I turned my back on her and went into my bedroom to dress. She followed, in her excellent simulation of walking. What I wanted to know was how general her general rule was, and what she would have deemed a permissible exception. But as I opened my mouth to ask her, she spoke up.
"Oh, Klara," she said. "They've found something of interest on the planet. Let me show you." She didn't wait for a response; at once the end of the room lit up.
We were looking again at that first little fleet of blimps. They were nearly at the coast, but they weren't in their tidy Vee formation anymore. They were scattered over the sky, and two of them were falling to the sea, blazing with great gouts of flame. Small things I couldn't quite make out were buzzing around and between them.
"My God," I said. "Something's shooting them down!"
Hypatia nodded. "So it would appear, Klara. It looks as though the Crabbers' blimps are filled with hydrogen, to burn the way they do. That suggests a rather low level of technological achievement, but give them credit. They aren't primitives, anyway. They're definitely civilized enough to be having themselves a pretty violent little war."
VIII
There wasn't any doubt about it. The Crabbers were industriously killing each other in the kind of aerial combat that was right out of the old stories of—what was it? I guess World War I. I couldn't see much of the planes that were shooting the blimps down. They were there, though, and what was going on was a bunch of real old-fashioned dogfights.
I don't know what I had hoped to see when we brought the long-dead Crabbers back to some kind of life. This definitely wasn't it. When the scenes changed—Hans was assiduous in zooming down to wherever on the planet's surface things were going on—it didn't improve. It got worse. There was a harbor crammed with surface vessels, where a great river joined the sea; but some of the ships were on fire, and others appeared to be sinking. ("Submarines did that, I think," Hypatia judged. "It could possibly be from bombing planes or mines, but my money's on submarines.") Those strange patterns of heat in the cities weren't a mystery any longer. The cities had been burned to the ground by incendiary bombing, leaving only glowing coals. Then, when we were looking down on a plain where flashes of white and reddish light sparkled all over the area, we couldn't see what was making them, but Hypatia had a guess for that, too. "Why," she said, sounding interested, "I do believe we're looking at a large-scale tank battle."
And so on, and on.
It was all so pointless! They didn't have to bother killing each other. Their star was going to do it for them soon enough. All unknowing, every one of those Crabbers was racing toward a frightful and near-term death from their bursting sun.
An hour earlier I had been pitying them for the fate that awaited them. Now I couldn't say that I thought that their fate was unjust.
Hypatia was looking at me in that motherly way she sometimes assumes. "I'm afraid all this is disturbing for you, Klara," she murmured. "Would it cheer you up to invite Mr. Tartch aboard? He's calling. He says he wants to talk to you about the new pictures."
"Sure he does," I said, pretty sure that what Bill really wanted to talk about was why he didn't deserve being treated so stand-offishly by me. "No. Tell him I'm asleep and don't want to be disturbed. And, listen, tell me all about Mark Rohrbeck."
"Ah," she said, in that tone of voice that makes one syllable speak volumes.
I wasn't having any of that. "If you've got something to say to me, say it!"
"But I don't, dear," she said, patently falsely. "You know I don't criticize you for your obsession with men."
She was getting close to the line. Then she crossed it. "You'd think," she said meditatively, "that after some of the experiences you've had with men you'd be more wary. Is it that you keep hoping you've already had the worst? Like that wretched little orphan, Wan."
I didn't answer that. I didn't even let her finish. I just said, "Shut up," and, wisely, she did. There are some subjects I don't discuss, and Hypatia is well aware that Wan, his rescue of me from my black hole and my brief, but not brief enough, time as his live-in lover are three of them.
Then she began to recite all of Mark Rohrbeck's stats. Mark's parents had died when he was young and he had been brought up by his grandfather, who had once made his living as a fisherman on Lake Superior. "Mostly the old man fished for sea lampreys—know what they are, Klara? They're ugly things. They have big sucking disks instead of jaws. They attach themselves to other fish and suck their guts out until they die. I don't think you'd want to eat a sea lamprey yourself, but they were about all that was left in the lake. Rohrbeck's grandpa sold them for export to Europe—people there thought they were a delicacy. They said they tasted like escargot. Then, of course, the Food Factories came along and put the old guy out of business—"
"Get back to talking about Mark Rohrbeck," I ordered. "The grandson. The one that's here."
"Oh. Sorry. Well, young Mark got a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, did well, went on to grad school at MIT, made a pretty fair reputation in computer science, married, had two kids, but then his wife decided there was a dentist she liked better than Rohrbeck, so she dumped him. And as I've mentioned before," she said appreciatively, "he does have really great genes. Does that cover it?"
I mulled that over for a moment, then said, "Just about. Don't go drawing any conclusions from this, do you hear?"
"Certainly, Klara," she said, but she still had that look.
I sighed. "All right. Now turn that damn thing back on."
"Of course, Klara," she said, unsurprised, and did. "I'm afraid it hasn't been getting any better."
It hadn't. It was just more of the same. I watched doggedly for a while, and then I said, "All right, Hypatia. I've seen enough."
She made it disappear, looking at me curiously. "There'll be better images when they finish with the mirror. By then we should be able to see actual individual Crabbers."
"Lovely," I said, not meaning it, and then I burst out, "My God, what's the matter with those people? There's plenty of room on the planet for all of them. Why didn't they just stay home and live in peace?"
It wasn't meant to be a real question, but Hypatia answered it for me anyway. "What do you expect? They're meat people," she said succinctly.
I wasn't letting her get away with that. "Come on, Hypatia! Human beings are meat people, too, and we don't go tearing halfway around the world just to kill each other!"
"Oh, do you not? What a short memory you have, Klara dear. Think of those twentieth-century World Wars. Think of the Crusades, tens of thousands of Europeans dragging themselves all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to kill as many Muslims as they could. Think of the Spanish conquistadors, murdering their way across the Americas. Hey, for that matter you could even think of the lousy monks that tore the meat to shreds in Alexandria. Of course," she added with faint distaste, "those people were all Christians."
I blinked at her. "You think what we're looking at is a religious war?" She shrugged gracefully. "What does it matter? Meat people don't need reasons to kill each other, dear."
IX
By the time the mirror was complete we could make out plenty of detail. We were even able to see individual Centaur-like Crabbers—the same build, four legs and upright torso, that they'd inherited from the primitives I'd seen.
That is, sometimes we could see them. Not always. The conditions had to be right. We couldn't see them when they were in the night part of the planet, of course, except in those ghostly-looking infrared views, and we couldn't optically see them at all when they were blanketed with clouds. But we could see enough. More than enough, as far as I was concerned.