Well, I did as he asked. Almost, anyway. The part I didn't do was hurry it up.
I could have done that easily enough. I could have simulated the whole six or seven courses at once, plus wine and coffee and a little bit of sorbet to clean the palate now and then, and maybe some dessert chocolates or mints. There was no point to it, though. Harry can eat an amazing amount of food in hardly any time at all—it all being simulation, of course—and then come back for more hardly any time later. It's his favorite recreation. But he enjoys looking forward to it while it's being prepared almost as much, and it keeps him quieter because he doesn't want to disturb me in my work.
So I did it the slow way, from scratch. I simulated every last bit of the menu being made. I carved the simulated meat out of a nonexistent pumpkin for the pie and pretend-boiled a batch of imaginary chestnuts for the dressing. I simulated a six-kilogram turkey, complete with feathers and internal organs and all to make it interesting. The turkey was a Narragansett, of course; in his time with me Harry has learned to despise those giant-breasted but totally tasteless twentieth-century birds. So I had to amputate the legs to braise them in chicken stock first; Narragansetts actually use their legs to walk around on, so they can turn out a little tough if you don't do that. Then I plucked and cleaned the bird and set the giblets to cooking for gravy. And on and on.
And, since that took hardly any of my capacity, I was using some of the rest for my own purposes.
The first thing I wanted to do was to test this system's capabilities.
They didn't seem particularly strong. The guardmind was pretty oblivious to anything I did. The secretary not so much so, but no real threat. When I slipped away I left behind the simulacrum of myself busily cooking Harry's dinner, and she never even glanced up.
That did not mean that there were not more capable programs somewhere in the system. Accordingly, I proceeded slowly, my primary aim being merely to map out the physical metrics of the installation. Nothing interfered, and there were no surprises.
Ground truth confirmed the Kugel's statement that these were some old Heechee tunnels. With the exception of one particularly large chamber none of the rooms appeared to contain any living organic persons. Most of the rooms seemed hardly even furnished. Evidently the Owner didn't go in much for entertaining guests.
I had identified all the castle's weaponry and charted, but did not approach, the main AI centers when the secretary called, "Stovemind?" I was back within my simulacrum before she got the next words of her instructions out, while Harry was still chewing on his turkey drumstick. "Remembering all the cautions you have been given," she said, "you will display yourself to the Owner at once."
She didn't tell us how to get to where this Owner was, although I had expected she would and was preparing to match her directions against the passages I had mapped out. She did it the quick and dirty way. She just disappeared. She took all her surround with her, and we were suddenly in another one entirely.
This time not a simulated one.
We were in the large organic-occupied chamber I had identified. In optical observation it resembled nothing so much as a tsar's throne room, or a high-end Las Vegas hotel suite. Apart from a number of simulations there were four or five female persons lounging about, each one of them very nearly as spectacular looking as the simulation that had sent us here. These were not simulations, however. They were organic. So was the room's one male occupant, a sallow-skinned man who was boredly picking through a tray of chocolates as he looked up at us. I knew at once that he was the Owner.
That was not all I knew, though. I recognized him as soon as I saw his face. He was indeed one of the richest human beings in the entire galaxy, and his name was Juan Enrique Santos-Smith. Or, for short, Wan.
VII
A master chef does not merely cook palatable meals, he cooks them for what sometimes are very unusual clients. In my professional capacity I had been expected to deal with whatever VIPs might turn up on the Wheel. For that reason I had been given a recognition library of some two hundred thousand of the most important human beings in the Galaxy. That was so that I could not only feed them well but greet them by name and even ask after the health of their families, if they had any.
The Owner was definitely on that list. I was aware that this Wan was the offspring of two old Gateway prospectors whose ships had unerringly taken them to an ancient Heechee artifact and left them there. That, as you might say, had been both good luck and bad. The bad luck was that they were even worse off than Harry had been in his own marooning on Arabella. Wan's parents never got rescued from their artifact. They died there. The good luck was that the artifact they died on was nothing less than a giant, sophisticated Heechee spacecraft of a type no human had previously seen, and it was crammed full of all sorts of technology of great worth to human beings.
For Wan, the important thing was that when at last humans did get to the spacecraft, the Gateway rules of discovery applied. Wan, the son and thus the only heir of those lost and nameless prospectors, owned every bit of it. Which made him just about unbelievably rich.
That explained several things. For one, it explained how Wan, who had to be reaching a pretty significant age, managed to look reasonably spry; organics medicine could do wonders for those who could pay the bill. For another, it explained how he had been able to afford constructing this retreat. He could have built a dozen like it, and still have enough money left over to, if he chose, fly them to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
With all that money, Wan wasn't going to limit himself to a retinue of only a handful of attendants, however gorgeous. There were at least a dozen other persons in the room, though these were all AI simulations rather than organics. A couple were half-heartedly playing chess, a group sat around a card table, others were in conversations here and there around the room. All of them wore unusual outfits. There was a man in a clown suit with a red putty nose, another in the white coat, stethoscope and scrubs of a physician, a couple of women with pencils stuck behind their ears and carrying the ruled notebooks of an old-time stenographer. Whatever they had been doing, they all stopped doing it to turn and stare at Harry and me.
The Owner stared like the others, while chewing on whatever it was he had in his mouth. Then he swallowed and said, sounding as surly as he looked: "I didn't invite you two here. Can either of you give me any reason for letting you stay?"
I spoke right up. "My name is Marc Antony and I am one of the finest professional chefs in the galaxy. I can prepare, excellently, any dish you choose, from whatever cuisine you like, including—" and I rattled off a list of the most interesting cuisines from most of the great cultures in human history—
Well, no, that's not exactly true.
It was a mere simulation of me that did all that. I wasn't exactly there anymore.
I didn't see any reason to stay in Wan's throne room simply to rattle off lists, or, for that matter, to listen to Wan's interminable eight- or nine-second tactless substitute for a civilized greeting. I simply provided my simulation with instructions as to which expressions to display and what things to say.
Of course, there was a slight risk there. Something might have gone wrong, but I provided for that. I came back every twenty or thirty milliseconds to check on how things were going and revise my instructions to the simulation when necessary.
I needed a little personal time to conduct a more detailed exploration of Wan's little kingdom.
I had all the time in the world to do that. The Owner let my simulation talk on for more than eighteen seconds before he interrupted. That, plus his original greeting, gave me more than twenty-seven seconds of organics time to explore. If you want to know what a competent AI can do in twenty-seven organics seconds, the answer is, "Anything he wants to."