1
ON WRINKLE ROCK
It isn’t easy to begin. I thought of a whole bunch of different ways to do it, like cute:
You don’t know about me without you have read some books that was made by Mr. Fred Pohl. He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. But my friendly data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein, says I’m too prone to obscure literary references anyway, so the Huckleberry Finn gambit was out. And I thought of starting with a searing expression of the soul-searching, cosmic angst that’s always (as Albert also reminds me) so much a part of my normal conversation:
To be immortal and yet dead; to be almost omniscient and nearly omnipotent, and yet no more real than the phosphor flicker on a screen-that’s how I exist. When people ask what I do with my time (so much time! so much of it crammed into each second, and with an eternity of seconds), I give them an honest answer. I tell them that I study, I play, I plan, I work. Indeed, that is all true. I do all these things. But during and between them I do one other thing. I hurt.
Or I could just start with a typical day. Like they do in the PV interviews. “A candid look at one moment in the life of the celebrated Robinette Broadhead, titan of finance, political powerhouse, maker and shaker of events on all the myriad worlds.” Maybe including a glimpse of me wheeling and dealing-for example, a table-pounding conference with the brass hats at the Joint Assassin Watch or, better still, a session at the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research:
I stepped up to the podium in a storm of serious applause. Smiling, I raised my arms to quell it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I thank each of you for making time in your busy schedules to join us here. You are a distinguished group of astrophysicists and cosmologists, famed theorists and Nobel laureates, and I welcome you to the Institute. I declare this workshop on the fine physical structure of the early universe to be in session.”
I really do say that kind of thing, or at least I send down a doppel to do it and my doppel does. I have to. It’s expected of me. I’m not a scientist, but through my Institute I supply the cash that pays the bills that lets science get done. So they want me to show up to greet them at the opening sessions. Then they want me to go away so they can work, and I do.
Anyway, I could not decide which of those tracks to begin on, and so I won’t use any of them. They’re all characteristic enough, though. I admit it. Sometimes I’m a little too cute. Sometimes, maybe even often, I am unattractively burdened with my own interior pain, which never seems to go away. Often I’m just a touch pompous; but at the same time, honestly, I am frequently quite effective in ways that matter a lot. The place where I’m actually going to start is with the party on Wrinkle Rock. Please bear with me. You have to put up with me only for a little while, and I have to do it always.
I would go almost anywhere for a really good party. Why not? It’s easy enough for me, and some parties happen only once. I even flew my own spaceship there; that was easy, too, and didn’t really take any time from the eighteen or twenty other things I was doing at the time.
Even before we got there I could feel the beginning of that nice party tingle, because they had the old asteroid dressed up for the occasion. Left to itself, Wrinkle Rock wasn’t much to look at. It was patchy black, spotted with blue, ten kilometers long. It was shaped more or less like a badly planned pear that the birds had been pecking at. Of course, those pockmarks weren’t from pecking birds. They were landing sockets for ships like ours. And, just for the party, the Rock had been prettied up with big, twinidy starburst letters-Our Galaxy The First 100 Years Are the Hardest-revolving around the rock like a belt of trained fireflies. The first part of what it said wasn’t diplomatic. The second part wasn’t true. But it was pretty to look at, anyway.
I said as much to my dear portable wife, and she grunted comfortably, settling herself in my arm, “Is garish. Real lights! Could have used holograms.”
“Essie,” I said, turning my head to nibble her ear, “you have the soul of a cybernetician.”
“Ho!” she said, twisting around to nibble back-only she nibbled a lot harder-“Am nothing but soul of cybernetician, as are you, dear Robin, and kindly pay attention to controls of ship instead of fooling around.”
That was just a joke, naturally. We were right on course, sliding into a dock with that agonizing slowness of all material objects; I had hundreds of milliseconds to spare when I gave the True Love its final nudge. So I gave Essie a kiss .
Well, I didn’t exactly give her a kiss, but let me leave it that way for now, all right? And she added, “Are making a big deal of this, you agree?”
“It is a big deal,” I told her, and kissed her a little harder, and, since we had plenty of time, she kissed me back.
We spent the long quarter of a second or so while True Love drifted through the intangible glitter of the party sign in as pleasant and leisurely a fashion as one could wish. That’s to say, we made love.
Since I am no longer “real” (but neither is my Essie)-since neither of us is still really meat-one may ask, “How do you do that?” I have an answer for that question. The answer is, “Beautifully.” Also “layishly,” “lovingly,” and, above all, “expeditiously.” I don’t mean we shirk our work. I just mean that it doesn’t take long to do it; and so, after we had pleased each other powerfully, and lounged around for a while afterwards languidly, and even showered sharingly (a wholly unnecessary ritual that, like most of our rituals, we do just for fun), we still had plenty of time out of that quarter of a second to study the other docking sockets on the Rock.
We had some interesting company ahead of us. I noted that one of the ships docked ahead of us was a big old original-Heechee vessel, the kind that we would have called a “Twenty” if we’d known that so huge a ship existed, back in the old days. We didn’t just spend that time rubbernecking. We’re shared-time programs, you know. We can easily do a dozen things at once. So I also kept in touch with Albert, to check on whether there were any new transmissions from the core, and make sure there was nothing from the Wheel, and keep in touch with a dozen other interests of one kind or another; while Essie ran her own search-and-merge scans. So by the time our locking ring mated with one of those bird-pecked holes that were actually the berthing ports for the asteroid, we were both in a pretty good mood and ready to party.
One of the (many) advantages of being what dear Portable-Essie and I are is that we didn’t have to unfasten seat belts and check seals and open locks. We don’t have to do anything much. We don’t have to move our storage fans around-they stay right where they are, and we go where we like through the electrical circuits of whatever kind of place we happen to be plugged into. (Usually that’s the True Love when we’re traveling, which we usually are.) If we want to go farther than that, we can go by radio, but then we’re up against that tiresome lag in round-trip communications.
So we docked. We plugged in to Wrinkle Rock’s systems. We were there.
Specifically, we were on Level Tango, Bay Forty-something of the tired old asteroid, and we were not by any means alone. The party had begun. The joint was jumping. There were a dozen people gathered to greet us-people like us, I mean-wearing party hats or holding party drinks, singing, laughing. (There were even a couple of meat people in sight, but they wouldn’t even discern that we had arrived for many milliseconds yet.) “Janie!” I shouted at one, hugging her; and “Sergei, golubka!” Essie cried, hugging another; and right then, while we were in the first moment of greeting and hugging and being happy, a nasty new voice snapped, “Hey, Broadhead.”