"Of course I do," Stan said, doing his best to be reasonable, "but is that what we want to talk about right now?"
"Not if you don't want to. I was just thinking that, you know, you've never seen me in a real dress before. Salt has lots of them, too. You can see them on the ship."
Stan didn't have to say, What do you mean, on the ship? What ship? The expression on his face said it for him, and Estrella answered just as though he had asked it out loud. "The ship to Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four, of course. I'm sure we'll like it." She paused, then remembered the other thing she wanted to tell him. "Oh, yes. Salt says it's a big ship. Big enough so that you and I will have a room of our own."
The ship was big indeed. Stan was sure of that, although all he could see of the spacecraft's outside was the metal snout that protruded into its docking bay, like the lander on a Gateway ship. This one didn't seem to be a lander, though. When they got into it they found themselves in a spindle-shaped chamber with Heechee resting-props scattered about, three separate control carrels with knurled boards and viewscreens and two two-meter tall pillars stuffed with racks of, of all things, those rolled-up crystalline things the Gateway people called prayer fans. A young male Heechee was perched before one of the control boards. He looked up as Salt led them in, and spoke briskly to her. She replied in more placating tones, but without apparent success. She turned to Stan and Estrella. "He, whose name is called by Dark Smoke, wants that you two go away," she said.
"Why?" asked Stan, but Estrella took his hand.
"Come on," she whispered softly. "We don't want to make trouble." Sulkily he let her lead him back toward the outer bay, but the Heechee female, who had turned back to the male, caught sight of what they were doing.
"Stop at once," she said. "Where do you wish to go?" And then, when Estrella tried to explain that they were leaving the ship, as ordered, "No, do not do that. It is not the needed thing at this time. Dark Smoke has no adequate authority of this sort to deny you passage. You will wait while I discuss."
Discuss the two Heechee did, for rather longer than seemed reasonable to Stan. A third Heechee appeared from the entrance and immediately joined in the debate. They weren't shouting at each other, as Stan would have expected from humans trying to settle a controversial point, but all three of them sounded quite insistent as they gestured toward each other, toward the human pair and toward one of the doors at the end of the chamber.
Then the argument stopped, as though cut off by some invisible stage director, and Salt came back to the humans. "I will direct you to place of privacy chamber now," she said. "You will follow."
Estrella tarried. "What was the problem, Salt?"
"No problem. No problem now," the Heechee corrected herself. "You go to chamber. We start spacecraft. You come out later, if you so want. One thing only. If during trip to Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four you see male dressed in peculiar clothing who also is passenger you do not speak to him. He extremely tired of your kind."
5
A Home for the Old Ones
I
Let me tell you what really happened with this annoying young guy. He came into the reservation while we were busy, bold as brass. He didn't belong there, and as soon as I had a moment I was going to tell him so. But just then we were too busy to pay him much attention. We were aversion-training a leopard cub.
That always takes all the attention we have. This particular cub was a healthy little male, no more than a week old. That's a little bit young to begin the aversion training, but we'd been tracking the mother, looking for a good opportunity, since she began showing the signs that she was about to give birth. When we spotted the mother this day she had dropped off to sleep in a convenient place, at the edge of a patch of brush that wasn't large enough to conceal any other leopards. So we jumped the gun a little. We doped the mother with an airgun and borrowed her cub while she slept.
That is a job that takes all three of us. Shelly was the one who picked up the baby. Shelly was completely covered, and sweating, in a gas-proof isolation suit so the cub wouldn't get any memories of a friendly human smell. Brudy kept an eye on the mother so we wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises from her—the mother had had her own aversion training long before, but if she had awakened and seen us messing with her cub she might have broken through it.
I was the head ranger. That was because I had the best "resume" when they were hiring. In fact I had a D.V.M. Although the Old Ones weren't exactly animals, they weren't exactly people either, so a veterinarian seemed like the right person for the job. As boss, I was the one who manipulated the aversion-training images. These were 3-D simulations of an Old One, a human and a Heechee, one after another, along with a cocktail of smells of each that was released as we displayed the images. There was also a sharp little electric shock each time that made the kit yowl and struggle feebly in Shelly's arms.
Aversion training isn't actually a hard job. We do it four or five times for each cub, just to make sure, but long before we're through with the training the animals'll do their best to run away as fast as they can from any one of the images or smells, whether they're simulations or the real thing. Which is what they're supposed to do.
I don't mind handling leopard cubs. They're pretty clean, because the mother licks them all day long. So are cheetahs. The ones that really stink are the baby hyenas; that's when whoever holds the animal is glad that the gas-proof suit works in both directions. As far as other predators are concerned, lions and wild dogs are long extinct in this part of the Rift Valley, so the leopards, hyenas and cheetahs are the only carnivores the Old Ones have to worry about on their reservation. Well, and snakes. But the Old Ones are smart enough to stay away from snakes, which aren't likely to chase them, anyway, since the Old Ones are a lot too big for them to eat. Oh, and I should mention the crocs, too. But we can't train crocodiles very reliably, not so you could count on their running the other way if an Old One wandered near. So what we do is train the Old Ones themselves to stay away.
What helps us there is that the Old Ones are sort of genetically scared of open water, never having experienced any until they were taken out of the big old spacecraft where the Heechee had left them and brought here. The only reason the Old Ones would ever go near water would be that they were tormented by thirst and just had to get a drink. We never let it come to that. We've taken care of that problem by digging boreholes and setting up little solar-powered drinking fountains all over their reservation. The fountains don't produce a huge gush of water, but there's a steady flow from each fountain, a deciliter a second year in and year out, and anyway the Old Ones don't need much water. They're not very interested in bathing, for instance. You catch a really gamy Old One, which we sometimes have to do when one of them is seriously sick or injured, and you might wish you could trade it for a hyena cub.
The first indication we got that we had a visitor was when we'd given the baby leopard four or five aversion shocks, and he suddenly began to struggle frantically in Shelly's arms, nipping at her gas-proof clothing, even when he wasn't being shocked. That wasn't normal. "Let him go," I ordered. When a cub gets really antsy we don't have any choice but to call it off for the day. It isn't that they'll hurt whoever's holding them, because the gas-proof coveralls are pretty nearly bite-proof as well. But it's bad for the cubs themselves. Wild animals can have heart attacks, too.
We backed away, keeping an eye on the mom as her baby, whining, scooted over to creep under her belly and begin to suckle. What I didn't know was what had set the cub off. Then I heard it: motor and fan noises from afar, and a moment later a hovercar appeared around a copse of acacias. Leopard cubs had better hearing than people, was all. The vehicle charged right up to us and skidded to a halt, the driver digging its braking skids into the ground for a quick stop and never mind how much dust it raised or how much damage it did to the roadway.