Heechee rendezvous (11 page)

“Do the Heechee,” commanded Wan, “and, let me see, yes. With Robinette Broadhead.”

“Sure, Wan,” said Dolly, retrieving her puppets from where Wan had kicked them and slipping them over her hands. The Heechee did not, of course, look like a real Heechee; and as a matter of fact the Robinette Broadhead was pretty libelous, too. But they amused Wan. That was what mattered to Dolly, since he was paying the bills. The first day out of Port Hegramet he had boastfully shown Dolly his bankbook. Six million dollars automatically socked into it every month! The numbers staggered Dolly. They made up for a lot. Out of all that cataract of cash there had to be a way, sooner or later, of squeezing a few drops for herself. To Dolly there was nothing immoral in such thoughts. Perhaps in an earlier day Americans would have called her a golddigger. But most of the human race, through most of its history, would only have called her poor.

So she fed him and bedded him. When he was in a bad mood she tried to look invisible, and when he wanted entertainment she tried to entertain:

“Halo thar, Mr. Heechee,” said the Broadhead hand, Dolly’s fingers twisting to give it a simpering grin, Dolly’s voice thick and corn-pone-bumpkin (part of the libel!). “I’m moughty pleased to make your acquaintance.”

The Heechee hand, Dolly’s voice a serpentine whine: “Greetings, rash Earthman. You are just in time for dinner.”

“Aw, gosh,” cried the Broadhead hand, grin widening, “I’m hungry, too. What’s fer dinner?”

“Aargh!” shrieked the Heechee hand, fingers a claw, mouth open. “You are!” And the right-hand fingers closed on the left-hand puppet.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” laughed Wan. “That is very good! Though that is not what a Heechee looks like. You do not know what a Heechee is.”

“Do you?” asked Dolly in her own voice.

“Nearly! More nearly than you!”

And Dolly, grinning, raised the Heechee hand. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Mr. Wan,” came the silky, snaky Heechee voice. “This is what I look like, and I’m waiting to meet you in the next black hole!”

Crash went the chair Wan was sitting on as he sprang up. “That is not funny!” he shouted, and Dolly was astonished to see he was trembling. “Make me food!” he demanded, and stomped off to his private lander, muttering.

It was not wise to joke with him. So Dolly made him his dinner and served him with a smile she did not feel. She gained nothing from the smile. His mood was fouler than ever. He screeched: “Stupid woman! Have you eaten all the good food when I was not looking? Is there nothing left fit to be eaten?”

Dolly was near tears. “But you like steak,” she protested.

“Steak! Of course I like steak, but look at what you serve for dessert!” He pushed the steak and broccoli out of the way to seize the plate of chocolate-chip cookies and shake it under her nose. Cookies sailed away in all directions, and Dolly tried to retrieve them. “I know it’s not what you’d like, honey, but there isn’t any more ice cream.”

He glared at her. “Huh! No more ice cream! Oh, very well, then. A chocolate soufflé-or a flan-“

“Wan, they’re almost all gone, too. You ate them.”

“Stupid woman! That is not possible!”

“Well, they’re gone. Anyway, all that sweet stuff isn’t good for you.”

“You have not been appointed my nurse! If I rot my teeth I will buy new ones.” He struck at the dish in her hand, and the cookies went flying indeed. “Jettison this trash. I do not wish to eat at all now,” he snapped.

It was just another typical meal on the frontiers of the Galaxy. It finished typically, too, with Dolly clearing away the mess and weeping. He was such a terrible person! And he didn’t even seem to know it.

But as a matter of fact, Wan did know that he was mean, antisocial, exploitive-a whole long list of things that had been explained to him by the psychoanalysis programs. More than three hundred sessions of them. Six days a week, for almost a year. And at the end he had terminated the analysis with a joke. “I have a question,” he told the holographic analyst, displayed for him as a good-looking woman, old enough to be his mother, young enough to be attractive, “and the question is this: How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a light bulb?”

The analyst said, sighing, “Oh, Wan, you’re resisting again. All right. How many?”

“Only one,” he told her, laughing, “but the light bulb has to really want to change. Haw-haw! -And you see, I don’t.”

She looked directly at him for a silent moment. The way she was displayed, she was sitting on a sort of beanbag chair, with her legs tucked under her, a note pad in her hand, a pencil in the other. She used it to push up the glasses that were sliding down her nose as she looked at him. As with everything else in her programming, the gesture was meant to have a purpose, the reassuring indication that she was, after all, only another human being like himself, not an austere goddess. Of course, human she was not. But she sounded human enough as she said, “That’s really a very old joke, Wan. What’s a light bulb?”

He shrugged irritably. “It is a round thing that gives off light,” he guessed, “but you are missing the point. I do not wish to be changed anymore. It is not fun for me. It was not my desire to begin this in the first place, and now I have decided to end it.”

The computer program said peacefully, “That’s your right, of course, Wan. What will you do?”

“I will go looking for my-I will go out of here and enjoy myself,” he said savagely. “That is also one of my rights!”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “Wan? Would you like to tell me what it was you started to say, before you changed your mind?”

“No,” he said, getting up, “I would not like to tell you what it is I will do; instead, I will do it. Good-bye.”

“You’re going to look for your father, aren’t you?” the psychoanalytic program called after him, but he didn’t answer. The only indication he gave that he heard was that instead of merely closing the door, he slammed it.

A normal human being-in fact, almost any human being at all, really
would have told his analyst that she was right. Would have at some time in three long weeks have told his ship companion and bed companion the same thing, if only to have someone to share in his outside-chance hope and his very real fear. Wan had never learned to share his feelings, because he had never learned to share anything at all. Brought up in Heechee Heaven, without any sort of warm-blooded human companion for the most crucial decade of his childhood, he had become the archetype of a sociopath. That terrible yearning for love was what drove him to seek his lost father through all the terrors of space. Its total lack of fulfillment made it impossible for him to accept love, or sharing, now. His closest companions for those terrified ten years had been the computer programs of stored, dead intelligences called the Dead Men. He had copied them and taken them with him when he took a Heechee starship, and he talked to them, as he would not to flesh-and-blood Dolly, because he knew they were only machines. They didn’t mind being treated that way. To Wan, flesh-and-blood human beings were also machines-vending machines, you might call them. He had the coin to make them yield what he wanted. Sex. Or conversation. Or the preparation of his food, or cleaning up after his piggish habits.

It did not occur to him to consider a vending machine’s feelings. Not even when the vending machine was actually a nineteen-year-old female human being who would have been grateful for the chance of being allowed to think she loved him.

The Heechee early discovered how to store the intelligence and even an approximation of the personality of a dead or dying person in mechanical Systems-as human beings learned when they first encountered the so-called Heechee Heaven where the boy Wan grew up. Robin considered that a tremendously valuable invention. I don’t see it that way. Of course, I may be considered prejudiced in the matter-a person like me, being mechanical storage in the first place, doesn’t need it; and the Heechee, having discovered that, did not bother to invent persons like me.

In the Lofstrom Loop in Lagos, Nigeria, Audee Walthers debated the measure of his responsibility toward Janie Yee-xing as the magnetic ribbon caught their descending pod, and slowed it, and dropped it off at the Customs and Immigration terminal. For playing with the forbidden toys he had lost the hope of a job, but for helping him do it Yee-xing had lost a whole career. “I have an idea,” he whispered to her as they lined up in the anteroom. “I’ll tell you about it outside.”

He did indeed have an idea, and it was a pretty good one, at that. The idea was me.

Before Walthers could tell her about his idea, he had to tell her about what he had felt in that terrifying moment at the TPT. So they checked into a transit lodge near the base of the landing loop. A bare room, and a hot one; there was one medium-sized bed, a washstand in the corner, a PV set to stare at while the traveler waited for his launch capsule, windows that opened on the hot, muggy African coastal air. The windows were open, though the screens were tight against the myriad African bugs, but Walthers hugged himself against the chill as he told her about that cold, slow being whose mind he had felt on the £ Ya.

And Janie Yee-xing shivered, too. “But you never said anything, Audee!” she said, her voice a little shrill because her throat was tight. He shook his head. “No. But why didn’t you? Isn’t there-“ She paused. “Yes, I’m sure there’s a Gateway bonus you could get for that!”

“We could get, Janie!” he said strongly, and she looked at him, then accepted the partnership with a nod. “There sure is, and it’s a million dollars. I checked it out on the ship’s standing orders, same time I copied the ship’s log.” And he reached into his scanty luggage and pulled out a datafan to show her.

She didn’t take it from him. She just said, “Why?”

“Well, figure it out,” he said. “A million dollars. There’s two of us, so cut it in half. Then I got it on the S. Ya., with the S. Ya.‘s equipment, so the ship and its owners and the whole damn crew might get a share- we’d be lucky if it was only half. More likely three-quarters. Then-well, we broke the rules, you know. Maybe they’d overlook that, considering everything. But maybe they wouldn’t, and we’d get nothing at all.”

Yee-xing nodded, taking it in. There was a lot to take in. She reached out and touched the datafan. “You copied the ship’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 bastard’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 God’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 ship’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 ship’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 space 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.”