“Ah,” said Essie, straightening. “Oh.”
While she was mulling that over, she began to pull the pins out of her bun. After you’ve lived with a person for a couple of decades you begin to know them, and I followed her internal processes as well as if she’d spoken them aloud. There was worry, of course, because I had felt the need to talk to a psychoanalyst. But there was also a considerable amount of faith in Sigfrid. Essie had always felt she owed Sigfrid, since she knew that it was only with Sigfrid’s help that I had been able to admit, long ago, that I was in love with her. (And also in love with Gelle-Klara Moynlin, which had been the problem.) “Do you wish to tell me what was about?” she asked politely, and I said:
“Age and depression, my dear. Nothing serious. Only terminal. How was your day?”
She studied me with that all-seeing diagnostic eye of hers, pulling the long dirty-blond hair through her fingers till it fell free, and tailored her answer to fit the diagnosis. “Bloody exhausting,” she said, “to point where I need a drink very much-as, I perceive, do you.”
So we had our drink. There was room on the chaise for both of us, and we watched the moon set over the Jersey shore of the sea while Essie told me about her day, and did not pry.
Essie has a life of her own, and a pretty demanding one-it’s a wonder to me that she is so unfailingly able to find plenty of room for me in it. Besides checking her franchises she had spent a grueling hour at the research facility we had endowed for integrating Heechee technology into our own computers. The Heechee didn’t actually use computers, it seemed, not counting primitive things like navigation controls for their ships, but they had some nifty ideas in nearby fields. Of course, that was Essie’s own specialty and what she’d got her doctorate in. And when she was talking about her research programs I could see her mind working:
No need to interrogate old Robin about this, can simply run override through Sigfrid program and at once have total access to interview. I said lovingly, “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” and she stopped in the middle of a sentence. “What Sigfrid and I talked about,” I explained, “is sealed.”
“Hah.” Smug.
“No hah,” I said, just as smug, “because I made Albert promise. It’s stored so that not even you can decrypt it without dumping the whole system.
“Hah!” she said again, curling around to look me in the eye. This time the “hah” was louder and it had an edge to it that could be translated as, Will have a word with Albert about this.
I tease Essie, but I also love Essie. So I let her off the hook. “I really don’t want to break the seal,” I said, “because-well, vanity. I sound like such a whiney wretch when I talk to Sigfrid. But I’ll tell you all about it.”
She sank back, pleased, and listened while I did. When I had finished she thought for a moment and said, “That is why are depressed? Because have not much to look forward to?”
I nodded.
“But, Robin! Have perhaps only limited future, but, my God, what glorious present.’ Galactic traveler! Filthy-rich tycoon! Irresistible sex object to adoring, and also very sexy, wife!”
I grinned and shrugged. Thoughtful silence. “Moral question,” she conceded at last, “is not unreasonable. Is credit to you that you consider such matters. I too have had qualms when, as you remember, some gloppy female bits were patched into me to replace worn-out ones not so long ago.”
“So you understand!”
“Understand excellently! I also understand, dear Robin, that having made moral decision is no point in worrying about it. Depression is foolish. Fortunately,” she said, slipping off the chaise and standing up to take my hand, “there is excellent antidepression measure available. Will you care to join me in bedroom?”
Well, of course I would. And did. And found the depression lifting, for if there is one thing I enjoy it is sharing a bed with S. Ya. Lavorovua Broadhead. I would have enjoyed it even if I had known then that I had less than three months left before the death that had depressed me.
2 What Happened on Peggy’s Planet
Meanwhile, on Peggy’s Planet my friend Audee Walthers was looking for a particular shebeen for a particular man.
I say he was my friend, although I hadn’t given him a thought in years. He had done me a favor once. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly-that is, if anybody had said to me, “Say, Robin, do you remember that Audee Walthers put his tail on the line so you could borrow a ship when you needed to?” I would have said indignantly, “Hell, yes! I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.” But I hadn’t been thinking about it every minute, either, and as a matter of fact I had no idea at that moment where he was or even if he was still alive.
Walthers should have been easy to remember, because he looked rather unusual. He was short and not handsome. His face was wider at the jaw than at the temples, which made him look a little like a friendly frog. He was also married to a beautiful and dissatisfied woman less than half as old as he. Her age was nineteen; her name was Dolly. If Audee had asked my advice, I would have told him that such May and December affairs cannot work out-unless, of course, as in my case, December is remarkably rich. But he desperately wanted it to work out, because he loved his wife very much, and so he worked like a slave for Dolly. Audee Walthers was a pilot. Any kind of pilot. He had piloted airbodies on Venus. When the big Earth transport (which constantly reminded him of my existence since I owned a share in it and had renamed it after my wife) was in orbit at Peggy’s he piloted shuttlecraft to load and unload it, between times he piloted whatever he could rent on Peggy’s for whatever tasks a charter demanded. Like most everybody else on Peggy’s, he had come 4 X 1O’° kilometers from the place where he was born to scratch out a living, and sometimes he made it and sometimes he did not. So when he came back from one charter and Adjangba told him there was another to be had, Walthers scrambled to get it. Even if it meant searching every bar in Port
Hegramet to find the charter party. That wasn’t easy. For a “city” of four thousand, Port Hegramet was bar-saturated. There were scores, and the obvious ones-the hotel cafe, the airport pub, the big gambling casino with Port Hegramet’s only floorshow-weren’t where the Arabs who were his next charter were. Nor was Dolly in the casino, where she might have been performing with her puppet show, or at home, or at least not to answer the phone. Half an hour later Walthers was still walking the ill-lit streets in search of his Arabs. He was no longer in the richer, more Western parts of the city, and when he finally found them it was in a shebeen at the edge of town, having an argument.
All of the buildings in Port Hegramet were temporary. That was a necessary consequence of its being a colony planet; every month, when the new immigrants arrived in the big Heechee Heaven transport from Earth, the population exploded like a balloon at the hydrogen valve.
Then it gradually shrank for a few weeks, as the colonists were moved out to plantations and lumbering sites and mines. It never collapsed quite to the former level, so each month there were a few hundred new residents, a few score new dwellings built and a few old ones swallowed up. But this shebeen was most obviously temporary of all. It was only three slabs of construction plastic propped together for walls, a fourth laid over them as a roof and the street side open to the warm Peggy’s air. Even so it was smoky and hazy inside, smoke of tobacco and smoke of hemp laced with the beery, sour smell of the home-brewed liquor they sold.
Walthers recognized his quarry at once from his agent’s description. There were not many like him in Port Hegramet-many Arabs, of course, but how many rich ones? And how many old ones? Mr. Luqman was even older than Adjangba, fat and bald, and each one of his plump fingers wore a ring, many of them diamonds. He was with a group of other Arabs at the back of the shebeen, but as Walthers started toward them the barwoman put out a hand. “Private party,” she said. “They pay. You leave alone.”
“They’re expecting me,” Walthers said, hoping it was true.