"Hell, yes," he said stoutly. But even as he said it he was pretty sure it was a lie.
The handlers were openly mourning for the loss of the places and people they might never see again. ("That Nairobi! That's a twenty-four-hour town, all right! All the action you could want—and cheap, too!") They were on terms of easy cameraderie with their charges, calling each of them by name. But the handlers were most interested in Salt and Achiever, who were of a different species. "Oh, sure," the handler named Jared told Stan, "we saw Heechee before, now and then, when they came to look at the Old Ones, and then naturally when we came to the Core we saw plenty. But this is the first time we lived with them."
That kind of attention brought Achiever no joy. He spent almost all his waking hours working the ship's lookplates, dispatching Salt to bring his meals. For nearly two days Stan saw little of him, until one of the Old Ones ambled, or tried to amble, into the control room and was shock-whipped back outside. Achiever popped his head outside to see what all the screaming was about, and caught sight of Stan. "You come on the hell here," he invited. "I possess a thing to show you."
It turned out to be the image of a planet, as blue and white as any other habitable planet anywhere. It was about the size of a grapefruit on the screen and growing perceptibly larger. "Our destination," he declared, flapping his bony fingers at the picture. "I am quite entirely confident that this is to be the case, as no other planetary object has appeared."
"But—" Stan said, "but—" thinking of the endless days and weeks that had taken Estrella and himself to reach the Core in the first place— "but are we there already? So fast? It's only been a couple of days."
"Adequate time for this journey," Achiever declared. "No. No doubt exists. This is quite speedy spacecraft, and we are here. Object in look-plate is to be new home for you, for quite some time almost certainly, perhaps indeed for always."
III
When they arrived on the planet, everybody piled out of the spacecraft at once, humans and Heechee and Old Ones all hurried along by the electronic whips and shouted orders of Wan's invisible crew.
What Stan saw when he caught his balance was a patch of tangled, lush greenery the size of a football field, treed around the edges, with a friendly little lake at the far side. In one direction was a mountainside, rather bleak, bearing a handful of buildings—or rather, Stan corrected himself, all that was left of some ancient buildings that now were in ruins. A gentle rain was falling. The air was not unpleasantly cool. And—Stan inhaled deeply and with unexpected pleasure—it smelled faintly of trees and grass and more distant vegetable odors, and not at all of the Old Ones.
That was a big plus as tar as Stan was concerned, but it was looking a lot like the only one. Moments after the last Old One shambled wincingly out of the ship, bellowing and waving its hands to protect itself from the unseen lash, the ship's ports closed. With only the faintest of shrill whines, it lifted itself off the greenery. It rotated a quarter-turn on its axis, then slid swiftly up and almost out of sight along the mountainside. A moment later it reappeared, setting down on the very peak. And there it stayed, silent and unmoving.
Then everybody began trying to figure out what to do in this place they had not chosen.
The first thing Stan discovered, Grace Nkroma right behind him, was that they did have food. There was a pyramidal structure by the lake that churned out packets of CHON-food from one side and clear, cold water from another. "Good," Grace said, and raised her voice. "Yussuf, get a couple of the others and start passing these out to the Old Ones to keep them quiet." And to Stan, "What are those huts?"
He hadn't seen them before, a dozen of them or so, beehive-shaped and made, as far as he could tell from here, out of clay and pebbles. There was one entrance to each, presumably a door, and nothing at all like a window. "They don't look very comfortable," he said.
"At least you could get Estrella out of the rain," Nkroma pointed out.
That was true enough. Annoyed because he hadn't thought of it himself, Stan took Estrella's arm to help her toward the shelter. She was having none of that. "Oh, Stan," she said, "don't you think I can walk over there by myself? Anyway—Oh!" she said, stopping short.
An elderly man, or a simulation of one, had appeared directly in front of them. He was wearing what looked like something that had been donated to some undemanding charity. The man himself didn't look much better. "Excuse me," he said politely, barring their way. "These places are for the Old Ones, not you."
Stan scowled at him, knowing perfectly well that he could push right through that intangible figure, holding back because of the unknown, but possibly very unpleasant, consequences. "And who the hell are you?" he demanded.
"I'm Horace Packer. Wan's orders were to make our guests, the Old Ones, as comfortable as possible. I don't have any orders like that for you."
20
What Klara Wants
I
When you're Gelle-Klara Moynlin and everybody in the universe knows your name, you have a certain responsibility. You can't, even, go all panicky. Not that I was really about to, of course. When you've lived as long as I have, you can take a death threat now and then without getting all excited about it.
I wasn't excited. What I was was sad, because I couldn't get the vision of the murder of all those innocent people, Heechee and human, out of my mind—yes, and mad, too, because the person threatening to do it was that loathsome toad, Wan.
Why did I loathe him in particular? I hate to admit it, but I had a history with the little turd. For a brief, but not brief enough, time long ago I was his—let me see, what's the word? All right. I was his bought and paid-for whore. Never mind the details. Let's just say that I was in a place I wanted to get out of, and the only way I had to do it was in Wan's private spaceship. The trouble was, the price of passage was high. I worked it off in his bed. Or his bathtub or his dining table or, often enough, his floor, because when Wan wanted what he wanted, he wanted it right then and there.
Enough of that. Let me just say that, sexually, the little wretch was selfish and discourteous, and in his other relations he was worse. I thought he was crazy even then. (Later on, of course, I was sure of it.) I didn't exactly hate him, but I would have been just as pleased to hear he was dead. Especially now that he was willing to murder people by the planetful. Including me, of course, but honestly my own life was pretty nearly used up already. The ones I cared about were all those millions of others at risk, with a lot more to live for than I.
So my mood wasn't great. Hypatia did her best to cheer me up, as much as I would let her. That wasn't much. I didn't feel like girl talk, or actually any other kind of talk either. For a while I let her tell me news bulletins about what was happening with the Wan situation, but there weren't many of them. He had landed on that One Moon Planet of Pale Yellow Star Fourteen where the Old Ones had been taken. He had lashed their keepers with some kind of electronic pain maker until they loaded their charges onto his ship, after which he had pretty much disappeared. After she told me that much, I told her I didn't want to hear any more. Nor did I want to listen to music, or have a bubble bath, or be read to. The only thing I was willing to accept was food. I ate it all, even appreciated the taste of it all, but my mood didn't change. It stayed somber.
Then it got violently bad.
I was picking at one of Hypatia's quiches, and more or less watching some kind of modern-day Hamlet that Hypatia had put on the lookplate, when I heard her here-I-am-again cough coming from behind me. As I turned I saw that she wasn't in her usual fifth-century robes. She was sitting bolt upright on a hard bench, wearing a pretty plain kind of private-secretary tailored suit. Her expression was as businesslike as her costume, by all of which I knew she was about to tell me something I wasn't going to like.