You bastard— He pushed himself up and moved through a nightmare to the panel.
“… let him never set foot on any territory of the Demarchy on pain of death. He has betrayed us all …”
“Let me talk.” He reached toward the instrument panel.
The captain caught his arm. “No.”
“… I further urge again that all fusion-powered vessels be impressed into the pursuit of the alien ship; we must prevent it from reachin' our enemies. We must have that ship for ourselves!”
PROPOSITION flashed on the screen, BILL OF ATTAINDER AGAINST WADIE ABDHIAMAL, NEGOTIATOR. CHARGES: TREASON. PENALTY: DEATH, NEGATING PREVIOUS CHARGE: GOVERNMENT NEGLIGENCE.
He stepped back from the panel, his fingers twitching uselessly; his hand dropped. He went to his seat, sat down heavily, watching the ballots begin to register, APPROVE, OBJECT, numbers tallying with the passing seconds. Below them the percentage-of-voters band moved through red into orange into yellow. Five hundred seconds until it would reach full violet … five hundred seconds for the last votes to record from the outermost rocks of the trojans. An insignificant time lag, by the standards of the prewar Belt, as one hundred and forty million kilometers was an insignificant distance. Their closeness had meant survival for the trojans after the war; it meant death for him, now, letting men vote without hesitation, without reflection. He waited. The others waited with him, saying nothing. The ship's drive filled the silence with vibration, almost sound, almost intruding, the only constant in the sudden chaos of the universe.
PROPOSITION APPROVED. They found him guilty, twenty to one, and sentenced him to die. He watched the death order repeat and merge, like a thing already forgotten, into a new cycle of debate over the use of the fusion ships. He raised his leaden hands, let them drop again, smiled, looking back at the others. “Now I finally know how MacWong's kept his job for so long.”
The captain cut off the debate, filling the screen with the void of his future.
“I guess I see the distinction between ‘demarchy’ and plain ‘democracy.’” Welkin said quietly.
“Welkin, you don't have the right to make any moral judgments about Heaven Belt.”
“He's got the right,” Shadow Jack said. He sat up, pulling his feet forward. “The crew of this ship, they were …” He fumbled for words. “They were all married, they were a family; all of them together. And they all died in the Rings, except …” He glanced at Welkin and Betha Torgussen, back at Wadie, and down, twisting his fingers. “They all died.”
Wadie watched the captain, her arm resting on the old man's shoulder. “I'm not married,” he said, his voice flat. “And now I never will be.” She looked back at him, not understanding, useless apology in her eyes, and a surprising sorrow. He got up, resenting the intrusion of her unexpected, and undesired, sympathy. “Well, Captain, you've ruined your final opportunity for a constructive agreement with the Demarchy. For my sake, I hope you have better luck with the Ringers than you did the last time.” He went out of the room and down the spiraling stairs. No one followed.
Ranger (in transit, Demarchy to Discus)
+2.40 megaseconds
Betha sat alone at the control panel in the soothing semidarkness, gazing at the endless bright stream of Demarchy television traffic, soundless by her own choice, that still trailed after them, two hundred million kilometers out. Caught in a spell of hypnotic revulsion, she marveled at the perpetual motion of the Demarchy media machine, wondered how any citizen—demarch?—ever made a sane decision under the constant dinning of a hundred different distortions of the truth. And remembering the mediamen on the field at Mecca, she should have known enough to believe Wadie Abdhiamal and let him speak ….
She cut off the broadcasts abruptly and put the crescent of Discus on the screen. She saw the Ranger in her mind, an infinitesimal mote, alone in the five hundred million kilometers of barren darkness, tracing back along Discus's path around the sun from the isolate swarm of rocks that was the Demarchy. She remembered then that they were not entirely alone. Expanding her mind's vision, she saw the Demarchy's grotesque, ponderous freighters loaded with ores or volatiles, crawling across the desolation; ships that took a hundred days to cross what the Ranger crossed in six. It was a barely bridgeable gap, now; and the survival of the Demarchy, and the Rings, depended on it. And someday there would be no ships.…
But now, tracing the violet mist of the Ranger's exhaust, she saw what might be three fusion craft, barely registering on the ship's most sensitive instruments.
She cursed the Demarchy, the obsessive veneer of sophistication, the artificial gaiety, the pointless waste of their media broadcasts. Fools, reveling in their fanatical independence when they should all be working together; living on self-serving self-sufficiency, with no stable government to control them, no honest bonds of kinship, but only the equal selfishness of every other citizen.… And their women; useless, frivolous, gaudy, the ultimate waste in a society that desperately needed every resource, including its human resources.
Fragments of conversation drew together in her mind, and she remembered suddenly what Clewell had said about crippled Bird Alyn. Perhaps in a sense they were a resource, sound and fertile women who had to be protected, in a society where radiation levels were always abnormally high; women who had let the protection grow into a way of life as artificial as everything else in their world.… Perhaps the danger of genetic damage lay at the root of all the incomprehensible involutions of their sexual mores. Desperate people did desperate things; even the people of Morningside, in the beginning.…
She turned slightly in her seat, to glance at Shadow Jack lying asleep on the floor, lost in a peaceful dream, a book of Morningside landscapes open beside him. She wondered, if those were desperate measures for the Demarchy, what must be true for Lansing. Her hands met on the panel, caressing her rings, as Wadie Abdhiamal entered the room.
“Captain.” He made the requisite bow. She nodded in return, watching him cross the room: the proper demarch, compulsively polite, compulsively immaculate. And as awkward as a child taking his first steps, moving in one gravity. His face looked haggard, showing the effects of stress and fluid loss. She remembered seeing him use his drinking water to wash his face on the Lansing 04, thinking that no one noticed … She brushed absently at her own hair. “Have you found everything you've needed, Abdhiamal? Have you eaten?” He had not joined tile rest of them when they ate together in the dining hall.
He sat down. “Yes … somethin'. I don't know what.” He looked vaguely ill, remembering. “I'm afraid I don't get along well with meat.”
“How—are you feeling?”
“Homesick.” He laughed, self-deprecatingly, as if it were a lie. He gazed at the empty screen. Rusty materialized on his knee, settled into his lap, tail muffling her nose. He stroked her back with a dark, meticulous hand; Betha noticed the massive gold ring on his thumb, inlaid with rubies.
“I'm sorry.” She pulled her pipe out of the hip pocket of her jeans, quieting her hands with its carven familiarity.
“Don't be.” He shifted and Rusty muttered querulously, tail flicking. “Because you were right, Captain; and I made the right choice in comin' with you. The Demarchy can't be allowed to take your ship; nobody in Heaven Belt can.… I'm not saying that because of what happened to me—” Something in his voice told her that was not entirely true. “I've known all along, from the first time I heard about this ship, that it would make too many people want to play God.” He looked up. “Even if it's not my right, I'd still turn your ship over to the Demarchy if I had the chance—if I thought it'd save them. But it wouldn't. The government is too weak, they'd never be able to keep an equilibrium now.” His fingers dug into the soft arms of the chair; his face was expressionless. “So I'll tell you this. I'll help you get out of here, however I can. Anythin' I can do, anythin' you want to know. As my final service to the Demarchy: to buy them a little more time and save them from themselves.” His eyes went to Discus on the screen. “If I've got to be a traitor, I'll be a good one. I take pride in my work.”