Heaven Chronicles

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