Heaven Chronicles

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.

He laughed softly, unexpectedly. “You are.”

She let her mouth relax, and found that it began to smile. She put her free hand up, feeling the strangeness of her face, the smile's distortion of it, the puffiness that remained of her grief. “Chaim—I don't hate myself, anymore. Not the way I've hated myself since Planet Two, at least.”

He plucked at the seal on his sleeping bag, separating his cocoon. “Does that mean I can stop hating myself, then?”

She blinked. “Yes … I suppose it does.”

He searched her eyes for affirmation; she met his gaze, no longer afraid. He pushed up from the bed, a man released. “Partners, then?” He reached out to her.

She nodded; took his hand and squeezed it briefly before she let it go. Warmth stayed in her palm.

The chameleon left its perch and began to creep down the wall, moving with extreme deliberation, going in search of its dwindling, ever-moving food supply. Chaim watched its progress for a long moment. He crossed his arms gingerly against the front of his coveralls, looking up at the ceiling as if he could see through it into space. “So where do we go from here? Where do we look, what do we try next?”

She jerked abruptly at the handhold. “Damn it! I'm not ready to face that now, too.” She shook her head.

“We've got to face it, sooner or later. It's better if we do it now.” He unzipped his pockets and pushed his hands into them. “Everybody in creation's been over the Main Belt with tweezers. We don't have supplies enough to keep random searching for as long as it'll take to hit a strike. We've got to think of something better.”

“There must be something nobody's tried, something everybody's overlooked, for some reason. Like the station on Planet Two that Sekka-Olefin found.” She turned, following his drifting motion out into the room. “Chaim, you're the prospector; isn't there something you heard about, some clue?”

“That's the point—I'm not such a damn great prospector, Mythili! Neither was my old man. He had lousy luck; even when he made a strike, it killed him. And I never learned half of what he knew.” His eyes grew distant. “Except … I do remember something. I told you back at the start, he had a lot of wild get-rich schemes. And there's one that didn't sound as crazy as the rest … about that factory rock from the Demarchy, that just disappeared during the war. Nobody ever found a trace of it, they all figured it must've been hit with a nuke barrage that kicked it clear out of the system. But the odds are against that; it takes a lot of energy to give escape velocity to a rock that big. There was a whole atomic battery plant on it. It was …” he frowned, concentrating, “let's see … my father said that even if it was knocked out of the fore-trojans—and it must've been, since they would have found it by now if it was still there—if it was, then its orbit should still have similar elements. That means it would drift around the Belt over a gigasecond or so, and it should've been spotted again eventually.”

She frowned, concentrating. “So either it was completely fragmented or it did leave the system.”

“Unless somehow it got trapped in another equilibrium point.”

“But the only way that could have happened in so short a time would be if it was hit twice, or collided with some other rock …” They looked at each other and she felt their fantasy building, layer on layer.

“The most likely place would be in the other Lagrange points.”

“Right, and probably a stable one—”

“The aft-trojans,” he finished it for her. “It could be there right now, as good as new.” He looked up again at the ceiling as though he actually expected to see it.

“As good as new?” Her face twisted.

He shrugged. “Let's face it—if the factory itself took a hit, the reactor would probably be spilling radiation. You couldn't miss it. But nobody ever reported anything like that from the aft-trojans. If the plant was blown up, there wouldn't be much point going after it; but if it wasn't … we could buy the whole goddamn Demarchy with that find!” He rubbed his hands together.

“How would we ever find it, in the whole of the aft-trojans?”

“They were mostly uninhabited, anything with any manmade stuff would stand out in the readings. That signal separater Fitch gave us could be just the edge we need for this.”

“But even the core-trojans are spread over a hundred and forty thousand kilometers—” She pictured them in her mind, their tenuous teardrop spread veil-thin through endless vacuum.

“I didn't say it would be easy. It's probably not even there; this whole thing is insane. But you wanted a long shot, and that's the only one I've got. It's either shoot our wad on this or go on the way we have, bleeding to death.” He shrugged. “Your choice is mine. What do you say?”

She took a deep breath. “What the hell. Let's gamble, let's throw it all away on the trojans! What the hell have we got to lose?” She raised her arms and swept them down, rising defiantly through the air.

He nodded, his eyes shining. “Only our chains.”

“Nothing.” Chaim looked up from the read-outs. They had been in the aft-trojans, sixty degrees behind Discus, for more than two megaseconds. And so far they had found nothing that should not have been there; no trace of radiation or any material that had not been formed in the original fusion of stone out of primordial dust.

Mythili sighed, saying nothing because she could not think of anything to say. She finished a handful of nuts, feeling the presence of every hard, broken fragment prick the tight walls of her stomach; they had begun rationing their supplies to stretch their search time. Wasted time. She tried not to think it, and failed. She looked away at the chameleon, which clung to the wall beside her with its tonglike toes. It seemed to crave their company more and more; or perhaps there was simply nothing else left for it to do. There did not seem to be a single cricket remaining on the ship, and there was nothing in their own dwindling supplies the lizard would eat. She wondered how long it could survive without food. Lucky … she thought, and sighed.

“You want to check out the twin?” Chaim twisted to look directly at her. “There