Heechee rendezvous (19 page)

2.
 
Observations and interpretation of the missing mass.

3.
 
Analysis of Heechee technology.

4.
 
Amelioration of terrorism.

5.
 
Amelioration of international tensions.

6.
 
Nonexploitive life extension.

“They all sound very commendable,” I said approvingly. “The soup’s fine, too.”

“Yes,” he said, “the chefs are very good at following instructions.” I glanced up at him drowsily. His voice seemed gentler-.no, perhaps the word is sweeter-than before. I yawned, trying to focus my eyes.

“Do you know, Albert,” I said, “I never noticed it before, but you look a little like my mother.”

He put down his pipe and regarded me sympathetically. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”

I regarded my faithful hologram with drowsy pleasure. “I guess that’s right,” I conceded. “Maybe it’s not my mother you look like, though. Those big eyebrows-“

“It doesn’t matter, Robin,” he said gently.

“It doesn’t, does it?” I agreed.

“So you might just as well go to sleep,” he finished.

And that seemed like such a good idea that I did. Not right away. Not abruptly. Just slowly, gently; I lingered half awake and I was absolutely comfortable and absolutely relaxed, so I didn’t quite know where half awake ended and all-asleep began. I was in a dream or a reverie, that in-between state when you suspect you are sleeping but don’t care much, and the mind wanders. Oh, yes, my mind wandered. Very far. I was chasing around the universe with Wan, reaching into one black hole after another in search of something very important to him, and also very important to me, though I didn’t know why. There was a face involved, not Albert’s, not my mother’s, not even Essie’s, a woman’s face with great dark eyebrows . .

Why, I thought, with pleased surprise, the son of a bitch has doped me! And meanwhile, the great Galaxy turned and tiny particles of organic matter pushed slightly less tiny particles of metal and crystal across the spaces between the stars; and the organic bits experienced pain and desolation and terror and joy in all their various ways; but I was all the way asleep and it did not matter to me a bit. Then.

One small bit of organic matter named Dolly Walthers was busy experiencing all of those feelings-or all but joy-and a great deal of such other feelings as resentment and boredom. In particular boredom, except at those moments when the dominant feeling in her sorry small heart was terror. As much as anything, the inside of Wan’s ship was like a chamber in some complicated, wholly automatic factory in which a small space had been left for human beings to crawl in to make repairs. Even the flickering golden coil that was part of the Heechee drive system was only partly visible; Wan had surrounded it with cupboarding to store food. Dolly’s own personal possessions-they consisted mostly of her puppets and a six-month supply of tampons-were jammed into a cabinet in the tiny toilet. All the other space was Wan’s. There was not much to do, and no room to do it in. Reading was one possible way to pass the time. The only datafans Wan owned that were readable, really, were mostly children’s stories, recorded for him, he said, when he was tiny. They were extremely boring to Dolly, though not quite as boring as doing nothing at all. Even cooking and cleaning were not as boring as nothing at all, but the opportunities were limited. Some cooking smells drove Wan to take refuge in the lander-or more often to stamp and rage at her. Laundry was easy, involving only putting their garments in a sort of pressure cooker that forced hot steam through them, but then as they dried they raised the humidity of the air and that, too, was cause for stamping and raging. He never really hit her-well, not counting what he probably thought of as amorous play-but he scared her a lot.

He did not scare her as much as the black holes they visited, one after another. They scared Wan, too. Fear did not keep him from going on; it only made him even more impossible to live with.

When Dolly realized that this whole mad expedition was only a hopeless search for Wan’s long-lost, and surely long-dead, father, she felt real tenderness for him. She wished he would let her express it. There were times when, especially after sex, especially on those rare occasions when he did not at once either go to sleep or drive her away from him with some cutting and unforgivably critical intimate remark-those times when, for a few minutes at least, they would hold each other in silence. Then she would feel a great yearning to make human contact with him. There were times when she wanted to put her lips to his ear and whisper, “Wan? I know how you feel about your father. I wish I could help.”

But, of course, she never dared.

The other thing she never dared do was to tell him that in her opinion, he was going to kill them both-until they came to the eighth hole and she had no choice. Even two days away from it-two days in faster-than-light travel, nearly a light-year in distance-it was different. “Why is it funny-looking?” she demanded, and Wan, not even looking around as he hunched before the screen, only said what she expected:

“Shut up.” Then he went on gabbling with his Dead Men. Once he realized she could speak neither Spanish nor Chinese he talked with them openly before her, but not in a language intelligible to her.

“No, please, honey,” she said, a sick feeling in her stomach. “It’s all wrong!” Why wrong she could not have said. The object on the screen was tiny. It was not very clear, and it jiggled about the screen. But there was no sign of the quick coruscations of energy as stray wisps of matter destroyed themselves as infall. Yet there was something to see, a swimmy sort of blue radiance that was certainly not black.

“Pah,” he said, sweating, and then, because he was scared as well, he ordered, “Tell the bitch what she wants. In English.”

“Mrs. Walthers?” The voice was hesitant and faint; it was a dead person’s voice, all right, if a person’s at all. “I was explaining to Wan that this is what is called a naked singularity. That means it is not rotating, therefore it is not exactly black. Wan? Have you compared it with the Heechee charts?”

He grumbled, “Of course, foolish, I was just about to do so!” but his voice was shaking as he touched the controls. Next to the image itself another image formed. There was the bluish, cloudy, eye-straining object. And there, on the other half of the screen, the same object, with around it a cluster of bright, short red lines and flickering green circles.

The Dead Man said with dismal satisfaction, “It is a danger object, Wan. The Heechee have tagged it so.”

“Idiot fool! All black holes are dangerous!” He snapped off the speaker and turned to Dolly with anger and contempt. “You’re frightened, too!” he accused, and stomped off to the stolen and frightening gadgets in the lander.

It was not consoling to Doily to see that Wan was also shaking. She waited, staring hopelessly at the screen, for the mindtouch that would be Wan’s exploratory reaching with the TPT. It was a long wait, because the TPT did not work at interstellar distances, and she slept in fits, and woke to peer into the lander hatch to see Wan, unmoving, crouched by the glittering mesh and the diamond-bright corkscrew, and slept again.

She was asleep when her dreams were interrupted by the hating, fearing, obsessed stab of Wan’s troubled mind through the TPT, and no more than half awake when he flung himself back into the main cabin and stood over her. “A person!” he gabbled, his eyes blinking wildly as sweat streamed into them from his forehead. “Now I must reach inside!”

And meanwhile, I was dreaming of a deep, steep gravitational hole and a treasure concealed in it. While Wan was deploying his stolen gadgets, sweating with terror, I was sweating with pain. While Dolly was staring wonderingly at the great ghostly blue object on her screen, I was staring at the same object. She had never seen it before. I had. I had a picture of it over my bed, and I had taken that picture at a time when I hurt even more and was even more disoriented. I tried to sit up, and Essie’s strong, gentle hand pushed me back. “Are still on life-support systems, Robin,” she scolded. “Must not move around too much!”

I was in the little hospice chamber we had built onto the house at

Tappan Sea, when it began to seem too much trouble to go to some clinic every time one of us needed repairs. “How did I get here?” I managed.

“By airplane, how else?” She leaned past me to study something on the screen over my head and nodded.

“I’ve had the operation,” I deduced. “That son of a bitch Albert knocked me out. You flew me home while I was still under.”

“How clever! Yes. Is all over. Doctor says you are healthy peasant pig and will recover quickly,” she went on, “only with bellyache continuing awhile because of two point three meters new intestine. Eat now. Then sleep some more.”

I leaned back while Essie fussed with the chef program and stared at the holopic. It was put there to remind me, no matter how unpleasant the tinkering that was going on to keep me alive, that there had been times far more unpleasant still, but that wasn’t what it was reminding me of. What it was reminding me of was a woman I had lost. I will not say I had not thought of her for years, because that would be untrue. I thought of her often-but as a remote memory, and now I was thinking of her as a person. “Time now,” Essie-caroled merrily, “for nourishing fish broth!” By God, she wasn’t fooling; that was what it was, nauseous-smelling but, she said, laced with all the things I needed and could tolerate in my present condition. And meanwhile, Wan was fishing in the black hole with the clever and complicated machinery of the Heechee; and meanwhile, it had just occurred to me that the sickening stuff I was eating was laden with more than medicine; and meanwhile, the clever machinery was performing a separate task Wan did not know about; and meanwhile, I forced myself awake enough to ask Essie how long I had been asleep, and how much longer I could expect to be, and she was saying, “Quite some time, both ways, dear Robin,” and then I was asleep again.

The separate task was notification, for of all the Heechee artifacts the disruptor of order in aligned systems was the one the Heechee worried about most. Improperly used, they feared, it could disrupt their own order decisively and nastily, and so each one had a built-in alarm.

When you fear that somebody may sneak up on you in the dark you set snares-a dragline of clashing tin pans on a tripcord, or a boobytrap to crash down on an intruder’s head, whatever. And there is no greater dark than the dark between the stars, so the Heechee set up their early-warning sentinels. The snares the Heechee had set were numerous, supple, and very, very loud. When Wan deployed his corkscrew it was signaled at once, and at once was when Captain’s communications officer reported it to him. “The alien has done it,” he said, muscles writhing, and Captain uttered a biological expletive. In translation it would not sound like much to a human being, because it referred to the act of sexual coupling at a time when the female was not in love. Captain didn’t say it for its technical meaning. He said it because it was violently obscene, and because nothing less would relieve his feelings. When he saw that Twice started nervously as she leaned to her remote-control board he was instantly contrite.

Captain had the most worries, because he was Captain, but it was Twice who had most of the work. She was operating three remotes at once: the command ship they were about to transfer to, the cargo hauler for hiding the sailship away, and a special drone in the Earth planetary system commanded to survey all transmissions and locate all spaceborne artifacts. And she was in no condition for any of this. The time of loving had come on her, steroids flowed briskly through her wiry veins, the biological program was running, and her body had ripened for its job. Not just her body. Twice’s personality ripened, too, and softened. The strain of trying to guide her drones with a body and nervous system that was tuned for a season of preoccupying sexual coupling was torture. Captain leaned toward her. “Are you all right?” he asked. She didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

He sighed and turned to the next problem. “Well, Shoe?”

The communications officer looked almost as distraught as Twice. “A few conceptual correspondences have been established, Captain,” he reported. “But the translation program is very far from complete.”

Captain twitched his cheek muscles. Was there any unexpected, illogical thing that could go wrong that had not gone wrong already? These communications.-not only was it dangerous that they could exist in the first place, but they were in several languages! Several! Not just two, as was right and proper in the Heechee scheme of things. Not just The Language of Do and The Language of Feel, as the Heechee themselves spoke, but in literally scores of mutually incomprehensible tongues. It might have eased the pain of hearing this endless blab of chatter i1 at least, he had been able to find out what they were saying.

So many worries and problems! Not just the visible sight of Twice getting weaker and more erratic every hour, not just the terrible shock of knowing that some non-Heechee creature was activating the mechanisms that could pierce a black hole; the biggest worry for Captain was whether or not he was capable of dealing with all these consequential challenges. Meanwhile, there was a job to be done. They located the sailship and homed in on it, no problem. They dispatched a message to its crew but, wisely, did not wait for an answer. The command ship, wakened out of its millennia-long powered-down sleep, turned up on schedule. They transferred themselves, lock to lock, to the bigger, more powerful vessel. That, too, was almost no problem, though Twice, gasping and whimpering as she raced from board to board, was slow in taking over her remote-command functions in the new ship. No harm done, though. And the lumbering cargo bubble also appeared where it was supposed to, and even when.