“Maybe it's none of my business. Shadow Jack, but just what in hell is the matter with you?”
“There's nothin' the matter with me! You think everybody has to be like you? Everybody isn't; you're a bunch of dirty perverts!” His voice shook. “It makes me sick.” He went out of the room. She heard him go down the steps too fast.
Betha sat very still, clutching the chair arms, wondering where she would find the strength to rise.… Rusty sidled against her legs, mrring. Stiffly she reached down, drew the cat up into her lap; hanging on to meaning, to the promise of a time when Heaven would be no more than one of countless stars lost behind the twilight. “Rusty, you're all the things I count on. What would I have done without you?” Rusty's rough, tiny tongue kissed the palm of her hand twice in gentle affection. “Oh, Rusty,” she whispered, “you make misers of us all.” Betha got to her feet slowly and looked toward the empty doorway.
Shadows moved silently over the tiles, moist and green, like the waters of a dream sea. Bird Alyn sobbed against the cold hexagonal tiles of the seatback, touched by the fragile fingers of a hanging fern. “… not fair, it's not fair …” Her love was an endless torment because it fed on dreams. He would never touch her, never stroke her hair … never love her, and she would never stop wanting his love.
She heard him enter the lab, and the sob caught in her throat. She pushed herself up, eyes shut, wetness dripping off her chin.
“Don't cry. Bird Alyn. It wastes water.” Shadow Jack stood before her, hands at his sides, watching her tears drip down.
She opened her eyes, saw him through lashes starred with teardrops, felt more tears rise defiantly. “We have … plenty of water, Shadow Jack.” Misery coiled inside her, tightening like a drawn spring. “We're not on Lansing; everything's different here!”
His eyes denied it; he said nothing, frowning.
She turned away on the bench. “But I'm not … I know I'm not.Why did this happen to me? Why am I so ugly, when I love you?”
He dropped down beside her on the seat, pulled her hands, one crippled and one perfect, down from her face. “Bird Alyn, you're not! You're not … you're beautiful.” She saw her image in his eyes and saw that it was true. “But—you can't love me.”
“I can't help it … how can I help it?” She reached out, her wet fingers brushed his face. “I love you.”
He caught her roughly, arms closing over her back, and pulled her against him. She struggled in surprise, but his mouth stopped her cry, and then her struggling. “… love you. Bird Alyn … since forever … don't you know?”
Her outflung hands rose to tighten on his shoulders, drawing him into her dreams, joy filled her like song—
“No—” He pulled back suddenly, letting her go. He leaned against the cold tiles, gulping air. “No. No. We can't.” His hands made fists.
“But … you love me …” Bird Alyn reached out, astonished by disappointment. “Why can't we? Please, Shadow Jack … please. I'm not afraid—“
“What do you want me to do, get you pregnant!”
She flinched, shaking her head. “It doesn't have to happen.”
“It does; you know that.” He sagged forward. “Do you want to feel the baby growin' in you and see it born … with no hands and no arms, or no legs, or no—To have to put it Out, like my mother did? We're defective! And I'll never let it happen to you because of me.”
“But it won't. Shadow Jack, everything's different here on this ship. They have a pill, they never have to get pregnant. They'd let us …” She moved close, stroked the midnight blackness of his hair. “Even one pill lasts for a long time.”
“And what about when they're gone?”
“We … we'd always have … memories. We'd know, we could remember how it felt, to touch, and kiss, and h-hold each other …”
“How could I keep from touchin' you again, and kissin' you, and holdin' you, if I knew?” His eyes closed over desperation. “I couldn't. If I was never going to see you again … but I will. I'd see you every day for the rest of my life, and how could I stop it, then? How could you? It would happen.”
She shook her head, pleading, her face burning, hot hopeless tears burning her eyes.
“I can't let go, Bird Alyn. Not now. Not ever. I couldn't stand what it would do to me … what it would do to you. Why did we ever see this ship! Why did this happen to us? It was all right till—until—” His hands caught together; he cracked his knuckles.
Softly she put out her own hand, catching his; fingers twined brown into bronze. Because of this ship their world would live … and because of it, nothing would ever be right in their lives again. She heard water dripping, somewhere, like tears; a dead blossom fell between them, clicked on the sterile tiles.
Betha left the doorway quietly, as she had come, and silently climbed the stairs.
Ranger (Discan space)
+2.70 megaseconds
Discus, a banded camelian the size of a fist, set in a silver plane: The rings, almost edge-on, were a film of molten light streaked with lines of jet, spreading toward them on the screen. Wadie drifted in the center of the control room, keeping his thoughts focused on the silhouette that broke the foreground of splendor: Snows-of-Salvation, orbiting thirty Discuss radii out, beyond the steep gradient depths of the gravity well. Snows-of-Salvation, that had been Bangkok on the prewar navigation charts, the major distillery for the Rings. It was one of five, but it outproduced the rest by better than ten to one; in part because its operations were powered by a nuclear battery constructed in the Demarchy, in part because it could send out shipments using a linear accelerator, also from the Demarchy but infinitely more useful here where transport distances were short. The Ringers' own primitive oxyhydrogen rockets made hopelessly inefficient tankers.
He remembered Snows-of-Salvation as it had been when he arrived with the Demarchy engineers: endless grayness honeycombing the ice and stone; a chill that crept into a man's bones until he couldn't remember warmth; a small gray population, a people renting space in purgatory. A people fanatical to the point of insanity, in the eyes of the Demarchy. He had been sent to keep demarch and Ringer from each others' throats—sent because no one better qualified had been willing to go. He had stayed to see that two incompatible and suspicious groups never forgot their common goal of increasing the supply of volatiles. And in the fifty megaseconds he had spent in his grim and lonely exile, he had come to know a number of men he could only call friends and had seen more of the Ringers' Grand Harmony than any other demarch. He had come to understand the chronically marginal life that existed for the Ringers everywhere; to see, almost painfully, what made them endure their oppressive collectivist ideology: the knowledge that they must always pull together or they would not survive.…
The captain's voice drew him back. His eyes fixed on her where she hung before the viewscreen, her hair floating softly, free from gravity, her shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He stared, the present an overlay on the past. The clean, colored warmth of the control room drove out a dreary poverty that made Morningside's plainness suddenly seem frivolous.
Morningside … could he ever have come to see its people as clearly as he had seen the Ringers? How long did it take to feel at ease with a people who offended your sense of propriety in every way imaginable? Whose behavior slipped through your attempts to categorize it the way water slipped between your fingers.… Four kilosecs ago he had come to the upper level to get himself some food. He had found the captain and Welkin already in the dining hall and Bird Alyn playing her guitar. They had all been singing; as though in four thousand seconds they were not going to commit an act of piracy or face one more trial whose outcome meant freedom and life for all of them.…