Heaven Chronicles

by Joan D. Vinge

  “More like tons and tons.” Chaim braced his feet and threw his weight against the wall of paper, but there was no give to the greater mass. “All piled up for the recycler that never came back.”

  “No.” She shook her head. He looked at her. “There's way too much here. Even if they saved every news report and corporate hypesheet from the whole of the Main Belt, there must be half a gigasec's worth here. It couldn't be just the postwar breakdown.”

  “But why? Why would anybody save old hypesheets, when everything was in info storage anyway?”

  She shrugged inside her suit. “Maybe it was a hobby. Are we going on through?”

  He bent over, throwing light into the paper-walled tunnel. “I don't know. I can't see anything, if it even ends.… God, what if the whole damn rock's stuffed full of this, and we get stuck with nowhere to turn around?”

  “Somebody lived here. There must be something else in there besides paper,” she said impatiently. “I'll go first, if it bothers you.” Coward. She refused to let herself even begin to shape a mental image around his words. She reached up to loosen her helmet. “If we take off our suits we'll have more room to move—”

  “Wait.” He caught her hand, freezing it in mid-motion. “Leave that on. The purifier's dead. You don't know what these places can smell like. Or look like.… I'd better go in first.” She saw his face through the dark reflection of her own, helmet to helmet; saw the strain-sharp line of his mouth that bit the words off raw-edged. “Wait here.”

  Remembering that he did know—and that most of the Main Belt had died of slow starvation or thirst—she dropped her hands and waited. He squirmed like an eel into the depths of the print-out mass. The seconds passed, and more seconds; until the darkness lost its form and grew timeless, until she could not keep the image of suffocating gullets choked by warm human flesh out of her mind—

  A small grunt of surprise or disgust came out of her suit speakers; Chaim's voice, from somewhere beyond the wall. “Chaim—?” Her own voice startled her more, squeezed with unexpected tension.

  “'S okay.” His reassurance slipped, on uncertain footing. “I'm through. Come ahead, there's a room here. But get ready; there's a couple of bodies, too.”

  She felt her skin prickle, coldness in the pit of her stomach. But she had spent megaseconds with the frozen corpse of Sekka-Olefin on board his ship, returning to Mecca from Planet Two. She was no stranger to death. She tightened her hands, loosened them again to pull herself into the print-out mass. Clawing with her heavy gloves, thrusting and kicking like a swimmer, she worked her way along the uneven intestine, following the beam of her light. At last she saw the beam spread and diffuse, blinked as it was answered by another light beaconing ahead. Chaim caught her reaching hands to draw her out of the tunnel; unable to avoid it, she let him pull her through.

  “Thanks.” She freed herself from his grasp as quickly as she could, looking away. The glancing brightness of her belt lamp showed her a haphazard plastic meshwork crisscrossing the inner surface of the piled print-outs, to keep them from collapsing in slow inevitability toward the iron-rich asteroid's feeble gravitational heart. This is all of it, then. But as she kept turning, following the line of the room's inner surface, she saw more piles of print-out, and heaps of plastic packing crates broken down, immense bags bulging with unnameable contents, heaps of old clothing or rags.

  In the center of this carefully filled space a small living area barely survived: a tiny metal table and chairs disorientingly bolted to the far wall—following gravity's lines as she did not—and a wide mat of foam heaped with more piles of rags.… Bodies. He had said there were bodies. Her eyes fixed on the shapeless rag piles with horrible fascination. She drifted out into the open center of the room as her staring and the harsh light of her lamp began to pick out protruding ends of bone, the pitiless white dome of a skull, the glaring black hollows of its sockets.

  She twisted suddenly in the air, trying to stop her forward motion with nothing to stabilize her; banged into the metal table top with a curse. The echoes of her collision and her shout seeped into the soft detritus along the walls, the room closed its silent disapproval around them again. Chaim still hung at the far side of the room, as though he couldn't force himself to get any closer to the corpses.

  She righted herself to the table's axis, watching the slow dance around her of things she had dislodged—empty containers with crusts of dried food at their lips, a stain-dulled knife, a long slender bone … she thought it looked like an ulna. She caught the drifting knife and jerked it out of the air. “What do … what do you think killed—did they die from?” Hating herself as she asked it.

  “Starved, probably,” he said. “That's what it usually is.” The words were very soft. His arms folded over his stomach in what she took for empathy. She remembered that he must have seen this sight over and over while he had prospected with his father. He didn't say anything more; she watched him track the rising arc of the pale bone's dance, end over end in the air.

  “Who were these people, anyway? Who would live in a—a garbage dump like this, never throwing anything away? Were they insane?” Still trapped in the fascination of the bizarre, she was dismayed by her own inability to close her eyes or look away.

  “Of course they were. What the hell else would they be?” His voice was thin and hard, a drawn wire. “Just like we were for coming here. There's nothing here. Let's go.”

  She glanced back at him, surprised. “But we just got here. Look, there are other rooms—” She gestured toward the walls of rubbish, other dark, narrow mouths opening on other unknowns.

  “Forget it. They won't be any different. There's nothing in this hole but death and garbage.” He began to pull himself toward the entrance.

  “Damn it, I worked my butt off getting us here! We're not leaving until I'm sure there's nothing else.” She brandished the knife, forgetting she still held it.

  His body whiplashed with angry surprise, or maybe with fear. She let go of the knife, pushing it away from them both, embarrassed. She moved off in another direction, toward the first of the openings. Looking back as she reached it, she saw him still motionless where he had been. “Well, are you going to help me?”

  He shook his head, his helmet winked in her light. His arms still pressed his stomach. “No. If you want to wallow in it, go ahead. Not me.”

  She turned wordlessly and pulled herself into the opening.

  The room beyond was crammed with more print-outs, leaving her only enough space to turn around with claustrophobic eagerness and push her way out again. Chaim drifted, watching, as she moved without comment to the next hole. Beyond it was more paper, but she also found numberless copies of prewar pictorials neatly stacked in boxes. She tried to pull one free, wondering whether they might have historical value; only to find that the pages had fused together from some chemical reaction between the synthetic paper and the ink.

  She dropped it in disgust, a memory stirring in her mind like dust disturbed: Recluse. She had read about people like this, and that was what they were called; people who withdrew physically as well as mentally into their own private world. The terrible exhilaration of that crippling fear tingled her skin—the ultimate in freedom, the ultimate in security, the ultimate womb of this place.… She kicked off from the side of a box, diving back into the narrow exit-hole.

  She passed Chaim still silently waiting, pulled herself through the last of the dark holes into the last claustrophobic room. This one was not as crowded as the others; there was still enough room for her to move a few meters through a sphere around its perimeter. Its quality was different, too: a wilderness of tangled, broken furniture, stuffed with rags of ancient clothing, jammed with trunks and boxes. She pried the boxes open desultorily, poked among the furniture legs for anything that might have some real value.

  Light leaped back at her unexpectedly, prisming with color, as she opened a small trunk crammed beneath a desk. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into the
color, droplets of congealed rainbow, gold and silver made molten by her violence. She brought up a necklace set with sapphires the size of peas, a ruby as big as her thumbnail, diamonds … glass. They had to be glass, paste, imitation. Her scintillating joy went out, leaving her empty and dark again. Find a treasure, in this squalid midden? She could as soon expect to find the sun shining. Dartagnan was right, there was nothing here worth wasting their time on; it was only her own stubbornness that had kept them here this long.

  But her hands moved through the jewelry again, making it float and spiral, winking at her with secret knowledge as she set her fantasies free and dreamed for one brief second that all of it was real. At last she chose two favorites out of the dance; the time-stained, gem-hung necklace, and a golden man's ring, studded with fake rubies and far too massive for the fingers that closed around it. She carried them with her, leaving the rest to resettle into stasis as she left the final room, defeated.

  “Find anything?” Chaim's voice was too weary to carry sarcasm.

  “Junk jewelry.” She held the pieces up in her fist, defiantly. “My claim. There's more in there if you want to pick it over.”

  “I just want to get the hell out of here.” He disappeared into the glacier mass of print-outs.

  She followed him through, and back along the corridor of dark stone; he was already waiting in the lock when she reached its end. They went through it together, and she watched him throw himself against the wheel like a man with death at his heels. He reached the Mother ahead of her in a reckless outward leap, almost closing her out of the ship's lock in his impatience.

  He peeled off his suit and left it hanging in midair, slamming away and up through the levels of the ship before she could get out of her own. Following him upward, half curious and half concerned, she listened in the emptiness outside the closed door of his cabin, and heard very clearly the sounds of his retching.

  She waited until there were no more sounds, and rapped on the door. “Chaim?” There was no answer. She pulled the door open, and entered his cabin for the first time. “Chaim?”

  He looked up at her from across the room, where he clung to the doorframe of the bathroom entrance, doubled over in what looked like prayer. But one look at his face told her that it was pain, not worship, that humbled his flesh.

  “What's wrong?” She was suddenly frightened for them both. “Can I help you?”

  “Pills … in that drawer.” He stretched out his hand, a gesture and a plea.

  She moved across the room and opened the top drawer of the cupboard, hearing the magnets snap. Inside, drifting up from a nest of clothing, she found a large, half-empty bottle of pills, plucked it out. “Antacids? There are just antacids—”

  “Give them to me!” His hand flagged her frantically.

  She carried them to him; he fumbled for a handful, spilling them out into the air. He ate several at once, chewing, grimacing, swallowing. “Damn! Damn …” He pressed his ash-colored face against a rigid arm. “God, I don't want to start bleeding—”

  “What is it? For God's sake, Chaim, tell me what it is!” She shook him.

  “My gut. My ulcer.”

  “An ulcer?” She let him go. “You have an ulcer?”

  He nodded.

  “Shiva! Why didn't you tell me!”

  “Why?” he gasped, not looking at her. “What was the point?”

  “Because it's a danger—to both of us!” Her hands closed over the cloth of her jumpsuit in sudden empathy. “Don't you have anything stronger than that?” The antacid pills and bottle were searching for the floor.

  “I couldn't afford it.”

  She bit her tongue; said, as quietly as she could, “Do you think it's bleeding now?” She had read only a little about ulcers, enough to understand his fear: A perforation could be fatal without medical treatment.

  He shook his head. “No sign when I … No. But it gets worse and worse. I never hurt this bad before.”

  “What we just saw in there: I didn't know it bothered you so much. I thought you saw a lot of that kind of thing, before—” breaking off, totally uncomprehending.

  “And I always hated it! I still hate it. I hate going on and on, never finding anything worth a damn. And always alone—” Tears welled in his eyes; she watched incredulously as they overflowed, spreading across his face in a shining film. “Like those crazy bastards down in the rock, drowning in garbage, dying by centimeters—just like this goddamned system!” His body spasmed with pain and frustration.

  “But we're not like them.” She remembered abruptly the strange emotion that had caught her soul there in the dark entrails of the rock.

  “We're worse. We had a chance to be a' team; more than a team, a—” He looked up again at her, and she stopped the word with her eyes, as she had stopped it once before.

  “No. Never.” Her own words shivered and paled abruptly. She shook her head, needing her whole body to force the motion. “Not after what happened.” She turned her back on him, no longer able to keep her eyes shielded. The bare, ivory-colored walls of his cabin seemed to blur into infinity. “You knew that.”

  “You ‘knew’ it! You wouldn't give me a chance. That's why this could never have worked, even if we'd found something—” His breath hissed between his teeth. “Get the hell out of here. Let me be alone by myself.”

  She went out of the room, slamming the door to, and fled across the narrow well into her own cabin. She huddled there, eyes closed, clinging to the brace beside the door; burying herself in the deeper blackness of her mind until she lost all track of time. But still the light was waiting for her, she knew that it waited—in this room, or beyond its door, or among the million stars burning endlessly in the depths of night. She was alive, she could not escape it, she had only to open her eyes to see the light, acknowledge it, commit an act of faith. And to open them was in the end easier than keeping them closed.… She opened her eyes, blinking painfully in the glare.

  She released her death-grip on the metal, pushed away from the wall toward the trunk by her bed and bedroll. In it were the few possessions she was never without, among them the small trove of her Old World book translations—the keys that had set her free from the solitary confinement of her life and let her share other minds, other worlds. She unfastened the lid and opened it, searching through the shifting, rising contents as carefully as she could. At last her hand found the one book she wanted, the one she had not touched since the moment when Chaim Dartagnan had put it back into her hands during their reunion on Mecca.

  She opened it, watching its pages riffle effortlessly in the cover's wake. She separated them hesitantly, randomly, hanging in the air. Her eyes caught an old familiar phrase from this essay, a paragraph of that one, the notes she had scrawled in answer in the margins. She pressed aside one more page, and her eyes fell to the lodestone of a stranger's writing below her own. She had written. It will be lonely to be dead; but it cannot be much more lonely than it is to be alive. And answering her, the stranger had written, Yes, yes, yes.…

  The book drifted out of her strengthless hands; she felt her own face grow slick and warm with tears. She cried as she had not cried in longer than she could remember, filling the empty room with lamentation, for all the times that she had held life at bay, taking the world's contempt into herself and letting it wound her. She wept herself to exhaustion and beyond it, knowing as she wept that she would never wash away the last grain of her regret.

  But at last her body grew light enough to overcome its own inertia; she went out of her room and crossed the hallwell again. A single cricket chirped somewhere in the commons down below. She tapped softly, and then more loudly, on Chaim's still-closed door, getting no answer. She pushed the door aside. At first she thought the room was empty; until she saw him buried in the cocoon of his sleeping bag, tethered on the frame of his bed. She crossed over to his bedside, making certain that he was only deeply asleep. The chameleon, which hung suspended from a grip on the wall above him,
pale with sleep, opened one eye to look at her. Its color began to change, darkening and brightening as it woke, adjusting instinctively to new conditions, as it always did. Two of a kind … she thought, looking back at Chaim, but there was no bitterness in the thought.

  Settling back in the air, her arm loosely through a handhold, she watched him sleeping; able to observe him without being observed, laying down her shield at last in the face of his defenseless sleep. Able to see that the past was past: the mistakes paid for, the wrongs righted, as far as humanly possible. She had let the past fill up the present until there was no room left for a new life, for tomorrow.… Who was she punishing besides herself? And why? And when would she have suffered enough … Oh God, is there anyone alive who doesn't hate herself—himself (looking down at Chaim's sleeping face)—in their deepest heart? Just by living we betray ourselves and are betrayed.… And only we can end it.

  Chaim stirred toward waking; the sleeping bag strained against the fastenings that held it immobile.

  “Chaim.” Her voice shook him gently.

  His eyes opened, staring blankly at the ceiling.

  “Chaim—”

  He turned his head; body and bag revolved toward her. The blank look stayed on his face as he registered her presence. He looked at her, saying nothing; his eyes were red-rimmed.

  “How are you?”

  He grimaced, at her or at himself, she wasn't sure. “I don't know.”

  “I'm better.” She glanced down. “Better than I've been in a long time, I think.”

  The incomprehension returned, chill with resentment. And yet somewhere an ember of understanding still strained toward fire.…

  She breathed on it tentatively, afraid of being left alone in the darkness now. “I found what you wrote in my book.”

  Slow surprise filled his face. “Yeah?” He pulled himself partway out of the sleeping bag.

  A nod. “When you're so lonely, you feel like you're the only one …” She twisted her hand around the support bar.