“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 Kiara now?”
He paused, tamping tobacco into his pipe and frowning. “Gelle-Kiara 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?”