The crowd wasn't entirely Heechee. In the forefront of the crowd were the twenty or thirty human beings that were Forested Planet's human population, and in the forefront of the forefront was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, actually having come out of her home for the purpose of greeting them, arms already outspread to hug Estrella.
The crowd was not unruly—unsurprising, since they were mainly Heechee. They didn't press around the returning heroes for pats or handshakes or to snatch the odd button off their clothing. They contented themselves with continuing to clap. That is, everyone but Klara did. She would not be denied. She swept past everyone else to give Estrella that hug—as copiously as she could, considering that Estrella's belly was the size it had become—and even took time for a briefer hug for Stan. Then she was tugging them to a waiting car, the crowd parting decorously to let them through.
The car wasn't the usual Heechee tricycle. It wasn't Heechee at all. It was four-wheeled and human-made—imported-from-Earth human-made—though not very like the vehicles Stan used to dodge on the streets of Istanbul. It was more comfortable than those and a lot quieter and, Stan was certain, a very great deal more expensive than any vehicle he had ever been in before, even if you didn't count what Klara had to have paid to bring it in from Outside.
There wasn't anybody at the steering wheel until Klara saw Stan staring at the empty seat. She called to the air, "Quit clowning around, Hypatia. Let Stan get a look at you." And, when her shipmind instantly appeared, "Thanks. Was that so hard?"
Hypatia's simulation didn't turn around. "I just thought you might like a little privacy."
Klara gave her a grunt. "As if you were going to give us any. Now shut up so Estrella and Stan can tell us about their adventures."
Stan was willing. He began at the beginning and, by the time they were climbing the spiral way to their apartment, had reached the point where Marc and the female pilot had brought them to the point in space where the anonymous but definitely bomb-bearing ship was slowly circling Planetless Very Large Very Hot White Star. "And then," he told her, "the two of them sort of projected themselves onto the bomb ship. That was all we could see. Anyway until it turned around. Broke out of orbit and began to nosedive, picking up speed all the way, right down into the big old star's something-or-other sphere. The star didn't even hiccough. Marc said the little ship was vaporized right away, the bomb thing and all, so that not only isn't it dangerous anymore, it doesn't even exist. I don't know. Marc sees the inputs directly, doesn't have to display them on a lookplate, so he can see better than I. All I saw was bright light."
"And that's the only one they had?"
"I don't know. Maybe not. He had to have had some others to blow up those other things, but if he did they're still somewhere on Arabella and Marc'll find them."
There was a moment of silence, and then Hypatia piped up from the front seat: "His name was Orbis McClune."
Stan looked puzzled. "Whose name?"
"The one who dove the ship into the star. Some of Marc's people located a woman who used to be married to him. He was a minister, before he got killed."
"Huh," Stan said, faintly disgruntled. "Marc didn't tell me."
"He didn't know until he got back here, Stan," Klara said as the car stopped before a familiar door. "Anyway here's where you get off."
Stan jumped out, tenderly helping Estrella get out of her seat. Puffing, she turned and asked politely, "Do you want to come in for a minute?"
Klara shook her head. "Hell, no. I mean, my God, the last thing you need right now is company. Only...."
Halfway out of the car, Estrella turned to look at her. "Only what?"
"Well," Klara said, "while you kids were gone, I did a lot of thinking about you. About babies. About your baby in particular."
Stan was holding Estella's hand and beginning to get a bit impatient. "So did we. Is that what you wanted to tell us?"
"Well, no." She took a deep breath. "What I wanted was to ask you if I could be your mother-in-law."
That came from about as far out of left field as anything in Stan's experience. He almost let go of Estrella's hand, caught it just in time and asked, "Whose? Mine? Or Estrella's?"
"Actually," Klara said, "both of yours." She looked suddenly in a way Klara never looked, which was embarrassed. She shook her head. "Hey, this is the wrong time to be talking about this kind of thing. You kids go on in, I'll talk to you later." And, as the car door began to close, "And, listen, it's good to have you back."
It was good to be home, too. They jumped in the drencher, thrilled to be bathing in hot water again. But while they were still in the chamber, Estrella paused in the middle of drying herself. "Hon?" she said. "Do you know what that was all about?"
He didn't, though, and he gave it no more than a few moments' thought. "Who knows?" he said. "Listen, let's take a look at Stork."
And they did, hungry for the sight of what the baby was doing. (Which turned out to be pretty much what it had been doing all along, namely getting bigger. In fact now quite a lot bigger.) And then, while they, rather inadequately dressed, were ordering a decent meal—actually two decent meals, one right after the other, to make up for all those months of unimproved CHON-food—the door let them know that someone was there.
It was Dr. Kusmeroglu. "How'd you get here so fast?" Estrella asked, half dressed and still chewing, as she let the doctor in.
"It was that Marc person," said Dr. Kusmeroglu, bright and eager. "You know, the cook? Is he here?" She looked around and found the answer to her own question. "Well. Anyway, he signaled Dr. von Shrink and Dr. von Shrink signaled me, so I came right over. First time I was ever in one of those new ultrafast ships. Were either of you ever—Oh, sure, of course you were. I just can't wait to hear about all you've gone through!" And then, when Stan opened his mouth to begin to tell her, she gave him a shake of her head. "But that'll have to wait, because right now Estrella and I have work to do. If you'll just go sit on the balcony for a little while, Stan...."
What she was there for was a childbirth thing, at which, Stan understood, male persons were unwelcome. Stan grabbed some clean clothes of his own and followed orders.
He wasn't cut totally out of the loop. As he dressed, he could see through the balcony door that the first thing the two women were doing was just what he had immediately done, namely to study Stork's display of the fetus. Then they disappeared from his sight, leaving him to, alternately, take in the warm breezes from the Mica Mountain and bite his lip in worriment over what the doctor might find. For months now Estrella hadn't had a proper diet, hadn't had a real doctor to look at her, hadn't had a decent bath or a haircut or a toothbrush or, for God's sake, toilet paper or—well, or anything at all that civilized people always had. And if that had had any bad effect on the baby—had, for instance, brought about any of those terrifying conditions that that damned book had told him about—
He tried to put that thought out of his head.
Fortunately none of it had. When they came out of the bedroom Estrella, too, was now fully dressed and the doctor began to talk. What Dr. Kusmeroglu had to say amounted to a lot of information about the baby's having nearly completed brain growth and why the baby had stopped kicking. (It had no choice. It had grown so large that there no longer was enough room in the uterus to kick.) "But she's all right?" Stan demanded after the first five minutes of increasingly obscure medical details.