Heechee rendezvous (6 page)

“Just tell me what you want,” said Walthers, trying not to show that he was still breathing hard.

“Well, rise and shine, Audee. There’s a party of six down with scurvy, Grid Seven Three Poppa, coordinates a little fuzzy but they’ve got a radio beacon. That’s all they’ve got. You’re flying them a doctor, a dentist, and about a ton of vitamin C to arrive at first light. Which means you take off in ninety minutes tops.”

“Ah, hell, Carey! Can’t it wait?”

“Only if you want them DOA. They’re real bad. The shepherd that found them says there’s two of them he don’t think will make it anyway.”

Walthers swore to himself, looked apologetically at Dolly, and then reluctantly began getting his gear together.

When Dolly spoke the voice was not a kitten’s anymore. “Junior? Can’t we go back home?”

“This is home,” he said, trying to make it light.

“Please, Junior?” The relaxed face had tightened up, and the ivory mask was impassive, but he could hear the strain in her voice.

“Dolly, love,” he said, “there’s nothing there for us. Remember? That’s why people like us come here. Now we’ve got a whole new planet
why, this city by itself is going to be bigger than Tokyo, newer than New York; they’re going to have six new transports in a couple of years, you know, and a Lofstrom loop instead of these shuttles-“

“But when? When I’m old?”

There might not have been a justifiable reason for the misery in her voice, but the misery was there all the same. Walthers swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried his joking best. “Sweet-pants,” he said, “you won’t be old even when you’re ninety.” No response. “Aw, but, honey,” he cajoled, “it’s bound to get better! They’re sure to start a food factory out in our Oort pretty soon. It might even be next year! And they as much as promised me a piloting job for the construction-“

“Oh, fine! So then you’ll be away a year at a time instead of just a month. And I’ll be stuck in this dump, without even any decent programs to talk to.”

“They’ll have programs-“

“I’ll be dead first!”

He was wide awake now, the joys of the night worn away. He said, “Look. If you don’t like it here we don’t have to stay. There’s more on Peggy’s than Port Hegramet. We can go out into the back country, clear some land, build a house-“

“Raise strong sons, found a dynasty?” Her voice was scornful.

“Well ... something like that, I guess.”

She turned over in the bed. “Take your shower,” she advised. “You smell like fucking.”

And while Audee Walthers, Jr., was in the shower, a creature that looked quite unlike any of Dolly’s puppets (though one of them was supposed to represent him) was seeing his first foreign stars in the thirty-one true years; and meanwhile one of the sick prospectors had stopped breathing, much to the relief of the shepherd who was trying, head averted, to nurse him; and meanwhile there were riots on Earth, and fifty-one dead colonists on a planet eight hundred light-years away .

And meanwhile Dolly had got up long enough to make him coffee and leave it on the table. She herself went back to bed, where she was, or pretended to be, sound asleep while he drank it, and dressed, and went out the door.

When I look at Audee, from this very great distance that separates us now, I am saddened to see that he looks so much like a wimp. He wasn’t, really. He was quite an admirable person. He was a first-rate pilot, physically brave, rough-and-tumble tough when he had to be, kind when he had a chance. I suppose everybody looks wimpy from inside, and of course from inside is how I see him now-from a very great distance inside, or outside, depending on what analog of geometry you choose to apply for this metaphor. (I can hear old Sigfrid sighing, “Oh Robin! Such digressions!” But then Sigfrid was never vastened.) We all have some areas of wimpiness, is what I am trying to say. It would be kinder to call them areas of vulnerability, and Audee simply happened to be extremely vulnerable where Dolly was concerned.

But wimpiness was not Audee’s natural state. For the next little bit of time he was all the good things a person needed to be-resourceful, succoring the needy, tireless. He needed to be. Peggy’s Planet had some traps concealed beneath its gentle facade.

As non-Terran worlds go, Peggy’s was a jewel. You could breathe the air. You could survive the climate. The flora did not usually give you hives, and the fauna was astonishingly tame. Well-not exactly tame. More like stupid. Walthers wondered sometimes what the Heechee had seen in Peggy’s Planet. The. thing was, the Heechee were supposed to be interested in intelligent life-not that they seemed to have found much- and there was certainly not much of that on Peggy’s. The smartest anims~1 was a predator, fox-sized, mole-slow. It had the IQ of a turkey, and proved it by being its own worst enemy. Its prey was dumber and slower than it was-so it always had plenty to eat-and its biggest single cause of death was strangulation on food particles when it threw up what it had eaten too much of. Human beings could eat that predator if they wanted to, and most of its prey, and a lot of the biota in general ... as long as they were careful.

The ragged-ass uranium prospectors hadn’t been careful. By the time the violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Walthers set his aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.

The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to pass the chore on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all over. As soon as Walthers’ back was turned, so were the shepherds.

The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag on his wrist described him as Selini Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-against chance of a passage for a new life on Peggy’s, sweltered in the ten-tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the

Of course, you realize the “wimpiness” Robin is excusing here isn’t that of Audee Walthers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to reassure himself from time to time that he wasn’t. Humans are so strange!

landing in the deorbiting capsule-fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they’d fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggy’s, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn’t believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.

Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers’ plane and shouted at him. “Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!”

“It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman,” Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.

“Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!”

Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. “They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman-“

“No! Egyptians!”

“-well, fellow Moslems, anyway-“

“I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious!

Very large affairs are at stake here!”

Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, “It’s the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!”

It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had accumulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn’t had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?

So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour-prickly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the damned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slays versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.

And Peggy’s could have been such a pretty world. It had everything- almost everything, if you didn’t count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys-well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Glass Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms-especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles;
so many millions of desperate people so willing to go so far from Earth and home.

“Poor Arabs,” he had thought to himself but there were some rich ones, too. Like the four he was working for. When they talked about “very large affairs” they measured the scale in dollars and cents, that was clear. This expedition was not cheap. His own charter was in six figures,
pity he couldn’t keep more of it for himself! And that was almost the least part of what they had spent for pop-up tents and sound-poppers, for microphone ranging and rock samplers; for the lease of satellite time for their false-color pictures and radar contour-mapping; for the instruments they paid him to drag around the terrain ... and what about the next step? Next they would have to dig. Sinking a shaft to the salt dome they had located, three thousand meters down, would cost in the millions- Except, he discovered, that it would not, because they too had some of
that illegal Heechee technology Wan had told Dolly about.

The first thing human beings had learned about the long-gone Heechee was that they liked to dig tunnels, because examples of their work lay all about under the surface of the planet Venus. And what they had dug the tunnels with was a technological miracle, a field projector that loosened the crystalline structure of rock, converted it to a sort of slurry; that pumped the slurry away and lined the shaft with that dense, hard, blue-gleaming Heechee metal. Such projectors still existed, but not in private hands.

They did, however, seem to be available to the hands of Mr. Luqman’s party ... which implied not only money behind them but influence which implied somebody with muscle in the right places; and from casual remarks dropped in the brief intervals of rest and meals, Walthers suspected that somebody was a man named Robinette Broadhead.

The salt dome was definite, the drilling sites were chosen, the main work of the expedition was done. All that remained was checking out a few other possibilities and completing the cross-checks. Even Luqman began to relax, and the talk in the evenings turned to home. Home for all four of them turned out not to be Libya or even Paris. It was Texas, where they averaged 1.75 wives each and about half a dozen children in all. Not very evenly distributed, as far as Walthers could tell, but they were, probably purposely, unclear about details. To try to encourage openness Walthers found himself talking about Dolly. More than he meant to. About her extreme youth. Her career as an entertainer. Her hand puppets. He told them how clever Dolly was, making all the puppets herself-a duck, a puppy, a chimp, a clown. Best of all, a Heechee. Dolly’s Heechee had a receding forehead, a beaked nose, a jutting chin, and eyes that tapered back to the ears like an Egyptian wall painting. In profile the face was almost a single line slanting down-all imaginary, of course, since no one had ever seen a Heechee then.

The youngest Libyan, Fawni, nodded judiciously. “Yes, it is good that a woman should earn money,” he declared.

“It isn’t just the money. It helps keep her active, you know? Even so, I’m afraid she gets pretty bored in Port Hegramet. She really has no one to talk to.”

The one named Shameem also nodded. “Programs,” he advised sagely. “When I had but one wife I bought her several fine programs for company. She particularly liked the ‘Dear Abby’ and the ‘Friends of Fatima,’ I remember.”