The Annals of the Heechee Read online

  They even visited the Dream Seats.

  Children were rarely allowed there, but Sneezy’s father guaranteed their behavior. So one day, on Bremsstrahlung’s time off, they were permitted to gaze at the emplacements from a safe distance.

  It was a thrilling experience. The Seats were sited in clusters of four, every three hundred meters or so around the external perimeter of the Wheel. Each cluster was in a little bubble of crystal, made of a substance that was transparent not only to light but to every other form of electromagnetic radiation. Was that necessary? No one could say for sure, but perhaps it would help—anything that could make the task of the watchers more sure was worth doing, even if there was only a remote chance it mattered.

  As was normal when there was no Drill, only one seat in each group of four was occupied. “Hold hands,” Bremsstrahlung instructed, “and you can come just a little closer.”

  Warily the children tiptoed within a meter of the on-duty watcher, a human female from another sector, her eyes closed, her ears stopped. She almost looked asleep as they peered at her through the interstices of the glittering web of antenna-metal that surrounded her. Through the crystal they could see below them—“below” by the geometry of the slowly spinning Wheel—space itself, including the distant muddy blob of the kugelblitz. Sneezy’s hand tightened watchfully on Oniko’s. He no longer was repelled by the touch of human flesh—so lardy, so springy, so fat. In fact, he rather enjoyed holding her hand. What surprised him was that she seemed rather to enjoy holding his, since Harold had not failed to let him know, long since, that to a human being the feel of hot, hard, writhing Heechee flesh was equally distasteful. Perhaps Oniko did not find it so. Or perhaps she was simply too polite to show it.

  Bremsstrahlung escorted them back to the public parts of the Wheel when they had looked their fill. Then he returned to get ready for his own shift. On the way back to their home area the children gabbled excitedly about what they had seen, pausing only to be diverted by a class trip of tiny ones, going to the aquarium for the first time.

  The aquarium wasn’t just a sort of museum. Much of the Heechee diet was seafood, and so was some of the human. Many of the animals in the tanks were sooner or later going to wind up on a table. Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko followed the little kids, tolerant of their chatter, amused by their reactions to the weird, wide-mouthed seasnakes that Heechee loved, or the squid that were for human tables. One of the squid was near the tank wall, and as a three-year-old came close it flashed from white to mottled and ejected a plume of ink as it rocketed away. The child jumped and gasped. Harold laughed. Oniko laughed. And, after a moment, Sneezy laughed, too, although of course the Heechee laugh was not quite the same sound or rictus as the human.

  “Silly little kid,” Oniko said with maternal fondness. “I remember the first time I—”

  She did not finish.

  There was a sudden squeal of warning from all over, and the lights began to flash. “Drill! Drill!” cried the schoolthings.

  As everyone dropped at once to the floor, Harold managed a quick question. “Why do we have a Drill now?” he demanded of the nearest schoolthing.

  “Lie still! Empty your mind!” it ordered, but then it relented for just one second. “It is only a Class Two,” it said. “An unscheduled ship is approaching—now take your position!”

  And so they did, all of them, even the tinies. But Sneezy had trouble emptying his mind, because there was a question. Yes, of course, when a ship came in there was always a Class Two Drill, that was not very frightening…but never before in his experience had a ship come in unscheduled.

  And this ship was from JAWS.

  By the time the Drill was over and Sneezy was back in his parents’ home, the unscheduled ship was secured and silent, but it was still there. And the rumors had flown like fire.

  Bremsstrahlung confirmed them. “Yes, Sternutator,” he said with worry, “you must leave. All children must. The Wheel is being evacuated of everyone not an adult, because we can’t risk a child radiating at the wrong time.”

  “I am second in my class in satori, Father!”

  “Of course you are! But the Joint Assassin Watch has ordered that you must go with the others. Please, my son. There is nothing we can do about it.”

  “They’ll take very good care of you,” Femtowave put in, but her voice was even hoarser with worry than his father’s.

  “But where will I go?” Sneezy begged.

  His parents looked to each other. “To a good place,” his mother said at last. “We don’t know where, yet. You children all come from different places, and I don’t think they will get all of you to your proper homes at once. But truly, Sterny, you will be taken care of. And it is only for a while, until this false alarm is cleared up. You will be back with us soon.”

  “I hope that is true,” said his father.

  And there was no time, no time for any last visits to the zoo or the coconut grove or anywhere, just one short session at the schoolhall so that each could pick up possessions and say good-bye to the schoolthing.

  The schoolthing couldn’t keep order that day. It didn’t try. It only dealt with each student separately, bidding a farewell, making sure the lockers were emptied, while all the other children chattered excitedly in anticipation and fear. None of them knew where they were going yet. Harold, of course, was praying for his own home.

  Sneezy listened wistfully. He wondered if he envied Harold. Was Peggys Planet really the way Harold pictured it? Summer all the time? and no school? and millions of hectares of wild fruits and berries to pick any time, any day?

  “But it’s a long way,” Harold was saying. “I bet I’ll have to change ships. That means I’ll be a month getting home.”

  “It would take me nearly three months,” Sneezy said wistfully.

  “Oh, but that’s because of your stupid Schwarzschild barrier,” Harold explained, quite unnecessarily to a boy who had already penetrated it once. “You don’t think you’re going to go there, do you, Dopey? Good heavens, they’re not going to run a whole ship for a couple of Heechee kids. That would be just inefficient. They wouldn’t do that!”

  In that, Harold was right. There were not that many children on the Wheel, and so the great Earth-built ship that received them was going to only one place. To Earth.

  Harold was crushed. Oniko was fearful. Sneezy was—well, Sneezy did not know from one moment to the next what he was, because the excitement and the pangs of leaving his parents and the nagging worry about what this sudden and unprecedented move meant all fought for dominance in his mind. The result was only confusion.

  They had less than twelve hours to board. That was a good thing. The less time for the excitement to melt away and the fears and miseries to grow, the better.

  At last they trooped one by one into the great interstellar vehicle as soon as the hundred new Watchers and their gear had been taken off. Oniko’s parents were there, hugging their daughter without words. So were Mr. and Mrs. Wroczek, and Sneezy politely looked away as Harold began to cry at the parting.

  “Good-bye, Father. Good-bye, Mother,” said Sneezy.

  “Good-bye, dear Sternutator,” said his father, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. Sneezy’s mother didn’t even try.

  “It will be a nice place, Sterny, dear,” she promised, hugging him. “We won’t be able to hear from you normally, because they’ve blacked out transmissions to the Wheel—but—oh, Sterny!” She hugged him hard. Heechee can’t cry, but there is nothing in their physiology or minds that keeps them from feeling loss as keenly as any human.

  Sneezy turned away.

  It was not a Heechee custom to kiss on parting, but as Sneezy entered the ship he wished that, in this case, an exception had been made.

  3

  Albert Speaks

  I’m Albert Einstein, or at least Robinette Broadhead calls me that, and I think I should clarify some matters.

  With all his cutesy false starts, Robin has still fa
iled to convey a good deal of data which I believe to be essential. Among others, who the Foe were. I will help out. That’s what I do; I help Robinette Broadhead.

  I should explain my own situation.

  To begin with, I’m not the “real” Albert Einstein. He’s dead. He died quite a good many years before it was possible, at least for human beings, to store a person as a database after the meat part wore out. As a result, we don’t even have a real copy of that Albert Einstein around.

  I am at most a rough approximation of what he might have been if he had been me.

  What I really am is something quite different from any sort of reconstruction of a human being. Basically I am a simple data-retrieval system, dressed up with some fancy touches for pretty’s sake. (The way people used to conceal a bedside communications phone inside a teddy bear.) In order to make me more user-friendly, my user, Robinette, requested that I should look like and act like a person. So my programmer gave him me. She was glad to do it. She liked humoring Robinette, since she was not only his programmer but his wife, S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead.

  So the way I look and act is really only a whim of Robin’s.

  I think it is fair to say that Robin is a man of many whims, and many moods, too. I’m not disparaging him. He can’t help it. Robin started out organic.

  For that reason, he suffered the handicaps of all meat beings. His intelligence was only what could be produced by sloppy biochemical means. His mind was not precise, and certainly not mathematical. It was the product of a meat brain, bathed in constant floods of hormones, biased by sensory inputs like pain and pleasure, and quite capable of screwing itself up over programming elements beyond my personal experience, like “doubt” and “guilt” and “jealousy” and “fear.” Imagine living like that! Actually, it’s a wonder to me that he functions as well as he does. I don’t see how I could, myself. But then I can’t say I really understand these things, since I have never felt them, except in an analog sense.

  That doesn’t mean I can’t deal with them. Essie Broadhead’s programs can do damn near anything. “Understanding” is quite unnecessary—you don’t have to understand how a spacecraft works to get into it and push the buttons. I can project how given stimuli will affect Robin’s behavior at least as well as he can, and I don’t have to “understand” to do it.

  After all, I don’t understand the square root of minus one, either, but that doesn’t keep me from finding useful ways of employing it in equations. It works. e to the i times pi power equals -1. It does not in the least matter that all the quantities involved are irrational, transcendental, imaginary, or negative.

  It doesn’t matter that Robin himself is all these things, either. He is. All of them. Especially he is negative a good part of the time, in ways that keep him from being that other irrational, not to say transcendental, state, “happy.”

  This is silly of him. By every objective standard, Robinette Broadhead has it made. He has everything human beings desire. He has vast wealth—well, it is true that he does not now personally have the wealth, since he is now machine-stored and there are fussy human legal problems over ownership by dead people; but the actual wealth is vested in his real wife (or “widow”), and there is so much of it that if Robin wants to spend a few hundred million here or there, he has but to say the word. He even uses the wealth wisely. Most of it he spends on the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research, with its facilities in places like London, Brasilia, Johore, Peggys Planet, and a dozen locations in the old United States, not to mention its fleet of exploration ships always busy poking around the Galaxy. Because of this his life has “purpose” and he has a lot of “power.” What’s left? “Health”? Of course he has that; if anything went wrong, it would simply be corrected at once. “Love”? Certainly! He has the best of all possible wives in S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead—at least, he has the machine-stored simulation of her and the simulation is essentially perfect, since S. Ya. wrote her doppel’s program herself.

  In short, if ever a meat person, or anyway former meat person, had reason to be happy, Robin is that person.

  This just shows that “reason” is not dominant in his psyche. All too often he isn’t happy at all. His endless concerns and confusions about who he loved, and what he meant by “love,” and whether he was being “fair” or “faithful” to his various love partners, are typical examples.

  For instance:

  Robin loved Gelle-Klara Moynlin, both being meat people at the time. They had a fight. They made up. Then, through an accident neither of them had any opportunity to prevent, he abandoned her in a black hole for thirty years.

  Well, that was a bad thing, of course. But it wasn’t his fault. Yet it took him endless hours of couch time with my colleague, the computer psychoanalyst Sigfrid von Shrink, to “relieve” his mind of the “guilt” that had caused him so much “pain.”

  Irrational? You bet. But there’s more.

  Meanwhile, while Klara was hopelessly out of reach—as far as he knew, forever—he met and fell “in love” with and married my basic creator, S. Ya. Lavorovna. By any figure of merit I can find to assess such matters, that was a fine thing. But then Klara reappeared. When Robin had to confront the fact that he “loved” both of them, he simply went into fugue.

  What made it worse was that he happened to die around the same time. (At least, his meat body wore out and he had to be machine-stored in gigabit space.) One would think that would simplify things. It is obvious that these biological matters really should not have caused him any further concern. He didn’t have any biology anymore. But no, not Robin Broadhead!

  Robin is not hopelessly stupid, either. (I mean, for a former meat person.) He is as aware as I that, anthropologically speaking, questions of “fidelity” and “jealousy” and “sexual guilt” have only to do with the biological fact that “love” implies “intercourse” which implies “reproduction”—jealousy is at root only a question of ensuring that the child one raises is genetically one’s own. He knows that. Unfortunately, he can’t feel that. Even the fact that he never biologically fathered any children in the first place doesn’t change anything.

  What strange things meat people worry about!—and go on worrying about, even when they have been promoted to nonmaterial existence, like me.

  But Robin did worry, a lot, and when Robin worried, I worried too. About him. Because that’s one of the other things I was programmed to do.

  I observe that I am becoming nearly as discursive as Robin.

  Well, that can’t be helped. “Like master, like man,” as the old meat-person proverb says—even when the “man” is a purely synthetic artifact of subroutines and databases, like me.

  We come now to the Foe.

  They were the race of intelligent beings, nonmeat (in fact nonmaterial) that the Heechee had learned of. The Foe (the Heechee called them “the Assassins” and so did many humans, but I never liked that term) had wiped out at least four civilizations and damaged a couple of others.

  It was apparent that they didn’t like meat people of any kind.

  It even appeared that they didn’t like matter of any kind. Somehow—even I did not know how—they had added so much mass to the universe that it was slowing its rate of expansion. At some time in the future it would collapse back on itself and rebound; the only logical inference was that then the Foe would somehow so tamper with it that the next universe would be more hospitable to them.

  Viewed objectively, this was an impressive and elegant project. I was never able to make Robin see that, though; he remained matter-oriented because of his unfortunate background.

  And the Foe were still around, locked away in their own black hole—that atypical black hole that contained no matter but was a sink of energy. (The energy that composed its mass was, of course, the Foe themselves.) There was a name for such a black hole. It was called a “kugelblitz.”

  When Robin and I first met the Heechee named Captain and his crew, it was traumatic for
the Heechee.

  Their way of dealing with the “Assassins” had been to run away and hide. They could not believe that human beings were so reckless as to choose any other course. They told us what was going on and were shocked when we refused to follow their example.

  When Captain was at last convinced that humanity (including the likes of me in that category for the moment) was going to keep our Galaxy, he recognized the inevitable. He didn’t like it. But he accepted it. He hightailed it back to the place where the Heechee had run to when they perceived what a threat the Foe were: the great black hole at the core of the Galaxy. His errand was to tell the rest of the Heechee that all their plans were ruined by this impudent race of human beings, and to get them to help us.

  This was a pretty urgent matter. The Heechee possessed enormous resources. Even though we had spent decades learning their technology and adding it to our own, before ever living human laid eyes on living Heechee, there was bound to be much we didn’t know about. So Captain promised to mobilize Heechee help for us—immediately—to help prepare for the day when the Foe might come out to destroy a few more races of meat people.

  Unfortunately, what “immediately” meant to the Heechee was nothing like what “immediately” meant to us—even if we include the pitifully slow-motion meat human beings as part of “us.” The clocks in black holes run slow. The time-dilation factor at the core made them slower than human, by a factor of about forty thousand to one.

  Fortunately, “immediately” at least meant as soon as ever they possibly could, and in fact they responded astonishingly fast—everything considered. The first Heechee vessel to pop out of their ergosphere turned up practically instantly—that is, in only eighteen years! The second came along only nine years after that.