Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER IV

Their shipmind really was a good cook. Fat pink shrimp that tasted as though they’d come out of the sea within the hour, followed by a fritto misto, the same, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert. Everything was all perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly relaxing now that it had turned out we really did have something to observe.

What there wasn’t any of was wine to go with the meal, just some sort of tropical juices in the winebulbs. June Terple noticed my expression when I tasted it. “We’re not doing anything alcoholic until we’ve completed the obs,” she said, half apologetic, half challenging, “Still, I think Hans can get you something if you really want it.”

I shook my head politely, but I was wondering if Hypatia had happened to say anything to Hans about my fondness for a drink now and then. Probably she had; shipminds do gossip when they’re as advanced as Hypatia and Hans, and it was evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of the black hole itself, or black holes in general.

We made a nice, leisurely meal of it. The only interruptions were inconspicu­ous, as crew members one after another briefly excused themselves to double-check how well the spider robots were doing as they clambered all over that five-hundred-kilometer dish, seamlessly stitching the optical reflection plates into their perfect parabola. None of the organic crew really had to bother. Hans was permanently vigilant, about that and everything else, but Terple obviously ran a tight ship. A lot of the back-and-forth chat was in-jokes, but that wasn’t a problem because Hypatia explained them, whispering in my ear.

When somebody mentioned homesickness and Oleg Kekuskian said jestingly— pointedly jestingly—that some of us weren’t homesick at all, the remark was aimed at Humphrey Mason-Manley: “He’s pronging Terple, Klara, and Kekuskian’s jealous,” Hypatia told me.

Julia —that was Hoo-lia —Ibarruru, the fat and elderly Peruvian-Incan former schoolteacher, was wistfully telling Starminder how much she wished she could visit the Core before she died, and was indignant when she found out that I’d never been to Machu Picchu. “And you’ve been all over the galaxy? And never took the time to see one of the greatest wonders of your own planet?”

The only subdued one was Mark Rohrbeck. Between the figs and the coffee, he excused himself and-didn’t come back for nearly half an hour. “Calling home,” Mason-Manley said wisely, and Hypatia, who was the galaxy’s greatest eavesdropper when I let her be, filled me in. “He’s trying to talk his wife out of the divorce. She isn’t buying it.”

When the coffee was about half gone, Terple whispered something to the air. Evidently Hans was listening, and in a moment the end of the room went dark. Almost at once the planet appeared for us again, noticeably bigger than it had been before. She whispered again, and the image expanded until it filled the room, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that I was falling into it.

“We’re getting about two- or three-kilometer resolution now,” Terple announced proudly.

That didn’t give us much beyond mountains, shorelines, and clouds, and the planet was still half in sun and half dark. (Well, it had to be, didn’t it? The planet was rotating under us, but its relative position to its sun didn’t change.) When I studied it, something looked odd about the land mass at the bottom of the image. I pointed. “Is that ocean, there, down on the left side? I mean the dark part. Because I didn’t see any lights there.”

“No, it’s land, all right. It’s probably just that that part is too cold to be inhabited. We’re not getting a square look at the planet, you know. We’re about twenty degrees south of its equator, so we’re seeing more of its south pole and nothing north of, let’s say, what would be Scotland or southern Alaska on Earth. Have you seen the globe Hans put together for us? No? Hans, display.”

Immediately a sphere appeared in the middle of the room, rotating slowly. It would have looked exactly like the kind my grandfather kept in his living room, latitude and longitude lines and all, except that the land masses were wholly wrong. “This is derived from old Heechee data that Starminder provided for us,” Hans’s voice informed me. “However, we’ve given our own names to the conti­nents. You see the one that’s made up of two fairly circular masses, connected by an isthmus, that looks like a dumbbell? Dr. Terple calls it ‘Dumbbell.’ It’s divided into Dumbbell East and Dumbbell West. Frying Pan is the sort of roundish one with the long, thin peninsula projecting to the southwest. The one just coming into view now is Peanut, because — “

“I can see why,” I told him. It did look a little like a peanut. Hans was perceptive enough to recognize, probably from the tone of my voice, that I found this ge­ography— planetography? — lesson a little boring. Terple wasn’t. “Go on, Hans,” she said sharply when he hesitated. So he did.

Out of guest-politeness I sat still while he named every dot on the map for me, but when he came to the end, I did too. “That’s very nice,” I said, unhooking myself from my dining place. “Thanks for the dinner, June, but I think I’d better let you get your work done. Anyway, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next five days.”

Every face I saw suddenly wore a bland expression, and Terple coughed. “Well, not quite five days,” she said uncomfortably. “I don’t know whether anyone told you this, but we’ll have to leave before the star blows.”

I stopped cold, one hand stuffing my napkin into its tied-down ring, the other holding on to the wall support. “There wasn’t anything about leaving early in your prospectus. Why wasn’t I told this?”

“It stands to reason, Klara,” she said doggedly. “As soon as the star begins its collapse, I’m shutting everything down and getting out of here. It’s too dangerous.”

I don’t like being surprised by the people who work for me. I gave her a look. “How can it be dangerous when we’re six thousand light-years away?”

She got obstinate. “Remember I’m responsible for the safety of this installation and its crew. I don’t think you have any idea what a supernova is like, Klara. It’s huge. Back in 1054 the Chinese astrologers could see it in daylight for almost the whole month of July, and they didn’t have our lensing to make it brighter.”

“So we’ll put on sunglasses.”

She said firmly, “We’ll leave. I’m not just talking about visible light. Even now, with six thousand years of cooling down after it popped, that thing’s still radiating all across the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave to X-rays. We’re not going to want to be where all that radiation comes to a focus when it’s fresh.”

As I was brushing my teeth, Hypatia spoke from behind me. “What Terple said makes sense, you know. Anything in the focus is going to get fried when the star goes supernova.”

I didn’t answer, so she tried another tactic. “Mark Rohrbeck is a good-looking man, isn’t he? He’s very confused right now, with the divorce and all, but I think he likes you.”

I looked at her in the mirror. She was in full simulation, leaning against the bathroom doorway with a little smile on her face. “He’s also half my age,” I pointed out.

“Oh, no, Klara,” she corrected me. “Not even a third, actually. Still, what dif­ference does that make? Hans displayed his file tor me. Genetically he’s very clean, as organic human beings go. Would you like to see it?”

“No.” I finished with the bathroom and turned to leave. Hypatia got gracefully out of my way just as though I couldn’t have walked right through her.

“Well, then,” she said. “Would you like something to eat? A nightcap?”

“What I would like is to go to sleep. Right now.”

She sighed. “Such a waste of time. Sooner or later you know you’re going to give up the meat, don’t you? Why wait? In machine simulation you can do any­thing you can do now, only better, and — “

“Enough,” I ordered. “What I’m going to do now is go to bed and dream about my lover coming closer every minute. Go away.”

The simulation disappeared, and her “Good night, then” came from empty air.

Hypatia doesn’t really go away when I tell her to, but she pretends she does. Part of the pretense is that she never acts as though she knows what I do in the privacy of my room.

It wasn’t exactly true that I intended to dream about Bill Tartch. If I were a romantic type, I might actually have been counting the seconds until my true love arrived. Oh, hell, maybe I was, a little bit, especially when I tucked myself into that huge circular bed and automatically reached out for someone to touch and nobody was there. I do truly enjoy having a warm man’s body to spoon up against when I drift off to sleep. But if I didn’t have that, I also didn’t have anybody snoring in my ear, or thrashing about, or talking to me when I first woke up and all I wanted was to huddle over a cup of coffee and a piece of grapefruit in peace.

Those were consoling thoughts — reasonably consoling—but they didn’t do much for me this time. As soon as I put my head down, I was wide awake again.

Insomnia was one more of those meat-person flaws that disgusted Hypatia so. I didn’t have to suffer from it. Hypatia keeps my bathroom medicine chest stocked with everything she imagines I might want in the middle of the night, including half a dozen different kinds of anti-insomnia pills, but I had a better idea than that. I popped the lid off my bedside stand, where I keep the manual controls I use when I don’t want Hypatia to do something for me, and I accessed the synoptic I wanted to see.

I visited my island.

Its name is Raiwea — that’s Rah-ee-wczy-uh, with the accent on the third syllable, the way the Polynesians say it—and it’s the only place in the universe I ever miss when I’m away from it. It’s not very big. It only amounts to a couple thousand hectares of dry land, but it’s got palm trees and breadfruit trees and a pretty lagoon that’s too shallow for the sharks ever to invade from the deep water outside the reef. And now, because I paid to put them there, it’s got lots of clusters of pretty little bungalows with pretty, if imitation, thatched roofs, as well as plumbing and air conditioning and everything else that would make a person comfortable. And it’s got playgrounds and game fields that are laid out for baseball or soccer or whatever a bunch of kids might need to work off excess animal energy. And it’s got its own food factory nestled inside the reef, constantly churning out every variety of healthful food anyone wants to eat. And it’s mine. It’s all mine. Every square centimeter. I paid for it, and I’ve populated it with orphans and single women with babies from all over the world. When I go there, I’m Grandma Klara to about a hundred and fifty kids from newborns to teens, and when I’m some­where else I make it a point, every day or so, to access the surveillance systems and make sure the schools are functioning and the medical services are keeping everybody healthy, because I — all right, damn it! —because I love those kids. Every last one of them. And I swear they love me back.

Hypatia says they’re my substitute for having a baby of my own.

Maybe they are. All the same, I do have a couple of my own ova stored in the Raiwea clinic’s deep freeze. They’ve been there for a good many years now, but the doctors swear they’re still one hundred percent viable and they’ll keep them that way. The ova are there just in case I ever decide I really want to do that other disgustingly meat-person thing and give birth to my own genetically personal child…

But I’ve never met the man I wanted to be its father. Bill Tartch? Well, maybe. I had thought he might be for a while, anyway, but then I wasn’t really so sure.

When I was up and about the next morning, Hypatia greeted me with a fresh display of the Crabber planet. It was too big now to fit in my salon, but she had zeroed in on one particular coastline. In the center of the image was a blur that might have been manmade — personmade, I mean. “They’re down to half-kilometer resolution now,” she informed me. “That’s pretty definitely a small city.”

I inspected it. It pretty definitely was, but it was very definitely small. “Isn’t there anything bigger?”

“I’m afraid not, Klara. Hans says the planet seems to be rather remarkably un­derpopulated, though it’s not clear why. Will you be going over to the PhoenixCorp ship now?”

I shook my head. “Let them work in peace. We might as well do some work ourselves. What’ve you got for me?”

What she had for me was another sampling of some of the ventures I’d put money into at one time or another. There were the purely commercial ones such as the helium-3 mines on Luna, and the chain of food factories in the Bay of Bengal, and the desert-revivification project in the Sahara, and forty or fifty others; they weren’t particularly interesting to me, but they were some of the projects that, no matter how much I spent, just kept getting me richer and richer every day.

Then we got to the ones I cared about. I looked in on the foundation Starminder had talked about, the one for sending humans into the Core to meet with the Heechee who had stayed behind. And the scholarship program for young women like myself—like I had been once, long ago—who were stuck in dirty, drudging, dead-end jobs. Myself, I got out of it by means of dumb luck and the Gateway asteroid, but that wasn’t an option now. Maybe a decent education was.

Along about then, Hypatia cleared her throat in the manner that means there’s something she wants to talk about. I guessed wrong. I guessed she wanted to discuss my island, so I played the game. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “I accessed Raiwea last night after I went to bed.”

“Really?” she said, just as though she hadn’t known it all along. “How are things?”

I went through the motions of telling her which kids were about ready to leave, and how there were eighteen new ones who had been located by the various agencies I did business with, ready to be brought to the island next time I was in the neighborhood. As she always did, whether she meant it or not, she clucked approvingly. Her simulation was looking faintly amused, though. I took it as a challenge. “So you see there’s one thing we animals can do that you can’t,” I told her. “We can have babies.”

“Or, as in your own case at least so far, not,” she said agreeably. “That wasn’t what I was going to tell you, though.”

“Oh?”

“I just wanted to mention that Mr. Tartch’s ship is going to dock in about an hour. He isn’t coming alone.”

Sometimes Hypatia is almost too idiosyncratically human, and more than once I’ve thought about getting her program changed. The tone of her voice warned me that she had something more to tell. I said tentatively, “That’s not surprising. Sometimes he needs to bring a crew with him.”

“Of course he does, Klara,” she said cheerfully. “There’s only one of them this time, though. And she’s very pretty.”