“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 noticed, 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 meter 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 gray. 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?”
The globe disappeared. Now we were looking down on one of those greenish infrared scenes: shoreline, bay—and something burning around the bay. Once again the outlines of the burning areas were geometrically unnatural. “As we speculated, it is almost certainly a community, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans informed me. “However, it seems to have suffered some catastrophe, similar to what we observed on the continent that is now out of sight.”