Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (18 page)

Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the preliminary thrill of Wan’s companionship and was in no hurry to move to a further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.

There were not many objections to Lurvy’s rule, since she had taken care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.

The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.

The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. “Go to the gold,” whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny Jim’s thick tenor would override: “They’ll kill you! They don’t like castaways!”

That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled, too.

And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: “Report all control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme caution.” Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was lonesome; he didn’t feel well; he was not receiving proper medical attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them. They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They should- They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.

And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine’s pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come across from Trish Bover’s relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from Robinette Broadhead:

“Dorema, I know you’re being swamped. Your whole mission was important and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don’t have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can’t change your assigned objectives. But I want you to know I’m on your side. Find out all you can. Try not to get into a spot you can’t retreat from. And I’ll do everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word.”

It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner, but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a capricious Titan of finance.

And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice. She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in her own life. In Lurvy’s own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy had heard the story of Broadhead’s last mission, the one that made him a multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said) Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy’s own experience with a mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But they were there.

The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe “died” was not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours older after all the years.

So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead’s message to Lurvy? Was he urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin’s prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching. It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone. When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men’s room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.

When Janine returned to the Dead Men’s room from an exploration with Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and led Wan away. “I think they want to be alone,” she explained. “Anyway, I’m tired. Let’s take a break.”

Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of corridors a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside the girl. “Are they conjugating?” he asked.

“Cripes, Wan. You’ve only got the one thing on your mind all the time.” But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand approached her breast. “Knock it off,” she said mildly.

He withdrew his hand. “You are being very disturbed, Janine,” he said, pouting.

“Oh, get off my back.” But when he moved millimeters away, she let herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as “anything” sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.

Even when he was grouchy. “You are not competing properly,” he complained.

“Competing at what, for the Lord’s sake?”

“You should talk to Tiny Jim,” he said severely. “He will teach you better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course, yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to copulate with you.”

“Yes, you’ve said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much.”

He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed all of Tiny Jim’s teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared. “I see. You want to kiss first,” he said.

“No! I don’t want to kiss ‘first’, and get your knee off my bladder.”

He released her unwillingly. “Janine,” he explained, “close contact is essential to ‘love’. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us. Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine.”

She giggled. “To what? Old dead Henrietta?” But he was scowling and she took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, “You’ve got some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a place like this.”

“‘Caught’?”

“Pregnant,” she explained. “Winning the goddam reproductive race. Knocked up. Oh, Wan,” she said, nuzzling the top of his head, “you just don’t know where it’s all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we’ll even get married, or something, and we’ll just win that old reproductive race a whole bunch. But right now you’re just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I. You don’t want to reproduce. You just want to make love.”

“Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim-“

“Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?” She stood up and regarded him for a moment, and said affectionately, “Tell you what. I’m going back to the Dead Men’s room. Why don’t you go read a book for a while to cool off?”

“You are silly!” he scolded. “I have no book here, or reader.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you feel better.”

Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. “I guess I don’t need to any more,” he said.

By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in what they had just discovered. He said, “Hey, kids, listen to this.” He dialed Henrietta’s number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: “Who are you?”

The voice strengthened. “I am a computer analog,” it said firmly. “When I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master’s from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-“ the voice hesitated, “than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-“ it hesitated again, “who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with- who-“ The voice was sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.

“Well, it doesn’t last,” he said, “but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for her. Do you want to know your mother’s name, Wan?”

The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. “My mother’s name?” he shrilled.

“Or anybody else’s. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the students’ fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn’t get much out of it, of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an interrogation program for Vera, and she’s been working at it all along, and-what’s the matter, Wan?”

The boy licked his lips. “My mother’s name?” he repeated.

“Oh. Sorry,” Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred to him that Wan’s emotions would be involved. “Her name was Elfega Zamorra. But she doesn’t seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don’t know why. And your father-well, that’s a funny thing. Your real father was dead before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else, but I don’t know who. Any idea why that is?” Wan shrugged. “I mean, why your mother or, I guess you’d call him, your step-father doesn’t seem to be stored?” Wan spread his hands.

Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress, she put her arm around him and said, “I guess this is a shock to you, Wan. I’m sure we’ll find out a lot more.” She gestured at the mare’s nest of recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room. “Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth,” she said. He looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth, and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.