Heechee Rendezvous Part 11

"Not the kind of food I wish, shut up. So you, Klara, must repay me for this trouble." He reached his hand behind him. Doily evidently understood his meaning; she moved a plate of fresh-baked chocolate brownies to his fingers, and he took one and began to eat it.

Gross person! Klara pushed her hair out of her eyes, studying him coldly. "How do I repay you? The way she does?"

"Certainly the way she does," said Wan, chewing, "by helping her maintain the ship, but also-Oh! Ho! Ha-ha, that is funny," he gasped, spraying crumbs of chocolate on Klara as he laughed. "You think I meant in bed! How stupid you are, Klara, I do not copulate with ugly older women."

Klara wiped the crumbs off her face as he reached for another brownie. "No," he said seriously, "it is more important than that. I want to know all about black holes."

She said, trying to be placating, "It all happened very fast. There's not much I can tell you."

"Tell what you can tell, then! And listen, do not try to lie!"

Oh, my G.o.d, thought Klara, how much of this must I put up with? And "this" meant more than the bullying Wan; it meant all of her resumed and wholly disoriented life.

The answer to "how much" turned out to be eleven days. It was time enough for the worst of the bruises to fade on her arms and body, time enough for her to get to know Dolly Walthers, and pity her, to know Wan, and despise him. It was not time enough for her to figure out what to do with her life.

But her life did not wait until she was ready for it. Ready or not, Wan's ship docked on Gateway. And there she was.

The very smells of Gateway were different. The noise level was different-much louder. The people were radically different. There did not seem to be a single living one among them for Klara to recognize from her last time there-thirty years, or not much more than thirty days, in the past, depending on whose clock you timed by. Also so many of them were in uniform.

That was quite new to Klara, and not at all pleasing. In the "old days" however subjectively recent those old days were-you saw maybe one or two uniforms a day, crewpersons on leave from the four-power guard cruisers mostly. Certainly you never saw one of them carrying a weapon. That was not true any longer. They were everywhere, and they were armed.

Debriefing had changed along with everything else. It had always been a nuisance. You'd come back to Gateway filthy and exhausted and still scared, because up until the last minute you hadn't been sure you'd make it, and then the Gateway Corp would sit you down with the evaluators and the data compilers and the accountants. Just what did you find? What was new about it? What was it worth? The debriefing teams were the ones charged with answering questions like that, and how they scored a flight made the difference between abject failure and-once in a great while-wealth beyond dreaming. A Gateway prospector needed skills simply to survive, once he had closed himself into one of those unpredictable ships and launched himself on his Mad Magic Mystery Bus Ride. But to prosper he needed more than skills. He needed a favorable report from the debriefing team.

Debriefing had always been bad news, but now it was worse. There wasn't a debriefing team from the Gateway Corp anymore. There were four debriefing teams, one from each of the four guardian powers. The debriefing had been moved to what had once been the asteroid's princ.i.p.al night club and gambling casino, the Blue h.e.l.l, and there were four separate little rooms, each with a flag on the door. The Brazilians got Dolly. The People's Republic of China s.n.a.t.c.hed Wan off the floor. The American MP took Klara by the arm, and when the lieutenant of MPs in front of the Soviet cubicle frowned and patted the b.u.t.t of his Kalashnikov, the American scowled right back, his hand resting on his Colt.

It didn't really make any difference, because as soon as Klara was through with the Americans, the Brazilians took their turn with her, and when you are invited somewhere by a young soldier with a sidearm it makes little difference whether it is a Colt or a Paz.

Between the Brazilians and the Chinese Klara crossed paths with Wan, sweating and indignant, on his way from the Chinese to the Russians, and realized she had something to be thankful for. The interrogators were rude, overbearing, and nasty with her, but they seemed to be worse with Wan. For reasons she didn't know, each of his sessions was lasting twice as long as her own. Which was already very long. Each team in turn pointed out that she was supposed to be dead; that her bank account had long since reverted to the Gateway Corp; that there was no mission payment due her for traveling with Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz, since it was not an officially authorized Gateway mission; and, as for any payment that might have been due for her trip to the black hole, well, she hadn't come back in that vessel, had she? With the Americans she claimed at least a science bonus-whoever else had been inside a black hole? They told her the matter would be taken under advis.e.m.e.nt. The Brazilians told her it was a matter for four-power negotiation. The Chinese said it all hinged on an interpretation of the award made to Robinette Broadhead, and the Russians had no interest in that subject at all, because what they wanted to know was whether Wan had given any indication of terrorist leanings.

The debriefing took forever, and then there was a medical check that took almost as long. The diagnostic programs had never encountered a living human being who had been exposed to the wrenching forces behind a Schwarzschild barrier before, and they would not let her go until they had pinpointed every bone and ligament and helped themselves freely to samples of all the fluids she had. And then they released her to the accountancy section for her statement of account. It was a hardcopy chit, and all it said was: MOYNLIN, Gelle-Klara Current balance: 0.

Awards due: not yet evaluated.

Waiting outside the accountancy offices was Dolly Walthers, looking fretful and bored. "How'd you do, hon?" she asked. Klara made a face. "Oh, that's too bad. Wan's still in there," she explained, "because they kept him for b.l.o.o.d.y ever in the debriefing. I've been just sitting here for hours. What are you going to do now?"

"I don't exactly know," Klara said slowly, thinking about the very limited options one had on Gateway when one had no money.

"Yeah. Same here." Dolly sighed. "With Wan, you know, you never know. He can't stay anywhere very long, because they start asking questions about some of the stuff on his ship and I don't think he got it all exactly legally." She swallowed and said quickly, "Watch it, here he comes."

To Klara's surprise, when Wan looked up from the chits he was studying he beamed at her. "Ah," he said, "my dear Gelle-Klara, I have been studying your legal position. Very promising indeed, I think."

Promising! She glared at him with considerable dislike. "If you mean that they'll probably toss me out into s.p.a.ce within the next forty-eight hours for nonpayment of bills, that's not what I call promising."

He peered at her, decided she was joking. "Ha-ha, that is very humorous. Since you are not used to dealing with large sums of money, permit me to recommend a banking chap I find very useful-"

"Cut it out, Wan. That's not funny."

"Of course it's not funny!" He scowled just as in the old days, and then his expression softened into incredulity. "Can it be-Is it possible-Have they not told you of your claim?"

"What claim?"

"Against Robinette Broadhead. My legal johnny says you might get quite fifty percent of his a.s.sets."

"Oh, bulls.h.i.t, Wan," she said impatiently.

"Not bulls.h.i.t! I have an excellent legal program! It is the doctrine of the calf follows the cow, if you understand. You should have had a full share of the survivors' benefits from his last mission now you should have an equal share of that, and also of all that he has added to it, since it came from that original capital."

"But-But-Oh, that's stupid," she snapped. "I'm not going to sue him."

"Of course sue him! What else? How else can you get what is yours? Why, I sue as many as two hundred persons a year, Gelle-Klara. And there is a very large sum involved indeed. Do you know what Broad-head's net worth is? Much, much more even than my own!" And then, with the jolly fraternal good-fellowship of one person of wealth to another: "Of course, there may be some inconvenience for you while the matter is being adjudicated. Allow me to transfer a small loan from my account to yours-one moment-" He made the necessary entries on his statement chit. "Yes, there you are. Good luck!"

So there was my lost love, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, more lost than ever after she had been found. She knew Gateway well. But the Gateway she knew was gone. Her life had skipped a beat, and everything she knew or cared for or was interested in had suffered the changes of a third of a century, while she, like some enchanted princess in a forest, had slept away the time. "Good luck," Wan had said, but what const.i.tuted good luck for the sleeping beauty whose prince had married someone else? "A small loan," Wan had said, and it turned out that was what he had meant. Ten thousand dollars. Enough to pay her bills for a few days- and then what?

There was, thought Klara, the excitement of finding out some of the facts people like her had been dying for. So once she had found herself a room and gotten something to eat she headed for the library. It no longer contained spools of magnetic tape. Everything was now stored on some kind of second-generation Heechee prayer fans (prayer fans! so that was what they were!), and she had to hire an attendant to teach her how to use them. ("Librarian services @ $125/hr., $62.50," said the item on her data chit.) Was it worth it?

To Klara's disgruntled surprise, not really. So many questions answered! And, strangely, so little joy in getting the answers.

When Klara was a Gateway prospector like any other, the questions were literally a matter of life and death. What were the meanings of the symbols on the control panels of Heechee ships? What settings meant death? What meant reward? Now here were the answers, not all of them, perhaps-there was still not much clue to that great shuddery question of who the Heechee were in the first place. But thousands upon thousands of answers, even answers to questions no one had known enough to ask thirty years before.

But the answers gave her little pleasure. The questions lost their urgency when you knew the answers were in the back of the book.

The one cla.s.s of questions whose answers held her interest was, I know, me.

Robinette Broadhead? Oh, surely. There was much data on him in store. Yes, he was married. Yes, he was still alive, and even well. Unforgivably, he gave every indication of being happy. Almost as bad, he was ok! He was not wizened or decrepit, of course, and his scalp still had all its hair and his face was wrinkle-free, but that was just Full Medical Plus, unfailing purveyor of health and youth to those who could afford it. Robinette Broadhead could obviously afford anything. But he was older all the same. There was a solid thickness to the neck, an a.s.surance to the smile that looked out at her from the PV image, that had not been part of the frightened, confused man who had broken her tooth and sworn to love her always. So now Klara had a quant.i.tative estimate for one more term: "Always." It meant a period substantially less than thirty years.

When she bad depressed herself sufficiently in the library -she roamed about Gateway to see what changes had occurred. The asteroid had become more impersonal and more civilized. There were many commercial enterprises on Gateway now. A supermarket, a fast-food franchise, a stereotheater, a health club, handsome new tourist pensions, glittering souvenir shops. There was plenty to do on Gateway now. But not for Klara. The only thing that attracted her interest, really, was the gambling casino in the spindle, replacement for the old Blue h.e.l.l; but such luxuries she could not afford.

She could not afford much of anything, really, and she was depressed. The lady magazines of her adolescence had been full of giggly little tricks to combat depression-what they called the blahs. Clean your sink. Call somebody on the PV. Wash your hair. But she had no sink, and who was there to call on Gateway? After she bad washed her hair for the third time she began to think of the Blue h.e.l.l again. A few small bets, she decided, would do no harm to her budget even if she lost-it would only mean, really, giving up a few luxuries for a bit.

In eleven spins of the roulette wheel she was penniless.

A party of Gabonian tourists was just leaving, laughing and stumbling, and behind them, at the short, narrow bar, Klara saw Dolly. She walked over to her steadily and said, 'Would you like to buy me a drink?"

"You bet," said Dolly unenthusiastically, waving to the barman.

I never knew Gelle-Klara Moynhin when Robin was romantically involved with her. For that matter, I didn't know Robinette Broadhead then, either, for he was too poor to afford so sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me. Although I cannot experience physical courage directly (since I don't even experience physical fear), I estimate theirs very highly. Their ignorance, almost as high. They didn't know what drove the FTL ships they flew. They didn't know how the navigation worked, or what the controls did. They didn't know how to read Heechee charts, and didn't have any to read anyway, because they weren't found for another decade after Klara was sucked into the black hole. It is astonishing to me how much meat intelligences can accomplish with so little information.

"Then could you lend me some money?"

Dolly laughed with surprise. "Lost your stake, did you? Boy, have you got a wrong number! I wouldn't be buying drinks if some of the tourists hadn't thrown me a couple of chips for luck." When the highball arrived Dolly divided the small change in front of her in half and pushed a part to Klara. "You could hit Wan up again," she said, "but he's not in a very good mood."

"That's not news," said Klara, hoping the whiskey would elevate her spirits. It did not.

"Oh, worse than usual. I think he's going to be in the deep s.h.i.t again." She hiccoughed and looked surprised.

"What's the matter?" Klara asked reluctantly. She knew perfectly well that once she asked, the girl would tell her, but it was, she supposed, a way of paying for the loose change.

"They're going to catch up with him sooner or later," Dolly said, sucking at the bottle again. "He's such a jerk, coming here when he could have dropped you off anywhere, and got his G.o.d-d.a.m.n candy and cake."

"Well, I'd rather be here than some other place," said Klara, wondering if it was true.

"Don't be silly. He didn't do it for you. He did it because he thinks he can get away with anything at all, anywhere. Because he's a jerk." She stared moodily at the bottle. "He even makes love like a jerk. Jerky, if you know what I mean? He even screws jerky. He comes up to me with that look on his face as if he's trying to remember the combination to the food locker, you know? And then he gets my clothes off, and then he starts, push here, poke there, wiggle this part. I think I ought to write up an operating manual for him. The jerk."

How many drinks the little stake lasted for Klara didn't know-several, anyway. At some later time Dolly remembered that she was supposed to shop for brownie mix and liqueur chocolates. At a later time still Klara, now strolling around by herself, realized she was hungry. What made her know it was the smell of food. She still had some of Dolly's loose change in her pocket. It was not enough for a decent meal, and anyway the sensible thing would be to go back to her cubicle and eat the prepaid meals, but what was the point of being sensible anymore? Besides, the smell was nearby. She pa.s.sed through a sort of archway of Heechee metal, ordered at random, and sat as close as she could get to a wall. She pried the sandwich apart with a finger to see what she was eating; probably synthetic, but not any product of the food mines or sea farms she had ever tasted before. Not bad. Not very bad, anyway, although there was no dish she could think of that would have tasted really good just then. She ate slowly, a.n.a.lyzing each bite, not so much because the food justified it as because doing that postponed the next thing she would have to do, namely contemplate what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

And she became aware of a stir. The busgirl was sweeping the floor twice as diligently, peering over her shoulder at every stroke of the broom; the counter people were standing straighter, speaking more clearly. Someone had come in.

It was a woman, tall, not young, handsome. Thick ropes of tawny hair hung down her back, and she was conversing pleasantly, but authoritatively, with staff and customers alike while she rubbed fingers under shelves to check for grease, tasted crusts to check for crispness, made sure the napkin holders were full, retied the ap.r.o.n strings on the busgirl.

Klara stared at her with dawning recognition that felt more like fear. Her! The one! The woman whose picture she had seen in so many of the news stories the library had produced about Robinette Broadhead. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead opens 54 new CHON-food outlets in Persian Gulf. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead to christen converted interstellar transport. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead directs programming of expanded datastore net.

Although the sandwich was just about the last crumb of food Klara could afford to buy, she could not force herself to finish it. She sidled toward the door, face averted, crammed the plate into the waste receptacle, and was gone.

There was only one place to go. When she saw that Wan was alone in it she took it as a direct message from providence that she had made the right decision. "Where's Dolly?" she asked.

He was lying in a hammock, sulkily nibbling on fresh papaya-bought at what incredible cost, Klara could not imagine. He said, "Where in-deed, yes, I would like to know that too! I will deal with her when she comes back, oh, yes!"

"I lost my money," she told him.

He shrugged contemptuously.

"And," she lied, inventing as she went along, "I came to tell you that you've lost, too. They're going to impound your ship."

"Impound!" he screeched. "The animals! The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Oh, when I see Dolly, believe me-she must have told them about my special equipment!"

"Or you did," Klara said brutally, "because you've sure been shooting your mouth off. You only have one chance."

"One chance?"

"Maybe one chance, if you're smart enough and courageous enough."

"Smart enough! Courageous enough! You forget yourself; Klara! You forget that for the first part of my life I was all alone-"

"No, I don't forget anything," she said wearily, "because you sure don't let me. It's what you do next that counts. Are you all packed, ship's stores all on board?"

"Stores? No, of course not. Have I not told you? Ice cream, yes, candy bars, yes, but my brownie mix and chocolates-"

"The h.e.l.l with the chocolates," said Klara, "and since she's not here when she's needed, the h.e.l.l with Dolly, too. If you want to keep your ship, take off now."

"Now? Alone? Without Dolly?"

"With a subst.i.tute," said Klara tightly. "Cook, bedmate, somebody to yell at-I'm available. And skilled. Maybe I can't cook as well as Dolly, but I can make love better. Or anyway more often. And you don't have time to think it over."

He stared at her slack-jawed for a long moment. Then he grinned. "Take those cases on the floor," he ordered, "also that package under the hammock. Also-"

"Wait a minute," she objected. "There's a limit to what I can carry, you know."

"As to what your limits are," he said, "we will discover in time, I a.s.sure you. Now you may not argue. Simply take that netting and fill it and then we go, and while you are doing so I will tell you a story I heard from the Dead Men many years ago. There were these two prospectors who discovered a great prize inside a black hole and could not think how to get it out. One said finally, 'Ah, now I know. I have brought my pet kitten along. We will simply tie her to the treasure and she will pull it out.' And the second prospector said, 'Oh, what a fool you are! How can a little kitten pull a treasure out of a black hole?" And the first prospector said, 'No, it is you who are the fool. It will be easy, for, see, I have a whip.'"

16 Gateway Revisited

Gateway gave me all of my many millions, but it also gives me the creeps. Coming there was like meeting myself coming back. I met myself as a young, dead-broke, terrified, despairing human being whose only choices lay between leaving on a trip that might kill him and staying in a place where no one would want to live. It hadn't changed that much. No one would still want to live there although people did and tourists were in and out all the time. But at least the trips were not as recklessly dangerous as they used to be. As we were docking I told my program Albert Einstein that I had made a philosophical discovery, namely that things even out. Gateway gets safer, and the whole home planet Earth gets more perilous. "Maybe there is a sort of law of conservation of misery that insures an average quantum value of unhappiness for every human being, and all we can really do is spread it in one direction or another?"

"It is when you say things like that, Robin"-he sighed-"that I wonder if my diagnostic programs are as good as they ought to be. Are you sure you're not in pain from your operation?" He was, or appeared to be, sitting on the edge of the seat, guiding our vessel into landing as he talked, but I knew that his question was rhetorical. He was monitoring me all along, of course.

As soon as the ship was secured I unplugged the Albert datafan, tucked it under my arm, and headed for my new ship. "No sightseeing?" Essie asked, studying me with almost the exact expression Albert had displayed. "Then you want me to come with?"

"I'm really excited about the ship," I said, "and I just want to go look at it. You can meet me there later." I knew she was eager to see how her beloved franchise was getting along in this location. Of course, I did not then know who she might run into.

So I was thinking about nothing in particular as I clambered through the hatch into my own, personal, human-built interstellar s.p.a.ce yacht, and be d.a.m.ned if it didn't turn out that I was just about as excited as I had told Essie I was. I mean, talk about childhood fantasies come true! It was real. And it was all mine, and it had everything.

At least, it had almost everything. It had a master stateroom with a marvelously wide anisokinetic bed and a genuine toilet next door. It had a fully stocked larder and something very like a real kitchen. It also had two working cabins, one for Essie and one for me, that could provide concealed berths for more guests in case we ever wanted company. It had the first human-built drive system ever to be successfully proved out for a civilian faster-than-light vessel-well, some of the parts were Heechee, salvaged out of damaged exploration ships, but most of it was human-made. And it was powerful with a bigger, faster drive. It had a home for Albert, a fan socket with his name engraved over it; I slipped him into place but did not activate him, because I was enjoying my solitary prowl. It had datafans full of music and PV plays and reference works and specialist programs to do almost everything I might ever want to do, or that Essie might, either. It had a viewscreen copied from the one on the big S. Ya. transport, ten times the size of the little blurry plates in the exploration ships. It had everything I had ever thought of wanting in a ship, in fact, and the only thing it didn't have was a name.

I sat on the edge of the big anisokinetic bed, the thrust feeling funny on my bottom, because it was all exerted upward instead of that constricting sideways squeeze you get from regular mattresses, and I thought about

One of the lesser artifacts the Heechee left around was the anisokinetic punch-a simple tool that could convert an impact to an equal force at some angle to the driving force. The theory of it turned out to be both profound and elegant. The use people made of it, less so-the most popular product made with anisokinetic materials was a bedding mattress with "springs" whose force was vector rather than scalar, producing what is said to be a t.i.tillating support for s.e.xual activity. s.e.xual activity! How much time meat intelligences waste on that sort of thing!

that problem. It was a good place to do it, since the person who would occupy that bed with me was the one I wanted to name the ship after. However, I had already named the transport after her.

Of course, I thought, there were ways of dealing with that. I could call it the Sem.Ya. Or the Essie. Or the Mrs. Robinette Broadheo4 for that matter, although that was pretty stupid.

The matter was fairly urgent. We were all set to go. There was nothing to keep us on Gateway, except that I couldn't face taking off in a ship that didn't have a name. I found myself in the control cabin, and dropped into the pilot seat. This one was built for a human bottom, and in that way alone an immense improvement over the old style.

When I was a kid in the food mines I used to sit on a kitchen chair, in front of the radar oven, and make believe I was piloting a Gateway ship to the far corners of the universe. What I did now was just about the same thing. I reached out and touched the course wheels and made believe to squeeze the initiator teat and-and-well, I fantasized. I imagined myself dashing through s.p.a.ce in just the same careless, adventurous, penalty-free style I had imagined as a child. Circling quasars. Speeding out to the nearby alien galaxies. Entering the silicon dust shroud around the core. Meeting a Heechee! Entering a black hole- The fantasy collapsed then, because that was too personally real, but I suddenly realized I had a name for the ship. It fit Essie perfectly, but did not duplicate the one on the S. Ya.: True Love.

It was the perfect name!

That being so, why did it leave me feeling vaguely sentimental, lovelorn, melancholy?

It was not a thought that I wanted to pursue. Anyway, now that a name had been decided, there were things to do: The registry had to be amended, the ship's insurance papers had to be corrected-the world had to be notified of my decision. The way to do that was to tell Albert to get it done. So I rocked the datafan that held him to make sure it was firmly seated and turned him on.

I had not got used to the new Albert, so it surprised me when he turned up not in a holograph box, not even near his datafan, but in the doorway to the main cabin. He stood there with an elbow cupped in a palm, the pipe in the free hand, gazing peacefully around for all the world as though he had just come in. "A beautiful ship, Robin," he said. "My congratulations."

"I didn't know you could jump around like that!"

"I am in fact not jumping around, my dear Robin," he pointed out amiably. "It is part of my program to give to the maximum extent possible the simulation of reality. To appear like a genie out of a bottle would not seem realistic, would it?"

"You're a neat program, Albert," I acknowledged, and, smiling, he said: "And an alert one, too, if I may say so, Robin. For example, I believe your good wife is coming this way now." He stepped aside-quite unnecessarily!-as Essie came in, panting and looking as though she were trying not to look upset.