“I’ve lived here for eight years, Mr. Broadhead.”
“Oh, I see.” I hadn’t known where the hell the son of a bitch lived, he was just a name and a nuisance. So much for travelog. I tried common interests. “I got a flash synoptic from the Food Factory on the way down here. The Herter-Hall party is doing well, finding out some marvelous things. Did you know that we’ve identified four of the Dead Men as actual Gateway prospectors?”
“I saw something about that on the PV, yes, Mr. Broadhead. It’s quite exciting.”
“More than that, Bover. It can change this whole world around—and make us all filthy rich, too.” He nodded, his mouth full of salad. He kept on keeping his mouth full, too; I wasn’t doing much good trying to draw him out. “All right,” I said, “why don’t we get down to business? I want you to drop that injunction.”
He chewed and swallowed. With the next forkful of shrimp poised at his mouth he said, “I know you do, Mr. Broadhead,” and refilled the mouth.
I took a long, slow sip of my wine and seltzer and said, with complete control of my voice and manner, “Mr. Bover, I don’t think you understand what the issues are. I don’t mean to put you down. I just can’t believe you have all the facts. We’re both going to lose if you keep that injunction in force.” I went over the whole case with him, with care, exactly as Morton had spelled it out to me: Gateway Corp’s intervention, eminent domain, the problem of complying with a court order when your compliance doesn’t get to the people it affects until a month and a half after they’ve gone and done whatever they were going to do, the opportunity for a negotiated settlement. “What I’m trying to say,” I said, “is that this is really big. Too big for us to be divided. They won’t fuck around with us, Bover. They’ll just go ahead and expropriate us.”
He didn’t stop chewing, just listened, and then when he had nothing more to chew he took a sip from his demitasse and said, “We really don’t have anything to discuss, Mr. Broadhead.”
“Of course we do!”
“Not unless we both think so,” he pointed out, “and I don’t. You’re a little mistaken in some of the things you say. I don’t have an injunction any more. I have a judgment.”
“Which I can get reversed in a hot—”
“Yes, maybe you can. But not in a hot anything. The law will take its course, and it will take time. I won’t make any deal. Trish paid for whatever comes out of this. Since she isn’t around to protect her rights I guess I have to.”
“But it’s going to cost both of us!”
“That’s as may be. As my lawyer says. He advised me against this meeting.”
“Then why did you come?”
He looked at the remains of his lunch, then out at the fountains in the courtyard. Three returned Gateway prospectors were sitting on the edge of a reflecting pool with a slightly drunk Varig stewardess, singing and tossing crumbs of French pastry to the goldfish. They had struck it rich. “It makes a nice change for me, Mr. Broadhead,” he said.
Out of the window of my suite, high up in the new Palace Tower, I could see the crown-of-thorns of the cathedral glinting in the sun. It was better than looking at my legal program on the full-service monitor, because he was eating me out. “You may have prejudiced our whole case, Robin. I don’t think you understand how big this is getting.”
“That’s what I told Bover.”
“No, really, Robin. Not just Robin Broadhead, Inc., not even just the Gateway Corporation. Government’s getting into it. And not just the signatories to the Gateway Convention either. This may wind up a U.N. matter.”
“Oh, come on, Morton! Can they do that?”
“Of course they can, Robin. Eminent domain. Your friend Bover isn’t helping things any, either. He’s petitioning for a conservator to take over your personal and corporate holdings in this matter, in order to administer the exploration properly.”
The son of a bitch. He must have known that was happening while we were eating the lunch I bought him. “What’s this word ‘proper’? What have I done that was improper?”
“Short list, Robin?” He ticked off his fingers. “One, you exceeded your authority by giving the Herter-Hall party more freedom of action than was contemplated, which, two, led to their expedition to Heechee Heaven with all of its potential consequences and thus, three, brought about a situation of grave national peril. Strike that. Grave human peril.”
“That’s crap, Morton!”
“That’s the way he put it in the petition,” he nodded, “and, yes, we may persuade somebody it’s crap. Sooner or later. But right now it’s up to the Gateway Corp to act or not.”
“Which means I better see the Senator.” I got rid of Morton and called Harriet to ask about my appointment.
“I can give you the Senator’s secretarial program now,” she smiled, and faded to show a rather sketchy animation of a handsome young black girl. It was quite poor simulation, nothing like the programs Essie writes for me. But then Praggler was only a United States senator.
“Good afternoon,” she greeted me. “The Senator asks me to say that he’s in Rio de Janeiro on committee business this evening, but will be happy to see you whenever convenient tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o’clock?”
“Let’s say nine,” I told her, somewhat relieved. I had been a little worried about Praggler’s failure to get back to me right away. But now I perceived he had a good reason: the fleshpots of Ipanema. “Harriet?” When she came back I asked, “How’s Mrs. Broadhead?”
“No change, Robin,” she smiled. “She’s awake and available now, if you’d like to speak to her.”
“Bet your sweet little electronic tooshy I do,” I told her. She nodded and drifted away. Harriet is a really good program; she doesn’t always understand the words, but she can make a yes-no decision from the tone of my voice, and so when Essie appeared I said, “S. Ya. Lavorovna, you do nice work.”
“To be sure, dear Robin,” she agreed, preening herself. She stood up and turned slowly around. “As do our doctors, you will observe.”
It took a moment for it to hit me. There were no life-support tubes! She wore flesh-form casts on her left side, but she was free of the machines! “My God, woman, what happened?”
“Perhaps healing has happened,” she said serenely. “Although it is only an experiment. The doctors have just left, and I am to try this for six hours. Then they will examine me again.”
“You look bloody marvelous.” We chatted fill-in talk for a few minutes; she told me about the doctors, I told her about Brasilia, while I studied her as carefully as I could in a PV tank. She kept getting up and stretching, delighting in her freedom, until she worried me. “Are you sure you’re supposed to do all that?”
“I have been told that I must not think of water skiing or dancing for a while. But perhaps not everything that is fun is prohibited.”
“Essie, you lewd lady, is that a lustful look I see in your eye? Are you feeling well enough for that?”
“Quite well, yes. Well. Not well,” she amplified, “but perhaps as though you and I had enjoyed a hard night’s drinking a day or two ago. A little fragile. But I do not think I would be harmed by a gentle lover.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“You will not be back tomorrow morning,” she said firmly. “You will be back when you are entirely through with your business in Brasilia and not one moment before or else, my boy, you will not find any willing partner for your debauched intentions here.”
I said good-bye in a rosy glow.
Which lasted all of twenty-five minutes, until I got around to double-checking with the doctor.
It took a little while, because she was just getting back to Columbia Medical when I called. “I’m sorry to be rushed, Mr. Broadhead,” she apologized, shrugging out of her gray tweed suit-coat. “I’ve got to show students how to suture nerve tissue in about ten minutes.”
“You usually call me Robin, Dr. Liederman,” I said, cooling off quickly.
>
“Yes, I do—Robin. Don’t get worried. I don’t have bad news.” While she was talking she was continuing to strip down, as far as brassiere level, before putting on a turtleneck and an operating-room gown. Wilma Liederman is a good-looking woman of a certain age, but I was not there to ogle her charms.
“But you don’t have good news, either?”
“Not yet. You’ve talked to Essie, so you know we’re trying her out without the machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and we won’t know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won’t.”
“Essie said six.”
“Six hours to readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows bad signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away.” She was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand. Holding her dripping hands in the air she came back closer to the comm set. “I don’t want you worrying, Robin,” she said. “All this is routine. She’s got about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if they’ve taken hold. I wouldn’t let her go this far if I didn’t think the chances were at least reasonable, Robin.”
“‘Reasonable’ doesn’t sound real good to me, Wilma!”
“Better than reasonable, but don’t push me. And don’t worry, either. You’re getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you want more—me too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything’s going to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it’s something we can fix. Now I’ve got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards.”
“I think I ought to get back there,” I said.
“For what? There’s nothing you can do but get in the way. Robin, I promise I won’t let her die before you get back.” In the background the P.A. system was chiming gently. “They’re playing my song, Robin, talk to you later.”
There are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know that I can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.
There are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.
And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing that the moments zip past and the days are packed; and other times when I am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn’t feel like doing it. Albert was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food Factory, connected to someone I loved.
Wouldn’t that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as Wan had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were feeling, let them feel the inside of you? What a wonderful thing for lovers!
And to that thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and telling him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of the couch.
It was not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The difficulty was that I was not quite sure which someone I wished I were connected to. My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a lot farther away and much harder to reach?
So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the pool, and a lounge in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite with a bottle of wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I really wanted to know. “Albert? Where, exactly, is Klara now?”
He paused, tamping tobacco into his pipe and frowning. “Gelle-Klara Moynlin,” he said at last, “is in a black hole.”
“Yes. And what does that mean?”
He said apologetically, “That’s hard to say. I mean it’s hard to put in simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don’t know. Not enough data.”
“Do your best.”
“Sure thing, Robin. I would say that she is in the section of the exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of the singularity you encountered—which,” he waved carelessly and a blackboard appeared behind him, “is of course just at the Schwarzschild radius.”
He stood up, jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:
2GM
c2
“At that boundary, light can’t go any farther. It is what you might think of as a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can go. You can’t see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from behind it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass—and I don’t have to tell an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I? From the instrumentation you brought back, it would appear that this particular hole was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give it a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want to know?”
“A little bit, Albert,” I said, shifting uncomfortably on the watercouch. I wasn’t really sure just what I was asking for.
“Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Robby,” he said. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of radiation around, and God knows what shear forces. But she hasn’t had much time to be dead yet. Depends on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you’re gone. Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of—”
“I understand about time dilation,” I interrupted. And I did, because I was feeling almost as though I were living through some of it. “Is there any way we can find that out?”
“‘A black hole has no hair,’ Robby,” he quoted solemnly. “That’s what we call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that the only information you get out of a black hole is mass, charge and angular momentum. Nothing else.”
“Unless you get inside it, the way she did.”
“Well, yes, Robby,” he admitted, sitting down and attending to his pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, “Robin?”
“Yes, Albert?”
He looked abashed, or as abashed as a holographic construct can. “I haven’t been entirely fair with you,” he said. “There is some information that comes out of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics. And it doesn’t do you any good, either. Not for your purposes.”
I didn’t really like having a computer program tell me what my “purposes” were. Especially since I wasn’t all that sure myself. “Tell me about it!” I ordered.
“Well—we don’t really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking’s first principles. He pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to have a ‘temperature’—which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of particles do escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest you, Robby.”
“What kind do they escape from?”
“Well, mostly from the tiny ones. The ones with the mass of, say, Mount Everest. Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get real hot, a hundred billion Kelvin and up. The smaller they get, the faster the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get—so they keep on getting smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes the other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish their mass, and the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like Klara’s has a temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time.”
“So you don’t get out of one of those.”
“Not any way I know about, no, Robin. D
oes that answer your questions?”
“For now,” I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it that when he was talking to me about Klara he called me “Robby”?
Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning to overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names from time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to speak to Essie about straightening out her programming, because I certainly did not feel I had any need for the services of Sigfrid von Shrink now.
Senator Praggler’s temporary office wasn’t in the Gateway tower, but on the 26th floor of the legislators’ office building. A courtesy from the Brazilian Congress to a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was only two stories below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with the dawn, I got there a couple minutes late. I had spent the time wandering around the early-morning city, ducking under the overhead roadways, coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort of temporary stasis of time.
But Praggler shook me out of it, all charged-up and beaming. “It’s wonderful news, Robin!” he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering coffee. “Jesus! How stupid we’ve all been!”
For a moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That only showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a late flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had turned out to be the prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. “I thought you’d have known all about it,” he apologized, when he had finished filling me in.
“I’ve been out walking,” I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to be telling me about something as big as that on my own project. But I recover fast. “Seems to me, Senator,” I said, “that’s a big plus for vacating that injunction.”
He grinned. “You know, I could have guessed it would strike you that way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?”
“Well, it looks clear to me. What’s the biggest purpose of the expedition? Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there’s a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up.”