Joan Vinge: The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

But he rarely stayed in one place long enough to get to know any woman well; and the few normal women he had known at all had bored him with their endless insipid conversation, their endless coquetry.

Wadie brushed back his dark curling hair and settled the soft beret carefully on his head. He was a fastidious dresser, even at dawn. It was expected. He picked up a silver ring set with rubies, slipped it onto his thumb. It had been a gift of gratitude, from two people he had helped long megaseconds before, a husband-and-wife prospecting team. He remembered that woman again—a woman pilot, a sound, healthy woman who had chosen to be sterilized in order to go into space. No kind of woman at all, really; because no real woman would willingly reject a home and family. That woman had been a freak—stubborn, defensive, self-righteous; a woman out of her place, out of her depth. And yet her partner had married her. But he had been a kind of freak himself; a mediaman—a professional liar—with scruples. It was no wonder the two of them chose to spend the rest of their lives in the middle of nowhere, picking over salvage on mined worlds…

Wadie shook his head at the memory, looking into the mirror, into the past He wondered again, as he had wondered before, what bizarre chemistry had drawn them together, and still kept them together. And wondered briefly, almost enviously, why that chemistry had never worked on him. He shrugged on his loose forest-green jacket, buttoned the high collar above the embroidered silken geometries. Hell, he was eleven hundred and fifty megaseconds old—thirty-eight Old World years—most of them spent solving everyone else’s problems, living everyone else’s life instead of his own. If he hadn’t found a woman by now who would accept him on his own terms, or one who could make him forget everything else, he never would. He wasn’t getting any younger; if he wanted a child, he couldn’t afford to wait much longer. When he finished this new assignment he would hire a contract mother to bear his child and raise it while he was away. He glanced back one last time at sleeping Kimoru as he left the apartment, closing the door quietly.

Wadie yawned discreetly as he left the building’s shadow and started across the quiet square. It was barely daylight now; the glow of the fluorescent lamps brightened like dawn in the ceiling’s imitation sky, ten meters above his head. The magnetized soles of his polished boots clicked faintly on the polished metal of the square, added security in the slight spin-gravity of Toledo planetoid. The surface of the square curved along the inside hull of a massive, hollowed chunk of iron, a rich miner’s harvest and a solid home, but one that was beginning, ungraciously, to show its age. The silvery geometric filigree of pure mineral iron beneath his feet had been preserved once by a thin bonding film, but it was oxidizing now as the film wore away. He could trace rusty paths, dull reddish brown in the early light, leading his eyes across the square and under the tarnished rococo wall to the entrance of the government center. Symptoms of a deeper illness… something like panic choked him; from habit he took a long breath, and eased back from the edge, from admitting that the disease would be terminal. He went on toward the center, ordering the lace at his cuffs. Living well is the best defense, he thought sourly.

Lije MacWong was waiting for him inside. Officially Wadie worked for the citizens of the Demarchy; actually he worked for MacWong. MacWong, the People’s Choice: the Demarchy’s absolute democracy was an unpredictable water beneath the fragile ship of government, and it had drowned countless unwary representatives. But MacWong moved instinctively with the flow of popular opinion, sometimes even risked diverting that flow to suit his own vision of the people’s needs. He did the people’s business, and made them like it. Wadie wondered from time to time what MacWong’s secret was; and wondered whether he really wanted to know. “Peace ’n’ prosperity, Lije.”

MacWong glanced up as Wadie entered the office, ice-blue eyes placid in his dark face. “Peace ’n’ prosperity, Wadie.” He rose, returned a formal bow, and moved reluctantly away from his aquarium.

Wadie peered past him for a glimpse of the fish—three glittering golden things no larger than a finger, with tails of shining gossamer, moving sinuously through sea grasses in the green-lit water. The goldfish were the only nonhuman creatures he had ever seen, and for all he knew MacWong was still paying for them. He pulled off his hat, watched its soft mushroom roundness begin to flatten beside MacWong’s on the desk top. “With all due respect, I trust this news about a Mysterious Message from Outer Space is genuine, and I’m not here because you like to see me suffer.” He sank slowly into MacWong’s neocolonial desk chair, smoothed wrinkles from his jacket.

“Have a seat.” MacWong smiled tolerantly. “The ‘message’ is genuine. These aren’t home movies I’m goin’ to show you.” He leaned carefully against the corner of his desk, avoiding the fresco of silver animal heads, and flicked a switch on the communications inset. Nothing happened. “Dammit,” He picked up a platinum paperweight shaped like a springing cat and dropped it on the panel. The impact was unimpressive, but the Kleinfelter mural projection on the far wall faded, and was replaced by the image of a woman’s face. “I don’t know what I’ll do if this desk quits working. They don’t build ’em like they used to.” He set the paperweight gently back in place.

“They don’t build ’em at all, Lije.” Wadie traced the scrolled embroidery on his jacket front; his fingers froze as he looked up at the screen. “A hologram? Where’d you get that, MacWong?”

“We picked it out of the air, or space, anyhow, thirty kilosecs ago. It’s a genuine hologramic transmission; it took us ten kilosecs to figure that out. And it’s not beamed. Think of the power and bandwidth something like that requires! I don’t know anybody who can do that for the hell of it any more.”

“Not many that can do it at all—” He broke off, watching, listening, as the woman’s voice rose. Her skin was pale to the point of colorlessness, like her cropped, floating hair; her face was long and angular. She wore a faded shirt open at the neck, without jewelry. In her thirties, he judged, and making no attempt to cover it up; her plainness was almost painful. He put it out of his mind, concentrating on her voice. She spoke Anglo, but with an unfamiliar accent; the most common words seemed to take on extra syllables in her mouth.

“…please identify yourselves further. We were not aware of violating your space. We are not, repeat not, from your system; and we—” She was interrupted by a noise that barely recorded; Wadie saw her pale skin blush with anger, her eyes sharpen like cut sapphire. He glanced at MacWong.

“The Ringer navy,” MacWong said. “Their ’cast went the other way. This is all we picked up.”

The woman glanced offscreen, and spoke words that he couldn’t hear, insulting words, he guessed; but her voice was steady as she faced the screen again. “This is not a Belter ship, we are not ‘Demarchists,’ and we have committed no acts of ‘piracy.’ You have no authority over my ship; permission to board is denied. But if you will give us co-ords for your—”

Again she was interrupted; he watched tension grow, tightening her face. “We’re not armed—” And resolution: “But we deny your ‘right of seizure.’ Pappy, get us—” She turned away again, and her image was ripped apart by a burst of red static. For half a second more he saw her, and then the screen went white.

“Well?”

Wadie loosened his hands on the metal frame of the chair. “Did they destroy it? Is that all?”