Heaven Chronicles

Toledo planetoid (Demarchy space) +30 kiloseconds

Wadie Abdhiamal, negotiator for the Demarchy, stirred sluggishly, dragged up out of sleep by the chiming of the telephone. He turned the lights up enough to make out its form and switched it on. “Yes?” He saw Lije MacWong's mahogany face brighten on the screen, pushed himself up on an elbow in the bed.

“Sorry to wake you up, Wadie.”

He grinned. “I'll bet you are.” MacWong enjoyed getting up early. Wadie glanced at the digital clock in the phone's base. “Somebody need a negotiator at this time of night? Don't the people even sleep?”

“I hope they're all sleepin' now.… Are you alone?”

Wadie glanced back over his shoulder at Kimoru's brown, sleek side, her tumbled black hair. She sighed in her sleep. He looked back at MacWong's image, judged from the disapproval in the pale-blue eyes that MacWong already knew the answer. Annoyed but not showing it, he said, “No, I'm not.”

“Pick up the receiver.”

Wadie obeyed, cutting off sound from the general speaker. He listened, silent, for the few seconds more it took MacWong to surprise him out of his sleep-fog. “Be down as soon as I can.”

He got out of bed, half-drifting in the scant gravity, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave. When he returned he found Kimoru sitting up in bed, the pinioned comforter pulled up to her chin. She blinked reproachfully, her eyelids showing lavender.

“Wadie, darlin' ”—a hint of spite—“it's not even morning! Whyever are you gettin' up already; am I such a bore in bed?” A hint of desperation.

“Kimoru.” He moved across the comfortable confinement of the room to kiss her lingeringly. “That's a hell of a thing to say to me. Duty called, I've got to leave … you know I hate to get up early. Particularly when you're here. Get your beauty sleep; I'll come back to take you out to breakfast—or lunch, if you prefer.” He fastened his shirt with one hand, touched her cheek with the other.

“Well, all right.” She slithered down under the cover. “But don't be too late. You know I've got to charm a customer for dear old Chang and Company at fifty kilosecs.” She yawned. Her teeth were very bright, and sharp. “I don't know why you don't get a decent job. Only a government man would put up with a schedule like yours … or have to.”

Or a geisha—? He went on dressing, didn't say it out loud; knowing that she didn't have a choice, and that to remind her of it was unnecessary and tactless. A woman who had been sterilized for genetic defects had very few opportunities open to her, in a society that saw a woman as a potential mother above all else. If she was married to an understanding husband, one who was willing to let a contract mother provide him with heirs, she could continue to lead a normal life. But a woman divorced for sterility—or an unmarried sterile woman—had only two alternatives: to work at a menial, unpleasant job, exposed to radiation from the dirty postwar atomic batteries; or to work as a geisha, entertaining the clients of a corporation. It was prostitution; but it was accepted. A geisha had few rights and little prestige, but she did have security, comfortable surroundings, fine clothes, and enough money to support her when she passed her prime. It was a sterile existence, but physical sterility left her with little choice.

Knowing the alternatives, Wadie neither blamed nor censured. And it struck him frequently that in working for the government, he had picked a career that most people respected less than formal prostitution—and one that had left his private life as barren of real relationships as any geisha's. He looked past his own reflection in the mirror, at Kimoru, already asleep again with one slender arm reaching out toward the empty half of the bed. He had no children, no wife. Most of the women he saw socially were women like Kimoru, geishas he met while negotiating disputes for the corporations that used them. He avoided them while he was on assignment, because he avoided anything that could remotely be considered a bribe. But in their free time the geishas liked to choose their own escort, and he had enough money to show them a good time.

But he rarely stayed in one place long enough to get to know any woman well; and the few normal women he had known at all had bored him with their endless insipid conversation, their endless coquetry.

Wadie brushed back his dark curling hair and settled the soft beret carefully on his head. He was a fastidious dresser, even at dawn. It was expected. He picked up a gold ring set with rubies, slipped it onto his thumb. It had been a gift of gratitude, from two people he had helped long megaseconds before, a husband-and-wife prospecting team. He remembered that woman again—a woman pilot, a sound, healthy woman who had chosen to be sterilized in order to go into space. No kind of woman at all, really; because no real woman would willingly reject a home and family. That woman had been a freak—stubborn, defensive, self-righteous; a woman out of her place, out of her depth. And yet her partner had married her. But he had been a kind of freak himself; a mediaman—a professional liar—with scruples. It was no wonder the two of them chose to spend the rest of their lives in the middle of nowhere, picking over salvage on ruined worlds.…

Wadie shook his head at the memory, looking into the mirror, into the past. He wondered again, as he had wondered before, what bizarre chemistry had drawn them together, and still kept them together. And wondered briefly, almost enviously, why that chemistry had never worked on him. He shrugged on his loose forest-green jacket, buttoned the high collar above the embroidered silken geometries. Hell, he was eleven hundred and fifty megaseconds old—thirty-eight Old World years—most of them spent solving everyone else's problems, living everyone else's life instead of his own. If he hadn't found a woman by now who would accept him on his own terms, or one who could make him forget everything else, he never would. He wasn't getting any younger; if he wanted a child, he couldn't afford to wait much longer. When he finished this new assignment he would hire a contract mother to bear his child and raise it while he was away. He glanced back one last time at sleeping Kimoru as he left the apartment, closing the door quietly.

Wadie yawned discreetly as he left the building's shadow and started across the quiet square. It was barely daylight now; the glow of the fluorescent lamps brightened like dawn in the ceiling's imitation sky, ten meters above his head. The magnetized soles of his polished boots clicked faintly on the polished metal of the square, added security in the slight spin-gravity of Toledo planetoid. The surface of the square curved along the inside hull of a massive, hollowed chunk of iron, a rich miner's harvest and a solid home, but one that was beginning, ungraciously, to show its age. The silvery geometric filigree of pure mineral iron beneath his feet had been preserved once by a thin bonding film, but it was oxidizing now as the film wore away. He could trace rusty paths, dull reddish brown in the early light, leading his eyes across the square and under the tarnished rococo wall to the entrance of the government center. Symptoms of a deeper illness … Something like panic choked him; from habit he took a long breath, and eased back from the edge, from admitting that the disease would be terminal. He went on toward the center, ordering the lace at his cuffs. Living well is the best defense, he thought sourly.

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'