“Touche, Sigfrid,” I interrupt.
“Yes. But it is what you do with it that makes the difference in how you feel, and whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in situations that are important to you. Please concern yourself with the inside of your own head, Rob, not mine.”
I say admiringly, “You sure are one fucking intelligent machine, Sigfrid.”
He says, “I have the impression that what you’re actually saying there is, ’I hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.’”
I have never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me aback, until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it’s true.
I do hate his guts.
He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how willing she is to do anything I ask her, pretty nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.
Chapter 12
I came back to my room one morning and found the P-phone whining faintly, like a distant, angry mosquito. I punched the message code and found that the assistant personnel director required my presence in her office at ten hundred hours that morning. Well, it was later than that already. I had formed the habit of spending a lot of time, and most nights, with Klara. Her pad was a lot more comfortable than mine. So I didn’t get the message until nearly eleven, and my tardiness in getting to the Corporation personnel offices didn’t help the assistant director’s mood.
She was a very fat woman named Emma Fother. She brushed off my excuses and accused, “You graduated your courses seventeen days ago. You haven’t done a thing since.”
“I’m waiting for the right mission,” I said.
“How long are you going to wait? Your per capita’s paid up for three more days, then what?”
“Well,” I said, almost truthfully, “I was going to come in to see you about that today anyway. I’d like a job here on Gateway.”
“Pshaw.” (I’d never heard anyone say that before, but that’s how it sounded.) “Is that why you came to Gateway, to clean sewers?”
Vessel 3-31, Voyage 08D27. Crew C. Pitrin, N. Ginza, J. Krabbe.
Transit time out 19 days 4 hours. Position uncertain, vicinity (21.y.) Zeta Tauri.
Summary: “Emerged in transpolar orbit planet .88 Earth radius at .4 A.U. Planet possessed 3 detected small satellites. Six other planets inferred by computer logic. Primary K7.
“Landing made. This planet has evidently gone through a warming period. There are no ice caps, and the present shorelines do not appear very old. No detected signs of habitation. No intelligent life.
“Finescreen scanning located what appeared to be a Heechee rendezvous station in our orbit. We approached it. It was intact. In forcing an entrance it exploded and N. Ginza was killed. Our vessel was damaged and we returned, J. Krabbe dying en route. No artifacts were secured. Biotic samples from planet destroyed in damage to vessel.”
I was pretty sure that was a bluff, because there weren’t that many sewers; there wasn’t enough gravity flow to support them. “The right mission could come along any day.”
“Oh, sure, Rob. You know, people like you worry me. Do you have any idea how important our work here is?”
“Well, I think so—”
“There’s a whole universe out there for us to find and bring home! Gateway’s the only way we can reach it. A person like you, who grew up on the plankton farms—”
“Actually it was the Wyoming food mines.”
“Whatever! You know how desperately the human race needs what we can give them. New technology. New power sources. Food! New worlds to live in.” She shook her head and punched through the sorter on her desk, looking both angry and worried. I supposed that she was check-rated on how many of us idlers and parasites she managed to get to go out, the way we were supposed to, which accounted for her hostility — assuming you could account for her desire to stay on Gateway in the first place. She abandoned the sorter and got up to open a file against the wall. “Suppose I do find you a job,” she said over her shoulder. “The only skill you have that’s any use here is prospecting, and you’re not using that.”
“I’ll take any- almost anything,” I said.
She looked at me quizzically and then returned to her desk. She was astonishingly graceful, considering she had to mass a hundred kilos. Maybe a fat woman’s fantasy of not sagging accounted for her desire to hold this job and stay on Gateway. “You’ll be doing the lowest kind of unskilled labor,” she warned. “We don’t pay much for that. One-eighty a day.”
“I’ll take it!”
“Your per capita has to come out of it. Take that away and maybe twenty dollars a day for toke money, and what do you have left?”
“I could always do odd jobs if I needed more.”
She sighed. “You’re just postponing the day, Rob. I don’t know. Mr. Hsien, the director, keeps a very close watch on job applications. I’ll find it very hard to justify hiring you. And what are you going to do if you get sick and can’t work? Who’ll pay your tax?”
“I’ll go back, I guess.”
“And waste all your training?” She shook her head. “You disgust me, Rob.”
But she punched me out a work ticket that instructed me to report to the crew chief on Level Grand, Sector North, for assignment in plant maintenance.
I didn’t like that interview with Emma Fother, but I had been warned I wouldn’t. When I talked it over with Klara that evening, she told me actually I’d got off light.
“You’re lucky you drew Emma. Old Hsien sometimes keeps people hanging until their tax money’s all gone.”
“Then what?” I got up and sat on the edge of her cot, feeling for my footgloves. “Out the airlock?”
“Don’t make fun, it could conceivably come to that. Hsien’s an old Mao type, very hard on social wastrels.”
“You’re a fine one to talk!”
She grinned, rolled over, and rubbed her nose against my back. “The difference between you and me, Rob,” she said, “is that I have a couple of bucks stashed away from my first mission. It didn’t pay big, but it paid somewhat. Also I’ve been out, and they need people like me for teaching people like you.”
I leaned back against her hip, half turned and put my hand on her, more reminiscently than aggressively. There were certain subjects we didn’t talk much about, but- “Klara?”
“What’s it like, on a mission?”
She rubbed her chin against my forearm for a moment, looking at the holoview of Venus against the wall. “… Scary,” she said.
I waited, but she didn’t say any more about it, and that much I already knew. I was scared right there on Gateway. I didn’t have to launch myself on the Heechee Mystery Bus Trip to know what being scared was like, I could feel it already.
“You don’t really have a choice, dear Rob,” she said, almost tenderly, for her.
I felt a sudden rush of anger. “No, I don’t! You’ve exactly described my whole life, Klara. I’ve never had a choice — except once, when I won the lottery and decided to come here. And I’m not sure I made the right decision then.”
She yawned, and rubbed against my arm for a moment. “If we’re through with sex,” she decided, “I want something to eat before I go to sleep. Come on up to the Blue Hell with me and I’ll treat.”
Plant Maintenance was, actually, the maintenance of plants: specifically, the ivy plants that help keep Gateway livable. I reported for duty and, surprise — in fact, nice surprise — my crew boss turned out to be my legless neighbor, Shikitei Bakin.