Joan Vinge - Heaven Chronicles

“What do you want me to do, get you pregnant!”

She flinched, shaking her head. “It doesn't have to happen.”

“It does; you know that.” He sagged forward. “Do you want to feel the baby growin' in you and see it born … with no hands and no arms, or no legs, or no—To have to put it Out, like my mother did? We're defective! And I'll never let it happen to you because of me.”

“But it won't. Shadow Jack, everything's different here on this ship. They have a pill, they never have to get pregnant. They'd let us …” She moved close, stroked the midnight blackness of his hair. “Even one pill lasts for a long time.”

“And what about when they're gone?”

“We … we'd always have … memories. We'd know, we could remember how it felt, to touch, and kiss, and h-hold each other …”

“How could I keep from touchin' you again, and kissin' you, and holdin' you, if I knew?” His eyes closed over desperation. “I couldn't. If I was never going to see you again … but I will. I'd see you every day for the rest of my life, and how could I stop it, then? How could you? It would happen.”

She shook her head, pleading, her face burning, hot hopeless tears burning her eyes.

“I can't let go, Bird Alyn. Not now. Not ever. I couldn't stand what it would do to me … what it would do to you. Why did we ever see this ship! Why did this happen to us? It was all right till—until—” His hands caught together; he cracked his knuckles.

Softly she put out her own hand, catching his; fingers twined brown into bronze. Because of this ship their world would live … and because of it, nothing would ever be right in their lives again. She heard water dripping, somewhere, like tears; a dead blossom fell between them, clicked on the sterile tiles.

Betha left the doorway quietly, as she had come, and silently climbed the stairs.

Discus, a banded camelian the size of a fist, set in a silver plane: The rings, almost edge-on, were a film of molten light streaked with lines of jet, spreading toward them on the screen. Wadie drifted in the center of the control room, keeping his thoughts focused on the silhouette that broke the foreground of splendor: Snows-of-Salvation, orbiting thirty Discuss radii out, beyond the steep gradient depths of the gravity well. Snows-of-Salvation, that had been Bangkok on the prewar navigation charts, the major distillery for the Rings. It was one of five, but it outproduced the rest by better than ten to one; in part because its operations were powered by a nuclear battery constructed in the Demarchy, in part because it could send out shipments using a linear accelerator, also from the Demarchy but infinitely more useful here where transport distances were short. The Ringers' own primitive oxyhydrogen rockets made hopelessly inefficient tankers.

He remembered Snows-of-Salvation as it had been when he arrived with the Demarchy engineers: endless grayness honeycombing the ice and stone; a chill that crept into a man's bones until he couldn't remember warmth; a small gray population, a people renting space in purgatory. A people fanatical to the point of insanity, in the eyes of the Demarchy. He had been sent to keep demarch and Ringer from each others' throats—sent because no one better qualified had been willing to go. He had stayed to see that two incompatible and suspicious groups never forgot their common goal of increasing the supply of volatiles. And in the fifty megaseconds he had spent in his grim and lonely exile, he had come to know a number of men he could only call friends and had seen more of the Ringers' Grand Harmony than any other demarch. He had come to understand the chronically marginal life that existed for the Ringers everywhere; to see, almost painfully, what made them endure their oppressive collectivist ideology: the knowledge that they must always pull together or they would not survive.…

The captain's voice drew him back. His eyes fixed on her where she hung before the viewscreen, her hair floating softly, free from gravity, her shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He stared, the present an overlay on the past. The clean, colored warmth of the control room drove out a dreary poverty that made Morningside's plainness suddenly seem frivolous.

Morningside … could he ever have come to see its people as clearly as he had seen the Ringers? How long did it take to feel at ease with a people who offended your sense of propriety in every way imaginable? Whose behavior slipped through your attempts to categorize it the way water slipped between your fingers.… Four kilosecs ago he had come to the upper level to get himself some food. He had found the captain and Welkin already in the dining hall and Bird Alyn playing her guitar. They had all been singing; as though in four thousand seconds they were not going to commit an act of piracy or face one more trial whose outcome meant freedom and life for all of them.…

Or perhaps, he had realized suddenly, they sang because they were much too aware and afraid of that fact. Not what you sing, or how , Welkin had said, but how it makes you feel. Suddenly aware of his own part in that coming trial, he had been drawn across the room to join them by something stronger than curiosity … only to have Betha Torgussen's face close and lose its warmth as she saw him; only to have her rise from the table, braking the pattern of song, and abruptly leave the room.

“… I can't believe this reading, Pappy. They should be frying down there, but they're not. There's no magnetosphere, no trapped radiation field.… Do you know anything about this, Abdhiamal?” The captain glanced over her shoulder at him, not quite meeting his eyes.

He looked past her at the screen. “This is Heaven, after all. Captain. Discus's radiation fields are strong enough, but they don't reach much higher than the rings. That was one of the things that brought us to this system—the rocks and snowballs around Discus are accessible as they never were around Old Jupiter.” He caught her eyes. “You don't seem very concerned about whether we were fryin'?”

“We make good shielding on Morningside, or we'd have fried long ago.” She broke away, as she always did, now; looked up at Bird Alyn hanging near the ceiling above her head. “Bird Alyn, find the local talk frequency for me.” Her voice was calm.

Bird Alyn nodded, braced against the ceiling, and swooped down to the panel to catch up an earjack.

“Where's Shadow Jack?” Welkin asked.

Bird Alyn stared at the panel, said something inaudibly.

“What?”

“… don't know … said … didn't think he could face …” She shrugged. The room filled with static as she switched on the receiver. The static slurred abruptly into words. The words sharpened as Bird Alyn locked them in. “Here …”

“What are they broadcasting?”

“They're talkin' to a ship, I think; a tanker. I heard ‘hydrogen.’”

“Good—then let's rudely interrupt them.” The captain reached for the broadcast button. “You're sure they'll know who we are, Abdhiamal?”

“I'm sure. Even the Ringers have had time to spread word of what happened to that ship by now. And if their propaganda is as extreme as it usually is, they'll expect you to be a butcher. They'll—respect your threat.”

“All right.” She wet her lips, pushed the button. “Snows-of-Salvation, Snows-of-Salvation, come in please …”

The speaker shrilled irritation; Bird Alyn jerked the earjack away from her head.

“Who is that? Get the hell off this freq! There's a mixed-load dockin' in progress here! Do you—”