Joan Vinge - Heaven Chronicles

They reached the perimeter of the Main Belt at last, and she altered their course to intersect the orbit of the first planetoid they encountered. But their scans showed them nothing of any value, no sign that a human being had ever even visited that tumbling spark of sun-washed rock. They encountered another, and another, as they pushed deeper into the riverflow of stone, but none of those showed any signs of life or profit. They changed course again, tracking down the first of the planetoids on their charts that had a name—one that had actually held a population—only to find a blasted drift of rubble screaming with radiation.

They went on from there, moving further in across the Main Belt's track of desolation, moving further upstream against its flow, further and further from their origin and ultimate destination. They intercepted more worldlets, named and nameless, each encounter becoming a new defeat.

But still they went on searching, letting the ship hope for them as their supplies of food and faith dwindled. Until at last the empty ritual scan for manmade materials, performed on one more featureless, nameless piece of rock, began to read out in positives. They looked on in silence as the vital signs spilled onto the screen; Mythili felt Chaim catch her own fear of shattering the moment's reality with a word. She moved past him along the panel's grips, still without speaking, and began to set their course to match speed and trajectory with #5359. The chameleon drifted in the air near her face, its prehensile tail hooked around a handhold above the panel. Lucky .… she thought, glancing at it, feeling the random motion of its turret eyes fixed on her in turn. She didn't let herself finish the thought.

The kiloseconds passed, and she brought the Mother into position above a silver-lit, artificially smooth docking surface. She matched the stately rotation of the tiny planetoid's surface, until its pitted antisilhouette seemed to stand still beneath them while the universe revolved in another plane of existence. And then she set the gentle motion free that closed the final kilometer separating them from their destination. The ship settled toward the stone, touched down with the fragile impact of a dragonfly settling on water.

She felt Chaim smile beside her in unconscious appreciation, felt it color with envy as he watched without sharing in her skill. She had denigrated his attempts to participate in the operation of the ship, undermining his confidence in his ability as a pilot; attempting to keep her own position secure against his claim of prospecting expertise. Although it kept her from sharing his knowledge, still she would not risk the vulnerability that an exchange of powers would open to her. And now she savored the triumph, however momentary, of her own skill over his. Chaim pinned his restless hands under his belt; his eyes were still on her, although she kept her own stubbornly on the viewscreen filled with gravel and stars.

“Good job,” he said at last, trying to keep his voice noncommittal. The canvas of his belt twisted.

“A little rough.” She lied, knowing that no one could have done it more cleanly, knowing that he would know it too.

They pulled on their pressure suits wordlessly. She considered the different qualities of mood that she had come to recognize in the megaseconds of silence between them … and that none of those silences had ever been an easy one, and that this one was coiling ever tighter around the mystery of what lay waiting. She put her helmet on with an abrupt movement, locking it in place almost frantically; straining for the sound of oxygen feeding into her suddenly self-contained universe from the pack on her back. Still she remembered Siamang's hard strength jamming shut the feed-valve that cut off her air, before he had forced her into the lock and out onto Planet Two's blue-dust plain to suffocate and die.… Every time she closed herself into her suit again, the memory came crowding in to share it. But air fed smoothly into her suit and cooled her sweating face as she followed Chaim into the airlock. The silence expanded while vacuum formed around them.

They trailed the mooring rope down in a slow arc to the bright gravel, dropping through the pelting drizzle of pebbles still settling out of the hailstorm their landing had dislodged. There was no evidence that she could see of anyone having been here since the Civil War, over three gigaseconds before. But even if no one had scavenged here since, there was no promise that there would be anything worth their taking, no reason to believe that this would be anything more than another milestone on the road to ultimate failure.… Desire and need shouted down the dark voice of reason, shouted to the sun and stars that this time, this time—

They found the sealed hatch that gave access to the dwelling-vacuole of this private estate, a miniature of the city planetoids where she had spent all of her life. Chaim pressed the plate that would cycle the lock. There was no response: the lights set into the door's surface did not even flicker red or green, but stared up at them blindly, dust-filmed, like the eyes of the dead. He grunted, braced his boots against the footholds in the doorframe and leaned over to operate the manual hatch release—the wheel oh ing like a mouth below blind eyes.

The hatch popped at last, exhaling a final, long-held breath of fossil air. Chaim glanced back at her. She heard him breathing heavily in her helmet speakers, but he said nothing as he finished pulling the hatch outward and moved down into the throat of stone beneath it. Mythili looked up and out once more, at the heavens wheeling in slow majesty above them, before she followed him down.

They resealed the hatch laboriously, opened the valve that bled a new mouthful of interior air into the claustrophobic darkness of the dead lock-space. At last, as pressure equalized, they pushed open the inner hatch and entered the tunnel beyond; entered into utter blackness.

“Shiva—there's no light!” The protest burst out of her before the conscious thought could form or answer itself. She had never been in an unlit vacuole, never thought that without manmade light …

Chaim switched on his belt lantern, flooding the long tube with technology's inconstant illumination. “Their atomic batteries must've died long since. These places are almost all like this, now.”

“I never thought … never thought about how it really was,” she said stupidly, still realizing that she had only begun to grasp the enormity, the totality of death and destruction that civil war had brought to the Main Belt.

“How it will be. That's the future you're looking at, not the past. We're the past—we've run out of time.”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped, trying to recover her own sense of equilibrium. “This all happened before we were born.”

“But it doomed us—all of us. Sekka-Olefin knew, that's why he wanted the money from that software he found on Planet Two so much. He knew we were all dying, because we can't keep our technology going, and we can't live without it. While he was stuck on Two he found out about its atmosphere being breathable, and he wanted to start a media campaign to get people to move there, before it was too late.”

“Move there?” Her mind moved back through time and space to the final moment when she had clawed off the suffocating helmet of her suit, on her knees in the blue-gray dust, and sucked in the lungful of impossibly thin, searingly cold free air of Planet Two; the breath she had thought would be her last.… “He was crazy! And so are you.”

Chaim frowned. “Then tell me what we're doing here, picking the bones of the dead. And tell me what the Demarchy's going to do when there's nothing left on them.”