Heaven Chronicles

by Joan D. Vinge

  And stopped, absorbing, absorbed by the blinding greenness that enfolded him as he emerged from the hillside. He had a sudden, vivid memory of the hydroponics greenhouses of the Harmony, the heat and humidity that made them a sweltering hell to the average citizen. His crewman retreated into the tunnel's entrance behind him; he ordered him back sharply. Periodic hydroponics service was required of all citizens, a shared trial. He had done hydroponics service in his youth; but as a Hand of Harmony, it was no longer required of him. Maybe rank does have its privileges.

  But the handful of ragged workers clustering now didn't look any more uncomfortable than the ones in the tunnels behind him. Insulated by his suit, he would never experience the reality of the gardens, of how life had been on Old Earth. Two futures waited here with him, in the balance of life and death—and either way, he would never have this opportunity again.…

  He looked back at the shifting knot of sullen, dirty faces, at the genetic deformities that marked them like a brand. Above them all, latticed and embroidered by the fragile looming trees, the roof of the sky was a transparent membrane, disfigured too by blotches of clumsy patchwork. Once there must have been something more, a shield of force to protect them from solar radiation … a protection that had long since been lost. In the Grand Harmony permanent hydroponics duty was given as a punishment. Here it was a punishment too, in a different way; for the crime of having been a victim.… He left his helmet on, the idea of contamination back in his mind again: not the contamination of disease but a more pernicious contamination of the spirit. It was not a place he wanted to get the feel of, after all.

  “What is it now?” One of them clutched at Wind Kitavu's sleeve, pulling his torn shirt halfway off his shoulder. “Are they wearin' suits to come out an' preach at us now?”

  Wind Kitavu worked free, jerking his shirt back up his arm. “No …” His voice dropped, his hand gestured at them as he explained. Raul lost the words as an atmosphere in gentle motion hissed sibilance. He watched the lithe motion of the reaching trees, watched an expression that was growing too familiar spread from face to face in the group of workers, the desolation so complete that it could not even re-form into anger.

  Wind Kitavu asked something in return, and the man who had stopped him pointed vaguely away. Without asking permission, without turning even to look back, Wind Kitavu left them, disappearing between the shrubs, loosening a slow shower of pastel blossom petals where he passed. The baby. Raul made no move to stop him, remembering what it was he went to do and having no desire to be a witness to it. The other workers began to drift back and away, still watching him warily as their bare feet pushed off from the springy mat of trampled vegetation.

  Raul glanced back into the tunnel, still empty behind him. He noticed for the first time that the overhead lamps that illuminated the underground were flameless. Electricity … somewhere these people still had a functioning generator, probably an atomic battery from before the war—or even from some later trade with the Demarchy. He considered again the fact that the Grand Harmony had none at all because of the Demarchy. If not for their bounty of snow, the Grand Harmony would be in a worse position than Lansing—and the only worse position was death.

  The Demarchy made him think of Wadie Abdhiamal and the mystery that lay behind their impending meeting. He had seen Abdhiamal function as a negotiator at Snows-of-Salvation: inexperienced, unsure of his own position, but wringing cooperation out of both sides with an instinct for fairness that dissolved cultural biases the way a heated knife sank through an ice block. And as a ship's captain he had transported Abdhiamal to meetings in Central Harmony and half the inhabited rocks of the Rings. He had seen the man ignored, insulted, actively threatened, but never losing patience … And he had been surprised, suspicious, and finally pleased when Abdhiamal questioned him about matters of Harmony governmental policy. Pleased, in the end, because he saw Abdhiamal actually listen and learn and make use of what he learned to help them all.

  The only weakness he had found in Wadie Abdhiamal was his inability to deal with one thing—the inevitability of Heaven's end. He had found that Abdhiamal believed some answer still existed; while he, Raul, like the people of Lansing, had seen long ago that the only answer was death. And yet he began to suspect that Abdhiamal's obsessive optimism covered a conviction as certain as his own that Heaven was doomed … but more than that, it covered a deep, pathological fear: Abdhiamal was not a man who could accept that all he accomplished would mean nothing in the end. He could not continue on that road, knowing its end was in sight; he would stumble and fall, crushed by the burden of his own knowledge. And so some part of Abdhiamal's mind had shut the truth away, buried it in a lie that let him continue. Raul had envied Abdhiamal the Demarchy, where comparative richness helped him protect his illusions. And he had wondered whether anything would ever force him to admit the truth.…

  But the starship—even he, Raul, had discovered hope again in what it could offer Heaven … and, specifically, the Grand Harmony. Why would Abdhiamal, of all people, try to make sure that neither of their governments got its hands on the ship? Abdhiamal was a fair man—but was he fair to the point of insanity, of genocide? And the woman who piloted the ship … why would she run such risks to keep a promise to a place like Lansing? Were they both insane, were they all? Or was there something he wasn't seeing? … Too many things that he couldn't see. But if she kept her promise, if that ship was falling right into his hands … that was the only answer that he would ever need. Ever.

  Ranger (Lansing space)

  +3.09 megaseconds

  “Can't you raise Lansing, Pappy?” Betha moved stiffly up from the rendezvous program on the control board.

  Clewell pulled the ear jack away from his head wearily. “No. I've got the ship monitoring all up and down the spectrum. If anyone talks to us we'll hear it.”

  “Maybe the transmitter broke down,” Shadow Jack said. “It's out about half the time, seems like. They have a hard time keepin' it repaired.” Bird Alyn floated beside him above Betha's head, gazing at the magnified image of Lansing on the screen. Betha watched the cloudy, marshmallow softness of the tent passing below: a shroud for a dying people, who would live a little longer because of the Ranger.

  Discus hung above and to the left, tilted and indistinct, a tiny finger's jewel. And somewhere in the closer darkness: three fusion ships from the Demarchy. Not one of them had begun deceleration to match velocities with Lansing and the Ranger. Their mission was one of murder.… Betha glanced at the latest tracking update; less than ten minutes left to off-load the hydrogen.

  “Well, our time is a little limited … I'm sure that Lansing won't mind if we drop you and the tanks into low orbit, and then get ourselves out of here.” She smiled up at Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn, forcing warmth into her voice. “They should be glad to see you two coming home with eight hundred tons of hydrogen.”

  “They will,” Shadow Jack said. They nodded, their faces shining clean and smiling bravely above the collars of their pressure suits. “But … are you sure you're goin' to be all right when we go?” An odd longing edged his voice, and a secret shame. “Just the—two of you?” He glanced away at Clewel's drawn face, cracking his knuckles.

  From the corner of her eye Betha saw Wadie look at her … impeccable Abdhiamal, in embroidered jacket and faded dungarees. She smiled in spite of herself. “We'll be all right,” she said, managing a confidence her own aching, battered body did not really believe, for his sake. She would not play on his guilt to make him change his mind. They had come this far; they would find a way to do the rest, somehow. Later … she'd think about it later. “Don't crack your knuckles. Shadow Jack. You'll ruin your joints.”

  Shadow Jack grinned feebly and stuffed his hands into his gloves.

  Wadie touched her shoulder. “Look.”

  As they spoke the Ranger had slipped a quarter of the way around Lansing. On the near horizon, they saw a blunt protrusion of naked stone, the tent lapping its
slope like clouds below a mountaintop.

  “The Mountain,” Bird Alyn said. “There're the radio antennas, an' the moorage … there's one of our—”

  “Hey.” Shadow Jack tugged at her arm. “That's not one of our ships! I never saw anythin' like that; where'd it come from?”

  “Maybe it's salvage.”

  “No, look, there's another one.”

  Betha increased the magnification. “Pappy, those look like—”

  “—Ringers! Ringers, go back, it's a trap, a—” A woman's voice burst out of the speaker, was choked off.

  “Mother!” A small cry escaped from Bird Alyn.

  “Those look like chemical rockets down there.” Clewell finished the sentence, his voice like dry leaves rattling.

  Wadie's hand tightened on her shoulder. “My God, those are Ringer ships; fifty million kilometers from Discus.…” His voice sharpened with disbelief. “The Demarchy knew the Harmony had a couple of high-mass-ratio strike forces, but nothin' like this. To be here now, with only chemical rockets, they must've started right after they first attacked you. And even then they'd need a mass ratio of a thousand to one—”

  A new voice came over the speaker: “Outsider starship! This is Hand Nakamore of the Grand Harmony. Maintain your present orbit. Do not activate your drive or you'll be fired upon. One of my ships will approach you now for boarding.” Betha looked down on the airless mountain, at three cumbersome Ringer craft, each hardly more than a mass of propellant tanks surrounding a tiny crew module. At last she saw one of them begin to rise, its invisible backwash kicking up clouds of surface rubble. Trapped … Her hands knotted at her sides. The best the Ranger could ever do was one gravity; and now she could only get one-quarter of that, with the load strapped to its hull. The Ringer chemical rockets could do several gees for more than long enough to close with them.

  The seconds passed; the Ringer ship rose slowly, almost insolently, toward them. The minutes passed … and with them, the Ranger's last hope of avoiding the Demarchy fleet as well. Christ, why must we lose now, when we're so close!

  Wadie hooked a foot under a rail along the panel, steadying himself. “Betha, that was Djem Nakamore's half-brother, Raul, on the radio. He's a Hand of Harmony, an officer in their navy. A high-ranking officer. Let me talk to him. He probably knows what I did at Snows-of-Salvation, but we were friends, once.”

  “Better wait, Abdhiamal,” Clewell said quietly. “We've got more company, sophisticated wideband.” He touched the panel and another segment of the screen brightened.

  “Lije MacWong,” Wadie said; Betha saw the easy grace tighten out of his body.

  “Captain Torgussen: If you're receiving this, you must realize that the Demarchy has pursued your ship. The distance-velocity gap between us is small enough now so that you can't outrun our missiles; do not attempt to leave Lansing space.” Behind MacWong's self-satisfied face Betha could see a control room half the size of the Ranger's and a ship's officer in a sun-gold jacket. Farther back in the room she saw cameras trained on the screen, saw a cluster of demarchs, like bright painted wooden dolls—company representatives overseeing their interests. She saw Esrom Tiriki, felt her mouth tighten.

  She signaled at Clewell to transmit. “I hear you, MacWong. And I'm impressed. Have you actually come all this way to destroy my ship? You can't take us now; all you can do is destroy us in passing.…” She hesitated. MacWong's startling blue eyes still stared blindly from the screen. She realized, chagrined, that even closing at eight hundred kilometers per second the Demarchy ships were still millions of kilometers away; light itself took half a minute to bridge the gap.

  At last MacWong reacted, looked past her to Wadie. For an instant she saw apology and regret; another second, and she saw only triumph. “On the contrary. Captain Torgussen. We have no intention of destroyin' your starship—if you obey our instructions. Our ships will pass through your vicinity in about four thousand seconds. You have that much time to dismantle and deactivate your drive. If, by that time, you haven't satisfactorily proved that your ship will be immobilized till we return for it, you will be fired on and destroyed. The people want your ship intact. Captain, but if they can't have it, they don't intend to let it go to anybody else.”

  Betha pushed back, her arms rigid against the panel. “Wadie … he's no fool after all.” The Ranger lay in the jaws of a trap; and each jaw was unaware of the other. When the jaws closed on her ship they would have to destroy each other too. She let go of the panel, forcing a smile. “Then I'm afraid you have a problem too, MacWong. We would have been gone before you arrived, except that someone else is already holding us here … Hand Nakamore, I'm sure you've been monitoring. Would you care to comment?” She waited, savoring the bitterness of useless satisfaction.

  Clewell grunted. “The Ringers are transmitting video, not to be outdone.…” A new patch of screen brightened with a black-and-white image. The Ringer control room was small, the crew strapped down to padded couches crowded by equipment: an image from the earliest days of space travel. A thickset Belter in a helmet with the Discan rings for insignia sat nearest the camera, his face grim behind a stubble of beard. “This is Hand Nakamore of the Grand Harmony. My forces have seized the Outsider starship, and if it attempts to comply with your demands, we'll destroy it. We have several prewar fusion bombs in our possession. If you attempt to keep us from takin' that ship we'll do our damnedest to destroy you too.”

  Betha glanced at Wadie, questioning.

  “He could have the bombs; salvage from the war.” Wadie studied the embroidered whorls on his jacket front. “If he could maneuver into MacWong's path with them, he wouldn't have to be too accurate, even if it took the Demarchy crews a megasec to die of radiation poisoning. Things like this happened during the war, crews of dead men fighting their final battle. That's how we got three fusion craft intact.…” He raised his eyes. “Nakamore will never let the Demarchy take the Ranger, even if it means he has to die too.”

  Betha saw the trace of consternation that betrayed MacWong at the sight of Nakamore; the obvious disbelief on the ruddy face of the ship's officer and on the face of Esrom Tiriki. She watched them change again to hatred and defiance, heard MacWong begin an angry response.

  “And so we're all going to die, and so are they … and so is Heaven.” Her voice rose. “And for what? This is insane—”

  “Don't you think they know that?” Wadie moved toward her, almost touched her again. “They know it as well as we do. But they're trapped here just like we are; all that's happened in the last two and a half gigasecs since the war, all the frustration and fear, has been leadin' down to this.… It had to end like this. Your own song says it—‘No one ever changed a world.’”

  She drew away from him. “It's the people who have to be willing to change! It didn't have to end like this. If they could have seen that there was still a future … There could still be one now, but even you can't see it; you won't see it. You're right, death is what you want … Suicide is the ultimate selfishness, and I've never seen a people more ready to commit it.” She unstrapped, pushing up out of her seat and away from him, her breath catching at the punishment of sudden movement. “You deserve it. Damn you all!”

  He caught her wrist. Furious, she felt Shadow Jack move out of her way, staring, as Wadie pulled her back to the screen. “MacWong, Raul, this is Abdhiamal. I want to talk to you.”

  Nakamore acknowledged him and Betha thought she saw a smile; she waited, saw MacWong break off his speech: “Sorry, Abdhiamal. You're a dead man. You've got nothin' to say to the Demarchy.” MacWong glanced sideways, barely turning his head. Betha looked past him at Tiriki.

  “We're all dead men unless you listen to me! Because of this ship, which you don't have any more right to than Nakamore does, or I do. For God's sake, MacWong, there were seven people on this ship, who came three light-years from another system to Heaven; and five of them are already dead because of it. And now you're goin' to destroy the rest of them, alo
ng with the best ships left to the Demarchy and the Rings? You're all that's left of Heaven Belt, and your own greed is ripping your guts out. You're killin' yourselves because you're scared to die. Taking the starship won't save Heaven, and it's goin' to finish you off instead, if you let it.

  “But you don't have to let it happen.” He nodded at Betha waiting beside him, silent with surprise. “These people came to trade with us because they wanted a better life. And in spite of what we've done to them, they're still willin' to trade. There's a whole trade ring of worlds out there, holding each other up so that they never fall into the kind of trap we've put ourselves in. They can save us too. Heaven Belt can be all it ever was if we join them.” He waited, searching the screen for a response. “Let the starship leave Heaven, instead of destroyin' it. You'll accomplish the same goal but you'll have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

  “You always could convince Djem that cold was hot, Wadie.” Betha looked for mockery on Nakamore's face, was surprised when she didn't find it. “But this time you even make sense to me.… I don't want to destroy the starship or my own ships. If I could get out of this bind by lettin' the ship leave the system, I would. The way things have turned out, it'd be enough just to put the ship beyond everybody's reach.… And the point's not lost on me that the only reason we've got you now is that this woman, this Captain Torgussen, came back to Lansing as she said she would.” Nakamore found Betha's eyes, curiously respectful. “I think you would come back to help us too.”