Heaven Chronicles

“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 goddamn 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