Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER VII

None of the crew was in the entrance lock when I came to the PhoenixCorp ship, but I could hear them. They were all gathered in the dining hall, laughing and chattering excitedly. When I got there, I saw that the room was darkened. They were all poking at virtuals of one scene or another as Hans displayed them, and no one noticed me as I came in.

I hooked myself inconspicuously to a belt near the door and looked around. I saw Bill and his sperm receptacle of the moment hooked chastely apart, Denys chirping at Mason-Manley, Bill talking into his recorders. Mason-Manley was squeezing Denys’s shoulder excitedly, presumably because he was caught up in the euphoria of the moment, but he seemed to be enjoying touching her, too. If Bill noticed, he didn’t appear to mind. But then, Bill was not a jealous type; that was one of the things I liked about him.

Until recently I hadn’t thought that I was, either.

Well, I told myself, I wasn’t. It wasn’t a question of jealousy. It was a question of— oh, call it good manners; if Bill chose to bed a bimbo now and then, that was his business, but it did not excuse his hauling the little tart all the way from Earth to shove her in my face.

A meter or so away from me, Mark Rohrbeck was watching the pictures, looking a lot less gloomy than usual. When he saw me at last, he waved and pointed. “Look, Ms. Moynlin!” he cried. “Blimps!”

So I finally got around to looking at the display. In the sector he was indicating, we were looking down on one of the Crabber planet’s oceans. There were a lot of clouds, but some areas had only scattered puffs. And there among them were eight fat little silver sausages, in a V formation, that surely were far too hard-edged and uniform in shape to be clouds.

“These are the objects we viewed before, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans’s voice informed me. “Now we can discriminate the individual elements, and they are certainly artifacts.”

“Sure, but why do you say they’re blimps? How do you know they aren’t ships of some kind?” I asked, and then said at once, “No, cancel that,” as I figured it out for myself. If they had been surface vessels, they would have produced some sort of wake in the water. They were aircraft, all right, so I changed the question to, “Where are they going, do you think?”

“Wait a minute,” June Terple said. “Hans, display the projection for Ms. Moyn­lin.”

That sheet of ocean disappeared, and in its place was a globe of the Crabber planet, its seas in blue, land masses in gray. Eight stylized little blimp figures, greatly out of proportion, were over the ocean. From them a silvery line extended to the northeast, with another line, this one golden, going back past the day-night terminator toward the southwest. Terple said, “It looks like the blimps came from around that group of islands at the end of the gold course-line, and they’re heading toward the Dumbbell continents up on the right. Unfortunately, those are pretty far north. We can’t get a good picture of them from here, but Hans has enhanced some of the data on the island the blimps came from. Hans?”

The globe disappeared. Now we were looking down on one of those greenish infrared scenes: shoreline, bay—and something burning around the bay. Once again the outlines of the burning areas were geometrically unnatural. “As we spec­ulated, it is almost certainly a community, Ms. Moynlin,” Hans informed me. “However, it seems to have suffered some catastrophe, similar to what we observed on the continent that is now out of sight.”

“What kind of catastrophe?” I demanded.

Hans was all apologetic. “We simply don’t have the data yet, Ms. Moynlin. A great fire, one might conjecture. I’m sure it will make sense when we have better resolution — in a few hours, perhaps. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Please do,” I said. And then, without planning it, I, found myself saying, “I think I’ll go back to my ship and lie down for a while.”

“But you just got here,” Mark Rohrbeck said, surprised and, I thought with some pleasure, maybe a little disappointed. Bill Tartch looked suddenly happy and began to unhook himself from his perch. I gave a little shake of the head to both of them.

“I’m sorry. I just want to rest,” I said. “It’s been an exhausting few days.”

That wasn’t particularly true, of course —not any part of it. I wasn’t really tired, and I didn’t want to rest. I just wanted to be by myself, or at any rate with no company but Hypatia, which comes to pretty much the same thing.

As I came into my ship, she greeted me in motherly mode. “Too many people, hon?” she asked. “Shall I make you a drink?”

I shook my head to the drink, but she was right about the other part of it. “Funny thing,” I said, sprawling on the couch. “The more people I meet, the fewer I am comfortable around.”

“Meat people are generally boring,” she agreed. “How about a cup of tea?”

I shrugged, and immediately heard the activity begin in the kitchen. Hypatia had her faults, but she was a pretty good mom when I needed her to be. I lay back on the couch and gazed at the ceiling. “You know what?” I said. “I’m be­ginning to think I ought to settle down on the island.”

“You could do that, yes,” she said diplomatically. Then, because she was Hy­patia, she added, “Let’s see, the last time you were there, you stayed exactly eleven days, wasn’t it? About six months ago?”

She had made me feel defensive —again. I said. “I had things to do.”

“Of course you did. Then the time before that wasn’t quite that long, was it? Just six days —and that was over a year ago.”

“You’ve made your point, Hypatia. Talk about something else.”

“Sure thing, boss.” So she did. Mostly what she chose to talk about was what my various holdings had been doing in the few hours since I’d checked them last. I wasn’t listening. After a few minutes of it, I swallowed the tea she’d made for me and stood up. “I’m going to soak in the tub for a while.”

“I’ll run it for you, hon. Hon? They’ve got some new pictures from the Crabber planet if you want to see them while you soak.”

“Why not?” And by the time I’d shucked my clothes the big onyx tub was full, the temperature perfect as always, and one corner of the bathroom was concealed by one of Hypatia’s simulations.

The new display was almost filled by what looked like hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny buildings. We were looking down at them from something like a forty-five-degree angle, and I couldn’t make out many details. Their sun must have been nearly overhead, because there weren’t many shadows to bring out details.

“This is the biggest city they’ve found yet,” Hypatia informed me. “It’s inland on the western part of the squarish continent in the southern hemisphere, where two big rivers come together. If you look close, you’ll see there’s a suggestion of things moving in the streets, but we can’t make out just what yet. However—”

I stopped her. “Skip the commentary,” I ordered. “Just keep showing me the pictures. If I have any questions, I’ll ask.”

“If that’s what you want, hon.” She sounded aggrieved. Hypatia doesn’t like to be told to shut up, but she did.

The pictures kept coming, one city after another, now a bay with what looked like surface ships of some kind moored in it, now some more blimps sailing peacefully along, now what might have been a wide-gauge railroad with a train steaming over a bridge. I couldn’t really see the tracks, only the bridge and a hazy line that stretched before and after it across the countryside. What I could see best was the locomotive, and most of all the long white trail of steam from its stack.

I watched for a while, then waved the display off. I closed my eyes and lay back to let the sweet-smelling foamy waters make me feel whole and content again. As I had done many thousands of times, sometimes with success.

This was one of the successes. The hot tub did its work. I felt myself drifting off to a relaxed and welcome sleep. ...

And then, suddenly, a vagrant thought crossed my mind, and I wasn’t relaxed anymore.

I got out of the tub and climbed into the shower stall, turning it on full; I let cold water hammer at me for a while, then changed it to hot. When I got out, I pulled on a robe.

As I was drying my hair, the door opened and Hypatia appeared, looking at me with concern. “I’m afraid what I told you about Tartch upset you, hon,” she said, oozing with compassion. “You don’t really care what he does, though, do you?”

I said, “Of course not,” wondering if it were true.

“That’s my girl,” she said approvingly. “There are some new scenes, too.”

They appeared; she didn’t wait to see if I wanted them on. I watched the changing scenes for a while, then decided I didn’t. I turned to Hypatia. “Turn it off,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

She didn’t move, but the scene disappeared. “What’s that, Klara?”

“While I was dozing in the tub, I thought for a moment I might fall asleep, and slip down into the water and drown. Then I thought you surely wouldn’t let that happen, because you’d be watching, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m always aware of any problems that confront you, Klara.”

“And then it occurred to me that you might be tempted to let me go ahead and drown, just so you could get me into that machine storage you’re always trying to sell me. So I got out of the tub and into the shower.”

I pulled my hair back and fastened it with a barrette, watching her. She didn’t speak, just stood there with her usual benign and thoughtful expression. “So, would you?” I demanded.

She looked surprised. “You mean would I deliberately let you drown? Oh, I don’t think I could do that, Klara. As a general rule I’m not programmed to go against your wishes, not even if it were for your own good. That would be for your good, you know. Machine storage would mean eternal life for you, Klara, or as close as makes no difference. And no more of the sordid little concerns of the meat that cause you so much distress.”

I turned my back on her and went into my bedroom to dress. She followed, in her excellent simulation of walking. What I wanted to know was how general her general rule was, and what she would have deemed a permissible exception. But as I opened my mouth to ask her, she spoke up.

“Oh, Klara,” she said. “They’ve found something of interest. Let me show you.” She didn’t wait for a response; at once the end of the room lit up.

We were looking again at that first little fleet of blimps. They were nearly at the coast, but they weren’t in their tidy V formation anymore. They were scattered over the sky, and two of them were falling to the sea, blazing with great gouts of flame. Small things I couldn’t quite make out were buzzing around and between them.

“My God,” I said. “Something’s shooting them down!”

Hypatia nodded. “So it would appear, Klara. It looks as though the Crabbers’ blimps are filled with hydrogen, to burn the way they do. That suggests a rather low level of technological achievement, but give them credit. They aren’t primi­tives, anyway. They’re definitely civilized enough to be having themselves a pretty violent little war.”