When Stan woke up, he immediately wished he hadn't. He had little previous experience of hangovers, but he recognized the symptoms at once. When his eyes were open enough, he identified Estrella standing over him, but much too close, and holding something out to him, but he could not tell what. He checked his memory, found it empty and muttered weakly, "Hon, I'm sorry."
Or thought he had. Estrella didn't seem to have heard. She not only was not appropriately sympathetic, she seemed somehow pleased about something. "Come on," she said, hardly comfortingly at all, "drink this. I want to tell you something."
The sense of what she was saying penetrated to Stan's brain. It didn't elevate his mood. In Stan's experience, when someone said she wanted to tell him something it was unlikely to be something he wanted to hear. Puzzlingly, though, Estrella didn't seem to be angry or offended or any of the other things Stan associated with that sort of remark. She was grinning. Her eyes were—yes—dancing. "Oh, for God's sake," she was saying. "Are you going to drink this or not?"
It appeared to be a cup of coffee. Not the good, thick Turkish kind, but the only marginally less good kind that Americans liked to drink at breakfast. He swallowed it as rapidly as he could, but Estrella was already tapping her fingers before he got it all down. "Well?" she demanded. "Sigfrid said he'd get Marc to put something in it."
Stan moved his head experimentally. Apparently the chef had. The blinding pain was gone without a trace. The inside of his mouth still tasted of ancient cigar ends, and he had a sudden overpowering thirst—
For which Estrella was ready. She was handing him a cup of something that fizzed. "Sigfrid said this would help, okay?" Sipping, he nodded. "So guess what? I had a long talk with Hypatia while Klara was busy with her guests. Did you know Klara had practically a nervous breakdown after the tsunami ruined her island?" Stan shook his head, which happily did not fall off. "That's why she's on this planet. Sigfrid suggested she come here. At first he thought she might want to set up something like her island—for orphans, you know?"
Stan experimentally stretched his muscles. Everything seemed to be working all right. He said, "Strell, hon, is this going to be a long story? Because I'm kind of hungry."
"Almost done. Klara said no. Said she couldn't face being a mommy.
"Then she met us."
Stan hadn't exactly stopped paying attention, but it was true that his mind was filling with visions of ham with red eye gravy and stacks of fries. When he realized Estrella had stopped talking and was regarding him he blinked. "Oh. Right. She took an interest in you."
"In the baby, mostly. So do you know what the mother-in-law stuff was about?"
"The baby?" he hazarded.
"Sort of. If Klara was your mother-in-law or my mother-in-law—or both our mothers-in-law—what would that make her to the baby?"
The scales fell from his eyes. "Oh, my God," he said wonderingly. "She wants to be the baby's grandma."
Estrella was nodding vigorously. "Exactly. What do you think about that?"
Stan didn't hesitate. "Oh, absolutely sure," he said. "She'll be good at it. Now can we get some breakfast?"
IV
Estrella and Stan no longer lacked for company. People kept calling and dropping in. Stan didn't care for it, but Estrella seemed pleased. She told Stan, "You know, this is kind of nice. Back home people were visiting all the time—for a cup of mate, or to bring back something they borrowed, or just to sit and gossip for a few minutes. I miss that. Don't you?" Since Stan had never had any experience of that sort of neighborliness he had no good answer except to smile, and pat her on the shoulder, and ask brightly if it wasn't getting close to time for lunch.
Then, when Stan was in the drencher, he came out and Estrella was waiting. "Hon? Rowena McClune called."
He stopped drying himself. "What about?"
"Well, she was real interested in the baby, and I invited her to come over. So she wants to do it now."
Stan groaned. "Strell, don't we have enough—"
"So I told her to come away. I liked her, Stan. You'd better put some clothes on."
While he was doing it he heard the door. When he came out, there she was, sitting in the overstuffed chair (but, he noticed, revealing her immaterial status because she put no dent in it). When they turned Stork on she seemed really fascinated, not only by the chubby little image with the Buddha smile that floated before, but in Stan's account of all the changes it had gone through. She was a good listener. Good talker, too; she was perfectly willing to answer every one of Estrella's questions about her other life. "Well," she said, "the first part, right after I died, wasn't too interesting. I just fooled around, like everybody else. Then I got tired of just having fun, the way most of the other machine-stored were doing, and I found out there weren't too many other kinds of things for a woman without much education to do. That could be dealt with, though. There were enough people in storage by then, some of them serious-minded, to have started some kind of correspondence-school things. I took courses. I don't know if organic Harvard would have let me into graduate school, with what I had in the way of a baccalaureate, but the machine-stored Harvard did, and before you knew it I had a Ph.D. Three of them, in fact, because I kept getting interested in different things."
Stan cut in. "That's all you did? Study?"
"I thought it was quite a lot, Stan. Wouldn't hurt you to try it, either."
Caught by surprise, Stan could only think of saying, "But, Rowena, I'm just about going to be a father."
"And you're barely eighteen years old," she reminded him. Then smiled. "We can talk about that another time. And, yes, I did do some other things. I simulated myself, and went back to see how Orbis was doing, with a face that wasn't my own. He was in mourning. Real mourning. I could see that my organic death had hit him hard. And he wasn't doing very well. His congregation was drifting away.
"But he was doing his best, because he thought they needed him.
"So my conscience began to hurt a little and I went back to school. Divinity school, this time. I became a fully credentialed minister of God. Did that for a while, then I realized I wasn't making much progress converting the unsaved—even tried it with Heechee, you know. With no luck at all.
"So I got Sigfrid to teach me something about psychology. To help me reason with the doubters, you know. And to help me with a few other things." She gazed benignly at Estrella and Stan. They were sitting together, rapt, holding hands. "Like, for instance, I can perform weddings. I can conduct a burial service if anybody wants one—in fact, I was doing it while we were talking at the party. It was for a man from old Earth who didn't like the Heechee way of disposing of the dead."
Stan looked doubtful. "I guess I don't know what that is."
She gave him a wry look. "Maybe you don't want to know. Actually, they put the body in one of those fish ponds—you've seen them? With those toothy fish? So the fish eat the corpse, and then—this is the sticky part—after a while the mourners eat one of the fish."
She sat silent for a moment while Stan and Estrella digested that news. It didn't seem to agree with them. Then she flashed them another smile. "Did I mention that I can also perform weddings?"
Stan swallowed "Dr. McClune, neither of us is very religious," he offered.
"I didn't think you were, Stan. I just thought that the two of you really loved each other, and that you might want to make it on the record."
"Well," Stan said, looking at Estrella, "when you put it like that, I guess—"
"No," Estrella said firmly. "We don't guess. We definitely know that, yes, we positively do want to get married. So will you do it for us, please? And as soon as possible?"