Heaven Chronicles

living on self-serving self-sufficiency, with no stable government to control them, no honest bonds of kinship, but only the equal selfishness of every other citizen.… And their women; useless, frivolous, gaudy, the ultimate waste in a society that desperately needed every resource, including its human resources.

Fragments of conversation drew together in her mind, and she remembered suddenly what Clewell had said about crippled Bird Alyn. Perhaps in a sense they were a resource, sound and fertile women who had to be protected, in a society where radiation levels were always abnormally high; women who had let the protection grow into a way of life as artificial as everything else in their world.… Perhaps the danger of genetic damage lay at the root of all the incomprehensible involutions of their sexual mores. Desperate people did desperate things; even the people of Morningside, in the beginning.…

She turned slightly in her seat, to glance at Shadow Jack lying asleep on the floor, lost in a peaceful dream, a book of Morningside landscapes open beside him. She wondered, if those were desperate measures for the Demarchy, what must be true for Lansing. Her hands met on the panel, caressing her rings, as Wadie Abdhiamal entered the room.

“Captain.” He made the requisite bow. She nodded in return, watching him cross the room: the proper demarch, compulsively polite, compulsively immaculate. And as awkward as a child taking his first steps, moving in one gravity. His face looked haggard, showing the effects of stress and fluid loss. She remembered seeing him use his drinking water to wash his face on the Lansing 04, thinking that no one noticed … She brushed absently at her own hair. “Have you found everything you've needed, Abdhiamal? Have you eaten?” He had not joined tile rest of them when they ate together in the dining hall.

He sat down. “Yes … somethin'. I don't know what.” He looked vaguely ill, remembering. “I'm afraid I don't get along well with meat.”

“How—are you feeling?”

“Homesick.” He laughed, self-deprecatingly, as if it were a lie. He gazed at the empty screen. Rusty materialized on his knee, settled into his lap, tail muffling her nose. He stroked her back with a dark, meticulous hand; Betha noticed the massive gold ring on his thumb, inlaid with rubies.

“I'm sorry.” She pulled her pipe out of the hip pocket of her jeans, quieting her hands with its carven familiarity.

“Don't be.” He shifted and Rusty muttered querulously, tail flicking. “Because you were right, Captain; and I made the right choice in comin' with you. The Demarchy can't be allowed to take your ship; nobody in Heaven Belt can.… I'm not saying that because of what happened to me—” Something in his voice told her that was not entirely true. “I've known all along, from the first time I heard about this ship, that it would make too many people want to play God.” He looked up. “Even if it's not my right, I'd still turn your ship over to the Demarchy if I had the chance— if I thought it'd save them. But it wouldn't. The government is too weak, they'd never be able to keep an equilibrium now.” His fingers dug into the soft arms of the chair; his face was expressionless. “So I'll tell you this. I'll help you get out of here, however I can. Anythin' I can do, anythin' you want to know. As my final service to the Demarchy: to buy them a little more time and save them from themselves.” His eyes went to Discus on the screen. “If I've got to be a traitor, I'll be a good one. I take pride in my work.”

She broke away from tracing his every movement, her face hot. “If you really mean that, Abdhiamal … I want your help, whatever your personal motives. I need to know anything you can tell me about the Ringers— especially I need the number and the locations of their distilleries. No matter how primitive they are, it's going to take careful planning to steal anything from them with an unarmed starship.… And as you say, I haven't done very well so far at getting what I want. Strategy was always Eric's—was never my strong point.”

“On the contrary. You outnegotiated us all, at Mecca.” Irony acknowledged her with a smile. “I expect I can give you reasonably accurate coordinates; I spent a lot of time in the Rings about two hundred and fifty megasecs ago, when we helped 'em enlarge their main distillery. As a matter of fact, I—” He broke off abruptly. “Tell me something about Morningside, Captain. Tell me about the way your people get things done. You don't seem to approve of our way.”

She studied the words, trying to find the reason behind his change of subject; certain only that he didn't really want an answer but simply a distraction. And so do I. “No, I can't say that I do approve, Abdhiamal. But that's the Demarchy's business, except when it gets in my way.… I guess that you could say we emphasize our kinship—as fellow human beings, but especially as blood relatives. You already know about our multiple-marriage family unit.” She glanced up, away; his eyes made no comment, but she sensed his uneasiness. “Above it is our ‘clan’—not in the Old World technical sense, except that it tells you who you can't marry—your particular parentfamily, your sibs, your own children. All your relations stretch out beyond it … almost to infinity, sometimes. We all try to take care of our own; everybody on Morningside has relations somewhere.… Except that a person who isn't willing to share the work finds that even his own relations aren't glad to share the rewards forever.

“The only formalized social structure above the clan level is what we call a ‘moiety’ …” She lost the sound of her own voice, and even the aching awareness of Abdhiamal's presence, in vivid memories that filled the space between her words with sudden yearning. Borealis moiety: an arbitrary economic unit for the distribution of goods and services. Borealis moiety: her home, her job, her family, her world … a laughing child—her daughter, or herself—falling back to make angel imprints in a bank of snow.…

“Our industries are independently run, as yours are—but I suppose you'd call them ‘monopolistic’ They cooperate, not for profits, but because they have to, or they'd fail. It works because we never have enough of anything, especially people. My parent family and a lot of my close relatives run a tree farm in the Borealis moiety … my wife Claire worked there too. Some families specialize in a trade, but Clewell and I and our spouses were a little of everything …” She remembered day's end in the endless twilight, the family sitting down together at the long dark wood table, while their children served them dinner. The soothing warmth of the fire, the sunset that never faded from the skylight of a semisubterranean house. The small talk of the day's small triumphs, the comfortable fatigue … the welcome homecoming of a spouse whose job had kept him or her away for days or sometimes weeks. Eric, returning from the arbitration of a long-drawn dispute—

She saw Wadie Abdhiamal, sitting back in his chair in the control room of the Ranger. A negotiator … I settle disputes, work out trade agreements.… Abdhiamal looked back at her with a faintly puzzled expression. She shook her head. Stop it. Stop being a fool! “I … I almost forgot—we have a High Council, too. It's a kind of parliament, made up of ombudsmen from the various moieties, elected to terms of service. It deals with what little interplanetary trade we manage and the emergency shipments. It originated the proposal for our trip to Heaven. It doesn't have much to do with our daily lives—”

“Then in a way you are like us,” Abdhiamal said, “without a strong centralized government, with emphasis on independence—”

“No.” She shook her head again, denying more than the words. “We're like a family. We get things done through cooperation, not competition, the way the Demarchy does. Your system is a paradox: the individual has absolute control, and yet no control at all, if they don't fit in with the majority. We cooperate and compromise because we know we all need each other just to survive.… And considering the position the Demarchy is in right now, I'd say it can hardly afford to go on putting self-interest above everything else, either.”

Abdhiamal blinked, as if her words had struck him in the face. But he only shrugged. “Needless to say, we don't see ourselves in quite that light. I suppose your idea of cooperation is closer to the Ringers' Grand Harmony.” There was no sarcasm in it. “They emphasize cooperation above all too, because they have to; they weren't as fortunate as the Demarchy, after the war. But they have a socialist state and strong navy; they get cooperation at the point of a gun. And that's no cooperation at all, really; that's why they're anathema, as far as the Demarchy's concerned. They don't trust individual human nature, even it if is backed up by family ties.”

Betha struggled against a sudden irrational resentment. “It's worked well enough so far. But then we don't kill any stranger who comes to us in need, either.”

“Maybe you just never had a good enough reason, Captain.”

She stiffened. Apology showed instantly on his face and behind it, she saw a reflection of her own disorientation, the frustration of a stranger trapped in an alien universe. He was a man with no family … and now no friends, no world, no future. And she suspected that he was not a man who was used to making mistakes—or used to sharing a burden, or sharing a life … not Eric.

“I'm sorry. Captain. Please accept my apologies.” Abdhiamal hesitated. “And let me apologize for my tactlessness after the general meeting, as well.”