I didn’t know what Klara was doing meanwhile, not then I didn’t. Actually, in detail, I surely did not really want to.
17 Picking Up the Pieces
The hardest part of Klara’s new life was keeping her mouth shut. She had a combative nature, Klara did, and with Wan, combat was all too easy to create. What Wan wanted was food, sex, company, occasional assistance at the jobs of running the spacecraft-when he wanted them, and not at any other times. What Klara wanted was time to think. She wanted to think about this astonishing derailment of her life. The possibility of getting killed she had always faced-if not bravely, exactly, then at least steadfastly. The possibility that so weird a misadventure as being stuck on a siding, inside a black hole, for an entire generation while the world moved on without her had never crossed her mind. That needed to be thought over.
Wan had no interest in Klara’s needs. When he wanted her for something, he wanted her. When he didn’t, he made that very clear. It was not his sexual demands that troubled Klara. In general they were not much more trouble, or more personally significant, than the routine of going to the bathroom. Foreplay for Wan consisted of taking his pants off. The act was over at his pace, and his pace was rapid. The use of Klara’s body disturbed her less than the rape of her attention.
Klara’s best times were when Wan was sleeping. They did not usually last very long. Wan was a light sleeper. She would settle down for a conversation with the Dead Men, or make herself something to eat that Wan didn’t particularly like, or simply sit and stare into space-a phrase that took on new meaning when the only thing one could look at that was more than an arm’s-length away was the screen that looked out onto space itself. And just as she was relaxed the shrill, teasing voice would come: “Doing nothing again, Klara? What a lazy thing you are! Dolly would have baked a whole batch of brownies for me!” Or, worse, he would be in a playful mood. Then out would come the little paper-folds and drugstore vials and silver boxes of pink and purple pills. Wan had just discovered drugs. He wanted to share the experience with Klara. And sometimes, out of boredom and dejection, she would let herself be persuaded. She would not inject or sniff or swallow anything she could not positively identify, and she rejected a lot of the things she could. But she accepted a lot, too. The rushes, the euphoria-they didn’t last, but they were a blessed diversion from the emptiness of a life that had hiccoughed and died and was trying to start itself again. Getting stoned with Wan, or even making love with Wan, was better than trying to evade the questions that Wan asked and she did not want to answer honestly. “Klara, do you honestly think I’ll ever find my father?”
“Not a hope, Wan, the old boy’s long dead.”
Because the old boy surely was. The man who had fathered Wan had left Gateway on a solitary mission just about the time Wan’s mother began to wonder if she’d really missed her first period. The records simply posted him as missing. Of course, he could have been swallowed up by a black hole. He could still be there, frozen in time as Klara herself had been.
But the odds were very poor.
An astonishing thing to Klara-out of the million astonishing things thirty years had brought-was the easy way Wan displayed and interpreted the old Heechee navigation charts. In a good mood-almost a record, because it had lasted nearly a quarter of an hour-he had shown her the charts and marked the objects he had already visited, including her own. When the mood evaporated and he stamped off furiously to sleep, Klara had cautiously asked the Dead Men about it. It could not be said that the Dead Men really understood the charts, but the tiny bit they did know was far more than Klara’s contemporaries had ever known.
Some of the cartographical conventions were simple enough-even self-evident, like Columbus’s egg, once you’d been told what they meant. The Dead Men were pleased to tell Klara what they meant. The problem was to keep them from telling her and telling her. The colors of the objects shown? Simple, said the Dead Men; the bluer they were, the farther they were; the redder, the nearer. “That shows,” whispered the most pedantic of the Dead Men, who happened to be a woman, “that shows the Heechee were aware of the Hubble-Humason Law.”
“Please don’t tell me what the Hubble-Humason Law is,” Klara said. ‘What about all these other markings? The things like crosses, with little extra bars on them?”
“They’re major installations,” sighed the Dead Man. “Like Gateway. And Gateway Two. And the Food Factory. And-“
“And these things like check marks?”
“Wan calls them question marks,” whispered the tiny voice. Indeed, they did look like that, a little, if you took the dot at the bottom of the question mark and turned the rest of it upside down. “Most of them are black holes. If you change the setting to twenty-three, eighty-four-“
“Please be still!” cried Wan, appearing disheveled and irritated from his bunk. “I cannot sleep with all this foolish yelling~”
“We weren’t yelling, Wan,” Klara said peaceably.
‘Weren’t yelling!” he yelled. “Mali!” He stomped over to the pilot seat and sat down, fists clenched on his thighs, shoulders hunched, glowering at her. “What if I want something to eat now?” he demanded.
“Do you?”
He shook his head. “Or what if I wanted to make love?”
“Do you?”
“Do I, do I! It is always an argument with you! And you are not really a very good cook and, also, in bed you are far less interesting than you claimed. Dolly was better.”
Klara found she was holding her breath, and forced herself to release it slowly and silently. She could not force herself to smile.
Wan grinned, pleased to see that he bad scored on her. “You remember Dolly?” he went on jovially. “That was the one you persuaded me to abandon on Gateway. There they have the rule of no pay, no breathe, and she had no money. I wonder if she is still alive.”
“She’s still alive,” gritted Klara, hoping it was true. But Dolly would always find someone to pay her bills. ‘Wan?” she began, desperate to change the subject before it got worse. ‘What do those yellow flashes on the screen mean? The Dead Men don’t seem to know.”
“No one knows. If the Dead Men do not know, is it not foolish to think I would know? You are very foolish sometimes,” he complained. And in the very nick of time, just as Klara was reaching the boiling point, the thin voice of the female Dead Man came again:
“Setting twenty-three, eighty-four, ninety-seven, eight, fourteen.”
‘What?” said Klara, startled.
“Setting twenty-three-“ The voice repeated the numbers. “What’s that?” Klara asked, and Wan took it upon himself to answer. His position had not changed, but the expression on his face was different less hostile. More strained. More fearful.
“It is a chart setting, to be sure,” he said.
“Showing what?”
He looked away. “Set it and find out,” he said.
It was difficult for Klara to operate the knurled wheels, for in all her previous experience such ~n act was tantamount to suicide: the chart-displaying function had not been learned, and a change in the settings almost invariably meant an unpredictable, and usually fatal, change in course. But all that happened was that the images on the screen flickered and whirled, and steadied to show-what? A star? Or a black hole? Whatever it was, it was bright cadmium yellow on the screen, and around it flickered no fewer than five of the upside-down question marks. “What is it?” she demanded.
Wan turned slowly to stare at it. “It is very big,” he said, “and very far away. And it is where we are going now.” All that combativeness was gone from his face now. Klara almost wished it were back, for what had replaced it was naked, unrelieved fear.
And meanwhile- Meanwhile, the task of Captain and his Heechee crew was nearing the end of its first phase, though it brought no joy to any of them. Captain was still grieving for Twice. Her slim, sallow, shiny body, emptied of personality, had been disposed of. At home it would have gone to join the other refuse in the settling tanks, for the Heechee were not sentimental about cadavers. On shipboard there were no settling tanks, so it had been jettisoned into space. The part of Twice that remained was in store with the rest of the ancestral minds, and as Captain roamed about his new and unfamiliar ship he touched the pouch where she was stored from time to time without knowing that he did it.