taken Rusty.”
He had to strain to hear her, wondered again if he was getting a little deaf. “So do I. She did what she thought was best.… And you wish she hadn't taken Shadow Jack.”
She still looked down; her head twitched slightly. “She did what she thought was best.” He thought of Eric, who had been trained to know what was best; remembered Betha's anguished doubt, in the private darkness of their room. “She means everything to me, too.”
Bird Alyn looked up at him at last. “Are—are you Betha's father?”
He laughed. “No, child; I'm her husband. One of her husbands.”
“Her—husband?” He almost thought he could see her blush. “
“There are seven of us, three women and four men.” He smiled. “I take it that's not so common here.”
“No.” Almost a protest. “Are … the rest of them back on your—planet?”
“They were the crew of the
She jerked suddenly. “Then—they're all dead, now.”
“Yes, all.…” He stopped, forcing his mind away from the empty room on the next level below, where a gaping wound opened on the stars. Deliberately he looked back at Bird Alyn, saw her embarrassment. “It's possible to be in love with more than one person, you know.”
“I always thought that meant somebody had to be unhappy.”
He shook his head, smiling, wondering what strange beliefs must be a part of the Lansing culture. And he wondered how those beliefs could survive, when a people were struggling for their own survival.
On Morningside the first colonists had struggled to survive, expatriates and exiles fleeing an Earth where the political world had turned upside down. They had arrived in a Promised Land that they discovered, too late, was not the haven they were promised—discovering at last the lyrical irony in the name Morningside. Tidally locked with its red dwarf star, Morningside turned one face forever toward the bloody sun, held one side forever frozen into night. Between the subsolar desert and the darkside ice lay a bleak ring of marginally habitable land, the Wedding Band … until death did them part. The fear of death, the need to enlarge a small and suddenly vulnerable population, had broken down the rigid customs of their European and North American past. They were no longer the people they had once been, and now, looking back across two hundred years of multiple marriage and the freedom-in-security of extended family kinship, few Morningsiders saw reason in their own past, or any reason to change back again.
Bird Alyn folded her arms, hiding her misshapen hand. And Clewell realized that perhaps the people of Lansing had had no choice in their customs either. If the radiation levels were as high as those on the
Clewell was silent with the realization that whatever Morningside lacked in comfort, it made up for in a grudging constancy, and that even beauty became meaningless without that.…
“How did you and Shadow Jack end up out here?”
She shrugged, a tiny waver of her weightless body. “I can work the computer; my parents programmed the recon unit. And Shadow Jack wanted to be a pilot and do something to help Lansing; he won a lottery.”
“Your parents let you go, instead of going themselves?” He saw Betha suddenly, in his mind: a gangly, earnest teenage girl, helping him take the measure of the immeasurable universe … saw his own children, waiting for him across that universal sea. He covered a sudden anger against whoever had sent their half-grown daughter out in a contaminated ship before they would go themselves.
Bird Alyn looked down at her crippled hand. “Well, you can only go if you work outside.…”
“Outside?”
“Lansing's a tent world … we have surface gardens, an' a plastic tent to keep in an atmosphere.” She ran her hand through her hair, her mouth twitching. “You work outside if you can't have children.” For a moment her eyes touched him, envious, almost accusing; she turned back to the viewscreen, looking out over isolation, withdrawing into herself. “I think I'll take a shower.”
He laughed carefully. “If you take too many showers, girl, you'll wrinkle up for good.”
“Maybe it would help.” Not smiling, she pushed off from the panel.
He looked out at the barren night, where all their hopes lay, and where all the dreams of their separate worlds lay ruined. Pain caught in his chest, and made him afraid.
Lansing 04 (Demarchy space)
+1.51 megaseconds
“There it is,” Shadow Jack said, with almost a sigh. “Mecca rock.”
Betha watched it come into view at the port: a fifty-kilometer potato-shaped lump of stone, scarred by nature's hand and man's. Mecca's long axis pointed to the sun; the side nearest them lay in darkness, haloed by an eternal corona of sunglare. As they closed she began to see landing lights; and, between them, immense shining protrusions lit from below, throwing their shadows out to be lost in the shadow of the void. She identified them finally as storage tanks—enormous balloons of precious gases.
“Did—did you love one of them best?”
She sighed. “Yes … yes, I suppose I did. It's something you can't help feeling; I loved them all so much, but one…”
He peered past her. They saw the ship, still lit by the sun: a ponderous metallic tick, its plastic belly bloated with precious gases and clutched inside three legs of steel, booms for the ship's nuclear-electric rockets. “Look at the size of that! It must be comin' in from the Rings. They wouldn't use that on local hauls.” He raised his head, following its downward arc. “Down there, that must be the docking field.”
She could see the field clearly now, an unnatural gleaming smoothness in the artificial light, cluttered with cranes and ringed by more mechanical parasites, gorged and empty. Smaller craft moved above them, fireflies showing red: sluggish tows in a profusion of makeshift incongruity.
