Klara gazed up at her without comprehension, then closed her eyes. Sixty-three years ago!
How many shocks can a human being stand without breaking? Klara was not very breakable; she was a Gateway prospector, four missions, all of them tough, any of them enough to give nightmares to anyone. But her head throbbed furiously as she tried to think. Time dilation? Was that the term for what happened inside a black hole? Was it possible that twenty or thirty years had sped past in the real world while she was spinning around the deepest gravity well there was?
“How about,” Dolly offered hopefully, “if I get you something to eat?” Klara shook her head. Wan, nibbling his 1ip in a surly way, lifted his head and called, “How foolish, offering her food! Give her a drink instead.”
He was not the kind of person you would want to please even by agreeing with him when he was right, but it sounded like too good an idea to pass up. She let Dolly bring her what seemed to be straight whiskey; it made her cough and splutter, but it warmed her. “Hon,” said Dolly hesitantly, “was one of those, you know, those guys that got killed, was he a special boyfriend?”
There was no reason for Klara to deny it. “Pretty much a boyfriend. I mean, we were in love, I guess. But we’d had a fight and split up, and then started to get together again, and then-And then Robin was in one ship, and I was in another-“
“Robbie?”
“No. Robin. Robin Broadhead. It was really Robinette, but he was kind of sensitive about the name-What’s the matter?”
“Rabin Broadhead. Oh, my God, yes,” said Dolly, looking astonished and impressed. “The millionaire!”
And Wan looked over, then came to stand beside her. “Robin Broadhead, to be sure, I know him well,” he boasted.
Klara’s mouth was suddenly dry. “You do?”
“Of course. Certainly! I have known him for many years. Yes, of course,” he said, remembering, “I have heard of his escape from the black hole years ago. How curious that you were there, too. We are business partners, you see. I receive from him and his enterprises nearly two-sevenths of my present income, including the royalties paid me by his wife’s companies.”
“His wife?” whispered Klara.
“Do you not listen? I said that, yes, his wife!”
And Dolly, suddenly gentle again, said: “I’ve seen her on the PV now and then. Like when they pick her for the Ten Best-Dressed Women, or when she won the Nobel Prize. She’s quite beautiful. Hon? Would you like another drink?”
Klara nodded, starting her head to throbbing again, but collected herself enough to say, “Yes, please. Another drink, at least.”
For nearly two days Wan elected to be benevolent to the former friend of his business partner. Dolly was kind, and tried to be helpful. There was no picture of S. Ya. in their limited PV file, but Dolly pulled out the hand puppets to show her what a caricature of Essie, at least, looked like, and when Wan, growing bored, demanded she do her night-club routine with them, managed to fob him off’. Klara found plenty of time to think. Dazed and battered as she was, she could still do simple arithmetic in her head.
She had lost more than thirty years of her life.
No, not out of her life; out of everybody else’s. She was no more than a day or two older than when she went into the naked singularity. The backs of her hands were scratched and bruised, but there were no age spots on them. Her voice was hoarse from pain and fatigue, but it was not an old woman’s voice. She was not an old woman. She was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, not that much over thirty, to whom something terrible had happened.
When she woke up on the second day the sharpened pains and the localized aches told her that she was no longer receiving analgesia. The sullen-faced captain was bending over her. “Open your eyes,” he snapped. “Now you are well enough to work for your passage; I think.”
What an annoying creature he was! Still, she was alive, and apparently getting well, and there was gratitude due. “That sounds reasonable enough,” Klara offered, sitting up.
“Reasonable? Ha! You do not decide what is reasonable here; I decide what is reasonable,” Wan explained. “You have only one right on my ship. You had the right to be rescued and I rescued you; now all the other rights are mine. Especially as because of you we must now return to Gateway.”
“Hon,” said Dolly tentatively, “that’s not entirely true. There’s plenty of food-“
“Not the kind of food I wish, shut up. So you, Klara, must repay me for this trouble.” He reached his hand behind him. Doily evidently understood his meaning; she moved a plate of fresh-baked chocolate brownies to his fingers, and he took one and began to eat it.
Gross person! Klara pushed her hair out of her eyes, studying him coldly. “How do I repay you? The way she does?”
“Certainly the way she does,” said Wan, chewing, “by helping her maintain the ship, but also-Oh! Ho! Ha-ha, that is funny,” he gasped, spraying crumbs of chocolate on Klara as he laughed. “You think I meant in bed! How stupid you are, Klara, I do not copulate with ugly older women.”
Klara wiped the crumbs off her face as he reached for another brownie. “No,” he said seriously, “it is more important than that. I want to know all about black holes.”
She said, trying to be placating, “It all happened very fast. There’s not much I can tell you.”
“Tell what you can tell, then! And listen, do not try to lie!”
Oh, my God, thought Klara, how much of this must I put up with? And “this” meant more than the bullying Wan; it meant all of her resumed and wholly disoriented life.
The answer to “how much” turned out to be eleven days. It was time enough for the worst of the bruises to fade on her arms and body, time enough for her to get to know Dolly Walthers, and pity her, to know Wan, and despise him. It was not time enough for her to figure out what to do with her life.
But her life did not wait until she was ready for it. Ready or not, Wan’s ship docked on Gateway. And there she was.
The very smells of Gateway were different. The noise level was different-much louder. The people were radically different. There did not seem to be a single living one among them for Klara to recognize from her last time there-thirty years, or not much more than thirty days, in the past, depending on whose clock you timed by. Also so many of them were in uniform.
That was quite new to Klara, and not at all pleasing. In the “old days” however subjectively recent those old days were-you saw maybe one or two uniforms a day, crewpersons on leave from the four-power guard cruisers mostly. Certainly you never saw one of them carrying a weapon. That was not true any longer. They were everywhere, and they were armed.
Debriefing had changed along with everything else. It had always been a nuisance. You’d come back to Gateway filthy and exhausted and still scared, because up until the last minute you hadn’t been sure you’d make it, and then the Gateway Corp would sit you down with the evaluators and the data compilers and the accountants. Just what did you find? What was new about it? What was it worth? The debriefing teams were the ones charged with answering questions like that, and how they scored a flight made the difference between abject failure and-once in a great while-wealth beyond dreaming. A Gateway prospector needed skills simply to survive, once he had closed himself into one of those unpredictable ships and launched himself on his Mad Magic Mystery Bus Ride. But to prosper he needed more than skills. He needed a favorable report from the debriefing team.
Debriefing had always been bad news, but now it was worse. There wasn’t a debriefing team from the Gateway Corp anymore. There were four debriefing teams, one from each of the four guardian powers. The debriefing had been moved to what had once been the asteroid’s principal night club and gambling casino, the Blue Hell, and there were four separate little rooms, each with a flag on the door. The Brazilians got Dolly. The People’s Republic of China snatched Wan off the floor. The American MP took Klara by the arm, and when the lieutenant of MPs in front of the Soviet cubicle frowned and patted the butt of his Kalashnikov, the American scowled right back, his hand resting on his Colt.
It didn’t really make any difference, because as soon as Klara was through with the Americans, the Brazilians took their turn with her, and when you are invited somewhere by a young soldier with a sidearm it makes little difference whether it is a Colt or a Paz.