"And then?" Lurvy asked.
Wan shrugged defensively. He didn't really know the answer to that, only that it had frightened his father. "They are not interesting," he repeated, contradicting himself.
Janine licked her fingers and tossed the empty berryfruit skins to the base of the bush. "You people," she sighed, "are unreal. Wan? Where do these Old Ones come?"
"To the edge of the gold, always. Sometimes into the blue or the green."
"Well, if they like these berryfruits, and if you know a place where they come to pick them, why don't we just leave a camera there? We can see them. They can't see us."
Wan shrilled triumphantly, "Of course! You see, Lurvy, it is not necessary to go there! Janine is right, only-" he hesitated- "Janine? What is a camera?"
As they went, Lurvy had to nerve herself to pass every intersection, could not help staring down each corridor. But they heard nothing, and saw nothing that moved. It was as quiet as the Food Factory when they first set foot in it, and just as queer. Queerer. The traceries of light on every wall, the patches of growing things-above all, the terrifying thought that there were Heechee alive somewhere near. When they had dropped off a camera by a berryfruit bush in a space where green, blue, and gold came together, Wan bustled them away, directly to the room where the Dead Men lived. That was first priority: to get to the radio that would once again put them in touch with the rest of the world. Even if the rest of the world was only old Payter, fidgeting resentfully around the Food Factory. If they could not do that much, Lurvy reasoned, they had no business being here at all, and they should return to the ship and head for home; it was no good exploring if they could not report what they found!
So Wan, courage returning in direct proportion to his increasing distance from the Old Ones, marched them through a stretch of green, up several levels in blue, to a wide blue door. "Let us see if it is working right," he said importantly, and stepped on a ridge of metal before the door. The door hesitated, sighed and then creakily opened for them, and, satisfied, Wan led them inside.
This place at least seemed human. If strange. It even smelled human, no doubt because Wan had spent so much time there over his short life. Lurvy took one of the minicameras from Paul and settled it on her shoulder. The little machine hissed tape past its lens, recording an octagonal chamber with three of the forked Heechee seats, two of them broken, and a stained wall bearing the Heechee version of instrumentation-ridges of colored lights. There was a tiny sound of clicks and hums, barely perceptible, behind the wall. Wan waved at it "In there," he said, "is where the Dead Men live. If `live' is the right word for what they do." He tittered.
Lurvy pointed the camera at the seats and the knurled knobs before them, then at a domed, clawed object under the smeared wall. It stood chest high, and it was mounted on soft, squashed cylinders to roll on. "What's that, Wan?"
"It is what the Dead Men catch me with sometimes," he muttered. "They don't use it very often. it is very old. When it breaks, it takes forever to mend itself."
Paul eyed the machine warily, and moved away from it. "Turn on your friends, Wan," he ordered.
"Of course. It is not very difficult," Wan boasted. "Watch me carefully, and you will see how to do it." He sat himself with careless ease on the one unbroken seat, and frowned at the controls. "I will bring you Tiny Jim," he decided, and thumbed the controls before him. The lights on the stained wall flickered and flowed, and Wan said, "Wake up, Tiny Jim. There is someone here for you to meet."
Silence.
Wan scowled, glanced over his shoulder at the others and then ordered: "Tiny Jim! Speak to me at once!" He pursed his lips and spat a gobbet at the wall. Lurvy recognized the source of the stains, but said nothing.
A weary voice over their heads said, "Hello, Wan."
"That is better," Wan shrilled, grinning at the others. "Now, Tiny Jim! Tell my friends something interesting, or I will spit on you again."
"I wish you would be more respectful," sighed the voice, "but very well. Let me see. On the ninth planet of the star Saiph there is an old civilization. Their rulers are a class of shit-handlers, who exercise power by removing the excrement only from the homes of those citizens who are honest, industrious, clever, and unfailing in the payment of their taxes. On their principal holiday, which they call the Feast of St. Gautama, the youngest maiden in each family bathes herself in sunflower oil, takes a hazelnut between her teeth, and ritually-"
"Tiny Jim," Wan interrupted, "is this a true story?"
Pause. "Metaphorically it is," Tiny Jim said sullenly.
"You are very foolish," Wan reproved the Dead Man, "and I am shamed before my friends. Pay attention. Here are Dorema Herter-Hall, who you will call Lurvy, and her sister Janine Herter. And Paul. Say hello to them."
Long pause. "Are there other living human beings here?" the voice asked doubtfully.
"I have just told you there are!"
Another long pause. Then, "Good-bye, Wan," the voice said sadly, and would not speak again, no matter how loudly Wan commanded or how furiously he spat at the wall.
"Christ," grumbled Paul. "Is he always like that?"
"No, not always," Wan shrilled. "But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try one of the others for you?"
"Are they any better?"
"Well, no," Wan admitted. "Tiny Jim is the best."
Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at Lurvy. "How simply bloody wonderful," he said. "Do you know what I'm beginning to think? I'm beginning to think your father was right. We should have stayed on the Food Factory."
Lurvy took a deep breath. "Well, we didn't," she pointed out. "We're here. Let's give it forty-eight hours, and then- And then we'll make up our minds."
Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven to abandon it.
The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. No one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant. They had made contact. "How is he?" Lurvy demanded at once.
"Oh, you mean your father? He's all right," Paul said. "He sounded grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I've got them on tape-but it'll take us a week to play them all." He rummaged through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter, to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. "We can only transmit single frames," he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. "But if we're going to be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system from here. Meanwhile, we've got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to kiss you for him."
"Then I guess we're going to stay for a while," said Janine.
"Then I guess we'd better bring more stuff out of the ship," her sister agreed. "Wan? Where should we sleep?"
So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul to sleep in, if he didn't mind bending his knees. There was a place for toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they al
l began to smell much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both, remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with her father on the Food Factory, with Wan's help in dealing with the Dead Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan's, to housekeeping tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven, photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually Wan's compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the preliminary thrill of Wan's companionship and was in no hurry to move to a further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy's rule, since she had taken care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. "Go to the gold," whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny Jim's thick tenor would override: "They'll kill you! They don't like castaways!"
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled, too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: "Report all control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme caution." Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was lonesome; he didn't feel well; he was not receiving proper medical attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them. They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They should- They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine's pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come across from Trish Bover's relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from Robinette Broadhead:
"Dorema, I know you're being swamped. Your whole mission was important and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don't have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can't change your assigned objectives. But I want you to know I'm on your side. Find out all you can. Try not to get into a spot you can't retreat from. And I'll do everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word."
It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner, but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a capricious Titan of finance.
And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice. She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in her own life. In Lurvy's own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy had heard the story of Broadhead's last mission, the one that made him a multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said) Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy's own experience with a mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But they were there.
The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe "died" was not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours older after all the years.
So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead's message to Lurvy? Was he urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin's prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching. It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone. When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men's room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.
When Janine returned to the Dead Men's room from an exploration with Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and led Wan away. "I think they want to be alone," she explained. "Anyway, I'm tired. Let's take a break."
Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of corridors a few d
ozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside the girl. "Are they conjugating?" he asked.
"Cripes, Wan. You've only got the one thing on your mind all the time." But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand approached her breast. "Knock it off," she said mildly.
He withdrew his hand. "You are being very disturbed, Janine," he said, pouting.
"Oh, get off my back." But when he moved millimeters away, she let herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as "anything" sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
Even when he was grouchy. "You are not competing properly," he complained.
"Competing at what, for the Lord's sake?"
"You should talk to Tiny Jim," he said severely. "He will teach you better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course, yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to copulate with you."
"Yes, you've said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much."
He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed all of Tiny Jim's teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared. "I see. You want to kiss first," he said.
"No! I don't want to kiss `first', and get your knee off my bladder."
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Page 13
