"The potential to evolve, right. But whether they did or not we just don't know."
She didn't answer that. She just sighed. Then she said, "As long as you're here, would you like a look around?"
"If I won't be in the way," I said.
Of course I was in the way. June Terple didn't let it show, but some of the others barely gave me the courtesy of looking up when we were introduced. There were eight of them altogether, with names like Julia Ibarruru and Mark Rohrbeck and Humphrey Mason-Manley and Oleg Kekuskian and—well, I didn't have to try to retain them all; Hypatia would clue me as needed. Julia was floating in a harness surrounded by fifteen or twenty 3-D icons that she was busy poking at and glowering at and poking at again, and she gave me no more than a quick and noncommital nod. If my name meant anything to her, or to most of the others, they didn't show any signs of being impressed. Especially Rohrbeck and Kekuskian didn't, because they were sound asleep in their harnesses when we peeked in on them, and Terple had a finger to her lips. "Third shift," she whispered when we'd closed the flaps on their cubicles and moved away. "They'll be waking up for dinner in a little while, but we should let them get their sleep. And there's only one other. Let's go find her."
On the way to that one other member of the crew Hypatia was whispering bits of biography in my ear. Kekuskian was the quite elderly bisexual astrophysicist; Rohrbeck the quite young and deeply depressed program designer, whose marriage had just come painfully apart. And the one remaining person was—
Was a Heechee.
I didn't have to be told that. Once you've seen any one Heechee you know what they all look like, skeletally thin front-to-back, squarish, skull-like face, a data pod hanging between its legs where, if it were male, his balls should be, and if female (as this one turned out to be) there shouldn't be anything much at all. Her name, Terple said, was Starminder, and as we entered her chamber she was working at a set of icons of her own. But as soon as she heard my name, she wiped them and barreled over to me to shake my hand. "You are very famous among persons in the Core, Gelle-Klara Moynlin," she informed me, hanging on to my hand for support. "Because of your Moynlin Citizen Ambassadors, you see. When your Rebecca Shapiro person came to the Core I met her. She was quite informative about human beings; indeed, it was because of her that I volunteered at once to come out. Do you know her?"
I tried to remember Rebecca Shapiro. I had put up grant money for a good many batches of recruits since I funded the program, and she would have had to be one of the earliest of them. Starminder saw my uncertainty and tried to be helpful. "Young woman. Very sad. She sang music composed by your now-dead Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for our people, which I almost came to enjoy."
"Oh, right, that Rebecca," I said, not very honestly. By then I'd paid the fare to the Core for—what?—at least two or three hundred Rebeccas or Carlos or Janes who volunteered to be Citizen Ambassadors to the Heechee in the Core because they had lives that were in shambles. That was a given. If their lives hadn't been, why would they want to leave the people and places they couldn't ever come back to?
Because, of course, the Core was time-dilated, like any black hole.
I knew what that meant. When you were time-dilated in the Core, where a couple of centuries of Outside time went by every day, the problems you had left behind got really old really fast. Time dilation was better than suicide—though, when you came to think of it, it was actually pretty much a kind of reverse suicide. You didn't die yourself, but every troublesome person you'd ever known did while you were gone.
I wish all those Citizen Ambassadors of mine well. I hope it all works out for them ... but being in a black hole hadn't done a thing for me.
Once I'd met all the people on PhoenixCorp, there wasn't much else to see. I had misjudged my budget-watcher. Terple hadn't been particularly spendthrift after all. If you didn't count the opulent plantings—and they were there primarily to keep the air good—PhoenixCorp actually was a pretty bare-bones kind of spacecraft. There were the sleeping quarters for the help, and some common rooms—the big one I'd come into when I first entered, plus a sort of dining room with beverage dispensers and netting next to the hold-ons to keep the meals from flying away, a couple of little rooms for music or virtuals when the people wanted some recreation. The rest of it was storage and, of course, all the machinery and instrumentation PhoenixCorp needed to do its job. Terple didn't show me any of the hardware. I didn't expect her to. That's the shipmind's business, and that sort of thing stays sealed away where no harm can come to it. So, unless somebody had been foolish enough to open up a lot of compartments that were meant to stay closed, there wouldn't have been anything to see.
When we were finished she finally insisted on that cup of tea—really that capsule of tea, that is—and while we were drinking it, holding with one hand to the hold-ons, she said, "That's about it, Klara. Oh, wait a minute. I haven't actually introduced you to our shipmind, have I? Hans? Say hello to Ms. Moynlin."
A deep, pleasant male voice said, "Hello, Ms. Moynlin. Welcome aboard. We've been hoping you'd visit us."
I said hello back to him and left it at that. I don't particularly like chatting with machine intelligences, except my own. I finished my tea, slid the empty capsule into its slot and said, "Well, I'll get out of your way. I want to get back to my own ship for a bit anyway."
Terple nodded, without asking why. "We're going to have dinner in about an hour. Would you like to join us? Hans is a pretty good cook."
That sounded like as good an idea as any, so, "That would be fine," I told her.
Then, as she was escorting me to the docking port, she gave me a side-wise look. "Listen," she said, "I'm sorry we bombed out on the radio search. It doesn't necessarily mean that the Crabbers never got civilized. After all, if somebody had scanned Earth any time before the twentieth century they wouldn't have heard any radio signals there, either, but the human race was fully evolved by then."
"I know that, June."
"Yes." She cleared her throat. "Do you mind if I ask you a question?"
I said, "Of course not," meaning that she could ask anything she wanted to, but whether or what I might I choose to answer was another matter entirely.
"Well, you put a lot of money into getting Phoenix started, just on the chance that there might have been an intelligent race there that got fried when their sun went super. What I'm wondering is why."
The answer to that was simple enough. I mean, what's the point of being about the richest woman in the universe if you don't have a little fun with your money now and then? But I didn't say that to her. I just said, "What else do I have to do?"
III
Well, I did have things to do. Lots of them, though most of them weren't very important.
The only one that was really important—to me—was overseeing what was going on on the little island off Tahiti that I live on when I'm home. It's a nice place, the way I've fixed it up. Most of my more-or-less family is there and when I'm away I really miss them.
Then there are other important things, like spending some time with Bill Tartch, who was a fairly sweet man, not to mention all the others like Bill Tartch who have come along over the years. Or such things as all the things I can buy with my money, plus figuring out what to do with the power that that kind of money gives. Put them all together, I had plenty to do with my life. And I had plenty of life to look forward to, too, especially if I let Hypatia talk me into immortality.
So why wasn't I looking forward to it?
That's the trouble with questions I can't answer. I keep trying to find answers for them.