Heechee Rendezvous

by Frederik Pohl

  And even so—it made no difference. The great shark-shaped ship moved closer.

  In spite of herself Klara watched admiringly as the pilot of the other ship matched course change and velocity increment without difficulty. It was a technically fascinating process. Wan froze at the controls, watching it, mouth open, slobbering. Then, when the other ship loomed large and disappeared below the view of the scanners, and there was a grating sound from the lander hatch, he bellowed in fear and dove for the toilet. Klara was alone as she saw the lander hatch open and fall back; and so it was Gelle-Klara Moynlin who was the first human being to stand in the presence of a Heechee.

  It rose from the hatch, stood erect, and confronted her. Less tall than she. Reeking of something ammoniacal. Its eyes were round, because that is the best design for an organ that must rotate in any direction, but they were not human eyes. There was no concentric ring of pigment around a central pupil. There was no pupil, just a cross-shaped blotch of darkness in the middle of a pinkish marble that stared at her. Its pelvis was wide. Slung below the pelvis, between what would have been its thighs if its legs had been articulated in a human way, was a capsule of bright blue metal. As much as anything else, the Heechee looked like a diapered toddler with a load in its pants.

  That thought penetrated through Klara’s terror and eased it—minutely—briefly—not enough. As the creature moved forward she leaped back.

  As Klara moved, the Heechee moved, too. It started as the hatch cover moved again and another one of them came through. From the tension and hesitancy of its movements it seemed to Klara that it was nearly as frightened as she, and so she said, not with the expectation of being understood but because it was impossible for her to say nothing:

  “Hello, there.”

  The creature studied her. A forked tongue licked the shiny black wrinkles of its face. It made a strange, purring sound, as though it were thinking. Then, in something close to recognizable English, it said: “I em Heetsee. I fill to you no harrum.”

  It gazed with fascination and repugnance at Klara, then chittered briskly to the other one, who began to search the vessel. They found Wan without trouble, and without trouble moved both Klara and Wan down through the hatch, through the connected landers, into the Heechee ship. Klara heard the batches scrape closed, and then a moment later felt the lurch that meant that Wan’s ship had been cast free.

  She was a captive of the Heechee, in a Heechee ship.

  They did not harm her. If they were intending to do it, at least they were in no hurry about it. There were five of them, and they were very busy.

  What they were busy at Klara could not guess, and apparently the one with the limited English vocabulary was too busy at it to take time for the laborious task of explaining. What they really wanted from Klara at that moment was for her to stay out of the way. They had no trouble communicating that to her. They unceremoniously took her by the arm, with a leathery and painful grip, and shoved her where they wanted her.

  Wan gave them no trouble at all. He lay huddled in a corner with his eyes tightly closed. When he discovered that Klara was nearby he peered at her with one eye, poked her in the spine to get her attention, and whispered: “Did he really mean he wouldn’t harm us, do you think?”

  She shrugged. He whimpered almost inaudibly, then relapsed into his fetal crouch. She saw with disgust that a trickle of saliva was coming out of the side of his mouth. He was the next thing to catatonic.

  If there was anyone to help her, that was not Wan. She would have to face the Heechee alone—whatever it might be that they intended.

  But what was happening was fascinating. So much was new to Klara! She had spent the decades of rapid accretion of Heechee technology whirling at very nearly light-speed around the core of the black hole. Her acquaintance with Heechee vessels was limited to the antiques she and I and the other prospectors had operated out of Gateway.

  This was something else. It was a lot bigger than a Five. It far outshone even Wan’s private yacht in its fittings. It didn’t have one control panel; it had three—of course, Klara did not know that two of them were for purposes other than piloting the ship itself. Those two possessed instruments and operating readouts she had never seen before. Not only was it eight or ten times the cubic volume of a Five, but relatively less of the space was taken up with equipment. It was possible to move about it quite freely! It had the standard features—the worm-shaped thing that glowed during faster-than-light travel, the V-shaped seats, and so on. But it also had blue-glowing boxes that whined and peeped and flickered with lights, and a different sort of worm-shaped crystal that, Wan told her, terrified, was for digging into black holes.

  Above all, it had Heechee.

  Heechee! The semimythical, perplexing, nearly divine Heechee! No human being had ever seen one, or even a picture. And here was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with no less than five of them all about her—growling and hissing and tweeting, and smelling quite strange.

  They looked strange, too. They were smaller than human beings, and their very wide pelvises gave them a gait like a walking skeleton. Their skin was plastic-smooth and mostly dark, though there were patches and curlicues of bright gold and scarlet that looked like Indian war paint. Their physiology was not merely lean. It was gaunt. There was not much flesh on those quick, strong limbs and fingers. Although their faces seemed as though they were carved out of shiny plastic, they were at least resilient enough to allow for facial expression…though Klara could not be sure what the expressions represented.

  And swinging below the crotches of every one of them, male and female alike, was a great cone-shaped thing.

  At first Klara thought it was part of their bodies, but when one of them disappeared into what she assumed was some sort of toilet it fussed for a moment and removed the cone. Was it something like a knapsack? A pocketbook? An attache case, to carry papers, pencils, and a brown-bag lunch? Whatever it was, it came off when they wanted it off. And when it was on it explained one of the great puzzles of Heechee anatomy, namely how they managed to sit down on those incredibly painful V-shaped seats. It was their dependent cones that filled the V-shaped gap. The Heechee themselves perched comfortably on the top of the cones. Klara shook her head, wondering—all the idle guesses and jokes on the subject in Gateway, why had no one ever thought of that?

  For decades the Heechee “prayer fans” were a mystery. We did not know that they were actually their equivalent of books and datastores, because the greatest minds of the time (my own included) could not find a way to read them, or even to find indications that they contained anything to be read. The reason was that although scansion was simple enough, it could only take place in the presence of a background microwave radiation. The Heechee themselves had no problem with that, because their cones produced the proper radiation all the time, since they were always in some sort of contact with the datafans that contained the stored memories of their ancestors—held in their cones. Human beings could be excused for not guessing that the Heechee carried data between their legs, for human anatomy would not allow such a thing. (My own excuse is less evident.)

  She felt Wan’s hot breath on the back of her neck. “What are they doing?” he demanded.

  She had almost forgotten he was there. She had almost forgotten even to be afraid, so fascinated was she by what she saw. That was not prudent. Who could tell what these monsters would do with their human captives?

  For that matter, who could guess what they were doing now? They were all buzzing and chirping in an agitated way, the four larger ones clustered around the smaller fifth, the one with blue and yellow markings on its—no, definitely, on her—upper arms. All five of them were paying no attention to the humans just now. They were concentrating on one of the display panels, which was showing a star chart that Klara thought vaguely familiar. A group of stars, and around them a cluster of check marks—hadn’t Wan displayed such a pattern on his own screen?

  “I’m hungry,” Wan growled sullenly in he
r ear.

  “Hungry!” Klara pulled sharply away from him, astonishment as much as revulsion. Hungry! She was nearly sick to her stomach with fear and worry—and, she realized, a queer odor, half ammonia and half rotting stump, that seemed to come from the Heechee themselves. Besides, she had to go to the bathroom…and this other monster could think of nothing but that he was hungry! “Please shut up,” she said over her shoulder, and touched off Wan’s always available fury.

  “What? Me shut up?” he demanded. “No, you shut up, foolish woman!” He almost stood up to tower over her, but got no farther than a crouch, quickly groveling back to the floor, for one of the Heechee looked up and came toward them.

  It stood over them for a moment, its wide, narrow-lipped mouth working as it rehearsed what it was about to say.

  “Be fair,” it pronounced distinctly, and waved a skinny arm toward the viewscreen.

  Klara swallowed laughter nervously trying to bubble out of her throat. Be fair! To whom? For what?

  “Be fair,” it said again, “for dese are sass sass sins.”

  So there was Klara, my truest love that was. She had suffered in a matter of weeks the terror of the black hole, the shock of losing decades of the world’s life, the misery of Wan, the intolerable trauma of being taken by the Heechee. And meanwhile—

  And meanwhile, I had problems of my own. I had not yet been vastened and did not know where she was; I did not hear the warning to beware of the Assassins; I didn’t then know that the Assassins existed. I couldn’t reach out to comfort her in her fear—not just because I didn’t know, but because I was full of fears of my own. And the worst of them did not involve Klara or the Heechee, or even my aberrant program Albert Einstein; it was in my own belly.

  21

  Abandoned by Albert

  Nothing worked. We tried everything. Essie pulled Albert’s fan from its socket, but he had locked the controls so that even without him we could change nothing. Essie set up another piloting program and tried to insert it; it was locked out. We shouted his name and scolded and begged him to appear. He would not.

  For days that seemed like weeks we kept going, guided by the nonexistent hands of my nonfunctioning data-retrieval system, Albert Einstein. And meanwhile, the nut-kid Wan and the dark lady of my dreams were in the spaceship of Captain’s Heechee crew and behind us the worlds were stewing and grumbling toward a violence too large to be accommodated. They were not what occupied our minds. Our worries were closer to hand. Food, water, air. We’d stocked the True Love for long cruises, much longer than this.

  But not for five people.

  We weren’t doing nothing. We were doing everything we could think to do. Walthers and Yee-xing tinkered together piloting programs of their own—tried them—could not override what Albert had done. Essie did more than any of us, for Albert was her creation and she would not, could not, admit herself beaten. Check and recheck; write test programs and watch them come up blank; she hardly slept. She copied Albert’s entire program into a spare datafan and tried that—still hoping, you see, that the fault was mechanical somewhere. But if so it carried over into the new storage. Dolly Walthers uncomplainingly fed the rest of us, stayed out of our way when we thought we might be getting somewhere (though we never were), and let us talk ideas out when we were stumped (which was often). And I had the hardest job of all. Albert was my program, said Essie, and if he would reply to anyone he would reply to me. So I sat there and talked to him. Talked to the air, really, because I had no evidence at all that he was listening as I reasoned with him, chatted with him, called his name, yelled at him, begged him.

  He did not answer, not even a flicker in the air.

  When we took a break for food Essie came to stand behind me and rub my shoulders. It was my larynx that was wearing out, but I appreciated the thought. “At least,” she said shakily, to the air more than to me, “must know what he’s doing, I think. Must realize supplies are limited. Must provide for return to civilization for us, because Albert could not deliberately let us die?” The words were a statement. The tone wasn’t.

  “I’m certain of it,” I said, but did not turn around so that she could see my face.

  “I, too,” she said in a dismal tone as I pushed away my plate; and Dolly, to change the subject, said in a motherly way:

  “Don’t you like my cooking?”

  Essie’s fingers stopped massaging my shoulders and dug in. “Robin! You don’t eat!”

  And they were all looking at me. It was actually funny. We were out in the middle of nowhere at all with no good way of getting home, and four people were staring at me because I didn’t eat my dinner. It was Essie, of course, clucking over me in the early stages of the trip, before Albert went mute; they suddenly realized that I might not be well.

  In point of fact I wasn’t. I tired quickly. My arms felt tingly, as though they had gone to sleep. I had no appetite—had not eaten much for days, and had escaped notice only because usually we ate in quick gobbles when we found time. “It helps to stretch out the supplies.” I smiled, but nobody smiled back.

  “Foolish Robin,” hissed Essie, and her fingers left my shoulders to test the temperature of my forehead. But that was not too bad, because I’d been gulping aspirin when no one was looking. I assumed an expression of patience.

  “I’m fine, Essie,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie—a little wishful thinking, maybe, but I wasn’t sure I was sick. “I guess I should have been checked over, but with Albert out of commission—”

  “For this? Albert? Who needs?” I craned my neck, puzzled, to look at Essie. “For this need only subset medic program,” she said firmly.

  “Subset?”

  She stamped her foot. “Medic program, legal program, secretarial program—all subsumed into Albert program, but can be accessed separately. You call medic program this instant!”

  I gaped at her. For a moment I couldn’t speak, while my mind raced. “Do as I say!” she shouted, and at last I found my voice.

  “Not the medical program!” I cried. “There’s something better than that!” And I turned around and bellowed to thin air:

  “Sigfrid von Shrink! Help! I need you desperately!”

  There was a time in the year of my psychoanalysis when I hung on hooks while I waited for Sigfrid to appear. Sometimes I had a real wait, for in those days Sigfrid was a patched-together program of Heechee circuits and human software, and none of the software was my wife Essie’s. Essie was good at her trade. The milliseconds of response time became nano-, pico-, femtoseconds, so that Albert could in real time respond as well as a human—well, hell, no! Better than any human!

  And so when Sigfrid did not at once appear it was the feeling you get when you turn a switch and the light doesn’t go on because it’s burned out. You don’t waste your time flicking the switch back and forth. You know. “Don’t waste time,” said Essie over my shoulder. If a voice can be pale, hers was.

  I turned and smiled shakily at her. “I guess things are worse than we thought,” I said. Her face was pale, all right. I put my hand on hers. “Takes me right back,” I said, making conversation so that we would not have to face just how much worse things were. “When I was in analysis with Sigfrid, waiting for him to show up was the worst part. I would always get uptight, and…” Well, I was rambling. I might have gone on doing it forever if I hadn’t seen in Essie’s eyes that I didn’t have to.

  I turned around and heard his voice at the same time: “I am sorry to hear that it was so difficult for you, Robin,” said Sigfrid von Shrink.

  Even for a holographic projection, Sigfrid looked rather poorly. He was there with his hands clasped on his lap, sitting uncomfortably on nothing at all. The program had not troubled to furnish him with chair or pad. Nothing. Just Sigfrid, looking, for one of the few times in my recollection of him, quite ill at ease. He gazed around at the five of us, all staring at him, and sighed before returning to me. “Well, Robin,” he said, “would you like to tell me what is bothe
ring you?”

  I could hear Audee Walthers take a breath to answer him, and Janie click her tongue to stop him, because Essie was shaking her head. I didn’t look at any of them. I said, “Sigfrid, old tin whiz, I have a problem that’s right down your alley.”

  He looked at me under his brows. “Yes, Robin?”

  “It’s a case of fugue.”

  “Severe?”

  “Incapacitating,” I told him.

  He nodded as though it were what he had been expecting. “I do prefer that you not use technical terms, Robin.” He sighed, but his fingers were lacing and relacing themselves in his lap. “Tell me. Is it yourself that you are asking me to help?”

  “Not really, Sigfrid,” I admitted. The whole ballgame could have blown up then. I think it almost did. He was silent for a moment, but not at all still—his fingers snaked in and out of each other, and there was a bluish sparkle in the air around the outlines of his body when he moved. I said, “It’s a friend of mine, Sigfrid, maybe the closest friend I have in the world, and he is in bad trouble.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding as though he did—which I expect was true enough. “I suppose you know,” he mentioned, “that your friend cannot be helped unless he is present.”

  “He’s present, Sigfrid,” I said softly.

  “Yes,” he said, “I rather thought he was.” The fingers were still now, and he leaned back as though there were a chair for him to lean against. “Suppose you tell me about it…and”—with a smile, which was the most welcome thing I had ever seen in my life—“this time, Robin, you may use technical terms if you wish.”