“You mean I can go?” Audee demanded.
“Of course you can go. There is a ship already en route to us here, part of a flotilla of supplies, personnel, and Ancient Ancestors, on their way outside. You can join them. By the time they transit the ergosphere, the elapsed time in the outside Galaxy will have been—” he ducked his head to communicate with his Ancient Ancestor “—in terms of the rotation of your planet around its primary, forty-four and one-half years.
8
UP IN CENTRAL PARK
And while I was listening, and speaking, and doing, and being in all those other places engaged in all those other things-hearing Audee’s story, fretting about General Julio Cassata, wandering, partying-this was what was happening in slow time between Klara and me:
I marched up to Gelle-Klara Moynlin with a wide, fond smile on my (doppel’s) face. “Hello, Klara,” I said.
She looked up in astonishment. “Robin! How nice to see you again!” She disengaged herself from the men she was with and came toward me. As she reached up to kiss me, I had to back away. There are disadvantages to being a machine-stored person who is trying to be affectionate with a meat person, and insubstantiality is one of them. You can love ‘em. You can’t kiss ‘em.
“Sorry,” I started to say, and at the same moment she looked repentant and said, “Oh, hell, I forgot. We can’t do that, can we? But you’re looking really well,, Robin.”
I said, “I look any way I want to look. I’m dead, you know.”
It took her a minute to grin back at my grin, but she did it. “Then you’ve got good taste. I hope I do that well when they can me.” And up from behind her was coming Dane Metclmikov.
He said, “Hello, Robin.” He said it neutrally. Not thrilled to see me again, not furious, either. He looked about the way Dane Metchnikov had always looked at everybody and everything-not very interested, or interested only to the extent that that person or thing might help or hinder whatever Dane was planning on.
I said, “Sorry we can’t shake hands.” “Sorry” seemed to be my favorite word, so I used it again: “Sorry you got stuck in the black hole. I’m glad you got out.” And to set the record straight, because Metchnikov was always a guy who liked to keep the record straight, he said:
“I didn’t get out. Klara came and rescued us.”
It was only then that I recalled what Albert had said about Metchnikov seeking legal advice.
You have to remember that I wasn’t actually saying any of this. My doppel was.
When you’re speaking through a doppel, there are two ways to do it. One is to start the doppel off and let it carry on the conversation all by itself-it will do that as well as you can. The other way is when you’re fidgety, nervous, and impatient and want to hear what’s going on as soon as you can. That was the way I was, and what you do then is you prompt the doppel. That meant I was feeding lines to my doppel in a fraction of a millisecond or so, and the doppel was saying them at meat speed. You get the picture? It was something like a singalong, where the bunch doesn’t know the words and somebody has to line them out:
“In a cavern, in a canyon—”
“IN A CAVERN, IN A CANYON—”
“—excavating for a mine—”
“—EXCAVATING FOR A MINE—”
“—lived a miner, forty-niner—”
and so on, only I wasn’t leading a crowd of boozers around a piano, I was feeding sentences to my doppel.
In between the sentences I had plenty of time to think and observe. What I mostly observed was Klara, but I spared attention for the two men she was with, too.
Although their movements were slower than snails, I had seen that Metchnikov was putting his hand out to be shaken. That was a good sign, in itself. I would have taken it to mean that he was not going to hold it against me that I had abandoned him, as well as Klara and the others, in that black hole . . . if it weren’t for the fact that he had been talking to lawyers.
The other man with Klara was a total stranger. When I took his measure, I didn’t like the measurements much. The son of a bitch was good-looking. He was tall. He was bronzed and smiling and paunchless, and he was in the process of resting a hand in a familiar way on Klara’s shoulders again, even as she was talking to me.
I explained to myself that that wasn’t important. Klara had been holding hands with Dane Metchnikov, too, and why not? They’d been old friends-unfortunately, once a little more than friends. It was only natural. This other guy put his hand on her shoulder? Well, that didn’t mean anything at all, really. It was only a friendly gesture. He could have been a relative, or even, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something, there to help her over the shock of encountering me again.
Looking at Klara’s face didn’t clear any of the questions up, although I did enjoy looking at it and remembering all the other times I’d looked at it, in love.
She hadn’t changed. She still looked exactly like my eternal and deeply loved One (or at least one of not very many) True Love. The present Gelle-Kiara Moynlin was indistinguishable from the Kiara I had left in the space near the kugelblitz, just after I died-who in turn had been hardly a hair different from the one I had dumped in the black hole decades earlier.
It wasn’t just Full Medical that accounted for the way she looked. Meat-Essie was an example of what Full Medical could do. She looked really youthful and adorable, too. But although they can do marvelous things with meat, the clock doesn’t stop entirely. It just gets set back every once in a while. And, for most people, as long as you’re getting restored, you might as well get improved a little at the same time-a perkier nose or a natural (natural!) wave in the hair; even Essie did that, a little.
Klara had not. The black eyebrows were still just a smidgen too thick, the figure stockier than (I remembered) she herself had wished it. She hadn’t been kept young. She had stayed young, and there was only one way to do that.
She had been back in the black hole. She had voluntarily returned to the place where I had marooned her, where time slowed to a crawl, and all the decades that had passed for me had been only weeks or months for her.
I could hardly take my eyes off her. Although it had been the better part of a century since Klara and I had been lovers, I had no trouble at all in seeing-in memory only; I did nothing rude-the texture of Kiara’s skin, and the dimples at the base of her spine, and the touch and taste of her. It was a funny sensation. I wasn’t exactly lusting for her bod. I wasn’t on the point of ripping her clothes off and bedding her right there on the turf of Central Park, with the cherry tree in full blossom overhead and Metchnikov and the paunchless, good-looking other guy gazing on. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t really want to make love to her at all, at least not in any urgent or tangible sense. The reason wasn’t just because it was (of course) impossible. Impossibility doesn’t matter to hominess.
The thing was, whatever I myself wanted or didn’t want to do with Klara, I certainly didn’t want either Metchnikov or the other guy doing any of it.
I know what that is. The name for it is “jealousy,” and I have to concede I’ve had a lot of it in my time.
Dane Metchnikov had managed to get a whole sentence out: “You look a lot different to me,” he had said.
He wasn’t smiling. That didn’t mean much, because even in the old days on Gateway Metchnikov had never been a smiley sort of guy. And, of course, I looked different to him, because he hadn’t seen me in a lot longer time than Klara-not since Gateway itself.
I could see that it was just about time to explore this question of lawyers, so I did what I always did when I needed advice and information fast. I yelled for it: “Albert!”