Heechee rendezvous (9 page)

“I certainly would,” said Walthers. And so he sat down and had the wine, and then he had the share of a joint with pretty Janie Yee-xing, and by and by had the other refreshments the tiny cabin had to offer, which were excellent in quality and satisfying to his soul, and if he thought at all of lost Dolly in the next half hour or so it was not at all with jealousy and rage, but almost with compassion.

There was plenty of room to fool around on return trips, it turned out, even in a cabin no bigger than the one Horatio Hornblower had occupied centuries before. And the wine was Peggy’s Planet’s best, but when they had finished emptying the bottle, and themselves, the cabin began to seem a lot smaller and there was still an hour or more before their shifts began. “I’m hungry,” Yee-xing announced. “I’ve got some rice and stuff here, but maybe-“

It was not a time to push his luck, although a home-cooked meal sounded good. Even rice and stuff. “Let’s go to the galley,” said Walthers, and, in no particular hurry, they wandered hand in hand back to the working part of the ship. They paused at a junction of corridors, where the long-gone Heechee had, for reasons of their own, planted little clusters of shrubs and bushes-not, no doubt, the same ones that were still growing there. Yee-xing paused to pick a bright blue berry.

“Look at that,” she said. “They’re all ripe, and the deadbeats don’t even pick them.”

“You mean the returning colonists? But they pay their way-“

“Oh, sure,” she said bitterly. “No pay, no fly. But when they get back they’ll go right on welfare, because what else is there for them?”

Walthers sampled one of the juicy, thin-skinned fruits. “You don’t like the returnees very much.”

Yee-xing grinned. “I don’t keep that a secret very well, do I?” But the grin faded. “In the first place, there’s nothing for them to go home to-if they had a decent life, they wouldn’t have left it. In the second place, things have got a lot worse since they left. More terrorist trouble. More international friction-why, there are countries that are building up their armies again! And in the third place, they’re not only going to suffer from all that; they’re part of the cause of it. Half the goons you see here will be in some terror group in a month-or supporting one, anyway.”

They strolled onward, and Walthers said humbly, “It’s true I’ve been away a long time, but I did hear that things are getting nasty-bombings and shootings.”

“Bombings! If that’s all there was! They’ve got a TPT now! You go back to the Earth system now, and you never know when you’re going to be right off your rocker without warning!”

“TPT? What’s a TPT?”

“Oh, my God, Walthers,” she said earnestly, “you have been away a long time. What they used to call the Craziness, don’t you remember? It’s a telempathic psychokinetic transceiver, one of those old Heechee things. There are about a dozen of them around, and the terrorists have one!”

“The Craziness,” Walthers repeated, scowling, as a memory tried to work its way up out of his subconscious.

“Right. The Craziness,” said Yee-xing, with gloomy satisfaction. “I remember when I was a kid in Kanchou, my father came home with his head all bloody because somebody had jumped out of the top story of the glass factory. Right on top of my father! Crazy as a bedbug! And it was all the TPT.”

Walthers nodded without answering, his face drawn. Yee-xing looked at him in puzzlement, then waved at the guards ahead of them. “That’s what they’re protecting mostly,” she said, “because there’s still one on the S. Ya. Too damn many of them around! And they thought of protecting them a little too late, because now there’s a bunch of terrorists that have a Heechee Five, and they’ve got a TPT in it, and somebody who’s

It was, of course, the castaway boy Wan who caused the Fever. All he wanted was some sort of human contact, because he was lonesome, It was not his intention to drive most of the human race crazy with his crazy, obsessive thoughts. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.

really crazy. Lunatic, I mean! When he gets on that thing and you feel him in your head it’s so creepy and awful-Walthers, is something the matter?”

He stopped at the entrance to the gold-lit corridor, the four guards looking at him with curiosity. “The Craziness,” he said. “Wan! This used to be his ship!”

“Well, sure it was,” the girl said, frowning. “Listen, we were going to get something to eat. We’d better do it.” She was getting worried. Walthers’ jaw was set, the muscles around his face contracted. As much as anything, he looked like somebody who was expecting to be punched in the face, and the guards were getting curious. “Come on, Audee,” she said pleadingly.

Walthers stirred and looked at her. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’m not hungry any more.”

Wan’s ship! How strange, Walthers thought, that he had not made the connection before. But of course it was so.

Wan had been born in this very vessel, long before it was renamed the S. Ya. Broadhead, long before the human race even knew it existed unless you considered a few dozen remote descendants of Australopithecus afarensis human. Wan had been born to a pregnant female Gateway prospector. Her husband was lost on one mission, herself stranded on another. She hung on to life for his first few years and then left him orphaned. Walthers could not easily imagine what Wan’s infancy was like
tiny child in this vast, almost empty vessel, no company but savages and the computer-stored analogs of dead space prospectors. One of whom, no doubt, had been his mother. It called for pity

Walthers had no pity to give. Not to Wan, who had borrowed his wife. Not, for that matter, to the same Wan who had found the machine they called the TPT-short for “telempathic psychokinetic transceiver,” as the thick tongue of the bureaucracy had relabeled it. Wan himself had only called it a dream couch, and the rest of the human race had called it the Fever, the terrible, cloudy obsessions that had infected every human alive when silly young Wan, discovering a couch, had found that it gave him some sort of contact with some sort of living beings. He did not know that the same process gave them some sort of contact with him, and so his teen-aged dreams and fears and sexual fantasies invaded ten billion human brains ... Perhaps Dolly should have made the connection, but she had been a small child when it happened. Walthers had not. He remembered, and it gave him a fresh reason to hate Wan.

He could no longer remember that recurrent worldwide madness very clearly, could hardly imagine how devastating its effects had been. He did not even try to imagine Wan’s idle, lonely childhood here, but present Wan, cruising around the stars on his mysterious quest, his only company Walthers’ fugitive wife-that, all of that, Walthers could imagine all too clearly.

In fact, he spent nearly all of the hour available to him, before his shift began, in imagining it, before it occurred to him that he was wallowing in self-pity and volunteered humiliation and that was really, after all, no way for a grown human being to behave.

He showed up on time. Yee-xing, there in the pilot room before him, said nothing but looked faintly surprised. He grinned at her in the changeover and set in to work.

Although the actual piloting of the ship amounted to not much more than holding on to the controls and letting the vessel fly itself~ Walthers kept himself busy. His mood had changed. The vastness of the vessel he had under his fingertips was a challenge. He watched Janie Yee-xing as, with knees and toe-tips and elbows, she worked the auxiliary controls that displayed course and position and ship’s state and all the other data that a pilot didn’t really need to know to fly the beast but ought to go to the trouble of finding out if he wanted to call himself a pilot. And he did the same. He summoned up the course display and checked the position of the S Ya., tiny glowing gold dot along a thin blue line nineteen hundred light-years long; he verified that the position was right by calculating angles to the red-glowing marker stars along the route; he frowned at the handful of “Stay Away!” markings, where black holes and gas clouds posed a threat-none of them anywhere near their course, it appeared- and he even called up the great Heechee sky chart that displayed the entire Galaxy, with other members of the Local Group hanging on its fringes. Several hundred very bright human beings and thousands of hours of machine-intelligence time had gone into unraveling the Heechee chart code. There were parts that were not understood yet, and Walthers studied, frowning, the handful of points in all that area where the blinking, multicolored halos that meant “Here there be danger” were doubled and tripled. What could be so dangerous that the Heechee charts fairly screamed with panic?

There was still a lot to learn! And, Walthers thought to himself, no better place to learn it than on this ship. His job was strictly temporary, of course. But if he did good work ... if he showed willingness and talent ... if he ingratiated himself with the captain ... why then, he thought, when they reached Earth, and the captain had to face the job of hiring a new Seventh Officer, what better candidate than Audee Walthers?

When the shift was over, Yee-xing came across the ten-meter space separating the two pilot positions and said, “As a pilot, you’re looking pretty good, Walthers. I was a little worried about you.”

He took her hand and they headed for the door. “I guess I was in a bad mood,” he apologized, and Yee-xing shrugged.

“First girl friend always catches all the crap after a divorce,” she observed. “What did you do, plug in one of our headshrinker programs?”

“I didn’t have to. I just-“ Walthers hesitated, trying to remember just what he had done. “I guess I just talked to myself a little. The thing about having your wife walk out on you,” he explained, “is that it makes you feel ashamed I mean, besides jealous, and angry, and all that other stuff. But after I stewed around for a while it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything much to be ashamed of. The feeling didn’t belong to me, you see?”

“And that helped?” she demanded.

“Well, after a while it did.” And, of course, the sovereign antidote for woman-induced pain was another woman, but he didn’t want to say that to the antidote.

“I’ll have to remember that, next time I get dumped. Well, I guess it’s about bedtime . .

He shook his head. “It’s early yet, and I’m all charged up. What about that old Heechee stuff? You said you knew a way past the guards.”

She stopped in the middle of the passage to study him. “You sure have your ups and downs, Audee,” she said. “But why not?”

The S. Ya. was double-hulled. The space between the hulls was narrow and dark, but it could be entered. So Yee-xing led Walthers through narrow passages close to the skin of the great spacecraft, through a maze of empty colonists’ bunks, past the crude, huge kitchen that fed them, into a space that smelled of stale garbage and ancient rot-into a vast, ill-lit chamber. “Here they are,” she said. Her voice was lowered, although she had promised him they were too far from the guards to be overheard. “Put your head close to that sort of silvery basket-you see where I’m pointing?-but you don’t touch it. That’s important!”

“Why is it important?” Walthers stared around at what looked like the Heechee equivalent of an attic. There were at least forty devices in the chamber, large and small, all of them firmly linked to the structure of the ship itself. There were big ones and little ones, spherical ones with splayed mountings joining the deck, squarish ones that glowed in the blue

The Heechee charting and navigation systems were not easy to decipher. For navigation, the system looks up two points, the start and finish of the trip. It then looks up all intervening obstacles such as dust or gas clouds, perturbing radiation, gravitational fields, and so on, and selects points of safe passage around or between them, after which it constructs a spline to fit the points and directs the vessel along it.

Many objects and points on the charts were tagged with attention marks-flickering auras, check marks, and so on. We realized early that these were often warnings. The difficulty was that we didn’t know which signs were warnings, or what they warned against.

and green colors of the metal. Of the woven metal shroud Janie Yee-xing was indicating, there were three, all exactly alike.

“It’s important because I don’t want my ass kicked off this ship, Audee. So pay attention!”

“I am paying attention. Why are there three of them?”

“Why did the Heechee do anything? Maybe all these things were spares. Now here’s the part you have to listen to. Put your head close to the metal part, but not too close. As soon as you start feeling things that don’t come out of you, that’s close enough. You’ll know when. But don’t get any closer, and above all don’t touch, because this is a two-way thing. As long as you’re just satisfied with sort of general feelings, nobody will notice. Probably. But if they do notice, the captain will have us both walking the plank, you understand?”

“Of course I understand,” Walthers said, a little annoyed, and moved his head within a dozen centimeters of the silvery mesh. He twisted around to look at Yee-xing. “Nothing,” he said.

“Try a little closer.”

It was not very easy to move your head a centimeter at a time when it was bent at a strange angle and you didn’t have anything to hold on to, but Walthers tried to do as instructed- “That’s it!” Yee-xing cried, watching his face. “No closer, now!” He didn’t answer. His mind was filled with the barest suspicion of sensations-a confused mumble of sensations. There were dreams and daydreams, and someone’s desperate shortness of breath; there was someone’s laughter, and someone, or actually what seemed to be three couples of someones, engaged in sexual activity. He twisted to grin at Janie, started to speak- And then, suddenly, there was something else there. Walthers froze. From Yee-xing’s description he had expected a sort of sense of company. The presence of other people. Their fears and joys and hungers and pleasures-but the “they” was always human.