Wadie accepted the tacit compliment, the tacit distaste, remembered fifty million seconds spent in the Grand Harmony of the Discan Rings, and things it had shown him that he had never expected to see. He stood up, reaching for his hat. “What if they're not in the mood for negotiation?”
“I don't expect they will be. But that doesn't matter; you're paid to put them in the mood. Promise them anythin', but keep them here, stall that ship, until we can take control of it.”
Wadie adjusted his beret, looked back from the mirroring wall. “What do you mean by ‘we,’ Lije? Just who is goin' to control that ship? It won't be the government, the people will see to that. And the first kid on the rock to own one—”
MacWong was not amused. “I sometimes wonder if you didn't spend too much time with the Ringers, Abdhiamal. Dammit, Wadie, I'm not still questioning your loyalty, after two hundred megasecs. But there are still some who do; who think maybe you'd really like to see a centralized government here.” He stopped. “There'll be a general meeting to settle the issue once we have the ship.” He leaned forward across the gargoyled desk. “The Demarchy has to have that ship, an' no one but the Demarchy.”
“You're the boss.” Wadie bowed.
“No.” MacWong straightened. “The Demarchy is the boss. We give the people what they think they want. Nothing else means anything. Forget that, and we're out of a job—or worse. If I was you, I wouldn't ever forget it.”
And knowing that MacWong never did, Wadie left the office.
Ranger (in transit, Discus to Lansing)
+130 kiloseconds
Betha left the hydroponics lab at last, began to climb up through the hollow silence of the central stairwell. She could no longer remember how many times she had climbed these stairs in the past two days; the duties of a crew of seven were an endless treadmill of labor for a crew of two. She passed the machine shop on the fourth level, kept on, reached their sleeping quarters on the third. One more level above, across the well, the flashing red light over the sealed dayroom door caught her unwilling eyes. She stopped, wrenched out of her fatigue by a fresh rush of grief.
She stepped hurriedly through to the corridor that ringed the stairwell on the third level, that gave access to seven private rooms … and all that remained of five human beings who were lost to her forever. To her right, Lara's room; everything in its place, mirroring the precision of Lara's mind.… Betha remembered the crisp directness of her voice across an examining table in the ship's infirmary; her graying hair, the warm concern in her gray eyes that denied her clinical detachment. There was a padded stool in Lara's room made from a cetoid vertebra; a Color Atlas of the Diseases of Fish, Amphibians, and Reptiles. She had been a medical researcher on Morningside, before their family had become a crew and she had become their doctor; but marine biology had been her hobby, her real love. And Sean, the smartass, had written a song, “Lara and the Leviathan,” that swallowed her up in verses about this “cetoid monster,” the Ranger.…
Through the open doorway directly before her, Betha could see a tangle of electronics gear, Nikolai's balalaika laid out on the sleeping bag on the platform of his bed. She pictured him, balding, bearded, brooding; with a voice like an echo escaping from a well.… A patient, skillful teacher, an electronics expert—a repairman, at home, serving the entire Borealis moiety. She remembered him laughing, dodging the shoe she had thrown at Sean for calling her Ranger a whale ….
She turned to her left, moved along the curving hallway against the currents of memory, like a woman wading into the sea …. Remembering Claire, placidly moon-faced, curly-haired; plump, fair farmer's daughter … Sean, the red-haired kid among them, only twenty-four …
Betha hesitated, finding herself before her own doorway. She glanced in, at her cluttered desk, her rumpled bedding. She moved on desperately, as though she would drown herself, to the next room … to Eric. Eric van Helsing, social scientist, moiety ombudsman, spokesman.…
The words of the song came unbidden into her mind, with the rushing heart of a desert wind on Morningside, the passion of first love:
Her hands twisted, unconsciously; six rings of gold slid against one another, circling her fingers, four on the left hand, two on the right.
She sagged against the wooden doorframe, shutting her eyes; pressed her face against the coolness, supported by its noncommittal strength. He was gone; they were all gone: her crew, her family … her husbands and her wives. Her strength, the strength that came from sharing, was gone with them, bled away into the bottomless void. How would she go on? Loss was too heavy a burden, life was too heavy a burden, to bear alone—
Something brushed her ankles; she opened her eyes, focusing. The cat wove between her feet, meowing forlornly. “Rusty—” She leaned down to pick the cat up, seeing the day of their departure from Morningside: the squirming, mewing kitten held out to her in the grubby hands of her daughter, Kiki, as all their children solemnly presented their chosen gifts to each and every parent. There had been a dozen grandparents looking on—and siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, their proud, hopeful faces washed with ruddy light, the Darkside Perimeter's eternal twilight.
All of them were waiting—all of them were a part of her. The children were waiting; she was not alone. But they were all beyond her reach now, across too much space and time; and it was her duty, her responsibility, to get this ship back to them—
She heard a sound in the hall, straightened away from the doorframe with Rusty still nested in her arms. She saw Clewell, wearing only his shorts, standing in the doorway of his own room, watching her.
“Betha—are you all right?”
“Yes … yes, I'm just tired. Pappy.” Tired of remembering, and remembering. How can one sudden sorrow turn all my joy to pain? Watching him back she saw the same desolation, the same wound of loss that tormented her. She felt her fear rise again. Oh, Clewell; don't let me lose you, too. “May—I share your room again, tonight?”
He nodded. “Please. I couldn't get to sleep anyway, alone.”
She followed him into his room, and in the darkness unbuttoned her plain cotton shirt, slipped out of her shoes and jeans. She settled into the double sleeping bag beside him, into his arms, and put her own arms around him gratefully in a gesture of long familiarity. He had not been her first husband, but he had been her friend through more years than she could remember now. He had been twenty-seven the year she was born, one of many uncles; but from childhood on he had been her favorite among all the relatives of her extended family. He had been an astronomer before he had become navigator on the Ranger; he had traveled from Borealis on the chill perimeter of day, out across the Boreal Sea and over the crumpled ice sheet of the darkside glacier, to his observatory under eternal night. Sometimes he had taken her along for a brief holiday of stargazing, free from the duties and clan responsibilities that even a child on Morningside was expected to fulfill.