“Robin! Come look!” cried Essie, and I swooped into the control room to do as I was ordered. Julio Cassata was looking hangdog and depressed under the viewscreen, and Essie was pointing at it with fury. “Warships!” she cried. “Look, Robin! Trigger-happy JAWS is getting ready to wipe out world!”
Cassata glowered at me. “Your wife’s driving me crazy,” he said. I didn’t look at him. I was looking at the screen. In that first moment before we went into FFL drive the screens had picked up the JAWS satellite, a hundred thousand kilometers away; even in our far-out orbit it was almost hidden by the bulge of the Earth, but I could see that JAWS was not alone. Midges swarmed around it.
Ships. Essie was right. Warships.
Then we were moving into FTL. The screen clouded, and Cassata protested: “They’re not going to attack anything. They’re just a precaution.”
“Precaution to send out whole fleet with weapons ready,” Essie scolded. “Of such precautions are wars made!”
“Would you rather have us do nothing?” he demanded. “Anyway, you’ll be there soon. You can complain right to him if you want to-I mean—”
He stopped, looking glum again; because of course the “him” was himself, in his meat version.
But he was right. “We right well will complain,” I told him. “Starting with why this ‘message’ was kept secret from us.”
Albert coughed politely. “It wasn’t, Robin,” he said.
Cassata chimed in belligerently, “You see! You’re always going off half-cocked. The whole message was broadcast in burst transmission, just as it was received first time out. I’ll bet Albert recorded it.”
Albert said apologetically, “It was only a sort of synoptic report on everything about the Heechee and the human race, Robin. There’s nothing in it that you couldn’t find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and so on.”
“Hah,” said Essie, still disgruntled, but she stopped there. She thought for a moment. Then she shrugged. “You fellows, you help yourself to drinks et cetera,” she said, remembering her duties as a hostess. “Me, I go listen to this burst for self.”
I started to follow, because Essie’s company on the worst day of her life was still better than Julio Cassata’s, but he stopped me. “Robin,” he said, “I didn’t want to say anything while she was here—”
I looked at him in astonishment. I could not believe there was anything he and I could ever share as a confidence. Then he said, “It’s about that guy your old girlfriend is married to.”
“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem to satisfy Cassata, so I added, “I never met him before, but his name’s Harbin Eskiadar, I think.”
“His name’s Esidadar, all right,” Cassata said savagely, “and I know. I hate his effing guts.”
I can’t deny that that perked me up right away. The topic of what a lousy person Kiara’s husband might be was quite congenial to me. “Have a drink,” I said.
He looked hesitant, then shrugged. “Just a quick one,” he said. “You don’t remember him? Well, do you remember me? I mean, like thirty or forty years ago, when we first met? I was a brigadier at the time?”
“I remember that, sure,” I said, producing drinks.
He took what I offered without looking to see what it was. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why it took me all these years to be promoted a lousy two grades?”
Actually, I never had. I hadn’t even thought about Cassata very much, far less about how he was doing in his job, because he had been nothing but bad news even back in the High Pentagon, when I was still meat and all the armed forces had to worry about was human terrorists.
My opinion of Cassata at that time was that he was a wart on the face of the human race. Nothing had changed it since, but I said politely, “I guess I never knew why.”
“Esidadar! Eskiadar was why! He was my aide-de-camp, and I damn near got thrown out of the service because of him! The son of a bitch was moonlighting, and what he did for an after-hours job was terrorism. He was part of General Beaupre Heimat’s old secret terrorist cell in the High Pentagon!”
After a moment, I said again, “Oh,” and this time Cassata nodded angrily, as though I had said it all.
In a sense I had, because anyone who had been through the days of misery and terrorism needed no discussion of what they were like. It was not something you forgot. For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody. Not just one somebody; hundreds of thousands had died, one way and another, in virus-poisoned water supplies or wrecked buildings or bombed cities. And not even any particular somebody, because the terrorists had struck at anyone, the innocent as well as the guilty-or the ones they considered guilty, anyway.
And the worst part of it was that trusted people, high-ranking military officers and even heads of state, had been secret members of terrorist groups. A whole nest of them had been uncovered in the High Pentagon itself.
“But Eskladar broke up the ring,” I said, remembering.
Cassata tried to laugh. It came out more like a snarl. “He turned over to save his own skin,” he said-and then, reluctantly, “Well, maybe not just to save himself. He was an idealist, I guess. But as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter. He was my ADC, and he cost me promotion for twenty years.”
He finished his drink. Brightening, he said, “Well, I don’t want to keep her waiting—” And then he stopped, but a little too late.
“Keep who waiting?” I asked, and he winced at the way I said it.
“Well, Robin,” he said abjectly, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I, uh, if besides me there was-well—”
“A woman,” I said, cleverly deducing. “We’ve got a stowaway on board.”
He looked unrepentant. “She’s just a canned deader, like you,” he said-diplomacy had never been Cassata’s strength. “I just had them put her store on along with mine. It won’t take up much room, for God’s sake, and I’ve only got . . .
He stopped there without quite saying just what he’d only got a little of left. He was a little, just a very little, too proud to beg.
He didn’t have to. “What’s her name?” I asked.
“Alicia Lo. She’s the one I was dancing with.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s only for this one flight. All right. Go keep your friend company.”
I didn’t add, “Just stay out of my sight.” I didn’t have to. That was exactly what he was certain to do, and if I had been in his position I expect I would certainly have done exactly the same thing myself.
And then there was nothing to get through but the interminable trip itself.
In the True Love, it takes only twenty-three minutes for a faster-than-light trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS. That’s actually real slow. In fact, it isn’t even faster than light, because eleven and a half of those minutes go into getting up speed at one end, and eleven and a half to slowing down again at the other; the actual trip time is, oh, a wink and a half~ Still, twenty-three minutes isn’t much-by meat-person standards.
We were not on Meat Standard Time. But, oh, how many milliseconds a single minute holds.
By the time we were well free of the asteroid, and Albert was setting course for the satellite, I was (metaphorically) biting my metaphoric nails. We keep True Love pretty much in the Earth solar system, hardly ever very far from the Earth itself, and so I always have contact with all the many projects I’ve got going on Earth to keep me amused-slow, yes, but only seconds slow, not eternities. Not this time. This time there was the radio blackout. I could have sent messages, all right (though Cassata forbade it furiously), but answers I could have none.