He said promptly, "I was doing the Lord's business! To tell sinners how they have offended Him. To reprove them for mixing with those instruments of the Antichrist, the Heechee. To teach them why they were singled out for His terrible punishment, and to beg them to repent and save their souls." He paused, not because he had nothing more to say on the subject but because the woman had suddenly begun making notes on the data-screen again.
She looked up irritably. "Don't stop. Say more about this punishment thing." And when he had done so, at length, she looked very nearly pleased. "Huh," she said. "Heart's in the right place, anyway. We'll talk more later, I guess."
And then she was gone—
—and then again, click-click, gone from one place and now in another, she was back, but wearing a different dress and a different hairstyle, and now not alone. Another woman was standing next to her. Not a pretty one this time. She seemed to be a bit older than McClune himself and she wore a baseball cap, with twenty-centimeter blonde braids hanging out of it on either side. The worst thing about her was her expression, an unpleasant mixture of anger and disdain. She gave Orbis a quick uninterested look and went back to studying the place they were in.
Which, actually, was worth looking at. All around them was a rose garden, where tables were laden with platters of fruits and meats and flagons of wine. Its rosebushes rose taller than Orbis McClune, and surrounded them so that he could form no guess about how large a space they were in.
He could see, however, that that lavish open space didn't have much furniture. The mahogany desk was back, though its single red rose had become a spray of two or three dozen. The desk also bore a screen, with a display of a bunch of stars on it, and a tall mahogany cabinet, doors closed. And there was a revolving chair at the desk for its occupant to sit in. The only other chair was better described as a throne, vacant but more handsome than any chair Orbis had ever seen before. It seemed to be made of ebony; its seat was upholstered in what looked like cloth of gold. Orbis did not believe for one moment that it was intended either for him or for the woman with the braids to sit on, which meant that they were intended to stand.
The woman at the desk—what was her name? Roz something, Orbis thought—looked up at him. "I guess I better introduce you," she said. "This"—nodding toward the woman with the braids—"is Phrygia Todd. She's going to be our pilot. Not," she added, finally offering a smile, "of this crummy little torpedo ship, of course. DeVon Washington can handle that. Wan is providing a much bigger one for our mission."
Automatically Orbis held out a hand to Phrygia Todd. She seemed to think it over but then decided to shake it. He didn't take offense, though. He was preoccupied with what Roz Borraly had said. What "mission"? He was so busy turning that over in his mind that it took him a moment to register the other thing. "This ship!" Was he on a spacecraft? Was the man who had had to pray his way onto an airplane now flying somewhere in space?
In a moment those questions were questions no longer, because the Roz Borraly woman was pointing at the screen. "That," she said, "is the place where they're hiding Wan's property that we're going to get back for him."
But what she said after that Orbis no longer heard, because the screen was changing, its view expanding. As the planet grew smaller, its sun had popped into view, bright and foreboding.
And not alone. At the edge of the screen another star had appeared— no, two other stars—no. There were half a dozen of them now, and suddenly interstellar space did not seem very spacious anymore.
Which, Orbis knew, could mean only one thing. Those stars were far too densely packed to be any part of the real galaxy. Whatever they were going to be doing, he realized, they were going to be doing it inside the Core.
Inside the Core. In the very place where lived those plague carriers of evil unspeakable, the damned and damnable Heechee themselves.
II
So shaken up was Orbis by this discovery that he hardly noticed when Borraly began again to talk. It wasn't until he heard her speaking his name that he looked up. She was staring at him in an unfriendly way, and her hand was worrisomely near something on her desk. "Sorry," he said at once. "You said?"
She pondered for a moment, then lifted her hand. "I said that you two can do our great friend and benefactor, Wan Santos-Smith, a service. You're gonna help him get some of the justice he's entitled to, finally, after all the ways he's been wronged." She cast a glance, Orbis thought it might have been a worried glance, at the throne. It was still empty, and she went on. "The good news," she said, flashing them the kind of smile that represented many hours of practice before a mirror, maybe even with an acting coach standing by—the kind of smile that Orbis McClune recognized with no trouble at all, since it was the same smile he had been presenting to an unworthy world all his life—"is that by helping Wan you'll help yourselves. Not just pay. There's more. Take a look at what's in that cabinet."
She didn't seem to touch any buttons or give any signs, but the carved wooden cabinet doors opened as she turned in that direction. What they revealed were shelves bearing a pair of those crystalline scroll things that some people called Heechee prayer fans.
"Recognize them?" she asked. "Right. Those are your works. They're the things all your data is stored in. If you had them yourselves you'd be your own boss, right? Well, you do a good job for Wan, and then they'll be yours. Forever," she added, flashing an encore of the same smile. She licked her lips, glancing again at the vacant throne. Then, the smile returning: "Any questions?"
Whether idle curiosity would be punished with one of those nerve whippings Orbis did not know, but he took the chance. "I'm just wondering what this property is that Wan's so anxious to get back."
The woman was abruptly solemn. I will answer that. You see," she said, "as a small child poor baby Wan was abandoned. Only the care and kindness of a small community of individuals made it possible for him to become the wise, just leader he is today. And what has happened to those individuals?" Her face was reddening with anger. "Robinette Broadhead and his gang of thugs kidnapped them! Took them out of their ancestral home and dumped them in some African jungle! Then, when Wan was able to rescue a few of them, Broadhead's accomplices moved them to the Core and did their best to hunt him down!" She stopped talking there, because the woman she had called Phrygia, the one with the braids, had jumped to her feet.
"Oh, wow!" she gasped. "Are you talking about the cavemen?"
Phrygia didn't say what she meant by that. She couldn't. She was contorted and screaming from the nerve whip that followed her injudicious remark.
But Orbis realized what she was talking about. The—what did you call them? The australopithecines. The soulless animals that, unbelievers claimed, were somehow the great grandparents of the human race.
It was for them that Wan was keeping Orbis McClune in this damnable state of life in death.
Beyond that Orbis couldn't think, because while Phrygia's screaming was still going on the woman, grim-faced, turned them both off—
—And back on, but this time in a place different still, and with a man he had never seen before. "Tell me why you hate the Heechee," he demanded....
And that was another awakening of very, very many of them, and nearly every one repeating something that had been done before.