Heaven Chronicles

“I understand.” She saw annoyance begin behind his eyes; stood up, not seeing it change into a kind of need. “If you'll excuse me …” She moved away, reaching for an excuse, an escape. “I—I have to see Clewell, down in the shop.”

“You mind if I go with you?” His voice surprised her.

She hesitated, halfway across the room. “Well, I—no, why should I?”

He rose, setting Rusty down. The cat leaped away, rumpled, moved across the room to where Shadow Jack still lay asleep, his face buried now in the pillow. Rusty settled on the softness beside his head, one speckled paw stretched protectively over his curled fingers.

“Poor Rusty.” Betha glanced down. “She's been so lonely since … She was used to a lot of attention.”

“She would have had all she wanted at Mecca.”

“She would have been worshipped. It isn't the same.”

She went down one level on a spiraling stairway, waited for him on the landing. He took each step with dignified deliberateness, his knees nearly buckling and his hand on the railing in a death grip. He stopped with studied nonchalance beside her, peering down over the polished wood banister. The well dropped four more stories, piercing the hollow needle of the ship's hull. The concentric circles of a service hatch lay pooled at the bottom.

“It's good exercise.” Betha stood against the wall, avoiding the sight of the drop.

He drew back with an innocuous smile.The doorway in the wall behind him was sealed shut, the red light flashing, throwing their shadows out into the pit. “What's behind this?” His hand brushed the door's icy surface.

“That was the dayroom. That's where everyone died when we took the damage to our hull. It's not pressurized; please don't touch anything.” She turned away from him, looking down at her hands. She went on down the stairs, leaving him behind.

She reached the machine shop on the fourth level, heard the rasp of a handsaw. “Pappy!” She shouted, heard the echoes rattle around the hollow torus of the shop.

“Here, Betha!”

She traced the answering echoes, began to walk, the gum soles of her shoes squeaking faintly on the wood. The irregular clack of Abdhiamal's polished boots closed with her; she didn't look at him.

“Jesus, Pappy, why in the world don't you use the cutters to do that?”

Clewell looked up as they approached, on up at the nest of lasers above the work table. “Because it's a hobby.”

“Which means you stand there for hours, breaking your back to do something you could punch in and get done in a minute.”

“The impatience of youth.” He leaned on the saw and the end split off the wooden block and dropped. “Finished.” His hand rose to his chest; seeing her watching, he lifted it further to rub his neck.

“Smartass.” She looked pained, hands on hips. “I—uh, I thought you were going to check over my estimates on patching that hole in our hull?”

“I did that too. They look good to me. But we can't do anything about it now, while we're at one gee.” He looked at her oddly.

Abdhiamal stooped to pick up the splintered end of the block, rubbed its roughness, oblivious. “Say, what is this stuff? It's fibrous.”

“It's wood. Organic. From the trunks of trees,” Clewell said. “False-oak, to be exact. It's hard, but it whittles well.”

“The floor, too? All plant fibers—wood?”

He nodded. “It's easier than turning it into plastic. False-oak grown two centimeters a day out by the Boreal Sea.”

Abdhiamal's hand caressed the etched metal of the table top; he glanced up at the cutters and the suspended protective shield. “Lasers?” His hand closed, empty, as he searched the room, loosened to point at the wide doors cut into the hull, opening directly onto space … at the electromagnets set into the ceiling. She saw him answering his own unspoken questions. “And what's this equipment for, over here?”

Betha followed his hand, seeing in her mind red-haired Sean at work, dauntlessly clumsy; Nikolai patiently guiding. She looked away. “Repairing microcircuits on our electronics equipment.”

“You have your own fusion power plant … you really could reproduce any part of this ship right here, couldn't you?”

“Theoretically. There are some I wouldn't want to try. This was a long trip; we had to be prepared for anything.” Except this.

“God! If Park and Osuna could only see this place.”

“Who?” Clewell removed the wood from a clamp.

“They're ‘engineers.’” Scorn lacerated the word.

“And what's wrong with engineers?” Betha folded her arms tightly against her stomach, raising her eyebrows.

“What's right with 'em?” Abdhiamal made an odd gesture. “They're a bunch of cannibals. They put patches on patches, tear, one thing apart and use the pieces to hold three more together, and then they tear apart one of those—”

“That sounds resourceful to me.”

“But they gloat about it! The think it's creation, but it's destruction. If they'd only read something, if only they had any imagination at all, they'd know what real creation is. The thing we could do, once … nobody did them better. But that's like askin' for life in a vacuum.”

“Or maybe you've just got your priorities wrong, Abdhiamal! What should they do, torture themselves over the past because relics are all they have left to work with? At least they're doing something for their people, not living at the expense of everyone else like some damned fop!” Betha jerked the piece of wood out of his hands, felt splinters cut her palm. She turned her back on his surprise, strode away through her echoing anger toward the door.

Clewell smiled at Abdhiamal's astonished face. “Abdhiamal, you just told it all to an engineer.”

Abdhiamal winced. “I should never have gotten out of bed … two megaseconds ago.” He stared out into the vastness of the empty room. “I always seem to say the wrong thing to … your wife. I thought she was a pilot.”

Clewell listened to Betha's footsteps fade as she climbed the stairs. He wondered what fresh burden she had brought with her from Mecca—that showed in her eyes and her every action, and that she could not share even with him. “She was an engineer on Morningside, before she was chosen to captain the Ranger. Parts of this ship are her design; she worked on its drive unit.” He saw surprise again in Abdhiamal's tawny eyes. “It's the first starship we've had the resources to build since before the Low.”

“Low?”

“Famine … emergency.” Memories of past hardship and suffering rose in him too easily, drawn by the fresh memory of loss. A bruising weariness made him settle against the table's edge. He set aside the wood; morbidly picturing his own body as ancient wood, storm-battered, decaying. He sighed. “On Morningside small changes in solar activity, perturbations in our orbit, can mean disaster. When I was a boy—in the last quarter of my tenth year—we went into a ‘hot spell’ …” He saw the darkside ice sheet withdrawing, shattered bergs clogging the waters of the Boreal Sea. The sea itself had risen half a meter, flooding vital coastal industries; the crops had rotted in the fields from too much rainfall. He had watched one of his fathers kill a litter of kittens because they had nothing to feed them. And he had cried, even though his own empty stomach ached with need. Still, after all these years … “It took years for the climate to stabilize, most of my lifetime before our own lives got back to ‘normal.’ We've entered a High, right now, and Uhuru's stabilized—they're our closest neighbor; this flight was planned to send them aid, originally. That's why we took a chance on risking the Ranger to come here to Heaven.” He felt the cutting edge of wind over snow on the darkside glacier, where the sky glittered with stars like splintered ice. “That's why we can't afford to stay here. Even if we go back to Morningside empty-handed, at least they'll have the ship.”

Abdhiamal nodded. “I see. I told—your wife, Captain Torgussen, that I'm willing to do all I can to help you get back to Morningside—for Heaven's own good. The way things seem to be goin', your remaining here is goin' to tear Heaven apart, not pull it back together again.…” For a moment Clewell was reminded of someone, but the