Heechee rendezvous (15 page)

Since the Court was busy whispering and arguing among themselves over, I gathered, the question of whether the diary of the first prospector to locate a Heechee tunnel on Venus should be admitted as evidence, I doubted that. But you don’t pay a lawyer as much as I was paying Maitre Ijsinger to argue with him.

Of course, there was no legal reason for me to pay him at all. As much as the case was about anything, it was about a motion on the part of the Empire of Japan to dissolve the Gateway Corporation. I came into it, as a

The Heechee, thinking that the australopithecines they discovered when they first visited the Earth would ultimately evolve a technological civilization, decided to preserve a colony of them in a sort of zoo. Their descendants were “the Old Ones.” Of course, that was a wrong guess on the part of the Heechee. Australopithecus never achieved intelligence, only extinction. It was a sobering reflection for human beings to realize that the so-called Heechee Heaven, later rechristened the S. Va. Broadhead-far the largest and most sophisticated starship the human race had ever seen-was in fact only a sort of monkey cage.

major stockholder in the S. Ya.’s charter business, because the Bolivians had brought suit to have the charter revoked on the grounds that the financing of the colonists amounted to a “return to slavery.” The colonists were called indentured servants, and I, among others, had been called a wicked exploiter of human misery. What were the Old Ones doing there? Why, they were parties at interest, too, because they claimed that the S. Ya. was their property-they and their ancestors had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Their position in the court was a little complicated. They were wards of the government of Tanzania, because that’s where their ancestral Earth home had been decreed to be, but Tanzania wasn’t represented in the courtroom. Tanzania was boycotting the Palace of Justice because of an unfavorable decision over their sea-bottom missiles the year before, so its affairs were being handled by Paraguay-which was actually taking an interest mostly because of a border dispute with Brazil, which in turn was present as host to the headquarters of the Gateway Corp. You follow all this? Well, I didn’t, but that was why I hired Maitre Ijsinger.

If I let myself get personally involved in every lousy multimillion dollar lawsuit, I’d spend all my time in court. I’ve got too much to do with the remainder of my life for that, so in the normal course of events I would have let the lawyers fight it out and spent my time more profitably, chatting with Albert Einstein or wading along the Tappan Sea with my wife. However, there were special reasons for being here. I saw one of them, half asleep, on a leather chair near the Old Ones. “I think I’ll see if Joe Kwiatkowski wants a cup of coffee,” I told Ijsinger.

Kwiatkowski was a Pole, representing the East Europe Economic Community, and one of the plaintiffs in the case. Ijsinger turned pale. “He’s an adversary!” he hissed.

“He’s also an old friend,” I told him, exaggerating the facts of the case only slightly-he had been a Gateway prospector, too, and we’d had drinks over old times before.

“There are no friends in a court action of this magnitude,” Ijsinger informed me, but I only smiled at him and leaned forward to hiss at Kwiatkowski, who came along willingly enough once he was awake.

“I should not be here with you, Robin,” he rumbled once we were in my fifteenth-floor suite. “Especially for coffee! Don’t you got something to put in it?”

Well, I had-slivovitz, and from his favorite Cracow distillery, too. And Kampuchean cigars, the brand he liked, and salt herring and biscuits to go with them all.

The court was built over a little canal off the Maas River, and you could smell the water. Because I had managed to get a window open, you could hear the boats going through under the building’s arch and traffic from the tunnel under the Maas a quarter kilometer away. I opened the window a little wider because of Kwiatkowski’s cigar, and saw the flags and bands in the side streets. “What are they parading for today?” I asked.

He brushed the question aside. “Because armies like parades,” he grunted. “Now, no fooling around, Robin. I know what you want and it is impossible.”

“What I want,” I said, “is for the Eeek to help wipe out the terrorists with the spaceship, which is obviously in the interest of everybody. You tell me that’s impossible. Fine, I accept that, but why is it impossible?”

“Because you know nothing of politics. You think the E.E.E.C. can go to the Paraguayans and say, ‘Listen, go and make a deal with Brazil, say you will be more flexible on this border dispute if they will pool their information with the Americans so the terrorist spaceship can be trapped.’”

“Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I think.”

“And you are wrong. They will not listen.”

“The Eeek,” I said patiently, having been well briefed for this purpose by my data-retrieval system, Albert, “is Paraguay’s biggest trading partner. If you whistle they jump.”

“In most cases, yes. In this case, no. The key to the situation is the Republic of Kampuchea. They have with Paraguay private arrangements. About these I will say nothing, except that they have been approved at the highest level. More coffee,” he added, holding out his coffee cup, “and this time, please, not so much coffee in it.”

I did not ask Kwiatkowski what the “private arrangements” were because, if he had been willing to tell me, he would not have called them private. I didn’t have to. They were military. All the “private arrangements” governments were making with each other these days were military, and if I had not been sweating about the terrorists I would have been sweating about the crazy way the world’s duly ordained governments were behaving. But one thing at a time.

So, on Albert’s advice, I got a lawyer from Malaysia into my private parlor next, and after her a missionary from Canada, and then a general in the Albanian Air Force, and for each one I had some bait to dangle. Albert told me what levers to pull and what glass beads to offer the natives-an extra allotment of colonization passages here, a “charitable” contribution there. Sometimes all it took was a smile. Rotterdam was the place to do it, because ever since the Palace was moved from The Hague, The Hague having been pretty well messed up in the troubles the last time some joker was fooling with a TPT, you could find anyone you wanted in Rotterdam. All kinds of people. All colors, all sexes, hi all kinds of costumes, from Ecuadorian lawyers in miniskirts to Marshall Islands thermal-energy barons in sarongs and shark’s-teeth necklaces. Whether I was making progress or not was hard to say, but at half-past twelve, my belly telling me that it was going to hurt in a serious way if I didn’t put some food in it, I knocked off for the morning. I thought longingly of our nice quiet hotel suite with a nice lukewarm steak from room service and my shoes off, but I had promised to meet Essie at her place of business. So I told Albert to prepare an estimate of what I had accomplished and recommendations about what I should do next, and fought my way to a cab.

You can’t miss one of Essie’s fast-food franchises. The glowing blue Heechee-metal arches are in just about every country of the world. As the Boss she had a roped-off section on the balcony reserved for us, and she met me coming up the stairs with a kiss, a frown, and a dilemma. “Robin! Listen! They want here to serve mayonnaise with the French fries. Should I allow?”

I kissed her back, but I was peering over her shoulder to see what ungodly messes were being set out on our tables. “That’s really up to you,” I told her.

“Yes, of course, is up to me. But is important, Robin! Have taken great care in meticulous duplication of true pommes-frites, you know. Now mayonnaise?” Then she stepped back and gave me a more thorough look, and her expression changed. “So tired! So many lines in the face! Robin, how are you feeling?”

I gave her my most charming smile. “Just hungry, my dear,” I cried, and gazed with deceitful enthusiasm at the plates before me. “Say! That looks good, what is it, a taco?”

“Is chapatti,” she said with pride. “Taco is over there. Also blini. See how you like, then.” So, of course, I had to taste them all, and it was not at all what my belly had asked for. The taco, the chapatti, the rice balls with sour fish sauce, the stuff that tasted, more than anything else, like boiled barley. They were not any of them my cup of tea. But they were all edible.

They were also all gifts of the Heechee. The great insight the Heechee had given us was that most of living tissue, including yours and mine, is made up of just four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen- C H 0 N-CHON-food. Since that is also what the gases that comprise the best part of a comet are made of, they built their Food Factory out in the Oort cloud, where our Sun’s comets hang waiting for a star to shake them loose and send them in to be pretty in our sky.

CHON isn’t all of it. You need a few other elements. Sulfur’s the most important, maybe, then perhaps sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, calcium-not to mention the odd dash of cobalt to make vitamin B-l2, chromium for glucose tolerance, iodine for the thyroid, and lithium, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, molybdenum, cadmium, and tin for the hell of it. You probably need the whole periodic table at least as traces, but most of the elements in quantities so small that you don’t have to worry about adding them to the stew. They show up as contaminants whether you want them or not. So Essie’s food chemists cooked up batches of sugar and spice and everything nice and produced food for everybody-not only what would keep them alive, but pretty much what they wanted to eat, wherefore the chapattis and the rice balls. You can make anything out of CHON-food if you stir it up right. Among the other things Essie was making out of it was a lot of money, and that turned out to be a game she delighted to play.

So when I finally settled down with something my stomach didn’t resist-it looked like a hamburger and tasted like an avocado salad with bacon bits in it, and Essie had named it the Big Chon-Essie was up and down every minute. Checking the temperature of the infra-red warming lights, looking for grease under the dishwashing machines, tasting the desserts, raising hell because the milkshakes were too thin.

I had Essie’s word that nothing in her chain would hurt anybody, though my stomach had less confidence in her word than I did. I didn’t like the noise from the street outside-was it the parade?-but outside of that I was as close to comfortable as I was likely to get just then. Relaxed enough to appreciate a turnaround in our status. When Essie and I go out in public, people look at us, and usually I’m the one they look at. Not here. In Essie’s franchise stores, Essie was the star. Outside the passersby were gathering to watch the parade. Inside no employee gave it a glance. They went about their jobs with all their back muscles tense, and all the surreptitious glances they sneaked went in the same direction, to the great lady boss. Well, not very ladylike, really; Essie has had the benefit of a quarter-century’s tuition in the English language from an expert- me-but when she gets excited it’s “nekulturny” and “khuligans!” all over the place.

I moved to the second-floor window to look out at the parade. It was coming straight down Weena, ten abreast, with bands and shouting and placards. Nuisance. Maybe worse than a nuisance. Across the street, in front of the station, there was a scuffle, with cops and placards, rearmers against pacifists. You couldn’t tell which was which from the way they clubbed each other with the placards, and Essie, rejoining me and picking up her own Big Chon, glanced at them and shook her head. “How’s sandwich?” she demanded.

“Fine,” I said, with my mouth full of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements. She gave me a speak-louder look. “I said it’s fine,” I amplified.

“I couldn’t hear you with all that noise,” she complained, licking her lips-she liked what she sold.

I jerked my head toward the parade. “I don’t know if this is so good,” I said.

“I think not,” she agreed, looking with distaste at a company of what I think they call Zouaves-anyway, dark-skinned marchers in uniform. I couldn’t see their national patches, but each one of them was carrying a rapid-fire shoulder weapon and playing tricks with it: spinning it around, bouncing the buttplate against the pavement and making it spring back into his hands, all without breaking stride.

“Maybe we’d better start back to the court,” I said.

She reached over and picked up the last crumb of my sandwich. Some Russian women melt down into spheres of fat when they get past forty, and some shrink and shrivel. Not Essie. She still had the straight back and narrow waist that first caught my eye. “Perhaps we should,” she said, beginning to gather up her computer programs, each on its own datafan. “Have seen enough uniforms as a child, do not specially want to see all these now.”

“You can’t really have much of a parade without uniforms.”

“Not just parade. Look. On sidewalks, too.” And it was true, about one man or woman in four was wearing some sort of uniform. It was a little surprising, because it had crept up on me. Of course, every country had always had some sort of armed forces, but they were just sort of kept in a closet, like a home fire extinguisher. People never actually saw them. But now people did, more and more.

“Still,” she said, conscientiously sweeping CHON crumbs off the table onto the disposable platelet and looking for the waste hamper, “you must be quite tired and we had better go. Give me your trash, please.”

I waited for her at the door, and she was frowning when she joined me. “Receptacle was almost full. In manual it is set forth clearly, empty at sixty-percent point-what will they do if large party leaves at once? I should go back and instruct manager-oh, hell,” she cried, her expression changing. “Have forgotten my programs!” And she dashed back up the stairs to where she had left her datafans.