Heaven Chronicles

by Joan D. Vinge

  She forced herself to perform the routines of her normal shipboard duties—although until they reached the Main Belt her responsibilities were few and unchallenging. She had found herself unconsciously competing with Dartagnan even for the simple activity of feeding their pet; until one day, unused to the behavior of insects, one of them had accidentally set the supply of live crickets free. The creatures had scattered, escaping into all parts of the ship, filling its crannies with their unexpected, chirping song. And so she had set Lucky free as well, to wander the ship at will, capturing crickets with a tongue of impossible length and quickness.

  From time to time she was aware of a brief, random fluctuation in the ship's energy levels; but her cursory attempts to trace the source came to nothing. She had checked out the signal separater that Fitch had given them, using every imaginable test, until she was certain it hid no unwelcome secrets. There was nothing else that she could discover a hidden glitch in, and so the problem drifted out of her thoughts again. She did not bother to mention it in her brief exchanges with Chaim—she spoke with him only when she could not avoid it.

  She ate listlessly, alone in her cabin; slept badly, dreaming dreams filled with vivid terror which hung on into her waking. She tried to read the books that lay in her private trunk, that had always been her solace; but even they were corrupted by the knowledge that Dartagnan's hands had violated them, that his mind had shared the intimacy of their pages and intruded on her innermost thoughts. She put them back in her trunk again, hating him, hating all men. Hating even her father, who in his own weakness, unable to produce the son he wanted, had given those books to her and encouraged her to act a man's role in a world that would never accept it. And she felt herself sliding further down the yielding walls into a formless blackness where nothing had meaning; knowing that she needed something, anything, to hold on to, but lacking the strength to reach out and find it.

  She gathered enough strength, wearily, to perform the functional act of feeding herself one more time; even though her stomach was a shrunken, hard lump of denial. She slipped out of her cabin, confident that Chaim was not outside his own across the well, and let herself fall downward into the eating area. The Mother's living quarters were spacious for two people, the ship having originally carried a crew of eight, and she recoiled from the emptiness of the commons after the womb-small security of her own cabin.

  But as her eyes readjusted their scale she realized that she was not alone this time. Chaim balanced lightly on a seat at the near side of the wide, dull-metal table in the room's center. He turned as she entered, his face almost eager. She looked away from it quickly, not quickly enough, as her feet settled with a click onto the mirroring floor.

  “Mythili—”

  She moved away from him stubbornly, toward the food lockers. She pulled a can out of one and pushed it into the warmer without even looking at the label. “What are you doing here?” she said resentfully. She had redesigned her days almost unconsciously so that she ate and slept at nonstandard times, the better to avoid even the sight of him.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Why? Is there some problem with the ship?” She half-turned, glancing back; the small, elusive fluctuation of energy intruded on her memory.

  “Yes.” He straightened, balancing against the table, searching her face for a response. “With the crew, damn it!”

  “What do you mean?” She flinched away from the anger in his voice.

  “Who do I mean. I mean us, for God's sake. You see anybody else on this ship?” He gestured, almost losing his balance. “It won't work like this. We can't go on pretending there's no one else on board. I can't, anyway. We're partners, like it or not; and we've got to face it or we won't survive. It won't work like this.”

  “I know,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. The heated container of food popped out at her and she jerked back.

  “Do you want it to fail? Don't you care whether we make it or not?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What?” he said, demanding, not asking.

  She bit her suddenly quivering lips, held her face and body rigid against the counter. “Yes, I care.” Some part of her shouted silently that it was a lie, No, God, I don't give a damn; it's all useless— Her hand groped the air, reaching out to something nameless.

  “Mythili … are you all right?” His anger faded as suddenly as it had come; his voice gentled, his concern reached toward her uncertainly, brushed her straining fingertips like a touch. “Can I help? Let me help, if I can …”

  She pulled her hand in, pulled her voice together. “I'm fine!” The past and present fused into one inescapable cage of hot steel.

  His silence lay as loudly as speech in the space between them. “I'm not fine,” he said at last, confessing almost defiantly to the weakness she would not admit. “It's like I've been on this ship all alone!” She didn't understand the peculiar vehemence of the words, didn't want to. “I see more of that damn lizard than I see of you! I know you've been avoiding me. But damn it, I haven't given you any reason to, have I?”

  “No reason? What reason do I need except the sight of you!” She turned to look at him finally, brushing back her disheveled hair.

  “What the—? What's that supposed to mean, for God's sake?” His face clenched.

  “It means that every time I see you I remember what happened on Planet Two.” Feeling Siamang's rough hands tearing at her clothing; what he had wanted to do and almost done to her, before they had abandoned her on the lifeless surface.… “That it happened because you wouldn't help me, because you didn't have the guts to stand up to Siamang. You used me as a pawn to save your own life, and every time I see you I remember that!”

  “Well, what the hell do you want me to do about it?” He held out his hands, but they were knotted into fists. “Do you want me to mutilate myself, so you don't have to see this—?” One hand leaped at his face, as if he really meant to dig his fingers into his flesh. “Do you want a stick to beat me with? Is that what you want from me? God damn it, Mythili, do you think there's anything you could do to me, say to me, think about me that I haven't done myself?” His hands dropped away. “But it doesn't change anything.… What happened on Planet Two happened. Yes, I was scared, I didn't want to die. I did the best I could—it wasn't good enough. I'd do anything to make it right; but there's nothing I can do! I wish to God you'd pressed the charges against me, and gotten it over with!”

  “I don't know why I didn't!” Her voice broke under the weight of the lie, the knowledge of why she had never pressed charges, and why she could never let it go. She shook her head. “But I didn't. And if I didn't, I—I have to live with the consequences, I suppose. I have to face the fact that we are on this ship—together.” She clasped her hands around the food can like a holy offering refused, a useless prayer for understanding. She moved it stiffly to a magnetized tray and felt it click down on the surface; aching to feel the same stability seize her own life and hold it fast. “What do you want changed, then?”

  His mouth worked. “I need to see a human face once in a while—yours will have to do, since it's the only one here besides my own. I'm not asking to share your body, for God's sake—” expecting a protest as her mouth opened, “—just to share my meals with you. That's all I want. You don't even have to talk if you don't have anything to say to me.”

  “All right.” She nodded, surprised to feel an immense and inexpressible relief filling her. “I suppose that's fair enough,” knowing that it was both less and more than that. She carried the food she had heated to the table and settled there with it, not close to him, but not pointedly far away. Peeling back the plastic, she discovered a serving of unflavored green beans, and nothing more. She ate them in silence, feeling his eyes track every bite. A cricket began to chirp somewhere, reassured by the quiet. The sound filled her with a nameless longing. She took the container to the disposal when she finished, with no appetite left to make her heat up something more. Nodding selfco
nsciously, she pushed off, rising up like a bird, seeking freedom in flight.

  “See you at dinner.”

  She saw him at dinner, and three times a day-period from then on; oftener, sometimes, when he joined her in the control room as she fitted their trajectory to the Main Belt's fluid ballet. She brought a book with her to the commons, a shield against contact; although she only stared blindly at the pages while she ate her tasteless, haphazard meals. Dartagnan often brought the lizard, wearing it like jewelry, letting it creep slowly, impossibly, over his shirt. She tried not to watch it, to give him any unnecessary attention at all.

  But somehow she found herself offering the book to him, to deflect his staring curiosity; and then, because she had, forced to discuss the implications of its tedious Old World essays on ecological adaptation. Although she was never certain whether he had any more real interest in the subject than she did, her appetite gradually returned, along with something like her old ability to speak without effort.

  But still she found no enthusiasm or pleasure anywhere in herself, no more than a weary acceptance of things she could not change. And Dartagnan's appetite dwindled until he seemed to live on soy milk, and she saw him surreptitiously swallowing nameless pills. His face grew hollow; bitter brackets tightened at the corners of his mouth. She wondered whether he was sick, got an irritable denial when she tried to question him about it. She didn't ask again, but nursed a fresh resentment.

  They reached the perimeter of the Main Belt at last, and she altered their course to intersect the orbit of the first planetoid they encountered. But their scans showed them nothing of any value, no sign that a human being had ever even visited that tumbling spark of sun-washed rock. They encountered another, and another, as they pushed deeper into the riverflow of stone, but none of those showed any signs of life or profit. They changed course again, tracking down the first of the planetoids on their charts that had a name—one that had actually held a population—only to find a blasted drift of rubble screaming with radiation.

  They went on from there, moving further in across the Main Belt's track of desolation, moving further upstream against its flow, further and further from their origin and ultimate destination. They intercepted more worldlets, named and nameless, each encounter becoming a new defeat.

  But still they went on searching, letting the ship hope for them as their supplies of food and faith dwindled. Until at last the empty ritual scan for manmade materials, performed on one more featureless, nameless piece of rock, began to read out in positives. They looked on in silence as the vital signs spilled onto the screen; Mythili felt Chaim catch her own fear of shattering the moment's reality with a word. She moved past him along the panel's grips, still without speaking, and began to set their course to match speed and trajectory with #5359. The chameleon drifted in the air near her face, its prehensile tail hooked around a handhold above the panel. Lucky.… she thought, glancing at it, feeling the random motion of its turret eyes fixed on her in turn. She didn't let herself finish the thought.

  The kiloseconds passed, and she brought the Mother into position above a silver-lit, artificially smooth docking surface. She matched the stately rotation of the tiny planetoid's surface, until its pitted antisilhouette seemed to stand still beneath them while the universe revolved in another plane of existence. And then she set the gentle motion free that closed the final kilometer separating them from their destination. The ship settled toward the stone, touched down with the fragile impact of a dragonfly settling on water.

  She felt Chaim smile beside her in unconscious appreciation, felt it color with envy as he watched without sharing in her skill. She had denigrated his attempts to participate in the operation of the ship, undermining his confidence in his ability as a pilot; attempting to keep her own position secure against his claim of prospecting expertise. Although it kept her from sharing his knowledge, still she would not risk the vulnerability that an exchange of powers would open to her. And now she savored the triumph, however momentary, of her own skill over his. Chaim pinned his restless hands under his belt; his eyes were still on her, although she kept her own stubbornly on the viewscreen filled with gravel and stars.

  “Good job,” he said at last, trying to keep his voice noncommittal. The canvas of his belt twisted.

  “A little rough.” She lied, knowing that no one could have done it more cleanly, knowing that he would know it too.

  They pulled on their pressure suits wordlessly. She considered the different qualities of mood that she had come to recognize in the megaseconds of silence between them … and that none of those silences had ever been an easy one, and that this one was coiling ever tighter around the mystery of what lay waiting. She put her helmet on with an abrupt movement, locking it in place almost frantically; straining for the sound of oxygen feeding into her suddenly self-contained universe from the pack on her back. Still she remembered Siamang's hard strength jamming shut the feed-valve that cut off her air, before he had forced her into the lock and out onto Planet Two's blue-dust plain to suffocate and die.… Every time she closed herself into her suit again, the memory came crowding in to share it. But air fed smoothly into her suit and cooled her sweating face as she followed Chaim into the airlock. The silence expanded while vacuum formed around them.

  They trailed the mooring rope down in a slow arc to the bright gravel, dropping through the pelting drizzle of pebbles still settling out of the hailstorm their landing had dislodged. There was no evidence that she could see of anyone having been here since the Civil War, over three gigaseconds before. But even if no one had scavenged here since, there was no promise that there would be anything worth their taking, no reason to believe that this would be anything more than another milestone on the road to ultimate failure.… Desire and need shouted down the dark voice of reason, shouted to the sun and stars that this time, this time—

  They found the sealed hatch that gave access to the dwelling-vacuole of this private estate, a miniature of the city planetoids where she had spent all of her life. Chaim pressed the plate that would cycle the lock. There was no response: the lights set into the door's surface did not even flicker red or green, but stared up at them blindly, dust-filmed, like the eyes of the dead. He grunted, braced his boots against the footholds in the doorframe and leaned over to operate the manual hatch release—the wheel ohing like a mouth below blind eyes.

  The hatch popped at last, exhaling a final, long-held breath of fossil air. Chaim glanced back at her. She heard him breathing heavily in her helmet speakers, but he said nothing as he finished pulling the hatch outward and moved down into the throat of stone beneath it. Mythili looked up and out once more, at the heavens wheeling in slow majesty above them, before she followed him down.

  They resealed the hatch laboriously, opened the valve that bled a new mouthful of interior air into the claustrophobic darkness of the dead lock-space. At last, as pressure equalized, they pushed open the inner hatch and entered the tunnel beyond; entered into utter blackness.

  “Shiva—there's no light!” The protest burst out of her before the conscious thought could form or answer itself. She had never been in an unlit vacuole, never thought that without manmade light …

  Chaim switched on his belt lantern, flooding the long tube with technology's inconstant illumination. “Their atomic batteries must've died long since. These places are almost all like this, now.”

  “I never thought … never thought about how it really was,” she said stupidly, still realizing that she had only begun to grasp the enormity, the totality of death and destruction that civil war had brought to the Main Belt.

  “How it will be. That's the future you're looking at, not the past. We're the past—we've run out of time.”

  “What are you talking about?” she snapped, trying to recover her own sense of equilibrium. “This all happened before we were born.”

  “But it doomed us—all of us. Sekka-Olefin knew, that's why he wanted the money from that software he f
ound on Planet Two so much. He knew we were all dying, because we can't keep our technology going, and we can't live without it. While he was stuck on Two he found out about its atmosphere being breathable, and he wanted to start a media campaign to get people to move there, before it was too late.”

  “Move there?” Her mind moved back through time and space to the final moment when she had clawed off the suffocating helmet of her suit, on her knees in the blue-gray dust, and sucked in the lungful of impossibly thin, searingly cold free air of Planet Two; the breath she had thought would be her last.… “He was crazy! And so are you.”

  Chaim frowned. “Then tell me what we're doing here, picking the bones of the dead. And tell me what the Demarchy's going to do when there's nothing left on them.”

  She felt the cold grip of his doomsaying close on her flesh unexpectedly, threw it off in anger. “You sound like you're afraid of the dark.”

  “You're damn right I am,” he muttered. But she knew it was not the darkness of this place he was afraid of. He gathered himself and pushed on along the tunnel, his light battering the walls and forcing open the way ahead.

  She followed sullenly, overlapping his light with her own.

  “Geez Allah!” His curse rattled inside her helmet as she caught up with him where the tunnel ended. “What the hell is this place?”

  Peering past him she saw not an opening-out into a larger room or rooms, but an abrupt barricade of some striated material. The passageway funneled down into a narrow wormhole of access. She reached out past his shoulder, running a glove over the wall of unidentifiable material; feeling its solid mass resist her, yet feeling individual striations give under her pressure. She felt a sudden charge build in her as her brain cross-referenced.… “Print-outs! It's all print-outs—kilos and kilos of them.”