“Celebrate what?” Tan demanded.
The fat man gave him a look of surprise. “Your science bonus, of course. Didn’t you know? Well, check it out, for Christ’s sake! Who knows, then you might loosen up and buy me a drink!”
He didn’t wait for it, though; he went off, chuckling, while the three of them bent over Estrella’s plate as she switched to the status reports.
And, yes, their names were there. “Not bad,” Tan said, when he saw the amount.
Estrella shook her head. “Divided among the three of us, not all that good, either,” she said practically. “Are you willing to settle for a little money?”
“A little money would be enough for me to go home and buy my own van, so I could go into business for myself,” Tan said stiffly.
“If that is what you wish. It isn’t, for me. I didn’t come all this way to spend the rest of my life struggling to stay alive in a one-room condo with Basic Medical and no future. Anyway, Hector says there will surely be more missions soon. Missions of a different kind, where we will know where we will be going.”
Stan gave her a thoughtful look. “How do you know what Hector says?” he asked, surprising himself by the tone of his own voice. He almost sounded jealous.
Estrella shrugged. “He likes me,” she said, as though that explained everything.
“He likes everybody,” Tan sneered. “Boys, girls, sheep, he doesn’t care, as long as it has a hole in it.”
Estrella gazed at him for a moment in silence. “He has not got into any of mine,” she said finally. “Let’s talk sensibly. What do you want to do? Take your share and go home? Or wait for something worthwhile?”
They waited. While they waited they watched the unfolding story of what Robinette Broadhead had discovered on the news.
And what had he not! Strange, semi-human creatures that at first everyone thought, heart-stoppingly, might actually be Heechee, but were not. (They were, it seemed, relatives of primitive pre-humans called australopithecines, captured by the Heechee on Earth millennia ago and transported to one of their space outposts for study.) There were a clutch of surviving—well, sort of surviving—lost Gateway prospectors, too, their ships taken to this place by the luck of the draw and unable to leave. Now the marooned prospectors were more or less dead, but also more or less still alive, preserved in some bizarre sort of Heechee machinery. There was the half-wild living human boy named Wan, descendant of other Gateway castaways and now, somehow, through some Heechee wizardry that broadcast his yearnings and hatreds to the entire solar system, the source of the Wrath of God. (A boy’s wet dreams, costing so many lives!) And—the final secret Broadhead had learned—now he even knew where the Heechee had fled to! They had holed up inside an immense black hole in the Galaxy’s Core, and they were still there, all of them!
It was one wonder after another. Everyone was talking about it—well, everyone but Estrella, it seemed to Stan. For whatever reason, she was spending more and more time with the permanent party and less with her old shipmates. Stan didn’t approve. “She shouldn’t do that,” he told Tan seriously. “They mean her no good.”
Tan laughed coarsely. “Depends on what you think ‘good’ is. Montefiore has his own ideas. But don’t worry about Estrella,” he advised. “That one’ll take good care of her maidenhead.”
Stan did worry, though. He told himself that what Estrella did was none of his business, but he thought about her a lot as the days passed.
The nine-bangle Englishwoman came back safe and sound in her One, having earned not only a tenth bangle but, at last, a stake. She had roamed a tunnel on a world not much kindlier than Mercury, wearing a space suit that kept her in air but didn’t keep out the blazing heat that radiated from the tunnel walls. Pushed to the limit she had scoured the empty corridors until she found—something; no one was sure what. Possibly it was a game, something like a 3-D version of Go. Or it might have been some sort of computing machine, like an abacus, or even a musical instrument. At any rate her bonus was enough to pay her way back to a decent retirement in the little village in Sussex she had come from. She even bought coffees for the boys before she left, listening to them tell her about all the amazing things that had happened while she was gone. “Heigh-ho,” she said, grinning the grin of someone who no longer had to worry about such things, “sounds like fun and games, doesn’t it? Well, good luck to you! Don’t give up. You never know, you might hit a good one yet.”
Tan looked sourly after her as she made the payback rounds, buying drinks for everyone who had bought them for her. “I doubt it,” he said, half under his breath.
“You’ve been doubting it ever since we got here,” Stan said in irritation, though the fact was that he was beginning to doubt it, too. It might have turned into a really serious argument, but that was when Estrella appeared in the entrance, looking around for them.
Estrella didn’t hesitate. As soon as she saw the two of them she launched herself in their direction with a great, accurate kick against the door frame. Tan caught her as she came in range, but she grabbed a holdfast and freed herself. Her twisted face looked grim, but the news she brought was great. She looked around, then whispered: “There’s a mission coming up. A big one.”
Stan’s heart leaped, but Tan was unresponsive. “One of these guaranteed new ones, where the Corporation will keep most of the profits?”
“Yes,” she said, “and no. They know the destination, but that’s all they know. They don’t know how long it will take, so it will be in an armored Five, one of the ones with the special fittings no one understands—but Broadhead has said that they’re essential for this trip. They will load this Five with supplies and material, enough for a very long flight, so it will be able to carry only two people. I’m going to be one of them. There’s room for one other.”
She was looking from one to the other of them, but mostly at Stan. Tan spoke up. “Not me,” he declared. “I don’t want any more mystery bus rides.”
Stan ignored him. “You said they knew the destination?”
Estrella took a deep breath. “It will go to where the Heechee have gone. Where they have been hiding all this time, in the Core of the Galaxy.”
Stan swallowed convulsively. You came to Gateway hoping for a big score—but this big? Not nibbling at bits and pieces the Heechee had left behind, but going straight to those vanished super-creatures themselves?
And what sort of reward might there be for that?
He didn’t think. He heard himself saying, “I’ll go!” almost before he realized he had made the decision. Then he turned to Tan. “Look. There’s only room for two, so you take my share of our bonus, too. Go home and have a good life. Buy Naslan the prettiest wedding dress she can find.” And then he added, “But tell her not to wait for me to come back.”
VI
A Heechee Five was supposed to be much bigger than a Three. Not this one, though. Certainly not any roomier. One whole corner of its space was taken up with the peculiar, unexplained device that—Broadhead had said—was necessary for them to enter the Core. Another couple of cubic meters were filled with the goods they were told to deliver to the Heechee—records of Gateway explorations and Heechee finds, background material on the human race, all sorts of odds and ends along with a recorded Message to the Heechee that was meant to explain just who human beings were. Add in their year’s worth of supplies for themselves, and there wasn’t much room for Stan and Estrella to get around.
As far as Estrella was concerned, not much room was needed. She didn’t move around much. She didn’t talk much to Stan, either. She went directly to her sleep sack as soon as they took off and stayed there, coming out only to eat or excrete, and uninterested in conversation in either case. When Stan asked her if something was wrong, she said only, “Yes.” When he asked her if there was anything he could do, she shook her head and said, “I have to work through this myself.” When he asked her what “this” was, all she would say was, “I have to find a way to like my
self again.” Then she went back to her sleep shelf again, and stayed there. For three whole days, while Stan wondered and stewed.
Then, on the fourth day, Stan woke up and found Estrella studying him. She was perched on the uncomfortable forked Heechee pilots’ seat, and she seemed to have been there for a long time. Experimentally he said, “Hello?” with a question mark at the end.
She gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment longer, then sighed. “Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared into the head again.
She was in there for quite a while. When she came out it appeared that she had spent the time fixing herself up. She had washed her hair and brushed it still damp, and she was wearing fresh shorts and top. She gave him another of those long, unexplained looks.
Then she said, “Stan. I have something to say to you. We will be together for a long time, I think, and it would be better if there were no tensions between us. Do you want to make love to me?”
Startled, Stan said the first thing that came into his head. Which was, “I’ve never made love to a virgin before.”
She laughed, not joyously. “That is not a problem, Stan. I’m not a virgin anymore. How do you think I got us on this mission?”
Stan’s only previous coupling, when he had painfully saved up enough to afford one of Mr. Ozden’s cousin’s less expensive girls, had not taught him much about the arts of love. Estrella didn’t know much more than he did, but inexperience wasn’t their only problem. A Heechee Five wasn’t designed for fucking. They tended to float away from the hold-ons the first time he tried to enter her.
But experimenting was enjoyable enough on its own, and they finally found that what worked best was for him to come to her from behind, with Estrella curling her ankles over his while he gripped her waist with both hands. Then it was simple enough.
Then, finished and still naked, they turned around to face each other and hung so, their arms wrapped around each other, without speaking. Stan found the position very comfortable. His cheek was pressed against her ear, his nose in her still damp and sweet-smelling hair. After a bit, without moving away, she asked, “Are we going to be friends, Stan?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. And they were.
Now that they were friends, especially friends who fucked, their Five didn’t seem so crowded anymore. They touched often, and in all kinds of ways—affectionate pats, casual rubs in passing, quick kisses, sweet strokings that, often enough, turned into more fucking. Estrella seemed to like it well enough; Stan very much.
They talked, too. About what the Core might be like. About the race of Heechee who might (or might not) still be there. About what it would be like when they came back and collected the unquestionably enormous bonus that would be due them. “It’ll be billions!” Stan gloated. “Enough to have a waterfront estate like Robinette Broadhead’s, with servants, and a good life—and we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy it all, too, because we’ll have Full Medical.”
“Full Medical,” Estrella whispered, sharing his dream.
“Absolutely! We won’t be old at forty and dead at fifty-five. We’ll live a long, long time, and—” he swallowed, aware that he was getting into a commitment—“and we’ll live it together, Estrella.” Which naturally led to more tender kissing, and to not so tender sex.
They had much to talk about, including the chapters in their earlier lives that had been omitted in their previous telegraphic summaries. When Stan talked about his mother’s death and what it had done to his father, Estrella took his hand in hers and kissed it. When he told her about life in Istanbul she was interested, and more so when he talked about the city itself—about its centuries as the mighty Christian city of Constantinople, about the Crusaders, also Christian but eager for some loot of any kind so they elected to loot it anyway, about the Emperor Justinian and his Theodora and the—well—the Byzantine, really Byzantine, court of Byzantium. All that fascinated her. She had known nothing of the Holy Roman Empire, little enough of Rome itself, its Caesars, its conquests, its centuries of world rule. To her it was all exciting myths and legends, all the better because they were true. Or as true, anyway, as Stan’s memory allowed.
While Stan, of course, knew even less of the America that had belonged to the Native Americans, before their subjugation by the white man and since. It was not the American history he had learned in school or heard about in his father’s stories. Her people, Estrella told him—the ones on her mother’s side—had a history of their own. Sometimes they had even built great cities like Machu Picchu and the immense Mayan structures in the south, and the mysterious works of the Anasazi nearer to her family’s home. But that, she said, sounding both wistful and proud, had lasted only until the Europeans arrived and took their lands away, and often enough their lives as well, and pushed them into harsher lives in reservations, and endless, retreating battles, and finally defeat. “There wasn’t much left for us, Stan,” she said. “The only good thing—well, it isn’t really good, is it?—is that now most of the Yankees are as poor as we.”
Which reminded Stan of an unsolved puzzle. “But you weren’t all that poor, were you? I mean, personally. Like when you had your, uh, accident. If that had happened to Tan, or almost anybody else I knew, there wouldn’t have been any big payoff to finance your going to Gateway. Did you have Full Medical or something?”
She laughed, surprised. “We had no medical at all. What I had was my brother.” Who, she said, let it be known that he was going to kill the pistolier. Whose sister’s husband was a clerk in the slaughterhouse’s accounts department. Who had juggled the books to pay them off, just to save his brother-in-law’s worthless life. “It was supposed to be a death benefit, but I double-crossed them. I lived. Then, when I was well enough to travel, I took the rest of the money and used it to come to Gateway.”
She looked so sad when she was telling about it that Stan couldn’t help kissing her, which before long led to more of that pleasurable lovemaking. And why not? After all, they were really on a sort of honeymoon cruise, weren’t they?
The days passed, ten, twelve, twenty. They slept holding each other tight, and never seemed to tire of it. It was a little cramped, to be sure. But the one-size-fits-all sleep sacks were constructed to be long enough for a stringbean Maasai or a corpulent Bengali, and skinny Stan and slim Estrella could fit inside together well enough for lovers. Sometimes they played music together, weird combinations of Stan’s trumpet and the flute Estrella produced from her bags. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they played cards or read or just sat companionably together in silence. And sometimes Stan pulled out the recorded Message to the Heechee—the reason they were on this trip in the first place—and they played it for themselves and wondered what the Heechee (if any) would make of it.
This Message had been cobbled together in a hurry by God knew who—some of the big brains in the Gateway Corp, no doubt, and no doubt with Robinette Broadhead leaning over their shoulder. It didn’t have any narration; the Heechee were not likely to understand any human language. Its only sound was music, first Tschaikowsky’s somber “Pathetique” in its entirety, then, to show that humans had more than one musical mood, Prokoviev’s jokey, perky Classical Symphony.
But mostly the Message was pictures: the empty Heechee tunnels on Venus; the nearly equally empty corridors on Gateway, when human beings first got there; a crew of prospectors warily climbing into an early Five; another crew, travel-stained, coming out of a Three bearing prayer fans and other Heechee gadgets; a picture of the pinwheel of the Galaxy, seen from above, with an arrow showing Earth’s position in the Orion Arm; a slowly spinning globe of the Earth itself; quick flashes of human cities—New York, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Rome; shots of people doing things—painting landscapes, running a tractor, peering through a telescope, masked around a hospital birthing bed where a new baby was coming into the world; then things that neither Estrella nor Stan had ever seen before. There was a series of pictures of an enormous floating object, then of a huge spindle-shaped chamber,
blue Heechee metal walls and a strange, huge machine squatting on tractor treads in the middle of it. “The Food Factory and that other thing Broadhead discovered,” Estrella guessed. Then the object’s internal passageways, their walls Heechee metal that glowed in several colors, and a couple of—they both caught their breaths—queer, hairy creatures that looked almost human, and had to be the primitives Broadhead had discovered there. And, at the last, the shot of the Galaxy again, with a tiny image of a Heechee Five that was probably meant to be their own craft, slowly moving from the Orion arm to the Core.
When the showing was over—for the fourth or fifth time—Stan was thoughtfully rubbing the place where his wispy mustache had been until Estrella had teased him into shaving it off. They had been watching with their arms around each other. He yawned, which made her yawn, too, because they had both been getting sleepy. She moved slightly for a better fit, but not away, as she saw that he was staring at their stacked piles of supplies.
“What is it, Stan?” she asked.
He said pensively, “This is, what, the thirty-fifth day we’ve been out?”
She counted on her fingers. “Yes, something like that. Maybe the thirty-fourth. What about it?”
He sighed. “It’s just that it looks like a long flight. I don’t know if anybody’s gone this far before.”
She tried to reassure him. “Sometimes short flights take a long time, and the other way around, too. With Heechee ships you never can tell.”
“I guess,” he said, turning his head to kiss her ear in the way she liked. She wriggled companionably and put up her lips, and that was better than reassurances.
For Stan was happy with Estrella, who not only shared his sleeping pod but never, ever reminded him he was only a teenaged boy. He thought about it drowsily. He had never been happier in his life than he was this minute. So why worry about how long the trip would take? He didn’t want it to end at all, would have been content if it had lasted a very long time indeed…
The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway Page 5
