The Ophiuchi Hotline (19 page)

It
did
look like the sort of tantalizing chance her first clone, Lilo 2, must have taken, Lilo realized. She remembered her resolve to suspect the easy escape, to look for the unlikely one. But she was still angry.

“What if I say the hell with common sense? Damn him, anyway. Go for broke, throw in with you, and we knock her off. How can he tell that I won’t make an irrational decision? Unless this is just another test and there’s really no message from the Hotline.”

“There is, but I’m glad you saw that possibility. You’ve trusted me entirely too quickly for your own good, you know.” His tongue was at her nipples again, and this time she didn’t protest. She stroked his back and let her eyes close slowly. The last of the muscle kinks from the high-gee trip were fading beneath an enveloping warmth, a tingling that went from her hot earlobes to her toes. But she opened her eyes again and looked down at him.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“He
doesn’t
know. Your best chance might actually be to make a try right now. He has no real defense
against your doing something totally illogical. He can’t predict that.”

“Then how can he chance it?”

Cathay sighed. “Because he knows
me
pretty well, too. You can’t join me if I’m not willing. And I’m not. I’m going. I’m choosing to live. I will abandon my students, abandon my self-respect, or what’s left of it, one more time. Now that I’ve revealed that, bared my shame to you, will you please shut up and open your legs?”

He said it with lightness in his voice and a half-smile, but when he entered her he was fierce, determined to lose himself in an excess of passion. Lilo surrendered and let him set the tempo, at least for the first time. To her surprise, she was responding well. Part of that was her physical need; it had been a long time. Another part was feeling sorry for him. It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living. But part of it was something else again, maybe the beginnings of that sort of feeling that could one day transform a simple act of recreational copping into that thing which is so subtly and yet so hugely different—the act of love.

The verdict on Cathay was blunt and to the point. Vaffa showed it to me after she’d decoded it. Trying to vindicate herself in my eyes? I hoped so; if she cared that much about my opinion, whether she was aware of it or not, it strengthened my position. The Boss did not need Cathay, not if allowing him to live meant leaving him on Pluto, knowing what he knew.

I think Vaffa made her plans in the first minute after reading the message. Her mind was that linear. She had to shift gears painfully when I told her Cathay was going with us.

“But he wants something in return,” Lilo said, on the spur of the moment.

“It won’t do him any good. What?”

“He realizes he has no bargaining power,” she said, improvising. “But he’s been useful to Tweed in the past. He can continue to be useful in the future, when we
return, if you don’t make him into a permanent enemy now.”

“Go on.”

“The three educational…contracts he holds.” They weren’t actually legal, of course. He was strictly bootleg, but to him, the contracts had the force of law because he had promised to stand behind them. “The mothers of those children will be in shit crater, you know. With the teacher shortage, how are they going to find someone to take over the education of their children? Cathay says the waiting list is ten years here. They’ll be grown before substitutes can be found. Everyone’s booked up, committed to teach kids who aren’t even born yet.”

“Not my problem.”

“No. But Tweed’s a rich man. Other bootleg teachers can be found, but they’re expensive.”

Vaffa considered it. “I’ll ask the Boss.”

The next day brought confirmation from Tweed. He would pay the money to the mothers of the children. It seemed to surprise Vaffa; she had asked the question mainly to satisfy Lilo, to whose judgment she had begun to defer in small ways.

It came as a big surprise to Cathay, who was elated and tried not to show it to Vaffa. Lilo saw it, and it made her feel good. It occurred to her that it was almost the only thing she had been able to do on her own initiative since her escape from prison. But even then she wondered if Tweed had foreseen it, else why the quick acceptance? Did money matter that little to him? Did he buy her argument that it would placate Cathay, make him useful to Tweed after his return? Or did he fear that without the money the mothers would become angry enough to denounce Cathay—leading to an investigation and possible trouble themselves? As usual, Tweed’s motives were opaque to her.

But now they had to obtain a ship, and Vaffa didn’t know the first thing about doing it. Lilo didn’t, either, but she acted as if she did, and she did not doubt that
she would be better at it than Vaffa.

Working from Cathay’s phone, they quickly got the idea of what the market in second-hand ships were like. There were always ships for sale; they became available as holehunters went bankrupt and had to sell out. But the market was brisk, and prices were always high. Lilo checked with a dozen brokers, and relayed the results to Tweed through Vaffa. The most encouraging thing she could report was that by paying three times the already inflated market value, they might be able to obtain a ship in four to five months.

“Why so much?” Vaffa asked.

“It’s complicated,” Lilo said. “There’s more buyers than sellers. You have to get on a waiting list. The courts award the assets of a bankrupt hunter to a broker, who collects a commission. As soon as a hunter who’s gone bust comes in, the ship is sold. They can ask almost anything for it. The waiting list runs to three or four years. To move up on the list, you pay a bribe to the broker. To move
way
up, the bribe can be three times the price of the ship.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“No, strangely enough. They were very open about it. The broker makes the list. The courts have nothing to say about whom the ship is sold to. So the broker cleans up. It sounds like a nice racket.”

“What about dealing directly with a holehunter?”

“Nope. The ones that are solvent aren’t selling, at any price. The ones who’re broke don’t own a ship any more. They go into receivership, and the courts always give them to brokers. I told you it was a racket.”

“And what about new ships?”

“An even longer waiting list, higher prices, and bigger bribes.”

Vaffa looked sour. Business was not her field of expertise. “I’ll relay it to the Boss.”

“You might mention something else,” Lilo said, thoughtfully. “We only need this ship for the one trip. It seems silly to buy it. Also, can you fly one?”

“I thought you let the computer do that.”

“True. But holehunters go a long way out. A lot of them don’t come back, because something goes wrong, maybe with the computer, and they don’t know how to fix it. A lot of those people think hunting holes is as easy as getting from Luna to Mars, but they’re wrong. Fifty percent don’t return from their first trip. So you’re going to need a pilot, because I don’t know anything about fixing ships, and neither does Cathay. I can do computer work, as long as it’s not too complicated. But I don’t know anything about fusion engines. We’ll need someone who does.”

Vaffa sighed. “So what are you proposing?”

“I don’t know if this is possible, but we could give it a try. Maybe we could charter a ship, one that belongs to a hunter. Even one tenth of the price of a ship would be attractive, I’d think. That is, unless money is no object. I don’t know just how rich the Boss is.”

I don’t think you can get rich enough that money is no object. If you think that way you either don’t get rich or you don’t stay rich. Tweed was fabulously wealthy, but he was interested in my idea. I don’t blame him; some of the prices we quoted him would have run a fairsized city for a year.

I didn’t care one way or the other about Tweed’s money. What was important to me was that you could buy a ship over the phone. To charter one, you had to go out and look for holehunters. There were no agencies that handled charters; who ever rented a ship that size, anyway?

Vaffa would not be able to handle it, certainly not alone. That meant I would get to go outside, to stir around, to get my bearings. If I saw a perfect chance, who knows…?

After two weeks they had got nowhere. Day after day they had returned to residential corridors lit by widely spaced pale blue nitelites, and collapsed into bed.

Tweed was beginning to get impatient. Vaffa said he was talking about a deadline; if they had not managed
to charter a ship in another two weeks, he was going to have them buy one. By that time, they would already have lost a month, and he was unwilling to let any more time go by before getting his bid down.

Lilo was not happy about it. She didn’t care about the lost time, but thought that if they bought a ship they would still be faced with the same problem: hiring a pilot. There were plenty of them around but Lilo was sure it would be hard to hire one. And for the same reasons they were having trouble chartering a ship. Vaffa scared the hunters away.

Holehunters were as quirky a group of people as the human race had ever produced. In many ways, they were almost as different as a human paired with a symb. It takes a special temperament to seal oneself into a single-seat ship for a trip that would last from twenty to forty years. Most of the ships had about fifty cubic meters of living space; some had less. The endpoint of a voyage could be as much as half a light-year from the sun. The people who survived such loneliness for such a time tended to be different.

“Most of them didn’t really like people much before they went out,” Cathay said. “When they come back, they haven’t seen anyone for at least twenty years. A lot of them decide they didn’t miss all that much.”

They were back at Cathay’s home after another day of haunting the pleasure palaces around the spaceport. Tonight Cathay had done as Lilo suggested, lowering the air temperature so it would be cozy to huddle around the fireplace which concealed the electric heater. They had all applied a mild hallucinodisiac cream onto their genitals, then inhaled a muscle-relaxant powder. They had coated their bodies with lucent oils: Lilo was lavender, Cathay was pearl, and Vaffa crimson. The result had been a stretched hour of slow-motion slithering, low-key and undemanding. Now they were lying face down, Lilo in the middle.

She felt good. It was like the peace that could be achieved when you had regained your breath after a ten-kilometer run, but without the pain and exhaustion that
would have preceded it. She had wanted Vaffa in a good mood for what she was about to propose, and it looked as though she had succeeded. Vaffa was inclined to be perfunctory about copping; Lilo assumed that the woman had never attracted anyone to love her and had decided, like so many, that sex was overrated. Tonight might well have been the first time she had experienced copping as a sensual delight, not merely the pursuit of orgasm.

“Well, I certainly can’t understand them,” Vaffa said.

“That’s because you’ve never run into anyone who dislikes people as much as
you
do,” Lilo said. She hoped it would go over well, not be taken as an insult. Vaffa had never pretended to like people.

“Maybe you’re right,” Vaffa said. She seemed about to smile, but her lips did not quite know how to manage it. Lilo sat up on one elbow and faced the faintly glowing apparition. Her head felt a little thick now that she’d raised it; there had been entirely too many things to drink and smoke and sniff during the course of the day. Tiny red tongues of flame were dancing over the hairless woman’s back. Lilo pursued them with her fingertips, pressing firmly into yielding muscle. Vaffa arched herself sensuously, with a contented moan.

“They’re very sensitive, holehunters,” Lilo said. “Am I right?”