Heechee rendezvous (23 page)

“If there were,” he apologized, “I wouldn’t know it, because as I mentioned I have been unable to make contact with the net. However, I do have a copy of the certificate of commissioning from the Gateway Corp. It is rated as a Twelve-that is to say, it could carry twelve passengers if equipped for simple exploration-“

“I know what a Twelve would be, Albert.”

“To be sure. In any event, it has been fitted for four passengers, although up to two others can be accommodated. It was test-flown to Gateway Two and back, performing optimally all the way. Good morning, Mrs. Broadhead.”

I looked over my shoulder; Essie had finished breakfast and joined us. She was leaning over me to study her creation more carefully. “Good program,” she complimented herself, and then, “Albert! From where you get this picking nose bit?”

Albert removed a finger from a nostril forgivingly. “From unpublished letters, Enrico Fermi to a relative in Italy; it is authentic, I assure you. Are there any other questions? No? Then, Robin and Mrs. Broadhead,” he finished, “I suggest you pack, for I have just received word over the police link that your aircraft has landed and is being serviced. You can take off in two hours.”

And so it was, and so we did, happily enough-or almost happily. The last little bit, less happily. We were just getting into our plane when there was a noise from behind the passenger terminal and we turned to look.

“Why,” Essie said wonderingly, “that sounds like guns firing. And those big things in the parking lot, see them pushing aside cars? One has just now demolished a fire standpipe and water is shooting out. Can they be what I think?”

I tugged her into the plane. “They can,” I said, “if what you think they are is army tanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We did. No problem. Not for us, anyway, even though Albert, listening in on the reopened gigabit net, reported that the teniente’s worst fears had been realized and a revolution was indeed lustily tuning up. Not for us then, at least, though elsewhere in the wide universe other things were going on that would pose for us some very large problems, and some very painful ones, and some that were both.

When Gelle-Klara Moynlin awoke she was not dead, as she had confidently expected to be. She was in a Heechee exploration ship. It was an armored Five by the look of it, but not the one she had been in at the last she remembered.

What she remembered was chaotic, frightful, and filled with pain and terror. She remembered it very well. It had not included this lean, dark, scowling man who wore a G-string and a scarf and nothing else. Nor had it included some strange young blond girl who was crying her eyes out. In the last memory Klara had there had been people crying, all right, oh, yes! And shrieking and cursing and wetting their underwear, because they were trapped within the Schwarzschild barrier of a black hole.

But none of those people were these people.

The young girl was bending over her solicitously. “Are you all right, hon? You’ve been through a real bad time.” There was no news for Klara in that statement. She knew how bad the time had been. “She’s awake,” the girl called over her shoulder.

The man came bounding over, pushing the girl aside. He did not waste time inquiring about Klara’s health. “Your name! Also orbit and mission number-quickly!” When she told him he didn’t acknowledge the answer. He simply disappeared and the blond girl came back.

“I’m Dolly,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck, but honestly, I was scared to death. Are you all right? You were all messed up, and we don’t have much of a medical program here.”

Klara sat up and discovered that, yes, she was messed up, all right. Every part of her ached, starting with her head, which appeared to have been bashed against something. She looked around. She had never been in a ship so full of tools and toys before, nor one that smelled so pleasantly of cooking. “Look, where am I?” she asked.

“You’re in his ship”-pointing. “His name’s Wan. He’s been wandering around, poking into black holes.” Dolly looked as though she were getting ready to cry again, but rubbed her nose and went on: “And listen, hon, I’m sorry, but all those other people you were with are dead. You were the only one alive.”

Klara caught her breath. “All of them? Even Robin?”

“I don’t know their names,” the girl apologized. And was not surprised when her unexpected guest turned her bruised face away and began to sob. Across the room Wan snarled impatiently at the two women. He was deep into concerns of his own. He did not know what a treasure he had retrieved, or how much that retrieved treasure complicated my life.

For it is pretty nearly true that I married my dear wife, Essie, on the elastic rebound from the loss of Klara Moynlin. At least, on the upsurge of feeling that came when I shed the guilt, or anyway most of the guilt, I felt for Klara’s loss.

When ultimately I found out that Klara was alive again it was a shock. But, my God, nothing-nothing—compared to the shock to Klara! Even now and in these circumstances I can’t help feeling what I can only call, incongruously enough, a physical pain when I think about my whilom most dear Klara as she found herself back from the dead. It isn’t just because of who she was, or who she was in relation to me. She deserved the compassion of anybody. Trapped, terrified, hurt, sure of dying-and then a moment later miraculously rescued. God pity the poor

I had not met Gelle-Klara Moynhin before her accident with the black hole. Robin couldn’t afford as sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me in those days. But I surely heard a lot about her from Robin over the years. What I mostly heard about was how guilty he felt over her death. The two of them, with others, had gone on a science mission for the Gateway Corp to investigate a black hole; most of their ships had been trapped; Robin had managed to get free.

There was no logical reason to feel guilty, of course. Moreover, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, though a normally competent female human, was in no sense irreplaceable-in fact, Robin replaced her rather swiftly with a succession of other females, finally bonding in a long-term mode with S. Ya. Lavorovna, not only a competent human female, but the one who designed me. Although I am well modeled on human drives and motivations, there are parts of human behavior I never will understand.

woman! God knows I do, and things did not quickly get better for her. She was unconscious half the time, because her body had taken a terrible battering. When she was awake, she was not always sure she was awake. From the tingling she felt and the warm flush and the buzzing in her ears she knew that they had been shooting her full of painkillers. Even so she ached terribly. Not just in the body. And when she was awake she could easily have been hallucinating, as far as she was able to know, because the sociopath Wan and the demoralized Dolly were not very stable figures to cling to. When she asked questions she got strange answers. When she saw Wan talking to a machine and asked Dolly what he was doing, she could make little sense of Dolly’s reply: “Oh, those are his Dead Men. He programmed them with all the mission records, and now he’s asking them about you.”

But what could that mean to someone who had never heard of Dead Men? And what could she feel when a wispy, uncertain voice from the speakers began to talk about her?

“-no, Wan, there’s nobody named Schmitz on that mission. Either ship. You see, there were two ships that went out together, and-“

“I do not care how many ships went out together!”

The voice paused. Then, uncertainly: “Wan?”

“Of course I am Wan! Who would I be but Wan?”

“Oh ... Well, no, there’s nobody there that fits your father’s description, either. Who did you say you rescued?”

“She claims to be named Gelle-Klara Moynlin. Female. Not very good-looking. About forty, maybe,” Wan said, not even looking at her to see how wrong he was; Klara stiffened and then reflected that the ordeal had no doubt made her look older than her age.

“Moynlin,” the voice whispered. “Moynlin... Gelle-Klara, yes, she was on that mission. The age is wrong, though, I think.” Klara gave a half nod, causing the throb in her head to start again, and then the voice went on. “Let me see, yes, the name is right. But she was born sixty-three years ago.”

The throbbing increased its tempo and its violence. Klara must have moaned, because the girl Dolly cried out to Wan and then leaned over her again. “You’re going to be all right,” she said, “but I’m going to get Henrietta to give you another little sleepy shot, all right? When you wake up again you’ll feel better.”

Klara gazed up at her without comprehension, then closed her eyes. Sixty-three years ago!

How many shocks can a human being stand without breaking? Klara was not very breakable; she was a Gateway prospector, four missions, all of them tough, any of them enough to give nightmares to anyone. But her head throbbed furiously as she tried to think. Time dilation? Was that the term for what happened inside a black hole? Was it possible that twenty or thirty years had sped past in the real world while she was spinning around the deepest gravity well there was?

“How about,” Dolly offered hopefully, “if I get you something to eat?” Klara shook her head. Wan, nibbling his 1ip in a surly way, lifted his head and called, “How foolish, offering her food! Give her a drink instead.”

He was not the kind of person you would want to please even by agreeing with him when he was right, but it sounded like too good an idea to pass up. She let Dolly bring her what seemed to be straight whiskey; it made her cough and splutter, but it warmed her. “Hon,” said Dolly hesitantly, “was one of those, you know, those guys that got killed, was he a special boyfriend?”

There was no reason for Klara to deny it. “Pretty much a boyfriend. I mean, we were in love, I guess. But we’d had a fight and split up, and then started to get together again, and then-And then Robin was in one ship, and I was in another-“

“Robbie?”

“No. Robin. Robin Broadhead. It was really Robinette, but he was kind of sensitive about the name-What’s the matter?”

“Rabin Broadhead. Oh, my God, yes,” said Dolly, looking astonished and impressed. “The millionaire!”

And Wan looked over, then came to stand beside her. “Robin Broadhead, to be sure, I know him well,” he boasted.

Klara’s mouth was suddenly dry. “You do?”

“Of course. Certainly! I have known him for many years. Yes, of course,” he said, remembering, “I have heard of his escape from the black hole years ago. How curious that you were there, too. We are business partners, you see. I receive from him and his enterprises nearly two-sevenths of my present income, including the royalties paid me by his wife’s companies.”

“His wife?” whispered Klara.

“Do you not listen? I said that, yes, his wife!”

And Dolly, suddenly gentle again, said: “I’ve seen her on the PV now and then. Like when they pick her for the Ten Best-Dressed Women, or when she won the Nobel Prize. She’s quite beautiful. Hon? Would you like another drink?”

Klara nodded, starting her head to throbbing again, but collected herself enough to say, “Yes, please. Another drink, at least.”

For nearly two days Wan elected to be benevolent to the former friend of his business partner. Dolly was kind, and tried to be helpful. There was no picture of S. Ya. in their limited PV file, but Dolly pulled out the hand puppets to show her what a caricature of Essie, at least, looked like, and when Wan, growing bored, demanded she do her night-club routine with them, managed to fob him off’. Klara found plenty of time to think. Dazed and battered as she was, she could still do simple arithmetic in her head.

She had lost more than thirty years of her life.

No, not out of her life; out of everybody else’s. She was no more than a day or two older than when she went into the naked singularity. The backs of her hands were scratched and bruised, but there were no age spots on them. Her voice was hoarse from pain and fatigue, but it was not an old woman’s voice. She was not an old woman. She was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, not that much over thirty, to whom something terrible had happened.

When she woke up on the second day the sharpened pains and the localized aches told her that she was no longer receiving analgesia. The sullen-faced captain was bending over her. “Open your eyes,” he snapped. “Now you are well enough to work for your passage; I think.”

What an annoying creature he was! Still, she was alive, and apparently getting well, and there was gratitude due. “That sounds reasonable enough,” Klara offered, sitting up.

“Reasonable? Ha! You do not decide what is reasonable here; I decide what is reasonable,” Wan explained. “You have only one right on my ship. You had the right to be rescued and I rescued you; now all the other rights are mine. Especially as because of you we must now return to Gateway.”

“Hon,” said Dolly tentatively, “that’s not entirely true. There’s plenty of food-“

“Not the kind of food I wish, shut up. So you, Klara, must repay me for this trouble.” He reached his hand behind him. Doily evidently understood his meaning; she moved a plate of fresh-baked chocolate brownies to his fingers, and he took one and began to eat it.

Gross person! Klara pushed her hair out of her eyes, studying him coldly. “How do I repay you? The way she does?”

“Certainly the way she does,” said Wan, chewing, “by helping her maintain the ship, but also-Oh! Ho! Ha-ha, that is funny,” he gasped, spraying crumbs of chocolate on Klara as he laughed. “You think I meant in bed! How stupid you are, Klara, I do not copulate with ugly older women.”