Hypatia says they’re my substitute for having a baby of my own.
Maybe they are. All the same, I do have a couple of my own ova stored in the Raiwea clinic’s deep freeze. They’ve been there for a good many years now, but the doctors swear they’re still one hundred percent viable and they’ll keep them that way. The ova are there just in case I ever decide I really want to do that other disgustingly meat-person thing and give birth to my own genetically personal child…
But I’ve never met the man I wanted to be its father. Bill Tartch? Well, maybe. I had thought he might be for a while, anyway, but then I wasn’t really so sure.
When I was up and about the next morning, Hypatia greeted me with a fresh display of the Crabber planet. It was too big now to fit in my salon, but she had zeroed in on one particular coastline. In the center of the image was a blur that might have been manmade — personmade, I mean. “They’re down to half-kilometer resolution now,” she informed me. “That’s pretty definitely a small city.”
I inspected it. It pretty definitely was, but it was very definitely small. “Isn’t there anything bigger?”
“I’m afraid not, Klara. Hans says the planet seems to be rather remarkably underpopulated, though it’s not clear why. Will you be going over to the PhoenixCorp ship now?”
I shook my head. “Let them work in peace. We might as well do some work ourselves. What’ve you got for me?”
What she had for me was another sampling of some of the ventures I’d put money into at one time or another. There were the purely commercial ones such as the helium-3 mines on Luna, and the chain of food factories in the Bay of Bengal, and the desert-revivification project in the Sahara, and forty or fifty others; they weren’t particularly interesting to me, but they were some of the projects that, no matter how much I spent, just kept getting me richer and richer every day.
Then we got to the ones I cared about. I looked in on the foundation Starminder had talked about, the one for sending humans into the Core to meet with the Heechee who had stayed behind. And the scholarship program for young women like myself—like I had been once, long ago—who were stuck in dirty, drudging, dead-end jobs. Myself, I got out of it by means of dumb luck and the Gateway asteroid, but that wasn’t an option now. Maybe a decent education was.
Along about then, Hypatia cleared her throat in the manner that means there’s something she wants to talk about. I guessed wrong. I guessed she wanted to discuss my island, so I played the game. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “I accessed Raiwea last night after I went to bed.”
“Really?” she said, just as though she hadn’t known it all along. “How are things?”
I went through the motions of telling her which kids were about ready to leave, and how there were eighteen new ones who had been located by the various agencies I did business with, ready to be brought to the island next time I was in the neighborhood. As she always did, whether she meant it or not, she clucked approvingly. Her simulation was looking faintly amused, though. I took it as a challenge. “So you see there’s one thing we animals can do that you can’t,” I told her. “We can have babies.”
“Or, as in your own case at least so far, not,” she said agreeably. “That wasn’t what I was going to tell you, though.”
“Oh?”
“I just wanted to mention that Mr. Tartch’s ship is going to dock in about an hour. He isn’t coming alone.”
Sometimes Hypatia is almost too idiosyncratically human, and more than once I’ve thought about getting her program changed. The tone of her voice warned me that she had something more to tell. I said tentatively, “That’s not surprising. Sometimes he needs to bring a crew with him.”
“Of course he does, Klara,” she said cheerfully. “There’s only one of them this time, though. And she’s very pretty.”
CHAPTER V
The very pretty assistant was very pretty, all right, and she looked to be about sixteen years old. No, that’s not true. She looked a lot better than sixteen years old. I don’t believe I had skin like that even when I was a newborn baby. She wore no makeup, and needed none. She had on a decorous one-piece jumpsuit that covered her from thigh to neck and left no doubt what was inside. Her name was Denys. When I got there —I had taken my time, because I didn’t want Bill to think I was eager—all three of PhoenixCorp’s males were hanging around, watching her like vultures sniffing carrion. It wasn’t just that she looked the way she looked. She was also fresh meat, for a crew that had been getting pretty bored with each other.
Of course, I had been fresh meat, too, and there had been no signs of that kind of testosterone rush when I arrived. But then, I didn’t look like Denys. Bill didn’t seem to notice. He had already set up for his opening teaser, and Denys was playing his quaint autocameras for him. As they panned around the entrance chamber and settled on his face, wearing its most friendly and intelligent expression, he began to speak to the masses:
“Wilhelm Tartch here again, where PhoenixCorp is getting ready to bring a lost race of intelligent beings back to life, and here to help me once again” —one of the cameras swung around as Denys cued it toward me —”I have the good luck to have my beautiful fiancée, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with me.”
I gave him a look, because whatever I was to Wilhelm Tartch, I definitely wasn’t planning to marry him. He tipped me a cheeky wink and went right on:
“As you all remember, before the Heechee ran away to hide in the Core, they surveyed most of the galaxy, looking for other intelligent races. They didn’t find any. When they visited Earth they found the australopithecines, but they were a long way from being modern humans. They hadn’t even developed language yet. And here, on this planet” —that view of the Crabber planet, presupernova, appeared behind him — “they found another primitive race that they thought might someday become both intelligent and civilized. Well, perhaps these Crabbers, as the PhoenixCorp people call them, did. But the Heechee weren’t around to see it, and neither are we, because they had some bad luck.
“There were two stars in their planet’s system, a red dwarf and a bright type-A giant. Over the millennia, as these lost people were struggling toward civilization, the big star was losing mass, which was being sucked into the smaller one —and then, without warning, the small one reached critical mass. It exploded —and the people, along with their planet and all their works, were instantly obliterated in the supernova blast.”