The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  “Sorry!” I screamed. “Do you know what it’s like to die? To know that you are disappearing, and there won’t be any you ever again anywhere?”

  Essie hugged me tighter than ever, murmuring comfort in my ear. “But is still a you, Robin. Is here with me. Was only duplicate that entered gigabit-isolate with Foe, you know?”

  I wrenched myself free (metaphorically) and glared at my two nearest and dearest; I wasn’t even aware of the JAWS officers. “It’s fine for you to say,” I said bitterly. “You didn’t have to feel it. I died. And it’s not the first time, I remind you both. I’ve had the experience before, and I am so terribly tired of dying. If there’s one thing I want in all the world, it’s to do it again!”

  I stopped, because they were looking at me in a peculiar way.

  “Oh,” I said, managing to grin, “I mean I want not to do it again.” But which I meant really was very unclear even to me.

  15

  Scared Rats Running

  When a stored personality in gigabit space has had a terrible shock, you don’t give him a stiff drink and a place to lie down, but sometimes it helps if you pretend you do.

  “You should rest for a moment, Robin,” said Albert.

  “Let me make comfortable, dove-heart,” murmured Essie, and a moment later I was comfortable indeed. Essie made it so. I was lying in a (metaphorical) hammock on the (unreal) lanai outside my (datastored) home overlooking the Tappan Sea, with dear Portable-Essie hovering over me and pressing a (nonexistent) drink in my hand. It was an icy margarita with just enough salt on the rim of the glass, and it tasted quite as good as if it had been real.

  I was the center of attention.

  Essie was sitting next to the hammock, stroking my hair lovingly and looking worried. Albert was seated on the edge of a chaise longue, scratching his ear meditatively with the stem of his pipe as he watched my face. That was all homely and familiar enough, but there were other people there. I wasn’t surprised to see Julio Cassata, who was pacing up and down on the grass just below the steps, but stopping at the end of each patrol to look searchingly in my direction. Even Alicia Lo, sitting quietly on a rocker at the edge of the lanai, was no surprise; but there was someone else there.

  The someone was a Heechee.

  I was not ready for surprises. I sat up and said, “What the hell?” I didn’t say it meanly. If anything, I think I said it beseechingly.

  Essie took it in the right way. “I don’t know if you remember Double-Bond,” she said. She was right. I didn’t. “He was a Heechee representative to JAWS,” Essie added, and vaguely I did remember. There had been a Heechee or two there, and, yes, one of them had been an Ancient Ancestor, like this one, and had had the sparse head-fuzz and deep-set eyes of age, like this one.

  “I’m pleased to see you again,” I said. I gulped the last of the tequila and looked around. And then I said again, “What the hell?” But this time it was in a quite different tone, because I had looked past the simulated, friendly Tappan Sea surround. I expected to find that we were in the True Love, and we were.

  But the screen was showing only mottled gray. When I looked through the True Love’s skin sensors, I saw we were in faster-than-light travel. When I peered at the retrolog, I saw the JAWS satellites dwindling behind us. JAWS looked different to me in some way. I wasn’t sure what, and didn’t take the time to figure it out. What was more important was what True Love was doing. We were en route somewhere, and I had not expected that at all.

  “Where are we going?” I cried.

  Albert coughed. “There were some developments while you were working through your doppel,” he said.

  “Didn’t dare disturb your concentration,” Essie said worriedly. “Sorry about that. But is all right, honest, dearest Robin, are safe and sound in True Love, as you see.”

  “You didn’t answer my question!”

  She laid the hand that had been stroking my hair alongside my cheek. It felt warm and caring. “We go to source,” she said soberly. “To kugelblitz. To home of Foe, fast as we can.”

  I let myself return to the pleasant Tappan Sea surround, feeling very disoriented. Essie had another margarita ready, and I reached out for it automatically. I held it in my hand, trying to figure out what was happening. We had left JAWS—

  Then I remembered what was different about the way the JAWS satellites had looked when we departed. “The fleet is gone!” I cried.

  “Exactly,” said Albert. “We are following them.”

  “Against orders,” added Julio Cassata.

  “Cannot give orders to us!” snapped Essie.

  “They can give orders to me,” said Cassata, “and we’re going against them. The fleet movement is a military operation, after all.”

  “Military!” I stared at the man, wondering if it was at all possible that he meant what I thought he meant. He shrugged. I translated the shrug easily enough; it was, yes, that was indeed what he meant.

  “This is crazy!” I shouted.

  He shrugged again. “But—” I said. “But—But I wasn’t ready to go on a long trip just now!”

  Essie leaned over and kissed me. “Dear Robin,” she said, “is no choice, after all. Is there? JAWS fleet is not to be trusted by itself. Who knows what idiocy they may try?”

  “But—But back on Wrinkle Rock—”

  She said lovingly, “Is nothing on Wrinkle Rock for you anymore, dear Robin. Farewells are said. After all, party is now over.”

  16

  The Long Voyage

  All the time I was messing around with the kids and their captors on the island of Tahiti was meat time. There had been time for meat people to do things. Meat people had.

  The meat people who ran JAWS had decided the threat on Earth was nothing they needed a fleet there for, so they had sent the cruisers off to the Watch Wheel. Meat-Cassata hadn’t bothered to terminate doppel Cassata, whose datastore was still on True Love along with the store for Alicia Lo. Albert was the one who had insisted on taking along the “prayer fan” that was the store for the Heechee Ancient Ancestor, Double-Bond. It wasn’t the only store he had put aboard, and he had his reasons; when I realized what they were, I could only approve.

  And, of course, doppel-Cassata approved very much. He hadn’t been terminated! Not only that, he couldn’t be terminated as long as he was aboard True Love in transit, because there was no one there to terminate him. For Cassata it was not only a reprieve, it was practically an eternity—weeks and weeks of travel—the equivalent, for him, of decades and decades of added life!

  That’s what is was for Julio Cassata.

  For me it was something quite different.

  The first thing I had to do was get over the terrible shocks that had come from my mind mingling with the Foe and the Foe entering into my mind, as well as that other shock of feeling myself die yet once again.

  One of the (many) advantages of being a stored intelligence is that you can edit the stores if you want to. If something hurts, you can just take it out, seal it up, put it on a shelf marked “Warning. Not to be opened unless necessary,” and go about your business pain-free.

  Like many of those many advantages, it carries a penalty with it.

  I know this, because I’d tried it. Long and long ago—oh, something like ten-to-the-eleventh milliseconds ago—I was really, really screwed up. I had just died then, too, only that time it was my real meat body that had died, and Albert and Essie had just poured me into machine storage. That is a real jolt. There was more. I had just encountered Klara, the woman I loved before I loved the woman who was my wife, Essie, and there were the two of them in my life; not only that, but I had actually thought I had murdered that other woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin; and, oh, yes, I had just met a live Heechee for the first time.

  Put them all together, it was bloody shattering.

  So to get me through the worst of it, Albert and Essie had restructured the program that was all that remained of me. They had isolated the datastores that h
ad to do with Klara and the terrible crush of guilt that had cost me years of psychoanalysis to ease, and they had encapsulated them in a read-only file and given it back to me, with a seal on it so I wouldn’t open it until I was ready.

  I don’t think I ever was ready, but after a while I opened it anyway. See, the way you remember things is associative. I had lost some associations. I could remember that something else had been on my mind, but I couldn’t remember what. I could say, “Gee, sure, at that time I was really shaken up because—”

  But I couldn’t remember what the “because” was.

  And that, I finally decided, was worse than having the whole thing right in front of me all the time, because if I had to stew and fret and worry, at least I could know what I was worrying about.

  To give you an idea of how I felt after my little adventure with the Foe on Moorea, I seriously considered asking Essie to put that one away for me in mothballs, too.

  But I couldn’t.

  I had to face it and live with it, and, oh, my God, it was scary.

  I kept going over and over that long wordless meeting of minds, and the more I thought about it, the huger and more terrifying it was. I, little Robinette Broadhead, had been in the presence of the things—the creatures, the monsters, maybe one might even say the people—who were busy turning the entire universe upside down for their own pleasure.

  What was a feckless, fragile little kid like me doing in the same league as superstars like them?

  I need to try to put something into perspective.

  It isn’t going to be easy. It isn’t even going to be possible, in any real sense, because the perspective is too immense—Albert would probably say “incommensurable,” meaning that you can’t measure the things involved on the same scale. It’s like—like—well, suppose you were talking to one of those early australopithecines of half a million years ago or so. You could probably find a way to explain to him that where you had come from (say, somewhere in Europe) was a hell of a long way from where he was born—say, somewhere in Africa. You might even be able to tell him that Alaska and Australia were a hell of a lot farther still. That much he might understand.

  But is there any conceivable way in which you could tell him how much farther away were, say, the core of the Galaxy of the Magellanic Clouds? Impossible! After a certain point—for australopithecine or modern-day human or even machine-stored intelligence like me—big is simply indistinguishably big.

  For that reason, I don’t know how to describe just how long it took for me to experience that long, tedious faster-than-light trip from JAWS to the Watch Wheel.

  It was forever. I can put the numbers in. Measured by gigabit time, it was well over ten-to-the-ninth milliseconds, which is about as much time, by meat standards, as my whole meat life had been before I was vastened.

  But that doesn’t really convey the slow, draggy way the time passed. On the “long” trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS I had made Albert show me the entire history of the universe.

  Now I had begun a trip that was a good thousand times longer, and what could he do for an encore?

  I needed a whole lot of things to do to keep busy. I had no trouble finding the first one.

  Albert had persuaded General Cassata to persuade JAWS to let us access every bit of data they had on the Foe. There was a hell of a lot of it. The trouble was that, as far as what was going on right now was concerned, it was all negative. It didn’t answer the questions I really wanted answered, which were mostly questions I didn’t have enough background knowledge to ask.

  Optimistic old Albert denied that. “We have learned much, Robin,” he lectured, chalk in hand before his blackboard. “For example, we now know that the Galaxy is a horse, the dog did not bark, and the cat is among the pigeons.”

  “Albert,” said Essie levelly. She was speaking to him, but she was looking at me. I supposed I had been looking confused at Albert’s undesired playfulness, but that was not odd. I was confused, not to mention stressed, worried, and generally unhappy.

  Albert got his stubborn look. “Yes, Mrs. Broadhead?”

  “Have thought for some time program may need routine overhaul, Albert. Is this now necessary?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, looking uncomfortable.

  “Whimsy,” she said, “is useful and even desirable in Albert Einstein program, for Robin wishes it so. However.”

  He said uncomfortably, “I take your meaning, Mrs. Broadhead. What you want is a simple and lucid synoptic report. Very well. The data is as follows. First, we have no evidence that any other bits, pieces, pseudopods, or extrusions of the Foe other than the ones Robin encountered on Tahiti exist anywhere else in the Galaxy. Second, we have no evidence that they still exist. Third, as to those units themselves, we have no evidence that they are in any significant way different from ourselves, which is to say patterned, organized, and stored electromagnetic charges in some suitable substrate, specifically in this case the pods of Oniko and Sneezy.” He looked directly at me. “Are you following this, Robin?”

  “Not a lot,” I said, making an effort. “You mean they’re just electrons, like you and me? Just some other kind of Dead Men? Not some subnuclear particles, like?”

  Albert winced. “Robin,” he complained, “I know you know better than that. Not only as to particle physics but as to grammar.”

  “You know what I mean,” I flared, trying not to be on edge and making myself more so by the effort.

  Albert sighed. “Indeed I do. Very well, I will spell it out. With all of the instrumentation we were able to bring to bear, which was probably all that would have been of use, we were able to detect no field, ray, energy emission, or other physical effect associated with the Foe which was not compatible with the assumption that they are, yes, composed of electromagnetic energy just like us.”

  “No gamma rays, even?”

  “Definitely no gamma rays,” he said, looking irritated. “Also no x-rays, cosmic rays, quark flows, or neutrinos; also, in another category, no poltergeists, N-rays, psychic auras, fairies at the bottom of the garden, or indications of the adeledicnander force.”

  “Albert!” cried Essie.

  “You’re patronizing me, Albert,” I complained.

  He gazed at me for a long moment.

  Then he stood up. His hair had turned woolly, and his complexion had darkened. Straw hat in hand (I could not remember seeing him with the hat before), he strutted a few steps in a cakewalk and chanted, “’Deedy Ah is, suh, yassuh, yassuh, yuk, yuk, yuk.”

  “Damn it, Albert!” I shouted.

  He resumed his normal appearance. “You have no sense of fun in your heart anymore, Robin,” he complained.

  Essie opened her mouth to speak. Then she closed it again, looking at me in an inquiring way. Then she shook her head, and, to my surprise, said only, “Go on, Albert.”

  “Thank you,” he said, as though it had been no more than he expected, in spite of her earlier threats. “To put it all more prosaically, since you are determined to be a wet blanket, let me return to my previous points which, if you remember, I put in semihumorous fashion to make them more palatable, and as a mnemonic device. ‘The Galaxy is a horse.’ Yes. A Trojan horse. Every external appearance indicates that it is just as it always has been in our lifetimes, but I infer that it is full of enemy troops. Or, to put it more simply, there are a whole lot of those Foe emissaries around, Robin, and we can’t detect them.”

  “But there’s been no evidence,” I cried, and then, as he gazed at me, “Well, yeah, I see what you’re saying. If we don’t see them, it’s because they’re hiding. Right. I follow that. But how do you know they are hiding? There has been only one single transmission that we can blame on the Foe—what?”

  He was shaking his head. “No, Robin. We have detected one. The only reason we did is that the Foe used the standard Earth communications facilities, and so that particular burst transmission, which the children on Moorea originated, turned up on the logs as an
anomaly. But we don’t monitor everything, Robin. If there were Foe on, say, Peggys Planet, where things are a lot looser, would anyone have noticed one more transmission? Or from a ship in space? Or, for that matter, from the Watch Wheel itself, say a few months ago, before we tightened everything up? I don’t think so, Robin. I think we have to assume that all the ‘false alarms’ on the Wheel were not false; that the Foe penetrated it some time ago; that they have gone wherever they wanted to go in our space and seen everything they wanted to see, and no doubt reported back to the kugelblitz. That,” he said, smiling cheerfully, “is what I meant by ‘The cat is among the pigeons.’ Why,” he finished, looking around in mild curiosity, “it would not surprise me a bit if there were a few of them right here with us on the True Love.”

  I jumped.

  I couldn’t help it. I was still bruised and shaken from that terrible, hurtful experience. I looked around wildly, and Albert chided, “Oh, you wouldn’t see them, Robin.”

  “I don’t expect to see them,” I snarled. “But where could they hide?”

  He shrugged. “If I were forced to speculate,” he said, “why, I would try to put myself in their place. Where could I hide if I wanted to stow away on the True Love without being seen? It would not be difficult. We have a great deal of stored data here. There are thousands of files that we haven’t opened. Any one of them might have a couple of stowaways—or a thousand of them. I mean, assuming the concept of ‘number’ of individuals has any meaning to what may well be a collective intelligence. Robin,” he said seriously, “I do not think that creatures capable of reversing the expansion of the universe can be discounted lightly. If I can think of one place to hide—in the programs for penetrating black holes, for example, or in some of the subroutines for translating, say, Polish into Heechee—believe me, they will no doubt be able to think of thousands. I would not even assume they were destroyed on Tahiti simply because you—” He stopped and cleared his throat, glancing apologetically at me.