Susan nodded.

“That’s us. It’s probably the last of its kind, now about to vanish without heir. And for all we know, we are the last of our kind, the only human beings left alive in all the cosmos.”

“Not the only ones,” Susan said quickly, struggling to sound hopeful. “There’s a very loud call coming from the North Atlantic.”

“Be real, Susan. There’s no one alive on Earth. No one human, at least. Our competition is trying to bait us into a response, to find out how many of us are still alive and where. They’ll fix on us and we’ll go up in smoke like Graff and Nautile.”

Just then the cabin shifted slightly, banking to starboard, as somewhere above a fountain of hot gas nudged the comet into a new heading. Sporadic jets of gas and rock were a natural part of every comet’s plunge sunward, and often changed projected course headings in unpredictable and sometimes frightening ways. Comet IRAS-Araki-Alcock had shifted from a far-flung orbit to a near collision with Earth, and the comet Hubble IV had zigged and zagged and sputtered until at last it fell headlong into the Sun. Tam’s landing party did not want to chance repeating either of those two scenarios and had, upon taking possession of Sunspace’s riskiest piece of real estate, promptly “rewired” Sargenti-Peterson with auxiliary nozzles and easily controllable counterthrusters. The words “preadaptation” and “exaptation” kept playing in Tam’s head. Steam and rock jetting from the comet’s interior would disguise any course corrections as natural occurrences. In ways that Tam and her crew had not anticipated, all those kilometers of furnaces and nozzles and the dozens of spiderlike robots that had built them—now replicating under Tam’s orders into hundreds—and even the gamma ray observatories, were about to justify their existence.

“So, what do we do?” the Second Officer demanded nervously, her face pale and mournful.

“Oh, you’re going to love this,” said Tam cheerfully. “It’s called engines up four bells full astern, for twenty hours.”

“Full astern? You’ll practically kill our forward velocity.”

“That’s the idea.”

“But that will drop us down from orbit.”

“Exactly.”

“But we’re orbiting the Sun.”

“Exactly—and stop looking at me that way. I have a plan.”

8

Quest for Ararat

Huddled inside the ceramic shell of Alvin, Hollis and Wayville had stopped talking to each other. No one on Earth could blame them, of course. They couldn’t even blame each other; there was very little left for the damned to say to the damned. Though Alvin could function for years, if necessary, no one had planned for a mission lasting more than two weeks. The provisions Hollis had stowed aboard were now all the food in the world.

In their own ways, Hollis and Wayville were succumbing to Yorktown Syndrome; but in different and distant ways they each knew that they were trying to hold themselves together, even if success meant only that they would probably starve to death with their wits intact.

Jonathan continued to update his book, immersing himself in the virtual reality tie-ins; but with all editorial stops pulled out, VR was rapidly becoming the entire book, rather than a mere teaser inviting people to read passenger biographies, court transcripts, or Walter Lord’s classic work, A Night to Remember.