"We can't say yet, Mr. Tartch. If it were anything like that there should be more visible light; there's very little. We'll simply have to wait for better data. Meanwhile, however, there's something else you might like to see." The scene we were viewing skittered across the face of the planet—huge cloud banks, a couple of islands, more cloud—and came to rest on a patch of ocean. In its center was a tiny blur of something that looked grayish when it looked like anything at all; it seemed to flicker in and out of sight, at the very limit of visibility.
"Clouds?" Bill guessed.
"No, Mr. Tartch. I believe it is a group of objects of some kind, and they are in motion—vectoring approximately seventy-one degrees, or, as you would say, a little north of east. They must be quite large or we would not pick up anything at all. They may be ships, although their rate of motion is too high for anything but a hydrofoil or ground effect craft. If they are still in sight when the mirror is more nearly complete we should be able to resolve them easily enough."
"Which will be when?"
Hans gave us that phony couple-of-seconds pause before he answered. "There is a small new problem about that, Mr. Tartch," he said apologetically. "Some of the installed mirror plates have been subjected to thermal shock and they are no longer an exact fit. Most of the installation machines have had to be diverted to adjust them, and so it will be some time before we can go on with completing the mirror. A few hours only, I estimate."
Bill looked at me and I looked at him. "Well, hell," he said. "What else is going to go wrong?"
What had gone wrong that time wasn't June Terple's fault. She said it was, though. She said that she was the person in charge of the whole operation, so everything that happened was her responsibility, and she shouldn't have allowed Ibarruru to override Hans's controls. And Julia Ibarruru was tearfully repentant. "Starminder told me the Heechee had identified eleven other planets in the Crabber system; I was just checking to see if there were any signs of life on any of them, and I'm afraid that for a minute I let the system's focus get too close to the star."
It could have been worse. I told them not to worry about it, and invited all three of them to my ship for a drink, Starminder included. That made my soi-disant fiancée's eyebrows rise, because he had certainly been expecting that the first person I welcomed aboard would be him. He was philosophical about it, though. "I'll see you later," he said. Then he led Denys off to interview some of the other people.
Hypatia had set out tea things on one table, and dry sherry on another, but before we sat down to either I had to give all three of the women the usual guided tour. The sudden return to normal gravity was a burden for them, but they limped admiringly through the guest bedroom, exclaimed at the kitchen—never used by me, but installed just in case I ever wanted to do any of that stuff myself—and were blown away by my personal bathroom. Whirlbath, bidet, big onyx tub, mirror walls—Bill Tartch always said it looked like a whore's dream of heaven, and he hadn't been the first guest to make that observation. I don't suppose the PhoenixCorp women had ever seen anything like it. I let them look. I even let them peek into the cabinets of perfumes and toiletries. "Oh, musk oil!" Terple cried. "But it's real! That's so expensive."
"I don't wear it anymore. Take it, if you like," I said, and, for the grand finale, opened the door to my bedroom.
When at last we got to the tea, sherry and conversation, Ibarruru's first remark was, "Mr. Tartch seemed like a very interesting man." She didn't spell out the connection, but I knew it was that huge bed that was in her mind. So we chatted about Mr. Tartch and his glamorous p-vision career, and how Terple had grown up with the stories of the Gateway prospectors on every day's news, and how Ibarruru had dreamed of an opportunity like this—"Astronomy's really almost a lost art on Earth, you know," she told me. "Now we have all the Heechee data, so there's no point anymore in wasting time with telescopes and probes."
"So what does an astronomer do when there's no astronomy to be done?" I asked, being polite.
She said ruefully, "I was teaching an undergraduate course in astronomy in a community college in Maryland. For students who aren't ever going to do any real astronomy, because if there's anything somebody really wants to see, why, they just get in a ship and go out and look at it."
"As I did, Ms. Moynlin," said Starminder, with the Heechee equivalent of a smile.
That was what I was waiting for. If there was a place in the universe I still wanted to see, it was her home in the Core. "You must miss the Core," I told her. "All those nearby stars, so bright—what we have here must look pretty skimpy to you."
"Oh, no," she said, being polite, "this is quite nice. For a change. What I really miss is my children."
It had never occurred to me that she had children, but, yes, she had left two young offspring behind when she came out. It was a difficult decision, but she couldn't resist the adventure. Miss them? Of course she missed them! Miss her? She looked surprised at that. "Why, no, Ms. Moynlin, they won't be missing me. They're asleep for the night. I'll be back long before they wake up. Time dilation, you see. I'm only going to stay out here for a year or two."
Ibarruru said nervously, "That's the part that worries me about going to the Core, Starminder. I'm not young anymore, and I know that if I went for even a few days nearly everyone I know would be gone when I got back. No, not just 'nearly' everyone," she corrected herself. "What is it, forty thousand to one? So a week there would be nearly a thousand years back home." Then she turned to the Heechee female. "But even if we can't go ourselves, you can tell us about it, Starminder. Would you like to tell Dr. Moynlin what it's like in the Core?"
It was what I wanted to hear, too. I'd heard it often enough before, but I listened as long as Starminder was willing to talk. Which was a lot, because she was definitely homesick.
Would it really matter if I spent a week in the Core? Or a month, or a year, for that matter? I'd miss my kids on the island, of course, but they'd be taken care of, and so would everything else that mattered to me. And there wasn't any other human being in the universe that I cared enough about to miss for more than a day.
I was surprised when Hypatia spoke up out of the air. "Ms. Moynlin"— formal because of the company— "there's a call for you." And she displayed Bill Tartch's face.
I could see by the background that he was in his own ship, and he looked all bright and fresh and grinning at me. "Permission to come aboard, hon?" he asked.
That produced a quick reaction among my guests.
"Oh," said Ibarruru, collecting herself. "Well, it's time we got back to work anyway, isn't it, June?" She was sounding arch. Terple wasn't; she simply got up, and Starminder followed her example.
"You needn't leave," I said.
"But of course we must," said Terple. "Julia's right. Thank you for the tea and, uh, things."
And they were gone, leaving me to be alone with my lover.
VI
"He's been primping for the last hour," Hypatia reported in my ear. "Showered, shaved, dressed up. And he put on that musk cologne that he thinks you like."
"I do like it," I said. "On him. Let me see you when I'm talking to you." She appeared obediently, reclining on the couch Ibarruru had just left. "I'd say the man's looking to get laid," she observed. "Again."
I didn't choose to pick up on the "again," which could have meant any of a couple of things. That's one of Hypatia's more annoying traits, of which she has just not quite enough to make me have her reprogrammed. When I chose Hypatia of Alexandria as a personality for my shipmind, it seemed to be a good idea at the time, but my own Hypatia took it seriously. That's what happens when you get yourself a really powerful ship-mind; they throw themselves into the part. The first thing she did was look up her template and model herself its close to the original as she thought I would stand -including such details as the fact that the original Hypatia really haled men.