Heechee rendezvous (20 page)

The whole process took nearly twelve hours. For Twice, they were hours of unremitting toil. Captain had less to do, which left him plenty of time to keep an eye on her. He watched her coppery skin turn purple with unfulfilled amorousness even while it was darkening with fatigue. It worried him. They had been so unready for all these challenges! If they had known there was going to be an emergency, he could easily have shipped an extra drone operator to share Twice’s burden. If they had dreamed it would be necessary, they could have taken a command vessel in the first place and spared the strain of changing ships. If they had thought-if they had suspected-If they had had any intimation at all- But they hadn’t. Really, how could they? Even by galactic time it had been only a few decades since the last peek outside the hiding place at the core-only a wink in astronomical time, and how could anyone have believed that so much could happen in it?

Captain rummaged through food packets until he found the tastiest and easiest to digest, and fed them affectionately to Twice at her board. She had little appetite. Her movements were slower, less sure, more difficult for her every hour. But she was getting the job done. When at last the photon ship’s sails had been furled, the great maw of the bubble vessel was open, the mothlike capsule that carried the sailship passengers slipping slowly into the bubble, Captain began to breathe freely again. For Twice, at least, that was the hardest part of what they would have to do. Now she would have a chance to rest-maybe even a chance to do, with him, what her body and soul were overready to do.

Because the sailship people had responded to his message instantly- for them it was instantly-their reply came before the great gleaming sphere had closed on them. The communications officer, Shoe, keyed his screen and the message appeared:

We accept that we must not complete our voyage.

We request that you convey us to a place where we will be safe.

We query: Are the Assassins returning?

The Heechee left only small scout ships for human beings to discover; they were careful not to leave their special-purpose spacecraft where they were easily located. For example, the bubble transport. This was nothing more than a hollow metal sphere fitted with faster-than-light drive and navigation equipment. The Heechee apparently used it to move bulk materials from place to place; the human race could have used it very well indeed. Each bubble transport could hold the equivalent of a thousand S. Ya.-class transports. Ten of them could have solved Earth’s population problem in a decade.

Captain shrugged with sympathy. To Shoe he said, “Transmit to them:

‘We are returning you to your home system for the time being. If possible, we will bring you back here later.’”

Shoe’s expression was strained, with a mixture of emotions. “What about their query about the Assassins?”

Captain felt a quick shudder in his abdomen. “Tell them not yet,” he said.

But it was not the fear of the other ones that was uppermost in Captain’s mind, not even his concern for Twice. The Heechee shared with the human race an astonishing number of traits: curiosity, male-female love, family solidarity, devotion to children, a pleasure in the manipulation of symbols. The magnitude of the shared traits was not always the same, however. There was one psychological characteristic that the Heechee possessed in a far stronger degree than most humans:

Conscience.

The Heechee were almost physically incapable of repudiating an obligation or letting a wrong ~go unrighted. For the Heechee, the sailship people were a special case. The Heechee owed them. It was from them that they had learned the most frightening fact the Heechee had ever had to face.

The Heechee and the sailship people had known each other well, but not recently, and not for very long. The relationship had begun badly for the sailship people. For the Heechee, it had ended even worse. It was not possible for either of them ever to forget the other.

In the slow, gurgling eddas the sailship people sang it was told how the cone-shaped landing vessels of the Heechee had suddenly appeared, terribly hard and terribly swift, in the sweet slush of their home. The Heechee ships had flashed about the floating arcologies of the people with much cavitation and significant local temperature rises. Many had died. Much damage had been done before the Heechee understood that these were sentient and even civilized beings, if slow ones.

The Heechee were terribly shocked at what they had done. They tried to make amends. The first step was communication, and that was difficult. The task took a very long time-long, at least, for the Heechee, though the time for the sludge dwellers was bewilderingly short before a hard, hot octahedral prism slid itself cautiously into the middle of an arcology. Almost at once it began to speak to them in a recognizable, though laughably ungrammatical, form of their own language.

After that events moved with blinding speed-for the slush dwellers. For the Heechee, watching them in their daily lives was a lot like watching lichens grow. Captain himself had visited their great gas-giant planet,
not a captain then, almost what could have been called a cabin boy; young; yeasty; adventurous, with that considerable, if cautious, Heechee optimism for the boundless future that had collapsed on them so terrifyingly. The gas giant was not the only marvelously exciting place the young Heechee visited. He visited Earth and met the australopithecines, he helped chart gas clouds and quasars, he ferried crews to outposts and construction projects. Years passed. Decades passed. The slow work of translating the sludge dwellers’ communications inched forward. It could have gone a little faster if the Heechee had thought it particularly important; but they did not. It couldn’t have gone very much faster in any case, because the sludge dwellers couldn’t.

But it was interesting, in an antiquarian, touristy sort of way, because the sludge dwellers had been around for a long, long time. Their chill biochemistry was something like three hundred times slower than a Heechee’s, or a human’s. Heechee recorded history went back five or six millennia-more or less the same as humanity’s, at the same stage in technological evolution. The recorded history of the sludge dwellers went back three hundred times as far. There were nearly two million years of consecutive, dated historical data. The earliest folk tales and legends and eddas were ten times earlier still. They were no harder to translate than the later ones, because the slush dwellers did not move very fast even in the evolution of their language, but the massed minds who translated them judged them not very interesting. They put the work of translating them off... until they discovered that two of them spoke of visitations
from space.

When I think of all those years the human race labored under the galling knowledge of inferiority-because the Heechee had done so much more than we had, and done it so much earlier-I have many regrets. I think I regret most that we didn’t know about the Two Eddas. I don’t mean just knowing the eddas themselves, for they would only have given us one more thing to worry about, though a reassuringly remote one. I mean mostly what they did to the Heechee morale.

The first song was from the very dawn of the slush dwellers’ civilization, and quite ambiguous. It was a visitation of the gods. They came, shining so brightly that even the slushers’ rudimentary optics could perceive them-shining with such a turbulence of energy that they caused the soupy gases to seethe and boil, and many died. They did no more than that, and when they went away they never returned. The song itself didn’t mean much. It had no details that the Heechee found believable,

Robin doesn’t tell much about the sailship people, mostly because he didn’t then know much. But that’s a pity. They’re interesting. Their language was made up of words of one syllable- one consonant, one vowel. They had some fifty distinguishable consonants, and fourteen vowels and diphthongs to play with- therefore they had for three-syllable units, such as names, 3.43 x 10
⁸
combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn’t name the females.

When a male impregnated a female, he produced a male child. He only did it rarely, because it cost him a great investment of energy. Unfertilized females produced females, more or less routinely. Bearing males, however, cost them their lives. They didn’t know that-or anything else, really. There are no love stories in the eddas of the sailship people.

and most of it was about a certain ur-slusher hero who dared defy the visitors and came to rule a whole soggy sector of their planet as a reward.

But the second song was more specific. It dated from millions of years later-almost within the historical period. It sang once more of visitors from outside the dense home world, but this time they were not mere tourists. They weren’t conquerors, either. They were refugees. They plunged down to the soggy surface, one shipload of them, it seemed, poorly equipped to survive in an environment that was cold, dense poison for them.

They hid there. They stayed for a long time, by their standards-more than a hundred years. Long enough for the slush dwellers to discover them and even to establish a kind of communication. They had been attacked by alien assassins that flamed like fire, wielding weapons that crushed and burned. Their home planet had been flamed clean. Every vessel they owned in space had been pursued and destroyed.

And then, when generations of the refugees had managed to survive and even multiply, it all came to an end. The flaming Assassins found them and boiled a whole huge shallow of the sludgy methane sea dry to destroy them.

When the Heechee heard this song they might have taken it for fable, except for one term. The term was not easy to translate, for it had had to survive both the incomplete communications with the refugees and the lapse of two million years. But it had survived.

It was what caused the Heechee to stop everything they did so that they could concentrate on a single task: the verification of the old edda. They sought out the home of the fugitives and found it-a planet scorched bare by a sun that had exploded. They sought for, and found, artifacts of previous spacegoing civilizations. Not many. None in good condition. But nearly forty separate bits and pieces of half-melted machines, and they isotope-dated them to two separate epochs. One of them coincided in time with the fugitives who fled to the slush planet. The other was many millions of years older.

They concluded that the stories were true: There had been such a race of Assassins; they had wiped out every spacefaring civilization they had discovered, for more than twenty million years.

And the Heechee came to believe that they were still somewhere around. For the term that had been so hard to translate described the expansion of the heavens and the reversal by the flame-wielders so that all the stars and galaxies would crush together again. For a purpose. And it was impossible to believe that these titans, whoever they were, would not linger to see the results of the process they had begun.

And the bright Heechee dream crumbled, and the slush dwellers sang a new edda: the song of the Heechee, who visited, learned to be afraid, and ran away.

So the Heechee set their booby-traps, hid most of the other evidence of their existence, and retreated to their hidey-hole at the core of the Galaxy.

In one sense, the sludge dwellers were just one of the booby-traps. LaDzhaRi knew that; they all did; that was why he had followed the ancestral commandment and reported that first touch of another mind on his. He expected an answer, though it had been years, even in LaDzhaRi’s time, since there had been a Heechee manifestation of any kind, and then only the quick touch of a routine TPT survey. He had also expected that when the answer came he would not like it. The whole epic struggle of building and launching the interstellar ship, the centuries already invested in their millennium-long journey-wasted! It was true that a flight of a thousand years to LaDzhaRi was no more than an ordinary whaling voyage for a Nantucket captain; but a whaler would not have liked being picked up in mid-Pacific and taken home empty, either. The whole crew had been upset. The excitement in the sailship had been so great that some of the crew involuntarily went into fast mode; the sludgy liquid was so churned that cavitation bubbles formed. One of the females was dead. One of the males, TsuTsuNga, was so demoralized that he was pawing over the surviving females, and not for dinner, either. “Please don’t be foolish,” LaDzhaRi pleaded. For a male to impregnate a female, as TsuTsuNga seemed about to do, involved so large an investment of energy that sometimes it threatened his life. For the females there was no threat-their lives were simply forfeited in order to bear a fertilized child-but they didn’t know that, of course, or much of anything else, really. But TsulsuNga said steadily:

“If I cannot become immortal by voyaging to another star, then at least I will father a son.”

“No! Please! Think, my friend,” begged LaDzhaRi, “we can be home if we wish. Can return as heroes to our arcologies, can sing our eddas so the entire world will hear.“ For the sludge of their homes carried sound as well as a sea, and their songs reached as far as a great whale’s.

TsuTsuNga touched LaDzhaRi briefly, almost contemptuously, at least dismissively. “We’re not heroes!” he said. “Go away and let me do this female.”

And LaDzhaRi reluctantly released him, and listened to the dwindling sounds as he moved away. It was true. They were failed heroes at best.