In the Lofstrom Loop in Lagos, Nigeria, Audee Walthers debated the measure of his responsibility toward Janie Yee-xing as the magnetic ribbon caught their descending pod, and slowed it, and dropped it off at the Customs and Immigration terminal. For playing with the forbidden toys he had lost the hope of a job, but for helping him do it Yee-xing had lost a whole career. “I have an idea,” he whispered to her as they lined up in the anteroom. “I’ll tell you about it outside.”
He did indeed have an idea, and it was a pretty good one, at that. The idea was me.
Before Walthers could tell her about his idea, he had to tell her about what he had felt in that terrifying moment at the TPT. So they checked into a transit lodge near the base of the landing loop. A bare room, and a hot one; there was one medium-sized bed, a washstand in the corner, a PV set to stare at while the traveler waited for his launch capsule, windows that opened on the hot, muggy African coastal air. The windows were open, though the screens were tight against the myriad African bugs, but Walthers hugged himself against the chill as he told her about that cold, slow being whose mind he had felt on the £ Ya.
And Janie Yee-xing shivered, too. “But you never said anything, Audee!” she said, her voice a little shrill because her throat was tight. He shook his head. “No. But why didn’t you? Isn’t there-“ She paused. “Yes, I’m sure there’s a Gateway bonus you could get for that!”
“We could get, Janie!” he said strongly, and she looked at him, then accepted the partnership with a nod. “There sure is, and it’s a million dollars. I checked it out on the ship’s standing orders, same time I copied the ship’s log.” And he reached into his scanty luggage and pulled out a datafan to show her.
She didn’t take it from him. She just said, “Why?”
“Well, figure it out,” he said. “A million dollars. There’s two of us, so cut it in half. Then I got it on the S. Ya., with the S. Ya.‘s equipment, so the ship and its owners and the whole damn crew might get a share- we’d be lucky if it was only half. More likely three-quarters. Then-well, we broke the rules, you know. Maybe they’d overlook that, considering everything. But maybe they wouldn’t, and we’d get nothing at all.”
Yee-xing nodded, taking it in. There was a lot to take in. She reached out and touched the datafan. “You copied the ship’s log?”
“No problem,” he said, and indeed it hadn’t been. During one of his tours at the controls, frosty silence from the First Officer at the other seat, Walthers had simply called up the data for the moment he had made contact from the automatic flight recorder, recorded the information as though it was part of his normal duty, and pocketed the copy.
“All right,” she said. “Now what?”
So he told her about this known eccentric zillionaire (who happened to be me), notorious for his willingness to spend largely for Heechee data, and as Walthers knew him personally- She looked at him with a different kind of interest. “You know Robinette Broadhead?”
“He owes me a favor,” he said simply. “All I have to do is find him.” For the first time since they had entered the little room Yee-xing smiled. She gestured toward the P-phone on the wall. “Go to it, tiger.”
So Walthers invested some of his not very impressive remaining bankroll in long-distance calls while Yee-xing gazed thoughtfully out at the bright tracery of lights around the Lofstrom loop, like a kilometers-long roller-coaster, its magnetic cables singing and the capsules landing on it choofing while the ones taking off were chuffing as they respectively gave up and took on escape velocity. She wasn’t thinking about their customer. She was thinking about the goods they had to sell, and when Walthers hung up the phone, his face dour, she hardly listened to what he had to say. Which was:
“The bastard’s not home,” he said. “I guess I got the butler at Tappan Sea. All he’d tell me was that Mr. Broadhead was on his way to Rotterdam. Rotterdam, for God’s sake! But I checked it out. We can get a cheap flight to Paris and then a slow-jet the rest of the way-we’ve got enough money for that-“
“I want to see the log,” said Yee-xing.
“The log?” he repeated.
“You heard me,” she said impatiently. “It’ll play on the PV. And I want to see.”
He licked his lips, thought for a moment, shrugged, and slipped it into the PV scanner.
Because the ship’s instruments were holographic, recording every photon of energy that struck them, all that data concerning the source of the chill emanations was on the fan. But the PV showed only a tiny and featureless white blob, along with the location coordinates.
It was not very interesting to look at in itself-which was, no doubt, why the ship’s sensors themselves had paid no attention to it. High magnification would perhaps show details, but that was beyond the capacities of the cheap hotel room set.
But even so- As Walthers looked at it, he felt a crawling sensation. From the bed
Yee-xing whispered, “You never said, Audee. Are they Heechee?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the still white blur. “I wish I knew-“ But it was not likely, was it? unless the Heechee were far unlike anything anyone had suspected. Heechee were intelligent. Had to be. They had conquered interstellar space half a million years ago. And the minds that Walthers had perceived were-were-What would you call it? Petrified, maybe. Present. But not active.
“Turn it off,” said Yee-xing. “It gives me the creeps.” She swatted one of the bugs that had penetrated the screen and added gloomily, “I hate this place.”
“Well, we’ll be off to Rotterdam in the morning.”
“Not this place. I hate being on the Earth,” she said. She waved at the sky past the lights of the landing loop. “You know what’s up there?
There’s the High Pentagon and Orbit-Tyuratam and about a million zappers and nukes floating around, and they’re all crazy here, Audee. You never know when the damn things are going to go off.”
Whether she intended a rebuke or not was unclear, but Walthers felt it anyway. He pulled the fan out of the PV scanner resentfully. It wasn’t his fault that the world was crazy! But it was his fault, no doubt of that, that Yee-xing was condemned to be on it. So she had every right to reproach him.
He started to hand her the datafan, his motives not certain, perhaps to demonstrate trust, perhaps to reinforce her status as his accomplice.
But in midreach he discovered just how crazy the world was. The gesture converted itself into a blow, aimed wickedly at her unsmiling, desolate face.
For the half of a breath it was not Janie there; it was Dolly, faithless, runaway Dolly, with the grinning, contemptuous shadow of Wan behind her-or neither of them, in fact not a person at all but a symbol. A target. An evil and threatening thing that had no identity but only a description. It was THE ENEMY, and the most certainly sure thing about it was that it needed to be destroyed. Violently. By him.
For otherwise Walthers himself would be destroyed, wrecked, disintegrated, by the maddest, most hating, most pervertedly destructive emotions he had ever felt, forced into his mind in an act of sickening, violent, devastating rape.
What Audee Walthers felt at that moment I knew very well because I felt it, too-as did Janie-as did my own wife, Essie-as did every human being within a dozen AU of a point a couple of hundred million kilometers from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Auriga. It was most lucky for me that I was not indulging my habit of piloting myself. I don’t know if I would have crashed. The touch from space only lasted half a minute, and I might not have had time to kill myself, but I surely would have tried. Rage, sick hatred, an obsessive need to wreck and ravish-that was the gift from the sky that the terrorists offered us all. But for once I had the computer doing the piloting so that I could spend my time on the P-phone, and computer programs were not infected by the terrorists’ TPT.
It wasn’t the first time. Not even the first time lately, for in the previous eighteen months the terrorists had dodged into solar space in their stolen Heechee ship and broadcast their pet lunatic’s most horrid fantasies to the world. It was more than the world could stand. It was, in fact, why I was on my way to Rotterdam, but this particular episode was the reason I turned around in midflight on the way there. I tried at once to call Essie, as soon as it was over, to make sure she was all right. No luck. Everybody in the world was trying to call everybody else, for the same reasons, and the relay points were jammed.
There was also the fact that my gut felt as though armadillos were engaging in sexual intercourse in it and, everything considered, I wanted Essie with me instead of taking a later commercial flight as planned. So I ordered the pilot to reverse course; and so when Walthers got to Rotterdam I wasn’t there. He could easily have caught me at Tappan Sea if he had taken a straight-through New York flight, and so he was wrong about that.
He was also wrong-quite wrong-forgivably wrong, for he had no way of knowing-about just what sort of mind he had tuned in on on the S.Ya.
And he had made one other error, quite serious. He had forgotten that the TPT worked both ways.
So the secret he had kept at one end of that fleeting mind-touch was no secret at all at the other.
I regret, or almost regret, that I know nothing about this “instant madness” from firsthand experience. I regretted it most when it first happened, a decade earlier. No one knew anything about a “telempathic psychokinetic transceiver” at that time. What it looked like, and was, was periodic, worldwide epidemics of insanity. A lot of the world’s best minds, including mine, had spent their best efforts trying to find a virus, a toxic chemical, a variation in the Sun’s radiation-anything-anything that would account for the shared madness that swept the human race every year or so. However, some of the world’s best minds- like mine-were handicapped. Computer programs like myself simply did not feel the maddening impulses. If we had, I daresay, the problem would have been solved much earlier.
A lavender squid-well, not really a squid, but looking about as squidlike as anything else in human experience-was in the middle of an exhausting, long-term project when Audee Walthers had his little accident with the TPT. Because the TPT goes in both directions it makes a great weapon but a lousy surveillance tool. It is sort of like calling up the person you’re spying on and saying, “Hey, look, I’ve got my eye on you.” So when Walthers bumped his head the sting was felt elsewhere. A where that was, in fact, very else. It was nearly a thousand light-years from the Earth, not far from the geodesic flight-line from Peggy’s Planet home- which was, of course, the reason Walthers was close enough for the touch to register.
Happens I know quite a lot about this particular lavender squid-or
My friend Robin has several faults, and one of them is a kind of cutesy coyness that is not as amusing as he thinks it is. The way he knew about the sailship folk, like the way he knew about most of the other things he was not present to see, is simply explained. He just doesn’t want to explain it. The explanation is that I told him. That simplifies things a lot, but it’s almost true.
Is it possible that cutesy coyness is contagious?
almost squid; you could have said that he looked like a wriggly, fat orchid, and been almost as close. I hadn’t met him at the time, of course, but now I know him well enough to know his name, and where he came from, and why he was there, and, most complicated of all, what he was doing. The best way to think of what he was doing was to say that he was painting a landscape. The reason that is complicated is that there was no one to see it for light-years in every direction, least of all my squid friend. He did not have the proper kind of eyes to perceive it with.
Still, he had his reasons. It was a sort of religious observance. It went back to the oldest traditions of his race, which was old indeed, and it had to do with that theologically crucial moment in their history when they, living among the clathrates and frozen gases of their home environment, with visibility minute in any direction, for the first time became aware that “seeing” could become the receiving end of a significant art form.
It mattered very much to him that the painting should be perfect. And so, when he suddenly felt himself being observed by a stranger, and the startling shock caused him to spray some of the finely divided powders he painted with in the wrong place, and in the wrong mixture of colors, he was deeply upset. Now a whole quarter hectare was spoiled! An Earthly priest would have understood his feelings, if not his reasons for them; it was quite as though in the observance of a mass the Host had been dropped and crushed underfoot.
The creature’s name was LaDzhaRi. The canvas he was working on was an elliptical sail of monomolecular film nearly thirty thousand kilometers long. The work was less than a quarter completed, and it had taken him fifteen years to get that far. LaDzhaRi did not care how long it took. He had plenty of time. His spacecraft would not arrive at its destination for another eight hundred years.
Or at least he thought he had plenty of time ... until he felt the stranger staring at him.
Then he felt the need to hurry. He stayed in normal eigenmode while he swiftly collected his painting materials-by then it was August 21- lashed them secure-August 22-pushed himself away from the butterfly-wing sail and floated free until he was well clear. By the first of September he was far enough away to switch on his jet thrust and, in high eigenmode, return to the little cylindrical tin can that rode at the center of the cluster of butterfly wings. Although it was a terribly expensive drain on him, he remained in high mode as he plunged through the entering caves and into the salty slush that was his home environment. He was shouting to his companions at the top of his voice.
By human standards that voice was extraordinarily loud. Terrestrial great whales have such loud voices that their songs can be recognized and responded to by other whales an ocean away. So had LaDzhaRi’s people, and in the tiny confines of the spacecraft his roaring shook the walls. Instruments quivered. Furniture rocked. The females fled in panic, fearing that they were about to be eaten or impregnated.
It was almost as bad for the seven other males, and as fast as he could, one of them struggled up to high eigenmode to shout back at LaDzhaRi. They knew what had happened. They too had felt the touch of the interloper, and of course they had done what was necessary. The whole crew had switched into high, transmitted the signal they owed their ancestors, and returned to normal mode... and would LaDzhaRi please do the same at once, and stop frightening the females?
So LaDzhaRi slowed himself down and allowed himself to “catch his breath”-although that was not an expression in use among his people. It did not do to thrash around in the slush in high for very long. He had already caused several troublesome cavitation pockets, and the whole slurpy environment they lived in was troubled. Apologetically he worked with the others until everything was lashed firm again, and the females had been coaxed out of their hiding places, one of them serving for dinner, and the whole crew settled down to discuss the lunatic touch, madly rapid and quite terrifying, that had invaded all their minds. That took all of September and the first part of October.
By then the ship had settled back into some sort of normal existence and LaDzhaRi returned to his painting. He neutralized the charges on the spoiled section of the great photon-trap wing. He laboriously collected the pigmented dust that had floated away, for one could not waste so much mass.
He was a thrifty soul, was LaDzhaRi. I have to admit that I found him rather admirable. He was loyal to the traditions of his people, under circumstances that human beings might have thought a little too menacing to be tolerated. For, although LaDzhaRi was not a Heechee, he knew where the Heechee could be reached, and he knew that sooner or later the message his shipmates had sent would have an answer.
So then, just as he was beginning to repaint the blanked-out section of his work, he felt another touch, and this time an expected one. Closer. Stronger. Far more insistent, and much, much more frightening.
All the fragments of life stories of these friends-or almost friends, or in some cases non-friends of mine were beginning to fall together. Not very rapidly. Not much faster, in fact, than the fragments of the universe were beginning to fall together in that great crunch back toward the cyclic primordial-atom state that (Albert kept telling me) was about to happen for reasons I never quite understood at the time. (But I didn’t feel badly about that, because at the time neither did Albert.) There were the sail-ship people, uneasily accepting the consequences of doing their duty. There were Dolly and Wan on their way to yet one more black hole, Dolly sobbing in her sleep, Wan scowling furiously in his. And there were Audee Walthers and Janie sitting disconsolate in their very much too expensive Rotterdam hotel room, because they had just found out I wasn’t there yet. Janie squatted on the huge anisokinetic bed while Audee harangued my secretary. Janie had a bruise on her cheek, souvenir of that moment’s madness in Lagos, but Audee had his arm in a cast-sprained wrist. He had not known until that moment that Janie was a black belt in karate.
Wincing, Walthers broke the connection and rested his wrist in his lap. “She says he’ll be here tomorrow,” he grumbled. “I wonder if she’ll give him the message.”
“Of course she will. She wasn’t human, you know.”
“Really? You mean she was a computer program?” That had not occurred to him, for such things were not common on Peggy’s Planet. “Anyway,” he said, taking consolation, “I guess in that case at least she won’t forget.” He poured them each a short drink out of the bottle of Belgian apple brandy they had picked up on the way to the hotel. He set down the bottle, wincing as he rubbed his right wrist, and took a sip before saying, “Janie? How much money have we got left?”
She leaned forward and tapped out their code on the PV. “About enough for four more nights in this hotel,” she reported. “Of course, we could move to a cheaper one-“
He shook his head. “This is where Broadhead’s going to stay, and I want to be here.”
“That’s a good reason,” Yee-xing commented blandly, meaning that she understood his real reason: If Broadhead wasn’t anxious to see Walthers, it would be harder to duck him in person than on the P-phone. “So why did you ask about the money?”
“Let’s spend one night’s rent on some information,” he proposed. “I’d kind of like to know just how rich Broadhead is.”
“You mean buy a financial report? Are you trying to find out if he can afford to pay us a million dollars?”
Walthers shook his head. “What I want to find out,” he said, “is how much more than a million we can take him for.”
Now those were no charitable sentiments, and if I had known about them at the right time I would have been a lot harder-nosed with Audee Walthers, my old friend. Or maybe not. When you’ve got a lot of money you get used to people seeing you as a tappable resource instead of a human being, even though you never get to like it.
Still, I had no objection to his finding out what I owned, or anyway as much about what I owned as I had allowed the financial-report services to know. There was plenty there. A sizable interest in the charter operation of the £ Ya. Some food-mine and fish-farm shares. A great many
Since Robin keeps talking about the “missing mass” question, I should explain what it is. In the latter twentieth century cosmologists had an insoluble contradiction to face. They could see that the universe was expanding, and this was certainly so because of the red shift. They could also see, however, that it contained too much mass for the expansion to be possible. That was proved by such facts as that the outer fringes of galaxies revolved too fast, clusters of galaxies held each other too tightly; even our own Galaxy with its companions was plunging toward a group of starclouds in Virgo much faster than it should have been. Obviously, much mass was missing from observations. Where was it?
There was one intuitively obvious explanation. Namely, that the universe had formerly been expanding, but Something had decided to reverse its growth and cause it to contract. No one believed that for a minute-in the late twentieth century.
enterprises back on Peggy’s Planet, including (to Walthers’ surprise) the company he leased his plane from. The very computer-data service that was selling them the information. Several holding companies and import-export or freight-forwarding firms. Two banks; fourteen real-estate agencies, based everywhere from New York to New South Wales, with a couple on Venus and Peggy’s Planet; and any number of unrecognizable little corporations, including an airline, a fast-food chain, something called Here After Inc.-and something called PegTex Petroventures. “My God,” said Audee Walthers, “that’s Mr. Luqman’s company! So I was working for the son of a bitch all along!”
“And I,” said Janie Yee-xing, looking at the part that mentioned the S. Ya. “Really! Does Broadhead own everything?”
Well, I did not. I owned a lot, but if they had looked at my holdings more sympathetically, they might have been able to see a pattern. The banks loaned money for explorations. The real-estate companies helped settle colonists, or took over their shacks and hogans for cash so they could leave. The £ Ya. ferried colonists to Peggy’s, and, as for Luqman, why, that was the crowning jewel in the empire, if they had only known it! Not that I had ever met Luqman, or would have known what he looked like if I saw him. But he had his orders, and the orders came down the chain of command from me: Find a good oil field somewhere near the equator of Peggy’s Planet. Why the equator? So the Lofstrom loop we would build there could take advantage of the planet’s rotational velocity. Why a launch loop? It was the cheapest and best way of getting things in and out of orbit. The oil we pumped would power up the loop. The excess crude oil would go onto the loop and into orbit, in shipping capsules; the capsules would go back to Earth on the £ Ya. ‘s return flights to be sold there-which meant there would be a profitable cargo of oil to carry on the half of each round trip that was now nearly dead loss which meant that we could cut the prices for colonists on the way out! I do not apologize for the fact that almost all of my ventures showed a profit every year. That’s how I kept them all going, and expanding, but the profit was only incidental. See, I have a philosophy about earning money, and that is that anybody who knocks himself out to accumulate it after the first hundred million or so is sick, and- Oh, but I’ve said all that already, haven’t I?
I’m afraid I wander. What with all the things going on in my mind I get a little confused about what has happened, and what hasn’t happened yet, and what never happens at all except in that mind.
Robin takes a lot of pride in the launch loop, because it reassured him that human beings could invent things the Heechee had not. Well, he’s right-at least if you don’t look at the details. The loop was invented on Earth by a man named Keith Lofstrom in the late twentieth century, though nobody built one until there was enough traffic to justify it. What Robin didn’t know was that although the Heechee never invented the loop, the sailship people did-they had no other way to get out of their dense, opaque atmosphere.
The point I’m making is that all my money-making ventures were also solidly useful projects that contributed to both the conquest of the Galaxy and the alleviation of the needs of human beings, and that’s a fact. And that’s why all these fragments of biography do ultimately fall together. They don’t look as though they’re going to. But they do. All of them. Even the stories of my semi-friend, Captain, the Heechee whom I ultimately came to know quite well, and of his lover and second in command, the female Heechee named Twice, whom, as you will discover, I did at the end come to know quite a lot better than that.
When the Heechee hid inside their Schwarzschild shell at the core of the Galaxy they knew there could be no easy communication between their scared selves and the immense universe outside. Yet they dared not be without news.
So they set up a web of starlets outside the black hole itself. They were far enough away so that the roaring radiation of infall into the hole did not swamp their circuitry, and there were enough of them so that if one were to fail or be destroyed-even if a hundred were-the ones that were left would be able to receive and record the data from their early-warning spy stations all around the Galaxy. The Heechee had run away to hide, but they had left eyes and ears behind.
So from time to time some brave souls sneaked out of the core, to find out what the eyes had seen and the ears had heard. When Captain and his crew were sent out to check space for the errant star, checking the monitors was an added duty. There were five of them aboard his ship- five living ones, anyway. By all odds the one that interested Captain the most was the slim, sallow, shiny-skinned female named Twice. By Captain’s standards she was a raving beauty. And sexy, too-every year without fail-and the time, he judged, was getting near again!
But not, he prayed, just yet. And so prayed Twice, for getting through the Schwarzschild perimeter was a brute of a job. Even when the ship had been purpose-built to manage it. There were other can openers around-Wan had stolen one-but those managed the job only in limited ways. Wan’s ship could not enter the event horizon and survive. It could only extend a part of itself there.
Captain’s ship was bigger and stronger. Even so, the shaking, tossing, racking strains of passing through the event horizon threw Captain and Twice and the other four members of the crew violently and hurtingly against their retaining harnesses; the diamond-bright corkscrew coruscated with great fat silent sparks of radiance showering all around the cabin; the light hurt their eyes, the violent motion bruised their bodies; and it went on and on. For an hour or more by the crew’s own subjective time, which was a queer, shifting blend of the normal pace of the universe at large and the slowed-down tempo inside the black hole.
But at last they were through into the unstressed space. The terrible lurching stopped. The blinding lights faded. The Galaxy glowed before them, a velvet dome of cream splattered with bright, bold stars, for they were too far inside the center to see more than the occasional patch of blackness.
“Massed minds be thanked,” said Captain, grinning as he crawled out of his harness-he looked like a med school skull when he grinned-“I think we’ve made it!” And the crew followed his example, unstrapping themselves, chattering cheerfully back and forth. As they rose to begin the data-collection process, Captain’s bony hand reached out to hold Twice’s. It was an occasion for rejoicing-as the captains of Nantucket whalers rejoiced when they passed Cape Horn, as the covered-wagon pioneers began to breathe again as they came down the slopes into the promised land of Oregon or California. The violence and peril were not over. They would have to go through it all again on the way back inside. But now, for at least a week or more, they could relax and collect data and this was the pleasure part of the expedition.
Or it should have been.
It should have been but was not, for as Captain secured the ship and the officer named Shoe opened the communication channels, every sensor on the board flared violet. The thousand automatic orbiting stations were reporting big news! Important news-bad news, and all the datastores clamored to announce their evil tidings at once.
There was a shocked silence among the Heechee. Then their training overcame their astonished terror, and the cabin of the Heechee ship became a whirlwind of activity. Receive and collate, analyze and compare. The messages mounted. The picture took shape.
The last record-tapping expedition had been only a few weeks before, by the slow creep of time inside the great central black hole-decades or so as time was measured in the galloping universe outside. But even so, not much time! Not in the scale of stars!
And yet the whole world was different.
Q.-What is worse than a prediction that doesn’t come true?
A.-A prediction that comes true sooner than you expect.
It had been the Heechee conviction that intelligent and technological life would arise in the Galaxy. They had identified more than a dozen inhabited worlds-and not merely inhabited, but bearing the promise of intelligence. They had made a plan for each of them.
Some of the plans had failed. There was a species of furry quadrupeds on a damp, cool planet so near the Orion nebula that its aurora filled the sky, small quick creatures with paws as nimble as a raccoon’s and lemur eyes. They would discover tools one day, the Heechee thought; and fire; and farming; and cities; and technology and space travel. And so they had, and used them all to poison their planet and decimate their race. There was another race, six-limbed segmented ammonia-breathers, very promising, sadly too near a star that went supernova. End of the ammonia-breathers. There were the chill, slow, sludgy creatures who occupied a special place in Heechee history. They had carried the terrible news that drove the Heechee into hiding, and that was enough to make them unique. More, they were not merely promising but actually intelligent already; not merely intelligent but civilized! Technology was already within their grasp. But they were a longshot entry in the galactic sweepstakes anyway, for their sludgy metabolism was simply too slow to compete with warmer, quicker races.
But one race, someday, would reach into space and survive. Or so the Heechee hoped.
And so the Heechee feared, too, for they knew even as they planned their retreat that a race that could catch up with them could also surpass them. But how could that possibility loom near so quickly? It had been only sixty terrestrial years since the last checkup!
Then the distant monitors orbiting the planet Venus had shown the sapiens bipeds there, digging out the abandoned Heechee tunnels, exploring their little solar system in spacecraft that moved on jets of chemical flame. Pitiably crude, of course. But promising. In a century or two- four or five centuries at most, the Heechee thought-they would likely enough find the Gateway asteroid. And in a century or two after that they might begin to understand the technology- But events had moved so swiftly! The human beings had found the
Gateway ships, the Food Factory-the immense distant habitat the Heechee had used to pen specimens of Earth’s then most promising race, the australopithecines. All had fallen to the humans, and that was not the end of it.
Captain’s crew was well trained. When the data had been accepted, and filtered through the massed minds, and tabulated, and summarized, the specialists prepared their reports. White-Noise was the navigator. It was his responsibility to take position fixes on all reported sources and update the ship locator file. Shoe was the communications officer, busiest of all-except perhaps for Mongrel, the integrator, who flew from board to board, whispering to the massed minds and suggesting cross-checks and correlations. Neither Burst, the black-hole-piercer specialist, nor Twice herself whose skill was in remote handling of slaved equipment, were needed for their specialties at this time, so they backed up the others, as did Captain, the ribbed muscles of his face twisting like serpents as he waited for the consolidated reports.
Mongrel was fond of her Captain, too, and so she gave him the least threatening ones first.
First, there was the fact that Gateway ships had been found and used. Well, there was nothing wrong with that! It was part of the plan, although it was disconcerting to have it happen so soon.
Second, there was the fact that the Food Factory had been found, and the artifact humans called Heechee Heaven. These were old messages, now decades old. Also not serious. Also disconcerting-quite disconcerting, because Heechee Heaven had been designed to trap any ships that docked there, and for two-way contact to have been established meant a quite unexpected sophistication among these upstart bipeds.
Third, there was a message from the sailship people, and that made the tendons in Captain’s face writhe faster. Finding a ship in a solar system was one thing-locating one in interstellar space was distressingly impressive.
There is a possible slight confusion here that I should eliminate. Robinette (and all the rest of the human race) called these people Heechee. Of course, they didn’t call themselves that, any more than native Americans called themselves Indians or the African Khoi-San tribes called themselves Hottentots and Bushmen. What the Heechee in fact called themselves was the intelligent ones. But that proves little. So does Homo sapiens.
And fourth- Fourth was White-Noise’s plot of the present whereabouts of all known Heechee vessels now operated by human beings, and when Captain saw that he squeaked with rage and shock. “Plot it against banned spaces!” he commanded. And as soon as the datafans were in place and the combined images appeared, the tendons in his cheeks trembled like plucked harpstrings. “They are exploring black holes,” he said, his voice thin.
White-Noise nodded. “There is more,” he said. “Some of the vessels carry order disruptors. They can penetrate.”
And Mongrel the integrator added: “And it does not seem that they understand the danger signs.”
Having given their reports, the rest of the crew waited politely. It was Captain’s problem now. They hoped very much that he was going to be able to handle it.
The female named Twice was not exactly in love with Captain, because it wasn’t time for that yet, but she knew she would be. Quite soon. Within the next few days, most likely. So in addition to her concern for this astonishing and frightening news, there was also her concern for Captain. He was the one who had his upper lip in the pincer. Although it was not yet time, she reached out and placed her lean hand over his. So deep in thought was Captain that he didn’t even notice, but patted it absently.
Shoe made the sniffling sound that was the Heechee equivalent of clearing his throat before asking, “Do you want to establish contact with the massed minds?”
“Not now,” hissed Captain, rubbing his ribcage with his free fist. It made a grating noise, loud in the stillness of the cabin. What Captain really wanted to do was to go back into his black hole in the core of the Galaxy and pull the stars up over his head. That was not possible. Next best would be to flee back to that same safe, friendly core and report to higher authority. Higher authority could then make the decisions. They could be the ones to deal with the massed minds of the ancestors, who would be eager to interfere. They could decide what to do about it-if possible, with some other Heechee captain and crew actually dispatched to this terrible swift space to carry out their orders. That was a possible option, but Captain was too well trained to allow himself so easy a way out. He was the one on the scene. Therefore he was the one who should make the first swift responses. If they were wrong-well, pity poor Captain! There would be consequences. Shunning, at least, though that was only for minor offenses. For graver ones there was the equivalent of being kicked upstairs-and Captain was not eager to join that mighty mass of stored minds that were all of his ancestors.
He hissed worriedly and made his decisions. “Inform the massed minds,” he ordered.
“Just inform? Not request recommendations?” asked Shoe.
Firmly, “Just inform. Prepare a penetrating drone and send it back to base with a duplicate of all data.” This was to Twice, who released his hand and began the task of activating and programming a small message vessel. And finally, to White-Noise: “Set course for the sailship interception point.”
It was not the Heechee custom to salute on receiving an order. It was also not the Heechee custom to argue about it, and it was a measure of the confusion in the ship that White-Noise asked, “Are you sure that’s what we should do?”
“Do it,” said Captain, shrugging irritably.
Actually, it was not a shrug but a quick, violent contraction of his hard, globular abdomen. Twice found herself staring admiringly at that fetching little bulge and at the way the tough, long strings of tendon from shoulder to wrist stood out from the arm itself. Why, your fingers would almost meet as you clung to it!
With a start she realized that her time of loving was closer than she had thought. What an inconvenience! Captain would be as annoyed as she, since they had had plans for a very special day and a half. Twice opened her mouth to tell him, then closed it again. It was no time to trouble him with that; he was completing the thought processes that ridged his cheek muscles and made him scowl, and beginning to give orders.
Captain had plenty of resources to draw on. There were more than a thousand cleverly cached Heechee artifacts scattered around the Galaxy. Not the ones that were meant to be found sooner or later, like Gateway; these were concealed under the exterior appearance of unpromising asteroids in inaccessible orbits, or between stars, or among clusters of other objects in dust swarms and gas clouds. “Twice,” he ordered without looking at her, “activate a command ship. We will rendezvous with it at the sailship point.”
She was upset, he observed. He was sorry but not surprised-come down to that, he was upset himself! He returned to the command seat and lowered the bones of his pelvis onto the projecting Y-flanges, his life-support pouch fitting neatly into the angle they enclosed.
And became aware that his communications officer was standing over him, face working worriedly. “Yes, Shoe? What is it?”
Shoe’s biceps flexed deferentially. “The-“ he stammered. “They- The Assassins-“
Captain felt an electric shock of fear. “The Assassins?”
“I think there is a danger that they will be disturbed,” said Shoe dismally. “The aboriginals are conversing by zero-speed radio.”
“Conversing? You mean transmitting messages? Who are you talking about-massed minds!” Captain shouted, leaping out of the seat again. “You mean the aboriginals are sending messages at galactic distances?”
Shoe hung his head. “I am afraid so, Captain. Of course, I do not yet know what they are saying-but there is a great volume of communication.”
Captain shook his wrists feebly to signal that he wanted to hear no more. Sending messages! Across the Galaxy! Where anyone might hear! Where, especially, the certain parties the Heechee hoped would not be disturbed at all might well hear. And react to. “Establish translation matrices with the minds,” he ordered, and dismally returned to his seat.
The mission was jinxed. Captain no longer had hopes of an idle pleasure cruise, or even of the satisfaction of a minor task well accomplished. The big question in his mind was whether he could get through the next few days.
Still, soon they would transship into the shark-shaped command vessel, fastest of the Heechee fleet, filled with technology. Then his options would increase. Not only was it larger and faster; it carried a number of devices not present on his little penetrator-ship. A TPT. Hole cutters like the ones his ancestors had used to scoop out the Gateway asteroid and the warrens under the surface of Venus. A device to reach into black holes to see what could be plucked out-he shuddered. Please the massed minds of the ancestors, that one they would not have to use! But he would have it. And he would have a thousand other useful bits of equipment- Assuming, that was, that the ship was still functioning and would meet them at the rendezvous.
The artifacts the Heechee had left behind were powerful, strong, and long-lasting. Bar accidents, they were built to last for at least ten million years.
But you could not bar all accidents. A nearby supernova, a malfunctioning part, even a chance collision with some other object-you could harden the artifacts against almost all hazards, but in infinite astronomical time “almost all” is little better than “none.”
And if the command ship happened to have failed? And if there were no other that Twice could locate and bring to the rendezvous?
The Heechee learned fairly early in their technological phase to store the intelligences of dead or dying Heechee in inorganic systems. That was how the Dead Men came to be stored to provide company for the boy Wan, and it was an application of that technology that produced Robin’s Here After company. For the Heechee (if I may venture a possibly not unbiased opinion) it may have been a mistake. Since they were able to use the dead minds of Heechee ancestors to store and process data, they were not very good at true artificial-intelligence systems, capable of far greater power and flexibility. Like-welt-like me.
Captain allowed himself to let the depression sink into his mind. There were too many ifs. And the consequences of each of them too unpleasant to face.
It was not unusual for Captain, or any other Heechee, to be depressed. They had earned it fairly.
When Napoleon’s Grand Army crawled back from Moscow their enemies were small harassing cavalry bands, the Russian winter-and despair.
When Hitler’s Wehrmacht repeated the same trek thirteen decades later, the main threats were the Soviet tanks and artillery, the Russian winter-and, again, despair. They retreated in better order and with more destruction to their foes. But not with more despair, or less.
Every retreat is a kind of funeral cortege, and the thing that has died is confidence. The Heechee had confidently expected to win a galaxy. When they found they must lose, and began their immense, star-spanning retreat to the core, the magnitude of their defeat was huger than any that humans had ever known, and the despair seeped into all of their souls.
The Heechee were playing a most complicated game. One could call it a team sport, except that few of the players were allowed to be aware that they were on a team at all. The strategies were limited, but the final goal of the game was certain. If they managed to survive as a race, they would win.
But so many pieces moved on that board! And the Heechee had so little control. They could start the game. After that, if they interfered directly they exposed themselves. That was when the game became perilous.
It was now Captain’s turn to play, and he knew the risks he ran. He could be the player who lost the game for the Heechee once and for all.
His first task was to preserve the Heechee hiding place as long as possible, which meant doing something about the sailship people.
That was the least of his worries, for the second task was the one that counted. The stolen ship carried equipment that could penetrate even the skin around the Heechee hidey-hole. It could not enter. But it could peer within, and that was bad. Worse, the same equipment could penetrate almost any event discontinuity, even the one that the Heechee themselves dared not enter. The one that they prayed would never be breached, since within it rested the thing they most terribly feared.
So Captain sat there at the controls of his ship, while the glowing silicate cloud that surrounded the core dwindled behind them. Meanwhile, Twice was beginning to show signs of the strain that would shortly press her to her limits; and meanwhile, the cold, sludgy sailship people crept through their long, slow lives; and meanwhile, the one human-manned craft in the universe that could do anything about it approached yet another black hole . .
And meanwhile, those other players on the great board, Audee Walthers and Janie Yee-xing, watched their stack of chips slowly disappearing as they waited to make their own private gamble.
There he stood, this fellow with a face like a tan avocado, blocking my way. I identified the expression before I recognized the face. The expression was obstinacy, irritation, fatigue. The face that displayed them belonged to Audee Walthers, Jr., who (my secretarial program had not failed to tell me) had been trying to get in touch with me for several days. “Hello, Audee,” I said, really very cordially, shaking his hand and nodding to the pretty Oriental-looking young woman beside him, “it’s great to see you again! Are you staying at this hotel? Wonderful! Listen, I’ve got to run, but let’s have dinner-set it up with the concierge, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” And I smiled at him, and smiled at the young woman, and left them standing there.
Now I don’t pretend that was really good manners, but as it happens I actually was in a hurry, and besides, my gut was giving me fits. I put Essie in a cab going one way and caught another to take me to the court. Of course, if I had known then what he was waiting to tell me, I might have been more forthcoming with Walthers. But I didn’t know what I was walking away from.
Or what I was walking toward, for that matter.
For the last little bit I actually did walk, because traffic was more than normally snarled. There was a parade getting ready to march, as well as the normal congestion around the International Palace of Justice. The Palace is a forty-story skyscraper, sunk on caissons into the soapy soil of Rotterdam. On the outside it dominates half the city. On the inside it’s all scarlet drapes and one-way glass, the very model of a modern international tribunal. it is not a place where you go to to plead to a parking ticket.
It is not a place where individual human beings are considered very much at all, in fact, and if I had any vanity, which I do, I would preen myself on the fact that the lawsuit in which I was technically one of the defendants actually had fourteen different parties at interest, and four of them were sovereign states. I even had a suite of rooms reserved for my private use in the Palace itself, because all parties at interest did. But I didn’t go there right away. It was nearly eleven o’clock and therefore at least an even chance that the court would have started its session for the day, so I smiled and pushed my way right into the hearing room. It was crowded. It was always crowded, because there were celebrities to be seen at the hearings. In my vanity I had thought I was one of them, and I expected heads to turn when I came in. No heads. No turning. Everybody was watching half a dozen skinny, bearded persons in dashikis and sandals, sitting in a corral at the plaintiffs’ end of the room, drinking Cokes and giggling among themselves. The Old Ones. You didn’t see them every day. I gawked at them like everybody else, until there was a touch on my arm and I turned to see Maitre Ijsinger, my flesh-and-blood lawyer, gazing reprovingly at me. “You are late, Mijuheer Broadhead,” he whispered. “The Court will have noticed your absence.”
Since the Court was busy whispering and arguing among themselves over, I gathered, the question of whether the diary of the first prospector to locate a Heechee tunnel on Venus should be admitted as evidence, I doubted that. But you don’t pay a lawyer as much as I was paying Maitre Ijsinger to argue with him.
Of course, there was no legal reason for me to pay him at all. As much as the case was about anything, it was about a motion on the part of the Empire of Japan to dissolve the Gateway Corporation. I came into it, as a
The Heechee, thinking that the australopithecines they discovered when they first visited the Earth would ultimately evolve a technological civilization, decided to preserve a colony of them in a sort of zoo. Their descendants were “the Old Ones.” Of course, that was a wrong guess on the part of the Heechee. Australopithecus never achieved intelligence, only extinction. It was a sobering reflection for human beings to realize that the so-called Heechee Heaven, later rechristened the S. Va. Broadhead-far the largest and most sophisticated starship the human race had ever seen-was in fact only a sort of monkey cage.
major stockholder in the S. Ya.’s charter business, because the Bolivians had brought suit to have the charter revoked on the grounds that the financing of the colonists amounted to a “return to slavery.” The colonists were called indentured servants, and I, among others, had been called a wicked exploiter of human misery. What were the Old Ones doing there? Why, they were parties at interest, too, because they claimed that the S. Ya. was their property-they and their ancestors had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Their position in the court was a little complicated. They were wards of the government of Tanzania, because that’s where their ancestral Earth home had been decreed to be, but Tanzania wasn’t represented in the courtroom. Tanzania was boycotting the Palace of Justice because of an unfavorable decision over their sea-bottom missiles the year before, so its affairs were being handled by Paraguay-which was actually taking an interest mostly because of a border dispute with Brazil, which in turn was present as host to the headquarters of the Gateway Corp. You follow all this? Well, I didn’t, but that was why I hired Maitre Ijsinger.
If I let myself get personally involved in every lousy multimillion dollar lawsuit, I’d spend all my time in court. I’ve got too much to do with the remainder of my life for that, so in the normal course of events I would have let the lawyers fight it out and spent my time more profitably, chatting with Albert Einstein or wading along the Tappan Sea with my wife. However, there were special reasons for being here. I saw one of them, half asleep, on a leather chair near the Old Ones. “I think I’ll see if Joe Kwiatkowski wants a cup of coffee,” I told Ijsinger.
Kwiatkowski was a Pole, representing the East Europe Economic Community, and one of the plaintiffs in the case. Ijsinger turned pale. “He’s an adversary!” he hissed.
“He’s also an old friend,” I told him, exaggerating the facts of the case only slightly-he had been a Gateway prospector, too, and we’d had drinks over old times before.
“There are no friends in a court action of this magnitude,” Ijsinger informed me, but I only smiled at him and leaned forward to hiss at Kwiatkowski, who came along willingly enough once he was awake.
“I should not be here with you, Robin,” he rumbled once we were in my fifteenth-floor suite. “Especially for coffee! Don’t you got something to put in it?”
Well, I had-slivovitz, and from his favorite Cracow distillery, too. And Kampuchean cigars, the brand he liked, and salt herring and biscuits to go with them all.
The court was built over a little canal off the Maas River, and you could smell the water. Because I had managed to get a window open, you could hear the boats going through under the building’s arch and traffic from the tunnel under the Maas a quarter kilometer away. I opened the window a little wider because of Kwiatkowski’s cigar, and saw the flags and bands in the side streets. “What are they parading for today?” I asked.
He brushed the question aside. “Because armies like parades,” he grunted. “Now, no fooling around, Robin. I know what you want and it is impossible.”
“What I want,” I said, “is for the Eeek to help wipe out the terrorists with the spaceship, which is obviously in the interest of everybody. You tell me that’s impossible. Fine, I accept that, but why is it impossible?”
“Because you know nothing of politics. You think the E.E.E.C. can go to the Paraguayans and say, ‘Listen, go and make a deal with Brazil, say you will be more flexible on this border dispute if they will pool their information with the Americans so the terrorist spaceship can be trapped.’”
“Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I think.”
“And you are wrong. They will not listen.”
“The Eeek,” I said patiently, having been well briefed for this purpose by my data-retrieval system, Albert, “is Paraguay’s biggest trading partner. If you whistle they jump.”
“In most cases, yes. In this case, no. The key to the situation is the Republic of Kampuchea. They have with Paraguay private arrangements. About these I will say nothing, except that they have been approved at the highest level. More coffee,” he added, holding out his coffee cup, “and this time, please, not so much coffee in it.”
I did not ask Kwiatkowski what the “private arrangements” were because, if he had been willing to tell me, he would not have called them private. I didn’t have to. They were military. All the “private arrangements” governments were making with each other these days were military, and if I had not been sweating about the terrorists I would have been sweating about the crazy way the world’s duly ordained governments were behaving. But one thing at a time.
So, on Albert’s advice, I got a lawyer from Malaysia into my private parlor next, and after her a missionary from Canada, and then a general in the Albanian Air Force, and for each one I had some bait to dangle. Albert told me what levers to pull and what glass beads to offer the natives-an extra allotment of colonization passages here, a “charitable” contribution there. Sometimes all it took was a smile. Rotterdam was the place to do it, because ever since the Palace was moved from The Hague, The Hague having been pretty well messed up in the troubles the last time some joker was fooling with a TPT, you could find anyone you wanted in Rotterdam. All kinds of people. All colors, all sexes, hi all kinds of costumes, from Ecuadorian lawyers in miniskirts to Marshall Islands thermal-energy barons in sarongs and shark’s-teeth necklaces. Whether I was making progress or not was hard to say, but at half-past twelve, my belly telling me that it was going to hurt in a serious way if I didn’t put some food in it, I knocked off for the morning. I thought longingly of our nice quiet hotel suite with a nice lukewarm steak from room service and my shoes off, but I had promised to meet Essie at her place of business. So I told Albert to prepare an estimate of what I had accomplished and recommendations about what I should do next, and fought my way to a cab.
You can’t miss one of Essie’s fast-food franchises. The glowing blue Heechee-metal arches are in just about every country of the world. As the Boss she had a roped-off section on the balcony reserved for us, and she met me coming up the stairs with a kiss, a frown, and a dilemma. “Robin! Listen! They want here to serve mayonnaise with the French fries. Should I allow?”
I kissed her back, but I was peering over her shoulder to see what ungodly messes were being set out on our tables. “That’s really up to you,” I told her.
“Yes, of course, is up to me. But is important, Robin! Have taken great care in meticulous duplication of true pommes-frites, you know. Now mayonnaise?” Then she stepped back and gave me a more thorough look, and her expression changed. “So tired! So many lines in the face! Robin, how are you feeling?”
I gave her my most charming smile. “Just hungry, my dear,” I cried, and gazed with deceitful enthusiasm at the plates before me. “Say! That looks good, what is it, a taco?”
“Is chapatti,” she said with pride. “Taco is over there. Also blini. See how you like, then.” So, of course, I had to taste them all, and it was not at all what my belly had asked for. The taco, the chapatti, the rice balls with sour fish sauce, the stuff that tasted, more than anything else, like boiled barley. They were not any of them my cup of tea. But they were all edible.
They were also all gifts of the Heechee. The great insight the Heechee had given us was that most of living tissue, including yours and mine, is made up of just four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen- C H 0 N-CHON-food. Since that is also what the gases that comprise the best part of a comet are made of, they built their Food Factory out in the Oort cloud, where our Sun’s comets hang waiting for a star to shake them loose and send them in to be pretty in our sky.
CHON isn’t all of it. You need a few other elements. Sulfur’s the most important, maybe, then perhaps sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, calcium-not to mention the odd dash of cobalt to make vitamin B-l2, chromium for glucose tolerance, iodine for the thyroid, and lithium, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, molybdenum, cadmium, and tin for the hell of it. You probably need the whole periodic table at least as traces, but most of the elements in quantities so small that you don’t have to worry about adding them to the stew. They show up as contaminants whether you want them or not. So Essie’s food chemists cooked up batches of sugar and spice and everything nice and produced food for everybody-not only what would keep them alive, but pretty much what they wanted to eat, wherefore the chapattis and the rice balls. You can make anything out of CHON-food if you stir it up right. Among the other things Essie was making out of it was a lot of money, and that turned out to be a game she delighted to play.
So when I finally settled down with something my stomach didn’t resist-it looked like a hamburger and tasted like an avocado salad with bacon bits in it, and Essie had named it the Big Chon-Essie was up and down every minute. Checking the temperature of the infra-red warming lights, looking for grease under the dishwashing machines, tasting the desserts, raising hell because the milkshakes were too thin.
I had Essie’s word that nothing in her chain would hurt anybody, though my stomach had less confidence in her word than I did. I didn’t like the noise from the street outside-was it the parade?-but outside of that I was as close to comfortable as I was likely to get just then. Relaxed enough to appreciate a turnaround in our status. When Essie and I go out in public, people look at us, and usually I’m the one they look at. Not here. In Essie’s franchise stores, Essie was the star. Outside the passersby were gathering to watch the parade. Inside no employee gave it a glance. They went about their jobs with all their back muscles tense, and all the surreptitious glances they sneaked went in the same direction, to the great lady boss. Well, not very ladylike, really; Essie has had the benefit of a quarter-century’s tuition in the English language from an expert- me-but when she gets excited it’s “nekulturny” and “khuligans!” all over the place.
I moved to the second-floor window to look out at the parade. It was coming straight down Weena, ten abreast, with bands and shouting and placards. Nuisance. Maybe worse than a nuisance. Across the street, in front of the station, there was a scuffle, with cops and placards, rearmers against pacifists. You couldn’t tell which was which from the way they clubbed each other with the placards, and Essie, rejoining me and picking up her own Big Chon, glanced at them and shook her head. “How’s sandwich?” she demanded.
“Fine,” I said, with my mouth full of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements. She gave me a speak-louder look. “I said it’s fine,” I amplified.
“I couldn’t hear you with all that noise,” she complained, licking her lips-she liked what she sold.
I jerked my head toward the parade. “I don’t know if this is so good,” I said.
“I think not,” she agreed, looking with distaste at a company of what I think they call Zouaves-anyway, dark-skinned marchers in uniform. I couldn’t see their national patches, but each one of them was carrying a rapid-fire shoulder weapon and playing tricks with it: spinning it around, bouncing the buttplate against the pavement and making it spring back into his hands, all without breaking stride.
“Maybe we’d better start back to the court,” I said.
She reached over and picked up the last crumb of my sandwich. Some Russian women melt down into spheres of fat when they get past forty, and some shrink and shrivel. Not Essie. She still had the straight back and narrow waist that first caught my eye. “Perhaps we should,” she said, beginning to gather up her computer programs, each on its own datafan. “Have seen enough uniforms as a child, do not specially want to see all these now.”
“You can’t really have much of a parade without uniforms.”
“Not just parade. Look. On sidewalks, too.” And it was true, about one man or woman in four was wearing some sort of uniform. It was a little surprising, because it had crept up on me. Of course, every country had always had some sort of armed forces, but they were just sort of kept in a closet, like a home fire extinguisher. People never actually saw them. But now people did, more and more.
“Still,” she said, conscientiously sweeping CHON crumbs off the table onto the disposable platelet and looking for the waste hamper, “you must be quite tired and we had better go. Give me your trash, please.”
I waited for her at the door, and she was frowning when she joined me. “Receptacle was almost full. In manual it is set forth clearly, empty at sixty-percent point-what will they do if large party leaves at once? I should go back and instruct manager-oh, hell,” she cried, her expression changing. “Have forgotten my programs!” And she dashed back up the stairs to where she had left her datafans.
I stood in the door, waiting for her, my eyes on the parade. It was quite disgusting! There were actual weapons going by, antiaircraft missile launchers and armored vehicles; and behind a bagpipe band was a company of the tommygun twirlers. I felt the door move behind me and stepped aside out of the way just as Essie pushed it open. “I found, Robin,” she said, smiling and holding the thick sheaf of fans up as I turned toward her.
And something like a wasp snarled past my left ear.
There are no wasps in Rotterdam. Then I saw Essie falling backward, and the door closing on her. It was not a wasp. It was a gunshot. One of those twirled weapons had held a live charge, and it had gone off.
I nearly lost Essie once before. It was a long time ago, but I hadn’t forgotten. All that old woe welled up as fresh as yesterday as I pulled the stupid door out of the way and bent over her. She was lying on her back, with the sheaf of tied datafans over her face, and as I lifted it away I saw that although her face was bloody her eyes were wide open and looking at me.
“Hey, Rob!” she said, her voice puzzled. “You punch me?”
“Hell, no! What would I punch you for?” One of the counter girls came rushing with a wad of paper napkins. I grabbed them away from her and pointed to the red-and-white striped electrovan with the words Poliklinische centrum stenciled on its side, idling at an intersection because of the parade. “You! Get that ambulance over here! And get the cops, too, while you’re at it!”
Essie sat up, pushing my arm away as cops and counter attendants swarmed around us. “Why ambulance, Robin?” she asked reasonably. “Is only a bloody nose, look!” And indeed that was all there was. It had been a bullet, all right, but it had hit the sheaf of fans and stayed there. “My programs!” Essie wailed, tugging against the policeman who wanted them to extract the bullet for evidence. But they were ruined anyway. And so was my day.
While Essie and I were having our little brush with destiny, Audee Walthers was taking his friend sightseeing around the town of Rotterdam. He had been sweating as he left me; the presence of a lot of money does that to people. The absence of money took most of the joy out of Rotterdam for Walthers and Yee-xing. Still, to Walthers, the hayseeds of Peggy’s Planet still in his hair, and to Yee-xing, rarely away from the S. Ya. and the immediate vicinity of the launch loops, Rotterdam was a metropolis. They couldn’t afford to buy anything, but at least they could look in the windows. At least Broadhead had agreed to see them, Walthers kept telling himself; but when he allowed himself to think it with some satisfaction, the darker side of Walthers responded with savage contempt: Broadhead had said he would see them. But he sure-hell hadn’t seemed very anxious about it .
“Why am I sweating?” he asked out loud.
Yee-xing slipped her arm through his for moral support. “It will be all right,” she replied indirectly, “one way or another.” Audee Walthers looked down at her gratefully. Walthers was not particularly tall, but Janie Yee-xing was tiny; all of her was tiny except for her eyes, lustrous and black, and that was surgery, a silliness from a time when she had been in love with a Swedish merchant banker and thought it was only the epicanthic fold that kept him from loving her back. “Well? Shall we go in?”
Walthers had no idea what she was talking about, and must have shown it by his frown; Yee-xing butted his shoulder with her small, close-cropped head and looked up toward a storefront sign. In pale letters hanging in what looked like empty ebon space it said:
Here After
Walthers examined it and then looked at the woman again. “It’s an undertakers’,” he guessed, and laughed as he thought he saw the point of her joke. “But we’re not that bad off yet, Janie.”
“It’s not,” she said, “or not exactly. Don’t you recognize the name?” And then, of course, he did: It was one of the many Robinette Broadhead holdings on the list.
The more you learned about Broadhead, the more likely you could figure out what things would make him agree to a deal; that was sense. “Why not?” said Walthers, approving, and led her through the air curtain into the cool, dark recesses of the shop. if it was not a funeral establishment, it had at least bought from the same decorators. There was soft, unidentifiable music in the background, and a fragrance of wildflowers, although the only floral display in sight was a single sheaf of bright roses in a crystal vase. A tall, handsome, elderly man rose before them; Walthers could not say whether he had got up from one of the chairs or materialized as a hologram. The figure smiled warmly at them, tried to guess their nationalities. He got it wrong. “Guten tag “he said to Walthers, and “Gor ho oy-ney,” to Yee-xing.
“We both speak English,” Walthers said. “Do you?”
Urbane eyebrows lifted. “Of course. Welcome to Here After. Is there someone near to you who is about to die?”
“Not that I know of,” said Walthers.
“I see. Of course, we can still accomplish a great deal even if the person has already reached metabolic death, although the sooner we begin transfer the better-Or are you wisely making plans for your own future?”
“Neither one,” said Yee-xing, “we just want to know what it is you offer.”
“Of course.” The man smiled, gesturing them to a comfortable couch. He did not appear to do anything to bring it about, but the lights became a touch brighter and the music dwindled a few decibels. “My card,” he said, producing a pasteboard for Walthers and answering the question that had been bothering him: The card was tangible, and so were the fingers that handed it to him. “Let me run through the basics for you; it will save time in the long run. To begin with, Here After is not a religious organization and does not claim to provide salvation. What we do offer is a form of survival. Whether you-the ‘you’ that is here in this room at this moment-will be ‘aware’ of it or not”-he smiled-“is a matter that the metaphysicians are still arguing. But the storage of your personalities, should you elect to provide for it, is guaranteed to pass Turing’s Test, provided we are able to begin transfer while the brain is still in good condition, and the surroundings that the surviving client perceives will be those which he chooses from our available list. We have more than two hundred environments to offer, ranging-“
Yee-xing snapped her fingers. “The Dead Men,” she said, suddenly comprehending.
The salesperson nodded, although his expression tightened a bit. “That is what the originals were called, yes. I see that you are familiar with the artifact called Heechee Heaven, now being used as a transport for colonists-“
“I’m the transport’s Third Officer,” Yee-xing said, quite truthfully except for tenses, “and my friend here is her Seventh.”
“I envy you,” the salesman said, and the expression on his face suggested that he really meant it. Envy did not keep him from delivering his sales pitch and Walthers listened attentively, Janie Yee-xing’s hand holding his. He appreciated the hand; it kept him from thinking about the Dead Men and their protégé, Wan-or, at least, about what Wan was likely to be doing at that moment.
The original Dead Men, the salesperson declared, were unfortunately rather botched; the transfer of their memories and personalities from the wet, gray storage receptacle in their skulls to the crystalline datastores that preserved them after death had been accomplished by unskilled
When the programs and databases for the so-called Dead Men became available for study, my creator, S. Ya. Broadhead, was naturally greatly interested. She set herself the task of duplicating their work. The most complex task was, of course, the transcription of the database of a human brain and nervous system, which is stored chemically and redundantly, onto the Heechee datafans. She did very well. Not only well enough to franchise the Here After chain, but well enough-well—to create me. The Here After storage was based on her earliest research. Later on she got better-better even than the Heechee for she was able to combine not only their techniques but independent human technology. The Dead Men could never pass a Turing Test. Essie Broadhead’s works, after a while, could. And did.
labor, using equipment that had been designed for quite a different species in the first place. So the storage was imperfect. The easiest way to think of it, the salesman explained, was to think the Dead Men had been so stressed by their unskilled transfer that they had gone mad. But that happened no longer. Now the storage procedures had been so refined that any deceased could carry on a conversation with his survivors so deftly that it was just like talking to the real person. More! The “patient” had an active life in the datastores. He could experience the Moslem, Christian, or Scientological Heaven, complete with, respectively, beautiful boys scattered like pearls on the grass, choirs of angels, or the presence of L. Ron Hubbard himself. if his bent was not religious, he could experience adventure (mountain-climbing, skin-diving, skiing, hang-gliding, and free-fall T’ai chi were popular selections), listening to music of any kind, in any company he chose... and, of course (the salesman, failing to estimate reliably the relationship between Walthers and Yee-xing, delivered the information without color), sex. All varieties of the sexual experience. Over and over.
“How boring,” said Walthers, thinking about it.
“For you and me,” the salesman granted, “but not for them. You see, they don’t remember the programmatic experiences very clearly. There’s an accelerated decay bias applied to those datastores. Not to the others. If you talk to a dear one today and come back a year from now and pick up the conversation, he’ll remember it exactly. But the Programmed experiences dwindle fast in their memories-just as recollection of pleasure, you see, so that they want to experience them again and again.”
“How horrible,” said Yee-xing. “Audee, I think it’s time we went to the hotel.”
“Not yet, Janie. What was that about talking to them?”
The salesman’s eyes gleamed. “Certainly. Some of them really enjoy talking, even to strangers. You have a moment? It’s very simple, really.” As he was talking he led them to a PV console, consulted a silk-bound directory, and punched out a series of code numbers. “I’ve actually be-come friendly with some of them,” he said bashfully. “When things are slow at the store, a lot of the time I call one of them up and we have a nice chat-Ah, Rex! How are you?”
“Why, I’m just fine,” said the handsome, bronzed senior citizen who appeared in the PV. “How nice to see you! I don’t think I know your friends?” he added, peering in a friendly way at Walthers and Yee-xing. If there was an ideal way for a man to appear when he passed a certain age, this was it; he had all his hair and seemed to have all his teeth; his face showed laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but was otherwise Unlined, and his eyes were bright and warm. He acknowledged the introductions politely. Questioned about what he was doing he shrugged modestly. “I’m about to sing the Catulli Carmina with the Wien Staatsoper, you know.” He winked. “The lead soprano is very beautiful, and I think those sexy lyrics have been getting to her in rehearsal.”
“Amazing,” murmured Walthers, gazing at him. But Janie Yee-xing was less enchanted.
“We really don’t want to keep you from your music,” she said politely, “and I’m afraid we’d better get along.”
“They’ll wait,” Rex declared fondly. “They always do.”
Walthers was fascinated. “Tell me,” he said, “when you talk about, ah, companionship in this, ah, state-can you have your choice of any companions you want? Even if they’re still alive?”
The question was aimed at the salesman, but Rex spoke first. He was gazing shrewdly and sympathetically at Walthers. “Anyone at all,” he said, nodding as though they shared a confidence. “Anyone living or dead or imaginary. And, Mr. Walthers, they’ll do anything you want them to!” The figure chuckled. “What I always say,” he added, “is that what you call ‘life’ is really only a sort of entr’acte to the real existence you get here. I just can’t understand why people put it off for so long!”
The Here Afters were, as a matter of fact, one of the little spinoff enterprises that I was fondest of, not because they earned much money. When we discovered that the Heechee had been able to store dead minds in machines a light clicked. Well, says I to my good wife, if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, says my good wife to me, no reason at all, Robin, to be sure, just give me a little time to work out the encoding. I had not made any decision about whether I wanted it done to me, when and if. I was quite sure, though, that I didn’t want it done to Essie, at least not right then, and so I was glad that the bullet had done no more than puff her nose.
Well, somewhat more. It involved us with the Rotterdam police. The uniformed sergeant introduced us to the brigadier, who took us in his big fast car with the lights going to the bureau and offered us coffee. Then Brigadier Zuitz showed us into the office of Inspector Van Der Waal, a great huge woman with old-fashioned contact lenses making her eyes bulge out with sympathy. It was How unpleasant for you, Mijnheer, and I hope your wound is not painful, Mevrouw, as she was leading us up the stairs-stair&-to the office of Commissaris Lutzlek, who was a different kettle of fish altogether. Short. Slim. Fair, with a sweet boy’s face, though he had to be at least fifty to have become a Principal Commissaire. You could imagine him putting his thumb in the dyke and hanging in there forever, if he had to, or until he drowned. But you could not imagine him giving up. “Thank you for coming in about this business in the Stationsplein,” he said, making sure we had seats.
“The accident,” I said.
“No. Regretfully, not an accident. If it had been an accident, it would have been a matter for the municipal police rather than for me. So therefore this inquiry, for which we ask your cooperation.”
I said, to put him in his place, “Our time is pretty valuable to be spent in this sort of thing.”
He was not puttable. “Your life is even more valuable.”
“Oh, come on! One of the soldiers in the parade was doing his twirling act, and he had a round in his gun and it went off.”
“Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “first, no soldier had a round in his gun; the guns are without firing pins in any case. Second, the soldiers are not even soldiers; they are college students hired to dress up for parades, just like the guards at Buckingham Palace. Third, the shot did not come from the parade.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the gun has been found.” He looked very angry. “In a police locker! This is quite embarrassing to me, Mijnheer, as you can imagine. There were many extra policemen for the parade, and they used a portable dressing-room van. The ‘policeman’ who fired the weapon was a stranger to others in the unit, but then they were drawn from many detachments. Come to clean up after the parade, he dressed quickly and left, with his locker open. There was nothing in it but the uniform- stolen, I suppose—and the gun, and a picture of you. Not of Mevrouw. Of you.”
He sat back and waited. The sweet boy’s face was peaceful.
I was not. It takes a minute to sink in, the announcement that somebody has the fixed intention of killing you. It was scary. Not just being killed; that’s scary by definition, and I can testify to how scared I can get when it looks like death is near, out of unforgotten and even repeated experience. But murder is worse than ordinary death. I said, “You know how that makes me feel? Guilty! I mean, I must have done something that really made somebody hate me.”
“Exactly so, Mijnheer Broadhead. What do you suppose it could have been?”
“I have no idea. If you find the man, I suppose you can find the reason. That shouldn’t be too hard-there must be fingerprints or something? I saw news cameras, perhaps there’s even a picture of him on somebody’s film-“
He sighed. “Mijnheer, please do not tell me how to conduct police routine. All those things are of course being followed up, plus depth interviews with everyone who might have seen the man, plus sweat analysis of the clothes, plus all other means of identification. I am assuming this man was a professional, and therefore those means will not succeed. So we approach it from the other direction. Who are your enemies, and what are you doing in Rotterdam?”
“I don’t think I have any enemies. Business rivals, maybe, but they don’t assassinate people.”
He waited patiently, so I added, “As to what I’m doing in Rotterdam, I think that’s quite well known. My business interests include some share in the exploitation of some Heechee artifacts.”
“This is known,” he said, not quite so patient.
I shrugged. “So I am a party in a suit at the International Palace of Justice.”
The commissaris opened one of his desk drawers, peered inside, and slammed it again moodily. “Mijnheer Broadhead,” he said, “you have had many meetings here in Rotterdam not connected with this suit, but instead with the question of terrorism. You wish it stopped.”
“We all want that,” I said, but the feeling in my belly was not just my degenerating pipes. I had thought I was being very secretive.
“We all want it, but you are doing something about it, Mijnheer. Therefore I believe you now do have enemies. The enemies of us all. The terrorists.” He stood up and offered us the door. “So while you are in my jurisdiction I will see that you have police protection. After that, I can only urge caution, for I believe you are in danger from them.”
“Everybody is,” I said.
“Everybody is at random, yes. But you are now a particular case.”
Our hotel had been built in the palmy days, for big-spending tourists and the jet-set rich. The best suites were decorated for their tastes. Not always for ours. Neither Essie nor I was into straw mats and wood-block pillows, but the management moved all that out and moved in the right kind of bed. Round and huge. I was looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it. Not so much use out of the lobby, which was a kind of architecture I hated: cantilevered walkways, more fountains than Versailles, so many mirrors that when you looked up you thought you were in outer space. Through the good offices of the commissaris, or anyway of the young cop he sent to escort us home, we were spared that. We were whisked through a service entrance, up a padded elevator that smelled of room-service food, to our own landing, where there had been a change in the decoration. Just across from our suite door there was a marble Winged Venus in the stairwell. Now it had a companion in a blue suit, a perfectly ordinary-looking man, studiously not meeting my eye. I looked at the cop escorting us. She grinned in embarrassment, nodded to her colleague in the stairwell, and closed the door behind us.
We were a particular case, all right.
I sat down and regarded Essie. Her nose was still somewhat swollen, but it did not seem to trouble her. Still, “Maybe you ought to go to bed,” I suggested.
She looked at me with tolerant affection. “For a bloodied nose, Robin? How very foolish you are. Or do you have some more interesting project in mind?”
It is a true tribute to my dear wife that as soon as she brought the subject up, my damaged day and my damaged colon to the contrary notwithstanding, I did indeed have something in mind. After twenty-five years you would think that even sex would begin to get boring. My data-retrieval friend Albert had told me about studies of laboratory animals that proved that that was inevitable. Male rats were left with their mates and their frequency of intercourse measured. There was a steady decline over time. Boredom. Then they took away the old mates and introduced new ones. The rats perked up and went to it with a will. So this was established scientific fact-for rats-but I guess that I am not, at least in that sense, a rat. In fact, I was enjoying myself quite a lot when, without warning, someone shoved a dagger right into my belly.
I couldn’t help it. I yelled.
Essie pushed me away. She sat up swiftly, calling for Albert in Russian. Obediently his hologram sprang into life. He squinted toward me and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “please, Mrs. Broadhead, place Robin’s wrist against the dispenser on the bedside table.”
I was bent double, hugging myself against the pain. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit, but what was in my gut was too bad to be expelled so easily. “Do something!” cried Essie, frantically pulling me to her bare breast as she pressed my arm against the table.
“I am already doing it, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert, and as a matter of fact I could appreciate the sudden sense of numbness as the injection needle force-sprayed something into my arm. The pain receded and became bearable. “You are not to be unduly alarmed, Robin,” Albert said kindly, “nor you, Mrs. Broadhead. I have been anticipating this sudden ischemic pain for some hours. It is only a symptom.”
“Damn arrogant program,” cried Essie, who had written him, “symptom of what?”
“Of the beginning of the final rejection process, Mrs. Broadhead. It is not yet critical, especially as I am already administering medication along with the analgesia. Still, I propose surgery tomorrow.”
I was feeling better enough already to sit up on the edge of the bed. I traced with my toe the design of arrows pointing toward Mecca that had been worked into the rug for long-gone big-spending oil magnates and said, “What about tissue match?”
“That has been arranged, Robin.”
I let go of my stomach experimentally. It didn’t explode. “I have a lot of appointments tomorrow,” I pointed out.
Essie, who had been rocking me gently, let go and sighed. “Obstinate maul Why put oft? Could have had transplant weeks ago and all this nonsense not necessary.”
“I didn’t want to,” I explained, “and anyway, Albert said there was time.”
“Was time! Oh, of course, was time. Is that reason to use time all up with fiddling and faddling until, oh, sorry, suddenly unexpected event takes place and time is all gone and you die? Like you warm and alive, Robin, not Here After program!”
I nuzzled her with my nose and chin. “Sick man! Get away from me!” she snarled, but did not draw away. “Huh! You feel better now.”
“Quite a lot better.”
“Good enough to talk sensibly and make appointment with hospital?” I blew in her ear. “Essie,” I said, “I positively will, but not right this minute, because, if I remember correctly, you and I have some unfinished business. Not Albert, though. So you will please turn yourself off, old friend.”
“Certainly, Robin.” He grinned and disappeared. But Essie held me off, staring into my face for a long time before she shook her head.
“You Robin,” she said. “You want me to write you as Here After program?”
“Not a bit,” I said, “and actually, right now that’s not what I want to discuss.”
“Discuss!” she scoffed. “Ha, I know how you discuss... . All I wanted to say is, if I do write you, Robin, you bet in some ways I write you much different!”
It had been quite a day. It was not surprising that I didn’t remember certain unimportant details. My secretary program remembered, of course, and so I got a hint when the service door to the butler’s pantry opened and a procession of room-service waiters came in with dinner. Not for two. For four.
“Oh, my God,” said Essie, striking her forehead with the back of her hand. “Your poor friend with face like frog, Robin, you have invited for dinner! And look at you! Bare feet! Sitting in underwear! Nekulturny indeed, Robin. Go and dress at once!”
I stood up, because there was no use arguing, but I argued anyway. “If I’m in my underwear, what about you?”
She gave me a scathing look. Actually, she wasn’t in her underwear; she was wearing one of those Chinese things slit up the side. It looked as much like a dress as it did a nightgown, and she used it interchangeably for both.
“In case of Nobel laureate,” she said reprovingly, “what one wears is defining what is proper. Also have showered and you have not, so do so, for you smell of sexual activity-and, oh, my God,” she added, cocking an ear to sounds at the door, “I think are here already!”
I headed for the bathroom as she went for the door, and lingered long enough to hear sounds of argument. The least expert of the room-service waiters was listening, too, a frown on his face and his hand reaching unconsciously toward the bulge under his armpit. I sighed, and left it to them, and headed for the bathroom.
Actually, it wasn’t a bathroom. All by itself it was a bath suite. The tub was big enough for two persons. Maybe for three or four, but I hadn’t been thinking in any numbers higher than two-though it did make me wonder just what those Arab tourists had liked doing in their baths~ There was concealed lighting in the tub itself, statuary surrounding it that poured out hot water or cold, a deep pile rug throughout. All the vulgar little things like toilets were in decorous little cubicles of their own. It was fancy, but it was nice. “Albert,” I called, pulling a blouse over my head, and he answered:
“Yes, Robin?”
There was no video in the bath, just his voice. I said, “I kind of like this. See if you can get me plans for putting one like this into the place at Tappan Sea.”
“Certainly, Robin,” he said, “but meanwhile, may I remind you that your guests are waiting?”
“You may, because you just did.”
“And also, Robin, you are not to overexert yourself. The medication I gave you will be of purely temporary value, unless-“
“Turn yourself off,” I ordered, and entered the main reception salon to greet my guests. A table had been set with crystal and china, candles were burning, wine was in a cooler, and the waiters were standing politely at attention. Even the one with the bulge under his arm. “Sorry I kept you waiting, Audee,” I said, beaming at them, “but it’s been a hard day.”
“Have told them,” said Essie, passing a plate to the young Oriental girl. “Was necessary, as stupid policeman at door considered them likely terrorists, too.”
“I tried to explain,” grumbled Walthers, “but he didn’t speak any English. Mrs. Broadhead had to sort him out. It’s a good thing you speak Dutch.”
She shrugged graciously. “Speak Deutsch, speak Dutch. Is same thing, provided one speaks loud. Also,” she said informatively, “is only a state of mind. Tell me, Captain Walthers. You go to speak language, other person does not understand. What do you think?”
“Well, I think I haven’t said it right.”
“Hal Exactly. But I, I think he has not understood it right. This is basic rule for speaking foreign language.”
I rubbed my belly. “Let’s eat,” I said, and led the way to the table. But I had not failed to notice the look Essie gave me, so I exerted myself to be sociable. “Well, we’re a sad-looking lot,” I said genially, making note of the cast on Walthers’ wrist, the bruise on Yee-xing’s face, Essie’s still puffy nose. “Been punching each other out, have you?”
As it turned out, that was not tactful, since Walthers promptly informed me that indeed they had, under the influence of the terrorists’ TPT. So we talked about the terrorists for a while. And then we talked about the sad condition the human race had got itself into. It was not a cheerful conversation, especially as Essie decided to get philosophical.
“What a rotten thing human being is,” she offered, and then reversed herself. “No. Am unjust. One human being can be quite fine, even as fine as we four sitting here. Not perfect. But on a statistical basis out of let us say one hundred chances to display kindness, altruism, decency-all these traits we humans esteem, you see-will in fact perform no fewer than twenty-five of them. But nations? Political groups? Terrorists?” She shook her head. “Out of one hundred chances, zero,” she said. “Or perhaps one, but then, you may be sure, with some trick up sleeve. You see, wickedness is additive. Is perhaps one grain in each human being. But add up quantity of say ten million human beings in even small country or group, equals evil enough to damage entire world!”
“I’m ready for dessert,” I said, gesturing to the waiters.
You would think that was a broad enough hint for any guest to take, especially considering that they already knew we’d had a bad day, but Walthers was obstinate. He lingered over dessert. He insisted on telling me his life’s story, and he kept looking at the waiters, and all in all I was getting quite uncomfortable, not just in the belly.
Essie says I am not patient with people. Perhaps so. The friends I am most comfortable interacting with are computer programs rather than flesh and blood, and they don’t have feelings to hurt-well, I’m not sure that’s true for Albert. But it is for, say, my secretarial program or my chef. It is certain that I was getting impatient with Audee Walthers. His life had been a dull soap opera. He had lost his wife and his savings. He had made unauthorized use of equipment on the S. Ya. with Yee-xing’s connivance and got her fired. He had spent his last dime to get here to Rotterdam, reason not specified, but clearly it had something to do with me.
Well, I am not unwilling to “loan” money to a friend down on his luck but, see, I was in no mood. It was not just the fright over Essie or the screwed-up day, or the nagging worry about whether the next nut with a gun would actually get me. there was my damned gut giving me fits. At last I told the waiters to clear off, though Walthers was still lingering over his fourth cup of coffee. I stomped over to the table with the liqueurs and cigars and glowered at him as he followed. “What is it, Audee?” I said, no longer polite. “Money? How much do you need?”
And I got such a look from him! He hesitated, watching while the last of the waiters filed out through the pantry, and then he let me have it. “It isn’t what I need,” he said, his voice trembling, “it’s what you’re willing to pay for something you want. You’re a real rich man, Broadhead. Maybe you don’t worry about people who stick their asses in a crack for you, but I made the mistake of doing it twice.”
I don’t like being reminded I owe a favor, either, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything. Janie Yee-xing put her hand on his bad wrist- gently. “Just tell him what you’ve got,” she ordered.
“Tell me what?” I demanded, and the son of a gun shrugged and said, the way you might tell me you’d found my car keys on the floor:
“Why, tell you that I’ve found what I think is a real, live Heechee.”
I found a Heechee ... I’ve got a fragment of the True Cross ... I talked with God, literally I did-those statements are all in the same league. You don’t believe them, but they scare you. And then, if you find they’re true, or if you can’t be sure they’re not-then it’s miracle time, and scared-to-death time. God and the Heechee. When I was a kid I didn’t distinguish greatly between them, and even as a grownup the confusion was still there.
It was past midnight when I was finally willing to let them go. By then I’d sucked them dry. I had the datafan they’d swiped from the £ Ya. I had brought Albert in on the discussion to ask all the questions his fertile digital mind could invent. I was feeling pretty rotten and frayed, and the analgesia had long worn off, but I couldn’t go to sleep. Essie announced firmly that if I was determined to kill self with overexertion she was at least going to stay up to enjoy spectacle, and as soon as she was gently snoring on the couch I called Albert again. “One financial detail,” I said. “Walthers said he’d passed up a million-dollar bonus to give this to me, so transfer, ah, two million to his account right away.”
“Certainly, Robin.” Albert Einstein never gets sleepy, but when he wants to indicate that it’s past my bedtime he is perfectly capable of yawning and stretching. “I should remind you, though, that the state of your health-“
I told him what he could do with the state of my health. Then I told him what he could do with his idea of putting me in the hospital the next day. He spread his hands gracefully. “You’re the boss, Robin,” he said humbly. “Still, I’ve been thinking.”
It is not true that Albert Einstein does not spend any time thinking. Since he moves at nuclear-particle speeds, however, the time involved is not usually perceptible to flesh-and-blood human beings like myself. Unless he wants it to be, usually for dramatic effect. “Spit it out, Albert.”
He shrugged. “It is only that in your precarious health, I do not like to see you excited without reason.”
“Reason! Jesus, Albert, sometimes you really act like a dumb machine. What more reason could anybody have than finding a living Heechee?”
“Yes,” he said, puffing his pipe judiciously, and changed the subject. “From the sensor readings I am receiving, Robin, I would think you must be in considerable pain.”
“How bright you are, Albert.” The fact of the matter was that the churning in my gut had shifted gears. Now there was a mixer blade pureeing my belly, and every spin was a separate hurt.
“Should I wake Mrs. Broadhead and inform her?”
That message was in code. If we woke Essie to tell her something like that, it would at once result in her throwing me into bed, summoning the surgical programs, and delivering me over to all the cossetting and curing Full Medical Plus could offer. The truth was it was beginning to look attractive. Pain scared me as dying did not. Dying was something you could get over and done with, at least, while pain looked unending.
But not right then! “No way, Albert,” I said, “at least not until you come out with whatever you’re being so coy about. Are you telling me that I made a wrong assumption somewhere along the line? If so, tell me where.”
“Only in terming Audee Walthers’ perception a Heechee, Robin,” he said, scratching his chin with the stem of his pipe.
I sat up straight, and grabbed at my stomach because the sudden motion had not been a good idea. “What the hell else could it be, Albert?”
He said solemnly, “Let us review the evidence. Walthers said that the intelligence he perceived seemed to be slowed down, even stopped. This is consistent with the hypothesis it is Heechee, since they are thought to be in a black hole, where time is slowed.”
“Right. Then why-“
“Second,” he went on, “the detection was in interstellar space. This is also consistent, since the Heechee are known to have that capability.”
“Albert!”
“Finally,” he said calmly, disregarding the tone of my voice, “the detection was of an intelligent form of life, and other than ourselves”-he twinkled at me-“or, should I say, other than the human race, the Heechee are the only known such form. However,” he said benignly, “the duplicate ship’s log that Captain Walthers brought us raises serious questions.”
“Get on with it, damn you!”
“Certainly, Robin. Let me display the data.” He moved aside in his holographic frame, and a ship’s chart leaped into existence. It showed a distant pale blob, and along the right-hand margin symbols and numerals danced. “Note the velocity, Robin. Eighteen hundred kilometers a second. That is not an impossible velocity for a natural object-say, a condensation from the wave-front of a supernova. But for a Heechee vessel? Why would it be going so slowly? And does that in fact look like a Heechee vessel?”
“It looks like nothing at all, for God’s sake! It’s just a blur. At extreme range. You can’t tell a thing.”
The small figure of Albert to one side of the chart nodded. “Not as it is, no,” he admitted, “but I have been able to enhance the image. There is, of course, other negative evidence. If indeed the source is a black hole-“
“What?”
He affected to misunderstand me. “I was saying that the hypothesis that the source is in a black hole is not consistent with the total absence of gamma or X-radiation from that region, as would presumably occur from infall of dust and gas.”
“Albert,” I said, “sometimes you go too far!”
He gazed at me with hooded-eyed concern. I know that those calm stares of Albert’s, and his pretenses of forgetting things, are only contrivances for effect. They do not reflect any appropriate reality-especially the times when he looks right into my eyes. The imaged eyes in Albert’s holopics see no more than the eyes in a photograph. If he senses me, and he surely did sense me good, it was through camera lenses and hypersound pulses and capacitance probes and thermal imagers, none of which are located anywhere near the eyes of the image of Albert. But there are, all the same, moments when those eyes seem to be looking right into my soul. “You want to believe they are Heechee, don’t you, Robin?” he asked softly.
“None of your business! Show me this enhanced image!”
“Very well.”
The image mottled ... marbled ... cleared; and I was looking at an immense dragonfly. It more than filled the screen in Albert’s little peepshow. Most of its gauzy wings could be made out only by the stars they obscured. But where all the wings came together there was a cylindrical object with points of light gleaming on its surface, and some of that light glittered off the wings themselves.
“It’s a sailship!” I gasped.
“Yes. A sailship,” Albert agreed. “A photonic spacecraft. Its only propulsion is from light pressure against the array of sails.”
“But Albert-But Albert, that must take forever.”
He nodded. “In human terms, yes, that is a good description. At its estimated velocity the trip from, say, the Earth to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take approximately six hundred years.”
“My God. Six hundred years in that little thing?”
“It isn’t little, Robin,” he corrected me. “It is more distant than you perhaps realize. My ranging data is only approximate, but my best estimate is that the distance from sailtip to sailtip is not less than one hundred thousand kilometers.”
On the damask couch Essie snorted, changed position, opened her eyes to look at me, said accusingly, “Still up, eh!” and closed her eyes again- all without waking up.
I sat back, and fatigue and pain swarmed over me. “I wish I were sleepy,” I said. “I need to let all this simmer awhile before I can take it in.”
“Of course, Robin. I’ll tell you what I suggest,” Albert said cunningly. “You didn’t have much for dinner, so why don’t I make you up some nice split-pea soup, or maybe some fish chowder-“
“You know what puts me to sleep, don’t you?” I said, almost laughing, glad to have my thoughts brought back to the mundane. “Why not?”
So I moved back to the dining alcove. I let Albert’s bartender subroutine fix me a nice hot buttered rum, and Albert himself appeared in the
PV-frame over the sideboard to keep me company. “Very nice,” I said, finishing it. “Let’s have another before I eat, all right?”
“Certainly, Robin,” he said, fiddling with his pipestem. “Robin?”
“Yes?” I said, reaching for the new drink.
“Robin”-bashfully-“I’ve got an idea.”
I was in a good mood to hear ideas, so I cocked an eyebrow at him as permission to go on. “Walthers gave me the notion: Institutionalize what you did for him. Set up annual awards. Like to Nobel prizes, or the Gateway science bonuses. Six prizes a year, a hundred thousand dollars each, each one for someone in a particular field of science and discovery. I have prepared a budget”-he moved to one side, turning his head to glance toward a corner of the viewing frame; a neatly printed prospectus appeared there-“showing that for a nominal outlay of six hundred thousand a year, nearly all of which would be recouped through tax savings and third-party participation-“
“Hold it, Albert. Don’t be my accountant. Be my science advisor. Prizes for what?”
He said simply, “For helping to solve the riddles of the universe.”
I sat back and stretched, feeling very relaxed and warm. And benign, even to a computer program. “Oh, hell, Albert, sure. Go ahead. Isn’t the soup ready yet?”
“Right this minute,” he said obligingly, and so it was. I dipped a spoon into it, and it was fish chowder. Thick. White, with lots of cream.
“I don’t see the point, though,” I said.
“Information, Robin,” he said.
“But I thought you got all that sort of information anyway.”
“Of course I do-after it’s published. I have a conceptually keyed search program going all the time, with more than forty-three thousand subject flags, and as soon as something on, say, Heechee language transcription appears anywhere it automatically goes into my store. But I want it before it’s published, and even if it isn’t published. Like Audee’s discovery, do you see? Winners each year chosen by a jury-I would be glad”-he twinkled-“to help you select the juries. And I have proposed six areas of inquiry.” He nodded toward the display; the budget disappeared, replaced by a neat tabulation:
1. Heechee communications translation.
2. Observations and interpretation of the missing mass.
3. Analysis of Heechee technology.
4. Amelioration of terrorism.
5. Amelioration of international tensions.
6. Nonexploitive life extension.
“They all sound very commendable,” I said approvingly. “The soup’s fine, too.”
“Yes,” he said, “the chefs are very good at following instructions.” I glanced up at him drowsily. His voice seemed gentler-.no, perhaps the word is sweeter-than before. I yawned, trying to focus my eyes.
“Do you know, Albert,” I said, “I never noticed it before, but you look a little like my mother.”
He put down his pipe and regarded me sympathetically. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”
I regarded my faithful hologram with drowsy pleasure. “I guess that’s right,” I conceded. “Maybe it’s not my mother you look like, though. Those big eyebrows-“
“It doesn’t matter, Robin,” he said gently.
“It doesn’t, does it?” I agreed.
“So you might just as well go to sleep,” he finished.
And that seemed like such a good idea that I did. Not right away. Not abruptly. Just slowly, gently; I lingered half awake and I was absolutely comfortable and absolutely relaxed, so I didn’t quite know where half awake ended and all-asleep began. I was in a dream or a reverie, that in-between state when you suspect you are sleeping but don’t care much, and the mind wanders. Oh, yes, my mind wandered. Very far. I was chasing around the universe with Wan, reaching into one black hole after another in search of something very important to him, and also very important to me, though I didn’t know why. There was a face involved, not Albert’s, not my mother’s, not even Essie’s, a woman’s face with great dark eyebrows . .
Why, I thought, with pleased surprise, the son of a bitch has doped me! And meanwhile, the great Galaxy turned and tiny particles of organic matter pushed slightly less tiny particles of metal and crystal across the spaces between the stars; and the organic bits experienced pain and desolation and terror and joy in all their various ways; but I was all the way asleep and it did not matter to me a bit. Then.
One small bit of organic matter named Dolly Walthers was busy experiencing all of those feelings-or all but joy-and a great deal of such other feelings as resentment and boredom. In particular boredom, except at those moments when the dominant feeling in her sorry small heart was terror. As much as anything, the inside of Wan’s ship was like a chamber in some complicated, wholly automatic factory in which a small space had been left for human beings to crawl in to make repairs. Even the flickering golden coil that was part of the Heechee drive system was only partly visible; Wan had surrounded it with cupboarding to store food. Dolly’s own personal possessions-they consisted mostly of her puppets and a six-month supply of tampons-were jammed into a cabinet in the tiny toilet. All the other space was Wan’s. There was not much to do, and no room to do it in. Reading was one possible way to pass the time. The only datafans Wan owned that were readable, really, were mostly children’s stories, recorded for him, he said, when he was tiny. They were extremely boring to Dolly, though not quite as boring as doing nothing at all. Even cooking and cleaning were not as boring as nothing at all, but the opportunities were limited. Some cooking smells drove Wan to take refuge in the lander-or more often to stamp and rage at her. Laundry was easy, involving only putting their garments in a sort of pressure cooker that forced hot steam through them, but then as they dried they raised the humidity of the air and that, too, was cause for stamping and raging. He never really hit her-well, not counting what he probably thought of as amorous play-but he scared her a lot.
He did not scare her as much as the black holes they visited, one after another. They scared Wan, too. Fear did not keep him from going on; it only made him even more impossible to live with.
When Dolly realized that this whole mad expedition was only a hopeless search for Wan’s long-lost, and surely long-dead, father, she felt real tenderness for him. She wished he would let her express it. There were times when, especially after sex, especially on those rare occasions when he did not at once either go to sleep or drive her away from him with some cutting and unforgivably critical intimate remark-those times when, for a few minutes at least, they would hold each other in silence. Then she would feel a great yearning to make human contact with him. There were times when she wanted to put her lips to his ear and whisper, “Wan? I know how you feel about your father. I wish I could help.”
But, of course, she never dared.
The other thing she never dared do was to tell him that in her opinion, he was going to kill them both-until they came to the eighth hole and she had no choice. Even two days away from it-two days in faster-than-light travel, nearly a light-year in distance-it was different. “Why is it funny-looking?” she demanded, and Wan, not even looking around as he hunched before the screen, only said what she expected:
“Shut up.” Then he went on gabbling with his Dead Men. Once he realized she could speak neither Spanish nor Chinese he talked with them openly before her, but not in a language intelligible to her.
“No, please, honey,” she said, a sick feeling in her stomach. “It’s all wrong!” Why wrong she could not have said. The object on the screen was tiny. It was not very clear, and it jiggled about the screen. But there was no sign of the quick coruscations of energy as stray wisps of matter destroyed themselves as infall. Yet there was something to see, a swimmy sort of blue radiance that was certainly not black.
“Pah,” he said, sweating, and then, because he was scared as well, he ordered, “Tell the bitch what she wants. In English.”
“Mrs. Walthers?” The voice was hesitant and faint; it was a dead person’s voice, all right, if a person’s at all. “I was explaining to Wan that this is what is called a naked singularity. That means it is not rotating, therefore it is not exactly black. Wan? Have you compared it with the Heechee charts?”
He grumbled, “Of course, foolish, I was just about to do so!” but his voice was shaking as he touched the controls. Next to the image itself another image formed. There was the bluish, cloudy, eye-straining object. And there, on the other half of the screen, the same object, with around it a cluster of bright, short red lines and flickering green circles.
The Dead Man said with dismal satisfaction, “It is a danger object, Wan. The Heechee have tagged it so.”
“Idiot fool! All black holes are dangerous!” He snapped off the speaker and turned to Dolly with anger and contempt. “You’re frightened, too!” he accused, and stomped off to the stolen and frightening gadgets in the lander.
It was not consoling to Doily to see that Wan was also shaking. She waited, staring hopelessly at the screen, for the mindtouch that would be Wan’s exploratory reaching with the TPT. It was a long wait, because the TPT did not work at interstellar distances, and she slept in fits, and woke to peer into the lander hatch to see Wan, unmoving, crouched by the glittering mesh and the diamond-bright corkscrew, and slept again.
She was asleep when her dreams were interrupted by the hating, fearing, obsessed stab of Wan’s troubled mind through the TPT, and no more than half awake when he flung himself back into the main cabin and stood over her. “A person!” he gabbled, his eyes blinking wildly as sweat streamed into them from his forehead. “Now I must reach inside!”
And meanwhile, I was dreaming of a deep, steep gravitational hole and a treasure concealed in it. While Wan was deploying his stolen gadgets, sweating with terror, I was sweating with pain. While Dolly was staring wonderingly at the great ghostly blue object on her screen, I was staring at the same object. She had never seen it before. I had. I had a picture of it over my bed, and I had taken that picture at a time when I hurt even more and was even more disoriented. I tried to sit up, and Essie’s strong, gentle hand pushed me back. “Are still on life-support systems, Robin,” she scolded. “Must not move around too much!”
I was in the little hospice chamber we had built onto the house at
Tappan Sea, when it began to seem too much trouble to go to some clinic every time one of us needed repairs. “How did I get here?” I managed.
“By airplane, how else?” She leaned past me to study something on the screen over my head and nodded.
“I’ve had the operation,” I deduced. “That son of a bitch Albert knocked me out. You flew me home while I was still under.”
“How clever! Yes. Is all over. Doctor says you are healthy peasant pig and will recover quickly,” she went on, “only with bellyache continuing awhile because of two point three meters new intestine. Eat now. Then sleep some more.”
I leaned back while Essie fussed with the chef program and stared at the holopic. It was put there to remind me, no matter how unpleasant the tinkering that was going on to keep me alive, that there had been times far more unpleasant still, but that wasn’t what it was reminding me of. What it was reminding me of was a woman I had lost. I will not say I had not thought of her for years, because that would be untrue. I thought of her often-but as a remote memory, and now I was thinking of her as a person. “Time now,” Essie-caroled merrily, “for nourishing fish broth!” By God, she wasn’t fooling; that was what it was, nauseous-smelling but, she said, laced with all the things I needed and could tolerate in my present condition. And meanwhile, Wan was fishing in the black hole with the clever and complicated machinery of the Heechee; and meanwhile, it had just occurred to me that the sickening stuff I was eating was laden with more than medicine; and meanwhile, the clever machinery was performing a separate task Wan did not know about; and meanwhile, I forced myself awake enough to ask Essie how long I had been asleep, and how much longer I could expect to be, and she was saying, “Quite some time, both ways, dear Robin,” and then I was asleep again.
The separate task was notification, for of all the Heechee artifacts the disruptor of order in aligned systems was the one the Heechee worried about most. Improperly used, they feared, it could disrupt their own order decisively and nastily, and so each one had a built-in alarm.
When you fear that somebody may sneak up on you in the dark you set snares-a dragline of clashing tin pans on a tripcord, or a boobytrap to crash down on an intruder’s head, whatever. And there is no greater dark than the dark between the stars, so the Heechee set up their early-warning sentinels. The snares the Heechee had set were numerous, supple, and very, very loud. When Wan deployed his corkscrew it was signaled at once, and at once was when Captain’s communications officer reported it to him. “The alien has done it,” he said, muscles writhing, and Captain uttered a biological expletive. In translation it would not sound like much to a human being, because it referred to the act of sexual coupling at a time when the female was not in love. Captain didn’t say it for its technical meaning. He said it because it was violently obscene, and because nothing less would relieve his feelings. When he saw that Twice started nervously as she leaned to her remote-control board he was instantly contrite.
Captain had the most worries, because he was Captain, but it was Twice who had most of the work. She was operating three remotes at once: the command ship they were about to transfer to, the cargo hauler for hiding the sailship away, and a special drone in the Earth planetary system commanded to survey all transmissions and locate all spaceborne artifacts. And she was in no condition for any of this. The time of loving had come on her, steroids flowed briskly through her wiry veins, the biological program was running, and her body had ripened for its job. Not just her body. Twice’s personality ripened, too, and softened. The strain of trying to guide her drones with a body and nervous system that was tuned for a season of preoccupying sexual coupling was torture. Captain leaned toward her. “Are you all right?” he asked. She didn’t answer. That was answer enough.
He sighed and turned to the next problem. “Well, Shoe?”
The communications officer looked almost as distraught as Twice. “A few conceptual correspondences have been established, Captain,” he reported. “But the translation program is very far from complete.”
Captain twitched his cheek muscles. Was there any unexpected, illogical thing that could go wrong that had not gone wrong already? These communications.-not only was it dangerous that they could exist in the first place, but they were in several languages! Several! Not just two, as was right and proper in the Heechee scheme of things. Not just The Language of Do and The Language of Feel, as the Heechee themselves spoke, but in literally scores of mutually incomprehensible tongues. It might have eased the pain of hearing this endless blab of chatter i1 at least, he had been able to find out what they were saying.
So many worries and problems! Not just the visible sight of Twice getting weaker and more erratic every hour, not just the terrible shock of knowing that some non-Heechee creature was activating the mechanisms that could pierce a black hole; the biggest worry for Captain was whether or not he was capable of dealing with all these consequential challenges. Meanwhile, there was a job to be done. They located the sailship and homed in on it, no problem. They dispatched a message to its crew but, wisely, did not wait for an answer. The command ship, wakened out of its millennia-long powered-down sleep, turned up on schedule. They transferred themselves, lock to lock, to the bigger, more powerful vessel. That, too, was almost no problem, though Twice, gasping and whimpering as she raced from board to board, was slow in taking over her remote-command functions in the new ship. No harm done, though. And the lumbering cargo bubble also appeared where it was supposed to, and even when.
The whole process took nearly twelve hours. For Twice, they were hours of unremitting toil. Captain had less to do, which left him plenty of time to keep an eye on her. He watched her coppery skin turn purple with unfulfilled amorousness even while it was darkening with fatigue. It worried him. They had been so unready for all these challenges! If they had known there was going to be an emergency, he could easily have shipped an extra drone operator to share Twice’s burden. If they had dreamed it would be necessary, they could have taken a command vessel in the first place and spared the strain of changing ships. If they had thought-if they had suspected-If they had had any intimation at all- But they hadn’t. Really, how could they? Even by galactic time it had been only a few decades since the last peek outside the hiding place at the core-only a wink in astronomical time, and how could anyone have believed that so much could happen in it?
Captain rummaged through food packets until he found the tastiest and easiest to digest, and fed them affectionately to Twice at her board. She had little appetite. Her movements were slower, less sure, more difficult for her every hour. But she was getting the job done. When at last the photon ship’s sails had been furled, the great maw of the bubble vessel was open, the mothlike capsule that carried the sailship passengers slipping slowly into the bubble, Captain began to breathe freely again. For Twice, at least, that was the hardest part of what they would have to do. Now she would have a chance to rest-maybe even a chance to do, with him, what her body and soul were overready to do.
Because the sailship people had responded to his message instantly- for them it was instantly-their reply came before the great gleaming sphere had closed on them. The communications officer, Shoe, keyed his screen and the message appeared:
We accept that we must not complete our voyage.
We request that you convey us to a place where we will be safe.
We query: Are the Assassins returning?
The Heechee left only small scout ships for human beings to discover; they were careful not to leave their special-purpose spacecraft where they were easily located. For example, the bubble transport. This was nothing more than a hollow metal sphere fitted with faster-than-light drive and navigation equipment. The Heechee apparently used it to move bulk materials from place to place; the human race could have used it very well indeed. Each bubble transport could hold the equivalent of a thousand S. Ya.-class transports. Ten of them could have solved Earth’s population problem in a decade.
Captain shrugged with sympathy. To Shoe he said, “Transmit to them:
‘We are returning you to your home system for the time being. If possible, we will bring you back here later.’”
Shoe’s expression was strained, with a mixture of emotions. “What about their query about the Assassins?”
Captain felt a quick shudder in his abdomen. “Tell them not yet,” he said.
But it was not the fear of the other ones that was uppermost in Captain’s mind, not even his concern for Twice. The Heechee shared with the human race an astonishing number of traits: curiosity, male-female love, family solidarity, devotion to children, a pleasure in the manipulation of symbols. The magnitude of the shared traits was not always the same, however. There was one psychological characteristic that the Heechee possessed in a far stronger degree than most humans:
Conscience.
The Heechee were almost physically incapable of repudiating an obligation or letting a wrong ~go unrighted. For the Heechee, the sailship people were a special case. The Heechee owed them. It was from them that they had learned the most frightening fact the Heechee had ever had to face.
The Heechee and the sailship people had known each other well, but not recently, and not for very long. The relationship had begun badly for the sailship people. For the Heechee, it had ended even worse. It was not possible for either of them ever to forget the other.
In the slow, gurgling eddas the sailship people sang it was told how the cone-shaped landing vessels of the Heechee had suddenly appeared, terribly hard and terribly swift, in the sweet slush of their home. The Heechee ships had flashed about the floating arcologies of the people with much cavitation and significant local temperature rises. Many had died. Much damage had been done before the Heechee understood that these were sentient and even civilized beings, if slow ones.
The Heechee were terribly shocked at what they had done. They tried to make amends. The first step was communication, and that was difficult. The task took a very long time-long, at least, for the Heechee, though the time for the sludge dwellers was bewilderingly short before a hard, hot octahedral prism slid itself cautiously into the middle of an arcology. Almost at once it began to speak to them in a recognizable, though laughably ungrammatical, form of their own language.
After that events moved with blinding speed-for the slush dwellers. For the Heechee, watching them in their daily lives was a lot like watching lichens grow. Captain himself had visited their great gas-giant planet, not a captain then, almost what could have been called a cabin boy; young; yeasty; adventurous, with that considerable, if cautious, Heechee optimism for the boundless future that had collapsed on them so terrifyingly. The gas giant was not the only marvelously exciting place the young Heechee visited. He visited Earth and met the australopithecines, he helped chart gas clouds and quasars, he ferried crews to outposts and construction projects. Years passed. Decades passed. The slow work of translating the sludge dwellers’ communications inched forward. It could have gone a little faster if the Heechee had thought it particularly important; but they did not. It couldn’t have gone very much faster in any case, because the sludge dwellers couldn’t.
But it was interesting, in an antiquarian, touristy sort of way, because the sludge dwellers had been around for a long, long time. Their chill biochemistry was something like three hundred times slower than a Heechee’s, or a human’s. Heechee recorded history went back five or six millennia-more or less the same as humanity’s, at the same stage in technological evolution. The recorded history of the sludge dwellers went back three hundred times as far. There were nearly two million years of consecutive, dated historical data. The earliest folk tales and legends and eddas were ten times earlier still. They were no harder to translate than the later ones, because the slush dwellers did not move very fast even in the evolution of their language, but the massed minds who translated them judged them not very interesting. They put the work of translating them off... until they discovered that two of them spoke of visitations from space.
When I think of all those years the human race labored under the galling knowledge of inferiority-because the Heechee had done so much more than we had, and done it so much earlier-I have many regrets. I think I regret most that we didn’t know about the Two Eddas. I don’t mean just knowing the eddas themselves, for they would only have given us one more thing to worry about, though a reassuringly remote one. I mean mostly what they did to the Heechee morale.
The first song was from the very dawn of the slush dwellers’ civilization, and quite ambiguous. It was a visitation of the gods. They came, shining so brightly that even the slushers’ rudimentary optics could perceive them-shining with such a turbulence of energy that they caused the soupy gases to seethe and boil, and many died. They did no more than that, and when they went away they never returned. The song itself didn’t mean much. It had no details that the Heechee found believable,
Robin doesn’t tell much about the sailship people, mostly because he didn’t then know much. But that’s a pity. They’re interesting. Their language was made up of words of one syllable- one consonant, one vowel. They had some fifty distinguishable consonants, and fourteen vowels and diphthongs to play with- therefore they had for three-syllable units, such as names, 3.43 x 108 combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn’t name the females.
When a male impregnated a female, he produced a male child. He only did it rarely, because it cost him a great investment of energy. Unfertilized females produced females, more or less routinely. Bearing males, however, cost them their lives. They didn’t know that-or anything else, really. There are no love stories in the eddas of the sailship people.
and most of it was about a certain ur-slusher hero who dared defy the visitors and came to rule a whole soggy sector of their planet as a reward.
But the second song was more specific. It dated from millions of years later-almost within the historical period. It sang once more of visitors from outside the dense home world, but this time they were not mere tourists. They weren’t conquerors, either. They were refugees. They plunged down to the soggy surface, one shipload of them, it seemed, poorly equipped to survive in an environment that was cold, dense poison for them.
They hid there. They stayed for a long time, by their standards-more than a hundred years. Long enough for the slush dwellers to discover them and even to establish a kind of communication. They had been attacked by alien assassins that flamed like fire, wielding weapons that crushed and burned. Their home planet had been flamed clean. Every vessel they owned in space had been pursued and destroyed.
And then, when generations of the refugees had managed to survive and even multiply, it all came to an end. The flaming Assassins found them and boiled a whole huge shallow of the sludgy methane sea dry to destroy them.
When the Heechee heard this song they might have taken it for fable, except for one term. The term was not easy to translate, for it had had to survive both the incomplete communications with the refugees and the lapse of two million years. But it had survived.
It was what caused the Heechee to stop everything they did so that they could concentrate on a single task: the verification of the old edda. They sought out the home of the fugitives and found it-a planet scorched bare by a sun that had exploded. They sought for, and found, artifacts of previous spacegoing civilizations. Not many. None in good condition. But nearly forty separate bits and pieces of half-melted machines, and they isotope-dated them to two separate epochs. One of them coincided in time with the fugitives who fled to the slush planet. The other was many millions of years older.
They concluded that the stories were true: There had been such a race of Assassins; they had wiped out every spacefaring civilization they had discovered, for more than twenty million years.
And the Heechee came to believe that they were still somewhere around. For the term that had been so hard to translate described the expansion of the heavens and the reversal by the flame-wielders so that all the stars and galaxies would crush together again. For a purpose. And it was impossible to believe that these titans, whoever they were, would not linger to see the results of the process they had begun.
And the bright Heechee dream crumbled, and the slush dwellers sang a new edda: the song of the Heechee, who visited, learned to be afraid, and ran away.
So the Heechee set their booby-traps, hid most of the other evidence of their existence, and retreated to their hidey-hole at the core of the Galaxy.
In one sense, the sludge dwellers were just one of the booby-traps. LaDzhaRi knew that; they all did; that was why he had followed the ancestral commandment and reported that first touch of another mind on his. He expected an answer, though it had been years, even in LaDzhaRi’s time, since there had been a Heechee manifestation of any kind, and then only the quick touch of a routine TPT survey. He had also expected that when the answer came he would not like it. The whole epic struggle of building and launching the interstellar ship, the centuries already invested in their millennium-long journey-wasted! It was true that a flight of a thousand years to LaDzhaRi was no more than an ordinary whaling voyage for a Nantucket captain; but a whaler would not have liked being picked up in mid-Pacific and taken home empty, either. The whole crew had been upset. The excitement in the sailship had been so great that some of the crew involuntarily went into fast mode; the sludgy liquid was so churned that cavitation bubbles formed. One of the females was dead. One of the males, TsuTsuNga, was so demoralized that he was pawing over the surviving females, and not for dinner, either. “Please don’t be foolish,” LaDzhaRi pleaded. For a male to impregnate a female, as TsuTsuNga seemed about to do, involved so large an investment of energy that sometimes it threatened his life. For the females there was no threat-their lives were simply forfeited in order to bear a fertilized child-but they didn’t know that, of course, or much of anything else, really. But TsulsuNga said steadily:
“If I cannot become immortal by voyaging to another star, then at least I will father a son.”
“No! Please! Think, my friend,” begged LaDzhaRi, “we can be home if we wish. Can return as heroes to our arcologies, can sing our eddas so the entire world will hear.“ For the sludge of their homes carried sound as well as a sea, and their songs reached as far as a great whale’s.
TsuTsuNga touched LaDzhaRi briefly, almost contemptuously, at least dismissively. “We’re not heroes!” he said. “Go away and let me do this female.”
And LaDzhaRi reluctantly released him, and listened to the dwindling sounds as he moved away. It was true. They were failed heroes at best.
Robin does not explain very well what the Heechee were afraid of. They had deduced that the purpose of causing the universe to contract again was to return it to the primordial atom after which it would burst in another Big Bang and start a new universe. They further deduced that in that case, the physical laws that govern the universe might develop in a different way.
What scared them most was the thought of beings who thought they would be happier in a universe with different physical laws.
The sailship people were not without such human traits as pride. It did not please them to be the Heechees’-what? Slaves? Not exactly, for the only service they were required to perform was to report, via sealed-beam communicator, any evidence of other spacefaring intelligence. They were very glad to do that for their own sakes, more than for the Heechees’. If not slaves, then what?
There was only one word that was right: pets.
So the racial psyche of the slush dwellers contained a patch of tarnish they could never burnish away, with whatever feats of interstellar venturing they might accomplish in their vast, slow starjammers. They knew they were pets. It was not the first time for them. Long before the Heechee came they had been chattels, in almost the same way, to beings quite unlike the Heechee, or humans, or themselves; and when, generations before, their sooth-singers had roared the ancient eddas about those others into the Heechee listening machine, the slush dwellers had not failed to notice that the Heechee ran away. A pet was not the worst thing one could be.
So love and fear were abroad in the universe. For love (what passed among the slush dwellers for love) TsuTsuNga damaged his health and risked his life. Dreaming of love, I lay in my hospice, waking less than an hour every day, while my store-bought innards reconciled themselves to the rest of me. Terrified by love, Captain saw Twice grow thinner and darker.
For Twice had not got better once the cargo bubble was en route. The surcease had come too late. The closest thing they had to a medical specialist was Burst, the black-hole operator, but even at home, even with the finest care, few females could survive unrequited love combined with terrible strain.
It was no surprise to Captain when Burst appeared, hangdog, pitying, and said, “I’m sorry. She is joining the massed minds.”
It is not a cheap commodity, love. Some of us can have it and never face the bill, but only if someone else picks up the check.