Too bad, right?
But what's the use of worrying about what can't be fixed?
When I was up and about the next morning Hypatia greeted me with a fresh display of the Crabber planet. The image was too big now to fit in my salon, but she had zeroed in on one particular coastline. In the center of the image there was a blur that might have been manmade—personmade, I mean. "They're down to half-kilometer resolution now," she informed me. "That's pretty definitely a small city."
I inspected it. It pretty definitely was, but it was very definitely small. "Isn't there anything bigger?"
"I'm afraid not, Klara. Hans says the planet seems to be rather remarkably underpopulated, though it's not clear why. Will you be going over to PhoenixCorp now?"
I shook my head. "Let them work in peace. We might as well do some work ourselves. What've you got for me?"
What she had for me was another sampling of some of the ventures I'd put money into at one time or another. There were the purely commercial ones like the helium-3 mines on the Moon, and the chain of food factories in the Bay of Bengal, and the desert-revivification project in the Sahara and forty or fifty others; they weren't particularly interesting to me, but they were some of the things that, no matter how much I spent, just kept making me richer and richer every day.
Along about then Hypatia cleared her throat in the manner that means there's something she wants to talk about. I guessed she wanted to discuss my island, so I played the game. "Oh, by the way," I said, "I accessed Raiwea last night after I went to bed."
"Really?" she said, just as though she hadn't known it all along. "How are things?"
I went through the motions of telling her which kids were about ready to leave, and how there were eighteen new ones who had been located by the various agencies I did business with, ready to be brought to the island next time I was in the neighborhood. As she always did, whether she meant it or not, she clucked approvingly. Her simulation was looking faintly amused, though. I took it as a challenge. "So you see there's one thing us animals can do that you can't," I told her. "We can have babies."
"Or, as in your own case at least so far, not," she said agreeably. "That wasn't what I was going to tell you, though."
"Oh?"
"I just wanted to mention that Mr. Tartch's ship is going to dock in about an hour. He isn't coming alone."
Sometimes Hypatia is almost too idiosyncratically human, and more than once I've thought about getting her programs changed. The tone of her voice warned me that she had something more to tell. I said tentatively, "That's not surprising. Sometimes he needs to bring a crew with him."
"Of course he does, Klara," she said cheerfully. "There's only one of them this time, though. And she's very pretty."
The very pretty assistant was very pretty, all right, and she looked to be about sixteen years old. No, that's not exactly true. She looked a lot better than sixteen years old. I don't believe I had skin like that even when I was a newborn baby. She wore no makeup, and needed none. She had on a decorous one-piece jump suit that covered her from thigh to neck and left no doubt of what was inside. Her name was Denys. When I got there—I had taken my time, because I didn't want Bill to think I was eager—all three of PhoenixCorp's males were hanging around, watching her like vultures sniffing carrion.
Bill didn't seem to notice. He had already set up for his opening teaser and Denys was playing his quaint old auto-cameras for him. As they panned around the entrance chamber and settled on his face, wearing its friendliest and most intelligent expression, he began to speak to the masses:
"Wilhelm Tartch here again, where PhoenixCorp is getting ready to bring a lost race of intelligent beings back to life, and here to help me—" one of the cameras swung around as Denys cued it toward me—"once again I have the good luck to have my beautiful fiancée, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with me."
I gave him a look, because, whatever I was to Wilhelm Tartch, I definitely wasn't someone who was planning to marry him. He tipped me a cheeky wink and went right on:
"As you all remember, before the Heechee ran away to hide in the Core, they surveyed most of the Galaxy, looking for other intelligent races. They didn't find any. When they visited Earth they found the australopithecines, but they were a long way from being modern humans. They hadn't even developed language yet. And here, on this planet—" That view of the Crabber planet, pre-supernova, appeared behind him."—they found another primitive race that they thought, someday, might become both intelligent and civilized. Well, perhaps these Crabbers, as the PhoenixCorp people call them, did. But the Heechee weren't around to see it, and neither are we, because they had some bad luck.
"There were two stars in their planet's system, a red dwarf and a bright type-A giant. Over the millennia, as these lost people were struggling toward civilization, the big star was losing mass, sucked into the smaller one. Then, without warning, the small one reached critical mass. It exploded. And the Crabber people, along with their planet and all their works, were instantly obliterated in the supernova blast."
He stopped there, gazing toward Denys until she called, "Got it." Then he kicked himself toward me, arms outstretched for a hug, big grin on his face; and when we connected he buried his face in my neck, whispering things like, "Oh, Klaretta, we've been away from each other too long!"
Bill Tartch is a good hugger. His arms felt fine around me, and his big, male body felt good against mine ... as I looked over his shoulder at Denys. Who was regarding us with an affectionate and wholly unjealous smile.
So, I thought, that part might not be much of a problem. I decided not to worry about it. Anyway the resolution of the Crabber planet was getting better and better, and that was what we were here for, after all.
What the Crabber planet had a lot of was water. As it turned on its axis the continental shore had disappeared into the nighttime side of the world, and what we were looking at was mostly ocean.
Bill Tartch wasn't pleased. "Is that all we're going to see?" he demanded of the room at large. "I thought there was at least some kind of a city."
Terple answered. "A small city—probably. Anyway, that's what it looked like before the planet turned and we lost it. I can show you that much if you like. Hans? Go back to when that object was still in sight."
The maybe-city didn't look any more exciting the second time I saw it, and it didn't impress Bill. He made a little tongue-click of annoyance. "You, shipmind! Can't you enhance the image for me?"
"It is enhanced, Mr. Tartch," Hans told him pleasantly. "However, we have somewhat better resolution now, and I've been tracking it in the infrared. There's a little more detail—" the continental margin appeared for us, hazily delineated because of the differences in temperature between water and land—"but, as you see, there are hot spots that I have not yet identified."
There were. Big ones, and very bright. What was encouraging, considering what we were looking for, was that some of them seemed to be fairly geometrical in shape, triangles and rectangles. But what were they?
"Christmas decorations?" Bill guessed. "You know, I mean not really Christmas, but with the houses all lit up for some holiday or other?"
"I don't think so, Mr. Tartch," Hans said judiciously. "There's not much optical light; what you're seeing is heat."
"Keeping themselves warm in the winter?"
"I don't know if it's their winter, Mr. Tartch, and that isn't probable in any case. Those sources read out at up to around three hundred degrees Celsius. That's almost forest-fire temperature."
Bill looked puzzled. "Slash-and-burn agriculture? Or maybe some kind of industry?"