Saul lifted his eyebrows. The lazy man’s shrug conveyed more than words could at this point. Carl Osborn responded with a smile, not a particularly friendly smile, but ironic. “Good. Your unslotting is proceeding normally. You should be up and about soon.”

Soul’s voice felt dry. Dusty. “Is… is there peace now?”

Carl blinked, then shook his head. “Most wakers ask what date it is. Or, if they’ve already been out, they ask if we’ve beaten the gunk. But not you. Not Saul Lintz.”

There was no antagonism in the remark. Saul managed to answer Carl’s wry smile with one of his own. “Okay, then. What… what’s the date?”

Carl nodded. “Eight years before the new century.”

So, Saul thought. Thirty years. That was a long nap.

“Aphelion…” he breathed.

“Not far from it,” Carl agreed. “We’re thirty a.u. out. You should see the sun. It’s not much brighter than the moon in a desert night.”

Where no person has gone before.

“The Nudge Launchers?” Saul asked. “Are they…”

Carl frowned. “We’ll get ’em built.”

Saul read a lot in that expression. It answered his first question. No peace. But we’re still here, so it can’t be all bad.

His body felt as if it were made of lead, but he managed to turn his head. “So who’s is charge now?… Kuyamato? Trugdorff?…Johannson?”

Carl shook his head. “They’re all dead, or dead-slotted.”

“Then who?”

Carl made a restless shrug. “I’m operations officer. If anyone’s in charge, I am.”

Saul settled back, slowly absorbing this.

He is older, harder. I wonder how many more years Carl has spent awake, while I slept.

“So do you need a doctor?” Frankly, he wouldn’t have expected to be revived, if it were up to Carl.

“Yeah, that’s right, Saul. We need a doctor. And Earth suggested it might be a good time to let you have another look at the diseases. Some seem to have mutated.”

Carl hovered over him for another moment. His lips pressed together. “I ought to be honest with you, Saul. The biggest reason I had you taken off ice was because we need Virginia.”

“Virginia,” Saul breathed. Remembering.

Carl nodded, his mouth tight. “Rest, Saul. You won’t be called on to do much. Not right away. I’ll check in on you later.”

Saul said nothing as the tall man slipped out of his peripheral vision. The years still had to be unsorted. Dreams that he had not quite experienced felt like water behind an overfilled dam. Faces riffled like shuffling cards.

Faces of women—Miriam, Virginia, Lani Nguyen. Faces of comrades—Nicholas Malenkov, dying in his arms.

And the ghost of Simon Percell. Through the fibercloth walls, through the ice mountain that surrounded him, Saul felt he could almost hear a soft, ironic laughter. It stayed with him when he fell into a deep, natural sleep.

Twice more he stirred briefly. The first time when a tech he recognized from the crew of the Edmund—nowamiddle-aged woman with a strange, greenish stain on one side of her face—greeted him mildly and offered him a drink. He had to ask her to speak slowly because she seemed to have picked up a queer accent.

An oddly handsome man without any hair at all was his caretaker the next time. A burn on one cheek seemed more like a brand than anything an accident might produce. Saul thought it wise to forbear comment.

Wait. Absorb. Learn.

The slot tenders were not as busy as they once had been. The pace was casual, but under it all, the tension was still there. In the hushed conversations he overheard, there were words, phrases, that he could not follow. He was allowed to sit up, the next time the watch shift changed, and he saw that there was some sort of ceremony as new slot tenders took charge.

No. There is no peace.

He saw on the wallboard that two recuperation lights shone. One for him. One for Virginia. She had kept her promise, and followed him down the River of Time.

Clever girl, Saul thought. I knew you could do it.

I can’t wait to tell you how much I really love you… however old you are by now.

With that wry thought, Saul slept again, and knew that he would be stronger when next he awakened.

Kepler’s Laws seemed almost biological now. Carl stared at the orbital display and sighed. Following a long ellipse out from the sun’s sting felt a lot like aging.

You start with a hot, fevered time when movement is rapid, life burgeons. Spring, a swelling heat, and ripe, quick summer. It passes. Things calm, raw reality seeps in, you slow and cool and come to terms with the fundamental hostility of the universe. Like growing old.

Simple Newtonian dynamics explained it all. The eccentric, moody Kepler had deduced the basic laws governing elliptical motion in a classic, brute-force manner: staring at the data until order seemed to ooze out, the eye bringing forth structure where another’s would see only a hash of numbers. Carl respected that ability far more now, after years of dealing with mountains of data, faithfully delivered by the interlocking systems of Halley Core.

He stepped Halley’s orbit forward on the big screen, watching the long ellipse advance, the scale swelling as the warm realm of the inner planets dwindled, circles sucked into the vortex of the sun. They were far past Saturn now, turning with an aching lethargy toward aphelion, beyond Neptune. Gravity’s weakening tug nudged the ice mountain feebly, the sun’s gossamer apronstrings.

He still came to Central every few days to check, to touch the consoles and renew his faith that this long night must have an end.

Like growing old.

How old am I,anyway? Two years serving under Ould-Harrad, after Saul and Virginia went into the slots. I was damned glad to slide into that chilly sleep myself. Worn out and depressed.

Then another shift under Lieutenant Morgan a decade later. Less harrowing, sure, but boring. I got heavily into the sense-stim, just to blot out the monotony of ice and dark. Must’ve run through every tape in the library a dozen times. JonVon was a help, rearranging and blending sensations and dramas. Some odd, delightful effects there… Still, much more than two years and I would’ve been ready for the rubber room.

Now it’s been—what? four more years? seems longer! —since Calciano woke me to take his place. The guy was pretty damned near gone, too.

He examined his reflection in a nearby blank screen, the gray flecks at the temples. Well, Virginia liked ’em older… Maybe now I can compete. I was a little hard to take, I guess. Brash and idealistic and pretty abrasive, I’m sure. Now, though…

He shook his head. Whatever he was becoming as a man… well, it was secondary. His main focus was on being a commander, or what passed for one these days. Plugging away, keeping the factions working together with minimal friction. He’d love to slip back into that dreamy cold sleep, let go, ride home free…

But there was no one left in the slots he would trust with the important aphelion maneuvers ahead. On the display they were a mere finger’s width from the turnaround, a lonely blue pinprick.

He’d had the time to bone up on Halley’s Comet, something he had skipped when applying for this mission. It had seemed irrelevant: Halley was another iceball, bound for the outer system and zones of space nobody had ever seen. That was enough for an ambitious youngster of twenty-five.

He had been chagrined to find he was even pronouncing the name wrong. Astronomers and space workers called it Halley with a short a; ground-huggers of his native North America used a long a, as if it were “Hailey.” But the discoverer had pronounced it with a w in the middle, so it should sound like “Hawley.” Carl imagined a haughty Englishman enunciating the name with one eyebrow arched, his lips turned into an amused, condescending smile.