—oh, yes?” His lined face looked up from the bit of rock.

“I’m sure you could watch elsewhere.”

He shrugged. “Stormfield’s closed. I’m not needed in sick bay right now. There’s no place else I particularly want to be.”

“I am sure Carl and Lani would welcome you. They are awake, watching.”

He raised a hand. “No, I’ll let them be. Don’t want to push in where I’m just a fifth wheel.”

“You worry over that old stone a lot,” she said to change the subject. He had been turning it over in his hands for hours.

He looked at the dark gray lump. “It’s from Suleiman’s bier. I’ve carried it around for weeks, studying it. But that’s… that’s not what I was thinking about right now.”

His gaze drifted over to the refrigerated unit holding sixteen liters of superchilled organic processor. Virginia thought she understood.

“You are with me no matter where you are in Halley, Saul.”

He blinked, nodded. “I know… it’s just…”

“Just that here the physical proximity of my organic memory is reassuring?”

He smiled the old wry smile, slightly puckered lips and crinkled eyes together conveying an irony that was never far from his own image of himself, she knew. “I’m that obvious?”

“To the one who loves you, yes.”

“There are times I wish…”

“Yes?”

“I could have found a way to clone you.”

“So you would know me—or someone like me—in the flesh?”

“Memory only makes some things worse.”

“There…” She felt no real hesitancy, and in any case with her speed the indecision would take only milliseconds, but she had to maintain the nuances of a living persona. “… There are our recordings.”