Nothing worked. We tried everything. Essie pulled Albert’s fan from its socket, but he had locked the controls so that even without him we could change nothing. Essie set up another piloting program and tried to insert it; it was locked out. We shouted his name and scolded and begged him to appear. He would not.
For days that seemed like weeks we kept going, guided by the nonexistent hands of my nonfunctioning data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein. And meanwhile, the nut-kid Wan and the dark lady of my dreams were in the spaceship of Captain’s Heechee crew and behind us the worlds were stewing and grumbling toward a violence too large to be accommodated. They were not what occupied our minds. Our worries were closer to hand. Food, water, air. We’d stocked the True Love for long cruises, much longer than this.
But not for five people.
We weren’t doing nothing. We were doing everything we could think to do. Walthers and Yee-xing tinkered together piloting programs of their own-tried them-could not override what Albert had done. Essie did more than any of us, for Albert was her creation and she would not, could not, admit herself beaten. Check and recheck; write test programs and watch them come up blank; she hardly slept. She copied Albert’s entire program into a spare datafan and tried that-still hoping, you see, that the fault was mechanical somewhere. But if so it carried over into the new storage. Dolly Walthers uncomplainingly fed the rest of us, stayed out of our way when we thought we might be getting somewhere (though we never were), and let us talk ideas out when we were stumped (which was often). And I had the hardest job of all. Albert was my program, said Essie, and if he would reply to anyone he would reply to me. So I sat there and talked to him. Talked to the air, really, because I had no evidence at all that he was listening as I reasoned with him, chatted with him, called his name, yelled at him, begged him.
He did not answer, not even a flicker in the air.
When we took a break for food Essie came to stand behind me and rub my shoulders. It was my larynx that was wearing out, but I appreciated the thought. “At least,” she said shakily, to the air more than to me, “must know what he’s doing, I think. Must realize supplies are limited. Must provide for return to civilization for us, because Albert could not deliberately let us die?” The words were a statement. The tone wasn’t.
“I’m certain of it,” I said, but did not turn around so that she could see my face.
“I, too,” she said in a dismal tone as I pushed away my plate; and Dolly, to change the subject, said in a motherly way:
“Don’t you like my cooking?”
Essie’s fingers stopped massaging my shoulders and dug in. “Robin! You don’t eat!”
And they were all looking at me. It was actually funny. We were out in the middle of nowhere at all with no good way of getting home, and four people were staring at me because I didn’t eat my dinner. It was Essie, of course, clucking over me in the early stages of the trip, before Albert went mute; they suddenly realized that I might not be well.
In point of fact I wasn’t. I tired quickly. My arms felt tingly, as though they had gone to sleep. I had no appetite-had not eaten much for days, and bad escaped notice only because usually we ate in quick gobbles when we found time. “It helps to stretch out the supplies.” I smiled, but nobody smiled back.
“Foolish Robin,” hissed Essie, and her fingers left my shoulders to test the temperature of my forehead. But that was not too bad, because I’d been gulping aspirin when no one was looking. I assumed an expression of patience.
“I’m fine, Essie,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie-a little wishful thinking, maybe, but I wasn’t sure I was sick. “I guess I should have been checked over, but with Albert out of commission-“
“For this? Albert? Who needs?” I craned my neck, puzzled, to look at Essie. “For this need only subset medic program,” she said firmly.
“Subset?”
She stamped her foot. “Medic program, legal program, secretarial program-all subsumed into Albert program, but can be accessed separately. You call medic program this instant!”
I gaped at her. For a moment I couldn’t speak, while my mind raced. “Do as I say!” she shouted, and at last I found my voice.
“Not the medical program!” I cried. “There’s something better than that!” And I turned around and bellowed to thin air:
“Sigfrid von Shrink! Help! I need you desperately!”
There was a time in the year of my psychoanalysis when I hung on hooks while I waited for Sigfrid to appear. Sometimes I had a real wait, for in those days Sigfrid was a patched-together program of Heechee circuits and human software, and none of the software was my wife Essie’s. Essie was good at her trade. The milliseconds of response time became nano-, pico-, femtoseconds, so that Albert could in real time respond as well as a human-well, hell, no! Better than any human!
And so when Sigfrid did not at once appear it was the feeling you get when you turn a switch and the light doesn’t go on because it’s burned out. You don’t waste your time flicking the switch back and forth. You know. “Don’t waste time,” said Essie over my shoulder. If a voice can be pale, hers was.
I turned and smiled shakily at her. “I guess things are worse than we thought,” I said. Her face was pale, all right. I put my hand on hers. “Takes me right back,” I said, making conversation so that we would not have to face just how much worse things were. “When I was in analysis with Sigfrid, waiting for him to show up was the worst part. I would always get uptight, and ...” Well, I was rambling. I might have gone on doing it forever if I hadn’t seen in Essie’s eyes that I didn’t have to.
I turned around and heard his voice at the same time: “I am sorry to hear that it was so difficult for you, Robin,” said Sigfrid von Shrink.
Even for a holographic projection, Sigfrid looked rather poorly. He was there with his hands clasped on his lap, sitting uncomfortably on nothing at all. The program had not troubled to furnish him with chair or pad. Nothing. Just Sigfrid, looking, for one of the few times in my recollection of him, quite ill at ease. He gazed around at the five of us, all staring at him, and sighed before returning to me. “Well, Robin,” he said, “would you like to tell me what is bothering you?”
I could hear Audee Walthers take a breath to answer him, and Janie click her tongue to stop him, because Essie was shaking her head. I didn’t look at any of them. I said, “Sigfrid, old tin whiz, I have a problem that’s right down your alley.”
He looked at me under his brows. “Yes, Robin?”
“It’s a case of fugue.”
“Severe?”
“Incapacitating,” I told him.
He nodded as though it were what he had been expecting. “I do prefer that you not use technical terms, Robin.” He sighed, but his fingers were lacing and relacing themselves in his lap. “Tell me. Is it yourself that you are asking me to help?”
“Not really, Sigfrid,” I admitted. The whole ballgame could have blown up then. I think it almost did. He was silent for a moment, but not at all still-his fingers snaked in and out of each other, and there was a bluish sparkle in the air around the outlines of his body when he moved. I said, “It’s a friend of mine, Sigfrid, maybe the closest friend I have in the world, and he is in bad trouble.”
“I see,” he said, nodding as though he did-which I expect was true enough. “I suppose you know,” he mentioned, “that your friend cannot be helped unless he is present.”
“He’s present, Sigfrid,” I said softly.
“Yes,” he said, “I rather thought he was.” The fingers were still now, and he leaned back as though there were a chair for him to lean against. “Suppose you tell me about it ... and”-with a smile, which was the most welcome thing I had ever seen in my life-“this time, Robin, you may use technical terms if you wish.”
Behind me I heard Essie softly exhale, and realized both of us bad been trying to hold our breaths. I reached back for her hand.
“Sigfrid,” I said, beginning to hope, “as I understand it, the term fugue refers to a flight from reality. If a person finds himself in a double-bind situation-excuse me, I mean if he finds himself in a position when one very powerful drive is frustrated by another, so he can’t live with the conflict-he turns his back on it. He runs away. He pretends it doesn’t exist. I know I’m mixing up several different schools of psychotherapy here, Sigfrid, but have I got the general idea right?”
“Close enough, Robin. At least I understand what you are saying.”
“An example of that might be”-I hesitated-“perhaps someone very deeply in love with his wife, who finds out that she’s been having an affair with his best friend.” I felt Essie’s fingers tighten on mine. I hadn’t hurt her feelings; she was encouraging me.
“You confuse drives and emotions, Robin, but that doesn’t matter. What are you leading up to?”
I didn’t let him rush me. “Or another example,” I said, “might be religious. Someone with a heartfelt faith, who discovers there is no God. Do you follow me, Sigfrid? It’s been an article of faith with him, although he knows there are a lot of intelligent people who disagree-and then, little by little, he finds more and more support for their belief, and finally it’s overwhelming ...
He nodded politely, listening, but his fingers had begun to writhe again.
“So finally he has to accept quantum mechanics,” I said.
And that was the second point at which it all could have gone right out the chute. I think it nearly did. The hologram flickered badly for a moment, and the expression on Sigfrid’s face changed. I can’t say what it changed to. It wasn’t anything I recognized; it was as though it had blurred and softened.
But when he spoke up his voice was steady. “When you talk about drives and fugues, Robin,” he said, “you are talking about human beings. Suppose the patient you are interested in isn’t human.” He hesitated, and then added, “Quite.” I made an encouraging noise, because I really didn’t know where to go from there. “That is to say, suppose he has these drives and emotions, ah, programmed into him, let us say, but only the way a human can be programmed to do something like speak a foreign language after he is fully grown. The knowledge is there, but it is imperfectly assimilated. There is an accent.” He paused. “We are not human,” he said.
Essie’s hand gripped mine tightly. A warning. “Albert is programmed with a human personality,” I said.
“Yes. As far as possible. Very far,” Sigfrid agreed, but his face was grave. “Albert is still not human, for no computer program is. I mention only that none of us can experience, for example, the TPT. When the human race is going mad with someone else’s madness, we feel nothing.”
The ground was very delicate now, thin ice crusted over a quagmire, and if I stepped too roughly what might we all fall into? Essie held my hand strongly; the others were hardly breathing. I said, “Sigfrid, human beings are all different, too. But you used to tell me that that didn’t matter a great deal. You said the problems of the mind were in the mind, and the cure for the problems was in there, too. All you did was help your patients bring them up to the surface, where they could deal with them, instead of keeping them buried, where they could cause obsessions and neuroses ... and fugue.”
“It is true that I said that, yes, Robin.”
“You just kicked the old machine, Sigfrid, right? To jar it loose from where it was stuck?”
He grinned-a pale grin, but there. “That is close enough, I suppose.”
“Right. So let me try a theory on you. Let me suggest that this friend of mine”-I didn’t dare name him again just then-“this friend of mine has a conflict he can’t handle. He is very intelligent and extremely well informed. He has access to the best and latest knowledge of science in particular-all kinds of science-physics and astrophysics and cosmology and everything else. Since quantum mechanics is at the base of it he accepts quantum mechanics as valid-he couldn’t do the job he was programmed to do without it. That’s basic to his-programming.” I had almost said “personality.”
The grin was more pain than amusement now, but he was still listening.
“And at the same time, Sigfrid, he has another layer of programming. He has been taught to think like and behave like-to be, as much as he can be-a very intelligent and wise person who has been dead for a hell of a long time and who happened to believe very strongly that quantum mechanics was all wrong. I don’t know if that would be enough of a conflict to damage a human being,” I said, “but it might do a lot of harm to-well-a computer program.”
There were actual beads of perspiration on Sigfrid’s face now. He nodded silently, and I had a bright, painful flashback-the way Sigfrid looked to me now, was that how I had looked to Sigfrid in those long-ago days when he was shrinking me? “Is that possible?” I demanded.
“It is a severe dichotomy, yes,” he whispered.
And there I bogged down.
The thin ice had broken. I was ankle-deep in the quagmire. I wasn’t drowning yet, but I was stuck. I didn’t know where to go next.
It broke my concentration. I looked around helplessly at Essie and the others, feeling very old and very tired-and a lot unwell, too. I had been so wrapped up in the technical problem of shrinking my shrink that I had forgotten the pain in my belly and the numbness in my arms; but they came back on me now. It wasn’t working. I didn’t know enough. I was absolutely certain that I bad uncovered the basic problem that had caused Albert to fugue-and nothing had come of it!
I don’t know how long I would have sat there like a fool if I hadn’t got help. It came from two people at once. “Trigger,” whispered Essie urgently in my ear, and at the same moment Janie Yee-xing stirred and said tentatively:
“There must have been a precipitating incident, isn’t that right?”
Sigfrid’s face became blank. A hit. A palpable hit.
“What was it, Sigfrid?” I asked. No response. “Come on, Sigfrid, old shrinking machine, spit it out. What was the thing that pushed Albert out the airlock?”
He looked me straight in the eye, and yet I couldn’t read his expression, because his face became fuzzy. It was almost as though it was a picture on the PV and something was breaking down in the circuits so the image was fading.
Fading? Or fuguing? “Sigfrid,” I cried, “please! Tell us what scared Albert into running away! Or if you can’t do that, just get him here so we can talk to him!”
More fuzz. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me anymore. “Tell me!” I commanded, and from that fuzzy holographic shadow came an answer:
“The kugelblitz.”
“What? What’s a kugelblitz?” I stared around in frustration. “Damn it, get him here so he can tell us for himself.”
“Is here, Robin,” whispered Essie in my ear.
And the image sharpened again, but it wasn’t Sigfrid anymore. The neat Freud face had softened and widened into the gentle, pouchy German band leader, and the white hair crowned the sad eyes of my best and closest friend.
“I am here, Robin,” said Albert Einstein sorrowfully. “I thank you for your help. I don’t know if you’ll thank me, though.”
Albert was right about that. I didn’t thank him.
Albert was also wrong about that, or right for wrong reasons, because the reason I didn’t thank him was not merely that what he said was so grisly unpleasant, so scary incomprehensible, but also that I was in no position to when he had finished.
My position wasn’t much better when he began, because the letdown when he came back let me down all the way. I was drained. Exhausted. It was perfectly expectable that I should be exhausted, I told myself, because God knew it had been about as stressful a strain as I had ever been through, but it felt worse than simple exhaustion. It felt terminal. It wasn’t just my belly or my arms or my head; it was as though all the power were draining out of all my batteries at once, and it took all the concentration I could get together to pay attention to what he was saying.
“I was not precisely in fugue, as you call it,” he said, turning the unlit pipe over in his fingers. He had not bothered to be comical. He was wearing sweatshirt and slacks, but his feet were in shoes and the shoelaces were tied. “It is true that the dichotomy existed, and that it rendered me vulnerable-you will understand, Mrs. Broadhead, a contradiction in my programming; I found myself looping. Since you made me homeostatic there was another imperative: to repair the malfunction.”
Essie nodded regretfully. “Homeostasis, yes. But self-repair implies self-diagnosis. Should have consulted me for check!”
“I thought not, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said. “With all respect, the difficulties were in areas in which I am better equipped to function than you.”
“Cosmology, ha!”
I stirred myself to speak-it wasn’t easy, because the lethargy was strong. “Would you mind, please, just saying what you did, Albert?”
He said slowly, “What I did is easy, Robin. I decided to try to resolve these conflicts. I know they seem more important to me than to you; you can be quite happy without settling cosmological questions, but I cannot. I devoted more and more of my capacity to study. As you may not know, I included a great many Heechee fans in the datastores for this ship, some of which had never been analyzed properly. It was a very difficult task, and at the same time I was making observations of my own.”
“What you did, Albert!” I begged.
“But that is what I did. In the Heechee datastores I found many references to what we have called the missing mass. You remember, Robin. That mass which the universe should have to account for its gravitational behavior, but which no astronomer has been able to find-“
“I remember!”
“Yes. Well, I may have found it.” He sat brooding for a moment. “I’m afraid that this did not solve my problem, though. It made it worse. If you had not been able to reach me through your clever little trick of talking through my subset Sigfrid I might be looping yet-“
“Found what?” I cried. The flowing adrenaline almost, but not quite, took my mind off the way my body was notifying me of its troubles. He waved a hand at the viewscreen, and I saw there was something on it.
In that first quick glance, what I saw on the screen did not make sense.
And when I did give it a second look, and a more careful one, what stopped me cold and staring was not what was important.
The screen showed mostly nothing at all. There was a corner of a whirlpool of light at one edge of it-a galaxy, of course; I thought it looked like M-31 in Andromeda as much as anything, but I am no expert in galaxies. Especially when I see them without any spattering of stars around them, and there was no such spattering here.
There was something like stars. Little points of light, here and there. But they weren’t stars, because they were winking and flickering like Christmas-tree lights. Think of a couple dozen fireflies, on a cold night so they aren’t flashing their little passionate pleas very often, quite far away so that they aren’t easy to see. That was what they looked like. The most conspicuous object among them, still not very conspicuous, was something that looked a little like the non-rotating black hole I had once lost Klara in, but not as large and not as threatening. And all of this was queer, but it was not what shocked a gasp out of me. I heard noises from the others, too. “It’s a ship!” Dolly whispered, shakily. And so it was.
Albert said so. He turned around gravely. “That is a ship, yes, Mrs. Walthers,” he said. “It is, in fact, the Heechee ship we saw before, I am nearly certain. I have been wondering if I could establish communication with it.”
“Communication! With the Heechee! Albert,” I shouted, “I know you’re crazy, but don’t you realize how dangerous that is?”
“As to danger,” he said somberly, “I am much more afraid of the kugelblitz.”
“Kugelblitz?” I had lost my temper completely. “Albert, you horse’s ass, I don’t know what a kugelblitz is and I don’t much care. What I care about is that you’ve damn near killed us all, and-“
I stopped, because Essie’s hand on my mouth stopped me. “Shut up, Robin!” she hissed. “You want drive him to fugue again? Now, Albert,” she said, quite calmly, “yes, please tell us what is kugelblitz. That thing looks to me like black hole, actually.”
He passed a hand over his forehead. “The central object, you mean. Yes, it is a kind of black hole. But there is not one black hole there; there are many. I have not been able to count how many, since they cannot be detected except when there is some infall of matter to produce radiation, and there is not much matter out here between galaxies-“
“Between galaxies?” cried Walthers, and then stopped with Essie’s eyes on him.
“Yes, Albert, please go on,” she encouraged.
“I do not know how many black holes are present. In excess of ten. Probably in excess of ten squared, all in all.” He glanced at me beseechingly. “Robin, do you have any idea how strange that is? How can one account for this?”
“I not only can’t account for it; I don’t even know what a kugelblitz is.”
“Oh, good heavens, Robin,” he said impatiently, “we have discussed this sort of thing before. A black hole results from the collapse of matter to an extraordinary density. John Wheeler was the first person to predict the existence of another form of black hole, containing not matter but energy-so much energy, so densely packed, that its own mass pulled space around it. That is called a kugelblitz!”
He sighed, then said, “I have two speculations. The first is that this entire construct is an artifact. The kugelblitz is surrounded by black holes; I think to attract any loose matter-of which there is not much here in the first place-to keep it from falling into the kugelblitz itself. The second speculation is that I think we may be looking at the missing mass.”
I jumped up. “Albert,” I cried, “do you know what you’re saying? You mean somebody made that thing? You mean-“ I jumped up and did not finish the sentence.
I did not finish the sentence, because I couldn’t. Part of the reason was that there were too many scary notions floating around in my head, for if someone had made the kugelblitz, and if the kugelblitz was part of this “missing mass,” then the obvious conclusion was that somebody was tampering with the laws of the universe itself, trying to reverse the expansion, for reasons that I could not (then) guess.
The other reason was that I fell over.
I fell over because for some reason my legs would not support me.
There was a blinding pain in the side of my head, just about the ear. Everything went all gray and swimmy.
I heard Albert’s voice cry out, “Oh, Robin! I haven’t been paying attention to your physical state!”
“My what?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It didn’t come out well. My lips
I did tell Robin several times what a kugelblitz was-a black hole caused by the collapse of a large quantity of energy, rather than a large quantity of matter-but as nobody had ever seen one he didn’t really listen. I also told him about the general state of intergalactic space-very little free matter or energy, barring scanty photon flux from distant galaxies, and, of course, the universal 3.7K radiation-which is what made it such a good place to put a kugelblitz, when you didn’t want anything else to fall into it.
did not seem to want to form the words properly, and I felt suddenly very sleepy. That first quick explosion of localized pain had come and gone, but there was a distant awareness of pain, oh, yes, big pain, not very far away and rapidly coming closer.
They say that there is a selective amnesia for pain. You don’t remember that root-canal job except, almost fondly, as a humorously rotten experience; if it were not for this, they say, no woman would have more than one child. That is true for most of you, I suppose. I’m sure it was true for me for a good many years, but not now.
Now I remember very clearly indeed and, yes, it is with almost humorous affection. What had happened in my head had provided its own anesthesia, and what I experienced was unclear. But I remember that unclearness with great clarity. I remember the panicky talk, and being hauled to a couch; I remember long dialogues and the tiny bite of needles as Albert fed me medication and took samples of me. And I remember Essie sobbing.
She was cradling my head in her lap. Though she was talking past me to Albert, and mostly in Russian, I heard my name often enough to know she was talking about me. I tried to reach up to pat her cheek. “I’m dying,” I said-or tried to say.
She understood me. She leaned over me, her long hair drifting across my face. “Very dear Robin,” she crooned, “is true, yes, you are dying. Or your body is. But that does not mean an end to you.”
Now, we had discussed religion from time to time over the decades we’d been together. I knew her beliefs. I even knew my own. Essie, I wanted to say, you’ve never lied to me before, you don’t have to do it now to try to ease dying for me. It’s all right. But all that came out was something like:
“Does so!”
Tears dripped over my face as she rocked me, crooning, “No. Truly no, dearest Robin. Is a chance, a very good chance-“
I made a tremendous effort. “There ... is ... no ... hereafter,”
I said, strongly, spacing the words out with the best articulation I could manage. It may not have been clear, but she understood me. She bent and kissed my forehead. I felt her lips move against my skin as she whispered:
“Yes. Is a hereafter now.”
Or maybe she said “a Here After.”
And the stars sailed on. They didn’t care what was happening to one biped m~mm~i1ian intelligent-well, semi-intelligent-living thing, simply because it happened to be me. I have always subscribed to the egocentric view of cosmology. I’m in the middle and everything ranges itself on one side of me or another; “normal” is what I am; “important” is what is near to me; “significant” is what I perceive as important. That was the view I subscribed to, but the universe didn’t. It went right on as though I didn’t matter at all.
The truth is that I didn’t matter just then even to me, because I was out of it. A good many thousand light-years behind us on Earth, General Manzbergen was chasing another batch of terrorists who had hijacked a launch shuttle and the commissaris had caught the man who had taken a shot at me; I didn’t know and, if! had known, wouldn’t have cared. A lot closer, but still as far from us as Antares is from Earth, Gelle-Klara Moynlin was trying to make sense of what the Heechee were telling her; I didn’t know that either. Very close to hand indeed, my wife, Essie, was trying to do something she had never done before, though she had invented the process, with the help of Albert, who had the entire process in his datastores but had not hands to do it with. About that I would have cared a great deal if I had known what they were doing.
But I couldn’t know, of course, since I was dead. I did not, however, stay that way.
When I was little my mother used to read me stories. There was one about a man whose senses were somehow scrambled after a brain operation. I don’t remember who wrote it, Verne, Wells, one of those biggies from the Golden Age-somebody. What I remember is the punch line. The man comes out of the operation so that he sees sound, and hears touch, and the end of the story is him asking, “What smells purple?”
That was a story told me when I was little. Now I was big. It was not a story anymore.
It was a nightmare.
Sensory impressions were battering at me, and I couldn’t tell what they were! I can’t describe them now, for that matter, any more than I can describe... smerglitch. Do you know what smerglitch is? No. Neither do I, because I just made the word up. It’s only a word. It has no meaning until it is invested with one, and neither did any of the colors, sounds, pressures, chills, pulls, twitches, itches, squirmings, burnings, yearnings-the billion quantum units of impression that were assaulting naked, tender me. I didn’t know what they meant. Or were. Or threatened. I don’t know what to compare it to, even. Maybe being born is like that. I doubt it. I don’t think any of us would survive it if it were.
But I survived.
I survived because of only one reason. It was impossible for me not to.
It’s the oldest rule in the book: You can’t knock up a pregnant woman, and you can’t kill someone who is dead already. I “survived” because all that part of me that could be killed had been.
Do you have the picture?
Try to see it. Flayed. Assaulted. And most of all, aware I was dead.
Among the other stories my mother read me was Dante’s Inferno, and what I sometimes wonder was whether Dante had some prevision of what it would be like for me. For if not, where did he get his description of Hell?
How long this lasted I did not know, but it seemed forever.
Then everything dwindled. The piercing lights moved farther away, and paler. The terrifying sounds were quieter, the itches and squeezes and turbulences diminished.
For a long time there was nothing at all, like Carlsbad Caverns in that scary moment when they turn off all the lights to teach you what dark is. There was no light. There was nothing but a distant confused mumbling that might have been the circulation of blood around the stirrups and anvil in my ears.
If I had had ears.
And then the mumbling began to hint of a voice, and words; and, from a long way off, the voice of Albert Einstein:
“Robin?”
I tried to remember how to speak.
“Robin? Robin, my friend, do you hear me?”
“Yes,” I shouted, and do not know how. “I’m here!” as though I knew where “here” was.
A long pause. Then Albert’s voice again, still faint but sounding closer. “Robin,” he said, each word spaced as though for a tiny child. “Robin. Listen. You are safe.”
“Safe?”
“You are safe,” he repeated. “I am blocking for you.” I did not answer. Had nothing to say.
“I will teach you now, Robin,” he said, “a little at a time. Be patient, Robin. Soon you will be able to see and hear and understand.”
Patient? I could be nothing but patient. I had no other options but to patiently endure while he taught me. I trusted old Albert, even then. I accepted his word that he could teach the deaf to hear and the blind to see.
But was there any way to teach the dead to live?
I do not particularly want to relive that next little eternity. By Albert’s time and the time of the cesium clocks that concerted the human parts of the Galaxy it took-he says-eighty-four hours and a bit. By his time. Not by mine. By mine it was endless.
Although I remember very well, I remember some things only distantly. Not from incapacity. From desire, and also from the fact of velocity. Let me explain that. The quick exchange of bits and bytes within the core of a datastore goes much faster than the organic life I had left behind. It blurs the past with layers of new data. And, you know, that’s just as well, because the more remote that terrible transition is from my “now,” the better I like it.
If I am unwilling to retrieve some of the early parts of that data, at least the first part that I am willing to look at is a big one. How big? Big.
Albert says I anthropomorphize. Probably I do. Where’s the harm? I spent most of my life in the morph of an anthropos, after all, and old habits die hard. So when Albert had stabilized me and I was-I guess the only word is vastened-it was as a human anthropomorphic being that I visualized myself. Assuming, of course, that the human being were huger than galaxies, older than stars, and as wise as all the billions of us have learned to be. I beheld the Local Group-our Galaxy and its next-door neighbors-as one little clot in a curdling sea of energy and mass. I could see all of it. But what I looked at was home, the mother Galaxy and M-31 beside it, with the Magellanic Clouds nestling nearby and all the other little clouds and globules and tufts and fluffs of streaky gas and starshine. And-the anthropomorphic part is-I reached out to touch them and cup them and run my fingers through them, as though I were God.
I was not really God, or even sufficiently godlike to be able really to touch any galaxies. I couldn’t touch anything at all, not having anything to touch them with. It was all illusion and optics, like Albert lighting his pipe. There was nothing there. No Albert and no pipe.
And no me. Not really. I was not operatively godlike, because I did not have any tangible existence. I could not create the heavens and the earth, nor destroy them. I could not affect even the least part of them in any physical way at all.
But I could behold them most splendidly. From outside or in. I could stand at the center of my home system and see, peering past Masei 1 and 2, the millions and zillions of other groups and galaxies stretching out in speckled immensity to the optical ends of the universe, where fleeing star clusters run away faster than light can return to display them ... and beyond that, too, though what I could “see” beyond the optical limit was not really much different-and not really, Albert tells me, any more than a hypothesis in the Heechee memory stores I was tapping.
For, of course, that’s all it was. Old Robin hadn’t suddenly swelled immense. It was just the paltry remains of Robinette Broadhead, who at that point was no more than a clutter of chained memory bits swimming around in the sea of datastores in the library of the True Love.
A voice broke into my immense and eternal reverie: Albert’s voice. “Robin, are you all right?”
I did not want to lie to him. “No. Nowhere near all right.”
“It will get better, Robin.”
“I hope so,” I said. “... Albert?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t blame you for going crazy,” I said, “if this is what you were going through.”
Silence for a moment, then the ghost of a chuckle. “Robin,” he said, “you haven’t seen yet what drove me crazy.”
I cannot say how long all of this took. I don’t know that the concept of “time” meant anything, for at the electronic level, which is where I was dwelling, the time scale does not map well against anything “real.” Much time is wasted. The stored electronic intelligence does not operate as efficiently as the machinery we are all born with; an algorithm is not a good substitute for a synapse. On the other hand, things move a lot faster down in subparticle land, where the femtosecond is a unit that can be felt. If you multiply the pluses and factor in the minuses, you’d have to say that I was living somewhere between ten and ten thousand times as fast as I was used to.
Of course, there are objective measures of real time-by which I mean Thee Love time. Essie marked the minutes very carefully. To prepare a corpse for the queasy semistorage of her Here After chain took many hours. To prepare that particular stiff which happened to be me for the somewhat better storage she was able to arrange in the datafan, exactly like Albert’s own datafan, took a great deal longer. When her part in it was done she sat and waited, with a drink in her hand that she didn’t drink and attempts at conversation from Audee and Janie and Dolly that she didn’t hear, although sometimes she answered something that they didn’t hear either. It was not a jolly party on the True Love while they waited to see if anything at all remained to access of the late Robinette Broadhead, and it took all in all more than three days and a half.
For me, in that world of spin and charm and color and forbidden orbits where I was now transported to exist, it was-well, call it forever. It seemed that way.
“What you must do,” Albert commanded, “is learn how to use your inputs and outputs.”
“Oh, swell,” I cried gratefully, “is that all? Gosh! Sounds like nothing at all!”
Sigh. “I am glad you retain your sense of humor,” he said, and what I heard was, because you’ll damn well need it “You’ve got to work now, I’m afraid. It is not easy for me to go on encapsulating you this way-“
“Enwhat?”
“Protecting you, Robin,” he said impatiently. “Limiting your access so that you won’t suffer from too much confusion and disorientation.”
“Albert,” I said, “are you out of your mind? I’ve seen the whole universe!”
“You’ve only seen what I was accessing myself, Robin. That’s not good enough. I can’t control access for you forever. You have to learn to do it for yourself. So I’m going to lower my guard a little for you, when you’re ready.”
I braced myself. “I’m ready.”
But I hadn’t braced myself enough.
You would not believe how much it hurt. The chirping, chittering, bitching, demanding voices of all the inputs assaulted my-well, assaulted those loci in a nonspatial geometry that I still persisted in thinking of as my ears. It was torture. Was it as bad as that first naked exposure to everything at once? No. It was worse. In that terrible first blast of sensation I had had one thing going for me. I had not then learned to identify noise as sound, or pain as pain. Now I knew. I knew pain when I felt it. “Please, Albert,” I screamed. “What is it?”
“These are only the datastores accessible to you, Robin,” he said soothingly. “Only the fans on board the True Love, plus telemetry, plus some inputs from the sensors to the ship and crew itself.”
“Make them stop.”
“I can’t.” There was real compassion in his voice, though really no voice existed. “You have to do it, Robin. You have to select what stores you wish to access. Pick out just one of them and block out the others.”
“Do what?” I begged, more confused than ever.
“Select just one, Robin,” he said patiently. “Some are our own data-stores, some are Heechee fans, some are other things. You have to learn how to interface with them.”
“Interface?”
“To consult them, Robin. As though they were reference volumes in a library. As though they were books on shelves.”
“Books don’t yell at you! And these are all yelling!”
“Surely. It is how they make themselves evident-just as books on shelves are evident to your eyes. But you need only to look at the one you want. There is one in particular that, I think, will ease this for you. See if you can find that one.”
“Find it? How do I look for it?”
There was a sound like a sigh. “Well,” he said, “there’s a stratagem that might be tried, Robin. I can’t tell you up, down, or sideways, because I don’t suppose there’s any frame of reference for you yet-“
“Damn right!”
“No. But there’s an old animal trainer’s trick, used to cause an animal to perform complicated maneuvers it does not understand. There was a stage magician who used it to get a dog to go into an audience, select a particular person, take from it a particular object-“
“Albert,” I begged, “this is not the time for you to tell me those long, rambling anecdotes!”
“No, this is not an anecdote. It’s a psychological experiment. It works well on dogs-I do not know that it has ever been tried on an adult human, but let’s see. This is what you do. Begin to move in any direction. if it is a good direction I will tell you to go on. When I stop telling you that, you stop doing that particular thing. Cast about. Try different things. When the new thing you do, or the new direction, is a useful one I will tell you to keep going. Can you do that?”
I said, “Will you give me a piece of bread when it’s over, Albert?”
Faint chuckle. “At least the electronic analog of one, Robin. Now, start casting about.”
Start casting about! How? But there was no use asking that question, because if Albert had been able to give me a “how” in words we wouldn’t have had to try a dog handler’s trick. So I began-doing things.
I can’t tell you what things I was doing, exactly. I can give you an analogy, maybe. When I was in school in science class they showed us an electroencephalogram scanner, and showed how all our brains generated alpha waves. It was possible, they said, to make the waves go faster or get larger-to increase the frequency or the amplitude-but there was no way to tell us how to do it. We all took turns, all of us kids, and every one of us did in fact manage to speed up the sine trace on the screen, and no two of us described what we did in the same way. One said he held his breath, another that he sort of tensed his muscles; one thought of eating, and another sort of tried to yawn without opening his mouth. None of them were real. All of them worked; and what I did now was not real, either, because I had nothing real to do it with.
But I moved. Somehow, I moved. And all the time Albert’s voice was saying, “No. No. No. No, that’s not it. No. No-“
And then: “Yes! Yes, Robin, keep on doing that!”
“I am keeping on!”
“Don’t talk, Robin. Just keep going. Keep going. Keepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoingkeep-no. Stop.
“No.
“No.
“No.
“No-yes! Keepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoing-no-yes! Keep going-stop! There it is, Robin. The volume you must open.”
“Here? This thing here? This voice that sounds like-“
I stopped. I couldn’t go on. See, I had accepted the fact that I was dead, nothing but stored electrons in a datafan, able to talk just then only to mechanical storage or other nonalive persons like Albert.
“Open the volume!” he commanded. “Let her speak to you!”
She did not need permission. “Hello, Robin love,” said the nonliving voice of my dear wife, Essie-strange, strained, but no doubt at all who it was. “Is a fine place are in now, is it not?”
I do not think that anything, not even the recognition of my own death, was as terrible a shock as finding Essie among the dead ones. “Essie,” I screamed, “what happened to you?”
And at once Albert was there, solicitous, quick: “She’s all right, Robin. She’s not dead.”
“But she must be! She’s here!”
“No, my dear boy, not really here,” said Albert. “Her book is there because she partially stored herself, as part of the experiments for the Here After project. And also as part of the experiments that led to me, as I am at present constituted.”
“You bastard, you let me think she was dead!”
He said gently, “Robin, you must get over this flesh-and-blood obsession with biology. Does it really matter if her metabolism still operates on the organic level, in addition to the version of her which is stored here?” And that strange Essie-voice chimed in:
“Be patient, dear Robin. Be calm. Is going to be all right.”
“I doubt that very much,” I said bitterly.
“Trust me, Robin,” she whispered. “Listen to Albert. He will tell you what to do.”
“The hardest part is over,” Albert reassured me. “I apologize for the traumas you have suffered, but they were necessary-I think.”
“You think”
“Yes, only think, Robin, for this has never been done before and we are operating largely in the dark. I know it has been a shock to you to meet the stored analog of Mrs. Broadhead in this way, but it will help to prepare you to meet her in the flesh.”
If I had had a body to do it with, I would have been tempted to punch him-if Albert had had anything to punch. “You’re crazier than I am,” I cried.
Ghost of a chuckle. “Not crazier, Robin. Only as crazy. You will be able to speak to her and see her, just as I did with you while you were still alive. I promise this, Robin. It will succeed-I think.”
“I can’t!”
Pause. “It is not easy,” he conceded. “But consider this. I can do it. So do you not think you can do as well as a mere computer program like myself?”
“Don’t taunt me, Albert! I understand what you’re saying. You think I can display myself as a hologram and communicate in real time with living persons; but I don’t know how!”
“No, not yet, Robin, for those subroutines do not yet exist in your program. But I can teach you. You will be displayed. Perhaps not with all the natural grace and agility of my own displays,” he boasted, “but at least you will be recognizable. Are you prepared to begin to learn?”
And Essie’s voice, or that voice which was a degraded copy of Essie’s, whispered, “Please do, dear Robin, for am waiting for you without patience.”
How tiresome it is to be born! Tiresome for the neonate, and more tiresome still for the auditor who is not experiencing it but only listening to interminable woes.
Interminable they were, and spurred by constant nagging from my midwives. “You can do it,” promised the copy of Essie from one side of me (pretending for the moment that I had a “side”), and, “It is easier than it seems,” confirmed the voice of Albert from the other. There were no two persons in the universe whose word I would take more readily than either of them. But I bad used up all my trust; there was none left, and I was scared. Easy? It was preposterous.
For I was seeing the cabin as Albert had always seen it. I didn’t have the perspective of two focusing eyes and a pair of ears located at particular points in space. I was seeing and hearing all of it at once. Long ago that old painter, Picasso, painted pictures like that, with the parts spread out in random order. They were all there, but so exploded and randomized that there was no overriding form to recognize but only a helter-skelter mosaic of bits. I had wandered the Tate and the Met with Essie to look at such paintings, and even found some pleasure in them. They were even amusing. But to see the real world spread out that way, like parts on an assembly bench-that was not amusing at all.
“Let me help you,” whispered the analog of Essie. “Do you see me there, Robin? Asleep in the big bed? Have been up for many days, Robin, pouring old organic you into fine new fan bottle and am now worn out but, see, I have just moved hand to scratch my nose. Do you see hand? Do you see nose? Do you recognize?” Then the ghost of a chuckle. “Of course you do, Robin, for that is me all over.”
There still was Klara to be thought about, if I had known enough just then to think about her-not just Klara but Wan (hardly worth a thought, really) and also Captain and his Heechee, who were worth all the thoughts anyone could give them. But I did not then know that, either. I was vaster, all right, but not as yet a whole lot smarter. And certainly I was distracted by problems of my own, although, if Captain and I had known each other and been able to compare, it would have been interesting to see whose problems were worse. Actually it would have been a standoff. Both sets of problems were simply off the scale, too much to be handled.
The physical closeness of his two human captives was one of Captain’s problems. In his bony nostrils they stank. They were physically repellent.
Loose, bouncing, jiggling fat and sagging flesh marred the clean lines of their structures-the only Heechee ever that gross were the few dying of the worst degenerative disease they knew. Even then the stink was not as bad. The human breath was rancid with putrefying food. The human voices grated like buzz-saws. It made Captain’s throat sore to try to frame the buzzy, grumbly syllables of their nasty little language.
In Captain’s view, the captives were nasty all over, not least because they simply refused to understand most of what he said. When he tried to tell them how perilously they had endangered themselves-not to mention the Heechee in their hiding place-their first question was: “Are you Heechee?”
In all his troubles, Captain had room for irritation at that. (It was in fact the same irritation the sailship people experienced when they learned that the Heechee called them slush dwellers. That Captain did know but didn’t think about.) “Heechee!” he groaned, then gave his abdominal shrug. “Yes. It does not matter. Be still. Stay quietly.”
“Phew,” muttered White-Noise, referring to more than the physical stink. Captain glared and turned to Burst.
“Have you disposed of their vessel?” he demanded.
“Of course,” said Burst. “It is en route to a holding port, but what of the kugelblitz?” (He did not, of course, use the word kugelblitz.)
Captain shrugged his belly morosely. He was tired. They were all tired.
They had been operating at the extreme limits of their capability for days now, and they were showing the effects. Captain tried to put his thoughts in order. The sailship had been tucked out of sight. These errant human beings had been removed from the vicinity of that most terrible of dangers, the kugelblitz, and their ship, on automatic, was being hidden away. So far he had done, he knew, as much as could have been expected of him. It had not been without cost, he thought, sorrowing for Twice; it was hard to believe that in the normal course of events he would still be enjoying her once-a-year love.
But it was not enough.
It was entirely possible, Captain reflected, that by this point there was no longer such a thing as “enough”; it might well be too late for anything he, or the entire Heechee race, could do. But he could not admit that. As long as there was a chance, he had to act. “Display the charts from their ship,” he ordered, and turned again to the rude, crude mounds of blubber he had captured. Speaking as simply as to a child he said: “Look at this chart.”
It was one of the minor annoyances of Captain’s situation that the leaner, and therefore less physically appalling, of his captives was also the nastier. “You be still,” he ordered, pointing a lean fist at Wan; his ravings had been even more nearly sense-free than the female’s. “You! Do you know what this is?”
At least the female had the sense to speak slowly. It took only a few repetitions before he understood Klara’s answer: “It is the black hole we were going to visit.”
Captain shuddered. “Yes,” he said, trying to match the unfamiliar consonants. “Exactly.” Burst was translating for the others, and he could see the tendons writhing on their limbs in shock. Captain chose his words carefully, pausing to check with the ancestral minds to make sure he had the right words:
“Listen carefully,” he said. “This is very dangerous. Long, long ago we discovered that a race of Assassins had killed off every technologically advanced civilization in the universe-at least in our own Galaxy, and in some nearby ones ...”
Well, it did not go that swiftly. Captain had to repeat and repeat, a dozen times for a single word sometimes, before the blubbery creatures could seem to grasp what he was saying. Long before he was finished his throat was raw, and the rest of his crew, though they knew as well as he what perils were involved, were frankly dozing. But he didn’t stop. That chart on the screen, with its clustered energy-sinks and its quintuple warning legend, did not let him relax.
The Assassins had done their work of slaughter millennia before the Heechee appeared on the scene. At first the Heechee had thought they were simple monsters from the primeval past, no more to be feared in their time than the Heechee equivalent of a tyrannosaur.
Then they had discovered the kugelblitz.
Captain hesitated there, looking around at his crew. The next part was hard to say, for it led to an obvious conclusion. His tendons writhing, he plunged ahead:
“It was the Assassins,” he said. “They have retreated into a black hole but the particular kind of black hole that is composed of energy, not matter, for they themselves were not made of matter. They were pure energy. Inside their black hole they exist only as a sort of standing wave in an energy sea.”
By the time he had repeated it several times, in several ways, he could see that questions were forming; but the logical deduction he feared wasn’t among them. The question was from the female, and it was only:
“How can a being composed only of energy survive?”
That was easy enough to answer. The answer was “I don’t know.”
Because Robin was, quite naturally, preoccupied with other concerns, I was not then able to discuss the kugelblitz with him in as much detail as I would have wished. Its statistics were interesting. Its temperature I calculated at about three million Kelvin, but that was not worrying. It was the energy density that disturbed me. The energy density of black-body radiation goes up as the cube of the temperature-that’s the old Stefan-Bolzmann law-but the number of photons goes up linearly with the temperature, too, so effectively it’s a fourth-power increase inside the kugelblitz. At one Kelvin it’s 4.72 electron-volts per liter. At three million it’s three million to the fourth power times that-oh, say, about 382,320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ev/ liter. And there was a bunch of liters in that thing. What’s the importance of that? That all that energy represented organized intelligences. Assassins. A universe of them, all stored in the one kugelblitz, waiting for their plans to mature and the universe to be remade to suit them.
There were, Captain knew, theories-theories that said the Assassins had once been creatures of physical bodies but had somehow cast them off- but whether the theories had any relation to fact even the oldest of the massed minds could not say.
But it was the very difficulty of survival for beings of pure energy, Captain explained, that led to the last and worst thing about the Assassins. The universe was not hospitable to them. So they decided to change the universe. Did something to create a good deal of additional mass in the universe. Caused the expansion of the universe to reverse itself~ Holed up in their kugelblitz ... and waited.
“I have heard of this missing mass often,” said the male captive eagerly. “The Dead Men when I was a child spoke of it-but they were crazy, you know.”
The female stopped him. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would they do this?”
Captain paused, bone-tired from the ordeal of trying to communicate with these dangerous primitives. Again the best answer was “I don’t know,” but there were speculations. “It is thought by the massed minds,” he said slowly, “that the physical laws of the universe were determined by random fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy at the first moment after the Big Bang. It is possible that the Assassins intend to interfere with that process. Once they have collapsed the universe and it rebounds, they may change those basic laws-the ratio of the masses of the electron and proton, the number that relates the gravitational force to the electromagnetic-all of them-and so bring about a universe in which they could live more comfortably ... but you and I could not.”
The male had been less and less able to contain himself. Now he burst out in squawking sounds, only gradually turning into intelligible words. “Ho-ho!” cried Wan, wiping away a tear. “What cowards you are! Afraid of some creatures that hide themselves in a black hole, to do something that won’t happen for billions of years! What does that matter to us?”
But the female had grasped Captain’s meaning. “Shut up, Wan,” she said, her facial muscles tightening in an almost Heechee expression. “What you’re saying is that these Assassins aren’t taking any chances. They came out once before to wipe out everybody who looked like he might be going to get civilized enough to interfere with their plan. They might do it again!”
“Exactly so!” cried Captain with pleasure. “You have said it precisely! And the danger is that you barbarians-you people,” he corrected himself, “are likely to bring them back. Using radio! Penetrating black holes! Flying all around the universe, even up to the kugelblitzes themselves!
Surely they have left monitoring systems to warn them if new technological civilizations emerge-you must very soon alert them, if you haven’t already!”
And when the prisoners had finally understood; Wan whimpering in fear, Klara white-faced and shaken; when they had been given food packets and told to rest; when the crew clustered around Captain to know what made his jaw tendons writhe like snakes, he could only say, “It is beyond belief.” To make the blubbery ones understand him had been difficult enough; for him to understand them, impossible. He said, “They say they cannot make all their fellows stop.”
“But they must,” cried White-Noise, aghast. “They are intelligent, are they not?”
“They are intelligent,” agreed Captain, “for otherwise they would not use our ships so easily. But I think they are also mad. They have no rule of law.”
“They must have law,” said Burst, unbelieving. “No society can live without law!”
“Their law is compulsion,” said Captain gloomily. “If one of them is where the agencies of enforcement cannot touch him, he may do as he pleases.”
“Then let them enforce! Let them track down every ship and make it stop!”
“You foolish White-Noise,” said Captain, shaking his head, “think about what you have said. Chase them down. Fight them. Battle them in space. Can you imagine any louder commotion than that-and can you imagine the Assassins will not hear?”
“Then what?” whispered Burst.
“Then,” said Captain, “we must reveal ourselves.” He raised his hand to still debate, and gave orders.
They were orders the crew had never thought they would hear, but they perceived Captain was right. Messages flew. In a dozen places in the Galaxy long-silent ships received their remote-controlled commands and came to life. A long dispatch was sent to the monitors near that central black hole where the Heechee lived, by now the first word of warning should have got through the Schwarzschild barrier and reinforcements should be coming out. It was a herculean task for the short-handed crew, and Twice’s absence was regretted more sorely than ever. But at last it was done, and Captain’s own ship turned on a new course for a rendezvous.
As he curled into a sleeping ball, Captain found himself smiling. It was not a joyous smile. It was the rictus of a paradox too wounding to respond to in any other way. He had feared, all through the talk with the captives, that they would come to an unwelcome conclusion: Once they knew that the Assassins had hidden themselves inside a black hole, they might easily suspect the Heechee had done the same, and so the central secret of the Heechee race would be compromised.
Compromised! He had done much more than compromise it! All on his own authority, with no higher powers to approve or forbid, Captain had awakened the sleeping fleets and summoned reinforcements from inside the event horizon. The secret was no secret anymore. After half a million years, the Heechee were coming out.
Where was I, really? It took me a long time to answer that question for myself, not least because my mentor, Albert, dismissed it as silly. “The question of ‘where’ is a foolish human preoccupation, Robin,” he grumped. “Concentrate! Learn how to do and how to feel! Reserve the philosophy and the metaphysics for those long evenings of leisure with a pipe and a stein of good beer.”
“Beer, Albert?”
He sighed. “The electronic analog of beer,” he said testily, “is quite ‘real’ enough for the electronic analog of a person. Now pay attention, please, to the inputs I am now offering you, which are video scans of the interior of the control cabin of the True Love.
I did as he said, of course. I was at least as eager as Albert to complete my training course so that I could go on to do-whatever it was possible for me to do in this new and scary state. But in my odd femtoseconds I could not help turning over that question in my mind, and I finally found an answer. Where was I, really?
I was in heaven.
Think about it. It meets most of the specifications, you know. My belly didn’t hurt anymore-I didn’t have a belly. My enslavement to mortality was over, for if I had owed a death I had paid it, and was quit for the morrow. If it was not quite eternity that waited for me, it was something pretty close. Data storage in the Heechee fans we already knew was good for at least half a million years without significant degradation-because we had the original Heechee fans still working-and that’s a lot of femtoseconds. No more earthly cares; no cares at all, except those I chose to take on for myself~
Yes. Heaven.
You probably don’t believe that, because you won’t accept that an existence as a disembodied ~clutter of databits in fan storage can have anything really “heavenly” about it. I know that because I had trouble accepting it myself. Yet “reality” is-is “really”-a subjective matter. We flesh-and-blood creatures “really” perceived reality only at second or third hand, as an analog painted by our sensory systems on the synapses of our brains. So Albert had always said. It was true-or almost true-no, it was more than true, in some ways, because we disembodied clutters have a wider choice of realities than you.
But if you still don’t believe me I can’t complain. However many times I told myself it was so, I didn’t find it very heavenly either. It had never occurred to me before how terribly inconvenient it was-financially, legally, and in many otherlies, not least maritally-to be dead.
So, coming back to the question, where was I really? Why, really I was at home. As soon as I had-well-died, Albert in remorse had turned the ship around. It took quite a while to get there, but I wasn’t doing anything special. Just learning how to pretend to be alive when in fact I wasn’t. It took the whole flight back just to make a start on that, for it was a lot harder to be born into fan storage than into the world in the old biological way-I had to actively do it, you see. Everything about me was a great deal vaster. In one sense I was limited to a Heechee-model datafan with a cubic content of not much more than a thousand cc, and in that sense I was detached from my plug-in and carried through customs and brought back to the old place on the Tappan Sea with no more trouble than you’d carry an extra pair of shoes. In another sense I was
vaster than galaxies, for I had all the accumulated datafans in the world to play in. Faster than a silver bullet, quick as quicksilver, swift as the shining lightning-I could go anywhere that any of the stored Heechee and human datastores had ever gone, and that was everywhere I had ever heard of. I heard the eddas of the slush dwellers from the sailship and hunted with the first exploring Heechee party that captured the australopithecines; I chatted with the Dead Men from Heechee Heaven (poor inarticulate wrecks, so badly stored in such haste by such inexpert help, but still remembering what it was to be alive). Well. Never mind where all I went; you don’t have time to hear. And that was all easy.
Human affairs were harder...
By the time we were back on the Tappan Sea Essie had had a chance to rest up and I had had the time and practice to recognize what I saw, and both of us had got over some of the trauma of my death. I don’t say we’d got over it all, but at least we could talk.
At first it was only talk, for I was shy of trying to display myself to my dear wife as a hologram. Then said Essie commandingly, “You, Robin! Is no longer tolerable, this talking to you on voice-only phone. Come where I can see!”
“Yes, do!” ordered the other Essie, stored with me, and Albert chimed in:
“Simply relax and let it happen. Robin. The subroutines are well in place.” In spite of them all, it took all my courage to show myself, and when I did my dear wife looked me up and down and said:
“Oh, Robin. How lousy you look!”
Now, that might sound less than loving, but I knew what Essie meant. She wasn’t criticizing; she was sympathizing, and trying to keep from tears. “I’ll do better later, darling,” I said, wishing I could touch her.
“Indeed he will, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert earnestly, which made me realize that he was sitting by my side. “At present I am helping him, and the attempt to project two images at once is difficult. I am afraid they are both degraded.”
“Then you disappear!” she suggested, but he shook his head. “There is also the need for Robin to practice-and, I think, you yourself may wish to make some programming amendments. For example, surround. I cannot give Robin a background unless I share it with him. Improvements are also needed in full animation, real-time reaction, consistency between frames-“
“Yes, yes,” groaned Essie, and set about doing things in her workshop. So did we all. There was much to do, especially for me.
I have worried about many things in my time, and almost always about the wrong ones. Worrying about dying hovered in the edges of my concerns for most of my physical life-just as it does in yours. What I feared was extinction. I didn’t get extinction. I got a whole new set of problems. A dead man, you see, no longer has any rights. He can’t own property. He can’t dispose of property. He can’t vote-not only can’t he vote in an election to a government office; he cannot even vote the large majority of shares he owns in the hundred corporations he himself has set up. When he is only a minority interest-even a very powerful one, as I was in, for example, the transport system that sent new colonists to Peggy’s Planet- he won’t even be heard. As you could say, he might as well be dead.
I was unwilling to be that dead.
It wasn’t avarice. As a stored intelligence I had very few needs; there was no risk of my being turned off because I couldn’t pay the utility bills. It was an urgency more pressing than that. The terrorists had not disappeared because the Pentagon captured their spaceship. Every day there were bombings and kidnappings and shootings. Two other launch loops were attacked and one of them damaged; a tanker of pesticide was deliberately scuttled off the coast of Queensland and so a hundred kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef was dying. There were actual battles being fought in Africa and Central America and the Near East; the lid was barely being kept on the pressure cooker. What we needed was a thousand more transports like the S. Ya., and who was going to build them if I were silent?
So we lied.
The story went out that Robin Broadhead had suffered a cerebrovascular accident, all right, but the lie that was tacked on said I was showing steady improvement. Well, I was. Not in the exact sense implied, of course. But almost as soon as we were back home I was able to talk, voice-only, with General Manzbergen and some of the people in Rotterdam; in a week I was showing myself, from time to time-swathed in lap robes supplied courtesy of Albert’s fertile imagination; after a month I allowed a PV crew to film me, tanned and fit, if thin, sailing our little catboat on the sea. Of course, the PY crew was my very own and the clips that appeared on the newscasts were more art than reportage, but it was very good art. I could not handle face-to-face confrontations. But I didn’t need to.
So all in all, you see, I wasn’t too badly off. I conducted my business. I planned, and carried out plans, to ease the ferment that fed the terrorists not enough to cure the problem, but to sit on the lid for a while longer. I had time to listen to Albert’s worries about the curious objects he called kugelblitz, and if we didn’t then know what they meant it was probably just as well. All I lacked was a body, and when I complained about that Essie said forcefully: “Dear God, Robin, is not end of world for you! How many others have had same problem!”
“To be reduced to a datastore? Not many, I should think.”
“But same problem anyhow,” she insisted. “Consider! Healthy young male goes ski-jumping, falls and cracks spine. Paraplegic, eh? No body that amounts to anything except liability, needs to be fed, needs to be diapered, needs to be bathed-you are spared that, Robin. But the important part of you, that is still here!”
“Sure,” I said. I did not add, what Essie of all people did not need to have me add, that my own definition of “important” parts included some accessories to which I had always attached particular value. Even there there were pluses to set against the losses. If I no longer had, e.g., sexual organs, there was surely no further problem about my suddenly complicated sexual relationships.
None of that had to be said. What Essie said instead was: “Buck up, old Robin. Keep in mind you are so far only first approximation of final product.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Were great problem, Robin! Here After storage was, I admit, quite imperfect. Learned much in development of new Albert for you. Had never before attempted complete storage of entire, and very valued, person unfortunately dead. The technical problems-“
“I understand there were technical problems,” I interrupted; I didn’t really want to hear, just yet, the details of the risky, untried, exquisitely complex job of pouring “me” out of the decaying bucket of my head into the waiting basin of a storage matrix.
“To be sure. Well. Now have more leisure. Now can make fine tuning. Trust me, old Robin, improvements can yet be made.”
“In me?”
“In you, certainly! Also,” she said, twinkling, “in very inadequate stored copy of self. Have good reason to believe same can be made much more interesting to you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow.” And wished more than ever for at least the temporary loan of some parts of a body, for what I wanted more than anything else just then was to put my arms around my very dear wife. And meanwhile and meanwhile the worlds went on. Even the very small worlds of my friend Audee Walthers and his own complicated loving.
When you look at them from inside, all worlds are the same size. Audee’s didn’t seem small to him. I took care of one of their problems very quickly; I gave each of them ten thousand shares of stock in the Peggy’s Planet ferry, the S. Ya. and its pendant enterprises. Janie Yee-xing didn’t have to worry about being fired anymore; she could rehire herself as a pilot if she chose, or ride the S. Ya. as passenger if she liked. So could Audee; or he could go back to Peggy’s and boss his former bosses on the oilfield; or none of the above, but lounge around in luxury for all his life; and so could Dolly. And, of course, that didn’t solve their problems at all. The three of them mooned around the guest suites for a while until finally Essie suggested we lend them the True Love for a cruise to nowhere until they got their heads straightened out, and we did.
None of them were foolish at all-like the rest of us, they acted that way now and then, maybe. They recognized a bribe when they saw one. They knew that what I really wanted was for them to keep their mouths shut about my present unpleasantly noncorporeal state. But they also knew what a friendly gift was, and there was that component in the stock transfer, too.
And what did they do, the three of them on the True Love?
I think I don’t want to say. Most of it is no one’s business but theirs. Consider. There are times in everyone’s life-certainly including yours, most definitely including my own-when what you are doing and saying is not either important or pretty. You strain at a bowel movement, you have a fugitive and shocking thought, you break wind, you tell a lie. None of it matters very much, but you do not want advertised those parts of everyone’s life in which he looks ludicrous or contemptible or mean. Usually they don’t get advertised, because there is no one to see-but now that I am vastened there is always one to see, and that is me. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, as everyone’s memories are added to the database, there are no personal mysteries left at all.
I will say this much of Audee Walthers’ private concerns. What motivated his actions and fueled his worries was that admirable and desirable thing, love. What frustrated his loving was also love. He loved his wife, Dolly, because he had schooled himself to love her all the while they were married-that was his view of how married people should be. On the other hand, Dolly had left him for another man (I use the term loosely in Wan’s case), and Janie Yee-xing had turned up to console him. They were both very attractive persons. But there were too many of them. Audee was as monogamous as I was. If he thought to make up with Dolly, there was Janie in the way-she had been kind, he owed her some sort of consideration-call it love. But between him and Janie there was Dolly: They had planned a life together and he had had no intention ever of changing it, so you could call that love, too. Complicated by some feeling that he owed Dolly some kind of punishment for abandoning him, and Janie some sort of resentment for being in the way-remember, I told you there were contemptible and ludicrous parts. Complicated much more by the equally complex feelings of Dolly and Janie
It must almost have been a relief to them when-orbiting idly in a great cometary ellipse that was pushing them out toward the asteroids and at angle to the ecliptic-whatever discussion they were having at the moment was interrupted by a gasp from Dolly and a stifled scream from Janie, and Audee Walthers turned to see on the screen a great cluster of vessels huger and more numerous and far, far bigger than any human being had seen in Earth’s solar system before.
They were scared out of their minds, no doubt.
But no more than the rest of us. All over the Earth, and everywhere in space where there were human beings and communications facilities to carry the word, there was shock and terror. It was the worst nightmare of every human being for the past century or so.
The Heechee were coming back
They didn’t hide. They were there-and so many of them! Optical sensors in the orbital stations spotted more than fifty ships-and what ships! Twelve or fourteen as big as the S. Ya. Another dozen bigger still, great globular structures like the one that had swallowed the sailship. There were Threes and Fives and some intermediate ones that the High Pentagon thought looked suspiciously like cruisers, and all of them coming straight down at us from the general direction of Vega. I could say Earth’s defenses were caught unprepared, but that would be a flattering lie. The truth was that Earth had no defenses worth mentioning. There were patrol ships, to be sure; but they had been built by Earthmen to fight other Earthmen. No one had dreamed of pitting them against the semi-mythical Heechee.
And then they spoke to us.
The message was in English, and it was short. It said: “The Heechee can’t allow interstellar travel or communication anymore except under certain conditions that they will decide and supervise. Everything else has to stop right away. They’ve come to stop it.” That was all before the speaker, with a helpless shake of the head, faded away.
It sounded a lot like a declaration of war.
It was interpreted that way, too. In the High Pentagon, in the orbiting forts of other nations, in the councils of power all over the world, there were abrupt meetings and conferences and planning sessions; ships were called in for rearming, and others were redirected toward the Heechee fleet; the orbital weapons that had been quiet for decades were checked and aligned-useless as arbalests, they might be, but if they were all we had to fight with, we would fight them. The confusion and shock and reaction swept the world.
And there was nowhere that suffered more astonishment and bewilderment than the people who made up my own happy household; for the person who gave the Heechee ultimatum Albert had recognized at once, and Essie only a moment later, and I before I even saw her face. It was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.
Gelle-Klara Moynlin, my love. My lost love. There she was, staring at me out of the frame of the PV and looking no older than the last time I’d seen her, years and decades before-and looking no better, either, because both times she was about as badly shaken up as it was possible for a person to be. Not to mention beaten up, once by me.
But if she’d been through a lot and showed it, my Klara, she had plenty in reserve. She turned from the screen when she had delivered her message to the human race and nodded to Captain. “You zaid it?” he demanded anxiously. “You gave the mezzage prezisely as I inzdructed?”
“Precisely,” said Klara, and added, “Your English is getting much better now. You could talk directly if you wanted to.”
“Is too important to take chanzes,” said Captain fretfully, and turned away. Half the tendons on his body were rippling and twitching now, and he was not alone. His loyal crew were as harried as himself, and in the communications screens that linked his ship to the others in the grand fleet he could see the faces of the other captains. It was a grand fleet, Captain reflected, studying the displays that showed them in proud array, but why was it his fleet? He didn’t need to ask. He knew the answer. The reinforcements from inside the core amounted to more than a hundred Heechee, and at least a dozen of them were entitled to call themselves senior to him if they chose. They could easily have asserted command of the fleet. They didn’t. They let it be his fleet because that made it also be his responsibility ... and his own sweet essence that would go to join the massed minds if it went wrong. “How foolish they are,” he muttered, and his communicator twitched agreement.
“I will instruct them to maintain better order,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Of course, Shoe.” Captain sighed and watched gloomily as the communicator rattled instructions to the other captains and controllers. The shape of the armada reformed itself slowly as the great cargo vessels, capable of biting a thousand-meter spherical chunk out of anything and carrying it anywhere, dropped back behind the transports and the smaller ships. “Human woman Klara,” he called. “Why do they not answer?”
She shrugged rebelliously. “They’re probably talking it over,” she said.
“Talking it over!”
“I’ve tried to tell you,” she said resentfully. “There are a dozen different major powers that have to get together, not counting a hundred little countries.”
“A hundred countries.” Captain groaned, trying to imagine such a thing. He failed...
Well. That was long and long ago, especially if you measure time in femtoseconds. So very much has happened since! So much that, vastened as I am, it is hard for me to take it all in. It is even harder to remember (whether with my own memory or some borrowed other) every detail of every event of that time, although, as you have seen, I can recall quite a lot when I want to. But that picture stays with me. There was Klara, her black brows scowling as she watched the Heechee jitter and mope; there was Wan, all but comatose and forgotten in a corner of the cabin. There were the Heechee crew, twitching and hissing to one another, and there was Captain, gazing with pride and fear at the resurrected armada on the mission he had ordered. He was gambling for the highest of stakes. He did not know what would happen next-expected anything-feared almost everything-could not be surprised, he thought, by whatever occurred ... until something did occur that surprised him very much.
“Captain!” cried Mongrel, the integrator. “There are other ships!”
And Captain brightened. “Ah!” he applauded. “At last they respond!” It was curious of the humans to do so physically rather than by means of radio, but then they were strange to begin with. “Are the ships speaking to us, Shoe?” he asked, and the communicator twitched his cheek muscles no. Captain sighed. “We must be patient, then,” he said, studying the display. The human vessels were certainly not approaching in any sensible order. It seemed, in fact, as though they had been detached from whatever errands they were on and thrown in to meet the Heechee fleet hurriedly, carelessly-almost frantically. One was in easy range of ship communication; two others farther away, and one of those battling an existing velocity that went the wrong way.
Then Captain hissed in surprise. “Human female!” he commanded. “Come here and inzdruct them to be careful! Zee what is happening!” From the nearest ship a smaller object had launched, a primitive thing that was chemically propelled, much too tiny to contain even a single person. It was accelerating directly toward the heart of the Heechee fleet, and Captain nodded to White-Noise, who instantly ordered a nudge into FI’L velocity that removed the nearest cargo vessels from danger. “They muzt not be zo zlipzhodi” he cried sternly. “A collizion could occur!”
“Not by accident,” said Klara grimly.
‘What? I do not underzdand!”
“Those are missiles,” she said, “and they’ve got nuclear warheads. That’s your answer. They’re not waiting for you to attack. They’re shooting first!”
Do you have the picture now? Can you see Captain standing there with his tendons shocked still and his jaw dropping, staring at Klara? He chews at his tough, thin lower lip and glances at the screen. There’s his fleet, the huge caravan of cargo transports resurrected from half a million years of hiding so that he can-with grave doubt; at great risk to himself offer the human race, a couple of million at a time, free transportation and safe refuge from the Assassins, in the core where the Heechee themselves hid. “Shooting?” he repeated numbly. “To hurt us? Pozzibly to kill?”
“Exactly,” flared Klara. “What did you expect? If it’s war you want, you’ll get it.”
And Captain closed his eyes, hardly hearing the horrified hiss and buzz that went around his crew as White-Noise translated. “War,” he muttered, unbelieving, and for the first time ever he thought of joining the massed minds not with fear but almost with longing; however bad it might be, how could it be worse than this?
And meanwhile...
Meanwhile, it almost went too far-but, fortunately for everyone, not quite. The Brazilian scoutship’s missile was far too slow to catch the Heechee as they dodged. By the time they were in position to fire again- long before any other human ship could come close-Captain had managed to explain to Klara, and Klara was on the communication circuits again, and the word was out. Not an invasion fleet. Not even a commando raid. A rescue mission-and a warning of what made the Heechee run and hide, and was now for us to worry about.
Vastened as I am I can smile at those pitiful old fears and apprehensions.
Not at the time, maybe. But now, ah, yes. The scales are all bigger, and a lot more exciting. There are ten thousand stored Heechee dead ones outside the core alone, and I can read them all. Have read them, nearly all. Go on reading them as I choose, whenever there is something I want to study more closely. Books on a library shelf?
They are more than that. I don’t exactly “read” them, either. It is much more like remembering them. When I “open” one of them, I open it all the way; I read it from the inside out, as though it were part of me.
It was not easy to do that, and for that matter hardly anything I have learned to do since I was vastened has come easily. But with Albert to help me and simple texts to practice on, I learned. The first datastores I accessed were only that-just data, no worse than consulting a table of logarithms. Then I had old Heechee-stored Dead Men and some of Essie’s first cases for her Here After franchises, and they were really not very well done. I was never in doubt about which part of what I was thinking was me.
But after we had straightened out the misunderstanding with Captain and I got to consult their own records, then it got hairy. There was Captain’s late love, the female Heechee named Twice. To “access” her was like waking up in the dark and putting on a whole suit of clothes that you couldn’t see-and that didn’t fit you anyway. It was not just that she was female, although that was an immense incongruity. It was not even that she was Heechee and I was human. It was what she knew, and always had known, that neither I nor any other human had guessed. Perhaps Albert had-perhaps that was what had driven him mad. But even Albert’s conjectures had not shown him a race of starfaring Assassins who stored themselves in a kugelblitz to wait for the birth of a new- and for them better-universe.
But once the shock was over, Twice became a friend. She’s really a nice person, once you get past the weirdness, and we have a lot of interests in common. The Heechee library of stored intelligences is not merely Heechee, or even human. There are musty old querulous voices that once belonged to winged creatures from an Antares planet, and slugs from a globular cluster. And, of course, there are the slush dwellers. Twice and I spent a lot of time studying them and their eddas. Time, you see, is what I have plenty of, with my femtosecond synapses.
I have enough time, almost, to want to visit the core itself, and perhaps someday I will. Not for some long time, though. Meanwhile and meanwhile, Audee and Janie Yee-xing have gone there, helping to pilot a mission that will be there for six or seven months-or, as we measure time out here, a few centuries; by the time they come back, Dolly’s presence should no longer be a problem, while Dolly herself is happy enough with her PV career. And Essie has the grace not to be too happy, lacking the sweet physical presence of myself, but seems all the same to have made a good adjustment. What she likes best (next to me) is her work, and she’s got plenty of it-improving the Here After; using the same processes that make CHON-food to make more important organic items ... such as, she hopes before very long, spare parts for people who need them, so that nobody need ever steal another person’s organs again ... And, when you come right down to it, most people are happy. Now that we’ve borrowed the Heechee fleet and can lift a million people a month with all their effects to any of fifty fine planets waiting to be used. It’s the pioneers and the covered wagons all over again, and a bright career for anyone.
Especially for me.
And then there was Klara.
We met at last, of course. I would have insisted, and anyway in the long run she couldn’t have been kept away. Essie took a launch loop to meet her in orbit and escort her personally, in our own aircraft, down to the Tappan Sea. It made for a little problem in etiquette, I’m sure. But otherwise Klara would have been swamped in media people trying to find out what it was like to be a “captive of the Heechee” or “kidnapped by the wolf-child Wan” or whatever other phrases they chose to bandy and, actually, I guess she and Essie got along pretty well. It wasn’t as though they had to fight over me. I didn’t exist to fight over, in that sense.
So I practiced my best holographic smiles and designed my best holographic surroundings and waited for her to get there. She came in by herself to the big atrium room where I was waiting-Essie must have had the tact to show her the way and disappear. And when Klara came through the door I could tell by the way she stopped, and gasped, that she had expected me to look a lot more dead.
“Hello, Klara,” I said. It wasn’t much of a speech, but what’s the right thing to say in those circumstances? And she said:
“Hello, Robin.” She didn’t seem to be able to think of anything to add to it, either. She stood looking at me until I thought to ask her to sit down. And I, of course, did a lot of looking at her, in all the multi-phased ways we electronically stored intelligences have; but in all those ways she looked pretty damned good. Tired, yes. She’d had some hard times. And dear Klara was not a classic beauty, not with those dark and thick eyebrows and that strong, muscular body-but, yes, she looked fine. I guess the staring session made her nervous, because she cleared her throat and said, “I understand you’re going to make me rich.”
“Not me, Klara. Just giving back to you your share of what we earned together.”
“Seems to have multiplied a lot.” She grinned. “Your, uh-Your wife says I can have fifty million dollars in cash.”
“You can have more than that.”
“No, no. Anyway, there is more-it seems I get shares in a lot of companies, too. Thanks, Robin.”
“You’re welcome.”
And then there was another silence, and then-would you believe it?-the next words out of my mouth were: “Klara, I’ve got to know! Have you been hating me all this time?”
It was the question, after all, that had been on my mind for thirty years.
Even then, the question struck me as incongruous. How it struck Klara I can’t say, but she sat there with her mouth open for a moment, and then she swallowed and shook her head.
And then she began to laugh. She laughed loud and full-bodied, and when she had finished laughing she knuckled the corner of her eye, still chuckling as she said, “Thank God, Robin! At least something hasn’t changed. You’ve died. You’ve got a mourning widow. The world’s on the brink of the biggest changes ever. Some scary creatures are likely out to screw up just everything, and ... and ... and you’re dead. And what you’re worried about is your own damn feelings of guilt!”
And I laughed, too.
For the first time in, my God, half my life, the last little vestige of guilt was gone. It was hard to identify what it felt like; it had been a long time since I’d known that liberation. I said, still laughing myself, “I know I sound stupid, Klara. But it’s been a long time for me, and I knew you were out there in that black hole with time slowed down-and I didn’t know what you were thinking. I thought maybe you were, I don’t know blaming me for deserting you-“
“But how could I, Robin? I didn’t know what happened to you. Do you want to know what I was really feeling? I was feeling terrified and numb, because I knew you were gone, and I thought you were dead.”
“And”-I grinned-“you finally get back here and I am!” I could see that she was more sensitive about jokes in that area than I was. “It’s all right,” I said. “Really all right. I’m just fine, and so’s the whole world!”
I really was. I wished I could touch her, of course, but that was beginning to seem part of a remote childhood past; what was present was that she was here, and safe, and the universe was open before us. And when I said so her jaw dropped again. “You’re so damned optimistic!” she blazed.
I was honestly surprised. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“The Assassins! They’re going to come out sometime, and what are we going to do? If they can scare the Heechee, they scare the hell out of me.”
“Ah, Klara,” I said, understanding at last. “I see what you mean. You mean it’s like it used to be for us when we knew the Heechee had been somewhere and might come back, and knew they’d been able to do things we couldn’t hope to do-“
“Exactly! We’re no match for the Assassins!”
“No,” I said, grinning, “we’re not. And we weren’t any match for the Heechee, either-then. But by the time they did come out-we were. With any luck at all we’ll have time before we have to face the Assassins.”
“So what? They’ll still be an enemy!”
I shook my head. “Not an enemy, Klara,” I said. “Just another resource.”
Frederik Pohl has been everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurians), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of Galaxy in the 1950s, he helped set the tone for a decade of SF-including his own memorable stories such as The Space Merchants (in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth). His latest novel is The Cool War. He has also written The Way the Future Was~. a memoir of his forty-five years in science fiction. Frederik Pohl was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, and now lives in New York City.