Heimat’s trial was a peculiar experience for me. I had died not long before, and that was the first time I had appeared in public in a holographic body, with my essential self stored in gigabit space. That was still a rather unusual situation, and Heimat’s lawyers tried to keep me from testifying because I wasn’t a “person.” They failed, of course. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had succeeded, because there were plenty of other witnesses.
Heimat obviously didn’t care. His arrest and prosecution he regarded as an unfortunate misadventure. Cynically and confidently he resigned himself to the verdict of history, because he could have had no doubt what the verdict of the court would be. But when I was on the stand he insisted on taking the cross-examination himself, while his lawyers fumed. “You, Broadhead,” he said. “You dare to accuse me of treason while you associate with the enemies of the human race! We shouldn’t parley with the Heechee! Kill them, take them prisoner—surround that place in the core where they hide out, shoot them down—”
It was an incredible performance. When the court finally stopped it, Heimat bowed courteously to the bench, smiled, said, “I have no further questions of this contraption that calls itself Robinette Broadhead,” and returned to look proud and confident for the rest of the trial.
That was Heimat. Cyril Basingstoke was, if anything, worse than he.
The meeting of the two retired monsters was wary on both sides. They knew each other.
Heimat hurried back to the recreation hall and found Basingstoke there already, idly glancing through the PV stores to see what entertainments this new place had to offer. They shook hands gravely, then stepped back to look at each other.
Cyril Basingstoke was a Curaçaon, a rich purple-black in color, as old as Heimat (or I), but fully cosseted by the medics so that he looked, maybe, forty-five. “It is good to see you, Beau,” he said, voice deep and rich and friendly. Basingstoke had no accent—well, maybe a touch of what sounded German and was probably Dutch, from the good Frisian monks who had taught him English in the Catholic school. Basingstoke was Islands-born, but there was nothing “Eyelunds, mon!” about the way he talked. If you could not see him, you would not guess it was a black man speaking, although he said each word larger than an American would—vowels more resonant and rounded, intonation more marked.
Basingstoke glanced out the window, toward the distant lagoon. “This is no bad place, Beaupre,” he said. “When they told me I was to be transferred, I thought it would be to some far worse one. That planet Aphrodite, perhaps—the one that goes around a flare star, so that one can live only in tunnels under the surface.”
Heimat nodded, though in fact he did not much care where he was anymore. Remembering that he was, in a sense, the host, he ordered drinks from the waiterthing. “Unfortunately—” he smiled “—they don’t allow alcohol.”
“They did not in Pensacola, either,” said Basingstoke. “That is why I was so pleased to be paroled, although if you remember, I was never a hard-drinking man.”
Heimat nodded, studying him. “Cyril?” he ventured.
“Yes, Beau?”
“You were out. Then you violated parole. Why did you kill those people?”
“Ah, well,” said Basingstoke, courteously accepting his ginger ale from the waiterthing, “they angered me, you see.”
“I thought that was the case,” Heimat said dryly. “But you must have known they’d just put you back here.”
“Yes, but I have my pride. Or habit? I think it is a matter of habit.”
Heimat said severely, “That’s the kind of thing a prosecutor might say.”
“Perhaps in some sense a prosecutor might be right for people like you and me, Beau. I didn’t need to kill those people. I was not used to crowds, you see. There was pushing and shoving to board a bus. I fell. They all laughed. There was a policeman with a machine-pistol and he was laughing too. I got up and took it away from him—”
“And shot thirty-five people.”
“Oh, no, Beau. I shot nearly ninety, but only thirty-five died. Or so they tell me.” He smiled. “I did not count the corpses.”
He nodded courteously to Heimat, who sat silent for a moment, sipping his own drink while Basingstoke idly summoned up pictures of Martinique and Curaçao and the Virgins. “What lovely places they are,” he sighed. “I almost wish I had not killed those people.”
Heimat laughed out loud, shaking his head. “Oh, Cyril! Is it true that we have the habit of killing?”
Basingstoke said politely, “For a matter of pride or principle, it is perhaps so.”
“So we should never be released?”
“Ah, Beau,” Basingstoke said fondly, “we never will, you know.”
Heimat brushed the remark aside. “But do you think it is true, we are incorrigible?”
Basingstoke said reflectively, “I think—No. Let me show you.” He whispered to the control, and the PV views flickered and returned to a scene of Curaçao. “You see, Beau,” he said, settling himself down comfortably for a nice long chat, “in my case it is pride. We were very poor when I was a child, but we always had pride. We had nothing else. Seldom even enough to eat. We would open a snack shop for the tourists, but all the neighbors had snack shops, too, and so we never made money from it. We had only the things that were free—the beautiful sun, the sands, the lovely colibri hummingbirds, the palm trees. But we had no shoes. Do you know what it is like to have no shoes?”
“Well, actually—”
“You do not—” Basingstoke smiled “—because you were American and rich. Do you see that bridge?”
He pointed to the PV vista, a bay with two bridges across it. “Not that ugly high thing, the other one. The one on pontoons that floats. With the outboard motors that open and close it, there at the end.”
“What about it?” asked Heimat, already beginning to wonder if having a companion would relieve boredom or add to it.
“That is a matter of pride without shoes, Beau. This I learned from my grandfather.”
Heimat said, “Look, Basil, I’m glad to see you and all that, but do you really have to—”
“Patience, Beau! If you have pride you must also have patience; this is what my grandfather taught me. He too was descamisado—without shoes. So on this bridge when it was new they had a toll. Two cents to walk across it…but only for rich people, that is, the people who wore shoes. People who were barefoot, they crossed free. So the rich people who wore shoes were not stupid; they would take them off and hide them, and cross, and put them back on at the other side.”
Heimat was beginning to get angry. “But your grandfather had no shoes!”
“No, but he had pride. Like you. Like me. So he would wait at the bridge until someone with shoes came along. Then he would borrow his shoes so he could pay his two cents and cross the bridge with his pride still safe. Do you see what I am saying, Beau? Pride is expensive. It has cost us both very much.”
I didn’t want to stop talking about the children because they were appealing; I can hardly stop talking about Heimat and Basingstoke, either, but for quite other reasons. If ever two persons were hateful to me, they are the ones. It is the attraction of the horrible.
When Cyril Basingstoke came to join Beaupre Heimat, the children on the Wheel were just getting the word that they were being evacuated. It made the news. Both Basingstoke and Heimat took an interest; probably they were rooting for the Foe, if anything, though it must have been a conflict for them both. (Pride in the human race? Resentment against that major fraction of it that had put them in prison?) But they had other conflicts, not least with each other. For neither Heimat nor Basingstoke cared much for the society of equals.
They bored each other, in fact. When Heimat found Basingstoke dreaming in front of the PV views of Curaçao or Sint Maarten or the coast of Venezuela, he would say, “Why do you let your mind rust out? I have made use of my prison time! Learn something. A language, as I have done.”
Indeed he had, a new lang
uage, perfectly, every few years; with all the time he had had to do it he was now fluent in Mandarin, Heechee, Russian, Tamil, Classical Greek, and eight other languages. “And who will you speak them to?” Basingstoke would ask, not taking his eyes from the tropic scene before them.
“That isn’t the point! The point is to keep sharp!”
And Basingstoke would look up at last and say, “For what?”
If Basingstoke was tired of Heimat’s nagging, Heimat was tired of Basingstoke’s interminable reminiscences. Every time the black man started a story, the general knew how to finish it. “When I was a boy,” Basingstoke would begin, and Heimat would chime in:
“You were very poor.”
“Yes, Heimat, very poor. We would sell snacks to the tourists—”
“But there was no money in it, because all your neighbors had snack shops, too.”
“Precisely. None at all. So sometimes we boys would catch an iguana and try to find a tourist to buy that. None of them wanted an iguana, of course.”
“But once in a while one would buy it, because he was sorry for you.”
“He would, so then we would follow the tourist to see where he let it go, and then we’d catch it and sell it again.”
“And after a while you’d eat it.”
“Why, yes, Beau. Iguana is very good, like chicken. Have I told you this story before?”
It was not just the boredom. There was, each found, something about the other that really grated on the nerves. Basingstoke found Heimat’s sexual habits revolting: “Why must you try to hurt the things, Beau? They are not alive anyway!”
“Because it gives me pleasure. The keepers have to take care of my needs; that is one of them. And it’s none of your business, Basil. It does not affect you, while that filthy stuff you eat stinks up the whole prison.”
“But that is one of my needs, Beau,” said Basingstoke. He had given the cookthings exact instructions, and they had of course obliged. Heimat had to admit that some of the things weren’t bad. There was an ugly-looking fruit that tasted splendid, and some kinds of shellfish that were divine. But some were awful. The worst was a sort of green pepper and onion stew made with salt dried codfish that tasted and smelled exactly like the garbage cans outside a seafood restaurant, after they have ripened all night. It was called a chiki, and when it wasn’t made with the rotten fish, it was made with something only marginally less repulsive, like goat.
Heimat tried diluting Basingstoke’s presence by introducing him to Pernetsky, but the Soviet marshal would not even open his eyes, much less speak to the newcomer. Outside the prison hospital Basingstoke asked, “But why is he doing this, Beaupre? He is certainly conscious, after all.”
“I think he has some idea of escape. Maybe he thinks if he continues to pretend to be asleep, they will take him to another hospital somewhere, outside of the prison, and then he can make a try.”
“They won’t.”
“I know,” said Heimat, looking around. “Well, Cyril? Do you want to explore the grounds some more today?”
Basingstoke glanced down the hill toward the sparkling, distant lagoon and the broad Pacific beyond it, then back wistfully at the recreation hall. But Heimat had finally refused to look at any more pictures with him, and Heimat at least was an audience. “Oh, I suppose so,” he said. “What are those buildings down by the shore?”
“A school, I think. And there is a little port there, where they have dredged out the lagoon so small ships can come in.”
“Yes, I see the port,” said Basingstoke. “We had such a port in Curaçao, away from the big one. It was for slaves, Beau. In the old days, when they brought a shipload of slaves in, they would not parade them through the town; they would bring them in a few kilometers away—”
“At the slave port,” Heimat finished for him, “where the auction block was. Yes. Let’s walk down toward the baby farm.”
“I do not like such things!” Basingstoke sulked. But as Heimat started down the path without him, he added, “But I will go with you.”
The baby farm was within the outer perimeter of the prison, but only just; it was a separate fenced-off enclave, green meadow with a few handsome cows grazing, and the prisoners were not allowed inside it.
Heimat was amused to find how much it offended Cyril. “It is decadent, Beau,” the old man muttered. “Oh, how I wish we had not failed in our cause! We should have forced them to forget such things. We should have made them scream.”
“We did,” said Heimat.
“We should have done more. I am revolted to think that a human child should be in the womb of a cow. When I was a tiny child—”
“Perhaps,” Heimat cut in, to head off the reminiscence, “if you were a woman, the idea of extra-uterine childbirth would not be so revolting to you, Cyril. Pregnancy is not without suffering.”
“Of course, suffering! Why shouldn’t they suffer? We suffered. When I was a boy—”
“Yes, I know what it was like when you were a boy,” said Heimat, but that didn’t stop Cyril from telling him all over again.
Heimat tuned the voice out. It was comfortably hot on the island, but there was a breeze coming up the hill from the sea. He could smell the faint wisp of cattle aroma from the meadow, where the herdthings were moving about, checking the temperatures and conditions of their charges.
Actually, Heimat thought, surrogate childbearing was a good thing. Assuming childbearing was a good thing in the first place, anyway. His own sexual pleasures went in quite different lines but, for a couple who wanted to be a family, it made sense. They started the baby in the usual way, with frolicsome and slippery pokings; Heimat was broad-minded enough to accept that that was what turned most people on. So if that was their pleasure, why should the pleasure then turn to pain for one of them? It was so easy to take the fertilized ovum away. It had already received all it would ever need of ancestry. The DNA spirals had already danced apart and recombined; the heredity was established. The chef, as you might say, had assembled the soufflé that was his pièce-de-résistance. Now all it needed was a warm oven to rise in, and the oven did not have to be human. Anything that was vertebrate and mammalian, of human size or larger, would do. Cows were perfect.
There were not many cows in the baby farm, because there weren’t very many human families left on the island to require them. But Heimat counted ten, twelve, fifteen—altogether eighteen surrogate mothers, placidly cropping grass while the herdthings poked thermometers into them and gazed into their ears.
“It is most disgusting,” breathed Cyril Basingstoke.
“No, why?” Heimat argued. “They don’t do drugs, or smoke, or do any of the other things human women might do to hurt the babies. No. If we had won, I would have instituted this system myself.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Basingstoke pleasantly.
They grinned at each other, two old gladiators amused at the thought of the final conflict that would never have to take place. Old fool, Heimat thought comfortably; it would of course have been necessary to get rid of him, too—if the revolution had succeeded.
“Beau?” said Basingstoke. “Look.”
One of the mothers was lowing in mild distress. Her temperature was being taken, but the herdthing was apparently holding the thermometer in an uncomfortable way. The cow shook its rear end free, trotted a few steps away, and began to graze again.
“It isn’t moving,” said Heimat, perplexed.
Basingstoke looked around at the four or five herders in the baby farm, then back up the hill toward the gardenerthings and the distant workthings on the paths. All were frozen motionless. Even the sounds of fans from the hoverbarrows had stopped.
Basingstoke said, “None of them are moving, Beau. They’re all dead.”
The pasture that was the baby farm was at the very lowermost edge of the prison compound. The slope steepened there, and Heimat looked at it with distaste. When you are an old man you are an old man, even with every possible replacement of tiss
ue and recalcification of bone. “If we go down,” he said, “we will just have to come up again.”
“Will we, man?” said Basingstoke softly. “Have a look.”
“Ah, some momentary power failure,” muttered Heimat. “They’ll be back on in a moment.”
“Yes. And then the moment for us will be past.”
“But, Basil,” Heimat said reasonably, “all right, suppose the mobile units are out of service for a moment, the barriers are still there.”
Basingstoke looked at him carefully. He didn’t speak. He just turned away, lifted a strand of the wire that kept the cattle on their meadow, and ducked under it.
Heimat stared irritably after him. The guards would be back on in a moment, of course. And even if that moment lasted long enough for the two prisoners to, for example, cross the wide cow pasture, what he had said about the barriers was still true, perhaps. It wasn’t the guards that kept the prisoners inside, but the sophisticated and unthwartable electronic pen. It came in three courses: pain, stun, death. It was difficult to get past the first and almost impossible to pass the second—also pointless, because there was the third. He told himself that Basingstoke simply didn’t know, not having had the experience; for Heimat had, in fact, actually tried. He only once got past the terrible, heart-stopping pain line, and then only to be knocked out at the second and awaken in his own bed, with a guardthing grinning down at him.
The Annals of the Heechee Page 22
