It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner, but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a capricious Titan of finance.
And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice. She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in her own life. In Lurvy’s own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy had heard the story of Broadhead’s last mission, the one that made him a multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said) Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy’s own experience with a mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But they were there.
The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe “died” was not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours older after all the years.
So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead’s message to Lurvy? Was he urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin’s prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching. It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone. When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men’s room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.
When Janine returned to the Dead Men’s room from an exploration with Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and led Wan away. “I think they want to be alone,” she explained. “Anyway, I’m tired. Let’s take a break.”
Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of corridors a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside the girl. “Are they conjugating?” he asked.
“Cripes, Wan. You’ve only got the one thing on your mind all the time.” But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand approached her breast. “Knock it off,” she said mildly.
He withdrew his hand. “You are being very disturbed, Janine,” he said, pouting.
“Oh, get off my back.” But when he moved millimeters away, she let herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as “anything” sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
Even when he was grouchy. “You are not competing properly,” he complained.
“Competing at what, for the Lord’s sake?”
“You should talk to Tiny Jim,” he said severely. “He will teach you better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course, yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to copulate with you.”
“Yes, you’ve said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much.”
He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed all of Tiny Jim’s teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared. “I see. You want to kiss first,” he said.
“No! I don’t want to kiss ‘first’, and get your knee off my bladder.”
He released her unwillingly. “Janine,” he explained, “close contact is essential to ‘love’. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us. Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine.”
She giggled. “To what? Old dead Henrietta?” But he was scowling and she took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, “You’ve got some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a place like this.”
“‘Caught’?”
“Pregnant,” she explained. “Winning the goddam reproductive race. Knocked up. Oh, Wan,” she said, nuzzling the top of his head, “you just don’t know where it’s all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we’ll even get married, or something, and we’ll just win that old reproductive race a whole bunch. But right now you’re just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I. You don’t want to reproduce. You just want to make love.”
“Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim-“
“Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?” She stood up and regarded him for a moment, and said affectionately, “Tell you what. I’m going back to the Dead Men’s room. Why don’t you go read a book for a while to cool off?”
“You are silly!” he scolded. “I have no book here, or reader.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you feel better.”
Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. “I guess I don’t need to any more,” he said.
By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in what they had just discovered. He said, “Hey, kids, listen to this.” He dialed Henrietta’s number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: “Who are you?”
The voice strengthened. “I am a computer analog,” it said firmly. “When I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master’s from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-“ the voice hesitated, “than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-“ it hesitated again, “who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with- who-“ The voice was sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.
“Well, it doesn’t last,” he said, “but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for her. Do you want to know your mother’s name, Wan?”
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. “My mother’s name?” he shrilled.
“Or anybody else’s. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the students’ fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn’t get much out of it, of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an interrogation program for Vera, and she’s been working at it all along, and-what’s the matter, Wan?”
The boy licked his lips. “My mother’s name?” he repeated.