hoping that the new Skimmers Union regime would thank them
for it. If so, they were grossly mistaken.
Constantine looked about the cavernous station, adjusting his
videoshades for closeups. Amid the fretting Shapers in their
overelaborate finery was a growing minority of others. An imported cargo of sundogs. Here and there shabbily clad ideological derelicts, their faces wreathed in smiles, were comparing
lace-sleeved garments to their torsos or lurking with predatory
nonchalance beside evacuees lightening their luggage.
"Vermin," Constantine said. The sight depressed him.
"Gentlemen, it's time we moved on."
The guards led him across the chained-off entry to a private
ramp padded in velcro. Constantine's clingtight boots crunched
and shredded across the fabric.
He floated down the free-fall embarkation tube to the airlock
of the Friendship Serene. Once inside he took his favorite acceleration chair and plugged in on video to enjoy the takeoff.
Within the port's skeletal gantryways, the smaller ships queued up for embarkation tubes, dwarfed by the stylized bulk of an
Investor starship. Constantine craned his neck, causing the hull
cameras of the Friendship Serene to swivel in slaved obedience.
"Is that Investor ship still here?" he said aloud. He smiled. "Do
you suppose they're hunting bargains?"
He lifted his videoshades. Within the ship's cabin his guards
clustered around an overhead tank, huffing tranquilizer gas
from breathing masks. One looked up, red-eyed. "May we go
into suspension now, sir?"
Constantine nodded sourly. Since the war had started up again, his guards had lost all sense of humor.
AN INVESTOR TRADE SHIP: 22-9-'53
Nora looked up at her husband, who sprawled above her in a
towering chair. His face was hidden by a dark beard and opaque
wraparound sunshades. His hair was close-cropped and he wore
a Mech jumpsuit. His old, scarred diplomatic bag rested on the
scratchy plush of the deck. He was taking it with him. He meant
to defect.
The heavy gravity of the Investor ship weighed on both of them like iron. "Stop pacing, Nora," he said. "You'll only exhaust
yourself."
"I'll rest later," she said. Tension knotted her neck and shoulders.
"Rest now. Take the other chair. If you'll close your eyes,
sleep a little ... in almost no time-"
"I'm not going with you." She pulled off her own sunshades
and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The light in the cabin was
the light Investors favored: a searing blaze of blue-white radiance, drenched in ultraviolet.
She hated that light. Somehow she had always resented the
Investors for robbing her Family's deaths of meaning. And the
three months she'd once spent in a ship like this one had been
the eeriest time of her life. Lindsay had been quick, adaptable,
the consummate sundog, as willing to deal with the aliens as he
was with anyone. She'd wondered at it then. And now they had
come full circle.
He said, "You came this far. You wouldn't have, if you didn't
want to come with me. I know you, Nora. You're still the same,
even if I've changed."
"I came because I wanted to be with you for every moment
that I could." She fought down the tears, her face frozen. The
sensation was horrifying, a black nausea. Too many tears, she
thought, had been pushed away for too long. The day would
come when she would choke on them.
Constantine used every weakness in Goldreich-Tremaine, she
thought. And my special weakness was this man. When Abelard
came back from the rejuvenation clinic, three weeks late and so
changed that the household robots wouldn't let him in ... But
even that was not so bad as the days without him, hunting for
him, finding that the black-market subble he'd gone to had been
deflated and put away, wondering what furtive Star Chamber
was picking him to shreds. . . .
"This is my fault," she said. "I accused Constantine with no
proof, and he humiliated me. Next time I'll know better."
"Constantine had nothing to do with it," he said. "I know what
I saw in that clinic. They were Superbrights."
"I can't believe in the Cataclysts," she said. "Those
Superbrights are watched like jewels; they don't have room for
wild conspiracies. What you saw was a fraud; the whole thing
was staged to draw me out. And I fell for it."
"Don't be proud, Nora. It's blinded you. The Cataclysts
abducted me, and you won't even admit they exist. You can't
win, because you can't bring back the past. Let it go, and come
with me."
"When I see what Constantine did to the Clique-"
"It's not your fault! My God, aren't there disasters enough
without your heaping them all on your own shoulders?
Goldreich-Tremaine is through! We have to live now! I told you
years ago that it couldn't last, and now it's over!" He flung his
arms wide. The left one, tugged by gravity, fell limply; the other
whirred with smooth precision through a powered arc.
They had been over this a hundred times, and she saw that his nerves were frayed. Under the influence of the treatment his
hard-won patience had vanished in a blaze of false youth. He
was shouting at her. "You're not God! You're not history!
You're not the Ring Council! Don't flatter yourself! You're
nothing now, you're a target, a scapegoat! Run, Nora! Sundog
it!"
"The Mavrides clan needs me," she said.
"They're better off without you. You're an embarrassment to
them now, we both are-"
"And the children?"
He was silent a moment. "I'm sorry for them, more sorry than
I can say, but they're adults now and they can take their own
chances. They're not the problem here, we are! If we make
things easy for the enemy, just slip away, evaporate, we'll be
forgotten. We can wait it out."
"And give the fascists their way in everything? The assassins,
the killers? How long before the Belt fills up again with Shaper
agents, and little wars blaze up in every corner?"
"And who'll stop that? You?"
"What about you, Abelard? Dressed as a stinking Mechanist
with stolen Shaper data in that bag! Do you ever think of
anyone's life but your own? Why in God's name don't you
stand up for the helpless instead of betraying them? Do you
think it's easier for me without you? I'll go on fighting, but
without you there'll be no heart in me."
He groaned. "Listen. I was a sundog before I met you, you
know just how little I had. ... I don't want that emptiness, no
one caring, no one knowing . . . And another betrayal on my
conscience. . . . Nora, we had almost forty years! This place was
good to us, but it's falling apart on its own! Good times will
come again. We have all the time there is! You wanted more
life, and I went out and got it for you. Now you want me to
throw it away. I won't be a martyr, Nora. Not for anyone."
"You always talked about mortality," she said. "You're different now."
"If I changed it was because you wanted me to."
"Not like this. Not treason."
"We'll die for nothing."
"Like the others," she said, regretting it at once. And there it
was before them: the old guilt in all its stark intimacy. Those
others, to whom duty was more than life. Those they had
abandoned, those they had killed in the Shaper outpost. That
was the crime the two of them had struggled to efface, the crime
that had bound them together. "Well, that's what you're asking,
isn't it? To betray my own people again, for you!"
There. She had said it. Now there was no going back. She