Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER VI

“He’s been primping for the last hour,” Hypatia reported in my ear. “Showered, shaved, dressed up. And he put on that musk cologne that he thinks you like.”

“I do like it,” I said. “On him. Let me see you when I’m talking to you.”

She appeared obediently, reclining on the couch Ibarruru had just left. “I’d say the man’s looking to get laid,” she observed. “Again.”

I didn’t choose to pick up on the “again.” That word was evidence of one of Hypatia’s more annoying traits, of which she has not quite enough to make me have her reprogrammed. When I chose Hypatia of Alexandria as a personality for my shipmind, it seemed to be a good idea at the time. But my own Hypatia took it seriously. That’s what happens when you get yourself a really powerful shipmind; she throws herself into the part. The first thing Hypatia did was look up her template and model herself as close to the original as she thought I would stand — including such details as the fact that the original Hypatia really hated men.

“So, do you want me out of the way so you can oblige him?” she asked sociably.

“No,” I said. ‘You stay.”

“That’s my girl. You ask me, sexual intercourse is greatly overrated anyway.”

“That’s because you never had any,” I told her. “By which I mean neither you, my pet program, nor the semimythical human woman I modeled you after, who died a virgin and is said to have shoved her used menstrual cloths in the face of one persistent suitor to turn him off.”

“Malicious myth,” she said comfortably. “Spread by the Christians after they murdered her. Anyway, here he comes.”

I would have been willing to bet that the first words out of Bill Tartch’s mouth would be Alone at last! accompanied by a big grin and a lunge for me. I would have half won. He didn’t say anything at all, just spread his arms and lurched toward me, grin and all.

Then he saw Hypatia, sprawled on the couch. “Oh,” he said, stumbling as he came to a stop —there evidently wasn’t any gravity in his rental ship, either. “I thought we’d be alone.”

“Not right now, sweetie,” I said. “But it’s nice to see you.”

“Me, too.” He thought for a moment, and I could see him changing gears: All right, the lady doesn’t want what I want right now, so what else can we do? That’s one of those good-and-bad things about Bill Tartch. He does what I want, and none of this sweeping-her-off-her-feet stuff. Viewing it as good, it means he’s con­siderate and sweet. Viewing it the other way—the way Hypatia chooses to view it—he’s a spineless wretch, sucking up to somebody who can do him good.

While I was considering which way to view it, Bill snapped his fingers. “I know,” he said, brightening. “I’ve been wanting to do a real interview with you anyway. That all right? Hypatia, you can record it for me, can’t you?”

Hypatia didn’t answer, just looked sulkily at me.

“Do what he says,” I ordered. But Bill was having second thoughts.

“Maybe not,” he said, cheerfully resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t take orders from him. “She’d probably screw it up on purpose for me anyway, so I guess we’d better get Denys in here.”

It didn’t take Denys much more than a minute to arrive, with those quaint little cameras and all. I did my best to be gracious and comradely. “Oh, yes, clip them on anywhere,” I said —in my ship’s gravity, the cameras wouldn’t just float. “On the backs of the chairs? Sure. If they mess the fabric a little, Hypatia will fix it right up.” I didn’t look at Hypatia, just gestured to her to get herself out of sight. She did without protest.

Bill had planted himself next to me and was holding my hand. I didn’t pull it away. It took Denys a little while to get all the cameras in place, Bill gazing tolerantly at the way she was doing it and not offering to help. When she an­nounced she was ready, the interview began.

It was a typical Wilhelm Tartch interview, meaning that he did most of the talking. He rehearsed our entire history for the cameras in one uninterrupted monologue; my part was to smile attentively as it was going on. Then he got to Phoenix.

“We’re here to see the results of this giant explosion that took place more than a thousand years ago—What’s the matter, Klara?”

He was watching my face, and I knew what he was seeing. “Turn off your cameras, Bill. You need to get your facts straight. It happened a lot longer than a thousand years ago.”

He shook his head at me tolerantly. “That’s close enough for the audience,” he explained. “I’m not giving an astronomy lesson here. The star blew up in 1054, right?”

“It was in 1054 that the Chinese astronomers saw it. That’s the year when the light from the supernova got as far as our neighborhood, but it took about five thousand years to get there. Didn’t you do your homework?”

“We must’ve missed that little bit, hon,” he said, giving me his best ruefully apologetic smile. “All right, Denys. Take it from the last little bit. We’ll put in some shots of the supernova to cover the transition. Ready? Then go. This giant explosion took place many thousands of years ago, destroying a civilization that might in some ways almost have become the equal of our own. What were they like, these people the Phoenix investigators call ‘Crabbers’? No one has ever known. When the old Heechee visited their planet long ago, they were still animallike primitives —Denys, we’ll put in some of those old Heechee files here — but the Heechee thought they had the potential to develop cognitive intelligence and even civilization. Did they ever fulfill this promise? Did they come to dom­inate their world as the human race did our Earth? Did they develop science and art and culture of their own? We know from the tantalizing hints we’ve seen so far that this may be so. Now, through the generosity of Gelle-Klara Moynlin, who is here with me, we are at last going to see for ourselves what these tragically doomed people achieved before their star exploded without warning, cutting them off—Oh, come on, Klara. What is it this time?”

“We don’t know if they had any warning or not, do we? That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”

Denys cleared her throat. She said diffidently, “Bill, maybe you should let me do a little more background research before you finish this interview.”

My lover gave her a petulant little grimace. “Oh, all right. I suppose there’s nothing else to do.”

I heard the invisible little cough that meant Hypatia had something to say to me, so I said to the air, “Hypatia?”

She picked up her cue. “The PhoenixCorp shipmind tells me they’re back at work on the dish, and they’re getting somewhat better magnification now. There are some new views you may want to see. Shall I display here?”

Bill seemed slightly mollified. He looked at me. “What do you think, Klara?”

It was the wrong question to ask me. I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking.

For that matter, I didn’t want to be thinking it at all. All right, he and this little Denys lollipop hadn’t done any of their backgrounding on the way out to Phoenix. So what, exactly, had they been doing with their time?

I said, “No, I think I’d rather see it on the PhoenixCorp ship. You two go ahead. I’ll follow in a minute.” And as soon as they were out of sight. I turned around, and Hypatia was sitting in the chair Denys had just left, looking smug.

“Can I do something for you, Klara?” she asked solicitously.

She could, but I wasn’t ready to ask her for it. I asked her for something else instead. “Can you show me the interior of Bill’s ship?”

“Of course, Klara.” And there it was, displayed for me, Hypatia guiding my point of view all through it.

It wasn’t much. The net obviously wasn’t spending any more than it had to on Bill’s creature comfort. It was so old that it had all that Heechee drive stuff out in the open; when I designed my own ship, I made sure all that ugliness was tucked away out of sight, like the heating system in a condo. The important fact was that it had two sleeping compartments, one clearly Denys’s, the other defi­nitely Bill’s. Both had unmade beds. Evidently the rental’s shipmind wasn’t up to much housekeeping, and neither was Denys. There was no indication that they might have been visiting back and forth.

I gave up. “You’ve been dying to tell me about them ever since they got here,” I said to Hypatia. “So tell me.”

She gave me that wondering look. “Tell you what exactly, Klara?”

“Tell me what was going on on Bill’s ship, for Christ’s sake! I know you know.”

She looked slightly miffed, the way she always did when Christ’s name was mentioned, but she said, “It is true that I accessed Mr. Tartch’s shipmind as a routine precaution. It’s a pretty cheap-jack job, about what you’d expect in a rental. It had privacy locks all over it, but nothing that I couldn’t—”

I snarled at her, “Tell me! Did they?”

She made an expression of distaste. “Oh, yes, hon, they certainly did. All the way out here. Like dogs in rut.”

I looked around the room at the wineglasses and cups and the cushions that had been disturbed by someone sitting on them. “I’m going to the ship. Clean up this mess while I’m gone,” I ordered, and checked my face in the mirror.

It looked just as it always looked, as though nothing were different.

Well, nothing was, really, was it? What did it matter if Bill chose to bed this Denys, or any number of Denyses, when I wasn’t around? It wasn’t as though I had been planning to marry the guy.