When she was gone, Stan and Estrella looked at each other. “What do you think, Strell? Should we do it?”
She was frowning. “Did you see how Salt looked?”
Stan considered. “Well, maybe a little tired…”
“Tired! You don’t get that kind of skin color from just being tired, hon. I wonder if she’s sick.”
“Nah,” said Stan, dismissing the question with the complete confidence of absolute ignorance on the subject of Heechee health. “So are we going to do it?”
“Well, why not? But if we are, first we’re going to practice. Like now, hon.”
It wasn’t until that conversation was long over and Stan and Estrella were playing duets on their lanai that Estrella abruptly said, “Oh, my God,” and put down her flute.
Stan took his lips away from the mouthpiece of his trumpet. “What’s the matter?”
“Stan, I just thought. The way we were looking around Klara’s apartment, you know? If we can see into other people’s homes any time we want to, do you suppose they can—?”
He blinked at her. “What are you, crazy? Why would they want to look in at us?”
“But suppose they do?”
“They wouldn’t!” he said doggedly.
III
Firmly though he had spoken, the question worried at Stan’s thoughts until, three or four practice sessions later, Sigfrid von Shrink dropped in. When they put the question to him, it turned out that they not only would, they did. “Heechee have different standards of morality than we do,” he told them. “They don’t think sexual intercourse has to be private. With them it only happens when the female is in estrus, so it’s comparatively infrequent, and sometimes they make a little ceremony out of it.”
“Wait one damn minute,” Estrella said with determination. “We’re not Heechee! Can we turn those cameras off or not?”
“Of course you can, if that’s what you want,” he said. “They aren’t exactly cameras, but I know what you mean. Wait a moment. All right, they’re turned off now.”
“As easily as that?” Stan demanded.
“Of course. Why not? But you know you’ll be depriving your friends of some entertainment.”
“They can damn well stay deprived!” Stan said hotly. “We don’t make love to entertain them!”
“Not just the making love, Stan. The music practice. The eating. Everything you do, really. Still, I suppose they’ll understand if you don’t want them watching you, I think. Anyway,” he said, forcibly changing the subject, “they’ve enjoyed listening to you two practicing—well, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the right word, because Heechee ideas of music aren’t at all like our own, but they found it interesting. So what about what Salt asked you? Would you mind going down to do it at the—ah—institution?”
“Well, sure,” Stan said. “We never said we wouldn’t.”
In the event, their recital was a great success. That is, no one walked out. No one hissed, either, except to the extent that Heechee sometimes did hiss when speaking the language of Do. They performed the Bach transcriptions that Estrella had made up for them, based on duets she had learned in her one scant year at the conservatory; they did some Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton and a few extracts from Mahler, and when they were through, four or five of the several dozen Heechee in the room politely clapped their hands as they had learned to do in their days Outside. Even the greater number of Heechee who had never been Outside tried to emulate them, though not very successfully. Skinny Heechee palms were not meant for applauding.
Then the little platform the Heechee had provided for them sank back into the floor. They were quickly surrounded by a dozen or more Heechee, Salt leading a pair of elderly males to meet them, Yellow Jade by her side with hand outstretched to shake Stan’s hand. “You performed with much excellence,” he told them both. “Therefore you were greatly enjoyed by the public as well as by myself and”—he gestured at the two ancients by Salt’s side—“my two sons, name of Warm, this one, and Ionic Solvent, this other. Have lately returned from prolonged period Outside. Unfortunately do not speak your language but ask me express pleasure at meeting.”
“Delighted,” Stan said unconvincingly. “Well, Strell, don’t you think we ought to be going?” And then, all the way home after the event, Stan and Estrella were complaining about the bizarre approximations of human food their Heechee hosts, eager to please but imperfectly informed, had laid out for them. About the shocking state of Salt’s complexion. And about trying to reconstruct the story of Yellow Jade’s astonishing two sons, now old and near enough to death to have come back to the Core to die, and thus enter the Stored Minds. And about the fact that neither of them spoke English, because their seventy-some years of service had been spent on the Jen Hao planet, where English was spoken only by visitors. About the fact that they were triple the age of their father, because Yellow Jade had left them Outside when he returned to the Core. And, anyway, where was Sigfrid?
“He probably had something else to do?” Estrella offered.
“What difference does that make? He’s an AI. He’s always doing fourteen or fifteen things at once.” And then, as they made the last turn before their doorway, “He should’ve been there.” And then their door came in sight and he was.
Sigfrid took his usual immaterial seat, accepted his simulated glass of wine to keep them company, and said, “I really enjoyed the Bach chaconne. I’ve heard it before, but never better.”
Stan looked suspicious. “I didn’t see you.”
“I didn’t show myself, Stan. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, but I wouldn’t have missed the event. Anyway, the reason I’m here is that I wanted to invite you to a little gathering at Klara’s.”
“She’s back?”
“She will be soon indeed, Estrella. She’s very fond of you, you know.”
Estrella ventured, “Salt said she went to look at those australo—whatever-you-call-them things.”
“Yes, that is true,” von Shrink conceded. “There is some concern about them. She went to see if she could help.” And, when Stan demanded to know more about those “concerns,” Sigfrid only shook his head. “It is nothing that need trouble you. Only some suspicion that the previous owner of the hominids may be planning something unwise. You’ve heard of him? Wan Santos-Smith? A very unpleasant man, and it seems that some of his people were seen snooping around the Old Ones.” He shook his head and repeated, “No doubt Klara will tell you all about it when she returns. Is there anything else?”
Stan debated pressing the issue, decided the chances of getting satisfaction were too slim to pursue and changed the subject. “I noticed Achiever wasn’t there either.”
“Ah,” von Shrink said regretfully, “Achiever. No, he isn’t in a position to attend a performance just now. It’s a sad story.” He looked from one to the other of them, uncharacteristically indecisive. Then he added inquiringly, “I didn’t know whether or not you would want to be kept informed—”
“We would,” Estrella said briefly.
Von Shrink’s simulation sighed and nodded. “I supposed that would be so,” he said. “Once you’ve shared the Dream Machine with someone there’s always a kind of bond, isn’t there? Anyway, your experience with Achiever had a profound effect on him. As a result, at present he is being nurtured by a group of Stored Minds. That’s what they call it, nurturing. It means that he is temporarily placed in storage himself, and the other Stored Minds try to complete his healing. They started that as soon as they learned what was at the basis of his problem—”
He stopped there, apparently willing to let it drop at that point. Estrella wasn’t. “Which was?” she demanded. “Come on, Dr. von Shrink. Seeing as I was involved, I have a right to know!”
“I suppose you do, Estrella. It’s rather nasty—”
“Tell!” Stan barked.
He sighed again. “Well, when Achiever left the Core, he happened to be in the company of a nubile Heechee female named Breeze. She began t
o come into estrus as the flight proceeded. Achiever’s body reacted to that, of course; any male Heechee’s would have. But then at the last moment he was dropped off on Gateway, with no suitable female to be found anywhere. And—” he lowered his voice, though it was no longer possible for anyone to be listening—“he did something quite traumatic. He attempted intercourse with a female human.”
“He committed rape?” Estrella said, unbelieving.
“No, not rape,” von Shrink corrected at once. “Not quite actual sexual intercourse at all. If that had happened, I expect Achiever wouldn’t have been able to live with himself. But he did attempt some, well, foreplay. He thinks the human female was at fault, and in a sense perhaps she was. It appears that she had done very poorly as a Gateway prospector. In fact, she had gone broke. So, in order to pay her bills on the asteroid, she resorted to, well, prostitution.”
“My God!” Estrella said. “With a Heechee?”
Von Shrink nodded gravely. “That accounts for some of the things you felt when you shared a Dream Couch with him. It wasn’t you he hated. It was that poor woman on Gateway. But you were handy.”
And as soon as he was gone Estrella sat before one of the lookplates. Stan was wandering idly toward the lanai when she called him back. “Stan? Are these the old things Dr. von Shrink was talking about?”
He strolled around to where he could see into the lookplate. What it displayed was a pair of odd-looking creatures, manlike to a degree, apelike almost as much. They wore rough-knit kilts and not much else, and they both sported thin, unkempt beards. They were eating some kind of fruits and jabbering to each other in a language Stan had never heard before.
As he and Estrella stared at them, Stan shook his head. “Do you think they’re people?”
“Do they look like people to you?”
“No, but—Hey!” He snapped his fingers. “They came from where Wan was, way back when he was the crazy kid that was using the Dream Machine way back when—”
“I remember. The Wrath of God, they called it.”
“Right. Wan’s doing. That’s what the Old Ones were, some kind of prehistoric humans that the Heechee had put out there for some reason or other. I guess he thinks he owns them.”
“Huh.” Estrella examined the shaggy ones on the screen, then emitted a small scream. Their feeding over, the smaller of the two creatures—beard or none, evidently the female—had dropped to hands and knees, while the larger, definitely and now quite conspicuously the male, was preparing to enter her from behind.
“Hey,” said Stan, amused. “They’re really going at it, aren’t they.”
Estrella turned the lookplate off. “Fair’s fair, Stan. We didn’t want people looking at us when we were making love, did we? So we shouldn’t watch them.”
“But they’re animals, Strell! And it’s interesting, kind of.”
She shook her head, firmly indicating that the subject was closed. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get some of that good food, right? What I’m thinking of is, let’s see, a thick, juicy, rare steak—beef, not buffalo—and some of those fries and a salad with maybe a little avocado cut up in it—”
“Make it two,” Stan said, his expression lightening. “And make it fast, will you please?” And then they sat back to wait.
But it wasn’t made fast.
In fact, for quite a while, half an hour or so at the least, it wasn’t made at all, although both Stan and Estrella repeated their orders several times. When at last they did hear the remote rumble that told them something had arrived, Stan snapped, “About damn time!” and Estrella beat him to the dispenser.
What was waiting for them did not come under any of those crystalline domes, nor did it look at all like the steaks they had envisioned. It was two packets in the colored wrappings of Heechee food. When, incredulously, they opened them up they discovered that they weren’t Heechee food—weren’t even as good as Heechee food! They were bricks of something brownish and tough that smelled vaguely of clam beds and tasted like not very good pemmican. “What the hell?” Stan exclaimed. “What’s going on here?”
But Estrella had no answer for him, and after tasting a crumb of her own bar was as irritated as he. “If this is what they’re feeding pregnant women I’m going to go down to the lake and catch a couple of those ugly little fish and fry them up.”
IV
She didn’t do that. She ate those horrid messes, and ate all the other horrid messes the dispenser kept giving them in lieu of real food. They had no one to complain to, either. Sigfrid didn’t come back. In spite of what he had said, Klara hadn’t returned, either. Yellow Jade was so wrapped up in his senile sons that he didn’t show up at all, and the one time they did catch a glimpse of Salt she was impenetrably surrounded by a crush of male Heechee. “They don’t seem to care what she looks like,” Estrella sniffed.
“She has certainly let herself go,” Stan agreed. “Want to see if we can catch some news?”
They could. They did, but took very little joy from it. The brainless, but good-looking, newscaster they had seen before was long gone. No one had really replaced him. The lookplate simply displayed views of whatever they requested, and most of the views were unpleasing. Stan had seen some shots of fascinating-looking floating cities, but when he found them again they were in various stages of disrepair. Whole planets seemed to be abandoned—forested where there had been skyscrapers, burned out, iced over. “Remember the pictures they had in the Gateway museum?” Stan asked. “Those were the kind of things the Foe did, but the Foe aren’t still doing them, are they?” Estrella only shook her head sadly, without answering.
Then Stan asked for, and got, a look at Istanbul. It too seemed nearly deserted. The Kemal Ataturk Towers were still standing, but apparently vacant—glass broken out of the windows, no sign of people going in or out. “Jesus,” Stan said. “What do you think happened?”
“I wish I knew,” Estrella said, and then changed her mind. “No, maybe I’m better off if I don’t know. Let’s do something else. How about another look at the kid?”
That, at least, was always rewarding. Every day the tiny creature in Estrella’s belly showed new things to marvel at. Those eye things that had seemed to be growing out of the baby’s temples were slowly migrating toward the front of her head, where they belonged. Her skin had become so thin that Estrella swore she could see the blood vessels beneath it. (Stan was less sure.) And then one day, while Estrella was back at her lookplates while Stan was studying Stork’s display, she jumped. Stan was yelling at her. “Strell! Guess what the hell what! She’s sucking her thumb!”
And so, Estrella agreed, she was. Not only that. Day by day the baby’s head turned from side to side, her legs flexed and extended, the little arms and hands experimenting with new positions—folded over the little chest, clasped prayer-like before the face, stretched almost straight at the sides. It was a magical slide show, always changing.
When they took time from the contemplation of their unborn, there was plenty to interest them in the lookplates—mostly incomprehensible, yes, but provocative. When they saw a procession of hooded children marching steadfastly into the shallows, and then the deeps, of some ocean, somewhere in the outside galaxy, they could only wonder what was going on. When the lookplate flared with appalling light as some star, also some unknown where, seemed to destroy itself in an eruption of flame they could only admire the spectacle, with no clue of what it meant.
Not counting the food, Stan and Estrella were almost content to be ignored by their friends. Sex was great sport again, now practiced in private. The food, they told each other, really wasn’t much worse than they had had in their old Five. The lanai was as lush as ever…
All the same, when their door growled for the first time in days, they both hurried to open it.
The caller wasn’t any of their first choices. It was Achiever. Without preamble he asked, “Have asked on earlier occasion if you had been asked. Now I ask again. Well? What is your answ
er?”
“Oh, hell,” Stan said. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Answer to what?”
The muscles under Achiever’s cheekbones were twitching madly. “How can you ask me answer to what? Have recently experienced significant event, somewhat pleasurable but very tiring, have retained little patience. Is it possible you have not yet been asked?”
“Asked what?” Stan demanded, now well on the way to becoming belligerent. But so was Achiever. He stomped a few steps away from the door, the fur at the back of his neck erect with anger, then stepped back. “This is not to any degree acceptable!” he shouted. “I am greatly enraged. Therefore I shut you off without customary convention of good-bye!” And he turned on his narrow heel and stomped away.
Estrella and Stan were in their bedroom, no longer fully dressed and no more than half-heartedly picking at their latest consignment of the marginally edible, not talking much, really, about Achiever because what was there still to say about that volatile and unlikeable Heechee?—when the door growled and the visitor turned out to be Salt, looking somehow radiant and in no respect purple. “Possibly can come in?” she asked, and took their silence as affirmative.
“Oh, absolutely,” Stan assured her, a little tardily—she was already perched in their living room and looking expectantly from one to the other of them. “You have been speaking with Achiever,” she told them. “I know this because he so informed me. It is partly relevant to him that I come to see you.”
Stan pulled the robe he had grabbed up tighter around him. “Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing is in the least wrong of any description,” Salt said, the tone of her voice sounding as though that were true. If she had been human, Stan would have said she was beaming. “Quite in actuality contrariwise. First must apologize to you for did not invite you to ceremony. Reason for this: other party and I well aware of your cultural modesty tabus.”
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