Outcasts of Heaven Belt

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Good-bye, Goody Two-Shoes,” she whispered. She shook her head. Her own eyes were mirrors of memory, for the face of a man who had tried to kill her; a man who had lied too well. “I might forgive you…but how could I ever forget?” An anguished brightness silvered the mirror of her eyes, she turned away again.

  “Mythili, wait!” He fumbled in the sack of his belongings, pulled out the book of poetry. “Wait; this belongs to you.” He held it out.

  She came back, took it from his hand without touching him. Confused anger startled her face as she recognized the title. “What are you doing with this?” pain and grief, “Shiva, isn’t there anything that you wouldn’t pry into? You’ll never have a ship! You’ll be a mediaman all your life, because that’s all you were ever meant to be.” She might have said “whore.”

  “I will get a ship. If it takes me the rest of my goddamned life, I will…And when I do, I’ll find you! Mythili—”

  She didn’t turn back, this time. He saw her hail a taxi, get in; watched it fall out and down into the vastness of the city air. Pain knotted his stomach, he clenched his teeth.

  “Dartagnan—” Abdhiamal came up beside him, eyes questioning, sympathetic. “No?”

  “No.” Chaim produced a smile, pasted it hastily over his mouth. “But that’s life. The only reward of virtue is virtue…the hell with that.” He picked up his sack, readjusted his camera strap. “You can’t afford it, in my business…Good thing my camera’s already broken; one of my good buddies will probably smash it over my head when I get back to work. Nobody likes an honest mediaman; you can’t trust ’em.”

  Abdhiamal smiled. “I disagree.”

  Dartagnan laughed, still looking out into the city. “Everybody knows you’ve got to be crazy to work for the government.” His eyes stung, from too much staring.

  “You look like you could use a drink. On me?” Abdhiamal gestured toward the city.

  “Why not?” Dartagnan nodded, hand pressing his stomach. “Yeah…that’s just what I need.”

  II

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  “Excuse me…pardon me—”

  “Wait your turn, pal. We got plenty of work for everybody.” The clerk snatched permission forms out of the air as the stranger’s approach pulled them loose from gravity’s feeble hand. He stuffed them into a mesh container on the cluttered table top. His expression ate holes in the amorphous mass of faces drifting in line before him; he fixed a steel-hard stare on the man who had upset their equilibrium.

  “My name is Wadie Abdhiamal, I’m a government negotiator.”

  “No wonder you’re in a hurry. But you got to wait your turn like everybody—”

  “I’m here officially.” Abdhiamal raised his voice without seeming to. “I’m looking for a man named Dartagnan.”

  “Take your pick.” The clerk frowned at Abdhiamal’s elegantly embroidered jacket, away from the bare civility of his face.

  “I was told he’d be here, but he’s not. Where would he go next?” Abdhiamal’s impatience seized the clerk by his own unbuttoned jacket-front.

  “To suit up. That way—” The clerk waved left-handed, brushing him off.

  Abdhiamal pushed off from the table, scattering the drift of derelict humanity as his arrival had scattered paper. His trajectory angled him toward the corridor entrance the clerk had indicated. He caught at a hand-hold and readjusted his course, pushed off again with undecorous force.

  The tunnel let him out into another room as devoid of personality as the waiting room, and as crowded with bodies. Abdhiamal pulled himself up short, searched the shifting mass for a glimpse of remembered red hair, the brown face of Chaim Dartagnan. He saw a dozen strangers already in suits, helmets in hand, lining up before the small hatch in a ponderous steel wall—which he recognized suddenly as a much greater entrance on the unknown. All were strangers to him. One was a woman, and the thought of what she waited to do made his stomach turn over…what they all waited to do to themselves.

  He looked on around the room, away from the hatch, into the mass of half-suited workers awaiting the next shift. A man he recognized instinctively as an authority figure—a man who belonged here, one who would never pass through that lock—was peering back at him across the broken line of sight. And half-standing, half-drifting at his side—

  “Dartagnan!” Abdhiamal raised a hand, his voice echoing; signaling the distant lifted face, the suddenly motionless body, toward him.

  Dartagnan came across the vast room, trailing an insulated pressure suit, clouded with uncertainty. “Abdhiamal?” He caught a wall brace as he reached Abdhiamal’s side, staring at him. He laughed once, rubbing his head. “What the hell? Working for the government finally drive you to this?”

  Abdhiamal studied his face unobtrusively. Dartagnan looked thinner than he remembered; tighter, harder…older. It had been barely six megaseconds since he first laid eyes on Chaim Dartagnan; since he had watched him give up his chance for a decent future—watched him lose everything, under the pitiless gaze of the media cameras—because he had put honesty and justice above his own self-interest. But justice was blind, and the only reward society had given him was the back of its hand. Abdhiamal shook his head. “Even my job is better than this. I came for you, in an official capacity—about the Siamang affair.”

  Dartagnan’s face aged further. “Why?” He glanced away at the waiting wall of steel, and back. “The trial, the judgment. I thought all that was over. Did she decide to press charges—Mythili, I mean?” His hands pressed his stomach; the suit drifted down out of his grasp.

  “No. She didn’t change her mind. That part is over.”

  “Over.” Dartagnan’s mouth pulled. “Then what?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Abdhiamal said suddenly, unable to keep it in. “For God’s sake, man—”

  Dartagnan shrugged, looking away again. “It’s a year’s pay for an hour’s work.”

  “And a lifetime dose of radiation!” Abdhiamal’s disgust broke through. “You know why they pay you so well.” He pointed toward the steel wall/door.

  “Sure I know.” Dartagnan leaned over, his feet lifting in equilibrium as he picked up the suit. “They gave us the whole hype: Their waldoes broke down, and without this plant there’s only one factory left to make nuclear batteries for the whole of the Demarchy. They’re trying to get them functional again, but in the meantime there’s a lot of work only a human can handle. It’s all very patriotic.” His eyes were as bleak as death. “And somebody has to do it.”

  Abdhiamal shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t. This is for losers, not an able-bodied, healthy man.”

  Dartagnan laughed again; his laughter was like tar. Abdhiamal failed to see the joke. “I’ve had this conversation before. What else can I do? I haven’t got a chance in hell of getting a media position with a corporation after I sold out Siamang and Sons—”

  “After you brought a murderer to justice,” Abdhiamal cut him off.

  Dartagnan smirked. “It all depends on your point of view. But I’ll never make it as a mediaman. If I learned anything I learned that, the hard way, these past megasecs. And I’m no damn good at anything else; at anything that takes any brains or guts or talent…” The suit twisted in his hands, the reflected image of his face tearing apart.

  Abdhiamal thumped the slick wall surface beside them with a hand. “If you need to suffer that much, Dartagnan, why don’t you knock your head against a wall? It makes as much sense.”

  Dartagnan looked up, expressionless. “It doesn’t pay as well.”

  “At least when you’ve stopped punishing yourself, your body won’t have to go on paying for the rest of your life.”

  “It’s too late for that.” His hands pressed his stomach again. He watched the cluster of suited workers across the room fasten helmets; watched the air lock hatch unseal, open, release a cloud of spent strangers and swallow up a new sacrifice. Another line began to form; his line. Beyond the meters-thick seal of metal th
e actual manufacturing area lay in the open vacuum of Calcutta planetoid’s dead and deadly surface. Since the Civil War the factory’s production capacity had steadily deteriorated, and the amount of radiation it spewed into space had climbed correspondingly. The war had destroyed the critical symbiosis of technologies that produced sophisticated microprocessor replacement parts for plants like this one; the resulting jury-rigged repairs had eaten away at its efficiency.

  “What do you want from me, Abdhiamal?” Dartagnan began to pull open the seal on the radiation suit, impatiently, nervously. “Or did you just come here to kick me when I’m—”

  Abdhiamal reached out, stopped him from pulling the suit on. “I came to make you a better offer. I’ve been in contact with Kwaime Sekka-Olefin’s relatives about the settling of his estate.”

  Dartagnan’s arm stopped resisting his grip. Blinking too much, he said, “And—”

  “And they feel you deserve some consideration for bringing his murderer to justice. Since I knew you were interested in prospecting—”

  “The Mother? They’re going to give me his ship?” Dartagnan’s intensity jerked them off-balance.

  Abdhiamal clutched at the wall-brace. “No,” he said gently. He let Dartagnan go. “Not exactly. They’re offering you first chance to buy it.”

  “Buy it?” Dartagnan’s free-drifting hand became a fist, and Abdhiamal thought for a split second that it would hit him in the face. But something in his expression stopped it; Dartagnan’s body sagged. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “They know you don’t have the money, Dartagnan. That’s why they’re not asking for payment up front.” Dartagnan’s head rose slowly. “They’re only asking half what the ship’s really worth. And they’ll give you a certain amount of time before you have to pay them anything. You can use the ship to hunt salvage in the meantime. If you’re any good as a prospector, you’ll be able to pay it off.” He made it sound as fair and reasonable as he could, drawing on his years of experience as a negotiator. He didn’t say how hard he had had to pressure Sekka-Olefin’s relatives to wring even that concession from them.

  Dartagnan let the radiation suit slip from his hand again. He looked away, aware once more of the space beyond their own small cone of contact, the heavy, murmuring despair that filled the room. He studied the new line forming for work. And then he kicked the suit aside. “Let’s get out of here.”

  III

  ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

  Mythili Fukinuki stood before the instrument panel on board the Mother, her feet barely resting on the floor in Mecca planetoid’s slight gravity. She held her concentration on inventorying the ship’s functions; trying to hold back the memories that the sight of the control room raised in her. This was not the first time she had worked at this panel; not the first time she had moved silently and alone through the levels of this immense spider-legged ship’s belly. But not entirely alone, the last time…

  She blinked convulsively, dissipating the glistening film of double-vision; the golden skin over her knuckles whitened as she clenched her hands. She would never forget that she had shared this ship with Sekka-Olefin’s corpse on the journey back from Planet Two. She could not stop reliving the nightmare that had preceded it, or the grueling sideshow of a trial that had followed. No matter that Sabu Siamang had been declared guilty and sent into exile on an uninhabited rock—he had still ruined her career and contaminated her entire life, and no punishment would ever be enough to repay that wrong.

  Or to repay her for the way he had destroyed the fragile net of trust and—and—(her mind would not shape the word) feeling (inadequately), that had formed between herself and Chaim Dartagnan. She saw Dartagnan suddenly in her mind’s eye, his hands upraised in habitual apology, begging the forgiveness she could never really grant him in her heart. She shut her eyes tightly, setting his image on fire, burning it away. Siamang had stripped that image of illusions; had proven that at his core Dartagnan was only a self-serving coward after all, willing to do anything to save his own life. And although he had done all he could to bring Siamang to justice, still she could never forget…

  She looked up sharply from the panel’s glowing displays at the sound of someone entering the ship down below. She pulled her face back into an acceptable cypher, smoothed her hands along the cloth of her utilitarian flightsuit. This must be Wadie Abdhiamal’s arrival. She had agreed to meet him here, to discuss the specific terms under which she could make this ship her own. Could they spare it? Resentment made her face twitch. She had lost her job as a Siamang company pilot because she had testified against Sabu; and all Sekka-Olefin’s relatives were offering her in return was an impossible dream. She was no prospector—and yet she would have to somehow, miraculously, shape-change into one if she was going to meet the price they were asking for this ship. And this ship was her only chance at a life with any dignity or freedom, now that her job as a pilot was gone forever. No one else in this damned, twisted society would let her do the job she was trained for, and because she was unmarried and sterile, her only alternatives were deadly or degrading. She had to succeed; she had to…Her hands knotted.

  “Demarch Fukinuki.” Wadie Abdhiamal appeared abruptly, rising up through the concentric railings of the drift-well at the control room’s center. He had left his pressure suit down below; he was faultlessly dressed, as always. “I’m glad you’re punctual.”

  Mythili nodded, managing a strained smile of welcome. “Demarch Abdhiamal. You’re late.” Her smile broadened barely, fell away again all at once as she saw that he was not alone.

  Abdhiamal pushed off from the railing, drifted to one side of the well and settled, leaving the opening clear. She watched another head materialize in his place, shoulders, arms, body…Dartagnan. Dartagnan. The word repeated over and over in her mind as she tried to believe what her eyes showed her. “Dartagnan!” Surprise shouted it, and anger, and betrayal as she realized what his presence here must mean. “What’s he doing here?” She turned toward Abdhiamal furiously; knowing the answer, making the question an accusation.

  “Mythili?” Chaim caught himself on the well-railing, jerked his rising body to a halt.

  She glanced at him: a split second of the incredulous look on his face told her that he was no more a party to this than she was. She looked back at Abdhiamal before Chaim’s eyes could catch and hold her own. “You had no right to do this to—^to us! I won’t work with him—” Her hand shot out.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to, if you want this ship.” She heard the vaguely condescending tone that Abdhiamal could never quite keep out of his voice when he spoke to her. “Sekka-Olefin’s relatives agreed that the ship should go to both of you, since you had an equal share in bringing his murderer to justice.”

  “Equal—?” She choked back the rest, looking from face to face again, feeling a cage close her in. “Whose idea was that? I suppose you think this is all terribly clever, Abdhiamal, setting me up like this—”

  “Wait, wait,” Chaim put his hands up, palm-out, in the placating gesture that set her memory on edge. He finished his ascent into the room, dressed in a drab gray-white jumpsuit like her own, with no mediaman’s camera slung at his shoulder. “Abdhiamal, what is this? You mean we share in this—?” His hands spread, taking in the ship around them, but his eyes stopped at her face. “Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  Abdhiamal smiled, smugly omniscient. “If I had, would you both be here now?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Her refusal went directly to Dartagnan.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you.” Abdhiamal shrugged slightly, tugged the hem of his loose jacket back under his belt. “Listen—the two of you tried to do something worthwhile, the right thing. And you weren’t rewarded for it, you were punished. I’m only trying to do my job, which is to see that things are settled fairly. This is the best I could do. It’s up to you from here on.”

  “Thanks, Abdhiamal,” Chaim said, as though he meant it. “Eve
n if we can’t keep this ship, I’ll always appreciate this,” looking back at her again.

  Abdhiamal nodded. “I appreciate the appreciation.”

  “I hope you’ll do us one more favor, then, Abdhiamal.” Mythili pressed her hands together fitfully, avoiding both their gazes. “Get out of here, and leave us alone—”

  Abdhiamal bowed his acquiescence, and glancing up she couldn’t detect any change in his expression. He moved toward the exit well.

  Chaim threw an apologetic glance after him. “Thanks again, Abdhiamal.”

  “Let me know what you decide.” Abdhiamal disappeared into the well.

  Mythili turned back to the control panel, listening to the echoes recede through the ship, filled with sudden claustrophobia. To be alone in this place with one man—this one man—was to feel the hull close around her in a way that it had not when she shared it with the two of them. She punched in a sequence on the panel, clumsy with haste, opening the segment of wall that became a port above the viewscreen.

  She looked out on the docking field abruptly: on the ungainly insectoid forms of volatiles tankers clutching the flaccid sacs in which they transported unrefined and semi-refined gases to the Demarchy’s distilleries. Immense ballooning storage tanks ringed the eternally eclipsed field, obscuring the light-hazed horizons of Mecca planetoid. Beyond the field’s fog of artificial light she knew that a starry black infinity of space lay on all sides, and that she was not a prisoner…

  Dartagnan came toward her from the hub of the cabin; she sensed his movement more than heard it, and turned to meet him. “Don’t come any closer. Please.” She brushed her night-black hair back from her face irritably. He stopped himself, wavering as he regained his balance; his open disappointment reached across the space between them.

  “Mythili, I didn’t know about this…”