In eleven spins of the roulette wheel she was penniless.
A party of Gabonian tourists was just leaving, laughing and stumbling, and behind them, at the short, narrow bar, Klara saw Dolly. She walked over to her steadily and said, ‘Would you like to buy me a drink?”
“You bet,” said Dolly unenthusiastically, waving to the barman.
I never knew Gelle-Klara Moynhin when Robin was romantically involved with her. For that matter, I didn’t know Robinette Broadhead then, either, for he was too poor to afford so sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me. Although I cannot experience physical courage directly (since I don’t even experience physical fear), I estimate theirs very highly. Their ignorance, almost as high. They didn’t know what drove the FTL ships they flew. They didn’t know how the navigation worked, or what the controls did. They didn’t know how to read Heechee charts, and didn’t have any to read anyway, because they weren’t found for another decade after Klara was sucked into the black hole. It is astonishing to me how much meat intelligences can accomplish with so little information.
“Then could you lend me some money?”
Dolly laughed with surprise. “Lost your stake, did you? Boy, have you got a wrong number! I wouldn’t be buying drinks if some of the tourists hadn’t thrown me a couple of chips for luck.” When the highball arrived Dolly divided the small change in front of her in half and pushed a part to Klara. “You could hit Wan up again,” she said, “but he’s not in a very good mood.”
“That’s not news,” said Klara, hoping the whiskey would elevate her spirits. It did not.
“Oh, worse than usual. I think he’s going to be in the deep shit again.” She hiccoughed and looked surprised.
“What’s the matter?” Klara asked reluctantly. She knew perfectly well that once she asked, the girl would tell her, but it was, she supposed, a way of paying for the loose change.
“They’re going to catch up with him sooner or later,” Dolly said, sucking at the bottle again. “He’s such a jerk, coming here when he could have dropped you off anywhere, and got his God-damn candy and cake.”
“Well, I’d rather be here than some other place,” said Klara, wondering if it was true.
“Don’t be silly. He didn’t do it for you. He did it because he thinks he can get away with anything at all, anywhere. Because he’s a jerk.” She stared moodily at the bottle. “He even makes love like a jerk. Jerky, if you know what I mean? He even screws jerky. He comes up to me with that look on his face as if he’s trying to remember the combination to the food locker, you know? And then he gets my clothes off, and then he starts, push here, poke there, wiggle this part. I think I ought to write up an operating manual for him. The jerk.”
How many drinks the little stake lasted for Klara didn’t know-several, anyway. At some later time Dolly remembered that she was supposed to shop for brownie mix and liqueur chocolates. At a later time still Klara, now strolling around by herself, realized she was hungry. What made her know it was the smell of food. She still had some of Dolly’s loose change in her pocket. It was not enough for a decent meal, and anyway the sensible thing would be to go back to her cubicle and eat the prepaid meals, but what was the point of being sensible anymore? Besides, the smell was nearby. She passed through a sort of archway of Heechee metal, ordered at random, and sat as close as she could get to a wall. She pried the sandwich apart with a finger to see what she was eating; probably synthetic, but not any product of the food mines or sea farms she had ever tasted before. Not bad. Not very bad, anyway, although there was no dish she could think of that would have tasted really good just then. She ate slowly, analyzing each bite, not so much because the food justified it as because doing that postponed the next thing she would have to do, namely contemplate what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
And she became aware of a stir. The busgirl was sweeping the floor twice as diligently, peering over her shoulder at every stroke of the broom; the counter people were standing straighter, speaking more clearly. Someone had come in.
It was a woman, tall, not young, handsome. Thick ropes of tawny hair hung down her back, and she was conversing pleasantly, but authoritatively, with staff and customers alike while she rubbed fingers under shelves to check for grease, tasted crusts to check for crispness, made sure the napkin holders were full, retied the apron strings on the busgirl.
Klara stared at her with dawning recognition that felt more like fear. Her! The one! The woman whose picture she had seen in so many of the news stories the library had produced about Robinette Broadhead. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead opens 54 new CHON-food outlets in Persian Gulf. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead to christen converted interstellar transport. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead directs programming of expanded datastore net.
Although the sandwich was just about the last crumb of food Klara could afford to buy, she could not force herself to finish it. She sidled toward the door, face averted, crammed the plate into the waste receptacle, and was gone.
There was only one place to go. When she saw that Wan was alone in it she took it as a direct message from providence that she had made the right decision. “Where’s Dolly?” she asked.
He was lying in a hammock, sulkily nibbling on fresh papaya-bought at what incredible cost, Klara could not imagine. He said, “Where in-deed, yes, I would like to know that too! I will deal with her when she comes back, oh, yes!”
“I lost my money,” she told him.
He shrugged contemptuously.
“And,” she lied, inventing as she went along, “I came to tell you that you’ve lost, too. They’re going to impound your ship.”
“Impound!” he screeched. “The animals! The bastards! Oh, when I see Dolly, believe me-she must have told them about my special equipment!”
“Or you did,” Klara said brutally, “because you’ve sure been shooting your mouth off. You only have one chance.”
“One chance?”
“Maybe one chance, if you’re smart enough and courageous enough.”
“Smart enough! Courageous enough! You forget yourself; Klara! You forget that for the first part of my life I was all alone-“
“No, I don’t forget anything,” she said wearily, “because you sure don’t let me. It’s what you do next that counts. Are you all packed, ship’s stores all on board?”
“Stores? No, of course not. Have I not told you? Ice cream, yes, candy bars, yes, but my brownie mix and chocolates-“
“The hell with the chocolates,” said Klara, “and since she’s not here when she’s needed, the hell with Dolly, too. If you want to keep your ship, take off now.”
“Now? Alone? Without Dolly?”
“With a substitute,” said Klara tightly. “Cook, bedmate, somebody to yell at-I’m available. And skilled. Maybe I can’t cook as well as Dolly, but I can make love better. Or anyway more often. And you don’t have time to think it over.”
He stared at her slack-jawed for a long moment. Then he grinned. “Take those cases on the floor,” he ordered, “also that package under the hammock. Also-“
“Wait a minute,” she objected. “There’s a limit to what I can carry, you know.”
“As to what your limits are,” he said, “we will discover in time, I assure you. Now you may not argue. Simply take that netting and fill it and then we go, and while you are doing so I will tell you a story I heard from the Dead Men many years ago. There were these two prospectors who discovered a great prize inside a black hole and could not think how to get it out. One said finally, ‘Ah, now I know. I have brought my pet kitten along. We will simply tie her to the treasure and she will pull it out.’ And the second prospector said, ‘Oh, what a fool you are! How can a little kitten pull a treasure out of a black hole?” And the first prospector said, ‘No, it is you who are the fool. It will be easy, for, see, I have a whip.’”
16 Gateway Revisited
Gateway gave me all of my many millions, but it also gives me the creeps. Coming there was like meeting myself coming back. I met myself as a young, dead-broke, terrified, despairing human being whose only choices lay between leaving on a trip that might kill him and staying in a place where no one would want to live. It hadn’t changed that much. No one would still want to live there although people did and tourists were in and out all the time. But at least the trips were not as recklessly dangerous as they used to be. As we were docking I told my program Albert Einstein that I had made a philosophical discovery, namely that things even out. Gateway gets safer, and the whole home planet Earth gets more perilous. “Maybe there is a sort of law of conservation of misery that insures an average quantum value of unhappiness for every human being, and all we can really do is spread it in one direction or another?”