Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

by Frederik Pohl

  Wan shrilled defensively, “I have never harmed anyone!” He was unable to take in just what he was accused of, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul was accusing. Lurvy put her hand on his arm.

  “I wish it were so, Wan,” she said. “The important thing is, you mustn’t do that again.”

  “No more dreaming in the couch?”

  “No, Wan.” He looked to Janine for guidance, then shrugged.

  “But that is not all,” Paul put in. “You have to help us. Tell us everything you know. About the couch. About the Dead Men. About the faster-than-light radio, the food—”

  “Why should I?” Wan demanded.

  Patiently, Paul coaxed: “Because in that way you can make up for the fever. I don’t think you understand how important you are, Wan. The knowledge in your head might mean saving people from starvation. Millions of lives, Wan.”

  Wan frowned over that concept for a moment, but “millions” was meaningless to him as applying to human beings—he had not yet adjusted to “five.” “You make me angry,” he scolded.

  “I don’t mean to, Wan.”

  “It is not what you mean to, it is what you do. You have just told me that,” the boy grumbled spitefully. “All right. What do you want?”

  “We want you to tell us everything you know,” Paul said promptly. “Oh, not all at once. But as you remember. And we want you to go through this whole Food Factory with us and explain everything in it—as far as you can, I mean.”

  “This place? There is nothing here but the dreaming room, and you won’t let me use that!”

  “It is all new to us, Wan.”

  “It is nothing! The water does not run, there is no library, the Dead Men are hard to talk to, nothing grows! At home I have everything, and much of it is working, so you can see for yourself.”

  “You make it sound like heaven, Wan.”

  “See for yourself! If I can’t dream, there is no reason to stay here!”

  Paul looked at the others, perplexed. “Could we do that?”

  “Of course! My ship will take us there—not all of you, no,” Wan corrected himself. “But some. We can leave the old man here. There is no woman for him, anyway, so there is no pairing to destroy. Or even,” he added cunningly, “only Janine and I can go. Then there will be more room in the ship. We can bring you back machines, books, treasures—”

  “Forget that, Wan,” Janine said wisely. “They’ll never let us do that.”

  “Not so fast, my girl,” her father said. “That is not for you to decide. What the boy is saying is interesting. If he can open the gates of heaven for us, who are we to stand outside in the cold?”

  Janine studied her father, but his expression was bland. “You don’t mean you’d let Wan and me go there alone?”

  “That,” he said, “is not the question. The question is, how can we most rapidly complete this God-bedamned mission and return to our reward. There is no other.”

  “Well,” said Lurvy after a moment, “we don’t have to decide that right now. Heaven will wait for us, for all our lives.”

  Her father said, “That is true, yes. But, expressed concretely, some of us have less lives to wait than others.”

  Every day new messages came in from Earth. Infuriatingly, these related only to a remote past, before Wan, irrelevant to everything they were doing or planning now: Submit chemical analyses of this. X-ray that. Measure these other things. By now the slow packets of photons that transmitted the word of their reaching the Food Factory had arrived at Downlink-Vera on Earth, and perhaps replies were already on their way. But they would not arrive for weeks. The base at Triton had a smarter computer than Vera, and Paul and Lurvy argued for transmitting all their data there for interpretation and advice. Old Peter rejected the idea with fury. “Those wanderers, gypsies? Why should we give them what costs us so much to get!”

  “But nobody’s questioning us, Pa,” Lurvy coaxed. “It’s all ours. The contracts spell it all out.”

  “No!”

  So they fed all that Wan told them into Shipboard-Vera, and Vera’s small, slow intelligence painfully sorted the bits into patterns. Even into graphics. The external appearance of the place Wan had come from—it was probably not a very good likeness, because it was apparent that Wan had not had the curiosity to study it very closely. The corridors. The machines. The Heechee themselves; and each time Wan offered corrections:

  “Ah, no. They both have beards, males and females. Even when they are quite young. And the breasts on the females are—” He held his hands just below his rib cage, to show how low they swung. “And you do not give them the right smell.”

  “Holos don’t smell at all, Wan,” said Paul.

  “Yes, exactly! But they do, you see. In rut, they smell very much.”

  And Vera mumbled and whined over the new data, and shakily drew in the new revisions. After hours of this, what had been a game for Wan turned into drudgery. When he began saying, “Yes, it is perfect, that is exactly how the Dead Men’s room looks,” they all understood that he was merely agreeing with anything that would stop the boredom for a while, and gave him a rest. Then Janine would take him for a wander through the corridors, sound and vision pickups strapped to her shoulder, in case he said something of value or pointed out a treasure, and they spoke of other things. His knowledge was as astonishing as his ignorance. Both were unpredictable.

  It was not only Wan that needed study. Every hour Lurvy or old Peter would come up with a new idea for diverting the Food Factory from its programmed drive, so that they could try to accomplish their original purpose. None worked. Every day more messages came in from Earth. They were still not relevant. They were not even very interesting; Janine let a score of letters from her pen-pals stay in Vera’s memory without bothering to retrieve them, since the messages she was getting from Wan filled her needs. Sometimes the communications were odd. For Lurvy, the announcement that her college had named her its Woman of the Year. For old Peter, a formal petition from the city he had been born in. He read it and burst into laughter. “Dortmund still wishes me to run for Bürgermeister! What nonsense!”

  “Why, that’s really nice,” Lurvy said agreeably. “It’s quite a compliment.”

  “It is quite nothing,” he corrected her severely. “Bürgermeister! With what we have I could be elected president of the Federal Republic, or even—” He fell silent, and then said gloomily, “If, to be sure, I ever see the Federal Republic again.” He paused, looking over their heads. His lips worked silently for a moment, and then he said: “Perhaps we should go back now.”

  “Aw, Pop,” Janine began. And stopped, because the old man turned on her the look of an alpha wolf on a cub. There was a sudden tension among them, until Paul cleared his throat and said:

  “Well, that’s certainly one of our options. Of course, there’s a legal question of contract—”

  Peter shook his head. “I have thought of that. They owe us so much already! Simply for stopping the fever, if they pay us only one percent of the damage we save, it is millions. Billions. And if they won’t pay—” He hesitated, and then said, “No, there is no question that they won’t pay. We simply must speak to them. Report that we have stopped the fever, that we cannot move the Food Factory, that we are coming home. By the time a return message can arrive we will be weeks on our way.”

  “And what about Wan?” Janine demanded.

  “He will come with us, to be sure. He will be among his own kind again, and that is surely what is best for him.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to let Wan decide that? And what happened to sending a bunch of us to investigate his heaven?”

  “That was a dream,” her father said coldly. “Reality is that we cannot do everything. Let someone else explore his heaven, there is plenty for all; and we will be back in our homes, enjoying riches and fame. It is not just a matter of the contract,” he went on, almost pleadingly. “We are saviors! There will be lecture tours and endorsements for the adver
tising! We will be persons of great power!”

  “No, Pop,” Janine said, “listen to me. You’ve all been talking about our duty to help the world—feed people, bring them new things to make their lives better. Well, aren’t we going to do our duty?”

  He turned on her furiously. “Little minx, what do you know about duty? Without me you would be in some gutter in Chicago, waiting for the welfare check! We must think of ourselves as well!”

  She would have replied, but Wan’s wide-eyed, frightened stare made her stop. “I hate this!” she announced. “Wan and I are going to go for a walk to get away from the lot of you!”

  “He is not really a bad person,” she told Wan, once they were beyond the sound of the others. Quarreling voices had followed them and Wan, who had little experience of disagreements, was obviously upset.

  Wan did not reply directly. He pointed to a bulge in the glowing blue wall. “This is a place for water,” he said, “but it is a dead one. There are dozens of them, but almost all dead.”

  Out of duty, Janine inspected it, pointing her shoulder-held camera at it as she slid the rounded cover back and forth. There was a protuberance like a nose at the top of it, and what must be a drain at the bottom; it was almost large enough to get into, but bone dry. “You said one of them still works, but the water isn’t drinkable?”

  “Yes, Janine. Would you like me to show it to you?”

  “Well, I guess so.” She added, “Really, don’t let them get to you. They just get excited.”

  “Yes, Janine.” But he was not in a talkative mood.

  She said, “When I was little he used to tell me stories. Mostly they were scary, but sometimes not. He told me about Schwarze Peter, who, as far as I can figure out, was something like Santa Claus. He said if I was a good little girl Schwarze Peter would bring me a doll at Christmas, but if I wasn’t he’d bring me a lump of coal. Or worse. That’s what I used to call him, Schwarze Peter. But he never gave me a lump of coal.” Wan was listening intently as they moved down the glowing corridor, but he did not respond. “Then my mother died,” she said, “and Paul and Lurvy got married and I went to live with them for a while. But Pop wasn’t so bad, really. He came to see me as often as he could—I guess. Wan! Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “No,” he said. “What’s Santa Claus?”

  “Oh, Wan!”

  So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began to smile; and curiously, as Wan’s mood improved Janine’s grew worse. Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let herself feel it—in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there? Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with the Heechee just outside it—terrifying if real, less real than mythical. Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?

  She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not tell that from anything they said—they were setting an example of courage to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special kind—less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying before he cashed in on his courage.

  And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest. Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan’s complications were merely not the same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it for a toilet: Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. “I had to go somewhere,” he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the ship’s sanitary like everybody else.

  “Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were sick, don’t you see? She’s always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff.”

  “There ought to be some other way.”

  “Well, there is.” There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny samples from each of them—which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan, once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer, and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to do so, a little late. “What’s the matter?”

  He was acting uncomfortable. “When the Dead Men give me a medical check they stick things in me. I don’t like that.”

  “It’s for your own good, Wan,” she said severely. “Hey! That’s an idea. Let’s go talk to the Dead Men.”

  And there was Janine’s own complicatedness. She didn’t really want to talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan’s dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. “Wan,” she said, “I want to try the couch.”

  He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his long nose. “Lurvy told me not to do that any more,” he stated.

  “I know she did. How do I get in?”

  “First you tell me I must do what you all say,” he complained, “then you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing.”

  She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. “Do I just pull the top down over me?”

  “Oh,” he said, shrugging, “if you’ve made up your mind—yes. It snaps shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just push.”

  She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at his petulant, concerned face. “Does it—hurt?”

  “Hurt? No! What an idea!”

  “Well, what does it feel like?”

  “Janine,” he said severely, “you are very childish. Why do you ask questions when you can see for yourself?” And he pushed down on the shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and locked. “It is best if you go to sleep,” he called down to her, through the shining blue network of wire.

  “But I’m not sleepy,” she objected reasonably. “I’m not anything. I don’t feel a thing…”

  And then she did.

  It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when she opened her eyes, and these other—souls?—were not at all as real or as immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were comforting.

  When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm, she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they started back.

  They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. “Stupid little brat!” Paul raged. “You ever do
anything like that again and I’ll paddle your pink little ass for you!”

  “She won’t!” her father said grimly. “I will see to that, right now; and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later.”

  They had all become so quarrelsome! No one paddled Janine’s bottom for trying out the dreaming couch. No one punished her at all. They all punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again, when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to Lurvy and Paul—they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court within 5,000 A.U.

  But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the Food Factory’s guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other place—and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera’s sound system in linkage with the “radio.” But Vera could not handle much give and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera was beaten.