Captain hissed loudly for a moment, and the tendons that stood out from his flat chest writhed in the attempt to understand. His English had become quite good, but nuances of expression sometimes avoided him. “‘Believe,’ Audee Walthers? But there is no question of belief. There is no faith required, as in that concept you have of religion.”
“Well, sure,” said Audee grimly. “But do you believe that?”
“No, of course not,” said Captain in surprise. “Space doesn’t have five dimensions.”
Audee grinned. “That’s a relief, because I was having trouble trying to visualize—”
“It has nine,” Captain explained.
They stopped, briefly, in their race to the core because Captain had left some of the stored Heechee craft in unstable orbits. That would not do, he explained. In the years they would be in the core the machines could drift to destruction, and Heechee did not like useful things destroyed. But Audee had stopped listening. “Years?” he said. “I thought this trip would be only a few months! How many years?”
“Quite a few, I think,” said Captain. “To us it will be only months. But Home, you know, is in a black hole.” And so when Captain left one of his crew to deal with the unmanned ships, Janie Yee-xing elected to go with him. She would, she said, fly one of them back to Earth, if Captain didn’t mind; she really hadn’t planned on years.
Captain didn’t mind. Neither did Audee, oddly enough. He was quite confused enough about whom he loved to welcome a few months (or years) in which the question need not be faced.
A situation not unfamiliar to me.
It must have been a weird and wonderful trip for Audee, suddenly thrust into a Heechee ship with Heechee shipmates. For that matter, the Heechee didn’t have any easy time of it, either, though at least they had previously had the experience of encountering bipeds that were markedly fat and hairy, while Audee had never before shared a ship with living skeletons.
But those problems were not unique to Audee or his hosts. We’ve all had them since, many times over, and that story is old. There’s not much point in recounting Audee’s difficulties with nine-dimensional space (no worse than my own with Albert Einstein) and with trying to make sense of Heechee arithmetic. Naturally everything in the ship was weird and strange to him—“chairs” designed to accommodate the Heechee pod, a “bed” that was a sack filled with dry, rustly stuff to burrow into…and we won’t even mention the toilets.
It helped when, as time passed, he began to think of his shipmates as individual “persons,” instead of as merely five examples of the category “Heechee.”
Captain was the easiest to recognize. He was the darkest, the one with the fuzziest approximation of hair on his scalp, the one who spoke pretty good English. White-Noise was the little female, almost pale gold in color, approaching nubility and worried about it. Mongrel had great difficulty with the few English words he tried; Burst had a great sense of humor and loved trading dirty jokes with the others—even, now and then with Audee, through Captain as interpreter.
It helped still more when Captain had the bright idea of giving Audee a Heechee pod—a modified one, of course. As Captain told Audee, one part of the Heechee pod was useless to Audee, if not indeed dangerous to his health. That was the tiny microwave-radiation generator. The Heechee race had evolved on an otherwise pleasant planet of a star that happened to be near a large and active gas cloud; Bremsstrahlung radiation in the microwave frequencies had drenched that world from prebiotic times, and the Heechee had evolved to tolerate it—indeed, to need it, as human beings need the sun. So when they began venturing to places where the radiation could not follow, they had to bring their own source of microwave along.
Then, when a little later on in their history they discovered how to preserve the essentials of a deceased Heechee, they found another use for the pods. Each one contained the stored transcription of an Ancient Ancestor.
They even gave Audee an Ancient Ancestor of his own.
To his surprise, she wasn’t really Ancient at all. She had been dead only a matter of weeks; she had been Captain’s own lover, and her name was Twice.
That was the final step in Audee’s assimilation of the notion that the Heechee were “people.”
It’s a small universe, isn’t it?
As Audee began to get used to Captain, Captain got used to Audee—enough to open a discussion that had been very much on his mind. He got his chance when Audee asked about the Foe.
It was, after all, the central problem the universe posed to both Heechee and humans. The Foe. The Assassins. The race of inimical, death-dealing beings whose existence had caused the Heechee to pack up and flee to a safe hideout in the galactic core.
Audee made Captain go over and over the story, often with the other Heechee in the crew chiming in; it still wasn’t easy to grasp. “I understand about Tangent’s trip,” he said, “and I understand that you knew a lot of civilized races had been wiped out, but how did you get from there to this idea of crumpling up the universe?”
The Heechee looked at each other. “I think first it was the deceleration parameter,” said Shoe.
Captain writhed his biceps in agreement. “Yes, the deceleration parameter. Of course, it was only a question for theoretical astrophysicists at first, you understand.”
“I would understand better if I knew what a deceleration parameter was,” Audee groaned.
“It could also be called an anomalous braking effect,” White-Noise offered from the other side of the room.
Captain flexed his twisty biceps in agreement. He went on: “It means only that our astronomers had observed that the universe was expanding less rapidly, by a power law, than it should have. Something was slowing it down.”
“And you figured out it was the Foe?”
Captain said somberly, “In conjunction with the other evidence, and after ruling out every other possibility, it became clear that it could be nothing else but some artificial intervention on a cosmic scale. And there just were no other candidates.”
“I can see that that would be disconcerting,” said Audee.
“Disconcerting,” Captain rasped. “It changed everything.” He gazed thoughtfully at Audee out of those pink eyes with the blotch of pupil in the middle. He glanced at the other Heechee swiftly, then made the snuffling sound that was the Heechee equivalent of clearing one’s throat to announce a change to a serious subject. “It is not too late,” he announced.
Audee blinked. “Not too late for what?”
“It is not too late for your people to join ours in the core,” Captain said precisely, speaking slowly to make sure that Audee understood. “It would be quite congenial for your human race inside the core if you were to come there.”
“It sounds,” said Audee politely, trying to lighten the conversation, “as though it might be a little crowded.”
“Crowded? Why crowded?” asked Captain, cheek twitching—it was the equivalent of a frown. “We have mapped this Galaxy quite carefully, and when we retreated to the core, we chose the best planets to take there with us. There are not too many left outside that are congenial to your race—or to ours.”
Audee saw a chance to do a little justified boasting on behalf of the human race. “Ah, but we make them congenial,” he explained proudly. “There are six planets already mapped and explored, for example, that would be perfect for human beings except that the temperature range is a bit low. We can fix that. We’re seeding those planets’ atmospheres with chlorofluorocarbons. They trap heat—like carbon dioxide—which causes a greenhouse effect, which will—”
“I understand carbon dioxide,” Captain gritted. “I also understand chlorofluorocarbons and, yes, it is true that certain of these compounds will in fact persist in an atmosphere for many centuries once put there. I agree that this may in certain cases raise the mean temperature of a planet by a few degrees.”
“Well, a few degrees is all you need for some of them,” Audee said reasonably. “And there’
s Venus. It’s too hot by far. But before long we’ll probably spread reflective dust particles in its upper atmosphere. This will cut down the insulation and make Venus habitable. Then we can do the same thing on other planets—there are two or three already identified. We can seed life where life never existed to make its own Gaea effect. We will move planets, if we must, to better orbits—”
Captain was growing testy. “But we have already done all of that inside the core,” he urged. “Do you know how many habitable planets we already have in place? More than eight hundred fifty, most of them not yet occupied even by advance parties. As you see, we planned for a long stay.”
“Yes,” said Audee neutrally. “I see that.”
Captain hissed faintly in puzzlement. He was aware that there was something in Audee’s tone but couldn’t tell what it was. He snuffled again and went on: “So you can join us! Some planets are prettier than others, to be sure, and I am certain you could have some of the very finest. Your entire race could fit on one of them!—two or three at the most,” he corrected himself, thinking it over.
“And do what?” asked Audee.
Captain blinked at him. “Why—wait, of course,” he said. “It is possible we would be safe there, Audee Walthers. Especially if we stop all transmissions at once and begin the transfer of all human beings and energy-using devices into the core as soon as possible.”
“Energy-using devices?”
“Devices that radiate detectable energy. That would give away our presence,” Captain explained.
“Ah,” said Audee, nodding, having spotted the flaw. “But you people posted automatic sensors,” he pointed out. “Why wouldn’t the Foe have done the same?”
“Perhaps they have,” Captain said glumly. “I didn’t say it was certain we would be safe. I only said it was possible. And if they have not in fact detected this—outbreak—then we can stay inside there, for millions and billions of years, if necessary, waiting.”
“But waiting for what, Captain?”
“Why—of course, waiting until some other race, perhaps, evolves to challenge them!”
Audee studied the Heechee carefully, wonderingly. It was clear that more than language differences lay between them.
“One has,” he said gently. “Us.”
For some time after that Audee worried that he might have hurt Captain’s feelings. He had, after all, implied against the entire Heechee race an accusation of cowardice. What Audee didn’t know was that Captain took it as a compliment.
If there is one part of Audee’s trip that I envy him more than any other, it is his penetration of the black hole itself. Not that Audee enjoyed it. No one would; it was scary.
As they approached that glowing, boiling, violently radiating furnace of infalling gases that marked the approach to the Heechee hideout, Captain ordered everyone strapped into their hammock sacks. White-Noise applied power to the crystal helix the Heechee called a “disruptor of order.” It glowed diamond-bright. The temperature rose. The ship began to shake.
Captain had learned to read human body language about as well as Audee had learned Heechee—that is, not very well—but he did not miss the whitening around Audee’s jaw. “You seem afraid,” he commented.
By Heechee standards it was not an impolite remark. Audee took it without offense. “Yes,” he said, gazing at the eye-wrenching surface of infalling gases, “I am terribly, terribly afraid of entering a black hole.”
“That is curious,” Captain said thoughtfully. “We have done this many times, and there is no peril to this ship. Tell me. Which are you more afraid of, this penetration or the Foe?”
Audee thought it over. The two kinds of fear were not at all the same. “I guess,” he said slowly, “the Foe.”
Captain’s cheek muscles writhed approvingly. “That is not in any way nonrational,” he said. “That is wise. Now we go in.”
The diamond corkscrew erupted in showers of sparks; thousands of them struck Audee, and all the others aboard, but they did not burn; they did nothing at all, but seemed to pass right through the bodies and come out the other side. The lurching of the ship threw Audee violently against the harnesses of his safety cocoon; it had been built for Heechee mass, not that of the larger human body, and it creaked alarmingly.
The process went on for a long time. Audee had no way to measure it; many minutes, surely; perhaps an hour or more; and it didn’t get less violent. He could hear the Heechee crew croaking comments and orders back and forth among themselves, and wondered dazedly how they were able to function when their gizzards were being jolted out of them…and wondered if Heechee had gizzards…and wondered if he were going to die…
And then, without warning it was over.
The Heechee began to unstrap themselves. Captain glanced curiously at Audee and called, “Would you like to see our core?” He waved a skinny arm at the viewscreen…and there it was.
What appeared on the ship’s viewing plates was a dazzle of light.
The Heechee core was packed with suns—ten thousand suns—more suns than there are in a thousand light-years from Earth, packed into a sphere of space only twenty light-years across. There were golden stars and dull crimson stars and blindingly blue-white stars. There was a whole rainbow Hertzsprung-Russell spectrum of stars that made the night sky a flood of color on any planet in the core—that made the term “night” an exotic abstraction, in fact, because there was no place in the core that was ever dark.
I wish I could have seen it.
I don’t envy very many people very many things, but I envied Audee Walthers that when I heard what he had seen. A dense compaction of stars—more than in any cluster—well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Or else any globular cluster would itself have become a black hole. And constellations like Christmas trees! I mean, colors. Even from Earth the stars are different colors, everyone knows that, but hardly anyone ever sees what the colors are. They’re all so far and so faint that the colors wash out, and mostly they look like various impure versions of white. But in the core—
In the core red is ruby and green is emerald and blue is sapphire and yellow is gleaming gold and white is, by God, blinding. And there isn’t any gradation of first-magnitude down to faint or invisible. The bright ones are far brighter than first-magnitude. And there are hardly any stars on the borderline of visibility, because there aren’t any faraway stars at all.
I did envy Audee for what he saw—
But, really, what he saw was only the viewscreen of the Heechee ship. He never set foot on a Heechee planet. He didn’t have time.
First to last, Audee’s elapsed time inside the core was about equal to the span of a normal night’s sleep. He didn’t do any sleeping, of course. He certainly didn’t have time for that. He hardly had time to breathe, as a matter of fact, because there was so hopelessly much to see and do.
If it hadn’t been for the Ancient Ancestors, things would have taken so ponderously long that it might hardly have mattered whether Audee got to the core or not. But Captain’s messages had been received—only moments before, by Heechee standards. Their relay machines worked in machine-storage time, and the Ancient Ancestors nearly could, too.
With only minutes of warning, the Heechee had had time to do almost nothing but bleat and shake, but they rallied fast. They had always kept a full flotilla of standby crews and ships available for just this situation. They were dispatched at once. By the time Audee had been inside the core for four local hours, he had seen six large Heechee ships sent off with hastily drafted, often bewildered ship-handlers, historians, Dream-Seat sensitives, and diplomats—at least, what passed among the Heechee for diplomats. (Relations with foreign powers had never been much of a Heechee concern, since they hadn’t been able to find any foreign powers to have relations with.)
Those first shiploads of Heechee specialists had been standing by, waiting for just that summons.
Probably none of them had actually expected to get it—“Not on my shift, anyway!�
� each one of them might have prayed, if Heechee had prayed, or at least asked of massed ancestral minds. Those crews had been standing by for a good long while—thousands of centuries, by galactic time. Even by the clocks in the core it had been a matter of decades.
No one crew stayed on standby for that long. They rotated at intervals of what local time measured as the equivalent of eight or nine months, then returned to their normal homes and habits. It was a lot like National Guard service in the old days in the United States. Like National Guardsmen, too, the surprise was ugly when the emergency they were standing by for turned out to be real, and immediate.
Half the Heechee had families. Half the ones with families had been allowed to bring mate and offspring with them, just as peacetime American soldiers had carried along wives and kids. The similarities ended there. Peacetime soldiers suddenly called on to fight usually had the chance to send their families out of the way. The Heechee didn’t. The places they were stationed in were the ships they set out in, and so in those first half dozen ships the crews included pregnant females, infants, and a fair number of school-age Heechee children. Most of these were terrified. Few wanted to go on this mystery-bus excursion into the unknown…but then, much of the same was true of the crews themselves.
None of this Audee saw with his own eyes, only in the communications screens of Captain’s spaceship. That was what he arrived in, and there he stayed.
By the beginning of the fifth hour of his visit to the core, another spaceship had had time to reach them.
The two ships docked. The second ship was much larger than Captain’s. It had a complement of nearly thirty, and all of them slid as rapidly as they could through the mated hatches to observe this queer animal, this “human,” at first hand.
The first thing that happened was that three of the new Heechee, gently and carefully, took Audee’s pod away from him. So he was deprived at once of the comforting presence of Twice. He understood the necessity; none of the new Heechee spoke English, and anyway, they could get from the stored mind of the Ancient Ancestor all the information she had been getting from him over weeks, in far less time than he could say any of it. That was an explanation; it didn’t make the loss less acute.
The Annals of the Heechee Page 13
