Outcasts of Heaven Belt

by Joan D. Vinge

  Wadie watched the manicured brown hands fold on the gargoyled desk top, the pale compelling eyes that had challenged the Demarchy before and won. They disappeared suddenly; the seconds passed, rebuttal: esrom tiriki flashed on the screen. He felt his mouth tighten as Tiriki’s serene, golden face appeared, eyes gleaming like metal. “The fact remains that the government…”

  The captain leaned back in her seat, fingers tapping soundlessly on the chair arms. “He’s one of the trolls, Pappy. Handsome, isn’t he?” She looked up. “And out for our blood. How does it go again? ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead—’” She broke off, took a deep breath. “Screw Jack and the Beanstalk…What was that about fusion ships, Abdhiamal? I thought you said the Demarchy depended on fission power and fission-powered electric rockets?”

  He nodded. “We have three small fusion craft left from before the war; they’re our navy, if you want to call it that. But you’ve got a big lead on them. They couldn’t catch you before you got to Discus.”

  “But it could give us less time to maneuver once we’re there.”

  “…the government agent Abdhiamal threatened us and kidnapped the Outsiders who had come to us to negotiate. Two hundred kilosecs have passed without any further word from him. Their knowledge would have benefited the entire Demarchy, it could have saved Heaven—but because of this ‘government man’ we’ve lost the crew and the starship forever. Consider that, when you make your final decision.” The band of light below showed an ever-deepening violet.

  Wadie’s hands tightened over nothing, final rebuttal: lije macwong showed on the screen.

  “I regret to say that, in honesty, I can’t deny Demarch Tiriki’s final accusation. Wadie Abdhiamal, a negotiator from my agency, has overstepped his authority to a degree I consider criminal. He has in the past been suspect of questionable loyalty, of known Ringer sympathies, and I frankly consider it possible that he intends to aid them in usin’ that ship against us. I can only repeat that he was acting without my consent, or the consent of any other person in the government. This agency isn’t, and never was, a party to these actions. He alone committed a crime, and like any other criminal, he should be found guilty…”

  Wadie straightened, felt something grate in his neck.

  “…of treason against the Demarchy…”

  “Lije!” he whispered, incredulous, willing the mahogany face to turn and the pale eyes to meet his own.

  “…and so, fellow demarchs, I want you to reconsider the basic issue before you make your decision. This should not be a simple vote of no confidence against a government that’s served you well; this is a judgment on the fate of the one man who has betrayed the hopes of us all. I ask instead for a bill of attainder against Wadie Abdhiamal, government negotiator, for treason…”

  You bastard—He pushed himself up and moved through a nightmare to the panel.

  “…let him never set foot on any territory of the Demarchy on pain of death. He has betrayed us all…”

  “Let me talk.” He reached toward the instrument panel.

  The captain caught his arm. “No.”

  “…I further urge again that all fusion-powered vessels be impressed into the pursuit of the alien ship; we must prevent it from reachin’ our enemies. We must have that ship for ourselves!”

  proposition flashed on the screen, bill of attainder against wadie abdhiamal, negotiator. charges: treason. penalty: death. negating previous charge: government negligence.

  He stepped back from the panel, his fingers twitching uselessly; his hand dropped. He went to his seat, sat down heavily, watching the ballots begin to register, approve, object, numbers tallying with the passing seconds. Below them the percentage-of-voters band moved through red into orange into yellow. Five hundred seconds until it would reach full violet…five hundred seconds for the last votes to record from the outermost rocks of the trojans. An insignificant time lag, by the standards of the prewar Belt, as one hundred and forty million kilometers was an insignificant distance. Their closeness had meant survival for the trojans after the war; it meant death for him, now, letting men vote without hesitation, without reflection. He waited. The others waited with him, saying nothing. The ship’s drive filled the silence with vibration, almost sound, almost intruding, the only constant in the sudden chaos of the universe.

  proposition approved. They found him guilty, twenty to one, and sentenced him to die. He watched the death order repeat and merge, like a thing already forgotten, into a new cycle of debate over the use of the fusion ships. He raised his leaden hands, let them drop again, smiled, looking back at the others. “Now I finally know how MacWong’s kept his job for so long.”

  The captain cut off the debate, filling the screen with the void of his future.

  “I guess I see the distinction between ‘demarchy’ and plain ‘democracy,’” Welkin said quietly.

  “Welkin, you don’t have the right to make any moral judgments about Heaven Belt.”

  “He’s got the right,” Shadow Jack said. He sat up, pulling his feet forward. “The crew of this ship, they were…” He fumbled for words. “They were all married, they were a family; all of them together. And they all died in the Rings, except…” He glanced at Welkin and Betha Torgussen, back at Wadie, and down, twisting his fingers. “They all died.”

  Wadie watched the captain, her arm resting on the old man’s shoulder. “I’m not married,” he said, his voice flat. “And now I never will be.” She looked back at him, not understanding, useless apology in her eyes, and a surprising sorrow. He got up, resenting the intrusion of her unexpected, and undesired, sympathy. “Well, Captain, you’ve ruined your final opportunity for a constructive agreement with the Demarchy. For my sake, I hope you have better luck with the Ringers than you did the last time.” He went out of the room and down the spiraling stairs. No one followed.

  RANGER (IN TRANSIT, DEMARCHY TO DISCUS)

  + 2.40 MEGASECONDS

  Betha sat alone at the control panel in the soothing semidarkness, gazing at the endless bright stream of Demarchy television traffic, soundless by her own choice, that still trailed after them, two hundred million kilometers out. Caught in a spell of hypnotic revulsion, she marveled at the perpetual motion of the Demarchy media machine, wondered how any citizen—demarch?—ever made a sane decision under the constant dinning of a hundred different distortions of the truth. And remembering the mediamen on the field at Mecca, she should have known enough to believe Wadie Abdhiamal and let him speak.

  She cut off the broadcasts abruptly and put the crescent of Discus on the screen. She saw the Ranger in her mind, an infinitesimal mote, alone in the five hundred million kilometers of barren darkness, tracing back along Discus’s path around the sun from the isolate swarm of rocks that was the Demarchy. She remembered then that they were not entirely alone. Expanding her mind’s vision, she saw the Demarchy’s grotesque, ponderous freighters loaded with ores or volatiles, crawling across the desolation; ships that took a hundred days to cross what the Ranger crossed in six. It was a barely bridgeable gap, now; and the survival of the Demarchy, and the Rings, depended on it. And someday there would be no ships…

  But now, tracing the violet mist of the Ranger’s exhaust, she saw what might be three fusion craft, barely registering on the ship’s most sensitive instruments.

  She cursed the Demarchy, the obsessive veneer of sophistication, the artificial gaiety, the pointless waste of their media broadcasts. Fools, reveling in their fanatical independence when they should all be working together; living on self-serving self-sufficiency, with no stable government to control them, no honest bonds of kinship, but only the equal selfishness of every other citizen…And their women; useless, frivolous, gaudy, the ultimate waste in a society that desperately needed every resource, including its human resources.

  Fragments of conversation drew together in her mind, and she remembered suddenly what Clewell had said about crippled Bird Alyn. Perhaps in a sense th
ey were a resource, sound and fertile women who had to be protected, in a society where radiation levels were always abnormally high; women who had let the protection grow into a way of life as artificial as everything else in their world…Perhaps the danger of genetic damage lay at the root of all the incomprehensible involutions of their sexual mores. Desperate people did desperate things; even the people of Morningside, in the beginning…

  She turned slightly in her seat, to glance at Shadow Jack lying asleep on the floor, lost in a peaceful dream, a book of Morningside landscapes open beside him. She wondered, if those were desperate measures for the Demarchy, what must be true for Lansing. Her hands met on the panel, caressing her rings, as Wadie Abdhiamal entered the room.

  “Captain.” He made the requisite bow. She nodded in return, watching him cross the room: the proper demarch, compulsively polite, compulsively immaculate. And as awkward as a child taking his first steps, moving in one gravity. His face looked haggard, showing the effects of stress and fluid loss. She remembered seeing him use his drinking water to wash his face on the Lansing 04, thinking that no one noticed…She brushed absently at her own hair. “Have you found everything you’ve needed, Abdhiamal? Have you eaten?” He had not joined the rest of them when they ate together in the dining hall.

  He sat down. “Yes…somethin’. I don’t know what.” He looked vaguely ill, remembering. “I’m afraid I don’t get along well with meat.”

  “How—are you feeling?”

  “Homesick.” He laughed, self-deprecatingly, as if it were a lie. He gazed at the empty screen. Rusty materialized on his knee, settled into his lap, tail muffling her nose. He stroked her back with a dark, meticulous hand; Betha noticed the massive gold ring on his thumb, inlaid with rubies.

  “I’m sorry.” She pulled her pipe out of the hip pocket of her jeans, quieting her hands with its carven familiarity.

  “Don’t be.” He shifted and Rusty muttered querulously, tail flicking. “Because you were right, Captain; and I made the right choice in comin’ with you. The Demarchy can’t be allowed to take your ship; nobody in Heaven Belt can…I’m not saying that because of what happened to me—” Something in his voice told her that was not entirely true. “I’ve known all along, from the first time I heard about this ship, that it would make too many people want to play God.” He looked up. “Even if it’s not my right, I’d still turn your ship over to the Demarchy if I had the chance—if I thought it’d save them. But it wouldn’t. The government is too weak, they’d never be able to keep an equilibrium now.” His fingers dug into the soft arms of the chair; his face was expressionless. “So I’ll tell you this. I’ll help you get out of here, however I can. Anythin’ I can do, anythin’ you want to know. As my final service to the Demarchy: to buy them a little more time and save them from themselves.” His eyes went to Discus on the screen. “If I’ve got to be a traitor, I’ll be a good one. I take pride in my work.”

  She broke away from tracing his every movement, her face hot. “If you really mean that, Abdhiamal…I want your help, whatever your personal motives. I need to know anything you can tell me about the Ringers—especially I need the number and the locations of their distilleries. No matter how primitive they are, it’s going to take careful planning to steal anything from them with an unarmed starship…And as you say, I haven’t done very well so far at getting what I want. Strategy was always Eric’s—was never my strong point.”

  “On the contrary. You outnegotiated us all, at Mecca.” Irony acknowledged her with a smile. “I expect I can give you reasonably accurate coordinates; I spent a lot of time in the Rings about two hundred and fifty megasecs ago, when we helped ’em enlarge their main distillery. As a matter of fact, I—” He broke off abruptly. “Tell me something about Morningside, Captain. Tell me about the way your people get things done. You don’t seem to approve of our way.”

  She studied the words, trying to find the reason behind his change of subject; certain only that he didn’t really want an answer but simply a distraction. And so do I. “No, I can’t say that I do approve, Abdhiamal. But that’s the Demarchy’s business, except when it gets in my way…I guess that you could say we emphasize our kinship—as fellow human beings, but especially as blood relatives. You already know about our multiple-marriage family unit.” She glanced up, away; his eyes made no comment, but she sensed his uneasiness. “Above it is our ‘clan’—not in the Old World technical sense, except that it tells you who you can’t marry—your particular parent-family, your sibs, your own children. All your relations stretch out beyond it…almost to infinity, sometimes. We all try to take care of our own; everybody on Morningside has relations somewhere…Except that a person who isn’t willing to share the work finds that even his own relations aren’t glad to share the rewards forever.

  “The only formalized social structure above the clan level is what we call a ‘moiety’…” She lost the sound of her own voice, and even the aching awareness of Abdhiamal’s presence, in vivid memories that filled the space between her words with sudden yearning. Borealis moiety: an arbitrary economic unit for the distribution of goods and services. Borealis moiety: her home, her job, her family, her world…a laughing child—her daughter, or herself—falling back to make angel imprints in a bank of snow…

  “Our industries are independently run, as yours are—but I suppose you’d call them ‘monopolistic.’ They cooperate, not for profits, but because they have to, or they’d fail. It works because we never have enough of anything, especially people. My parent family and a lot of my close relatives run a tree farm in the Borealis moiety…my wife Claire worked there too. Some families specialize in a trade, but Clewell and I and our spouses were a little of everything…” She remembered day’s end in the endless twilight, the family sitting down together at the long dark wood table, while their children served them dinner. The soothing warmth of the fire, the sunset that never faded from the skylight of a semi-subterranean house. The small talk of the day’s small triumphs, the comfortable fatigue…the welcome homecoming of a spouse whose job had kept him or her away for days or sometimes weeks. Eric, returning from the arbitration of a long-drawn dispute—

  She saw Wadie Abdhiamal, sitting back in his chair in the control room of the Ranger. A negotiator…I settle disputes, work out trade agreements…Abdhiamal looked back at her with a faintly puzzled expression. She shook her head. Stop it. Stop being a fool! “I…I almost forgot—we have a High Council, too. It’s a kind of parliament, made up of ombudsmen from the various moieties, elected to terms of service. It deals with what little interplanetary trade we manage and the emergency shipments. It originated the proposal for our trip to Heaven. It doesn’t have much to do with our daily lives—”

  “Then in a way you are like us,” Abdhiamal said, “without a strong centralized government, with emphasis on independence—”

  “No.” She shook her head again, denying more than the words. “We’re like a family. We get things done through cooperation, not competition, the way the Demarchy does. Your system is a paradox: the individual has absolute control, and yet no control at all, if they don’t fit in with the majority. We cooperate and compromise because we know we all need each other just to survive…And considering the position the Demarchy is in right now, I’d say it can hardly afford to go on putting self-interest above everything else, either.”

  Abdhiamal blinked, as if her words had struck him in the face. But he only shrugged. “Needless to say, we don’t see ourselves in quite that light. I suppose your idea of cooperation is closer to the Ringers’ Grand Harmony.” There was no sarcasm in it. “They emphasize cooperation above all too, because they have to; they weren’t as fortunate as the Demarchy, after the war. But they have a socialist state and strong navy; they get cooperation at the point of a gun. And that’s no cooperation at all, really; that’s why they’re anathema, as far as the Demarchy’s concerned. They don’t trust individual human nature, even it if is backed up by family ties.” />
  Betha struggled against a sudden irrational resentment. “It’s worked well enough so far. But then we don’t kill any stranger who comes to us in need, either.”

  “Maybe you just never had a good enough reason, Captain.”

  She stiffened. Apology showed instantly on his face and behind it, she saw a reflection of her own disorientation, the frustration of a stranger trapped in an alien universe. He was a man with no family…and now no friends, no world, no future. And she suspected that he was not a man who was used to making mistakes—or used to sharing a burden, or sharing a life…not Eric.

  “I’m sorry, Captain. Please accept my apologies.” Abdhiamal hesitated. “And let me apologize for my tactlessness after the general meeting, as well.”

  “I understand.” She saw annoyance begin behind his eyes; stood up, not seeing it change into a kind of need. “If you’ll excuse me…” She moved away, reaching for an excuse, an escape. “I—I have to see Clewell, down in the shop.”

  “You mind if I go with you?” His voice surprised her.

  She hesitated, halfway across the room. “Well, I—no, why should I?”

  He rose, setting Rusty down. The cat leaped away, rumpled, moved across the room to where Shadow Jack still lay asleep, his face buried now in the pillow. Rusty settled on the softness beside his head, one speckled paw stretched protectively over his curled fingers.

  “Poor Rusty.” Betha glanced down. “She’s been so lonely since…She was used to a lot of attention.”

  “She would have had all she wanted at Mecca.”

  “She would have been worshipped. It isn’t the same.”

  She went down one level on a spiraling stairway, waited for him on the landing. He took each step with dignified deliberateness, his knees nearly buckling and his hand on the railing in a death grip. He stopped with studied nonchalance beside her, peering down over the polished wood banister. The well dropped four more stories, piercing the hollow needle of the ship’s hull. The concentric circles of a service hatch lay pooled at the bottom.