Abdhiamal scratched Rusty under the chin. “It's a simple operation. Can't they perform it on Lansing?”
“They could … but they won't.” Misery hung on him like a weight. “If you're a Materialist, you're supposed to take responsibility for your own actions. You're supposed to take the consequences, not expect anybody else to do it for you. Like my mother, when my sister was born an' they said she was too defective … my mother had to put her Out.… She wouldn't let my father touch her anymore.” He looked down at his hands. “But the medical technology's bad anyhow. Sometimes I think they just don't want to waste what's left.”
Abdhiamal's voice was gently professional. “How were you judged defective? You look sound to me.”
Shadow Jack's hands tightened on metal. “Maybe I wasn't defective, then. But my sister was. And they needed more outside workers, so they told me I had to work on the surface. That's what you do if you're marginally damaged, like Bird Alyn. That's where I met her.…” Where he had discovered what life must have been like once, lived in the beauty of gardens and not the blackness of stone. And where he had discovered that his own life did not end because he had left the shielding walls of rock; that feeling did not, or belief, or hope. But he had spent too many megaseconds mending a tattered world-shroud, too many megaseconds in a contaminated ship.… And there were no miracles to heal a crippled hand or mend a broken heart.
He struck the doorframe. “Everything goes wrong! I didn't mean to call Betha … what I called her. But she had so many husbands; she even has children! When Bird Alyn and I can't even have each other … it just made me crazy. Betha lost so much, and I said—I said that to her. She helped us after we tried to take her ship just like everybody else—”
“You did? And she let you get away with it?”
He nodded, feeling ridiculous. “All we had was a can opener—I guess she thought we were fools.”
“And—you said she has children?” Abdhiamal looked down at the wide leather band circling his wrist
“Yeah. Goin' into space is like … like doing anything else to them. It's not the end of anything.” He bit his tongue, remembering that it had been for the crew of the Ranger.
“If she forgave you for trying to steal her ship, I expect she'll forgive you for callin' her a pervert. Sooner than she'll forgive me for makin' remarks about engineers.”
Shadow Jack frowned, not understanding.
Abdhiamal's smile faded. “It seems you and I have more than one problem in common. Like every group in Heaven Belt shares the problems of every other one. And I'm not so sure any more that there's an easy answer for any of us.”
Shadow Jack turned away, saw Bird Alyn watching him from the end of the hall. He met her eyes, hopelessness dragging him down like the chains of gravity. “There aren't any answers at all. I should have known that. Sorry to take up your time, Abdhiamal.”
Wadie closed the door, still cradling the cat absently against his side. In his mind he saw the future on Lansing, grief and death among the gardens—and saw in Lansing the future of all Heaven.… The future? Silence pressed his ears, deafening him. The end. The Demarchy was only one more fading patch of snow. There was no answer. Nothing he could ever do—nothing he had ever done—would hold back Death. He had made himself believe that his work had some relevance and worth, that a kind of creation existed in his negotiations, a binding force to keep equilibrium with disintegration and decay. But he had been wrong. It had always been too late. He was a damned fop, living at the expense of everyone else … and wasting his life on the self-delusion that he was somehow saving them all. Wasting his life: he had thrown away his last chance of ever having a life of his own, a home, a family, any real relationship. And all that he had ever done, been, or believed was meaningless. It had all been for nothing—and it would all be nothing in the end. Nothing.
Rusty squirmed in his grasp like an impatient child. As he released her his arm scraped the ventilator screen, his hand closed over a flat, palm-sized square trapped by the soft exit of air. He pulled it down, stared at it. A picture—a hologram—of a man and a woman, each holding a child, flooded in blazing light where they stood before an ugly, half-sunken dwelling. The woman was Betha Torgussen, her hair long, coiled on her head in braids. And the man, tall, with dark hair and a lean, sunburned face … Eric? Her voice came to him suddenly, from behind a shielding faceplate, in a train car on Mecca. I—I thought you were someone I knew. Wadie brushed the images with a finger, moving through them. Ghosts …
Betha Torgussen's voice came to him out of a speaker on the wall, telling the crew that Nakamore had acquiesced.
Ranger (Discan space)
+2.74 megaseconds
“Okay, Pappy, the cables are secured. We really outdid ourselves when we closed with this load! Start us in.” Betha raised her chin from the speaker button, hooking her arm under the twisted strength of the steel cable, secure in the crevice between cylinders of hydrogen. She felt the abrupt lurch as the winches started the final shipment of fuel moving in toward the looming brilliance of the Ranger.
“This is the lot, Betha.” Clewell's voice filled her helmet, smiling. She imagined his smile, felt it through the ship's mirrored hull.
“This is it. We've done it. Pappy! We're really going to make it.” Through the shielded faceplate of her helmet she saw the molten silver, the ruby scarab of Discus reflecting on the Ranger's hull, rising above a dull-green horizon of clustered tanks, marred by a tiny spot of blackness. The shadow of Snows-of-Salvation … or a ragged hole torn in the metal. She looked away, dizzy, past the small bright-suited figure of Shadow Jack at one end of the fifty-meter-long bundled cylinders. And out into the void; imagined the merciless drag of the Discan gravity well pulling her loose into the endless night … like five others before her. She shut her eyes, clung to the cable; opened them again to look down at the solid surface of the tanks, along the dull greenness at Abdhiamal, inept and uncommunicative at the shipment's other limit. They were almost flush now with the Ranger's massive protection; it would be over soon. One more, just one more time.… Sweat tickled her face; she shook her head angrily inside her helmet. Damn it! You won't fall—
“Betha!” It was Bird Alyn's voice, rising clearly for once above the crackle of her feeble helmet speaker. Betha saw her, gnatlike beside the immense holding rack clamped to the ship's skin. “The load's not closing even! … Abdhiamal, your end—the end cable's caught between tanks—”
“I'll clear it.”
“Abdhiamal, wait!” Betha saw him go over the end, saw the flash of his guidance rocket as he disappeared. “Pappy! Loosen the aft cable, right now!” She pulled her own guidance unit loose from the catch at her waist, pressed the trigger, sent herself after him to the end of the world. Looking over, she saw him hovering near the hub of the wheel of tanks, the cable trapped between two cylinders. She saw him catch hold of the cable, brace his feet, and pull—“Abdhiamal, stop, stop!”—saw the cable slip free … watched as the bound tanks recoiled below her and the cable wrenched loose from the hull, arcing soundlessly toward her like a striking snake. She backed desperately, knowing, knowing—
“Clewell!” Her face cracked against the helmet glass in starbursts of light as the cable struck her across the chest, throwing her out and away from the ship. She fought for breath, blood in her mouth, her lungs crippled with pain, saw the ship like a fiery pinwheel slip out of her view, blackness, blood and molten silver, blackness.… She fumbled for the trigger of her guidance rocket, but her hands were empty. And she was falling.