The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

Ranger (Demarchy space) + 553 kiloseconds

“No, that won’t work either. They could see this isn’t a prewar ship.” Bird Alyn shook her head; her hair, caught into two stubby ponytails, stood out from her head like seafoam.

“Then there’s nothing more I can suggest, offhand.” Betha glanced from face to face, questioning. Clewell sat firmly belted into a seat; Bird Alyn and Shadow Jack sprawled in the air, totally secure in the absence of gravity. The five-day journey along sixty degrees of Discus’s orbit had transformed them, superficially: Their skin and hair were shining clean, their long, gangly bodies forced into dungarees and soft pullover shirts. But the start of one-gee acceleration had left them crushed on the floor like reedflies, and they still winced with the stiffness of wrenched muscles, and the memory. And there were other memories, that shone darkly in their hungry eyes and quick, nervous words; memories out of a past that Betha was afraid to imagine and glad she would never know.

“I still say you should leave the Demarchy alone.” Shadow Jack stuck out a thin bronze foot, stroked Rusty gingerly as she drifted past. “We should’ve gone for the Rings. It’s a lot safer to steal it from them. If you ask me—”

“I wasn’t asking—that.” Betha smiled faintly. “I want to trade, not steal.… I already know how ‘safe’ it is in the rings of Discus, Shadow Jack.”

“But the Demarchy’s worse. They’ve got a higher technology.”

“How much higher? You don’t really know. And they aren’t looking for us, either. With your ship to ferry us in, we can slip in and out of a distillery before they even think about it. But what do we trade for hydrogen?” She repeated the inventory again in her mind, struggling with the knowledge that only Eric would know what was right, what to offer, what to say. Only Eric had been trained to know… Oh, Eric—

Shadow Jack frowned, pulling at his toes. Bird Alyn caught Rusty, set her spinning slowly head over paws in the air. Rusty caught her own tail and began to wash it. Bird Alyn laughed, inaudible.

“The cat,” Shadow Jack said. “We could give them the cat!”

“What?” Clewell straightened indignantly.

“Sure. Nobody’s got a cat any more. But nobody in the Demarchy could know we didn’t; Lansing had a lot of animals, once. And it’s just what the Demarchists go for: somethin’ really rare. The owner of a distillery, he’d probably give you half his stock to own Rusty.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Clewell said.

“No… maybe it’s not, Pappy.” Betha spread her hands, and Rusty pushed off toward her. “I think he’s got a point. Rusty, would you like to live like a queen?” She gathered Rusty into her arms, gathered in the precious memories of her children’s faces, as they handed her the gifts of love. She felt her throat tighten against more words, wondering what payment would be demanded next of them; knowing that whatever the emotional price was, they must pay it, if it would buy this ship’s passage home to Morningside. She saw sharp sorrow on Bird Alyn’s face; saw Bird Alyn struggle to hide it, as she hid her own. “Besides… we haven’t been able to think of anything else that wouldn’t give us away. Any equipment we tried to trade would be obvious as coming from outside the system. We’ll be taking enough of a risk as it is.”

“I know.” Clewell looked down. “You’re the captain.”

“Yes, I am.” Betha pulled herself down to the control panel, tired of arguing, tired of postponing the inevitable. There was no choice, there was only one thing that mattered—saving this ship—and she must never forget it… She watched the latest surveillance readouts, not seeing them. The Ranger was well within Demarchy space now. They had detected dozens of asteroids and heavy radio traffic. They had identified Mecca, the largest distillery, eight million kilometers away, with a closing velocity of ten kilometers per second—only hours of flight time for the Ranger. But it would take the Lansing 04 two weeks, decelerating every meter of the way, to close the distance-and-velocity gap between them and Mecca. Her stomach tightened at the prospect; the extra shielding they had put on board the Lansing ship cut the radiation levels to one-sixth of what they had been, but the readings were still too high. And yet if the Ranger came any closer to an inhabited area, the risk of detection would be too great.

“I’m going to Mecca, Pappy,” she said at last. “I’m going to get us our ticket home.”

Clewell sat firmly in his seat as Bird Alyn floated free above his head. They watched together while the Lansing 04, a battered tin can with a reactor tied to its tail, fell away into the bottomless night. He looked back from the darkness to Bird Alyn’s face, her own dark eyes still fixed on the screen. “I’m glad you’re here. There’s too much—emptiness on this ship, alone.”

She blinked self-consciously, her arms moving like bird wings as she turned toward him in the air. Her eyes rarely met his, or anyone’s; as if she was afraid of seeing her own image reflected there. “I wish—I wish she hadn’t taken Rusty.”

He had to strain to hear her, wondered again if he was getting a little deaf. “So do I. She did what she thought was best… And you wish she hadn’t taken Shadow Jack.”

She still looked down; her head twitched slightly.

“She did what she thought was best.” He thought of Eric, who had been trained to know what was best; remembered Betha’s anguished doubt, in the private darkness of their room. “She means everything to me, too.”

Bird Alyn looked up at him at last. “Are—are you Betha’s father?”

He laughed. “No, child; I’m her husband. One of her husbands.”

“Her—husband?” He almost thought he could see her blush. “One of her husbands? How many does she have?”

“There are seven of us, three women and four men.” He smiled. “I take it that’s not so common here.”

“No.” Almost a protest. “Are… the rest of them back on your—planet?”

“They were the crew of the Ranger.”

She jerked suddenly. “Then—they’re all dead, now.”

“Yes, All…” He stopped, forcing his mind away from the empty room on the next level below, where a gaping wound opened on the stars. Deliberately he looked back at Bird Alyn, saw her embarrassment.

“It’s possible to be in love with more than one person, you know.”

“I always thought that meant somebody had to be unhappy.”

He shook his head, smiling, wondering what strange beliefs must be a part of the Lansing culture. And he wondered how those beliefs could survive, when a people were struggling for their own survival.

On Morningside the first colonists had struggled to survive, expatriates and exiles fleeing an Earth where the political world had turned upside down. They had arrived in a Promised Land that they discovered, too late, was not the haven they were promised—discovering at last the lyrical irony in the name Morningside. Tidally locked with its red dwarf star, Morningside turned one face forever toward the bloody sun, held one side forever frozen into night. Between the subsolar desert and the darkside ice lay a bleak ring of marginally habitable land, the Wedding Band… until death did them part. The fear of death, the need to enlarge a small and suddenly vulnerable population, had broken down the rigid customs of their European and North American past. They were no longer the people they had once been, and now, looking back across two hundred years of multiple marriage and the freedom-in-security of extended family kinship, few Morningsiders saw reason in their own past, or any reason to change back again.

Bird Alyn folded her arms, hiding her misshapen hand. And Clewell realized that perhaps the people of Lansing had had no choice in their customs either. If the radiation levels were as high as those on the Lansing 04, even one percent as high, then the threat of genetic damage could force them into breeding customs that seemed strange or even suicidal anywhere else. The whole of Heaven Belt was a trap and a betrayal in a way that Morningside had never been: because Heaven had promised a life of ease and beauty in return for a high technology, but it damned human weakness without pity.

Clewell was silent with the realization that whatever Morningside lacked in comfort, it made up for in a grudging constancy, and that even beauty became meaningless without that…

“How did you and Shadow Jack end up out here?”

She shrugged, a tiny waver of her weightless body. “I can work the computer; my parents programmed the recon unit. And Shadow Jack wanted to be a pilot and do something to help Lansing; he won a lottery.”

“Your parents let you go, instead of going themselves?” He saw Betha suddenly, in his mind: a gangly, earnest teenage girl, helping him take the measure of the immeasurable universe… saw his own children, waiting for him across that universal sea. He covered a sudden anger against whoever had sent their half-grown daughter out in a contaminated ship before they would go themselves.

Bird Alyn looked down at her crippled hand. “Well, you can only go if you work outside…”

“Outside?”

“Lansing’s a tent world… we have surface gardens, and a plastic tent to keep in an atmosphere.” She ran her hand through her hair, her mouth twitching. “You work outside if you can’t have children.” For a moment her eyes touched him, envious, almost accusing; she turned back to the viewscreen, looking out over isolation, withdrawing into herself. “I think I’ll take a shower.”

He laughed carefully. “If you take too many showers, girl, you’ll wrinkle up for good.”

“Maybe it would help.” Not smiling, she pushed off from the panel.

He looked out at the barren night, where all their hopes lay, and where all the dreams of their separate worlds lay ruined. Pain caught in his chest, and made him afraid. Help me, God, I’m an old man. Don’t let me be too old… He pressed his hands against the pain, heard the sprayer go on and Bird Alyn’s voice rise like warbling birdsong, beginning a Morningside lullaby: