MR. KOYAMA'S COMET
By Walter Jon Williams
Part One: March 1983
In June of 1981 a third-generation Mitsubishi executive, Koyama Eido, took his retirement amid the extravagant praise and well-earned respect of his peers and underlings. He got extravagantly drunk, paid off his mistress, and the very next day put into operation a plan he had been working on for almost forty years. He moved with his wife to a house he had built on the island of Shikoku. The house was in rugged terrain on the southern part of the island and was difficult to access; it cost Mr. Koyama an extraordinary amount of money to get the telephone and utilities put in; and the house was built in an unusual style, with a flat roof that would not weather well-but to Mr. Koyama none of that mattered. What mattered was that the house was so remote there was little light pollution, that it looked east to the Pacific and southwest to the Bungo Channel, and that the seeing was better over water.
In a hutch built on his flat roof, Mr. Koyama installed a fourteen-inch reflective telescope that he had built with his own hands. During good weather he would trundle this out onto the platform and gaze into the sky, at stars and planets and distant galaxies, and he would take careful, studied photographs of them which he would develop in his darkroom and later hang on his walls. But simply watching the sky wasn't quite enough: Mr. Koyama wanted more. He wanted something up there to bear his name.
Every day, therefore, just after sunset and just before dawn, Mr. Koyama would go onto his roof with a pair of Fujinan naval binoculars that he had purchased in Chiba from a starving ex-submarine captain in 1946. Patiently, wrapped in a warm wool overcoat, he would focus their five-inch objective lenses on the sky and inspect it carefully. He was looking for comets.
In December of 1982 he found one, but unfortunately had to share the credit with Seki, a comet-finder of some reputation who had discovered the comet some days previous. Mr. Koyama was chagrined by missing Seki-Koyama 1982P by some seventy-two hours but kept looking, vowing increased dedication and vigilance.
He wanted one all to himself.
March of 1983 opened cold and drizzly: Mr. Koyama shivered under his hat and overcoat as he scanned the sky night after night. A bout of influenza kept him off the roof till the twenty-second, and he was annoyed to discover that Seki and Ikeya had together discovered a new comet while he was laid up. Increased dedication and vigilance, he vowed again.
The morning of the twenty-third, Mr. Koyama finally found his comet. There, near the not-yet-risen sun, he saw a fuzzy ball of light. He sneezed, gripped the Fujinans tightly, and gazed up again to confirm the sighting. Nothing else should be in that part of the sky.
His heart pounding, Mr. Koyama descended to his study and picked up the telephone. He called the telegraph office and sent a wire to the International Astronomical Union. (Telegrams are de rigueur with the IAU; a telephone call would be considered vulgar.) Offering vague prayers to a host of gods in which he did not profess actual belief, Mr. Koyama returned to the roof with the strange feeling that his comet would have disappeared while he wasn't looking.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
The comet was still there.
The confirmation from the IAU came two days later, and confirmed as well what Mr. Koyama already knew from his own observations: Koyama 1983D was a real whizzer. It was flying from the sun like a bat out of hell.
Further reports indicated all sorts of anomalies. A routine spectrographic analysis showed that Koyama 1983D was a decidedly odd duck indeed: instead of the normal hydroxyls and carbon, Mr. Koyama's comet registered large amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, silicon, and various mineral salts. In short, all that was necessary for organic life.
A storm of controversy immediately arose over Koyama's comet. How anomalous was it, and was organic life possible in the cold and dusty ranges of the Oort Cloud? Mr. Koyama was interviewed by teams from the BBC, NBC, and Soviet television. He was profiled in Time magazine. He offered modest statements about his amateur status and his astonishment as to all the fuss; but he was inwardly more pleased than he had been over anything, even the birth of his eldest son.
His wife observed him walking about the house with the strut of a twenty-year-old and the broad grin of a clown.
Every night and morning, Mr. Koyama was on the roof. It was going to be hard to top this, but he was going to try.
Part Two: October 1985
Astronomy was getting more attention these days, what with the reappearance of P/Halley 19821, but Mr. Koyama maintained his equilibrium in the face of the turmoil. He was an old hand now. He had discovered four additional comets since Koyama 1983D, and was assured of a prominent place in cometary history. Each of his cornets had been the so-called 'Koyama-type' comets with their weird spectrography and their bat-out-of-hell speed. Koyama-type comets were being discovered by all manner of amateurs, always hugging the sun.
The controversy had not died down; had in fact intensified. Was it possible that the solar system was passing through a storm of comets containing organic elements, or was this a fairly ordinary occurrence that somehow hadn't been noticed till now? Fred Hoyle smiled and issued an I-told-youso statement reiterating his theory of cosmic seedlings containing organic life; and even his bitterest opponents conceded that the annoying old Yorkshireman might have won this round.
Mr. Koyama received many invitations to speak; he declined them all. Time speaking meant time away from his rooftop observatory. Currently the record number of comet discoveries was nine, held by an Australian minister. Mr. Koyama was going to win the honor for Japan or die trying.
Part Three: Late June 1986
There: another comet, barely visible, chasing the sun about the sky. That made six altogether. Mr. Koyama descended to his study and called the telegraph office. His heartbeat increased. He needed confirmation on this one desperatelynot confirmation of the sighting, but of the spectrography.
Mr. Koyama was climbing the charts of comet-sighters, and this was in a period of a nervous, -increased watching of the sky: people were looking up a lot these days, hoping to find the dark nonreflective Swarm parent that was presumably lurking nearby. But the prospect of number six wasn't what excited Mr. Koyama-he was getting fairly blase about finding new comets these days. What he needed was confirmation of his new theory.
Mr. Koyama accepted the congratulations of the telegrapher and put down the telephone. He gazed with a frown at the chart he had on his desktop. It suggested something that he suspected he was the only one to notice. It was the kind of thing that was only noticed by people who spent their nights on rooftops, counting the hours and days, shrugging off the dew, and staring at bits of the night through long refractive lenses.
The Koyama-style comets seemed to possess not only weird organics and uncommon velocity, but an even stranger periodicity. Every three months, more or less, a new Koyama type comet appeared near the sun. It was as if the Oort Cloud were shrugging off a ball of organic compounds to mark each new Terran season.
Smiling, Mr. Koyama savored the idea of the sensation his observation would cause, the panic among cosmographers trying to work out new formulas for explaining it. His place in astronomy would be assured. Koyama comets were proving as regular as planets. In a way, he thought, it was lucky the Swarm had landed, because otherwise the observation might have been made earlier . .
The thought echoed slowly in his mind. Mr. Koyama's smile turned to a frown. He looked at his chart and performed some mathematics in his head. His frown deepened. He took out a pocket calculator and confirmed his calculations. His heart lurched. He sat down- quickly.
The Swarm: a tough kilometers-long shell protecting vast quantities of biomass.
Something like that would be vulnerable to changes in temperature. If it got near the sun it would have to bleed off excess heat somehow. The result would be a fluorescence not unlike that of a comet.
Suppose the Swarm were in a fast orbit with the sun at one focus and the Earth at the other. With the Earth in motion relative to the sun, the orbit would be complicated, but not impossible. But with all the sightings of Koyama-type comets, it should be possible to pinpoint the approximate location of the Swarm.
A few hundred hydrogen-tipped missiles would then end the War of the Worlds in bang-up style.
"Muthafucka," breathed Mr. Koyama, a strong word he had learned from GIs during the occupation. Who the hell should he tell about this? he wondered. The IAU was the wrong forum. The Prime Minister? The Jieitai?
No. They would have no reason to believe an obscure retired businessman who called up raving about the Swarm. No doubt they got enough of those calls as it was.
He would call up his comrades from Mitsubishi. They had enough clout to see that he got heard.
As he reached for the phone and began to dial, Mr: Koyama felt his heart begin to sink. His place in astronomical history was assured, he knew, but not as he wanted. Instead of six comets, all he had discovered was a damned lump of yeast.
HALF PAST DEAD
By John J. Miller I.
Brennan followed the Mercedes full of Immaculate Egrets to the gate of the cemetery in a gray BMW he had stolen from the gang three days before.
He stopped a hundred yards behind them, his headlights off, while one of the Egrets got out of the Mercedes and swung open the graveyard's sagging wrought-iron gate. He waited until they went on into the cemetery, then he slid out of the BMW, took his bow and quiver of arrows from the back seat, slipped his hood over his head, and crossed the street after them.
The six-foot-high brick fence around the graveyard was stained with city grime and crumbling with age. He pulled himself over it easily and dropped down inside without a sound.
The Mercedes was somewhere near the center of the cemetery. The driver killed the engine and turned the headlights off as Brennan watched. Car doors opened and slammed shut. He could hear or see nothing significant from where he stood.
He had to get closer to the Egrets.
It was a dark night, the full moon often hidden by thick, shifting clouds. The trees growing wild inside the cemetery screened most of what city light there was. He moved slowly in the darkness, the sounds of his passing covered by the wind blowing with a hundred whispering voices through the branches overhead.
A shadow shifting among shadows, he moved behind an old slab tombstone canted like a crooked tooth in the mouth of an unkempt giant. He watched three of the Egrets enter a mausoleum that had once been the crowning glory of the cemetery.
The monument of a once rich, now forgotten family, it had been allowed to sink into decay like the rest of the graveyard. Its marble stonework had been eaten away by acid rain and bird droppings, its giltwork had flaked away over years of neglect. One of the Egrets stayed behind as the others went through the wrought-iron door into the interior of the mausoleum. He closed the door behind the others, and leaned against the front wall of the sepulcher. He lit a cigarette and his face shone briefly in the flame of the match. It was Chen, the Egret lieutenant Brennan had been following for the last two weeks.
Brennan crouched behind the tombstone, frowning. He had known since Vietnam that Kien was channeling heroin to the States through a Chinatown street gang called the Immaculate Egrets. He had scouted the gang and latched onto Chen, who appeared to rank fairly high in the organization, with the hope of finding hard evidence to link the Egrets to Kien. He had witnessed a dozen felonies over the last few weeks, but had uncovered nothing concerning Kien.
There was one inexplicable thing. The past several weeks had seen an incredible influx of heroin into the city. It was so plentiful that the street price had plummeted and there had been a record number of o.d.'s. The Immaculate Egrets, through whom the drug flowed, were selling it at cut-rate prices, stealing customers right and left from the Mafia and Sweet William's Harlem crowd. But Brennan had been unable to discover how they were getting their stag so cheaply and plentifully.
Skulking behind a tombstone was getting him nowhere. The answers, if the graveyard had any, would be in the mausoleum.
His mind made up, he drew an arrow from the quiver velcroed to his belt and nocked it to the string of his bow. He breathed deeply, smoothly, once, twice, caught his breath, and stood. As he did he glimpsed the name pecked into the weathered rock of the tombstone. Archer. He hoped it wasn't an omen.
It wasn't a difficult shot, but he still called on his Zen training to clear his mind and steady his muscles. He aimed a foot lower and a little to the left of the glowing cigarette tip, and, when the time was right, let the string slip from his fingers.
His bow was a four-wheel compound with elliptical cams that, once the tension point was reached, reduced the initial pull of one hundred and twenty pounds to sixty. The nylon bowstring thrummed, sending the shaft through the night like a hawk swooping on an unsuspecting target. He heard a thud and a strangled groan as the arrow struck home. He slipped out of the shadows like a cautious animal, and ran to where Chen lay slumped against the mausoleum wall.
He tarried long enough to make sure that Chen was dead and to leave one of his cards, a plastic-laminated ace of spades, stuck on the arrowtip protruding from Chen's back.
He nocked another arrow to his bowstring and creaked open the wrought-iron door that closed off the interior of the tomb. Inside, a stairway led down a dozen steps to another door haloed by a dim, steady light that burned in a chamber beyond. He waited for a moment, listening, then went down the stairs silently.
He stopped at the door of the inner chamber to listen again. Someone was moving around inside. He counted to twenty, slowly, but heard only quiet, scuffing footsteps. He'd come this far. There was no sense in turning back now.
Brennan dove through the door, and came up on one knee, bowstring drawn back to his ear. One man wearing the colors of the Immaculate Egrets was in the room. He was counting plastic bags of white powder and marking the tally on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. He opened his mouth wide in astonishment just as Brennan released the arrow. It struck him high in the chest and knocked him backward over the kneehigh pile of keys.
Brennan leaped across the chamber, but the Egret was as dead as everyone else in the boneyard by the time Brennan reached him. Brennan looked up from the body and glanced around.
What had happened to the other two Snow Birds who had gone into the sepulcher?
They had vanished into thin air. Or, more likely, Brennan thought, through a door concealed in one of the walls.
He slung the bow across his back and checked the walls, running his hands over them, looking for hidden seams or cracks, rapping and listening for a hollow sound. He had finished one wall without finding anything, and was starting on the next when he heard a muffled whoosh of air at his back and felt a warm, humid breeze.
He whirled around. The look of astonishment on his face matched that of the two men who had appeared from nowhere into the middle of the mausoleum. One, who wore the colors of the Egrets, had saddlebags draped over each shoulder. The other, a thin, reptilian-looking joker, was carrying what looked like a bowling ball. They had, Brennan realized with some astonishment, vanished into thin air.
And now they were back.
The Egret carrying the bulging saddlebags was closest to him. Brennan unslung his bow, swung it like a baseball bat, and connected with the side of the Egret's head. The man dropped with a groan, collapsing next to the pallet loaded with heroin.
The joker reared back, hissing sibilantly. He was taller than Brennan and thin to the point of emaciation. His skull was hairless, his nose a slight bump with a pair of flaring nostril pits. Overlong incisors protruded from his upper jaw.
He stared unblinkingly at Brennan. When he opened his lipless mouth and hissed, he exposed a lolling forked tongue that flicked frantically in Brennan's direction. He clutched his bowling ball tighter.
Only, Brennan realized, it wasn't a bowling ball that the joker held. It was the proper size and shape, but it had no finger holes and, as Brennan watched, the air around it started to pulsate with flickering bits of coruscating energy. It was some kind of device that had enabled the joker and his companion to materialize into the mausoleum. They were using it to bring heroin in from-somewhere. And the joker was starting to activate it again.
Brennan swung his bow at the joker, who dodged with easy, fluid grace. The halo around the artifact grew brighter. Brennan dropped his bow and closed in, determined to take the device from the joker before he could escape or turn the thing's energies on him.
He grappled the joker easily, but found that his opponent was unexpectedly strong. The joker twisted and heaved in Brennan's grasp in an oddly fluid manner, as if his bones were utterly flexible. They tugged against each other for a moment and then Brennan found himself staring at the joker, their faces inches apart.
The joker's long, grotesque tongue flicked out, caressing Brennan's face in a lingering, almost sensual manner. Brennan flinched backward involuntarily, exposing his neck and throat to the taller joker. The reptiloid lunged forward, relinquishing his grip on the strange device, and fastened his mouth on the side of Brennan's throat where it curved into his shoulder.
Brennan felt the joker's teeth pierce his flesh. The joker worked his mouth, pumping saliva into the wound. The area around the bite went numb almost immediately and Brennan panicked.
A surge of horror-induced strength enabled him to pull free from the joker's embrace. He felt his flesh tear, and blood ran down his throat and chest. The numbness spread rapidly over his right side.
The joker let Brennan pull away with the device. He smiled cruelly and licked Brennan's blood from his chin with his lolling forked tongue.
He's poisoned me, Brennan thought, recognizing the symptoms of a fast-acting neurotoxin. He knew that he was in trouble. He wasn't an ace. He had no special protection or defenses, no armor or fortified constitution. The joker was confident in the efficacy of his poison. He stood back to watch Brennan die.
Brennan knew he needed help fast. There was only one person who might be able to reverse the damage the poison was already wreaking on his body. She'd be at Tachyon's Jokertown clinic now, but there was no way to reach her. Already he was finding it hard to stand as his heart pumped poison to every cell of his body.