The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  The simple fact that the workthings were temporarily powered down meant nothing at all about the barriers, he told himself. What a fool Basingstoke was!

  And while he was thinking all this, Beaupre Heimat was lifting the wire for himself and hurrying after the other man, fastidiously dodging the cowflops on the grass, pausing only to kick at a herdthing to make sure it would not respond.

  It did not.

  He caught up with Basingstoke, panting, at the very edge of the compound. The pain wires were quite visible here—for the sake of the cattle, not the prisoners—against a row of pretty hibiscus and torch flowers.

  A gardenerthing was toppled motionless against a torch-flower shrub. Its hand was raised and frozen to a trowel. Heimat spat on it thoughtfully.

  “The power is off, man,” Basingstoke said softly.

  Said Heimat, swallowing, “You go first, Cyril. I’ll drag you back if you’re caught.”

  Basingstoke laughed. “Oh, Beau, what a hero you are! Come along, we’ll do it together!”

  12

  JAWS

  What you must remember at all times is that all things end—so Albert keeps telling me. I think he thinks it is some kind of consolation.

  It’s true, though. Even the interminable trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS ended at last.

  JAWS lives in a geostationary satellite, or actually it’s five satellites tumbling around each other in parasitic orbits, a few tens of thousands of kilometers over Conakry in Africa. It used to be in a different place—just about over the Galapagos islands—but then it was for a different purpose. It was called the High Pentagon then.

  When we came out of orbit I wasn’t looking at it. I was looking down at the Earth, big and broad below us. Sunrise had passed the Gulf of Guinea, but the western bulge of Africa was still all dark. I took pleasure in the sight. I still think the Earth is about the prettiest planet there is. I could see sunlight hitting the tops of mountains off to the west, and that wonderfully blue Atlantic just below, and I was feeling quite affectionate toward the troublesome old place when I heard Essie cry, “Have ruined it!”

  It took a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the planet. “Sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t looking at the screen.” She hadn’t been, either, as a matter of fact. Generally we only use the screen out of habit. When we really want a good look at something, it’s just as easy for us to use the True Love’s own external sensors direct. So I switched and saw what Essie saw.

  There were a lot more than five objects in common orbit now, not even counting the flotilla of JAWS cruisers moving restlessly about in formation. People had been flocking to JAWS, and their spacecraft were in mooring orbits. There must have been a dozen of those shuttle ships, but the thing that Essie was talking about was a huge, crumpled mass of film. It took a moment to recognize it.

  It had once been the main propulsive power for an interstellar photon-sailship. I had seen it once before, when it was in its glory, and then it had carried a crew of Sluggards on an exploration trip to some other star. “Why is it such a mess?” I demanded of Julio Cassata.

  He gave me an irritated look. He was busy on the communications channels, and the person he was irritated with wasn’t me. It was the Watch Officer on JAWS, and there wasn’t much use in being irritated with him, or it, because it wasn’t a him. He said, “I say again, this is Major General Julio Cassata’s doppel, and I request immediate landing clearance. Effing machines,” he snarled, looking at Albert before he looked at me. Then, “You mean the sailship? But it was your damn Institute that brought it here for study. What did you think we were going to do with the sail? Keep pulling it back when the sun was pushing it out of orbit?…Yes, thank you,” he said to the commset, and nodded to Alicia Lo to take us in.

  It wasn’t that easy.

  The particular section of JAWS we were headed for was Delta, a soup can that weighed forty thousand tons. You could tell it was the command satellite. For the convenience of the high brass, or anyway the meat portions of it, it rotated more rapidly than the others. That gave them a little better up-and-down orientation for their comfort, but it wasn’t a convenience for Alicia Lo.

  Still, she corkscrewed us neatly into the dock. It was a virtuoso performance, and she deserved a better audience than Essie and me. We weren’t watching her. We were looking at that shark-ship fleet of JAWS cruisers, obviously ready for action—any kind of action. I murmured, “I hope they aren’t going to do anything foolish.”

  “If do anything at all,” Essie said soberly, “will be foolish. Is no nonfoolish thing to do.”

  And then we were aboard the JAWS satellite.

  The way people like Essie and me come aboard a spacecraft or satellite is to bridge in to the internal communications facilities; after that, we can go anywhere the cables go, and maybe a little bit beyond. On Delta-JAWS we went as far as the hatch chamber and stopped. There were no comm facilities, or at least none we were allowed to use. The Watch Officer, a machine program in the form of a callow young lieutenant, said with military courtesy but no give, “General Cassata may proceed, sirs and madams, but the rest of you must remain in the secure lounge.”

  Of course, we didn’t want to do that, not at all. It wasn’t what I had come to JAWS for.

  If Cassata had lingered a moment, I would have asked him to explain all this. As he hadn’t, I explained it myself. The lieutenant listened politely and then took appropriate action. He bucked it to higher authority.

  Higher authority was a short, stocky woman named Mohandan Dar Havandhi. When she appeared she stared at us silently for so long that I had the sudden conviction she was a meat person, but it was only her manner. When she opened her mouth she revealed herself to be as machine-stored as the rest of it, but all she opened her mouth to say was, “No.”

  “But, Commandant Havandhi,” Essie purred soothingly, “is Mr. Robinette Broadhead.”

  “I am aware of that,” said the commandant.

  “Then must also be aware that Mr. Robinette Broadhead is executive of Broadhead Foundation, with full clearance for all extra-solar matters.”

  “That is true,” the commandant said, “but we are under Condition Red. Peacetime clearances are suspended. Of course,” she said, with a smile that showed gold teeth—how faithful some of us are to our meat originals!—“you need not be confined to the secure lounge if you prefer.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling forgivingly, “in that case we’ll just—”

  “You may alternatively return to your ship,” she said, and would not be budged.

  Military minds! You can’t reason with them. We tried, of course. We pointed out that “security” was a laughable anachronism, Condition Red or no Condition Red, because the only enemy who might need keeping out was fifty thousand light-years away, in the kugelblitz. She didn’t bother telling us that wasn’t true, since the message had come from much nearer. She just shook her head. We tried threatening to call marshals and heads of state. She just said we certainly could do that, all right, if we wanted to, as soon as the embargo on civilian radio messages was lifted. She did not offer any guess as to when that might be. We tried to be chummy with her. We asked what all those spaceships were doing at JAWS. She didn’t answer at all; no, we weren’t going to get any military secrets out of her.

  It really wasn’t as interminable as it seemed—a few thousand milliseconds at most—because Julio Cassata, or anyway his doppel, came back. Surprisingly, Cassata was looking faintly pleased. “My meat guy is in conference,” he told us, “so it will be a little while before I can, uh, see him.” He favored us with a smile—not favoring us all equally; the young woman named Alicia Lo got most of the smile. “So what would you like to do while we wait? Take a look around JAWS?”

  “We can’t,” I said, pointing to the commandant.

  “Of course you can,” he said, secure in rank. He addressed her. “Commandant Havandhi, I relieve you of these guests. I will personally escort them around the base.�
��

  The five satellites of JAWS make up nearly two hundred thousand tons mass and are inhabited by something like thirty thousand people, meat and machine-stored. Two of the satellites are nothing but communications and data-processing centers. There’s nothing to see there. Gamma is all hardware, military hardware; it’s full of buster bombs and Heechee tunneling machines, converted to dig holes in ships or fortresses rather than rock. We didn’t expect to be allowed there, either, apart from the fact that Albert already knew all about every last piece of ordnance anyway. Alpha is crew quarters and R&R facilities, and there wasn’t any reason for us to go there—we didn’t need any of their ideas of rest and recreation.

  All the same, when the electronic barriers that kept unauthorized machine intelligences out of JAWS were let down for us, the fact that we were confined to Delta annoyed me. Cassata tried to soothe. “Forgive the old lady,” he said, grinning. “She was an exchange officer here when this was the High Pentagon, and she thinks everything has gone downhill since.” He glanced at his watch—as nonexistent as my own. “We’ve got at least ten thousand milliseconds and there’s a lot of interesting stuff—Sluggards, Quancies, Voodoo Pigs, besides all the other stuff—I mean the parts of the other stuff I can let you into. What do you want to see?”

  I said, “I don’t want to see anything. I didn’t come here to take the two-dollar tour. I want to talk to people! I want to find out what’s going on—”

  “And then,” said Cassata, “you want to get in on the action yourself, right?”

  I shrugged angrily. I had had plenty of time in the “secure lounge” to build up a head of steam, and Julio Cassata wasn’t making it go away. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but I held myself to one word:

  “Yes.”

  Cassata was still edgy himself. He’d been given a reprieve from termination by his meat original, but that was all. He said, “You make trouble, Broadhead.”

  “I’ve got the power to make a lot of it,” I agreed.

  He looked at me narrowly, then shrugged. “It isn’t up to me,” he said. “It isn’t even up to me. The Combined Chiefs make the rules around here. So what’s it to be? The two-dollar tour? Or the secure lounge?”

  Essie and I had seen JAWS before, back when the Combined Chiefs were a little more respectful to the guy who controlled the Broadhead Foundation. So had Albert. Alicia Lo was a lot more interested. To her it was one of those secret places that you hear about but never expect to see, like the inside of Fort Knox or the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.

  You understand, we didn’t actually “go” anywhere. We didn’t have to. Cassata fed us into JAWS-Delta’s communications system, and we saw what he wanted us to see. He was a polite host, so he did better than that; he created a sort of officer’s club lounge for us to sit in, with a fire blazing at one end of the room and a table laid out with drinks and snacks. The other end of the room was—whatever we were being shown.

  When Cassata offhandedly proposed a look at a nest of Sluggards, Alicia was thrilled—as, of course, he had intended she should be.

  The Sluggards were a historic “first” for human beings, because they were the first alien intelligent race any member of the human race had ever seen. Or not “seen,” exactly. Felt. Audee Walthers, fooling around with a Dream Couch, had detected their pathetic, huge, lumbering sailship in interstellar space decades before.

  That was a most important event, but what it led to was more important by a whole lot, because the Slugs detected Audee, too. And that was what told the Heechee that people like us were abroad in the Galaxy, and that was what brought the Heechee, kicking and screaming, Out of their hidey-hole in the core.

  “I thought the Heechee kidnaped this Sluggard ship back to its own planet,” Alicia offered.

  “They did,” Cassata agreed, “but old Broadhead here kidnaped them back here for study. Or his Institute did. The Slugs don’t mind. They were expecting another thousand years or so on their trip. Their sail is still in orbit just outside JAWS—”

  “Saw. Looks seriously mashed,” Essie said severely.

  “Well, what else were we going to do? Spread out, the damn thing’s forty thousand kilometers long. Anyway, they won’t need it again. Do you want to see them or not?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Alicia Lo, cutting through the argument. Cassata waved a hand, and there they were.

  Sluggards aren’t pretty. Some people say they sort of look like some kind of tropical flower. Others think they look like one of those deep-sea things with a lot of tentacles; it’s hard to say what they resemble, because they don’t very much resemble anything on Earth. The males are considerably bigger than the females, but that isn’t the females’ only problem. The females have nothing but problems, because there’s no such thing as women’s rights among Sluggards. A female Sluggard may not worry about this much, though, since they are not intellectual. Their lives are entirely taken up with birthing. One infant comes out every cycle—the cycle runs a little less than four months. If the lucky lady has been visited by a male at the right time, the infant is male. If not, it’s female. Sluggard males do not seem to be particularly horny (considering the Sluggard females, who can blame them?), and so usually the female has not been sexually favored lately.

  So there are endless numbers of female Sluggards being born all the time.

  They don’t go to waste, though. From time to time one of the males picks out a particularly fat and appealing female. Then he eats her.

  One supposes the females don’t like that. No female Sluggard has ever complained, though. They can’t. They don’t talk at all.

  Males, on the other hand, talk incessantly—or sing—or anyway make some sort of sounds continuously throughout their lives. You might not know that, though, if you happened to be sitting right next to a Sluggard in full cry—assuming you could, since what they live in is both cold and heavy and poisonous to meat people. You might be aware of a faint pulsing, like a heavy truck going by outside your house. The Slugs are slow. So are their voices; the shrillest coloratura soprano among the Slugs might get way up to twenty or twenty-five hertz. So you couldn’t hear what they were singing.

  There were several dozen of the creatures, male and female, floating around in the slush of their spaceship. One male was in a small compartment by himself. The rest were in a common tank, surrounded by all sorts of curious Slug devices that floated with them: the furnishings and gadgets, I supposed, that made up a comfortable Sluggard home, and the only way I could tell the people from the furniture was that I had seen pictures of Slugs before. I couldn’t see anything move. They looked funny in another way, too. I didn’t remember exactly what the natural hues of a Sluggard should be, but they looked as though they had been colored by someone who didn’t remember even as well as I did.

  “One is moving!” cried Essie.

  It was clever of her to have noticed it. The one in the separate chamber was, barely, extending a tentacle. It was terribly slow even by meat-human standards (not to mention my own!). In the Slugs’ own terms, however, he was writhing in great agitation and high speed; you could see little ripply lines in the sludge all around him, where he had made pressure waves.

  “That’s one of the new ones,” said Cassata. “They finished debriefing the original crew, so they imported six more males from the Slug planet a few weeks ago.”

  “Why is he off by himself?” asked Alicia Lo.

  “He’s in high-speed mode so he can be interviewed. They thrash around so, you know? If he were in with the others in high mode, he’d mess up their living quarters.”

  Albert said professorially, “I observe we are not viewing them by visible light.”

  “No, right. It’s tomography, because you couldn’t see in visible light in that slush they live in. Want to hear what he’s singing?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but cut in an audio feed. It wasn’t the Sluggard we heard, but a machine translator. It declaimed:

  Great
blinding blistering brutes

  Thrashed and harmed with much cavitation

  And many deaths and highly painful injuries—

  “That’s just the latest stanza,” Cassata explained. “He’s only been going for about an hour this time. We have to let them rest up between sessions. They can’t stand high mode very long, and we can’t deal with them at all when they’re in normal. Want to keep on watching them for a while?”

  I said, “What I want, General Cassata, is to talk to somebody in authority around here. How the hell much longer do we have to stall around?”

  But Essie put her soft, sweet hand on my lips. “General will let us know soonest possible, is that not so, Julio? So have nothing better to do.”

  —also to females

  the Sluggard’s translation finished, and I began to think of causing some death and highly painful injuries myself.

  See, there we were again, caught in the disparity between gigabit time and meat.

  I don’t think that I am basically a very patient man, but, oh, how much patience this machine-stored analog of me has had to learn! Especially in dealing with meat people. Not to mention with that particularly infuriating and exceptionally immovable section of the meat population, the military.

  I stated my views on this matter for Julio Cassata’s benefit. He only grinned some more. He was enjoying it. Of course, from his point of view, the longer we waited here, the longer he had left to “live”—that is to say, the longer his doppel had, and his doppel was obviously reluctant to get itself terminated. I was a little surprised that he didn’t suggest that he take pretty Alicia Lo off for another little private sightseeing trip—I could well imagine what sights he had in mind—and perhaps he would have if Albert hadn’t come up with an idea.