It was a nice meal of it. The only interruptions were when one crew member after another briefly excused himself to double-check how the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over that 500-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection foils into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was in-jokes, but that wasn’t a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering in my ear. When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly—pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren’t homesick at all, that was aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: “He’s pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian’s jealous.” Julia—that was Hoolia—Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Inca former schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I’d never been to Machu Picchu. “And you’ve been all over the Galaxy? And never took the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?” The only subdued one was Mark Rohrbeck. Between the figs and the coffee he excused himself and didn’t come back for nearly half an hour. “Calling home,” Mason-Manley said wisely, and Hypatia, who was the Galaxy’s greatest eavesdropper when I let her be, filled me in. “He’s trying to talk his wife out of the divorce. She isn’t buying it.”
When the coffee was about half gone, Terple whispered something to the air. Evidently Hans was listening, and in a moment the end of the room went dark. The planet appeared, noticeably bigger than it had been before. She whispered again, and the image expanded until it filled the room, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that I was falling into it.
“We’re getting about two- or three-kilometer resolution now,” Terple announced proudly.
That didn’t give us much beyond mountains, shorelines and clouds, and the planet was still half in sun and half dark. (Well, it had to be, didn’t it? The planet was rotating under us, but, in just the few days we were going to be observing it, its position relative to its sun wasn’t going to change.) When I studied it, something looked odd about the landmass at the bottom of the image. I pointed. “Is that ocean, there, down on the left side? I mean the dark part. Because I didn’t see any lights there.”
“No, it’s land, all right. It’s probably just that that part is too cold to be inhabited. We’re not getting a square look at the planet, you know. We’re about twenty degrees south of its equator, so we’re seeing more of its South Pole and nothing north of, let’s say, what would be Scotland or southern Alaska on Earth. Have you seen the globe Hans put together for us? No? Hans, display.”
Immediately a sphere appeared in the middle of the room, rotating slowly. It would have looked exactly like the kind my grandfather kept in his bedroom, latitude and longitude lines and all, except that the land masses were wholly wrong. “This is derived from old Heechee data that Starminder provided for us,” Hans’s voice informed me. “However, we’ve named the continents ourselves. You see the one that’s made up of two fairly circular masses, connected by an isthmus, that looks like a dumbbell? Dr. Terple calls it ‘Dumbbell.’ It’s divided into Dumbbell East and Dumbbell West. Fryingpan is the sort of roundish one with the long, thin peninsula projecting to the southwest. The one just coming into view now is Peanut, because—”
“I can see why,” I told him. Hans was a perceptive enough program to recognize, probably from the tone of my voice, that I found this geography lesson a little boring. Terple wasn’t.
“Go on, Hans,” she said sharply when he hesitated. So he did.
Out of guest-politeness I sat still while he named every dot on the map for me, but when he came to the end I did too. “That’s very nice,” I said, unhooking myself from my dining place. “Thanks for the dinner, June, but I think I’d better let you get your work done. Anyway, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next five days.”
Every face I saw wore a suddenly bland expression, and Terple coughed. “Well, not quite five days,” she said uncomfortably. “I don’t know whether anyone told you this, but we’ll leave before the star blows.”
I stopped cold, one hand stuffing my napkin into its tied-down ring, the other holding onto the wall support. “There wasn’t anything about leaving early in your prospectus. Why wasn’t I told this?”
She said doggedly, “When the star begins its collapse, I’m getting out of here. It’s too dangerous.”
I don’t like being surprised by the people who work for me. I gave her a look. “How can it be dangerous when we’re six thousand light-years away?”
She got obstinate. “Remember I’m responsible for the safety of this installation and its crew. I don’t think you have any idea of what a supernova is like, Klara. It’s huge. Back in 1054 the Chinese astrologers could see it in daylight for almost the whole month of July, and they didn’t have our lensing to make it brighter.”
“So we’ll put on sunglasses.”
She said firmly, “We’ll leave. I’m not just talking about visible light. Even now, after six thousand years of cooling down after it popped, that thing’s still radiating all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave to X-rays. We’re not going to want to be where all that radiation comes to a focus when it peaks.”
As I was brushing my teeth Hypatia spoke from behind me. “What Terple said makes sense, you know. Anything in the focus is going to get fried when the star goes supernova.”
I didn’t answer, so she tried another tack. “Mark Rohrbeck is a good-looking man, isn’t he? He’s very confused right now, with the divorce and all, but I think he likes you.”
I looked at her in the mirror. She was in full simulation, leaning against the bathroom doorway with a little smile on her face. “He’s also half my age,” I pointed out.
“Oh, no, Klara,” she corrected me. “Not even a third of your age, actually. Still, what difference does that make? Hans displayed his file for me. Genetically he’s very clean, as organic human beings go. Would you like to see it?”
“No.” I finished with the bathroom and turned to leave. Hypatia got gracefully out of my way just as though I couldn’t have walked right through her.
“Well, then,” she said. “Would you like something to eat? A nightcap?”
“What I would like is to go to sleep. Right now.”
She sighed. “Such a waste of time. Sooner or later you know you’re going to give up the meat, don’t you? Why wait? In machine simulation you can do anything you can do now, only better, and—”
“Enough,” I ordered. “What I’m going to do now is go to bed and dream about my lover. Go away.”
The simulation disappeared, and her “Good night, then,” came from empty air. Hypatia doesn’t really go away when I tell her to, but she pretends she does. Part of the pretense is that she never acts as though she knows what I do in the privacy of my room, though of course she does.
It wasn’t exactly true that I intended to dream about Bill Tartch. Maybe I thought about him, a little bit, especially when I tucked myself into that huge circular bed and automatically reached out for someone to touch, and nobody was there. I truly enjoy having a warm male body to spoon up against to drift off to sleep. But, if I didn’t have that, I also didn’t have anybody snoring in my ear, or thrashing about, or talking to me when I first woke up and all I wanted was to huddle over a cup of coffee and a piece of grapefruit in peace.
Those were fairly consoling thoughts, but as soon as I put my head down I was wide awake again.
Insomnia was one more of those meat-person flaws that disgusted Hypatia so. I didn’t have to suffer from it. Hypatia keeps my bathroom medicine chest stocked with everything she imagines I might want in the middle of the night, including half a dozen different kinds of anti-insomnia pills, but I had a better idea than that. I popped the lid off my bedside stand, where I keep the manual controls I use when I don’t want Hypatia to do som
ething for me, and I accessed the synoptic I wanted to see.
I visited my island.
Its name is Raiwea—that’s rah-ee-WAY-uh, with the accent on the third syllable, the way the Polynesians say it—and it’s the only place in the universe I ever miss when I’m away from it. It’s not very big. It only amounts to a couple thousand hectares of dry land altogether, but it’s got palm trees and breadfruit trees and a pretty lagoon that’s too shallow for the sharks ever to invade from the deep water outside the reef. And now, because I paid to put them there, it’s got lots of clusters of pretty little bungalows with pretty, if imitation, thatched roofs, as well as plumbing and air-conditioning and everything else that would make a person comfortable. And it’s got playgrounds and game fields that are laid out for baseball or soccer or whatever a bunch of kids might need to work off excess animal energy. And it’s got its own Food Factory nestled inside the reef that’s constantly churning out every variety of healthful food anyone wants to eat; and it’s mine. All of it is mine. Every square centimeter. I paid for it, and I’ve populated it with orphans and single women with babies from all over the world. When I go there, I’m Grandma Klara to about a hundred and fifty kids from newborns to teens, and when I’m somewhere else I make it a point, every day or so, to access the surveillance systems and make sure the schools are functioning and the medical services are keeping everybody healthy, because I—all right, damn it!—because I love those kids. Every last one of them, and I swear they love me back.
Hypatia says they’re my substitute for having a baby of my own.
Maybe they are. All the same, I do have a couple of my own ova stored in the Raiwea clinic’s deep freeze. They’ve been there for a good many years now, but the doctors promise they’re still 100% viable. The ova are there just in case I ever decide I really want to do that other disgustingly meat-person thing and give birth to my own genetically personal child…
But I don’t seem to meet the man I want to be its father. Bill Tartch? Well, maybe. I had thought he might be for a while, anyway, but then I wasn’t really so sure.
The thing is, I thought I had met that man once. It might even have worked out, only then I got stuck in that damn black hole for a couple of decades, and by the time I got rescued, why, somewhere along those years, old Rob Broadhead had got himself hooked up with some other woman.
Too bad, right?
But what’s the use of worrying about what can’t be fixed?
When I was up and about the next morning Hypatia greeted me with a fresh display of the Crabber planet. The image was too big now to fit in my salon, but she had zeroed in on one particular coastline. In the center of the image there was a blur that might have been manmade—personmade, I mean. “They’re down to half-kilometer resolution now,” she informed me. “That’s pretty definitely a small city.”
I inspected it. It pretty definitely was, but it was very definitely small. “Isn’t there anything bigger?”
“I’m afraid not, Klara. Hans says the planet seems to be rather remarkably underpopulated, though it’s not clear why. Will you be going over to PhoenixCorp now?”
I shook my head. “Let them work in peace. We might as well do some work ourselves. What’ve you got for me?”
What she had for me was another sampling of some of the ventures I’d put money into at one time or another. There were the purely commercial ones like the helium-3 mines on the Moon, and the chain of food factories in the Bay of Bengal, and the desert-revivification project in the Sahara and forty or fifty others; they weren’t particularly interesting to me, but they were some of the things that, no matter how much I spent, just kept making me richer and richer every day.
Along about then Hypatia cleared her throat in the manner that means there’s something she wants to talk about. I guessed she wanted to discuss my island, so I played the game. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “I accessed Raiwea last night after I went to bed.”
“Really?” she said, just as though she hadn’t known it all along. “How are things?”
I went through the motions of telling her which kids were about ready to leave, and how there were eighteen new ones who had been located by the various agencies I did business with, ready to be brought to the island next time I was in the neighborhood. As she always did, whether she meant it or not, she clucked approvingly. Her simulation was looking faintly amused, though. I took it as a challenge. “So you see there’s one thing us animals can do that you can’t,” I told her. “We can have babies.”
“Or, as in your own case at least so far, not,” she said agreeably. “That wasn’t what I was going to tell you, though.”
“Oh?”
“I just wanted to mention that Mr. Tartch’s ship is going to dock in about an hour. He isn’t coming alone.”
Sometimes Hypatia is almost too idiosyncratically human, and more than once I’ve thought about getting her programs changed. The tone of her voice warned me that she had something more to tell. I said tentatively, “That’s not surprising. Sometimes he needs to bring a crew with him.”
“Of course he does, Klara,” she said cheerfully. “There’s only one of them this time, though. And she’s very pretty.”
V
The very pretty assistant was very pretty, all right, and she looked to be about sixteen years old. No, that’s not exactly true. She looked a lot better than sixteen years old. I don’t believe I had skin like that even when I was a newborn baby. She wore no makeup, and needed none. She had on a decorous one-piece jump suit that covered her from thigh to neck and left no doubt of what was inside. Her name was Denys. When I got there—I had taken my time, because I didn’t want Bill to think I was eager—all three of PhoenixCorp’s males were hanging around, watching her like vultures sniffing carrion.
Bill didn’t seem to notice. He had already set up for his opening teaser and Denys was playing his quaint old auto-cameras for him. As they panned around the entrance chamber and settled on his face, wearing its friendliest and most intelligent expression, he began to speak to the masses:
“Wilhelm Tartch here again, where PhoenixCorp is getting ready to bring a lost race of intelligent beings back to life, and here to help me—” one of the cameras swung around as Denys cued it toward me—“once again I have the good luck to have my beautiful fiancée, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with me.”
I gave him a look, because, whatever I was to Wilhelm Tartch, I definitely wasn’t someone who was planning to marry him. He tipped me a cheeky wink and went right on:
“As you all remember, before the Heechee ran away to hide in the Core, they surveyed most of the Galaxy, looking for other intelligent races. They didn’t find any. When they visited Earth they found the australopithecines, but they were a long way from being modern humans. They hadn’t even developed language yet. And here, on this planet—” That view of the Crabber planet, pre-supernova, appeared behind him. “—they found another primitive race that they thought, someday, might become both intelligent and civilized. Well, perhaps these Crabbers, as the PhoenixCorp people call them, did. But the Heechee weren’t around to see it, and neither are we, because they had some bad luck.
“There were two stars in their planet’s system, a red dwarf and a bright type-A giant. Over the millennia, as these lost people were struggling toward civilization, the big star was losing mass, sucked into the smaller one. Then, without warning, the small one reached critical mass. It exploded. And the Crabber people, along with their planet and all their works, were instantly obliterated in the supernova blast.”
He stopped there, gazing toward Denys until she called, “Got it.” Then he kicked himself toward me, arms outstretched for a hug, big grin on his face; and when we connected he buried his face in my neck, whispering things like, “Oh, Klaretta, we’ve been away from each other too long!”
Bill Tartch is a good hugger. His arms felt fine around me, and his big, male body felt good against mine…as I looked over his shoulder at Denys. Who was regarding
us with an affectionate and wholly unjealous smile.
So, I thought, that part might not be much of a problem. I decided not to worry about it. Anyway the resolution of the Crabber planet was getting better and better, and that was what we were here for, after all.
What the Crabber planet had a lot of was water. As it turned on its axis the continental shore had disappeared into the nighttime side of the world, and what we were looking at was mostly ocean.
Bill Tartch wasn’t pleased. “Is that all we’re going to see?” he demanded of the room at large. “I thought there was at least some kind of a city.”
Terple answered. “A small city—probably. Anyway, that’s what it looked like before the planet turned and we lost it. I can show you that much if you like. Hans? Go back to when that object was still in sight.”
The maybe-city didn’t look any more exciting the second time I saw it, and it didn’t impress Bill. He made a little tongue-click of annoyance. “You, shipmind! Can’t you enhance the image for me?”
“It is enhanced, Mr. Tartch,” Hans told him pleasantly. “However, we have somewhat better resolution now, and I’ve been tracking it in the infrared. There’s a little more detail—” the continental margin appeared for us, hazily delineated because of the differences in temperature between water and land—“but, as you see, there are hot spots that I have not yet identified.”
There were. Big ones, and very bright. What was encouraging, considering what we were looking for, was that some of them seemed to be fairly geometrical in shape, triangles and rectangles. But what were they?
“Christmas decorations?” Bill guessed. “You know, I mean not really Christmas, but with the houses all lit up for some holiday or other?”
The Boy Who Would Live Forever Page 15