The financial advisor’s name was Rick or Mick. She never did get it quite straight. He was an impossible straight arrow, given to the notion that the North American Union was nearing moral collapse, apparently signified by the increasing number of people opting out of marriages at their first opportunity. He was fond of reminding everyone of Rome during her final days, and he implied that he himself would be a durable and highly rewarding partner.
He invited her to supply her number, but again she found she would be off-world quite extensively. Would that it were otherwise. Perhaps another time would work better.
Hutch wondered what Preach was doing, and the evening dragged on. When it finally ended, and she discovered it was barely nine o’clock, her mother asked hopefully how it had gone, whether she’d enjoyed herself, what did she think of the two males.
Hutch was an only child, and her mother’s sole chance for grandchildren. It all laid a dark sense of guilt on her shoulders. But what was she supposed to do? “Yes, Mom,” she said, “they were nice guys. Both of them.”
Teresa caught the tone and the past tense and sighed. “I guess I should just leave it alone,” she said.
Hutch had intended to tell her mother that this would be the last flight. But something held her back. Instead, she said only that she didn’t plan to go on piloting indefinitely. “Hang in there, Mom,” she added.
THERE WERE OBLIGATORY appearances by relatives over the next few days. Between visits, Hutch and Teresa toured the area, ate in restaurants that Hutch hadn’t been into in years, stopped by the Hudson Church Repertory Theater for a performance of Downhill All the Way, did plenty of shopping, and attended a sunrise concert. As was her custom, Hutch didn’t wear a link when she was attending purely social events.
On her last full day she went to the Margaret Ingersoll School, named for the first president of the North American Union, and talked to an auditorium full of teenagers about star flight. They were an enthusiastic audience. Hutch described how it felt to go into close orbit around a gas giant, or to step onto a world, an entire world, bigger than the Earth, on which nothing had ever lived. She flashed images of rings and moons and nebulas and listened delightedly to their reactions. And she saved the black hole for last.
“The long string of lights,” she explained, “the diamond necklace effect, is a star that’s been torn up and is going down the gullet.”
They looked at the luminous halo that surrounded the hole, at the black center, at the star-fragments. “Where does it go?” asked a girl in the rear of the auditorium.
“We don’t know whether it goes anywhere,” she said. “But some people think it’s a doorway to another universe.”
“What do you think?” asked a boy.
“Don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it lets out somewhere,” and she lowered her voice, “into a world where teens spend their spare time doing geometry.”
Afterward, on her way out, an eighteen-year-old boy asked whether she might be free that evening.
As it happened, she had planned a double date with her mother.
TERESA’S ESCORT WAS one of the actors from the show, polished and good-looking and charming. He’d played the role of Maritain, the bumbling political fanatic.
Her own date was a close friend, the celebrated Gregory MacAllister, with whom she’d shared the traumatic experience on Deepsix. MacAllister had been guest-lecturing at Princeton when she contacted him to say hello. One thing had led to another, and he’d come up for the evening.
They got back after midnight. Teresa was delighted with Mac, and seemed to think Hutch had been hiding something from her. “Believe me, Mom,” Hutch said, “he’s an interesting guy, but you wouldn’t want him underfoot. He was on his best behavior tonight.”
The remark left her puzzled but did not dash her hopes.
While they hung up their jackets, Hutch noticed that the commlink was blinking. “What have you got, Janet?” she asked the system.
“Matthew Brawley called, Priscilla. Twice.”
She caught her breath. And when Teresa asked whimsically who Matthew Brawley was, she knew that her mother had seen the reaction.
“Just a friend,” she said.
Teresa nodded and almost restrained a smile. “I’ll make coffee,” she said, and left.
Hutch wondered whether she wanted to take the message in her bedroom, but decided against an action that would only rouse her mother’s curiosity and invite further inquiry. “What have you got, Janet?” she asked.
“The first call was at 7:15. He left a number and asked that you call back.”
“And the second?”
“I’ll put it on-screen.”
The opposite wall faded to black, and Preach materialized. He wore floppy black gym pants and a bilious green pullover shirt open at the neck. He was leaning against something, a tabletop maybe, but the object hadn’t been scanned, and so he stood in front of her at an impossible angle, defying gravity. “Hi, Hutch,” he said. “I was looking forward to our night out, but Virgil’s anxious to get the program up and running. I’m headed to Atlanta tonight, and up to the Wheel tomorrow. By Friday we’ll be on our way.
“I guess that puts us off until spring. But I have you on my calendar and I’m holding you to it.
“Have a good flight out to 3011, or whatever it is. I’ll be nearby. Say hello when you get time.”
He smiled, and blinked off.
She stood looking at the screen.
Damn.
Chapter 4
Time draweth wrinkles in a fair face, but addeth fresh colors to a fast friend, which neither heat, nor cold, nor misery, nor place, nor destiny, can alter or diminish.
GEORGE HOCKELMANN GOT off to an unpromising start in life. He was the son of unambitious Memphis suburbanites who were content to lounge their way through the years, sipping cold beer and watching themselves performing heroically or romantically in simulated adventures in distant places and more rousing times. George had been a clumsy kid, both physically and socially. He didn’t engage in athletics, didn’t make friends easily, and in later life, he came to suspect he’d spent the better part of his first fifteen years sitting in his room building models of starships.
His classes didn’t go well either. He must have had a vacuous stare or something because his teachers didn’t expect much from him, and consequently he didn’t produce much. That was probably just as well, because he was already an inviting target for bullies.
But he survived, often with the help of Herman Culp, a tough little kid from Hurst Avenue. Although most of his grades remained indifferent, he discovered a talent for math that translated itself, by the time he was twenty-three, into a sheer genius for predicting financial trends. At twenty-four, he launched The Main Street Observer, an investment newsletter that became so successful that he was twice investigated by the SXC on suspicion of manipulation.
By twenty-six, he’d joined Nussbaum’s Golden Hundred, the richest entrepreneurs in the North American Union. Six years later, he concluded he’d earned all the money he could possibly spend, he had no real interest in wielding influence, and so he began to look for something else to do with his life.
He bought the Memphis Rebels of the United League and set out to bring a world championship to his hometown. It never quite happened, and now, more than two decades later, he regarded it as his single serious failure.
He’d remained close to Herman. They went hunting each year in the fall, usually in Manitoba. But there’d been a year when Herman had been offered the use of a cousin’s lodge. It was north of Montreal along the St. Maurice River, picturesque country, loaded with moose and deer. The lodge was situated near Dolbeau, a legendary spot where a UFO was supposed to have set down almost a half century earlier. They’d wandered around town, visited its museum, talked to the inhabitants, gone out to the place where everybody said it actually landed. They’d looked at broken trees and scorched rock, the graves of three unfortunate hunters who had, with their dogs, apparently stumbled onto the visitors. (Little had been found of the hunters other than charred smears, said the townspeople. So George had wondered what was buried, but he didn’t pursue the issue.)