The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  “But that’s a lot!” cried Tangent, delighted. “That’s almost a whole book-equivalent for each channel!”

  “More,” Flocculence corrected her. “For the Sluggard language is extremely compact. Listen. I will replay a section of one of the recordings—”

  There was a faint, low hooting sound—Tangent did not so much hear it as feel it in her bones—“And now the same recording, speeded up and frequency-shifted to a normal bit-rate for us—”

  The hooting became a quick, shrill twittering. Tangent listened with impatience. It hurt her ears. “Have you translated any of it?” she asked, less for information—she knew that if there had been any major breakthroughs she would have been notified at once—than to make the noise stop.

  But surprisingly the Ancient Ancestor crowed, “Oh, yes! Much! In Listening Post Seventeen there was what I think you would call a political meeting. It has to do with the nature of the site itself; it is either theologically sacred or dangerously polluted, and the Sluggards were discussing what to do about it. The debate is still going on—”

  “After sixty-one years?”

  “Well, only about seven hours of their time, Tangent.”

  “Good, good,” Tangent said happily. It was a major victory; there were few better ways of gaining insight into a culture than through studying its modes of settling public questions. “And you’re sure that’s what it is? Are your translations reliable?”

  “Oh,” said Flocculence doubtfully, “fairly reliable. I wish we had Binding Force here with us.” Binding Force was Flocculence’s former partner in many investigations. The two of them had made a wonderful team. Some day, no doubt, they would again. But for the moment Binding Force was far too ancient to go into space again, and too healthy to die.

  “How reliable is ‘fairly’ reliable?”

  “Well, at least half our Sluggard vocabulary is words deduced from context. I could be deducing wrong.”

  “Unlucky for you if you are,” Tangent snapped, and then immediately caught herself. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job,” she soothed. And hoped it was true.

  Glare hadn’t been on Flocculence’s first trip, but before she shipped out with Tangent, she had learned quite a lot about the Sluggards. For that matter, everybody had. The Sluggards were, after all, really quite important to the Heechee. As important, say, as a diagnosis of cancer would have been to any human before Full Medical came along.

  The Sluggards possessed an ancient civilization. In terms of years, it was far older even than the Heechee’s own, but that didn’t really signify, because nothing much had happened in it. What did happen happened very slowly. The Sluggard’s planet was cold. The Sluggards themselves were both cold and sluggish—that was how they got their name. They swam slowly through a slush of gases; the chemistry of their bodies was as tedious as their movements, and so was their speech.

  So was the propagation of impulses through their nervous systems—which is to say, their thoughts.

  So when that first Heechee expedition could no longer doubt that these slushy, creepy creatures possessed intelligence, they were both delighted and ticked off. What was the use of discovering another intelligent race at last if so simple an exchange as—

  “Take me to your leader.”

  “Which leader?”

  —could take six months to complete?

  That first Heechee discovery ship lingered in orbit around the Sluggard planet for a year. Flocculence and Binding Force dropped sondes into the sludgy atmosphere and painfully built up a slow recognition of discrete sounds that was the first step toward a vocabulary. It wasn’t easy. It certainly wasn’t simple. The sondes were dropped more or less at random, aiming only at spots where the deep-probe radars and sonars had identified clusters of beings. Often the clusters were gone by the time the sondes got there. The ones that were best aimed recorded slow, deep moans. Transmitters passed the sounds into orbit, recording experts speeded them up and transposed them down to the audible range, and after weeks each tape might produce a single word.

  But Heechee semanticists had many resources. At the end of their year in orbit they had identified enough of a vocabulary to prepare a simple tape. Then they constructed a graven tablet with a picture of a Heechee, a picture of a Sluggard, a picture of a sound playback unit, and a picture of the tablet itself. All the images were incised on flat surfaces of crystal, so that the Sluggards could feel them—they were, after all, blind.

  Then the Heechee duplicated the lot sixty times and dropped a set into each of sixty Sluggard population centers.

  The tapes read:

  Greetings.

  We are friends.

  Talk to this and we will hear.

  We will answer soon.

  “Soon,” in that context, meant a good long time. When that was done, the Heechee ship left. The crew was somewhat glum. There was no sense waiting around for an answer. The best thing was to come back when the Sluggards had had time to discover the messages, get over the initial shock, and respond. Even then there would be an inevitable longish period of dumb questions and time-wasting answers; but they didn’t need a live Heechee for that. They chose their least valuable Ancient Ancestor, explained to her what sorts of questions might be asked and what sorts of answers—and urgings, and counterquestions—should be returned, and left her in orbit to spend a dismal few decades in solitude. Every Heechee in the crew wished he could be there to get those answers, but few could feel very confident of doing it—their best guess was that to get any solid information from the Sluggards would take more than half a century.

  As indeed it did.

  Twenty days after arrival in orbit around the Sluggard planet, Tangent was as ready for the real work of the expedition as she ever would be.

  The Ancient Ancestor they had left behind was unfortunately no longer operational, but she had served her purpose. Questions had been asked and answered, and the data was in store. Radar, or the Heechee device that did for the Heechee what radar had done for human beings, had located the present positions of the physical clusters that marked Sluggard communities, as well as other objects solid enough and large enough to constitute navigation hazards. FTL radio contact had been made with the home planets and the data transmitted, and frail old Binding Force had sent a cheery message approving their translation attempts and urging them on. The special structures on Tangent’s ship that would allow it to carry out its main mission had been checked and tested and reported ready.

  There was one other Heechee device which they had hoped would serve them well, but it was a disappointment. That was a sort of communications instrument. What it transmitted and received was a special sort of data—well, what you might call “feelings.” It neither transmitted nor received “information” in the classical sense—one could not use it to order another thousand kilotons of structural metal or to command a ship to change its course. But one Heechee wearing the appropriate metal-mesh helmet could “hear” the emotions of others, even at planetary distances.

  It was what we came to call the “Dream Seat.”

  For the Heechee, the main domestic use of the device was for what passed among them as police work. The Heechee didn’t detect crimes. They prevented them. The emanations from a mind so disordered as to be about to commit an antisocial act, a violent act in particular, could be detected in the early stages. A counseling-and-intervention team was then dispatched at once to apply corrective therapy.

  The Dream Seats had also been very helpful in deciding that, for instance, the “Voodoo Pigs” were close enough to intelligent to bear watching, because their “feelings” were far more complex than those of the lower animals. So it was a standard Heechee resource instrument in that fundamental Heechee quest for interstellar companionship. It had been hoped that Tangent’s orbiting spacecraft could simply listen in on the Sluggards and “hear” their moods and anxieties and joys.

  The Dream Seat did work, as a matter of fact. It just didn’t work in any very
useful way. As with everything else the Sluggards did, their emotions were hopelessly slow. Said Quark glumly, pulling off the headset, “You might as well be listening to how a sedimentary rock feels about metamorphosis.”

  “Keep trying,” Tangent instructed. “When at last we understand the Sluggards, it will all be worthwhile.”

  Later on she remembered saying that, and wondered how she could have been so wrong.

  I’ve told you an awful lot about Tangent and her shipmates, and I haven’t yet told you why it all matters. Trust me. It mattered a lot. Not only to Tangent, and to the whole Heechee race, but to humanity in general and, most especially, to me in particular.

  But good old Albert tells me I talk too much, and so I’ll try to keep to essentials. The essentials were that Tangent and her crew did what Heechee ships almost never did. They took their specially armored spacecraft and dived it down into the dense, frigid, damaging gases of the Sluggard planet in order to visit the Sluggards on their home turf.

  “Turf” isn’t the right word, either—I have a lot of trouble finding right words, because the vocabulary I learned as a meat person on Earth really doesn’t apply anymore. The Sluggards didn’t have turf in the sense of plots of land to build on. They didn’t have any land. Their specific gravity was so close to the specific gravity of the gases they lived in that they floated, along with all their household goods, their households, and their Sluggard equivalents of factories, farms, offices, and schools. And, of course, neither human nor Heechee could live in that environment unprotected. Although the Heechee were careful engineers (I know humans who would call them cowardly, in fact), there was at least a nagging worry that even their ship might fail in the crushing pressures where the Sluggards lived.

  So before they entered the planet’s atmosphere they checked and rechecked and double-checked everything there was to check. Flocculence and the other Ancient Ancestors had to do double duty, not only keeping up with their work of translation but storing and analyzing all the data about the ship’s own systems.

  “Are we ready?” Tangent asked at last, seated at the captain’s stool in the control room, webbing herself in as did all the others. One by one the section chiefs reported readiness, and she took a deep breath. “I would commence descent now,” she said to the penetration pilot, Glare.

  Glare ordered the steerperson, “Commence descent.”

  The ship slowed its orbital speed and slipped down into the cold, thick, swirling poison gases the Sluggards swam in.

  Entry was bouncy, but the ship had been built for that. Navigation was blind, at least optically speaking; but the ship had sonar and electronic eyes, and on the screens in the room they could see the shapes of clusters of Sluggard “homes” and other objects as they approached. “I would not go so fast,” Tangent cautioned, “because of the risk of cavitation.”

  Glare agreed. “Slow down,” she ordered, and the great ship inched toward the nearest Sluggard arcology.

  The whole crew watched the screens with awe and delight. Sludgy objects began to appear. There were structures like clouds, and creatures like the soft-plastic toys, shaped like amoebae or jellyfish, that children play with. The Sluggards were almost as still as their “buildings.” All of the females, and most of the males, moved so slowly that no Heechee eye could see a change; only a few of the males, going into what they called “high mode,” now and then exhibited visible motion. And more and more of the males did that as the ship approached and their torpid senses let them know that something or other seemed to be happening.

  That was when Tangent made her first mistake.

  She assumed that the movement of the males was because they were startled at the sudden appearance of the Heechee ship. Heaven knows, that must have startled them—like a high-speed lander suddenly appearing over a primitive human village that had never seen a spacecraft, or even an airplane, before. But it wasn’t startlement that sent the males lashing about so fast and destructively. It was pain. The high-frequency sound the Heechee ship steered by was agony to the Sluggards. It drove them out of their minds, and, before long, the weaker of them died of it.

  Could the Heechee ever have really satisfied their yearning for interstellar friends with the Sluggards?

  I don’t see how. My own experience says no; it was as hard for Heechee to communicate with Sluggards as it is for us stored persons to get into any meaningful real-time relationship with meat people. It’s not impossible. It’s generally just more trouble than it’s worth. And when I talk to meat people at close range, they don’t usually die of it.

  After that it wasn’t a happy ship anymore (said Glare, morosely shrugging her belly muscles). The expectation had been so delicious; the letdown was mean.

  It got worse.

  The mission was teetering on the verge of failure. Though the sondes continued to trickle words into the recorders, the attempts to approach Sluggards in their homes were always both catastrophic and disappointing—disappointing for the Heechee, catastrophic for their new “friends.”

  And then, in orbit, there came the news from home.

  It was a message from Binding Force, and what he said, with the testiness of age and the resentment of one who wishes he had been present, was, in free translation, “You’ve screwed it up. The important parts of the data were not customs and polity of the Sluggards. It is their poetry.”

  The shipboard Ancient Ancestors had recognized the poetry as poetry—as a sort of combination of the songs of the great whales and the old Norse eddas of Earth. Like the eddas, they sang of great battles of the past, and the battles were important.

  The songs were of creatures who had appeared without bodies and had caused great destruction. The Sluggards called them the equivalent of “Assassins,” and according to Binding Force they were in fact without bodies—were creatures of energy; had in fact really appeared and caused great destruction…

  “What you thought were mere legends,” scolded Binding Force in his message, “were not about gods and devils. They are straightforward accounts of an actual visit by creatures that seem totally hostile to all organic life. And there is every reason to believe they are still around.”

  That was the first time the Heechee had ever heard of the Foe.

  6

  Loves

  By the time Glare finished her story there was quite a crowd gathered around. Every one of them had questions, but it took a moment for them to get the questions together. Glare sat silent, rubbing her rib cage. The movement made a faint grating noise, like someone running a finger across a washboard.

  A short black man I didn’t know said, “Excuse me, but I don’t understand. How did Tangent know that was the Foe?” He was speaking in English, and I realized that someone had been translating Glare’s story all along. The someone was Albert.

  While he was translating the short man’s question into Heechee for Glare, I gave him a look. He shrugged in response, meaning (I assumed), well, I wanted to hear the story, too.

  Glare was shrugging, too, in response to the question—at least, she was giving her abdomen that quick contraction that is the Heechee equivalent. “We didn’t know,” she said. “That came later, after Binding Force had performed deep-structure analysis on the Sluggard eddas. Then it became clear that these intruding Assassins were not from that planet. Of course, there was much other data.”

  “Of course,” Albert chimed in. “The missing mass, for one thing.”

  “Yes.” said Glare. “The missing mass. This had been a great puzzle for our astrophysicists for some time, as I believe it had been for yours.” She reached thoughtfully for another of the little fungus caps, while Albert explained to the others how the “missing mass” had turned out to be no natural cosmic phenomenon, but an artifact of the Foe; and at that point I stopped listening. I hear plenty of that kind of thing from Albert all the time. I stop listening a lot then, too. Hearing Glare tell us the story of Tangent’s terrible trip was one thing. That was a story I could
listen to with full attention. But when Albert gets into the why of things, my mind wanders. Next thing he would be getting into nine-dimensional space and Mach’s Hypothesis.

  He did. Glare seemed quite interested. I wasn’t. I leaned back, waved to the waitress for another shot of “rocket juice”—the damn near lethal white whiskey that Gateway prospectors had drowned their worries in in the old days—and let him talk.

  I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about poor horny Tangent, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago, and her ill-fated trip.

  I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Tangent—well, that’s not exactly true, either. There are those words again. How inaccurately they convey meaning! I don’t have a heart, so of course there are not any soft spots in it. (Essie says I can’t be “soft” in any sense but “-ware,” which is a cybernetic joke.) And “always” isn’t exact, either, because I’ve only known about Tangent for about thirty, or perhaps I should say thirty million, years. But I do think of her often, and with sympathy, because I’d been shot down, too, and I knew how it felt.

  I took a pull of my rocket juice, gazing benevolently at the group around the table. The rest of the audience was a lot more fascinated than I had been by the way Albert and Glare exchanged cosmological quips, but then they hadn’t had Albert living in their pockets for the last fifty (or fifty million) years. In that time you get to know a program pretty well. I reflected that, generally speaking, I knew what Albert was going to say before he said it. I even knew the significance of the way he looked at me sidelong, now and then, as he talked. He was reproaching me, in a subliminal way, for not letting him tell me something he had wanted to tell me very much.

  I gave him a tolerant smile to let him know I understood him…and, a little bit, to remind him that I was the one who decided who got told what when.