I wasn’t quite open about that.
I don’t exactly know why that is, but I do have suspicions. Unfortunately they have to do with phenomena like the “missing mass” and the perplexing question of why we have only three perceptible dimensions in space instead of nine, and Robin simply won’t listen to me when I talk about that, either.
4
SOME PARTIES AT THE PARTY
There was one place on Gateway I absolutely had to see again.
After I got tired of brooding over all the things I had to brood over and hearing people say, “Hey, Robinette, you’re looking great!” I went there. It was called Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel 8, Room 51, and for several sick and scary months it had been my home.
I went there all by myself I didn’t want to take Essie away from her old Leningrad buddy, and anyway, the part of my life that was wrapped up in that dirty little hole was not a part she had shared. I stood gazing at it, taking it all in. I even actuated perceptors I don’t usually bother with, because I didn’t want to just see it. I wanted to smell and feel it.
It looked, smelled, and felt crummy, and I almost drowned in the huge, hot flood of nostalgia that washed over me.
Room 51 was the cubicle I had been assigned to when I first came to Gateway-Jesus! Decades and decades ago!
It had been cleaned out some, and redecorated a lot. It wasn’t a hole for a scared Gateway prospector to hide himself and his funk in anymore. Now it belonged to some feeble old geriatric case who had come to Wrinide Rock because that was where he had the best chance of clinging to his worn-out meat body a while longer. It looked different. They’d fixed it up with a real bed, if a narrow one, instead of my old hammock. There was a shiny new PV comxnset mounted on the wall, and a foldaway sink with actual running water, and about a million other luxuries I hadn’t had. The geriatrics case had tottered off somewhere else to join the party, no doubt. Anyway, he wasn’t there. I had it all to myself, all the closet-sized claustrophobic luxury of it.
I took a deep “breath.”
That was another big difference. The smell was gone. They’d got rid of the old Gateway lug that soaked into your clothes and skin, the well-used air that everybody else had been breathing-and sweating into, and farting into-for years and years. Now it only smelled a little of green, growing things, no doubt from the plantings that helped the oxygen-replenishment system along. The wails still glimmered with the Heechee-metal shine-blu~ only; Gateway had never had any of the other colors.
Changes? Sure there had been changes. But it was the same room. And what a world of misery and worriment I had crammed into it.
I’d lived the way every Gateway prospector lived-counting up the minutes until I would have to take a ifight, any flight, or be kicked off the asteroid because my money was gone. Poring over the lists of expeditions that were seeking crew members, trying to guess which one might make me rich-or, really, trying to decide which one might at least not make me dead. I had bedded GelleKlara Moynlin in that room, when we weren’t doing it in her own. I had cried myself crazy in it when I came back from the last mission I had shared with her without her.
It seemed to me that I had lived a longer life right there, in those few lousy months I had spent on Gateway, than in all the decades since.
I don’t know how many milliseconds I spent there, in maudlin nostalgia time, before I heard a voice behind me say, “Well, Robin! You know, I had an idea I might find you mooning around here.”
Her name was Sheri Loffat.
I have to confess that, glad as I was to see Sheri again, I was also glad that Essie was busy hoisting a few with her old drinking buddy just then. Essie is not a jealous woman at all. But she might have made an exception for Sheri Loffat.
Sheri was peering in at me through the narrow doorway. She looked not a minute older than the last time I’d seen her, more than half a century back. She was looking a whole lot better than she had then, in fact, because then she was just out of the hospital after a mission that had gone sour in every way but financial. Now she was looking one other thing besides “good.” She was looking extremely appetizing because what she was wearing, apart from a broad grin, was nothing but a knitted shirt and a pair of underwear panties.
I recognized the outfit immediately. “Like it?” she asked, leaning in to kiss me. “I put it on just for you. Remember?”
I answered indirectly. I said, “I’m a married man now.” That was to set the record straight, but it didn’t keep me from kissing her back as I said it.
“Well, who isn’t married?” she asked reasonably. “I’ve got four kids, you know. Not to mention three grandchildren and a great-grand.”
I said, “My God.”
I leaned back to look at her. She wriggled her way in the doorway and hooked herself by the scruff of her tee shirt to a hook on the wail. That was just what we used to do sometimes, when we were still meat and Gateway was the doorway to the universe, because the asteroid’s rotational “gravity” was so light that hanging was more comfortable than sitting. I did like the outfit. I was not likely to forget it. It was exactly what Sheri had been wearing the first time she came into my bed.
“I didn’t even know you were dead,” I said, to welcome her.
She looked uncomfortable with the subject, as though she hadn’t quite got used to it. “It only happened last year. Of course, I didn’t look quite this young then. So being dead isn’t a total loss.” She put her fingers on her chin, studying me up and down. She commented, “I keep seeing you on the news, Robin. You’ve done well.”
“So did you,” I said, remembering. “You went home with five or six million dollars, didn’t you? From that Heechee toolbox you found?”
“More like ten million, when you counted in the royalties.” She smiled.
“Rich lady!”
She shrugged. “I had a lot of fun with it. Bought myself a couple of counties of ranchland on Peggys Planet, got married, raised a family, died . . . it was pretty nice, all right. Not counting the last part. But I wasn’t just talking about money, though you’ve obviously got plenty of that. What do they say” ‘The richest man in the universe’? I should have hung on to you while I had the chance.”
I had realized she’d come down off the hook to get closer. Now I discovered I was holding her hand—“Sorry,” I said, letting go.
“Sorry for what?”
The answer to that was that if she needed to ask the question she wouldn’t understand the answer, but I didn’t have to say so. She sighed. “I guess I’m not the lady you’ve got on your mind right now.”
“Well—”
“Oh, that’s all right, Robin. Honest. It was just a kind of for-old-time’s-sake thought. Stifi,” she went on, “honestly, I’m a little surprised you aren’t with her and that guy-what’s his name—”
“Sergei Borbosnoy?”
But she shook her head impatiently. “No, nothing like that. It’s—wait a minute-yes, Eskladar. Harbin Eskladar.”
I blinked at her, because I knew who Harbin Eskladar was. He’d been pretty famous once. Not that I’d ever met him. Certainly I hadn’t wanted to, at least not at first, because Harbin Eskladar had been a terrorist, and what would my dear PortableEssie be doing with an exterrorist?
But Sheri was going right on: “Of course, I guess you move in pretty high society these days. I know you knew Audee Walthers. And I guess you’re tight with Glare and all those others—”
“Glare?” I was having trouble keeping up with Sheri, but that stopped me cold. Although she’d said it in English, it was a Heechee name.
She looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t know? Gosh, Robin, maybe one time I’m ahead of you! Didn’t you see the Heechee ship dock?”