"He committed rape?" Estrella said, unbelieving.
"No, not rape," von Shrink corrected at once. "Not quite actual sexual intercourse at all. If that had happened, I expect Achiever wouldn't have been able to live with himself. But he did attempt some, well, foreplay. He thinks the human female was at fault, and in a sense perhaps she was. It appears that she had done very poorly as a Gateway prospector. In fact, she had gone broke. So, in order to pay her bills on the asteroid, she resorted to, well, prostitution."
"My God!" Estrella said. "With a Heechee?"
Von Shrink nodded gravely. "That accounts for some of the things you felt when you shared a Dream Couch with him. It wasn't you he hated. It was that poor woman on Gateway. But you were handy."
And as soon as he was gone Estrella sat before one of the lookplates. Stan was wandering idly toward the lanai when she called him back. "Stan? Are these the old things Dr. von Shrink was talking about?"
He strolled around to where he could see into the lookplate. What it displayed was a pair of odd-looking creatures, manlike to a degree, apelike almost as much. They wore rough-knit kilts and not much else, and they both sported thin, unkempt beards. They were eating some kind of fruits and jabbering to each other in a language Stan had never heard before.
As he and Estrella stared at them, Stan shook his head. "Do you think they're people?"
"Do they look like people to you?"
"No, but—Hey!" He snapped his fingers. "They came from where Wan was, way back when he was the crazy kid that was using the Dream Machine way back when—"
"I remember. The Wrath of God, they called it."
"Right. Wan's doing. That's what the Old Ones were, some kind of prehistoric humans that the Heechee had put out there for some reason or other. I guess he thinks he owns them."
"Huh." Estrella examined the shaggy ones on the screen, then emitted a small scream. Their feeding over, the smaller of the two creatures— beard or none, evidently the female—had dropped to hands and knees, while the larger, definitely and now quite conspicuously the male, was preparing to enter her from behind.
"Hey," said Stan, amused. "They're really going at it, aren't they."
Estrella turned the lookplate off. "Fair's fair, Stan. We didn't want people looking at us when we were making love, did we? So we shouldn't watch them."
"But they're animals, Strell! And it's interesting, kind of."
She shook her head, firmly indicating that the subject was closed. "I've got a better idea. Let's get some of that good food, right? What I'm thinking of is, let's see, a thick, juicy, rare steak—beef, not buffalo—and some of those fries and a salad with maybe a little avocado cut up in it—"
"Make it two," Stan said, his expression lightening. "And make it fast, will you please?" And then they sat back to wait.
But it wasn't made fast.
In fact, for quite a while, half an hour or so at the least, it wasn't made at all, although both Stan and Estrella repeated their orders several times. When at last they did hear the remote rumble that told them something had arrived, Stan snapped, "About damn time!" and Estrella beat him to the dispenser.
What was waiting for them did not come under any of those crystalline dones, nor did it look at all like the steaks they had envisioned. It was two packets in the colored wrappings of Heechee food. When, incredulously, they opened them up they discovered that they weren't Heechee food—weren't even as good as Heechee food! They were bricks of something brownish and tough that smelled vaguely of clam beds and tasted like not very good pemmican. "What the hell?" Stan exclaimed. "What's going on here?"
But Estrella had no answer for him, and after tasting a crumb of her own bar was as irritated as he. "If this is what they're feeding pregnant women I'm going to go down to the lake and catch a couple of those ugly little fish and fry them up."
IV
She didn't do that. She ate those horrid messes, and ate all the other horrid messes the dispenser kept giving them in lieu of real food. They had no one to complain to, either. Sigfrid didn't come back. In spite of what he had said, Klara hadn't returned, either. Yellow Jade was so wrapped up in his senile sons that he didn't show up at all, and the one time they did catch a glimpse of Salt she was impenetrably surrounded by a crush of male Heechee. "They don't seem to care what she looks like," Estrella sniffed.
"She has certainly let herself go," Stan agreed. "Want to see if we can catch some news?"
They could. They did, but took very little joy from it. The brainless, but good-looking, newscaster they had seen before was long gone. No one had really replaced him. The lookplate simply displayed views of whatever they requested, and most of the views were unpleasing. Stan had seen some shots of fascinating-looking floating cities, but when he found them again they were in various stages of disrepair. Whole planets seemed to be abandoned—forested where there had been skyscrapers, burned out, iced over. "Remember the pictures they had in the Gateway museum?" Stan asked. "Those were the kind of things the Foe did, but the Foe aren't still doing them, are they?" Estrella only shook her head sadly, without answering.
Then Stan asked for, and got, a look at Istanbul. It too seemed nearly deserted. The Kemal Ataturk Towers were still standing, but apparently vacant glass broken out of the windows, no sign of people going in or out. "Jesus," Stan said. "What do you think happened?"
"I wish I knew," Estrella said, and then changed her mind. "No, maybe I'm better off if I don't know. Let's do something else. How about another look at the kid?"
That, at least, was always rewarding. Every day the tiny creature in Estrella's belly showed new things to marvel at. Those eye things that had seemed to be growing out of the baby's temples were slowly migrating toward the front of her head, where they belonged. Her skin had become so thin that Estrella swore she could see the blood vessels beneath it. (Stan was less sure.) And then one day, while Estrella was back at her lookplates while Stan was studying Stork's display, she jumped. Stan was yelling at her. "Strell! Guess what the hell what! She's sucking her thumb!"
And so, Estrella agreed, she was. Not only that. Day by day the baby's head turned from side to side, her legs flexed and extended, the little arms and hands experimenting with new positions—folded over the little chest, clasped prayer-like before the face, stretched almost straight at the sides. It was a magical slide show, always changing.
When they took time from the contemplation of their unborn, there was plenty to interest them in the lookplates—mostly incomprehensible, yes, but provocative. When they saw a procession of hooded children marching steadfastly into the shallows, and then the deeps, of some ocean, somewhere in the outside galaxy, they could only wonder what was going on. When the lookplate flared with appalling light as some star, also some unknown where, seemed to destroy itself in an eruption of flame they could only admire the spectacle, with no clue of what it meant.
Not counting the food, Stan and Estrella were almost content to be ignored by their friends. Sex was great sport again, now practiced in private. The food, they told each other, really wasn't much worse than they had had in their old Five. The lanai was as lush as ever....
All the same, when their door growled for the first time in days, they both hurried to open it.