The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “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 for 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 pretence 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-way-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 of 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 centimetre. I paid for it, and I’ve populated it with orphans and single women with babies from all over the world. When I got here, 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 per cent 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 centre of the image was a blur that might have been manmade – personmade, I mean. “They’re down to half-kilometre 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 programme 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 neighbourhood. 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.”

  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 fiancee, 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 towards Denys until she called, “Got it.” Then he kicked himself towards 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 centre was a tiny blur of something that looked greyish 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.”