“I told you before, Chaim: I knew your father. I knew he was smart—I knew he’d leave you something, a key, a clue. I knew you weren’t going out on this survey without a real goal in mind.” She could see his face now, familiar, shining with sweat like her own. “That was smart of you, trying to throw anybody who suspected off by spending so much time in the Main Belt. I almost had to give up on you, I didn’t know if my ship could take it; it’ll never make the trip back to the Demarchy from here. But I didn’t give up. And now after all this time, it’s finally paid off…I’m going to be a rich man.” He pulled the thing he carried forward.
“Look,” Chaim said shortly, and she heard an edge of nervous fear in his truculence, “I told you I’m not taking on more partners. Just because you followed us to this claim doesn’t mean we’re going to cut you in on it.”
“I didn’t figure you would.” He brought the thing up in front of him; Mythili recognized it at last as a portable laser cutting torch. Her lungs were suddenly tight and aching.
“Fitch—” Chaim raised his hands, placating, surrendering.
“Don’t bother with it, Dartagnan. I saw your testimony against Siamang; I know you’d promise me anything now, and try to turn me in later. I’m not giving you the chance to do that to me.”
“What does that mean?” Chaim said, knowing what it meant.
“It means he’s going to kill us, and pirate our claim.” Mythili moved forward a little, painfully aware of the uncertain footing and the pit behind them. “Fitch, listen, listen to what I just said. You don’t seem like that kind of man, not a murderer, not a thief. We never did anything to you. You’re not that greedy. And you said Chaim’s father was your friend—” she was amazed at the quiet reason in her own voice, which was somehow functioning without the control of a conscious mind that had gone white with the fear of death.
Fitch laughed once; there was something in the sound as desperate as their own terror, and as unable to believe that he was actually doing this to them. But he shook his head at her, and the quiet torch in his hands did not waver. “We weren’t close. Besides, I think he’d understand. He’d understand that a man who’s spent his life in space gets old before his time. And when you’re getting too old and your ship is, too; when in all your life you’ve never made a find that’s done more than just keep you alive to go on searching; when you know you’re born unlucky, you’ll die old and poor and alone…when you know all that, and you see two healthy young kids get handed a ship and go out to make a rich strike—”
“—you go a little crazy,” Chaim finished softly.
“No!” Fitch said. “You finally get sane. You realize the truth, that you’re the one you have to look out for. I lived inside the rules all my life, and what did it get me? Nothing! Now I make my own rules. Nothing else matters—you don’t. Don’t waste my time with talk,” as Mythili tried to speak, “just start backing up.” He gestured with the laser.
She glanced over her shoulder. They were less than two meters from the edge of the gaping reactor hole, its lips bearded with overhanging rubble. They would fall into the pit, not a fatal fall, but the rubble coming down on top of them would bury them forever. Her eyes leaped from a piece of twisted metal to a chunk of concrete, searching for a weapon—all the while knowing that there was nothing she could do quickly enough to save herself or Chaim from Fitch’s torch.
Chaim moved abruptly beside her, not moving back but toward Fitch, his hands still outstretched. She wondered with sudden disgust whether he was about to beg for his life. But before she could even finish the thought he stumbled, sank to his knees in the broken masonry.
Fitch swore, and the nose of his laser torch dropped slightly, following Chaim down. “Get up.” His attention flickered between them.
Chaim thrashed awkwardly, starting a slow cloud of debris. Mythili wondered at his inability to get his equilibrium back, wondered if he was that frightened. But then in the space of a heartbeat he was up and moving—on a collision course with the weapon in Fitch’s grasp. “Mythili, get out!” The shout spilled over into movement, impact, a chaos of input, a crack of lightning. She threw herself backwards as the laser flew off-track, firing, slashing through the space where she had been and dazzling her eyes to tears. She heard more grunts and cries; blinked furiously, trying to force sight back into the dark-bright mottled space inside her head as she groped in the debris for a metal bar. She pulled one free at last, pushing herself upward. The periphery of her wounded vision showed her the two men struggling to keep from being overbalanced in the soft sea of rubble. The intermittent, bloody streak of the laser’s beam lashed the darkness. Fitch’s knee caught Chaim in the stomach, thrusting him backwards, tearing his hands loose from the torch.
As Fitch recoiled from his own thrust, rising in the air, he brought the torch’s beam back into line. Mythili hurled the bar, her body’s reaction to the movement distorting her aim. But still the bar struck the torch, knocking it out of Fitch’s hands, and sent it spiraling lazily into the air. The red beam roved, pointing like the finger of God, and she realized that the dead-man switch had jammed. “Look out, look out—!” She threw her hands up, pressing her helmet glass…watched helplessly as Fitch tried to maneuver himself out of its path, and failed. Still in mid-fall, with nothing to give his frantically twisting body support for a counter-motion, he cried out as he saw his own weapon turn against him.
The stream of intensified light stroked down across him in an idle caress, laying open his suit, searing the cloth and flesh beneath it; releasing the captive oxygen, the artificial ecosystem that kept him separate from the vacuum outside. She heard his scream start, lost it in the rush of escaping air that saved her from hearing its end.
Chaim pushed off as the falling finger of light reached out for him in turn, rebounded sideways before it found him—kept on tumbling, as the debris shifted under him, spilling him toward the pit.
“Chaim!” She screamed this time, screamed his name as she saw him slide toward the edge. He clambered over the shifting face of the rubble, a grotesque slow-motion pantomime of a man trying to walk on water. A chunk of cement struck him in the chest, canceling his frantic upward momentum, throwing him back.
She bounded forward as she saw him fall, doubled her own momentum as she landed at the shifting lip of the pit and plunged recklessly out and down. She matched Chaim’s free fall, catching frantically at his leg as she dropped past him. Her body wrenched, and together they went on falling through the crest of the avalanching metal and concrete, to a collision with the bottom of the pit. Her feet struck cement with an impact that ground her teeth, and bones grated on cartilage.
“Move! Move—” She didn’t need Chaim’s garbled shout of warning to go on collapsing over her feet, to push herself off again across the floor of the pit in a blind leap. He followed her through it, and together they came up against the far wall in another jarring impact, as behind them the falling rubble made inexorable silent thunder. She settled at the wall’s foot, sank down in pain and exhaustion, not letting herself turn back to watch.
“Thank you,” Chaim said thickly, crouching strengthless beside her. “Thank God you didn’t run.” He laughed, with shaken irony.
She looked up at him, and suddenly her own body was trembling uncontrollably. “You fool! You damned fool! What did you do that for? You threw yourself right at him, it’s a miracle he didn’t fry you! What the hell were you trying to prove?”
More laughter seeped into her helmet, thin and gray; she listened in disbelief. “I can’t do anything that suits you.” He pushed himself up, rested a hand on her shoulder. “I guess I was trying to prove that—that what happened on Planet Two would never happen again.”
She drew him toward her, felt their bodies touch, suit to suit. Their faces met, glass to glass, in silence.
They buried Fitch in the abandoned city below the factory: the only inhabitant in a City of the Dead. She listened with uncertain emotion as Chaim spoke a ben
ediction, calling Fitch a symbol of all Heaven’s humanity and the thing that had killed him a symbol of how it had destroyed itself—not through technology, but through misguided greed.
And then with the ship’s salvaging equipment, they cut loose the waldoes of the ruined factory and lifted them away. Clutching the prize in spidery arms, the Mother began a homeward course, tracking back through lifeless wastes toward the Demarchy’s still-beating heart. Chaim did not try to force the closeness between them, although she felt his longing, and she was grateful. She felt no need either to pull away or to draw close before she was ready, and yet her gratitude at his understanding drew her closer in spite of herself. And while the journey outward had seemed endless in its solitude, their shared return slipped by her like a soft afternoon, as the past fell further and further behind.
They made radio contact long before they reached Demarchy space, reporting their find, anticipating their reception and not disappointed by the eagerness of the response. But as they neared Calcutta planetoid Mythili felt her tension rising again, without a clear reason.
“Mythili…what’s bothering you?” Chaim studied her earnestly across the trays of food on the metal tabletop. The chameleon perched on his shoulder, looking at her too, with one of its independently roving eyes. His own appetite had grown cautiously hearty, while she sat picking at her sticky mixed beans and rice like an unhappy child. “What’s wrong?”
She looked away from the droning entertainment tape on the salvaged player they had installed beside the table. “Nothing,” she murmured, unable to say anything substantial.
“Don’t give me that. Tell me what it is—something I’ve done?”
The dismay on his face surprised her so much that she laughed without meaning to. “No. No, it’s not you, Chaim. It’s just…I don’t know. I just—hate having this end, I think.” The laughter flinched. “It’s ironic; I hated this trip, this ship,” you, but she didn’t say it, “so much on the way out; and now I hate the thought of it ending.”
“Do you?” The absurdness of the emotion on his face didn’t change, although the emotion itself did. “But this isn’t the end—it’s just the beginning. We’ve got the ship now and forever. We’re free—”
“Free to end up like Fitch?” The words burst out of her, and hearing them she recognized at last the source of her unhappiness.
He sat back, grimacing; as though the idea had only just struck him. But he shook his head. “No. It won’t be like that. Because…” he hesitated, “because it’s not so much the money, or the lack of it, that made this trip better, more, than the trip out. It’s the fact that we’re sharing this one.” His fingers pressed the table edge. “Hell, if we have to, we can haul gases with this ship to make a living. But I figure we’ll always be able to get by on prospecting, if we want to. And I want to: A find like the one we made this time—it means something. Not just to us, but to the Demarchy. It gives everybody a little more time.” His eyes grew distant. “If that damned reactor had only been there!”
She felt a shadow fall across her own mind, realized that after what she had seen in the Main Belt, she was beginning to believe him. “You think it would have saved the Demarchy?”
“No…I don’t know…it would have helped. And with the money we got out of it, I could’ve done what Sekka-Olefin wanted me to do: sold the Demarchy on moving its people to Planet Two.”
“You still believe in that crazy old man’s crazy ideas?” Her voice rose slightly.
“It makes a lot of sense!” His sharpness answered her own. “He told me it’s no worse than part of Old Earth—no worse than Antarctica, and people live there.”
“Antarctica!” She shook her head. “Antarctica’s an icecap; don’t you know that? He was right…Planet Two’s just as bad.”
“But it’s a world, like Earth—” He leaned forward; the chameleon tilted precariously on his shirt collar, and blinked. “You don’t need the same sort of artificial environment we need in space—you don’t need the technology, you don’t have to make everything. Air, water…you have all you need. It’s a natural environment.”
“All the food? The heat?” she said, unable to keep the words neutral. “Do you really think it would be any easier to survive on Planet Two than out here? It’s too cold. The only reason people could live in Antarctica was because the rest of Earth had a better climate to support them—no one lived there before Earth had a high tech level.”
“How do you know so damn much about Earth, anyway?” His exasperation prickled.
“My books. You’ve seen them—” She was able to say that, at least, without rancor now. “Remember that ecology book I gave you; didn’t you get anything about ‘natural environments’ out of it?”
“Not much.” He looked down uncomfortably. “I had other things on my mind…You really think it’s impossible? You think I’d be leading the Demarchy from one bad end to another one? You really think Sekka-Olefin was crazy, he didn’t know what he was talking about?”
She nodded. “It was a fool’s dream, Chaim. Something to keep him from going mad, stranded there all alone…” She gentled her voice at the sight of his face. “Read the books yourself, if you want to be sure.”
His head moved from side to side. “But he wasn’t wrong about what’s happening to Heaven, to the Demarchy—to us. That we’ll all die, in the end. If we can’t start a colony on Planet Two, there’s nowhere left to run. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it…only try to hold back the night as long as we can. Doing what you and I are doing: at least that’s something…” He turned a can slowly on the surface of the tray, staring down at his hand, at the futile motion.
“Yes.” She nodded, feeling a great heaviness settle inside her, knowing that it would never lift again as long as she lived. “I guess—maybe it is worthwhile to go on with prospecting. I guess we can manage together. We do make a pretty good team.” Forcing a smile, she found that suddenly it felt real.
An insistent chiming fell like coins down through the well from the control room, signaling their final approach to Calcutta. She unsealed a pocket on her jumpsuit and reached into it, pulling out the jewelry she had found in the nameless planetoid that had turned their lives around. Separating the ring from the necklace, she held it out to him. “Here,” she said, speaking with a cheerfulness she barely felt. “A memento. We might as well look like rich SOBs for once in our lives. Even if it is junk, this may be the only time we’ll be able to carry it off.”
He laughed, grateful for the change of subject. Taking the heavy ring without reluctance, he turned it between his fingers. “Whoever owned this must have massed a ton.” He poked a finger through the hole, with room to spare.
“Maybe they wore it over a suit glove.” She untangled the necklace’s gaudy, jeweled pendants, shaking her head. “Anyone whose taste ran to this sort of thing would be tasteless enough to wear it outside.”
“Maybe it’s an antique. The Old Worlders were a lot heavier-set.” Chaim squinted at the inside of the ring hole. She saw him straighten and shift suddenly, bringing the ring up closer to his eyes. “Myth…tell me what you see inside here.” He passed her the ring, so intently that she wondered whether he was playing a joke on her.
But she took the ring, holding it up into the light. Her own hands froze as she made out the small, worn symbols on the inside. “F-fourteen karat?” She looked up at him, her eyes still straining. “It’s real—?” breathless. “Shiva! It can’t be—” Fumbling, she picked up the necklace, chose a depending clear-colored stone and pushed it across her watch crystal. She felt it scrape, rubbed her fingers over the furrow it left behind. Real. “And there’s a whole trunkful of it out there…”
“My God.” He struck his forehead with his hand.
“But once we’ve sold the waldoes, we’ll be able to go out again and get the rest.” She held the necklace up, watching it wink languorously in the air. “Maybe it’s not worth much against the darkness—but there are still en
ough blind, rich SOBs who’ll buy it anyway to keep us bankrolled for a while.” The thought gave her a perverse pleasure. She looked at the chameleon making its way down the front of Chaim’s threadbare shirt. “Lucky,” she murmured, and shook her head, “you lived up to your name, after all…You’re going to eat crickets till they come out your ears when we get home, little one!” She grinned.
Chaim grunted, sharing her irony. “You can count on it.” He smiled briefly, stroking the chameleon’s speckled green back. His eyes darkened again as he turned the ring on his finger. “All of it real…”
“Chaim?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Just thinking about fool’s gold…and fools’ dreams. Mythili—” he put out his hand until it covered one of her own. “Maybe this is too soon. But I have to say it now, before…while I’ve still got some privacy…”
She looked down at his hand, back at his face, wondering at his sudden inarticulateness. “What is it?”
“Myth…I want to get married.”
“What?” She blinked, and blinked. “Married? To whom?”
“You, damn it, who do you think? I know, I know—” he ran on before she could answer, “—it’s too soon. I’m not trying to rush anything, it’s your choice, it always was…I just wanted you to know, that’s all. That I…that I mean it.” His hand tightened.
She freed her own hand nervously, curling the edge of her collar. “You know I’m sterile. I can’t ever have children—” A choking knot in her throat kept her from saying more.
“I know. That’s fine with me. I don’t want any children; I don’t want to bring them into a world without a future.”
“Then—why? Why get married at all?”
“Because it’s a commitment. A promise that I’ll remember there’s something worth living for right now, even if there isn’t any future. Our own lifetime doesn’t have to be so bad, if we make the most of it. And because—” he caught her eyes, “—because I guess I love you, Myth.” He took a deep breath.
Outcasts of Heaven Belt Page 12
