Heechee Rendezvous Part 20

Captain paused, bone-tired from the ordeal of trying to communicate with these dangerous primitives. Again the best answer was "I don't know," but there were speculations. "It is thought by the ma.s.sed minds," he said slowly, "that the physical laws of the universe were determined by random fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy at the first moment after the Big Bang. It is possible that the a.s.sa.s.sins intend to interfere with that process. Once they have collapsed the universe and it rebounds, they may change those basic laws-the ratio of the ma.s.ses of the electron and proton, the number that relates the gravitational force to the electromagnetic-all of them-and so bring about a universe in which they could live more comfortably ... but you and I could not."

The male had been less and less able to contain himself. Now he burst out in squawking sounds, only gradually turning into intelligible words. "Ho-ho!" cried Wan, wiping away a tear. "What cowards you are! Afraid of some creatures that hide themselves in a black hole, to do something that won't happen for billions of years! What does that matter to us?"

But the female had grasped Captain's meaning. "Shut up, Wan," she said, her facial muscles tightening in an almost Heechee expression. "What you're saying is that these a.s.sa.s.sins aren't taking any chances. They came out once before to wipe out everybody who looked like he might be going to get civilized enough to interfere with their plan. They might do it again!"

"Exactly so!" cried Captain with pleasure. "You have said it precisely! And the danger is that you barbarians-you people," he corrected himself, "are likely to bring them back. Using radio! Penetrating black holes! Flying all around the universe, even up to the kugelblitzes themselves!

Surely they have left monitoring systems to warn them if new technological civilizations emerge-you must very soon alert them, if you haven't already!"

And when the prisoners had finally understood; Wan whimpering in fear, Klara white-faced and shaken; when they had been given food packets and told to rest; when the crew cl.u.s.tered around Captain to know what made his jaw tendons writhe like snakes, he could only say, "It is beyond belief." To make the blubbery ones understand him had been difficult enough; for him to understand them, impossible. He said, "They say they cannot make all their fellows stop."

"But they must," cried White-Noise, aghast. "They are intelligent, are they not?"

"They are intelligent," agreed Captain, "for otherwise they would not use our ships so easily. But I think they are also mad. They have no rule of law."

"They must have law," said Burst, unbelieving. "No society can live without law!"

"Their law is compulsion," said Captain gloomily. "If one of them is where the agencies of enforcement cannot touch him, he may do as he pleases."

"Then let them enforce! Let them track down every ship and make it stop!"

"You foolish White-Noise," said Captain, shaking his head, "think about what you have said. Chase them down. Fight them. Battle them in s.p.a.ce. Can you imagine any louder commotion than that-and can you imagine the a.s.sa.s.sins will not hear?"

"Then what?" whispered Burst.

"Then," said Captain, "we must reveal ourselves." He raised his hand to still debate, and gave orders.

They were orders the crew had never thought they would hear, but they perceived Captain was right. Messages flew. In a dozen places in the Galaxy long-silent ships received their remote-controlled commands and came to life. A long dispatch was sent to the monitors near that central black hole where the Heechee lived, by now the first word of warning should have got through the Schwarzschild barrier and reinforcements should be coming out. It was a herculean task for the short-handed crew, and Twice's absence was regretted more sorely than ever. But at last it was done, and Captain's own ship turned on a new course for a rendezvous.

As he curled into a sleeping ball, Captain found himself smiling. It was not a joyous smile. It was the rictus of a paradox too wounding to respond to in any other way. He had feared, all through the talk with the captives, that they would come to an unwelcome conclusion: Once they knew that the a.s.sa.s.sins had hidden themselves inside a black hole, they might easily suspect the Heechee had done the same, and so the central secret of the Heechee race would be compromised.

Compromised! He had done much more than compromise it! All on his own authority, with no higher powers to approve or forbid, Captain had awakened the sleeping fleets and summoned reinforcements from inside the event horizon. The secret was no secret anymore. After half a million years, the Heechee were coming out.

24 The Geography of Heaven

Where was I, really? It took me a long time to answer that question for myself, not least because my mentor, Albert, dismissed it as silly. "The question of 'where' is a foolish human preoccupation, Robin," he grumped. "Concentrate! Learn how to do and how to feel! Reserve the philosophy and the metaphysics for those long evenings of leisure with a pipe and a stein of good beer."

"Beer, Albert?"

He sighed. "The electronic a.n.a.log of beer," he said testily, "is quite 'real' enough for the electronic a.n.a.log of a person. Now pay attention, please, to the inputs I am now offering you, which are video scans of the interior of the control cabin of the True Love.

I did as he said, of course. I was at least as eager as Albert to complete my training course so that I could go on to do-whatever it was possible for me to do in this new and scary state. But in my odd femtoseconds I could not help turning over that question in my mind, and I finally found an answer. Where was I, really?

I was in heaven.

Think about it. It meets most of the specifications, you know. My belly didn't hurt anymore-I didn't have a belly. My enslavement to mortality was over, for if I had owed a death I had paid it, and was quit for the morrow. If it was not quite eternity that waited for me, it was something pretty close. Data storage in the Heechee fans we already knew was good for at least half a million years without significant degradation-because we had the original Heechee fans still working-and that's a lot of femtoseconds. No more earthly cares; no cares at all, except those I chose to take on for myself~ Yes. Heaven.

You probably don't believe that, because you won't accept that an existence as a disembodied ~clutter of databits in fan storage can have anything really "heavenly" about it. I know that because I had trouble accepting it myself. Yet "reality" is-is "really"-a subjective matter. We flesh-and-blood creatures "really" perceived reality only at second or third hand, as an a.n.a.log painted by our sensory systems on the synapses of our brains. So Albert had always said. It was true-or almost true-no, it was more than true, in some ways, because we disembodied clutters have a wider choice of realities than you.

But if you still don't believe me I can't complain. However many times I told myself it was so, I didn't find it very heavenly either. It had never occurred to me before how terribly inconvenient it was-financially, legally, and in many otherlies, not least maritally-to be dead.

So, coming back to the question, where was I really? Why, really I was at home. As soon as I had-well-died, Albert in remorse had turned the ship around. It took quite a while to get there, but I wasn't doing anything special. Just learning how to pretend to be alive when in fact I wasn't. It took the whole flight back just to make a start on that, for it was a lot harder to be born into fan storage than into the world in the old biological way-I had to actively do it, you see. Everything about me was a great deal vaster. In one sense I was limited to a Heechee-model datafan with a cubic content of not much more than a thousand cc, and in that sense I was detached from my plug-in and carried through customs and brought back to the old place on the Tappan Sea with no more trouble than you'd carry an extra pair of shoes. In another sense I was vaster than galaxies, for I had all the acc.u.mulated datafans in the world to play in. Faster than a silver bullet, quick as quicksilver, swift as the shining lightning-I could go anywhere that any of the stored Heechee and human datastores had ever gone, and that was everywhere I had ever heard of. I heard the eddas of the slush dwellers from the sailship and hunted with the first exploring Heechee party that captured the australopithecines; I chatted with the Dead Men from Heechee Heaven (poor inarticulate wrecks, so badly stored in such haste by such inexpert help, but still remembering what it was to be alive). Well. Never mind where all I went; you don't have time to hear. And that was all easy.

Human affairs were harder...

By the time we were back on the Tappan Sea Essie had had a chance to rest up and I had had the time and practice to recognize what I saw, and both of us had got over some of the trauma of my death. I don't say we'd got over it all, but at least we could talk.

At first it was only talk, for I was shy of trying to display myself to my dear wife as a hologram. Then said Essie commandingly, "You, Robin! Is no longer tolerable, this talking to you on voice-only phone. Come where I can see!"

"Yes, do!" ordered the other Essie, stored with me, and Albert chimed in: "Simply relax and let it happen. Robin. The subroutines are well in place." In spite of them all, it took all my courage to show myself, and when I did my dear wife looked me up and down and said: "Oh, Robin. How lousy you look!"

Now, that might sound less than loving, but I knew what Essie meant. She wasn't criticizing; she was sympathizing, and trying to keep from tears. "I'll do better later, darling," I said, wishing I could touch her.

"Indeed he will, Mrs. Broadhead," said Albert earnestly, which made me realize that he was sitting by my side. "At present I am helping him, and the attempt to project two images at once is difficult. I am afraid they are both degraded."

"Then you disappear!" she suggested, but he shook his head. "There is also the need for Robin to practice-and, I think, you yourself may wish to make some programming amendments. For example, surround. I cannot give Robin a background unless I share it with him. Improvements are also needed in full animation, real-time reaction, consistency between frames-"

"Yes, yes," groaned Essie, and set about doing things in her workshop. So did we all. There was much to do, especially for me.

I have worried about many things in my time, and almost always about the wrong ones. Worrying about dying hovered in the edges of my concerns for most of my physical life-just as it does in yours. What I feared was extinction. I didn't get extinction. I got a whole new set of problems. A dead man, you see, no longer has any rights. He can't own property. He can't dispose of property. He can't vote-not only can't he vote in an election to a government office; he cannot even vote the large majority of shares he owns in the hundred corporations he himself has set up. When he is only a minority interest-even a very powerful one, as I was in, for example, the transport system that sent new colonists to Peggy's Planet- he won't even be heard. As you could say, he might as well be dead.

I was unwilling to be that dead.

It wasn't avarice. As a stored intelligence I had very few needs; there was no risk of my being turned off because I couldn't pay the utility bills. It was an urgency more pressing than that. The terrorists had not disappeared because the Pentagon captured their s.p.a.ceship. Every day there were bombings and kidnappings and shootings. Two other launch loops were attacked and one of them damaged; a tanker of pesticide was deliberately scuttled off the coast of Queensland and so a hundred kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef was dying. There were actual battles being fought in Africa and Central America and the Near East; the lid was barely being kept on the pressure cooker. What we needed was a thousand more transports like the S. Ya., and who was going to build them if I were silent?

So we lied.

The story went out that Robin Broadhead had suffered a cerebrovascular accident, all right, but the lie that was tacked on said I was showing steady improvement. Well, I was. Not in the exact sense implied, of course. But almost as soon as we were back home I was able to talk, voice-only, with General Manzbergen and some of the people in Rotterdam; in a week I was showing myself, from time to time-swathed in lap robes supplied courtesy of Albert's fertile imagination; after a month I allowed a PV crew to film me, tanned and fit, if thin, sailing our little catboat on the sea. Of course, the PY crew was my very own and the clips that appeared on the newscasts were more art than reportage, but it was very good art. I could not handle face-to-face confrontations. But I didn't need to.

So all in all, you see, I wasn't too badly off. I conducted my business. I planned, and carried out plans, to ease the ferment that fed the terrorists not enough to cure the problem, but to sit on the lid for a while longer. I had time to listen to Albert's worries about the curious objects he called kugelblitz, and if we didn't then know what they meant it was probably just as well. All I lacked was a body, and when I complained about that Essie said forcefully: "Dear G.o.d, Robin, is not end of world for you! How many others have had same problem!"

"To be reduced to a datastore? Not many, I should think."

"But same problem anyhow," she insisted. "Consider! Healthy young male goes ski-jumping, falls and cracks spine. Paraplegic, eh? No body that amounts to anything except liability, needs to be fed, needs to be diapered, needs to be bathed-you are spared that, Robin. But the important part of you, that is still here!"

"Sure," I said. I did not add, what Essie of all people did not need to have me add, that my own definition of "important" parts included some accessories to which I had always attached particular value. Even there there were pluses to set against the losses. If I no longer had, e.g., s.e.xual organs, there was surely no further problem about my suddenly complicated s.e.xual relationships.

None of that had to be said. What Essie said instead was: "Buck up, old Robin. Keep in mind you are so far only first approximation of final product."

"What does that mean?" I demanded.

"Were great problem, Robin! Here After storage was, I admit, quite imperfect. Learned much in development of new Albert for you. Had never before attempted complete storage of entire, and very valued, person unfortunately dead. The technical problems-"

"I understand there were technical problems," I interrupted; I didn't really want to hear, just yet, the details of the risky, untried, exquisitely complex job of pouring "me" out of the decaying bucket of my head into the waiting basin of a storage matrix.

"To be sure. Well. Now have more leisure. Now can make fine tuning. Trust me, old Robin, improvements can yet be made."

"In me?"

"In you, certainly! Also," she said, twinkling, "in very inadequate stored copy of self. Have good reason to believe same can be made much more interesting to you."

"Oh," I said. "Wow." And wished more than ever for at least the temporary loan of some parts of a body, for what I wanted more than anything else just then was to put my arms around my very dear wife. And meanwhile and meanwhile the worlds went on. Even the very small worlds of my friend Audee Walthers and his own complicated loving.

When you look at them from inside, all worlds are the same size. Audee's didn't seem small to him. I took care of one of their problems very quickly; I gave each of them ten thousand shares of stock in the Peggy's Planet ferry, the S. Ya. and its pendant enterprises. Janie Yee-xing didn't have to worry about being fired anymore; she could rehire herself as a pilot if she chose, or ride the S. Ya. as pa.s.senger if she liked. So could Audee; or he could go back to Peggy's and boss his former bosses on the oilfield; or none of the above, but lounge around in luxury for all his life; and so could Dolly. And, of course, that didn't solve their problems at all. The three of them mooned around the guest suites for a while until finally Essie suggested we lend them the True Love for a cruise to nowhere until they got their heads straightened out, and we did.

None of them were foolish at all-like the rest of us, they acted that way now and then, maybe. They recognized a bribe when they saw one. They knew that what I really wanted was for them to keep their mouths shut about my present unpleasantly noncorporeal state. But they also knew what a friendly gift was, and there was that component in the stock transfer, too.

And what did they do, the three of them on the True Love?

I think I don't want to say. Most of it is no one's business but theirs. Consider. There are times in everyone's life-certainly including yours, most definitely including my own-when what you are doing and saying is not either important or pretty. You strain at a bowel movement, you have a fugitive and shocking thought, you break wind, you tell a lie. None of it matters very much, but you do not want advertised those parts of everyone's life in which he looks ludicrous or contemptible or mean. Usually they don't get advertised, because there is no one to see-but now that I am vastened there is always one to see, and that is me. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, as everyone's memories are added to the database, there are no personal mysteries left at all.

I will say this much of Audee Walthers' private concerns. What motivated his actions and fueled his worries was that admirable and desirable thing, love. What frustrated his loving was also love. He loved his wife, Dolly, because he had schooled himself to love her all the while they were married-that was his view of how married people should be. On the other hand, Dolly had left him for another man (I use the term loosely in Wan's case), and Janie Yee-xing had turned up to console him. They were both very attractive persons. But there were too many of them. Audee was as monogamous as I was. If he thought to make up with Dolly, there was Janie in the way-she had been kind, he owed her some sort of consideration-call it love. But between him and Janie there was Dolly: They had planned a life together and he had had no intention ever of changing it, so you could call that love, too. Complicated by some feeling that he owed Dolly some kind of punishment for abandoning him, and Janie some sort of resentment for being in the way-remember, I told you there were contemptible and ludicrous parts. Complicated much more by the equally complex feelings of Dolly and Janie It must almost have been a relief to them when-orbiting idly in a great cometary ellipse that was pushing them out toward the asteroids and at angle to the ecliptic-whatever discussion they were having at the moment was interrupted by a gasp from Dolly and a stifled scream from Janie, and Audee Walthers turned to see on the screen a great cl.u.s.ter of vessels huger and more numerous and far, far bigger than any human being had seen in Earth's solar system before.

They were scared out of their minds, no doubt.

But no more than the rest of us. All over the Earth, and everywhere in s.p.a.ce where there were human beings and communications facilities to carry the word, there was shock and terror. It was the worst nightmare of every human being for the past century or so.

The Heechee were coming back They didn't hide. They were there-and so many of them! Optical sensors in the orbital stations spotted more than fifty ships-and what ships! Twelve or fourteen as big as the S. Ya. Another dozen bigger still, great globular structures like the one that had swallowed the sailship. There were Threes and Fives and some intermediate ones that the High Pentagon thought looked suspiciously like cruisers, and all of them coming straight down at us from the general direction of Vega. I could say Earth's defenses were caught unprepared, but that would be a flattering lie. The truth was that Earth had no defenses worth mentioning. There were patrol ships, to be sure; but they had been built by Earthmen to fight other Earthmen. No one had dreamed of pitting them against the semi-mythical Heechee.

And then they spoke to us.

The message was in English, and it was short. It said: "The Heechee can't allow interstellar travel or communication anymore except under certain conditions that they will decide and supervise. Everything else has to stop right away. They've come to stop it." That was all before the speaker, with a helpless shake of the head, faded away.

It sounded a lot like a declaration of war.

It was interpreted that way, too. In the High Pentagon, in the orbiting forts of other nations, in the councils of power all over the world, there were abrupt meetings and conferences and planning sessions; ships were called in for rearming, and others were redirected toward the Heechee fleet; the orbital weapons that had been quiet for decades were checked and aligned-useless as arbalests, they might be, but if they were all we had to fight with, we would fight them. The confusion and shock and reaction swept the world.

And there was nowhere that suffered more astonishment and bewilderment than the people who made up my own happy household; for the person who gave the Heechee ultimatum Albert had recognized at once, and Essie only a moment later, and I before I even saw her face. It was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

25 Return to Earth

Gelle-Klara Moynlin, my love. My lost love. There she was, staring at me out of the frame of the PV and looking no older than the last time I'd seen her, years and decades before-and looking no better, either, because both times she was about as badly shaken up as it was possible for a person to be. Not to mention beaten up, once by me.

But if she'd been through a lot and showed it, my Klara, she had plenty in reserve. She turned from the screen when she had delivered her message to the human race and nodded to Captain. "You zaid it?" he demanded anxiously. "You gave the mezzage prezisely as I inzdructed?"

"Precisely," said Klara, and added, "Your English is getting much better now. You could talk directly if you wanted to."

"Is too important to take chanzes," said Captain fretfully, and turned away. Half the tendons on his body were rippling and twitching now, and he was not alone. His loyal crew were as harried as himself, and in the communications screens that linked his ship to the others in the grand fleet he could see the faces of the other captains. It was a grand fleet, Captain reflected, studying the displays that showed them in proud array, but why was it his fleet? He didn't need to ask. He knew the answer. The reinforcements from inside the core amounted to more than a hundred Heechee, and at least a dozen of them were ent.i.tled to call themselves senior to him if they chose. They could easily have a.s.serted command of the fleet. They didn't. They let it be his fleet because that made it also be his responsibility ... and his own sweet essence that would go to join the ma.s.sed minds if it went wrong. "How foolish they are," he muttered, and his communicator twitched agreement.

"I will instruct them to maintain better order," he said. "Is that what you mean?"

"Of course, Shoe." Captain sighed and watched gloomily as the communicator rattled instructions to the other captains and controllers. The shape of the armada reformed itself slowly as the great cargo vessels, capable of biting a thousand-meter spherical chunk out of anything and carrying it anywhere, dropped back behind the transports and the smaller ships. "Human woman Klara," he called. "Why do they not answer?"

She shrugged rebelliously. "They're probably talking it over," she said.

"Talking it over!"

"I've tried to tell you," she said resentfully. "There are a dozen different major powers that have to get together, not counting a hundred little countries."

"A hundred countries." Captain groaned, trying to imagine such a thing. He failed...

Well. That was long and long ago, especially if you measure time in femtoseconds. So very much has happened since! So much that, vastened as I am, it is hard for me to take it all in. It is even harder to remember (whether with my own memory or some borrowed other) every detail of every event of that time, although, as you have seen, I can recall quite a lot when I want to. But that picture stays with me. There was Klara, her black brows scowling as she watched the Heechee jitter and mope; there was Wan, all but comatose and forgotten in a corner of the cabin. There were the Heechee crew, twitching and hissing to one another, and there was Captain, gazing with pride and fear at the resurrected armada on the mission he had ordered. He was gambling for the highest of stakes. He did not know what would happen next-expected anything-feared almost everything-could not be surprised, he thought, by whatever occurred ... until something did occur that surprised him very much.

"Captain!" cried Mongrel, the integrator. "There are other ships!"

And Captain brightened. "Ah!" he applauded. "At last they respond!" It was curious of the humans to do so physically rather than by means of radio, but then they were strange to begin with. "Are the ships speaking to us, Shoe?" he asked, and the communicator twitched his cheek muscles no. Captain sighed. "We must be patient, then," he said, studying the display. The human vessels were certainly not approaching in any sensible order. It seemed, in fact, as though they had been detached from whatever errands they were on and thrown in to meet the Heechee fleet hurriedly, carelessly-almost frantically. One was in easy range of ship communication; two others farther away, and one of those battling an existing velocity that went the wrong way.

Then Captain hissed in surprise. "Human female!" he commanded. "Come here and inzdruct them to be careful! Zee what is happening!" From the nearest ship a smaller object had launched, a primitive thing that was chemically propelled, much too tiny to contain even a single person. It was accelerating directly toward the heart of the Heechee fleet, and Captain nodded to White-Noise, who instantly ordered a nudge into FI'L velocity that removed the nearest cargo vessels from danger. "They muzt not be zo zlipzhodi" he cried sternly. "A collizion could occur!"

"Not by accident," said Klara grimly.

'What? I do not underzdand!"

"Those are missiles," she said, "and they've got nuclear warheads. That's your answer. They're not waiting for you to attack. They're shooting first!"

Do you have the picture now? Can you see Captain standing there with his tendons shocked still and his jaw dropping, staring at Klara? He chews at his tough, thin lower lip and glances at the screen. There's his fleet, the huge caravan of cargo transports resurrected from half a million years of hiding so that he can-with grave doubt; at great risk to himself offer the human race, a couple of million at a time, free transportation and safe refuge from the a.s.sa.s.sins, in the core where the Heechee themselves hid. "Shooting?" he repeated numbly. "To hurt us? Pozzibly to kill?"

"Exactly," flared Klara. "What did you expect? If it's war you want, you'll get it."

And Captain closed his eyes, hardly hearing the horrified hiss and buzz that went around his crew as White-Noise translated. "War," he muttered, unbelieving, and for the first time ever he thought of joining the ma.s.sed minds not with fear but almost with longing; however bad it might be, how could it be worse than this?

And meanwhile...

Meanwhile, it almost went too far-but, fortunately for everyone, not quite. The Brazilian scoutship's missile was far too slow to catch the Heechee as they dodged. By the time they were in position to fire again- long before any other human ship could come close-Captain had managed to explain to Klara, and Klara was on the communication circuits again, and the word was out. Not an invasion fleet. Not even a commando raid. A rescue mission-and a warning of what made the Heechee run and hide, and was now for us to worry about.

26 The Thing the Heechee Feared

Vastened as I am I can smile at those pitiful old fears and apprehensions.

Not at the time, maybe. But now, ah, yes. The scales are all bigger, and a lot more exciting. There are ten thousand stored Heechee dead ones outside the core alone, and I can read them all. Have read them, nearly all. Go on reading them as I choose, whenever there is something I want to study more closely. Books on a library shelf?

They are more than that. I don't exactly "read" them, either. It is much more like remembering them. When I "open" one of them, I open it all the way; I read it from the inside out, as though it were part of me.

It was not easy to do that, and for that matter hardly anything I have learned to do since I was vastened has come easily. But with Albert to help me and simple texts to practice on, I learned. The first datastores I accessed were only that-just data, no worse than consulting a table of logarithms. Then I had old Heechee-stored Dead Men and some of Essie's first cases for her Here After franchises, and they were really not very well done. I was never in doubt about which part of what I was thinking was me.

But after we had straightened out the misunderstanding with Captain and I got to consult their own records, then it got hairy. There was Captain's late love, the female Heechee named Twice. To "access" her was like waking up in the dark and putting on a whole suit of clothes that you couldn't see-and that didn't fit you anyway. It was not just that she was female, although that was an immense incongruity. It was not even that she was Heechee and I was human. It was what she knew, and always had known, that neither I nor any other human had guessed. Perhaps Albert had-perhaps that was what had driven him mad. But even Albert's conjectures had not shown him a race of starfaring a.s.sa.s.sins who stored themselves in a kugelblitz to wait for the birth of a new- and for them better-universe.