I braced myself. "Go ahead. What is it?"
"Sorry to interrupt, boss, but Wan's gone off with all the Old Ones in his ship. They think he's heading right out of the Core."
I shrugged. "Good riddance. Does that mean we don't have to worry about his blowing up that star anymore?"
"I don't know. That isn't what I wanted to tell you about anyway."
That was when I got really certain it wasn't going to be something I was going to want to hear. I could feel all the muscles in my body tensing up. "Damn it, what?"
She said, "Hon, they've identified the spaceship he hijacked. It was the one Achiever was piloting. It looks like Stan and Estrella—and Salt— are all still aboard."
II
Even at that moment I thought that was sort of a funny way for her to say it. But I had more urgent things on my mind.
The thing is, I've never had many friends. I don't mean employees or the kids who lived on my island or bedmates. I mean friends. The kind of friends you hang out with because you just like having them around. Right now, here in the Core, I was even friend-poorer than usual. Not counting Hypatia, I just had three. There was Estrella, there was Stan, and there was Salt; and now all three of them were in mortal danger.
I couldn't help it. I raged at Hypatia. She took it well enough, having had plenty of practice. That wasn't satisfactory, though, since obviously this catastrophe was not her fault. So I ordered her to fetch me some better scapegoats to yell at.
She tried. Or said she did. Neither of the leading candidates showed up, though, when she called them. I suppose Thermocline and Sigfrid probably were pretty busy trying to get a handle on the situation. They weren't really that busy, though. They could have found time if they wanted to. No, there was a different explanation. They were avoiding me.
Likely enough that was smart of them. I wasn't fit to be talked to.
Hypatia kept bringing me bulletins. Nobody had been harmed at One Moon Planet; Wan's whip-bearing simulations had simply scooped up every one of the Old Ones and every one of their keepers unfortunate enough to be on duty just then. Achiever's ship had been one of the ultra-fast ones from Outside, so there wasn't any hope of catching it even if anyone tried. The precise location of the gravity-killing weapon that would blow up Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star had not been pinned down and maybe never would; best guess was that it was in orbit, somewhere near there, but too small to track. And so on. Lots of news, none of it good.
At least it gave me time to cool down. I don't mean I stopped being angry. I was angrier than ever, but it was all aimed at that little weasel, Wan, rather than the ones I had wanted so badly to scream at. I was sad, too. I mean the kind of sadness where you suddenly find your nose running and tears trickling down your face even when you think you're thinking about something else. The way I had been, after that Kilauea tsunami erased my beautiful little Raiwea.
I sat brooding for a few minutes while Hypatia fluttered around. She was giving me odd looks out of the corner of her eye—watching, I supposed, to see if I was going to blow up. When she tried to interest me in food again I shook my head. "Not hungry," I told her. I stewed around for a moment, then I got an idea. Whether it was a good one or not I did not know, but I said, "Get hold of that damn cook, Marc Antony, for me."
I don't know what she told him, but he did show up—not in person, though, but just on my lookplate. "What is it?" he demanded. "I am quite busy."
I wasn't taking anything from him, or from anybody else, either, just then. "God damn it," I said, "they can't do this! You have to do something."
He looked at me coldly. "What?"
"You have to go after them! Get them back. I don't care what it takes, do you hear me?"
"I hear you," he said, and disappeared. There was no good-bye. He just vanished from the plate.
That was what you'd call a mixed reaction. He understood what I wanted him to do, all right. I just didn't know whether or not he would do it, and when I turned around, Hypatia was giving me another of those fishy looks.
I was not feeling patient. "What?" I demanded.
"Hon," she said, sounding even more sympathetic than the situation called for, "I know how you feel."
Usually when Hypatia says things like that she's heading for a real yelling-at. This time, however, I was too upset to do it. I took a deep breath and tried to collect myself. "Pour me a drink," I ordered. When it rolled in I picked it off the server and took a good hit—icy cold vodka, the way I liked it—before I said, "I know you think you know how I feel. What about it?"
Hypatia got up from the couch she'd been lounging on and came over to stand beside me, her expression as sympathetic as the tone of her voice. I think she would have patted my head if she could. "They aren't worth it," she told me. "Men!"
I set the drink down to glare at her. "What the hell about men?"
She backed away a little, but said doggedly, "It's always some man or another, isn't it? Robin, Wan, Bill Tartch, all the others. You just never get over your glands."
It took me aback that even Hypatia would put Wan in the same sentence with Rob Broadhead, or even with Bill, although I understood that, from her point of view, all males were ravening rapists and bullies....
Then I figured out what she was talking about.
"For Christ's sake, Hypatia, have you got it in your head that I'm hot for Stan Avery's body?"
She didn't say yes or no. She just gave me that long-suffering, understanding look and said, "I know. It's something you can't help, as long as you're a prisoner to those ovaries—"
I guess the look on my face stopped her. "Stan is a child!" I said—well, more like yelled, probably.
She didn't answer that. She didn't even mention the fact that, compared to me at my age, most of my lovers had been children, too, although it was true. She didn't say anything at all. She just looked at me with more of that patient, understanding expression of hers.
So I did something I rarely do. I tried to explain myself to her.
All right, I know she's just a machine intelligence, but there have been times in the last few forevers when she felt like the only friend I had left. I said, "Hypatia, sweetie, I'll be all right as soon as they're safe. I don't need another man. I don't need to scrape together some genetic material and whip up a baby of my own. I've got a better way to fill out my life now, and all I want is to get it back."
"Yes, hon," she said, bobbing her head, "I understand what you're saying."
What I wanted to do at that point was to yell at her some more. I didn't, though. What would have been the point? It was all outside her programming and experience, not just because she was a machine but because she was the particular machine she was.
Hypatia does, in fact, look and act very much like a human being. Sometimes I forget that she isn't, but then, sooner or later, she does something to remind me.
21
A Season on Arabella
I
In their first week on Arabella a couple of significant things happened. After two or three shivering nights on the bare ground, one morning a weird-looking machine with five spindly legs came rattling down over the rocks to their valley. If it had the power of speech, it didn't use it. All it did was deposit a load of sleeping bags in front of Stan, then back away and climb the hill again.