The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

Ranger (in transit Discus to Lansing) + 2.96 megaseconds

Wadie walked the corridor to Betha Torgussen’s private room, slowed by one-quarter gravity and the fatigue of their work in space… and by the same tangle of emotion that drove him to face her now. The memory of the Discan sky, hazed with shining flotsam and hung with crescent moons, haunted him: the knowledge of a costly victory won and almost lost again by his own actions; two lives, the last of the Morningside crew, almost lost—and with them the part of himself that he had only just begun to discover…

He reached the open door, stopped as the hallway slipped back into focus, and stepped through.

Rusty’s head appeared suddenly from a cocoon of bedding, watched him like a familiar as he looked across the room. The captain sat at her desk, her back to him, her attention lost among scattered displays and printouts. Empty coffee cups littered the desk top; there was a sign above her head on the wall, TEN YEARS AGO I COULDN’T EVEN SPELL “ENGINEER,” AND NOW I ARE ONE. He smiled briefly, until he heard her sigh, a sound that was a small groan. The vision formed inside his eyes of her cracked and bandaged ribs, a bruise the width of his arm.

He turned abruptly to leave the room again, found a picture on the wall inside a broad green arrow pointing down: found Betha Torgussen, and Welkin, and—Eric, bearded now and smiling. With them, two more women, two more men, and seven children bundled in heavy clothes; all pale, laughing, waving in three dimensions, joyfully disheveled against a background of snow. A family who knew how to share… and somehow, with the fever of futile greed that burned through Heaven, their sharing no longer seemed to alien or so bizarre…

Rusty stirred on the bed, blinking; she mrred inquiringly. Betha turned across the back of her chair, controlling a grimace, her own eyes suddenly quick and nervous, questioning his presence.

“Betha… I’d like to see you, if you don’t mind. There’re some things I think I need to say.” He crossed the room.

“All right, Abdhiamal.” Her eyes went to his wrist, Clewell’s wristband. “Yes, maybe you should.” Her face changed. “But first, tell me how Clewell is. How is he taking the acceleration?”

“Well enough, I guess. He’s very weak, but he’s no fool…” And nobody’s fool. Sudden appreciation for the old man filled him. “I don’t suppose I’d have the guts to be here if I didn’t believe he was goin’ to be all right… But what about you? What are you tryin’ to prove? Why the hell aren’t you getting some rest—” He broke off, not sure who he was really angry at.

Her bruised mouth tightened. “Because I’d rather be sore than dead. And yes, I am trying to prove something.” She gestured at the computer terminal, her expression easing. “I—didn’t know whether to let you know about this, but… we’ve detected a patch of hydrogen and helium, Doppler-shifted into the red; I think it’s a hydrogen fusion torch pointed away from us. Right now it’s still thirty million kilometers behind us—but we’re being followed.”

“You can detect an averted torch at that range? Your instruments are better than ours.” He was impressed again.

“Are they? Good… But with these fuel canisters strapped to the hull, we can’t move faster than whoever’s behind us. What I need to know is whether the ships come from the Demarchy or Discus; and, if they are from the Demarchy, what you think their mission is. Do they still want to take the ship, or are they out to destroy us?”

He leaned on the desk, the tendons ridging slightly in his arm. “Good question. The ships are from the Demarchy. Nobody else has anythin’ like that left; the Ringers have only oxyhydrogen rockets. Our—the Demarchy’s—fusion ships are owned by interests in the most powerful tradin’ companies, but in times of ‘national emergency’ the Demarchy commandeers ’em. Which means MacWong’s story about my handing you to the Ringers must’ve been well received…” He stopped. “He knows it was a damn lie; and knowin’ him, I’d say that means he did it because he still wants this ship, and that was the only way he could think of to get the ships to follow you.”

“But then he must know that we’ll still outrun them, now that we’ve got the fuel; even if we stop at Lansing. If they have to do a turnaround to match our deceleration we’ll be long gone before they reach us. If they don’t slow down, they’ll overshoot… and all they could do then would be destroy us in passing.” Her fingers tapped nervously.

He nodded. “He’d know that too. But he wants that ship intact for the Demarchy, and he’s not the kind to mine quartz and think it’s ice. He’s got somethin’ planned but I don’t know what.”

“At least we know where they are, and they don’t know we know. If they were counting on surprise to close the gap they’ve lost it.” She shifted in her seat, leaning hard on the desk top. “I suppose we’ll know more when we begin decelerating and see if they do the same. Even if they don’t slow down… well, depending on what you can tell me about the range of their weapons, I think we can still stop at Lansing long enough to off load the extra hydrogen—and then accelerate at right angles to them with enough time to get away. By the time they can change course, we’ll be out of this system forever.”

“Out of our system forever. And we’ll be…” He looked down at her strong and gentle face, wondered why he had ever thought it was plain. His hands tightened over a sudden desire to touch it.

Realization colored her cheeks. She looked up at him strangely, almost welcoming, lifted a hand. “Sit down, Abdhiamal… Wadie Abdhiamal. You’ll be better off without us, yes.”

He sank down on the padded wall seat, pushing aside heaped clothes. “Betha, there’re no words to apologize for what we’ve done to you. And when it comes to things I’ve done to you, out of my own stupidity… my God, I nearly—killed you. All the things I said, not meanin’—”

Her hand waved the words to silence. “I never meant to ruin your life, Wadie… I owe you as many apologies as you owe me. More. Is it too late to cancel them all out, now?”

He leaned back, resting his head against the wall, eyes on her. “It’s never too late. But I’m not—very good at expressing my emotions, Betha. I’m not even good at admitting them to myself.” He took a long breath. “All of a sudden there are a lot of things I want to be different. But there’s so little time—” He broke off; feeling the presence of ghosts. “That picture across the room: Is that—Eric, beside you?”

Surprise caught her. She nodded, her face composed. “He was my first husband. He was—a kind of negotiator too, an ombudsman. We were monogamous for eight years before we married into Clewell’s family.”

“And you have children?”

“The twins, Richard and Kirsten; the boy and girl in front of me. They’re about eleven now…” She smiled. “They’re all my children. But the twins were born to me, they have my name. All seven of our kids who are still at home are staying with my family.”

“You left your children—” He stopped himself before he hurt her again. We do change; but change always comes too fast… and too late. And there were only one hundred kiloseconds remaining until they reached Lansing.

She glanced at him, puzzled. “Yes. We left them with my parents, on their tree farm.” And understanding, “Half the world is your family when you’re growing up on Morningside. They hug you, tell you stories, and make you toys… there’s always someone who’s glad to see you. We didn’t abandon our children. But it has been very hard to miss seeing so much of their lives as they grow. At least Clewell and I will still get to see how they’ve grown…” She looked down, shuffling papers; he saw the return of more than one kind of pain.

“Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn… are they why you’re risking everything, to buy a dyin’ world a few more seconds?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought… but I suppose maybe it is. I wish—I wish I knew how to do more.”

“You know, then? What it’s like for them on Lansing?”

She nodded.

“I’m not much lookin’ forward to it myself, I’ve got to admit. But I’ve talked myself out of anythin’ better—literally.” He smiled. “I don’t regret it. It was in a good cause.”

She picked up a cup, set it down aimlessly. “What will you do, Wadie, on Lansing?”

He smiled again, hearing his name; the smile stopped when he remembered. “Sit and watch the world end, I suppose. All the worlds. Not with a bang but a gasp.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

He felt her touch him as though she had raised a hand. He shook his head. “Maybe I do. Maybe that’s my penance for pretendin’ there was no tomorrow.”

“You don’t believe that?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I believe any more.” Only knowing that he was alive in a vast mausoleum and afraid to look at death. “But I belong here, to Heaven; if that makes any sense. It scares the hell out of me, but I’ve got to see it through. But thanks.” He saw her smile, disappointed.

“You can change your mind.”

“Sooner than I could change Heaven… Ironic, isn’t it; that we began with everything and Morningside with nothing… and look who failed.”

“We almost failed too—more than once.” Betha stared at the wall, looking through time. “So did Uhuru, and Hellhole, and Lebensraum. But we had help.”

“From where?”

“From each other. Planets like Morningside are so marginal any small setback becomes a disaster… but they’re the most common kind of habitable world; they’re all like Morningside in our volume of space. But our worlds are within reach of one another. We set up a trade ring, and when one of us falls flat, the rest pick it up and put it back together. And that’s how we survive. That’s all we do; we survive. But it’s enough… it’ll have to be enough forever, now that our journey here has failed.

“We have our own ironies, you know… Morningside was settled after a major political upheaval on Earth. Our nearest neighbor now, Uhuru, was settled by some of our former ‘enemies’ after their own empire on Old Earth fell. Need makes stranger bedfellows than politics ever did.”

He laughed abruptly. “As the five of us should know.”

“Yes.” She held him with her eyes, fingers over her lips.

“If you’d come before the war, Betha, maybe the five of us would even be doin’ some good. Heaven could have learned somethin’ then about sharing. Now it’s too late; there’s nothing left to share.”

She shifted position again, wincing. “Wadie… you said the knowledge that put Heaven’s technology where it was is still intact. That if you could rebuild your capital industry, you could still make the Belt work again, and it could be everything it once was. You said even the Ranger could make the difference… What if—what if we tied you into our trading network? It’s feasible; the distance here from Morningside isn’t that much greater than the distances we already travel. If we gave you the means for recovery, you could give us what we wanted all along, a richer life for all our worlds—and you’d never have to see this happen again!”

He listened to her voice come alive with inspiration; felt suddenly as though the pain and grief had lifted from her mind only to settle in his own. “That’s what I said. But I was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We’ve gone down too far. We can’t recover now; death is a disease that’s infected us all. We’ll never work together now, even to save ourselves.”

“But if they could understand that there was hope for all of them…”

“How would you make them understand? You’ve seen how well they listen.” He slammed his hand down on the bench. “They wouldn’t listen!”

“No, they wouldn’t…” Betha began to smile, in misery, moving her head from side to side. “Wadie Abdhiamal—how did we come to this? You saying they wouldn’t, me saying they would… How could we come to understand each other better than we understand ourselves?”

He shook his head, felt a smile soothe his own mouth, lost his useless anger watching her.

Her hand moved tentatively from the desk to touch the leather band on his wrist; he caught her hand and their fingers twined, brown and pale. She looked across at him, down at their hands. She drew her hand from his again, said quietly to no one, “And not one of them lived happily ever after…”