Estrella didn't hesitate. As soon as she saw the two of them she launched herself in their direction with a great, accurate kick against the door frame. Tan caught her as she came in range, but she grabbed a holdfast and freed herself. Her twisted face looked grim, but the news she brought was great. She looked around, then whispered: "There's a mission coming up. A big one."
Stan's heart leaped, but Tan was unresponsive. "One of these guaranteed new ones, where the Corporation will keep most of the profits?"
"Yes," she said, "and no. They know the destination, but that's all they know. They don't know how long it will take, so it will be in an armored Five, one of the ones with the special fittings no one understands—but Broadhead has said that they're essential for this trip. They will load this Five with supplies and material, enough for a very long flight, so it will be able to carry only two people. I'm going to be one of them. There's room for one other."
She was looking from one to the other of them, but mostly at Stan. Tan spoke up. "Not me," he declared. "I don't want any more mystery bus rides."
Stan ignored him. "You said they knew the destination?"
Estrella took a deep breath. "It will go to where the Heechee have gone. Where they have been hiding all this time, in the Core of the Galaxy."
Stan swallowed convulsively. You came to Gateway hoping for a big score—but this big? Not nibbling at bits and pieces the Heechee had left behind, but going straight to those vanished super-creatures themselves?
And what sort of reward might there be for that?
He didn't think. He heard himself saying, "I'll go!" almost before he realized he had made the decision. Then he turned to Tan. "Look. There's only room for two, so you take my share of our bonus, too. Go home and have a good life. Buy Naslan the prettiest wedding dress she can find." And then he added, "But tell her not to wait for me to come back."
VI
A Heechee Five was supposed to be much bigger than a Three. Not this one, though. Certainly not any roomier. One whole corner of its space was taken up with the peculiar, unexplained device that—Broadhead had said—was necessary for them to enter the Core. Another couple of cubic meters were filled with the goods they were told to deliver to the Heechee—records of Gateway explorations and Heechee finds, background material on the human race, all sorts of odds and ends along with a recorded Message to the Heechee that was meant to explain just who human beings were. Add in their year's worth of supplies for themselves, and there wasn't much room for Stan and Estrella to get around.
As far as Estrella was concerned, not much room was needed. She didn't move around much. She didn't talk much to Stan, either. She went directly to her sleep sack as soon as they took off and stayed there, coming out only to eat or excrete, and uninterested in conversation in either case. When Stan asked her if something was wrong, she said only, "Yes." When he asked her if there was anything he could do, she shook her head and said, "I have to work through this myself." When he asked her what "this" was, all she would say was, "I have to find a way to like myself again." Then she went back to her sleep shelf again, and stayed there. For three whole days, while Stan wondered and stewed.
Then, on the fourth day, Stan woke up and found Estrella studying him. She was perched on the uncomfortable forked Heechee pilots' seat, and she seemed to have been there for a long time. Experimentally he said, "Hello?" with a question mark at the end.
She gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment longer, then sighed. "Excuse me," she said, and disappeared into the head again.
She was in there for quite a while. When she came out it appeared that she had spent the time fixing herself up. She had washed her hair and brushed it still damp, and she was wearing fresh shorts and top. She gave him another of those long, unexplained looks.
Then she said, "Stan. I have something to say to you. We will be together for a long time, I think, and it would be better if there were no tensions between us. Do you want to make love to me?"
Startled, Stan said the first thing that came into his head. Which was, "I've never made love to a virgin before."
She laughed, not joyously. "That is not a problem, Stan. I'm not a virgin anymore. How do you think I got us on this mission?"
Stan's only previous coupling, when he had painfully saved up enough to afford one of Mr. Ozden's cousin's less expensive girls, had not taught him much about the arts of love. Estrella didn't know much more than he did, but inexperience wasn't their only problem. A Heechee Five wasn't designed for fucking. They tended to float away from the hold-ons the first time he tried to enter her.
But experimenting was enjoyable enough on its own, and they finally found that what worked best was for him to come to her from behind, with Estrella curling her ankles over his while he gripped her waist with both hands. Then it was simple enough.
Then, finished and still naked, they turned around to face each other and hung so, their arms wrapped around each other, without speaking. Stan found the position very comfortable. His cheek was pressed against her ear, his nose in her still damp and sweet-smelling hair. After a bit, without moving away, she asked, "Are we going to be friends, Stan?"
"Oh, yes," he said. And they were.
Now that they were friends, especially friends who fucked, their Five didn't seem so crowded anymore. They touched often, and in all kinds of ways—affectionate pats, casual rubs in passing, quick kisses, sweet strokings that, often enough, turned into more fucking. Estrella seemed to like it well enough; Stan very much.
They talked, too. About what the Core might be like. About the race of Heechee who might (or might not) still be there. About what it would be like when they came back and collected the unquestionably enormous bonus that would be due them. "It'll be billions!" Stan gloated. "Enough to have a waterfront estate like Robinette Broadhead's, with servants, and a good life—and we'll have plenty of time to enjoy it all, too, because we'll have Full Medical."
"Full Medical," Estrella whispered, sharing his dream.
"Absolutely! We won't be old at forty and dead at fifty-five. We'll live a long, long time, and—" he swallowed, aware that he was getting into a commitment—"and we'll live it together, Estrella." Which naturally led to more tender kissing, and to not so tender sex.
They had much to talk about, including the chapters in their earlier lives that had been omitted in their previous telegraphic summaries. When Stan talked about his mother's death and what it had done to his father, Estrella took his hand in hers and kissed it. When he told her about life in Istanbul she was interested, and more so when he talked about the city itself—about its centuries as the mighty Christian city of Constantinople, about the Crusaders, also Christian but eager for some loot of any kind so they elected to loot it anyway, about the Emperor Justinian and his Theodora and the—well—the Byzantine, really Byzantine, court of Byzantium. All that fascinated her. She had known nothing of the Holy Roman Empire, little enough of Rome itself, its Caesars, its conquests, its centuries of world rule. To her it was all exciting myths and legends, all the better because they were true. Or as true, anyway, as Stan's memory allowed.
While Stan, of course, knew even less of the America that had belonged to the Native Americans, before their subjugation by the white man and since. It was not the American history he had learned in school or heard about in his father's stories. Her people, Estrella told him—the ones on her mother's side—had a history of their own. Sometimes they had even built great cities like Machu Picchu and the immense Mayan structures in the south, and the mysterious works of the Anasazi nearer to her family's home. But that, she said, sounding both wistful and proud, had lasted only until the Europeans arrived and took their lands away, and often enough their lives as well, and pushed them into harsher lives in reservations, and endless, retreating battles, and finally defeat. "There wasn't much left for us, Stan," she said. "The only good thing—well, it isn't really good, is it?—is that now most of the Yankees are as poor as we."