"Right on schedule, Klara. We'll be there in ten hours or so." She didn't move—that is, her simulation didn't move—but I could hear the clink of ice going into a glass in the galley. "I've been accessing the PhoenixCorp shipmind, if you want to see what's going on?"
"Do it," I said, but she was already doing it. She waved again—pure theater, of course, but Hypatia's full of that—and at once we got a new set of graphics. As the little serving cart rolled in and stopped just by my right hand we were looking through PhoenixCorp's own visuals, at a dish-shaped metal spiderweb. Little things were crawling across it.
I could form no real picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare it with. I didn't have to compare. I knew it was big.
"Have one for yourself," I said, lifting my glass.
She gave me that patient, exasperated look and let it pass. Sometimes she does simulate having a simulated drink with me while I have a real one, but this time she was in her schoolteacher mode. "As you can see, Klara," she informed me, "the shipment of optical mirror pieces has arrived and the drones are putting them in place on the parabolic dish. They'll be getting first light from the planet in an hour or so, but I don't think you'll care about seeing it. The resolution will be poor until they get everything put together; that should take about eighteen hours. Then we should have optimal resolution to observe the planet."
"For four days," I said, taking a pull at my glass.
She gave me a different look—still the schoolteacher, but now a schoolteacher pulling up with a particularly annoying student. "Hey, Klara. You knew there wouldn't be much observing time. It wasn't my idea to come all the way out here, anyway. We could have watched the whole thing from your island."
I swallowed the rest of my nightcap and stood up. "That's not how I wanted to do it," I told her. "The trouble with you simulations is that you don't appreciate what reality is like. Wake me up an hour before we get there."
And I headed for my stateroom, with my big round under-occupied bed. I didn't want to chat with Hypatia just then. The main reason I had kept her busy giving me financial advice so long was that it prevented her from giving me advice on other things, like the thing she was always trying to talk me into. Or that one other big thing that I really needed to make up my mind about, and couldn't.
The cart with my black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice—make that quote fresh-squeezed unquote orange juice, but Hypatia was too good at her job for me to be able to tell the difference—was right by my bed when she woke me up. "Ninety minutes to linkup," she said cheerily, "and a very good morning to you. Shall I start your shower?"
I said, "Um." Ninety minutes is not a second too long for me to sit and swallow coffee, staring into space, before I have to do anything as energetic as getting into a shower. But then I looked into the wall mirror by the bed, didn't like what I saw, and decided I'd better spruce myself up a little bit.
I was never what you'd call a pretty woman. My eyebrows were a lot too heavy, for one thing. Once or twice over the years I'd had the damn things thinned down to fashion-model proportions, just to see if it would help any. It didn't. I'd even messed around with my bone structure, more cheekbones, less jaw, to try to look a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of years I'd gone blonde, tried redhead once but checked it out and made them change it back before I left the beauty parlor. They were all mistakes. They didn't work. Whenever I looked at myself, whatever the cosmetologists and the medical fixer-uppers had done, I could still see the old Gelle-Klara Moynlin hiding there behind all the trim. So screw it. For the last little while I'd gone natural.
Well, pretty natural, anyway. I didn't want to look old.
I didn't, of course. By the time I was bathed and hair fixed and wearing a simple dress that showed off my actually pretty decent legs, I looked as good as I ever had. "Almost there," Hypatia called. "You better hang onto something. I have to match velocities and it's a tricky job." She sounded annoyed, as she usually does when I give her something hard to do. She does it, of course, but she complains a lot. "Faster than light I can do, slower than light I can do, but when you tell me to match velocity with somebody who's doing exactly c you're into some pretty weird effects, so—oh, sorry."
"You should be," I told her, because that last lurch had nearly made me spill my third cup of coffee. "Hypatia? What do you think, the pearls or the cameo?"
She did that fake two or three second pause, as though she really needed any time at all to make a decision, before she gave me the verdict. "I'd wear the cameo. Only whores wear pearls in the daytime."
So of course I decided to wear the pearls. She sighed but didn't comment. "All right," she said, opening the port. "We're docked. Mind the step, and I'll keep in touch."
I nodded and stepped over the seals into the PhoenixCorp mother ship.
There wasn't any real "step." But there was a sharp transition from the comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of PhoenixCorp. My stomach did a quick little flip-flop of protest, but I grabbed a hold-on bar and looked around.
I don't know what I'd expected to find, maybe something like the old Gateway asteroid. PhoenixCorp had done itself a lot more lavishly than that, and I began to wonder if I hadn't maybe been a touch too open-handed with the financing. The place certainly didn't smell like Gateway. Instead of Gateway's sour, ancient fugg it had the wetly sweet smell of a greenhouse. That was because there were vines and ferns and flowers growing in pots all around the room—spreading out in all directions, because of that zero-gee environment, and if I'd thought about that ahead of time I wouldn't have worn a skirt. The only human being in sight was a tall, nearly naked black man who was hanging by one toe from a wall bracket, exercising his muscles with one of those metal-spring gadgets. ("Humphrey Mason-Manley," Hypatia whispered in my ear. "He's the archeologist-anthropologist guy from the British Museum.") Without breaking his rhythm Humphrey gave me a look of annoyance.
"What are you doing here, miss? No visitors are permitted. This is private property, and—"
Then he got a better look at me and his expression changed. Not to welcoming exactly, but to what I'd call sort of unwillingly impressed. "Oh, crikey," he said. "You're Gelle-Klara Moynlin, are you not? That's a bit different. Welcome aboard, I guess."
II
It wasn't the most affable greeting I'd ever had. However, when Humphrey Mason-Manley woke up the head engineer for me, she turned out to be a lot more courteous. She didn't have to be, either. Although I had put up the seed money to get the project started, PhoenixCorp was set up as a nonprofit quango, owned by nobody but itself. I wasn't even on the board.
The boss engineer's name, Hypatia whispered to me, was June Thaddeus Terple—Doctor Terple. I didn't really need the reminder. Terple and I had met before, though only by screen. In person she was taller than I'd thought. She looked to be about the age I looked to be myself, which is to say, charitably, thirtyish. She was wearing a kind of string bikini, plus a workman's belt of little pouches around her waist so she could keep things in it. She took me into her office, which was a sort of wedge-shaped chamber with nothing much visible in it but hand-holds on the walls and a lot more of those flowering plants. "Sorry I wasn't there to meet you, Dr. Moynlin," she said.