VII
None of the crew were in the entrance lock when I came to the PhoenixCorp ship, but I could hear their voices. They were all gathered in the dining hall, laughing and chattering excitedly. When I got there I saw that the room had been darkened. They were looking at virtuals of one scene or another as Hans displayed them, and no one noticed me come in.
I hooked myself inconspicuously to a belt and looked around. I saw Bill and his sperm receptacle of the moment hooked chastely apart, Denys chirping at Mason-Manley, Bill talking into his recorders. Mason-Manley was squeezing Denys's shoulder excitedly, presumably because of the euphoria of the moment, but she seemed to be enjoying it. If Bill noticed, he didn't appear to mind. But then Bill was not a jealous type.
Until recently I hadn't thought that I was, either.
Well, it wasn't a question of jealousy. It was a question of—oh, call it good manners. If Bill chose to bed a bimbo now and then that was his business, but it did not excuse his hauling the little tart all the way from Earth to shove her in my face.
A meter or so away from me Mark Rohrbeck was watching the pictures, looking a lot less gloomy than usual. When he saw me at last he waved and pointed. "Look, Ms. Moynlin!" he cried. "Blimps!"
So I finally got around to looking at the display. In the sector he was indicating we were looking down on one of the Crabber planet's oceans. There were a lot of clouds, but some areas had only scattered puffs. And there among them were eight fat little silver sausages, in a Vee formation, that surely were far too hard-edged and uniform in shape to be clouds.
"These are the objects we were viewing before, Ms. Moynlin," Hans's voice informed me. "Now we can discriminate the individual elements, and they are certainly artifacts."
"Sure, but why do you think they're airborne? How do you know they aren't ships of some kind?" I asked, and then said at once, "No, cancel that." I had figured it out for myself. If they had been surface vessels they would have produced some sort of wake in the water. They were aircraft, all right, so I changed the question to, "Where are they going, do you think?"
"Wait a minute," June Terple said. "Hans, display the projection for Ms. Moynlin."
That sheet of ocean disappeared, and in its place there was a globe of the Crabber planet, its seas in blue, land masses in gray. Eight little oval figures, greatly out of proportion, were over the ocean. From them a silvery line extended itself to the northeast, with another line, this one golden, going back past the day-night terminator toward the southwest. Terple said, "It looks like the blimps came from around that group of islands at the end of the gold course-line, and they're heading toward the dumbbell continents up on the right. Unfortunately, those are pretty far north. We can't get a good picture of them from here, but Hans has enhanced some of the data on the island the blimps came from. Hans?"
The globe disappeared. We were looking down on one of those greenish infrared scenes: shoreline, bay—and something burning around the bay. Once again the outlines of the burning areas were geometrically unnatural. "As we speculated, it is almost certainly a community, Ms. Moynlin," Hans informed me. "However, it seems to have suffered some catastrophe, similar to what we observed on the continent which is now out of sight."
"What kind of catastrophe?" I demanded.
Hans was all apologetic. "We simply don't have the data as yet, Ms. Moynlin. A great fire, one might conjecture. I'm sure it will all make sense when we have better resolution—in a few hours, perhaps. I'll keep you posted."
"Please do," I said. And then, without planning it, I found myself saying, "I think I'll go back to my ship and lie down for a while."
Bill looked suddenly happy and began to unhook himself from his perch. I gave him a little shake of the head.
"I'm sorry. I just want to rest," I said. "It's been an exhausting few days."
That wasn't particularly true, of course. I didn't want to rest. I just wanted to be by myself, or at any rate with no company but Hypatia, which comes to pretty much the same thing.
As I came into my ship she greeted me in motherly mode. "Too many people, hon?" she asked. "Shall I make you a drink?"
I shook my head to the drink, but she was right about the rest of it. "Funny thing," I said, sprawling on the couch. The more people I meet, the fewer I am comfortable around.'
"Meat people are generally boring," she agreed. "How about a cup of tea?"
I shrugged, and immediately heard the activity begin in the kitchen. Hypatia had her faults, but she was a pretty good mom when I needed her to be. I lay back on the couch and gazed at the ceiling. "You know what?" I said. "I'm beginning to think I ought to settle down on the island."
"You could do that, yes," she said diplomatically. Then, because she was Hypatia, she added, "Let's see, the last time you were there you stayed exactly eleven days, wasn't it? About six months ago?"
She had made me feel defensive—again. I said, "I had things to do."
"Of course you did. Then the time before that wasn't quite that long, was it? Just six days—and that was over a year ago."
"You've made your point, Hypatia. Talk about something else."
"Sure thing, boss." So she did. Mostly what she chose to talk about was what my various holdings had been doing in the few hours since I'd checked them last. I wasn't listening. After a few minutes of it I drank the tea she'd made for me and stood up. "I'm going to soak in the tub for a while."
"I'll run it for you, hon. Hon? They've got some new pictures from the Crabber planet if you want to see them while you soak."
"Why not?" And by the time I'd shucked my clothes the big onyx tub was full, the temperature perfect as always. I closed my eyes and lay back to let the sweet-smelling foamy waters make me feel whole and content again. As I had done many thousands of times, sometimes with success.
This was one of the successes. The hot tub did its work. I felt myself drifting off to a relaxed and welcome sleep....
And then, suddenly, a vagrant thought crossed my mind and I wasn't relaxed anymore.
I got out of the tub and climbed into the shower stall, turning it on full; I let cold water hammer at me for a while, then changed it to hot. When I got out I pulled on a robe.
As I was drying my hair, the door opened and Hypatia appeared, looking at me with concern. "I'm afraid what I told you about Tartch upset you, hon," she said, oozing with compassion. "You don't really care what he does, though, do you?"
I said, "Of course not," wondering if it were true.
"That's my girl," she said approvingly. "There are some new scenes from the planet, too."
"Not now," I said. "I want to ask you something."
She didn't move, but the scene disappeared. "What's that, Klara?"
"While I was dozing in the tub I thought for a moment I might fall asleep, and slip down into the water, and drown. Then I thought you surely wouldn't let that happen, because you'd be watching, wouldn't you?"
"I'm always aware of any problems that confront you, yes, Klara."
"And then it occurred to me that you might be tempted to let me go ahead and drown, just so you could get me into that machine storage you're always trying to sell me. So I got out of the tub and into the shower."
I pulled my hair back and fastened it with a barrette, watching her. She didn't speak, just stood there with her usual benign and thoughtful expression. "So would you?" I demanded.
She looked surprised. "You mean would I deliberately let you drown? Oh, I don't think I could do that, Klara. As a general rule I'm not programmed to go against your wishes, not even if it were for your own good. That would be for your good, you know. Machine storage would mean eternal life for you, Klara, or as close as makes no difference. And no more of the sordid little concerns of the meat that cause you so much distress."