I kissed her back, but I was peering over her shoulder to see what ungodly messes were being set out on our tables. “That’s really up to you,” I told her.
“Yes, of course, is up to me. But is important, Robin! Have taken great care in meticulous duplication of true pommes-frites, you know. Now mayonnaise?” Then she stepped back and gave me a more thorough look, and her expression changed. “So tired! So many lines in the face! Robin, how are you feeling?”
I gave her my most charming smile. “Just hungry, my dear,” I cried, and gazed with deceitful enthusiasm at the plates before me. “Say! That looks good, what is it, a taco?”
“Is chapatti,” she said with pride. “Taco is over there. Also blini. See how you like, then.” So, of course, I had to taste them all, and it was not at all what my belly had asked for. The taco, the chapatti, the rice balls with sour fish sauce, the stuff that tasted, more than anything else, like boiled barley. They were not any of them my cup of tea. But they were all edible.
They were also all gifts of the Heechee. The great insight the Heechee had given us was that most of living tissue, including yours and mine, is made up of just four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—C H O N—CHON-food. Since that is also what the gases that comprise the best part of a comet are made of, they built their Food Factory out in the Oort cloud, where our Sun’s comets hang waiting for a star to shake them loose and send them in to be pretty in our sky.
CHON isn’t all of it. You need a few other elements. Sulfur’s the most important, maybe, then perhaps sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, calcium—not to mention the odd dash of cobalt to make vitamin B-12, chromium for glucose tolerance, iodine for the thyroid, and lithium, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, molybdenum, cadmium, and tin for the hell of it. You probably need the whole periodic table at least as traces, but most of the elements in quantities so small that you don’t have to worry about adding them to the stew. They show up as contaminants whether you want them or not. So Essie’s food chemists cooked up batches of sugar and spice and everything nice and produced food for everybody—not only what would keep them alive, but pretty much what they wanted to eat, wherefore the chapattis and the rice balls. You can make anything out of CHON-food if you stir it up right. Among the other things Essie was making out of it was a lot of money, and that turned out to be a game she delighted to play.
So when I finally settled down with something my stomach didn’t resist—it looked like a hamburger and tasted like an avocado salad with bacon bits in it, and Essie had named it the Big Chon—Essie was up and down every minute. Checking the temperature of the infra-red warming lights, looking for grease under the dishwashing machines, tasting the desserts, raising hell because the milkshakes were too thin.
I had Essie’s word that nothing in her chain would hurt anybody, though my stomach had less confidence in her word than I did. I didn’t like the noise from the street outside—was it the parade?—but outside of that I was as close to comfortable as I was likely to get just then. Relaxed enough to appreciate a turnaround in our status. When Essie and I go out in public, people look at us, and usually I’m the one they look at. Not here. In Essie’s franchise stores, Essie was the star. Outside the passersby were gathering to watch the parade. Inside no employee gave it a glance. They went about their jobs with all their back muscles tense, and all the surreptitious glances they sneaked went in the same direction, to the great lady boss. Well, not very ladylike, really; Essie has had the benefit of a quarter-century’s tuition in the English language from an expert—me—but when she gets excited it’s “nekulturny” and “khuligans!” all over the place.
I moved to the second-floor window to look out at the parade. It was coming straight down Weena, ten abreast, with bands and shouting and placards. Nuisance. Maybe worse than a nuisance. Across the street, in front of the station, there was a scuffle, with cops and placards, rearmers against pacifists. You couldn’t tell which was which from the way they clubbed each other with the placards, and Essie, rejoining me and picking up her own Big Chon, glanced at them and shook her head. “How’s sandwich?” she demanded.
“Fine,” I said, with my mouth full of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements. She gave me a speak-louder look. “I said it’s fine,” I amplified.
“I couldn’t hear you with all that noise,” she complained, licking her lips—she liked what she sold.
I jerked my head toward the parade. “I don’t know if this is so good,” I said.
“I think not,” she agreed, looking with distaste at a company of what I think they call Zouaves—anyway, dark-skinned marchers in uniform. I couldn’t see their national patches, but each one of them was carrying a rapid-fire shoulder weapon and playing tricks with it: spinning it around, bouncing the buttplate against the pavement and making it spring back into his hands, all without breaking stride.
“Maybe we’d better start back to the court,” I said.
She reached over and picked up the last crumb of my sandwich. Some Russian women melt down into spheres of fat when they get past forty, and some shrink and shrivel. Not Essie. She still had the straight back and narrow waist that first caught my eye. “Perhaps we should,” she said, beginning to gather up her computer programs, each on its own datafan. “Have seen enough uniforms as a child, do not specially want to see all these now.”
“You can’t really have much of a parade without uniforms.”
“Not just parade. Look. On sidewalks, too.” And it was true, about one man or woman in four was wearing some sort of uniform. It was a little surprising, because it had crept up on me. Of course, every country had always had some sort of armed forces, but they were just sort of kept in a closet, like a home fire extinguisher. People never actually saw them. But now people did, more and more.
“Still,” she said, conscientiously sweeping CHON crumbs off the table onto the disposable platelet and looking for the waste hamper, “you must be quite tired and we had better go. Give me your trash, please.”
I waited for her at the door, and she was frowning when she joined me. “Receptacle was almost full. In manual it is set forth clearly, empty at sixty-percent point—what will they do if large party leaves at once? I should go back and instruct manager—oh, hell,” she cried, her expression changing. “Have forgotten my programs!” And she dashed back up the stairs to where she had left her datafans.
I stood in the door, waiting for her, my eyes on the parade. It was quite disgusting! There were actual weapons going by, antiaircraft missile launchers and armored vehicles; and behind a bagpipe band was a company of the tommygun twirlers. I felt the door move behind me and stepped aside out of the way just as Essie pushed it open. “I found, Robin,” she said, smiling and holding the thick sheaf of fans up as I turned toward her.
And something like a wasp snarled past my left ear.
There are no wasps in Rotterdam. Then I saw Essie falling backward, and the door closing on her. It was not a wasp. It was a gunshot. One of those twirled weapons had held a live charge, and it had gone off.
I nearly lost Essie once before. It was a long time ago, but I hadn’t forgotten. All that old woe welled up as fresh as yesterday as I pulled the stupid door out of the way and bent over her. She was lying on her back, with the sheaf of tied datafans over her face, and as I lifted it away I saw that although her face was bloody her eyes were wide open and looking at me.
“Hey, Rob!” she said, her voice puzzled. “You punch me?”
“Hell, no! What would I punch you for?” One of the counter girls came rushing with a wad of paper napkins. I grabbed them away from her and pointed to the red-and-white striped electrovan with the words Poliklinische centrum stenciled on its side, idling at an intersection because of the parade. “You! Get that ambulance over here! And get the cops, too, while you’re at it!”
Essie sat up, pushing my arm away as cops and counter attendants swarmed around us. “Why ambulance, Robin?”
she asked reasonably. “Is only a bloody nose, look!” And indeed that was all there was. It had been a bullet, all right, but it had hit the sheaf of fans and stayed there. “My programs!” Essie wailed, tugging against the policeman who wanted them to extract the bullet for evidence. But they were ruined anyway. And so was my day.
While Essie and I were having our little brush with destiny, Audee Walthers was taking his friend sightseeing around the town of Rotterdam. He had been sweating as he left me; the presence of a lot of money does that to people. The absence of money took most of the joy out of Rotterdam for Walthers and Yee-xing. Still, to Walthers, the hayseeds of Peggys Planet still in his hair, and to Yee-xing, rarely away from the S. Ya. and the immediate vicinity of the launch loops, Rotterdam was a metropolis. They couldn’t afford to buy anything, but at least they could look in the windows. At least Broadhead had agreed to see them, Walthers kept telling himself; but when he allowed himself to think it with some satisfaction, the darker side of Walthers responded with savage contempt: Broadhead had said he would see them. But he sure-hell hadn’t seemed very anxious about it…
“Why am I sweating?” he asked out loud.
Yee-xing slipped her arm through his for moral support. “It will be all right,” she replied indirectly, “one way or another.” Audee Walthers looked down at her gratefully. Walthers was not particularly tall, but Janie Yee-xing was tiny; all of her was tiny except for her eyes, lustrous and black, and that was surgery, a silliness from a time when she had been in love with a Swedish merchant banker and thought it was only the epicanthic fold that kept him from loving her back. “Well? Shall we go in?”
Walthers had no idea what she was talking about, and must have shown it by his frown; Yee-xing butted his shoulder with her small, close-cropped head and looked up toward a storefront sign. In pale letters hanging in what looked like empty ebon space it said:
Here After
Walthers examined it and then looked at the woman again. “It’s an undertakers’,” he guessed, and laughed as he thought he saw the point of her joke. “But we’re not that bad off yet, Janie.”
“It’s not,” she said, “or not exactly. Don’t you recognize the name?” And then, of course, he did: It was one of the many Robinette Broadhead holdings on the list.
The more you learned about Broadhead, the more likely you could figure out what things would make him agree to a deal; that was sense. “Why not?” said Walthers, approving, and led her through the air curtain into the cool, dark recesses of the shop. If it was not a funeral establishment, it had at least bought from the same decorators. There was soft, unidentifiable music in the background, and a fragrance of wildflowers, although the only floral display in sight was a single sheaf of bright roses in a crystal vase. A tall, handsome, elderly man rose before them; Walthers could not say whether he had got up from one of the chairs or materialized as a hologram. The figure smiled warmly at them, tried to guess their nationalities. He got it wrong. “Guten tag,” he said to Walthers, and “Gor ho oy-ney,” to Yee-xing.
“We both speak English,” Walthers said. “Do you?”
Urbane eyebrows lifted. “Of course. Welcome to Here After. Is there someone near to you who is about to die?”
“Not that I know of,” said Walthers.
“I see. Of course, we can still accomplish a great deal even if the person has already reached metabolic death, although the sooner we begin transfer the better—Or are you wisely making plans for your own future?”
“Neither one,” said Yee-xing, “we just want to know what it is you offer.”
“Of course.” The man smiled, gesturing them to a comfortable couch. He did not appear to do anything to bring it about, but the lights became a touch brighter and the music dwindled a few decibels. “My card,” he said, producing a pasteboard for Walthers and answering the question that had been bothering him: The card was tangible, and so were the fingers that handed it to him. “Let me run through the basics for you; it will save time in the long run. To begin with, Here After is not a religious organization and does not claim to provide salvation. What we do offer is a form of survival. Whether you—the ‘you’ that is here in this room at this moment—will be ‘aware’ of it or not”—he smiled—“is a matter that the metaphysicians are still arguing. But the storage of your personalities, should you elect to provide for it, is guaranteed to pass Turing’s Test, provided we are able to begin transfer while the brain is still in good condition, and the surroundings that the surviving client perceives will be those which he chooses from our available list. We have more than two hundred environments to offer, ranging—”
Yee-xing snapped her fingers. “The Dead Men,” she said, suddenly comprehending.
The salesperson nodded, although his expression tightened a bit. “That is what the originals were called, yes. I see that you are familiar with the artifact called Heechee Heaven, now being used as a transport for colonists—”
“I’m the transport’s Third Officer,” Yee-xing said, quite truthfully except for tenses, “and my friend here is her Seventh.”
“I envy you,” the salesman said, and the expression on his face suggested that he really meant it. Envy did not keep him from delivering his sales pitch and Walthers listened attentively, Janie Yee-xing’s hand holding his. He appreciated the hand; it kept him from thinking about the Dead Men and their protégé, Wan—or, at least, about what Wan was likely to be doing at that moment.
When the programs and databases for the so-called Dead Men became available for study, my creator, S. Ya. Broadhead, was naturally greatly interested. She set herself the task of duplicating their work. The most complex task was, of course, the transcription of the database of a human brain and nervous system, which is stored chemically and redundantly, onto the Heechee datafans. She did very well. Not only well enough to franchise the Here After chain, but well enough—well—to create me. The Here After storage was based on her earliest research. Later on she got better—better even than the Heechee—for she was able to combine not only their techniques but independent human technology. The Dead Men could never pass a Turing Test. Essie Broadhead’s works, after a while, could. And did.
The original Dead Men, the salesperson declared, were unfortunately rather botched; the transfer of their memories and personalities from the wet, gray storage receptacle in their skulls to the crystalline datastores that preserved them after death had been accomplished by unskilled labor, using equipment that had been designed for quite a different species in the first place. So the storage was imperfect. The easiest way to think of it, the salesman explained, was to think the Dead Men had been so stressed by their unskilled transfer that they had gone mad. But that happened no longer. Now the storage procedures had been so refined that any deceased could carry on a conversation with his survivors so deftly that it was just like talking to the real person. More! The “patient” had an active life in the datastores. He could experience the Moslem, Christian, or Scientological Heaven, complete with, respectively, beautiful boys scattered like pearls on the grass, choirs of angels, or the presence of L. Ron Hubbard himself. If his bent was not religious, he could experience adventure (mountain-climbing, skin-diving, skiing, hang-gliding, and free-fall T’ai chi were popular selections), listening to music of any kind, in any company he chose…and, of course (the salesman, failing to estimate reliably the relationship between Walthers and Yee-xing, delivered the information without color), sex. All varieties of the sexual experience. Over and over.
“How boring,” said Walthers, thinking about it.
“For you and me,” the salesman granted, “but not for them. You see, they don’t remember the programatic experiences very clearly. There’s an accelerated decay bias applied to those datastores. Not to the others. If you talk to a dear one today and come back a year from now and pick up the conversation, he’ll remember it exactly. But the programed experiences dwindle fast in their memories—just as recollection of pleasure, you see, so that th
ey want to experience them again and again.”
“How horrible,” said Yee-xing. “Audee, I think it’s time we went to the hotel.”
“Not yet, Janie. What was that about talking to them?”
The salesman’s eyes gleamed. “Certainly. Some of them really enjoy talking, even to strangers. You have a moment? It’s very simple, really.” As he was talking he led them to a PV console, consulted a silk-bound directory, and punched out a series of code numbers. “I’ve actually be-come friendly with some of them,” he said bashfully. “When things are slow at the store, a lot of the time I call one of them up and we have a nice chat—Ah, Rex! How are you?”
“Why, I’m just fine,” said the handsome, bronzed senior citizen who appeared in the PV. “How nice to see you! I don’t think I know your friends?” he added, peering in a friendly way at Walthers and Yee-xing. If there was an ideal way for a man to appear when he passed a certain age, this was it; he had all his hair and seemed to have all his teeth; his face showed laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but was otherwise unlined, and his eyes were bright and warm. He acknowledged the introductions politely. Questioned about what he was doing he shrugged modestly. “I’m about to sing the Catulli Carmina with the Wien Staatsoper, you know.” He winked. “The lead soprano is very beautiful, and I think those sexy lyrics have been getting to her in rehearsal.”
“Amazing,” murmured Walthers, gazing at him. But Janie Yee-xing was less enchanted.
“We really don’t want to keep you from your music,” she said politely, “and I’m afraid we’d better get along.”
“They’ll wait,” Rex declared fondly. “They always do.”
Walthers was fascinated. “Tell me,” he said, “when you talk about, ah, companionship in this, ah, state—can you have your choice of any companions you want? Even if they’re still alive?”
The question was aimed at the salesman, but Rex spoke first. He was gazing shrewdly and sympathetically at Walthers. “Anyone at all,” he said, nodding as though they shared a confidence. “Anyone living or dead or imaginary. And, Mr. Walthers, they’ll do anything you want them to!” The figure chuckled. “What I always say,” he added, “is that what you call ‘life’ is really only a sort of entr’acte to the real existence you get here. I just can’t understand why people put it off for so long!”
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