Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER I

We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is programmed to notice things that might interest me. So she asked me if I wanted to take a look at it, and I did.

Of course I’d already seen the star blow up two or three times in simulations, but as a flesh-and-blood human being I like reality better than simulations — most of the time, anyway. Hypatia had already turned on the Heechee screen, but it showed nothing other than the pebbly gray blur that the Heechee use. Hypatia can read those things, but I can’t, so she changed the phase for me.

What I was seeing then was a field of stars, looking exactly like any other field of stars to me. It’s a lack in me, I’m sure, but as far as I’m concerned every star looks like all the other stars in the sky, at least until you get close enough to it to see it as a sun. So I had to ask her, “Which one is it?”

She said, “You can’t see it yet. We don’t have that much magnification. But keep your eyes open. Wait a moment. Another moment. Now, there it is.”

She didn’t have to say that. I could see it for myself. Suddenly a point of light emerged and got brighter, and brighter still, until it outshone everything else on the screen. It actually made me squint. “It happens pretty fast,” I said.

“Well, not really that fast, Klara. Our vector velocity, relative to the star, is quite a lot faster than light, so we’re speeding things up. Also, we’re catching up with the wavefront, so we’re seeing it all in reverse. It’ll be gone soon.”

And a moment later it was. Just as the star was brightest of all, it unexploded itself. It became a simple star again, so unremarkable that I couldn’t even pick it out. Its planets were unscorched again, their populations, if any, not yet whiffed into plasma. “All right,” I said, somewhat impressed but not enough to want Hy­patia to know it, “turn the screen off and let’s get back to work.”

Hypatia sniffed —she has built herself a whole repertoire of human behaviors that I had never had programmed into her. She said darkly, “We’d better, if we want to be able to pay all the bills for this thing. Do you have any idea what this is costing?”

Of course, she wasn’t serious about that. I have problems, but being able to pay my bills isn’t one of them.

I wasn’t always this solvent. When I was a kid on that chunk of burned-out hell they call the planet Venus, driving an airbody around its baked, bleak surface for the tourists all day and trying not to spend any of my pay all night, what I wanted most was to have money. I wasn’t hoping for a whole lot of money. I just wanted enough money so that I could afford Full Medical and a place to live that didn’t stink of rancid seafood. I wasn’t dreaming on any vast scale.

It didn’t work out that way, though. I never did have exactly that much money.

First I had none at all and no real hopes of ever getting any. Then I had much, much more than that, and I found out something about having a lot of money. When you have the kind of money that’s spelled M*O*N*E*Y, it’s like having a kitten in the house. The money wants you to play with it. You can try to leave it alone, but if you do it’ll be crawling into your lap and nibbling at your chin for attention. You don’t have to give in to what the money wants. You can just push it away and go about your business, but then God knows what mischief it’ll get into if you do, and anyway then where’s the fun of having it?

So most of the way out to the PhoenixCorp site, Hypatia and I played with my money. That is, I played with it while Hypatia kept score. She remembers what I own better than I do — that’s her nature, being the sort of task she was designed to do — and she’s always full of suggestions about what investments I should dump or hold or what new ventures I should get into.

The key word there is “suggestions.” I don’t have to do what Hypatia says. Sometimes I don’t. As a general rule I follow Hypatia’s suggestions about four times out of five. The fifth time I do something different, just to let her know that I’m the one who makes the decisions here. I know that’s not smart, and it generally costs me money when I do. But that’s all right. I have plenty to spare.

There’s a limit to how long I’m willing to go on tickling the money’s tummy, though. When I had just about reached that point, Hypatia put down her pointer and waved the graphics displays away. She had made herself optically visible to humor me, because I like to see the person I’m talking to, wearing her fifth-century robes and coronet of rough-cut rubies and all, and she gave me an inquiring look. “Ready to take a little break, Klara?” she asked. “Do you want something to eat?”

Well, I was, and I did. She knew that perfectly well. She’s continually moni­toring my body, because that’s one of the other tasks she’s designed to do, but I like to keep my free will going there, too. “Actually,” I said, “I’d rather have a drink. How are we doing for time?”

“Right on schedule, Klara. We’ll be there in ten hours or so.” She didn’t move — that is, her simulation didn’t move—but I could hear the clink of ice going into a glass in the galley. “I’ve been accessing the PhoenixCorp shipmind. If you want to see what’s going on ... ?”

“Do it,” I said, but she was already doing it. She waved again —pure theater, of course, but Hypatia’s full of that—and we got a new set of graphics. As the little serving cart rolled in and stopped just by my right hand, we were looking through PhoenixCorp’s own visuals, and what we were looking at was a dish-shaped metal spiderweb, with little things crawling across it. I could form no precise picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare it with. But I didn’t have to. I knew it was big.

“Have one for yourself,” I said, lifting my glass.

She gave me that patient, exasperated look and let it pass. Sometimes she does simulate having a simulated drink with me while I have a real one, but this time she was in her schoolteacher mode. “As you can see, Klara,” she informed me, “the shipment of optical mirror pieces has arrived, and the drones are putting them in place on the parabolic dish. They’ll be getting first light from the planet in an hour or so, but I don’t think you’ll care about seeing it. The resolution will be poor until they get everything put together; that should take about eighteen hours. Then we should have optimal resolution to observe the planet.”

“For four days,” I said, taking a pull at my glass.

She gave me a different look —still the schoolteacher, but now a schoolteacher putting up with a particularly annoying student. “Hey, Klara. You knew there wouldn’t be much time. It wasn’t my idea to come all the way out here anyway. We could have watched the whole thing from your island.”

I swallowed the rest of my nightcap and stood up. “That’s not how I wanted to do it,” I told her. “The trouble with you simulations is that you don’t appreciate what reality is like. Wake me up an hour before we get there.”

And I headed for my stateroom, with my big and round and unoccupied bed. I didn’t want to chat with Hypatia just then. The main reason I had kept her busy giving me financial advice so long was that it prevented her from giving me advice on the thing she was always trying to talk me into, or that one other big thing that I really needed to make up my mind about, and couldn’t.

The cart with my black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice —make that quote “fresh-squeezed” unquote orange juice, but Hypatia was too good at her job for me to be able to tell the difference — was right by my bed when she woke me up. “Ninety minutes to linkup,” she said cheerily, “and a very good morning to you. Shall I start your shower?”

I said, “Um.” Ninety minutes is not a second too long for me to sit and swallow coffee, staring into space, before I have to do anything as energetic as getting into a shower. But then I looked into the wall mirror by the bed, didn’t like what I saw, and decided I’d better spruce myself up a little bit.

I was never what you’d call a pretty woman. My eyebrows were a lot too heavy, for one thing. Once or twice over the years I’d had the damn things thinned down to fashion-model proportions, just to see if it would help any. It didn’t. I’d even messed around with my bone structure, more cheekbones, less jaw, to try to look a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of years I’d gone blonde, then tried redhead once but checked it out and made them change it back before I left the beauty parlor. They were all mistakes. They didn’t work. Whenever I looked at myself, whatever the cosmetologists and the medical fixer-uppers had done, I could still see the old Gelle-Klara Moynlin hiding there behind all the trim. So screw it. For the last little while I’d gone natural.

Well, pretty natural, anyway. I didn’t want to look old.

I didn’t, of course. By the time I was bathed and my hair was fixed and I was wearing a simple dress that showed off my pretty good legs, actually, I looked as good as I ever had. “Almost there,” Hypatia called. “You better hang on to some­thing. I have to match velocities, and it’s a tricky job.” She sounded annoyed, as she usually does when I give her something hard to do. She does it, of course, but she complains a lot. “Faster than light I can do, slower than light I can do, but when you tell me to match velocity with somebody who’s doing exactly c you’re into some pretty weird effects, so —Oh, sorry.”

“You should be,” I told her, because that last lurch had nearly made me spill my third cup of coffee. “Hypatia? What do you think, the pearls or the cameo?”

She did that fake two- or three-second pause, as though she really needed any time at all to make a decision, before she gave me the verdict. “I’d wear the cameo. Only whores wear pearls in the daytime.”

So of course I decided to wear the pearls. She sighed but didn’t comment. “All right,” she said, opening the port. “We’re docked. Mind the step, and I’ll keep in touch.”

I nodded and stepped over the seals into the PhoenixCorp mother ship.

There wasn’t any real “step.” What there was was a sharp transition from the comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of the PhoenixCorp ship. My stomach did a quick little flip-flop of protest, but I grabbed a hold-on bar and looked around.

I don’t know what I’d expected to find, maybe something like the old Gateway asteroid. PhoenixCorp had done itself a lot more lavishly than that, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t maybe been a touch too open-handed with the financing. The place certainly didn’t smell like Gateway. Instead of Gateway’s sour, ancient fug, it had the wetly sweet smell of a greenhouse. That was because there were vines and ferns and flowers growing in pots all around the room — spreading out in all directions, because of that zero-gee environment, and if I’d thought about that ahead of time, I wouldn’t have worn a skirt. The only human being in sight was a tall, nearly naked black man who was hanging by one toe from a wall bracket, exercising his muscles with one of those metal-spring gadgets. (“Hum­phrey Mason-Manley,” Hypatia whispered in my ear. “He’s the archeologist-anthropologist guy from the British Museum.”) Without breaking his rhythm, Humphrey gave me a look of annoyance.

“What are you doing here, miss? No visitors are permitted. This is private prop­erty, and — “

Then he got a better look at me and his expression changed. Not to welcoming exactly, but to what I’d call sort of unwillingly impressed. “Oh, crikey,” he said. “You’re Gelle-Klara Moynlin, are you not? That’s a bit different. Welcome aboard, I guess.”