Heaven Chronicles

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Your dream, not mine!” She rebelled against the part of him that had included her without asking; against the part of herself that might have been glad. “I never wanted to be a prospector, I don't know a damn thing about it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a junker, living on the edge of starvation. And I don't want to spend it sharing this ship with you, Dartagnan!”

  His whole body tautened visibly. “I see.” He sagged, as though the unseen tensions had let him go again abruptly, leaving him more formless than before. But the yielding softness had gone out of his eyes, and he looked at her without hope or apology. “So it's not your dream. Have you got anything to put in its place? No—or you wouldn't be here. You don't know a damn thing about prospecting; but I do. Only I can't pilot a ship this size well enough to get it into the places a prospector has to go. You can. Maybe we don't want each other,” he said with spiteful satisfaction, “but we sure as hell need each other. I want this ship; I want this chance at a real life. And even if you don't want it, you want a chance at some kind of life, and this's your last one. I can stand it if you can.” His free hand clutched the arm that anchored him to the chair.

  Mythili bit the inside of her mouth until she felt sharp pain, until the first response died in her throat. “All right. I agree with everything you say. I'll work with you, because I have to. We'll share whatever we find fifty-fifty. But that's all—” words escaping again in spite of her.

  “That's all I expected.” Chaim moved his mouth, imitating a smile sourly. “And I think there's one more thing we can agree on: Abdhiamal really screwed both of us.”

  In the artificial brightening of a new day, Mythili left her tiny rented room and took an air taxi out across the kilometer-wide vacuole that held Mecca City. The towers of the city clustered on every side, their colored surfaces shimmering with faint movement as she looked outward and ahead. The sight did not touch her with wonder as it once had; today she scarcely saw them at all.

  She had agreed to share a ship and a gamble with Chaim Dartagnan, and now she was about to back it up, taking all that was left of her life savings to buy the equipment and supplies they needed to make their trip. It was insane … but what other choice was there? She felt the tension that had shocked her awake after a night of depression-drugged sleep winding still tighter in her chest. She swallowed and sighed; but the tightness came back, and the taxi closed inexorably with her destination.

  She made her way down the central core of the Abraxis commercial building, settling like a feather into gravity's soft well of suction. The skin of the building walls was golden, and she felt herself suffocating, sinking through honey. Workers and customers moved past her, propelling themselves like swimmers from the corridor's wall. She let them pass, letting her own slow sink-rate remain undisturbed.

  The ship-outfitter's business, with its massive displays, occupied the two bottom-most levels of the building. Grimly she pushed aside the flaps of the upper-level entrance, found herself in a catacomb of stabilized boxes and closed mesh containers. She moved cautiously through the narrow aisles, where a handful of desultory strangers inspected navigation equipment she identified at a glance and prospector's gear she could not recognize at all. They stared as she passed, herself an unclassifiable oddity in this male domain.

  She emerged finally into a large, less cluttered area; saw Chaim at last, gesturing over an equipment list, a pile of potential purchases growing at his feet. He glanced up, as though her tension radiated like cold, and broke off his conversation with the shopman. But his face stayed flatly expression less, unlike her own; the gift of his career as a professional liar. “This is my partner. She'll fill you in on anything else we need.”

  She moved across the open space, joined the two men beside the counter where a small screen recorded the growing cost of their journey. The shopman regarded her with mixed emotions; she ignored him for the pile of supplies. She stared at the screen again, tallying the list in her mind, feeling a resentment rooted in something deeper than her ignorance of a prospector's needs: “Do we really need all that, Dartagnan?”

  “We need more. But we can't afford it.” He glanced uncomfortably at the shopman.

  “What about that spectroscope? The ship already has one.” She touched the one word on the screen that she really recognized, her fingers rigid.

  “Not good enough. Sekka-Olefin already knew what he was looking for, and where to find it. We don't. We need all the help we can get.”

  She shrugged, her mouth pulling down. “All right.”

  “What about navigation equipment?”

  “I checked the ship's system over again. It's in fine shape. There's nothing we can afford to add to it that would make a real difference.”

  He looked relieved, the first genuine expression she had seen on his face. “Then I guess we can afford to eat, after all.”

  “You want me to go ahead and fill the rest of your order, then?” The shopman addressed Chaim.

  “Yeah.” Chaim passed him the list, glancing her way. “Go ahead.”

  She looked away from him, becoming aware of the man in worn coveralls who waited, listening, at the edge of her sight. He moved forward at her glance, intruding on their circle of consciousness. Another prospector, she guessed, and not a very successful one; a heavyset man who looked old, older than he was, because a lifetime spent exposed to shipboard radiation aged the body badly. His dark brown, graying hair was clipped close along the sides of his bald head, and his broad, gnarly face was seamed with lines that could have been good-humored. As if to prove it, he smiled when she looked at him. She did not smile back. Undaunted, he cracked open their privacy and included himself in it.

  Chaim turned at his approach, ungraceful with surprise.

  The prospector squinted. “Aren't you … yeah, you must be! Gamal Dartagnan's kid? I'll be damned! Imagine runnin' into you, after all this time.”

  Chaim stared, mildly disbelieving. “You knew my old ma—uh, my father?” he said, groping for a civil response.

  “Yeah, I sure did. We were great friends, him and me. Almost partners.”

  Mythili felt her face pinch at the falseness of the tone. Chaim's own face had become a vacant wall again; a defense, against what she wasn't sure. “What's your name?”

  “Fitch. He must've mentioned me—”

  “No.” Chaim's boot nudged the pile of supplies; containers stirred sluggishly and resettled. “How'd you know me? … We didn't look much alike.”

  Fitch laughed, unaffected by the lack of positive response. “The hair. Anybody'd know that hair. And he talked about you all the time.”

  Chaim's expression became slightly more expressionless.

  “And you're kind of a celebrity, you know—all the media about old Sekka-Olefin's murder, and how you brought the killer in, with the help of the little lady, here.”

  Mythili considered silently the fact that she stood half a head taller than Fitch, and wondered why she couldn't find the irony even slightly amusing; wondered whether she had lost her sense of humor permanently.

  “And now word has it that you've got yourself Sekka-Olefin's ship. Word must be right, or you wouldn't be here outfitting. Following in the old man's footsteps, huh? Got a damn fine ship for it, from what I hear.… You know much about prospecting?”

  “Only what I learned by doing it, with my old man.” A controlled sarcasm oiled the words.

  “Oh, yeah?” Fitch laughed again; a trace of self-consciousness weakened it this time. “Well, he was a damn shrewd man. But still, you couldn't have spent much time out there. It takes a lifetime of experience—”

  “A lifetime wasn't enough to keep my old man from killing himself.” Chaim's frown broke through. Mythili saw Fitch's face begin to lose hope, struggle to hold on to it. “What do you want, Fitch? You want something.”

  “I just wanted to meet Gamal Dartagnan's son. Gamal was a man with a big heart and some big ideas, and I figured you might share them … I wanted to
know if maybe you could use some help.” He threw the words out with too much energy. “I mean, I've got a ship of my own and all—I've spent my whole life searching salvage. But my ship can't do anything like what that one of yours could do; she just doesn't have the reach. Just like your old man—if he'd had a better ship, he could've made a million, I'm sure of it. I've got the experience, I know where to look … I've got a lot to offer a partner.” He craned forward.

  “He has a partner,” Mythili said abruptly. “We can't afford another one.”

  “She's right. There's already one too many.” Chaim grimaced. “The ship belongs to the two of us, Fitch. We'll make it on our own, or not at all. We don't need any more ‘help’. We're up to our necks in it.” His hand chopped the air like a headsman's blade, cutting off the conversation.

  Fitch withdrew, deflated, shriveling. “Well … I'm sorry you feel that way, but I guess I can understand it,” he said thickly. “It's a loner's trade, prospecting. You got to think of yourself first, and make your own chances. But just to show you I understand, I want you to have this signal separater.” He held it out, packaged in plastic foam. “It'll stretch the range of your equipment. Maybe it'll bring you luck. I was going to put it in my ship, but there's nothing much it'll change for me. Maybe when I see you again, you'll remember I gave you this, and reconsider taking on a partner.”

  Mythili opened her mouth to refuse it, hearing the same hollow hypocrisy in his humility that she'd heard in his bluster. But Chaim reached out before she could speak and took the package from Fitch's hands with a small, stomach-tight bow of acknowledgment. “Thanks. We appreciate it.” The hostility had disappeared from his eyes, and he actually seemed sincere. Mythili closed her mouth without saying anything, surprised into silence.

  “And maybe … maybe you'd take this on, too …” Fitch reached behind him, and produced something else, a mesh container.

  Ah, she thought, her tension suddenly loosening. Here it comes—I knew there was more. The catch.

  But the thing he pressed into her unwilling hands was totally unexpected—a small cage, containing a live animal. She stared at it incredulously. She had never been this close to an animal before; never held one in her hands, even caged. “What is it—?” she murmured, resisting her urge to push it back at him.

  “Some kind of lizard.” Fitch shrugged. “I won it in a card game. It only eats insects; I can't afford to feed it any more.…” He looked down at the cage, and what looked like genuine regret filled his eyes. “I got real attached to him. You would, too. He changes colors, see—? Reacts to light or heat.” He pointed at the creature in the cage. “I call him Lucky.”

  Mythili peered in at the lizard, feeling her refusal die stillborn as it gazed back at her, its skeptical eye encased in a turret of beaded flesh. Its pebbly, hairless green skin was changing hue as she watched, taking on a speckled pattern of light and shadow like a photograph. She stared at it, unable to tear her gaze away.

  “Sure,” Chaim said. “We'll take good care of it.”

  “I'm grateful to you.” Fitch bobbed politely, and disappeared into the maze of piled supplies as unexpectedly as he had come.

  The shopman shook his head, one hand hugging the inventory terminal. “Who can figure junkers? That signal separater is the first thing he's paid for up front in half a gigasec—and he gives it away.” His drooping black mustache twitched as he twisted his mouth. “Speaking of insects: I'd check that device for bugs, if you know what I mean” He gestured.

  “I intend to.” Mythili looked back at Chaim, still holding the signal separater in his hands. She glanced down at the lizard again. A chameleon: that was what it was called. She had read about them, once. She wondered just how Chaim expected to pay for its food, when they could barely afford their own. Insects were restricted to the hydroponic gardens; it wasn't like they were plentiful or cheap. “Why do you want to be bound to a sleazy piece of quartz like Fitch?” she asked, as much curious as disapproving. “He looked like he's never made enough scavenging junk to pay for a cup of water. Why did you let him give you that?” She bent her head at the separater. Or this. But her eyes went to the lizard's motionless form again, in unwilling fascination. It balanced like a dancer on a single slender branch inside its cage. Its combination of alienness and astonishing grace held her spellbound.

  “Because we can use a signal separater. That's Rule One.” Chaim looked at her steadily, forcing her to acknowledge him. “And because if we don't get lucky, we'll end up a gigasec from now just as lousy as he is.” He let the signal separater go, watched it drift down and impact dully in the pile of supplies, before he turned away.

  “Lifting.” Mythili flicked the final switch of the sequence, felt the almost imperceptible shudder of the ship's transformation from stasis to motion. They began to move slowly—like a pageant starting, she thought—outward and away from the docking field. Watching through the unshielded port, she felt the shackles fall from her own existence as she left behind the prison that Mecca had become in these past megaseconds. Elation swelled inside her, unexpectedly, a soft explosion of heart-music spilling into her veins as she looked out on the infinite night, the star Heaven rising like a promise of new beginnings past Mecca's shrinking horizon.

  She glanced sideways at the small intrusion of someone else's sigh, saw Chaim Dartagnan pressed intently against the panel just beyond reach. Her elation fell inward, became a tight compression aching at her core. Her freedom was illusory, uncertain, as ephemeral as the life of the insects they had purchased to feed their new pet. There was no promise that there would ever be another journey, if this one failed. And whether this journey succeeded or not, she would have to endure his presence; the dark, turbid waters that every glimpse of him eddied in her mind. She felt her mind replay images of the past on the screen of the present, as it had done over and over on the empty walls of her rented room … the last time she had piloted a ship with Chaim Dartagnan on board; the humiliation, the suffering, the death of Sekka-Olefin—the death that had almost been her own, because of Chaim Dartagnan's weakness.

  Chaim looked over at her, away from the widening blackness of the sky, as if the intensity of her stare were something he could feel. He shook his head slightly, almost unconsciously; she didn't know whether he was reorienting his own reality or making a denial.

  Mecca had dropped completely from sight below them; the distant diamond-chip sun was centering in the port and on the display screens. She looked back at the panel without comment. The barely perceptible thrust of the ship's nuclear-electric rockets was slowly but constantly increasing their speed, beginning their long journey in toward the desolate torus of drifting worldlets that was the Main Belt; where before the Civil War the majority of Heaven system's population had lived—where the majority of it had died.

  The Civil War had turned the Main Belt into a vast cemetery, its planetoids into gravestones for a hundred million people. The Demarchy, in their own postwar struggle to survive, had already stripped it clean of its most obvious technological artifacts; but individual scavengers still picked through the ruins, hoping for some fortunate oversight that would make them rich, or at least let them go on searching.… “What happens when we reach the Belt? Where do we start?” She begrudged having to ask, tried to keep it from showing in her voice.

  “We start as soon as we're close enough to the first rock we meet to scan it. My old man never overlooked anything, even if it wasn't on the charts. Every other prospector who's ever been in to the Main Belt has the same set of charts on file that we do, and they've been picking it over for a couple of our lifetimes.” He input a sequence on the panel almost roughly, and a navigation chart flashed onto the middle screen between them. “Of course, it never did him a damn bit of good, in all the time I was with him. He had ‘big ideas,’ like Fitch said, and nothing else. He was always sure he could've found some battery plant that disappeared during the war, or a lost starship orbiting the sun—or complete happiness in a g
oddamn hydro tank, for all I know—if he just had a better ship, or more supplies, or an even break … They're all alike, the damn fools; looking for fool's gold.” He struck another contact point, and the screen went blank. He sighed, letting go of his anger. “But then … one of his crack-brained ideas finally paid off for him, in the end.”

  She half-turned in surprise. “It did? Then why aren't you—”

  “—rich?” He laughed the way he had input commands. “Because he had an accident that killed him before he could collect. His luck ran true to the end; all bad. A corporate scout filed on his claim and they got it all.”

  “What went wrong? What happened to him?” she asked, in spite of herself.

  “I don't know.” Chaim's arms crossed his stomach, his hands pulled restlessly at his coveralls. Mythili felt her own stomach clench and turn, remembering what had happened to Sekka-Olefin. “But it doesn't matter to him anymore. And it probably won't matter to anybody before much longer; not even to me.” He pushed off from the panel, reached the rim of the well to the lower levels and sank into it.

  She watched him go, uncomprehending; feeling words rattle against her teeth like pebbles, cold and heavy. But she turned back to the board, watching the chronometer tick off seconds like a census of stars.

  The census mounted. As seconds piled up into kiloseconds and megaseconds, Mythili wove patterns of behavior that avoided Chaim Dartagnan as completely as possible, keeping her mind as empty of his presence on board as the night they moved through was empty.

  Yet even the emptiness turned against her; not bringing her peace of mind, but only leaving room for memories to grow wild, spiny and bitter. She could deny the present or deny the past, but not both together: more and more she could see only the resemblance of this voyage to the last one she had made, with Dartagnan the mediaman, and Sabu Siamang the killer. There was no solace in silence, no comfort in avoidance, no escaping from the gray limbo of her own mind.