Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER V

The very pretty assistant was very pretty, all right, and she looked to be about sixteen years old. No, that’s not true. She looked a lot better than sixteen years old. I don’t believe I had skin like that even when I was a newborn baby. She wore no makeup, and needed none. She had on a decorous one-piece jumpsuit that covered her from thigh to neck and left no doubt what was inside. Her name was Denys. When I got there —I had taken my time, because I didn’t want Bill to think I was eager—all three of PhoenixCorp’s males were hanging around, watching her like vultures sniffing carrion. It wasn’t just that she looked the way she looked. She was also fresh meat, for a crew that had been getting pretty bored with each other.

Of course, I had been fresh meat, too, and there had been no signs of that kind of testosterone rush when I arrived. But then, I didn’t look like Denys. Bill didn’t seem to notice. He had already set up for his opening teaser, and Denys was playing his quaint autocameras for him. As they panned around the entrance chamber and settled on his face, wearing its most friendly and intelligent expres­sion, he began to speak to the masses:

“Wilhelm Tartch here again, where PhoenixCorp is getting ready to bring a lost race of intelligent beings back to life, and here to help me once again” —one of the cameras swung around as Denys cued it toward me —”I have the good luck to have my beautiful fiancée, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with me.”

I gave him a look, because whatever I was to Wilhelm Tartch, I definitely wasn’t planning to marry him. He tipped me a cheeky wink and went right on:

“As you all remember, before the Heechee ran away to hide in the Core, they surveyed most of the galaxy, looking for other intelligent races. They didn’t find any. When they visited Earth they found the australopithecines, but they were a long way from being modern humans. They hadn’t even developed language yet. And here, on this planet” —that view of the Crabber planet, presupernova, ap­peared behind him — “they found another primitive race that they thought might someday become both intelligent and civilized. Well, perhaps these Crabbers, as the PhoenixCorp people call them, did. But the Heechee weren’t around to see it, and neither are we, because they had some bad luck.

“There were two stars in their planet’s system, a red dwarf and a bright type-A giant. Over the millennia, as these lost people were struggling toward civilization, the big star was losing mass, which was being sucked into the smaller one —and then, without warning, the small one reached critical mass. It exploded —and the people, along with their planet and all their works, were instantly obliterated in the supernova blast.”

He stopped there, gazing toward Denys until she called, “Got it.” Then he kicked himself toward me, arms outstretched for a hug, a big grin on his face. When we connected, he buried his face in my neck and whispered, “Oh, Klaretta, we’ve been away from each other too long!”

Bill Tartch is a good hugger. His arms felt fine around me, and his big, male body felt good against mine. “But we’re together now,” I told him ... as I looked over his shoulder at Denys — who was regarding us with an affectionate and wholly unjealous smile.

So that part might not be much of a problem, at that. I decided not to worry about it. Anyway, the resolution of the Crabber planet was getting better and better, and that was what we were here for, after all.

What the Crabber planet had a lot of was water. As the planet turned on its axis, the continental shore had disappeared into the nighttime side of the world, and what we were looking at was mostly ocean.

Bill Tartch wasn’t pleased. “Is that all we’re going to see?” he demanded of the room at large. “I expected at least some kind of a city.”

Terple answered. “A small city—probably. Anyway, that’s what it looked like before we lost it; I can show you that much if you like. Hans, go back to when that object was still in sight.”

The maybe-city didn’t look any better the second time I saw it, and it didn’t impress Bill. He made a little tongue-click of annoyance. “You, shipmind! Can’t you enhance the image for me?”

“That is enhanced, Mr. Tartch,” Hans told him pleasantly. “However, we have somewhat better resolution now, and I’ve been tracking it in the infrared. There’s a lit­tle more detail”—the continental margin appeared for us, hazily delineated because of the differences in temperature between water and land, and we zoomed in on the ob­ject—”but, as you see, there are hot spots that I have not yet been able to identify.”

There were. Big ones, and very bright. What was encouraging, considering what we were looking for, was that some of them seemed to be fairly geometrical in shape, triangles and rectangles. But what were they?

“Christmas decorations?” Bill guessed. “You know, I mean not really Christmas, but with the houses all lit up for some holiday or other?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Tartch,” Hans said judiciously. “There’s not much optical light; what you’re seeing is heat.”

“Keeping themselves warm in the winter?”

“We don’t know if it’s their winter, Mr. Tartch, and that isn’t probable in any case. Those sources read out at up to around three hundred degrees Celsius. That’s almost forest-fire temperature.”

Bill looked puzzled. “Slash-and-burn agriculture? Or maybe some kind of in­dustry?”

“We can’t say yet, Mr. Tartch. If it were actual combustion, there should be more visible light; but there’s very little. We’ll simply have to wait for better data. Meanwhile, however, there’s something else you might like to see.” The scene we were viewing skittered across the face of the planet—huge cloud banks, a couple of islands, more cloud —and came to rest on a patch of ocean. In its center was a tiny blur of something that looked grayish when it looked like anything at all; it seemed to flicker in and out of sight, at the very limit of visibility.

“Clouds?” Bill guessed.

“No, Mr. Tartch. I believe it is a group of objects of some kind, and they are in motion—vectoring approximately seventy-one degrees, or, as you would say, a little north of east. They must be quite large, or we would not pick up anything at all. They may be ships, although their rate of motion is too high for anything but a hydrofoil or ground-effect craft. If they are still in sight when the mirror is more nearly complete, we should be able to resolve them easily enough.”

“Which will be when?”

Hans gave us that phony couple-of-seconds pause before he answered. “There is a small new problem about that, Mr. Tartch,” he said apologetically. “Some of the installed mirror plates have been subjected to thermal shock, and they are no longer in exact fit. Most of the installation machines have had to be delivered to adjust them, and so it will be some time before we can go on with completing the mirror. A few hours only, I estimate.”

Bill looked at me and I looked at him. “Well, shit,” he said. “What else is going to go wrong?”

What had gone wrong that time wasn’t June Terple’s fault. She said it was, though. She said that she was the person in charge of the whole operation, so everything that happened was her responsibility, and she shouldn’t have allowed Ibarruru to override Hans’s controls. And Julia Ibarruru was tearfully repentant. “Starminder told me the Heechee had identified eleven other planets in the Crabber system; I was just checking to see if there were any signs of life on any of them, and I’m afraid that for a minute I let the system’s focus get too close to the star.”

It could have been worse. I told them not to worry about it and invited all three of them to my ship for a drink. That made my so-called fiancé’s eyebrows rise, because he had certainly been expecting to be the first person I welcomed aboard. He was philosophical about it, though. “I’ll see you later,” he said, and if none of the women knew what he meant by that, it could only have been because they’d never seen a leer before. Then he led Denys off to interview some of PhoenixCorp’s other people.

Which was pretty much what I was planning for myself. Hypatia had set out tea things on one table, and dry sherry on another, but before we sat down to either, I had to give all three of the women the usual guided tour. The sudden return to normal gravity was a burden for them, but they limped admiringly through the guest bedroom, exclaimed at the kitchen — never used by me, but installed just in case I ever wanted to do any of that stuff myself — and were blown away by my personal bathroom. Whirlbath, bidet, big onyx tub, mirror walls —Bill Tartch always said it looked like a whore’s dream of heaven, and he hadn’t been the first guest to make that observation. I don’t suppose the PhoenixCorp women had ever seen anything like it. I let them look. I even let them peek into the cabinets of perfumes and toiletries. “Oh, musk oil!” Terple cried. “But it’s real! That’s so expensive.”

“I don’t wear it anymore. Take it, if you like,” I said and, for the grand finale, opened the door to my bedroom.

When at last we got to the tea, sherry, and conversation, Ibarruru’s first remark was, “Mr. Tartch seemed like a very interesting man.” She didn’t spell out the connection, but I knew it was that huge bed that was in her mind. So we chatted about Mr. Tartch and his glamorous p-vision career, and how Terple had grown up with the stories of the Gateway prospectors on every day’s news, and how Ibarruru had dreamed of an opportunity like this —“Astronomy’s really almost a lost art on Earth, you know,” she told me. “Now we have all the Heechee data, so there’s no point anymore in wasting time with telescopes and probes.”

“So what does an astronomer do when there’s no astronomy to be done?” I asked, being polite.

She said ruefully, “I teach an undergraduate course in astronomy at a com­munity college in Maryland. For people who will never do any astronomy, because if there’s anything somebody really wants to see, why, they just get in a ship and go out and look at it.”

“As I did, Ms. Moynlin,” said Starminder, with the Heechee equivalent of a smile.

That was what I was waiting for. If there was a place in the universe I still wanted to see, it was her home in the Core. “You must miss the Core,” I told her. “All those nearby stars, so bright—what we have here must look pretty skimpy to you.”

“Oh, no,” she said, being polite, “this is quite nice. For a change. What I really miss is my family.”

It had never occurred to me that she had a family, but, yes, she had left a mate and two young offspring behind when she came out. It was a difficult decision, but she couldn’t resist the adventure. Miss them? Of course she missed them! Miss her? She looked surprised at that. “Why, no, Ms Moynlin, they won’t be missing me. They’re asleep for the night. I’ll be back long before they wake up. Time dilation, you see. I’m only going to stay out here for a year or two.”

Ibarruru said nervously, “That’s the part that worries me about going to the Core, Starminder. I’m not young anymore, and I know that if I went for even a few days, nearly everyone I know would be gone when I got back. No, not just ‘nearly’ everyone,” she corrected herself. “What is it, forty thousand to one? So a week there would be nearly a thousand years back home.” Then she turned to the Heechee female. “But even if we can’t go ourselves, you can tell us about it, Starminder. Would you like to tell Ms. Moynlin what it’s like in the Core?”

It was what I wanted to hear, too. I’d heard it often enough before, but I listened as long as Starminder was willing to talk. Which was a lot, because she was def­initely homesick.

Would it really matter if I spent a week in the Core? Or a month, or a year, for that matter? I’d miss my kids on the island, of course, but they’d be taken care of, and so would everything else that mattered to me. And there wasn’t any other human being in the universe that I cared enough about to miss for more than a day.

I was surprised when Hypatia spoke up out of thin air. “Ms. Moynlin” —formal because of the company—”there’s a call for you.” And she displayed Bill Tartch’s face.

I could see by the background that he was in his own ship, and he looked all bright and fresh and grinning at me. “Permission to come aboard, hon?” he asked.

That produced a quick reaction among my guests.

“Oh,” said Ibarruru, collecting herself. “Well, it’s time we got back to work anyway, isn’t it, June?” She was sounding arch. Terple wasn’t; she simply got up, and Starminder followed her example.

“You needn’t leave,” I said.

“But of course we must,” said Terple. “Julia’s right. Thank you for the tea and, uh, things.”

And they were gone, leaving me to be alone with my lover.