Gateway (14 page)

If Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it, they didn't show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess and, when they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn't play for money, we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to occupy your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the oppressed heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that occupied our ship, and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population. We got along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other's shadow and stink every minute. The inside of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an apartment kitchen. The lander gives you a little extra space -- add on the equivalent of a fair-sized closet -- but on the outleg at least that's usually filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors. When you're in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration. It isn't really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your body to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity. But it feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about two kilos. This means you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so each person in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to that each person's own personal space: cupboards for tapes and disks and clothing (you don't wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures of the near and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up to your total allowance of weight and bulk (75 kilograms, % of a cubic meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already. Add onto that the original Heechee equipment of the ship. Three-quarters of that you will never use. Most of it you wouldn't know how to use if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it alone. But you can't remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed. If you amputate a piece of it, it dies. Perhaps if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don't, and so it stays: the great diamond-shaped golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the flimsy spiral of golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even more often, becomes unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly) and so on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time. Add on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted to your form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath installations. The food-preparing section. The waste disposers. The test kits, the weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky enough to reach a planet you can land on. What you have left is not very much. It is a little like living for weeks on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going, and with four other people competing for space. After the first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share. To be truthful, Ham wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed more. But I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when other people got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all up and down his back as well. I didn't think of Sam as violating my living space until I found a long, black beard hair in my food. Ham at least was almost hairless, with a soft golden skin that made him look like a Jordanian harem eunuch. (Did the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about that; his parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.) I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass, who came with Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn't talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else. I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel, where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two. So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up. I'm lying. That's not really what you do with your time. What you do with your time is wait for turnaround. Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a building tension that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was, because I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy. Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie's face: "Let's play some poker, Rob." "No, thanks." "Come on, Rob. We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can't play it any other way.) "I don't want to." And suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as crew, now you won't even play cards!" And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake. And, come right down to it, it almost was. Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you're in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you're in trouble: the rations won't support five people for more than three hundred days. But they might support four. Or three. Or two. Or one. At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser politely cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons. A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few come back as Ones. So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast. Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end wrapped in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys' gym. Then we began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't enough solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played cards with the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship. Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time -- well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh's constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam's armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway's air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara -- well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet.

---------------------------------------- A NOTE ON STELLAR BIRTH

Dr. Asmenion. I suppose most of you are here more because you hope to collect a science bonus than because you're really interested in astrophysics. But you don't have to worry. The instruments do most of the work. You do your routine scan, and if you hit anything special, it'll come out in the evaluation when you're back. Question. Isn't there anything special we should look out for? Dr. Asmenion. Oh, sure. For instance, there was a prospector who cleaned up half a million, I think, by coming out in the Orion Nebula and realizing that one part of the gas cloud was showing a hotter temperature than the rest of it. He decided a star was being born. Gas was condensing and beginning to heat up. In another ten thousand years there'll probably be a recognizable solar system forming there, and he did a special scan mosaic of that whole part of the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year, the Corporation sends that ship out there to get new readings. They pay a hundred-thousand dollar bonus, and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I'll give you the coordinates for some likely spots, like the Trifid nebula, if you want me to. You won't get a half million, but you'll get something. ----------------------------------------

And yet -- she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone's head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara's. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever. On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham's electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating gray force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying. I looked up and met Klara's eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass, golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream. We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare.

15

Sigfrid's office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else's. It can't be too hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to him, "Christ, it's hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning." "I don't have an air conditioner, Robbie," he says patiently. "Getting back to your mother--" "Screw my mother," I say. "Screw yours, too." There is a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I will regret that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, "I mean, I'm really uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It's hot in here." "You are hot in here," he corrects me. "What?" "My sensors indicate that your temperature goes up almost a degree whenever we talk about certain subjects: your mother, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and excretion." "Well, that's great," I yell, suddenly angry. "You're telling me you spy on me?" "You know that I monitor your external signs, Robbie," he says reprovingly. "There is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers." "So you say." "I do say that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know that these subjects are charged with some emotional overload for you. Would you like to talk about why that might be?" "No! What I'd like to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little secrets are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed? Tap my phone?" "No, Rob. I don't do any of those things." "I certainly hope that's the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing when you lie." Pause. "I don't think I understand what you are saying, Rob." "You don't have to," I sneer. "You're just a machine." It's enough that I understand. It is very important to me to have that little secret from Sigfrid. In my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me one night, full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it out of my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really enjoy this contest with Sigfrid. It gets me angry. When I am angry I forget that very large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don't know how to stop.

16

After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into a velocity that felt like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around something, and all the engines were still. We stank to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another's company, but we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like dearest lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it than one A.U. But it wasn't the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a gas-giant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna. Neither Klara nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as long as I could and then said, "What's the matter?" Klara said absently, "I doubt we can land on that." She did not seem disappointed. She didn't seem to care at all. Sam Kahane blew a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: "Well. First thing, we'd better get some clean spectra. Rob and I will do it. The rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures." "Fat chance," said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn't sure who. It could even have been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a feeling that if I asked why they weren't happy, one of them would tell me, and then I wouldn't like the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the lander, and we got in each other's way while we pulled on our topgear, checked our life-support systems and comms, and sealed up. Sam waved me into the lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened. For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place any human being had ever been, terrified that I'd forgotten to snap my tether. But I hadn't had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a lock position, and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship. Before I got there Sam was out, too, spinning toward me. We managed to grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs. Sam gestured at a point between the immense saucer-shaped gas-giant disk and the hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my gauntlets until I saw what he was indicating: M-31 in Andromeda. Of course, from where we were it wasn't in the constellation of Andromeda. There wasn't anything in sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that matter like any other constellation I have ever seen. But M-31 is so big and so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth when the smog isn't too bad, whirlpool-lens-shaped fog of stars. It is the brightest of the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well from almost anywhere a Heechee ship is likely to go. With a little magnification you can be sure of the spiral shape, and you can double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of sight. While I was zeroing in with M-31, Sam was doing the same with the Magellanic clouds, or what he thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He claimed he had identified S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic shots. The purpose of all that, of course, is so that the academics who belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we've been. You might wonder why they care, but they do; so much that you don't qualify for any scientific bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You'd think they would know where we were going from the pictures we take out the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn't work out that way. They can get the main direction of thrust, but after the first few light-years it gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it's not clear that the line of flight is a straight line; some say it follows some wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space. Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get -- including a measure of how far the Magellanic clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know why that is? Because you can tell from that how many light-years away we are from them, and thus how deep we are into the Galaxy. The clouds revolve in about eighty million years. Careful mapping can show changes of one part in two or three millions -- say, differences in ranging of 150 light-years or so. What with Sam's group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that sort of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway would interpret them I almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not quite, forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in courage, was turning out to be a bust.