Joan Vinge - Heaven Chronicles

“No.” He looked down, at the torn corner of the voucher still wadded in his hand. “Not now … but someday, I will. And when I get it, I want you to be my partner. I want you to—to—” To stay with me. His mind, his eyes, finished it, uselessly.

“Good-bye, Goody Two-Shoes,” she whispered. She shook her head. Her own eyes were mirrors of memory, for the face of a man who had tried to kill her; a man who had lied too well. “I might forgive you … but how could I ever forget?” An anguished brightness silvered the mirror of her eyes, she turned away again.

“Mythili, wait!” He fumbled in the sack of his belongings, pulled out the book of poetry. “Wait; this belongs to you.” He held it out.

She came back, took it from his hand without touching him. Confused anger startled her face as she recognized the title. “What are you doing with this?” pain and grief, “Shiva, isn't there anything that you wouldn't pry into? You'll never have a ship! You'll be a mediaman all your life, because that's all you were ever meant to be.” She might have said “whore.”

“I will get a ship. If it takes me the rest of my goddamned life, I will.… And when I do, I'll find you! Mythili—”

She didn't turn back, this time. He saw her hail a taxi, get in; watched it fall out and down into the vastness of the city air. Pain knotted his stomach, he clenched his teeth.

“Dartagnan—” Abdhiamal came up beside him, eyes questioning, sympathetic. “No?”

“No.” Chaim produced a smile, pasted it hastily over his mouth. “But that's life. The only reward of virtue is virtue … the hell with that.” He picked up his sack, readjusted his camera strap. “You can't afford it, in my business.… Good thing my camera's already broken; one of my good buddies will probably smash it over my head when I get back to work. Nobody likes an honest mediaman; you can't trust 'em.”

Abdhiamal smiled. “I disagree.”

Dartagnan laughed, still looking out into the city. “Everybody knows you've got to be crazy to work for the government.” His eyes stung, from too much staring.

“You look like you could use a drink. On me?” Abdhiamal gestured toward the city.

“Why not?” Dartagnan nodded, hand pressing his stomach. “Yeah … that's just what I need.”

“Excuse me … pardon me—”

“Wait your turn, pal. We got plenty of work for everybody.” The clerk snatched permission forms out of the air as the stranger's approach pulled them loose from gravity's feeble hand. He stuffed them into a mesh container on the cluttered table top. His expression ate holes in the amorphous mass of faces drifting in line before him; he fixed a steel-hard stare on the man who had upset their equilibrium.

“My name is Wadie Abdhiamal, I'm a government negotiator.”

“No wonder you're in a hurry. But you got to wait your turn like everybody—”

“I'm here officially.” Abdhiamal raised his voice without seeming to. “I'm looking for a man named Dartagnan.”

“Take your pick.” The clerk frowned at Abdhiamal's elegantly embroidered jacket, away from the bare civility of his face.

“I was told he'd be here, but he's not. Where would he go next?” Abdhiamal's impatience seized the clerk by his own unbuttoned jacket-front.

“To suit up. That way—” The clerk waved left-handed, brushing him off.

Abdhiamal pushed off from the table, scattering the drift of derelict humanity as his arrival had scattered paper. His trajectory angled him toward the corridor entrance the clerk had indicated. He caught at a hand-hold and readjusted his course, pushed off again with undecorous force.

The tunnel let him out into another room as devoid of personality as the waiting room, and as crowded with bodies. Abdhiamal pulled himself up short, searched the shifting mass for a glimpse of remembered red hair, the brown face of Chaim Dartagnan. He saw a dozen strangers already in suits, helmets in hand, lining up before the small hatch in a ponderous steel wall—which he recognized suddenly as a much greater entrance on the unknown. All were strangers to him. One was a woman, and the thought of what she waited to do made his stomach turn over … what they all waited to do to themselves.

He looked on around the room, away from the hatch, into the mass of half-suited workers awaiting the next shift. A man he recognized instinctively as an authority figure—a man who belonged here, one who would never pass through that lock—was peering back at him across the broken line of sight. And half-standing, half-drifting at his side—

“Dartagnan!” Abdhiamal raised a hand, his voice echoing; signalling the distant lifted face, the suddenly motionless body, toward him.

Dartagnan came across the vast room, trailing an insulated pressure suit, clouded with uncertainty. “Abdhiamal?” He caught a wall brace as he reached Abdhiamal's side, staring at him. He laughed once, rubbing his head. “What the hell? Working for the government finally drive you to this?”

Abdhiamal studied his face unobtrusively. Dartagnan looked thinner than he remembered; tighter, harder … older. It had been barely six megaseconds since he first laid eyes on Chaim Dartagnan; since he had watched him give up his chance for a decent future—watched him lose everything, under the pitiless gaze of the media cameras—because he had put honesty and justice above his own self-interest. But justice was blind, and the only reward society had given him was the back of its hand. Abdhiamal shook his head. “Even my job is better than this. I came for you, in an official capacity—about the Siamang affair.”

Dartagnan's face aged further. “Why?” He glanced away at the waiting wall of steel, and back. “The trial, the judgment. I thought all that was over. Did she decide to press charges—Mythili, I mean?” His hands pressed his stomach; the suit drifted down out of his grasp.

“No. She didn't change her mind. That part is over.”

“Over.” Dartagnan's mouth pulled. “Then what?”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Abdhiamal said suddenly, unable to keep it in. “For God's sake, man—”

Dartagnan shrugged, looking away again. “It's a year's pay for an hour's work.”

“And a lifetime dose of radiation!” Abdhiamal's disgust broke through. “You know why they pay you so well.” He pointed toward the steel wall/door.

“Sure I know.” Dartagnan leaned over, his feet lifting in equilibrium as he picked up the suit. “They gave us the whole hype: Their waldoes broke down, and without this plant there's only one factory left to make nuclear batteries for the whole of the Demarchy. They're trying to get them functional again, but in the meantime there's a lot of work only a human can handle. It's all very patriotic.” His eyes were as bleak as death. “And somebody has to do it.”

Abdhiamal shifted uncomfortably. “You don't. This is for losers, not an able-bodied, healthy man.”

Dartagnan laughed again; his laughter was like tar. Abdhiamal failed to see the joke. “I've had this conversation before. What else can I do? I haven't got a chance in hell of getting a media position with a corporation after I sold out Siamang and Sons—”

“After you brought a murderer to justice,” Abdhiamal cut him off.

Dartagnan smirked. “It all depends on your point of view. But I'll never make it as a mediaman. If I learned anything I learned that, the hard way, these past megasecs. And I'm no damn good at anything else; at anything that takes any brains or guts or talent.…” The suit twisted in his hands, the reflected image of his face tearing apart.

Abdhiamal thumped the slick wall surface beside them with a hand. “If you need to suffer that much, Dartagnan, why don't you knock your head against a wall? It makes as much sense.”