MacWong glanced up as Wadie entered the office, ice-blue eyes placid in his dark face. “Peace 'n' prosperity, Wadie.” He rose, returned a formal bow, and moved reluctantly away from his aquarium.
Wadie peered past him for a glimpse of the fish—three glittering golden things no larger than a finger, with tails of shining gossamer, moving sinuously through sea grasses in the green-lit water. The goldfish were the only nonhuman creatures he had ever seen, and for all he knew MacWong was still paying for them. He pulled off his hat, watched its soft mushroom roundness begin to flatten beside MacWong's on the desk top. “With all due respect, I trust this news about a Mysterious Message from Outer Space is genuine, an' I'm not here because you like to see me suffer.” He sank slowly into MacWong's neocolonial desk chair, smoothed wrinkles from his jacket.
“Have a seat.” MacWong smiled tolerantly. “The ‘message’ is genuine. These aren't home movies I'm goin' to show you.” He leaned carefully against the corner of his desk, avoiding the fresco of silver animal heads, and flicked a switch on the communications inset. Nothing happened. “Dammit.” He picked up a platinum paperweight shaped like a springing cat and dropped it on the panel. The impact was unimpressive, but the Kleinfelter mural projection on the far wall faded, and was replaced by the image of a woman's face. “I don't know what I'll do if this desk quits working. They don't build 'em like they used to.” He set the paperweight gently back in place.
“They don't build 'em at all, Lije.” Wadie traced the scrolled embroidery on his jacket front; his fingers froze as he looked up at the screen. “A hologram? Where'd you get that, MacWong?”
“We picked it out of the air, or space, anyhow, thirty kilosecs ago. It's a genuine hologramic transmission; it took us ten kilosecs to figure that out. And it's not beamed. Think of the power and bandwidth something like that requires! I don't know anybody who can do that for the hell of it anymore.”
“Not many that can do it at all—” He broke off, watching, listening, as the woman's voice rose. Her skin was pale to the point of colorlessness, like her cropped, floating hair; her face was long and angular. She wore a faded shirt open at the neck, without jewelry. In her thirties, he judged, and making no attempt to cover it up; her plainness was almost painful. He put it out of his mind, concentrating on her voice. She spoke Anglo, but with an unfamiliar accent; the most common words seemed to take on extra syllables in her mouth.
“… please identify yourselves further. We were not aware of violating your space. We are not, repeat not, from your system; and we—” She was interrupted by a noise that barely recorded; Wadie saw her pale skin blush with anger, her eyes sharpen like cut sapphire. He glanced at MacWong.
“The Ringer navy,” MacWong said. “Their ‘cast’ went the other way. This is all we picked up.”
The woman glanced offscreen, and spoke words that he couldn't hear, insulting words, he guessed; but her voice was steady as she faced the screen again. “This is not a Belter ship, we are not ‘Demarchists,’ and we have committed no acts of ‘piracy.’ You have no authority over my ship; permission to board is denied. But if you will give us co-ords for your—”
Again she was interrupted; he watched tension grow, tightening her face. “We're not armed—” And resolution: “But we deny your ‘right of seizure.’ Pappy, get us—” She turned away again, and her image was ripped apart by a burst of red static. For half a second more he saw her, and then the screen went white.
“Well?”
Wadie loosened his hands on the metal frame of the chair. “Did they destroy it? Is that all?”
MacWong shook his head. “The ship took a hit, but it got away from the Ringers—all but one of 'em. We monitored some of their followups; that alien ship is a ramscoop, and when one of the Ringer pursuit craft got too close she just used the exhaust to melt it into scrap. Maybe that indignant Viking Queen isn't armed, but she's dangerous.”
Wadie said nothing, waiting.
“We don't know where the ship is now, or even why it's here. But I have some ideas. She said it was from outside the system, and I believe that. Nobody in the Belt has anything that sophisticated anymore. And a woman runnin' it—particularly a woman who looks like that—”
“Maybe she's an albino … maybe she's from the Main Belt. The scavengers don't care who goes into space; they've got no protection against radiation anyhow. Maybe they got very lucky on salvage.” And yet he knew that MacWong was right; that the woman and her accent were too alien.
MacWong looked at him. “Nobody gets that lucky. What's wrong, Wadie, the miracle too much for you? This isn't some mediaman's fantasy, believe me. That's a ship from Outside, the first contact we've had with the rest of humanity in over three gigasecs. And the course they set away from the Rings could be taking them to the old capital, Lansing. If that's right, there can only be one reason why that ship is here: they don't know about the Civil War. They've come to Heaven lookin' for golden streets, and when they learn there aren't any left we'll never see 'em again. We can't let that happen.…”
“What good would one ship do us now?” He stared at the blank wall screen, against his will felt another question stubbornly taking form.
“That ship could do us all the good in the universe.” MacWong picked up his platinum cat. “That ship is treasure, that ship is power … that ship could save us.”
Wadie nodded, admitting to himself that the ship's immense fusion reactor alone could give the Demarchy the start to rebuild capital industry. And God only knew what other technology—functioning technology—they might have on board. Just the possession of a ship like that would change the Demarchy's snow dealings with the Rings forever. They could even bypass Discus and the Ringers, set up distilleries of their own out of Sevin's moons.…
For as long as he could remember he had lived with signs of a society gradually coming apart at the seams, alone in the wasteland that civil war had made of Heaven Belt. Because of its peripheral location, the Demarchy had survived the Civil War relatively intact. But the Main Belt had been destroyed, and now the Demarchy's only outside trade contact was with the Grand Harmony of the Discan Rings, and the Ringers were barely surviving. The Demarchy was slipping down with them, but because it had so much further to go, he had discovered that no one else seemed to realize the truth. They were blinded by the fierce, traditional self-interest that was the Demarchy's strength—and perhaps, now, its fatal weakness.
He had become a negotiator, hoping to bind up his people's self-inflicted wounds. He had believed that somehow the unifying element, the common bond of need that joined every human being, could be used as a force against disintegration and decay; that the Demarchy would continue, that they would find an answer. And with this ship … His imagination leaped, fell back as the question struck him down: Who would control a ship like that … and who could control the one's who did control it? “But as you said, that ship will go back home, once they see what's left of Lansing.”
“Maybe.” MacWong flicked dust off of his cuff. “But Osuna thinks they might need to refuel first. It's a long way home to anywhere from here. They're not likely to go back to the Rings to get fuel, under the circumstances. Which means they might come to us; if they need processed hydrogen, there's no place else to go. So I'm sendin' out everyone I can spare. I want you at Mecca. The distilleries will make it a prime target, and you're more experienced at dealing with—‘aliens’—than anybody on the staff.”