Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  And Essie’s voice, or that voice which was a degraded copy of Essie’s, whispered, “Please do, dear Robin, for am waiting for you without patience.”

  How tiresome it is to be born! Tiresome for the neonate, and more tiresome still for the auditor who is not experiencing it but only listening to interminable woes.

  Interminable they were, and spurred by constant nagging from my midwives. “You can do it,” promised the copy of Essie from one side of me (pretending for the moment that I had a “side”), and, “It is easier than it seems,” confirmed the voice of Albert from the other. There were no two persons in the universe whose word I would take more readily than either of them. But I bad used up all my trust; there was none left, and I was scared. Easy? It was preposterous.

  For I was seeing the cabin as Albert had always seen it. I didn’t have the perspective of two focusing eyes and a pair of ears located at particular points in space. I was seeing and hearing all of it at once. Long ago that old painter, Picasso, painted pictures like that, with the parts spread out in random order. They were all there, but so exploded and randomized that there was no overriding form to recognize but only a helter-skelter mosaic of bits. I had wandered the Tate and the Met with Essie to look at such paintings, and even found some pleasure in them. They were even amusing. But to see the real world spread out that way, like parts on an assembly bench—that was not amusing at all.

  “Let me help you,” whispered the analog of Essie. “Do you see me there, Robin? Asleep in the big bed? Have been up for many days, Robin, pouring old organic you into fine new fan bottle and am now worn out but, see, I have just moved hand to scratch my nose. Do you see hand? Do you see nose? Do you recognize?” Then the ghost of a chuckle. “Of course you do, Robin, for that is me all over.”

  23

  Out of the Heechee Hideaway

  There still was Klara to be thought about, if I had known enough just then to think about her—not just Klara but Wan (hardly worth a thought, really) and also Captain and his Heechee, who were worth all the thoughts anyone could give them. But I did not then know that, either. I was vaster, all right, but not as yet a whole lot smarter.

  And certainly I was distracted by problems of my own, although, if Captain and I had known each other and been able to compare, it would have been interesting to see whose problems were worse. Actually it would have been a standoff. Both sets of problems were simply off the scale, too much to be handled.

  The physical closeness of his two human captives was one of Captain’s problems. In his bony nostrils they stank. They were physically repellent. Loose, bouncing, jiggling fat and sagging flesh marred the clean lines of their structures—the only Heechee ever that gross were the few dying of the worst degenerative disease they knew. Even then the stink was not as bad. The human breath was rancid with putrefying food. The human voices grated like buzz-saws. It made Captain’s throat sore to try to frame the buzzy, grumbly syllables of their nasty little language.

  In Captain’s view, the captives were nasty all over, not least because they simply refused to understand most of what he said. When he tried to tell them how perilously they had endangered themselves—not to mention the Heechee in their hiding place—their first question was: “Are you Heechee?”

  In all his troubles, Captain had room for irritation at that. (It was in fact the same irritation the sailship people experienced when they learned that the Heechee called them slush dwellers. That Captain did know but didn’t think about.) “Heechee!” he groaned, then gave his abdominal shrug. “Yes. It does not matter. Be still. Stay quietly.”

  “Phew,” muttered White-Noise, referring to more than the physical stink. Captain glared and turned to Burst.

  “Have you disposed of their vessel?” he demanded.

  “Of course,” said Burst. “It is en route to a holding port, but what of the kugelblitz?” (He did not, of course, use the word kugelblitz.)

  Captain shrugged his belly morosely. He was tired. They were all tired. They had been operating at the extreme limits of their capability for days now, and they were showing the effects. Captain tried to put his thoughts in order. The sailship had been tucked out of sight. These errant human beings had been removed from the vicinity of that most terrible of dangers, the kugelblitz, and their ship, on automatic, was being hidden away. So far he had done, he knew, as much as could have been expected of him. It had not been without cost, he thought, sorrowing for Twice; it was hard to believe that in the normal course of events he would still be enjoying her once-a-year love.

  But it was not enough.

  It was entirely possible, Captain reflected, that by this point there was no longer such a thing as “enough”; it might well be too late for anything he, or the entire Heechee race, could do. But he could not admit that. As long as there was a chance, he had to act. “Display the charts from their ship,” he ordered, and turned again to the rude, crude mounds of blubber he had captured. Speaking as simply as to a child he said: “Look at this chart.”

  It was one of the minor annoyances of Captain’s situation that the leaner, and therefore less physically appalling, of his captives was also the nastier. “You be still,” he ordered, pointing a lean fist at Wan; his ravings had been even more nearly sense-free than the female’s. “You! Do you know what this is?”

  At least the female had the sense to speak slowly. It took only a few repetitions before he understood Klara’s answer: “It is the black hole we were going to visit.”

  Captain shuddered. “Yes,” he said, trying to match the unfamiliar consonants. “Exactly.” Burst was translating for the others, and he could see the tendons writhing on their limbs in shock. Captain chose his words carefully, pausing to check with the ancestral minds to make sure he had the right words:

  “Listen carefully,” he said. “This is very dangerous. Long, long ago we discovered that a race of Assassins had killed off every technologically advanced civilization in the universe—at least in our own Galaxy, and in some nearby ones…”

  Well, it did not go that swiftly. Captain had to repeat and repeat, a dozen times for a single word sometimes, before the blubbery creatures could seem to grasp what he was saying. Long before he was finished his throat was raw, and the rest of his crew, though they knew as well as he what perils were involved, were frankly dozing. But he didn’t stop. That chart on the screen, with its clustered energy-sinks and its quintuple warning legend, did not let him relax.

  The Assassins had done their work of slaughter millennia before the Heechee appeared on the scene. At first the Heechee had thought they were simple monsters from the primeval past, no more to be feared in their time than the Heechee equivalent of a tyrannosaur.

  Then they had discovered the kugelblitz.

  Captain hesitated there, looking around at his crew. The next part was hard to say, for it led to an obvious conclusion. His tendons writhing, he plunged ahead:

  “It was the Assassins,” he said. “They have retreated into a black hole—but the particular kind of black hole that is composed of energy, not matter, for they themselves were not made of matter. They were pure energy. Inside their black hole they exist only as a sort of standing wave in an energy sea.”

  By the time he had repeated it several times, in several ways, he could see that questions were forming; but the logical deduction he feared wasn’t among them. The question was from the female, and it was only:

  “How can a being composed only of energy survive?”

  Because Robin was, quite naturally, preoccupied with other concerns, I was not then able to discuss the kugelblitz with him in as much detail as I would have wished. Its statistics were interesting. Its temperature I calculated at about three million Kelvin, but that was not worrying. It was the energy density that disturbed me. The energy density of black-body radiation goes up as the cube of the temperature—that’s the old Stefan-Bolzmann law—but the number of photons goes up linearly with the temperature, too, so effectively it’s a fourt
h-power increase inside the kugelblitz. At one Kelvin it’s 4.72 electron-volts per liter. At three million it’s three million to the fourth power times that—oh, say, about 382,320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ev/liter. And there was a bunch of liters in that thing. What’s the importance of that? That all that energy represented organized intelligences. Assassins. A universe of them, all stored in the one kugelblitz, waiting for their plans to mature and the universe to be remade to suit them.

  That was easy enough to answer. The answer was “I don’t know.” There were, Captain knew, theories—theories that said the Assassins had once been creatures of physical bodies but had somehow cast them off—but whether the theories had any relation to fact even the oldest of the massed minds could not say.

  But it was the very difficulty of survival for beings of pure energy, Captain explained, that led to the last and worst thing about the Assassins. The universe was not hospitable to them. So they decided to change the universe. Did something to create a good deal of additional mass in the universe. Caused the expansion of the universe to reverse itself. Holed up in their kugelblitz…and waited.

  “I have heard of this missing mass often,” said the male captive eagerly. “The Dead Men when I was a child spoke of it—but they were crazy, you know.”

  The female stopped him. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would they do this?”

  Captain paused, bone-tired from the ordeal of trying to communicate with these dangerous primitives. Again the best answer was “I don’t know,” but there were speculations. “It is thought by the massed minds,” he said slowly, “that the physical laws of the universe were determined by random fluctuations in the distribution of matter and energy at the first moment after the Big Bang. It is possible that the Assassins intend to interfere with that process. Once they have collapsed the universe and it rebounds, they may change those basic laws—the ratio of the masses of the electron and proton, the number that relates the gravitational force to the electromagnetic—all of them—and so bring about a universe in which they could live more comfortably…but you and I could not.”

  The male had been less and less able to contain himself. Now he burst out in squawking sounds, only gradually turning into intelligible words. “Ho-ho!” cried Wan, wiping away a tear. “What cowards you are! Afraid of some creatures that hide themselves in a black hole, to do something that won’t happen for billions of years! What does that matter to us?”

  But the female had grasped Captain’s meaning. “Shut up, Wan,” she said, her facial muscles tightening in an almost Heechee expression. “What you’re saying is that these Assassins aren’t taking any chances. They came out once before to wipe out everybody who looked like he might be going to get civilized enough to interfere with their plan. They might do it again!”

  “Exactly so!” cried Captain with pleasure. “You have said it precisely! And the danger is that you barbarians—you people,” he corrected himself, “are likely to bring them back. Using radio! Penetrating black holes! Flying all around the universe, even up to the kugelblitzes themselves! Surely they have left monitoring systems to warn them if new technological civilizations emerge—you must very soon alert them, if you haven’t already!”

  And when the prisoners had finally understood; Wan whimpering in fear, Klara white-faced and shaken; when they had been given food packets and told to rest; when the crew clustered around Captain to know what made his jaw tendons writhe like snakes, he could only say, “It is beyond belief.” To make the blubbery ones understand him had been difficult enough; for him to understand them, impossible. He said, “They say they cannot make all their fellows stop.”

  “But they must,” cried White-Noise, aghast. “They are intelligent, are they not?”

  “They are intelligent,” agreed Captain, “for otherwise they would not use our ships so easily. But I think they are also mad. They have no rule of law.”

  “They must have law,” said Burst, unbelieving. “No society can live without law!”

  “Their law is compulsion,” said Captain gloomily. “If one of them is where the agencies of enforcement cannot touch him, he may do as he pleases.”

  “Then let them enforce! Let them track down every ship and make it stop!”

  “You foolish White-Noise,” said Captain, shaking his head, “think about what you have said. Chase them down. Fight them. Battle them in space. Can you imagine any louder commotion than that—and can you imagine the Assassins will not hear?”

  “Then what?” whispered Burst.

  “Then,” said Captain, “we must reveal ourselves.” He raised his hand to still debate, and gave orders.

  They were orders the crew had never thought they would hear, but they perceived Captain was right. Messages flew. In a dozen places in the Galaxy long-silent ships received their remote-controlled commands and came to life. A long dispatch was sent to the monitors near that central black hole where the Heechee lived, by now the first word of warning should have got through the Schwarzschild barrier and reinforcements should be coming out. It was a herculean task for the short-handed crew, and Twice’s absence was regretted more sorely than ever. But at last it was done, and Captain’s own ship turned on a new course for a rendezvous.

  As he curled into a sleeping ball, Captain found himself smiling. It was not a joyous smile. It was the rictus of a paradox too wounding to respond to in any other way. He had feared, all through the talk with the captives, that they would come to an unwelcome conclusion: Once they knew that the Assassins had hidden themselves inside a black hole, they might easily suspect the Heechee had done the same, and so the central secret of the Heechee race would be compromised.

  Compromised! He had done much more than compromise it! All on his own authority, with no higher powers to approve or forbid, Captain had awakened the sleeping fleets and summoned reinforcements from inside the event horizon. The secret was no secret anymore. After half a million years, the Heechee were coming out.

  24

  The Geography of Heaven

  Where was I, really? It took me a long time to answer that question for myself, not least because my mentor, Albert, dismissed it as silly. “The question of ‘where’ is a foolish human preoccupation, Robin,” he grumped. “Concentrate! Learn how to do and how to feel! Reserve the philosophy and the metaphysics for those long evenings of leisure with a pipe and a stein of good beer.”

  “Beer, Albert?”

  He sighed. “The electronic analog of beer,” he said testily, “is quite ‘real’ enough for the electronic analog of a person. Now pay attention, please, to the inputs I am now offering you, which are video scans of the interior of the control cabin of the True Love.”

  I did as he said, of course. I was at least as eager as Albert to complete my training course so that I could go on to do—whatever it was possible for me to do in this new and scary state. But in my odd femtoseconds I could not help turning over that question in my mind, and I finally found an answer. Where was I, really?

  I was in heaven.

  Think about it. It meets most of the specifications, you know. My belly didn’t hurt anymore—I didn’t have a belly. My enslavement to mortality was over, for if I had owed a death I had paid it, and was quit for the morrow. If it was not quite eternity that waited for me, it was something pretty close. Data storage in the Heechee fans we already knew was good for at least half a million years without significant degradation—because we had the original Heechee fans still working—and that’s a lot of femtoseconds. No more earthly cares; no cares at all, except those I chose to take on for myself.

  Yes. Heaven.

  You probably don’t believe that, because you won’t accept that an existence as a disembodied clutter of databits in fan storage can have anything really “heavenly” about it. I know that because I had trouble accepting it myself. Yet “reality” is—is “really”—a subjective matter. We flesh-and-blood creatures “really” perceived reality only at second or third hand, as an analog pai
nted by our sensory systems on the synapses of our brains. So Albert had always said. It was true—or almost true—no, it was more than true, in some ways, because we disembodied clutters have a wider choice of realities than you.

  But if you still don’t believe me I can’t complain. However many times I told myself it was so, I didn’t find it very heavenly either. It had never occurred to me before how terribly inconvenient it was—financially, legally, and in many otherlies, not least maritally—to be dead.

  So, coming back to the question, where was I really? Why, really I was at home. As soon as I had—well—died, Albert in remorse had turned the ship around. It took quite a while to get there, but I wasn’t doing anything special. Just learning how to pretend to be alive when in fact I wasn’t. It took the whole flight back just to make a start on that, for it was a lot harder to be born into fan storage than into the world in the old biological way—I had to actively do it, you see. Everything about me was a great deal vaster. In one sense I was limited to a Heechee-model datafan with a cubic content of not much more than a thousand cc, and in that sense I was detached from my plug-in and carried through customs and brought back to the old place on the Tappan Sea with no more trouble than you’d carry an extra pair of shoes. In another sense I was vaster than galaxies, for I had all the accumulated datafans in the world to play in. Faster than a silver bullet, quick as quicksilver, swift as the shining lightning—I could go anywhere that any of the stored Heechee and human datastores had ever gone, and that was everywhere I had ever heard of. I heard the eddas of the slush dwellers from the sailship and hunted with the first exploring Heechee party that captured the australopithecines; I chatted with the Dead Men from Heechee Heaven (poor inarticulate wrecks, so badly stored in such haste by such inexpert help, but still remembering what it was to be alive). Well. Never mind where all I went; you don’t have time to hear. And that was all easy.