“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 anymore, 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 modeled 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 toward 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 moment, 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 neighborhood, 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 fulfill 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?”