Heechee rendezvous (16 page)

I stood in the door, waiting for her, my eyes on the parade. It was quite disgusting! There were actual weapons going by, antiaircraft missile launchers and armored vehicles; and behind a bagpipe band was a company of the tommygun twirlers. I felt the door move behind me and stepped aside out of the way just as Essie pushed it open. “I found, Robin,” she said, smiling and holding the thick sheaf of fans up as I turned toward her.

And something like a wasp snarled past my left ear.

There are no wasps in Rotterdam. Then I saw Essie falling backward, and the door closing on her. It was not a wasp. It was a gunshot. One of those twirled weapons had held a live charge, and it had gone off.

I nearly lost Essie once before. It was a long time ago, but I hadn’t forgotten. All that old woe welled up as fresh as yesterday as I pulled the stupid door out of the way and bent over her. She was lying on her back, with the sheaf of tied datafans over her face, and as I lifted it away I saw that although her face was bloody her eyes were wide open and looking at me.

“Hey, Rob!” she said, her voice puzzled. “You punch me?”

“Hell, no! What would I punch you for?” One of the counter girls came rushing with a wad of paper napkins. I grabbed them away from her and pointed to the red-and-white striped electrovan with the words Poliklinische centrum stenciled on its side, idling at an intersection because of the parade. “You! Get that ambulance over here! And get the cops, too, while you’re at it!”

Essie sat up, pushing my arm away as cops and counter attendants swarmed around us. “Why ambulance, Robin?” she asked reasonably. “Is only a bloody nose, look!” And indeed that was all there was. It had been a bullet, all right, but it had hit the sheaf of fans and stayed there. “My programs!” Essie wailed, tugging against the policeman who wanted them to extract the bullet for evidence. But they were ruined anyway. And so was my day.

While Essie and I were having our little brush with destiny, Audee Walthers was taking his friend sightseeing around the town of Rotterdam. He had been sweating as he left me; the presence of a lot of money does that to people. The absence of money took most of the joy out of Rotterdam for Walthers and Yee-xing. Still, to Walthers, the hayseeds of Peggy’s Planet still in his hair, and to Yee-xing, rarely away from the S. Ya. and the immediate vicinity of the launch loops, Rotterdam was a metropolis. They couldn’t afford to buy anything, but at least they could look in the windows. At least Broadhead had agreed to see them, Walthers kept telling himself; but when he allowed himself to think it with some satisfaction, the darker side of Walthers responded with savage contempt: Broadhead had said he would see them. But he sure-hell hadn’t seemed very anxious about it .

“Why am I sweating?” he asked out loud.

Yee-xing slipped her arm through his for moral support. “It will be all right,” she replied indirectly, “one way or another.” Audee Walthers looked down at her gratefully. Walthers was not particularly tall, but Janie Yee-xing was tiny; all of her was tiny except for her eyes, lustrous and black, and that was surgery, a silliness from a time when she had been in love with a Swedish merchant banker and thought it was only the epicanthic fold that kept him from loving her back. “Well? Shall we go in?”

Walthers had no idea what she was talking about, and must have shown it by his frown; Yee-xing butted his shoulder with her small, close-cropped head and looked up toward a storefront sign. In pale letters hanging in what looked like empty ebon space it said:

Here After

Walthers examined it and then looked at the woman again. “It’s an undertakers’,” he guessed, and laughed as he thought he saw the point of her joke. “But we’re not that bad off yet, Janie.”

“It’s not,” she said, “or not exactly. Don’t you recognize the name?” And then, of course, he did: It was one of the many Robinette Broadhead holdings on the list.

The more you learned about Broadhead, the more likely you could figure out what things would make him agree to a deal; that was sense. “Why not?” said Walthers, approving, and led her through the air curtain into the cool, dark recesses of the shop. if it was not a funeral establishment, it had at least bought from the same decorators. There was soft, unidentifiable music in the background, and a fragrance of wildflowers, although the only floral display in sight was a single sheaf of bright roses in a crystal vase. A tall, handsome, elderly man rose before them; Walthers could not say whether he had got up from one of the chairs or materialized as a hologram. The figure smiled warmly at them, tried to guess their nationalities. He got it wrong. “Guten tag “he said to Walthers, and “Gor ho oy-ney,” to Yee-xing.

“We both speak English,” Walthers said. “Do you?”

Urbane eyebrows lifted. “Of course. Welcome to Here After. Is there someone near to you who is about to die?”

“Not that I know of,” said Walthers.

“I see. Of course, we can still accomplish a great deal even if the person has already reached metabolic death, although the sooner we begin transfer the better-Or are you wisely making plans for your own future?”

“Neither one,” said Yee-xing, “we just want to know what it is you offer.”

“Of course.” The man smiled, gesturing them to a comfortable couch. He did not appear to do anything to bring it about, but the lights became a touch brighter and the music dwindled a few decibels. “My card,” he said, producing a pasteboard for Walthers and answering the question that had been bothering him: The card was tangible, and so were the fingers that handed it to him. “Let me run through the basics for you; it will save time in the long run. To begin with, Here After is not a religious organization and does not claim to provide salvation. What we do offer is a form of survival. Whether you-the ‘you’ that is here in this room at this moment-will be ‘aware’ of it or not”-he smiled-“is a matter that the metaphysicians are still arguing. But the storage of your personalities, should you elect to provide for it, is guaranteed to pass Turing’s Test, provided we are able to begin transfer while the brain is still in good condition, and the surroundings that the surviving client perceives will be those which he chooses from our available list. We have more than two hundred environments to offer, ranging-“

Yee-xing snapped her fingers. “The Dead Men,” she said, suddenly comprehending.

The salesperson nodded, although his expression tightened a bit. “That is what the originals were called, yes. I see that you are familiar with the artifact called Heechee Heaven, now being used as a transport for colonists-“

“I’m the transport’s Third Officer,” Yee-xing said, quite truthfully except for tenses, “and my friend here is her Seventh.”

“I envy you,” the salesman said, and the expression on his face suggested that he really meant it. Envy did not keep him from delivering his sales pitch and Walthers listened attentively, Janie Yee-xing’s hand holding his. He appreciated the hand; it kept him from thinking about the Dead Men and their protégé, Wan-or, at least, about what Wan was likely to be doing at that moment.

The original Dead Men, the salesperson declared, were unfortunately rather botched; the transfer of their memories and personalities from the wet, gray storage receptacle in their skulls to the crystalline datastores that preserved them after death had been accomplished by unskilled

When the programs and databases for the so-called Dead Men became available for study, my creator, S. Ya. Broadhead, was naturally greatly interested. She set herself the task of duplicating their work. The most complex task was, of course, the transcription of the database of a human brain and nervous system, which is stored chemically and redundantly, onto the Heechee datafans. She did very well. Not only well enough to franchise the Here After chain, but well enough-well—to create me. The Here After storage was based on her earliest research. Later on she got better-better even than the Heechee
for she was able to combine not only their techniques but independent human technology. The Dead Men could never pass a Turing Test. Essie Broadhead’s works, after a while, could. And did.

labor, using equipment that had been designed for quite a different species in the first place. So the storage was imperfect. The easiest way to think of it, the salesman explained, was to think the Dead Men had been so stressed by their unskilled transfer that they had gone mad. But that happened no longer. Now the storage procedures had been so refined that any deceased could carry on a conversation with his survivors so deftly that it was just like talking to the real person. More! The “patient” had an active life in the datastores. He could experience the Moslem, Christian, or Scientological Heaven, complete with, respectively, beautiful boys scattered like pearls on the grass, choirs of angels, or the presence of L. Ron Hubbard himself. if his bent was not religious, he could experience adventure (mountain-climbing, skin-diving, skiing, hang-gliding, and free-fall T’ai chi were popular selections), listening to music of any kind, in any company he chose... and, of course (the salesman, failing to estimate reliably the relationship between Walthers and Yee-xing, delivered the information without color), sex. All varieties of the sexual experience. Over and over.

“How boring,” said Walthers, thinking about it.

“For you and me,” the salesman granted, “but not for them. You see, they don’t remember the programmatic experiences very clearly. There’s an accelerated decay bias applied to those datastores. Not to the others. If you talk to a dear one today and come back a year from now and pick up the conversation, he’ll remember it exactly. But the Programmed experiences dwindle fast in their memories-just as recollection of pleasure, you see, so that they want to experience them again and again.”

“How horrible,” said Yee-xing. “Audee, I think it’s time we went to the hotel.”

“Not yet, Janie. What was that about talking to them?”

The salesman’s eyes gleamed. “Certainly. Some of them really enjoy talking, even to strangers. You have a moment? It’s very simple, really.” As he was talking he led them to a PV console, consulted a silk-bound directory, and punched out a series of code numbers. “I’ve actually be-come friendly with some of them,” he said bashfully. “When things are slow at the store, a lot of the time I call one of them up and we have a nice chat-Ah, Rex! How are you?”

“Why, I’m just fine,” said the handsome, bronzed senior citizen who appeared in the PV. “How nice to see you! I don’t think I know your friends?” he added, peering in a friendly way at Walthers and Yee-xing. If there was an ideal way for a man to appear when he passed a certain age, this was it; he had all his hair and seemed to have all his teeth; his face showed laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but was otherwise Unlined, and his eyes were bright and warm. He acknowledged the introductions politely. Questioned about what he was doing he shrugged modestly. “I’m about to sing the Catulli Carmina with the Wien Staatsoper, you know.” He winked. “The lead soprano is very beautiful, and I think those sexy lyrics have been getting to her in rehearsal.”

“Amazing,” murmured Walthers, gazing at him. But Janie Yee-xing was less enchanted.

“We really don’t want to keep you from your music,” she said politely, “and I’m afraid we’d better get along.”

“They’ll wait,” Rex declared fondly. “They always do.”

Walthers was fascinated. “Tell me,” he said, “when you talk about, ah, companionship in this, ah, state-can you have your choice of any companions you want? Even if they’re still alive?”

The question was aimed at the salesman, but Rex spoke first. He was gazing shrewdly and sympathetically at Walthers. “Anyone at all,” he said, nodding as though they shared a confidence. “Anyone living or dead or imaginary. And, Mr. Walthers, they’ll do anything you want them to!” The figure chuckled. “What I always say,” he added, “is that what you call ‘life’ is really only a sort of entr’acte to the real existence you get here. I just can’t understand why people put it off for so long!”

The Here Afters were, as a matter of fact, one of the little spinoff enterprises that I was fondest of, not because they earned much money. When we discovered that the Heechee had been able to store dead minds in machines a light clicked. Well, says I to my good wife, if they can do it, why can’t we? Well, says my good wife to me, no reason at all, Robin, to be sure, just give me a little time to work out the encoding. I had not made any decision about whether I wanted it done to me, when and if. I was quite sure, though, that I didn’t want it done to Essie, at least not right then, and so I was glad that the bullet had done no more than puff her nose.

Well, somewhat more. It involved us with the Rotterdam police. The uniformed sergeant introduced us to the brigadier, who took us in his big fast car with the lights going to the bureau and offered us coffee. Then Brigadier Zuitz showed us into the office of Inspector Van Der Waal, a great huge woman with old-fashioned contact lenses making her eyes bulge out with sympathy. It was How unpleasant for you, Mijnheer, and I hope your wound is not painful, Mevrouw, as she was leading us up the stairs-stair&-to the office of Commissaris Lutzlek, who was a different kettle of fish altogether. Short. Slim. Fair, with a sweet boy’s face, though he had to be at least fifty to have become a Principal Commissaire. You could imagine him putting his thumb in the dyke and hanging in there forever, if he had to, or until he drowned. But you could not imagine him giving up. “Thank you for coming in about this business in the Stationsplein,” he said, making sure we had seats.