I gave up—I mean, I gave up about a thousand times, but each time then I’d shut up for a while, trying to calm myself down by thinking about something else—as if there was anything else I could think about!—and wondering if Marc Antony was really out there somewhere, and if so why he didn’t show himself, because I was running on empty. And then I’d think, well, if he did, what could he do anyway? And then the whole thing would boil up in my mind again, and I just couldn’t not go at it again with him.
It wasn’t just my own life I was worrying about. Not entirely, anyway. Honest, those millions and billions who were going to die if I couldn’t talk him out of it were on my mind, too. Maybe not as much. But there, all right.
A lot of what we said was just, me, “Please, Orbis!” and, him, “Screw you, Phrygia” in one variation or another. I tried all sorts of other things, too. I tried just working up a friendly conversation with him, just us two people that were stuck together and might as well be sociable. I tried asking him what did he miss most about not being organic anymore? (Not having a congregation to preach to, he said.) Another time we got to talking about how Wan came to own us. I told him about that damn Indochina-Malaysia war, and how when they bombed K.L. and the towers collapsed there were so many people getting killed that the Here After people weren’t checking anybody’s credit, just getting us all machine-stored as fast as they could. (Only when they did check credit I didn’t have any, so Wan could buy me.) Orbis was much the same, only what did him in wasn’t a war but an earthquake that dropped a big stone statue on his head. (Funny thing. It looked like what bothered him most, being a Protestant himself, was that the statue was of some Catholic priest.)
And so on, and on.
So, having done everything I could think of to get Orbis to change his mind, I more or less did it all over again. I was telling Orbis how I came to go from Homecoming Queen at Eastern New Mexico University to blackjack dealer in one of the big Los Angeles casinos to my last job, driving a subway train in Kuala Lumpur. (What a laugh that is. When Wan found out I’d driven a subway, he decided I was their best bet to learn how to pilot a spaceship. Go figure.)
Then I noticed that Orbis wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the lookplate, so I did too. (All right, no, I didn’t exactly see anything on the lookplate. We didn’t have a lookplate. Didn’t need it, any more than we needed to display simulations of ourselves to each other. We skipped the middleman and went right to observing the inputs.)
What the inputs were showing us was the star itself.
Most stars look ordinary enough. This one wasn’t ordinary. It looked to be eye-hurtingly white and scarily hot, and I could just imagine what it would be like if it did, in fact, blow itself to smithereens. I gave up. “Marc Antony,” I said, “I give up. Show yourself. It’s time for you to take over.”
He didn’t do that. He didn’t show himself. He just whispered in my ear—all right, he “whispered” in my “ear”—and what he said, the son of a bitch, was, “No need. You’re doing reasonably well.”
I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t. He knew I wasn’t. I sighed and went back to what he said I was doing reasonably well at. I said, “Well, shit, Orbis—oh, sorry.”
He said mildly, “There’s nothing in the Commandments against having a dirty mouth. Say what you want to say, Phrygia.”
“I was going to say I don’t know what your problem is. If I wanted to die, I’d do it.”
He said reprovingly, “Suicide is sinful. I don’t want to add to my burden of sins when I face my Judge.”
“But blowing up a star and killing millions of people—”
“Not millions of people. They’re mostly Heechee.”
“Again shit. So, murdering even one single human being, are you saying that’s not a sin?”
“Haven’t I answered that already?” His voice sounded absent-minded. He was. He wasn’t giving me much attention, because his look was on the piloting plate.
What I noticed was that, in his concentration on the image of that nasty-looking star on the lookplate, he had set his end of the triggering servomodule down. That appeared to be my best chance yet. I sidled over toward it, as inconspicuously as I could…
Not inconspicuously enough. He looked up and gave me one of those bullshit smiles. “Do you want the trigger? Help yourself. It might work if you push the button. It doesn’t matter if it does.”
I glowered at him. “What are you talking about?”
He sighed. “Oh, Phrygia, haven’t you figured it out? Wan knows how I feel about suicide. He wouldn’t trust me to do the job. He put it on a timer. I don’t have to pull the button, it’s going to blow anyway. I don’t have to do anything at all. I can just let it happen. And do you know what that means?”
I didn’t. He could see that was so, so he explained. “It means that if I die, no matter how many people die with me, it will not be due to an act of sin. You see,” he said, sounding more like a lawyer than some godly person talking about his own death, “I’ve given this a lot of thought. If I take any action at all to change things it means that when I die an act of volition is included. That makes it suicide, and I don’t want that on my soul. Do you understand me so far?”
I didn’t, and I said so, but he went right on anyway. “But there may be a way out of that. At least, I hope so.”
Then he put his hand on the ship’s piloting controls—yeah, yeah, I mean he put his “hand” on the “controls”—and the little bits of actual physical trash on the ship’s floor suddenly raised themselves up and floated in the air. “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.
He didn’t answer that directly. “You might prefer to leave now,” he told me. “Your friend who’s hiding, too.” Pop! Marc Antony at once displayed himself, standing right beside me and, for the first time in my experience, looking almost baffled.
He didn’t let it interfere with business, though. “You’re flying the ship right into that star, Mr. McClune,” he said. “Why are you doing that?”
“Actually,” Orbis corrected him, “I’ve already done so. I believe we are now in what is called the star’s photosphere.”
We were certainly in some inhospitable place. Everything around me began to warp and twist and turn fuzzy—whether because the ship was physically stressed or because the star’s radiation was interfering with our simulations I did not know.
“We don’t want to leave this bomb thing around where the same thing might happen all over again, do we?” Orbis was saying. “Better turn it into plasma and get it over with.” Then he looked up, all twisted out of shape and blurry around the edges, but with the biggest, warmest smile I’d seen from him yet. The last thing I heard from him was, “There is no doubt that suicide’s a sin, but I’m pretty sure that a man can unsinfully give his own life if it’s in order to save others—”
And then I didn’t hear any more from him.
24
* * *
On the Way to Forever
I
Stan and Estrella’s trip back to Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Fourteen took them no longer than the trip out. When the ship’s port began to open they heard a puzzling noise, something like the patter of a drenching rain, something like the buzzing of many bees, that came from outside the ship. Then they saw what was making it. At least a thousand Heechee, maybe more than that, filled every open space around the landing area to welcome them back, doing their best to applaud them with stringy Heechee hands that had never been designed for such work.
The crowd wasn’t entirely Heechee. In the forefront of the crowd were the twenty or thirty human beings that were Forested Planet’s human population, and in the forefront of the forefront was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, actually having come out of her home for the purpose of greeting them, arms already outspread to hug Estrella.
The crowd was not unruly—unsurprising, since they were mainly Heechee. They didn’t press around the returning heroes for pats or handshakes or to snatch the odd button off their clo
thing. They contented themselves with continuing to clap. That is, everyone but Klara did. She would not be denied. She swept past everyone else to give Estrella that hug—as copiously as she could, considering that Estrella’s belly was the size it had become—and even took time for a briefer hug for Stan. Then she was tugging them to a waiting car, the crowd parting decorously to let them through.
The car wasn’t the usual Heechee tricycle. It wasn’t Heechee at all. It was four-wheeled and human-made—imported-from-Earth human-made—though not very like the vehicles Stan used to dodge on the streets of Istanbul. It was more comfortable than those and a lot quieter and, Stan was certain, a very great deal more expensive than any vehicle he had ever been in before, even if you didn’t count what Klara had to have paid to bring it in from Outside.
There wasn’t anybody at the steering wheel until Klara saw Stan staring at the empty seat. She called to the air, “Quit clowning around, Hypatia. Let Stan get a look at you.” And, when her shipmind instantly appeared, “Thanks. Was that so hard?”
Hypatia’s simulation didn’t turn around. “I just thought you might like a little privacy.”
Klara gave her a grunt. “As if you were going to give us any. Now shut up so Estrella and Stan can tell us about their adventures.”
Stan was willing. He began at the beginning and, by the time they were climbing the spiral way to their apartment, had reached the point where Marc and the female pilot had brought them to the point in space where the anonymous but definitely bomb-bearing ship was slowly circling Planetless Very Large Very Hot White Star. “And then,” he told her, “the two of them sort of projected themselves onto the bomb ship. That was all we could see. Anyway until it turned around. Broke out of orbit and began to nosedive, picking up speed all the way, right down into the big old star’s something-or-other sphere. The star didn’t even hiccough. Marc said the little ship was vaporized right away, the bomb thing and all, so that not only isn’t it dangerous anymore, it doesn’t even exist. I don’t know. Marc sees the inputs directly, doesn’t have to display them on a lookplate, so he can see better than I. All I saw was bright light.”
“And that’s the only one they had?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. He had to have had some others to blow up those other things, but if he did they’re still somewhere on Arabella and Marc’ll find them.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Hypatia piped up from the front seat: “His name was Orbis McClune.”
Stan looked puzzled. “Whose name?”
“The one who dove the ship into the star. Some of Marc’s people located a woman who used to be married to him. He was a minister, before he got killed.”
“Huh,” Stan said, faintly disgruntled. “Marc didn’t tell me.”
“He didn’t know until he got back here, Stan,” Klara said as the car stopped before a familiar door. “Anyway here’s where you get off.”
Stan jumped out, tenderly helping Estrella get out of her seat. Puffing, she turned and asked politely, “Do you want to come in for a minute?”
Klara shook her head. “Hell, no. I mean, my God, the last thing you need right now is company. Only…”
Halfway out of the car, Estrella turned to look at her. “Only what?”
“Well,” Klara said, “while you kids were gone, I did a lot of thinking about you. About babies. About your baby in particular.”
Stan was holding Estella’s hand and beginning to get a bit impatient. “So did we. Is that what you wanted to tell us?”
“Well, no.” She took a deep breath. “What I wanted was to ask you if I could be your mother-in-law.”
That came from about as far out of left field as anything in Stan’s experience. He almost let go of Estrella’s hand, caught it just in time and asked, “Whose? Mine? Or Estrella’s?”
“Actually,” Klara said, “both of yours.” She looked suddenly in a way Klara never looked, which was embarrassed. She shook her head. “Hey, this is the wrong time to be talking about this kind of thing. You kids go on in, I’ll talk to you later.” And, as the car door began to close, “And, listen, it’s good to have you back.”
It was good to be home, too. They jumped in the drencher, thrilled to be bathing in hot water again. But while they were still in the chamber, Estrella paused in the middle of drying herself. “Hon?” she said. “Do you know what that was all about?”
He didn’t, though, and he gave it no more than a few moments’ thought. “Who knows?” he said. “Listen, let’s take a look at Stork.”
And they did, hungry for the sight of what the baby was doing. (Which turned out to be pretty much what it had been doing all along, namely getting bigger. In fact now quite a lot bigger.) And then, while they, rather inadequately dressed, were ordering a decent meal—actually two decent meals, one right after the other, to make up for all those months of unimproved CHON-food—the door let them know that someone was there.
It was Dr. Kusmeroglu. “How’d you get here so fast?” Estrella asked, half dressed and still chewing, as she let the doctor in.
“It was that Marc person,” said Dr. Kusmeroglu, bright and eager. “You know, the cook? Is he here?” She looked around and found the answer to her own question. “Well. Anyway, he signaled Dr. von Shrink and Dr. von Shrink signaled me, so I came right over. First time I was ever in one of those new ultrafast ships. Were either of you ever—Oh, sure, of course you were. I just can’t wait to hear about all you’ve gone through!” And then, when Stan opened his mouth to begin to tell her, she gave him a shake of her head. “But that’ll have to wait, because right now Estrella and I have work to do. If you’ll just go sit on the balcony for a little while, Stan…”
What she was there for was a childbirth thing, at which, Stan understood, male persons were unwelcome. Stan grabbed some clean clothes of his own and followed orders.
He wasn’t cut totally out of the loop. As he dressed, he could see through the balcony door that the first thing the two women were doing was just what he had immediately done, namely to study Stork’s display of the fetus. Then they disappeared from his sight, leaving him to, alternately, take in the warm breezes from the Mica Mountain and bite his lip in worriment over what the doctor might find. For months now Estrella hadn’t had a proper diet, hadn’t had a real doctor to look at her, hadn’t had a decent bath or a haircut or a toothbrush or, for God’s sake, toilet paper or—well, or anything at all that civilized people always had. And if that had had any bad effect on the baby—had, for instance, brought about any of those terrifying conditions that that damned book had told him about—
He tried to put that thought out of his head.
Fortunately none of it had. When they came out of the bedroom Estrella, too, was now fully dressed and the doctor began to talk. What Dr. Kusmeroglu had to say amounted to a lot of information about the baby’s having nearly completed brain growth and why the baby had stopped kicking. (It had no choice. It had grown so large that there no longer was enough room in the uterus to kick.) “But she’s all right?” Stan demanded after the first five minutes of increasingly obscure medical details.
Cut off in midstream, the doctor blinked at him. “Well, sure she’s all right. Barring that she needs more rest and better food, anyway—and, if you can possibly arrange it, Stan, as little aggravation as possible. Those contractions she’s been having—”
Stan instantly turned his attention to Estrella. “What contractions?”
She shrugged. “Well, they weren’t very strong and I didn’t want to worry you.”
“But—” he began, but the doctor overrode him.
“She was fine, Stan. They were just the Braxton-Hicks contractions that are perfectly normal at this time. Think of it as the uterus practicing up for when the labor starts, all right?” She glanced at her wrist screen, moving her lips silently as she checked over her notes and finally said, “I guess that’s about it. I’m going to make some dietary recommendations, but outside of that—What?”
Stan was demanding attention. “The baby. When is it going to get born, can you say?”
The doctor pursed her lips. “Ah. Good question. It’s a little tricky to calculate, because I don’t know exactly how long you were Outside,” she said, “but probably somewhere around two to four weeks from now. Maybe six. Stork will keep an eye on things and let us know how they’re progressing.”
She looked up as the door announced another visitor. “I’ll get it,” Estrella said, rising with some difficulty from the deep armchair she had been sitting in. With mixed emotions Stan watched her—what was the word?—yes, waddle toward the door. Pregnancy was not just a dangerous event that at some point involved a lot of misery, it was an event which, every day, was a stiff pain in—well, in everything there was to have a pain in.
The person standing outside was again Klara’s shipmind, Hypatia of Alexandria. She acknowledged Estrella’s introduction to Dr. Kusmeroglu civilly enough, but then turned her back on the doctor to address Stan and Estrella.
“Klara has a suggestion. Everyone you ever met has been calling her, wondering when they can see you. She thought you might like to do them all at once and get it over with. A little gathering at her home, for instance.”
Stan was suspicious, but Estrella wasn’t. “That’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “Stan? When would you like to do it?”
“Well,” he began, “I’m kind of tired—”
She made a face. “Let’s not put it off. Hypatia, we could do it right now, if that’s all right.”
The Boy Who Would Live Forever Page 45