Heechee rendezvous (31 page)

It didn’t take long for the brigadier to arrive, but by the time he had gotten there I had almost forgotten him. Essie was engaged in a lively chat with the guard the ensign had left, and I was thinking. What I was thinking about mostly, for a change, was not Klara but the mad African woman and her almost as mad associates. They scared me. Terrorists scared me. In the old days there was a PLO and an IRA and Puerto Rican nationalists and Serbian secessionists and German and Italian and American rich kids asserting their contempt for their daddies-oh, lots of terrorists, all sizes, all kinds-but they were all separate. The fact that they had got together scared me. The poor and the furious had learned to join their rages and resources, and there was no question at all that they could make the world listen. Capturing one ship would not stop them; it would only make their efforts bearable for a while-or almost bearable. But to solve their problem-to ease their rage and supply their needs- more was needed. The colonization of worlds like Peggy’s Planet was the best and maybe the only answer, but it was slow. The transport could take three thousand eight hundred poor people to a better life each month. But each month something like a quarter of a million new poor people were being born, and the fatal arithmetic was easy to do:

250,000

3,800

246,200

new poor people to deal with each month. The only hope was new and bigger transports, hundreds or thousands of them. A hundred would keep us even with the present level of misery. A thousand would cure it once and for all-but where were the thousand big ships to come from? It had taken eight months to build the True Love, and a lot more of my money than I had really intended. What would it cost to build something a thousand times as big?

The brigadier’s voice took my mind off these reflections. “It is,” he was saying, “flatly impossible! I let you see her because I was asked to. To take her away with you is out of the question!” He glowered at me as I joined them, taking Essie’s hand.

“Also,” she said, “is question of male Walthers and Chinese woman. We wish them also.”

“We do?” I asked, but the brigadier wasn’t listening to me.

“What else, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “You wouldn’t like me to turn over my section of the Pentagon? Or give you a cruiser or two?”

Essie shook her head politely. “Our ship is more comfortable, thank you.”

“Jesus!” Cassata wiped his brow and allowed Essie to lead him into the main lounge for the promised bourbon. “Well,” he said, “there’s no real charge against Walthers and Yee-xing. They had no right coming up here without clearance, but if you take them away again we can forget that one.”

“Splendid!” Essie cried. “Remains now only other Walthers!”

“I could not possibly take the responsibility,” he began, and Essie did not let him finish.

“Certainly not! One understands that, of course. So we will refer to higher authority, right? Robin! Call General Manzbergen. Do here, so will be no annoying record to possibly embarrass, all right?”

There is no use arguing with Essie when she is in such a mood, and besides, I was curious to see what she was up to. “Albert,” I called. “Do it, please.”

“Sure, Robin,” he said obligingly, voice only; and in a moment the screen lit up, and there was General Manzbergen at his desk. “Morning, Robin, Essie,” he said genially. “I see you’ve got Perry Cassata there- congratulations to all of you!”

“Thank you, Jimmy,” said Essie, looking sidewise at the brigadier, “but is not what we called about, please.”

“Oh?” He frowned. “Whatever it is, do it fast, all right? I’ve got a top meeting coming up in ninety seconds.”

“Take less than that, General dear. Merely please instruct Brigadier Cassata to turn over Dolly Walthers to us.”

Manzbergen looked puzzled. “For what?”

“So can use her to locate missing Wan, General dear. Has TPT, you know. Much in everyone’s interest to make him give it back.”

He grinned fondly at her. “Minute, honey,” he said, and bent to a hushphone.

The brigadier might have been rushed, but he was on his toes. “There’s a lag,” he pointed out. “Isn’t this zero-speed radio?”

“Is burst transmission,” Essie lyingly explained. “Have only small vessel here, not much power”-another lie-“so must conserve communications energy-ah, here is general again!”

The general pointed toward Cassata. “It’s authorized,” he barked. “They’re trustworthy, we owe them a favor-and they might be able to save us a pack of future trouble. Give them whoever they want, on my authority. Now, for God’s sake, let me get to my meeting-and don’t call me again unless it’s World War Four!”

So the brigadier went away, shaking his head, and pretty soon the MPs brought Janie Yee-xing to us, and a minute later Audee Walthers, and quite a while after that Dolly Walthers. “Nice to see you all again,” said Essie, welcoming them aboard. “Am sure you have much to talk over among you, but first let us get away from this wicked place. Albert! Move it, please?”

“Right, Mrs. Broadhead,” sang Albert’s voice. He didn’t bother with materializing in the pilot seat; he simply walked in a door and leaned against the lintel, smiling at the company.

“Will introduce later,” said Essie. “This is good friend who is computer program. Albert? Are now safely away from Pentagon?”

He nodded, twinkling. Then before my eyes he turned from elderly man in pipe and baggy sweater to the leaner, taller, uniformed, and medaled Chief of Staff General James P. Manzbergen. “Right you are, honey,” he cried. “Now let’s get our asses into FTL before they find out we foxed them!”
 
...

Who sleeps with whom? Ah, that was the question! We had five passengers, and only three staterooms to put them in. The True Love had not been planned for very many guests, and especially when the guests did not come presorted in pairs. Should we put Audee in with his wedded wife, Dolly? Or with his most recent bedmate, Janie Yee-xing? Put Audee by himself and the two women together?-and what would they do to each other if we did? It was not that Janie and Dolly were hostile to each other so much as that Audee seemed unaccountably hostile to both of them. “He cannot make up his mind which he should be true to,” said Essie wisely, “and is a man who wishes to be true to a woman, is Audee.”

Well, I understood that well enough, and even understood that more of our passengers than one suffered that problem.

But there is a word in that statement that did not apply to me, and it is the word suffered. You see, I wasn’t suffering. I was enjoying myself. I was enjoying Essie, too, because the way we solved the problem of assigning accommodations was to walk away from it. Essie and I retired to Captain’s Quarters and locked the door. We told ourselves that the reason we did was to let our three guests sort things out among themselves. That was a good reason. God knows they needed time to do that, because the interpersonal dynamics latent among the three of them were enough to explode a star; but we had other reasons, too, and the biggest of them was so that we could make love.

And so we did. Enthusiastically. With great joy. You would think that after a quarter of a century-at our advanced ages; and making allowances for familiarity and boredom and the fact that there are, after all, just so many mucous surfaces to rub against and a finite number of appurtenances to rub them with-there would be very little incentive for us to do that. Wrong. We were motivated as hell.

Perhaps because it was because of the relatively cramped quarters on the True Love. Locking ourselves into our private cabin with its anisokinetic bed gave the affair a spice of teenage fooling around on the porch, with Daddy and Mommy only a window screen away. We giggled a lot as the bed pushed us about in ingenious ways-and suffer? Not a bit of it. I hadn’t forgotten Klara. She popped into my mind over and over, often at very personal times.

But Essie was there on the bed with me, and Klara was not.

So I lay back on the bed, twitching a little now and then to feel how the bed would twitch back, and how it would twitch Essie, cuddled close into my side, and she would twitch a little-it was a little like playing three-cushion billiards, but with more interesting pieces-and thought, calmly and sweetly, about Klara.

At that moment I felt quite certain that everything would work out. What after all was wrong? Only love. Only that two people loved each other. There was nothing wrong in that! It was a complication, to be sure, that one of that particular two, e.g., me, might be also a part of another two who loved each other. But complications could be resolved-somehow or other-couldn’t they? Love was what made the universe go around. Love made Essie and me linger in Captain’s Quarters. Love was what made Audee follow Dolly to the High Pentagon; and a kind of love was what made Janie go with him; and another kind of love, or maybe the same kind, made Dolly marry him in the first place, because one of the functions of love is surely to give a person another person to organize his or her life around. And off in one stretch of the great, gassy, starry wastes (though at that moment I did not yet know it) Captain was mourning for a love; and even Wan, who had never loved anyone but himself, was in fact scouring that universe for someone to aim his love at. You see how it works? It is love that is the motivator.

“Robin?” said Essie drowsily to my collarbone. “Did that very well. My compliments.”

And, of course, she too was talking about love, although in this case I chose to accept it as a compliment to my skills in the demonstration of it. “Thank you,” I said.

“Makes me ask question, though,” she went on, drawing back to peer at me. “Are fully recovered? Gut in good shape? Two point three meters new tubing working well with old? Has Albert reported all well?”

“I feel just fine,” I reported, as indeed I did, and leaned over to kiss her ear. “I only hope the rest of the world is going as well.”

She yawned and stretched. “If you refer to vessel, Albert is quite capable of handling pilotage.”

“Ah, yes, but is he capable of handling the passengers?”

She rolled over sleepily. “Ask him,” she said.

So I called, “Albert? Come and talk to us.” I turned to look at the door, curious to see how he would manage his appearance this time, through a tangible, real door that happened to be closed. He fooled me. There was a sound of Albert apologetically clearing his throat, and when I turned back he was sitting on Essie’s dressing bench again, eyes bashfully averted.

Essie gasped and grabbed for the covers to shield her neat, modest breasts.

Now, that was a funny thing. Essie had never bothered to cover herself in front of one of her programs before. The funniest thing about it was that it did not seem strange at the time. “Sorry to intrude, my dear friends,” said Albert, “but you did call.”

“Yes, fine,” said Essie, sitting up to look at him better-but with the bedspread still clutched to her. Perhaps by then her own reaction had struck her as odd, but all she said was “So. Our guests, how are they?”

“Very well, I should say,” Albert said gravely. “They are having a three-sided conversation in the galley. Captain Walthers is preparing sandwiches, and the two young women are helping.”

“No fights? No eyes scratched out?” I asked.

“Not at all. To be sure, they are rather formal, with many ‘excuse mes’ and ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous.’ However,” he added, looking pleased with himself, “I do have a report for you on the sailship. Would you like to have it now? Or-it occurs to me-perhaps you would like to join your guests, so that you may all hear it at once.”

All my instincts were to get it right away, but Essie looked at me. “Is only polite, Robin,” she said, and I agreed.

“Splendid,” said Albert. “You will find it extremely interesting, I am sure. As do I. Of course, I have always been interested in sailing, you know,” he went on chattily. “When I was fifty the Berliner Handeisgesellschaft gave me such a fine sailboat-lost, unfortunately, when I must leave Germany because of those wicked Nazis. My dear Mrs. Broadhead, I owe you so much! Now I have all these fine memories that I did not have before! I remember my little house near Ostend, where I used to walk along the beach with Albert-that”-he twinkled-“was King Albert, of Belgium. And we would speak of sailing, and then in the evenings his wife would accompany me on the piano while I played my violin- and all this I now remember, dear Mrs. Broadhead, only because of you!”

Through the whole speech Essie had been sitting rigid beside me, staring at her creation with a face like a stone. Now she began to sputter and then she broke out in guffaws. “Oh, Albert!” she cried, reaching behind her for a pillow. She took aim and threw it right through him, to bounce harmlessly against the cosmetics beyond him. “Great funny program, you are welcome! Now get out, please. Since are so human, with memories and tedious anecdotes, cannot permit to observe me unclothed!” And he allowed himself, this time, to simply wink away, while Essie and I hugged each other and laughed. “So get dressed now,” she ordered at last, “so we can find out about sailship in mode satisfactory to computer program. Laughter is sovereign medicine, right? In that case have no further fears for your health, dear Robin, so well rejoiced a body will surely last forever!”

We headed for the shower, still chuckling-unaware that, in my case, “forever” at that moment amounted to eleven days, nine hours, and twenty-one minutes.