Heechee rendezvous (40 page)

When you look at them from inside, all worlds are the same size. Audee’s didn’t seem small to him. I took care of one of their problems very quickly; I gave each of them ten thousand shares of stock in the Peggy’s Planet ferry, the S. Ya. and its pendant enterprises. Janie Yee-xing didn’t have to worry about being fired anymore; she could rehire herself as a pilot if she chose, or ride the S. Ya. as passenger if she liked. So could Audee; or he could go back to Peggy’s and boss his former bosses on the oilfield; or none of the above, but lounge around in luxury for all his life; and so could Dolly. And, of course, that didn’t solve their problems at all. The three of them mooned around the guest suites for a while until finally Essie suggested we lend them the True Love for a cruise to nowhere until they got their heads straightened out, and we did.

None of them were foolish at all-like the rest of us, they acted that way now and then, maybe. They recognized a bribe when they saw one. They knew that what I really wanted was for them to keep their mouths shut about my present unpleasantly noncorporeal state. But they also knew what a friendly gift was, and there was that component in the stock transfer, too.

And what did they do, the three of them on the True Love?

I think I don’t want to say. Most of it is no one’s business but theirs. Consider. There are times in everyone’s life-certainly including yours, most definitely including my own-when what you are doing and saying is not either important or pretty. You strain at a bowel movement, you have a fugitive and shocking thought, you break wind, you tell a lie. None of it matters very much, but you do not want advertised those parts of everyone’s life in which he looks ludicrous or contemptible or mean. Usually they don’t get advertised, because there is no one to see-but now that I am vastened there is always one to see, and that is me. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, as everyone’s memories are added to the database, there are no personal mysteries left at all.

I will say this much of Audee Walthers’ private concerns. What motivated his actions and fueled his worries was that admirable and desirable thing, love. What frustrated his loving was also love. He loved his wife, Dolly, because he had schooled himself to love her all the while they were married-that was his view of how married people should be. On the other hand, Dolly had left him for another man (I use the term loosely in Wan’s case), and Janie Yee-xing had turned up to console him. They were both very attractive persons. But there were too many of them. Audee was as monogamous as I was. If he thought to make up with Dolly, there was Janie in the way-she had been kind, he owed her some sort of consideration-call it love. But between him and Janie there was Dolly: They had planned a life together and he had had no intention ever of changing it, so you could call that love, too. Complicated by some feeling that he owed Dolly some kind of punishment for abandoning him, and Janie some sort of resentment for being in the way-remember, I told you there were contemptible and ludicrous parts. Complicated much more by the equally complex feelings of Dolly and Janie

It must almost have been a relief to them when-orbiting idly in a great cometary ellipse that was pushing them out toward the asteroids and at angle to the ecliptic-whatever discussion they were having at the moment was interrupted by a gasp from Dolly and a stifled scream from Janie, and Audee Walthers turned to see on the screen a great cluster of vessels huger and more numerous and far, far bigger than any human being had seen in Earth’s solar system before.

They were scared out of their minds, no doubt.

But no more than the rest of us. All over the Earth, and everywhere in space where there were human beings and communications facilities to carry the word, there was shock and terror. It was the worst nightmare of every human being for the past century or so.

The Heechee were coming back

They didn’t hide. They were there-and so many of them! Optical sensors in the orbital stations spotted more than fifty ships-and what ships! Twelve or fourteen as big as the S. Ya. Another dozen bigger still, great globular structures like the one that had swallowed the sailship. There were Threes and Fives and some intermediate ones that the High Pentagon thought looked suspiciously like cruisers, and all of them coming straight down at us from the general direction of Vega. I could say Earth’s defenses were caught unprepared, but that would be a flattering lie. The truth was that Earth had no defenses worth mentioning. There were patrol ships, to be sure; but they had been built by Earthmen to fight other Earthmen. No one had dreamed of pitting them against the semi-mythical Heechee.

And then they spoke to us.

The message was in English, and it was short. It said: “The Heechee can’t allow interstellar travel or communication anymore except under certain conditions that they will decide and supervise. Everything else has to stop right away. They’ve come to stop it.” That was all before the speaker, with a helpless shake of the head, faded away.

It sounded a lot like a declaration of war.

It was interpreted that way, too. In the High Pentagon, in the orbiting forts of other nations, in the councils of power all over the world, there were abrupt meetings and conferences and planning sessions; ships were called in for rearming, and others were redirected toward the Heechee fleet; the orbital weapons that had been quiet for decades were checked and aligned-useless as arbalests, they might be, but if they were all we had to fight with, we would fight them. The confusion and shock and reaction swept the world.

And there was nowhere that suffered more astonishment and bewilderment than the people who made up my own happy household; for the person who gave the Heechee ultimatum Albert had recognized at once, and Essie only a moment later, and I before I even saw her face. It was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

Gelle-Klara Moynlin, my love. My lost love. There she was, staring at me out of the frame of the PV and looking no older than the last time I’d seen her, years and decades before-and looking no better, either, because both times she was about as badly shaken up as it was possible for a person to be. Not to mention beaten up, once by me.

But if she’d been through a lot and showed it, my Klara, she had plenty in reserve. She turned from the screen when she had delivered her message to the human race and nodded to Captain. “You zaid it?” he demanded anxiously. “You gave the mezzage prezisely as I inzdructed?”

“Precisely,” said Klara, and added, “Your English is getting much better now. You could talk directly if you wanted to.”

“Is too important to take chanzes,” said Captain fretfully, and turned away. Half the tendons on his body were rippling and twitching now, and he was not alone. His loyal crew were as harried as himself, and in the communications screens that linked his ship to the others in the grand fleet he could see the faces of the other captains. It was a grand fleet, Captain reflected, studying the displays that showed them in proud array, but why was it his fleet? He didn’t need to ask. He knew the answer. The reinforcements from inside the core amounted to more than a hundred Heechee, and at least a dozen of them were entitled to call themselves senior to him if they chose. They could easily have asserted command of the fleet. They didn’t. They let it be his fleet because that made it also be his responsibility ... and his own sweet essence that would go to join the massed minds if it went wrong. “How foolish they are,” he muttered, and his communicator twitched agreement.

“I will instruct them to maintain better order,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Of course, Shoe.” Captain sighed and watched gloomily as the communicator rattled instructions to the other captains and controllers. The shape of the armada reformed itself slowly as the great cargo vessels, capable of biting a thousand-meter spherical chunk out of anything and carrying it anywhere, dropped back behind the transports and the smaller ships. “Human woman Klara,” he called. “Why do they not answer?”

She shrugged rebelliously. “They’re probably talking it over,” she said.

“Talking it over!”

“I’ve tried to tell you,” she said resentfully. “There are a dozen different major powers that have to get together, not counting a hundred little countries.”

“A hundred countries.” Captain groaned, trying to imagine such a thing. He failed...

Well. That was long and long ago, especially if you measure time in femtoseconds. So very much has happened since! So much that, vastened as I am, it is hard for me to take it all in. It is even harder to remember (whether with my own memory or some borrowed other) every detail of every event of that time, although, as you have seen, I can recall quite a lot when I want to. But that picture stays with me. There was Klara, her black brows scowling as she watched the Heechee jitter and mope; there was Wan, all but comatose and forgotten in a corner of the cabin. There were the Heechee crew, twitching and hissing to one another, and there was Captain, gazing with pride and fear at the resurrected armada on the mission he had ordered. He was gambling for the highest of stakes. He did not know what would happen next-expected anything-feared almost everything-could not be surprised, he thought, by whatever occurred ... until something did occur that surprised him very much.

“Captain!” cried Mongrel, the integrator. “There are other ships!”

And Captain brightened. “Ah!” he applauded. “At last they respond!” It was curious of the humans to do so physically rather than by means of radio, but then they were strange to begin with. “Are the ships speaking to us, Shoe?” he asked, and the communicator twitched his cheek muscles no. Captain sighed. “We must be patient, then,” he said, studying the display. The human vessels were certainly not approaching in any sensible order. It seemed, in fact, as though they had been detached from whatever errands they were on and thrown in to meet the Heechee fleet hurriedly, carelessly-almost frantically. One was in easy range of ship communication; two others farther away, and one of those battling an existing velocity that went the wrong way.

Then Captain hissed in surprise. “Human female!” he commanded. “Come here and inzdruct them to be careful! Zee what is happening!” From the nearest ship a smaller object had launched, a primitive thing that was chemically propelled, much too tiny to contain even a single person. It was accelerating directly toward the heart of the Heechee fleet, and Captain nodded to White-Noise, who instantly ordered a nudge into FI’L velocity that removed the nearest cargo vessels from danger. “They muzt not be zo zlipzhodi” he cried sternly. “A collizion could occur!”

“Not by accident,” said Klara grimly.

‘What? I do not underzdand!”

“Those are missiles,” she said, “and they’ve got nuclear warheads. That’s your answer. They’re not waiting for you to attack. They’re shooting first!”

Do you have the picture now? Can you see Captain standing there with his tendons shocked still and his jaw dropping, staring at Klara? He chews at his tough, thin lower lip and glances at the screen. There’s his fleet, the huge caravan of cargo transports resurrected from half a million years of hiding so that he can-with grave doubt; at great risk to himself
offer the human race, a couple of million at a time, free transportation and safe refuge from the Assassins, in the core where the Heechee themselves hid. “Shooting?” he repeated numbly. “To hurt us? Pozzibly to kill?”

“Exactly,” flared Klara. “What did you expect? If it’s war you want, you’ll get it.”

And Captain closed his eyes, hardly hearing the horrified hiss and buzz that went around his crew as White-Noise translated. “War,” he muttered, unbelieving, and for the first time ever he thought of joining the massed minds not with fear but almost with longing; however bad it might be, how could it be worse than this?

And meanwhile...

Meanwhile, it almost went too far-but, fortunately for everyone, not quite. The Brazilian scoutship’s missile was far too slow to catch the Heechee as they dodged. By the time they were in position to fire again- long before any other human ship could come close-Captain had managed to explain to Klara, and Klara was on the communication circuits again, and the word was out. Not an invasion fleet. Not even a commando raid. A rescue mission-and a warning of what made the Heechee run and hide, and was now for us to worry about.

Vastened as I am I can smile at those pitiful old fears and apprehensions.

Not at the time, maybe. But now, ah, yes. The scales are all bigger, and a lot more exciting. There are ten thousand stored Heechee dead ones outside the core alone, and I can read them all. Have read them, nearly all. Go on reading them as I choose, whenever there is something I want to study more closely. Books on a library shelf?

They are more than that. I don’t exactly “read” them, either. It is much more like remembering them. When I “open” one of them, I open it all the way; I read it from the inside out, as though it were part of me.

It was not easy to do that, and for that matter hardly anything I have learned to do since I was vastened has come easily. But with Albert to help me and simple texts to practice on, I learned. The first datastores I accessed were only that-just data, no worse than consulting a table of logarithms. Then I had old Heechee-stored Dead Men and some of Essie’s first cases for her Here After franchises, and they were really not very well done. I was never in doubt about which part of what I was thinking was me.