Heaven Chronicles Page 14

  Lije MacWong was waiting for him inside. Officially Wadie worked for the citizens of the Demarchy; actually he worked for MacWong. MacWong, the People's Choice. The Demarchy's absolute democracy was an unpredictable water beneath the fragile ship of government, and it had drowned countless unwary representatives. But MacWong moved instinctively with the flow of popular opinion, sometimes even risked diverting that flow to suit his own vision of the people's needs. He did the people's business, and made them like it. Wadie wondered from time to time what MacWong's secret was; and wondered whether he really wanted to know. ”Peace 'n' prosperity, Lije.”

  MacWong glanced up as Wadie entered the office, ice-blue eyes placid in his dark face. “Peace 'n' prosperity, Wadie.” He rose, returned a formal bow, and moved reluctantly away from his aquarium.

  Wadie peered past him for a glimpse of the fish—three glittering golden things no larger than a finger, with tails of shining gossamer, moving sinuously through sea grasses in the green-lit water. The goldfish were the only nonhuman creatures he had ever seen, and for all he knew MacWong was still paying for them. He pulled off his hat, watched its soft mushroom roundness begin to flatten beside MacWong's on the desk top. “With all due respect, I trust this news about a Mysterious Message from Outer Space is genuine, an' I'm not here because you like to see me suffer.” He sank slowly into MacWong's neocolonial desk chair, smoothed wrinkles from his jacket.

  “Have a seat.” MacWong smiled tolerantly. “The ‘message’ is genuine. These aren't home movies I'm goin' to show you.” He leaned carefully against the corner of his desk, avoiding the fresco of silver animal heads, and flicked a switch on the communications inset. Nothing happened. “Dammit.” He picked up a platinum paperweight shaped like a springing cat and dropped it on the panel. The impact was unimpressive, but the Kleinfelter mural projection on the far wall faded, and was replaced by the image of a woman's face. “I don't know what I'll do if this desk quits working. They don't build 'em like they used to.” He set the paperweight gently back in place.

  “They don't build 'em at all, Lije.” Wadie traced the scrolled embroidery on his jacket front; his fingers froze as he looked up at the screen. “A hologram? Where'd you get that, MacWong?”

  “We picked it out of the air, or space, anyhow, thirty kilosecs ago. It's a genuine hologramic transmission; it took us ten kilosecs to figure that out. And it's not beamed. Think of the power and bandwidth something like that requires! I don't know anybody who can do that for the hell of it anymore.”

  “Not many that can do it at all—” He broke off, watching, listening, as the woman's voice rose. Her skin was pale to the point of colorlessness, like her cropped, floating hair; her face was long and angular. She wore a faded shirt open at the neck, without jewelry. In her thirties, he judged, and making no attempt to cover it up; her plainness was almost painful. He put it out of his mind, concentrating on her voice. She spoke Anglo, but with an unfamiliar accent; the most common words seemed to take on extra syllables in her mouth.

  “… please identify yourselves further. We were not aware of violating your space. We are not, repeat not, from your system; and we—” She was interrupted by a noise that barely recorded; Wadie saw her pale skin blush with anger, her eyes sharpen like cut sapphire. He glanced at MacWong.

  “The Ringer navy,” MacWong said. “Their ‘cast’ went the other way. This is all we picked up.”

  The woman glanced offscreen, and spoke words that he couldn't hear, insulting words, he guessed; but her voice was steady as she faced the screen again. “This is not a Belter ship, we are not ‘Demarchists,’ and we have committed no acts of ‘piracy.’ You have no authority over my ship; permission to board is denied. But if you will give us co-ords for your—”

  Again she was interrupted; he watched tension grow, tightening her face. “We're not armed—” And resolution: “But we deny your ‘right of seizure.’ Pappy, get us—” She turned away again, and her image was ripped apart by a burst of red static. For half a second more he saw her, and then the screen went white.

  “Well?”

  Wadie loosened his hands on the metal frame of the chair. “Did they destroy it? Is that all?”

  MacWong shook his head. “The ship took a hit, but it got away from the Ringers—all but one of 'em. We monitored some of their followups; that alien ship is a ramscoop, and when one of the Ringer pursuit craft got too close she just used the exhaust to melt it into scrap. Maybe that indignant Viking Queen isn't armed, but she's dangerous.”

  Wadie said nothing, waiting.

  “We don't know where the ship is now, or even why it's here. But I have some ideas. She said it was from outside the system, and I believe that. Nobody in the Belt has anything that sophisticated anymore. And a woman runnin' it—particularly a woman who looks like that—”

  “Maybe she's an albino … maybe she's from the Main Belt. The scavengers don't care who goes into space; they've got no protection against radiation anyhow. Maybe they got very lucky on salvage.” And yet he knew that MacWong was right; that the woman and her accent were too alien.

  MacWong looked at him. “Nobody gets that lucky. What's wrong, Wadie, the miracle too much for you? This isn't some mediaman's fantasy, believe me. That's a ship from Outside, the first contact we've had with the rest of humanity in over three gigasecs. And the course they set away from the Rings could be taking them to the old capital, Lansing. If that's right, there can only be one reason why that ship is here: they don't know about the Civil War. They've come to Heaven lookin' for golden streets, and when they learn there aren't any left we'll never see 'em again. We can't let that happen.…”

  “What good would one ship do us now?” He stared at the blank wall screen, against his will felt another question stubbornly taking form.

  “That ship could do us all the good in the universe.” MacWong picked up his platinum cat. “That ship is treasure, that ship is power … that ship could save us.”

  Wadie nodded, admitting to himself that the ship's immense fusion reactor alone could give the Demarchy the start to rebuild capital industry. And God only knew what other technology—functioning technology—they might have on board. Just the possession of a ship like that would change the Demarchy's snow dealings with the Rings forever. They could even bypass Discus and the Ringers, set up distilleries of their own out of Sevin's moons.…

  For as long as he could remember he had lived with signs of a society gradually coming apart at the seams, alone in the wasteland that civil war had made of Heaven Belt. Because of its peripheral location, the Demarchy had survived the Civil War relatively intact. But the Main Belt had been destroyed, and now the Demarchy's only outside trade contact was with the Grand Harmony of the Discan Rings, and the Ringers were barely surviving. The Demarchy was slipping down with them, but because it had so much further to go, he had discovered that no one else seemed to realize the truth. They were blinded by the fierce, traditional self-interest that was the Demarchy's strength—and perhaps, now, its fatal weakness.

  He had become a negotiator, hoping to bind up his people's self-inflicted wounds. He had believed that somehow the unifying element, the common bond of need that joined every human being, could be used as a force against disintegration and decay; that the Demarchy would continue, that they would find an answer. And with this ship … His imagination leaped, fell back as the question struck him down: Who would control a ship like that … and who could control the one's who did control it? “But as you said, that ship will go back home, once they see what's left of Lansing.”

  “Maybe.” MacWong flicked dust off of his cuff. “But Osuna thinks they might need to refuel first. It's a long way home to anywhere from here. They're not likely to go back to the Rings to get fuel, under the circumstances. Which means they might come to us; if they need processed hydrogen, there's no place else to go. So I'm sendin' out everyone I can spare. I want you at Mecca. The distilleries will make it a prime target, and you're more exp
erienced at dealing with—‘aliens’—than anybody on the staff.”

  Wadie accepted the tacit compliment, the tacit distaste, remembered fifty million seconds spent in the Grand Harmony of the Discan Rings, and things it had shown him that he had never expected to see. He stood up, reaching for his hat. “What if they're not in the mood for negotiation?”

  “I don't expect they will be. But that doesn't matter; you're paid to put them in the mood. Promise them anythin', but keep them here, stall that ship, until we can take control of it.”

  Wadie adjusted his beret, looked back from the mirroring wall. “What do you mean by ‘we,’ Lije? Just who is goin' to control that ship? It won't be the government, the people will see to that. And the first kid on the rock to own one—”

  MacWong was not amused. “I sometimes wonder if you didn't spend too much time with the Ringers, Abdhiamal. Dammit, Wadie, I'm not still questioning your loyalty, after two hundred megasecs. But there are still some who do; who think maybe you'd really like to see a centralized government here.” He stopped. “There'll be a general meeting to settle the issue once we have the ship.” He leaned forward across the gargoyled desk. “The Demarchy has to have that ship, an' no one but the Demarchy.”

  “You're the boss.” Wadie bowed.

  “No.” MacWong straightened. “The Demarchy is the boss. We give the people what they think they want. Nothing else means anything. Forget that, and we're out of a job—or worse. If I was you, I wouldn't ever forget it.”

  And knowing that MacWong never did, Wadie left the office.

  Ranger (in transit, Discus to Lansing)

  +130 kiloseconds

  Betha left the hydroponics lab at last, began to climb up through the hollow silence of the central stairwell. She could no longer remember how many times she had climbed these stairs in the past two days; the duties of a crew of seven were an endless treadmill of labor for a crew of two. She passed the machine shop on the fourth level, kept on, reached their sleeping quarters on the third. One more level above, across the well, the flashing red light over the sealed dayroom door caught her unwilling eyes. She stopped, wrenched out of her fatigue by a fresh rush of grief.

  She stepped hurriedly through to the corridor that ringed the stairwell on the third level, that gave access to seven private rooms … and all that remained of five human beings who were lost to her forever. To her right, Lara's room; everything in its place, mirroring the precision of Lara's mind.… Betha remembered the crisp directness of her voice across an examining table in the ship's infirmary; her graying hair, the warm concern in her gray eyes that denied her clinical detachment. There was a padded stool in Lara's room made from a cetoid vertebra; a Color Atlas of the Diseases of Fish, Amphibians, and Reptiles. She had been a medical researcher on Morningside, before their family had become a crew and she had become their doctor; but marine biology had been her hobby, her real love. And Sean, the smartass, had written a song, “Lara and the Leviathan,” that swallowed her up in verses about this “cetoid monster,” the Ranger.…

  Through the open doorway directly before her, Betha could see a tangle of electronics gear, Nikolai's balalaika laid out on the sleeping bag on the platform of his bed. She pictured him, balding, bearded, brooding; with a voice like an echo escaping from a well.… A patient, skillful teacher, an electronics expert—a repairman, at home, serving the entire Borealis moiety. She remembered him laughing, dodging the shoe she had thrown at Sean for calling her Ranger a whale ….

  She turned to her left, moved along the curving hallway against the currents of memory, like a woman wading into the sea …. Remembering Claire, placidly moon-faced, curly-haired; plump, fair farmer's daughter … Sean, the red-haired kid among them, only twenty-four …

  Betha hesitated, finding herself before her own doorway. She glanced in, at her cluttered desk, her rumpled bedding. She moved on desperately, as though she would drown herself, to the next room … to Eric. Eric van Helsing, social scientist, moiety ombudsman, spokesman.…

  You are the rain, my love, sweet water

  Flowing through the desert of my life

  The words of the song came unbidden into her mind, with the rushing heart of a desert wind on Morningside, the passion of first love:

  Let me flower first for you

  Let me quench my thirst in you

  Share the best and worst with you …

  Her hands twisted, unconsciously; six rings of gold slid against one another, circling her fingers, four on the left hand, two on the right.

  Husband, have me for a wife.

  You are the rain.…

  She sagged against the wooden doorframe, shutting her eyes; pressed her face against the coolness, supported by its noncommittal strength. He was gone; they were all gone: her crew, her family … her husbands and her wives. Her strength, the strength that came from sharing, was gone with them, bled away into the bottomless void. How would she go on? Loss was too heavy a burden, life was too heavy a burden, to bear alone—

  Something brushed her ankles; she opened her eyes, focusing. The cat wove between her feet, meowing forlornly. “Rusty—” She leaned down to pick the cat up, seeing the day of their departure from Morningside: the squirming, mewing kitten held out to her in the grubby hands of her daughter, Kiki, as all their children solemnly presented their chosen gifts to each and every parent. There had been a dozen grandparents looking on—and siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, their proud, hopeful faces washed with ruddy light, the Darkside Perimeter's eternal twilight.

  All of them were waiting—all of them were a part of her. The children were waiting; she was not alone. But they were all beyond her reach now, across too much space and time; and it was her duty, her responsibility, to get this ship back to them—

  She heard a sound in the hall, straightened away from the doorframe with Rusty still nested in her arms. She saw Clewell, wearing only his shorts, standing in the doorway of his own room, watching her.

  “Betha—are you all right?”

  “Yes … yes, I'm just tired. Pappy.” Tired of remembering, and remembering. How can one sudden sorrow turn all my joy to pain? Watching him back she saw the same desolation, the same wound of loss that tormented her. She felt her fear rise again. Oh, Clewell; don't let me lose you, too. “May—I share your room again, tonight?”

  He nodded. “Please. I couldn't get to sleep anyway, alone.”

  She followed him into his room, and in the darkness unbuttoned her plain cotton shirt, slipped out of her shoes and jeans. She settled into the double sleeping bag beside him, into his arms, and put her own arms around him gratefully in a gesture of long familiarity. He had not been her first husband, but he had been her friend through more years than she could remember now. He had been twenty-seven the year she was born, one of many uncles; but from childhood on he had been her favorite among all the relatives of her extended family. He had been an astronomer before he had become navigator on the Ranger; he had traveled from Borealis on the chill perimeter of day, out across the Boreal Sea and over the crumpled ice sheet of the darkside glacier, to his observatory under eternal night. Sometimes he had taken her along for a brief holiday of stargazing, free from the duties and clan responsibilities that even a child on Morningside was expected to fulfill.

  When she was fifteen she had gone away for her technical training; and then to her first job as an engineer, at a production plant on the desert edge of the subsolar Hotspot. She had fallen in love with Eric, married him; and in time they had returned to the Borealis moiety. She had reentered Clewell's life as a grown woman, and she and Eric had been invited to join his family.

  Morningside society grew out of the multiple-marriage family, and bonds of kinship were its strength and security. Marriage among the members of a clan—a parent family, its children, their own children—was socially taboo; but outside the central clan unit, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews married freely, their sheer numbers providing the cultural and biologic
al controls. A marriage could be made between a single couple or a dozen people, and each family made its own rules to live by. Special friendships between individuals in a large family were common, and either the group as a whole adapted, or a subgroup split off. Weddings were a cause for general celebration, but divorce was a common, and private, matter for a family group. Three of the members of Clewell's family that Betha had known as a child had divorced the rest, and his first wife had died, before she and Eric had joined the group, and Claire, and Sean, after them.

  Betha remembered the brief, fond ceremony of marriage, the immense, freeform family celebrations that had followed. All of Morningside loved a celebration, because too much of the time they had too little to celebrate. And now there would be even less, whether the Ranger ever returned or not.…