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steak! (Not always out of a Food Factory, either.) All the same, I didn't like watching what was
happening on this half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive when the
wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.
So I wasn't a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch hadn't waited for me to call
him and was already on the line.
Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate areas. He likes sexy talk. I
don't particularly, so I tried to keep the call short. He looked as good as ever not very tall, not exactly
handsome but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about grin and he was
just two days out. That's not a lot of hard data to get out of what was more than a quarter of an hour of
talk capsuled back and forth over all those light-years, I guess, but the rest is private; and when I was
finished it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp people.
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Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used her effectuators
to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn't have a skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold
neckband that wouldn't be flopping around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn't
argue. And while I was getting into them she asked chattily, "So did Mr. Tartch say thank you?"
I know Hypatia's tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. "For what?"
"Why, for keeping his career going," she said, sounding surprised. "He was pretty much washed up until
you came along, wasn't he? So it's only appropriate that he should, you know, display his gratitude."
"You're pushing your luck," I told her, as I slipped into a pair of jeweled foot stockings. Sometimes I
think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time it just wasn't justified. I didn't have to do favors to
get a man. Christ, the problem was to fend them off! It's just that when it's over I like to leave them a little
better off than I found them; and for Bill, true enough, a little help now and then had been useful.
But I didn't want to discuss it with her. "Talk about something else or shut up," I ordered.
"Sure, hon. Let's see. How did you like the Crabbers?"
I told her the truth. "Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy."
Hypatia giggled. "Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they're much worse than your
own remote predecessors? Because I don't thinkAustralopithecus robustus worried about whether its
dinners were enjoying the meal."
We were getting into a familiar argument. "That was a long time ago, Hypatia."
"So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. Now, if you really want to
take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business "
"Not yet," I told her, as I had told her many times before. And maybe not ever.
What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat body, with all its aches
and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored intelligence. Like other people I knew had
done. Like Hypatia herself, though in her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of
someone who had once been living meat.
It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn't getting as much pleasure as I
would have liked out of living, but I certainly didn't want todie. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I
would never have to.
But I wasn't prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat person could do that a
machine person couldn't well, one big one and I wasn't prepared to abandon the flesh until I had
done what the female flesh was best at. For which I needed a man ... and I wasn't at all sure that Bill
Tartch was the particular man I needed.
When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking conspiratorial and
expectant. "We've got about twenty percent of the optical foils in place," Terple informed me, thrilled
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with excitement. "Would you like to see?" She didn't wait for an answer, but commanded: "Hans! Display
the planet."
The lights went dark, and there before us floated a blue and white globe the size of my head, looking as
though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was
out of sight off to my right. There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It
looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas I couldn't see them. On the planet
itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple
did something that made the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even more
land on the dark side, because spots of light artificial lights, cities' lights blossomed all over parts of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]