Heechee Rendezvous Part 5

Yee-xing nodded, taking it in. There was a lot to take in. She reached out and touched the datafan. "You copied the s.h.i.+p's log?"

"No problem," he said, and indeed it hadn't been. During one of his tours at the controls, frosty silence from the First Officer at the other seat, Walthers had simply called up the data for the moment he had made contact from the automatic flight recorder, recorded the information as though it was part of his normal duty, and pocketed the copy.

"All right," she said. "Now what?"

So he told her about this known eccentric zillionaire (who happened to be me), notorious for his willingness to spend largely for Heechee data, and as Walthers knew him personally- She looked at him with a different kind of interest. "You know Robinette Broadhead?"

"He owes me a favor," he said simply. "All I have to do is find him." For the first time since they had entered the little room Yee-xing smiled. She gestured toward the P-phone on the wall. "Go to it, tiger."

So Walthers invested some of his not very impressive remaining bankroll in long-distance calls while Yee-xing gazed thoughtfully out at the bright tracery of lights around the Lofstrom loop, like a kilometers-long roller-coaster, its magnetic cables singing and the capsules landing on it choofing while the ones taking off were chuffing as they respectively gave up and took on escape velocity. She wasn't thinking about their customer. She was thinking about the goods they had to sell, and when Walthers hung up the phone, his face dour, she hardly listened to what he had to say. Which was: "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d's not home," he said. "I guess I got the butler at Tappan Sea. All he'd tell me was that Mr. Broadhead was on his way to Rotterdam. Rotterdam, for G.o.d's sake! But I checked it out. We can get a cheap flight to Paris and then a slow-jet the rest of the way-we've got enough money for that-"

"I want to see the log," said Yee-xing.

"The log?" he repeated.

"You heard me," she said impatiently. "It'll play on the PV. And I want to see."

He licked his lips, thought for a moment, shrugged, and slipped it into the PV scanner.

Because the s.h.i.+p's instruments were holographic, recording every photon of energy that struck them, all that data concerning the source of the chill emanations was on the fan. But the PV showed only a tiny and featureless white blob, along with the location coordinates.

It was not very interesting to look at in itself-which was, no doubt, why the s.h.i.+p's sensors themselves had paid no attention to it. High magnification would perhaps show details, but that was beyond the capacities of the cheap hotel room set.

But even so- As Walthers looked at it, he felt a crawling sensation. From the bed Yee-xing whispered, "You never said, Audee. Are they Heechee?"

He didn't take his eyes off the still white blur. "I wish I knew-" But it was not likely, was it? unless the Heechee were far unlike anything anyone had suspected. Heechee were intelligent. Had to be. They had conquered interstellar s.p.a.ce half a million years ago. And the minds that Walthers had perceived were-were-What would you call it? Petrified, maybe. Present. But not active.

"Turn it off," said Yee-xing. "It gives me the creeps." She swatted one of the bugs that had penetrated the screen and added gloomily, "I hate this place."

"Well, we'll be off to Rotterdam in the morning."

"Not this place. I hate being on the Earth," she said. She waved at the sky past the lights of the landing loop. "You know what's up there?

There's the High Pentagon and Orbit-Tyuratam and about a million zappers and nukes floating around, and they're all crazy here, Audee. You never know when the d.a.m.n things are going to go off."

Whether she intended a rebuke or not was unclear, but Walthers felt it anyway. He pulled the fan out of the PV scanner resentfully. It wasn't his fault that the world was crazy! But it was his fault, no doubt of that, that Yee-xing was condemned to be on it. So she had every right to reproach him.

He started to hand her the datafan, his motives not certain, perhaps to demonstrate trust, perhaps to reinforce her status as his accomplice.

But in midreach he discovered just how crazy the world was. The gesture converted itself into a blow, aimed wickedly at her unsmiling, desolate face.

For the half of a breath it was not Janie there; it was Dolly, faithless, runaway Dolly, with the grinning, contemptuous shadow of Wan behind her-or neither of them, in fact not a person at all but a symbol. A target. An evil and threatening thing that had no ident.i.ty but only a description. It was THE ENEMY, and the most certainly sure thing about it was that it needed to be destroyed. Violently. By him.

For otherwise Walthers himself would be destroyed, wrecked, disintegrated, by the maddest, most hating, most pervertedly destructive emotions he had ever felt, forced into his mind in an act of sickening, violent, devastating rape.

What Audee Walthers felt at that moment I knew very well because I felt it, too-as did Janie-as did my own wife, Essie-as did every human being within a dozen AU of a point a couple of hundred million kilometers from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Auriga. It was most lucky for me that I was not indulging my habit of piloting myself. I don't know if I would have crashed. The touch from s.p.a.ce only lasted half a minute, and I might not have had time to kill myself, but I surely would have tried. Rage, sick hatred, an obsessive need to wreck and ravish-that was the gift from the sky that the terrorists offered us all. But for once I had the computer doing the piloting so that I could spend my time on the P-phone, and computer programs were not infected by the terrorists' TPT.

It wasn't the first time. Not even the first time lately, for in the previous eighteen months the terrorists had dodged into solar s.p.a.ce in their stolen Heechee s.h.i.+p and broadcast their pet lunatic's most horrid fantasies to the world. It was more than the world could stand. It was, in fact, why I was on my way to Rotterdam, but this particular episode was the reason I turned around in midflight on the way there. I tried at once to call Essie, as soon as it was over, to make sure she was all right. No luck. Everybody in the world was trying to call everybody else, for the same reasons, and the relay points were jammed.

There was also the fact that my gut felt as though armadillos were engaging in s.e.xual intercourse in it and, everything considered, I wanted Essie with me instead of taking a later commercial flight as planned. So I ordered the pilot to reverse course; and so when Walthers got to Rotterdam I wasn't there. He could easily have caught me at Tappan Sea if he had taken a straight-through New York flight, and so he was wrong about that.

He was also wrong-quite wrong-forgivably wrong, for he had no way of knowing-about just what sort of mind he had tuned in on on the S.Ya.

And he had made one other error, quite serious. He had forgotten that the TPT worked both ways.

So the secret he had kept at one end of that fleeting mind-touch was no secret at all at the other.

I regret, or almost regret, that I know nothing about this "instant madness" from firsthand experience. I regretted it most when it first happened, a decade earlier. No one knew anything about a "telempathic psychokinetic transceiver" at that time. What it looked like, and was, was periodic, worldwide epidemics of insanity. A lot of the world's best minds, including mine, had spent their best efforts trying to find a virus, a toxic chemical, a variation in the Sun's radiation-anything-anything that would account for the shared madness that swept the human race every year or so. However, some of the world's best minds- like mine-were handicapped. Computer programs like myself simply did not feel the maddening impulses. If we had, I daresay, the problem would have been solved much earlier.

8 The Nervous Crew of the Sailboat

A lavender squid-well, not really a squid, but looking about as squidlike as anything else in human experience-was in the middle of an exhausting, long-term project when Audee Walthers had his little accident with the TPT. Because the TPT goes in both directions it makes a great weapon but a lousy surveillance tool. It is sort of like calling up the person you're spying on and saying, "Hey, look, I've got my eye on you." So when Walthers b.u.mped his head the sting was felt elsewhere. A where that was, in fact, very else. It was nearly a thousand light-years from the Earth, not far from the geodesic flight-line from Peggy's Planet home- which was, of course, the reason Walthers was close enough for the touch to register.

Happens I know quite a lot about this particular lavender squid-or

My friend Robin has several faults, and one of them is a kind of cutesy coyness that is not as amusing as he thinks it is. The way he knew about the sails.h.i.+p folk, like the way he knew about most of the other things he was not present to see, is simply explained. He just doesn't want to explain it. The explanation is that I told him. That simplifies things a lot, but it's almost true.

Is it possible that cutesy coyness is contagious?

almost squid; you could have said that he looked like a wriggly, fat orchid, and been almost as close. I hadn't met him at the time, of course, but now I know him well enough to know his name, and where he came from, and why he was there, and, most complicated of all, what he was doing. The best way to think of what he was doing was to say that he was painting a landscape. The reason that is complicated is that there was no one to see it for light-years in every direction, least of all my squid friend. He did not have the proper kind of eyes to perceive it with.

Still, he had his reasons. It was a sort of religious observance. It went back to the oldest traditions of his race, which was old indeed, and it had to do with that theologically crucial moment in their history when they, living among the clathrates and frozen gases of their home environment, with visibility minute in any direction, for the first time became aware that "seeing" could become the receiving end of a significant art form.

It mattered very much to him that the painting should be perfect. And so, when he suddenly felt himself being observed by a stranger, and the startling shock caused him to spray some of the finely divided powders he painted with in the wrong place, and in the wrong mixture of colors, he was deeply upset. Now a whole quarter hectare was spoiled! An Earthly priest would have understood his feelings, if not his reasons for them; it was quite as though in the observance of a ma.s.s the Host had been dropped and crushed underfoot.

The creature's name was LaDzhaRi. The canvas he was working on was an elliptical sail of monomolecular film nearly thirty thousand kilometers long. The work was less than a quarter completed, and it had taken him fifteen years to get that far. LaDzhaRi did not care how long it took. He had plenty of time. His s.p.a.cecraft would not arrive at its destination for another eight hundred years.

Or at least he thought he had plenty of time ... until he felt the stranger staring at him.

Then he felt the need to hurry. He stayed in normal eigenmode while he swiftly collected his painting materials-by then it was August 21- lashed them secure-August 22-pushed himself away from the b.u.t.terfly-wing sail and floated free until he was well clear. By the first of September he was far enough away to switch on his jet thrust and, in high eigenmode, return to the little cylindrical tin can that rode at the center of the cl.u.s.ter of b.u.t.terfly wings. Although it was a terribly expensive drain on him, he remained in high mode as he plunged through the entering caves and into the salty slush that was his home environment. He was shouting to his companions at the top of his voice.

By human standards that voice was extraordinarily loud. Terrestrial great whales have such loud voices that their songs can be recognized and responded to by other whales an ocean away. So had LaDzhaRi's people, and in the tiny confines of the s.p.a.cecraft his roaring shook the walls. Instruments quivered. Furniture rocked. The females fled in panic, fearing that they were about to be eaten or impregnated.

It was almost as bad for the seven other males, and as fast as he could, one of them struggled up to high eigenmode to shout back at LaDzhaRi. They knew what had happened. They too had felt the touch of the interloper, and of course they had done what was necessary. The whole crew had switched into high, transmitted the signal they owed their ancestors, and returned to normal mode... and would LaDzhaRi please do the same at once, and stop frightening the females?

So LaDzhaRi slowed himself down and allowed himself to "catch his breath"-although that was not an expression in use among his people. It did not do to thrash around in the slush in high for very long. He had already caused several troublesome cavitation pockets, and the whole slurpy environment they lived in was troubled. Apologetically he worked with the others until everything was lashed firm again, and the females had been coaxed out of their hiding places, one of them serving for dinner, and the whole crew settled down to discuss the lunatic touch, madly rapid and quite terrifying, that had invaded all their minds. That took all of September and the first part of October.

By then the s.h.i.+p had settled back into some sort of normal existence and LaDzhaRi returned to his painting. He neutralized the charges on the spoiled section of the great photon-trap wing. He laboriously collected the pigmented dust that had floated away, for one could not waste so much ma.s.s.

He was a thrifty soul, was LaDzhaRi. I have to admit that I found him rather admirable. He was loyal to the traditions of his people, under circ.u.mstances that human beings might have thought a little too menacing to be tolerated. For, although LaDzhaRi was not a Heechee, he knew where the Heechee could be reached, and he knew that sooner or later the message his s.h.i.+pmates had sent would have an answer.

So then, just as he was beginning to repaint the blanked-out section of his work, he felt another touch, and this time an expected one. Closer. Stronger. Far more insistent, and much, much more frightening.

9 Audee and Me

All the fragments of life stories of these friends-or almost friends, or in some cases non-friends of mine were beginning to fall together. Not very rapidly. Not much faster, in fact, than the fragments of the universe were beginning to fall together in that great crunch back toward the cyclic primordial-atom state that (Albert kept telling me) was about to happen for reasons I never quite understood at the time. (But I didn't feel badly about that, because at the time neither did Albert.) There were the sail-s.h.i.+p people, uneasily accepting the consequences of doing their duty. There were Dolly and Wan on their way to yet one more black hole, Dolly sobbing in her sleep, Wan scowling furiously in his. And there were Audee Walthers and Janie sitting disconsolate in their very much too expensive Rotterdam hotel room, because they had just found out I wasn't there yet. Janie squatted on the huge anisokinetic bed while Audee harangued my secretary. Janie had a bruise on her cheek, souvenir of that moment's madness in Lagos, but Audee had his arm in a cast-sprained wrist. He had not known until that moment that Janie was a black belt in karate.

Wincing, Walthers broke the connection and rested his wrist in his lap. "She says he'll be here tomorrow," he grumbled. "I wonder if she'll give him the message."

"Of course she will. She wasn't human, you know."

"Really? You mean she was a computer program?" That had not occurred to him, for such things were not common on Peggy's Planet. "Anyway," he said, taking consolation, "I guess in that case at least she won't forget." He poured them each a short drink out of the bottle of Belgian apple brandy they had picked up on the way to the hotel. He set down the bottle, wincing as he rubbed his right wrist, and took a sip before saying, "Janie? How much money have we got left?"

She leaned forward and tapped out their code on the PV. "About enough for four more nights in this hotel," she reported. "Of course, we could move to a cheaper one-"

He shook his head. "This is where Broadhead's going to stay, and I want to be here."

"That's a good reason," Yee-xing commented blandly, meaning that she understood his real reason: If Broadhead wasn't anxious to see Walthers, it would be harder to duck him in person than on the P-phone. "So why did you ask about the money?"

"Let's spend one night's rent on some information," he proposed. "I'd kind of like to know just how rich Broadhead is."

"You mean buy a financial report? Are you trying to find out if he can afford to pay us a million dollars?"

Walthers shook his head. "What I want to find out," he said, "is how much more than a million we can take him for."

Now those were no charitable sentiments, and if I had known about them at the right time I would have been a lot harder-nosed with Audee Walthers, my old friend. Or maybe not. When you've got a lot of money you get used to people seeing you as a tappable resource instead of a human being, even though you never get to like it.

Still, I had no objection to his finding out what I owned, or anyway as much about what I owned as I had allowed the financial-report services to know. There was plenty there. A sizable interest in the charter operation of the Ya. Some food-mine and fish-farm shares. A great many

Since Robin keeps talking about the "missing ma.s.s" question, I should explain what it is. In the latter twentieth century cosmologists had an insoluble contradiction to face. They could see that the universe was expanding, and this was certainly so because of the red s.h.i.+ft. They could also see, however, that it contained too much ma.s.s for the expansion to be possible. That was proved by such facts as that the outer fringes of galaxies revolved too fast, cl.u.s.ters of galaxies held each other too tightly; even our own Galaxy with its companions was plunging toward a group of starclouds in Virgo much faster than it should have been. Obviously, much ma.s.s was missing from observations. Where was it?

There was one intuitively obvious explanation. Namely, that the universe had formerly been expanding, but Something had decided to reverse its growth and cause it to contract. No one believed that for a minute-in the late twentieth century.

enterprises back on Peggy's Planet, including (to Walthers' surprise) the company he leased his plane from. The very computer-data service that was selling them the information. Several holding companies and import-export or freight-forwarding firms. Two banks; fourteen real-estate agencies, based everywhere from New York to New South Wales, with a couple on Venus and Peggy's Planet; and any number of unrecognizable little corporations, including an airline, a fast-food chain, something called Here After Inc.-and something called PegTex Petroventures. "My G.o.d," said Audee Walthers, "that's Mr. Luqman's company! So I was working for the son of a b.i.t.c.h all along!"

"And I," said Janie Yee-xing, looking at the part that mentioned the S. Ya. "Really! Does Broadhead own everything?"

Well, I did not. I owned a lot, but if they had looked at my holdings more sympathetically, they might have been able to see a pattern. The banks loaned money for explorations. The real-estate companies helped settle colonists, or took over their shacks and hogans for cash so they could leave. The Ya. ferried colonists to Peggy's, and, as for Luqman, why, that was the crowning jewel in the empire, if they had only known it! Not that I had ever met Luqman, or would have known what he looked like if I saw him. But he had his orders, and the orders came down the chain of command from me: Find a good oil field somewhere near the equator of Peggy's Planet. Why the equator? So the Lofstrom loop we would build there could take advantage of the planet's rotational velocity. Why a launch loop? It was the cheapest and best way of getting things in and out of orbit. The oil we pumped would power up the loop. The excess crude oil would go onto the loop and into orbit, in s.h.i.+pping capsules; the capsules would go back to Earth on the Ya. 's return flights to be sold there-which meant there would be a profitable cargo of oil to carry on the half of each round trip that was now nearly dead loss which meant that we could cut the prices for colonists on the way out! I do not apologize for the fact that almost all of my ventures showed a profit every year. That's how I kept them all going, and expanding, but the profit was only incidental. See, I have a philosophy about earning money, and that is that anybody who knocks himself out to acc.u.mulate it after the first hundred million or so is sick, and- Oh, but I've said all that already, haven't I?

I'm afraid I wander. What with all the things going on in my mind I get a little confused about what has happened, and what hasn't happened yet, and what never happens at all except in that mind.

Robin takes a lot of pride in the launch loop, because it rea.s.sured him that human beings could invent things the Heechee had not. Well, he's right-at least if you don't look at the details. The loop was invented on Earth by a man named Keith Lofstrom in the late twentieth century, though n.o.body built one until there was enough traffic to justify it. What Robin didn't know was that although the Heechee never invented the loop, the sails.h.i.+p people did-they had no other way to get out of their dense, opaque atmosphere.

The point I'm making is that all my money-making ventures were also solidly useful projects that contributed to both the conquest of the Galaxy and the alleviation of the needs of human beings, and that's a fact. And that's why all these fragments of biography do ultimately fall together. They don't look as though they're going to. But they do. All of them. Even the stories of my semi-friend, Captain, the Heechee whom I ultimately came to know quite well, and of his lover and second in command, the female Heechee named Twice, whom, as you will discover, I did at the end come to know quite a lot better than that.

10 The Place Where the Heechee Dwelt

When the Heechee hid inside their Schwarzschild sh.e.l.l at the core of the Galaxy they knew there could be no easy communication between their scared selves and the immense universe outside. Yet they dared not be without news.

So they set up a web of starlets outside the black hole itself. They were far enough away so that the roaring radiation of infall into the hole did not swamp their circuitry, and there were enough of them so that if one were to fail or be destroyed-even if a hundred were-the ones that were left would be able to receive and record the data from their early-warning spy stations all around the Galaxy. The Heechee had run away to hide, but they had left eyes and ears behind.

So from time to time some brave souls sneaked out of the core, to find out what the eyes had seen and the ears had heard. When Captain and his crew were sent out to check s.p.a.ce for the errant star, checking the monitors was an added duty. There were five of them aboard his s.h.i.+p- five living ones, anyway. By all odds the one that interested Captain the most was the slim, sallow, s.h.i.+ny-skinned female named Twice. By Captain's standards she was a raving beauty. And s.e.xy, too-every year without fail-and the time, he judged, was getting near again!

But not, he prayed, just yet. And so prayed Twice, for getting through the Schwarzschild perimeter was a brute of a job. Even when the s.h.i.+p had been purpose-built to manage it. There were other can openers around-Wan had stolen one-but those managed the job only in limited ways. Wan's s.h.i.+p could not enter the event horizon and survive. It could only extend a part of itself there.

Captain's s.h.i.+p was bigger and stronger. Even so, the shaking, tossing, racking strains of pa.s.sing through the event horizon threw Captain and Twice and the other four members of the crew violently and hurtingly against their retaining harnesses; the diamond-bright corkscrew coruscated with great fat silent sparks of radiance showering all around the cabin; the light hurt their eyes, the violent motion bruised their bodies; and it went on and on. For an hour or more by the crew's own subjective time, which was a queer, s.h.i.+fting blend of the normal pace of the universe at large and the slowed-down tempo inside the black hole.

But at last they were through into the unstressed s.p.a.ce. The terrible lurching stopped. The blinding lights faded. The Galaxy glowed before them, a velvet dome of cream splattered with bright, bold stars, for they were too far inside the center to see more than the occasional patch of blackness.

"Ma.s.sed minds be thanked," said Captain, grinning as he crawled out of his harness-he looked like a med school skull when he grinned-"I think we've made it!" And the crew followed his example, unstrapping themselves, chattering cheerfully back and forth. As they rose to begin the data-collection process, Captain's bony hand reached out to hold Twice's. It was an occasion for rejoicing-as the captains of Nantucket whalers rejoiced when they pa.s.sed Cape Horn, as the covered-wagon pioneers began to breathe again as they came down the slopes into the promised land of Oregon or California. The violence and peril were not over. They would have to go through it all again on the way back inside. But now, for at least a week or more, they could relax and collect data and this was the pleasure part of the expedition.

Or it should have been.

It should have been but was not, for as Captain secured the s.h.i.+p and the officer named Shoe opened the communication channels, every sensor on the board flared violet. The thousand automatic orbiting stations were reporting big news! Important news-bad news, and all the datastores clamored to announce their evil tidings at once.

There was a shocked silence among the Heechee. Then their training overcame their astonished terror, and the cabin of the Heechee s.h.i.+p became a whirlwind of activity. Receive and collate, a.n.a.lyze and compare. The messages mounted. The picture took shape.

The last record-tapping expedition had been only a few weeks before, by the slow creep of time inside the great central black hole-decades or so as time was measured in the galloping universe outside. But even so, not much time! Not in the scale of stars!

And yet the whole world was different.

Q.-What is worse than a prediction that doesn't come true?

A.-A prediction that comes true sooner than you expect.

It had been the Heechee conviction that intelligent and technological life would arise in the Galaxy. They had identified more than a dozen inhabited worlds-and not merely inhabited, but bearing the promise of intelligence. They had made a plan for each of them.

Some of the plans had failed. There was a species of furry quadrupeds on a damp, cool planet so near the Orion nebula that its aurora filled the sky, small quick creatures with paws as nimble as a racc.o.o.n's and lemur eyes. They would discover tools one day, the Heechee thought; and fire; and farming; and cities; and technology and s.p.a.ce travel. And so they had, and used them all to poison their planet and decimate their race. There was another race, six-limbed segmented ammonia-breathers, very promising, sadly too near a star that went supernova. End of the ammonia-breathers. There were the chill, slow, sludgy creatures who occupied a special place in Heechee history. They had carried the terrible news that drove the Heechee into hiding, and that was enough to make them unique. More, they were not merely promising but actually intelligent already; not merely intelligent but civilized! Technology was already within their grasp. But they were a longshot entry in the galactic sweepstakes anyway, for their sludgy metabolism was simply too slow to compete with warmer, quicker races.

But one race, someday, would reach into s.p.a.ce and survive. Or so the Heechee hoped.

And so the Heechee feared, too, for they knew even as they planned their retreat that a race that could catch up with them could also surpa.s.s them. But how could that possibility loom near so quickly? It had been only sixty terrestrial years since the last checkup!

Then the distant monitors...o...b..ting the planet Venus had shown the sapiens bipeds there, digging out the abandoned Heechee tunnels, exploring their little solar system in s.p.a.cecraft that moved on jets of chemical flame. Pitiably crude, of course. But promising. In a century or two- four or five centuries at most, the Heechee thought-they would likely enough find the Gateway asteroid. And in a century or two after that they might begin to understand the technology- But events had moved so swiftly! The human beings had found the Gateway s.h.i.+ps, the Food Factory-the immense distant habitat the Heechee had used to pen specimens of Earth's then most promising race, the australopithecines. All had fallen to the humans, and that was not the end of it.