Immediately a sphere appeared in the middle of the room, rotating slowly. It would have looked exactly like the kind my grandfather kept in his bedroom, latitude and longitude lines and all, except that the land masses were wholly wrong. "This is derived from old Heechee data that Starminder provided for us," Hans's voice informed me. "However, we've named the continents ourselves. You see the one that's made up of two fairly circular masses, connected by an isthmus, that looks like a dumbbell? Dr. Terple calls it 'Dumbbell.' It's divided into Dumbbell East and Dumbbell West. Fryingpan is the sort of roundish one with the long, thin peninsula projecting to the southwest. The one just coming into view now is Peanut, because—"
"I can see why," I told him. Hans was a perceptive enough program to recognize, probably from the tone of my voice, that I found this geography lesson a little boring. Terple wasn't.
"Go on, Hans," she said sharply when he hesitated. So he did.
Out of guest-politeness I sat still while he named every dot on the map for me, but when he came to the end I did too. "That's very nice," I said, unhooking myself from my dining place. "Thanks for the dinner, June, but I think I'd better let you get your work done. Anyway, we'll be seeing a lot of each other over the next five days."
Every face I saw wore a suddenly bland expression, and Terple coughed. "Well, not quite five days," she said uncomfortably. "I don't know whether anyone told you this, but we'll leave before the star blows."
I stopped cold, one hand stuffing my napkin into its tied-down ring, the other holding onto the wall support. "There wasn't anything about leaving early in your prospectus. Why wasn't I told this?"
She said doggedly, "When the star begins its collapse, I'm getting out of here. It's too dangerous."
I don't like being surprised by the people who work for me. I gave her a look. "How can it be dangerous when we're six thousand light-years away?"
She got obstinate. "Remember I'm responsible for the safety of this installation and its crew. I don't think you have any idea of what a supernova is like, Klara. It's huge. Back in 1054 the Chinese astrologers could see it in daylight for almost the whole month of July, and they didn't have our lensing to make it brighter."
"So we'll put on sunglasses."
She said firmly, "We'll leave. I'm not just talking about visible light. Even now, after six thousand years of cooling down after it popped, that thing's still radiating all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave to X-rays. We're not going to want to be where all that radiation comes to a focus when it peaks."
As I was brushing my teeth Hypatia spoke from behind me. "What Terple said makes sense, you know. Anything in the focus is going to get fried when the star goes supernova."
I didn't answer, so she tried another tack. "Mark Rohrbeck is a good-looking man, isn't he? He's very confused right now, with the divorce and all, but I think he likes you."
I looked at her in the mirror. She was in full simulation, leaning against the bathroom doorway with a little smile on her face. "He's also half my age," I pointed out.
"Oh, no, Klara," she corrected me. "Not even a third of your age, actually. Still, what difference does that make? Hans displayed his file for me. Genetically he's very clean, as organic human beings go. Would you like to see it?"
"No." I finished with the bathroom and turned to leave. Hypatia got gracefully out of my way just as though I couldn't have walked right through her.
"Well, then," she said. "Would you like something to eat? A nightcap?"
"What I would like is to go to sleep. Right now."
She sighed. "Such a waste of time. Sooner or later you know you're going to give up the meat, don't you? Why wait? In machine simulation you can do anything you can do now, only better, and—"
"Enough," I ordered. "What I'm going to do now is go to bed and dream about my lover. Go away."
The simulation disappeared, and her "Good night, then," came from empty air. Hypatia doesn't really go away when I tell her to, but she pretends she does. Part of the pretense is that she never acts as though she knows what I do in the privacy of my room, though of course she does.
It wasn't exactly true that I intended to dream about Bill Tartch. Maybe I thought about him, a little bit, especially when I tucked myself into that huge circular bed and automatically reached out for someone to touch, and nobody was there. I truly enjoy having a warm male body to spoon up against to drift off to sleep. But, if I didn't have that, I also didn't have anybody snoring in my ear, or thrashing about, or talking to me when I first woke up and all I wanted was to huddle over a cup of coffee and a piece of grapefruit in peace.
Those were fairly consoling thoughts, but as soon as I put my head down I was wide awake again.
Insomnia was one more of those meat-person flaws that disgusted Hypatia so. I didn't have to suffer from it. Hypatia keeps my bathroom medicine chest stocked with everything she imagines I might want in the middle of the night, including half a dozen different kinds of anti-insomnia pills, but I had a better idea than that. I popped the lid off my bedside stand, where I keep the manual controls I use when I don't want Hypatia to do something for me, and I accessed the synoptic I wanted to see.
I visited my island.
Its name is Raiwea—that's rah-ee-WAY-uh, with the accent on the third syllable, the way the Polynesians say it—and it's the only place in the universe I ever miss when I'm away from it. It's not very big. It only amounts to a couple thousand hectares of dry land altogether, but it's got palm trees and breadfruit trees and a pretty lagoon that's too shallow for the sharks ever to invade from the deep water outside the reef. And now, because I paid to put them there, it's got lots of clusters of pretty little bungalows with pretty, if imitation, thatched roofs, as well as plumbing and air-conditioning and everything else that would make a person comfortable. And it's got playgrounds and game fields that are laid put for baseball or soccer or whatever a bunch of kids might need to work off excess animal energy. And it's got its own Food Factory nestled inside the reef that's constantly churning out every variety of healthful food anyone wants to eat; and it's mine. All of it is mine. Every square centimeter. I paid for it, and I've populated it with orphans and single women with babies from all over the world. When I go there, I'm Grandma Klara to about a hundred and fifty kids from newborns to teens, and when I'm somewhere else I make it a point, every day or so, to access the surveillance systems and make sure the schools are functioning and the medical services are keeping everybody healthy, because I—all right, damn it! because I love those kids. Every List one of them, and I swear they love me back.
Hypatia says they're my substitute for having a baby of my own.
Maybe they are. All the same, I do have a couple of my own ova stored in the Raiwea clinic's deep freeze. They've been there for a good many years now, but the doctors promise they're still 100% viable. The ova are there just in case I ever decide I really want to do that other disgustingly meat-person thing and give birth to my own genetically personal child....
But I don't seem to meet the man I want to be its father. Bill Tartch? Well, maybe. I had thought he might be for a while, anyway, but then I wasn't really so sure.
The thing is, I thought I had met that man once. It might even have worked out, only then I got stuck in that damn black hole for a couple of decades, and by the time I got rescued, why, somewhere along those years, old Rob Broadhead had got himself hooked up with some other woman.