Joan Vinge: The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

Clewell caught Rusty’s drifting tail, bloodied at the tip. “She barely got out.”

Betha nodded.

“Why did we ever come to Heaven?” His voice shook.

She looked up. “You know why we came!” She stopped, forcing control. “I don’t know… I mean… I mean, I thought I knew…” Four years ago, as they left Morningside, she had been sure of everything: her destination, her happiness, her marriage, her life. And now, suddenly, incredibly, only life remained. Why?

Because the people of Morningside, the bleak innermost world of a pitiless red dwarf star, had a dream of Heaven. Heaven: A G-type sun system without an Earthlike planet, but with an asteroid belt rich in accessible metals. And with Discus, a gas giant ringed in littered splendor by frozen water, methane, and ammonia—the elemental keys to life. The ore-rich Belt and the frozen gases had made it feasible—almost easy—to build up a colony entirely self-sufficient in its richness; heaven in every sense of the word to colonists from Sol’s asteroid belt, who had always been dependent on Earth for basic survival needs. And it had become a dream for another colony, Morningside, hungry now for something more than survival: the dream that they could establish contact with the Heaven Belt, and negotiate a share in its overflowing bounty.

The dream that had carried the starship Ranger across three light-years; that had been shattered with the shattered dayroom, by the reality of sudden death. The desolation burned again across her eyes; her mind saw the Ranger’s one-hundred-meter spindle form, every line as familiar as her own face, every centimeter blueprinted on her memory… saw it flawed by one tiny, terrible wound; saw five faces, lost to her now in darkness, endlessly falling…

Clewell said softly, “What now?”

“We go on—go on as planned.”

“You want to go on trying to make contact with these…” His hand pointed at the ruin on the screen. “Do you want to lead them home by the hand, to murder all of Morningside? Isn’t it enough—”

Betha shook her head, clinging to the arms of her seat. “We don’t have any choice! You know that. We don’t have enough hydrogen on board to get the ship back to ramscoop speeds. We have to refuel somewhere in Heaven, or we’ll never get home.” A vision of home stunned her: firelight on dark beams, on the night before their departure—a little boy’s face bright with tears, buried against her shirt. Mommy… I dreamed you had to die to go to Heaven. Remembering her child’s sobs waking out of nightmare, her own eyes filled with tears and the endless darkness. She bit her lip. Goddamn it, I’m not a child, I’m thirty-five years old!

“Pappy, don’t start acting like an old man.” She frowned, and watched his irritation strip ten years from his face. Without looking, she reached out to blank the viewscreen. “We don’t have any choice now. We have to go on with it.” We have to pay them back, her eyes flickered, hard edges of sapphire glinting. She tossed Rusty carefully away, watched her cat-paddle uselessly as she drifted out into the room. “We have enough fuel left to get us around the system… but who do we trust? Why did they attack us?

And those ships, chemical rockets—they shouldn’t have anything like that outside of a museum! It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they were pirates, renegades. There’s nothing else that fits.” Clewell’s hand hung in the air, uncertain.

“Maybe.” She sighed, knowing that renegades had no place in Heaven. Having no choice except to believe it, she forgot that the angry, mindless face that had cursed her on their screen had called her pirate. “We’ll go on in to the main Belt, to the capital at Lansing, as planned, then. And then… we’ll find a way to get what we need.”

Wadie Abdhiamal, negotiator for the Demarchy, stirred sluggishly, dragged up out of sleep by the chiming of the telephone. He turned the lights up enough to make out its form and switched it on. “Yes?”

He saw Lije MacWong’s mahogany face brighten on the screen, pushed himself up on an elbow in the bed.

“Sorry to wake you up, Wadie.”

He grinned. “I’ll bet you are.” MacWong enjoyed getting up early. Wadie glanced at the digital clock in the phone’s base. “Somebody need a negotiator at this time of night? Don’t the people ever sleep?”

“I hope they’re all sleepin’ now… Are you alone?”

Wadie glanced back over his shoulder at Kimoru’s brown, sleek side, her tumbled black hair. She sighed in her sleep. He looked back at MacWong’s image, judged from the disapproval in the pale-blue eyes that MacWong already knew the answer. Annoyed but not showing it, he said, “No, I’m not.”

“Pick up the receiver.”

Wadie obeyed, cutting off sound from the general speaker. He listened, silent, for the few seconds more it took MacWong to surprise him out of his sleep-fog. “Be down as soon as I can.”

He got out of bed, half-drifting in the scant gravity, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave.

When he returned he found Kimoru sitting up in bed, the pinioned comforter pulled up to her chin. She blinked reproachfully, her eyelids showing lavender.

“Wadie, darlin’,”—a hint of spite—”it’s not even morning! Whyever are you gettin’ up already; am I such a bore in bed?” A hint of desperation.

“Kimoru.” He moved across the comfortable confinement of the room to kiss her lingeringly. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me. Duty called, I’ve got to leave… you know I hate to get up early. Particularly when you’re here. Get your beauty sleep; I’ll come back to take you out to breakfast—or lunch, if you prefer.” He fastened his shirt with one hand, touched her cheek with the other.

“Well, all right.” She slithered down under the cover. “But don’t be too late. You know I’ve got to charm a customer for dear old Chang and Company at fifty kilosecs.” She yawned. Her teeth were very bright, and sharp. “I don’t know why you don’t get a decent job. Only a government man would put up with a schedule like yours… or have to.”

Or a geisha—? He went on dressing, didn’t say it out loud; knowing that she didn’t have a choice, and that to remind her of it was unnecessary and tactless. A woman who had been sterilized for genetic defects had very few opportunities open to her, in a society that saw a woman as a potential mother above all else. If she was married to an understanding husband, one who was willing to let a contract mother provide him with heirs, she could continue to lead a normal life. But a woman divorced for sterility—or an unmarried sterile woman—had only two alternatives: to work at a menial, unpleasant job, exposed to radiation from the dirty postwar atomic batteries; or to work as a geisha, entertaining the clients of a corporation. It was prostitution; but it was accepted. A geisha had few rights and little prestige, but she did have security, comfortable surroundings, fine clothes, and enough money to support her when she passed her prime. It was a sterile existence, but physical sterility left her with little choice.

Knowing the alternatives, Wadie neither blamed nor censured. And it struck him frequently that in working for the government, he had picked a career that most people respected less than formal prostitution—and one that had left his private life as barren of real relationships as any geisha’s. He looked past his own reflection in the mirror, at Kimoru, already asleep again with one slender arm reaching out toward the empty half of the bed. He had no children, no wife. Most of the women he saw socially were women like Kimoru, geishas he met while negotiating disputes for the corporations that used them. He avoided them while he was on assignment, because he avoided anything that could remotely be considered a bribe. But in their free time the geishas liked to choose their own escort, and he had enough money to show them a good time.