Heechee rendezvous (28 page)

“Why not work?” she demanded combatively. “Listen, Robin, I have thought this out with care. I remember all you have told me of this, and I quote you exactly: Best part of sessions, you said, came often with Sigfrid while you were on your way to see him, rehearsing what you would say, what Sigfrid would say, what you would reply.”

“Did I say that?” It was always amazing to me how much Essie remembered of the idle chit-chat of a quarter of a century together.

“Said exactly,” she said smugly, “so why not me? Only because I am personally involved?”

“Well, that would surely make it harder.”

“The hard things do at once,” she said merrily. “Impossible sometimes take up to a week.”

“Bless you,” I said, “but-“ I thought for a moment. “See, it’s not just a question of listening. The big thing about a good shrink program is that it listens to the nonverbal stuff, too. Do you understand what I mean? The ‘me’ that does the talking doesn’t always know what it wants to say. I block it-some ‘I’ or other blocks it, because letting all that old stuff out involves pain, and it doesn’t want the pain.”

“I would hold your hand through all of the pain, dear Robin.”

“Of course you would. But would you understand the nonverbal stuff? That inside, silent ‘me’ talks in symbols. Dreams. Freudian slips. Unexplained aversions. Fears. Needs. Twitchings and blinkings. Allergies-all of those things, Essie, and a thousand more, like impotence, shortness of breath, itches, insomnia. I don’t mean I suffer from all those things-“

“Certainly not all!”

“-but they’re part of the vocabulary that Sigfrid could read. I can’t. You can’t either.”

Essie sighed and accepted defeat. “Then must go to plan B,” she said.

“Albert! Turn on lights. Come in here.”

The lights in the room came up slowly and Albert Einstein came in through the door. He didn’t exactly yawn and stretch, but he did give the impression of an elderly genius just out of the sack, ready for whatever might come but not quite fully awake yet. “Have you chartered photoreconnaissance vessel?” she demanded.

“It is already on its way, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said.

It did not seem to me that I had quite agreed to do that, but perhaps I had, I thought. “And,” she went on, “have dispatched messages as agreed?”

“All of them, Mrs. Broadhead.” He nodded. “As you instructed. To all persons high in the military establishment or government of the United States who owe Robin a favor, asking them to use their best efforts to persuade the Pentagon people to let us interview Dolly Walthers.”

“Yes. That is as instructed,” Essie agreed, and turned to me. “So you see, is now only one way to go. Go find this Dolly. Go find this Wan. Go find Klara. Then,” she said, her voice steadfast but her expression looking suddenly much less confident and a whole lot more vulnerable, “then we see what we see, Robin, and the very best of good luck to all of us.”

She was going very much faster than I could follow, and in directions I was sure I had never agreed to. My eyes were popping with astonishment. “Essie! What’s going on? Who said-“

“Person who said, dear Robin, was I. Is obvious. Cannot deal with Klara as ghost in subconscious. Can perhaps deal with real live Klara face to face. Only way to go, correct?”

“Essie!” I was deeply shocked. “You sent those messages? You forged my name? You-“

“Now, you wait, you Robin!” she said, deeply shocked herself. “What forgery? I signed messages ‘Broadhead.’ Is my name, correct? Have right to sign my name to message, correct?”

I stared at her, frustrated. Fondly frustrated. “Woman,” I said, “you’re too smart for me, you know that? Why do I get the idea that you knew every word of this conversation before we had it?”

She shrugged smugly. “Am information specialist, as I keep telling you, dear Robin. Know how to deal with information, especially twenty-five years of it on subject that I love dearly and want dearly to be happy. So, yes, I thought with care of what could be done and what you would permit, and reached inevitable conclusions. Would do much more than that if necessary, Robin,” she finished, getting up and stretching. “Would do whatever was best, not excluding going off by myself for six months or so so you and Klara can work things out.”

And so ten minutes later, while Essie and I were getting ourselves cleaned up and dressed, Albert had received departure clearance and popped the True Love free of its docking pit, and we were on our way to the High Pentagon.

My dear wife, Essie, had many virtues. One was an altruism that sometimes took my breath away. Another was a sense of humor, and sometimes she imparted that to her programs. Albert had dressed himself for the part of daring hot pilot: leather helmet with earflaps flying, Red Baron white silk scarf thrown around his neck as he sat crouched in the pilot seat, glowering ferociously at the controls. “You can cut that out, Albert,” I told him, and he turned his head and gave me a sheepish smile.

“I was only trying to amuse you,” he said, removing the helmet.

“You did that, all right.” And indeed I was amused. I was feeling rather good, all in all. The only way to deal with the terrible crushing depression of problems unmet is to meet them-one way or another-and this was surely a way. I appreciated my wife’s loving care. I appreciated the way my beautiful new ship flew. I even appreciated the neat way the holographic Albert got rid of his holographic helmet and scarf. There was no vulgar popping out of existence. He simply rolled them up and stowed them between his feet, and I guess waited to vanish them until no one was looking. “Does flying this ship take all your attention, Albert?” I asked.

“Well, not really, Robin,” he admitted. “It has full navigation programming, of course.”

“So your being there is just another way of amusing me. Then amuse me in a different way, why don’t you? Talk to me. Tell me some of that stuff you’re always anxious to show off. You know. About cosmology, and the Heechee, and the Meaning of Everything, and God.”

“If you wish, Robin,” he said agreeably, “but first perhaps you would like to see this incoming message.”

Essie looked up from the corner where she was going over her customer-comment synoptics as Albert wiped the big overhead screen of its star pictures and displayed:

Robinette, my boy, for the guy who made the

Brazilians roll over and play dead nothing is too much.

High Pentagon alerted to your visit and instructed to

extend every courtesy. The joint is yours.

Manzbergen

“By God,” said I, surprised and delighted, “they did it! They turned over the data!”

Albert nodded. “So it would appear, Robin. I think you have a right to be pleased with your efforts.”

Essie came over and kissed the back of my neck. “I endorse this comment,” she purred. “Excellent Robin! Man of great influence.”

“Aw, shucks,” I said, grinning. I couldn’t help grinning. If the Brazilians had turned over their search-and-locate data to the Americans, then the Americans could very probably put it together with their own data and find a way to deal with the damn spaceborne terrorists and their damn crazy-making TPT. No wonder General Manzbergen was pleased with me! I was pleased with myself. And it just went to show that when problems seemed absolutely overwhelming and you couldn’t decide which to tackle first, if you just tackled one of them you would find that all the others were melting away too ... “What?”

“I asked if you were still interested in carrying on a conversation,”

Albert said wistfully.

“Why, sure. I guess so.” Essie was back in her corner, but watching Albert rather than returning to her reports.

“Then if you don’t mind,” Albert said shyly, “it would give me pleasure to talk to you not about cosmology and eschatology and the missing mass, but about my own previous life, instead.”

Essie, scowling, opened her mouth to speak, but I raised a hand. “Let him talk, love. I guess my mind wouldn’t really be on the missing mass right now, anyway.”

So we flew along on that short, happy run to the High Pentagon while Albert, leaning back in the pilot seat with his hands folded over the plump tummy in the sloppy sweater, reminisced about early days in the patent office in Switzerland, and the way the queen of Belgium used to accompany his violin-playing on the piano; and meanwhile my at-third-hand friend Dolly Walthers was being questioned with great vigor by military intelligence officers~4n the High Pentagon; and meanwhile my not-quite-yet friend Captain was tidying up the traces of his intervention and grieving over his lost love; and meanwhile my once-much-more-than friend Klara Moynlin was... was . .

I didn’t know what Klara was doing meanwhile, not then I didn’t. Actually, in detail, I surely did not really want to.

The hardest part of Klara’s new life was keeping her mouth shut. She had a combative nature, Klara did, and with Wan, combat was all too easy to create. What Wan wanted was food, sex, company, occasional assistance at the jobs of running the spacecraft-when he wanted them, and not at any other times. What Klara wanted was time to think. She wanted to think about this astonishing derailment of her life. The possibility of getting killed she had always faced-if not bravely, exactly, then at least steadfastly. The possibility that so weird a misadventure as being stuck on a siding, inside a black hole, for an entire generation while the world moved on without her had never crossed her mind. That needed to be thought over.

Wan had no interest in Klara’s needs. When he wanted her for something, he wanted her. When he didn’t, he made that very clear. It was not his sexual demands that troubled Klara. In general they were not much more trouble, or more personally significant, than the routine of going to the bathroom. Foreplay for Wan consisted of taking his pants off. The act was over at his pace, and his pace was rapid. The use of Klara’s body disturbed her less than the rape of her attention.

Klara’s best times were when Wan was sleeping. They did not usually last very long. Wan was a light sleeper. She would settle down for a conversation with the Dead Men, or make herself something to eat that Wan didn’t particularly like, or simply sit and stare into space-a phrase that took on new meaning when the only thing one could look at that was more than an arm’s-length away was the screen that looked out onto space itself. And just as she was relaxed the shrill, teasing voice would come: “Doing nothing again, Klara? What a lazy thing you are! Dolly would have baked a whole batch of brownies for me!” Or, worse, he would be in a playful mood. Then out would come the little paper-folds and drugstore vials and silver boxes of pink and purple pills. Wan had just discovered drugs. He wanted to share the experience with Klara. And sometimes, out of boredom and dejection, she would let herself be persuaded. She would not inject or sniff or swallow anything she could not positively identify, and she rejected a lot of the things she could. But she accepted a lot, too. The rushes, the euphoria-they didn’t last, but they were a blessed diversion from the emptiness of a life that had hiccoughed and died and was trying to start itself again. Getting stoned with Wan, or even making love with Wan, was better than trying to evade the questions that Wan asked and she did not want to answer honestly. “Klara, do you honestly think I’ll ever find my father?”

“Not a hope, Wan, the old boy’s long dead.”

Because the old boy surely was. The man who had fathered Wan had left Gateway on a solitary mission just about the time Wan’s mother began to wonder if she’d really missed her first period. The records simply posted him as missing. Of course, he could have been swallowed up by a black hole. He could still be there, frozen in time as Klara herself had been.

But the odds were very poor.

An astonishing thing to Klara-out of the million astonishing things thirty years had brought-was the easy way Wan displayed and interpreted the old Heechee navigation charts. In a good mood-almost a record, because it had lasted nearly a quarter of an hour-he had shown her the charts and marked the objects he had already visited, including her own. When the mood evaporated and he stamped off furiously to sleep, Klara had cautiously asked the Dead Men about it. It could not be said that the Dead Men really understood the charts, but the tiny bit they did know was far more than Klara’s contemporaries had ever known.

Some of the cartographical conventions were simple enough-even self-evident, like Columbus’s egg, once you’d been told what they meant. The Dead Men were pleased to tell Klara what they meant. The problem was to keep them from telling her and telling her. The colors of the objects shown? Simple, said the Dead Men; the bluer they were, the farther they were; the redder, the nearer. “That shows,” whispered the most pedantic of the Dead Men, who happened to be a woman, “that shows the Heechee were aware of the Hubble-Humason Law.”

“Please don’t tell me what the Hubble-Humason Law is,” Klara said.
 
‘What about all these other markings? The things like crosses, with little extra bars on them?”

“They’re major installations,” sighed the Dead Man. “Like Gateway. And Gateway Two. And the Food Factory. And-“

“And these things like check marks?”

“Wan calls them question marks,” whispered the tiny voice. Indeed, they did look like that, a little, if you took the dot at the bottom of the question mark and turned the rest of it upside down. “Most of them are black holes. If you change the setting to twenty-three, eighty-four-“