The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  The second thing was that all his familiar Heechee shipmates were dragged away into the roil of newcomers, standing packed against each other in knots around each of the Heechee from the ship, talking and gesticulating and, yes, smelling. The typical, ammoniacal Heechee reek was overpowering, with so many of them squeezed into the ship. Audee had almost forgotten the smell existed, through custom; and besides, the Heechee who produced it were friends. The new ones were all strangers.

  The third thing was that half a dozen of the new Heechee clustered around him, twittering and jabbering so fast that he could not make out the words. Finally he understood that they were asking him to hold still. He gave the best imitation he could of the Heechee upper-arm shrug of assent, wondering what he was being asked to hold still for.

  It turned out to be a complete physical examination. They had his clothes off in no time, and in less time still they were poking, prodding, peering. Slipping tiny, soft probes into ears and nostrils and anus. Nicking off imperceptibly tiny specimens of skin and hair and toenails and mucus. None of it was painful, but it was so damn undignified.

  And already, Audee knew, a lot of time had passed back on Earth. The clock that ticked so slowly in the core was spinning away days and months at a click in the outside Galaxy.

  The last thing that happened, or almost the last, was the most surprising of all.

  When they had finished giving him the most complete physical examination any human being had ever had in so short a time, they allowed him to dress again. Then a short, pale female Heechee touched his shoulder reassuringly. Speaking slowly and carefully, as to a cat, she said, “We have finished with your Ancient Ancestor. You may have it back now.”

  “Thank you,” Audee growled, snatching the pod away from her.

  “Twice will tell you what you must do next.” The female Heechee smiled—the cheek-writhing that was the Heechee smile, of course.

  “I bet she will,” Audee said bitterly, strapping on the pod and bending down.

  Twice sounded exhausted. She had been drained dry, and it had been an ordeal for her; then she had been pumped full of instructions, and that wasn’t easy, either. “You are to make a speech,” she announced at once. “Don’t try to speak our tongue; you don’t do it well enough—”

  “Why not?” demanded Audee, surprised; actually, he thought he had a pretty good accent by now, for a human.

  “You only know the language of Do, not the language of Feel,” Twice explained, “and this is a matter of great emotional importance to all of us. So speak in English; I’ll translate for the audience.”

  Audee scowled. “What audience?”

  “Why, all the Heechee, of course. You must tell them in your own words that humans are going to help the Heechee deal with the problem of the Foe.”

  “Oh, hell,” Audee exploded, cursing his undignified position, bent double to be near the pod; cursing the Foe; cursing the stupid impulse that had made him volunteer in the first place. “I hate making speeches! Anyway, what can I tell them that you don’t all already know?”

  “Nothing, of course,” Twice agreed. “But it will be good if they hear it from you.”

  So for the next ten minutes or so (while months and years were speeding by), Audee made his speech.

  In a way it was a relief, because all the dozens of Heechee backed away from him to make a space; he saw several of them pointing objects at him and deduced that the objects were some sort of cameras. In another way, that time was worst of all, because as he was talking it occurred to him that Heechee were literal and when Twice said “all the Heechee” she undoubtedly meant all the Heechee. Billions of them! All looking with terror and fascination at, and making critical judgments on, this frightening alien, him!

  They were indeed looking at him. All of them. All of the billions upon billions of them inside the core. Children in their schoolhalls and nurseries, workers stopped at their tasks, old ones, young ones—dead ones, too, for the massed minds of the Ancient Ancestors would not miss an experience like this. On the domed-in surface of planets, in the habitats in space, from the departing ships climbing up to their ordeal of passage through the Schwarzschild barrier…all of them were watching.

  Audee had stage fright beyond belief.

  He did it, though. He said, “I, uh, I—” And then he took a deep breath and started again. “I’m, ah, that is—I’m just one person, see, and I can’t speak for everybody. But I know what people are like—human people, I mean. And we’re not going to run away and hide like you guys. No offense. I mean, I know you can’t help it—”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting your feelings,” he said, forgetting the cameras, forgetting the billions and billions in the audience. “I just want to tell it like it is. We’re used to struggling, you see. We thrive on it. We catch on quick—look at the way we’ve learned how to do everything you can do, a lot of the time better. Maybe we can’t do anything about the Foe, but we’re sure going to try. I don’t mean I’m promising that—I don’t have any right to promise anything for anybody but me. All I mean is, I know that. That’s all, and,” he finished, “thanks a lot for listening.”

  He stood there, obstinately smiling in silence, until the Heechee with the cameras at last, reluctantly, began to put them down.

  A buzz of conversation broke out; Audee could not tell what they were saying, because none of them were saying it to him. But then the female Heechee who had given Twice back to him bent down to her pod for a moment and then approached. She said:

  “I have this to say, Audee Walthers Third. I have consulted the Ancient Ancestors about the translation and I have it right, so I will say it in English.”

  She took a breath, moved her razor-thin lips silently for a second in rehearsal, and then, shaking her wrists at him as she spoke, she said:

  “‘Courage is not wisdom.

  “‘Wisdom is appropriate behavior.

  “‘Courage is sometimes suicide.’

  “That is how the Ancestors told me to say to you what I want to say.”

  Audee waited for a second, but there didn’t seem to be any more. So he said, “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Audee took his time about it, too. He had been a long time being poked and prodded and put on display, and besides the fact that his bladder was full, he wanted to be by himself for a minute. He took off his pod and left it outside the door, because he didn’t even want Twice with him just then.

  As he was filling the tulip-shaped toilet receptacle with urine, as he was washing his hands, as he was peering at his face in the rotating mirror, he was thinking. There was a current beating time in his head to a different tempo. It had taken him ten seconds to get inside and close the door—outside nearly half a million seconds had passed, at the ratio of something like forty thousand to one. Five seconds to open his fly. A minute, maybe, to urinate. Two more minutes to wash his hands and look at his face in the mirror.

  He tried to calculate: What did all that add up to? The numbers eluded him; out of weeks of habit he kept trying to convert them into Heechee arithmetic and failing; but surely, he thought, something like eight or nine months on the outside had gone by just while he was having a pee.

  It added a curious dimension to the act of relieving his bladder to reflect that, while he was doing it, a child could have been conceived and born in the outside world.

  He opened the door and announced, “I want to go home.”

  Captain burrowed his way through the crowd to confront him. “Yes, Audee?” he asked, shaking his wrists in the negative; in this case it meant failure to understand, but Audee took it as refusal.

  “No, I mean it,” Audee said firmly. “I want to go back before everybody I know is a candidate for a retirement home.”

  “Yes, Audee?” said Captain again. Then he reflected. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You have been thinking that we wanted you to remain here for an extended period. That w
on’t be necessary. You have been seen. The information has been spread. Other human beings will be coming before long, prepared for a longer stay.”

  “You mean I can go?” Audee demanded.

  “Of course you can go. There is a ship already en route to us here, part of a flotilla of supplies, personnel, and Ancient Ancestors, on their way outside. You can join them. By the time they transit the ergosphere, the elapsed time in the outside Galaxy will have been—” he ducked his head to communicate with his Ancient Ancestor “—in terms of the rotation of your planet around its primary, forty-four and one-half years.”

  8

  Up in Central Park

  And while I was listening, and speaking, and doing, and being in all those other places engaged in all those other things—hearing Audee’s story, fretting about General Julio Cassata, wandering, partying—this was what was happening in slow time between Klara and me:

  I marched up to Gelle-Klara Moynlin with a wide, fond smile on my (doppel’s) face. “Hello, Klara,” I said.

  She looked up in astonishment. “Robin! How nice to see you again!” She disengaged herself from the men she was with and came toward me. As she reached up to kiss me, I had to back away. There are disadvantages to being a machine-stored person who is trying to be affectionate with a meat person, and insubstantiality is one of them. You can love ’em. You can’t kiss ’em.

  “Sorry,” I started to say, and at the same moment she looked repentant and said,

  “Oh, hell, I forgot. We can’t do that, can we? But you’re looking really well, Robin.”

  I said, “I look any way I want to look. I’m dead, you know.”

  It took her a minute to grin back at my grin, but she did it. “Then you’ve got good taste. I hope I do that well when they can me.” And up from behind her was coming Dane Metchnikov.

  He said, “Hello, Robin.” He said it neutrally. Not thrilled to see me again, not furious, either. He looked about the way Dane Metchnikov had always looked at everybody and everything—not very interested, or interested only to the extent that that person or thing might help or hinder whatever Dane was planning on.

  I said, “Sorry we can’t shake hands.” “Sorry” seemed to be my favorite word, so I used it again: “Sorry you got stuck in the black hole. I’m glad you got out.” And to set the record straight, because Metchnikov was always a guy who liked to keep the record straight, he said:

  “I didn’t get out. Klara came and rescued us.”

  It was only then that I recalled what Albert had said about Metchnikov seeking legal advice.

  You have to remember that I wasn’t actually saying any of this. My doppel was.

  When you’re speaking through a doppel, there are two ways to do it. One is to start the doppel off and let it carry on the conversation all by itself—it will do that as well as you can. The other way is when you’re fidgety, nervous, and impatient and want to hear what’s going on as soon as you can. That was the way I was, and what you do then is you prompt the doppel. That meant I was feeding lines to my doppel in a fraction of a millisecond or so, and the doppel was saying them at meat speed. You get the picture? It was something like a singalong, where the bunch doesn’t know the words and somebody has to line them out:

  “In a cavern, in a canyon—”

  “IN A CAVERN, IN A CANYON—”

  “—excavating for a mine—”

  “—EXCAVATING FOR A MINE—”

  “—lived a miner, forty-niner—”

  and so on, only I wasn’t leading a crowd of boozers around a piano, I was feeding sentences to my doppel.

  In between the sentences I had plenty of time to think and observe.

  What I mostly observed was Klara, but I spared attention for the two men she was with, too.

  Although their movements were slower than snails, I had seen that Metchnikov was putting his hand out to be shaken. That was a good sign, in itself. I would have taken it to mean that he was not going to hold it against me that I had abandoned him, as well as Klara and the others, in that black hole…if it weren’t for the fact that he had been talking to lawyers.

  The other man with Klara was a total stranger. When I took his measure, I didn’t like the measurements much. The son of a bitch was good-looking. He was tall. He was bronzed and smiling and paunchless, and he was in the process of resting a hand in a familiar way on Klara’s shoulders again, even as she was talking to me.

  I explained to myself that that wasn’t important. Klara had been holding hands with Dane Metchnikov, too, and why not? They’d been old friends—unfortunately, once a little more than friends. It was only natural. This other guy put his hand on her shoulder? Well, that didn’t mean anything at all, really. It was only a friendly gesture. He could have been a relative, or even, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something, there to help her over the shock of encountering me again.

  Looking at Klara’s face didn’t clear any of the questions up, although I did enjoy looking at it and remembering all the other times I’d looked at it, in love.

  She hadn’t changed. She still looked exactly like my eternal and deeply loved One (or at least one of not very many) True Love. The present Gelle-Klara Moynlin was indistinguishable from the Klara I had left in the space near the kugelblitz, just after I died—who in turn had been hardly a hair different from the one I had dumped in the black hole decades earlier.

  It wasn’t just Full Medical that accounted for the way she looked. Meat-Essie was an example of what Full Medical could do. She looked really youthful and adorable, too. But although they can do marvelous things with meat, the clock doesn’t stop entirely. It just gets set back every once in a while. And, for most people, as long as you’re getting restored, you might as well get improved a little at the same time—a perkier nose or a natural (natural!) wave in the hair; even Essie did that, a little.

  Klara had not. The black eyebrows were still just a smidgen too thick, the figure stockier than (I remembered) she herself had wished it. She hadn’t been kept young. She had stayed young, and there was only one way to do that.

  She had been back in the black hole. She had voluntarily returned to the place where I had marooned her, where time slowed to a crawl, and all the decades that had passed for me had been only weeks or months for her.

  I could hardly take my eyes off her. Although it had been the better part of a century since Klara and I had been lovers, I had no trouble at all in seeing—in memory only; I did nothing rude—the texture of Klara’s skin, and the dimples at the base of her spine, and the touch and taste of her. It was a funny sensation. I wasn’t exactly lusting for her bod. I wasn’t on the point of ripping her clothes off and bedding her right there on the turf of Central Park, with the cherry tree in full blossom overhead and Metchnikov and the paunchless, good-looking other guy gazing on. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t really want to make love to her at all, at least not in any urgent or tangible sense. The reason wasn’t just because it was (of course) impossible. Impossibility doesn’t matter to horniness.

  The thing was, whatever I myself wanted or didn’t want to do with Klara, I certainly didn’t want either Metchnikov or the other guy doing any of it.

  I know what that is. The name for it is “jealousy,” and I have to concede I’ve had a lot of it in my time.

  Dane Metchnikov had managed to get a whole sentence out: “You look a lot different to me,” he had said.

  He wasn’t smiling. That didn’t mean much, because even in the old days on Gateway Metchnikov had never been a smiley sort of guy. And, of course, I looked different to him, because he hadn’t seen me in a lot longer time than Klara—not since Gateway itself.

  I could see that it was just about time to explore this question of lawyers, so I did what I always did when I needed advice and information fast. I yelled for it: “Albert!”

  Of course, I didn’t speak “out loud”—I mean, in any way Klara or the two men could hear. And when Albert showed up, he was no more visible t
o them than was the real, not doppel, me.

  That was a good thing. Albert was obviously in a playful mood.

  He was a rare old spectacle. He had one of those tacky, worn-out sweaters he affects wrapped around his head like a turban. He had been taking liberties with his physical specifications, too. His eyes were narrower, and they seemed to be rimmed with black makeup. His features were darker. His hair was jet black. “I hear and obey, O Master,” he chanted in a reverent singsong. “Why have you summoned your genie out of his nice warm bottle?”

  When you have a faithful data-retrieval program like Albert Einstein, you don’t need a court jester. “Clown,” I said, “I’ll summon Essie to have you reprogrammed if you don’t straighten out. What’s the idea of the comedy?”

  “O Master,” he said, bowing his head, “your humble messenger fears the just wrath of your noble self when he hears evil tidings.”

  I said, “Shit.” But I had to admit he had made me laugh, and that was one way of making evil tidings easier to bear. “All right,” I said, nodding to show that I knew what the evil tidings were going to be. “Tell me about Metchnikov. He was on the mission to the black hole, and now he’s back. I just figured out that that means he’s entitled to a share of the science bonus I got for the mission, right?”

  Albert looked at me curiously. Then he said, unwinding the sweater from his head, “That’s right, Robin. It’s not just him, either. When Klara went back to the black hole with Harbin Eskladar—”

  “Hold it! Who?”

  “That’s Harbin Eskladar,” he said, pointing to the other man. “You told me you knew about him.”

  “Albert,” I sighed, rearranging the conjectures and misunderstandings inside my mind to fit the new pattern, “you should know by now that when I tell you I know anything, I’m lying.”

  He looked at me seriously. “So I feared,” he said. “That’s the bad news, I’m afraid.”