Children of the Comet Read Online Free PDF

Council says they’ll have housing for us any day now.”
    He’d replied, “You’ll get used to it, Stefan. We all will.”
    The man’s wife, her eyes moist, started to say something, but the air currents drew them out of earshot.
    Another half mile of travel took him to what had been the captain’s suite. It was lonely enough now, with his wife gone these many years and his son, Alten, working on Rebirth’s still-untamed surface, lending his engineer’s talents to the job of getting a civilization going.
    He looked around at the main salon. It was spartan enough. He’d spent the years since his wife’s death simplifying. But there were still the mementos from an Earth that no longer existed. An Oriental rug hanging on one wall—a relic of the centuries when they still made such things by hand. An actual piano of carved rosewood; his wife had played old music on it, and he hadn’t had the heart to get rid of it. A glass dome enclosing an arrangement of dried leaves from a rain forest that had been long gone even then. A velvet sofa. Framed prints of paintings by vanished painters. A sculpted model of Time’s Beginning , with its long shaft surrounded by the oblate spheres of the habitat modules and the forward umbrella to ward off the deadly radiation that came from slamming into interstellar hydrogen at more than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. There was no resemblance to the earlier starships with their spinning wheels to simulate gravity; Time’s Beginning had been designed to accelerate, then decelerate, at one G for the entire two and a half billion years.
    He took a shower to get rid of the grime and sweat of the spacesuit, then thought about supper. He wasn’t hungry, but he still presided over a captain’s table of sorts, and he owed it to the others to put in an appearance.
    There was still time to make a call to his son on the planet’s surface. Alten, as far as he knew, was working at a construction site a few miles from the growing city of Rebirth’s capital-to-be, New Brussels.
    He tried to dial him up and was informed by the Time’s Beginning communication center that the relay satellite—the first and so far only one—was currently behind the planet but that his call could be placed in two hours.
    When he got back from dinner, he was a little depressed. He’d had to preside over an argument between one of the Endgamist majority and an obnoxious member of Karn’s firebrand party. The dispute got complicated when a colonist with a third point of view became vehement. “We’ve only planted settlements in four star systems in 3C-273, including this one!” he’d said, thumping the table for emphasis. “That’s not what I call seeding the galaxy. We’ve still got four habitat modules left, each with its own shuttle and everything needed to get started. I say let’s finish the job!”
    Joorn didn’t want to take sides, but he managed to get them to calm down. “It ate up an extra twelve years of lifetime to do those other three stars, building up our gamma from scratch each time,” he’d said diplomatically. “I can understand why most people are travel-weary. But look at the bright side. We’ll inherit the four unused habitats and their starter kits, won’t we? We’ll have five times the resources and five times the people. That’s quite a head start over the other three focal points we planted. That’ll make this colony the crown jewel of the galaxy.”
    â€œAnd it’ll still take twenty million years for the colonization front to fill the galaxy,” the Karn partisan grumbled. “That is, if the human species hasn’t evolved itself out of existence by then.”
    The Endgamist got in one last barb. “Which is what we hope the First Ones have done by now back in the Milky Way,” he said. “Well, we’re