I gave up—I mean, I gave up about a thousand times, but each time then I'd shut up for a while, trying to calm myself down by thinking about something else—as if there was anything else I could think about!—and wondering if Marc Antony was really out there somewhere, and if so why he didn't show himself, because I was running on empty. And then I'd think, well, if he did, what could he do anyway? And then the whole thing would boil up in my mind again, and I just couldn't not go at it again with him.
It wasn't just my own life I was worrying about. Not entirely, anyway. Honest, those millions and billions who were going to die if I couldn't talk him out of it were on my mind, too. Maybe not as much. But there, all right.
A lot of what we said was just, me, "Please, Orbis!" and, him, "Screw you, Phrygia" in one variation or another. I tried all sorts of other things, too. I tried just working up a friendly conversation with him, just us two people that were stuck together and might as well be sociable. I tried asking him what did he miss most about not being organic anymore? (Not having a congregation to preach to, he said.) Another time we got to talking about how Wan came to own us. I told him about that damn Indochina-Malaysia war, and how when they bombed K.L. and the towers collapsed there were so many people getting killed that the Here After people weren't checking anybody's credit, just getting us all machine-stored as fast as they could. (Only when they did check credit I didn't have any, so Wan could buy me.) Orbis was much the same, only what did him in wasn't a war but an earthquake that dropped a big stone statue on his head. (Funny thing. It looked like what bothered him most, being a Protestant himself, was that the statue was of some Catholic priest.)
And so on, and on.
So, having done everything I could think of to get Orbis to change his mind, I more or less did it all over again. I was telling Orbis how I came to go from Homecoming Queen at Eastern New Mexico University to blackjack dealer in one of the big Los Angeles casinos to my last job, driving a subway train in Kuala Lumpur. (What a laugh that is. When Wan found out I'd driven a subway, he decided I was their best bet to learn how to pilot a spaceship. Go figure.)
Then I noticed that Orbis wasn't looking at me. He was staring at the lookplate, so I did too. (All right, no, I didn't exactly see anything on the lookplate. We didn't have a lookplate. Didn't need it, any more than we needed to display simulations of ourselves to each other. We skipped the middleman and went right to observing the inputs.)
What the inputs were showing us was the star itself.
Most stars look ordinary enough. This one wasn't ordinary. It looked to be eye-hurtingly white and scarily hot, and I could just imagine what it would be like if it did, in fact, blow itself to smithereens. I gave up. "Marc Antony," I said, "I give up. Show yourself. It's time for you to take over."
He didn't do that. He didn't show himself. He just whispered in my ear—all right, he "whispered" in my "ear"—and what he said, the son of a bitch, was, "No need. You're doing reasonably well."
I wasn't. I knew I wasn't. He knew I wasn't. I sighed and went back to what he said I was doing reasonably well at. I said, "Well, shit, Orbis—oh, sorry."
He said mildly, "There's nothing in the Commandments against having a dirty mouth. Say what you want to say, Phrygia."
"I was going to say I don't know what your problem is. If I wanted to die, I'd do it.'
He said reprovingly, "Suicide is sinful. I don't want to add to my burden of sins when I face my Judge."
"But blowing up a star and killing millions of people—"
"Not millions of people. They're mostly Heechee."
"Again shit. So, murdering even one single human being, are you saying that's not a sin?"
"Haven't I answered that already?" His voice sounded absent-minded. He was. He wasn't giving me much attention, because his look was on the piloting plate.
What I noticed was that, in his concentration on the image of that nasty-looking star on the lookplate, he had set his end of the triggering servomodule down. That appeared to he my best chance yet. I sidled over toward it, as inconspicuously as I could....
Not inconspicuously enough. He looked up and gave me one of those bullshit smiles. "Do you want the trigger? Help yourself. It might work if you push the button. It doesn't matter if it does."
I glowered at him. "What are you talking about?"
He sighed. "Oh, Phrygia, haven't you figured it out? Wan knows how I feel about suicide. He wouldn't trust me to do the job. He put it on a timer. I don't have to pull the button, it's going to blow anyway. I don't have to do anything at all. I can just let it happen. And do you know what that means?"
I didn't. He could see that was so, so he explained. "It means that if I die, no matter how many people die with me, it will not be due to an act of sin. You see," he said, sounding more like a lawyer than some godly person talking about his own death, "I've given this a lot of thought. If I take any action at all to change things it means that when I die an act of volition is included. That makes it suicide, and I don't want that on my soul. Do you understand me so far?"
I didn't, and I said so, but he went right on anyway. "But there may be a way out of that. At least, I hope so."
Then he put his hand on the ship's piloting controls—yeah, yeah, I mean he put his "hand" on the "controls"—and the little bits of actual physical trash on the ship's floor suddenly raised themselves up and floated in the air. "What the hell are you doing?" I yelled.
He didn't answer that directly. "You might prefer to leave now," he told me. "Your friend who's hiding, too." Pop! Marc Antony at once displayed himself, standing right beside me and, for the first time in my experience, looking almost baffled.
He didn't let it interfere with business, though. "You're flying the ship right into that star, Mr. McClune," he said. "Why are you doing that?"
"Actually," Orbis corrected him, "I've already done so. I believe we are now in what is called the star's photosphere."
We were certainly in some inhospitable place. Everything around me began to warp and twist and turn fuzzy—whether because the ship was physically stressed or because the star's radiation was interfering with our simulations I did not know.
"We don't want to leave this bomb thing around where the same thing might happen all over again, do we?" Orbis was saying. "Better turn it into plasma and get it over with." Then he looked up, all twisted out of shape and blurry around the edges, but with the biggest, warmest smile I'd seen from him yet. The last thing I heard from him was, "There is no doubt that suicide's a sin, but I'm pretty sure that a man can unsinfully give his own life if it's in order to save others—"
And then I didn't hear any more from him.
24
On the Way to Forever
I
Stan and Estrella's trip back to Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Fourteen took them no longer than the trip out. When the ship's port began to open they heard a puzzling noise, something like the patter of a drenching rain, something like the buzzing of many bees, that came from outside the ship. Then they saw what was making it. At least a thousand Heechee, maybe more than that, filled every open space around the landing area to welcome them back, doing their best to applaud them with stringy Heechee hands that had never been designed for such work.