Heaven Chronicles

Out of water.… A memory of her own children, too far away, too long ago, dimmed their hungry faces. She looked down at her own hands, at thin golden rings, four on the left hand, two on the right. “Well?”

Shadow Jack cleared his throat, his eyes daring her to offer water. “The Demarchy—it's in the trojan asteroids sixty degrees ahead of Discus. It's got the best technology left now. They made the nuclear battery that runs our electric rocket; they're the only ones who can make 'em anymore.”

“If they're so well off, why do they have to rob the Discans?”

“They don't have to. Usually they trade, metals for the processed snow, for water and gases and hydrocarbons. Sometimes things happen, though—incidents. They both want to come out on top. I guess they think someday they'll build up the Belt again. They're wrong, though. Even if they'd quit fightin' each other, it's too late. Anybody can see that.”

“Not exactly a cockeyed optimist, are you, boy?” Clewell said.

Shadow Jack frowned, scratching. “I'm not blind.”

“Well, Clewell.” Betha felt Rusty snuffling against her neck, settled the cat on her shoulder. Claws hooked cautiously into the weave of her denim jacket. “What do you think? Do you think it's the truth? Did we—come all the way to Heaven for nothing?”

He rubbed his face with his hands. She saw his own wedding bands reflecting light, three on the left hand, three on the right. “I guess it's possible. It's so insane, it's the only way to explain what we've been through.”

She nodded, glanced at the haggard faces of the waiting strangers: Not exactly angels. Victims, of a tragedy almost beyond comprehension; a tragedy that had reached into her own life, and his, to destroy the dreams of another people as it had destroyed its own. This Heaven, like all dreams of heaven, had been a fragile thing; perhaps none of them had ever been meant to be more than a dream.… She lit her pipe, calmed by its familiarity, before she searched the two tense, expectant faces. “I'll make you a proposition. Shadow Jack, Bird Alyn. You said Lansing needs hydrogen for water; we need it for fuel. We're going after it now. Come with us and tell us things we need to know about this system, and if we succeed we'll share what we get with you.”

“How do we know you'll keep your word?”

Betha raised her eyebrows. “How do we know you've told us the truth?”

He didn't answer, and Bird Alyn frowned at him.

“If you're honest with us, we'll be honest with you.” Betha waited.

He looked at Bird Alyn; she nodded. “I guess anythin's better than our chances alone.… But what about the Lansing 04? We can't junk it—”

“We can take your ship with us. It's possible we can repair your shielding.”

His mouth opened; he shut it, embarrassed. “We—can we radio home, Lansing, and tell 'em what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Then it's a deal. We'll stick with you, and tell you what we know.” They relaxed visibly, together, hanging like rag dolls in the air.

Clewell folded his arms. “Just keep one thing in mind—that the captain meant it when she told you it takes training to run the Ranger. We'll be accelerating at one gravity. Even if you took over the ship and contacted your people, they'd never catch up with you. All you'd get out of it would be a one-way journey to forever.”

Shadow Jack started to answer, kept silent.

“I'll see to your ship, then. Clewell, will you take them below? Maybe, ah …” She looked back; tactfulness eluded her. “They could use a shower.”

“A shower of what?” Bird Alyn murmured.

Betha paused, inhaling smoke. “Well … water.”

“Unfortunately we're out of champagne.” Clewell pushed off for the doorway.

Shadow Jack laughed uneasily. “Enough water to wash in?”

She nodded. “Use all you want; please. We have plenty. And soap. And clean clothes, Clewell—”

“With pleasure.” He led them eagerly out of the room into the echoing stairwell; Rusty floundered after them. For a moment Betha drifted, listening, her eyes taking in the grass-greenness of the rug, the dust-blue sky color of the walls, that had been designed to keep seven people from going mad during more than three years tau of close confinement. She realized the vast and pernicious emptiness that had filled the room, the entire ship, in the past few days; like the greater desolation beyond its hull. Realized it, now that suddenly it was no longer true. She heard the sprayers go on, and faint yelps of excited laughter.

Clewell reappeared in the doorway, carrying Rusty. “I hope they don't drown themselves … though anything would be an improvement.”

She looked down at the pipe in her hand, remembering how he had carved it for her during their final days in Borealis. Surprising herself, she began to smile.

Ranger (in transit, Lansing to Demarchy) +290 kiloseconds

Bird Alyn moved slowly through the green light of the Ranger's hydroponics lab, her frail body twitching with the effort of standing upright in one gravity. She hummed softly, oblivious to discomfort, pulled into the past by the cool constant moistness and the smell of apples, the hum of insect life. Shadow-dapples slid over the tiles, merging and breaking with the drift of canopied leaves, showering sparks of veridian fire over the viscous liquid inside clear, covered vats.

The setting was strangely alien, like everything in the bountiful alien wonderland of this starship. But a fern or a tree were always the same, no matter how gravity or its lack contorted them. They were living things that required her—that rewarded her care and attention with a leaf or a blossom or fruit to give her people life. The only living things that willingly absorbed all the love she could give them, that never turned away from her because she was an ugly, ungainly cripple.…

Bird Alyn drew the dipstick out of another vat, studied the readings, shook it down. She sighed and slid down the vat's side to sit on the floor, massaging her swollen feet. They prickled, with the sluggishness of poor circulation. She leaned back, looking up through the shifting green; imagined she saw the milky translucency of the Lansing shroud and Shadow Jack working as a spinner, instead of the banks of fluorescent lights.

She had counted the kiloseconds, the very seconds of every Lansing day, until Shadow Jack came down to join her for the day's one meal. Silent, moody, filled with futile anger—he was still the one person in her world who responded to her, who pushed out of his own shadowed world each day long enough to show her kindness. Sometimes she wondered whether he was kind out of pity; never caring whether he was. She was simply grateful, because she loved him, and knew that love had no pride.

From childhood she had understood that she would work in the surface gardens; through all of her life she had seen why—that she was different, deformed. Her parents had trained her to use a computer, because they had accepted that she would have to work at a job where the radiation level was high; they had equipped her to work on a ship, to do the best she could for the survival of her world. But beyond that they had withdrawn from her, as people withdraw from a mistake that has ruined their lives, as they withdraw from the victim of a terminal disease.

And she had never questioned her own inferiority, because Materialist philosophy taught her that every individual must accept the responsibility for his own shortcomings. She had gone to work on Lansing's surface almost gladly; glad to escape from the world of normal people, glad to lose herself in the beauty of the gardens, solitary even among her fellow defectives.

And then she had discovered Shadow Jack sitting dazed and frightened in the grass at the entrance to the tunnels.… Shadow Jack, who had grown up used to a normal life of security and acceptance. Who had been told, suddenly, that he was not normal, and cast out into an alien world, ashamed, abandoned. She had comforted him, out of compassion and her own need; his need had bound him to her, and made them friends.