“What the hell are you talking about?” Cassata demanded. I couldn’t see him—none of us were bothering with visual simulations—but I could feel him bristling.
“Only that we have not beat them here, General Cassata,” said Albert. “We really could not, you know. The True Love is an admirable spacecraft, but it does not have the speed of a JAWS vessel. If they are not here, it is not that they have not yet arrived; it is that they have been here and left already.”
“Left where?” I barked.
He was silent for a moment. Then the vista before us began to swell. Albert was readjusting the ship’s sensors. The “below” grew shadowy. The “above”—the direction toward the kugelblitz itself—grew closer. “Tell me,” said Albert thoughtfully, “have you ever formed a visual impression of what it might be like when the Foe came out? I don’t mean a rational conjecture. I mean the sort of half-dozing fantasy a person might have, imagining that moment.”
“Albert!”
He disregarded me. “I think,” he said, “that somewhere in everybody lurks a kind of primitive notion that they might suddenly erupt from the kugelblitz in a fleet of immense, invulnerable space battleships, conquering everything before them. Irresistible. Rays blazing. Missiles pouring out—”
“Damn you, Albert!” I yelled.
He said somberly, “But Robin. See for yourself.”
And as the magnification increased…we did.
19
The Last Spacefight
Even when you see for yourself, you don’t always believe what you’re seeing. I didn’t. It was insane.
But it was there. The JAWS ships, in STL flight, hurtling toward the kugelblitz; and, from the kugelblitz, hurtling toward them, little bits of somethings that spurted out of the swirling, mustard-colored blurs. The little somethings were not blurred at all. They were bright metal.
They looked very much like spaceships.
There really could not be very much doubt of that. We were at extreme range for such tiny objects, but the True Love had first-rate instrumentation. What we saw we saw in optical and IR and X-ray and all the other photon frequencies there were, and we “saw” it as well through magnetometers and grav-detectors; and all confirmed unmistakably the terrible fact:
The kugelblitz had launched an armada.
I might have expected almost anything else, but not that. I mean, what use did the Foe have for spaceships? I could not answer that question, but ships they were. Big ones! Armored ones! A thousand and more of them, it looked like, and every one of them slipping into an immense cone formation and bearing directly down on the game, tiny, hopelessly outnumbered clutch of JAWS cruisers.
“Blow their goddamn rocks off,” yelled General Julio Cassata, and, you know, I yelled along with him.
I couldn’t help it. It was a fight, and I was rooting for my side. There was no doubt the fight had commenced. You can’t see rays in space, not even the converted Heechee digger rays that were the JAWS fleet’s main armament, but there were bright flashes of chemical explosions and worse, startlingly visible, as the JAWS ships launched their secondary missiles.
The myriad Foe vessels bored on. They were untouched.
Considered purely as spectacle, it was, my God, tremendous. Even though at the same time it was terrifying. Even if I didn’t know exactly what was going on.
It was my very first space battle. For that matter, it was everybody else’s first, too, because the last fight between ships in space had been between the Brazilians and the ships of the People’s Republic of China, nearly a century before, in that last bloody and inconclusive struggle that led to the foundation of the multinational Gateway authority. So I was no expert on what should have happened next, but what did happen was a lot less than I could have expected. Ships should have exploded or something. Bits and pieces of wreckage should have flown all over.
There wasn’t any of that.
What happened was that the cone of Foe ships opened up and surrounded the battling JAWS vessels. They englobed them; and then they well…what they did, they vanished. They just disappeared, leaving the JAWS cruisers huddled together in space.
And then the cruisers disappeared, too.
And then, just below us, the Watch Wheel itself flickered and was gone.
Space was empty around us. There was nothing to be seen except the pearly whirl of the Galaxy below, the distant external firefly galaxies, the smoky yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.
We became visible to each other; it was too lonesome otherwise. We looked at each other uncomprehendingly.
“I wondered if something like this might happen,” said Albert Einstein, soberly sucking his pipe.
Cassata roared: “Damn you! If you know what’s going on, tell us!”
Albert shrugged. “I think you’ll see for yourself,” he said, “because I imagine it will be our turn next.”
And it was. We looked at each other, and then there was nothing else to see. Nothing outside the ship, I mean. Nothing but the pebbly gray of faster-than-light travel. It was like looking out of an airplane window into dense fog.
And then it wasn’t.
Fog vanished. The ship’s sensors could see clearly again.
And what we suddenly saw, without warning, was solid, familiar black space and stars…and even a planet and a moon…and, yes, I knew what they were. That planet and that moon were the ones human eyes (or nearly human eyes) had looked at for half a million years.
We were in orbit around the Earth; and so were a good many other artifacts I recognized as JAWS cruisers, and even the immense Watch Wheel itself.
It was more than I could handle.
I thought I knew what to do about that, though, because when things are too much for me there is always one thing I can do to get help. I did it. “Albert!” I cried.
But Albert just went on gazing out at the Earth and the Moon and the other objects outside the True Love, and smoking his pipe, and didn’t answer.
20
Back Home
Albert Einstein was not the only appliance that seemed to have stopped functioning. The JAWS ships had problems of their own. Every control system for weaponry of any kind had been simply fried. They didn’t work.
Everything else was fully operational. Communications were fine—and busy, with everyone asking everyone else just what the hell had happened. Nothing nondestructive was damaged. The lights on the Wheel still worked, and so did the air-changers. The workthings prepared meals and tidied up spills. The bunks in the commodore’s cabin in the JAWS flagship continued to make themselves, and the trash receptacles emptied themselves into the recycling pools.
The True Love, which had never had any arms, was as good as new. We could have started it and flown right off to anywhere at all.
But where should we go?
We went nowhere. Alicia Lo took the controls and kept us in a safe orbit, but that was it. I didn’t bother. I was focused one hundred percent on my faithful data-retrieval system and very dear friend. I said desperately, “Albert, please.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at me absently. “Robin,” he said, “I must ask you to be patient for a while.”
“But Albert! I beg you! What’s going to happen next?”
He gave me what is called an unfathomable look—at least, I certainly couldn’t fathom it.
“Please! Are we in danger? Are the Foe going to come down and kill us all?”
He looked astonished. “Kill us? What an idea, Robin! After they met you and me and Mrs. Broadhead and Miss Lo and General Cassata? No, of course not, Robin, but I must excuse myself, I’m quite busy now.”
And that was all he would say.
And after a while the shuttles began to come up from the launch loops, and we had our datastores taken back down to the good old Earth, and we tried—oh, for a long time we tried—to sort things out.
21
Endings
I didn’t know how to begin this, and now I find I d
on’t know how to end it, either.
You see, that was the ending. There’s nothing else to tell except what happened.
I know that to linear meat ears that must sound odd (not to say revoltingly cute), just as so many of the other things I have said sounded odd (or worse). I can’t help that. The odd cannot be expressed nonoddly, and I have to tell it like it is. What “happened” next didn’t really matter, because what happened had done so already.
Of course, even vastened folks like myself are somewhat linear…and so it took us a while to find that out.
What Essie and I wanted more than anything else, we agreed, was breathing space—to rest up; to try to find out just what was going on; above all to collect our awry thoughts. We actually had our physical datastores taken to the old house on the Tappan Sea, the first time we had done that in a fairish number of years, and we settled down to get our heads straight.
Albert’s datastore came with us.
Albert himself was another question. Albert no longer responded to my call. If Albert was still in the datastore, he did not show himself.
Essie was not about to admit defeat from one of her own programs. The first thing she did was to busy herself with program checks and debugging routines. Then Essie gave up.
“Can find nothing wrong with Albert Einstein program,” she said, “except does not work.” She looked angrily at the datafan that had held Albert Einstein. “Is only corpse!” she said fretfully. “Is body whence the life has died, you know?”
“What can we do?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. I just was not used to having my machines fail me.
Essie shrugged. She offered a consolation prize: “Can write new Albert program for you,” she said. I shook my head. I didn’t want a new program. I wanted Albert. “Then,” she said practically, “can rest and cultivate our gardens. How about nice swim and then scrumptious huge fattening lunch?”
“Who can eat? Essie, help me! I want to know,” I complained. “I want to know what the hell he was talking about when he told us not to worry—what do you and Cassata and Alicia Lo have to do with it? What do the three of you have in common?”
She pursed her lips. Then she brightened. “How about ask them?”
“Ask them what?”
“Ask them all about selves. Invite them here—then can all have nice lunch!”
It didn’t happen quite that fast.
In the first place, neither of them was physically (I mean, their data-stores were physically) on Earth. Both were still in orbit. I didn’t want to settle for doppels, because I didn’t want even that infuriating quarter-second delay in the actual conversation, so they had to be shipped to the Tappan Sea, and that took a long time. It took longer than that, because for some reason Cassata couldn’t get away at first.
I didn’t waste the time.
Without Albert life was a little harder for me. That didn’t make it really difficult because, after all, there was not much that Albert could do (other than answer the riddle that he himself proposed, I mean) that I couldn’t do for myself if I had to. Now I had to. So it was I, not Albert, who roamed the world to see what was going on.
A lot was, though not much of it seemed helpful to me.
There had been a flurry of panic at first. JAWS issued alarming tight-lipped bulletins about the damage to its fleet, and then even more alarming urgent demands to build a new fleet, bigger and better than ever, on the principle that if you try something that doesn’t work, you should keep on trying it forever.
But that in itself had a reassuringly normal sound. The populace at large, after that first shock of terror, realized that, after all, no one was dead. Foe spaceships did not appear in the skies over San Francisco and Beijing to blast them to cinders. Our planet was not hurled into the sun.
Nothing seemed to be happening at all, in fact, and slowly the panic trickled away. People went back to their lives, like any peasants on a volcano slope. The mountain had erupted; no one had been hurt. It would erupt again, to be sure—but not yet a while, pray God.
The Institute scheduled a hundred new workshops, pondering the events at the Watch Wheel. Half of them spent all their time analyzing and reanalyzing the “battle” between the Foe ships and JAWS. There was not much to analyze. What we had seen was what we knew. There wasn’t anything else. There was nothing in any of the other sensory records to contradict, or even to embellish, what we had seen with our eyes. The Foe ships had come out and neutralized our cruisers; then the Foe had temperately picked us up and put us back in the playpen we belonged in. That was all.
The workshops on the Foe themselves argued and discussed, but added nothing new. Panels of eminent scientists agreed that what they had thought all along was probably what they should go on thinking: The Foe had been born shortly after the Big Bang. They had found the climate congenial. When the weather got worse—when matter intruded into their cozy soup of space and energy—they resolved to change it. They set the change in motion, then returned to their kugelblitzes to wait patiently for a nicer day.
As to the brief engagement around the Watch Wheel—well, if you woke a bear from hibernation, he would probably swat at you out of irritation. But then he would go back to hibernate; and the swat of this particular disturbed bear had been really quite gentle.
Oh, yes, there were plenty of speculations—God, were there ever speculations. Facts, no. There were not even any plausible theories, or at least none that offered any useful prospects for experiments to test them out or that suggested any worthwhile steps to be taken. Everyone (everyone outside of JAWS, anyway) agreed that JAWS’s plan for building a huger and fiercer fleet was probably a silly idea, but, as no one had a better one, it looked as though that were likely to happen.
And, when Cassata and Alicia Lo were due to arrive, I went into the datastore files and put my hand (that is, my “hand”) on Albert’s store and said, “Please, Albert, as a personal favor to me, won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Albert didn’t answer.
But when I went into the drawing room to greet our guests there was a scrap of paper on my favorite chair. It said:
Robin, I’m really sorry about all this, but I can’t interrupt what I’m doing just now. You’re doing the best you can, aren’t you? Just carry on. With love, Albert
Julio Cassata was out of uniform again—shirt, shorts, sandals—and he looked positively pleased to see me. When I asked him about it, he said, “Oh, it’s not you, Broadhead,”—he hadn’t totally changed—“it’s just that that bastard was finally getting around to terminating me. Which bastard? Me, naturally—the meat me. Doesn’t like having copies of himself around. Would’ve done it long ago, but he was busy with the rebuilding program. Hated to let me come down here, because he was afraid you’d get the Institute to declare me essential or something.”
I know a hint when I hear one, so I said, with some reservations, “Right, the Institute does.” After all, the Institute could change its mind later on if it wanted to…but after I had said that, it did make him seem more human.
“Thanks,” he said; and Essie said, “Let’s go out on lanai, is beautiful,” and I said, “What would you like to drink?” and, all in all, it was more like a little party than a workshop on just-what-the-hell-is-fundamentally-going-on.
Then I got down to it. “According to Albert Einstein, the reason the Foe aren’t going to kill us is because they encountered the three of you, plus me and Albert Einstein. Not any other machine-stored person, just you three.” Cassata and Lo looked surprised, then slightly flattered. “Any idea why?” I asked. Then they only looked blank.
Essie started out. “Have been thinking about this,” she announced. “Question is, what do we three have in common? To begin with, are all machine-stored, but as Robin points out, so are umpteen zillion others not mentioned. Second thing. Am personally machine duplicate of still surviving meat person. So is Julio.”
“I’m not,” said Alicia Lo.
�
��Yes,” said Essie regretfully, “already know this. Checked first thing. Your meat body died of peritonitis eight years ago, so that’s not it. Third thing. Are all quite bright by standard measurements; have all certain skills, pilotage, navigation, et cetera—but so here, too, have many many others. Have long since ruled out all obvious linkages, so must dig deeper. For instance. Am personally of Russian heritage.”
“I’m American-Hispanic black,” said Cassata, shaking his head, “and Alicia’s Chinese; no good. And I’m male, but you two are female.”
“Julio and I both used to play handball a lot,” Alicia Lo offered, but it was Essie’s turn to shake her head.
“Did not play such games in Leningrad. Don’t think athletic prowess would be of interest to Foe, anyway.”
I said, “The trouble is, we don’t know what would interest them.”
“You are as so often right, dear Robin,” sighed Essie. “Hell. Wait. Can do this in less boring way, you know.”
“I’m not in any real big hurry,” said Cassata quickly, thinking of what he would be when he was no longer essential.
“Did not say faster, only less boring. You people? Have more drinks, maybe windsurf a little? I will run up quick cross-check program on all three stores, matching subroutines. Is easy enough and will not interfere with other activities.” She grinned. “Might tickle a little,” she added, and was gone to her programming office.
And left me to be the host.
That’s a congenial enough occupation for me. I made them drinks. I offered them the facilities of the house for entertainment, which were considerable—including a private bedroom, which was what I had had at the back of my mind, but which they didn’t seem to require just then. They were content just to sit and talk. It was pleasant to be there and do that, out on the lanai with the broad sea and the hills on the other shore in front of us, and that’s what we did.
I verified the fact that Essie had once again made a shrewd character diagnosis. Doppel-Cassata was so much more tolerable than his meat original that I actually found myself listening with interest to his anecdotes and laughing at his jokes. Alicia Lo was a doll. I had not failed to notice that she was pretty, slim and small and quick, or that she had a naturally sweet personality. I discovered that she was very well informed, too. As one of the last of the Gateway prospectors, she had taken her chances on four hairy science missions, and after she was vastened she wandered all over the Galaxy. She had seen places I had explored only at second hand, and a few I hadn’t even heard of. I was only beginning to have an idea of what she saw in Julio Cassata, but I could easily see why Cassata had fallen for her.
The Annals of the Heechee Page 34
