Heechee rendezvous (38 page)

I do not think that anything, not even the recognition of my own death, was as terrible a shock as finding Essie among the dead ones. “Essie,” I screamed, “what happened to you?”

And at once Albert was there, solicitous, quick: “She’s all right, Robin. She’s not dead.”

“But she must be! She’s here!”

“No, my dear boy, not really here,” said Albert. “Her book is there because she partially stored herself, as part of the experiments for the Here After project. And also as part of the experiments that led to me, as I am at present constituted.”

“You bastard, you let me think she was dead!”

He said gently, “Robin, you must get over this flesh-and-blood obsession with biology. Does it really matter if her metabolism still operates on the organic level, in addition to the version of her which is stored here?” And that strange Essie-voice chimed in:

“Be patient, dear Robin. Be calm. Is going to be all right.”

“I doubt that very much,” I said bitterly.

“Trust me, Robin,” she whispered. “Listen to Albert. He will tell you what to do.”

“The hardest part is over,” Albert reassured me. “I apologize for the traumas you have suffered, but they were necessary-I think.”

“You think”

“Yes, only think, Robin, for this has never been done before and we are operating largely in the dark. I know it has been a shock to you to meet the stored analog of Mrs. Broadhead in this way, but it will help to prepare you to meet her in the flesh.”

If I had had a body to do it with, I would have been tempted to punch him-if Albert had had anything to punch. “You’re crazier than I am,” I cried.

Ghost of a chuckle. “Not crazier, Robin. Only as crazy. You will be able to speak to her and see her, just as I did with you while you were still alive. I promise this, Robin. It will succeed-I think.”

“I can’t!”

Pause. “It is not easy,” he conceded. “But consider this. I can do it. So do you not think you can do as well as a mere computer program like myself?”

“Don’t taunt me, Albert! I understand what you’re saying. You think I can display myself as a hologram and communicate in real time with living persons; but I don’t know how!”

“No, not yet, Robin, for those subroutines do not yet exist in your program. But I can teach you. You will be displayed. Perhaps not with all the natural grace and agility of my own displays,” he boasted, “but at least you will be recognizable. Are you prepared to begin to learn?”

And Essie’s voice, or that voice which was a degraded copy of Essie’s, whispered, “Please do, dear Robin, for am waiting for you without patience.”

How tiresome it is to be born! Tiresome for the neonate, and more tiresome still for the auditor who is not experiencing it but only listening to interminable woes.

Interminable they were, and spurred by constant nagging from my midwives. “You can do it,” promised the copy of Essie from one side of me (pretending for the moment that I had a “side”), and, “It is easier than it seems,” confirmed the voice of Albert from the other. There were no two persons in the universe whose word I would take more readily than either of them. But I bad used up all my trust; there was none left, and I was scared. Easy? It was preposterous.

For I was seeing the cabin as Albert had always seen it. I didn’t have the perspective of two focusing eyes and a pair of ears located at particular points in space. I was seeing and hearing all of it at once. Long ago that old painter, Picasso, painted pictures like that, with the parts spread out in random order. They were all there, but so exploded and randomized that there was no overriding form to recognize but only a helter-skelter mosaic of bits. I had wandered the Tate and the Met with Essie to look at such paintings, and even found some pleasure in them. They were even amusing. But to see the real world spread out that way, like parts on an assembly bench-that was not amusing at all.

“Let me help you,” whispered the analog of Essie. “Do you see me there, Robin? Asleep in the big bed? Have been up for many days, Robin, pouring old organic you into fine new fan bottle and am now worn out but, see, I have just moved hand to scratch my nose. Do you see hand? Do you see nose? Do you recognize?” Then the ghost of a chuckle. “Of course you do, Robin, for that is me all over.”

There still was Klara to be thought about, if I had known enough just then to think about her-not just Klara but Wan (hardly worth a thought, really) and also Captain and his Heechee, who were worth all the thoughts anyone could give them. But I did not then know that, either. I was vaster, all right, but not as yet a whole lot smarter. And certainly I was distracted by problems of my own, although, if Captain and I had known each other and been able to compare, it would have been interesting to see whose problems were worse. Actually it would have been a standoff. Both sets of problems were simply off the scale, too much to be handled.

The physical closeness of his two human captives was one of Captain’s problems. In his bony nostrils they stank. They were physically repellent.

Loose, bouncing, jiggling fat and sagging flesh marred the clean lines of their structures-the only Heechee ever that gross were the few dying of the worst degenerative disease they knew. Even then the stink was not as bad. The human breath was rancid with putrefying food. The human voices grated like buzz-saws. It made Captain’s throat sore to try to frame the buzzy, grumbly syllables of their nasty little language.

In Captain’s view, the captives were nasty all over, not least because they simply refused to understand most of what he said. When he tried to tell them how perilously they had endangered themselves-not to mention the Heechee in their hiding place-their first question was: “Are you Heechee?”

In all his troubles, Captain had room for irritation at that. (It was in fact the same irritation the sailship people experienced when they learned that the Heechee called them slush dwellers. That Captain did know but didn’t think about.) “Heechee!” he groaned, then gave his abdominal shrug. “Yes. It does not matter. Be still. Stay quietly.”

“Phew,” muttered White-Noise, referring to more than the physical stink. Captain glared and turned to Burst.

“Have you disposed of their vessel?” he demanded.

“Of course,” said Burst. “It is en route to a holding port, but what of the kugelblitz?” (He did not, of course, use the word kugelblitz.)

Captain shrugged his belly morosely. He was tired. They were all tired.

They had been operating at the extreme limits of their capability for days now, and they were showing the effects. Captain tried to put his thoughts in order. The sailship had been tucked out of sight. These errant human beings had been removed from the vicinity of that most terrible of dangers, the kugelblitz, and their ship, on automatic, was being hidden away. So far he had done, he knew, as much as could have been expected of him. It had not been without cost, he thought, sorrowing for Twice; it was hard to believe that in the normal course of events he would still be enjoying her once-a-year love.

But it was not enough.

It was entirely possible, Captain reflected, that by this point there was no longer such a thing as “enough”; it might well be too late for anything he, or the entire Heechee race, could do. But he could not admit that. As long as there was a chance, he had to act. “Display the charts from their ship,” he ordered, and turned again to the rude, crude mounds of blubber he had captured. Speaking as simply as to a child he said: “Look at this chart.”

It was one of the minor annoyances of Captain’s situation that the leaner, and therefore less physically appalling, of his captives was also the nastier. “You be still,” he ordered, pointing a lean fist at Wan; his ravings had been even more nearly sense-free than the female’s. “You! Do you know what this is?”

At least the female had the sense to speak slowly. It took only a few repetitions before he understood Klara’s answer: “It is the black hole we were going to visit.”

Captain shuddered. “Yes,” he said, trying to match the unfamiliar consonants. “Exactly.” Burst was translating for the others, and he could see the tendons writhing on their limbs in shock. Captain chose his words carefully, pausing to check with the ancestral minds to make sure he had the right words:

“Listen carefully,” he said. “This is very dangerous. Long, long ago we discovered that a race of Assassins had killed off every technologically advanced civilization in the universe-at least in our own Galaxy, and in some nearby ones ...”

Well, it did not go that swiftly. Captain had to repeat and repeat, a dozen times for a single word sometimes, before the blubbery creatures could seem to grasp what he was saying. Long before he was finished his throat was raw, and the rest of his crew, though they knew as well as he what perils were involved, were frankly dozing. But he didn’t stop. That chart on the screen, with its clustered energy-sinks and its quintuple warning legend, did not let him relax.

The Assassins had done their work of slaughter millennia before the Heechee appeared on the scene. At first the Heechee had thought they were simple monsters from the primeval past, no more to be feared in their time than the Heechee equivalent of a tyrannosaur.

Then they had discovered the kugelblitz.

Captain hesitated there, looking around at his crew. The next part was hard to say, for it led to an obvious conclusion. His tendons writhing, he plunged ahead:

“It was the Assassins,” he said. “They have retreated into a black hole
but the particular kind of black hole that is composed of energy, not matter, for they themselves were not made of matter. They were pure energy. Inside their black hole they exist only as a sort of standing wave in an energy sea.”

By the time he had repeated it several times, in several ways, he could see that questions were forming; but the logical deduction he feared wasn’t among them. The question was from the female, and it was only:

“How can a being composed only of energy survive?”

That was easy enough to answer. The answer was “I don’t know.”

Because Robin was, quite naturally, preoccupied with other concerns, I was not then able to discuss the kugelblitz with him in as much detail as I would have wished. Its statistics were interesting. Its temperature I calculated at about three million Kelvin, but that was not worrying. It was the energy density that disturbed me. The energy density of black-body radiation goes up as the cube of the temperature-that’s the old Stefan-Bolzmann law-but the number of photons goes up linearly with the temperature, too, so effectively it’s a fourth-power increase inside the kugelblitz. At one Kelvin it’s 4.72 electron-volts per liter. At three million it’s three million to the fourth power times that-oh, say, about 382,320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ev/ liter. And there was a bunch of liters in that thing. What’s the importance of that? That all that energy represented organized intelligences. Assassins. A universe of them, all stored in the one kugelblitz, waiting for their plans to mature and the universe to be remade to suit them.

There were, Captain knew, theories-theories that said the Assassins had once been creatures of physical bodies but had somehow cast them off- but whether the theories had any relation to fact even the oldest of the massed minds could not say.

But it was the very difficulty of survival for beings of pure energy, Captain explained, that led to the last and worst thing about the Assassins. The universe was not hospitable to them. So they decided to change the universe. Did something to create a good deal of additional mass in the universe. Caused the expansion of the universe to reverse itself~ Holed up in their kugelblitz ... and waited.

“I have heard of this missing mass often,” said the male captive eagerly. “The Dead Men when I was a child spoke of it-but they were crazy, you know.”

The female stopped him. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would they do this?”

Captain paused, bone-tired from the ordeal of trying to communicate with these dangerous primitives. Again the best answer was “I don’t know,” but there were speculations. “It is thought by the massed minds,” he said slowly, “that the physical laws of the universe were determined by random fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy at the first moment after the Big Bang. It is possible that the Assassins intend to interfere with that process. Once they have collapsed the universe and it rebounds, they may change those basic laws-the ratio of the masses of the electron and proton, the number that relates the gravitational force to the electromagnetic-all of them-and so bring about a universe in which they could live more comfortably ... but you and I could not.”

The male had been less and less able to contain himself. Now he burst out in squawking sounds, only gradually turning into intelligible words. “Ho-ho!” cried Wan, wiping away a tear. “What cowards you are! Afraid of some creatures that hide themselves in a black hole, to do something that won’t happen for billions of years! What does that matter to us?”

But the female had grasped Captain’s meaning. “Shut up, Wan,” she said, her facial muscles tightening in an almost Heechee expression. “What you’re saying is that these Assassins aren’t taking any chances. They came out once before to wipe out everybody who looked like he might be going to get civilized enough to interfere with their plan. They might do it again!”

“Exactly so!” cried Captain with pleasure. “You have said it precisely! And the danger is that you barbarians-you people,” he corrected himself, “are likely to bring them back. Using radio! Penetrating black holes! Flying all around the universe, even up to the kugelblitzes themselves!