The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  He’d given me time to collect my thoughts. I smiled. “I think you’re the one who’s playing games now, Sigfrid. Or else you just miss the point. You see, the trouble with you,” I said patronizingly, “is that you’ve never been real, so you don’t know the difference. Real people have real problems. Physical problems. Little ones, at least; that’s how they know they’re real. I don’t! In all the years I’ve been—discorporated—I’ve never once had to grunt and strain on the toilet because I was constipated. I’ve never had a hangover, or a runny nose, or a sunburn, or any other of the ills the flesh is heir to.”

  He said in exasperation, “You don’t get sick? Is that what you’re pissing and moaning about?”

  I looked at him in shock. “Sigfrid, you never used to talk to me like this in the old days.”

  “You weren’t as healthy as this in the old days! Robinette, I really wonder if this conversation is doing either of us any good. Perhaps I’m not the one you should be talking to.”

  “Well,” I said, beginning almost to enjoy myself, “at least I’ve heard you say—oh, Jesus, now what?” I finished, because I wasn’t talking to Sigfrid von Shrink anymore. “What the hell are you up to now?”

  Albert Einstein fumbled with his pipe, leaned over to scratch his bare ankle, and said: “You see, Robin, perhaps your problem isn’t psychoanalytic after all. So perhaps I’d be a better person to handle it.”

  I sank back on the bed and closed my eyes.

  In those old days when Sigfrid and I went round and round every Wednesday afternoon at four, I sometimes came away thinking I’d scored points in the game I thought we were playing, but I’d never, ever had the experience of having him simply give up. That was a real victory, of a kind I had never expected—and of a kind that made me feel worse than ever. I still felt like hell. If my problem wasn’t psychoanalytic, then it was real; and “real,” I thought, translated to “insoluble.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Albert had been busy. We weren’t in the two-hour adultery special anymore, we were in Albert’s plain old Princeton study, with the bottle of Skrip on the desk and the blackboard full of indecipherable mathematics behind him. “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said sourly, “if we’re back to playing games again.”

  “Games are real, too, Robin,” he said earnestly. “I hope you don’t mind my cutting in. If you were just going to talk about tears and traumas, Dr. von Shrink would have been your best program, but metaphysics is more my line.”

  “Metaphysics!”

  “But that’s what you’ve been talking about, Robin,” he said, surprised. “Didn’t you know? The nature of reality? The meaning of life? Such things are not my main line, or at least not the subjects for which my name became famous, but I think I can help you, if you don’t mind.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Why, then you can dismiss me whenever you like,” he said mildly. “Let’s at least try.”

  I got up off the bed—it had become a worn leather couch, with the stuffing sticking out of one cushion—and walked around the study, shrugging one small shrug that meant, all right, what the hell.

  “You see,” he said, “you can be as real as you want to be, Robin.”

  I lifted a stack of journals off the chair by his desk and sat down to face him. “Don’t you mean I can be as good an imitation as I want to be?”

  “We come to the Turing test, maybe? If you are such a good imitation that you can fool even yourself, isn’t that a kind of reality? For instance, if you really want to have things like constipation and the common cold, that’s easy enough. Dr. Lavorovna and I can easily write into your program all the minor ills you like, and monte-carlo them so that they appear at random—hemorrhoids today, perhaps, and maybe tomorrow a wart on the side of your nose. I can’t believe you’d really want that.”

  “They’d still be illusions!”

  Albert considered the matter, then conceded, “In a certain sense, yes, I suppose they would. But remember the Turing test. Forgive my impertinence, but when you and Dr. Lavorovna are together, don’t you sometimes, well, make love?”

  “You know damn well we do! We just did!”

  “Is it any less pleasurable because it, too, as you would say, is an illusion?”

  “It is extremely pleasurable. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with it. Because, damn it, Essie can’t get pregnant.”

  “Ab,” he said, just as Essie had done, “oh. Is that really what you want?”

  I thought for a moment to be sure. “I don’t exactly know. It’s something I’ve thought of wanting, sometimes.”

  “But it isn’t really impossible, you know, Robin. It would not even be very difficult to program. Dr. Lavorovna, if she wished, could surely write a program in which she would experience all the physical aspects of pregnancy, even coming to term. With an actual child, Robin—‘actual,’ that is, in the sense that you yourself are actual,” he added hastily. “But in that same way it could be your and her child. Complete with a monte-carloed assortment of your hereditary traits, with a personality that would develop as you reared it—the product, like all human beings, of nature plus nurture, with a dash of happenstance thrown in.”

  “And when it grew up to be our age, we’d still be our age!”

  “Ah.” Albert nodded, satisfied. “We come now to growing old. Is that what you want? Because I should tell you,” he went on seriously, “that you will age, Robin. Not because anyone programs you to, but because you must. There will be transcription errors. You will change, and probably you will deteriorate. Oh, you have a great deal of redundancy in your storage, so the errors will not cumulate very quickly, at least not in any large matters. But in infinite time—oh, yes, Robin. The Robinette Broadhead of ten-to-the-twentieth milliseconds from now will not be the same as the Robinette Broadhead of today.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” I cried. “I can’t die, but I can grow old and feeble and stupid!”

  “Do you want to die?”

  “I…don’t…know!”

  “I see,” said Albert thoughtfully. I covered my face in my hands, as close to crying as I have been for a long time. Every bit of fear and depression and worry and self-doubt was flooding in on me then, and these stupid conversations were doing no good at all!

  “I see,” said the voice again, but this time it wasn’t Albert Einstein’s voice. It was deeper and huger, and even before I looked up I knew Whose voice it was.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered.

  “Yes, exactly.” God smiled.

  If you have never happened to appear before the Throne of Judgment, you probably don’t really know what it would be like.

  I didn’t. I only had hazy ideas of grandeur, but the grandeur all around me was far grander than I had dreamed. I had expected, oh, I don’t know—awesome? Splendid? Frightening, even?

  It wasn’t frightening, but it was certainly all the other things. The immense throne was gold. I don’t mean your tacky, everyday common gold. It was luminous, warm, even almost transparent gold; it wasn’t drab metal but the essence of goldenness made real. The immense throne towered above me, surrounded by drapes of pearly marble that looked as though Phidias and Praxiteles had joined forces to carve them. The chair I sat in was warm carved ivory, and I was wearing a white penitential shift, staring straight up into the great and all-seeing eyes of the Almighty.

  As I said, it wasn’t frightening. I stood up and stretched. “Nice illusion,” I complimented. “Tell me, God, which One are You? Jehovah? Allah? Thor? Whose God are You?”

  “Yours, Robin,” rolled the majestic voice.

  I smiled up at Him. “But I don’t actually have one, You see. I’ve always been an atheist. The idea of a personal god is a childish one, as was pointed out by my friend—and doubtless your friend, too—Albert Einstein.”

  “That does not matter, Robin. I’m enough of a god even for an atheist. You see, I judge. I have all the godly attributes. I am the Creator and the Redeemer. I am not merely
good. I am the standard by which goodness is measured.”

  “You’re judging me?”

  “Isn’t that what gods are for?”

  For no real reason, I was beginning to feel tense. “Well, but—I mean, what am I supposed to do here? Should I confess my sins, examine every moment of my life?”

  “Well, no, Robin,” God said reasonably. “Actually, you’ve been confessing and examining for the last hundred years or so. There’s no need to go through all that again.”

  “But what if I don’t want to be judged?”

  “That doesn’t matter either, you see. I do it anyhow. This is my judgment.”

  He leaned forward, gazing down at me with those sorrowful, kind, majestic, loving eyes. I couldn’t help it. I squirmed.

  “I find that you, Robinette Broadhead,” He said, “are stubborn, guilt-ridden, easily distracted, vain, incomplete, and often foolish, and I am well pleased in you. I wouldn’t have you any other way. Against the Foe you may well fail disgracefully, because you often do. But I know that you will do what you always do.”

  “And—” I stammered “—and what’s that?”

  “Why, you will do the best you can, and what more can even I ask? So go forth, Robin, and with you goes My blessing.” He raised His hands in a grand gesture of grace. Then His expression changed as He peered down at me. You cannot say that God is “annoyed,” but at least He looked displeased. “Now what’s the matter?” He demanded.

  I said stubbornly, “I’m still discontented.”

  “Of course you are discontented,” God thundered. “I made you discontented, because if you weren’t discontented, why would you bother to try to become better?”

  “Better than what?” I asked, trembling in spite of myself.

  “Better than Me,” cried God.

  18

  Journey’s End

  Even the loneliest river winds somewhen to the sea, and at last—at long last—at long, long last—Albert appeared on the deck of the cruise ship simulation where Essie and I were playing shuffleboard (missing even the easiest of shots, because the cliffs and the unexpected waterfalls from the glaciers and the ice floes in the water were so spectacular) and pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say: “One minute to arrival. I thought you’d like to know.”

  We did like to know. “Let’s look at once!” Essie cried, and disappeared. I took a little longer, studying Albert. He was wearing a brass-buttoned blue blazer and a yachting cap, and he smiled at me.

  “I still have a lot of questions, you know,” I told him.

  “And unfortunately I have not nearly that many answers, Robin,” he said kindly. “That’s good, though.”

  “What’s good?”

  “To have many questions. As long as you know there are questions, there is some hope of answering them.” He nodded approval, in that way he has that would drive me right up the wall if it didn’t make me feel so good. He paused for a moment to see if we were going to get into metaphysics again and then added, “Shall we join Mrs. Broadhead and the general and his lady and the others?”

  “There’s plenty of time!”

  “There’s no doubt of that, Robin. Indeed there is plenty of time.” He smiled; and I shrugged permission, and the Alaskan fjord disappeared. We were back in the control cabin of the True Love. Albert’s jaunty cap was gone, along with his natty blue blazer. His slicked-down hair was flying in all directions again, and he was back in his sweater and baggy pants, and we were alone.

  “Where’d everybody go?” I demanded, and then answered for myself: “They couldn’t wait? They’re scanning through the ship’s instruments? But there’s nothing to see yet.”

  He shrugged amiable agreement, watching me as he puffed on his pipe.

  Albert knows that I don’t really like looking directly through the ship’s skin sensors. The good old viewscreen over the controls is usually good enough for me. When you slide into the instrumentation of the True Love and look in all directions at once, it is a disorienting experience—especially for people who still cling to their meat-person habits, like me. So I don’t do it often. What Albert says is that it’s just one of my old meat-person hang-ups. That’s true. I grew up as a meat person, and meat people can only see in one direction at a time, unless they’re cross-eyed. Albert says I should get over it, but I usually don’t want to.

  This time I did, but not just yet. A minute is, after all, quite a long stretch in gigabit time…and there was still something I wanted to ask him.

  Albert told me a story once.

  The story was about one of his old meat-time buddies, a mathematician named Bertrand Russell, a lifelong atheist like Albert himself.

  Of course, my Albert was not really that Albert, and so they weren’t actual buddies, but Albert (my Albert) often talked as though they were. He said that once some religious person had cornered Russell at a party and said, “Professor Russell, don’t you realize what a grave risk you are taking with your immortal soul? Suppose you have guessed wrong? What will you do if, when you die, you find there really is a God, and He really does call you to judgment? And when you arrive at the Throne of Judgment He looks down on you and asks, ‘Bertrand Russell, why did you not believe in Me?’ What will you say?”

  According to Albert, Russell didn’t turn a hair. He simply replied, “I would say, ‘God, You should have given me better evidence.’”

  So when I said to Albert, “Do you really think you’ve given me enough evidence?” he simply nodded, understanding the reference, and leaned down to scratch his ankle, and said, “I thought you’d come back to that, Robin. No. I haven’t given you any evidence at all. The only evidence, one way or the other, is in the universe itself.”

  “Then you’re not God?” I burst out, finally daring.

  He said gravely, “I wondered when you were going to ask me that.”

  “And I wonder when you’re going to answer!”

  “Why, right now, Robin,” he said patiently. “If you are asking if the display you interacted with came from the same datastores as the simulation I generally display, why, yes. In that limited sense. But if you are asking a larger question, that’s harder. What’s God? More specifically, what is your God, Robin?”

  “No, no,” I snarled. “I’m the one who’s asking the questions here.”

  “Then I must try to answer for you, mustn’t I? Very well.” He pointed the pipestem at me. “I would take God, in your sense, to be a sort of vector sum of all the qualities you believe to be ‘just’ and ‘moral’ and ‘loving.’ And I suppose that among all sentient beings, humans and Heechee and machine intelligences and all, there is a sort of consensus of what these virtuous things are, and that a mutually shared ‘God’ would be a sum of all the vectors. Does that answer your question?”

  “Not a bit!”

  He smiled again, glancing at the viewscreen. All it showed was the usual pebbly gray nothing of a ship in faster-than-light travel. “I didn’t think it would, Robin. It doesn’t satisfy me, either, but then the universe is not necessarily in business to make us happy. Now.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him the next question, but it took me a moment to formulate it and by then he was ahead of me. “With your permission, Robin,” he said. “We are really almost back into normal space now, and I am sure we would both like to look.”

  And he didn’t wait for that permission. He was gone; but first he gave me one of those sweet, sad, compassionate smiles that, like so much else about my very dear friend Albert Einstein, drives me ape.

  But of course he was right.

  I showed him who was boss, though. I didn’t follow right away. I took, oh, maybe eight or nine milliseconds to—well, to do what Essie would have called “be gloopy,” but what I thought of as pondering what he had said.

  There wasn’t all that much to ponder. Or, more accurately, there was one hell of a huge lot to ponder, but not enough detail to make pondering on it satisfactory. Maddening old Albert! If he made up his mi
nd to play God—even an admitted imitation God—he could at least have been specific. I mean, that was what the rules called for! When Jehovah spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, when the Angel Moroni handed over graven tablets—they said what they expected.

  I had, I felt with aggravation, a right to specifics from my very own source of all wisdom.

  But I obviously wasn’t going to get any, so I sulkily followed…just about in time.

  The pebbly gray nothing was splotching and curdling even as I slid into the ship’s sensors, and in only another millisecond or two the splotches froze up into sharp detail.

  I could feel Essie’s hand steal into mine as we looked in all directions at once. The old vertigo hit me, but I put it behind me.

  There was too much to see. More spectacular than the Alaskan fjords, more awe-inspiring than anything I had ever perceived.

  We were well out beyond the good old Galaxy itself—not just the fried-egg galactic disk, with its pearly lump of yolk in the middle, but way out past even the tenuous halo. “Below” us was a thin scattering of halo stars, like sparse little bubbles popping out of the galactic wine. “Above” was black velvet that someone had spilled tiny, faint curls of luminous paint on. Very near to us were the bright lights of the Watch Wheel, and off to one side were the dozen sulfur-yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.

  They didn’t look dangerous. They just looked nasty, like some unattractive little mess left on a living-room floor that somebody should get busy and clean up.

  I wished I knew how to do that.

  Cried Essie triumphantly: “Look, dear Robin! No hooligan JAWS ships on Wheel! Have beat them here!”

  And when I looked at the Wheel, it seemed she was right. The Wheel rolled silently in solitude, not a single ship in its dock, not a JAWS cruiser anywhere around it. But Albert sighed, “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Broadhead.”