Joan Vinge - Heaven Chronicles

She glanced at him, puzzled. “Yes. We left them with my parents, on their tree farm.” And understanding, “Half the world is your family when you're growing up on Morningside. They hug you, tell you stories, and make you toys … there's always someone who's glad to see you. We didn't abandon our children. But it has been very hard to miss seeing so much of their lives as they grow. At least Clewell and I will get to see how they've grown.…” She looked down, shuffling papers; he saw the return of more than one kind of pain.

“Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn … are they why you're risking everything, to buy a dyin' world a few more seconds?”

She hesitated. “I don't know. I hadn't thought … but I suppose maybe it is. I wish—I wish I knew how to do more.”

“You know, then? What it's like for them on Lansing?”

She nodded.

“I'm not much lookin' forward to it myself, I've got to admit. But I've talked myself out of anythin' better—literally.” He smiled. “I don't regret it. It was in a good cause.”

She picked up a cup, set it down aimlessly. “What will you do, Wadie, on Lansing?”

He smiled again, hearing his name; the smile stopped when he remembered. “Sit and watch the world end, I suppose. All the worlds. Not with a bang but a gasp.”

“You don't have to, you know.”

He felt her touch him as though she had raised a hand. He shook his head. “Maybe I do. Maybe that's my penance for pretendin' there was no tomorrow.”

“You don't believe that?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “I don't know what I believe anymore.” Only knowing that he was alive in a vast mausoleum and afraid to look at death. “But I belong here, to Heaven; if that makes any sense. It scares the hell out of me, but I've got to see it through. But thanks.” He saw her smile, disappointed.

“You can change your mind.”

“Sooner than I could change Heaven …. Ironic, isn't it; that we began with everything and Morningside with nothing … and look who failed.”

“We almost failed too—more than once.” Betha stared at the wall, looking through time. “So did Uhuru, and Hellhole, and Lebensraum. But we had help.”

“From where?”

“From each other. Planets like Morningside are so marginal any small setback becomes a disaster … but they're the most common kind of habitable world; they're all like Morningside in our volume of space. But our worlds are within reach of one another. We set up a trade ring, and when one of us falls flat, the rest pick it up and put it back together. And that's how we survive. That's all we do; we survive. But it's enough … it'll have to be enough forever, now that our journey here has failed.

“We have our own ironies, you know.… Morningside was settled after a major political upheaval on Earth. Our nearest neighbor now, Uhuru, was settled by some of our former ‘enemies’ after their own empire on Old Earth fell. Need makes stranger bedfellows than politics ever did.”

He laughed abruptly. “As the five of us should know.”

“Yes.” She held him with her eyes, fingers over her lips.

“If you'd come before the war, Betha, maybe the five of us would even be doin' some good. Heaven could have learned somethin' then about sharing. Now it's too late; there's nothing left to share.”

She shifted position again, wincing. “Wadie … you said the knowledge that put Heaven's technology where it was is still intact. That if you could rebuild your capital industry, you could still make the Belt work again, and it could be everything it once was. You said even the Ranger could make the difference.… What if—what if we tied you into our trading network? It's feasible; the distance here from Morningside isn't that much greater than the distances we already travel. If we gave you the means for recovery, you could give us what we wanted all along, a richer life for all our worlds—and you'd never have to see this happen again!”

He listened to her voice come alive with inspiration; felt suddenly as though the pain and grief had lifted from her mind only to settle in his own. “That's what I said. But I was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We've gone down too far. We can't recover now; death is a disease that's infected us all. We'll never work together now, even to save ourselves.”

“But if they could understand that there was hope for all of them …”

“How could you make them understand? You've seen how well they listen.” He slammed his hand down on the bench. “They wouldn't listen!”

“No, they wouldn't.…” Betha began to smile, in misery, moving her head from side to side, “Wadie Abdhiamal—how did we come to this? You saying they wouldn't, me saying they would.… How did we come to understand each other better than we understand ourselves?”

He shook his head, felt a smile soothe his own mouth, lost his useless anger watching her.

Her hand moved tentatively from the desk to touch her band on his wrist; he caught her hand and their fingers twined, brown and pale. She looked across at him, down at their hands. She drew her hand from his again, said quietly to no one, “And not one of them lived happily ever after.…”

A raid . While he, Raul Nakamore, had been chasing the phantom Ship from Outside, it had run literal rings around him and raided the very distillery his borrowed ships had been set to defend. While he was still locked into his initial—futile—trajectory toward Lansing, without fuel enough to make an attempt at further pursuit anything but a joke. Raul drummed irritably on the arm of his seat, having no better way to vent his frustration.

And yet, the reports he'd received indicated that the starship had not headed directly out of the system; indicated, in fact, that the ship might be tracking his own course and returning again to Lansing. Raul glanced at the instrument board, seeing twenty-seven hundred kiloseconds elapsed, only twenty-three kiloseconds remaining before they reached Lansing. Like the fable of the tortoise and the hare—slowed by the stolen hydrogen, the starship would never reach Lansing before them, if Lansing was its destination. But why should it be? Why would these outsiders play pirate for Lansing, when they'd suffered losses in the Rings already? Revenge? But they could easily have destroyed the distillery, and instead they stole one thousand tons of hydrogen: too little to cripple the Grand Harmony, too much for a ramscoop's drive.

And showing them how to steal it had been Wadie Abdhiamal … Wadie Abdhiamal of the Demarchy. Outlawed by the Demarchy, Djem had said, voted a traitor by his own people for helping the starship escape them. And if there was one thing he, Raul, was sure of, it was that Abdhiamal was no traitor. Why had he betrayed the future of his own people, then? He might not be a jingoist but he wasn't insane. Why would he threaten Snows-of-Salvation, when he knew better than any other demarch what it meant to the survival of both their peoples? Why would he betray his friends? Because they had been his friends; and by betraying them he had cut himself off from the only haven he would have found in his exile.

Maybe he'd been forced into it. But Djem hadn't thought that Abdhiamal had acted like a man who had been forced.… Raul knew that Djem would never forgive Wadie Abdhiamal—for the betrayal of their friendship, if for no other reason. What was it about that ship, or whoever ran it, that would make a man like Abdhiamal willing to sacrifice everything? Maybe he would never know. But if that ship was following them to Lansing …

Raul stretched and turned to look at Sandoval. Sandoval sat with an expression of uncompromising boredom on his hawk-nosed profile, rereading a novel tape. A good officer, Raul thought. If he believed this use of his ship and crew was fruitless or pointless, he never let it show. Raul kept his own doubts and speculations private. Twenty-three kiloseconds to Lansing. And maybe they wouldn't be disappointed after all.…