The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

Lansing 04 (Lansing space) + 190 kiloseconds

The night stretched like silence beyond their searching eyes; they took comfort in its vast, star-flecked indifference. They were scavengers, picking the bones of worlds; the night gave them shelter because it made no judgments, and they were grateful for its amorality.

Shadow Jack watched the night, or its image on the screen… sometimes in the dim, close womb of the ship his mind blurred, and reality began to merge with image. He stretched his legs and scratched, brushed back the dirty hair that drifted forward into his eyes and was as black as the night before him on the screen. One eye was green and one was blue; both were bloodshot, and his head throbbed with his heartbeat. The carbon-dioxide level in the cabin was well over three percent; he had long ago stopped noticing the smells. He pulled himself back down into his seat, looking at one errant hole pricked in the darkness, the one star that was not a star—that was something infinitely more insignificant, and infinitely more precious.

“I think we’re close enough to begin scan.”

He heard Bird Alyn’s voice, barely audible as always, even in the quiet space between them. He swallowed twice, wetting his throat for words. “Right. Go ahead and run it through.”

She reached forward with her right hand, her crippled left hand resting on air as she typed the order into the reconnaissance-unit computer that would begin one more analysis. Shadow Jack watched the long fingers with the broken, dirty nails move over the shining board. He looked away, for the ten thousandth time, at the cramped squalor of the cabin: still finding no miracle to transform the welded scrap-iron husk into a ship to match the technological beauty of the reconnaissance unit. Almost in apology, he smoothed fingerprints from the coolness of the panel with his frayed sleeve. The recon unit was a prize of salvage, a more precious thing than his own life, because it gave his entire world a chance for survival. Before the Civil War it had been a prospecting unit, programmed for laser and radar analysis of asteroidal metals, organics, volatiles. Now it scanned for the old instead of the new, searching the debris of death for artifacts to stretch the lives of the living. He looked back at the display with Bird Alyn, waiting, watched figures print out on the flat glossy screen—

“Nothin’,” Bird Alyn said. “No metallic reflections, no radioactivity, no effluent across the surface… nothin’, nothin’, nothin’. Nobody ever lived there—”

“It’s always nothin’!” He struck at the thick, darkened glass of the port, at a universe beyond his control.

“Maybe next time. Besides, maybe somebody else’s found what they need. We’re not the only ship…”

She faded.

“I know that!” His voice battered his ears, he put up his hands. “I’m sorry. My head hurts.”

“So does mine.”

He glanced at her. It wasn’t a reproach; her red-rimmed eyes were gentle, before they dropped away, fading against her face and the matted cotton of her hair, brown into brown into brown. Freckles splattered her nose, darker brown. “Do you think there’s any water?”

“I’ll see.” He unstrapped and drifted up out of his seat, one bare foot pushing off from the panel. He reached the wall behind them, read the gauge on the still. “Yeah, there’s some in it now.” He heard Bird Alyn’s sigh as he forced the nozzle through the seal on the drinking cup, waited while it filled. “Point four liters.” He sighed, too.

They drank, taking turns at the straw, savoring the water’s warm flatness; Bird Alyn reached over to turn down the display on the screen. She hesitated, leaned forward. “This’s strange… look, the display’s changed. There must be something else out there; we’re getting a backscatter analysis of somethin’ further on. Metal… low radioactivity…” Her voice rose until he could hear her without trying.

Bubbles of water burst against his fingers and slimed his hand as he squeezed the cup too hard. “A derelict?”

She tapped the controls briefly, and displayed a picture from the Matkusov mirror on the hull. A sun-bright needle threaded stars on the blackness. “A ship,” she whispered.

“Oh, reality, look at that…”

“I never saw a ship like that…”

“There’s never been one.”

“Not since the War. It’s got to be—”

“It’s got to be—salvage.” Shadow Jack leaned forward, touched the ship with a wet fingertip. “I claim you, ship! With a ship like that… we could do anything with a ship like that.”

“It’s driftin’, no propulsion. That doesn’t mean it’s dead… To find that, here, so close to Lansing—”

“It is dead, it must be more’n two gigasecs old. What’s our relative velocity? Can we intercept?”

Her long fingers asked the questions, the board answered. “Yes!” She looked up. “If we push, in four or five kilosecs.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “We push.”

They waited, caught inside webs of private dream, as the needle of light grew into an impossible golden insect: triple antennae bristling ahead, spokes on an invisible wheel, its body stretching behind, filament-fine, and broadening into a bulbous, pearlike tail. A miracle… The word shone in his mind, and knowing there were no miracles, he believed, defiantly. A ship that could get them water to fill the marshes, to bring back life to the parched grasses and dying trees… to the dying people of Lansing.

His mind’s eye looked back into the past, down across Lansing’s fields from the limits of the sky, where he had worked suspended cloudlike fifty meters up, spinning the sticky patches to mend the plastic membrane of the world-shroud. Somewhere below him through the fragile canopy of trees, Bird Alyn had worked in the gardens… Like a vision of Old Earth, he remembered her crossing the yellowed fields at dusk to meet him, her footsteps lifting her like a bird. When they brought back that ship everything would be made right… everything.

He looked over at Bird Alyn, at her hand—three crooked, nerveless fingers and a thumb; felt her catch him looking. Not everything. He frowned with helpless self-disgust; she turned her face away as though the frown were meant for her. He looked out at the night, cracking his knuckles as he remembered why it would never be all right. He remembered the broken sound of his father’s reassurance, a third of a lifetime before—as he left his only son sitting in the grass, abandoned to the fatal light, and went back into the sheltering depths of rock alone…