She was going too fast for him. "Wait a minute. He was inside you? How'd he do that?"
"He just did it, Stan." She yawned and changed the subject. "You know what? I wish I could've borrowed that couch for a couple of hours."
"Yes," he said absently, "sure. Me too." He wasn't thinking about the couch, though, because he now had other things to ruminate on, and he was ruminating so hard that, until Estrella nudged him, he didn't notice that they had arrived at their own apartment.
They were trying to decide whether to call on Hypatia for a final meal when someone was at the door.
When Stan opened it he was surprised to see Hypatia standing there, with a couple Heechee guiding motorized pallets behind her. "Dr. Moynlin's compliments," she said. "She just received some new furnishings from Earth, and wonders if you can use these others."
And while Stan and Estrella watched the two Heechee rolled their goods into the apartment; and even before they had everything set up, Stan and Estrella recognized that they were being given that same large and obviously comfortable four-poster bed, with rose-colored sheets that seemed to be made of raw silk. When the bed was installed and made neatly, hospital corners and all, Estrella firmly escorted them to the apartment door. "Thank Klara very much for us," she told the shipmind, "but right now I want to try this thing out."
They did try it out. It turned out to be satisfactory in all respects, and Stan was not a bit clumsy, in neither Estrella's opinion nor his own. When at last they went to sleep, it was with Estrella in his arms, and all was as right as could be with everything on the Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four.
13
Stovemind in the Core
I
After I left that other Marc Antony to do my work on the Wheel, I did go to the Core, where I busied myself with my usual pursuits for a while. I did not hurry, but long before the first organic day had passed, I had most of my duties well organized.
Let me make one thing clear. Although I use the word "duties" for lack of a better one, its implication is quite wrong. Everything I did was entirely voluntary. I had left the Wheel of my own free will, being surplus to requirement there, and I had had no "duties" assigned to me in the Core. How could I have? Who in the Core (or anywhere else for that matter) had the authority to assign work for me?
No, there was only one reason for all my activities. It is simply not my nature to be idle.
Since my primary function is as master chef, I began a study of my prospective clientele. That was easy enough. All I had to do was to census all the humans in the Core and to ask or deduce their menu preferences. There weren't that many humans present—no more than fifteen hundred or so when I arrived, fewer than ten thousand even after those first days. Some of the immigrants were, by organic standards, somewhat famous— two former vice presidents of the United States, some entertainment stars, even Gelle-Klara Moynlin, who had once been the richest woman in the galaxy. (Still was, although she had given much of her wealth away when she came to the Core.) However, the famous didn't receive any better treatment from me than the least of the unknowns. I gave them all of my best.
My best, for each, rested on what I thought they would prefer. For a start, it was quite easy to match meals to ethnicities—toad in the hole and Stilton cheese for the Brits, assorted curries and several kinds of dumplings in cream or sugar syrup for those from the Indian subcontinent, dim sum and a variety of main-course entrees for the Chinese— stuffed crab claws, Peking duck, jellyfish, barbecued beef, braised eel and so on. I located a Greek colony on Misty Glacier Planet, for whom I started with a nice orektika of tongue, cheese spread with black peppers and kalamaka olives, followed by that egg-lemon soup that they always want. Their main courses were usually one or another kind of lamb. On Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four there was a young boy from Turkey—my only Turkish customer as far as I could tell—but he was a problem. The first thing I did was to make him some yaprak dolma and a nice kuzo tandir roast, but then for some reason he blacked himself out, so I couldn't see whether they pleased him. His loss. From then on he would be lucky to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and serve him right.
At the same time I was, of course, working at my other special task.
One might wonder why I didn't mention that one first, since under some circumstances it might be a matter of life or death. It just didn't seem urgent at the time. I didn't really expect to get into a use-of-force situation in the Core. The reason I made the preparations was not because I anticipated a need, but because that was what I did.
In terms of security I found there was disgracefully little for me to work with. I hadn't expected much. I hadn't supposed that the Heechee would maintain fleets of armed spacecraft strategically located around the volume of the Core—and they hadn't—but I had thought they would at least have arranged for a decent military surveillance system. They did have a sort of a system, but it was of course rudimentary and—like the Heechee lifestyle in general—civilian-oriented.
The Heechee did also have a regular program of sending scout ships out into the external galaxy every few decades, just to see if the Assassins seemed to be looking for them. What the Heechee would have done if they had ever found that they were, I did not know. I suspected, nothing at all. Apparently they thought the Schwarzschild barrier that surrounded the Core would keep any possible enemy out, including the Assassins, because they had no Plan B. The Heechee alarm channel was at least something to work with. If I were to add to it, perhaps using some of my own food-delivery remotes, and further add some kind of weaponry I would have the beginning of a useful security system.
Weaponry was the problem. There was one possibility that seemed worth exploring. The Heechee had a program of self-propelled torpedoes— small, fast, shipmind-guided, torpedo-shaped spacecraft that they used as transports, carrying data fans or even Stored Minds from place to place. I could commandeer a number of them, packed with explosives. Forty or fifty of them Core-wide, I estimated, would do for a beginning. The explosives were not a problem. If I could tweak the Food Factories into making every spice and condiment ever heard of, I could just as easily get them to turn out cordite, gelignite, plastique or plain old tritnitrotoluene.
I will be truthful and say that I was rather pleased with myself for having succeeded in discovering the need and inventing solutions for it while the innocent Heechee were all unaware. They were, however, less innocent than I had thought. I discovered that when a message appeared in my screen from a Heechee named Thermocline: "Hello, Marc. I see we're neighbors, so if you have a free moment could you please come and visit me?"
To say I was astonished is an understatement. I knew who Thermocline was. On the Wheel he had been one of my most adventurous Heechee dining customers, and that wasn't all. Although organic, he had been a member of Thor Hammerhurler's security team, charged with making sure that the Wheel's physical weaponry remained at full readiness just in case of some undesirable activity from the Foe. (As though any of that weaponry would have made a difference.)
So while I, through my effectors, was making up a few dozen special meals I started a few programs on making inquiries.
That would take some time, but I was not in any hurry. I am not in the business of making house calls. I didn't mind keeping Thermocline waiting for as many as five or six seconds to remind him of it.
Besides, I had had some fresh-fruit requests from the Singaporeans— some of that furry rambutan that they said had been Queen Victoria's favorite fruit, and hard-fleshed salak. Also mangoes, fresher and riper than any that ever turned up in a store, and even durian, complete with its overripe Camembert smell. These took time. A fresh peach is in principle no harder to create than a cheese sandwich, but I like to take special pains with skin color, degrees of ripeness and so on. I couldn't leave them to my sous-chef subroutines. By the time I had them all chilled and dewy, working through the remotes on the Singaporeans' planet, the word on Thermocline came through.