and ten-percent stoned, but it all whooshed out of me as I looked at her. I put down the drink, handed the joint to someone at random, took her arm, and pulled her out into the tunnel.
“Klara,” I said. “Did you get my letters?”
She looked puzzled. “Letters?” She shook her head. “I guess you sent them to Venus? I never got there. I got as far as the rendezvous with the plane-of-the-ecliptic flight, and then I changed my mind. I came right back on the orbiter.”
“Oh, Klara.”
“Oh, Rob,” she mimicked, grinning; that wasn’t much fun, because when she smiled I could see where the tooth was missing that I had knocked out. “So what else have we got to say to each other?”
I put my arms around her. “I can say that I love you, and I’m sorry, and I want to make it up to you, and I want to get married and live together and have kids and—”
“Jesus, Rob,” she said, pushing me away, gently enough, “when you say something you say a lot, don’t you? So hold it for a while. It’ll keep.”
“But it’s been months!”
She laughed. “No fooling, Rob. This is a bad day for Sagittarians to make decisions, especially about love. We’ll talk about it another time.”
“That crap! Listen, I don’t believe in any of that!”
“I do, Rob.”
I had an inspiration. “Hey! I bet I can trade with somebody in the first ship! Or, wait a minute, maybe Susie would trade with you—”
She shook her head, still smiling. “I really don’t think Susie would like that,” she said. “Anyway, they bitched enough about letting me switch with Sess. They’ll never stand still for another last minute change.”
“I don’t care, Klara!”
“Rob,” she said, “don’t rush me. I did a lot of thinking about you and me. I think we’ve got something that’s worth working for. But I can’t say it’s all straight in my head yet, and I don’t want to push it.”
“But, Klara—”
“Leave it at that Rob. I’ll be in the first Five, you’ll be in the second.
Vessel 3-184, Voyage O19D14O. Crew S. Kotsis, A. McCarthy, K. Metsuoko.
Transit time out 615 days 9 hours. No crew reports from destination. Spherical scan data inconclusive as to destination. No identifiable features.
Extract from log: “This is the 281st day out. Metsuoko lost the draw and suicided. Alicia voluntarily suicided 40 days later. We haven’t yet reached turnaround, so it’s all for nothing. The remaining rations are not going to be enough to support me, even if you include Alicia and Kenny, who are intact in the freezer. So I am putting everything on full automatic and taking the pills. We have all left letters. Please forward them as addressed, if this goddamned ship ever gets back.”
Mission Plan filed proposal that a Five with double life-support rations and a one-person crew might be able to complete this mission and return successfully. Proposal tabled on grounds of low priority: no evident benefit from repeating this mission.
When we get where we’re going we’ll be able to talk. Maybe even switch around to come back together. But meanwhile we’ll both have a chance to think about what we really want.”
The only words I seemed to know I seemed to be saying over and over again: “But, Klara—”
She kissed me, and pushed me away. “Rob,” she said, “don’t be in such a hurry. We’ve got all the time there is.”
Chapter 27
“Tell me something, Sigfrid,” I say, “how nervous am I?”
He is wearing his Sigmund Freud hologram this time, true Viennese stare, not a bit gemillich. But his voice is the gently sad baritone: “if you are asking what my sensors say, Rob, you are quite agitated, yes.”
“I thought so,” I say, bouncing around the mat.
“Can you tell me why?”
“No!” The whole week has been like that, marvelous sex with Doreen and S. Ya., and floods of tears in the shower; fantastic gambling and play at the bridge tournament, and total despair on the way home. I feel like a yo- yo. “I feel like a yo-yo,” I yell. “You opened up something I can’t handle.”
“I think you underestimate your capacity for handling pain,” he says reassuringly.
“Fuck you, Sigfrid! What do you know about human capacities?”
He almost sighs. “Are we back to that again, Rob?”
“We bloody well are!” And funnily, I feel less nervous; I goad him into an argument again, and the peril is reduced.
“It is true, Rob, that I am a machine. But I am a machine designed to understand what humans are like and, believe me, well designed for my function.”
“Designed! Sigfrid,” I say reasonably, “you aren’t human. You may know, but you don’t feel. You have no idea what it feels like to have to make human decisions and carry the load of human emotion. You don’t know what it feels like to have to tie a friend up to keep him from committing murder. To have someone you love die. To know it’s your fault. To be scared out of your mind.”
“I do know those things, Rob,” he says gently. “I really do. I want to explore why you are feeling so turbulent, so won’t you please help me?”
“No!”
“But your agitation, Rob, means that we are approaching the central pain—”
“Get your bloody drill out of my nerve!” But the analogy doesn’t throw him for a second; his circuits are finely tuned today.
“I’m not your dentist, Rob, I’m your analyst, and I tell you—”
“Stop!” I know what I have to do to get him away from where it hurts. I haven’t used S. Ya.’s secret little formula since that first day, but now I want to use it again. I say the words, and convert him from a tiger to a pussycat; he rolls over and lets me stroke his tummy, as I command him to display the gaudier bits from some of his interviews with attractive and highly quirky female patients; and the rest of the hour is spent as a peepshow; and I have got out of his room one more time intact.
Or nearly.
Chapter 28
Out in the holes where the Heechee hid, out in the caves of the stars, sliding the tunnels they slashed and slid, healing the Heechee-hacked scars… Jesus, it was like a Boy Scout camp; we sang and frolicked all the nineteen days after turnaround. I don’t think I ever felt that good in my life. Partly it was release from fear; when we hit turnaround we all breathed easier, as always do. Partly it was that the first half of the trip had been pretty gritty, with Metchnikov and his two boyfriends in a complicated triple spat most of the time and Susie Hereira a lot less interested in me on shipboard than she had been as a once-a-night out on Gateway. But mostly, I think, for me anyway, it knowing that I was getting closer and closer to Klara. Danny A. helped me work out the figures; he’d taught some of the courses on Gateway, and he may have been wrong but there wasn’t any around righter so I took
