At last he rose and went about his merely human business.
He .had the promise. This body, this brain must someday perish. The self, the spirit that they generated would not. It too would go into that which was to find and be the Ultimate.
But omnipotence and omniscience were not yet, nor could they be for untold billions of years. He knew now why their reality required that Proserpina be forgotten. T
Here the sun was only first among the stars, a hundred-thousandth as bright as over Luna, less than a tenth of full Earth. Still, when lights had been turned off in the observation cabin, eyes adapting to dusk saw shadows cast, faint and shifty. On the little world that crowded the primary viewscreen, peaks and crags reared gauntly forth, while glints and shimmers showed where metal lay naked. Dark vision was needful to make the rock surfaces something other than a mottled murkiness. It found a scene like a delirium, mountains, plains, valleys, cliffs, rilles, pits, crevices, flows frozen in their final convulsions, things less identifiable, wildly scrambled together.
After months under thrust, acceleration and deceleration at a steady Lunar gravity, weightlessness came strange even to this crew. Brandir and Kaino floated, gazing, in silence. Air currents seemed to rustle no louder than their blood. Low and slow, torchcraft Beynac orbited her goal. It turned faster than she revolved, a rotation each nine and a half hours. Feature after feature crept over the leading horizon.
“Behold!” cried Kaino.
He pointed to a sootiness not far below the north pole, as it hove in sight. From a distance they had seen that it spread halfway around the globe. This close, they picked out the foothills and steeps of it. Where the range was tumbled or riven, they saw depths that gleamed bluish white. “What is that?”
“A comet smote,” Brandir judged. “This is the debris. Radiation caused exposed organic material from the comet to form larger molecules.” He was quiet a few seconds, as if quelling a shiver. How long had that taken, in these outskirts of the Solar System?The lines in his countenance deepened. He forced matter-of-factness into the melodious Lunarian language: “Belike most is water ice.”
Kaino nodded eagerly. His question had been unthinking; he knew as well as his brother what the sight probably meant. “A hoard of it! And if that prove not enough, why, I’ve observed another comet within a few hundred astronomical units.” He gestured at auxiliary screens full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night. “A fortunate happenstance, amidst all this hollowness.”
“Should we want it. We have tracked down our father’s dream; we know not what new dreams may spring forth.” Brandir spoke curtly. His mood was harsher than fitted this terminus of their expedition. He returned his attention to what he had been studying before Kaino exclaimed.
He forsook it again, and glared, when Ilitu entered. The geologist’s brown hair was rumpled, his clothes carelessly thrown on. He checked his flight at the main screen and the contentment on his thin face flared into joy.
“So your heed is back upon science,” Kaino greeted. Ilitu and Etana had gone off together, exultant, while Beynac was completing the approach.
The younger man ignored the jape, or pretended to. “Have you obtained a good value for the mass?” he asked breathlessly.
Kaino nodded. “Twenty-nine and three-fifths percent of Luna’s.”
“A-ahh. Then indeed the body is chiefly iron. The core of a larger one, shattered in some gigantic collision, just as my mentor believed.” Ilitu stared and stared. “But he could not foresee everything,” he went on, almost as if to himself. “It is a chaos, like Miranda. It must itself have been broken in pieces, many of them melted, by that fury … and then shards of both rained down upon each other, fusing— Yes.” A fingertip trembled across the images of a scarp two hundred kilometers long, a gash that gaped for three hundred, a highland that was a jumble of diverse huge blocks, chunks, and rubble. “The welding could not be total. The interior is surely veined with caverns and tunnels between ill-fitting segments. Sustained heavy bombardment would have collapsed them, making the spheroid still rougher than we see. Hence we know that Jupiter cast it afar soon after it formed. We have found a remnant of the primordial.”