He swore softly and took her arm. 'Come on,' he said, pushing their way through the swarm of paparazzi.
*
'We must have been seen going in,' he told her, once they were safely back in the condo. 'Or your friend the engineer called somebody.'
'Is it always like this, Rafiel?'
He wanted to be honest with her. 'Sometimes we tip the paps off ourselves,' he admitted. 'I mean, I don't personally do it. I don't have to. Jeftha or Mosay or somebody will, because we want the paparazzi there, you know? They're good for business. They're the source of the publicity that makes us into stars.'
'Did you?'
'Did I tip them off? No. No, this time they found us out on their own. They're good at that.'
-So he had no secrets any more: the paparazzi knew that his life was nearing its end and that he had started a child he would not live to see grow, all of which made him more newsworthy than ever, for the same reasons: because he was Rafiel, the short-timer; because he was going to do that black-comic thing, to die. Since hardly anybody really suffered, people like Rafiel filled a necessary niche in the human design: they did the suffering for everyone else to enjoy vicariously - and with the audience's inestimable privilege of turning the suffering off when they chose.
'Yes, but is it always like this?'
He picked up the kitten and cradled it in his arms, upside down, its blue eyes looking up warily at him.
'It will be as long as we're here together,' he said.
She did not respond to that. She just walked silently over to the communications screen.
It seemed to Rafiel that his beloved wanted not to be beloved, or not actively beloved, right then. Her back was significantly turned toward him. She had taken some faxes from Hakluyt and was poring over them, not looking at him. He took his cue from her and went into the other room to deal with a couple of callbacks. He did not think he had satisfactorily explained the situation to her. On the other hand, he didn't think he had to.
When he came back she was sitting with a fax in her hand, purring Nicolette in her lap, her head down. He stood there for a moment, looking not at Alegretta but at the cat. The little animal showed no sign of the human gene splices that let her be a temporary incubator for their child. She was just a cat. But inside the cat was the child which would see such wonders, for ever denied to himself - a new sun in the sky, planets (perhaps planets, anyway) where no human had ever set foot - all the things that were possible to someone with an endless life ahead of him.
He knew that the thing in the cat's belly was not actually a child yet, hardly even a real foetus; it was no longer than a grain of dust, but already it was richer in powers and prospects than its father would ever be.
Then, as Alegretta moved, he saw that she was weeping.
He stood staring at her, more embarrassed than he had ever been with Alegretta before. He couldn't remember ever seeing an adult cry before. Not even himself. He moved uncomfortably and must have made some small noise, because she looked up and saw him there.
She beckoned him over and put her hand on his. 'My dear,' she said, still weeping, 'I can't put it off any longer. I have to be there for the final tests, so - I have to leave tomorrow.'
'Come to bed,' he said.
In the morning he was up before her. He woke her with a kiss. She smiled up at him as she opened her eyes, then let the smile slip away as she remembered, finally saw what he was holding in his hand. She looked at him in puzzlement. 'What's that thing for?'
He held up the little cage. 'I sent the server out for it first thing this morning,' he said. 'It's to put the kitten in for the trip. We don't want to break the family up again, do we?'
'We?'
He shrugged. 'The you and me we. I decided I really wanted to see your Hakluyt before it takes you away from me.'
'But Rafiel! It's such a long trip to Hakluyt!'
'Kosmojets go there, don't they?'
'Of course they do, but' - she hesitated, then plunged on - 'but are you up to that kind of stress, Rafiel? I mean physically? Just to get into orbit is a strain, you know; you have to launch to orbit through the railgun, and that's a seven-gee acceleration. Can you stand seven gees?'
'I can', he said, 'stand anything at all, except losing you so soon.'
12
Rafiel is excited over the trip. Their first leg is an airplane flight. It's his first time in a plane in many years, and there's no choice about it; no maglev trains go to the Peruvian Andes. That's where the railgun is, on the westward slope of a mountain, pointing toward the stars. As the big turboprop settles in to its landing at the base of the railgun, Rafiel gets his first good look at the thing. It looks like a skijump in reverse: its traffic goes up. The scenery all around is spectacular. Off to the north of the railgun there's a huge waterfall which once was a hydroelectric dam supplying power to half Peru and almost all of Bolivia. Lukewarm-fusion put the hydropower plants out of business and now it is just a decorative cataract. When they get out Rafiel finds his heart pounding and his breath panting, for even the base of the railgun is nearly 2500 metres above sea level, but he doesn't care. He is thrilled.
While they were dressing in their cushiony railgun suits, Rafiel paused to listen to the scream of a capsule accelerating up the rails to escape velocity. Alegretta stopped what she was doing, too, to look at him. 'Are you sure you can handle this?' she asked. His offhand wave said that he was very, very sure. She checked him carefully as he got into each item of the railgun clothes. What they wore was important - no belts for either of them, no brassiere for Alegretta, slippers rather than shoes, no heavy jewellery - because the seven-gee strain would cost them severely for any garment that pressed into their flesh or constrained their freedom. When Alegretta was satisfied about that, she got to the serious problem of fitting baskets to the cats.
'Will she be all right?' Rafiel asked anxiously, looking at Nicolette - meaning, really, will the almost-baby in her belly be all right?
'I'll make her be all right,' Alegretta promised, checking the resilience of the padding with her knuckles. 'That'll do. Anyway, cats stand high-gee better than people. You've heard stories of them falling out of tenth-storey windows and walking away? They're true - sometimes true, anyway. Now let's get down to the loading platform.'
That was busier than Rafiel had expected. Four or five other passengers were saying good-byes to friends on the platform, but it wasn't just people who were about to be launched into space. There were crates and cartons, all padded, being fitted carefully into place in the cargo section, and servers were strapping down huge Dewars of liquid gas. 'Inside,' a guard commanded, and when they were in the capsule a steward leaned over them to help with the straps and braces. 'Just relax,' he said, 'and don't turn your heads.' Then he bent to check the cat baskets. The kitten was already asleep, but her mother was obviously discontented with what was happening to her. However, there wasn't much she could do about it in the sweater-like restraint garment that held her passive.... No, Rafiel thought, not a sweater; more like a straitjacket-
And then they were on their way.
The thrust squeezed all the breath out of Rafiel, who had not fully remembered what seven gees could do to him. The padded seat was memory plastic and it had moulded itself to his body; the restraints were padded; the garments were without wrinkles or seams to cut into his flesh. But still it was seven gees. The athletic dancer's body that had never gone over seventy-five kilograms suddenly and bruisingly weighed more than half a ton. Breathing was frighteningly difficult; his chest muscles were not used to expanding his ribcage against such force. When he turned his head, ever so minutely, he was instantly dizzied as the bones of the inner ear protested being twisted so viciously. He thought he was going to vomit; he forced himself to breathe.