"Huh," he said, his thoughts more concentrated on the prospect of a latrine.
"So we're likely to have more of the damn things," she said, somberly gleeful at the opportunity to share her bad news with someone else. "And that's not all. Did you know they're running out of food?"
Even after McClune had relieved himself at the Tae Kwan Do's urinals and slaked his thirst at the taps in their men's room, he was still puzzling over that.
Running out of food! But that was preposterous. People didn't "run out" of food anymore. There was always plenty of food; that was a given. Sure, there had been times when hungering people had even mined coal to grow on it bacteria that could be pressed into horrid little edible lumps that, however textured and flavored, always tasted like used motor oil.
But that was then. That was before the Heechee Food Factories were discovered, orbiting in space in the Oort cloud of comets to suck from them their elemental carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—what they called CHON—and make them into almost any kind of food you could imagine. And after that it was only a step to redesign the Food Factories for Earthly use, floating in ocean waters and pulling the elements they needed from the sea. Why, there were hundreds of the things, churning out rations day in and day out, everywhere! McClune had seen pictures of them, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Red Sea, off the coasts of Morocco and China, wherever there was enough organic matter to give them the carbon and nitrogen they needed to go with the hydrogen and oxygen from the water itself. Of course he had hated what he saw—more Heechee deviltry!—but they certainly had kept Earth's dozen billion people alive. One of his parishioners had actually worked on one of the things until he retired to Rantoul. His job had been mixing the raw CHON with trace elements enough to provide the consumer with all the vitamins and minerals he needed, in a giant floating factory that was moored off the coast of Baja California, and fed most of the Southwest....
Then enlightenment struck. Baja! Of course! The same tsunami that had planed most Pacific shorelines bare would certainly have demolished the Baja Food Factory—and probably the ones on the Oregon coast and the Aleutians and the shores of Central America, and wherever else in those destroyed parts of the world where a Food Factory could have been put. And so, yes, it was possible that, for the first time in a generation, food might indeed be running out.
When McClune called it a day, he was hungry, tired and, he suspected, probably seriously sunburned as well. He was also as close to being happy as he usually allowed himself to get.
Then, to make his day even better, there was good news waiting for him at home. As he pushed past the creaky old door, he saw Cara le Brun and the two girls gorging themselves from a heap of CHON-food packets. Whatever else might happen, his mission was not endangered by the threat of starving. "Run out?" Ella said scornfully. "Course they're gonna run out. We knew that was coming, so we stocked up days ago."
Le Brun had her news too. "I was hunting for interviews at the Here After and I found out something. It's where the Heechee are hanging out. You know that offer they're making?"
Ella and Judy nodded, but McClune looked blank. "What offer?"
"You didn't know? Oh, hell," she said, remembering, "you don't have a machine mind, do you? It's the immigration thing. Like for people who don't have anywhere to go?" And when he looked even blanker, "To the Core, see? They're offering to take anybody who wants it to the Core. Only thing is, it's only for people who've been machine-stored, so most likely they'll have been dead first."
Then the change in McClune's expression—puzzlement to shock to outright anger—registered with her at last. "Hey," she said, her grin placatory, "don't look like that. The Here After deal's kind of weird, sure, but when you look at the alternatives it's not so bad, is it?"
And then she frowned, puzzled, as McClune's expression softened, the rage draining away, the vast, heart-warming, meaningless smile replacing it. "Bad?" he said, considering. "Why, no, Ms. le Brun, it isn't just bad. It is totally, blasphemously, hopelessly evil in all its parts, and I have prayed a thousand times, on my knees, that those responsible for it should boil in a lake of fire for all eternity in the nethermost reaches of Hell."
The smile broadened still more as he turned and walked away. He knew the value of making a good exit, so he did not stop there but kept on making it, right out the creaky old door.
Outside the twilight was warm and the breeze gentle. He glanced at the Heechees' mound of rags, thought briefly of kicking them to the four winds, decided against it as an interior rumble suggested a more immediately important project. He headed toward the latrine.
A good bowel movement was after all a blessing. He took his time about it. By the time he was returning to the others a couple of stars had begun to peep out overhead. Most of the world thought those first glimmers of evening starlight rather pretty, if they thought of them at all. To Orbis McClune they carried a load of guilt. It was they that had lured the world to spaceflight, and thus to the Heechee and all their wickedness.
But they were far away, and on this world McClune was almost at peace as he pushed the door aside and went in. As much peace as the tormented soul of Orbis McClune ever had, at least.
It didn't last. Cara le Brun was sitting in a corner of the room, whispering to her machine mind but with her eyes on him and her expression absorbed. She stopped talking, got up and walked toward him, looking unexpectedly apologetic. At once McClune's defenses went up. He was wary of surprises, which in his experience seldom portended anything good.
Not this time, either. "Hey, Orbis," she said, reaching out to put her hand on his shoulder. Before he could shake it off she was going on: "Listen, I had Barb check you out. I'm sorry if I said anything wrong. I didn't know you had a wife in Here After storage."
VI
The next morning's sun was no hotter, McClune's unsteady perch on the bench beneath the great, frowning statue no more wearying than before, but Orbis McClune felt them more. His voice was just as commanding, his threats and warnings as plangent as ever. However, the old fire in his heart was quenched by the unwanted, long-suppressed memories of an ancient hurt... the one named Rowena.
Rowena. The beautiful. The decorous. The, well, the loved ... or at least the very nearly loved as nearly as it was in Orbis McClune's power to love anything mortal. Until the decorous became unruly, and paid for it with her life, and then had not the grace to be once and for all truly dead but went on to be a constant hurt in McClune's.
The source of that unmitigatable hurt was there before him, right across the street. It was the technicians of Here After that had made it to Rowena's crashed car almost as soon as the ambulance, in time to get her dying consent and transform her personality—her soul!—into nothing more tangible than a cloud of electrons captured within a machine. As she still was at this moment. And always would be, as far into the future as human life continued to exist on Earth.
McClune's voice cracked, right in the middle of one of his favorite descriptions of the eternities of torture that awaited the damned. A couple of the idlers who made up his audience looked amused, but he caught himself and went right on. That is, his mouth continued to shape words and the words became well-reasoned arguments, but the arguments were merely the ones he had voiced so many times before.
Rowena should not have done it.
Her whole life proved that. Her clergyman-father was almost as strict in his beliefs as McClune himself—strict enough to have named his daughter after one of the purest maidens in Sir Walter Scott's long oeuvre, and to have insisted she model herself after that person. Rowena had been brought up to be a perfect wife for, say, the early eighteenth century. And for the first three years of their marriage those were the qualities she displayed, to her husband and to the world.