The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

He coughed politely and said, “I believe, General Cassata, that the Sluggards are not the only aliens of whom specimens are present here.”

  Cassata raised his eyebrows. “You don’t mean the Voodoo Pigs?”

  “The Voodoo Pigs, yes. Also the Quancies. The Institute has provided colonies of both for study. Might we see them as well?”

  If there is anything less interesting to look at than the Quancies, it is the Voodoo Pigs, but of course you don’t know that until you try. “Oh, Julio,” cried Alicia Lo, “could we?” And then of course it was certain that we would.

  Cassata shrugged and changed the scene. We were looking at a rocky pool of gray-green water, where half a dozen fishy-looking creatures were basking under a pale orange light. We got sound, too, the honking of Quancies chatting among themselves.

  Since I had seen all the Quancies I ever wanted to see, I turned to the table of snacks. It wasn’t that I was hungry—or even “hungry.” I just wished we would get on with it.

  I called on all my long training in patience. I didn’t like it, but I had no alternative that I could see. Real-Cassata was still in his meeting, and doppel-Cassata was just being a good host to us—if, I thought, mostly to his new girl. But the sky was falling, and it was no time for a trip to the zoo!

  While the white-jacketed waiterthing was handing me a sandwich of chopped chicken liver and onion—all, of course, as simulated as the waiterthing itself—Albert wandered over to join me. “A good German bock, please,” he said to the waiter, and smiled at me. “You don’t care to hear what the Quancies are saying to each other, Rob?”

  “Quancies never have anything to say.” I took a sullen bite of my sandwich. It was delicious, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

  “It is probably futile to interview them,” Albert agreed, accepting the stein of dark beer. You have to admit that Quancies are intelligent, more or less, because at least they have language. What they don’t have is hands. They live in the sea, and their tiny flippers are no more use than a seal’s. If they weren’t air-breathing we probably never would have known they existed, because they don’t have cities, or tools, or, what is most important, writing. Therefore they have no written history. Neither do the Sluggards; but their life span is so long (if so slow) that their bards remember eddas that are as trustworthy, at least, as Homer’s songs. “I do have some news that may interest you,” said Albert when he had finished his first deep swallow of the beer.

  Good old Albert! “Finish that up and I’ll buy you another,” I cried. “And tell me!”

  “It is nothing much,” he said, “but of course I still have access to the datastore facilities on the True Love. There were a number of files that I thought might have some bearing on the present situation. It took quite a while to access them all, and there was very little useful data in the first few thousand. Then I checked out the immigration records for the past few months.”

  “You found something,” I said to help him along. It isn’t only meat people who have taught me patience.

  “I did, yes,” he said. “Most of the children who were evacuated from the Watch Wheel, you remember, were relocated on Earth. According to the immigration records, at least seven of them are presently in the area served by the western-Pacific communications net. Of course, it is from that net that the communication to the kugelblitz originated.”

  I gave him a shocked and unbelieving stare. “Why would human children work for the Assassins?” I demanded.

  “I don’t think they did,” said Albert, thoughtfully accepting his second stein, “although the possibility cannot be ruled out. But we do know that they were present on the Wheel when the Watchers suspected they had detected something, and are now on Earth; it is at least possible that the Assassins have traveled with them.”

  I felt myself shiver. “We have to tell JAWS!”

  “Yes, of course.” Albert nodded. “I have already done so. I fear, though, that this will have the result of prolonging the meeting the original General Cassata has been conducting.”

  I said, “Shit.”

  “However—” Albert smiled “—I do not think it will be by very much, as I had already summed the data and presented it to Commandant Havandhi for transmittal to the meeting.”

  “So what am I supposed to do now? Gape at the Quancies some more?”

  “I think,” said Albert, “that the others are also losing interest in the Quancies and ready to go on to the Voodoo Pigs.”

  “I’ve seen Voodoo Pigs!”

  “There is nothing better to do, is there?” He hesitated and then added, “Also, I would like you to observe the carvings of the Voodoo Pigs. They are, I think, of some special interest.”

  I could not tell, looking at the Voodoo Pigs, just what it was about them that Albert thought might be of interest. All I felt was disgust—I mean, not counting the impatience I worked so hard to quell. The Voodoo Pigs lived in slop. I had never understood why they didn’t drown in their own filth, but they didn’t seem to mind it.

  That was the piggishness of the Voodoo Pigs. They didn’t really look porcine. More than anything else, they looked like blue-skinned anteaters; they tapered to a point, fore and aft. They really were piggy, though. What they lived in couldn’t be called a cage. It was a sty.

  They lived in their own waste. The mud was not merely mud plus pigshit. It was stuck full of little garnishes, like raisins in a pudding of rotten fruit and excrement, and the garnishes were the carvings Albert had mentioned.

  Since Albert had made a point of it, I took a careful look at the Voodoo Pig carvings. I didn’t see what had interested him. The carvings weren’t anything new. The museums all had them. I’d even once held one in my hand—gingerly, because the smell of the sty had survived even boiling and polishing. They were just carved bits of woody plant matter, or of tooth or bone. They ran about ten or twelve centimeters long, and when they were carved out of teeth, the teeth were not the Voodoo Pigs’ own. The pigs didn’t have any teeth. All they had were abrasive and very hard rasping surfaces at the skinny ends of their noses—or trunks, or mouths, depending on how you chose to describe them. The teeth came from their food animals, several dozen of which had been imported along with the pigs when the colony was established. The fact that they used the teeth of other animals for their carvings didn’t prove any delicate sensibilities on the part of the pigs, though, because when they used bones, the bone was as likely as not to have come from their deceased nearest and dearest, once they had passed on and been eaten. “Carvings” isn’t exactly the right word, either. The pigs nibbled the pieces into shape, because they didn’t have tools to carve anything with. They didn’t have any language, either.

  In fact, take them all in all, they had about the IQ of a gopher—

  Only they created, and obsessively went on creating, these works of art.

  “Art,” too, may be too strong a word, because they had only one subject. The carvings were like dolls. They resembled, as close as I can describe it, a six-limbed creature with the body of a lion and the head and torso of a gorilla, and there was nothing remotely resembling it anywhere on the planet they came from.

  “So what’s special about them?” I asked Albert.

  He countered, “Why do you think the pigs carve them?”

  The rest of the party got into the guessing game. “Religious objects,” said Cassata.

  “Dolls,” said Alicia Lo. “They need something to cuddle.”

  And, “Visitors,” said my dear Portable-Essie.

  And Albert beamed at her approvingly.

  As is so often the case between Albert and me, I had no idea what was on his mind. It would have been interesting to follow that up just then, but Cassata jerked upright. “Message,” he said. “Excuse me,” and vanished.

  He didn’t exactly come back. What happened was that we lost the sight and sound of the little nook he had created for us. We just heard a voice. Not his, at first. At first we got what I recognized as a pickup from th
e Sluggards’ translator:

  Huge they were and harmfully hot

  And the people lashed each other in fear.

  And then Cassata’s voice, full of excitement:

  “Come on! You can come into the staff meeting!” And then Cassata himself appeared, glowing with the happiness of a soldier who sees a chance to do some fighting. “They’ve done it, folks!” he cried. “They’ve tracked down the source of the message to the Assassins. They’re shutting that whole sector down, and we’ll be moving in!”

  13

  Kids In Captivity

  The school’s principal was not only human, she was good at dealing with children. She had four degrees and nineteen years of experience. In that time she had encountered nearly every problem kids could provide, which was roughly one problem per child per semester for all the thousands of children she had supervised over the years.

  None of that helped now. She was out of her depth.

  When she arrived in the waiting room of the counseling section she was breathless and unbelieving. “But that is fantastic, my dear,” she told the sobbing Oniko. “How could they possibly—To be able to read your diary—But why in the world—” She flung herself into a chair, scowling at the incredibility of it all.

  “Ma’am?” said Sneezy, and when he got a glance from the principal went on, “It’s not just Oniko. I kept a diary, too, and that’s part of the transmission.”

  The principal shook her head helplessly. She waved at the wall screen, which promptly displayed the school’s private beach; workthings were tending barbecue fires, and students were beginning to assemble. She looked from the children to the screen and back again. “I should be there,” she said fretfully. “It’s luau night tonight, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Sneezy, and Harold nodded vigorously beside him.

  “Roast pig,” said Harold. “Dancing!”

  The principal looked glum. She thought for a moment, then made her decision. “You’ll have to tell the whole thing to the counselors,” she said. “All three of you.”

  “I didn’t keep any diary!” Harold wailed.

  “But, you see, we can’t be sure of that. No,” the principal said firmly, “that’s the way it will have to be. You’ll all have to tell your stories. The machines will have questions, I’m sure. Just tell the truth, don’t leave anything out—I’m afraid you’ll miss the luau, but I’ll instruct the cookthings to save you something.” And she rose, waved the door open, and was gone.

  Harold gazed stonily at his friends. “You two!” he snarled in condemnation.

  “I’m sorry,” Sneezy said politely.

  “Sorry! Making me miss the luau! Listen,” said Harold, thinking fast, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll go first. Then maybe I can get through and down to the beach before the dancing starts, anyway. I mean, that’s the least you two can do, isn’t it, after all this trouble?”

  Of course, at this point none of the kids knew just how much trouble all this trouble was. They were kids. They were not used to being at the center of events that shook the entire universe.

  There was, Sneezy supposed, a certain amount of justice in what Harold said, though there was a second level of unfairness that was not dealt with at all. Neither he nor Oniko had done anything! No one had told them they shouldn’t spend their time investigating Earth conditions in every way possible. No one had even hinted that there was anything wrong with synopsizing and organizing the data in their diaries—which, to be sure, were not really “diaries” at all, in the sense of little gilt-edged books that you wrote your latest crushes and enmities in. They had simply played all the information they could gather into their pods, as any right-thinking Heechee (or Heechee-influenced human) would have done.

  They had done nothing at all that was in any way reprehensible—but, oh, how terrifying it was that their innocent activities had somehow been converted into that most forbidden of all possible actions, a transmission to the Foe! It was too scary a thought for Sneezy to deal with. Oniko was nearer. Her fears were easier to handle. He said, “There’s another booth, Oniko. Would you like to go in now?”

  She shook her head. Her dark eyes were darker still with recent tears, but she had stopped sobbing. “You go, Sternutator.”

  He hesitated, then said, “All right, but I’ll wait until you’re through. We can go down to the beach together.”

  “No, please, Sternutator. You go ahead when you’re done. I’m not hungry, anyway.”

  Sneezy hissed in thought. He did not like the idea of Oniko missing the beach party, and liked even less the thought of her trying to hobble her way, walker and all, down the sands by herself. It was difficult enough for Oniko to get around on a level surface, with her muscles still unhardened to the full crush of Earth.

  Then it occurred to him that he need promise nothing; he could wait for her whether she asked him to or not. “Very well, Oniko,” he started to say.

  And then the whole question became moot.

  The lights went out.

  The lounge was in twilight, the only illumination coming from the picture window that looked out on the mountain; but the mountain was already hiding the setting sun.

  From the counseling booth Harold’s enraged roar came: “Now what the devil!” The door to the cubicle shook, then gradually slid wide enough for a boy to squeeze through as Harold shoved it open manually. “What’s going on?” he demanded, glaring at Sneezy and Oniko. “The stupid program just cut off in the middle of asking me a question!”

  Sneezy said helpfully, “I would guess that the power has gone off.”

  “Oh, Dopey, what a fool you are! The power never goes off”

  Sneezy looked around at the wall screen, now blank; at the lounge lighting fixtures, all dark; at the door that would no longer open at anyone’s approach.

  “But it has, Harold,” he said reasonably. “So what are we going to do now?”

  When the power was off the lights were off, and the corridors of the school buildings were now dark and disturbing. When the lights were off the elevators were off, and so their only way down to the main buildings and thence to the beach was to climb down the never-used stairs.

  That was not a practical choice for Oniko and her rubbery legs.

  “We’ll have to walk,” said Harold accusingly, and Sneezy agreed.

  “But it will be better to go outside and use the road,” he pointed out. Harold scowled out the mountainside window, then at the smaller one that let them see down onto the beach. Although the school was dead, the students were not. Nearly all of them were there, tiny in the distance, milling about the beach. The scene on the beach didn’t look frightening. It looked rather like fun, and Harold sighed.

  “Oh, good lord, I suppose we have to go by the road to take care of Oniko. Well, let’s get on with it.” He didn’t mention that with the school out of service, the alternative was to slip and slide down the hillside, which wouldn’t be much easier for him than for the girl. He walked toward the door. Having had little experience with doors that did not open when desired, he nearly bumped his nose before he stopped short and angrily wrestled it open.

  It was nearly full dark now, and of course even the streetlights were out. That didn’t matter much. There would be a quarter of a moon before long, and even the Pacific starlight would be nearly enough to see by. What worried Sneezy more than the power blackout was Oniko. She had rarely cried on the Wheel, even when bigger children had teased her. Now she seemed unable to stop for long. The tears had begun again, slow drops forming in the corners of her eyes; as one rolled down her chin, another was ready to take its place. “Please, Oniko,” Sneezy begged. “It is only a problem with the electricity. Nothing is serious.”

  “It’s not the electricity,” she sobbed. “It’s my diary.”

  “How silly you are,” said Sneezy dismally, wishing he could at least convince himself, if not Oniko. “That must be a coincidence. Do you think the Foe would bother with a child’s composi
tions?”

  She shifted on her crutches to gaze at him. “But they did!” she wailed. “My exact words, and yours, too.”

  “Yes, Dopey,” Harold cut in roughly. “Don’t try to get out of it! It’s all your fault—and hers, I mean.”

  “Including the power failure?” Sneezy inquired. But he got no satisfaction from the retort. In some sense, he acknowledged to himself, it was their fault. The odds against coincidence were frightful. The Heechee had no analogy of forty million monkeys typing out the complete works of William Shakespeare, but that wasn’t necessary to convince Sneezy. Coincidence was, to all intents and purposes, impossible…

  Just about as impossible as the only alternative he could see, namely that somehow the Foe had been watching over their shoulders as they completed their notes.

  Confronted with two equally preposterous alternatives, Sneezy did what any sensible child, Heechee or human, would have done. He put it out of his mind.

  He pointed along the road to the winding driveway used by the hovertrucks. “Let’s go down to the beach that way,” he suggested.

  “But it’s kilometers,” Harold groaned.

  “Very well,” said Sneezy, “you take a shortcut if you like. Oniko and I will use the road.”

  “Oh, lord,” sighed Harold, adding one more charge to the indictment against Sneezy and Oniko, “I guess we might as well all stick together. But it’s going to take all night.”

  He turned and led the way, Sneezy and Oniko following. The girl was tragic-faced and silent, limping along and refusing Sneezy’s help. After a dozen meters Harold looked around and scowled. He was already far ahead. “Can’t you go any faster?” he called.

  “You may go without us,” said Sneezy, wishing he would not. For reasons he could not identify, Sneezy was ill at ease. When Harold irritably came back to walk with exaggerated patience next to them, he was glad of the company.

  Was there, really, anything to be afraid of?

  Sneezy could think of nothing real. It was true that it was dark and that they could easily be run over by some speeding vehicle—but it was also true that there weren’t any vehicles on the road; their power, too, was off.