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.
The Outcasts of Heaven Belt
There are more stars in the galaxy than there are droplets of water in the Boreal Sea. Only a fraction of those stars wink and glitter, like snowflakes passing through the light, in the unending night sky over the darkside ice. And out of those thousand thousand visible stars, the people of the planet Morningside had made a wish on one—called Heaven.
Sometimes when the winds ceased, a brittle silence would settle over the darkside ice sheet; and it might seem to a Morningside astronomer, in the solitude of his observatory, that all barriers had broken down between his planet and the stars, that the very hand of interstellar space brushed his pulse. Space lapped at his doorway, the night flowed up and up and up, merging imperceptibly with the greater night that swallowed all mornings, and all Morningsides, and all the myriad stars whose numbers would overflow the sea.
And he would think of the starship Ranger, which had gone up from Morningside's fragile island into the endless night: a silvered dustmote carried on a violent invisible breeze across the cathedral distances of space, drawn from candleflame to candleflame through the darkness.…
They would be a long time gone. And what had seemed to the crew to be the brave, bright immensity of their fusion craft shrank to insignificance as they left the homeworld further and further behind—as the Ranger became only one more mote, lost among countless unseen motes in the fathomless depths of night. But like an ember within a tinderbox, their lives gave the ship its own warm heart of light, and life. The days passed, and the months, and years … and light-years, while seven men and women watched over the ship's needs, and one another's. Their shared past patterned their present with images of the world they had left behind, visions of the future they hoped to bring back to it. They were bound for Heaven, and like true believers they found that belief instilled a deeper meaning in the charting of stars and the tending of hydroponic vats, in their silence and their laughter, in every song and memory they carried with them from home.
And at last one star began to separate from all the rest, centering on the ship's viewscreen, becoming a focus for their combined hope. Years had dwindled to months and finally weeks, as, decelerating now, backing down from near the speed of light, they kept their rendezvous with the new system. They passed the orbit of Sevin, the outermost of Heaven's worlds, where the new sun was still scarcely more than an ice-crowned point of light. Counting the days now, like children reaching toward Christmas, the crew anticipated journey's end before them: all the riches and wonders of the Heaven Belt.
But before they reached their final destination, they would encounter one more wonder that was no creation of humankind—the gas giant Discus, a billowing ruby set in a plate of silver rings. They watched it expand until it obliterated more of this black and alien sky than the face of their own sun had blocked in the dusty sky of home. They closed with the giant's lumbering course, slipping past like a cautious firefly. And while the crew sat together in the dayroom, gazing out in awe at its splendor, the captain and the navigator discovered something new, something quite unexpected, on the ship's displays: four unknown ships, powered by antiquated chemical rockets, on an intercepting course ….