Tan laughed coarsely. “Depends on what you think ‘good’ is. Montefiore has his own ideas about that. But don’t worry about Estrella,” he advised. “That one’ll take good care of her maidenhead.”
Stan did worry, though. He told himself that what Estrella did was none of his business, but he thought about her a lot as the days passed.
The nine-bangle Englishwoman came back, having earned not only a tenth bangle but, at last, a stake. She had roamed a tunnel on a world not much kindlier than Mercury, wearing a spacesuit that kept her in air but didn’t keep out the blazing heat that radiated from the tunnel walls. Pushed to the limit she had scoured the empty corridors until she found—something; no one was sure what. Possibly it was a game, something like a 3-D version of Go; at any rate her bonus was enough to pay her way back to a decent retirement in the little village in Sussex she had come from. She even bought coffees for the boys before she left, listening to them tell her about all the amazing things that had happened while she was gone. “Heigh-ho,” she said, grinning the grin of someone who no longer had to worry about such things, “sounds like fun and games, doesn’t it? Well, good luck to you! Don’t give up. You never know, you might hit a good one yet.”
Tan looked sourly after her as she made the payback rounds, buying drinks for everyone who had bought them for her. “I doubt it,” he said, half under his breath.
“You’ve been doubting it ever since we got here,” Stan said in irritation, though the fact was that he was beginning to doubt it, too. It might have turned into a really serious argument, but that was when Estrella appeared in the entrance, looking around for them.
Estrella didn’t hesitate. As soon as she saw the two of them she launched herself in their direction with a great, accurate kick against the doorframe. Tan caught her as she came in range, but she grabbed a holdfast and freed herself. Her twisted face looked grim, but the news she brought was great. She looked around, then whispered: “There’s a mission coming up. A big one.”
Stan’s heart leaped, but Tan was unresponsive. “One of these guaranteed new ones, where the Corporation will keep most of the profits?”
“Yes,” she said, “and no. They know the destination, but that’s all they know. They don’t know how long it will take, so it will be in an armored Five, one of the ones with the special fittings no one understands—but Broad- head says they’re essential for this trip. They will load it with supplies and material, enough for a very long flight, so it will be able to carry only two people. I’ll be one. There’s room for another.”
She was looking from one to the other of them, but mostly at Stan. But Tan spoke up. “Not me,” he declared. “I don’t want any more mystery bus rides.”
Stan ignored him. “You said they knew the destination?”
Estrella took a deep breath. “It will go to where the Heechee have gone. Where they have been hiding all this time, in the Core of the Galaxy.”
Stan swallowed convulsively. You came to Gateway hoping for a big score—but this big? Not nibbling at bits and pieces the Heechee had left behind, but going straight to those vanished supercreatures themselves?
And what sort of reward might there be for that?
He didn’t think. He heard himself saying, “I’ll go!” almost before he realized he had made the decision. Then he turned to Tan. “Look. There’s only room for two, so you take my share of our bonus, too. Go home and have a good life. Buy Naslan the prettiest wedding dress she can find.” And then he added, “But tell her not to wait for me.”
IX
A Heechee Five was supposed to be much bigger than a Three. Not this one, though. One whole corner of its space was taken up with the peculiar, unexplained device that—Broadhead had said—was necessary for them to enter the Core. Another couple of cubic meters were filled with the goods they were told to deliver to the Heechee—records of Gateway explorations and Heechee finds, background material on the human race, all sorts of odds and ends along with a recorded Message to the Heechee that was meant to explain just who human beings were. Add in their year’s worth of supplies for themselves, and there wasn’t much room for Stan and Estrella to get around in.
As far as Estrella was concerned, not much room was needed. She didn’t move around much. She didn’t talk much to Stan, either. She went directly to her sleep sack as soon as they took off and stayed there, coming out only to eat or excrete, and uninterested in conversation in either case. When Stan asked her if something was wrong, she said only, “Yes.” When he asked her if there was anything he could do, she shook her head and said, “I have to work through this myself.” When he asked her what “this” was, all she would say was, “I have to find a way to like myself again.” Then she went back to her sleep shelf again, and stayed there. For three whole days, while Stan wondered and stewed.
Then, on the fourth day, Stan woke up and found Estrella studying him. She was perched on the uncomfortable forked Heechee pilots’ seat, and she seemed to have been there for a long time. Experimentally, he said, “Hello?” with a question mark at the end.
She gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment longer, then sighed. “Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared into the head again.
She was in there for quite a while. When she came out it appeared that she had spent the time fixing herself up. She had washed her hair and brushed it still damp, and she was wearing fresh shorts and top. She gave him another of those long, unexplained looks.
Then she said, “Stan. I have something to say to you. We will be together for a long time, I think, and it would be better if there were no tensions between us. Do you want to make love to me?”
Startled, Stan said the first thing that came into his head. Which was, “I’ve never made love to a virgin before.”
She laughed, not joyously. “That is not a problem, Stan. I’m not a virgin anymore. How do you think I got us on this mission?”
Stan’s only previous coupling, when he had painfully saved up enough to afford one of Mr. Ozden’s cousin’s less expensive girls, had not taught him much about the arts of love. Estrella didn’t know much more than he did, but inexperience wasn’t their only problem. A Heechee Five wasn’t designed for fucking. They tended to float away from the hold-ons the first time he tried to enter her.
But experimenting was enjoyable enough on its own, and they finally found what worked best was for him to come to her from behind, with Estrella curling her ankles over his while he gripped her waist with both hands. Then it was quick enough.
Then, still naked, they hung together, arms wrapped around each other, without speaking. Stan found it very comfortable. His cheek was pressed against her ear, his nose in her still-damp and sweet-smelling hair. After a bit, without moving away, she asked, “Are we going to be friends, Stan?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. And they were.
Now that they were friends, especially friends who fucked, their Five didn’t seem so crowded anymore. They touched often, and in all kinds of ways—affectionate pats, casual rubs in passing, quick kisses, sweet strokings that, often, turned into more fucking. Estrella seemed to like it well enough, Stan very much.
They talked, too. About what the Core might be like. About the Heechee who might (or might not) still be there. About what it would be like when they came back and collected the unquestionably huge bonus due the first humans to visit the Heechee—“It’ll be billions!” Stan gloated. “Enough to have a waterfront estate like Robinette Broadhead’s, with servants, and a good life—and we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy, too, because we’ll have Full Medical.”
“Full Medical,” Estrella whispered, sharing his dream.
“Absolutely! We won’t be old at forty and dead at fifty-five. We’ll live a long, long time, and”—he swallowed, aware that he was getting into a commitment—“and we’ll live it together, Estrella.” Which naturally led to more tender kissing, and to not-so-tender sex.
They had much to talk about, including the chapters in their
earlier lives that had been omitted in their previous telegraphic summaries. When Stan talked about his mother’s death and what it had done to his father, Estrella took his hand in hers and kissed it. When he told her about life in Istanbul she was interested, and more so when he talked about the city itself—about its centuries as the mighty Christian city of Constantinople, about the Christian Crusaders who looted it, about Justinian and Theodora and the—well—the Byzantine court of Byzantium. All that fascinated her. She knew nothing of the Byzantine Empire, little enough of Rome itself, its Caesars, its conquests, its centuries of world rule. To her it was all exciting myths and legends, all the better because they were true. Or as true, anyway, as Stan’s memory allowed.
While Stan, of course, knew even less of the America of the Native Americans, before their subjugation by the white man and since. It was not the American history of school or his father’s stories. Her own people, Estrella told him—the ones on her mother’s side—had a history of their own. Sometimes they had even built great cities like Machu Picchu and the immense Mayan structures in the south, and the mysterious works of the Anasazi. But that, she said, sounding both wistful and proud, was only until the Europeans arrived and took their lands away, and often enough their lives as well, and pushed them into harsher lives in reservations, and endless, retreating battles, and finally defeat. “There isn’t much left, Stan,” she said. “The only good thing—well, it isn’t really good, is it?—is that now most of the Yankees are as poor as we.”
Which reminded Stan of an unsolved puzzle. “But you weren’t all that poor, were you? I mean, personally. Like when you had your, uh, accident. If that had happened to Tan, or almost anybody else I knew, there wouldn’t have been any big payoff to finance your going to Gateway. Did you have Full Medical or something?”
She laughed, surprised. “We had no medical. What I had was my brother.” Who, she said, let it be known that he was going to kill the pistolier. Whose sister’s husband was a clerk in the slaughterhouse’s accounts department. Who had juggled the books to pay them off, just to save his brother-in-law’s worthless life. “It was supposed to be a death benefit, but I double-crossed them. I lived. Then, when I was well enough to travel, I took the rest of the money and used it for Gateway.”
She looked so sad when she was telling about it that Stan couldn’t help kissing her, which before long led to more of that pleasurable lovemaking. And why not? After all, they were really on a sort of honeymoon cruise, weren’t they?
The days passed, ten, twelve, twenty. They slept holding each other tight, and never seemed to tire of it. It was a little cramped, to be sure. But the one-size-fits-all sleep sacks were constructed to be long enough for a string-bean Maasai or a corpulent Bengali, and skinny Stan and slim Estrella could fit inside well enough for lovers. Sometimes they played music together, weird combinations of Stan’s trumpet and the flute Estrella produced from her bags. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they played cards or read or just sat companionably together in silence. And sometimes Stan pulled out the recorded Message to the Heechee—the reason they were on this trip in the first place—and they played it and wondered what the Heechee (if any) would make of it.
The Message had been cobbled together in a hurry by God knew who—some of the big brains in Gateway Corp, no doubt, and no doubt with Robinette Broadhead leaning over their shoulder. It didn’t have any narration. No point of that, since the Heechee were not likely to understand any human language. Its only sound was music, first Tchaikovsky’s somber Pathétique in its entirety, then, to show that humans had more than one musical mood, Prokofiev’s jokey, perky Classical Symphony.
But mostly the Message was pictures. The empty Heechee tunnels on Venus. The nearly equally empty corridors on Gateway, when human beings first got there. A crew of prospectors warily climbing into an early Five. Another crew, travel-stained, coming out of a Three bearing prayer fans and other Heechee gadgets. A picture of the pinwheel of the Galaxy, seen from above, with an arrow showing Earth’s position in the Orion Arm. A slowly spinning globe of the Earth itself. Quick flashes of human cities—New York, Tokyo, London, Rome. Shots of people doing things: painting landscapes, running a tractor, peering through a telescope, masked around a hospital birthing bed where a new baby was coming into the world. Then things that neither Estrella nor Stan had ever seen before. There was a series of pictures of an enormous floating object, then of a huge spindle-shaped chamber, blue Heechee-metal walls and a strange, huge machine squatting on tractor treads in the middle of it. “The Food Factory and that other thing,” Estrella guessed. Then internal passageways and a couple of—they both caught their breaths—queer, hairy creatures that looked almost human, and had to be the primitives Broadhead had discovered there. And, at the last, the shot of the Galaxy again, with a tiny image of a Heechee Five that was probably meant to be their own craft, slowly moving from the Orion Arm to the Core.
When it was over—for the fourth or fifth time—Stan was thoughtfully rubbing the place where his wispy mustache had been until Estrella teased him into shaving it off. They had been watching with their arms around each other. He yawned, which made her yawn, too, because they had both been getting sleepy. She moved slightly for a better fit, but not away, as she saw that he was staring at their stacked piles of supplies.
“What is it, Stan?” she asked.
He said pensively, “It looks like a long flight. I don’t know if anybody’s gone this far before.”
She tried to reassure him. “Sometimes short flights take a long time, and the other way around, too. With Heechee ships you never can tell.”
“I guess,” he said, turning his head to kiss her ear in the way she liked. She wriggled companiably and put up her lips, and that was better than reassurance.
For Stan was happy with Estrella. He thought about it drowsily. He had never been happier in his life than he was this minute. So why worry about how long the trip would take when he didn’t want it to end at all, would have been content if it had lasted a very long time indeed.…
But it didn’t.
It ended that day, almost at that very moment, when kissing had turned to caressing but before they began to take each other’s clothes off, and it ended in a startling way.
The great drive coil gave them no warning. It was that other thing, the squat, domed gadget whose purpose had never been explained to them in any terms that made sense. It began to mutter and glow, then growl, then begin to scream on a rising pitch until they could hear it no more, as the glow brightened. Then at last the drive coil got into the act, beginning to glow and brightening to an eye-hurting incandescent white, with revolving barber-pole stripes of hot red and chrome yellow. It began to shudder. Or the ship did. Stan couldn’t tell which because he was shaking, too, in a way that was frighteningly unlike anything he had felt before. He wasn’t sleepy anymore as they clung to each other.…
Then, without warning, everything stopped.
Estrella pulled herself free and turned on the outside eyes. Behind them was a scary spread of mottled pale blue. Before them, a sky of unbelievable stars, so many of them, so bright, and, very near, a large metallic dodecahedron, twelve symmetrical sides, each with a little dimple in its center. Their ship plunged with breakneck speed into one of the dimples and nestled there. Before Stan or Estrella could move, the port was opened from outside.
Something that looked like a furry, animated skeleton was glaring in at them. “I think it must be a Heechee,” Estrella whispered numbly.
And, of course, it was. And that was the beginning of the longest, the unbelievably longest, day in Stan’s life.
X
Nothing in Stan’s seventeen years of life had taught him how to greet an alien creature from another planet. He fell back on the fictions of his childhood. He raised his hands above his head, and declaimed, “We come in peace.”
In those old fictions that had seemed to work. In the real world it didn’t. The Heechee fell back in obviou
s panic. A low, hooting moan came from its queerly shaped mouth, and it turned and ran away. “Shit,” Stan said dismally, staring after it. Estrella clutched his arm.
“We frightened the thing,” she said.
“I bet we did. It frightened the hell out of me!”
“Yes, but we have to show him we’re friendly. Maybe we should start playing the Message for them?”
That sounded like a good idea. At least Stan didn’t have a better one, but while they were trying to start the playback the Heechee came running back. This time he had all his friends with him. There were half a dozen of the creatures, dressed in smocks with curious pod-shaped objects hanging between their legs—king-size jockstraps? Heavy-duty? Stan couldn’t guess. The creatures were jabbering agitatedly among themselves as they hurried in, and they wasted no time. One of them slapped Estrella’s hand away from the playback machine while a couple of the others grabbed Stan. They were surprisingly strong. They were armed. More or less armed, at least; several of them were carrying an assortment of knives—bright blue metal or gold, some curved like a scalpel, all of them looking dangerous. Especially when one of the Heechee held a knife with its extremely sharp point almost touching Stan’s right eyeball and tugged him toward the exit. “Don’t fight them!” Estrella cried, herself captive in the same way.
He didn’t. He let himself be dragged unresisting into a larger chamber—red-veined blue-metal walls, unidentifiable machines and furnishings scattered around. As they crossed the threshold Stan stumbled, taken unaware by the sudden return of weight; they were in gravity again, not as strong as Earth’s, maybe, but enough to make him totter against his captor. He jerked his head back from the blade just in time to avoid losing an eye. The Heechee with the knife screeched a warning, but Stan wasn’t trying to give him any trouble. Not even when he and Estrella were dragged against a wall and chained, spread-eagled, to what might have been coatracks. Or statuary. Or anything at all, but were solid enough to hold them.
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