“You saw her again, then, after we met at Way Down?”
“Through Howard Anson.” Rob wished that he had told Corrie at once of his earlier meetings with Senta Plessey, though he was still reluctant to mention the subject of those discussions. “You know Anson runs an Information Service,” he went on. “I’ve been one of his customers for years, but I didn’t make the connection until he told me what he did. He and Senta live together. She told me that Regulo was handsome, back before his sickness became worse.”
“How often did you see them?” Corrie’s voice was grim, and she was not about to change the subject.
“Oh, just a couple of times.” Rob thought that it was time for desperate measures. “I was surprised by one of the things she told me. She said that Darius Regulo is your father — that you were conceived when she was living with him. I wondered why you hadn’t mentioned it to me.”
Corrie’s reaction astonished Rob. She bent forward and the upper part of her suit began to shake rapidly, as though she were suffering from some kind of seizure. After a second or two he realized that she was laughing, gripped by genuine or simulated amusement. Nothing that Rob had said ought to be so funny.
“That again!” she said finally. “I thought I’d heard the last of it. Rob, you just don’t understand Senta yet. It’s not good to say this about my own mother, I know, but Senta lives in a pure dream world. She always has, as long as I’ve known her. Darius Regulo’s my father, is he? What did he say when you told him that?”
Rob stared at the asteroid in front of him, seeking any sign of wobble in its rotation. “I never managed to ask him. We started to talk about Senta, then he changed the subject. It’s not easy to make conversation with Regulo when he wants to talk about something else.”
“You still ought to ask him. Do it when he’s tired. You know that Senta’s a taliza addict, half the time she’s happy to escape the real world.” Corrie had moved in very close to Rob. “It’s quite true that she lived with Regulo for a long time, and it’s true that she conceived a child soon after they split up — me. When I was small, she would tell me about Regulo and say that I was his child. But after a few more years I began to understand Senta better. She would never admit to having a child by an ordinary father. Can’t you see that? She would have to believe her baby came from the richest, most powerful, most mysterious man in the whole System.”
“Then who was your father?” After his earlier glimpse into the labs, and the narrow escape from Caliban, Rob was beginning to feel that his own grip on reality was slipping. There was a limit to the number of surprises a man could absorb in one day.
“I don’t know. It could have been Regulo, I admit that. More likely, it was some rich parasite, or one of her soulful-looking society hangers-on. Senta has a weakness for good-looking young men. Remember how she made up to you, when you first met her.”
“She was on a taliza high.” It occurred to Rob that Corrie had almost no understanding of her own mother’s hopes and fears. Howard Anson played the part of the social man-of-leisure, but there was iron under the soft surface. Had Senta changed, since Corrie’s childhood?
“I don’t think the taliza would make much difference.” Corrie placed her hand on the sleeve of Rob’s aquasuit. “Look, Rob, if I’m not worried who my father was, why should you be? I’m me. I’m not Senta, and I’m not Regulo, and I’m not owned by either of them. Can’t you accept me for what I am?” She turned, and began to head back along the shaft towards the central sphere of Atlantis. Rob hesitantly followed her.
“If you’re wondering why I came here to work for Regulo as soon as I could do it legally,” she went on. “Try thinking from my point of view. I’d heard Senta’s stories about him, ever since I was old enough to understand a sentence. I wanted to meet him, and I took the Space Aptitude Test before I was ten years old. When I got the chance to apply for a job here, I grabbed at it. And I got it — without special help from Regulo or anybody else. And I’ve done well.”
Corrie was diving ahead of Rob, a silver gleam of suit against the dark walls. Her voice, earnest and upset, came clearly over the suit radio, but she was outdistancing him easily. Rob didn’t have the same familiarity with the inside structure of Atlantis.
“Hey, Corrie, what’s the hurry?” he called, trying to speed up his progress along the shaft.
“I’m tired of talking about this, that’s all.” She was through the second lock and swinging on towards the living-sphere. “I’ll be in my rooms. Come there if you choose to. But you have to promise there won’t be more chat about Senta and Regulo.”
Rob followed slowly. Now he was more confused than ever. Someone was lying to him, but the big question wasn’t who — it was why. He wished that he could discuss the whole thing with Howard Anson, but Howard was back on Earth, millions of kilometers away. Rob didn’t trust the privacy of the comlinks on Atlantis. Until he could get back to L-4 he would have to wrestle with it on his own. As he made his way to Corrie’s rooms, he mentally reviewed the list of questions that had to be answered before he could take Corrie’s advice and ignore the past.
Corrie’s rooms were up near the “pole” of the living-sphere, on the axis of rotation where the effective gravity provided by the spin of Atlantis was negligible. One entire wall of her main room was a transparent panel, looking out onto the brightly lit submarine garden. Shimmering schools of fish moved lazily through the green and purple weeds, like a living rainbow.
On previous visits Rob had sat there for hours, looking out and not speaking. Since Corrie had developed that scenery herself — admittedly with substantial aid from the robo-gardeners — Rob’s interest had pleased her. Then she learned that for Rob it merely formed an unseen and neutral backdrop to the design calculations that occupied most of his waking hours. Rob was blessed with a strong visual imagination. When he was thinking hard, he literally did not see the display of life outside the window. After a couple of tries, Corrie decided that it was hopeless. Rob’s interest in the beauties of Nature could not compete with his fascination for pipes, cables, caissons, pulleys and ballasts.
By the time that Rob was through the inner lock of the entry shaft and had made his way to Corrie’s quarters, she was already changed into one of her light leotards. She was hovering three feet off the floor, legs crossed and tucked up beneath her, watching the graceful parade of fish across the viewing panel. As Rob came in she turned her head and motioned for him to keep quiet. Her head was cocked to one side, listening. Rob moved to her side. After a few seconds he could hear it, too, a steady burst of drumming against the outer wall, followed a few seconds later by an irregular sequence of loud thumps.
He looked at Corrie questioningly.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “It started as I was changing, and at first I didn’t take much notice of it.” She gestured to her left. “It sounds to me as though it comes from that way, farther along the wall.”
Rob leaned close to the panel and tried to see around the curve of the outer wall, but nothing was visible there. “Let’s go and take a look. We ought to be able to find another panel in that direction.”
“No need to. I think I can do better than that.” Corrie floated over to the elaborate control panel set into one wall of the room. She switched on the display screen that was mounted next to it. “When I first came here I found it was hard to know where people were in the living-sphere, and I wanted to look at the fish and the plants outside. I found an easy way to do it. Did you know that there are viewing cameras all over Atlantis, inside and out, so that Caliban can have data inputs about everything that’s happening? I tapped into the set that cover the living-sphere and the aquasphere. All we have to do is pick the right camera.”