Heechee rendezvous (7 page)

“I wish I could, but there’s not much like that on Peggy’s yet. It’s very difficult for her. So I really can’t blame her if sometimes when I’m, you know, feeling amorous and she isn’t-“ Walthers broke off, because the Libyans were laughing.

“It is written in the Second Sura”-young Fawzi guffawed-“that

Walthers’ suspicion that Robin Broadhead financed the prospectors was well-founded. Walthers’ opinion of Robin’s motives-not so well-founded. Robin was a very moral man, but not normally a very legal one. He was also a man (as you see) who got a lot of pleasure out of dropping hints about himself, particularly when talking about himself in the third person.

woman is our field and we may go into our field to plow it when we will. So says Al-Baqara, the Cow.”

Walthers, suppressing resentment, essayed a joke: “Unfortunately my wife is not a cow.”

“Unfortunately your wife is not a wife,” the Arab scolded. “Back home in Houston we have for such as you a term: pussy-whipped. It is a shameful state for a man.”

“Now, listen,” Walthers began, reddening; and then clamped down again on his anger. Over by the cooking tent Luqman looked up from his meticulous measuring of the day’s brandy ration and frowned at the sound of the voices. Walthers forced a reassuring smile. “We shall never agree,” he said, “so let’s be friends anyway.” He sought to change the subject. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why you decided to look for oil right here on the equator.”

Fawzi’s lips pursed and he studied Walthers’ face closely before he replied. “We have had many indications of appropriate geology.”

“Sure you have-all those satellite photos have been published, you know. They’re no secret. But there’s even better-looking geology in the northern hemisphere, around the Glass Sea.”

“That is enough,” Fawzi interrupted, his voice rising. “You are not paid to ask questions, Walthers!”

“I was just-“

“You were prying where you have no business, that is what you were doing!”

And the voices were loud again, and this time Luqman came over with their eighty milliliters each of brandy. “Now what is it?” he demanded. “What is the American asking?”

“It does not matter. I have not answered.”

Luqman glared at him for a moment, Walthers’ brandy ration in his hand, and then abruptly he lifted it to his lips and tossed it down. Walthers stifled a growl of protest. It did not matter that much. He did not really want to be drinking companions with these people. And in any case it seemed Luqman’s careful measuring of milliliters had not kept him from a shot or two in private, earlier, because his face was flushed and his voice was thick. “Walthers,” he growled, “I would punish your prying if it was important, but it is not. You want to know why we look here, one hundred seventy kilometers from where the launch loop will be built? Then look above you!” He thrust a theatrical arm to the darkened sky and then lurched away, laughing. Over his shoulder he tossed, “It does not matter anymore anyway!”

Walthers stared after him, then glanced up into the night sky.

A bright blue bead was sliding across the unfamiliar constellations. The transport! The interstellar vessel S. Ya. Broadhead had entered high orbit. He could read its course, jockeying to low orbit and parking there, an immense, potato-shaped, blue-gleaming lesser moon in the cloudless sky of Peggy’s Planet. In nineteen hours it would be parked. Before then he had to be in his shuttle to meet it, to participate in the frantic space-to-surface flights for the fragile fractions of the cargo and for the favored passengers, or nudging the free-fall deorbiters out of their paths to bring the terrified immigrants down to their new home.

Walthers thanked Luqman silently for stealing his drink; he could afford no sleep that night. While the four Arabs slept he was breaking down tents and stowing equipment, packing his aircraft, and talking with the base at Port Hegramet to make sure he had a shuttle assignment. He had. If he was there by noon the following day they would give him a berth and a chance to cash in on the frantic round trips that would empty the vast transport and free it for its return trip. At first light he had the Arabs up, cursing and stumbling around. In half an hour they were aboard his plane and on the way home.

He reached the airport in plenty of time, although something inside him was whispering monotonously, Too late. Too late.

Too late for what? And then he found out. When he tried to pay for his fuel, the banking monitor flashed a red zero. There was nothing in the account he shared with Dolly.

Impossible!.—or not really impossible, he thought, looking across the field to where Wan’s lander had been ten days earlier and was no more. And when he took time to race over to the apartment he was not really surprised by what he found. Their bank account was gone. Dolly’s clothes were gone, the hand puppets were gone, and most gone of all was Dolly herself.

I was not thinking at all of Audee Walthers at that time. If I had been, I would surely have wept for him-or for myself. I would have thought that it was at least a good excuse for weeping. The tragedy of the dear, sweet lover gone away was one I knew well, my own lost love having locked herself inside a black hole years and years before.

But the truth is I never gave him a thought. I was concerned with self affairs. What occupied me most notably were the stabbings in my gut, but also I spent a lot of time thinking about the nastiness of terrorists threatening me and everything around me.

Of course, that was not the only nastiness around. I thought about my worn-out intestines because they forced me to. But meanwhile my store-bought arteries were slowly hardening, and every day six thousand cells were dying in my irreplaceable brain; and meanwhile stars slowed in their flight and the universe dragged itself toward its ultimate entropic death, and meanwhile-Meanwhile everything, if you stopped to think of it, was skidding downhill. And I never gave any of it a thought.

But that’s the way we do it, isn’t it? We keep going because we have schooled ourselves not to think of any of those “meanwhiles”-until, like my gut, they force themselves on us.

A bomb in Kyoto that incinerated a thousand thousand-year-old carved wooden Buddhas, a crewless ship that homed on the Gateway asteroid and released a cloud of anthrax spores when it was opened, a shooting in Los Angeles, and plutonium dust in the Staines reservoir for London- those were the things that were forcing themselves on all of us. Terrorism. Acts of senseless violence. “There’s a queerness in the world,” said I to my dear wife, Essie. “Individuals act sober and sensible, but in groups they are brawling adolescents-such childishness people exhibit when they form groups!”

“Yes,” said Essie, nodding, “that is true, but tell me, Robin. How is your gut?”

“As well as can be expected,” I said lightly, adding as a joke, “You can’t get good parts anymore.” For those guts were, of course, a transplant, like a sizable fraction of the accessories my body requires to keep itself moving along-such are the benefits of Full Medical Plus. “But I am not talking about my own sickness. I’m talking about the sickness of the world.”

“And is right that you should do so,” Essie agreed, “although is my opinion that if you got your gut relined you would talk about such things less often.” She came up behind me and rested her palm on my forehead, gazing abstractedly out at the Tappan Sea. Essie understands instrumentation as few people do and has prizes to prove it, but when she wants to know if I have a fever she checks it the way her nurse did to her when she was a toddler in Leningrad. “Is not very hot,” she said reluctantly, “but what does Albert say?”

“Albert says,” I said, “that you should go peddle your hamburgers.” I pressed her hand with mine. “Honestly. I’m all right.”

“Will ask Albert to be sure?” she bargained-actually, she was deeply involved in setting up a whole new string of her franchises and I knew it.

“Will,” I promised, and patted her still splendid bottom as she turned away to her own workroom. As soon as she was gone I called, “Albert? You heard?”

In the holoframe over my desk the image of my data-retrieval program swirled into visibility, scratching his nose with the stem of his pipe. “Yes, Robin,” said Albert Einstein, “of course I heard. As you know, my receptors are always functioning except when you specifically ask me to turn them off, or when the situation is clearly private.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, studying him. He is not any sort of pinup, my Albert, with his untidy sweatshirt gathered in folds around his neck and his socks down around his ankles. Essie would straighten him up for me in a second if I asked her to, but I liked him the way he was. “And how can you tell the situation is private if you don’t peek?”

He moved the stem of his pipe from his nose to his cheekbone, still scratching, still gently smiling; it was a familiar question and did not require an answer.

Albert is really more of a friend than a computer program. He knows enough not to answer when I ask a rhetorical question. Long ago I had about a dozen different information-retrieval and decision-making programs. I had a business-manager program to tell me how my investments were doing, and a doctor program to tell me when my organs were due for replacement (among other things-I think he also conspired with my chef program at home to slip the odd pharmaceutical into my food), and a lawyer program to tell me how to get out of trouble, and, when I got into too much of it, my old psychiatrist program who told me why I was screwing up. Or tried to; I didn’t always believe him. But more and more I got used to one single program. And so the program I spent most of my time with was my general science advisor and home handyman, Albert Einstein. “Robin,” he said, gently reproving, “you didn’t call me just to find out if I was a Peeping Tom, did you?”

“You know perfectly well why I called you,” I told him, and indeed he did. He nodded and pointed to the far wall of my office over Tappan Sea, where my intercom screen was-Albert controls that as well as about everything else I own. On it a sort of X-ray picture appeared.

“While we were talking,” he said, “I was taking the liberty of scanning you with pulsed sound, Robin. See here. This is your latest intestinal transplant, and if you will look closely-wait, I’ll enlarge the image-I think you’ll be able to see this whole area of inflammation. I’m afraid you’re rejecting, all right.”

“I didn’t need you to tell me that,” I snapped. “How long?”

“Before it becomes critical, you mean? Ah, Robin,” he said earnestly, “that is difficult to say, for medicine is not quite an exact science-“

“How long!”

He sighed. “I can give you a minimum and maximum estimate. Catastrophic failure is not likely in less than one day and almost certain in sixty days.”

I relaxed. It was not as bad as it might have been. “So I have some time before it gets serious.”

“No, Robin,” he said earnestly, “it is already serious. The discomfort you now feel will increase. You should start medication at once in any case, but even with the medication the prognosis is for quite severe pain rather soon.” He paused, studying me. “I think from the expression on your face,” he said, “that for some idiosyncratic reason you want to put it off as long as you possibly can.”

“I want to stop the terrorists!”

“An, yes,” he agreed, “I know you do. And indeed that is a valid thing to do, if! may offer a value judgment. For that reason you wish to go to Brasilia to intercede with the Gateway commission”-I did; the worst thing the terrorists were doing was done from a spaceship no one had been able to catch-“and try to get them to share data so that they can move against the terrorists. What you want from me, then, is assurance that the delay won’t kill you.”

“Exactly, my dear Albert.” I smiled.

“I can give you that assurance,” he said gravely, “or at least I can continue to monitor you until your condition becomes acute. At that time, however, you must at once begin new surgery.”

“Agreed, my dear Albert.” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back.

“However,” he went on, “it does not seem to me that that is your only reason for putting off the replacement. I think there is something else on your mind.”

“Oh, Albert”-! sighed-“you’re pretty tedious when you act like Sigfrid von Shrink. Turn yourself off like a good fellow.”

And he did, looking thoughtful; and he had every reason to look thoughtful, because he was right.

You see, somewhere inside me, in that unlocatable space where I keep the solid core of guilt Sigfrid von Shrink did not quite purge away, I carried the conviction that the terrorists were right. I don’t mean right in murdering and blowing up and driving people crazy. That’s never right. I mean right in believing that they had a grievance, a wickedly unjust grievance against the rest of the human race, and therefore they were right in demanding attention be paid to it. I didn’t want just to stop the terrorists. I wanted to make them well.

Or, at least, I wanted not to make them any sicker than they were, and that was where we got into the morality of it all. How much do you have to steal from another person before the act makes you a thief?

The question was much on my mind, and I had no good place to go for the answers. Not to Essie, because with Essie the conversation always came back to my gut. Not with my old psychoanalytic program, because those conversations always shifted from “What do I do to make things better?” to “Why, Robin, do you feel that you must make things better?” Not even with Albert. I could chat with Albert about anything at all. But when I ask him questions like that he gives me the sort of look he would give me if I asked him to define the properties of phlogiston. Or of God. Albert is only a holographic projection, but he interacts with the environment really well, just as well as though he were there, sometimes. So he looks meditatively around wherever we happen to be-the Tappan Sea house, for instance, which I admit is pretty comfortably fixed up, and he says something like, “Why do you ask such metaphysical questions, Robin?” and I know that the unspoken part of his message is, Good heavens, boy, don’t you know when you’ve got it made?