She is a wonderful woman, my Essie. Real or not.
She was also quite right, in every way that one could logically argue, so I succumbed to logic. I can’t say that I really felt cheerful, but the novocaine had, at least, dulled the pain-whatever that real pain was—enough so that I could go through the motions of having a good time. I did. I danced. I partied. I went whooping from one cluster of old machine-stored friends to another, and I joined Essie and half a dozen others in the Blue Hell. A bunch of people were dancing slowly to music that the rest of us didn’t hear-Julio Cassata was one of them, moving zombielike around the floor with a pretty little Oriental girl in his arms. It didn’t seem to bother the dancers when we began singing old songs. I sang right along with the rest, even when they switched to ancient Russian ballads about trolleybuses and the road to Smolensk—it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known the words because, as I say, when you’re operating in gigabit space you know just about anything you want to, at the moment you want to know about it . . . and if in my case I didn’t, Albert Einstein would be sure to come and tell me.
I felt his tap on my shoulder as we were leaning on the old piano, and looked up to see his smiling face. “Very good voice, Robin,” he complimented, “and your Russian language has become quite fluent.”
“Join us,” I invited.
“I think not,” he said. “Robin? Something has happened. All of the main broadcasting circuits went off the air about fifteen hundred milliseconds ago.”—
“Oh?” It took me a moment to understand what he was telling me. Then I swallowed and said, “Oh! They’ve never done that before!”
“No, Robin. I came here because I thought General Cassata might know something about it.” He glanced over at where Cassata and his lady were shuffling aimlessly around.
“Shall we ask him?”
Albert frowned thoughtfully at that, and before he could answer, Essie had abandoned the singing to come over. “What?” she said sharply, and when Albert had told her, said in shock, “Is not possible to break down! Many independent circuits, all multiply redundant!”
“I don’t think it was a breakdown, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert.
“Then what?” she demanded. “More silly JAWS nonsense?”
“It is certainly a JAWS order, of course, but what caused the order is, I think, something that happened on Earth. I cannot guess what it might have been.”
9
ON MOOREA
The passengers on the refugee flight from the Watch Wheel were almost all children, and it was a weepy journey. They perked up a little when they reached Earth Orbit, but not very much. Loop shuttles swarmed up to meet them, attaching themselves to the transport ship like sucklings to a sow.
It was the children’s hard luck that the first ship to reach them was from JAWS. It was full of intelligence analysts.
So the next hours were no fun for the children. The JAWS analysts “debriefed” them, stubbornly asking the same questions over and over in the hope of getting some new datum that might be somehow of use in determining just how false the “false alarm” had been.
Of course, none of the children had any such information to give. It took a long time before the JAWS agents were convinced of that, but ultimately, and reluctantly, they allowed kinder people and programs to take over.
The new shift was in charge of finding places for the children to stay on Earth. For some of the children it was easy, because they had families there. The remainder went to schools all over the planet.
Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko were almost the last to find places. They stuck together out of friendship, and even more because none of them spoke French or Russian, which ruled out the schools in Paris and Leningrad, and besides, none of them was quite ready to face the confusion of a big city. That ruled out Sydney, New York, and Chicago, and when the billeting program had found places for all the other children, they three were left.
“I wish it could be some warm place, not too far from Japan,” said Oniko. Sneezy, having given up hope of finding a Heechee colony to take him, added his vote to the request.
The billeting program was a schoolmarmy woman, middle-aged, bright-eyed, soft-spoken. Although she was human in form, Sneezy felt kindness emanating from her. She peered at her screen-which did not exist, any more than she did-puzzled over the readout for a moment, then gave Sneezy a pleased smile.
“I’ve got three vacancies on Moorea, Sternutator. That’s very near Tahiti.
“Thank you,” said Sneezy politely, looking without recognition at the map she displayed. The name of the island meant nothing to him. One human place sounded very much like any other human place, for they were all equally, wildly exotic to a Heechee boy. But Harold, glumly reconciled to the fact that he wouldn’t be taken to Peggys Planet right away, shouted from behind:
“Oh, boy! I’m with you on that one, okay? And if it’s nice, maybe you can buy it like you said, Oniko!”
The shuttle took them down through the buffeting air to a loop on New Guinea. Then came the longest leg of the trip, stratospheric jet to Faa-Faa-Faa Airport in Papeete. As a special treat for the newcomers, the human principal of the school met them and took them across to the neighbor island by boat. “Look there,” she said, holding Oniko’s hand as the children clung to the seats of the open inertial-drive whaler. “Just around the point, inside the lagoon, you see those white buildings on the beach? With the taro patch on one side, on the side of the mountain, and the papaya plantation on the other? That’s your school.”
She didn’t mention the other, grimmer buildings farther up the side of the mountain. Harold was too busy being sick over the side of the boat to ask about them, and Sneezy too consumed with tearless homesickness for the distant core, and Oniko too bludgeoned by Earth’s harsh gravity to respond to anything at all.
For Oniko it was all painful, if not indeed threatening to her health. She was crushed. On Earth her slim body did not weigh more than thirty kilos, but that was twenty-odd more than her unpracticed bones and muscles had ever been required to carry before.
All of the refugee children had needed preparation for Earth’s gravity after spending time on the Watch Wheel. For the whole long flight to Earth they had been made to drink calcium-laden things like milk, and hot chocolate, and, weirdest of all, “cheese soup,” as well as having to exercise three hours each day in the spinning treadmills and with the springy machines. For most of the children it was simply a wise precaution. For Oniko it was the only alternative to snapping bones. The doctor programs had special plans for her, and she had spent hours on end on a table while humming sonar coaxed her bones to grow stronger and electric pulses made each muscle twitch and jump. As they neared Earth orbit, the doctorthing assured her that she had recalcified quite a lot. She should be safe against fractures if she exercised reasonable care, and used a walker, and did not jump from any height. But if the bones had been propped up for their ordeal, not nearly enough had been done for her muscles. Every step tired her. Every time she stood up she ached. So the exotic thing that gave her most pleasure in her first days at Western Polynesian Preparatory School was the lagoon.
The water was scary as well as joyous, to be sure. There were living creatures under those pretty green wavelets! But she accepted the schoolthing’s promise that none of them could hurt her, and when she immersed herself in the tepid, briny lagoon, there was hardly any weight at all on her bones. She floated around in it blissfully every chance she got. In the morning before class, during recess, even after dark when the (also wondrous, also scary) “Moon” lit the ripples for her.