When I came back into my ship, Hypatia was waiting for me—optically visible, in full 3-D simulation, lounging draped Roman-style on the loveseat in my main cabin and fully dressed in her fifth-century robes.
"So how did you like your investment?" she asked sociably.
"Tell you in a minute," I said, heading for the head and closing the door behind me. Of course, a closed door makes no real difference with Hypatia. She can see me wherever I am on the ship, and no doubt does, but as long as a machine intelligence acts and looks human I want it to pretend to observe human courtesies.
I wasn't long, but that was the main reason I'd come back to my ship just then. I don't like peeing in free fall, in those awful toilets they have. Hypatia keeps ours at a suitable gravity for my comfort, like the rest of the ship. Besides, it makes her nervous if I use any other toilets, because she likes to rummage through my excretions to see if I'm staying healthy.
Which she had been doing while I was in the head. When I came out she didn't seem to have moved, but she said, "Are you really going to eat their food?"
"Sure. Why not?"
"You've been running a little high on polyglycerides. Better you let me cook for you."
Teasing her, I said, "June Terple says Hans is a better cook."
"She said he's a good cook," she corrected me, "but so am I. I've been accessing him, by the way, so if there's anything you'd like to know about the crew...."
"Not about the crew, but Starminder said something about a Rebecca Shapiro. Who was she?"
"That data is not in the Phoenix shipmind's stores, Klara," she said, reproving me. "However...."
She whited out a corner of my lounge and displayed a face on it while she gave me a capsule biography of Rebecca Shapiro. She had been the dramatic soprano with a brilliant operatic future ahead of her until she got her larynx crushed in a plane crash. They'd repaired it well enough for most purposes, but she was never going to be able to sing "The Queen of the Night" again. So, with her life on Earth ruined, Rebecca had signed up for my program. "Any other questions?" Hypatia finished.
"Not about Rebecca, but I've been wondering why they call their shipmind Hans?"
"Oh, that was Mark Rohrbeck's idea; he wanted to name him after some old computer pioneer. The name doesn't matter, though, does it? I mean, why did you decide to call me Hypatia?"
I had an answer for that. "Because Hypatia of Alexandria was a smart, snotty bitch," I told her. "Like you."
"Humph," she said.
"As well as being the first great woman scientist," I added, because Hypatia always likes to talk about herself.
She did. "The first known one," she corrected. "Who knows how many of them there were whose accomplishments didn't manage to survive? Women didn't get much of a break in your ancient meat world—or, for that matter, now."
"You were supposed to be beautiful, too," I reminded her. "And you died a virgin anyway."
"By choice, Klara. Even that old Hypatia didn't care much for all that messy meat stuff. And I didn't just die. I was brutally murdered. It was a cold wet spring in the year AD 450, and a gang of those damn Nitrian monks tore me to shreds because I wasn't a Christian. Anyway," she finished, "you're the one who picked my identity. If you wanted me to be someone else you could have given me a different one."
She had me grinning by then. "I still can," I reminded her. "Maybe something like Joan of Arc?"
She shuddered fastidiously at the idea of being a Christian instead of a gods-fearing Roman pagan, and changed the subject. "Would you like me to put a call through to Mr. Tartch now?"
Well, I would and I wouldn't. I wasn't quite ready to talk to him. I shook my head. "I've been wondering about these extinct people we're trying to resurrect. Have you got any Heechee records of the planet that I haven't seen yet?"
"You bet. More than you'll ever want to watch."
"So show me some."
"Sure thing, boss," she said, and disappeared, and all at once I was standing on an outcropping of rock, looking down on a bright, green valley where some funny-looking animals were moving around.
The difference between PhoenixCorp's major simulations and mine was that mine cost more. Theirs were good enough for working purposes, because they showed you pretty much anything you wanted to see, but mine put you right in the middle of it. Mine were full sensory systems, too, so I could smell and feel as well as I could see and hear. As I stood there a warm breeze was riffling my hair, and there was a distinct reek of smoke. "Hey, Hypatia," I said, a little surprised. "Have these people discovered fire?"
"Not to use, no," she murmured in my ear. "There must've been a lightning strike up in the hills from the storm."
"What storm?"
"The one that just passed. Don't you see everything's wet?"
Not on my rock, it wasn't. The sun overhead was big and bright and very hot. It had already baked the rock dry, but I could see that the jumble of dark-green vines at the base of my rock were still dripping, and when I turned around I could see a splotch of burning vegetation on the distant hill.
The valley was more interesting. Copses of trees, or something like trees; a herd of big, shaggy things, Kodiak bear—sized but obviously vegetarians because they were industriously pushing some of the trees over to eat their leaves; a pair of rivers, a narrow, fast-moving one with little waterfalls that came down from the hills to my left and flowed to join a broader, more sluggish one on the right to make a bigger stream; a few other shaggy creatures, these quite a lot bigger still, feeding by themselves on whatever was growing in the plain—well, it was an interesting sight; maybe a little like the Great American Prairie must have looked before our forebears killed off all the wild meat animals.
The most interesting part of it was a pack of a dozen or so predators in the middle distance, circling furtively around a group of three or four creatures I couldn't easily make out. I pointed. "Are those the ones?" I asked Hypatia. And when she said they were, I told her to get me up closer.
At close range I could see the hunted ones were something that looked like pigs—well, they looked like pigs, that is, if pigs happened to have long, skinny legs and long squirrely tails. There was a mommy pig baring her teeth and trying to snap at the predators in all directions at once, and three little ones doing their best to huddle under the mother's belly. It was the predators I was paying attention to. They looked vaguely primate. That is, they had apelike faces and short tails. But they didn't look like any primate that ever lived on Earth, because they had six limbs: four that they ran on, and two more like arms, and in their sort-of hands they held sharp-edged rocks. As they got into position they began hurling the rocks at the prey.
The mother pig didn't have a chance. In a couple of minutes two of her babies were down and she was racing away with that long tail flicking from side to side like a metronome, and the surviving piglet right behind her, its tail-flicks keeping time with its mother's, and the six-limbed predators had what they had come for.
It was not a pretty scene.
I know perfectly well that animals live by eating, and I'm not sentimental about the matter—hell, I eat steak! (Not always out of a Food Factory, either.) All the same, I didn't like watching what was happening on this half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive when the wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.
So I wasn't a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch hadn't waited for me to call him and was already on the line.
Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate areas. He likes sexy talk. I don't particularly, so I tried to keep the call short. He looked as good as ever—not very tall, not exactly handsome but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about grin—and he was just two days out. That's not a lot of hard data to get out of what was more than a quarter of an hour of talk capsuled back and forth over all those light-years, I guess, but the rest is private; and when I was finished it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp people.