"We're looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, Klara," she explained. "We're not getting shipside magnification from the mirror anymore. That's gone. I'm worried about that camera, too. The gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last much—" She stopped, as the image disappeared for good. Simply winked out and was gone. "—longer," she finished, and, of course, it hadn't.
I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her eyes. Ibarruru and Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. "That's it," I said briskly. "The show's over."
Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. "Hans has all the data," he reported. "He's all right."
Terple had her hand up. "Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the dish burned pretty fast and the hull's probably intact, so if we can get a repair crew out there—"
"Right away," I promised. "Well, almost right away. First we go home."
I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the cheer was rapidly fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. "Where's that?" he asked glumly.
I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said sympathetically, "You're missing your kids, aren't you? Well, I've got a place where there are plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up male on my island, you'll be the only dad they've got."
XII
That blast from the supernova didn't destroy PhoenixCorp after all. The mirror was a total write-off, of course, but the ship itself was only cooked a little.
So June Terple stooged around for a bit while it cooled down, then went back to check it out with what was left of her crew. Which wasn't much. Mason-Manley talked his way back into her good graces once Denys wasn't around anymore. Kekuskian promised to come out for the actual blow-up, eighty years from now, provided he was still alive. And, of course, Terple still had the indestructible Hans, now back in his own custom-designed datafan. The rest of her crew were all replacements. Starminder went back to her family in the Core, and I paid Ibarruru's fare to go along with her as a kind of honorary Citizen Ambassador.
Naturally, Terple invited me to join them for their stint at the neutron star. She couldn't really avoid it, since the new money was coming from the same place as the old, namely mostly me. I said maybe, to be polite, but I really meant no. One look at the death of a world was enough for me. And Bill Tartch's special show on the Crabbers went on the net within days. He had a great success with it, easily great enough so that he didn't really mind the fact that he no longer had me.
Hypatia kept copies of all the files for me, and those last little bits of data stayed with me on my island for a long time, until things went sour and everything got ruined at once. (But that's another story. A really bad one, and I don't want to think about it.) I played pieces of the files now and then, for any of the kids that showed an interest, and for their moms, too, when they did. But mostly I played them for myself.
Mark Rohrbeck stayed with me on Raiwea for a while, too, though not that long. That's the way my island works. When my kids are ready for the world outside, I let them go. It was the same with Rohrbeck. For him it took just a little over three months. Then he was ready, and kissed me good-bye, and went.
8
On the Forested Planet
I
To get off the spacecraft Estrella and Stan walked out a five-meter passage. Then they were out on a platform, in bright sunshine. That is where they both stopped in shock. "My God," Estrella whispered. "There's a million of them!"
It wasn't a million, really, but it surely was a lot of Heechee, and all of them bunched around them on the platform and staring ... or ranked farther away on porches and terraces and staring ... or clustered on roofs and in windows as much as half a kilometer away, and also staring. That was what all of them were doing: staring. All of them were also muttering and chirping to each other—each one decorously soft-voiced, to be sure, but collectively like the whir of an immense flight of locusts. Stan put his arm around Estrella. "So where the hell is Salt?" he demanded.
There wasn't any answer from the press of Heechee, none of whom appeared to speak English. Though they were all out in the open Stan wrinkled his nose at the persistent Heechee sting of ammonia in the air, along with spicy scents and fruity ones—coming, Stan guessed, from woods somewhere nearby. (This was, after all, the "Forested Planet.") Stan wasn't interested in smells just then. "Damn her," he grumbled. "I don't know what we're supposed to do now."
Others did, though. Two of them, perhaps high-ranking Heechee to judge from the lines of red, blue and yellow embroidery that decorated their smocks, came forward. Each took an arm, one for Estrella and one for Stan. The Heechee were surprisingly small, ten or a dozen centimeters shorter even than Estrella, but she didn't resist. Neither did Stan, though he thought of it, but saw no point, when he felt the strength of that bony grasp. Both humans let the Heechee do what they would. Which was to conduct the humans to another, higher-up sort of stage. Then the two Heechee took turns speaking—in their own language—perhaps to the crowd, perhaps to the tiny lenses Stan could see winking at them from the crowd. "I think we're on the evening news," he muttered to Estrella, but she was peering past the bulk of the ship that had brought them, now kneeling quietly in its landing receptacle. Then, as the two Heechee grasped their arms again, he added, "Now what do they want?"
They wanted Stan and Estrella to board a topless, three-wheeled vehicle, which had no driver at its sort of tiller but two rows of Heechee perches. No proper seats, of course.
That was when Salt at last appeared. "Yes, one understands," she said, sounding slightly remorseful but also harried, "that is too bad about the sitting down, is that not the case? But do not be concerned. The distance is much less than far."
"Distance to where?" Stan demanded, while Estrella asked, "Aren't you coming with us?"
"Distance to place you are going," Salt explained. "Me? With you? No, I do not go. How could I? Must return to proper duties."
With that she was gone into the crowd, while the Heechee pair mounted the vehicle, perching themselves at the posts in the rear, gesturing Stan and Estrella to the ones in front. "I'm not sitting on those things!" Estrella announced. She didn't, either, but as soon as she climbed on board the cart started up anyway, leaving the two humans to clutch the perches for support.
They kept on doing so for the next while. Making an odd whining sound, the vehicle dived almost at once down an incline and into a broad, well lighted tunnel. Ahead of them three or four other three-wheelers led the way, all their occupants turning to stare at Stan and Estrella, and twice that number followed behind.
How long they traveled Stan could not say. They were out in the open for a while (bright mountains ahead, green woods around), then back underground. Side tunnels flashed by, and were ignored. One or two of the following carts peeled away, and were replaced by three or four new ones. The lighting, which had been blue and green at the beginning, changed to green and gold, then gold and red, then back to blue and green again. "I think I'm going to he carsick," Estrella muttered in Stan's ear, as she hung onto the perch for dear life.