He chuckled dryly. “You know how many times I’ve played them.”

A hint of shyness, yes. “I could… augment them.”

“No!” He slammed a fist into his web-chair. “I want the real thing, the real… you.”

“It would be.”

“When we recorded ourselves, it was a lark, like couples taking Polaroid pictures of themselves in the bedroom. We never intended that only one of us would play them back.” He shook his head. “This way, without you—the real you…”

“But I am me. More real than any holo-image! And if I enter into the sensory link, it is an older and probably wiser Virginia whom you will meet. Me.”

Saul had resisted this suggestion before, for reasons she did not fully understand. But now, perhaps out of the pressing loneliness that danger brings, he lifted his head and stared directly into her opticals. “I… it would?”

She knew she would not guarantee that it would be some genuine Virginia, fixed in amber. She was not the personality that had flooded into the cramped JonVon persona and inundated it. Slow evolution and self-actuated advances had brought her a vast distance since those years. But Saul did not have to know that nor did anyone, and it would be of comfort to him.

“Come to me, Saul.”

He put aside the stone and reached for the neural tap. To her surprise, she felt nervous.

Perhaps for her it would be a returning, too.

Shortly before perihelion the sun stopped its retreat to the south and began rising again. As the disk grew, it swept toward the equator. There was perpetual noon as the comet shuddered and erupted beneath the unending blaze. The southern hemisphere, gutted and gouged for months, now cooled as the north came under ferocious attack.

Sublimating water and carbon dioxide carried heat away from the fast-spinning mote. Its surface cracked in many places, following the weakening imprints Man had stamped upon it for seven decades. Fresh volatiles sublimed and exploded. Sharp chunks weathered to stubs within minutes, as though sandblasted. Pebbles rose and formed hovering sheets which momentarily shielded the ice beneath, then were blown away to join the gathering dust tail.

At the north pole, so far spared the worst, the clawing sun bit deep. Since the times of great plagues, some factions had buried the irrecoverably dead deep in the ice near the pole. Now the Hot found them.

By chance, the sight was visible over a light pipe that surfaced in a sheltered nook at the exact north pole. Exploding gases beneath lifted the wrapped mummies and hurled them skyward. Blistering heat released ionized oxygen from the ice, and the bodies burst into flame, lighting the landscape with momentary orange pyres. The torches were thrown, tumbling and flaring, up and out against the immense, unknowing forces. They hung in the sky for long moments, like distant glittering castles, and then winked out, plunging forever into the river that rolled out from the sun.

“Goddamn! We’re past it!”

Carl’s amazed face intruded on a 3D design study she was changing. He had used override to break into her mainstream persona.

“Yes. You can rejoice,” she said warmly.

“How’d you do it?”

“Vector mechanics, nothing tougher than that.”

“You were marvelous!” Lani said beside Carl, her eyes wide with wonder at being alive. Virginia realized distantly that they really had expected to die.

“I told you the probabilities,” Virginia said. “Surely you—”

“We figured you were just cheering us up!” Carl laughed.

“I made the calculation accessible, Carl, you dope.” Virginia sent some light chuckles to follow this sentence, reflecting that if anyone had actually checked her, they would’ve found she had in fact reported a survival probability of three to one when it had really been only fifty-two percent. But she had been sure no one would do the entire complicated calculation. In thirty years, everyone had come to rely on her, just as they counted on Saul’s bio-miracles.

Lani was bright-eyed, expectant. “When can we go outside? I want to grow some crops in the sun again.”

“Nearly half a year,” Virginia said seriously. She had found that people took statements more to heart if they were laced with sharper vowels and a few bass tones.

“Never mind, we’ll have plenty to do inside,” Carl said, slapping Lani on the rump affectionately.

Virginia knew exactly what he had in mind. It was implicit in his entire psychological profile, true, but her intuition told her more. Carl had bottled himself up emotionally for decades, and that had been crucial in the survival of Halley Core. Now time and circumstance had worked its curious magic and he was free. The youthful Carl could not—did not—respond to Lani’s quiet gifts. This weathered, wiser Carl could, and would, and should.

Somewhere in the compacted recesses of organic memory, a twinge of humor and irony kindled. He’s getting what he needed, even if it isn’t what he wanted. Virginia made a note to cycle Lani in for a “routine” physical within forty days.

The prickly storm swelled. Though they had survived the worst at perihelion, a residue of heat still leaked inward. Virginia sent men and women and mechs to seal tunnels which collapsed, whole zones of shafts whose walls began to sputter and evaporate.

Warmed in vacuum, ice sublimates directly into vapor without becoming liquid. As Halley’s scarred skin blew away, Virginia began her grand experiment.

Teams of hardened mechs ventured forth from the eroded shaft mouths. They dispersed slabs of amorphous silicates, grit and grime dried and filtered and compacted through the years of mining. Quickly they spread huge fields of linked, slate-black sheets oil well-chosen spots near Halley’s equator. They were too heavy for the subliming vapors below to push them away, and the mechs made doubly sure by hammering cables to anchor the slabs.

The effect came with aching slowness. Halley spun now with a day of only three hours. At a precisely calculated moment, the silicate shields blocked sunlight from the ice. Over that zone, outpouring gas ebbed. Other areas continued, and this difference in thrust, combined over the turning face of Halley, began to minutely alter its orbit. Astronomers had long noted this “rocket effect” on rotating comets that temporarily exposed fields of dust, but it had always been spontaneous and temporary. Now it was done by design.

Virginia deployed her mechs remorselessly. Some overheated and failed, others were crushed between the large sheets as they butted and swayed in the sun-driven gale of gas. At her command, they could tilt the slabs end-on, so the protected areas suddenly leaped to life, spurting amber-tinged plumes. Deftly, resolutely, she played a dynamic symphony with the furious hurricane forces that buffeted the mechs and their cargoes. For days, and then weeks, she cupped the outraged steam of Halley to new purposes. Unbalanced thrusts aligned along the comet’s orbit, a persistent hand that swept them along a new orbit.

Four months beyond perihelion, Virginia waited for the inevitable. She had deployed fresh arrays of infrared and microwave radars, concentrated along the expected cone of the sky.

The first was slow and tiny, a marvel of stealth technology. She got a glimpse of broad, transparent vanes that radiated away the sun’s heat. Only her phased-array microwave net, operating at ten gigahertz, picked up its faint shadow. She had spread the gossamer wire receivers over a volume spanning a hundred kilometers, to get high definition. If it had been faster she might not have been able to integrate the diverse signals in time. As it was, she crisped the snub-nosed thing ten kilometers away from Halley.