Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  She was asleep when her dreams were interrupted by the hating, fearing, obsessed stab of Wan’s troubled mind through the TPT, and no more than half awake when he flung himself back into the main cabin and stood over her. “A person!” he gabbled, his eyes blinking wildly as sweat streamed into them from his forehead. “Now I must reach inside!”

  And meanwhile, I was dreaming of a deep, steep gravitational hole and a treasure concealed in it. While Wan was deploying his stolen gadgets, sweating with terror, I was sweating with pain. While Dolly was staring wonderingly at the great ghostly blue object on her screen, I was staring at the same object. She had never seen it before. I had. I had a picture of it over my bed, and I had taken that picture at a time when I hurt even more and was even more disoriented. I tried to sit up, and Essie’s strong, gentle hand pushed me back. “Are still on life-support systems, Robin,” she scolded. “Must not move around too much!”

  I was in the little hospice chamber we had built onto the house at Tappan Sea, when it began to seem too much trouble to go to some clinic every time one of us needed repairs. “How did I get here?” I managed.

  “By airplane, how else?” She leaned past me to study something on the screen over my head and nodded.

  “I’ve had the operation,” I deduced. “That son of a bitch Albert knocked me out. You flew me home while I was still under.”

  “How clever! Yes. Is all over. Doctor says you are healthy peasant pig and will recover quickly,” she went on, “only with bellyache continuing awhile because of two point three meters new intestine. Eat now. Then sleep some more.”

  I leaned back while Essie fussed with the chef program and stared at the holopic. It was put there to remind me, no matter how unpleasant the tinkering that was going on to keep me alive, that there had been times far more unpleasant still, but that wasn’t what it was reminding me of. What it was reminding me of was a woman I had lost. I will not say I had not thought of her for years, because that would be untrue. I thought of her often-but as a remote memory, and now I was thinking of her as a person. “Time now,” Essie-caroled merrily, “for nourishing fish broth!” By God, she wasn’t fooling; that was what it was, nauseous-smelling but, she said, laced with all the things I needed and could tolerate in my present condition. And meanwhile, Wan was fishing in the black hole with the clever and complicated machinery of the Heechee; and meanwhile, it had just occurred to me that the sickening stuff I was eating was laden with more than medicine; and meanwhile, the clever machinery was performing a separate task Wan did not know about; and meanwhile, I forced myself awake enough to ask Essie how long I had been asleep, and how much longer I could expect to be, and she was saying, “Quite some time, both ways, dear Robin,” and then I was asleep again.

  The separate task was notification, for of all the Heechee artifacts the disruptor of order in aligned systems was the one the Heechee worried about most. Improperly used, they feared, it could disrupt their own order decisively and nastily, and so each one had a built-in alarm.

  When you fear that somebody may sneak up on you in the dark you set snares—a dragline of clashing tin pans on a tripcord, or a booby-trap to crash down on an intruder’s head, whatever. And there is no greater dark than the dark between the stars, so the Heechee set up their early-warning sentinels. The snares the Heechee had set were numerous, supple, and very, very loud. When Wan deployed his corkscrew it was signaled at once, and at once was when Captain’s communications officer reported it to him. “The alien has done it,” he said, muscles writhing, and Captain uttered a biological expletive. In translation it would not sound like much to a human being, because it referred to the act of sexual coupling at a time when the female was not in love. Captain didn’t say it for its technical meaning. He said it because it was violently obscene, and because nothing less would relieve his feelings. When he saw that Twice started nervously as she leaned to her remote-control board he was instantly contrite.

  Captain had the most worries, because he was Captain, but it was Twice who had most of the work. She was operating three remotes at once: the command ship they were about to transfer to, the cargo hauler for hiding the sailship away, and a special drone in the Earth planetary system commanded to survey all transmissions and locate all spaceborne artifacts. And she was in no condition for any of this. The time of loving had come on her, steroids flowed briskly through her wiry veins, the biological program was running, and her body had ripened for its job. Not just her body. Twice’s personality ripened, too, and softened. The strain of trying to guide her drones with a body and nervous system that was tuned for a season of preoccupying sexual coupling was torture. Captain leaned toward her. “Are you all right?” he asked. She didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

  He sighed and turned to the next problem. “Well, Shoe?”

  The communications officer looked almost as distraught as Twice. “A few conceptual correspondences have been established, Captain,” he reported. “But the translation program is very far from complete.”

  Captain twitched his cheek muscles. Was there any unexpected, illogical thing that could go wrong that had not gone wrong already? These communications—not only was it dangerous that they could exist in the first place, but they were in several languages! Several! Not just two, as was right and proper in the Heechee scheme of things. Not just The Language of Do and The Language of Feel, as the Heechee themselves spoke, but in literally scores of mutually incomprehensible tongues. It might have eased the pain of hearing this endless blab of chatter if, at least, he had been able to find out what they were saying.

  So many worries and problems! Not just the visible sight of Twice getting weaker and more erratic every hour, not just the terrible shock of knowing that some non-Heechee creature was activating the mechanisms that could pierce a black hole; the biggest worry for Captain was whether or not he was capable of dealing with all these consequential challenges. Meanwhile, there was a job to be done. They located the sailship and homed in on it, no problem. They dispatched a message to its crew but, wisely, did not wait for an answer. The command ship, wakened out of its millennia-long powered-down sleep, turned up on schedule. They transferred themselves, lock to lock, to the bigger, more powerful vessel. That, too, was almost no problem, though Twice, gasping and whimpering as she raced from board to board, was slow in taking over her remote-command functions in the new ship. No harm done, though. And the lumbering cargo bubble also appeared where it was supposed to, and even when.

  The whole process took nearly twelve hours. For Twice, they were hours of unremitting toil. Captain had less to do, which left him plenty of time to keep an eye on her. He watched her coppery skin turn purple with unfulfilled amorousness even while it was darkening with fatigue. It worried him. They had been so unready for all these challenges! If they had known there was going to be an emergency, he could easily have shipped an extra drone operator to share Twice’s burden. If they had dreamed it would be necessary, they could have taken a command vessel in the first place and spared the strain of changing ships. If they had thought—If they had suspected—If they had had any intimation at all—

  But they hadn’t. Really, how could they? Even by galactic time it had been only a few decades since the last peek outside the hiding place at the core—only a wink in astronomical time, and how could anyone have believed that so much could happen in it?

  Captain rummaged through food packets until he found the tastiest and easiest to digest, and fed them affectionately to Twice at her board. She had little appetite. Her movements were slower, less sure, more difficult for her every hour. But she was getting the job done. When at last the photon ship’s sails had been furled, the great maw of the bubble vessel was open, the mothlike capsule that carried the sailship passengers slipping slowly into the bubble, Captain began to breathe freely again. For Twice, at least, that was the hardest part of what they would have to do. Now she would have a chance to rest—maybe even a chance to do, with him, what her body
and soul were overready to do.

  Because the sailship people had responded to his message instantly—for them it was instantly—their reply came before the great gleaming sphere had closed on them. The communications officer, Shoe, keyed his screen and the message appeared:

  We accept that we must not complete our voyage.

  We request that you convey us to a place where we will be safe.

  We query: Are the Assassins returning?

  The Heechee left only small scout ships for human beings to discover; they were careful not to leave their special-purpose spacecraft where they were easily located. For example, the bubble transport. This was nothing more than a hollow metal sphere fitted with faster-than-light drive and navigation equipment. The Heechee apparently used it to move bulk materials from place to place; the human race could have used it very well indeed. Each bubble transport could hold the equivalent of a thousand S. Ya.–class transports. Ten of them could have solved Earth’s population problem in a decade.

  Captain shrugged with sympathy. To Shoe he said, “Transmit to them: ‘We are returning you to your home system for the time being. If possible, we will bring you back here later.’”

  Shoe’s expression was strained, with a mixture of emotions. “What about their query about the Assassins?”

  Captain felt a quick shudder in his abdomen. “Tell them not yet,” he said.

  But it was not the fear of the other ones that was uppermost in Captain’s mind, not even his concern for Twice. The Heechee shared with the human race an astonishing number of traits: curiosity, male-female love, family solidarity, devotion to children, a pleasure in the manipulation of symbols. The magnitude of the shared traits was not always the same, however. There was one psychological characteristic that the Heechee possessed in a far stronger degree than most humans:

  Conscience.

  The Heechee were almost physically incapable of repudiating an obligation or letting a wrong go unrighted. For the Heechee, the sailship people were a special case. The Heechee owed them. It was from them that they had learned the most frightening fact the Heechee had ever had to face.

  The Heechee and the sailship people had known each other well, but not recently, and not for very long. The relationship had begun badly for the sailship people. For the Heechee, it had ended even worse. It was not possible for either of them ever to forget the other.

  In the slow, gurgling eddas the sailship people sang it was told how the cone-shaped landing vessels of the Heechee had suddenly appeared, terribly hard and terribly swift, in the sweet slush of their home. The Heechee ships had flashed about the floating arcologies of the people with much cavitation and significant local temperature rises. Many had died. Much damage had been done before the Heechee understood that these were sentient and even civilized beings, if slow ones.

  The Heechee were terribly shocked at what they had done. They tried to make amends. The first step was communication, and that was difficult. The task took a very long time—long, at least, for the Heechee, though the time for the sludge dwellers was bewilderingly short before a hard, hot octahedral prism slid itself cautiously into the middle of an arcology. Almost at once it began to speak to them in a recognizable, though laughably ungrammatical, form of their own language.

  After that events moved with blinding speed—for the slush dwellers. For the Heechee, watching them in their daily lives was a lot like watching lichens grow. Captain himself had visited their great gas-giant planet—not a captain then, almost what could have been called a cabin boy; young; yeasty; adventurous, with that considerable, if cautious, Heechee optimism for the boundless future that had collapsed on them so terrifyingly. The gas giant was not the only marvelously exciting place the young Heechee visited. He visited Earth and met the australopithecines, he helped chart gas clouds and quasars, he ferried crews to outposts and construction projects. Years passed. Decades passed. The slow work of translating the sludge dwellers’ communications inched forward. It could have gone a little faster if the Heechee had thought it particularly important; but they did not. It couldn’t have gone very much faster in any case, because the sludge dwellers couldn’t.

  But it was interesting, in an antiquarian, touristy sort of way, because the sludge dwellers had been around for a long, long time. Their chill biochemistry was something like three hundred times slower than a Heechee’s, or a human’s. Heechee recorded history went back five or six millennia—more or less the same as humanity’s, at the same stage in technological evolution. The recorded history of the sludge dwellers went back three hundred times as far. There were nearly two million years of consecutive, dated historical data. The earliest folk tales and legends and eddas were ten times earlier still. They were no harder to translate than the later ones, because the slush dwellers did not move very fast even in the evolution of their language, but the massed minds who translated them judged them not very interesting. They put the work of translating them off…until they discovered that two of them spoke of visitations from space.

  When I think of all those years the human race labored under the galling knowledge of inferiority—because the Heechee had done so much more than we had, and done it so much earlier—I have many regrets. I think I regret most that we didn’t know about the Two Eddas. I don’t mean just knowing the eddas themselves, for they would only have given us one more thing to worry about, though a reassuringly remote one. I mean mostly what they did to the Heechee morale.

  The first song was from the very dawn of the slush dwellers’ civilization, and quite ambiguous. It was a visitation of the gods. They came, shining so brightly that even the slushers’ rudimentary optics could perceive them—shining with such a turbulence of energy that they caused the soupy gases to seethe and boil, and many died. They did no more than that, and when they went away they never returned. The song itself didn’t mean much. It had no details that the Heechee found believable, and most of it was about a certain ur-slusher hero who dared defy the visitors and came to rule a whole soggy sector of their planet as a reward.

  Robin doesn’t tell much about the sailship people, mostly because he didn’t then know much. But that’s a pity. They’re interesting. Their language was made up of words of one syllable—one consonant, one vowel. They had some fifty distinguishable consonants, and fourteen vowels and diphthongs to play with—therefore they had for three-syllable units, such as names, 3.43 × 108 combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn’t name the females.

  When a male impregnated a female, he produced a male child. He only did it rarely, because it cost him a great investment of energy. Unfertilized females produced females, more or less routinely. Bearing males, however, cost them their lives. They didn’t know that—or anything else, really. There are no love stories in the eddas of the sailship people.

  But the second song was more specific. It dated from millions of years later—almost within the historical period. It sang once more of visitors from outside the dense home world, but this time they were not mere tourists. They weren’t conquerors, either. They were refugees. They plunged down to the soggy surface, one shipload of them, it seemed, poorly equipped to survive in an environment that was cold, dense poison for them.

  They hid there. They stayed for a long time, by their standards—more than a hundred years. Long enough for the slush dwellers to discover them and even to establish a kind of communication. They had been attacked by alien assassins that flamed like fire, wielding weapons that crushed and burned. Their home planet had been flamed clean. Every vessel they owned in space had been pursued and destroyed.

  And then, when generations of the refugees had managed to survive and even multiply, it all came to an end. The flaming Assassins found them and boiled a whole huge shallow of the sludgy methane sea dry to destroy them.

  When the Heechee heard this song they might have taken it for fable, except for one term.
The term was not easy to translate, for it had had to survive both the incomplete communications with the refugees and the lapse of two million years. But it had survived.

  It was what caused the Heechee to stop everything they did so that they could concentrate on a single task: the verification of the old edda. They sought out the home of the fugitives and found it—a planet scorched bare by a sun that had exploded. They sought for, and found, artifacts of previous spacegoing civilizations. Not many. None in good condition. But nearly forty separate bits and pieces of half-melted machines, and they isotope-dated them to two separate epochs. One of them coincided in time with the fugitives who fled to the slush planet. The other was many millions of years older.

  They concluded that the stories were true: There had been such a race of Assassins; they had wiped out every spacefaring civilization they had discovered, for more than twenty million years.

  And the Heechee came to believe that they were still somewhere around. For the term that had been so hard to translate described the expansion of the heavens and the reversal by the flame-wielders so that all the stars and galaxies would crush together again. For a purpose. And it was impossible to believe that these titans, whoever they were, would not linger to see the results of the process they had begun.

  And the bright Heechee dream crumbled, and the slush dwellers sang a new edda: the song of the Heechee, who visited, learned to be afraid, and ran away.

  So the Heechee set their booby-traps, hid most of the other evidence of their existence, and retreated to their hidey-hole at the core of the Galaxy.

  In one sense, the sludge dwellers were just one of the booby-traps. LaDzhaRi knew that; they all did; that was why he had followed the ancestral commandment and reported that first touch of another mind on his. He expected an answer, though it had been years, even in LaDzhaRi’s time, since there had been a Heechee manifestation of any kind, and then only the quick touch of a routine TPT survey. He had also expected that when the answer came he would not like it. The whole epic struggle of building and launching the interstellar ship, the centuries already invested in their millennium-long journey—wasted! It was true that a flight of a thousand years to LaDzhaRi was no more than an ordinary whaling voyage for a Nantucket captain; but a whaler would not have liked being picked up in mid-Pacific and taken home empty, either. The whole crew had been upset. The excitement in the sailship had been so great that some of the crew involuntarily went into fast mode; the sludgy liquid was so churned that cavitation bubbles formed. One of the females was dead. One of the males, TsuTsuNga, was so demoralized that he was pawing over the surviving females, and not for dinner, either. “Please don’t be foolish,” LaDzhaRi pleaded. For a male to impregnate a female, as TsuTsuNga seemed about to do, involved so large an investment of energy that sometimes it threatened his life. For the females there was no threat—their lives were simply forfeited in order to bear a fertilized child—but they didn’t know that, of course, or much of anything else, really. But TsuTsuNga said steadily: