She turned to her left, moved along the curving hallway against the currents of memory, like a woman wading into the sea… Remembering Claire, placidly moon-faced, curly-haired; plump, fair farmer’s daughter… Sean, the red-haired kid among them, only twenty-four…
Betha hesitated, finding herself before her own doorway. She glanced in, at her cluttered desk, her rumpled bedding. She moved on desperately, as though she would drown herself, to the next room… to Eric. Eric van Helsing, social scientist, moiety ombudsman, spokesman…
The words of the song came unbidden into her mind, with the rushing heart of a desert wind on Morningside, the passion of first love:
Her hands twisted, unconsciously; six rings of gold slid against one another, circling her fingers, four on the left hand, two on the right.
She sagged against the wooden doorframe, shutting her eyes; pressed her face against the coolness, supported by its noncommittal strength. He was gone; they were all gone: her crew, her family… her husbands and her wives. Her strength, the strength that came from sharing, was gone with them, bled away into the bottomless void. How would she go on? Loss was too heavy a burden, life was too heavy a burden, to bear alone—
Something brushed her ankles; she opened her eyes, focusing. The cat wove between her feet, meowing forlornly. “Rusty—” She leaned down to pick the cat up, seeing the day of their departure from Morningside: the squirming, mewing kitten held out to her in the grubby hands of her daughter, Kiki, as all their children solemnly presented their chosen gifts to each and every parent. There had been a dozen grandparents looking on—and siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, their proud, hopeful faces washed with ruddy light, the Darkside Perimeter’s eternal twilight.
All of them were waiting—all of them were a part of her. The children were waiting; she was not alone. But they were all beyond her reach now, across too much space and time; and it was her duty, her responsibility, to get this ship back to them—
She heard a sound in the hall, straightened away from the doorframe with Rusty still nested in her arms. She saw Clewell, wearing only his shorts, standing in the doorway of his own room, watching her.
“Betha—are you all right?”
“Yes… yes, I’m just tired, Pappy.” Tired of remembering, and remembering. How can one sudden sorrow turn all my joy to pain? Watching him back she saw the same desolation, the same wound of loss that tormented her. She felt her fear rise again, Oh, Clewell; don’t let me lose you, too. “May—I share your room again, tonight?”
He nodded. “Please. I couldn’t get to sleep anyway, alone.”
She followed him into his room, and in the darkness unbuttoned her plain cotton shirt, slipped out of her shoes and jeans. She settled into the double sleeping bag beside him, into his arms, and put her own arms around him gratefully in a gesture of long familiarity. He had not been her first husband, but he had been her friend through more years than she could remember now. He had been twenty-seven the year she was born, one of many uncles; but from childhood on he had been her favorite among all the relatives of her extended family. He had been an astronomer before he had become navigator on the Ranger; he had traveled from Borealis on the chill perimeter of day, out across the Boreal Sea and over the crumpled ice sheet of the darkside glacier, to his observatory under eternal night. Sometimes he had taken her along for a brief holiday of stargazing, free from the duties and clan responsibilities that even a child on Morningside was expected to fulfill.
When she was fifteen she had gone away for her technical training; and then to her first job as an engineer, at a production plant on the desert edge of the subsolar Hotspot. She had fallen in love with Eric, married him; and in time they had returned to the Borealis moiety. She had reentered Clewell’s life as a grown woman, and she and Eric had been invited to join his family.
Morningside society grew out of the multiple-mar-riage family, and bonds of kinship were its strength and security. Marriage among the members of a clan—a parent family, its children, their own children—was socially taboo; but outside the central clan unit, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews married freely, their sheer numbers providing the cultural and biological controls. A marriage could be made between a single couple or a dozen people, and each family made its own rules to live by. Special friendships between individuals in a large family were common, and either the group as a whole adapted, or a subgroup split off. Weddings were a cause for general celebration, but divorce was a common, and private, matter for a family group. Three of the members of Clewell’s family that Betha had known as a child had divorced the rest, and his first wife had died, before she and Eric had joined the group, and Claire, and Sean, after them.
Betha remembered the brief, fond ceremony of marriage, the immense, freeform family celebrations that had followed. All of Morningside loved a celebration, because too much of the time they had too little to celebrate. And now there would be even less, whether the Ranger ever returned or not…
Betha became aware of Clewell’s hand moving slowly, tenderly along her side. But the warm instinctive response of half a lifetime died in her. She buried her face against the pillow, smothering the words, “Oh, Clewell, I can’t… I can’t. Not yet I’m so sorry…”
His arms comforted her again, “No, Betha… it’s all right. This is all I really need. Just to hold you.”
She felt Rusty stir and settle between their feet at the end of the bed. She moved deeper into Clewell’s arms, closing him in her own, and fled from memory into sleep.
Lansing 04 (Lansing space)
+ 190 kiloseconds
The night stretched like silence beyond their searching eyes; they took comfort in its vast, star-flecked indifference. They were scavengers, picking the bones of worlds; the night gave them shelter because it made no judgments, and they were grateful for its amorality.
Shadow Jack watched the night, or its image on the screen… sometimes in the dim, close womb of the ship his mind blurred, and reality began to merge with image. He stretched his legs and scratched, brushed back the dirty hair that drifted forward into his eyes and was as black as the night before him on the screen. One eye was green and one was blue; both were bloodshot, and his head throbbed with his heartbeat. The carbon-dioxide level in the cabin was well over three percent; he had long ago stopped noticing the smells. He pulled himself back down into his seat, looking at one errant hole pricked in the darkness, the one star that was not a star—that was something infinitely more insignificant, and infinitely more precious.
“I think we’re close enough to begin scan.”
He heard Bird Alyn’s voice, barely audible as always, even in the quiet space between them. He swallowed twice, wetting his throat for words. “Right. Go ahead and run it through.”
She reached forward with her right hand, her crippled left hand resting on air as she typed the order into the reconnaissance-unit computer that would begin one more analysis. Shadow Jack watched the long fingers with the broken, dirty nails move over the shining board. He looked away, for the ten thousandth time, at the cramped squalor of the cabin: still finding no miracle to transform the welded scrap-iron husk into a ship to match the technological beauty of the reconnaissance unit. Almost in apology, he smoothed fingerprints from the coolness of the panel with his frayed sleeve. The recon unit was a prize of salvage, a more precious thing than his own life, because it gave his entire world a chance for survival. Before the Civil War it had been a prospecting unit, programmed for laser and radar analysis of asteroidal metals, organics, volatiles. Now it scanned for the old instead of the new, searching the debris of death for artifacts to stretch the lives of the living. He looked back at the display with Bird Alyn, waiting, watched figures print out on the flat glossy screen—