She glanced down, weaving her fingers together, twisting them, testing the fit. She looked up again, her throat aching, still unable to speak the words that had been prisoner too long inside her; hoping that he could read in her eyes the promise he would not hear from her lips. “I’m—not ready to say yes now, Chaim. But I’m not saying no.” She untangled her fingers, and gave him her hand freely.
He grinned. “Damn—I can still sell an idea when I want to.”
They left the ship at last, trailing the long guide rope down to the surface of the Calcutta docking field. It was cluttered with corporate mediamen and freelancers; the din of questions blurred into white noise in their suit speakers. But a single figure stood waiting for them as they forced their way through the gauntlet of questions. Mythili saw the insignia on his plain, dark pressure suit, the silver octagonal star enclosed in a teardrop, the symbol of the Demarchy. Chaim glanced over at her, murmuring, “Abdhiamal?”
She nodded. She pictured his self-satisfied smile as they closed with him, imagined the litany of smug congratulations he would be reciting to himself at the sight of their success and their reconciliation.
She frowned abruptly, giving Chaim a light shove. “Keep away from me, Dartagnan. I hope I never see you again, after this!”
He gaped at her. She winked, and the amazement fell away; he smiled feebly, nodded. “The same goes for me, you bitch! If I ever see Abdhiamal again, I’m going to shove his teeth down his throat.”
“You’ll have to wait in line.” Vicious satisfaction—“Abdhiamal!”—and mock surprise.
Abdhiamal looked from face to face between them, shaking his head, his own face dour. “Well…I only have one question for you, then.”
They stopped, holding murder on their faces. “What is it?”
“Are you going to ask me to witness when you marry?”
They looked at him in silent incredulity, and at each other. Slowly Chaim worked the gold ring off of his gloved finger, and pressed it into Abdhiamal’s open hand. Smiling, they passed him by on either side, and moved on across the field hand in hand.
THE
OUTCASTS
OF
HEAVEN BELT
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
There are more stars in the galaxy than there are droplets of water in the Boreal Sea. Only a fraction of those stars wink and glitter, like snowflakes passing through the light, in the unending night sky over the darkside ice. And out of those thousand thousand visible stars, the people of the planet Morningside had made a wish on one—called Heaven.
Sometimes when the winds ceased, a brittle silence would settle over the darkside ice sheet; and it might seem to a Morningside astronomer, in the solitude of his observatory, that all barriers had broken down between his planet and the stars, that the very hand of interstellar space brushed his pulse. Space lapped at his doorway, the night flowed up and up and up, merging imperceptibly with the greater night that swallowed all mornings, and all Morningsides, and all the myriad stars whose numbers would overflow the sea.
And he would think of the starship Ranger, which had gone up from Morningside’s fragile island into the endless night: a silvered dustmote carried on a violent invisible breeze across the cathedral distances of space, drawn from candleflame to candleflame through the darkness…
They would be a long time gone. And what had seemed to the crew to be the brave, bright immensity of their fusion craft shrank to insignificance as they left the homeworld further and further behind—as the Ranger became only one more mote, lost among countless unseen motes in the fathomless depths of night. But like an ember within a tinderbox, their lives gave the ship its own warm heart of light, and life. The days passed, and the months, and years…and light-years, while seven men and women watched over the ship’s needs, and one another’s. Their shared past patterned their present with images of the world they had left behind, visions of the future they hoped to bring back to it. They were bound for Heaven, and like true believers they found that belief instilled a deeper meaning in the charting of stars and the tending of hydroponic vats, in their silence and their laughter, in every song and memory they carried with them from home.
And at last one star began to separate from all the rest, centering on the ship’s viewscreen, becoming a focus for their combined hope. Years had dwindled to months and finally weeks, as, decelerating now, backing down from near the speed of light, they kept their rendezvous with the new system. They passed the orbit of Sevin, the outermost of Heaven’s worlds, where the new sun was still scarcely more than an ice-crowned point of light. Counting the days now, like children reaching toward Christmas, the crew anticipated journey’s end before them: all the riches and wonders of the Heaven Belt.
But before they reached their final destination, they would encounter one more wonder that was no creation of humankind—the gas giant Discus, a billowing ruby set in a plate of silver rings. They watched it expand until it obliterated more of this black and alien sky than the face of their own sun had blocked in the dusty sky of home. They closed with the giant’s lumbering course, slipping past like a cautious firefly. And while the crew sat together in the dayroom, gazing out in awe at its splendor, the captain and the navigator discovered something new, something quite unexpected, on the ship’s displays: four unknown ships, powered by antiquated chemical rockets, on an intercepting course…
RANGER (DISCAN SPACE)
+ 0 SECONDS
“Pappy, are they still closing?”
“Still closing, Betha.” Clewell Welkin bent forward as new readings appeared at the bottom of the screen. “But the rate’s holding steady. They must be cutting power; they couldn’t do ten gees forever. Christ, don’t let them hit us again…”
Betha struck the intercom button again with her fist, “It’s going to be all right. No one else will get near us.” Her voice shook, someone else’s voice, not Betha Torgussen’s, and no one answered, “Come on, somebody, answer me. Eric! Eric! Switch on—”
“Betha.” Clewell leaned out across the padded seat arm, caught her shoulder.
“Pappy, they don’t answer.”
“Betha, one of those ships, it’s not falling back! It’s—”
She brushed away his hand, searching the readouts on the screen. “Look at it! They want to take us. They must; it’s burning chemical fuel, and they can’t afford to waste that much.” She held her breath, knuckles whitening on the cold metal panel. “They’re getting too close. Show them our tail, Pappy.”
Pale eyes flickered in his seamed face. “Are you—?”
She half-rose, pushed back from the panel, down into the seat again. “Clewell, they tried to kill us! They’re armed, they want to take our ship and they will, and that’s the only way to stop them…Let them cross our tail, Navigator.”
“Yes, Captain.” He turned away from her toward the panel, and began to punch in the course change that would end their pursuit.
At the final moment Betha switched the screen from simulation to outside scan, picked out the amber fleck of the pursuing ship thirty kilometers behind them—watched it fleetingly made golden by the alchemy of supercharged particles from her ship’s exhaust. And watched its gold darken again into the greater darkness shot with stars. She shuddered, not feeling it, and cut power.
“What—what do we do now?” Clewell drifted up off the seat, against the restraining belt, as the ship’s acceleration ceased. The white fringe of his hair stood out from his head like frost.
Before her on the screen the rings of Discus edged into view, eclipsing the night: the plate of striated silver, twenty separate bands of utter blackness and moon-white, the setting for the rippling red jewel of gas that was the central planet. Her hand was on the selector dial, her eyes burned with the brightness, paralyzing her will. She shut her eyes, and turned the dial.
The intercom was broken. They still sat at the table, Erie and Sean and Nikolai, Lara and Claire; they looked up at her, laughing, breathing again, looke
d out through the dome at the glory of Discus on the empty night…She opened her eyes. And saw empty night. Oh, God, she thought. The room was empty; they were gone. Oh, God. Only stars, gaping beyond the shattered plastic of the dome, crowding the blackness that had swallowed them all…She didn’t scream, lost in the soundless void.
“They’re all—gone. All of them. That warhead…it shattered the dome.”
She turned to see Clewell, his face bloodless and empty; saw their lives, with everything suddenly gone. Thinking, frightened, He looks so old…She released her seatbelt mindlessly, pushed herself along the panel to his side and took his hands. They held each other close, in silence.
A squirming softness batted against her head; she jerked upright as claws like tiny needles caught a foothold in the flesh of her shoulder. “Rusty!” She reached up to pull the cat loose, began to drift and hooked a foot under the rung along the panel base. Golden eyes peered at her from a round brindled face, above a nose half black and half orange; mottled whiskers twitched as the mouth formed a meow? like an unoiled gate hinge. Betha’s hands tightened over an urge to fling the cat across the room. What right does an animal have to be alive, when five human beings are dead? She turned her face away as Rusty stretched a patchwork paw to touch her, mrring consolation for an incomprehensible grief. Betha cradled her, kissed the furred forehead, comforted by the soft knot of her warmth.
Clewell caught Rusty’s drifting tail, bloodied at the tip. “She barely got out.”
Betha nodded.
“Why did we ever come to Heaven?” His voice shook.
She looked up. “You know why we came!” She stopped, forcing control. “I don’t know…I mean…I mean, I thought I knew…” Four years ago, as they left Morningside, she had been sure of everything: her destination, her happiness, her marriage, her life. And now, suddenly, incredibly, only life remained. Why?
Because the people of Morningside, the bleak innermost world of a pitiless red dwarf star, had a dream of Heaven. Heaven: A G-type sun system without an Earthlike planet, but with an asteroid belt rich in accessible metals. And with Discus, a gas giant ringed in littered splendor by frozen water, methane, and ammonia—the elemental keys to life. The ore-rich Belt and the frozen gases had made it feasible—almost easy—to build up a colony entirely self-sufficient in its richness; heaven in every sense of the word to colonists from Sol’s asteroid belt, who had always been dependent on Earth for basic survival needs. And it had become a dream for another colony, Morningside, hungry now for something more than survival: the dream that they could establish contact with the Heaven Belt, and negotiate a share in its overflowing bounty.
The dream that had carried the starship Ranger across three light-years; that had been shattered with the shattered dayroom, by the reality of sudden death. The desolation burned again across her eyes; her mind saw the Ranger’s one-hundred-meter spindle form, every line as familiar as her own face, every centimeter blueprinted on her memory…saw it flawed by one tiny, terrible wound; saw five faces, lost to her now in darkness, endlessly falling…
Clewell said softly, “What now?”
“We go on—go on as planned.”
“You want to go on trying to make contact with these…” His hand pointed at the ruin on the screen. “Do you want to lead them home by the hand, to murder all of Morningside? Isn’t it enough—”
Betha shook her head, clinging to the arms of her seat. “We don’t have any choice! You know that. We don’t have enough hydrogen on board to get the ship back to ramscoop speeds. We have to refuel somewhere in Heaven, or we’ll never get home.” A vision of home stunned her: firelight on dark beams, on the night before their departure—a little boy’s face bright with tears, buried against her shirt. Mommy…I dreamed you had to die to go to Heaven. Remembering her child’s sobs waking out of nightmare, her own eyes filled with tears and the endless darkness. She bit her lip. Goddamn it, I’m not a child, I’m thirty-five years old!
“Pappy, don’t start acting like an old man.” She frowned, and watched his irritation strip ten years from his face. Without looking, she reached out to blank the viewscreen. “We don’t have any choice now. We have to go on with it.” We have to pay them back, her eyes flickered, hard edges of sapphire glinting. She tossed Rusty carefully away, watched her cat-paddle uselessly as she drifted out into the room. “We have enough fuel left to get us around the system—but who do we trust? Why did they attack us? And those ships, chemical rockets—they shouldn’t have anything like that outside of a museum! It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe they were pirates, renegades. There’s nothing else that fits.” Clewell’s hand hung in the air, uncertain.
“Maybe.” She sighed, knowing that renegades had no place in Heaven. Having no choice except to believe it, she forgot that the angry, mindless face that had cursed her on their screen had called her pirate. “We’ll go on in to the main Belt, to the capital at Lansing, as planned, then. And then…we’ll find a way to get what we need.”
TOLEDO PLANETOID (DEMARCHY SPACE)
+ 30 KILOSECONDS
Wadie Abdhiamal, negotiator for the Demarchy, stirred sluggishly, dragged up out of sleep by the chiming of the telephone. He turned the lights up enough to make out its form and switched it on. “Yes?” He saw Lije MacWong’s mahogany face brighten on the screen, pushed himself up on an elbow in the bed.
“Sorry to wake you up, Wadie.”
He grinned. “I’ll bet you are.” MacWong enjoyed getting up early. Wadie glanced at the digital clock in the phone’s base. “Somebody need a negotiator at this time of night? Don’t the people even sleep?”
“I hope they’re all sleepin’ now…Are you alone?”
Wadie glanced back over his shoulder at Kimoru’s brown, sleek side, her tumbled black hair. She sighed in her sleep. He looked back at MacWong’s image, judged from the disapproval in the pale-blue eyes that MacWong already knew the answer. Annoyed but not showing it, he said, “No, I’m not.”
“Pick up the receiver.”
Wadie obeyed, cutting off sound from the general speaker. He listened, silent, for the few seconds more it took MacWong to surprise him out of his sleep-fog. “Be down as soon as I can.”
He got out of bed, half-drifting in the scant gravity, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave. When he returned he found Kimoru sitting up in bed, the pinioned comforter pulled up to her chin. She blinked reproachfully, her eyelids showing lavender.
“Wadie, darlin’”—a hint of spite—“it’s not even morning! Whyever are you gettin’ up already; am I such a bore in bed?” A hint of desperation.
“Kimoru.” He moved across the comfortable confinement of the room to kiss her lingeringly. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me. Duty called, I’ve got to leave…you know I hate to get up early. Particularly when you’re here. Get your beauty sleep; I’ll come back to take you out to breakfast—or lunch, if you prefer.” He fastened his shirt with one hand, touched her cheek with the other.
“Well, all right.” She slithered down under the cover. “But don’t be too late. You know I’ve got to charm a customer for dear old Chang and Company at fifty kilosecs.” She yawned. Her teeth were very bright, and sharp. “I don’t know why you don’t get a decent job. Only a government man would put up with a schedule like yours…or have to.”
Or a geisha—? He went on dressing, didn’t say it out loud; knowing that she didn’t have a choice, and that to remind her of it was unnecessary and tactless. A woman who had been sterilized for genetic defects had very few opportunities open to her, in a society that saw a woman as a potential mother above all else. If she was married to an understanding husband, one who was willing to let a contract mother provide him with heirs, she could continue to lead a normal life. But a woman divorced for sterility—or an unmarried sterile woman—had only two alternatives: to work at a menial, unpleasant job, exposed to radiation from the dirty postwar atomic batteries; or to work as a geisha, entertaining t
he clients of a corporation. It was prostitution; but it was accepted. A geisha had few rights and little prestige, but she did have security, comfortable surroundings, fine clothes, and enough money to support her when she passed her prime. It was a sterile existence, but physical sterility left her with little choice.
Knowing the alternatives, Wadie neither blamed nor censured. And it struck him frequently that in working for the government, he had picked a career that most people respected less than formal prostitution—and one that had left his private life as barren of real relationships as any geisha’s. He looked past his own reflection in the mirror, at Kimoru, already asleep again with one slender arm reaching out toward the empty half of the bed. He had no children, no wife. Most of the women he saw socially were women like Kimoru, geishas he met while negotiating disputes for the corporations that used them. He avoided them while he was on assignment, because he avoided anything that could remotely be considered a bribe. But in their free time the geishas liked to choose their own escort, and he had enough money to show them a good time.
But he rarely stayed in one place long enough to get to know any woman well; and the few normal women he had known at all had bored him with their endless insipid conversation, their endless coquetry.
Wadie brushed back his dark curling hair and settled the soft beret carefully on his head. He was a fastidious dresser, even at dawn. It was expected. He picked up a gold ring set with rubies, slipped it onto his thumb. It had been a gift of gratitude, from two people he had helped long megaseconds before, a husband-and-wife prospecting team. He remembered that woman again—a woman pilot, a sound, healthy woman who had chosen to be sterilized in order to go into space. No kind of woman at all, really; because no real woman would willingly reject a home and family. That woman had been a freak—stubborn, defensive, self-righteous; a woman out of her place, out of her depth. And yet her partner had married her. But he had been a kind of freak himself; a mediaman—a professional liar—with scruples. It was no wonder the two of them chose to spend the rest of their lives in the middle of nowhere, picking over salvage on ruined worlds…
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