Bill looked at me and I looked at him. “Well, shit,” he said. “What else is going to go wrong?”
What had gone wrong that time wasn’t June Terple’s fault. She said it was, though. She said that she was the person in charge of the whole operation, so everything that happened was her responsibility, and she shouldn’t have allowed Ibarruru to override Hans’s controls. And Julia Ibarruru was tearfully repentant. “Starminder told me the Heechee had identified eleven other planets in the Crabber system; I was just checking to see if there were any signs of life on any of them, and I’m afraid that for a minute I let the system’s focus get too close to the star.”
It could have been worse. I told them not to worry about it and invited all three of them to my ship for a drink. That made my so-called fiance’s eyebrows rise, because he had certainly been expecting to be the first person I welcomed aboard. He was philosophical about it, though. “I’ll see you later,” he said, and if none of the women knew what he meant by that, it could only have been because they’d never seen a leer before. Then he led Denys off to interview some of PhoenixCorp’s other people.
Which was pretty much what I was planning for myself. Hypatia had set out tea things on one table, and dry sherry on another, but before we sat down to either, I had to give all three of the women the usual guided tour. The sudden return to normal gravity was a burden for them, but they limped admiringly through the guest bedroom, exclaimed at the kitchen – never used by me, but installed just in case I ever wanted to do any of that stuff myself – and were blown away by my personal bathroom. Whirlbath, bidet, big onyx tub, mirror walls – Bill Tartch always said it looked like a whore’s dream of heaven, and he hadn’t been the first guest to make that observation. I don’t suppose the PhoenixCorp women had ever seen anything like it. I let them look. I even let them peek into the cabinets of perfumes and toiletries. “Oh, musk oil!” Terple cried. “But it’s real! That’s so expensive.”
“I don’t wear it any more. Take it, if you like,” I said and, for the grand finale, opened the door to my bedroom.
When at last we got to the tea, sherry, and conversation, Ibarruru’s first remark was, “Mr Tartch seemed like a very interesting man.” She didn’t spell out the connection, but I knew it was that huge bed that was in her mind. So we chatted about Mr Tartch and his glamorous p-vision career, and how Terple had grown up with the stories of the Gateway prospectors on every day’s news, and how Ibarruru had dreamed of an opportunity like this – “Astronomy’s really almost a lost art on Earth, you know,” she told me. “Now we have all the Heechee data, so there’s no point any more in wasting time with telescopes and probes.”
“So what does an astronomer do when there’s no astronomy to be done?” I asked, being polite.
She said ruefully, “I teach an undergraduate course in astronomy at a community college in Maryland. For people who will never do any astronomy, because if there’s anything somebody really wants to see, why, they just get in a ship and go out and look at it.”
“As I did, Ms Moynlin,” said Starminder, with the Heechee equivalent of a smile.
That was what I was waiting for. If there was a place in the universe I still wanted to see, it was her home in the Core. “You must miss the Core,” I told her. “All those nearby stars, so bright – what we have here must look pretty skimpy to you.”
“Oh, no,” she said, being polite, “this is quite nice. For a change. What I really miss is my family.”
It had never occurred to me that she had a family, but, yes, she had left a mate and two young offspring behind when she came out. It was a difficult decision, but she couldn’t resist the adventure. Miss them? Of course she missed them! Miss her? She looked surprised at that. “Why, no, Ms Moynlin, they won’t be missing me. They’re asleep for the night. I’ll be back long before they wake up. Time dilation, you see. I’m only going to stay out here for a year or two.”
Ibarruru said nervously, “That’s the part that worries me about going to the Core, Starminder. I’m not young any more, and I know that if I went for even a few days, nearly everyone I know would be gone when I got back. No, not just ‘nearly’ everyone,” she corrected herself. “What is it, forty thousand to one? So a week there would be nearly a thousand years back home.” Then she turned to the Heechee female. “But even if we can’t go ourselves, you can tell us about it, Starminder. Would you like to tell Ms Moynlin what it’s like in the Core?”
It was what I wanted to hear, too. I’d heard it often enough before, but I listened as long as Starminder was willing to talk. Which was a lot, because she was definitely homesick.
Would it really matter if I spent a week in the Core? Or a month, or a year, for that matter? I’d miss my kids on the island, of course, but they’d be taken care of, and so would everything else that mattered to me. And there wasn’t any other human being in the universe that I cared enough about to miss for more than a day.
I was surprised when Hypatia spoke up out of thin air. “Ms Moynlin” – formal because of the company – “there’s a call for you.” And she displayed Bill Tartch’s face.
I could see by the background that he was in his own ship, and he looked all bright and fresh and grinning at me. “Permission to come aboard, hon?” he asked.
That produced a quick reaction among my guests.
“Oh,” said Ibarruru, collecting herself. “Well, it’s time we got back to work anyway, isn’t it, June?” She was sounding arch. Terple wasn’t; she simply got up, and Starminder followed her example.
“You needn’t leave,” I said.
“But of course we must,” said Terple. “Julia’s right. Thank you for the tea and, uh, things.”
And they were gone, leaving me to be alone with my lover.
CHAPTER VI
“He’s been primping for the last hour,” Hypatia reported in my ear. “Showered, shaved, dressed up. And he put on that musk cologne that he thinks you like.”
“I do like it,” I said. “On him. Let me see you when I’m talking to you.”
She appeared obediently, reclining on the couch Ibarruru had just left. “I’d say the man’s looking to get laid,” she observed. “Again.”
I didn’t choose to pick up on the “again”. That word was evidence of one of Hypatia’s more annoying traits, of which she has not quite enough to make me have her reprogrammed. When I chose Hypatia of Alexandria as a personality for my shipmind, it seemed to be a good idea at the time. But my own Hypatia took it seriously. That’s what happens when you get yourself a really powerful shipmind; she throws herself into the part. The first thing Hypatia did was look up her template and model herself as close to the original as she thought I would stand – including such details as the fact that the original Hypatia really hated men.
“So, do you want me out of the way so you can oblige him?” she asked sociably.
“No,” I said. “You stay.”
“That’s my girl. You ask me, sexual intercourse is greatly overrated anyway.”
“That’s because you never had any,” I told her. “By which I mean neither you, my pet program, nor the semimythical human woman I modelled you after, who died a virgin and is said to have shoved her used menstrual cloths in the face of one persistent suitor to turn him off.”
“Malicious myth,” she said comfortably. “Spread by the Christians after they murdered her. Anyway, here he comes.”
I would have been willing to bet that the first words out of Bill Tartch’s mouth would be Alone at last! accompanied by a big grin and a lunge for me. I would have half won. He didn’t say anything at all, just spread his arms and lurched towards me, grin and all.
Then he saw Hypatia, sprawled on the couch. “Oh,” he said, stumbling as he came to a stop – there evidently wasn’t any gravity in his rental ship, either. “I thought we’d be alone.”
“Not right now, sweetie,” I said. “But it’s nice to see you.”
“Me, too.” He thought for a mome
nt, and I could see him changing gears: All right, the lady doesn’t want what I want right now, so what else can we do? That’s one of those good-and-bad things about Bill Tartch. He does what I want, and none of this sweeping-her-off-her-feet stuff. Viewing it as good, it means he’s considerate and sweet. Viewing it the other way – the way Hypatia chooses to view it – he’s a spineless wretch, sucking up to somebody who can do him good.
While I was considering which way to view it, Bill snapped his fingers. “I know,” he said, brightening. “I’ve been wanting to do a real interview with you anyway. That all right? Hypatia, you can record it for me, can’t you?”
Hypatia didn’t answer, just looked sulkily at me.
“Do what he says,” I ordered. But Bill was having second thoughts.
“Maybe not,” he said, cheerfully resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t take orders from him. “She’d probably screw it up on purpose for me anyway, so I guess we’d better get Denys in here.”
It didn’t take Denys much more than a minute to arrive, with those quaint little cameras and all. I did my best to be gracious and comradely. “Oh, yes, clip them on anywhere,” I said – in my ship’s gravity, the cameras wouldn’t just float. “On the backs of the chairs? Sure. If they mess the fabric a little, Hypatia will fix it right up.” I didn’t look at Hypatia, just gestured to her to get herself out of sight. She did without protest.
Bill had planted himself next to me and was holding my hand. I didn’t pull it away. It took Denys a little while to get all the cameras in place, Bill gazing tolerantly at the way she was doing it and not offering to help. When she announced she was ready, the interview began.
It was a typical Wilhelm Tartch interview, meaning that he did most of the talking. He rehearsed our entire history for the cameras in one uninterrupted monologue; my part was to smile attentively as it was going on. Then he got to Phoenix.
“We’re here to see the results of this giant explosion that took place more than a thousand years ago – What’s the matter, Klara?”
He was watching my face, and I knew what he was seeing. “Turn off your cameras, Bill. You need to get your facts straight. It happened a lot longer than a thousand years ago.”
He shook his head at me tolerantly. “That’s close enough for the audience,” he explained. “I’m not giving an astronomy lesson here. The star blew up in 1054, right?”
“It was in 1054 that the Chinese astronomers saw it. That’s the year when the light from the supernova got as far as our neighbourhood, but it took about five thousand years to get there. Didn’t you do your homework?”
“We must’ve missed that little bit, hon,” he said, giving me his best ruefully apologetic smile. “All right, Denys. Take it from the last little bit. We’ll put in some shots of the supernova to cover the transition. Ready? Then go. This giant explosion took place many thousands of years ago, destroying a civilization that might in some ways almost have become the equal of our own. What were they like, these people the Phoenix investigators call ‘Crabbers’? No one has ever known. When the old Heechee visited their planet long ago, they were still animallike primitives – Denys, we’ll put in some of those old Heechee files here – but the Heechee thought they had the potential to develop cognitive intelligence and even civilization. Did they ever fulfil this promise? Did they come to dominate their world as the human race did our Earth? Did they develop science and art and culture of their own? We know from the tantalizing hints we’ve seen so far that this may be so. Now, through the generosity of Gelle-Klara Moynlin, who is here with me, we are at last going to see for ourselves what these tragically doomed people achieved before their star exploded without warning, cutting them off – Oh, come on, Klara. What is it this time?”
“We don’t know if they had any warning or not, do we? That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”
Denys cleared her throat. She said diffidently, “Bill, maybe you should let me do a little more background research before you finish this interview.”
My lover gave her a petulant little grimace. “Oh, all right. I suppose there’s nothing else to do.”
I heard the invisible little cough that meant Hypatia had something to say to me, so I said to the air, “Hypatia?”
She picked up her cue. “The PhoenixCorp shipmind tells me they’re back at work on the dish, and they’re getting somewhat better magnification now. There are some new views you may want to see. Shall I display here?”
Bill seemed slightly mollified. He looked at me. “What do you think, Klara?”
It was the wrong question to ask me. I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking.
For that matter, I didn’t want to be thinking it at all. All right, he and this little Denys lollipop hadn’t done any of their backgrounding on the way out to Phoenix. So what, exactly, had they been doing with their time?
I said, “No, I think I’d rather see it on the PhoenixCorp ship. You two go ahead. I’ll follow in a minute.” And as soon as they were out of sight. I turned around, and Hypatia was sitting in the chair Denys had just left, looking smug.
“Can I do something for you, Klara?” she asked solicitously.
She could, but I wasn’t ready to ask her for it. I asked her for something else instead. “Can you show me the interior of Bill’s ship?”
“Of course, Klara.” And there it was, displayed for me, Hypatia guiding my point of view all through it.
It wasn’t much. The net obviously wasn’t spending any more than it had to on Bill’s creature comfort. It was so old that it had all that Heechee drive stuff out in the open; when I designed my own ship, I made sure all that ugliness was tucked away out of sight, like the heating system in a condo. The important fact was that it had two sleeping compartments, one clearly Denys’s, the other definitely Bill’s. Both had unmade beds. Evidently the rental’s shipmind wasn’t up to much housekeeping, and neither was Denys. There was no indication that they might have been visiting back and forth.
I gave up. “You’ve been dying to tell me about them ever since they got here,” I said to Hypatia. “So tell me.”
She gave me that wondering look. “Tell you what exactly, Klara?”
“Tell me what was going on on Bill’s ship, for Christ’s sake! I know you know.”
She looked slightly miffed, the way she always did when Christ’s name was mentioned, but she said, “It is true that I accessed Mr Tartch’s shipmind as a routine precaution. It’s a pretty cheap-jack job, about what you’d expect in a rental. It had privacy locks all over it, but nothing that I couldn’t –”
I snarled at her, “Tell me! Did they?”
She made an expression of distaste. “Oh, yes, hon, they certainly did. All the way out here. Like dogs in rut.”
I looked around the room at the wineglasses and cups and the cushions that had been disturbed by someone sitting on them. “I’m going to the ship. Clean up this mess while I’m gone,” I ordered, and checked my face in the mirror.
It looked just as it always looked, as though nothing were different.
Well, nothing was, really, was it? What did it matter if Bill chose to bed this Denys, or any number of Denyses, when I wasn’t around? It wasn’t as though I had been planning to marry the guy.
CHAPTER VII
None of the crew was in the entrance lock when I came to the PhoenixCorp ship, but I could hear them. They were all gathered in the dining hall, laughing and chattering excitedly. When I got there, I saw that the room was darkened. They were all poking at virtuals of one scene or another as Hans displayed them, and no one noticed me as I came in.
I hooked myself inconspicuously to a belt near the door and looked around. I saw Bill and his sperm receptacle of the moment hooked chastely apart, Denys chirping at Mason-Manley, Bill talking into his recorders. Mason-Manley was squeezing Denys’s shoulder excitedly, presumably because he was caught up in the euphoria of the moment, but he seemed to be enjoying touching her, too. If Bill not
iced, he didn’t appear to mind. But then, Bill was not a jealous type; that was one of the things I liked about him.
Until recently I hadn’t thought that I was, either.
Well, I told myself, I wasn’t. It wasn’t a question of jealousy. It was a question of – oh, call it good manners; if Bill chose to bed a bimbo now and then, that was his business, but it did not excuse his hauling the little tart all the way from Earth to shove her in my face.
A metre or so away from me, Mark Rohrbeck was watching the pictures, looking a lot less gloomy than usual. When he saw me at last, he waved and pointed. “Look, Ms Moynlin!” he cried. “Blimps!”
So I finally got around to looking at the display. In the sector he was indicating, we were looking down on one of the Crabber planet’s oceans. There were a lot of clouds, but some areas had only scattered puffs. And there among them were eight fat little silver sausages, in a V formation, that surely were far too hard-edged and uniform in shape to be clouds.
“These are the objects we viewed before, Ms Moynlin,” Hans’s voice informed me. “Now we can discriminate the individual elements, and they are certainly artifacts.”
“Sure, but why do you say they’re blimps? How do you know they aren’t ships of some kind?” I asked, and then said at once, “No, cancel that,” as I figured it out for myself. If they had been surface vessels, they would have produced some sort of wake in the water. They were aircraft, all right, so I changed the question to, “Where are they going, do you think?”
“Wait a minute,” June Terple said. “Hans, display the projection for Ms Moynlin.”
That sheet of ocean disappeared, and in its place was a globe of the Crabber planet, its seas in blue, land masses in grey. Eight stylized little blimp figures, greatly out of proportion, were over the ocean. From them a silvery line extended to the northeast, with another line, this one golden, going back past the day-night terminator toward the southwest. Terple said, “It looks like the blimps came from around that group of islands at the end of the gold course-line, and they’re heading toward the Dumbbell continents up on the right. Unfortunately, those are pretty far north. We can’t get a good picture of them from here, but Hans has enhanced some of the data on the island the blimps came from. Hans?”
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