Heaven Chronicles

I

The sound of silence filled the black and silver vacuum of the Mecca docking field, echoed from the winking distillery towers, the phosphorescently-glowing storage sacks of gases, the insectoid forms of the looming cargo freighters. But it only filled the helmet of Chaim Dartagnan's suit by an effort of will, as his mind blocked the invidious clamor from the helmet's speakers:

“Demarch Siamang. Demarch Siamang—!”

“—true that you're going to—”

“What will you be bringing back?”

“—rescue the stranded—?”

“Hey, Dartagnan, c'mon, Red, give your of buddies a break!”

Dartagnan smiled and released the mooring rope to casually readjust his camera strap against his shoulder. Eat your hearts out, bastards. Any one of you'd break my neck to be here instead of me. He glanced back across the glaring, pitted gravel of the field. At the very front of the crowd beyond the gate he saw the elbowing desperation of his fellow mediamen, cameras draped across the barrier; the security guard shoved them back with what looked like relish. Independents all, crawling all over each other to get at the big story, or the unique pitch, that would win the attention of a corporate head and earn them a place in the ranks of a corporation's promotional crew. There but for the grace of Siamang and Sons go I.… He had won, by flattering the hell out of Old Man Siamang; won the chance to prove his reporting and image-hyping skills as the only mediaman along on this (he saw it in rhetoric) History-Making Journey, a Daring Rescue by a Siamang Scion, a Philanthropic Family's Mission of Mercy … my ass, Dartagnan thought. He saw the two corporate cameramen filming his passage, the colored armbands that made them Siamang's men. His stomach constricted over an unexpected pang of hope.

He glanced up, at the purity of blackness unmarred by atmosphere, at the stars. Somewhere below his feet, through kilometers of nearly solid rock, was the tiny, pale spinel of the sun Heaven. He would be seeing it again, soon enough—he focused on the looming grotesqueness tethered at the end of the mooring cable, bifurcated by the abrupt edge of the asteroid's horizon: the converted volatile freighter that would take them across the Main Belt and on in to Heaven's second planet, to pick up one man … and a treasure. The three jutting booms that kept its nuclear electric rockets suspended away from the living quarters clutched rigid cylinders instead of the usual flimsy volatiles sack; it carried a liquid fuel rocket for their descent to the planet's surface.

The rest of the party was clustering now beneath the ship. He pulled himself along the final length of cable, unslung his camera and checked its pressure seal, plugged the recording jack into his suit's radio. He began to film, identifying one figure from another by the intricately colored geometric patternings on their suits. There was Old Man Siamang, praising the nobility of a single human life, no effort should be too great to save this man—and a salvage find that could benefit all the people of the Demarchy.… Dartagnan shook his head, behind his shielding faceplate. The Demarchy was an absolute democracy, and its philosophy was every man for himself, unless he got in the way of too many others … or he happened to have something too many others wanted.

Chaim knew, because it was his business to know, that a prospector had gotten himself stranded on Planet Two when his landing craft broke down. The prospector's radioed distress calls had been monitored; and knowing, like everyone else, that no one would come after him unless it was worth their while, he had revealed that he had found a considerable cache of prewar salvage items, including computer software that could streamline any distillery's volatile processing.

The distilleries were among the few of the small, independent corporations of the Demarchy to have the resources to send a ship in after him, and his discovery provided them with the motivation. Siamang and Sons had as much motivation as anyone, but they also had one crucial additional asset: they alone had the rocket engines available for a landing craft. And so Siamang and Sons would be the first to reach Planet Two, making them most likely to get the rights to the prize as well.

Old Man Siamang had finished his speech, and the handful of representatives of other distilleries responded with all the sincerity their silent applause implied. Sabu Siamang, the old man's son and heir, added a few words, equally insincere. But great copy. Siamang was sending his own son on a journey into the unknown, a landing on a world with not only a substantial gravity well, but also the unpredictability of an atmosphere. Maybe there was no one else Old Siamang would trust: but Dartagnan had heard it rumored that there were other reasons why the old man might want the future corporate head to face a little reality and responsibility. Young Siamang said good-bye to his father—any resentment well disguised under a gracious respectfulness—and to his wife. Dartagnan felt surprised that a woman of her position had come out onto the surface, even for this short a time. Her voice was calm, self-assured, like her husband's. Chaim wondered whether she did it for appearances, or if she'd wanted to come. He felt another sharp, sudden emotion; ignored it, unsure even of what it was.

He filmed the ritual of cordial bowing, the leave-taking, the others going back across the field: filming and being filmed, he followed Sabu Siamang up into the waiting ship.

Dartagnan kicked free of his suit in the cramped alcove with the unconscious grace of a man who had spent his whole life on planetoids where gravity was almost nonexistent. He pulled himself through the doorway into the control room, took in the instrument panels: Siamang leaned lightly against one, probing carelessly among the rows of displays.

“Don't touch those! … please, Demarch Siamang.” The soft, almost girlish voice had a cutting edge of irritation, which dulled abruptly with remembered deference.

Dartagnan looked past Siamang in the dim half-light: saw the pilot, the third and final member of their expedition. Just a kid, he thought, startled: a slim boy in a dark, formless jumpsuit, with short sky-black hair: average height, his own height, maybe two meters. Epicanthic folds almost hooded the bad temper in the boy's dark, upturning eyes.

Siamang looked around, startled at the tone; an expression of not-quite-apology formed on his face. “Oh, sorry.” A broad expanse of smile showed against his dark skin, darker hair. Dartagnan irrelevantly remembered animal faces frescoed on an antique table. (He had never seen any real animal larger than an insect; they were extreme rarities since the Civil War.) Chaim was never sure of the color of Siamang's eyes, but only that they struck with the building intensity of a spotlight. He saw the pilot falter and look down. Siamang looked back at Dartagnan, relaxing. Chaim faced the blinding gaze easily, used to not-seeing a face. Siamang was in his mid-thirties, perhaps ten years older than Dartagnan himself, and the rich embroidery of his loose jacket, the precise tailoring of his tight breeches, the shine on his boots, were blinding in their own right. The well-dressed demarch … “You haven't met our pilot, have you? Mythili Fukinuki … Our token mediaman, Mythili—”

Something in Siamang's voice made the pilot's surname into a double double-entendre. Dartagnan looked back at the pilot, stared, as suspicion became realization. My God, a woman—? He didn't say it aloud; was grateful, as her eyes snapped up, burning with hostility. He had never seen a female pilot, they were as much a rarity as a living animal. He realized belatedly that Siamang had not introduced him, apparently wasn't planning to. He wondered if Siamang had already forgotten his name. “Uh—my name's Chaim Dartagnan. My friends call me Red.” He raised a hand, gestured at the auburn friz of his hair above his own faded-brown skin.

The pilot categorized him with a look he had grown used to.

Siamang's easy laughter filled the uneasy space between them. “I didn't think mediamen had any friends.”

Dartagnan matched the laughter, added a careful note of self-deprecation. “I guess I should've said ‘acquaintances’.”

“Red, here, is up from the media ranks, Mythili. If he does a good job, Dad's going to hire him permanently. So be nice to him; you may have to be seeing a lot more of him.” He winked, and the pilot's expression changed slightly. Chaim estimated that the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “How does it feel, Red, to be up here now, instead of down there with the rest of the coprophage-corps?”

Dartagnan laughed again, meaning it. “Real good, boss. Just fine. I plan to make a habit of it.”

“We're scheduled for departure in one kilosecond. Demarch Siamang,” the pilot said. “Maybe you ought to check your cabin to make sure all your belongings are aboard. Just down the passageway—” She pointed at the hole in the middle of the floor, ringed by an aluminum guardrail.

“Good idea.” Siamang pushed himself away from the panel, moving by her as he half-drifted toward the well. “Good to be aboard, Fukinuki …” His hand slid down over her buttocks in passing.

If looks could kill, we'd be dead men. Dartagnan studied the floor, waiting to be turned to stone.

“Well?”

He glanced up, not focusing.

“You have the crew's dormitory all to yourself. Do you want to check out your belongings or not?” She pointed again. She had moved out of range of the exit well.

He waved at his camera and sack of gear, at his own threadbare, unembellished jacket. “This's it; I travel light.” He grinned ingratiatingly at nothing, got no response. “You know … uh … I have the same problem with my name. Everybody's always asking me, ‘Where's the Three Musketeers?’” It was a subject of morbid fascination to him that the most stupid and illiterate of men seemed somehow to have heard of that obscure Old World novel.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” She drifted to the control panel, caught hold of a stabilizing strap, began to check readings.

“What's—”

“And before you ask, ‘What's a nice girl like me doing in a job like this?’ I'll tell you. It's because I want to be here. And yes, no, no, and no. Yes, I am sterile. No, I wasn't born that way. No, I'm not sorry I did it. And no, I did not get the job by agreeing to put out for my passengers—I got it because I'm a damn good pilot! … Any more questions, mediaman?”

“No … I guess that about covers them all.” He raised his hands, palms out in surrender. “But actually,” he lied, “I was only planning to ask if you'd mind my filming our departure on your screen.”

“I do mind. The control room's a restricted area as far as the passengers are concerned.”

“It's my job—”

“It's my job. Keep your lens out of it.”

He shrugged, and bowed, and stepped into the well.

Supplies and equipment had been stored in the crew's quarters, filling most of the space from ceiling to floor, wall to wall. Dartagnan found the one remaining bunk halfway up a wall and strapped himself onto it, comforted by the feeling of closeness, used to it. My God, is it really happening …? He shut his eyes, hands under his head; relaxed his body abruptly, thoroughly, like switching off a machine. Memories from the time when he had piloted his father's ship showed him the images he would have seen on this ship's viewscreen, as they rose almost silently, almost without sensation of movement, from Mecca's surface … His imagination expanded, for a vision of the entire Heaven system, circling in a sea of darkness:

The Heaven system consisted of a G-class star orbited by four planets. The two inner worlds, nameless, were essentially uninhabitable, one too hot, one too cold, with nearly nonexistent atmospheres. The two outer worlds were gas giants: Discus, a carnelian scarab set within twenty separate bands of sun-silvered dust and frozen gases; Sevin, dim green, and unreachable since the Civil War. Both of those worlds were also uninhabited.

But between Planet Two and Discus lay an asteroid belt, the Heaven Belt, which at one time had held a thriving human colony richer even than its parent Earth. But the Civil War had destroyed Heaven Belt, bringing death to nearly a hundred million people, most of its population; and now the Belt was for the most part a vast ruin, where the still-living preyed on the artifacts of the dead in order to keep on living. Among the small isolated pockets of humanity that still continued, the Demarchy had survived almost intact, due to its location. The Demarchy lay in the trojan asteroids, a 140,000-kilometer teardrop of planetoids trapped forever sixty degrees ahead of Discus in its orbital path. The Demarchy had been able to continue trade within itself, and with another surviving subculture, the inhabitants of the ice-bound debris that circled just beyond the rings of Discus proper. The Ringers supplied the volatiles—oxygen, hydrogen and hydrocarbons—necessary to life, as they had once supplied them to the whole of Heaven Belt. In return, the Demarchy provided the Rings with the pure minerals and refined ores that it had in plenty.

Even before the war, the corporations that dominated the Demarchy's economy and its trade had been primarily small and fragmented. The self-interested nature of the Demarchy's town-meeting style of government discouraged monopolies, and so the inherent competitiveness of capitalism had gone to an extreme. The same sophisticated communications network that kept the Demarchy's radical democracy functioning also provided a medium for the expression of corporate competition, and as a result the citizens of the Demarchy were dunned by a constant flow of news disguised by promotion, promotions disguised as news. The need for an ever-slicker, more compelling distortion of the truth had created a new ecological niche in Demarchy society, one that had been filled by the pen-for-hire, the mediaman, willing to say anything, sell anything, without question, for the highest bidder. Willing to do anything at all to impress a corporate head …

Dartagnan grew rigid unconsciously; pain knifed him in the stomach. He pressed his hands down over the pain, sighed, remembering the bribes, the lies, the haunting of offices and corridors, the long, long megaseconds it had taken to catch Old Man Siamang's ear at last, in a public washroom … the obsequious flattery it had taken to win an interview, and in his office, the careful camera angles, the fulsome praise. Sabu Siamang had been there, too, easy, gracious, charming, the complete gentleman. Dartagnan had used the same fawning approach on him, with mixed results. Sabu had asked his name, bemused, and asked, “What happened to the Three Musketeers?” Dartagnan had laughed too loudly.

Dartagnan winced mentally, opened his eyes, staring at the wall.… But Old Siamang had liked his work, had offered him this bizarre journey as a reward: ten megaseconds away from civilization, putting him out of touch with everything he needed to know. But if he did his job well, that wouldn't matter; when he returned to Mecca City he would be Siamang's man, and his life would be secure at last.

He thought about Mythili Fukinuki, Goody Two-Shoes, I-don't-put-out-for-the-passengers, wondered how the hell she'd ever won the old man's alleged heart. A woman pilot, for God's sake—one of those women who put selfish interests and personal ambition above their own biological role as women, as childbearers, as the preservation of mankind's future.

Before the Civil War there had been no reason why women could not work or travel in space; but the war had changed many things, even for the Demarchy. The Demarchy still had the resources to preserve sperm, but not ova; because of the high shipboard radiation levels men were exposed to—both from solar storms and from the dirty atomic fission batteries of their own ships—they were usually sterilized, and a supply of undamaged sperm was put aside for the time when they were ready to raise a family. Sound, fertile women had no similar recourse, and so they were encouraged, even forced, to remain in the relative safety of the cities, protected by walls of stone, supported by their men. But with the comparatively high background radiation from the dirty postwar power sources, even in the “protected” cities, the percentage of defective births was on the rise. Women who could produce a healthy child were considered to be one of the Demarchy's prime assets. But to some of them, that still wasn't enough.… She had contacts. That's the only way anybody ever gets anything.

He heard someone moving in the commons on the next level; he got up, taking his camera with him. Mythili Fukinuki was heating containers of food in the pantry. He drifted up behind her, looked over her shoulder.

“Lunchtime?”

She twisted to face him, startled; light danced along the tines of the fork in her hand.

Chaim jerked back, awkwardly, through half a somersault. He righted himself, hands raised. “Hey, all I want is lunch!”

Her face eased into a mocking smile; he wondered who was being mocked. “There are the bins, pick out what you want. Remember to close the lids tightly. This is an infrared heater, there's the trash. Eat when you want to, clean up after yourself.” She turned back, fixed her containers with a clack onto the magnetized tray, and moved away to the table.

He joined her with his own tray, half-sitting on air in the near-normal gravity of the ship's constant acceleration. She frowned faintly, went on eating, in silence. Uncomfortable, he began, “I'm impressed. This is a hell of a nice ship, I—”

“Well it looks like the two of you are getting along even better than I imagined.” Siamang drifted down through the ceiling well. “Put in a good word for me, Red; if you get any further—”

Dartagnan looked up, feeling the edge on Siamang's voice. He offered a grin. “I sure will, boss … if I get any further.”

The pilot picked up her tray wordlessly, made a wide circuit upward to the entry well, and disappeared. Chaim heard the door of her cabin slam to, and, in the silence, the click of a lock. This time it was Siamang who laughed too loudly. Siamang glanced at the pantry, the empty table, the fork spearing a sticky lump of vegetable-in-sauce halfway to Dartagnan's mouth. Siamang raised his eyebrows, used his eyes.

Dartagnan lowered the fork, noticed something new and peculiar about the eyes. “I just started, boss, if you want to take mine. I can heat up some more.” He offered with his hands, pushed himself away from the table.

“You're sure you don't mind? thanks, Red.” Siamang moved complacently in toward the table as Chaim moved away. His voice slurred, barely noticeable. “One thing you must have that I don't is a way with women … if you could call that one a woman. Must come from all the lies you tell.” He picked up the fork. “You impress me, Red. How can you mediamen tell so many lies, so convincingly? Are you born that way?”

Chaim focused on Siamang's eyes for half a second, trying to be certain of what he saw; Siamang's eyes probed the private darknesses of his mind like a spotlight. He looked away, unfocused. An aggressor … The disjointed word burned on his eyelids like an afterimage. But the eyes were too bright, glassy, the pupils dilated until he couldn't see an iris. Siamang was high on something; Dartagnan didn't know what, didn't want to know. He smiled inanely. “No, boss, nobody's born that way. It takes practice; a hell of a lot of practice.” He flipped the cover casually down over his camera lens, drifted toward the pantry. He had the sudden unhappy thought that there wouldn't be many scenes worth recording during their transit to Planet Two. He said a quick, silent prayer to no one in particular that Siamang would give him some decent footage when they got there.

“Tell me something else, Red—” Siamang's voice went on, teasing, vaguely condescending.

Dartagnan grinned, not seeing Siamang, or the room, or even the ship, but only the starry void beyond. It's going to be a long trip. It better be worth it.

After the first few hundred kiloseconds, Dartagnan stopped carrying his camera, stopped doing almost everything that brought him into contact with the others. Siamang stayed closed in his room, passing the time in a world that Chaim was not interested in visiting; he came out only for meals, for an occasional, teasing attack on Dartagnan's scruples, or a casual pass at the pilot. The pilot stayed locked in her own cabin, doing what, Dartagnan didn't know, didn't care; she came out only to eat and check readings in the control room, avoiding them both.

But he used the opportunity of her absence, eventually, to ignore her arbitrary restrictions and get into the control room himself. He filmed the view of stars that showed on the screen; stayed, watching the screen in the comfortable, clicking silence, escaping from the blank-walled boredom of his cluttered quarters below.

His eyes began to drift from the central viewscreen, studying the projected strings of numbers, the intricate geometric filigrees that showed on the peripheral screens. He frowned absently at the angle of the sun, the position of the lightweight screen beyond the ship's hull that kept sunlight from striking directly on the landing module. He murmured an inquiry to the computer, watched as the string of figures changed on the screen, began to flash, on and off.

“What do you think you're doing?”

He jerked guiltily, caught hold of the panel as the pilot rose up into the room. “I think one of the propellant tanks on the landing module is heating up; you might want to adjust the sunshade—”

“Get away from there. I told you the control room was off limits! What have you done.…” She pushed off from the rungs that circled the well's perimeter, came up to the panel. “Of all the stupid—” Her eyes went to the flashing figures on the screen, back down to the panel. She queried, got the same answer. “You're right.” She looked up at him again as if she'd never seen him before. “How could you know that?”

“Mediamen know everything.” He saw her expression begin to change back. “Well—actually, I'm a qualified pilot.”

“You?” She blinked. “I didn't think—”

“Funny, I think the same things about women.”

She turned back to the panel; he watched her reposition the sunshade. She said, very softly, defensively, “I don't usually make those mistakes. But I haven't been coming up here as much as I should … I shouldn't let him get to me!”

“Siamang?”

She nodded, not looking at him, the soft, shadowed curve of her mouth drawing tight.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Not exactly what you'd call easy to love, is he?” But believe me, I've known worse.

“He's a sadist!” Her voice shook.

Dartagnan felt his throat close, swallowed. “What do you mean? You mean he—”

“No. No, he's too ‘civilized’ for that. He's a psychological sadist. When he's with his father, with the other corporation men, he's fine, charming, normal. But when it's someone he doesn't—respect—he …” she broke off, searching for the word, “… he …”

“He ‘teases’. ” Chaim nodded. “I'll show you my scars, if you'll show me yours.” He hesitated. “Why do you put up with it?”

“I like my job! He—doesn't travel much.”

He heard a noise below; his slow smile widened with insincerity as he looked toward the well. “Heads up.”

Siamang appeared, pinned them against the panel with his gaze as he pushed upward past the rim of the well. “So here you are,” he said, too congenially. He held a drink bulb in his hand, sucked at the straw.

“Hello, boss.” Dartagnan bowed. “We were just talking about what a pleasure it is to work for Siamang and Sons.”

Siamang laughed in disbelief. “I thought we were supposed to confine our socializing to the lower levels.”

“I was just getting a little footage of the stars, a little arty effect: with the pilot's supervision.…” He raised his hands apologetically.

“He was just leaving,” Mythili said, her voice brittle.

“Good. Don't want to break the rules, do we, Red?” Siamang tossed his drink bulb out into the air. Chaim watched it arc slowly downward toward the cold metal of the floor. “Time for a refill.” He sank, like the bulb, disappeared below floor level. His door opened, closed.

“You're always surrendering, aren't you, Dartagnan? Always lying—”

Dartagnan looked back at the pilot's rigid face, feeling her distaste, and down at his hands, still palm-out in the air. He pulled them in against his sides, unexpectedly ashamed, covered the twinge of his stomach. “Yeah.” He wiped his hands on his jacket. “Always lying flat on my back, while the whole damned universe fucks my integrity.” He stepped into the well.

Mythili Fukinuki caught at the ceiling, stopped herself from drifting on down into the dormitory. Dartagnan looked up, almost surprised.

“Do you mind?”

“Not if you don't.” He pushed aside his camera on the bunk. “Make yourself at home. I'm harmless.”

She floated down. Her knees bent slightly as she reached the floor, stabilizing. Her short, shining hair moved softly across her forehead; her skin was the color of antique gold in the strong light. Chaim glanced away uneasily.

Her own dark eyes searched the emptiness, avoiding him. “Why do you do it, if it—”

“What's a nice boy like me doing in a job like this?” He grinned, peering down at her, like the Cheshire Cat. She flushed. The grin disappeared, leaving him behind. “Somebody has to do it.”

“But you don't.” She brushed back her hair. “Not if you really hate it so much.”

“The voice of experience?” He baited her, smarting with the things she didn't say. “Goody Two-Shoes, female pilot, tell our viewers how you got where you are. And don't tell me it was clean living. It was connections—”

Her mouth tightened. “That's right, it was. My uncle was a freighter pilot, my father got him to use his influence. But they did it because it was what I wanted.”

“Well, good for them; good for you,” he said sourly. “We should all have it so good. If we did, maybe I'd be where you are, instead of where I am.”

“There are other jobs. You don't need influence—”

“—to dump fertilizer into a hydroponics tank for the rest of my life? To break up rocks in a refinery? Sure. All the dead-end jobs in the universe, back home on Delhi.… Being a mediaman, at least I've got a chance, at money, at making contacts … at maybe getting free, getting a ship of my own again, someday. If this's what I have to do to get it—whatever I have to do—I will.”

She settled slowly onto a box. “Oh … What happened to your ship? What kind of ship was it?”

“It wasn't my ship … my father's. He taught me all I know; like they say.” He laughed oddly. “He was a prospector, it was a flyin' piece of junk. I never saw it till I was eighteen. I hardly ever saw him. My mother was a contract mother.”

“Oh.” Almost sorrow.

He nodded. “When I was eighteen my father dropped in out of the black like a meteor and told me I was going prospecting. I spent fifty megasecs learning to pilot a ship, scouting artifacts on rocks with names I'd never even heard of; hardly ever seeing anybody but him … and a lot of corpses.” He laughed again, not hearing it. “I thought I'd go crazy. Finally he gave up and let me go home, instead. The next thing we heard from him, he claimed he'd made the strike of his life … and the next thing we heard, he was dead. He'd smashed up the ship, and smashed himself up, in a lousy docking accident. Some corporation picked up his salvage find, we never got a thing. I had to start doing something then, to support my mother … and here I am. I thought I'd enjoy being a mediaman, after fifty megaseconds of prospecting … Now, even solitary confinement sounds good.”

“Why did your mother let you do it? Doesn't she know—?” Sympathy softened the clear, straight lines of her face.

“What was she supposed to do? Dump fertilizer instead of me?” He shrugged. “She's nice looking, she got married, maybe a hundred megasecs ago. I don't hear from her much now; her husband doesn't appreciate me, for obvious reasons.… While my father was alive, she never even contracted to have anybody else's children. Funny—he stayed with us maybe seven times in six hundred megaseconds, never gave her a thing, except me; but she loved him, I think she always hoped he'd marry her someday.” He grunted. “Wouldn't that make a great human-interest filler.… Sorry, I haven't been filling my quota of compulsive conversation for the last megasecond.” And watching her, all at once he was overwhelmingly aware of another need that had not been fulfilled for too long. The fact that she made no effort at all at sensuality made her suddenly, unbearably sensual. He unbuttoned the high collar of his loose, gray-green jacket, shifted uncomfortably above the edge of the bunk, almost losing his balance.

“My father,” she said, looking down, unaware, “wanted a son. But he couldn't have one … genetic damage. That's why he let me become a pilot; it was like having a son for him. But there's nothing wrong with that—” her voice rose slightly. “Because piloting is what I always wanted to do.”

“Was it? Or was it really just that you wanted to please your father?” He wondered what had made him say that.

She looked up sharply. “It was what I wanted. If a mediaman isn't satisfied to stay in his ‘place’, why should I have to be?”

Something in her look cracked the barrier of his invulnerable public face. He nodded. “It's not easy, is it? They never make it easy.…”

She smiled, very faintly. “No, Dartagnan … they never do. But maybe you've helped, a little.”

“Call me Chaim?”

“I thought your friends called you Red.”

“I don't have any friends.”

She shook her head, still smiling; pushed up from the box, and rose toward the entrywell. “Yes, you do.”

Alone, he meditated on stars until his arousal subsided, leaving a warmth in his mind that had nothing to do with sex. He savored it as he listened to her heating food in the commons above his head; heard something else, Siamang's voice:

“How about heating something up for me, Mythili?”

“I'm a pilot, not a cook, Demarch Siamang. You'll have to do it yourself.”

“That's not what I meant—”

Dartagnan heard a magnetized tray clatter on the counter, a choked noise of indignation. “Do that for yourself, too!”

More faintly, a door slammed shut. Chaim let her image back into his mind, grinned at it, rueful. Well, your friendship is better than nothing, poor Goody Two-Shoes.…

But he saw little more of her, as a friend or in any other way, for the next four and a half megaseconds; their mutual dislike of Siamang, and fear of provoking him, still came between them, an impassable barrier.

Until finally Planet Two filled the viewscreen: alien, immense, a painter's palette in sterile grays—gray-blue, gray-green, gray-brown. A castaway's grateful voice filled the speaker static; tracing his radio fix, Mythili put them into a polar orbit, breaking the hypnotic flow of grays with the blinding whiteness of ice caps. For the first time, Chaim saw clouds—pale, wispy streamers of frozen water vapor trapped high in the planet's atmospheric layer. He recorded it all, and was filled with a rare wonder at being one of the few human beings in Heaven system ever to have seen it firsthand. It occurred to him that the clouds seemed more numerous than he remembered from pictures: he managed to make intelligent conversation about it, standing at Mythili's side. And, as they made final preparations to enter the ungainly craft that would take them down out of orbit, she asked him quietly to assist her in the landing.

He sat strapped into the heavily padded seat beside her own in the cabin that seemed cramped even to him. Siamang sat behind him, apparently sober, surprisingly silent. Chaim studied Mythili's movements, saw his own nervousness reflected in her face, but making her movements sharper, more certain, as though it only augmented her skill. She freed them from the grasp of the parent ship, executed the first rocket burn that broke them out of their orbit … and began the descent maneuver that neither she nor any living pilot in Heaven system had ever done, with the exception of the man stranded below.

They entered the upper atmosphere; she began the second burn. She would have to maintain a crucial balance: too swift a rate of descent would result in their destruction … but too slow a one would exhaust the ship's fuel resources while they were still high above the surface. No ships had been constructed for over two billion seconds in the Heaven system that were capable of using a planet's atmosphere to slow their descent—because since the war there had never been a need for such a ship. Until now: No nuclear electric rocket could produce the acceleration necessary for a planetary landing. And so this ship, which could provide the necessary thrust to slow their descent, had been constructed of makeshift parts and with makeshift technology, in scarcely two megaseconds' time.

Chaim read off their altitude and rate of descent from instruments that had never been calibrated for second-to-second precision at six hundred meters per second; clutched the instrument panel with sweating hands, fighting against his own sudden, unaccustomed weight. Mythili dropped them down toward the signal of the radio beacon, the viewscreen virtually useless, blocked by the intermittent glare of their rockets and the angle of their descent. She bit off a gasp, or a curse, each time they were buffeted or swept from the line of their trajectory by the terrifying force of the unseen atmospheric turbulence.

And at a thousand meters, she began the final burn. Chaim raised his voice as the sound of the rockets reached them, growing: “… six hundred meters, twenty meters per second, five hundred meters—” he felt thrust increase, “—four hundred meters, eighteen meters per second … three hundred meters … two hundred … one hundred meters, ten meters per second …” She cut thrust again, their rate of descent stabilized. “… fifty meters, ten meters per second … forty meters … thirty … twenty meters … Mythili, we're—” She increased thrust to full; ten meters per second squared crushed him down into his seat. The viewscreen was blind with dust. The ship lurched, noise drowned his words, vibration rattled his teeth, “—too fast!”

Impact jarred through him, almost an anticlimax. Mythili cut power; seconds passed before the silence registered. He blinked at the screen, still swirling gray, and pushed up in his seat against gravity's unfamiliar hand. “Congratulations—” he laughed, finding himself breathless, “it's a planet … And I didn't get a single damned shot of the whole descent!”

She drooped, triumphant, laughing with him. “If you'd been filming instead of being my copilot, I don't think we'd be here to worry about it.”

He bobbed his head. “Too kind—” touched her with his eyes. She held his gaze, smiling.

“Is it my imagination, or is it getting cold in here?” Dartagnan watched his breath frost as he spoke. He struggled with his spacesuit, feeling leaden and clumsy. He heard Siamang swear in irritation in the cramped space behind him.

“It's not your imagination—the atmosphere acts like water, it's conducting all our heat away right through the hull.” Mythili massaged her arms as she studied the viewscreen. “Siamang's engineers predicted something like this.”

Chaim saw the dome of the abandoned experimental station, nearly a kilometer away across the flat, subpolar plain; and closer in, the ungainly bulk of the prospector's ship. Both of us made a better landing than we had a right to.… Beyond them both, along the incredibly distant horizon, he thought he saw a dusting of pale snow pocked with broad, shallow craters: the south-polar icecap of Planet Two. He imagined the incredible volatile resources this world represented; remembered abruptly that they were all at the bottom of a gravity well.

“Come on, Red. Get your camera and let's get going. This is what we came for!” Siamang's voice was good natured, eager. Chaim felt a surge of relief, hoping Siamang's professional business dealings would be easier to record than his private life.

“Coming, boss … Aren't you coming?” He looked back at Mythili. “Walking on a planet isn't something everybody's done—”

She nodded. “I know. But I have to stay with the ship; it's not very well designed to deal with the effects of an atmosphere. I have to keep the cabin warm enough so that the instruments don't freeze, and enough fuel has to be bled from the tanks so that they don't rupture. And besides,” she lowered her voice, “I stay out of corporate business dealings.”

“Oh. Well, I'll show you my home movies when I get back.” He settled his helmet onto his head, latched it, picked up his camera. He staggered, stunned by its weight. The surface gravity of Planet Two was over a hundred times normal: He suddenly wished he'd accepted the corporation's offer of a lightweight prewar camera, instead of insisting on his own.

“Come on, Red!”

He followed Siamang through the lock and down the precarious rungs of the ladder. The atmospheric pressure kept his suit from ballooning; it clutched him as he moved, with hands of ice.

“Damn it!” Siamang stumbled sideways, struck by an invisible blow: wind, Dartagnan realized, as it shoved him roughly back against the side of the ship. His helmet rang on metal. The surface air had been calm when they set down, but the wind was rising now, swirling the blue-gray dust into translucent curtains. Between the gusts he caught sight of a tiny figure starting toward them from the dome.

They struggled out across the shallow, flame-fused dish of the ship's landing area, went on across the fine, loose surface of the dust. “We're real dirt-siders now, boss,” he said cheerfully, more cheerfully than he felt. Dust sandblasted his faceplate; he shut his eyes against it, beginning to sweat, already shivering. Siamang didn't answer, as he struggled to keep his footing; his face was grim, barely visible behind his helmet glass. Dartagnan looked up at the sky, the spinel sun grown large against an alien ultramarine blue. He thought of sapphire, the only thing he could remember that possessed the same purity of color. They should have named it Blue instead of Two … Blue Hell. He looked down again, across the blue-gray plain at the dome, hardly larger, and at the suited figure closing with them now, proof that they were actually making headway. He let his camera slip off of his stiffening shoulder, wrapped the strap around a numb, gloved hand.

“If you aren't a sight for sore eyes!” A stranger's voice burst from his helmet speakers: the prospector, castaway, welcoming committee of one. The man held out his hands as he reached them, caught one of their own in each, shook them, bowing, all at once. He moved almost easily, Chaim noticed, envious.

“That's not all that's sore,” Siamang said, his congeniality sounding strained. “Let's get in out of this damned atmosphere.”

“Sure, of course. Let me take that for you, I'm used to this—” The man reached for Dartagnan's camera.

Chaim waved him off, recalling his duty. “No, thanks, I'm with the media … let me get a shot of this.…” He moved out, hefting the camera, plugged in, focused, pressed the trigger, tripping over his own feet. Historic Moment, Historic Rescue, Historic Setting … Cameraman Busts His Ass.… They were passing the prospector's stranded ship. Siamang's voice reached him. “Get a shot of that, Red—”

“Right, boss.” He did a close-up of the name painted on the hull, and the silhouette of an insect. “The Esso Bee?” He laughed incredulously, heard the others laugh, in amusement, and in startled recognition. He looked back toward the prospector's shadowed face, “Kwaime Sekka-Olefin, I presume?” He remembered the details of the original news broadcast. Their stranded man was an heir to a distillery fortune, but the actual corporation had been destroyed during the Civil War: Sekka-Olefin Volatiles, Esso for short, and this “secret” experimental station had been run by them before the war.

“That's right; and damned glad to meet you!” The man laughed again. “My God—it's wonderful!”

“Our pleasure,” Siamang said easily, “our pleasure to be of service, to one man or all mankind.”

They reached the low dome at last. Dartagnan recorded it for posterity, set in the desolation of wind and dust and snow, tried to keep his chattering teeth from recording on the soundtrack. Breathing hard, he trudged ahead to film their arrival, found the dark, welcoming entrance of the shelter. A passageway led steeply down, he noticed, as they passed through the airlock; he realized the main part of the installation must be underground, to help maintain an even interior temperature. He noticed that one wall of the passage was oddly serrated. He backed slowly toward it, filming, as the others entered the hall; stared, through the lens, as Sekka-Olefin suddenly lunged toward him. “Look out—!” Olefin's voice rattled in his helmet. Olefin's glove caught at his arm, missed, as Dartagnan stepped out onto the air.

The air let him down, and with a yelp of surprise he fell backwards down the stairs. The camera landed on his stomach. He lay dazed and battered, gasping for breath, seeing stars without trying. The others reached him, somehow managing not to land on top of him. They lifted the camera off of him, hauled him to his feet.

“You all right, Red?”

“Say, didn't you see the steps there—?”

“Steps?” he mumbled. “What do you mean—uh!” His right ankle buckled under a fraction of his mass, pain shot up his leg, on up his spine like an electric shock. “My leg …” He pressed back against the corridor wall, balancing on one foot. “Hurts like hell.”

“Hell's what this place is,” Siamang muttered, disgusted. “How about your camera?” He dropped it into Dartagnan's arms.

Dartagnan lost his balance; Olefin reached out and caught him. He shook the sealed case, probed it, turned it over, and peered through the lens. His chest hurt. He replugged the recording jack. “Looks okay … Ought to be a great shot of the ceiling as I went over backwards.” He tasted blood from his split lip. “I think the damned thing landed on top of me on purpose.”

“Good thing it's tougher than you are,” Siamang said, “or you might be out of a job, Red.”

Dartagnan laughed, weakly. He looked back up the passageway. The purpose of the serrated wall was appallingly obvious to him, in hindsight; steps, a series of plateaus for breaking downward momentum under high gravity. That's adding insult to injury.… He grimaced.

The prospector offered him a shoulder to lean on, and they went on along the hall.

“How about a drink to celebrate the occasion? To celebrate my not having to drink alone—” Olefin picked a bottle up off of the floor in the littered cubicle that had been his home for the past ten megaseconds. Dartagnan noticed a pile of other bottles, mostly empty.

“Sounds good. I could use some antifreeze; this place is instant death. How cold does it get here, anyway? It must be zero degrees Kelvin.…” Siamang rubbed circulation back into his fingers. They had taken off their suits, at Olefin's urging; the air would have been uncomfortably cool under other circumstances.

“No … no, it only gets down to about 230 degrees Kelvin after the sun sets. Of course, that's not counting the wind chill factor.” Olefin grinned.

Dartagnan sat on the bare cot, his leg up, his ankle swelling inside his boot. Olefin glanced back at him, questioning. Chaim noticed that the eyes were green, freckled with brown, under the heavy brows, brow-ridges. Olefin was in his fifties and well preserved for a man who had spent most of his life in space. His unkempt, uncut hair was receding, silvering at the temples, a startling brightness against his brown skin. Distinguished Scion of Old Money … didn't know any of 'em were real people. Dartagnan shook his head. “No, thanks … I'm a teetotaler.”

Siamang looked surprised.

“Medicinal purposes?” Olefin asked, gestured with the bottle.

“That's why I don't.” He shook his head again, sincerely remorseful. “I can't drink. Got an ulcer.” He wiped his bloody lip.

Siamang's surprise burst out in laughter. “An ulcer? What've you got to worry about, Red?”

Dartagnan sighed. “I worry about having to refuse a free drink. I could sure use one.”

Olefin poured vodka into hemispherical cups; the clear liquid stayed level and didn't ooze back up the sides as he poured. Afraid to start feeling sorry for himself, Dartagnan reached for his camera. “Would you say you were lucky in finding so much intact here, Demarch Sekka-Olefin? It looks like all the life-support systems are still functional. Did that save your life? What happened to the researchers stationed here, after the war?” It almost felt good to him, after seven megaseconds of enforced silence.

Olefin leaned forward on his stool, sharing the eagerness for the sound of his own voice. “Yes, I sure as hell was lucky. Would've been damned fatal on board the Esso Bee. But nothing actually happened to damage this station during the Civil War; nobody knew it was here except Esso. After the war nobody was in a position to come here at all.… From the looks of things, the crew must have starved to death.”

Dartagnan swallowed. God, the public will love this.… “But … uh, the valuable salvage finds you made will mean that they didn't die in vain? Their discoveries will go to help the living—?”

“Yes … yes! In ways I never expected.” Olefin's voice took on a vaguely fanatical note. “Did you know that—”

Siamang shifted impatiently, set down his cup. “Demarch Sekka-Olefin; Red. If I'm not imposing—” there was no trace of sarcasm “—I'd like to ask that the interviewing be postponed until we've had the chance to discuss more important matters.”

“Oh. Certainly …” Olefin broke off, seemed suddenly almost glad of the interruption. “Anything I can do, considering what you've done for me.”

Siamang composed his face as Dartagnan turned the camera on him. “Of course, the most important matter, the basic reason I've come four hundred million kilometers, is—”

—more money, Dartagnan thought.

“—to see that you get safely off this miserable hell-world of a planet.” He produced something packaged in foam from his thin folder. “This is the replacement unit, complete with the instructions, for the component that was damaged when your ship landed here on Planet Two.”

Olefin beamed like a child with a birthday present; but Chaim noted the dark flash of another sort of humor that moved behind the hazel eyes. “‘For want of a chip, the ship was lost!’ To think of all the time and money I put in, perfecting the Esso Bee and a nuke-electric that could drag home half a planet; the best design possible—to have it all go for nothing, because one single piece of electronics was put on the outside, when it should have been on the inside.… Thank you—I literally can't thank you enough, Demarch Siamang; but I'll do my best.” He stood, reached out to shake Siamang's hand heartily. Seated again, he poured himself another drink, raised it in salute, drank it down.

“Well, you can repay us, in a sense …” Siamang paused, poised, disarmingly reticent, “… by giving Siamang and Sons the opportunity to be the first corporation to make an offer on the computer software that you reported finding.”

Olefin gave a quick nod, barely visible, that was not meant to be agreement.

Siamang went on, oblivious. “As you obviously know, it would be vital in streamlining our distilling processes—”

“And in streamlining the processing of a lot of other distilleries.” Olefin interrupted with unexpected smoothness. “What I had in mind, Demarch Siamang, was to call a public auction on the media for all the salvage, when I return to the Demarchy. I planned to offer to you, or whomever came after me, a substantial percentage of the take as a reward—”

Siamang's expression tightened imperceptibly. “What we had in mind, Demarch Sekka-Olefin, was more on the order of a flat fee offer on the software. We're not interested in any of the rest, you could bargain however you wanted on that. But it's very important to us—naturally—that Siamang and Sons is the firm to get those programs.”

And a general auction wouldn't guarantee you did. Dartagnan hid a smile behind his camera. He realized suddenly why Siamang and Sons had wanted an edited tape, and not live transmission, on this rescue mission: business transactions were never meant to be public affairs.

“I understand your feelings, Siamang; come from a distillery family myself. But I feel a covert agreement with one firm is too monopolistic, not in keeping with the Demarchy's traditions of free enterprise.… And besides, to be blunt, I've got important plans for the profit I'll be making on this salvage, and I want to get as good a deal on it as possible. That software is by far the most valuable part of it.”

“I see.” Siamang's eyes flickered to the replacement part safely settled on Olefin's knees. Chaim guessed, without trying, what wish he made. “Well, then, if you don't mind, I'll make that pleasant trek to our ship one more time and radio the home company about your position on the matter.” His smile was sunlight on the cold edge of his voice. “They may give me a little more flexibility in making an offer.…” He bowed.

Chaim stood up, goaded by an indefinable unease: he sat down again abruptly.

Siamang glanced back, pulling on his suit. “You stay here, Red. Finish your interview. You'd just slow me up. I don't intend to spend any more time out in that open air than I have to.” He bowed again courteously to Sekka-Olefin, and left the room.

Dartagnan listened to the odd shuffling of unaccustomed footsteps recede, and swore under his breath, with pain and frustration. He lifted the camera again, compulsively, protective coloration. Through the lens he saw Olefin shake his head, hand up, and reach to pour himself another drink. Chaim let the camera drop, irritated, but relieved to see that the prospector wasn't drinking this one down like the others. There was plenty of time for an interview: with the communications time-lag, Siamang wouldn't be back for at least three kiloseconds.

Olefin grinned. “A little loosens tongues, and makes life easier; a lot loosens brains, and makes it hell. I try to draw the line.… Fall was worse than you care to admit, wasn't it? Where does it hurt? … maybe I ought to have a look at that ankle.” He stood up.

Dartagnan leaned back against the cold wall, laughed once. “Ask me where it doesn't hurt! Black and blue and green all over.… Thanks, but you'd have to cut off my boot, by now, and it's the only one I've got. Doesn't matter, we'll be back in normal gee soon and it won't give me any trouble. I just have to get the job done now—” He winced as Olefin's fingers probed along his ankle.

“Job comes before everything, even you, huh? So you're a corporate flak.…” Olefin's fist rapped the sole of his boot, “Siamang's man?”

“I'm—hoping to be!” Dartagnan muttered, through clenched teeth. “So when he tells me to jump, I don't ask why, or how … I just ask, ‘Is this high enough?’”

“You won't be doing much jumping for a while, for anybody. Got a sprain, maybe a fracture.” The green-brown eyes studied him, amused; he wondered exactly what was funny. Olefin went back to pick his drink off a dusty shelf. “Don't think I could stand to work for anybody else. Comes from being raised among the idle rich, I suppose.…”

“You don't have to be rich, believe me.” Dartagnan settled on an elbow, and the cot creaked.

Olefin looked at him, the rough brows rose.

He smiled automatically. “My father was a prospector. Rock poor, to the day he died … just when he'd finally found something big, or so he claimed.” Establish a rapport with the subject, get a better interview.…

“That right? What was his name?” An encouraging interest showed on Olefin's face.

“Dartagnan—Gamal Dartagnan.”

“Yeah, I knew him—” Olefin nodded at his drink. “Didn't know he had a son. Only talked to him four or five times.”

“You and me both. He took me out with him, though. Just before the last trip he made.”

“That's right … heard about his accident. Very sorry to hear it.”

Chaim shifted his weight. “They called it an accident.”

Olefin sat down, said carefully, “Are you saying you don't think it was?”

He shrugged. “My father'd been prospecting for a long time. He knew enough not to make a mistake that big. And it seemed a little coincidental to me that a corporation just happened to be right there to pick up his find.”

“Somebody had to get there first—” Sekka-Olefin shook his head. “I suppose in your line of work you don't see the best side of corporation policy. But not many stoop to that kind of thing; that would be suicide, if it ever got out. Maybe his instruments went out; accidents happen, people make mistakes … space doesn't give you a second chance.”

Dartagnan nodded, looking down. “Maybe so. Maybe that is what happened. I suppose you'd know the truth if anybody would—you play both sides of the game.… He held that damned junkheap together with frozen spit—”

Olefin sipped his drink, expressionless. “What made you decide to quit prospecting to become a mediaman?”

Dartagnan wondered suddenly who was interviewing whom. “Prospecting. Maybe I didn't know when I was well off.”

“But now it's too late.”

He wasn't sure whether it was a question or a moral judgment. “Not if I make good in this job.…”

Olefin nodded, at something. “How'd you like another long-term job instead?”

Chaim sat up, not hiding his eagerness. “Doing what—prospecting?”

“Conducting a media campaign.”

Dartagnan slumped forward, oddly disappointed. “That's—a hell of a compliment, from a total stranger. Are you sure you mean it? And what kind of a campaign—what are you planning to sell?”

“Planet Two.”

Dartagnan sat up straight again. “What?”

“The colonizing of Planet Two from the Demarchy.”

Geez Allah: a job offer from a maniac. A rich maniac.… He reached for his camera. At least this won't be dull—

“Let's forget about that thing for a while—” Olefin shook his head. “I'll talk to it all you want, if you accept the job. But hear me out, before you type me as a crank.”

Chaim grinned sheepishly. “Whatever you say.” He toyed with the lens, aiming it where it lay; he jammed the trigger ON. A sound pierced his left eardrum, barely audible even to him, at the extreme upper end of the register. He gambled that Olefin's hearing wasn't good enough to pick it up. More than one way to get a good interview … a job in the hands worth two in the offing. “Okay, then, would you care to expand on your reasons for wanting to establish a colony on a hellhole like Planet Two?” He settled back, hands massaging his injured leg.

Olefin laughed, sobered. “How many megaseconds would you estimate Heaven Belt has left?”

Dartagnan looked at him blankly. “Before what?”

“Before civilization collapses entirely; before we all join the hundred million people who died right after the Civil War.”

Dartagnan remembered Mecca City, a manmade geode in the heart of the rock, towers like crystal growths in every imaginable shading of jewel color. He tried to imagine it as a place of death, and failed. “I don't know about the scavengers back in the Main Belt, but I don't see any reason why the Demarchy can't go on forever, just like it always has.”

“Don't you? … No. I suppose you don't. Nobody does. I suppose they don't want to face the inevitability of death. And who am I to blame them?”

“We all have to die someday.”

“But who really believes that? Maybe the fact that Esso was wiped out by the war, the fact that I was squandering literally the last of the family fortune, made me see it so clearly: that humanity's existence here has a finite end; and that end's in sight. Speaking of making mistakes, we made a hell of a big one—the Civil War—and one mistake in Heaven and you're damned forever. Damned dead.…

“Existing in an asteroid belt depends entirely on an artificial ecosystem. Everything that's vital for life, we have to process or make ourselves—air, water, food; everything. But like any other ecosystem—more than most—you destroy enough of it, and nothing that's left can survive for long. It has to retreat, or die. Back in the Solar Belt they had Earth to retreat to, if they needed it, where everything necessary for life happened naturally. But at the time Heaven was colonized, this hadn't happened to them, so they didn't foresee the need. When the old Belters colonized this system, they figured that the raw elements—the ores and the minerals, the frozen gases around Discus—were all they had to have. Never occurred to anyone that sometime they wouldn't be able to process them.

“But that's what happened. Most of the capital industry in Heaven was destroyed during the war. What we've got left is barely adequate, and there's no way we can expand or even replace it. Hell, the Ringers are hardly surviving now, and if they go under I don't know how our own distilleries are going to make it.… How good are you at holding your breath?”

Dartagnan laughed uneasily. “But—” He groped for a rebuttal, found his mind empty, like his sudden vision of the future. “But—all right. So maybe you're right, we are sliding downhill to the end.… If there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, why worry about it? Just make the best of what we've got, while we've still got it.”

“But that's the point! There is something we can do—starting now, we can establish a colony here on Planet Two, against the time when technology fails and the Demarchy can't support us anymore.”

“I don't see the point.” Dartagnan shook his head. “It's even harder to stay alive here than out in space. Even in a suit, you'd freeze to death! The atmosphere sucks the warmth out of you, even now, when the sun's up. And the gravity—”

“Gravity here's only a quarter what the human body was built to withstand. As for the cold—our equipment wasn't designed to deal with it, but it'd be easy enough to adapt; all we need is better insulation. This's no worse than parts of old Earth. Antarctica, for instance. No warmer than this, and snow up to here; but they didn't mind. The greatest thing human beings have going for them is adaptability! If those dirt-siders could do it, a Belter can do it.” Olefin's hands leaped with emphasis, his eyes gleaming like agate, lit by an inner vision. “In fact, part of my idea for a media campaign would be to rename this planet Antarctica: ‘Return to nature, cast off the artificial environment; live the way man was meant to live’—”

“I don't know.…” Dartagnan's head moved again in negation. “You sure this place is no colder than Earth? Besides, the atmosphere's still unbreathable.”

“But it's not! That's one of the most crucial points the public has to be made aware of. One of the experimental projects here was a study of the atmospheric conditions—and it proved conclusively that the atmosphere of this world is denser than it was when we first came into the system. The way the various periodicities of its orbit add up right now is causing the polar caps to melt, freeing the gases. The atmosphere's thin and dry compared to what we're used to, but it's breathable. I know; I've tried it.”

“For how long?” Dartagnan felt a sudden constricted panic at the thought of trying to breathe an alien atmosphere; his hand rose to his throat. “How's that possible? How could there be enough free oxygen?”

“Don't know. But there is; I've been out two, three kilosecs at a time.”

Dartagnan looked down, polishing the polish on the worn vinyl of his boot. “You'd have to live underground, I suppose; help to conserve heat. But we do that anyhow. And solar power—it's a lot closer in to the sun.…”

“There, you see!” Olefin nodded eagerly. “You're starting to see the possibilities. It's the answer; we had to find an answer, and this is it. This can make your career! With the money I make off of this salvage sale, we can launch a media campaign that'll convert the entire Demarchy. What do you say, Dartagnan?”

Chaim stopped polishing, kept his face averted. “I want a chance to think over what you told me first, Demarch Sekka-Olefin. I still can't really see this place as the Garden of Allah.… I'll give you my answer before we lift off, all right?” He realized that the real question he needed an answer to was whether this was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life … or whether he really had any choice. But a kind of excitement rose in him like desire, filling the void Olefin's future had created, with the knowledge that if he sold himself to Sekka-Olefin, he might not be selling out at all.

“Fair enough.…” Olefin was saying, smiling, as though he already had his answer. “I expect my numerous blood-sucking relations are going to be prostrate with grief when they hear about my plans for this salvage money. They didn't appreciate my spending what was left of the family inheritance on this project; I didn't name that ship out there; they named it, after me.…” He laughed at his own joke. “And my mother-ship up there in orbit isn't called the Mother for nothing.”

Dartagnan began a grin, heard footsteps in the hall, and felt his face lose all expression again. He drew his aching leg off of the cot, positioned it gingerly on the floor. He stood up, and was suddenly afraid to move.

Olefin leaned past him, pulled a long t-barred pole from under the cot, and held it out. Chaim saw that the ends were wrapped in rags. “Here,” Olefin said, “use my crutch. I fell down the goddamned steps in the dark when I first got here.”

Chaim finished the grin this time, as Siamang arrived in the doorway, his helmet under his arm. Dartagnan's eyes moved from Olefin's face to Siamang's. He realized suddenly that he had made his decision. He bowed.

Siamang bowed to them in return, his gaze shielded by propriety. “I trust I haven't inconvenienced you, Demarch Sekka-Olefin. I'm sure you want to make your repairs and get off of this miserable planet as soon as possible.” He chafed his arms through his suit. “My pilot tells me we'll have to lift off before sunset, ourselves; our storage batteries are getting low from trying to maintain temperatures in the ship. But I've got good news—permission to do whatever' s necessary to reach an agreement with you about that software.” A gleam like a splinter of ice escaped his eyes. Dartagnan tried to see whether his pupils were dilated, couldn't.

“Good, then.” Olefin nodded. “Maybe we can discuss business matters further, after all.”

“My hope as well. But first—if you don't mind—I would like to take a look at what we're going to be bargaining for.”

Olefin looked vaguely surprised; Dartagnan wondered what Siamang thought he could tell simply by looking at program spools. Olefin shrugged. “If you don't mind going back out into the ‘weather’, Demarch Siamang. I've got them aboard the Esso Bee.”

Siamang grimaced. “That's what I was afraid of. But yes, I'd still like to see them.”

They made their way across the shifting, slatey dust to the base of Olefin's landing craft. Dartagnan stopped, staring at the ladder that climbed the mass of the solid-fuel module between jutting pod-feet. His muscles twitched with fatigue, his ankle screamed abuse along the corridors of his nerves.

Siamang looked at his upturned faceplate. “You'll never make it up there, Red.” Siamang's voice inside his helmet was oddly unperturbed, and slurred, very slightly. “Don't worry about it, you've got plenty of film footage. Just record the audio… and worry about how you'll get back on board our own ship.” Siamang's glove closed lightly on his shoulder, good-humoredly, unexpectedly. Startled, he watched them climb the ladder and disappear through the lock.

Dartagnan settled on a rung of the ladder, grateful that for now at least the atmosphere was at rest, and kept its own invisible hands off of him. The sun was dropping down from its zenith in the ultramarine shell of the sky; he noticed tiny flecks of gauzy white sticking to the flawless, sapphire purity of blue, very high up. He realized he was seeing clouds from below. He began to shiver, wondering when the others would finish their business, and whether it would be before he froze to death. Their cautious haggling droned on, filling his ears; he began to feel sleepy under the anesthetic of cold.…

He shook his head abruptly, stood up, waking himself with pain. He realized then that the ghost-conversation inside his helmet was no longer either droning or polite; heard Siamang threatening: “This's my last offer. Olefin. I advise you to take it, or I'll have to—”

“Put it away, Siamang. Threats don't work with me. I've been around too long—”

Dartagnan heard vague, disassociated noises, a cry, a thud. And finally, Siamang's voice: “Olefin. Olefin?” Numbed with another kind of coldness, Chaim focused his camera on the hatchway, and waited.

Siamang appeared, dragging Olefin's limp, suited form. He gave it a push; Dartagnan stumbled back as it dropped like a projectile to the dust in front of him, to lie twisted, unmoving. Dumbfounded, he went on filming: the corpse, Siamang's descent of the ladder; the Death of a Dream.

Siamang came toward him across the fire-fused dust, took the camera out of his nerveless hands. He pried the thumb-sized film cassette loose and threw it away. Dartagnan saw it arc downward, disappear somewhere out in the endless blue-gray silt of the plain: His own future, mankind's future, Sekka-Olefin's last will and testament, lost to his heirs—lost to mankind, forever. “That wouldn't have made very good copy, now, would it?” Siamang dropped the camera, stepped on the fragile lens aperture with his booted foot. He picked it up again, handed it back. “Too bad your camera broke when you took that fall. But we don't hold bad luck against a man, as long as he cooperates. I'm sure I can depend on you to cooperate, in return for the proper incentive?”

Dartagnan struggled to reach his voice. “He—he's really dead?” “No corporation would stoop to murder,” Olefin had said.…

Siamang nodded; his hand moved slightly. Dartagnan saw the dark sheen of metal. Siamang was armed. A dart-gun; untraceable poison. “I can depend on you, can't I, Red? I'd like to keep this simple.”

“I'm your man, boss … body and soul,” Dartagnan whispered. Thinking, I'll see you in hell for this; if it's the last thing I ever do.

“That's what I figured.… It was an accident, he fell; he was too damned fragile, he'd been in space too long. I never intended to kill him. But that doesn't make much difference, under the circumstances. So I think we'll just say he was alive when we left him. His body'll freeze out here, nobody can prove he didn't fall after we left—if anybody ever even bothers to investigate. Anybody could see he drank too much.”

“Yeah … anybody.” The wind was rising, butting against Dartagnan's body; the dust shifted under his feet, eroding his stability.

“I'm sure you can construct a moving account of our mission, even without film—a portrait in words of the grateful old man, the successful conclusion of our business transaction.…” Siamang brushed the metal container fixed at the waist of his suit. “Do a good, convincing job, and I'll make it more than worth your while,” Dartagnan felt more than saw the aggressor's eyes assess him, behind Siamang's helmet-glass. “What's your fondest wish, Red? Head of our media staff? Company pilot? Maybe a ship of your own? … Name it, it's yours.”

“A ship,” he mumbled, startled. “I want a ship,” thinking wildly. The smart businessman knows his client.

“Done,” Siamang bowed formally, offered a gloved hand. Chaim took the hand, shook it.

Siamang's heavy boot kicked the bottom of his crutch, it flew free. Dartagnan landed flat on his back in the dirt.

“Just remember your place, Red; and don't get any foolish ideas.” Siamang turned away, starting back toward their ship across the lifeless plain.

Dartagnan belly-flopped into the airlock, lay gasping for long seconds before he pulled himself to his feet and started it cycling. He removed his helmet, picked up his crutch, started after Siamang into the control room. The vision of Mythili Fukinuki formed like a fragile blossom in the empty desolation of his mind; he forced his face into obedient blankness, hoped it would hold, as the image in his mind became reality.

She stood at the panel, arms folded, listening noncommittally to Siamang's easy lies. Chaim entered the cramped cabin, she glanced at him as Siamang said, “Isn't that about all, Red?”

“I guess so, boss.” He nodded, not sure what he had agreed to. He stopped, balancing precariously, as her eyes struck him like a slap.

“I'm afraid that's not all, Demarch Siamang.” Mythili pushed away from the panel, set her gaze of loathing hatred against Siamang's own impenetrable stare. A small knife glittered suddenly in her hand. “There's the matter of a murder.” She gained the satisfaction of seeing Siamang's self-confidence suddenly crack. “I didn't like what I heard when you talked to your father, and so I monitored your suit radio. I heard everything.” She looked again at Dartagnan, and away. “And I intend to tell everything, when we get back to the Demarchy. You won't get away with it.”

“Never underestimate the power of a woman.” Siamang smiled sourly, flexing his hands. “I don't suppose it would do any good to point out that if you turn me in you'll be out of a job; whereas if you were willing to play along, you could have any job you wanted?”

“No,” she said, “it wouldn't. Not everybody has a price.”

“I didn't expect you would, in any case. But I expect you're getting a great deal of pleasure out of doing this to me, Fukinuki.… Unfortunately, there's another old saying, ‘Never underestimate your enemy.’ I'm terminating your services, Mythili. You're not getting a chance to talk.” Siamang produced the gun, raised it.

She stiffened, lifting her head defiantly. “You won't kill me. I'm your pilot, you need me to get you home.”

“That's where you're wrong. As you pointed out to me, Red here is a qualified pilot. So I don't really need you anymore. You've made yourself expendable. Drop the knife, Mythili.” His hand tightened. “Drop it or I'll kill you right now.”

Slowly her fingers opened; the knife clattered on the floor. Siamang picked it up.

Dartagnan swore under his breath. “But, boss, I'm not qualified to pilot anything like this—”

“A ship's a ship.” Siamang frowned. “You'll manage.”

“Chaim—” she turned to him desperately, “help me. He won't kill us both, he'd never get back to the Demarchy if he did! Together we can stop him; don't let him get away with this—”

“I'll kill you both if I have to, and pilot the ship myself.” Siamang's eyes turned deadly; Dartagnan saw the dilated pupils clearly now—and believed him.

“He's bluffing,” Mythili said.

Chaim caught her gaze, pleading. “Mythili, for God's sake, change your mind. Tell him you'll keep your mouth shut. Go along with him, it isn't worth it, it's not worth your life.”

She looked away from him, deaf and blind.

“Save your breath, Red. I wouldn't trust her anyway … she's got too much integrity. And besides, she hates me too much; she'd never change her mind. She's just been waiting for a chance like this, look at her—” Anger strained his voice. “No. I think we'll just drop her off somewhere between here and the Demarchy, and let her walk home. And in the meantime—” he moved toward her suddenly, “—we might as well have a little fun.” He blocked her as she tried to escape, threw her back against the instrument panel, ripping open the seal of her jumpsuit.

“No!” Dartagnan cried.

Siamang turned; held her, struggling, against the panel. Dartagnan glimpsed her face beyond him, the loathing and the fresh, sudden terror; her shining, golden skin. Siamang pulled her away from the board, twisting her arm behind her. “Okay, Red, if you want her first. She's sweet on you anyway.…” He pushed her at Dartagnan.

Chaim caught hold of her, dropped his crutch, fighting to keep his balance. “Mythili …”

She spat in his face, pulling her jumpsuit closed. Siamang laughed.

Chaim let anger show. “Forget it; I'm not interested.”

“Don't do me any favors, mediaman—” She was flint-on-steel against him, her outrage burned him like a flame.

He let her go, wiped his face; he said roughly, “Believe me. I'm not doing you any favor.” But, God help me, maybe I'm saving your life—and mine. He looked back at Siamang, leaned down to pick up his crutch, covering sudden inspiration. “I've got a better idea. Instead of spacing her later, put her out here, now, in a suit with the valve jammed. The sun's going down … she'll suffocate or freeze … and we can watch, to make sure she's dead. A tragic accident.” He felt her anguish, her helpless rage; felt a hot, stabbing pain in his stomach.

Siamang smiled as the possibilities registered. “Yes, I like it.… All right, Red; we'll do it your way. But there's no reason why I still can't have some fun with little Fukinuki, first.…” He reached up, began to unbutton his jacket.

“Yes, there is.”

Siamang looked at him. “Oh?”

“It's getting late, the ship's batteries are running down. And besides, the wind's rising. If you expect me to get us up out of here safely, I don't want to wait any longer.… Won't you get enough pleasure watching her die out there—?” Dartagnan's voice rose too much.

Siamang smiled again, slowly. “Okay, Red, you win.… Get into a suit, Mythili, before I change my mind.”

She walked wordlessly past Dartagnan, clinging to the shreds of her dignity; he watched her put on a suit. She fumbled, awkward, made clumsy by gravity and nervousness. Wanting to help her, Chaim stood motionless, turned to stone.

She turned back to them at last, waiting, the helmet under her arm. “All right,” she murmured, barely audible. “I'm ready.…”

Siamang crossed the cabin to her side, reached behind her head to the airflow valve at her neck. She shuddered as he touched her. Dartagnan watched him tighten the knob that shut off the oxygen flow, watched his body tighten with the effort.

“Put on your helmet.”

She took a deep breath, put it on. Siamang latched it in place, motioned her toward the lock. She went to it, stepped inside, jerkily, like a broken doll.

“Red.” Siamang gestured. “You do the honors.”

Dartagnan hobbled to the control plate, counting seconds in his mind. He could barely see her face, staring back at him, saw her mouth move silently: Damn you, damn you, damn you! … He thought there were tears in her eyes, wasn't sure.

He nodded, whispering, “Goodbye, Goody Two-Shoes. Good luck—” His hand trembled as he reached out to start the lock cycling.

He turned back with Siamang to the control panel, watched the viewscreen, waited. The seconds passed, the lock cycled. She appeared suddenly on the screen, stumbled as the wind gusted … fell, got up, fell again as she tried to run, trying to reach the sheltering dome, too far away. The shifting, slate-blue dust slipped under her feet; she fell again, tried to get up, couldn't. At last he saw her try to free the frozen valve one final time … and then unlatch her helmet. She raised her head, too far away for him to see her face; he dragged a breath into his own tortured lungs. She reached for her helmet again, frantically … crumpled forward into the dust, lay coiled like a fetus, lay still.

Dartagnan made himself look at Siamang; looked away again, sick. He sagged down into the pilot's seat, reached for the restraining straps. Siamang turned back from the screen, the obscenity of his pleasure fading to stunned disgust. “Get us out of this graveyard.” He moved past Chaim, toward his own padded couch; stopped, turned back. “By the way, this time it was premeditated murder. And you did it, Red. Keep that in mind.”

Dartagnan didn't answer, staring at the screen, looking down at the empty seat beside him.

He took the ship safely up through the atmosphere, learning that getting up off a planet's surface was much simpler than getting safely down. He rendezvoused, docked the shrunken landing module at last within the stretched, arachnoid fingers of the parent ship; he heard his father's voice directing, guiding, encouraging … knowing with a kind of certainty that after what he had seen and done on the world below, he couldn't make a mistake now.

On board the main ship again, he moved through the levels to the control room, found their flight coordinates already in the computer. Mechanically he took the ship out of orbit, barely conscious of what he did; as he turned away from the panel Siamang congratulated him, with apparent sincerity. Dartagnan pushed on past, wordlessly, and ducked into the aluminum-ringed well. He reached Mythili Fukinuki's cabin door, stopped himself, and with a sudden masochistic urge, opened it and went inside. He slid the door shut, drifted to the bed, pulling off his jacket, his shirt, one boot. He forced his aching body into the sleeping bag, settled softly, mumbling, “Good night. Goody Two-Shoes.…” And finally, thankfully, he slept.

When he woke again his face burned under his touch, his ankle was hot and swollen inside his boot. He went down into the commons, forced himself to eat, found a bottle of antibiotics and swallowed a handful of pills heedlessly. Then he went back to the cabin, locked the door, and slept again.

He repeated the cycle four more times, avoiding Siamang, before his fever broke and he remembered to check the ship's progress. He made minor alterations in their course, lingered at the screen for long seconds, searching the darkness for something he would never find. Then he tried to use the radio, and was deafened by a rush of static. He realized that Siamang had done something to the long-range antenna while he slept; there would be no more radio contact until they were back within Demarchy space. He checked the chronometer: Less than half a megasecond of flight time had elapsed; even without the added mass of the propellant tanks they had carried on the way out, more than three megaseconds still remained.

“How's our progress?”

He turned and found Siamang behind him. “Fine, as far as I can tell.” His own voice startled him, unexpected.

“And how's your conscience?”

Dartagnan laughed sharply, nervously. “What conscience?”

Siamang smiled. Dartagnan risked a look straight into his eyes. They were clear, the pupils undilated; he wondered whether that was good or bad. “I wondered whether you might be suffering the pangs of remorse; you're not looking too well.” Faint mockery, faint disapproval … faint suspicion.

Chaim scratched an unshaven cheek, cautiously expressionless. “Only the pangs of a fall down stairs.” He glanced down at his unbuttoned jacket, the cheap bedraggled lace on his half-tucked-in shirt. He looked back at Siamang, flawlessly in control, as always. He raised his hands. “I was just going to go clean myself up,” he muttered, and retreated.

Seconds sifted down through the hourglass of time; the ship moved through the darkness, slowly gaining speed. The casual persecution Siamang had inflicted on the trip out grew more calculated now, and more pervasive; until Dartagnan began to feel that Siamang only lived for his personal torment, a private demon sprung from his own private hell. He lived on soy milk, as the chronic tension exacerbated his ulcer; he began to lose sleep, as Siamang's probing found the hidden wounds of his guilt. He felt the armor of his hard-won, studied indifference wearing thin, and wondered how much more he could stand. And he wondered what pathology drove Siamang to methodically destroy the loyalty of the only “witness” in his own defense.…

Until suddenly Dartagnan saw that it was no pathology at all, but a coldly rational test. In spite of what he was, in spite of everything, Siamang didn't trust him … and unless Siamang was completely convinced of his cowed submission, and his totally amoral self-interest, there might be a third Tragic Accident before the end of this Odyssey of Lies and Death. They were safely on a homeward course; he was entirely expendable again. Three deaths might be hard to explain, but Siamang had the means to sway public opinion at any trial—as long as there was no one to testify against him.

His sudden comprehension of his danger steadied Dartagnan on the tightwire he walked above the abyss of his desperation: He would endure anything, do anything he had to do; there were only two things that mattered now—his own survival, and the reward that he would have earned a thousand times over.… Not a ship, not his freedom, but the knowledge that Siamang and Sons would pay. They would pay to bring Mythili Fukinuki back to the Demarchy; they would pay for Sekka-Olefin's death … they could never even begin to pay enough, for what they had done to Heaven's future.

And so he endured, ingratiating, obedient, and smiling—always smiling. He lived for the future, the present was a darkness behind his eyes; he was a man on a wire above the starry void between the past and their destination. And in the refuge of his cabin, he found the private world of Mythili Fukinuki, in a chest filled with books and papers. Ashamed at first, he rummaged through them, finding the precise impersonalities of astrogation manuals … and books on poetry and philosophy, not only recent but translations into the Anglo from all the varied cultures of their heritage on Earth. Passages were marked with parentheses, question marks, exclamations; her own thoughts held communion in the margins of the shining plastic pages or spilled over, filling notebooks.

He began to read, as she had read, to fill the empty stretch of time. He felt her presence in everything he read, in each small discovery; beyond anger or bitter grief, she gave him comfort, brought him strength.… And he understood at last that he had hated prospecting because he hated loneliness; that because of his resentment, being with his father had been the same as being alone. But he saw himself on his own ship, imagined Mythili Fukinuki as his partner—and knew he would need nothing more, need no one else, to be content.… A much-opened book of poems fell open again in his hands, and he saw her plain, back-slated writing in the margin: It will be lonely to be dead; but it cannot be much more lonely than it is to be alive.…

He found a grease pencil in the sack of his belongings, and slowly, as though there was no strength left in his hand, wrote Yes, yes, yes … The vision of her motionless form, the swirling dust of Planet Two, choked his memory; he snapped the book shut. No, I wasn't wrong! He put the book carefully into his sack, and after that he stopped reading.

But he realized then that if he was wrong, if he was as guilty as Siamang himself … if Mythili Fukinuki had died because of him, then even if he survived to give testimony, it would only be his own word against Siamang's, and that might not be enough. Siamang had influence; he had nothing—he had no proof, without Mythili. And if she was dead, he had to be certain that Siamang would never get away with it. Somehow he had to find a way to make Siamang incriminate himself. But his camera was ruined, the radio was out; he didn't even have a tape recorder on him … or did he?

He got up silently, and slipped out of the room.

They were well within Demarchy space; a hundred kiloseconds remained before they would dock at Mecca. Dartagnan made radio contact at last, as Siamang looked on, and set up a media conference for their arrival. A hundred kiloseconds … and still he had no proof.

“Come on, Red, let's celebrate our impending return to civilization.” Siamang gestured, smiling openly, without sarcasm. “God, it'll be a relief to get back to the real world! This whole damned thing is an experience I only want to forget.”

“The same here, boss. The sooner the better.” Dartagnan followed him below, humoring his apparent good humor. Chaim drank soy milk cut with water, trying to lull the chronic spasms of his stomach; Siamang drank something that he assumed was considerably stronger. But Siamang's mood stayed easy and congenial, his conversation rambled, innocuous, clever, only slightly condescending, “… join me in one drink at least, Red—” Siamang slid one of the magnetized drink bulbs across the metal surface of the table. “How much can it hurt?”

“It hurts plenty, believe me, boss. I'd like to, I would; but I just can't take liquor.”

“It's not vodka.” Siamang's tone turned conspiratorial, and sharpened slightly. “I want you to have a drink with me, Red. I won't take no for an answer.”

“No, I'm sorry.…”

“Drink it.” Siamang laughed; Chaim felt his stomach tighten. “Do it—as a favor to me.”

Dartagnan hesitated, toying absently with the metal band that circled his throat beneath the high collar of his jacket. “All right, boss; just one … if you'll do me a favor in return?”

Siamang started. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want my payoff now. I want you to give me a corporate credit voucher for the value of my scoutship.”

Siamang frowned. “I'm willing to transfer the credit to your account directly—”

He shook his head. “Sometimes direct credit transfers don't—get registered. I want it in writing before I do my part to keep you clear of that murder.”

Siamang's frown deepened, lifted slowly. “All right. Red… I'll humor you. I don't expect you'll let me down if I do; since you're in this as deep as I am, and you'll go right down with me—” He went out of the room.

Dartagnan sat staring uneasily at the cup. What the hell; it hasn't done anything to Siamang.… He turned the metal collar slowly around his neck. Damn it, it's worth a bellyache; it's worth anything, to be sure I get what I need.

Siamang returned, passed the voucher across the table to him. “Is that satisfactory?”

Dartagnan took it in his hands, like a starving man holding food. For a second the realization of what that money could mean to his own future rose into his mind, and made him dizzy. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely, “that's just perfect.” He folded it and stuck it into his boot. He lifted the drink bulb from the table, “I'll drink to that.” He pulled up on the straw, and drank.

He tasted nothing, only the bland sweetness of pear juice; he went on drinking, surprised, finished it.

Siamang drank with him, smiled. “What are you going to do with a ship, Red? You mean you really don't enjoy being a garbage man to humanity?”

“I've recycled just about all the shit I ever want to face, boss. Just about all I can stand.…” He squinted; the light glancing up from the table top hurt his eyes: Come on, that's impossible … suddenly afraid that it wasn't.

“Going to be a prospector, like Sekka-Olefin?”

He looked back at Siamang. “Not like Sekka-Olefin. He—made a mistake.” Siamang's voice set his teeth on edge, his skin prickled, he began to feel as though his body was strung together on live wires. “Just like my old man … I'm not going to make that mistake.” Shut up! He shook his head, the light broke up into prisms.

“What mistake was that, Red? What mistake could there be that a man who'd go into your profession hasn't made already?”

Chaim almost shouted it, shaking with uncontrollable rage. He choked back the words, gagged on sudden self-loathing.… Why isn't Siamang feeling it? And then he realized that Siamang hadn't been drinking anything at all, except fruit juice. Siamang was entirely sober; and he had been given one last test.…

Mecca City opened around him, vibrant, brilliant, beautiful, an alien flower … his mind sang, a choir of voices, the voice of the city, eternal life. He cupped life in his hands and drank … life streaming through the prism of his fingers in rainstars of light. He was eternal, he laughed, inhaling the city fragrance of sound, chords of cinnamon and cloves, leitmotif of gardenia … of corruption … a fragrance growing, that deafened him, shattering his ears, shattering his soul like crystal, shattering the crystal city.… A cloying stench of decay clogged his nose, his mouth, his lungs, like slatey dust; the fragile towers withered, fading, shriveling around him; like bodies decaying, betrayed … death was eternal, only death; and her face, all their faces turned to him, turned to ruin, worm-eaten, rotting, decayed … I know you … Mythili, I know you … he had no voice … I know you aren't! … I know you… He heard her sobbing, like flowers, crystal acid-drops eating away his viscera like decay, I don't want to! I don't want to die … I want to live … I have to … want to live …. Cradled in the arms of death, worm-riddled, he saw his flesh rotting, falling from his bones … and it was the end, the end of the world.…

Dartagnan woke, moved feebly on the floor in the bathroom of his private cabin, trying to remember how he had gotten here, why he had eaten hot coals … why he was crying. He lay still, too weary to move, listened to the grating whine of a fan … the exhaust fan. He remembered, then, being sick to his stomach. He touched his face, filmed with wetness, sweat and tears—and vomit; God, he hadn't done a very clean job of it. He pushed himself up, drifted to the wash basin to shut off the fan. He saw himself in the mirror, shut his eyes instead and swore in a fury of humiliation—

Siamang. He reached down, dragged his boot off, swearing again as he wrenched his still-swollen ankle. But he laughed in satisfaction as his hand closed over the crumpled, drifting prize, the credit voucher. Still there … He tried again futilely to remember what else had happened; knowing that Siamang had drugged him for a reason, and that he could have said anything, would have said anything, and anything could have been the wrong thing. But he had the voucher; and he was still alive—A flicker of nightmare, a discontinuity, shook him; he ran his hands down his body in sudden fear. He was still alive. The metal collar was still around his neck; he had what he needed. Maybe, just this once, something was going to come out right.…

He stripped, went to the shower, sealed himself in along with his ruined clothes, and turned on the water. He let it run, heedless of the waste, through three full shower cycles, an entire kilosecond, until he finally began to feel clean. Life, and—almost—self-respect, stirred sluggishly in him again as the heat lamp dried the sheen of water from his skin, baked the shame and the last of the stiffness out of his mind and body. He shaved, did what he could with his clammy clothes, put on the one fresh shirt he had saved for their return to Mecca. Appearance was everything; he had to present a good appearance when he faced himself in the eyes of the media cameras.… He investigated his ankle. The brown skin was still splotched with ugly bruises, but it was healing, slowly, with the passing of time. He forced it back into his boot, polished both boots with his dirty shirt. He thought about other wounds, and wondered how much time he would need before those were healed as well.

“Dartagnan—”

He heard Siamang rap on his door, quietly, and then more loudly. He went to it, opened it, his face set. Siamang stared; Chaim wondered whether he was staring at the neatness of his clothes, or the haggardness of his face. “What do you want?”

Almost diffidently, Siamang held out a drink bulb; Dartagnan grimaced. “It's just milk; you can believe it. Look, I'm sorry about what happened to you, Red. I shouldn't have given you that big a dose, I didn't think about your not being used to it—”

The hell you didn't, Dartagnan thought.

“—I want you to know I'm sorry. How do you feel?”

“Like I'll be glad when I can forget it. How much time's left before we reach Mecca?”

“That's why I knocked—only five kiloseconds. Are you going to be able to bring us in all right?”

Dartagnan almost smiled, realizing the reason for Siamang's sudden solicitude. “I think so. I hope so.” He moved out into the hall, hesitated, trying to make it sound casual: “I hope I didn't—say anything I shouldn't have, boss. I … don't remember much about it.”

“You told me you hated my stinking guts, Red.”

He froze. “I'm sorry, boss, I didn't mean it, I didn't know what I was—”

Siamang grinned forgiveness. “It's all right, Red. I don't blame you at all. In fact it's just what I wanted to hear … I wanted to hear you say what you really thought, just once. Because you also said that I'd given you what you wanted, and that was all that mattered. I know I can trust you now, Red; because I'm sure we understand each other. Isn't that right?” Mockery traced the words. His hand struck Chaim's shoulder lightly.

Dartagnan smiled. “Sure boss. Anything you say.”

Dartagnan watched the elongated crescent of the asteroid Mecca grow large on the viewscreen, and gradually eclipse as he maneuvered them into its shadow. Siamang hung behind him, watching; oblivious, Chaim watched only the intricate, expanding pattern of strangely familiar ground lights below them. He began to pick out ships—the tankers like gigantic ticks, bloated or empty; the small, red-blossoming tows. He listened to the disjointed, disembodied radio communications, almost thought he could see the ships making way for him. He spoke calmly to the ground controller, explaining who he was, and boosted the response for Siamang to hear: the encouragements, the welcomings—interspersed with the terse, anxious coordinates to guide an inexperienced pilot down to the bright, scarred surface of the docking field. Their ship closed with the real world; Dartagnan felt the slight, jarring impact of a perfect landing rise through its structure. In his mind he compared the slow ceremony of docking to the terrifying urgency of their descent to the surface of Planet Two … remembered sharing the pride of a job well done. For half a second, he smiled.

The field was curiously empty, their helmet speakers strangely silent, as they disembarked at last and made their way along a mooring cable toward the exit from the field. One guard met them, greeting Siamang with deference, cleared them to pass downward through the airlock into the asteroid's heart.

“Where the hell is everybody, Red? My father should be here, where's our media coverage?” Siamang's voice frowned. “I thought you radioed ahead about our arrival.”

“I did, boss; you heard me. They must be waiting for us inside.” They've got to be.…

They were: Dartagnan followed Siamang along the corridor that dropped them inward from the surface, his broken camera floating at his shoulder, and saw his fellow mediamen clustered in wait on the platform at the city's edge. A surprisingly sparse crowd of curious onlookers, surprisingly quiet, bumped and drifted among them. Awed …? he thought. He wondered if Siamang's rivals among the distilleries had kept their workers away. The irony pleased him; but not, he noticed, Siamang.

He watched the crowd flow forward to meet them, let it surround him, letting the mediamen get it out of their systems. “Demarch Siamang … Demarch Siamang … Hey, Red—?” He glimpsed the city, past and through them … a kilometer in diameter, towers trembling faintly, glittering in the shifting currents of air. Colored plastic stretched over fragile frames filled every square meter of ceiling, wall, floor, here where gravity was barely more than an abstraction: A manmade tribute to the magnificent generosity of nature, and the splendor of the Heaven Belt. The splendor made sterile because nature had turned its back on man; man the betrayer, who had betrayed himself. Chaim saw Sekka-Olefin's future, in a sudden, strobing nightmare of horror overlying every crystal-facet wall, every stranger's face that closed in on his own … My God … my God … And I'm the only one who knows! He steadied himself, inhaling the spices of the scented air, summoning strength and resolution.

And then he raised his hands, raised his voice into the familiar singsong of a media hype. “Ladies and gentlemen … my fellow Demarchs …” Silence began to gather. “I'm sure you all know and recognize Demarch Siamang. But there's a side of him that none of you really knows—” he stretched his silence until the silence around him was absolute; every eye, every pitiless camera lens was trained on him where he stood, with Siamang complacently at his side. He took a deep breath. “This man—is a murderer. He went four hundred million kilometers to Planet Two, to save Kwaime Sekka-Olefin, and wound up killing him instead, over that box of—stolen—computer software you see there in his hand.” He turned, bracing, saw Siamang's face, the perfect image of incredulous amazement.

Siamang's eyes were blank with a fury that only he could read. “This man is a psychotic. I don't have any idea what he's talking about. I obtained this salvage from Sekka-Olefin in a legitimate business transaction: and he was perfectly alive when we left him—”

A stranger pushed forward, touched Dartagnan's arm; golden-brown eyes demanded his attention, assured, analytical. “Are you Chaim Dartagnan?”

Chaim nodded, distracted; Siamang broke off speaking abruptly, “Who the hell are you?”

“My name's Abdhiamal; I'm a government negotiator … Demarch Dartagnan, what evidence do you have to support your charge?”

“Now, listen, Abdhiamal—” Siamang interrupted, indignant. “No one needs any government interference here, this is simply a—”

“Demarch Dartagnan has the floor,” Abdhiamal said evenly, his eyes never leaving Chaim's face. “You'll be permitted to speak in turn. Dartagnan?”

Dartagnan almost laughed; triumph filled him, overwhelming gratitude made him giddy. He kept his own eyes on the media cameras—his damnation, his salvation, his weapon.… “He got hold of my camera. I don't have the recording of the murder. But he bribed me, to cover the whole thing up.… This's the corporation credit voucher, made out to me—” He spread it between his hands, held it out to the thousands of hungry eyes behind every camera lens.

“That's a forgery.”

“And this—” Dartagnan pulled open the collar of his jacket, “is a recording of the transaction.” He twisted the jury-rigged playback knob on the note recorder he had ripped out of his spacesuit; he heard his own voice, “… I want it in writing, before I do my part to keep you clear of that murder.” And Siamang's, “All right, Red.”

“That was an accident!” Siamang's voice slipped out of control. “I didn't mean to kill Olefin, it was an accident— But ask him about Mythili Fukinuki, ask him about our pilot: That was no accident. He murdered her in cold blood; there was nothing I could do to stop him. He's a madman, a homicidal maniac—”

“Mythili Fukinuki's not dead.” Dartagnan turned to watch for the second it took to register on Siamang's face. He smiled; he turned back again to Abdhiamal, was surprised at the surprise he found in the amber-colored eyes. “At least … I don't think she is. When I was alone with Sekka-Olefin he claimed a human could survive in Planet Two's atmosphere; he said he'd breathed it himself. Siamang wanted to space her, because she overheard Olefin's murder … I told him to put her out on the surface instead. He was on drugs, I couldn't stop it or he would've killed us all. It was the only thing I could think of.…” Ashamed, he looked down, away from the memory of her face: “Damn you, damn you …” “If I was wrong, if she died, then I'm just as guilty as he is; the Demarchy can do anything they choose to me, I deserve it. All that matters to me now is that somebody made it back, to tell the truth. And to see that Siamang and Sons pays to get her home— because I don't believe that she is … dead.…” A sudden reaction took away his voice. “Has there … have you heard of any radio messages being received? Is there any word?”

“Better than that, as far as you're concerned.” Abdhiamal smiled, without amusement. “Mythili Fukinuki returned to the Demarchy before you did, in that prospector's ship. She reported everything that happened … except the fact that you weren't actually trying to kill her, Dartagnan.”

Dartagnan laughed incredulously. “My God, she would … she would!”

Abdhiamal smiled again, at something he saw in Dartagnan's face. “As far as the Demarchy's concerned, your testimony leaves it up to her whether she wants to press her charges of attempted murder against you. But with a confession, and both your evidence and hers, I'd say the case against Demarch Siamang is a little more clear-cut.… You see, Demarch Siamang,” he looked back, “this isn't a news conference; consider it more of a preliminary hearing. The Demarchy had already been informed of Demarch Fukinuki's testimony and evidence before you arrived; your father is being considered an accomplice, pending further questioning. All we needed was your version; and we have that, now.”

Never underestimate the power of a woman.… Dartagnan grinned, weak in the knees. He noticed that Siamang was ringed in now by “spectators”: vigilantes, volunteer police requested for the occasion. Siamang's eyes raked them with disdain. “This is an outrage. This is entrapment—” He looked back at the cameras. “People of the Demarchy, are you going to stand by while a fellow Demarch is persecuted by the government?”

“The people asked me to come here, Siamang. Save your rhetoric for your trial; in the meantime, consider yourself confined to your home.… And I'll take charge of the software—” Abdhiamal held out his hand. Chaim recognized a kind of gratification on the government man's face; realized that Abdhiamal was hardly older than himself, behind the mask of his self-assurance. In the Demarchy, a government agent earned less respect than a mediaman; and had considerably less influence.

Siamang passed the container to him, entirely in control once more. He faced Dartagnan again, at last; Dartagnan tried to read the expression behind his eyes, couldn't. Siamang reached out abruptly, caught Dartagnan's arm, jerked the voucher out of his hand. Chaim watched him tear it up, watched the pieces drift as they sought the lines of gravitational force. “You'll never have a ship now, Red.” A final mockery showed in Siamang's eyes, edged his voice. “But I hope you never stop wanting one, so you'll never stop hating yourself for this.”

Dartagnan smiled, filled with a terrible pride; smiled with a sincerity he didn't know he still had in him. He shook his head, met the aggressor's eyes at last. “Believe me, boss, I never wanted a ship, or anything, half so much as I wanted to see this happen… to see truth win out in this lousy business, just once, because of me.” He turned the smile on the cameras, and on the men behind them.

Siamang's escort led him away, to the rim of the ledge where an airbus waited. The handful of mediamen swarmed after them, onto the bus, into air taxis; Dartagnan stared at the bobbing mass of striped canopies, whirring propellers. The remaining crowd of strangers around him began to disperse, drifting over the ledge into the city, leaving him alone with Abdhiamal. “What about me?”

Abdhiamal shrugged. “You're not going anywhere, are you? Your further testimony will be needed when they call a trial; somehow I expect you'll want to be there. I'd hate to see Siamang promo his way out of a guilty verdict now.”

Dartagnan frowned. “He won't, will he—?”

“I doubt it. Public opinion's had too much time to build against him. His father couldn't do much to help him, because he didn't know enough about the situation.… You know, your fellow mediamen seem to be a lot more interested in the murderer than in your having exposed him.” Abdhiamal looked at him.

Dartagnan grinned weakly. “It figures … I just paid 'em the biggest insult I could think of. Besides, a mediaman follows the smell of power … it smells like money, in case you're interested.” He leaned down, picked up a corner of the ruined credit voucher. The full impact of what he had given up caught him like a blow. “Easy come, easy go.” He laughed, painfully, embarrassing himself. “That reminds me—what about the software, the salvage; what happens to Sekka-Olefin's money, now?”

“The artifacts will be sold at a public auction; Siamang and Sons being disqualified from bidding, of course. Sekka-Olefin's relatives have put in claims against it; the money will be distributed among them, since he didn't leave any will stating what he wanted done with it.”

“But he did! He told me what he wanted done with it. He didn't want it to go to his relatives; he wants it used to establish a colony on Planet Two, against the time when the Demarch's not habitable anymore—” Chaim broke off, realizing how it sounded.

Abdhiamal looked at him, tactfully noncommittal. “Do you have any proof of that?”

“Yeah. Every word of it, on film … at the bottom of a well. A gravity well—” He swore. “His goddamned relatives'll never listen. He was right! And it all went for nothing, because of Siamang.” He saw the crystal city through a haze of death, knew he would have to see it that way for the rest of his life: the towers decaying, the fragile thread of life coming apart. “That stinking bastard …I hope they vote to space him. Because that's what he's done to their future, and they'll never even know.…” His voice shook, with bitterness and exasperation.

“At least you've done something to try to make it up to him.” The voice wasn't Abdhiamal's.

He turned back, incredulous. “Mythili?” She stood beside him, materializing out of the diminished crowd; Abdhiamal had moved away, discreetly. “Mythili.” He started toward her. She pushed away, out of his reach. He stopped, pulled in his hands. “Sorry … I'm just … I'm glad. Just glad to see you.” He noticed the patches of pink, healing skin on her cheeks and nose. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Some frostbite. Some burns, from the cold. I was a mess for a while. But I'm fine.”

He nodded too, unthinking. “I'm glad. The old man was right, then—Sekka-Olefin. He told me that it was possible to live—”

“I know.” She looked down abruptly, rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “I heard you.”

“Do you believe it?”

She still looked down. “Yes … yes, I believe you, now, Chaim. But why did you do it? We could have stopped him; you could have—”

“—gotten us both killed?” Shame kindled anger. “Why didn't you just keep your mouth shut, like I did? Everything would've been okay.”

Her eyes flashed up. “Because I'm not like you! … I know, it was stupid. I know that now.… But I couldn't have hidden it anyway; he would have known. I'm not good at hiding what I feel—” She bit her lip. “I'm not like you, Dartagnan.”

He let his breath out slowly, said stupidly, again, “I'm just glad you're all right … I saw you, on the viewscreen, saw you take off your helmet. And then I thought I'd been wrong, that you—”

“I thought so, too.” She laughed, tremulously, at the ghost of memory. “The air was so thin, so cold, I thought I couldn't breathe. I panicked, and I blacked out. The noise and heat when you lifted off saved me, it woke me, or I would have frozen to death instead. I almost didn't get up again … I thought I'd already died.”

“You repaired Olefin's ship?”

“Yes … It's a good ship, and the Mother is a fantastic ship; he must have spent a fortune—”

“He did. Literally. On a dream.”

“I brought his body back; a pleasant companion, for a trip of three-plus megaseconds.” She shuddered. “Three and a quarter megaseconds, with a dead man, and frost-burned lungs, and memory.… God, how I hated you, Chaim! How I hated you … and yet—” She wouldn't look at him.

“I know,” he said. “I know. Three and a half megaseconds with Siamang, and memory; wanting to kill him, and afraid he'd kill me. But you were there. I could feel you, helping me get through. Helping me survive to make it right. I always planned to tell the truth, Mythili, I never meant to do anything else.”

“So the end justifies the means, then?” Her voice teetered on the edge of control.

He didn't answer, couldn't.

“I won't press charges against you.” She turned away.

“Mythili. Don't go yet—” She looked back at him, he groped for words. “What … what will you be doing now? Are you still working for Siamang and Sons?”

“No. Siamang, senior, fired me, after I made my accusations.” She almost smiled, not meaning it, “I'm hoping one of his competitors will offer me a job.…” hopelessly. “So you won't have a ship of your own, now, either—?”

“No.” He looked down, at the torn corner of the voucher still wadded in his hand. “Not now … but someday, I will. And when I get it, I want you to be my partner. I want you to—to—” To stay with me. His mind, his eyes, finished it, uselessly.

“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; signalling 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 the 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. “Even 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 …”

“I know you didn't.” She cut him off. In his eyes lost images were rising; something between disgust and terror would not let her see them. “You don't need to fawn on me, Chaim. I'm not working for a corporation anymore. And neither are you, from the looks of it.”

“No.” His head stayed down; he stared at his own long-fingered brown hand clenched over a seat-back before the panel. “Sorry,” he said, still apologizing, compulsively, for something beyond words. “But maybe we've bottomed out, Mythili. Maybe we've changed our luck.” He lifted his head slowly. “This ship—look at it! It's all ours; it's giving us a chance to start over again, to prove we've got the guts to live by our own rules, this time. This is a dream come true—” His wide mouth stretched wider in a hopeful grin.

“Your dream, not mine!” She rebelled against the part of him that had included her without asking; against the part of herself that might have been glad. “I never wanted to be a prospector, I don't know a damn thing about it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a junker, living on the edge of starvation. And I don't want to spend it sharing this ship with you, Dartagnan!”

His whole body tautened visibly. “I see.” He sagged, as though the unseen tensions had let him go again abruptly, leaving him more formless than before. But the yielding softness had gone out of his eyes, and he looked at her without hope or apology. “So it's not your dream. Have you got anything to put in its place? No—or you wouldn't be here. You don't know a damn thing about prospecting; but I do. Only I can't pilot a ship this size well enough to get it into the places a prospector has to go. You can. Maybe we don't want each other,” he said with spiteful satisfaction, “but we sure as hell need each other. I want this ship; I want this chance at a real life. And even if you don't want it, you want a chance at some kind of life, and this's your last one. I can stand it if you can.” His free hand clutched the arm that anchored him to the chair.

Mythili bit the inside of her mouth until she felt sharp pain, until the first response died in her throat. “All right. I agree with everything you say. I'll work with you, because I have to. We'll share whatever we find fifty-fifty. But that's all—” words escaping again in spite of her.

“That's all I expected.” Chaim moved his mouth, imitating a smile sourly. “And I think there's one more thing we can agree on: Abdhiamal really screwed both of us.”

In the artificial brightening of a new day, Mythili left her tiny rented room and took an air taxi out across the kilometer-wide vacuole that held Mecca City. The towers of the city clustered on every side, their colored surfaces shimmering with faint movement as she looked outward and ahead. The sight did not touch her with wonder as it once had; today she scarcely saw them at all.

She had agreed to share a ship and a gamble with Chaim Dartagnan, and now she was about to back it up, taking all that was left of her life savings to buy the equipment and supplies they needed to make their trip. It was insane … but what other choice was there? She felt the tension that had shocked her awake after a night of depression-drugged sleep winding still tighter in her chest. She swallowed and sighed; but the tightness came back, and the taxi closed inexorably with her destination.

She made her way down the central core of the Abraxis commercial building, settling like a feather into gravity's soft well of suction. The skin of the building walls was golden, and she felt herself suffocating, sinking through honey. Workers and customers moved past her, propelling themselves like swimmers from the corridor's wall. She let them pass, letting her own slow sink-rate remain undisturbed.

The ship-outfitter's business, with its massive displays, occupied the two bottom-most levels of the building. Grimly she pushed aside the flaps of the upper-level entrance, found herself in a catacomb of stabilized boxes and closed mesh containers. She moved cautiously through the narrow aisles, where a handful of desultory strangers inspected navigation equipment she identified at a glance and prospector's gear she could not recognize at all. They stared as she passed, herself an unclassifiable oddity in this male domain.

She emerged finally into a large, less cluttered area; saw Chaim at last, gesturing over an equipment list, a pile of potential purchases growing at his feet. He glanced up, as though her tension radiated like cold, and broke off his conversation with the shopman. But his face stayed flatly expression less, unlike her own; the gift of his career as a professional liar. “This is my partner. She'll fill you in on anything else we need.”

She moved across the open space, joined the two men beside the counter where a small screen recorded the growing cost of their journey. The shopman regarded her with mixed emotions; she ignored him for the pile of supplies. She stared at the screen again, tallying the list in her mind, feeling a resentment rooted in something deeper than her ignorance of a prospector's needs: “Do we really need all that, Dartagnan?”

“We need more. But we can't afford it.” He glanced uncomfortably at the shopman.

“What about that spectroscope? The ship already has one.” She touched the one word on the screen that she really recognized, her fingers rigid.

“Not good enough. Sekka-Olefin already knew what he was looking for, and where to find it. We don't. We need all the help we can get.”

She shrugged, her mouth pulling down. “All right.”

“What about navigation equipment?”

“I checked the ship's system over again. It's in fine shape. There's nothing we can afford to add to it that would make a real difference.”

He looked relieved, the first genuine expression she had seen on his face. “Then I guess we can afford to eat, after all.”

“You want me to go ahead and fill the rest of your order, then?” The shopman addressed Chaim.

“Yeah.” Chaim passed him the list, glancing her way. “Go ahead.”

She looked away from him, becoming aware of the man in worn coveralls who waited, listening, at the edge of her sight. He moved forward at her glance, intruding on their circle of consciousness. Another prospector, she guessed, and not a very successful one; a heavyset man who looked old, older than he was, because a lifetime spent exposed to shipboard radiation aged the body badly. His dark brown, graying hair was clipped close along the sides of his bald head, and his broad, gnarly face was seamed with lines that could have been good-humored. As if to prove it, he smiled when she looked at him. She did not smile back. Undaunted, he cracked open their privacy and included himself in it.

Chaim turned at his approach, ungraceful with surprise.

The prospector squinted. “Aren't you … yeah, you must be! Gamal Dartagnan's kid? I'll be damned! Imagine runnin' into you, after all this time.”

Chaim stared, mildly disbelieving. “You knew my old ma—uh, my father?” he said, groping for a civil response.

“Yeah, I sure did. We were great friends, him and me. Almost partners.”

Mythili felt her face pinch at the falseness of the tone. Chaim's own face had become a vacant wall again; a defense, against what she wasn't sure. “What's your name?”

“Fitch. He must've mentioned me—”

“No.” Chaim's boot nudged the pile of supplies; containers stirred sluggishly and resettled. “How'd you know me? … We didn't look much alike.”

Fitch laughed, unaffected by the lack of positive response. “The hair. Anybody'd know that hair. And he talked about you all the time.”

Chaim's expression became slightly more expressionless.

“And you're kind of a celebrity, you know—all the media about old Sekka-Olefin's murder, and how you brought the killer in, with the help of the little lady, here.”

Mythili considered silently the fact that she stood half a head taller than Fitch, and wondered why she couldn't find the irony even slightly amusing; wondered whether she had lost her sense of humor permanently.

“And now word has it that you've got yourself Sekka-Olefin's ship. Word must be right, or you wouldn't be here outfitting. Following in the old man's footsteps, huh? Got a damn fine ship for it, from what I hear.… You know much about prospecting?”

“Only what I learned by doing it, with my old man.” A controlled sarcasm oiled the words.

“Oh, yeah?” Fitch laughed again; a trace of self-consciousness weakened it this time. “Well, he was a damn shrewd man. But still, you couldn't have spent much time out there. It takes a lifetime of experience—”

“A lifetime wasn't enough to keep my old man from killing himself.” Chaim's frown broke through. Mythili saw Fitch's face begin to lose hope, struggle to hold on to it. “What do you want, Fitch? You want something.”

“I just wanted to meet Gamal Dartagnan's son. Gamal was a man with a big heart and some big ideas, and I figured you might share them … I wanted to know if maybe you could use some help.” He threw the words out with too much energy. “I mean, I've got a ship of my own and all—I've spent my whole life searching salvage. But my ship can't do anything like what that one of yours could do; she just doesn't have the reach. Just like your old man—if he'd had a better ship, he could've made a million, I'm sure of it. I've got the experience, I know where to look … I've got a lot to offer a partner.” He craned forward.

“He has a partner,” Mythili said abruptly. “We can't afford another one.”

“She's right. There's already one too many.” Chaim grimaced. “The ship belongs to the two of us, Fitch. We'll make it on our own, or not at all. We don't need any more ‘help’. We're up to our necks in it.” His hand chopped the air like a headsman's blade, cutting off the conversation.

Fitch withdrew, deflated, shriveling. “Well … I'm sorry you feel that way, but I guess I can understand it,” he said thickly. “It's a loner's trade, prospecting. You got to think of yourself first, and make your own chances. But just to show you I understand, I want you to have this signal separater.” He held it out, packaged in plastic foam. “It'll stretch the range of your equipment. Maybe it'll bring you luck. I was going to put it in my ship, but there's nothing much it'll change for me. Maybe when I see you again, you'll remember I gave you this, and reconsider taking on a partner.”

Mythili opened her mouth to refuse it, hearing the same hollow hypocrisy in his humility that she'd heard in his bluster. But Chaim reached out before she could speak and took the package from Fitch's hands with a small, stomach-tight bow of acknowledgment. “Thanks. We appreciate it.” The hostility had disappeared from his eyes, and he actually seemed sincere. Mythili closed her mouth without saying anything, surprised into silence.

“And maybe … maybe you'd take this on, too …” Fitch reached behind him, and produced something else, a mesh container.

Ah, she thought, her tension suddenly loosening. Here it comes—I knew there was more. The catch.

But the thing he pressed into her unwilling hands was totally unexpected—a small cage, containing a live animal. She stared at it incredulously. She had never been this close to an animal before; never held one in her hands, even caged. “What is it—?” she murmured, resisting her urge to push it back at him.

“Some kind of lizard.” Fitch shrugged. “I won it in a card game. It only eats insects; I can't afford to feed it any more.…” He looked down at the cage, and what looked like genuine regret filled his eyes. “I got real attached to him. You would, too. He changes colors, see—? Reacts to light or heat.” He pointed at the creature in the cage. “I call him Lucky.”

Mythili peered in at the lizard, feeling her refusal die stillborn as it gazed back at her, its skeptical eye encased in a turret of beaded flesh. Its pebbly, hairless green skin was changing hue as she watched, taking on a speckled pattern of light and shadow like a photograph. She stared at it, unable to tear her gaze away.

“Sure,” Chaim said. “We'll take good care of it.”

“I'm grateful to you.” Fitch bobbed politely, and disappeared into the maze of piled supplies as unexpectedly as he had come.

The shopman shook his head, one hand hugging the inventory terminal. “Who can figure junkers? That signal separater is the first thing he's paid for up front in half a gigasec—and he gives it away.” His drooping black mustache twitched as he twisted his mouth. “Speaking of insects: I'd check that device for bugs, if you know what I mean” He gestured.

“I intend to.” Mythili looked back at Chaim, still holding the signal separater in his hands. She glanced down at the lizard again. A chameleon: that was what it was called. She had read about them, once. She wondered just how Chaim expected to pay for its food, when they could barely afford their own. Insects were restricted to the hydroponic gardens; it wasn't like they were plentiful or cheap. “Why do you want to be bound to a sleazy piece of quartz like Fitch?” she asked, as much curious as disapproving. “He looked like he's never made enough scavenging junk to pay for a cup of water. Why did you let him give you that?” She bent her head at the separater. Or this. But her eyes went to the lizard's motionless form again, in unwilling fascination. It balanced like a dancer on a single slender branch inside its cage. Its combination of alienness and astonishing grace held her spellbound.

“Because we can use a signal separater. That's Rule One.” Chaim looked at her steadily, forcing her to acknowledge him. “And because if we don't get lucky, we'll end up a gigasec from now just as lousy as he is.” He let the signal separater go, watched it drift down and impact dully in the pile of supplies, before he turned away.

“Lifting.” Mythili flicked the final switch of the sequence, felt the almost imperceptible shudder of the ship's transformation from stasis to motion. They began to move slowly—like a pageant starting, she thought—outward and away from the docking field. Watching through the unshielded port, she felt the shackles fall from her own existence as she left behind the prison that Mecca had become in these past megaseconds. Elation swelled inside her, unexpectedly, a soft explosion of heart-music spilling into her veins as she looked out on the infinite night, the star Heaven rising like a promise of new beginnings past Mecca's shrinking horizon.

She glanced sideways at the small intrusion of someone else's sigh, saw Chaim Dartagnan pressed intently against the panel just beyond reach. Her elation fell inward, became a tight compression aching at her core. Her freedom was illusory, uncertain, as ephemeral as the life of the insects they had purchased to feed their new pet. There was no promise that there would ever be another journey, if this one failed. And whether this journey succeeded or not, she would have to endure his presence; the dark, turbid waters that every glimpse of him eddied in her mind. She felt her mind replay images of the past on the screen of the present, as it had done over and over on the empty walls of her rented room … the last time she had piloted a ship with Chaim Dartagnan on board; the humiliation, the suffering, the death of Sekka-Olefin—the death that had almost been her own, because of Chaim Dartagnan's weakness.

Chaim looked over at her, away from the widening blackness of the sky, as if the intensity of her stare were something he could feel. He shook his head slightly, almost unconsciously; she didn't know whether he was reorienting his own reality or making a denial.

Mecca had dropped completely from sight below them; the distant diamond-chip sun was centering in the port and on the display screens. She looked back at the panel without comment. The barely perceptible thrust of the ship's nuclear-electric rockets was slowly but constantly increasing their speed, beginning their long journey in toward the desolate torus of drifting worldlets that was the Main Belt; where before the Civil War the majority of Heaven system's population had lived—where the majority of it had died.

The Civil War had turned the Main Belt into a vast cemetery, its planetoids into gravestones for a hundred million people. The Demarchy, in their own postwar struggle to survive, had already stripped it clean of its most obvious technological artifacts; but individual scavengers still picked through the ruins, hoping for some fortunate oversight that would make them rich, or at least let them go on searching.… “What happens when we reach the Belt? Where do we start?” She begrudged having to ask, tried to keep it from showing in her voice.

“We start as soon as we're close enough to the first rock we meet to scan it. My old man never overlooked anything, even if it wasn't on the charts. Every other prospector who's ever been in to the Main Belt has the same set of charts on file that we do, and they've been picking it over for a couple of our lifetimes.” He input a sequence on the panel almost roughly, and a navigation chart flashed onto the middle screen between them. “Of course, it never did him a damn bit of good, in all the time I was with him. He had ‘big ideas,’ like Fitch said, and nothing else. He was always sure he could've found some battery plant that disappeared during the war, or a lost starship orbiting the sun—or complete happiness in a goddamn hydro tank, for all I know—if he just had a better ship, or more supplies, or an even break … They're all alike, the damn fools; looking for fool's gold.” He struck another contact point, and the screen went blank. He sighed, letting go of his anger. “But then … one of his crack-brained ideas finally paid off for him, in the end.”

She half-turned in surprise. “It did? Then why aren't you—”

“—rich?” He laughed the way he had input commands. “Because he had an accident that killed him before he could collect. His luck ran true to the end; all bad. A corporate scout filed on his claim and they got it all.”

“What went wrong? What happened to him?” she asked, in spite of herself.

“I don't know.” Chaim's arms crossed his stomach, his hands pulled restlessly at his coveralls. Mythili felt her own stomach clench and turn, remembering what had happened to Sekka-Olefin. “But it doesn't matter to him anymore. And it probably won't matter to anybody before much longer; not even to me.” He pushed off from the panel, reached the rim of the well to the lower levels and sank into it.

She watched him go, uncomprehending; feeling words rattle against her teeth like pebbles, cold and heavy. But she turned back to the board, watching the chronometer tick off seconds like a census of stars.

The census mounted. As seconds piled up into kiloseconds and megaseconds, Mythili wove patterns of behavior that avoided Chaim Dartagnan as completely as possible, keeping her mind as empty of his presence on board as the night they moved through was empty.

Yet even the emptiness turned against her; not bringing her peace of mind, but only leaving room for memories to grow wild, spiny and bitter. She could deny the present or deny the past, but not both together: more and more she could see only the resemblance of this voyage to the last one she had made, with Dartagnan the mediaman, and Sabu Siamang the killer. There was no solace in silence, no comfort in avoidance, no escaping from the gray limbo of her own mind.

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 selfconsciously, 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 found 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.”

“More like tons and tons.” Chaim braced his feet and threw his weight against the wall of paper, but there was no give to the greater mass. “All piled up for the recycler that never came back.”

“No.” She shook her head. He looked at her. “There's way too much here. Even if they saved every news report and corporate hypesheet from the whole of the Main Belt, there must be half a gigasec's worth here. It couldn't be just the postwar breakdown.”

“But why? Why would anybody save old hypesheets, when everything was in info storage anyway?”

She shrugged inside her suit. “Maybe it was a hobby. Are we going on through?”

He bent over, throwing light into the paper-walled tunnel. “I don't know. I can't see anything, if it even ends.… God, what if the whole damn rock's stuffed full of this, and we get stuck with nowhere to turn around?”

“Somebody lived here. There must be something else in there besides paper,” she said impatiently. “I'll go first, if it bothers you.” Coward. She refused to let herself even begin to shape a mental image around his words. She reached up to loosen her helmet. “If we take off our suits we'll have more room to move—”

“Wait.” He caught her hand, freezing it in mid-motion. “Leave that on. The purifier's dead. You don't know what these places can smell like. Or look like.… I'd better go in first.” She saw his face through the dark reflection of her own, helmet to helmet; saw the strain-sharp line of his mouth that bit the words off raw-edged. “Wait here.”

Remembering that he did know—and that most of the Main Belt had died of slow starvation or thirst—she dropped her hands and waited. He squirmed like an eel into the depths of the print-out mass. The seconds passed, and more seconds; until the darkness lost its form and grew timeless, until she could not keep the image of suffocating gullets choked by warm human flesh out of her mind—

A small grunt of surprise or disgust came out of her suit speakers; Chaim's voice, from somewhere beyond the wall. “Chaim—?” Her own voice startled her more, squeezed with unexpected tension.

“'S okay.” His reassurance slipped, on uncertain footing. “I'm through. Come ahead, there's a room here. But get ready; there's a couple of bodies, too.”

She felt her skin prickle, coldness in the pit of her stomach. But she had spent megaseconds with the frozen corpse of Sekka-Olefin on board his ship, returning to Mecca from Planet Two. She was no stranger to death. She tightened her hands, loosened them again to pull herself into the print-out mass. Clawing with her heavy gloves, thrusting and kicking like a swimmer, she worked her way along the uneven intestine, following the beam of her light. At last she saw the beam spread and diffuse, blinked as it was answered by another light beaconing ahead. Chaim caught her reaching hands to draw her out of the tunnel; unable to avoid it, she let him pull her through.

“Thanks.” She freed herself from his grasp as quickly as she could, looking away. The glancing brightness of her belt lamp showed her a haphazard plastic meshwork crisscrossing the inner surface of the piled print-outs, to keep them from collapsing in slow inevitability toward the iron-rich asteroid's feeble gravitational heart. This is all of it, then. But as she kept turning, following the line of the room's inner surface, she saw more piles of print-out, and heaps of plastic packing crates broken down, immense bags bulging with unnameable contents, heaps of old clothing or rags.

In the center of this carefully filled space a small living area barely survived: a tiny metal table and chairs disorientingly bolted to the far wall—following gravity's lines as she did not—and a wide mat of foam heaped with more piles of rags.… Bodies. He had said there were bodies. Her eyes fixed on the shapeless rag piles with horrible fascination. She drifted out into the open center of the room as her staring and the harsh light of her lamp began to pick out protruding ends of bone, the pitiless white dome of a skull, the glaring black hollows of its sockets.

She twisted suddenly in the air, trying to stop her forward motion with nothing to stabilize her; banged into the metal table top with a curse. The echoes of her collision and her shout seeped into the soft detritus along the walls, the room closed its silent disapproval around them again. Chaim still hung at the far side of the room, as though he couldn't force himself to get any closer to the corpses.

She righted herself to the table's axis, watching the slow dance around her of things she had dislodged—empty containers with crusts of dried food at their lips, a stain-dulled knife, a long slender bone … she thought it looked like an ulna. She caught the drifting knife and jerked it out of the air. “What do … what do you think killed—did they die from?” Hating herself as she asked it.

“Starved, probably,” he said. “That's what it usually is.” The words were very soft. His arms folded over his stomach in what she took for empathy. She remembered that he must have seen this sight over and over while he had prospected with his father. He didn't say anything more; she watched him track the rising arc of the pale bone's dance, end over end in the air.

“Who were these people, anyway? Who would live in a—a garbage dump like this, never throwing anything away? Were they insane?” Still trapped in the fascination of the bizarre, she was dismayed by her own inability to close her eyes or look away.

“Of course they were. What the hell else would they be?” His voice was thin and hard, a drawn wire. “Just like we were for coming here. There's nothing here. Let's go.”

She glanced back at him, surprised. “But we just got here. Look, there are other rooms—” She gestured toward the walls of rubbish, other dark, narrow mouths opening on other unknowns.

“Forget it. They won't be any different. There's nothing in this hole but death and garbage.” He began to pull himself toward the entrance.

“Damn it, I worked my butt off getting us here! We're not leaving until I'm sure there's nothing else.” She brandished the knife, forgetting she still held it.

His body whiplashed with angry surprise, or maybe with fear. She let go of the knife, pushing it away from them both, embarrassed. She moved off in another direction, toward the first of the openings. Looking back as she reached it, she saw him still motionless where he had been. “Well, are you going to help me?”

He shook his head, his helmet winked in her light. His arms still pressed his stomach. “No. If you want to wallow in it, go ahead. Not me.”

She turned wordlessly and pulled herself into the opening.

The room beyond was crammed with more print-outs, leaving her only enough space to turn around with claustrophobic eagerness and push her way out again. Chaim drifted, watching, as she moved without comment to the next hole. Beyond it was more paper, but she also found numberless copies of prewar pictorials neatly stacked in boxes. She tried to pull one free, wondering whether they might have historical value; only to find that the pages had fused together from some chemical reaction between the synthetic paper and the ink.

She dropped it in disgust, a memory stirring in her mind like dust disturbed: Recluse. She had read about people like this, and that was what they were called; people who withdrew physically as well as mentally into their own private world. The terrible exhilaration of that crippling fear tingled her skin—the ultimate in freedom, the ultimate in security, the ultimate womb of this place.… She kicked off from the side of a box, diving back into the narrow exit-hole.

She passed Chaim still silently waiting, pulled herself through the last of the dark holes into the last claustrophobic room. This one was not as crowded as the others; there was still enough room for her to move a few meters through a sphere around its perimeter. Its quality was different, too: a wilderness of tangled, broken furniture, stuffed with rags of ancient clothing, jammed with trunks and boxes. She pried the boxes open desultorily, poked among the furniture legs for anything that might have some real value.

Light leaped back at her unexpectedly, prisming with color, as she opened a small trunk crammed beneath a desk. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into the color, droplets of congealed rainbow, gold and silver made molten by her violence. She brought up a necklace set with sapphires the size of peas, a ruby as big as her thumbnail, diamonds … glass. They had to be glass, paste, imitation. Her scintillating joy went out, leaving her empty and dark again. Find a treasure, in this squalid midden? She could as soon expect to find the sun shining. Dartagnan was right, there was nothing here worth wasting their time on; it was only her own stubbornness that had kept them here this long.

But her hands moved through the jewelry again, making it float and spiral, winking at her with secret knowledge as she set her fantasies free and dreamed for one brief second that all of it was real. At last she chose two favorites out of the dance; the time-stained, gem-hung necklace, and a golden man's ring, studded with fake rubies and far too massive for the fingers that closed around it. She carried them with her, leaving the rest to resettle into stasis as she left the final room, defeated.

“Find anything?” Chaim's voice was too weary to carry sarcasm.

“Junk jewelry.” She held the pieces up in her fist, defiantly. “My claim. There's more in there if you want to pick it over.”

“I just want to get the hell out of here.” He disappeared into the glacier mass of print-outs.

She followed him through, and back along the corridor of dark stone; he was already waiting in the lock when she reached its end. They went through it together, and she watched him throw himself against the wheel like a man with death at his heels. He reached the Mother ahead of her in a reckless outward leap, almost closing her out of the ship's lock in his impatience.

He peeled off his suit and left it hanging in midair, slamming away and up through the levels of the ship before she could get out of her own. Following him upward, half curious and half concerned, she listened in the emptiness outside the closed door of his cabin, and heard very clearly the sounds of his retching.

She waited until there were no more sounds, and rapped on the door. “Chaim?” There was no answer. She pulled the door open, and entered his cabin for the first time. “Chaim?”

He looked up at her from across the room, where he clung to the doorframe of the bathroom entrance, doubled over in what looked like prayer. But one look at his face told her that it was pain, not worship, that humbled his flesh.

“What's wrong?” She was suddenly frightened for them both. “Can I help you?”

“Pills … in that drawer.” He stretched out his hand, a gesture and a plea.

She moved across the room and opened the top drawer of the cupboard, hearing the magnets snap. Inside, drifting up from a nest of clothing, she found a large, half-empty bottle of pills, plucked it out. “Antacids? There are just antacids—”

“Give them to me!” His hand flagged her frantically.

She carried them to him; he fumbled for a handful, spilling them out into the air. He ate several at once, chewing, grimacing, swallowing. “Damn! Damn …” He pressed his ash-colored face against a rigid arm. “God, I don't want to start bleeding—”

“What is it? For God's sake, Chaim, tell me what it is!” She shook him.

“My gut. My ulcer.”

“An ulcer?” She let him go. “You have an ulcer?”

He nodded.

“Shiva! Why didn't you tell me!”

“Why?” he gasped, not looking at her. “What was the point?”

“Because it's a danger—to both of us!” Her hands closed over the cloth of her jumpsuit in sudden empathy. “Don't you have anything stronger than that?” The antacid pills and bottle were searching for the floor.

“I couldn't afford it.”

She bit her tongue; said, as quietly as she could, “Do you think it's bleeding now?” She had read only a little about ulcers, enough to understand his fear: A perforation could be fatal without medical treatment.

He shook his head. “No sign when I … No. But it gets worse and worse. I never hurt this bad before.”

“What we just saw in there: I didn't know it bothered you so much. I thought you saw a lot of that kind of thing, before—” breaking off, totally uncomprehending.

“And I always hated it! I still hate it. I hate going on and on, never finding anything worth a damn. And always alone—” Tears welled in his eyes; she watched incredulously as they overflowed, spreading across his face in a shining film. “Like those crazy bastards down in the rock, drowning in garbage, dying by centimeters—just like this goddamned system!” His body spasmed with pain and frustration.

“But we're not like them.” She remembered abruptly the strange emotion that had caught her soul there in the dark entrails of the rock.

“We're worse. We had a chance to be a' team; more than a team, a—” He looked up again at her, and she stopped the word with her eyes, as she had stopped it once before.

“No. Never.” Her own words shivered and paled abruptly. She shook her head, needing her whole body to force the motion. “Not after what happened.” She turned her back on him, no longer able to keep her eyes shielded. The bare, ivory-colored walls of his cabin seemed to blur into infinity. “You knew that.”

“You ‘knew’ it! You wouldn't give me a chance. That's why this could never have worked, even if we'd found something—” His breath hissed between his teeth. “Get the hell out of here. Let me be alone by myself.”

She went out of the room, slamming the door to, and fled across the narrow well into her own cabin. She huddled there, eyes closed, clinging to the brace beside the door; burying herself in the deeper blackness of her mind until she lost all track of time. But still the light was waiting for her, she knew that it waited—in this room, or beyond its door, or among the million stars burning endlessly in the depths of night. She was alive, she could not escape it, she had only to open her eyes to see the light, acknowledge it, commit an act of faith. And to open them was in the end easier than keeping them closed.… She opened her eyes, blinking painfully in the glare.

She released her death-grip on the metal, pushed away from the wall toward the trunk by her bed and bedroll. In it were the few possessions she was never without, among them the small trove of her Old World book translations—the keys that had set her free from the solitary confinement of her life and let her share other minds, other worlds. She unfastened the lid and opened it, searching through the shifting, rising contents as carefully as she could. At last her hand found the one book she wanted, the one she had not touched since the moment when Chaim Dartagnan had put it back into her hands during their reunion on Mecca.

She opened it, watching its pages riffle effortlessly in the cover's wake. She separated them hesitantly, randomly, hanging in the air. Her eyes caught an old familiar phrase from this essay, a paragraph of that one, the notes she had scrawled in answer in the margins. She pressed aside one more page, and her eyes fell to the lodestone of a stranger's writing below her own. She had written. It will be lonely to be dead; but it cannot be much more lonely than it is to be alive. And answering her, the stranger had written, Yes, yes, yes.…

The book drifted out of her strengthless hands; she felt her own face grow slick and warm with tears. She cried as she had not cried in longer than she could remember, filling the empty room with lamentation, for all the times that she had held life at bay, taking the world's contempt into herself and letting it wound her. She wept herself to exhaustion and beyond it, knowing as she wept that she would never wash away the last grain of her regret.

But at last her body grew light enough to overcome its own inertia; she went out of her room and crossed the hallwell again. A single cricket chirped somewhere in the commons down below. She tapped softly, and then more loudly, on Chaim's still-closed door, getting no answer. She pushed the door aside. At first she thought the room was empty; until she saw him buried in the cocoon of his sleeping bag, tethered on the frame of his bed. She crossed over to his bedside, making certain that he was only deeply asleep. The chameleon, which hung suspended from a grip on the wall above him, pale with sleep, opened one eye to look at her. Its color began to change, darkening and brightening as it woke, adjusting instinctively to new conditions, as it always did. Two of a kind … she thought, looking back at Chaim, but there was no bitterness in the thought.

Settling back in the air, her arm loosely through a handhold, she watched him sleeping; able to observe him without being observed, laying down her shield at last in the face of his defenseless sleep. Able to see that the past was past: the mistakes paid for, the wrongs righted, as far as humanly possible. She had let the past fill up the present until there was no room left for a new life, for tomorrow.… Who was she punishing besides herself? And why? And when would she have suffered enough … Oh God, is there anyone alive who doesn't hate herself—himself (looking down at Chaim's sleeping face)—in their deepest heart? Just by living we betray ourselves and are betrayed.… And only we can end it.

Chaim stirred toward waking; the sleeping bag strained against the fastenings that held it immobile.

“Chaim.” Her voice shook him gently.

His eyes opened, staring blankly at the ceiling.

“Chaim—”

He turned his head; body and bag revolved toward her. The blank look stayed on his face as he registered her presence. He looked at her, saying nothing; his eyes were red-rimmed.

“How are you?”

He grimaced, at her or at himself, she wasn't sure. “I don't know.”

“I'm better.” She glanced down. “Better than I've been in a long time, I think.”

The incomprehension returned, chill with resentment. And yet somewhere an ember of understanding still strained toward fire.…

She breathed on it tentatively, afraid of being left alone in the darkness now. “I found what you wrote in my book.”

Slow surprise filled his face. “Yeah?” He pulled himself partway out of the sleeping bag.

A nod. “When you're so lonely, you feel like you're the only one …” She twisted her hand around the support bar.

He laughed softly, unexpectedly. “You are.”

She let her mouth relax, and found that it began to smile. She put her free hand up, feeling the strangeness of her face, the smile's distortion of it, the puffiness that remained of her grief. “Chaim—I don't hate myself, anymore. Not the way I've hated myself since Planet Two, at least.”

He plucked at the seal on his sleeping bag, separating his cocoon. “Does that mean I can stop hating myself, then?”

She blinked. “Yes … I suppose it does.”

He searched her eyes for affirmation; she met his gaze, no longer afraid. He pushed up from the bed, a man released. “Partners, then?” He reached out to her.

She nodded; took his hand and squeezed it briefly before she let it go. Warmth stayed in her palm.

The chameleon left its perch and began to creep down the wall, moving with extreme deliberation, going in search of its dwindling, ever-moving food supply. Chaim watched its progress for a long moment. He crossed his arms gingerly against the front of his coveralls, looking up at the ceiling as if he could see through it into space. “So where do we go from here? Where do we look, what do we try next?”

She jerked abruptly at the handhold. “Damn it! I'm not ready to face that now, too.” She shook her head.

“We've got to face it, sooner or later. It's better if we do it now.” He unzipped his pockets and pushed his hands into them. “Everybody in creation's been over the Main Belt with tweezers. We don't have supplies enough to keep random searching for as long as it'll take to hit a strike. We've got to think of something better.”

“There must be something nobody's tried, something everybody's overlooked, for some reason. Like the station on Planet Two that Sekka-Olefin found.” She turned, following his drifting motion out into the room. “Chaim, you're the prospector; isn't there something you heard about, some clue?”

“That's the point—I'm not such a damn great prospector, Mythili! Neither was my old man. He had lousy luck; even when he made a strike, it killed him. And I never learned half of what he knew.” His eyes grew distant. “Except … I do remember something. I told you back at the start, he had a lot of wild get-rich schemes. And there's one that didn't sound as crazy as the rest … about that factory rock from the Demarchy, that just disappeared during the war. Nobody ever found a trace of it, they all figured it must've been hit with a nuke barrage that kicked it clear out of the system. But the odds are against that; it takes a lot of energy to give escape velocity to a rock that big. There was a whole atomic battery plant on it. It was …” he frowned, concentrating, “let's see … my father said that even if it was knocked out of the fore-trojans—and it must've been, since they would have found it by now if it was still there—if it was, then its orbit should still have similar elements. That means it would drift around the Belt over a gigasecond or so, and it should've been spotted again eventually.”

She frowned, concentrating. “So either it was completely fragmented or it did leave the system.”

“Unless somehow it got trapped in another equilibrium point.”

“But the only way that could have happened in so short a time would be if it was hit twice, or collided with some other rock …” They looked at each other and she felt their fantasy building, layer on layer.

“The most likely place would be in the other Lagrange points.”

“Right, and probably a stable one—”

“The aft-trojans,” he finished it for her. “It could be there right now, as good as new.” He looked up again at the ceiling as though he actually expected to see it.

“As good as new?” Her face twisted.

He shrugged. “Let's face it—if the factory itself took a hit, the reactor would probably be spilling radiation. You couldn't miss it. But nobody ever reported anything like that from the aft-trojans. If the plant was blown up, there wouldn't be much point going after it; but if it wasn't … we could buy the whole goddamn Demarchy with that find!” He rubbed his hands together.

“How would we ever find it, in the whole of the aft-trojans?”

“They were mostly uninhabited, anything with any manmade stuff would stand out in the readings. That signal separater Fitch gave us could be just the edge we need for this.”

“But even the core-trojans are spread over a hundred and forty thousand kilometers—” She pictured them in her mind, their tenuous teardrop spread veil-thin through endless vacuum.

“I didn't say it would be easy. It's probably not even there; this whole thing is insane. But you wanted a long shot, and that's the only one I've got. It's either shoot our wad on this or go on the way we have, bleeding to death.” He shrugged. “Your choice is mine. What do you say?”

She took a deep breath. “What the hell. Let's gamble, let's throw it all away on the trojans! What the hell have we got to lose?” She raised her arms and swept them down, rising defiantly through the air.

He nodded, his eyes shining. “Only our chains.”

“Nothing.” Chaim looked up from the read-outs. They had been in the aft-trojans, sixty degrees behind Discus, for more than two megaseconds. And so far they had found nothing that should not have been there; no trace of radiation or any material that had not been formed in the original fusion of stone out of primordial dust.

Mythili sighed, saying nothing because she could not think of anything to say. She finished a handful of nuts, feeling the presence of every hard, broken fragment prick the tight walls of her stomach; they had begun rationing their supplies to stretch their search time. Wasted time. She tried not to think it, and failed. She looked away at the chameleon, which clung to the wall beside her with its tonglike toes. It seemed to crave their company more and more; or perhaps there was simply nothing else left for it to do. There did not seem to be a single cricket remaining on the ship, and there was nothing in their own dwindling supplies the lizard would eat. She wondered how long it could survive without food. Lucky … she thought, and sighed.

“You want to check out the twin?” Chaim twisted to look directly at her. “There was something in the long-range scan; I'm not losing my mind—” he murmured, as if he wasn't absolutely certain of it himself.

She shrugged. “We're here; we might as well.” The kilometers-long piece of stone below orbited a common center of gravity with a larger mate she could see shining, a spurious star, above the bleak, dead mass they had just close-scanned.

She altered their course again, feeling the delicate mastery of her skills that she had regained and enhanced these past megaseconds. This was something that used her abilities fully, challenged them, honed them.… But soon it would all be gone. She didn't regret the decision they had made in gambling on the long shot; but she did regret that it would do them no good—that the satisfaction of this moment would only leave her more hungry, when their last chance and this ship were gone.

They closed with the second planetoid. Chaim put the results of the reconnaissance scan on the screen almost perfunctorily, below the actual view of naked stone framed in the ship's viewing port. A binary … it was hopeless, the original factory had not been part of a binary system. Their long-range instruments must be going bad on top of everything else. She watched morosely over his shoulder as the readings began to appear, lining up as she had learned to expect them, high in iron and nickel ores. Anticipating zero on hydrocarbons and metal alloys, she looked out at the barren scape below them before she saw the actual figures.… She blinked, and looked again. “Chaim.” She reached out, her hand brushed his arm unthinkingly.

He glanced up. “Oh, God,” he breathed. “Oh, God.…” His arm knotted and trembled. A pragmatic, colorless dawn was breaking across its surface; the growing light glanced from the bristling discontinuity of towers and domes. She tore her eyes away from the sight of them: The readings continued to come, and looking down she saw that they were not zero anymore.

“Ninety-five,” Chaim murmured. “Look at that! Look! We've found it! Geez Allah, we're rich!” He caught her hand, pulling her toward him, sending them out in a spin until they rebounded from the control room's ceiling. “He was right, the old man was right, God damn him … he finally did something for me!”

She heard her own laughter echoing through his shouts, echoing through the ship—her own laughter, as alien as a voice out of deep space. Chaim's arms closed around her, she felt suddenly as solid as steel, as ephemeral as bubbles. She pulled his face toward her own and kissed him.

He stared, speechless, as she broke away again. He kissed her back, eyes closed, arms tightening, pressing himself against her with sudden urgency.

She broke away and struggled back toward the panel. “I—I'll take us down.” She felt her blood sweep to the ends of her body and recoil through every artery, capillary, vein; dazed by a feeling as strong as terror, that was not. Her hands stumbled over the instruments.

Chaim nodded, clearing his throat. “Sure … Let's see what we've got.” He settled down to the instrument panel beside her, his voice husky. “Look at that; there's no radiation leaking at all. It must be in perfect shape!” He grinned, abruptly reoriented.

She felt her own excitement change form again as she looked down at the readings beside him. The figures twitched unexpectedly on the screen, still plagued by the random fluctuation that had been with them from the start. It struck her as ironic that after a gigasec this factory was in better shape than their own equipment. Her eyes tracked on across the readings, caught again. “Chaim, look. It looks like there's something in orbit here besides us.”

“Another ship?”

She nodded, pointing at the screen.

“Showing any power?” He peered past her.

“No …”

“Hm.” He let himself drift again abruptly. “Must be a derelict; doesn't look like much. We can check it out later, see what's left of it. But first I want to see that factory!”

She didn't argue.

She brought the ship in as close to the source of their readings as she could, handling the difficult rendezvous perfectly with only half her concentration. They went through the ritual of suiting up, emerging through the lock onto the airless surface of another unfamiliar world, seeming to move through it all for the first time. The planetoid rolled sunward into another fleeting day, and the light of distant Heaven silvered the razed stone surface of the docking field, limned the eerie insect-silhouette of the Mother behind them—etched the shining reality of the factory up ahead against the black surface of the sky. It seemed to grow out of the stone itself, an iceberg jutting above a frozen sea, the greater part of its plant buried beneath the surface. Beautiful, incongruous, immense—flawed. Unfamiliar with its form, still she recognized the gaping, unnatural breach along one side: “Chaim, it looks like it did take a hit.”

“I know. But there's no radiation.” He repeated the reading like a prayer. “The reactor has to be intact. That's still worth a ship and then some … it's still worth plenty! And look at the waldoes, they haven't been touched. I know a factory back home that'd pay a mint just for those.”

They crossed the distance toward the factory's evaporating shadow in bounds that seemed effortless, her body as light as her spirits. The airlock that faced on the empty docking field gaped open in a cry of perpetual astonishment; but this time the morbid image did not stay in her mind. They passed on through it into the factory's fractured cavern.

Near the entrance their spotlights picked out the broad access tunnel that led down into the planetoid's insulating heart, where the factory's hundreds of workers had lived before the war. Passing it by, they moved on into the plant itself. Dim illumination suffused the interior from the broken wall to their right, and gradually their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking up, Mythili saw cranes and unnameable appendages dripping like stalactites from the ceiling high overhead, the shadowy walls and partitions that broke the space into a maze of soundless mysteries through which they drifted like lost souls. “Do you know where we're going?” she asked, suddenly uncertain. “What are we looking for?”

Chaim nodded, ahead of her. “More or less. I almost worked at one of these places; they gave me an orientation. I want to see the reactor, and what kind of damage there's been.”

Mythili glanced down at the radiation counter at the wrist of her suit. It still registered nothing; she followed his slow, searching progress without further questions. The light grew stronger as they neared the ragged break in the dome's fragile outer shell. She found herself wondering that a hit which had apparently come so close to the reactor itself had not damaged it enough to cause even a small leakage.

“Watch your step—” Chaim was silhouetted as he bounded up and over the heap of rubble from a collapsed wall. She followed him like a dancer over the shifting surface, saw him turn sharply left through a breach in a higher, heavier wall.

A sudden shout rattled in her helmet as he disappeared from sight. She threw herself forward in a long bound, and another, until she could see him again. He was struggling to get to his feet again, where he had fallen in another pile of girders and rubble. But just beyond him was the thing that had wrung the cry from him—a vast hole opening in the surface of the vaster floor.

Mythili caught a protruding end of beam, pulling herself up short at Chaim's side. “What happened?” not directing the question at him, but at the hole beyond him.

“It's gone.” His own thoughts followed hers to the rim of the pit. “The reactor—it's gone!”

She clung harder to the beam-end, strangling the useless words that tried to form in her throat. Why? Where? Who? “How?” She voiced the one question that she could possibly imagine having an answer.

“I don't know. I don't know.…” Chaim muttered, drawing himself up. “God help me. But this—” he waved a hand at the blasted wall, “—must've been done on purpose, for a way to get the thing out of here. Maybe the blast was what slowed the rock down enough to trap it here. They must've been in a hell of a hurry to rip it out the hard way.”

“Then you think someone found this place after the first attack, and—stole the reactor out of it?”

He grunted. “Yeah.”

“But what happened to it? Why wasn't there ever any record of it?”

“I don't know. If it happened during the war, it could be nobody ever knew it happened. Maybe the reactor's in use somewhere in the Demarchy right now. Or whoever stripped it might have got blasted themselves, and the thing was lost forever. All we need to know is that the goddamn thing is gone!” He wrenched loose a piece of metal and hurled it. She watched its slow, graceful arc outward and down beyond the rim of the hole.

She bit her lip, feeling her own emotions stretched beyond the limits of control, beginning to break loose and recoil. “But the rest of the factory is still here!” She threw that undeniable fact in the face of her faltering courage. “There must be other things worth salvaging, that some factory could use—”

Chaim turned back to her; she searched behind his faceplate glass. She heard the long, slow intake of his breath. “Maybe there is. The exterior waldoes we saw as we came across the field; they looked intact. The factory I told you about—its waldoes were damaged. If we can get these clear, we just might be able to sell them for our own ransom. Nobody else's got replacement parts to offer.”

“I do.” A third voice, a stranger's, filled the captive space of their helmets.

Mythili shook her head in disbelief; she saw the perplexed look that Chaim gave back to her. Together they turned, found a third figure standing, impossibly, behind them. A shudder crawled up her spine as she imagined that she saw a specter from the dead past, a ghostly guardian seeking vengeance on the violators of a tomb.

“What the hell.…” Chaim whispered. “Who—?”

“Don't tell me you've forgotten me, Chaim. It wasn't so long ago we met, back on Mecca. I'm your father's friend, and yours, boy.”

“Fitch!” Chaim shook his head, uncomprehending. “What in the name of God? How—what the hell are you doing here?”

“Following you. You don't think this was a coincidence, do you?”

“You tracked us all this way.” Mythili was already sure of the answer, sure there could be no other explanation. “How? The signal separater you gave us back at Mecca wasn't bugged, I know it wasn't!”

Fitch came toward them, his face still invisible to her. “You're a bright girl,” he said mildly. “But not bright enough.… How's Lucky doing? And did you ever take a good look at his cage? That's where the transmitter was hidden.” He laughed. “You must've paid a fortune for those damned crickets!”

She felt her face flush. “You bastard—” she murmured, hearing Chaim's curse echo her own. She cursed herself, silently; knowing she should have realized that power leak meant something.

As Fitch approached, she saw that he carried something massive at his side, something she couldn't identify. She felt herself beginning to sweat.

“What were you following us for?” Chaim asked, although the answer was as clear to her as the answer to how; and probably it was to him, too.

“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 cartilege.

“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 benediction, 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 enough 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.

She glanced down, weaving her fingers together, twisting them, testing the fit. She looked up again, her throat aching, still unable to speak the words that had been prisoner too long inside her; hoping that he could read in her eyes the promise he would not hear from her lips. “I'm—not ready to say yes now, Chaim. But I'm not saying no.” She untangled her fingers, and gave him her hand freely.

He grinned. “Damn—I can still sell an idea when I want to.”

They left the ship at last, trailing the long guide rope down to the surface of the Calcutta docking field. It was cluttered with corporate mediamen and freelancers; the din of questions blurred into white noise in their suit speakers. But a single figure stood waiting for them as they forced their way through the gauntlet of questions. Mythili saw the insignia on his plain, dark pressure suit, the silver octagonal star enclosed in a teardrop, the symbol of the Demarchy. Chaim glanced over at her, murmuring, “Abdhiamal?”

She nodded. She pictured his self-satisfied smile as they closed with him, imagined the litany of smug congratulations he would be reciting to himself at the sight of their success and their reconciliation.

She frowned abruptly, giving Chaim a light shove. “Keep away from me, Dartagnan. I hope I never see you again, after this!”

He gaped at her. She winked, and the amazement fell away; he smiled feebly, nodded. “The same goes for me, you bitch! If I ever see Abdhiamal again, I'm going to shove his teeth down his throat.”

“You'll have to wait in line.” Vicious satisfaction—“Abdhiamal!”—and mock surprise.

Abdhiamal looked from face to face between them, shaking his head, his own face dour. “Well … I only have one question for you, then.”

They stopped, holding murder on their faces. “What is it?”

“Are you going to ask me to witness when you marry?”

They looked at him in silent incredulity, and at each other. Slowly Chaim worked the gold ring off of his gloved finger, and pressed it into Abdhiamal's open hand. Smiling, they passed him by on either side, and moved on across the field hand in hand.