Aces High

"Don't waste your energy," he said, and as though to back him up, she heard the sound of fire engines approaching. "I was born in a fire station," she said. "My mother didn't get to the hospital in time."

"Fascinating," he said "but I've got to leave pretty soon." He looked at Tachyon. "I, uh, I would like to know how you knew-uh, why you called me J.J."

She shrugged. "J. J. Jumpin' Jack. It was faster to say." She managed a tiny smile. "That's all. We've never met before. Honest."

Relief was large on his face. "Ah. Well, listen, sometime soon we could get acquainted and-"

" Sixty minutes," Tachyon said. "I'd say you're just about out of time. What we could call the Cinderella factor. When someone trips."

Jumpin' Jack Flash gave him a dirty look before he lifted into the air. A halo of flame ignited itself around him as he roared off into the darkness.

Jane stared after him for a moment and then looked down sadly. "I almost hurt him back there. I did hurt someone – I… "

Tachyon put his arms around her. "Lean on me. It's all right."

Gently, she removed his arms from her. "Thank you. But I'm done leaning." Okay, Sal?

She turned back to the burning Cloisters and continued to pour water on the worst of the flames.

Curled up in an alleyway, Demise shuddered. His leg was bad enough that it wasn't completely healed yet, but it would heal; he knew it the way he knew how much he hated the Astronomer for abandoning him, for ever pulling him in with his promises and favors in the first place. TIAMAT, hell. He'd get that twisted-up old fuck before TIAMAT ever got here and that was a promise. He'd put that old fuck through a dance he'd take to hell with him.

He drifted in semidelirium. Not far away, but unknown to him, Kafka watched the destruction of the Cloisters. When the water poured down into the flames from thin air he turned away, willing the cold deadness of hatred to stay in him.

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 Cha

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 sca

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 ma

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 a

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.