Heechee rendezvous (25 page)

“They’re going to catch up with him sooner or later,” Dolly said, sucking at the bottle again. “He’s such a jerk, coming here when he could have dropped you off anywhere, and got his God-damn candy and cake.”

“Well, I’d rather be here than some other place,” said Klara, wondering if it was true.

“Don’t be silly. He didn’t do it for you. He did it because he thinks he can get away with anything at all, anywhere. Because he’s a jerk.” She stared moodily at the bottle. “He even makes love like a jerk. Jerky, if you know what I mean? He even screws jerky. He comes up to me with that look on his face as if he’s trying to remember the combination to the food locker, you know? And then he gets my clothes off, and then he starts, push here, poke there, wiggle this part. I think I ought to write up an operating manual for him. The jerk.”

How many drinks the little stake lasted for Klara didn’t know-several, anyway. At some later time Dolly remembered that she was supposed to shop for brownie mix and liqueur chocolates. At a later time still Klara, now strolling around by herself, realized she was hungry. What made her know it was the smell of food. She still had some of Dolly’s loose change in her pocket. It was not enough for a decent meal, and anyway the sensible thing would be to go back to her cubicle and eat the prepaid meals, but what was the point of being sensible anymore? Besides, the smell was nearby. She passed through a sort of archway of Heechee metal, ordered at random, and sat as close as she could get to a wall. She pried the sandwich apart with a finger to see what she was eating; probably synthetic, but not any product of the food mines or sea farms she had ever tasted before. Not bad. Not very bad, anyway, although there was no dish she could think of that would have tasted really good just then. She ate slowly, analyzing each bite, not so much because the food justified it as because doing that postponed the next thing she would have to do, namely contemplate what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

And she became aware of a stir. The busgirl was sweeping the floor twice as diligently, peering over her shoulder at every stroke of the broom; the counter people were standing straighter, speaking more clearly. Someone had come in.

It was a woman, tall, not young, handsome. Thick ropes of tawny hair hung down her back, and she was conversing pleasantly, but authoritatively, with staff and customers alike while she rubbed fingers under shelves to check for grease, tasted crusts to check for crispness, made sure the napkin holders were full, retied the apron strings on the busgirl.

Klara stared at her with dawning recognition that felt more like fear. Her! The one! The woman whose picture she had seen in so many of the news stories the library had produced about Robinette Broadhead. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead opens 54 new CHON-food outlets in Persian Gulf. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead to christen converted interstellar transport. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead directs programming of expanded datastore net.

Although the sandwich was just about the last crumb of food Klara could afford to buy, she could not force herself to finish it. She sidled toward the door, face averted, crammed the plate into the waste receptacle, and was gone.

There was only one place to go. When she saw that Wan was alone in it she took it as a direct message from providence that she had made the right decision. “Where’s Dolly?” she asked.

He was lying in a hammock, sulkily nibbling on fresh papaya-bought at what incredible cost, Klara could not imagine. He said, “Where in-deed, yes, I would like to know that too! I will deal with her when she comes back, oh, yes!”

“I lost my money,” she told him.

He shrugged contemptuously.

“And,” she lied, inventing as she went along, “I came to tell you that you’ve lost, too. They’re going to impound your ship.”

“Impound!” he screeched. “The animals! The bastards! Oh, when I see Dolly, believe me-she must have told them about my special equipment!”

“Or you did,” Klara said brutally, “because you’ve sure been shooting your mouth off. You only have one chance.”

“One chance?”

“Maybe one chance, if you’re smart enough and courageous enough.”

“Smart enough! Courageous enough! You forget yourself; Klara! You forget that for the first part of my life I was all alone-“

“No, I don’t forget anything,” she said wearily, “because you sure don’t let me. It’s what you do next that counts. Are you all packed, ship’s stores all on board?”

“Stores? No, of course not. Have I not told you? Ice cream, yes, candy bars, yes, but my brownie mix and chocolates-“

“The hell with the chocolates,” said Klara, “and since she’s not here when she’s needed, the hell with Dolly, too. If you want to keep your ship, take off now.”

“Now? Alone? Without Dolly?”

“With a substitute,” said Klara tightly. “Cook, bedmate, somebody to yell at-I’m available. And skilled. Maybe I can’t cook as well as Dolly, but I can make love better. Or anyway more often. And you don’t have time to think it over.”

He stared at her slack-jawed for a long moment. Then he grinned. “Take those cases on the floor,” he ordered, “also that package under the hammock. Also-“

“Wait a minute,” she objected. “There’s a limit to what I can carry, you know.”

“As to what your limits are,” he said, “we will discover in time, I assure you. Now you may not argue. Simply take that netting and fill it and then we go, and while you are doing so I will tell you a story I heard from the Dead Men many years ago. There were these two prospectors who discovered a great prize inside a black hole and could not think how to get it out. One said finally, ‘Ah, now I know. I have brought my pet kitten along. We will simply tie her to the treasure and she will pull it out.’ And the second prospector said, ‘Oh, what a fool you are! How can a little kitten pull a treasure out of a black hole?” And the first prospector said, ‘No, it is you who are the fool. It will be easy, for, see, I have a whip.’”

Gateway gave me all of my many millions, but it also gives me the creeps. Coming there was like meeting myself coming back. I met myself as a young, dead-broke, terrified, despairing human being whose only choices lay between leaving on a trip that might kill him and staying in a place where no one would want to live. It hadn’t changed that much. No one would still want to live there although people did and tourists were in and out all the time. But at least the trips were not as recklessly dangerous as they used to be. As we were docking I told my program Albert Einstein that I had made a philosophical discovery, namely that things even out. Gateway gets safer, and the whole home planet Earth gets more perilous. “Maybe there is a sort of law of conservation of misery that insures an average quantum value of unhappiness for every human being, and all we can really do is spread it in one direction or another?”

“It is when you say things like that, Robin”-he sighed-“that I wonder if my diagnostic programs are as good as they ought to be. Are you sure you’re not in pain from your operation?” He was, or appeared to be, sitting on the edge of the seat, guiding our vessel into landing as he talked, but I knew that his question was rhetorical. He was monitoring me all along, of course.

As soon as the ship was secured I unplugged the Albert datafan, tucked it under my arm, and headed for my new ship. “No sightseeing?” Essie asked, studying me with almost the exact expression Albert had displayed. “Then you want me to come with?”

“I’m really excited about the ship,” I said, “and I just want to go look at it. You can meet me there later.” I knew she was eager to see how her beloved franchise was getting along in this location. Of course, I did not then know who she might run into.

So I was thinking about nothing in particular as I clambered through the hatch into my own, personal, human-built interstellar space yacht, and be damned if it didn’t turn out that I was just about as excited as I had told Essie I was. I mean, talk about childhood fantasies come true! It was real. And it was all mine, and it had everything.

At least, it had almost everything. It had a master stateroom with a marvelously wide anisokinetic bed and a genuine toilet next door. It had a fully stocked larder and something very like a real kitchen. It also had two working cabins, one for Essie and one for me, that could provide concealed berths for more guests in case we ever wanted company. It had the first human-built drive system ever to be successfully proved out for a civilian faster-than-light vessel-well, some of the parts were Heechee, salvaged out of damaged exploration ships, but most of it was human-made. And it was powerful with a bigger, faster drive. It had a home for Albert, a fan socket with his name engraved over it; I slipped him into place but did not activate him, because I was enjoying my solitary prowl. It had datafans full of music and PV plays and reference works and specialist programs to do almost everything I might ever want to do, or that Essie might, either. It had a viewscreen copied from the one on the big S. Ya. transport, ten times the size of the little blurry plates in the exploration ships. It had everything I had ever thought of wanting in a ship, in fact, and the only thing it didn’t have was a name.

I sat on the edge of the big anisokinetic bed, the thrust feeling funny on my bottom, because it was all exerted upward instead of that constricting sideways squeeze you get from regular mattresses, and I thought about

One of the lesser artifacts the Heechee left around was the anisokinetic punch-a simple tool that could convert an impact to an equal force at some angle to the driving force. The theory of it turned out to be both profound and elegant. The use people made of it, less so-the most popular product made with anisokinetic materials was a bedding mattress with “springs” whose force was vector rather than scalar, producing what is said to be a titillating support for sexual activity. Sexual activity! How much time meat intelligences waste on that sort of thing!

that problem. It was a good place to do it, since the person who would occupy that bed with me was the one I wanted to name the ship after. However, I had already named the transport after her.

Of course, I thought, there were ways of dealing with that. I could call it the Sem.Ya. Or the Essie. Or the Mrs. Robinette Broadheo4 for that matter, although that was pretty stupid.

The matter was fairly urgent. We were all set to go. There was nothing to keep us on Gateway, except that I couldn’t face taking off in a ship that didn’t have a name. I found myself in the control cabin, and dropped into the pilot seat. This one was built for a human bottom, and in that way alone an immense improvement over the old style.

When I was a kid in the food mines I used to sit on a kitchen chair, in front of the radar oven, and make believe I was piloting a Gateway ship to the far corners of the universe. What I did now was just about the same thing. I reached out and touched the course wheels and made believe to squeeze the initiator teat and-and-well, I fantasized. I imagined myself dashing through space in just the same careless, adventurous, penalty-free style I had imagined as a child. Circling quasars. Speeding out to the nearby alien galaxies. Entering the silicon dust shroud around the core. Meeting a Heechee! Entering a black hole- The fantasy collapsed then, because that was too personally real, but I suddenly realized I had a name for the ship. It fit Essie perfectly, but did not duplicate the one on the S. Ya.:

True Love.

It was the perfect name!

That being so, why did it leave me feeling vaguely sentimental, lovelorn, melancholy?

It was not a thought that I wanted to pursue. Anyway, now that a name had been decided, there were things to do: The registry had to be amended, the ship’s insurance papers had to be corrected-the world had to be notified of my decision. The way to do that was to tell Albert to get it done. So I rocked the datafan that held him to make sure it was firmly seated and turned him on.

I had not got used to the new Albert, so it surprised me when he turned up not in a holograph box, not even near his datafan, but in the doorway to the main cabin. He stood there with an elbow cupped in a palm, the pipe in the free hand, gazing peacefully around for all the world as though he had just come in. “A beautiful ship, Robin,” he said. “My congratulations.”

“I didn’t know you could jump around like that!”

“I am in fact not jumping around, my dear Robin,” he pointed out amiably. “It is part of my program to give to the maximum extent possible the simulation of reality. To appear like a genie out of a bottle would not seem realistic, would it?”

“You’re a neat program, Albert,” I acknowledged, and, smiling, he said:

“And an alert one, too, if I may say so, Robin. For example, I believe your good wife is coming this way now.” He stepped aside-quite unnecessarily!-as Essie came in, panting and looking as though she were trying not to look upset.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded, suddenly alarmed.

She didn’t answer right away. “Haven’t heard, then?” she said at last.

“Heard what?”

She looked both surprised and relieved. “Albert? You have not acquired linkage with data net?”

“I was just about to do so, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said politely. “No! Do not! There is-ah-there are some adjustments in bias must make for Gateway conditions first.” Albert pursed his lips thoughtfully but did not speak; I was not so reticent.