He smiled again, politely. “I don't think so.”
“You're the ones who came to trade, from Lansing.” The second voice rasped like grit. “They said the car was waiting for you.”
Betha winced, unseen. She looked across at the shorter, somehow bulkier figure; wondered if it was possible to find a fat Belter. Her own 1.75 meters felt oddly petite. The woman cleared her helmet glass, showed a middle-aged face, brown skin and graying hair, eyes of shining jet.
“Yes, we are.” Betha kept her faceplate dark to hide her paleness, felt Shadow Jack fidget beside her.
“You're the first ones I've ever seen from the Main Belt. What's it like back in there? It's good to learn that you aren't all—”
Rusty emitted a piercing yowl of desolation, and Betha gasped as it rattled against her ears.
“My Lord, what was that?” The woman's gloves rose to her own shielded ears.
“Ghosts,” Shadow Jack said, “of dead Belters.”
The woman's face went blank with confusion. Betha glanced at the man, saw him smile and frown together; he met her unseen eyes. “Never heard a noise like that. Maybe we passed over a power cable.” She realized that not only the cat, but the carrying case transmitter must be an unheard-of novelty in Heaven now.
The woman looked shaken. “I'm sorry. That wasn't gracious of me, anyway. Just that you're such a novelty. I'm Rinee Bohanian, of Bohanian Agroponics.” She gestured at the sunside behind them. “Family business, you know.”
“Wadie Abdhiamal.” The man nodded. “I work for the Demarchy.”
“Don't we all?” the woman said.
“The government.”
She peered at him with a suspicion edging on dislike. “Well.” She looked back at Betha. “And what's your name? You know, I'd like to get a look at a genuine spacewoman—”
“Betha Torgussen. I'm sorry, my helmet's broken.” She crossed her fingers; no one showed surprise. “And this is—”
“Shadow Jack,” Shadow Jack said. “I'm a pirate.”
“Pilot,” Betha murmured, irritated, but the others laughed.
“That's a Materialist name.” The man was looking at Shadow Jack. “I haven't met one of those in a long time.”
“Everybody's one, on Lansing. But it's just wishing. Nothin' left to contemplate.” He was almost relaxing, the hard edge softening out of his voice.
The man glanced at Betha, questioning.
“Not everyone.” She turned away toward the front of the car, looking for a reason to stop talking. She heard the woman asking the man what he did for the government, didn't listen to his reply. They were nearing the terminator; it ran smoothly to meet them, like a cloud shadow crossing the broken desert lands of Morningside. Beyond the terminator, parallel to the edge of shadow, lay a line of leviathans: stubby poles of steel crowned by rings of copper, strung with serial blinking lights, red and green.
“That's the linear accelerator,” the woman said. “It's used to ship cargo that doesn't have to move too fast, or go too far.… What exactly does a Materialist think?”
They crossed the terminator, blinking into night as though a switch had been thrown, and passed between the looming towers of the accelerator. The dark-haired man sat listening to Shadow Jack; unwillingly Betha felt her eyes drawn back to his face.
“… and you're given a word, the name of somethin' material that's supposed to set each of you apart and shape your being somehow. Half the people don't even know what their words mean, now.…”
She watched the stranger in silence, helpless, flushed with sudden radiance, chilled until she trembled.… Remembering Morningside, the first days of her love for Eric: remembering an engineer and a social scientist ill-met in a factory yard on the Hotspot perimeter, and blazing metal in the unending heat of endless noon.… Remembering their last days on Morningside: a film of ice broken in a well in unending dusk, where the crackling edge of the darkside ice sheet, stained with rose and amber by the fires of sunset, shattered its mirror image in the Boreal Sea. Borealis Field, where her family, as the newly chosen crew of the Ranger, worked together preparing for an emergency shipment, preparing themselves for the journey across 1.3 light-years to icebound Uhuru.
They had been selected from all the volunteers willing to leave homes and jobs because another world in their trade ring needed help; but they had never imagined the journey that in the end would be assigned to them. Word had come from the High Council that a radio message had been received from Uhuru, and aid was no longer needed. They had been given a new, unexpected destination, the Heaven system, and a goal that was more than simple survival for another world or their own. She remembered the celebration, their pride at the honor, their families' families' pride.… Remembered Eric leading her quietly from the crowded, fire-bright hall, for one brief time alone before a journey that would last for years. His gentle hands, and the caressing heat of the deserted sauna; their laughing plunge into banked snow … the heat of passion, the wasting cold of death … fire and ice, fire and ice.… She cried silently, Eric, don't betray me now.… Give me strength.
The car slipped on through darkness.
The car drifted to a stop beneath the slender towers of their destination, among the ballooning storage sacs that glowed with ghostly foxfire—dim yellows, greens, and blues, excited by the ground lights into a strange phosphorescence. Betha shook off the past, looking out into the glowing forest of alien shapes. She heard the woman: “… how your Lansing fields are like our tank farmin'. Of course, there's no shortage of water for us; we have the snow stored below in the old mining cavities. We've got enough to last forever, I expect.” A pride that was unconsciously greed filled her smile. The government man glanced at her; Betha saw him show quick anger and wondered why. Shadow Jack pushed abruptly up out of his seat, stabilized himself instinctively. Tension tightened him like a wire again; she wondered what showed on his face.
They followed the man and woman through disembodied radio noise and the impersonal clutter of workers on the platform, came to another hatch set into the solidness of the surface rock. Below the airlock they entered tunnels that sloped steeply downward, without seeming to, into the heart of the stone. Betha felt her suit grow limp with the return of air pressure, making her movements easy. Sounds carried to her now, dimmed by her helmet, as she passed new clusters of citizens, some suited and some not, all mercifully oblivious; she wondered again at the behavior of the cameramen on the field.
They followed a rope along the wall of the main corridor, where the rough gloves of pressure suits had scraped a shallow trough along the pitted surface. Ahead and below she saw the tunnel's end, opening onto a space hung with fine netting. Curious, she drifted out onto the ledge at the chamber's lip.
“Oh …” Her breath was lost in a sigh. She stood as Shadow Jack already stood, transfixed by a faery beauty trapped in stone. Before them a vacuole opened up, a kilometer or more in diameter: an immense, unnatural geode filled with shining spines of crystal growth, blunt and spike-sharp, rainbow on rainbow of strident, flowing color. The hollow core of air was hung with gossamer, silken filaments spread by some incredible spider.…
The images began to re-form in her mind; she realized that this was the city, the heart of life in the Mecca asteroid—that the crystal spines were its towers, reaching up from the floor, out on every side … down, from the ceiling. Why don't they fall—? Her thoughts spun, falling; she felt someone's hands clutch her arms. Her mind settled, her feet settled softly on the ledge. Angrily she forced her eyes out again into the chamber's dizzy immensity. People drifted, as tiny as midges, along the gossamer threads; light ropes, strung across the wide, soft spaces. The towers grew thickest, probing the inner air, on ceiling and floor, in the direct line of gravity's faint inexorable drag. The buildings that hugged the hollow's curving sides were shorter, stubbier, enduring greater stress.The towers shivered delicately in the slight stirring currents of ventilation; they were not solid crystalline surfaces, but trembling tents of colored fabric stretched over slender metal frames.