He released her unwillingly. "Janine," he explained, "close contact is essential to `love'. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us. Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine."
She giggled. "To what? Old dead Henrietta?" But he was scowling and she took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, "You've got some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a place like this."
"`Caught'?"
"Pregnant," she explained. "Winning the goddam reproductive race. Knocked up. Oh, Wan," she said, nuzzling the top of his head, "you just don't know where it's all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we'll even get married, or something, and we'll just win that old reproductive race a whole bunch. But right now you're just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I. You don't want to reproduce. You just want to make love."
"Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim-"
"Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?" She stood up and regarded him for a moment, and said affectionately, "Tell you what. I'm going back to the Dead Men's room. Why don't you go read a book for a while to cool off?"
"You are silly!" he scolded. "I have no book here, or reader."
"Oh, for the Lord's sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you feel better."
Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. "I guess I don't need to any more," he said.
By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in what they had just discovered. He said, "Hey, kids, listen to this." He dialed Henrietta's number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative hello and then asked: "Who are you?"
The voice strengthened. "I am a computer analog," it said firmly. "When I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master's from Tulane and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was thirty-eight years old, two years younger than-" the voice hesitated, "than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who-" it hesitated again, "who-who my husband seemed to-who had an affair with- who-" The voice was sobbing now, and Paul turned it off.
"Well, it doesn't last," he said, "but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not just for her. Do you want to know your mother's name, Wan?"
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. "My mother's name?" he shrilled.
"Or anybody else's. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the students' fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn't get much out of it, of course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an interrogation program for Vera, and she's been working at it all along, and-what's the matter, Wan?"
The boy licked his lips. "My mother's name?" he repeated.
"Oh. Sorry," Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred to him that Wan's emotions would be involved. "Her name was Elfega Zamorra. But she doesn't seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don't know why. And your father-well, that's a funny thing. Your real father was dead before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else, but I don't know who. Any idea why that is?" Wan shrugged. "I mean, why your mother or, I guess you'd call him, your step-father doesn't seem to be stored?" Wan spread his hands.
Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress, she put her arm around him and said, "I guess this is a shock to you, Wan. I'm sure we'll find out a lot more." She gestured at the mare's nest of recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room. "Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth," she said. He looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth, and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.
"Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough," she said wisely. "Just let him live with it for a while." She rummaged through the case of rations for one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, "By the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?"
Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep. He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently to record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected movement.
It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. "Heechee," she breathed.
But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at the camera, and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had no chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on the face than on the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it would have looked like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from the shipboard computer's reconstruction of Wan's description, but on a cruder, more animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved to one side Lurvy saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit bush, wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed. There were even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color sewn to their tunics, what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a string of sharp-edged beads around the neck of one of the males. "I suppose," Lurvy said shakily, "that even the Heechee might degenerate in time. And they've had lots of time."
The view in the camera spun dizzily. "Damn him," Paul snapped. "He's not so degenerate he doesn't notice the camera. He's picked the damn thing up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we're here?"
The boy shrugged disinterestedly. "Of course they do. They always have, you know. They simply do not care."
Lurvy's heart caught. "What do you mean, Wan? How do you know they won't come after us?"
The view in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was handing it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, "I have told you, they almost never come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the food chutes or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more."
There was a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the view whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones, sucking a finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun and then went blank. "Paul! What did they do?" Lurvy demanded.
"Broke it, I suppose," he said, failing to get the picture back after manipulating the controls. "Question is, what do we do? Haven't we got enough here? Shouldn't we think about going back?"
And think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of light. He had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom went there himself. Rarely in the blue. And, yes, of cou
rse they knew there were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines that listened, and sometimes watched, everywhere- when they were not broken, of course. They simply did not care very much. "If we don't go into the gold they will not trouble us," he said positively. "Except, of course, if they come out."
"Wan," Paul snarled, "I can't tell you how confident you make me feel."
But it developed that that was only the boy's way of saying that the odds were very good. "I go to the gold for excitement often," he boasted. "Also for books. I have never been caught, you know."
"And what if the Heechee come here for excitement, or books?" Paul demanded.
"Books! What would they do with books? For berryfruit, maybe. Sometimes they go with the machines-Tiny Jim says they are for repairing things that break. But not always. And the machines do not work very well, or very often. Besides, you can hear them far away!"
They all sat silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Lurvy said, "Here's what I think. Let's give ourselves one week here. I don't think that's stretching our luck too much. We have, what is it, Paul?-five cameras left. We'll plant them around, slave them to the monitor here and leave them. If we take care, maybe we can conceal them so the Heechee won't find them. We'll explore all the red corridors, because they're safe, and as many of the blue and green as we can. Collect samples. Take pictures-I want to get a look at those repair machines. And when we've done as much of that as we can, we'll-we'll see how much time we have. And then we'll make a decision about going into the gold."
"But no more than one week. From now," Paul repeated. He was not insisting. He was only making sure he understood.
"No more," Lurvy agreed, and Janine and Wan nodded.
But forty-eight hours later they were in the gold, all the same. They had decided to replace the broken camera, and so, all four of them together, they retraced their steps to the three-way intersection where the berryfruit bush rose, bare of ripe fruit. Wan was first, hand in hand with Janine, and she detached herself to swoop down on the wreck of the camera. "They really bashed it," she marveled. "You didn't tell us they were so strong, Wan. Look, is that blood?"
Paul snatched it from her hand, turning it over, frowning at the crust of black along one edge. "It looks like they were trying to get it open," he said. "I don't think I could do that with my bare hands. He must have slipped and cut himself."
"Oh, yes," shrilled Wan absently, "they are quite strong." His attention was not on the camera. He was peering down the long gold corridor, sniffing the air, listening more for distant sounds than to the others.
"You're making me nervous," Lurvy said. "Do you hear anything?"
He shrugged irritably. "You smell them before you hear them but, no, I do not smell anything. They are not very near. And I am not afraid! I come here often, to get books or to watch the funny things they do."
"I bet," said Janine, taking the old camera from Paul while he hunted a place to conceal the new one. There were not many places. Heechee decor was stark.
Wan bristled. "I have gone down that corridor as far as you can see!" he boasted. "Even the place where the books is is far down-do you see? Some of them are in the corridor."
Lurvy looked, but was not sure what Wan meant. A few dozen meters away was a heap of glittering trash, but no books. Paul, peeling tape from a sticky bracket to mount it as high as he could on the wall, said, "The way you carry on about those books of yours. I've seen them, you know, Moby Dick and The Adventures of Don Quixote. What would the Heechee be doing with them?"
Wan shrilled with dignity, "You are stupid, Paul. Those are only what the Dead Men gave me, they are not the real books. Those are the real books."
Janine looked at him curiously, then moved a few step down the corridor. "They're not books," she called over her shoulder.
"Of course they are! I have told you they are!"
"No, they aren't. Come and look." Lurvy opened her mouth to call her back, hesitated, then followed. The corridor was empty, and Wan did not seem more than usually agitated. When she was halfway to the glittering scatter she recognized what she was looking at, and quickly joined Janine to pick one up.
"Wan," she said, "I've seen these before. They're Heechee prayer fans. There are hundreds of them on Earth."
"No, no!" He was getting angry. "Why do you say that I lie?"
"I'm not saying you lie, Wan." She unrolled the thing in her hands. It was like a tapering scroll of plastic; it opened easily in her hand, but as soon as she released it it closed again. It was the commonest artifact of Heechee culture, found by the scores in the abandoned tunnels on Venus, brought back by Gateway prospectors from every successful mission. No one had ever found what the Heechee did with them, and whether the name that they had been given was appropriate only the Heechee knew. "They're called `prayer fans', Wan."
"No, no," he shrilled crossly, taking it away from her and marching into the chamber. "You do not pray with them. You read them. Like this." He started to put the scroll into one of the tulip-shaped fixtures on the wall, glanced at it, threw it down. "That is not a good one," he said, rummaging in the heaps of fans on the floor. "Wait. Yes. This is not good, either, but it is at least something one can recognize." He slipped it into the tulip. There was a quick tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and then the tulip and scroll disappeared. A lemon-shaped cloud of color enveloped them, and shaped itself to display a sewn book, opened at a page of vertical lines of ideographs. A tinny voice-a human voice!-began to declaim something in a staccato, highly tonal language.
Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made her cosmopolitan. She gasped, "I-I think that's Japanese! And those look like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?"
He said in a superior tone, "These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy, they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny Jim says that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men, even the ones that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them all the time."
"My God," said Lurvy. "And how many times have I had one of those in my hands and not known what it was for?"
Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished and voice stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his hands. "That beats me," he said. "Every scientist in the world has had a go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?"
Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of showing these people how much more than they he knew. "Perhaps they are stupid too," he shrilled. Then, charitably, "Or perhaps they merely have only the ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If they ever bothered to read them."
"Have you got one of those handy, Wan?" Lurvy asked.
He shrugged petulantly. "I never bother with those," he explained. "Still, if you do not believe me-" He rummaged around in the heaps, his expression making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had already explored and found without interest. "Yes. I think this is one of the worthless ones."
When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was bright-and baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the controls of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that twined around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew together again. If it was written language, it was as remote from any Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly languages had characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all represented by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket radio. All in all, it was unnerving.
"I did not think you would enjoy it," Wan observed spitefully. "Turn it off, Wan," Lurvy said; and then, energetically, "We want to take as many of the
se things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as you can and take them back to the Dead Men's room. And take that old camera, too; give it to the bio-assay unit, and see if it can make anything out of the Heechee blood."
"And what are you going to do?" Paul asked. But he had already slipped off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery "books".
"We'll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are which-I mean, which are the ones you don't bother with?"
"Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little chipped-you can see."
"All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We'll be modest some other time," she said, slipping out of her coverall. She stood in bra and panties, tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan's tunic and Janine's dress they could carry at least half of the objects away. And that would be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on the Food Factory, anyway-although probably they were the ones Wan had brought there, and thus only the ones he had found he could understand. "Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?"
"Of course," he said. "Why else would I bring books there?" He was sorting irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the oldest, "useless" ones to Janine and Lurvy. "I am cold," he complained.
"We all are. I wish you'd worn a bra, Janine," she said, frowning at her sister.
Janine said indignantly, "I wasn't planning to take my clothes off. Wan's right. I'm cold, too."
"It's only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let's see how fast we can pick out the Heechee ones." They had her coverall nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a few dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But they were really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty or forty. Her coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in any event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they chose,
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Page 14
