"Please don't," he implored her. "We're bound to get there soon." Then, happily, they did. Without warning the vehicle dove itself into a side tunnel like every other side tunnel they had passed. Then up a ramp, this one winding in a tight corkscrew up a couple of levels, until it stopped at a turn in the screw like every other. The female Heechee behind them rose gracefully from her perch. "You get out now," she said. "Is where you to be living."
And when they obeyed, the female sat again, the tiller turned and they were gone.
"I didn't know she spoke English," Estrella said, gazing after them.
"More important," said Stan, eyeing the knobless, latchless door, "is, how do we get in?"
That turned out to be easy enough. Estrella pointed out a sort of pad next to the faintly gleaming door, but when Stan pressed it all that resulted was a distant hoarse braying from the other side of the door—some kind of doorbell, perhaps. But as soon as Stan touched the door itself it slid open, and the way to their new home was clear.
They looked around wonderingly. What was on the other side of the door wasn't a single room. It was several rooms—from the doorway they couldn't tell quite how many—and through another door they could just see the corner of what appeared to be a balcony, drenched in sunlight. "Wow, Stan," Estrella breathed. "It's big. And it's ours!"
"Big" was something new for Stan and Estrella, neither of whom had been used to luxury. For Stan the height of comfort had been sharing a bed with Oltan Kusmeroglu in his parents' apartment. Estrella had never been quite that pampered. So what they found on Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four was a new high in hedonism. The floor space of their apartment had to be over a hundred square meters, and Stan guessed—or hoped—they wouldn't have to share it with anyone else.
The furnishings, of course, did seem a bit odd, not even counting the fact that most of the rooms had no windows. They hadn't expected anything intended for human beings, to be sure. What they found was what they had expected. They had been left a heap of more than a dozen rolls of the sleep vegetation, enough to fill the space between the prongs of every Heechee perch in the apartment. They weren't going to have to sleep on any of those rolls, either. Instead, they had been provided with a pair of constructions built like a litter box for very large cats, filled with fresh-cut slips of foliage. That was the way every Heechee wanted his own bedroom furnished, Estrella told Stan; the rolls they had been used to in the ship were only for travel, the Heechee equivalent of sleeping bags.
In all there were five rooms—well, Stan called them rooms, although in some cases the only division between one and the next was a quite transparent curtain. (The room that held the bodily waste disposers did have a sliding door.) Two were bedrooms, or at least vegetation-box rooms. One of the others held several of those built-in desks and screens with the flower-pot receptacles for Heechee books, and the fifth, the smallest, had walls with a dozen Heechee lookplates staring blankly out at them.
"Any idea how to turn them on?" Stan asked, knowing what the answer would be, and getting it. "Okay, then. Any idea how we go about getting something to eat?"
He got the predicted answer to that, too, but when he turned to look Estrella was out on the balcony. He heard her gasp. "Come on out here, will you?" she asked.
When he stepped out onto the balcony he discovered a huge backdrop of mirror-bright hills off on the horizon, and saw at once why the Shining Mica Mountains got their name. It was only the tops of the mountains that were bright; on their lower slopes, and in the bright green valley Stan and Estrella were looking down on, there were broad meadows between clusters of trees as tall as redwoods—thus explaining why the name of the planet, too, was quite appropriate. The air smelled good, though not exactly with Earthly smells. The breeze did not smell of pine or fir, nor were the odors all floral. The smells were spicier and friendlier than any terrestrial wood in the experience of either of them, almost like some grandma's kitchen in pie-baking time.
But the smells did not divert Stan for long. "Hey," he said, "look!"
He was looking at the sky. From the platform they had stood on after leaving the spacecraft he had been vaguely aware of an unusual number of faint stars in the overhead sky. Now they weren't faint, and there were literally scores of them, in all the colors a proper star could come in: white and blue, yellow and orange, red and a sultry maroon. Off near the horizon Warm Old Star Twenty-Four was getting ready to set, with the pale disk of one of Forested Planet's tiny moons trailing behind it. "They said there were bunches of stars in the Core," Stan said, marveling. "I guess I just didn't know how many bunches."
For answer Estrella pressed his hand, then left him to his marveling at—or, better, to his puzzling over the astronomical display. He didn't take long to follow, though. The grumbling of his not-sufficiently-recently-filled stomach distracted him from the view.
When he was back inside, Estrella was nowhere to be seen, but the closed door to the excretions room told him where she was. And reminded him that he needed to do some excreting of his own.
Estrella was commendably quick. Then Stan's own excreting didn't take long, either, although it would have taken less time still if the closing of the door hadn't immediately plunged him into total dark. He managed, though. When he was finished he felt better in one way, somewhat worse in another—relieving the pressure on his bladder had sharpened the feeling of acute hunger in his belly.
In this he was not alone. Estrella was fretfully rubbing her own abdomen as she gazed at the walls. "I'm pretty sure there are cupboards in some of those, maybe with food in them. Only I can't get the damn things open. How about you? Want to try?"
He did try. Many times, in many different ways, though with only one result: nothing. Tapping the walls, punching them with his fist, yelling at them—it was all the same. If indeed there were storage spaces there he could find no way to reach them.
Then another problem showed itself.
The light in the room they were in, never bright because they were a couple of chambers away from the balcony that was the apartment's only source of illumination, was visibly dimming. It wasn't taking its time about it, either. The room that had been a little shadowed was now definitely gloomy and getting rapidly more so.
When Warm Old Star Twenty-Four set it didn't fool around. One minute there was bright sunshine bouncing off the mica deposits on the mountains, the next the star was dropped below the horizon.
And abruptly their new little home was plain and simple dark. Like nighttime Earth. Like nighttime Earth on a night when clouds obscured the sky and there were no streetlights, not even houselights, anywhere around. Through the connecting rooms Stan could catch a glimpse of the spectacle that was a night sky in the Core. Glorious it was, too. But as a practical matter, for the sake of trying to get around within their apartment, it was wholly useless.
"Shit," Stan muttered.
Estrella answered only indirectly. "Might as well get some sleep," she said.
When Stan agreed she didn't reply. He couldn't hear her moving around, either. When he tried reaching out for her, blind-man's-buff style, he cracked his shins on one of their disappearing tables that hadn't disappeared. Finally the soft rustle of Heechee sleeping-grasses gave him a clue—helped out, maybe, by his eyes growing partly accustomed to the gloom. But when he got near enough to touch her the sound of her regular breathing told him that she was, or wanted to be thought to be, already asleep.
He considered waking her, decided against it. He thought he might have brought this disappointment on himself, possibly because he hadn't carried her over the threshhold. But if so, it was too late for amends.