Heechee Rendezvous Part 18

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. "d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d 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 sweats.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+p, some of which had never been a.n.a.lyzed 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 ma.s.s. You remember, Robin. That ma.s.s 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 flas.h.i.+ng their little pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+p!" Dolly whispered, shakily. And so it was.

Albert said so. He turned around gravely. "That is a s.h.i.+p, yes, Mrs. Walthers," he said. "It is, in fact, the Heechee s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.s, I don't know what a kugelblitz is and I don't much care. What I care about is that you've d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s pulled s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s."

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 ma.s.s," 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 quant.i.ty of energy, rather than a large quant.i.ty of matter-but as n.o.body had ever seen one he didn't really listen. I also told him about the general state of intergalactic s.p.a.ce-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-ca.n.a.l 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, s.p.a.cing 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."

22 Is There Life after Death?

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 a.s.saulting 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. a.s.saulted. 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 h.e.l.l?

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 s.p.a.ced 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. a.s.suming, 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 ma.s.s. 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 stars.h.i.+ne. And-the anthropomorphic part is-I reached out to touch them and cup them and run my fingers through them, as though I were G.o.d.

I was not really G.o.d, or even sufficiently G.o.dlike 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 G.o.dlike, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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?"