Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used her effectuators to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn't have a skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold neckband that wouldn't be flopping around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn't argue. And while I was getting into them she asked chattily, "So did Mr. Tartch say thank you?"
I know Hypatia's tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. "For what?"
"Why, for keeping his career going," she said, sounding surprised. "He was pretty much washed up until you came along, wasn't he? So it's only appropriate that he should, you know, display his gratitude."
"You're pushing your luck," I told her, as I slipped into a pair of jeweled foot stockings. Sometimes I think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time it just wasn't justified. I didn't have to do favors to get a man. Christ, the problem was to fend them off! It's just that when it's over I like to leave them a little better off than I found them; and for Bill, true enough, a little help now and then had been useful.
But I didn't want to discuss it with her. "Talk about something else or shut up," I ordered.
"Sure, hon. Let's see. How did you like the Crabbers?"
I told her the truth. "Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy."
Hypatia giggled. "Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they're much worse than your own remote predecessors? Because I don't think Australopithecus robustus worried about whether its dinners were enjoying the meal."
We were getting into a familiar argument. "That was a long time ago, Hypatia."
"So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. Now, if you really want to take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business—"
"Not yet," I told her, as I had told her many times before. And maybe not ever.
What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat body, with all its aches and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored intelligence. Like other people I knew had done. Like Hypatia herself, though in her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of someone who had once been living meat.
It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn't getting as much pleasure as I would have liked out of living, but I certainly didn't want to die. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I would never have to.
But I wasn't prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat person could do that a machine person couldn't—well, one big one—and I wasn't prepared to abandon the flesh until I had done what the female flesh was best at. For which I needed a man ... and I wasn't at all sure that Bill Tartch was the particular man I needed.
When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking conspiratorial and expectant. "We've got about twenty percent of the optical foils in place," Terple informed me, thrilled with excitement. "Would you like to see?" She didn't wait for an answer, but commanded: "Hans! Display the planet."
The lights went dark, and there before us floated a blue and white globe the size of my head, looking as though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was out of sight off to my right. There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas I couldn't see them. On the planet itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple did something that made the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even more land on the dark side, because spots of light—artificial lights, cities' lights—blossomed all over parts of the nighttime area.
"You see, Klara?" she crowed. "Cities! Civilization!"
IV
Their shipmind really was a good cook. A fritto misto, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert, all perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly relaxing now that it had turned out we really would have something to observe.
However, there wasn't any wine to go with the meal. "We're not doing anything alcoholic until we've completed the obs," June Terple volunteered, half apologetic, half challenging. "Still, I think Hans could get you something...."
I shook my head, wondering if Hypatia had said anything to Hans about how I liked a drink now and then. Probably she had. Shipminds do gossip, and it was evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of black holes.
It was a nice meal of it. The only interruptions were when one crew member after another briefly excused himself to double-check how the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over that 500-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection foils into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was in-jokes, but that wasn't a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering in my ear. When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly— pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren't homesick at all, that was aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: "He's pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian's jealous." Julia—that was Hoolia—Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Inca former schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I'd never been to Machu Picchu. "And you've been all over the Galaxy? And never took the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?" The only subdued one was Mark Rohrbeck. Between the figs and the coffee he excused himself and didn't come back for nearly half an hour. "Calling home," Mason-Manley said wisely, and Hypatia, who was the Galaxy's greatest eavesdropper when I let her be, filled me in. "He's trying to talk his wife out of the divorce. She isn't buying it."
When the coffee was about half gone, Terple whispered something to the air. Evidently Hans was listening, and in a moment the end of the room went dark. The planet appeared, noticeably bigger than it had been before. She whispered again, and the image expanded until it filled the room, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that I was falling into it.
"We're getting about two- or three-kilometer resolution now," Terple announced proudly.
That didn't give us much beyond mountains, shorelines and clouds, and the planet was still half in sun and half dark. (Well, it had to be, didn't it? The planet was rotating under us, but, in just the few days we were going to be observing it, its position relative to its sun wasn't going to change.) When I studied it, something looked odd about the landmass at the bottom of the image. I pointed. "Is that ocean, there, down on the left side? I mean the dark part. Because I didn't see any lights there."
"No, it's land, all right. It's probably just that that part is too cold to be inhabited. We're not getting a square look at the planet, you know. We're about twenty degrees south of its equator, so we're seeing more of its South Pole and nothing north of, let's say, what would be Scotland or southern Alaska on Earth. Have you seen the globe Hans put together for us? No? Hans, display."