The truth is that I didn’t matter just then even to me, because I was out of it. A good many thousand light-years behind us on Earth, General Manzbergen was chasing another batch of terrorists who had hijacked a launch shuttle and the commissaris had caught the man who had taken a shot at me; I didn’t know and, if I had known, wouldn’t have cared. A lot closer, but still as far from us as Antares is from Earth, Gelle-Klara Moynlin was trying to make sense of what the Heechee were telling her; I didn’t know that either. Very close to hand indeed, my wife, Essie, was trying to do something she had never done before, though she had invented the process, with the help of Albert, who had the entire process in his datastores but had not hands to do it with. About that I would have cared a great deal if I had known what they were doing.
But I couldn’t know, of course, since I was dead.
I did not, however, stay that way.
When I was little my mother used to read me stories. There was one about a man whose senses were somehow scrambled after a brain operation. I don’t remember who wrote it, Verne, Wells, one of those biggies from the Golden Age—somebody. What I remember is the punch line. The man comes out of the operation so that he sees sound, and hears touch, and the end of the story is him asking, “What smells purple?”
That was a story told me when I was little. Now I was big. It was not a story anymore.
It was a nightmare.
Sensory impressions were battering at me, and I couldn’t tell what they were! I can’t describe them now, for that matter, any more than I can describe…smerglitch. Do you know what smerglitch is? No. Neither do I, because I just made the word up. It’s only a word. It has no meaning until it is invested with one, and neither did any of the colors, sounds, pressures, chills, pulls, twitches, itches, squirmings, burnings, yearnings—the billion quantum units of impression that were assaulting naked, tender me. I didn’t know what they meant. Or were. Or threatened. I don’t know what to compare it to, even. Maybe being born is like that. I doubt it. I don’t think any of us would survive it if it were.
But I survived.
I survived because of only one reason. It was impossible for me not to. It’s the oldest rule in the book: You can’t knock up a pregnant woman, and you can’t kill someone who is dead already. I “survived” because all that part of me that could be killed had been.
Do you have the picture?
Try to see it. Flayed. Assaulted. And most of all, aware I was dead.
Among the other stories my mother read me was Dante’s Inferno, and what I sometimes wonder was whether Dante had some prevision of what it would be like for me. For if not, where did he get his description of Hell?
How long this lasted I did not know, but it seemed forever.
Then everything dwindled. The piercing lights moved farther away, and paler. The terrifying sounds were quieter, the itches and squeezes and turbulences diminished.
For a long time there was nothing at all, like Carlsbad Caverns in that scary moment when they turn off all the lights to teach you what dark is. There was no light. There was nothing but a distant confused mumbling that might have been the circulation of blood around the stirrups and anvil in my ears.
If I had had ears.
And then the mumbling began to hint of a voice, and words; and, from a long way off, the voice of Albert Einstein:
“Robin?”
I tried to remember how to speak.
“Robin? Robin, my friend, do you hear me?”
“Yes,” I shouted, and do not know how. “I’m here!” as though I knew where “here” was.
A long pause. Then Albert’s voice again, still faint but sounding closer. “Robin,” he said, each word spaced as though for a tiny child. “Robin. Listen. You are safe.”
“Safe?”
“You are safe,” he repeated. “I am blocking for you.”
I did not answer. Had nothing to say.
“I will teach you now, Robin,” he said, “a little at a time. Be patient, Robin. Soon you will be able to see and hear and understand.”
Patient? I could be nothing but patient. I had no other options but to patiently endure while he taught me. I trusted old Albert, even then. I accepted his word that he could teach the deaf to hear and the blind to see.
But was there any way to teach the dead to live?
I do not particularly want to relive that next little eternity. By Albert’s time and the time of the cesium clocks that concerted the human parts of the Galaxy it took—he says—eighty-four hours and a bit. By his time. Not by mine. By mine it was endless.
Although I remember very well, I remember some things only distantly. Not from incapacity. From desire, and also from the fact of velocity. Let me explain that. The quick exchange of bits and bytes within the core of a datastore goes much faster than the organic life I had left behind. It blurs the past with layers of new data. And, you know, that’s just as well, because the more remote that terrible transition is from my “now,” the better I like it.
If I am unwilling to retrieve some of the early parts of that data, at least the first part that I am willing to look at is a big one. How big? Big.
Albert says I anthropomorphize. Probably I do. Where’s the harm? I spent most of my life in the morph of an anthropos, after all, and old habits die hard. So when Albert had stabilized me and I was—I guess the only word is vastened—it was as a human anthropomorphic being that I visualized myself. Assuming, of course, that the human being were huger than galaxies, older than stars, and as wise as all the billions of us have learned to be. I beheld the Local Group—our Galaxy and its next-door neighbors—as one little clot in a curdling sea of energy and mass. I could see all of it. But what I looked at was home, the mother Galaxy and M-31 beside it, with the Magellanic Clouds nestling nearby and all the other little clouds and globules and tufts and fluffs of streaky gas and starshine. And—the anthropomorphic part is—I reached out to touch them and cup them and run my fingers through them, as though I were God.
I was not really God, or even sufficiently godlike to be able really to touch any galaxies. I couldn’t touch anything at all, not having anything to touch them with. It was all illusion and optics, like Albert lighting his pipe. There was nothing there. No Albert and no pipe.
And no me. Not really. I was not operatively godlike, because I did not have any tangible existence. I could not create the heavens and the earth, nor destroy them. I could not affect even the least part of them in any physical way at all.
But I could behold them most splendidly. From outside or in. I could stand at the center of my home system and see, peering past Masei 1 and 2, the millions and zillions of other groups and galaxies stretching out in speckled immensity to the optical ends of the universe, where fleeing star clusters run away faster than light can return to display them…and beyond that, too, though what I could “see” beyond the optical limit was not really much different—and not really, Albert tells me, any more than a hypothesis in the Heechee memory stores I was tapping.
For, of course, that’s all it was. Old Robin hadn’t suddenly swelled immense. It was just the paltry remains of Robinette Broadhead, who at that point was no more than a clutter of chained memory bits swimming around in the sea of datastores in the library of the True Love.
A voice broke into my immense and eternal reverie: Albert’s voice. “Robin, are you all right?”
I did not want to lie to him. “No. Nowhere near all right.”
“It will get better, Robin.”
“I hope so,” I said. “…Albert?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t blame you for going crazy,” I said, “if this is what you were going through.”
Silence for a moment, then the ghost of a chuckle. “Robin,” he said, “you haven’t seen yet what drove me crazy.”
I cannot say how long all of this took. I don’t know that the concept of “time” meant anything, for at the electronic level, which is where I was dwelling, the time scale d
oes not map well against anything “real.” Much time is wasted. The stored electronic intelligence does not operate as efficiently as the machinery we are all born with; an algorithm is not a good substitute for a synapse. On the other hand, things move a lot faster down in subparticle land, where the femtosecond is a unit that can be felt. If you multiply the pluses and factor in the minuses, you’d have to say that I was living somewhere between ten and ten thousand times as fast as I was used to.
Of course, there are objective measures of real time—by which I mean True Love time. Essie marked the minutes very carefully. To prepare a corpse for the queasy semistorage of her Here After chain took many hours. To prepare that particular stiff which happened to be me for the somewhat better storage she was able to arrange in the datafan, exactly like Albert’s own datafan, took a great deal longer. When her part in it was done she sat and waited, with a drink in her hand that she didn’t drink and attempts at conversation from Audee and Janie and Dolly that she didn’t hear, although sometimes she answered something that they didn’t hear either. It was not a jolly party on the True Love while they waited to see if anything at all remained to access of the late Robinette Broadhead, and it took all in all more than three days and a half.
For me, in that world of spin and charm and color and forbidden orbits where I was now transported to exist, it was—well, call it forever. It seemed that way.
“What you must do,” Albert commanded, “is learn how to use your inputs and outputs.”
“Oh, swell,” I cried gratefully, “is that all? Gosh! Sounds like nothing at all!”
Sigh. “I am glad you retain your sense of humor,” he said, and what I heard was, because you’ll damn well need it. “You’ve got to work now, I’m afraid. It is not easy for me to go on encapsulating you this way—”
“Enwhat?”
“Protecting you, Robin,” he said impatiently. “Limiting your access so that you won’t suffer from too much confusion and disorientation.”
“Albert,” I said, “are you out of your mind? I’ve seen the whole universe!”
“You’ve only seen what I was accessing myself, Robin. That’s not good enough. I can’t control access for you forever. You have to learn to do it for yourself. So I’m going to lower my guard a little for you, when you’re ready.”
I braced myself. “I’m ready.”
But I hadn’t braced myself enough.
You would not believe how much it hurt. The chirping, chittering, bitching, demanding voices of all the inputs assaulted my—well, assaulted those loci in a nonspatial geometry that I still persisted in thinking of as my ears. It was torture. Was it as bad as that first naked exposure to everything at once? No. It was worse. In that terrible first blast of sensation I had had one thing going for me. I had not then learned to identify noise as sound, or pain as pain. Now I knew. I knew pain when I felt it. “Please, Albert,” I screamed. “What is it?”
“These are only the datastores accessible to you, Robin,” he said soothingly. “Only the fans on board the True Love, plus telemetry, plus some inputs from the sensors to the ship and crew itself.”
“Make them stop.”
“I can’t.” There was real compassion in his voice, though really no voice existed. “You have to do it, Robin. You have to select what stores you wish to access. Pick out just one of them and block out the others.”
“Do what?” I begged, more confused than ever.
“Select just one, Robin,” he said patiently. “Some are our own datastores, some are Heechee fans, some are other things. You have to learn how to interface with them.”
“Interface?”
“To consult them, Robin. As though they were reference volumes in a library. As though they were books on shelves.”
“Books don’t yell at you! And these are all yelling!”
“Surely. It is how they make themselves evident—just as books on shelves are evident to your eyes. But you need only to look at the one you want. There is one in particular that, I think, will ease this for you. See if you can find that one.”
“Find it? How do I look for it?”
There was a sound like a sigh. “Well,” he said, “there’s a stratagem that might be tried, Robin. I can’t tell you up, down, or sideways, because I don’t suppose there’s any frame of reference for you yet—”
“Damn right!”
“No. But there’s an old animal trainer’s trick, used to cause an animal to perform complicated maneuvers it does not understand. There was a stage magician who used it to get a dog to go into an audience, select a particular person, take from it a particular object—”
“Albert,” I begged, “this is not the time for you to tell me those long, rambling anecdotes!”
“No, this is not an anecdote. It’s a psychological experiment. It works well on dogs—I do not know that it has ever been tried on an adult human, but let’s see. This is what you do. Begin to move in any direction. If it is a good direction I will tell you to go on. When I stop telling you that, you stop doing that particular thing. Cast about. Try different things. When the new thing you do, or the new direction, is a useful one I will tell you to keep going. Can you do that?”
I said, “Will you give me a piece of bread when it’s over, Albert?”
Faint chuckle. “At least the electronic analog of one, Robin. Now, start casting about.”
Start casting about! How? But there was no use asking that question, because if Albert had been able to give me a “how” in words we wouldn’t have had to try a dog handler’s trick. So I began—doing things.
I can’t tell you what things I was doing, exactly. I can give you an analogy, maybe. When I was in school in science class they showed us an electroencephalogram scanner, and showed how all our brains generated alpha waves. It was possible, they said, to make the waves go faster or get larger—to increase the frequency or the amplitude—but there was no way to tell us how to do it. We all took turns, all of us kids, and every one of us did in fact manage to speed up the sine trace on the screen, and no two of us described what we did in the same way. One said he held his breath, another that he sort of tensed his muscles; one thought of eating, and another sort of tried to yawn without opening his mouth. None of them were real. All of them worked; and what I did now was not real, either, because I had nothing real to do it with.
But I moved. Somehow, I moved. And all the time Albert’s voice was saying, “No. No. No. No, that’s not it. No. No—”
And then: “Yes! Yes, Robin, keep on doing that!”
“I am keeping on!”
“Don’t talk, Robin. Just keep going. Keep going. Keepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoingkeep—no. Stop.
“No.
“No.
“No.
“No—yes! Keepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoingkeepgoing—no—yes! Keep going—stop! There it is, Robin. The volume you must open.”
“Here? This thing here? This voice that sounds like—”
I stopped. I couldn’t go on. See, I had accepted the fact that I was dead, nothing but stored electrons in a datafan, able to talk just then only to mechanical storage or other nonalive persons like Albert.
“Open the volume!” he commanded. “Let her speak to you!”
She did not need permission. “Hello, Robin love,” said the nonliving voice of my dear wife, Essie—strange, strained, but no doubt at all who it was. “Is a fine place are in now, is it not?”
I do not think that anything, not even the recognition of my own death, was as terrible a shock as finding Essie among the dead ones. “Essie,” I screamed, “what happened to you?”
And at once Albert was there, solicitous, quick: “She’s all right, Robin. She’s not dead.”
“But she must be! She’s here!”
“No, my dear boy, not really here,” said Albert. “Her book is there because she partially stored herself, as part of the experiments for the Here After project. And also as part of the experiments that
led to me, as I am at present constituted.”
“You bastard, you let me think she was dead!”
He said gently, “Robin, you must get over this flesh-and-blood obsession with biology. Does it really matter if her metabolism still operates on the organic level, in addition to the version of her which is stored here?” And that strange Essie-voice chimed in:
“Be patient, dear Robin. Be calm. Is going to be all right.”
“I doubt that very much,” I said bitterly.
“Trust me, Robin,” she whispered. “Listen to Albert. He will tell you what to do.”
“The hardest part is over,” Albert reassured me. “I apologize for the traumas you have suffered, but they were necessary—I think.”
“You think.”
“Yes, only think, Robin, for this has never been done before and we are operating largely in the dark. I know it has been a shock to you to meet the stored analog of Mrs. Broadhead in this way, but it will help to prepare you to meet her in the flesh.”
If I had had a body to do it with, I would have been tempted to punch him—if Albert had had anything to punch. “You’re crazier than I am,” I cried.
Ghost of a chuckle. “Not crazier, Robin. Only as crazy. You will be able to speak to her and see her, just as I did with you while you were still—alive. I promise this, Robin. It will succeed—I think.”
“I can’t!”
Pause. “It is not easy,” he conceded. “But consider this. I can do it. So do you not think you can do as well as a mere computer program like myself?”
“Don’t taunt me, Albert! I understand what you’re saying. You think I can display myself as a hologram and communicate in real time with living persons; but I don’t know how!”
“No, not yet, Robin, for those subroutines do not yet exist in your program. But I can teach you. You will be displayed. Perhaps not with all the natural grace and agility of my own displays,” he boasted, “but at least you will be recognizable. Are you prepared to begin to learn?”
Heechee Rendezvous Page 28