Of course, all of this was in slow time. Each interchange in this dialogue took six or eight months of continuances and motion hearings and the taking of depositions. After three litigious years the Corporation grudgingly allowed a quarter-million-dollar settlement, which just about paid the Ohs’ lawyer bills.
Then, years after that, someone else repeated their trip with better equipment. The new underwater probes had lights and cameras, and they found what was making the signals. It wasn’t intelligence. It was worms—ten meters long, eyeless, living on the sulfurous exudation of undersea thermal vents. The things turned out on dissection to have electrical systems, just as the Ohs had claimed. That was all they did have that was of any interest at all.
Nevertheless, at least the Ohs were clearly entitled to another couple of hundred thousand, now that their discovery of life was confirmed. They didn’t get it, though. They were, no longer in any position to collect any further bonuses, having failed to return from their latest mission.
The intelligent-alien bonus didn’t go entirely unclaimed, though. Two other parties of Gateway explorers did, in fact, collect their ten million apiece. They found what the Corporation, with some charity, agreed to call “intelligent” aliens.
Everyone admitted that the Corporation was stretching a point here. Even the lucky explorers did, though that didn’t keep them from taking the money. The “Voodoo Pigs” looked like blue-skinned anteaters and wallowed in filth, like domesticated Earthly pigs. What made them “intelligent” was that they had developed an art form: they made little statuettes, nibbling them into shape with their teeth (well, the things they used for teeth), and that was more than any Earthly animal had ever done. So the Corporation philosophically paid off.
Then there were the “Quancies.” They lived in the sea of a remote planet. They had tiny flippers, but no real hands; they weren’t any good at manufacturing things for that reason, and so no one considered them technological. What they did have was a definite, and even a more or less translatable, language. They were definitely smarter than, say, dolphins or whales or anything else on Earth but man himself—and there, too, the Corporation paid its bonus. (By then it was getting so rich that it was actually becoming generous, anyway.)
Those were all the live ones.
There were, to be sure, traces of other “civilizations” that were gone. A planet here and there had refined metal structures, not yet completely rusted away; other showed that somebody, sometime, had gone so far as to pollute its environment with certainly artificial radionuclides.
That was it.
And the more they found, the more the wonder grew. Where were the old civilizations? The ones who had reached Earth’s stage of culture a million or a billion years before? Why hadn’t they survived?
It was as though the first explorers into, say, the Amazon jungle had found huts, farms, villages, but instead of living denizens only corpses. The explorers would certainly wonder what had killed all the people off.
So wondered the Gateway prospectors. They could have accepted it if they had found no traces of any other intelligence (always, of course, not counting the Heechee themselves). Those members of the human race who cared about such things had been braced for that all along: the SETI searches and the cosmological estimates had prepared them for a lonely universe. But there had been other creatures that appeared to have been capable of as much technology and as much wisdom as the human race. They had existed, and now they were gone.
What had happened?
It was a long time before the human race found out the answer to that, and then they didn’t like it at all.
PART NINE
THE AGE
OF GOLD
While human beings were beginning to thread their way across the immensity, of the galaxy, the world they had left behind was beginning to change. It took a long time, but at last the Heechee wonders the Gateway prospectors had brought home were beginning to make a real change for the better in the condition of the peoples of the Earth—even the poorest ones.
One key discovery unlocked all the rest. That was learning how to read the Heechee language. The hardest part of that was finding any Heechee language to read, because the Heechee did not seem to have been familiar with things like pencils, paper, or printing. It was a sure-thing bet in the opinion of everybody who ever gave it a thought that the Heechee must have had some way of recording things, but where was it?
When the answer turned up it was obvious enough: the long-mysterious “prayer fans” were actually Heechee “books.” That is, it was obvious after the fact—though the tricky bit was that the things couldn’t be read without some high-tech aid.
Once the records were identified as records, the rest was up to linguists. It wasn’t all that hard. It certainly was no harder, say, than the long-ago decipherment of “Linear B,” and it was made easier by the fact that places were discovered, on “Heechee Heaven” and elsewhere, where parallel texts could be found in both languages.
When the prayer fans were interpreted, some of the most intractable Heechee mysteries became crystal clear. Not the least of them was how to reproduce the Heechee faster-than-light drive. Then colonization could really begin. The great ship that had been called “Heechee Heaven” was the first to be used for that purpose, because it was already there. It ferried thousands of poverty-stricken emigrants at a time to new homes on places like Peggy’s Planet, and that was only the beginning. Within five years that ship was joined by others, now human made—just as fast; even bigger.
And on the home planet itself…
On the home planet itself, it was the CHON-food factories that made the first big difference.
Simply put, what they did was end human starvation forever. The Heechee’s own CHON-food factories orbited in cometary space—that was the reason for the long-baffling Heechee fascination with Oort clouds, now answered at last. The human-made copies of these factories could be sited anywhere—that is, anywhere there was a supply of the basic four elements. The only other raw material they needed was enough of a salting of impurities to fill out the dietary needs.
So before long the CHON-food factories sat on the shores of the Great Lakes in North America and-Lake Victoria in Africa and everywhere else where water and the four elements were present and people wanted to eat. They were along the beaches of every sea. No one starved anymore.
No one died of hunger before his time—and before long it was almost true that no one died at all. This was for two reasons. The first of them had to do with surgery, and, peculiarly, with the CHON-food factories, as well.
For a long time human beings had known how to substitute transplants for any worn-out organ. Now the replacement parts no longer had to be butchered out of cadavers. The same system that made CHON-food, considerably refined, could be induced to manufacture tailor-made human organs to implant into people in need. (A whole wicked industry of assassinations for the marketplace collapsed overnight.) Nobody had to die because a heart, lung, kidney, bowel, or bladder wore out. You just turned over your specifications to the people at the spare-parts division of the CHON-food factory, and when they pulled your new organs out of their amniotic soup the surgeons popped them in place.
In fact, all the life sciences flowered. The Heechee food factories made it possible to identify, and then to reproduce or even create, a thousand new biological agents—anti-antigens; antivirals, selective enzymes; cell replacements. Disease simply passed out of fashion. Even such long-endured traumas as tooth decay, childbirth, and the common cold became history. (Why should any woman suffer through parturition when some other breeding machine—say, a cow—could be persuaded to accept the fertilized ovum, nurture it to ripeness, and deliver it healthy and squalling?)
And then there was the second reason. If, in spite of everything, a person did finally die of simple overall decay, he didn’t have to die completely.
At least, there was another Heechee invention—it had been first found on the ship
called “Heechee Heaven”—that robbed death of some of its sting. The Heechee’s techniques for capturing a dead person’s mind in machine storage produced the “dead men” on Heechee Heaven. Later, on Earth, it produced the enterprise called “HereAfter, Inc.,” the worldwide chain of operators that would take your deceased mother or spouse or friend, put his or her memory into computer space, and permit you to converse with him or her whenever you liked—forever. Or as long as someone paid the storage charges for his or her datafile.
At first that certainly wasn’t quite the same as being really alive. But it was a whole lot better than being irrecoverably dead.
Of course, as the technology matured (and it matured very fast), machine storage of human intelligence got easier and a great deal better.
When it got really good it began to raise some unexpected problems. Surprisingly, the problems were theological. The promises of Earthly religions were being fulfilled in a way the religious leaders had never planned, for indeed it seemed now to be true that “life” was only a sort of overture, and that “death” was in fact nothing more than the stepping stone to “eternal bliss in Heaven.”
The dying man who then woke up to find himself no more than a collection of bits in the datafile of the immense computer networks might well wonder why he had clung to life in his organic body so long, for the machine afterlife had everything going for it. He had lost nothing through death. He still could “feel.” The machine-stored ate as much as they liked—neither cost nor season were factors in planning a menu—and if they chose they excreted, too. (It did not matter that the “food” the “dead man” ate was only symbolically represented by bits of data, because so was he. He could not tell the difference.) All the biological functions were possible. He was deprived of none of the pleasures of the flesh. He could even make love with his dearest—provided only that she had stored herself in the same net—or with any number of dearests, real and imaginary, if that was how his tastes went. If he wanted the society of the still-living friends he had left behind, there was nothing to stop him representing himself to them (as a machine-generated hologram) in order to have a conversation, or a friendly game of cards.
There was also travel; and, perhaps most popular of all, there was work.
After all, the basic human work is only a kind of data processing. Humans don’t dig the foundations for skyscrapers. Machines do that; all the humans do is run the machines, and that could be done as readily from machine storage as in the flesh.
All those books that the deceased had been meaning to read—the plays, the operas, the ballets, the orchestral performances—now there was time to enjoy them. As much time as he chose. Whenever he chose.
That was heaven indeed. The dead person’s style of life was exactly what he wanted it to be. He didn’t have to worry about what he could “afford” or what was “bad for him.” The only limit was his own desire. If he wished to be cruising in the Aegean or sipping cold rum drinks on a tropical beach, he only had to order it. Then the datastores would summon up any surround he liked, as detailed as any reality could be and just as rewarding. It was almost like living in a perfect video game. The operative word is “perfect,” for the simulations were just as good as the reality; in fact they were better. Tahiti without mosquitoes, French cuisine without gaining weight, the pleasure in the risks of mountain-climbing without the penalty of being killed in an accident. The deceased could ski, swim, feast, indulge in any pleasure…and he never had a hangover.
Some people are never happy. There were a few of the formerly dead who weren’t satisfied. Sipping aperitifs at the Café de la Paix or rafting down the Colorado River, they would take note of the taste of the Campari and the spray of the water and ask, “But is it real?”
Well, what is “real”? If a man whispers loving words to his sweetheart on the long-distance phone, what is it that she “really” hears? It isn’t his own dear voice. That was a mere shaking of the atmosphere. It has been analyzed and graphed and converted into a string of digits; what is reconstituted in the phone at her ear is an entirely different shaking of the air. It is a simulation.
For that matter, what did she hear even when her darling’s lips were only inches away? It was not her ear that “heard” the words. All the ear does is register changes in pressure by their action on the little stirrup and anvil bones. Just as all the eye does is respond to changes in light-sensitive chemicals. It is up to the nerves to report these things to the brain, but they only report coded symbols of the things, not the things themselves, for the nerves cannot carry the sound of a voice or the sight of Mont Blanc; all they transmit is impulses. They are no more real than the digitized voice of a person on a phone.
It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to assemble these coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.
So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as “real” as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by “ghosts,” and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory.
It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.
All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.
When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn’t much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was—oh, well, maybe—let’s say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.
That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin’s barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; “Q” (an arbitrary name assigned to the unknown first man to make use of fire), “X” (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.
That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.
Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started.
The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn’t die before they wanted to. With medical encouragement and no painful penalties, they generally had kids, and generally lots of them. And when they did “die”…
Well, when they did “die” they also still “lived” in mechanical storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.
So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.
All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn’t drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore—not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway—because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.
It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage, though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were well and truly dead, and in no conditi
on to dispute the stories.
It wasn’t bad to be a meat person anymore. Hardly any of them were poor.
Well, they weren’t money poor. Not even on Earth. Nor were they poor in possessions. All their factories with all their clever robots were turning out smart kitchen appliances and fun game machines and talk-anywhere video-telephones, and they were doing it all the time. The cities got really big. Detroit led the way in the old United States, with its three-hundred-story New Renaissance megastructures that covered everything from Wayne State University dormitories to the river; a hundred and seventy million people lived in that crystal ziggurat, and every one of them had personal TVs with three hundred channels and holographic VCRs to fill any gaps left by the networks. Out in the Navajo reservation the tribe (now eighty million strong) erected a more-than-Paolo-Soleri arcology; the lowest forty stories produced frozen diet meals, clothing, and woven rugs for the tourist trade, and all above was filled with extended Navajo families. On the sands of the Kalahari Desert, the !Kungs entered a life of plenty and ease. China reached twenty billion that year, each family with its fridge and electric wok. Even in Moscow the shelves of the GUM department store were loaded with clock radios, playing cards, and leisure suits.
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