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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
She remembered it very well. It had not included this lean, dark, scowling man
who wore a G-string and a scarf and nothing else. Nor had it included some
strange young blond girl who was crying her eyes out. In the last memory Klara
had there had been people crying, all right, oh, yes! And shrieking and
cursing and wetting their underwear, because they were trapped within the
Schwarzschild barrier of a black hole.
But none of those people were these people.
The young girl was bending over her solicitously. "Are you all right, hon?
You've been through a real bad time." There was no news for Kiara in that
statement. She knew how bad the time had been. "She's awake," the girl called
over her shoulder.
The man came bounding over, pushing the girl aside. He did not waste time
inquiring about Klara's health. "Your name! Also orbit and mission number-
quickly!" When she told him he didn't acknowledge the answer. He simply
disappeared and the blond girl came back.
"I'm Dolly," she said. "I'm sorry I'm such a wreck, but honestly, I was scared
to death. Are you all right? You were all messed up, and we don't have much of
a medical program here."
Kiara sat up and discovered that, yes, she was messed up, all right. Every
part of her ached, starting with her head, which appeared to have been bashed
against something. She looked around. She had never been in a ship so full of
tools and toys before, nor one that smelled so pleasantly of cooking. "Look,
where am I?" she asked.
"You're in his ship"-pointing. "His name's Wan. He's been wandering around,
poking into black holes." Dolly looked as though she were getting ready to cry
again, but rubbed her nose and went on: "And listen, hon, I'm sorry, but all
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those other people you were with are dead. You were the only one alive."
Klara caught her breath. "All of them? Even Robin?"
"I don't know their names," the girl apologized. And was not surprised when
her unexpected guest turned her bruised face away and began to sob. Across the
room Wan snarled impatiently at the two women. He was deep into concerns of
his own. He did not know what a treasure he had retrieved, or how much that
retrieved treasure complicated my life.
For it is pretty nearly true that I married my dear wife, Essie, on the
elastic rebound from the loss of Klara Moynlin. At least, on the upsurge of
feeling that came when I shed the guilt, or anyway most of the guilt, I felt
for Klara's loss.
When ultimately I found out that Klara was alive again it was a shock. But, my
God, nothing-nothing--compared to the shock to Klara! Even now and in these
circumstances I can't help feeling what I can only call, incongruously enough,
a physical pain when I think about my whilom most dear Klara as she found
herself back from the dead. It isn't just because of who she was, or who she
was in relation to me. She deserved the compassion of anybody. Trapped,
terrified, hurt, sure of dying-and then a moment later miraculously rescued.
God pity the poor
I had not met Gelle-Klara Moynhin before her accident with the black hole.
Robin couldn't afford as sophisticated a data-retrieval system as me in those
days. But I surely heard a lot about her from Robin over the years. What I
mostly heard about was how guilty he felt over her death. The two of them,
with others, had gone on a science mission for the Gateway Corp to investigate
a black hole; most of their ships had been trapped; Robin had managed to get
free.
There was no logical reason to feel guilty, of course. Moreover, Gelle-Klara
Moynlin, though a normally competent female human, was in no sense
irreplaceable-in fact, Robin replaced her rather swiftly with a succession of
other females, finally bonding in a long-term mode with S. Ya. Lavorovna, not
only a competent human female, but the one who designed me. Although I am well
modeled on human drives and motivations, there are parts of human behavior I
never will understand.
woman! God knows I do, and things did not quickly get better for her. She was
unconscious half the time, because her body had taken a terrible battering.
When she was awake, she was not always sure she was awake. From the tingling
she felt and the warm flush and the buzzing in her ears she knew that they had
been shooting her full of painkillers. Even so she ached terribly. Not just in
the body. And when she was awake she could easily have been hallucinating, as
far as she was able to know, because the sociopath Wan and the demoralized
Dolly were not very stable figures to cling to. When she asked questions she
got strange answers. When she saw Wan talking to a machine and asked Dolly
what he was doing, she could make little sense of Dolly's reply: "Oh, those
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