Heaven Chronicles Page 19

  “Christ, who were those people?” She glanced over her shoulder as they boarded the single canister car of the ground transport; behind them someone sealed the door. She heard Shadow Jack mutter, “Unreal.” There were two others in the cabin, she saw, wishing it was empty, glad there were only two and hoping they didn't have cameras. Ahead through the plastic dome, the filament-fine monorail track stretched away over the barren brightness. Beyond the platform on her right she saw what looked to be a circular hatchway set into the surface of the rock; above it was a sign: HYDROPONICS CO-OP. She realized that the guard hadn't been making a joke; the chunk of naked stone that was Mecca was a self-sufficient world, riddled with tubes and vacuoles that supported life and all its processes. Too much radiation was bad for the plants.…

  Her thoughts jarred and re-formed as gentle inertia pressed her against the seatback. Rusty snuffled and scratched in the carrier, making a sound like static inside her helmet; suddenly, painfully, she remembered their destination, and their purpose. And that only Eric could help her now—but Eric was gone. “I wonder if this was built before the war?” She glanced at Shadow Jack's mirrored faceplate, needing an answer.

  “Yes, it was.” The voice in her helmet belonged to a stranger.

  She started; so did Shadow Jack. They turned to look at the two others in the car; one, long legs stretching casually, reached up to clear his faceplate. “Eric—!” Her hand rose to her own helmet, hung motionless, almost weightless.

  Curling dark hair, a lean, pensive face; the sudden smile that was almost a child's. The brown eyes looked surprised … amber eyes … not Eric, not … Eric is dead. She pulled down her trembling hand, leaving her faceplate dark. “I—I'm sorry. I thought … I thought you were someone I knew.”

  He smiled again, politely. “I don't think so.”

  “You're the ones who came to trade, from Lansing.” The second voice rasped like grit. “They said the car was waiting for you.”

  Betha winced, unseen. She looked across at the shorter, somehow bulkier figure; wondered if it was possible to find a fat Belter. Her own 1.75 meters felt oddly petite. The woman cleared her helmet glass, showed a middle-aged face, brown skin and graying hair, eyes of shining jet.

  “Yes, we are.” Betha kept her faceplate dark to hide her paleness, felt Shadow Jack fidget beside her.

  “You're the first ones I've ever seen from the Main Belt. What's it like back in there? It's good to learn that you aren't all—”

  Rusty emitted a piercing yowl of desolation, and Betha gasped as it rattled against her ears.

  “My Lord, what was that?” The woman's gloves rose to her own shielded ears.

  “Ghosts,” Shadow Jack said, “of dead Belters.”

  The woman's face went blank with confusion. Betha glanced at the man, saw him smile and frown together; he met her unseen eyes. “Never heard a noise like that. Maybe we passed over a power cable.” She realized that not only the cat, but the carrying case transmitter must be an unheard-of novelty in Heaven now.

  The woman looked shaken. “I'm sorry. That wasn't gracious of me, anyway. Just that you're such a novelty. I'm Rinee Bohanian, of Bohanian Agroponics.” She gestured at the sunside behind them. “Family business, you know.”

  “Wadie Abdhiamal.” The man nodded. “I work for the Demarchy.”

  “Don't we all?” the woman said.

  “The government.”

  She peered at him with a suspicion edging on dislike. “Well.” She looked back at Betha. “And what's your name? You know, I'd like to get a look at a genuine spacewoman—”

  “Betha Torgussen. I'm sorry, my helmet's broken.” She crossed her fingers; no one showed surprise. “And this is—”

  “Shadow Jack,” Shadow Jack said. “I'm a pirate.”

  “Pilot,” Betha murmured, irritated, but the others laughed.

  “That's a Materialist name.” The man was looking at Shadow Jack. “I haven't met one of those in a long time.”

  “Everybody's one, on Lansing. But it's just wishing. Nothin' left to contemplate.” He was almost relaxing, the hard edge softening out of his voice.

  The man glanced at Betha, questioning.

  “Not everyone.” She turned away toward the front of the car, looking for a reason to stop talking. She heard the woman asking the man what he did for the government, didn't listen to his reply. They were nearing the terminator; it ran smoothly to meet them, like a cloud shadow crossing the broken desert lands of Morningside. Beyond the terminator, parallel to the edge of shadow, lay a line of leviathans: stubby poles of steel crowned by rings of copper, strung with serial blinking lights, red and green.

  “That's the linear accelerator,” the woman said. “It's used to ship cargo that doesn't have to move too fast, or go too far.… What exactly does a Materialist think?”

  They crossed the terminator, blinking into night as though a switch had been thrown, and passed between the looming towers of the accelerator. The dark-haired man sat listening to Shadow Jack; unwillingly Betha felt her eyes drawn back to his face.

  “… and you're given a word, the name of somethin' material that's supposed to set each of you apart and shape your being somehow. Half the people don't even know what their words mean, now.…”

  She watched the stranger in silence, helpless, flushed with sudden radiance, chilled until she trembled.… Remembering Morningside, the first days of her love for Eric: remembering an engineer and a social scientist ill-met in a factory yard on the Hotspot perimeter, and blazing metal in the unending heat of endless noon.… Remembering their last days on Morningside: a film of ice broken in a well in unending dusk, where the crackling edge of the darkside ice sheet, stained with rose and amber by the fires of sunset, shattered its mirror image in the Boreal Sea. Borealis Field, where her family, as the newly chosen crew of the Ranger, worked together preparing for an emergency shipment, preparing themselves for the journey across 1.3 light-years to icebound Uhuru.

  They had been selected from all the volunteers willing to leave homes and jobs because another world in their trade ring needed help; but they had never imagined the journey that in the end would be assigned to them. Word had come from the High Council that a radio message had been received from Uhuru, and aid was no longer needed. They had been given a new, unexpected destination, the Heaven system, and a goal that was more than simple survival for another world or their own. She remembered the celebration, their pride at the honor, their families' families' pride.… Remembered Eric leading her quietly from the crowded, fire-bright hall, for one brief time alone before a journey that would last for years. His gentle hands, and the caressing heat of the deserted sauna; their laughing plunge into banked snow … the heat of passion, the wasting cold of death … fire and ice, fire and ice.… She cried silently, Eric, don't betray me now.… Give me strength.

  The car slipped on through darkness.

  The car drifted to a stop beneath the slender towers of their destination, among the ballooning storage sacs that glowed with ghostly foxfire—dim yellows, greens, and blues, excited by the ground lights into a strange phosphorescence. Betha shook off the past, looking out into the glowing forest of alien shapes. She heard the woman: “… how your Lansing fields are like our tank farmin'. Of course, there's no shortage of water for us; we have the snow stored below in the old mining cavities. We've got enough to last forever, I expect.” A pride that was unconsciously greed filled her smile. The government man glanced at her; Betha saw him show quick anger and wondered why. Shadow Jack pushed abruptly up out of his seat, stabilized himself instinctively. Tension tightened him like a wire again; she wondered what showed on his face.

  They followed the man and woman through disembodied radio noise and the impersonal clutter of workers on the platform, came to another hatch set into the solidness of the surface rock. Below the airlock they entered tunnels that sloped steeply downward, without seeming to, into the heart of the stone. Betha felt her suit grow limp with the return o
f air pressure, making her movements easy. Sounds carried to her now, dimmed by her helmet, as she passed new clusters of citizens, some suited and some not, all mercifully oblivious; she wondered again at the behavior of the cameramen on the field.

  They followed a rope along the wall of the main corridor, where the rough gloves of pressure suits had scraped a shallow trough along the pitted surface. Ahead and below she saw the tunnel's end, opening onto a space hung with fine netting. Curious, she drifted out onto the ledge at the chamber's lip.

  “Oh …” Her breath was lost in a sigh. She stood as Shadow Jack already stood, transfixed by a faery beauty trapped in stone. Before them a vacuole opened up, a kilometer or more in diameter: an immense, unnatural geode filled with shining spines of crystal growth, blunt and spike-sharp, rainbow on rainbow of strident, flowing color. The hollow core of air was hung with gossamer, silken filaments spread by some incredible spider.…

  The images began to re-form in her mind; she realized that this was the city, the heart of life in the Mecca asteroid—that the crystal spines were its towers, reaching up from the floor, out on every side … down, from the ceiling. Why don't they fall—? Her thoughts spun, falling; she felt someone's hands clutch her arms. Her mind settled, her feet settled softly on the ledge. Angrily she forced her eyes out again into the chamber's dizzy immensity. People drifted, as tiny as midges, along the gossamer threads; light ropes, strung across the wide, soft spaces. The towers grew thickest, probing the inner air, on ceiling and floor, in the direct line of gravity's faint inexorable drag. The buildings that hugged the hollow's curving sides were shorter, stubbier, enduring greater stress.The towers shivered delicately in the slight stirring currents of ventilation; they were not solid crystalline surfaces, but trembling tents of colored fabric stretched over slender metal frames.

  “It was a ‘model city’ before the war.” She saw that the government man was the one who had caught her arms; he released her noncommittally. “It used to be a gamin' center. Now we play more practical games; most of those towers belong to merchant groups.” The man unlatched his helmet, lifting it off and looking at her expectantly. “The air's okay here.”

  She reached up only to switch on her outside speaker; her skin prickled, wanting the touch of his eyes. “Thank you” —she tried to sound unsure—“but I'll wait.” Shadow Jack, speakerless, stood looking out into the city, sullenly content to play deaf and dumb. “Can you tell us which of those belongs to someone who can sell us hydrogen?”

  “Hydrogen?” His wandering glance leaped back to her shielded face. “I thought you'd want air. Or water.”

  “We do. We need water—we have oxygen. So we need hydrogen, obviously.” Rusty yowled; she closed her ears.

  “Oh.” His face relaxed into acceptance. “Obviously.… You know, it's not often that I meet a woman who's chosen to go into space. Is it common on Lansing?”

  “Going into space isn't common on Lansing, anymore.” Betha remembered suddenly that the stranger's golden-brown eyes belonged to the enemy. “If you could just point out the distillery offices for me?”

  “Down there”—he pointed—“that cluster of long greens on the floor; lot of offices for the distilleries in that bunch. Tiriki, Flynn, Siamang …”

  “Distilleries? There's more than one?” Should I have known? She swore under her breath.

  “Sure are.” But he smiled, tolerantly. “This is the Demarchy, the people rule; we don't like monopolistic practices. It infringes on the people, they won't stand for it.… I know—let me take you around.”

  “No, really—”

  “It's the least I can do, when you've come this far.” He put two fingers into his mouth and whistled shrilly, three times. She flinched; he turned back to her, surprising her with a quick, apologetic bow. “That's how you call a taxi here, now. Mecca's manners are going to hell.… Heaven is going to hell.” He laughed oddly, as if he hadn't expected to say it out loud. “I'm from Toledo, myself.”

  “What—ah—did you say you do for the government?” She looked away uneasily across the ledge. The woman from the train had disappeared. Why is he staying with us like this?

  “I'm a negotiator. I try to keep things from getting any more uncivilized than they already are.” Again the quick, pained laugh. “I settle disputes, work out trade agreements … look into unexpected visits.”

  She almost turned, froze as she saw the cameramen from moorage emerge from the tunnel. “Shadow Jack!” She caught his arm. “Stay with me, don't get separated.”

  The voices closed in on them, “… in that run-down ship?”

  “Who are you making your deal with?”

  “How much—”

  “What do you have—”

  Mediamen and staring locals crowded them, ringed them in, jostling and interrupting. She saw the government man elbowed aside as the air taxi drifted up to the ledge, grating to a stop. She pushed toward it, gesturing to Shadow Jack. It was canopied and propeller-driven, steered by hand by a bored-looking, well-dressed boy. “Where to?”

  “To—to Tiriki's. And hurry.” She ducked her head at the edge of the striped canopy, felt the footing bob beneath her in a sea of air, seeing crystals reflecting above and below. Shadow Jack followed. The taxi sank outward and down, away from the grasping mob on the precipice.

  “… Torgussen!” She heard the government man shouting after her.

  She looked back; her hands rose to her helmet, fumbling, pulled it off. She saw his face change with surprise … recognition … loss.… Stop it! There was no resemblance, there could be no recognition … Eric is dead! She clung to a canopy pole, feeling the air currents stir her pale, snarled hair, soothe her burning face. Oh, God, how often will this happen? Shadow Jack hung over the edge, looking down, up, sideways, as they passed the artificial sun caged in glass suspended in the cavern's center. Slowly she sank onto a seat, forcing her own senses to absorb her surroundings, jamming the echoes of the past.

  The cavern was filled with sound, merging and indistinct: laughter, shouting, the beehive hum of unseen mechanisms. She looked ahead, aware now of subtle differences of richness and elaboration among the massed towers; of balconies set at insane angles; of dark hollows in the bedrock walls, tunnels to exclusive homes. And gradually she became aware of the mingling of spices that perfumed the cool filtered air; she breathed deeply, tasting it, savoring it, easing her stuffy head. Unimpressed, the driver stared through her at the emerald pinnacle of their destination.

  They pushed through the soft elastic mouth of the roof entrance, into a long empty corridor stretching twenty-five meters down to the building's base on rock. Betha began to sink toward it, almost imperceptibly, and with no sensation of falling; they began to pass doorways. Shadow Jack unlatched his helmet, pulled it off and shook his head. She heard him take a deep breath. “Where are we?” His hair was plastered like streamers over his wet face; he wiped it back with a gloved hand.

  “Tiriki Distillates. The man from the train suggested it.” She hesitated, not wanting to tell him what she suspected.

  “Bastards.” His mouth pulled back. “I'd like to see this place blow up. They wouldn't be so—” Anger choked him.

  Betha watched him, feeling sorrow edged with annoyance. She reached out; her glove pressed the soft, resistant covering on his shoulder. “I know how you feel … I know. But so did the people in that train car. Take the chip off your shoulder, right now, or I'll knock it off myself: I can't afford it. I want something from these people, and so do you, and it's a hell of a lot more important than what either one of us feels. So put a sweet smile on your face while we make this deal, and keep it there if it gags you.” Somewhere the memory broke loose: “‘Smile and smile … and be a villain.’” She smiled, breathing the cool scented air, and willed his eyes to meet hers. Slowly he raised his head; as he looked at her, for the first time, she saw him smile.

  Someone pushed through a doorway almost at her side. He caught the flap, looking at her with
frank disbelief.

  She rubbed her unwashed face, embarrassed. “We'd like to negotiate for a load of hydrogen. Can you tell us who to see?”

  A mask of propriety formed. “Of course. Sure. At the far end of the hall, the Purchasing Department. And thanks for doing business with Tiriki.” He ducked his head formally and moved past them, pushing off from wall to wall, rising like a swimmer through the brightening sea-green light. They went on down, into the depths.

  “Look at this rag.” They heard the voice before they reached the doorway. “What do they know about it? They don't know a damn thing.”

  “No, Esrom.”

  Betha brushed aside the flaps and they went in, wearing smiles rigid with tension.

  “I could do better myself. That's what we ought to do, do it ourselves. We ought to hire some mediamen and put out our own paper—”

  “Yes, Esrom.”

  “—tell them our side. Look here, Sia, ‘monopolistic’ …”

  The golden-skinned, ethereally beautiful woman behind the counter looked up at them; her arching eyebrows rose. The golden-skinned, strikingly handsome man with the printout turned. Brother and sister, Betha thought, and … impeccable. They wore soft greens, colors flowing into a background of sea-green light, the woman in a long embroidered gown, the man in an embroidered jacket, lace at his sleeves. She pictured what they saw in return, brushed at her stringy hair.

  But the man said, “Sia, did you ever see anything like that? Look at that skin, and hair, together.…” His dark eyes moved down her suit, identified it, looked back at her face. “But she's been in space.” Interest faded to regret.

  The woman tapped his arm. “Esrom, please!” She charmed them with a smile. “And what can we do for you?” She smoothed her sinuously drifting, raven-black hair along her back, tucked strands under her lacy cap.

  “We'd like to buy a load of hydrogen from you.” Betha felt herself blushing crimson while they watched in fascination. She tried to hide her annoyance. “One thousand tons.”