She jerked suddenly. “Then—they're all dead, now.”
“Yes, all.…” He stopped, forcing his mind away from the empty room on the next level below, where a gaping wound opened on the stars. Deliberately he looked back at Bird Alyn, saw her embarrassment. “It's possible to be in love with more than one person, you know.”
“I always thought that meant somebody had to be unhappy.”
He shook his head, smiling, wondering what strange beliefs must be a part of the Lansing culture. And he wondered how those beliefs could survive, when a people were struggling for their own survival.
On Morningside the first colonists had struggled to survive, expatriates and exiles fleeing an Earth where the political world had turned upside down. They had arrived in a Promised Land that they discovered, too late, was not the haven they were promised—discovering at last the lyrical irony in the name Morningside. Tidally locked with its red dwarf star, Morningside turned one face forever toward the bloody sun, held one side forever frozen into night. Between the subsolar desert and the darkside ice lay a bleak ring of marginally habitable land, the Wedding Band … until death did them part. The fear of death, the need to enlarge a small and suddenly vulnerable population, had broken down the rigid customs of their European and North American past. They were no longer the people they had once been, and now, looking back across two hundred years of multiple marriage and the freedom-in-security of extended family kinship, few Morningsiders saw reason in their own past, or any reason to change back again.
Bird Alyn folded her arms, hiding her misshapen hand. And Clewell realized that perhaps the people of Lansing had had no choice in their customs either. If the radiation levels were as high as those on the Lansing 04, even one percent as high, then the threat of genetic damage could force them into breeding customs that seemed strange or even suicidal anywhere else. The whole of Heaven Belt was a trap and a betrayal in a way the Morningside had never been: because Heaven had promised a life of ease and beauty in return for a high technology, but it damned human weakness without pity.
Clewell was silent with the realization that whatever Morningside lacked in comfort, it made up for in a grudging constancy, and that even beauty became meaningless without that.…
“How did you and Shadow Jack end up out here?”
She shrugged, a tiny waver of her weightless body. “I can work the computer; my parents programmed the recon unit. And Shadow Jack wanted to be a pilot and do something to help Lansing; he won a lottery.”
“Your parents let you go, instead of going themselves?” He saw Betha suddenly, in his mind: a gangly, earnest teenage girl, helping him take the measure of the immeasurable universe … saw his own children, waiting for him across that universal sea. He covered a sudden anger against whoever had sent their half-grown daughter out in a contaminated ship before they would go themselves.
Bird Alyn looked down at her crippled hand. “Well, you can only go if you work outside.…”
“Outside?”
“Lansing's a tent world … we have surface gardens, an' a plastic tent to keep in an atmosphere.” She ran her hand through her hair, her mouth twitching. “You work outside if you can't have children.” For a moment her eyes touched him, envious, almost accusing; she turned back to the viewscreen, looking out over isolation, withdrawing into herself. “I think I'll take a shower.”
He laughed carefully. “If you take too many showers, girl, you'll wrinkle up for good.”
“Maybe it would help.” Not smiling, she pushed off from the panel.
He looked out at the barren night, where all their hopes lay, and where all the dreams of their separate worlds lay ruined. Pain caught in his chest, and made him afraid. Help me, God, I'm an old man. Don't let me be too old.… He pressed his hands against the pain, heard the sprayer go on and Bird Alyn's voice rise like warbling birdsong, beginning a Morningside lullaby:
Lansing 04 (Demarchy space)
+1.51 megaseconds
“There it is,” Shadow Jack said, with almost a sigh. “Mecca rock.”
Betha watched it come into view at the port: a fifty-kilometer potato-shaped lump of stone, scarred by nature's hand and man's. Mecca's long axis pointed to the sun; the side nearest them lay in darkness, haloed by an eternal corona of sunglare. As they closed she began to see landing lights; and, between them, immense shining protrusions lit from below, throwing their shadows out to be lost in the shadow of the void. She identified them finally as storage tanks—enormous balloons of precious gases. At last … She stirred in the narrow, dimly lit space before the instruments, felt her numbed emotions stir and come alive. She filled her congested lungs with the dead, stale air, heard a fan go on somewhere behind her, clanking and ineffective; wondered whether she could ever revive a sense of smell mercifully long dead. It was small comfort to know that the claustrophobic misery of their journey would have been worse without the overhauling they had done on board the Ranger. Two strangers from Lansing could teach even Morningsiders something about toughness.… The Ranger came back into her mind, and with it the galling knowledge that they could have crossed Demarchy space to Mecca in one day instead of fifteen, in perfect comfort—if things had been different. “But we're here. Thank God. And thanks to you. Shadow Jack. That was a good job.” Her hand stroked his arm unthinkingly, in a gesture meant for someone else. He started out of his habitual glumness, looking embarrassed and then something more; reached to scan the radio frequencies. Static and voices broke across the cabin's clicking silence.
“Did—did you love one of them best?”
She sighed. “Yes … yes, I suppose I did. It's something you can't help feeling; I loved them all so much, but one…” Who isn't here, when I need him. She shook her head, her eyes blurred, and sharpened again as a piece of the real world moved across them. “Out there. Shadow Jack.” She leaned closer to the port, rubbed the fog of moisture from the glass. “A tanker coming in.”
He peered past her. They saw the ship, still lit by the sun: a ponderous metallic tick, its plastic belly bloated with precious gases and clutched inside three legs of steel, booms for the ship's nuclear-electric rockets. “Look at the size of that! It must be comin' in from the Rings. They wouldn't use that on local hauls.” He raised his head, following its downward arc. “Down there, that must be the docking field.”
She could see the field clearly now, an unnatural gleaming smoothness in the artificial light, cluttered with cranes and ringed by more mechanical parasites, gorged and empty. Smaller craft moved above them, fireflies showing red: sluggish tows in a profusion of makeshift incongruity. Another world … She listened, watching, matching fragments of one-sided radio conversations with the movements of the slow-motion dance below them: boredom and sharp attention, an outburst of anger, unintelligible humor about an unseen technicality. “Shouldn't they be receiving our signal?”
He nodded. “They are. I guess they'll call us down when they feel like it.”
Rusty stirred in the air above the control board, batted listlessly at the twined cord of his headset. “Poor Rusty,” Betha murmured, reaching out. “Your trip in this sauna is almost over.…” The rawness of her throat hurt her suddenly.
Shadow Jack twisted guiltily, stroked Rusty's rumpled fur. “Bird Alyn really let me have it for makin' you take Rusty away. She didn't want to lose her. She loves plants, makin' things grow—things that are alive.…” His mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost sorrow. “I guess Rusty was about the most wonderful thing of all, to Bird Alyn.”