Iris

'Yeah,' said Sealock, his mouth dry. 'Say good-bye to our friends from USEC.'

'Stupid bastards,' said Cornwell, and was surprised at himself. Sealock turned to grin in his direction. 'Yeah? There's a lot of that going around lately. . . . Come on, we've got to get this shit can on the road.'

They went below, calling the others to action.

Deepstarsquatted for a while in the ground-hugging mists of Ocypete , and it began. Opaque wisps of mist were drifting about, slowly rising toward the level of the CM. A view of the bottom part of the craft showed that the struts and nozzle mounting were hidden by the stuff. And the sky was slowly brightening, a twilight that masked the dimmest stars. Ocypete was breathing, outgassing the atmosphere that had once been hers, and more. She would soon have a substantial atmosphere instead of this thin muck. Dissolution would happen rapidly as methane, ammonia, and finally carbon dioxide evaporated. The pressure would rise over two, then three, bar, and the features on its face would be wiped out by clouds and haze. As it was, and would be, the little world could never again be the same. Already the stars were going out.

Tendrils of methane fog crept up the sides of the ship like some immense living force, striving to hold it down, engulf it, and hold it to its bosom forever. Moments were passing. The people inside the mechanism activated it.

New gases swirled out from the base of the ship, driving the mist before them, creating an island of stark clarity. Venting hydrogen, Deepstar teetered slowly, gently, then began to climb. As it rose, entering new regions of obscurity, Bernoullian eddies of vapor swept across and around the thousand complex surfaces of the ship, finally to be captured in the fountain of descending gas pressure to stretch and disappear. Safely aloft, the Hyloxso engines were lit off—a bulbous spike of bright flame appeared, red, then yellow, then a translucent white clarity that was defined only by its flickering outlines. Below, the mistscape had turned to jealous, hateful chaos.

The mists waited things out, then flowed back in to claim the spot that humans had vacated. All was quiet for a moment, the worlds swirling beneath the violet light of Mother Ship's flame. A bright spark appeared in the sky, throwing new shadows. Deepstar fled from Iris on the flare of its heavy-ion engine, a dim, tiny light drifting slowly away into a deepening night. We'll meet again, the world beneath them sighed on newborn winds, in another year. When they were gone, five million safe kilometers away, a tall, periscope-like mast slowly rose from the dark sea of Iris. It looked around carefully, then began sighting in, first Aello , then Podarge , then Ocypete . An invisible beam of power flashed, carrying the deepest insight of Quantum Transformational Dynamics. Three jolts and the three moons, soared away, punted from the toe of a cosmic boot. Iris drove inward, still accelerating. At the precise moment when the proper velocity had been reached, the drive shut down and darkness closed in. The ship, enclosed in a still substantial world, fell on. Shorn of its moonlets and ring, the world seemed infinitely forlorn and blank. For a long time, a year, Iris simply fell along the mathematically complex but nearly straight path that Demogorgon had chosen. Finally she came within ten million kilometers of Jupiter, into the sway of the much larger world, and her course altered, narrowing its incoming tangent to the sun to within finely tuned parameters. It was going well.

By this time the swirling bands that mottled Iris' cloud banks were a strangely entangled mess compared to the familiar bands and zones of Jove. The temperature rose, and the solar wind began to rip handfuls of world away. Newly ionized particles began to stream outward at a slightly different angle from the barely visible haze that trailed directly behind. Iris was becoming a comet, the greatest comet that ever could be.

Eventually it was visible from Earth, from the few dark regions where light pollution didn't blind the night sky. A second-magnitude star, not yet large enough to present adisk, and growing to make a belt buckle for Ophiuchus . When it was lost again in the twilight glow, it was first magnitude, and slightly elongated. Then, from the vantage point of Earth, it was lost behind the mask of day. The lengthening teardrop of Iris proper continued to fall. More than three times her original size now, sixty thousand kilometers in diameter, the world was larger than Uranus, though as solids vaporized and her atmosphere bubbled out to nothingness her density had become an insubstantial 0.3 gm/cm2. Indeed, were it not for the high-albedo clouds which hid the depths of her atmosphere from the searching heat of Sol, she would already have been ninety percent gone. As it was, much of the hydrogen was still present, though ineffectively held by gravity. It would only be a matter of time before the small atoms found the trajectory that, in their wild oscillations, would allow them to leak into the void. Iris was slowly developing into the traditional shape of a comet, lengthening at the point of her teardrop into a broad tail of streaming gas. At the height of her acceleration she had come to have a more or less regular flow pattern, flowering out from her leading hemisphere and spreading, to disappear in the dark halo of her nightside. Now, all pattern vanished and she was a featureless raindrop of milk, falling crazily toward the light.

The orbit of Mars passed unheeded. The sun waxed slowly brighter, with its promise of freedom and the Grand Design, the mission of ages, reborn. Iris fell . . .

As spring came once again to the northern hemisphere of Earth, billions waited in curiosity as the diffuse spot of light that was the approaching Iris climbed out of the morning twilight. Even before it could be seen in near darkness, the bright stain had spread over most of Scorpio's chelae, covering perhaps five times Luna's half degree. From this perspective, it was still only a slightly elongated circle of haze with a bright center. From night to night its progress through the stars could be seen, and, briefly, the demon eye of Antares was swallowed and disgorged. Soon the central spot alonewas brighter by far than Venus, also visible in the early morning sky.

From the heart of the CFE, Ennis Cornwell watched as Iris reached out and, like her goddess namesake, stretched a bright white rainbow across the night sky. Radiating from a central sphere brighter than the full moon, hazy only at its outer edge, the comet sent out a huge tail, itself hugely bright and spreading to cover almost a fifth of the sky.

When he was a young man, this was the way he'd expected Halley's comet to look, waiting for its apparition in 2062. When it actually came, he could barely make it out against the haze-ridden sky, and really saw it only on the entertainment nets.

Now this was a comet.