Heechee rendezvous (14 page)

And fourth- Fourth was White-Noise’s plot of the present whereabouts of all known Heechee vessels now operated by human beings, and when Captain saw that he squeaked with rage and shock. “Plot it against banned spaces!” he commanded. And as soon as the datafans were in place and the combined images appeared, the tendons in his cheeks trembled like plucked harpstrings. “They are exploring black holes,” he said, his voice thin.

White-Noise nodded. “There is more,” he said. “Some of the vessels carry order disruptors. They can penetrate.”

And Mongrel the integrator added: “And it does not seem that they understand the danger signs.”

Having given their reports, the rest of the crew waited politely. It was Captain’s problem now. They hoped very much that he was going to be able to handle it.

The female named Twice was not exactly in love with Captain, because it wasn’t time for that yet, but she knew she would be. Quite soon. Within the next few days, most likely. So in addition to her concern for this astonishing and frightening news, there was also her concern for Captain. He was the one who had his upper lip in the pincer. Although it was not yet time, she reached out and placed her lean hand over his. So deep in thought was Captain that he didn’t even notice, but patted it absently.

Shoe made the sniffling sound that was the Heechee equivalent of clearing his throat before asking, “Do you want to establish contact with the massed minds?”

“Not now,” hissed Captain, rubbing his ribcage with his free fist. It made a grating noise, loud in the stillness of the cabin. What Captain really wanted to do was to go back into his black hole in the core of the Galaxy and pull the stars up over his head. That was not possible. Next best would be to flee back to that same safe, friendly core and report to higher authority. Higher authority could then make the decisions. They could be the ones to deal with the massed minds of the ancestors, who would be eager to interfere. They could decide what to do about it-if possible, with some other Heechee captain and crew actually dispatched to this terrible swift space to carry out their orders. That was a possible option, but Captain was too well trained to allow himself so easy a way out. He was the one on the scene. Therefore he was the one who should make the first swift responses. If they were wrong-well, pity poor Captain! There would be consequences. Shunning, at least, though that was only for minor offenses. For graver ones there was the equivalent of being kicked upstairs-and Captain was not eager to join that mighty mass of stored minds that were all of his ancestors.

He hissed worriedly and made his decisions. “Inform the massed minds,” he ordered.

“Just inform? Not request recommendations?” asked Shoe.

Firmly, “Just inform. Prepare a penetrating drone and send it back to base with a duplicate of all data.” This was to Twice, who released his hand and began the task of activating and programming a small message vessel. And finally, to White-Noise: “Set course for the sailship interception point.”

It was not the Heechee custom to salute on receiving an order. It was also not the Heechee custom to argue about it, and it was a measure of the confusion in the ship that White-Noise asked, “Are you sure that’s what we should do?”

“Do it,” said Captain, shrugging irritably.

Actually, it was not a shrug but a quick, violent contraction of his hard, globular abdomen. Twice found herself staring admiringly at that fetching little bulge and at the way the tough, long strings of tendon from shoulder to wrist stood out from the arm itself. Why, your fingers would almost meet as you clung to it!

With a start she realized that her time of loving was closer than she had thought. What an inconvenience! Captain would be as annoyed as she, since they had had plans for a very special day and a half. Twice opened her mouth to tell him, then closed it again. It was no time to trouble him with that; he was completing the thought processes that ridged his cheek muscles and made him scowl, and beginning to give orders.

Captain had plenty of resources to draw on. There were more than a thousand cleverly cached Heechee artifacts scattered around the Galaxy. Not the ones that were meant to be found sooner or later, like Gateway; these were concealed under the exterior appearance of unpromising asteroids in inaccessible orbits, or between stars, or among clusters of other objects in dust swarms and gas clouds. “Twice,” he ordered without looking at her, “activate a command ship. We will rendezvous with it at the sailship point.”

She was upset, he observed. He was sorry but not surprised-come down to that, he was upset himself! He returned to the command seat and lowered the bones of his pelvis onto the projecting Y-flanges, his life-support pouch fitting neatly into the angle they enclosed.

And became aware that his communications officer was standing over him, face working worriedly. “Yes, Shoe? What is it?”

Shoe’s biceps flexed deferentially. “The-“ he stammered. “They- The Assassins-“

Captain felt an electric shock of fear. “The Assassins?”

“I think there is a danger that they will be disturbed,” said Shoe dismally. “The aboriginals are conversing by zero-speed radio.”

“Conversing? You mean transmitting messages? Who are you talking about-massed minds!” Captain shouted, leaping out of the seat again. “You mean the aboriginals are sending messages at galactic distances?”

Shoe hung his head. “I am afraid so, Captain. Of course, I do not yet know what they are saying-but there is a great volume of communication.”

Captain shook his wrists feebly to signal that he wanted to hear no more. Sending messages! Across the Galaxy! Where anyone might hear!
Where, especially, the certain parties the Heechee hoped would not be disturbed at all might well hear. And react to. “Establish translation matrices with the minds,” he ordered, and dismally returned to his seat.

The mission was jinxed. Captain no longer had hopes of an idle pleasure cruise, or even of the satisfaction of a minor task well accomplished. The big question in his mind was whether he could get through the next few days.

Still, soon they would transship into the shark-shaped command vessel, fastest of the Heechee fleet, filled with technology. Then his options would increase. Not only was it larger and faster; it carried a number of devices not present on his little penetrator-ship. A TPT. Hole cutters like the ones his ancestors had used to scoop out the Gateway asteroid and the warrens under the surface of Venus. A device to reach into black holes to see what could be plucked out-he shuddered. Please the massed minds of the ancestors, that one they would not have to use! But he would have it. And he would have a thousand other useful bits of equipment- Assuming, that was, that the ship was still functioning and would meet them at the rendezvous.

The artifacts the Heechee had left behind were powerful, strong, and long-lasting. Bar accidents, they were built to last for at least ten million years.

But you could not bar all accidents. A nearby supernova, a malfunctioning part, even a chance collision with some other object-you could harden the artifacts against almost all hazards, but in infinite astronomical time “almost all” is little better than “none.”

And if the command ship happened to have failed? And if there were no other that Twice could locate and bring to the rendezvous?

The Heechee learned fairly early in their technological phase to store the intelligences of dead or dying Heechee in inorganic systems. That was how the Dead Men came to be stored to provide company for the boy Wan, and it was an application of that technology that produced Robin’s Here After company. For the Heechee (if I may venture a possibly not unbiased opinion) it may have been a mistake. Since they were able to use the dead minds of Heechee ancestors to store and process data, they were not very good at true artificial-intelligence systems, capable of far greater power and flexibility. Like-welt-like me.

Captain allowed himself to let the depression sink into his mind. There were too many ifs. And the consequences of each of them too unpleasant to face.

It was not unusual for Captain, or any other Heechee, to be depressed. They had earned it fairly.

When Napoleon’s Grand Army crawled back from Moscow their enemies were small harassing cavalry bands, the Russian winter-and despair.

When Hitler’s Wehrmacht repeated the same trek thirteen decades later, the main threats were the Soviet tanks and artillery, the Russian winter-and, again, despair. They retreated in better order and with more destruction to their foes. But not with more despair, or less.

Every retreat is a kind of funeral cortege, and the thing that has died is confidence. The Heechee had confidently expected to win a galaxy. When they found they must lose, and began their immense, star-spanning retreat to the core, the magnitude of their defeat was huger than any that humans had ever known, and the despair seeped into all of their souls.

The Heechee were playing a most complicated game. One could call it a team sport, except that few of the players were allowed to be aware that they were on a team at all. The strategies were limited, but the final goal of the game was certain. If they managed to survive as a race, they would win.

But so many pieces moved on that board! And the Heechee had so little control. They could start the game. After that, if they interfered directly they exposed themselves. That was when the game became perilous.

It was now Captain’s turn to play, and he knew the risks he ran. He could be the player who lost the game for the Heechee once and for all.

His first task was to preserve the Heechee hiding place as long as possible, which meant doing something about the sailship people.

That was the least of his worries, for the second task was the one that counted. The stolen ship carried equipment that could penetrate even the skin around the Heechee hidey-hole. It could not enter. But it could peer within, and that was bad. Worse, the same equipment could penetrate almost any event discontinuity, even the one that the Heechee themselves dared not enter. The one that they prayed would never be breached, since within it rested the thing they most terribly feared.

So Captain sat there at the controls of his ship, while the glowing silicate cloud that surrounded the core dwindled behind them. Meanwhile, Twice was beginning to show signs of the strain that would shortly press her to her limits; and meanwhile, the cold, sludgy sailship people crept through their long, slow lives; and meanwhile, the one human-manned craft in the universe that could do anything about it approached yet another black hole . .

And meanwhile, those other players on the great board, Audee Walthers and Janie Yee-xing, watched their stack of chips slowly disappearing as they waited to make their own private gamble.

There he stood, this fellow with a face like a tan avocado, blocking my way. I identified the expression before I recognized the face. The expression was obstinacy, irritation, fatigue. The face that displayed them belonged to Audee Walthers, Jr., who (my secretarial program had not failed to tell me) had been trying to get in touch with me for several days. “Hello, Audee,” I said, really very cordially, shaking his hand and nodding to the pretty Oriental-looking young woman beside him, “it’s great to see you again! Are you staying at this hotel? Wonderful! Listen, I’ve got to run, but let’s have dinner-set it up with the concierge, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” And I smiled at him, and smiled at the young woman, and left them standing there.

Now I don’t pretend that was really good manners, but as it happens I actually was in a hurry, and besides, my gut was giving me fits. I put Essie in a cab going one way and caught another to take me to the court. Of course, if I had known then what he was waiting to tell me, I might have been more forthcoming with Walthers. But I didn’t know what I was walking away from.

Or what I was walking toward, for that matter.

For the last little bit I actually did walk, because traffic was more than normally snarled. There was a parade getting ready to march, as well as the normal congestion around the International Palace of Justice. The Palace is a forty-story skyscraper, sunk on caissons into the soapy soil of Rotterdam. On the outside it dominates half the city. On the inside it’s all scarlet drapes and one-way glass, the very model of a modern international tribunal. it is not a place where you go to to plead to a parking ticket.

It is not a place where individual human beings are considered very much at all, in fact, and if I had any vanity, which I do, I would preen myself on the fact that the lawsuit in which I was technically one of the defendants actually had fourteen different parties at interest, and four of them were sovereign states. I even had a suite of rooms reserved for my private use in the Palace itself, because all parties at interest did. But I didn’t go there right away. It was nearly eleven o’clock and therefore at least an even chance that the court would have started its session for the day, so I smiled and pushed my way right into the hearing room. It was crowded. It was always crowded, because there were celebrities to be seen at the hearings. In my vanity I had thought I was one of them, and I expected heads to turn when I came in. No heads. No turning. Everybody was watching half a dozen skinny, bearded persons in dashikis and sandals, sitting in a corral at the plaintiffs’ end of the room, drinking Cokes and giggling among themselves. The Old Ones. You didn’t see them every day. I gawked at them like everybody else, until there was a touch on my arm and I turned to see Maitre Ijsinger, my flesh-and-blood lawyer, gazing reprovingly at me. “You are late, Mijuheer Broadhead,” he whispered. “The Court will have noticed your absence.”