The mother pig didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes, two of her babies were down and she was racing away with that long tail flicking from side to side like a metronome, and the surviving piglet right behind her, its tail-flicks keeping time with its mother’s, and the six-limbed predators had what they had come for.
It was not a pretty scene.
I know perfectly well that animals live by eating, and I’m not sentimental about the matter —hell, I eat-steak! (Not always out of a food factory, either.) All the same, I didn’t like watching what was happening on this half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive when the wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.
So I wasn’t a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch hadn’t waited for me to call him and was already on the line.
Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate area. He likes that kind of sexy talk. I don’t particularly, so I tried to keep the call short. The basic facts he had to convey were that he missed me and that, unspokenly, he looked as good as ever—not very tall, not exactly handsome but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about grin —and that he was just two days out. That’s not a lot of hard data to get out of what was more than a quarter-hour of talk capsuled back and forth over all those light-years. I guess, but the rest was private; and when I was finished, it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp people.
Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used her effectuators to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn’t have a skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold neckband that wouldn’t be flopping around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn’t argue. And while I was getting into them she asked chattily, “So did Mr. Tartch say thank you?”
I know Hypatia’s tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. “For what?”
“Why, for keeping his career going,” she said, sounding surprised. “He was pretty much washed up until you came along, wasn’t he? So it’s only appropriate that he should, you know, display his gratitude.”
“You’re pushing your luck,” I told her as I slipped into a pair of jeweled stockings. Sometimes I think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time it just wasn’t justified. I didn’t have to do favors to get a man. Christ, the problem was to fend them off! It’s just that when it’s over I like to leave them a little better off than I found them; and Bill, true enough, had reached that stage in his career when a little help now and then was useful.
But I didn’t want to discuss it with her. “Talk about something else or shut up,” I ordered.
“Sure, hon. Let’s see. How did you like the Crabbers?”
I told her the truth. “Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy.”
Hypatia giggled. “Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they’re much worse than your own remote predecessors? Because I don’t think Australopithecus robustus worried too much about whether its dinners were enjoying the meal, either.”
We were getting into a familiar argument. “That was a long time ago, Hypatia.”
“So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. Now, if you really want to take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business —”
“Not yet,” I told her, as I had told her many times before.
What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat body, with all its aches and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored intelligence. As other people I knew had done. Like Hypatia herself, though in her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of someone who had once been living meat.
It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn’t getting as much pleasure as I would have liked out of living, but I certainly didn’t want to die. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I would never have to.
But I wasn’t prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat person could do that a machine person couldn’t—well, one big one —and I wasn’t prepared to abandon the flesh until I had done what the female flesh was best at. For which I needed a man . . . and I wasn’t at all sure that Bill Tartch was the particular man I needed.
When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking conspiratorial and expectant. “We’ve got about twenty percent of the optical sheets in place,” Terple informed me, thrilled with excitement. “Would you like to see?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but commanded: “Hans! Display the planet.”
The lights went dark, and before us floated a blue-and-white globe the size of my head, looking as though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was out of sight off to my right. There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas, I couldn’t see them. On the planet itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple did something that made the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even more land on the dark side, because spots of light—artificial lights, cities’ lights — blossomed all over parts of the nighttime area.
“You see, Klara?” she crowed. “Cities! Civilization!”
CHAPTER IV
Their shipmind really was a good cook. Fat pink shrimp that tasted as though they’d come out of the sea within the hour, followed by a fritto misto, the same, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert. Everything was all perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly relaxing now that it had turned out we really did have something to observe.
What there wasn’t any of was wine to go with the meal, just some sort of tropical juices in the winebulbs. June Terple noticed my expression when I tasted it. “We’re not doing anything alcoholic until we’ve completed the obs,” she said, half apologetic, half challenging, “Still, I think Hans can get you something if you really want it.”
I shook my head politely, but I was wondering if Hypatia had happened to say anything to Hans about my fondness for a drink now and then. Probably she had; shipminds do gossip when they’re as advanced as Hypatia and Hans, and it was evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of the black hole itself, or black holes in general.
We made a nice, leisurely meal of it. The only interruptions were inconspicuous, as crew members one after another briefly excused themselves to double-check how well the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over that five-hundred-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection plates into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was in-jokes, but that wasn’t a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering in my ear.
When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly— pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren’t homesick at all, the remark was aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: “He’s pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian’s jealous,” Hypatia told me.
Julia —that was Hoo-lia —Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Incan former schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I’d never been to Machu Picchu. “And you’ve been all over the galaxy? And never took the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?”