Heechee Rendezvous Part 19

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 subst.i.tute 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? Gos.h.!.+ 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 d.a.m.n 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, b.i.t.c.hing, demanding voices of all the inputs a.s.saulted my-well, a.s.saulted 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 s.h.i.+p and crew itself."

"Make them stop."

"I can't." There was real compa.s.sion 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-"

"d.a.m.n 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 a.n.a.log 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 a.n.a.logy, maybe. When I was in school in science cla.s.s 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. "h.e.l.lo, 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 const.i.tuted."

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 rea.s.sured 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 a.n.a.log 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 s.p.a.ce. I was seeing and hearing all of it at once. Long ago that old painter, Pica.s.so, 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 a.s.sembly bench-that was not amusing at all.

"Let me help you," whispered the a.n.a.log 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."

23 Out of the Heechee Hideaway

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 sails.h.i.+p 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 sails.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p," 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 repet.i.tions 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 cl.u.s.tered energy-sinks and its quintuple warning legend, did not let him relax.

The a.s.sa.s.sins 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 a.s.sa.s.sins," 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. a.s.sa.s.sins. 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 ma.s.sed 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 a.s.sa.s.sins. The universe was not hospitable to them. So they decided to change the universe. Did something to create a good deal of additional ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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?"