The Annals of the Heechee Read online

  So say I, and I ought to know.

  You never saw a happier bunch of machine-stored citizens than the folks who lived on Wrinkle Rock. It really was a rock. It was a lumpy old asteroid, a few kilometers through, more or less, just like the million others that circle the Sun between Jupiter and Mars or some other place. Well—not just like. This particular asteroid was pierced and drilled with tunnels from crust to crust. No human being had drilled them. We found it that way; and that was the other reason why it was the best place to have the celebration for the hundredth anniversary of human interstellar flight.

  Wrinkle Rock, you see, was quite an unusual asteroid, even a unique one. Originally it circled the Sun in an orbit at right angles to the ecliptic. That was the merely unusual part. The unique part was that when it was found, it had been stuffed full of ancient Heechee spaceships. Not just one or two, but lots of them—nine hundred and twenty-four, in fact! Ships that still worked!—well, that worked most of the time, anyway, especially if you didn’t care where you were going. We never knew where that would be, at first. We got in the ship, and we fired ’er up, and leaned back, and waited, and prayed.

  Sometimes we hit lucky.

  More often, we died. Most of the ones of us still around for the party were the ones who had been lucky.

  But every successful voyage in a Heechee ship taught us something, and by and by we could go anywhere in the Galaxy, and even be pretty sure of arriving alive. We even improved on the Heechee technology in a few ways. They used rockets to get from dirtside to low orbit; we used Lofstrom loops. Then the asteroid wasn’t necessary anymore to the people running the space-exploration program.

  So they moved it into Earth orbit.

  First they were going to turn it into a museum. Then they decided to make it a home for survivors of the Heechee trips. That’s when we began to call it Wrinkle Rock. Before that its name had been Gateway.

  Now, here we are going to come up against another communication problem, because how do I say what Essie and I did next?

  The easy way is just to say we partied.

  Well, we did that, all right. That’s what you do at parties. We flitted around in our disembodied way to greet and hug and trade catch-up stories with our disembodied friends—not that all our friends on the Rock were disembodied, but we didn’t bother with the meat ones right away. (I don’t want to give the impression we don’t love our meat friends. They are just as dear to us as the machine-stored ones, but, my God, they’re tediously slow.)

  So for the next tens of thousands of milliseconds it was just one long succession of, “Marty! Long time no see!” and, “Oh, Robin, look how young Janie Yee-xing has made self!” and, “Remember the way this place used to smell?” It went on for a long time, because after all this was a pretty big party. Well, I’ll give you the numbers. After about the first fifty big hugs and glad lies I took a moment to call up my faithful data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein. “Albert,” I said when he ambled in, blinking at me amiably, “how many?”

  He sucked his pipe a moment, then pointed the stem at me. “Quite a lot, I’m afraid. There were, all in all, thirteen thousand eight hundred forty-two Gateway prospectors, first to last. Some are, of course, irretrievably dead. A number of others have chosen not to come, or couldn’t, or perhaps are not here yet. But my present count is that three thousand seven hundred twenty-six are present, about half of whom are machine-stored. There are also, to be sure, a number of guests of former prospectors, as in the case of Mrs. Broadhead, not to mention a number of patients here for medical reasons unconnected with exploration.”

  “Thank you,” I said; and then, as he started to leave, “One more thing, Albert. Julio Cassata. It has been bugging me to try to figure out just why he is getting nasty about the Institute workshops, and especially why he is here at all. I’d appreciate it if you could look into the matter.”

  “But I already am doing that, Robin.” Albert smiled. “I’ll report to you when I think I have some information. Meanwhile, have a nice time.”

  “I already am,” I said, satisfied. An Albert Einstein is a handy gadget to have around; he takes care of things when I’m having fun. So I went back to partying with an easy mind.

  We didn’t know all of the 3,726 reuniting veterans. But we knew an awful lot of them; and that’s what makes it a little hard to tell you exactly what we were doing, because who wants to hear how many times one of us shrieked to one of them, or one of them cried to one of us, “What a surprise! How wonderful you look!”

  We zoomed through gigabit space all up and down and through the riddled quadrants and levels and tunnels of the old rock, greeting this one and that one of our colleagues and machine-stored peers. We had drinks with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle—Sergei had been Essie’s classmate in Leningrad before taking off for Gateway and, eventually, a mean, lingering death from radiation exposure. We spent a long time at a cocktail party in the Gateway museum, wandering with glasses in hand around the exhibits of artifacts from Venus and Peggys Planet, and bits and pieces of tools and fire pearls and prayer-fan datastores from all over the galaxy. We ran into Janie Yee-xing, who had been going with our friend Audee Walthers III before he took off to visit the Heechee in the core. Probably she’d wanted to marry him, I thought, but the question no longer was relevant, because Janie had got herself killed trying to land a chopper in the middle of a winter-weather hurricane on a planet called Persephone. “Of all dumb things,” I said, grinning at her. “An aircraft accident!” And then I had to apologize, because nobody likes to hear that their death was dumb.

  Those were the stored souls like us, the ones we could talk to easily and without intermediaries. Of course, there were a lot of meat people we wanted to greet, too.

  But that was a whole other problem.

  Being a disembodied mind in gigabit space is not easily described.

  In a way, it’s like sex.

  That is, it’s something that you can’t easily say what it’s like to someone who hasn’t tried it. I know this about sex, because I’ve tried to describe the joys of making love to some rather odd people—well, not exactly people but intelligences—never mind who they were just yet—and it takes a lot of work. After many milliseconds of listening to my attempts at description and discussion and metaphor—and a lot of incomprehension—what they’ve said was something like, “Oh, yeah, now I get it! It’s like that other thing you do—sneezing—right? When you know you have to, and you can’t do it, only you have to? And it gets to be more and more of an itch until you can’t stand it if you don’t sneeze, and then you do, and it feels good? Is that right?”

  And I say, “No, that’s wrong,” and give up.

  It’s just as hard to tell what it’s like in gigabit space. I can describe some of the sorts of things I do there, though. For instance, when we were drinking with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle, we weren’t “really” in the Spindle. A Spindle did, actually, exist; it was the central hollow in the Gateway asteroid. At one time the bar it contained—it was called the Blue Hell—had been every prospector’s favorite place for drinking and gambling and trying to get up enough courage to sign on for one of those terrifying, often fatal and one-way rides in a Heechee ship. But the “real” Spindle wasn’t used for drinking anymore. It had been converted into a sunlamped solarium for the feeblest cases among the geriatric inhabitants of Wrinkle Rock.

  Did that cause us any problems? Not a bit! We just created our own simulated Spindle, complete with Blue Hell gambling casino, and we sat there with Sergei, swilling down icy vodka and nibbling pretzels and smoked fish. The simulation had tables, bartenders, pretty serving waitresses, a three-piece band playing hits of half a century ago, and a noisy, celebrating, party crowd.

  It had, in fact, everything you would expect in a happy little gin mill except one thing. “Reality.” None of it was “real.”

  The whole scene, including some of the partying people, was nothing but a collection of simulations ta
ken out of machine storage. Just as I am, just as Essie is in her portable form—just as Sergei was.

  You see, we didn’t have to be in the Spindle, real or otherwise. When we sat down to have a drink, we could have created any setting we liked. We often did, Essie and I. “Where want to dine?” Essie would ask, and I’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, Lutece? La Tour d’Argent? Or, no, I know, I’ve got a taste for fried chicken. How about a picnic in front of the Taj Mahal?”

  And then our support systems would dutifully access the files marked “Taj Mahal” and “Chicken, fried,” and there we would be.

  Of course, neither the background nor the food and drinks would be “real”—but neither were we. Essie was a machine-stored analog of my dear wife, who was still alive somewhere or other—and still my wife, too. I was the stored remainder of me, what was left after I died on the exciting occasion when we first met a living Heechee. Sergei was stored Sergei, because he’d died, too. And Albert Einstein—

  Well, Albert was something else entirely; but we kept him with us, because he was a hell of a lot of fun at a party.

  And none of that made any difference! The drinks hit just as hard, the smoked fish was just as fat and salty, the little bits of raw crudités were just as crisp and tasty. And we never gained weight, and we never had hangovers.

  While meat people—

  Well, meat people were a whole other thing.

  There were plenty of meat people among the 3,726 Gateway veterans gathered to celebrate the Rock’s hundredth anniversary. A lot of them were good friends. A lot of the others were people I would have loved to have for friends, because all us old prospectors have a lot in common.

  The difficulty with meat people is trying to carry on a conversation with them. I’m fast—I operate in gigabit time. They’re slow.

  Fortunately, there’s a way of dealing with the situation, because otherwise trying to talk to one of those torpid, tardy, flesh and blood people would drive me right out of my mind.

  When I was a kid in Wyoming, I used to admire the chess masters who hung around the parks, pushing their greasy pieces over the oil-smeared boards. Some of them could play twenty games at once, moving from board to board. I marveled. How could they keep track of twenty positions at once, remembering every move, when I could barely keep one in my head?

  Then I caught on. They didn’t remember anything at all.

  They simply came to a board, took in the position, saw a strategy, made a move, and went on to the next. They didn’t have to remember anything. Their chess-playing minds were so quick that any one of them could take the whole picture in while his opponent was scratching his ear.

  See, that’s the way it is with me and meat people. I could not stand to carry on a conversation with a living person without doing at least three or four other things at the same time. They stood like statues! When I saw my old buddy Frankie Hereira, he was licking his lips as he watched some other ancient codger struggling to open a bottle of champagne. Sam Struthers was just coming out of the men’s room, his mouth opening to shout a greeting to some other live person in the hall. I didn’t speak to either. I didn’t even try. I just set up an image of myself and started it in motion, one for each of them. Then I “went away.”

  I don’t mean I actually went anywhere; I just paid attention to other things. I didn’t have to stay around, because the subroutines in my programs were perfectly capable of walking one of my doppels toward Frankie and one toward Sam, and smiling, and opening “my” mouth to speak when they noticed “me.” By the time I had to make a decision on what it was I wanted to say, I would be back there.

  But that was the meat people. Fortunately for my boredom threshold, there were lots of machine-stored people (or not exactly all of them people) as well. Some were very old friends. Some were people I knew because everybody knew them. There was Detweiler, who had discovered the Voodoo Pigs, and Liao Xiechen, who was a terrorist until the Heechee appeared and he changed sides. He was the one who had exposed the entire gang of murderers and bomb-throwers in the American space program. There was even Harriman, who had actually seen a supernova explode, and coasted long enough on the expanding wavefront to win a five-million-dollar science award in the old days. There was Mangrove, who wound up in a Heechee station orbiting a neutron star and found out that the queer, tiny, maneuverable globes moored to the station were actually sample collectors and could be made to go down to the star’s surface and bring back some eleven tons—a chunk almost as large as a fingernail—of neutronium. Mangrove ultimately died of the radiation dose he got bringing it home, but that didn’t keep him from joining us on Wrinkle Rock.

  So I raced along the conduits of Gateway, quick as the lightning in the serried sky, and greeted a hundred old friends and new. Sometimes Portable-Essie was with me. Sometimes she was off on her own excursions of greeting. Faithful Albert was never out of call, but he never joined in the hugs and embraces, either. Fact was, he never showed himself except to me, or when invited to. Nobody in that giggly, steamy, high-school-reunion, New-Year’s-Eve, wedding-reception atmosphere wanted to bother with a mere data-retrieval system, even though he was about the very best friend I had ever had.

  So when we were back in the Spindle, back drinking with Sergei Borbosnoy, and things got a little tedious for me, I whispered, “Albert?”

  Essie gave me a look. She knew what I was doing. (After all, she wrote his program, not to mention my own.) She didn’t mind; she just went on rattling along in Russian to Sergei. There wasn’t anything wrong in that, because of course I understand Russian—speak it fluently, along with a bunch of other languages, because, after all, I’ve had plenty of time to learn. What was wrong was that they were talking about people I didn’t know and didn’t care about.

  “You called, O Master?” Albert murmured in my ear.

  I said, “Don’t be cute. Have you figured out what’s going on with Cassata?”

  “Not entirely, Robin,” he said, “because if I had I would of course have sought you out to report. However, I have drawn some interesting inferences.”

  “Infer ahead,” I whispered, smiling at Sergei as he poured another freezing shot of vodka into my glass without even looking at me.

  “I perceive three discrete questions,” said Albert comfortably, settling himself down to a nice, long tutorial. “The question of the relevance of the Institute seminars to JAWS, the question of the maneuvers, and the question of the presence of General Cassata himself here. These could be further subdivided into—”

  “No,” I whispered, “they could not. Quick and simple, Albert.”

  “Very well. The seminars are, of course, directly related to the central question of the Foe: How they could be recognized through their signatures, and why they wish to alter the evolution of the universe. The only real puzzle is why JAWS should now express concern about the Institute’s seminars, since there have been many similar conferences, without objection, from JAWS. I believe that that is related to the question of the maneuvers. For this belief I can adduce a datum: Since the maneuvers began, all communications from both the JAWS satellite and the Watch Wheel have been embargoed.”

  “Emwhat?”

  “Embargoed, yes, Robin. Cut off. Censored. Prohibited. No communication of any sort with either is allowed. I infer that, first, these events are related, and both are related to the maneuvers. As you know, there was a false alarm on the Watch Wheel some weeks ago. Perhaps it was not a false alarm—”

  “Albert! What are you saying?” I wasn’t speaking out loud, but Essie gave me a puzzled look. I smiled reassuringly, or tried to, though there was nothing reassuring about the thought.

  “No, Robin,” said Albert soothingly, “I have no reason to believe the alarm was other than false. But perhaps JAWS is more concerned than I; this would account for the sudden maneuvers, which appear to have included testing some new weapons—”

  “Weapons!”

  Another look from Essie. Out loud I said cheer
ily, “Na zhdrovya,” and raised my glass.

  “Exactly, Robin,” said Albert gloomily. “That leaves only the presence of General Cassata to account for. I believe that is quite simply explained. He is keeping an eye on you.”

  “He isn’t doing a very good job of it.”

  “That’s not exactly true, Robin. It is a fact that the general seems to be quite involved in his own affairs just now, yes. He is in fact closeted with a young lady, and has been for some time. But before retiring with the young person he ordered that no spacecraft may leave for the next thirty minutes, organic time. I think it quite probable that he will check up on you before that time has expired, and meanwhile you cannot leave the asteroid.”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “I think not,” Albert corrected me deferentially.

  “He can’t do that!”

  Albert pursed his lips. “In the long run, that is so,” he agreed. “Certainly you will sooner or later be able to get higher authority to overrule General Cassata, since there is still some degree of civilian control of the Joint Assassin Watch Service. However, for the moment I am afraid he has the asteroid sealed.”