She seemed to have left something out. "You mean Wan took you away from Peggys Planet?"
She shook her head. "Aw, no. Not then. He just went off, I think with some other woman, and I kind of forgot he existed. Then, six or eight months later, just when I was really hitting bottom, along comes this guy from some lawyer's office, and he tells me Wan's willing to pay for the makeover at Here After if then I'll come out to his place and teach some friends of his how to be ballet dancers." She giggled. "I guess you've seen the friends. They're girls he picked up here and there, and I guess they have a lot of talents, but dancing isn't one of them. Well, except maybe Liz. I kind of owe her, I guess."
She was waiting for me to ask her what for, so I did.
"It's kind of a long story," she said—as though there had been any brevity before that. "Wan was always scared sick of dying, you know. So he kept the whole Here After machine-storage stuff with him, with Liz trained to run it. Only he didn't die. I did, and Liz stored me."
"Liz?" I said, to keep her going.
"Elizaveta. Doctor Death, we called her. The Russian bimbo that's up there with Wan. You can recognize her because, A, she's not all that good-looking, compared to the rest of us, and, B, she's always looking worried because she's still organic and she's scared of getting pregnant." She bobbed her head to confirm what she'd just told me. Then she said, "Anyway, after I got the hang of stored activity I figured out how to simulate a whole ballet company, and he watches them sometimes—not in Giselle or The Nutcracker, you know, but special performances that I make up for him myself." She winked at me, and then asked, "You sure you wouldn't like a drink or something?"
"Thanks," I said, shaking my head. I was getting impatient with this woman, so I decided to cut this interview short. "Let me ask you a couple of questions. The Owner's secretary asked us if we knew how to make a star explode. Do you know why he wants to know that?"
She looked puzzled. "Oh, wait a minute. He said once that he wished he could do that. Maybe could, if he could find some old Heechee thing somewhere that could make it happen. Could that have anything to do with it?"
That was surprising for two reasons. Apparently Wan was getting close to something the old Heechee, Thermocline, had once hinted at. I needed to discuss this with Thor Hammerhurler. Meanwhile I needed more information, but this woman was not the source to ask. "One more thing, then. Do you have any idea why Wan has all these weapons?"
She shrugged. "Because he wants to kill some people. That's what those things are for, right? He'll do it soon's he works his nerve up to it, I guess. Which won't be like today; he's not real brave. He's sure good at hating, though."
"Do you know who it is he hates?"
"Well," she said thoughtfully, "pretty much everybody. But especially Robinette Broadhead—you know who that is? Well, of course you do. And some women. Quite a lot of women, I think. He's not so good at being in a relationship, and when they end he blames the women, a lot, and most of all he hates the Heechee. He hates every last one of them, the whole race. But he's a good hater, and he probably hates dozens of people I never even heard of.... Listen, you sure about that drink?"
"I'm sure, Allison."
"Because," she said, getting up and moving closer to me, "you don't have to be in a hurry, you know. I don't get that much company these days."
At this point I must confess to something that, in an organic, I would have to call embarrassment. You see, I understood what Allison was saying, not just the expressed words but including the subtext. What she was offering was to have sexual intercourse with me.
Sexual intercourse is not an activity AIs like myself have had much experience in—no, not just not much experience, none at all. It isn't part of our programming.
But that doesn't mean we can't do it. Even me, if I had chosen. I am, I remind you, one of the most powerful AIs ever constructed. It would have been possible for me to simulate everything necessary to engage in such an entertainment.
I can't say whether or not I would actually have done it. Certainly any new experience is interesting, and I enjoy having them. I did go so far as to make a quick trip back to the throne room just to see how things were going, in case I wanted to take a little extra time with Allison.
But things weren't going that well.
The conversation I had left in progress had stopped. Wan's gatekeeper-secretary female had assumed a visible shape and she was whispering in his ear, and his expression was on the verge of something between anger and worriment.
I returned to Allison's chamber at once. "Sorry," I said, as politely as I could. "I really should be getting back. But there's one thing that puzzles me, though. I wouldn't have thought Wan was the ballet type. Why do you suppose he wanted to go to the trouble of bringing you here?"
"That's easy," she said, looking regretful as I went through the motions of simulating standing up and getting ready to leave. "He asked me why ballet was worth watching. I told him because it was a lot of pretty girls in not much clothes bending their bodies into all kinds of peculiar positions."
The Owner's expression hadn't changed. Even the pursed lips of the woman whispering in his ear had not yet slackened—earning my sympathy, because I knew what it was like for an AI to have to slow down speech for an organic listener. The whole throne room was exactly as I had left it a moment before. In the corridor outside, however, there was something new: Harry himself, no longer in the throne room and looking very uneasy as he stood in the grip of two larger-than-life security guards wearing the livery of the Owner.
They wore pretty fierce expressions, too, but neither their size nor the threatening look on their faces bothered me. When you're only a simulation to begin with you can be any size you like; what matters is the power of your programming, and, as I have mentioned, mine was powerful enough to make me a useful ally of Thor Hammerhurler. I subsumed the space around the two guards and contracted myself around them. When they were squeezed sufficiently small to be insignificant I gave them their orders. "Leave him alone. Go away," I commanded. Having no choice, they did.
Harry rubbed his arms just as though the grip of the guards had caused him actual physical pain. "What took you so long, Markie?" he demanded. "Things were going all right, and then all of a sudden those apes grabbed me and dragged me out here, I dunno why."
"Because they found out what we've been doing. Come on. We're going back to the ship."
VIII
We stopped to pick up Allison, because Harry begged. There weren't any problems. Scurry through the castle's communication channels until we found an antenna. Locate our spacecraft in the sky. Launch ourselves toward it—we were in our ship, and well beyond the reach of any forces Wan could summon, long before Wan had time to act.
The first thing I did was call, "Kugel! Come out. We need to talk." For a moment I thought he wasn't going to choose to respond, but then that patchwork of spots and colors began to form, greatly startling Allison. "Jesus H. Kee-rist," she yelped. "What the hell is that?"