Human affairs were harder…
By the time we were back on the Tappan Sea Essie had had a chance to rest up and I had had the time and practice to recognize what I saw, and both of us had got over some of the trauma of my death. I don’t say we’d got over it all, but at least we could talk.
At first it was only talk, for I was shy of trying to display myself to my dear wife as a hologram. Then said Essie commandingly, “You, Robin! Is no longer tolerable, this talking to you on voice-only phone. Come where I can see!”
“Yes, do!” ordered the other Essie, stored with me, and Albert chimed in:
“Simply relax and let it happen. Robin. The subroutines are well in place.” In spite of them all, it took all my courage to show myself, and when I did my dear wife looked me up and down and said:
“Oh, Robin. How lousy you look!”
Now, that might sound less than loving, but I knew what Essie meant. She wasn’t criticizing; she was sympathizing, and trying to keep from tears. “I’ll do better later, darling,” I said, wishing I could touch her.
“Indeed he will, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert earnestly, which made me realize that he was sitting by my side. “At present I am helping him, and the attempt to project two images at once is difficult. I am afraid they are both degraded.”
“Then you disappear!” she suggested, but he shook his head.
“There is also the need for Robin to practice—and, I think, you yourself may wish to make some programing amendments. For example, surround. I cannot give Robin a background unless I share it with him. Improvements are also needed in full animation, real-time reaction, consistency between frames—”
“Yes, yes,” groaned Essie, and set about doing things in her workshop.
So did we all. There was much to do, especially for me.
I have worried about many things in my time, and almost always about the wrong ones. Worrying about dying hovered in the edges of my concerns for most of my physical life—just as it does in yours. What I feared was extinction. I didn’t get extinction. I got a whole new set of problems.
A dead man, you see, no longer has any rights. He can’t own property. He can’t dispose of property. He can’t vote—not only can’t he vote in an election to a government office; he cannot even vote the large majority of shares he owns in the hundred corporations he himself has set up. When he is only a minority interest—even a very powerful one, as I was in, for example, the transport system that sent new colonists to Peggys Planet—he won’t even be heard. As you could say, he might as well be dead.
I was unwilling to be that dead.
It wasn’t avarice. As a stored intelligence I had very few needs; there was no risk of my being turned off because I couldn’t pay the utility bills. It was an urgency more pressing than that. The terrorists had not disappeared because the Pentagon captured their spaceship. Every day there were bombings and kidnappings and shootings. Two other launch loops were attacked and one of them damaged; a tanker of pesticide was deliberately scuttled off the coast of Queensland and so a hundred kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef was dying. There were actual battles being fought in Africa and Central America and the Near East; the lid was barely being kept on the pressure cooker. What we needed was a thousand more transports like the S. Ya., and who was going to build them if I were silent?
So we lied.
The story went out that Robin Broadhead had suffered a cerebrovascular accident, all right, but the lie that was tacked on said I was showing steady improvement. Well, I was. Not in the exact sense implied, of course. But almost as soon as we were back home I was able to talk, voice-only, with General Manzbergen and some of the people in Rotterdam; in a week I was showing myself, from time to time—swathed in lap robes supplied courtesy of Albert’s fertile imagination; after a month I allowed a PV crew to film me, tanned and fit, if thin, sailing our little catboat on the sea. Of course, the PV crew was my very own and the clips that appeared on the newscasts were more art than reportage, but it was very good art. I could not handle face-to-face confrontations. But I didn’t need to.
So all in all, you see, I wasn’t too badly off. I conducted my business. I planned, and carried out plans, to ease the ferment that fed the terrorists—not enough to cure the problem, but to sit on the lid for a while longer. I had time to listen to Albert’s worries about the curious objects he called kugelblitz, and if we didn’t then know what they meant it was probably just as well. All I lacked was a body, and when I complained about that Essie said forcefully: “Dear God, Robin, is not end of world for you! How many others have had same problem!”
“To be reduced to a datastore? Not many, I should think.”
“But same problem anyhow,” she insisted. “Consider! Healthy young male goes ski-jumping, falls and cracks spine. Paraplegic, eh? No body that amounts to anything except liability, needs to be fed, needs to be diapered, needs to be bathed—you are spared that, Robin. But the important part of you, that is still here!”
“Sure,” I said. I did not add, what Essie of all people did not need to have me add, that my own definition of “important” parts included some accessories to which I had always attached particular value. Even there there were pluses to set against the losses. If I no longer had, e.g., sexual organs, there was surely no further problem about my suddenly complicated sexual relationships.
None of that had to be said. What Essie said instead was: “Buck up, old Robin. Keep in mind you are so far only first approximation of final product.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Were great problem, Robin! Here After storage was, I admit, quite imperfect. Learned much in development of new Albert for you. Had never before attempted complete storage of entire, and very valued, person unfortunately dead. The technical problems—”
“I understand there were technical problems,” I interrupted; I didn’t really want to hear, just yet, the details of the risky, untried, exquisitely complex job of pouring “me” out of the decaying bucket of my head into the waiting basin of a storage matrix.
“To be sure. Well. Now have more leisure. Now can make fine tuning. Trust me, old Robin, improvements can yet be made.”
“In me?”
“In you, certainly! Also,” she said, twinkling, “in very inadequate stored copy of self. Have good reason to believe same can be made much more interesting to you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow.” And wished more than ever for at least the temporary loan of some parts of a body, for what I wanted more than anything else just then was to put my arms around my very dear wife.
And meanwhile and meanwhile the worlds went on. Even the very small worlds of my friend Audee Walthers and his own complicated loving.
When you look at them from inside, all worlds are the same size. Audee’s didn’t seem small to him. I took care of one of their problems very quickly; I gave each of them ten thousand shares of stock in the Peggys Planet ferry, the S. Ya. and its pendant enterprises. Janie Yee-xing didn’t have to worry about being fired anymore; she could rehire herself as a pilot if she chose, or ride the S. Ya. as passenger if she liked. So could Audee; or he could go back to Peggys and boss his former bosses on the oilfield; or none of the above, but lounge around in luxury for all his life; and so could Dolly. And, of course, that didn’t solve their problems at all. The three of them mooned around the guest suites for a while until finally Essie suggested we lend them the True Love for a cruise to nowhere until they got their heads straightened out, and we did.
None of them were foolish at all—like the rest of us, they acted that way now and then, maybe. They recognized a bribe when they saw one. They knew that what I really wanted was for them to keep their mouths shut about my present unpleasantly noncorporeal state. But they also knew what a friendly gift was, and there was that component in the stock transfer, too.
And what did they do, the three of them on the True Love?
I think I don’t want to say. Most of it is no
one’s business but theirs. Consider. There are times in everyone’s life—certainly including yours, most definitely including my own—when what you are doing and saying is not either important or pretty. You strain at a bowel movement, you have a fugitive and shocking thought, you break wind, you tell a lie. None of it matters very much, but you do not want advertised those parts of everyone’s life in which he looks ludicrous or contemptible or mean. Usually they don’t get advertised, because there is no one to see—but now that I am vastened there is always one to see, and that is me. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, as everyone’s memories are added to the database, there are no personal mysteries left at all.
I will say this much of Audee Walthers’s private concerns. What motivated his actions and fueled his worries was that admirable and desirable thing, love. What frustrated his loving was also love. He loved his wife, Dolly, because he had schooled himself to love her all the while they were married—that was his view of how married people should be. On the other hand, Dolly had left him for another man (I use the term loosely in Wan’s case), and Janie Yee-xing had turned up to console him. They were both very attractive persons. But there were too many of them. Audee was as monogamous as I was. If he thought to make up with Dolly, there was Janie in the way—she had been kind, he owed her some sort of consideration—call it love. But between him and Janie there was Dolly: They had planned a life together and he had had no intention ever of changing it, so you could call that love, too. Complicated by some feeling that he owed Dolly some kind of punishment for abandoning him, and Janie some sort of resentment for being in the way—remember, I told you there were contemptible and ludicrous parts. Complicated much more by the equally complex feelings of Dolly and Janie…
It must almost have been a relief to them when—orbiting idly in a great cometary ellipse that was pushing them out toward the asteroids and at angle to the ecliptic—whatever discussion they were having at the moment was interrupted by a gasp from Dolly and a stifled scream from Janie, and Audee Walthers turned to see on the screen a great cluster of vessels huger and more numerous and far, far bigger than any human being had seen in Earth’s solar system before.
They were scared out of their minds, no doubt.
But no more than the rest of us. All over the Earth, and everywhere in space where there were human beings and communications facilities to carry the word, there was shock and terror. It was the worst nightmare of every human being for the past century or so.
The Heechee were coming back
They didn’t hide. They were there—and so many of them! Optical sensors in the orbital stations spotted more than fifty ships—and what ships! Twelve or fourteen as big as the S. Ya. Another dozen bigger still, great globular structures like the one that had swallowed the sailship. There were Threes and Fives and some intermediate ones that the High Pentagon thought looked suspiciously like cruisers, and all of them coming straight down at us from the general direction of Vega. I could say Earth’s defenses were caught unprepared, but that would be a flattering lie. The truth was that Earth had no defenses worth mentioning. There were patrol ships, to be sure; but they had been built by Earthmen to fight other Earthmen. No one had dreamed of pitting them against the semimythical Heechee.
And then they spoke to us.
The message was in English, and it was short. It said: “The Heechee can’t allow interstellar travel or communication anymore except under certain conditions that they will decide and supervise. Everything else has to stop right away. They’ve come to stop it.” That was all before the speaker, with a helpless shake of the head, faded away.
It sounded a lot like a declaration of war.
It was interpreted that way, too. In the High Pentagon, in the orbiting forts of other nations, in the councils of power all over the world, there were abrupt meetings and conferences and planning sessions; ships were called in for rearming, and others were redirected toward the Heechee fleet; the orbital weapons that had been quiet for decades were checked and aligned—useless as arbalests, they might be, but if they were all we had to fight with, we would fight them. The confusion and shock and reaction swept the world.
And there was nowhere that suffered more astonishment and bewilderment than the people who made up my own happy household; for the person who gave the Heechee ultimatum Albert had recognized at once, and Essie only a moment later, and I before I even saw her face. It was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.
25
Return to Earth
Gelle-Klara Moynlin, my love. My lost love. There she was, staring at me out of the frame of the PV and looking no older than the last time I’d seen her, years and decades before—and looking no better, either, because both times she was about as badly shaken up as it was possible for a person to be. Not to mention beaten up, once by me.
But if she’d been through a lot and showed it, my Klara, she had plenty in reserve. She turned from the screen when she had delivered her message to the human race and nodded to Captain. “You zaid it?” he demanded anxiously. “You gave the mezzage prezisely as I inzdructed?”
“Precisely,” said Klara, and added, “Your English is getting much better now. You could talk directly if you wanted to.”
“Is too important to take chanzes,” said Captain fretfully, and turned away. Half the tendons on his body were rippling and twitching now, and he was not alone. His loyal crew were as harried as himself, and in the communications screens that linked his ship to the others in the grand fleet he could see the faces of the other captains. It was a grand fleet, Captain reflected, studying the displays that showed them in proud array, but why was it his fleet? He didn’t need to ask. He knew the answer. The reinforcements from inside the core amounted to more than a hundred Heechee, and at least a dozen of them were entitled to call themselves senior to him if they chose. They could easily have asserted command of the fleet. They didn’t. They let it be his fleet because that made it also be his responsibility…and his own sweet essence that would go to join the massed minds if it went wrong. “How foolish they are,” he muttered, and his communicator twitched agreement.
“I will instruct them to maintain better order,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Of course, Shoe.” Captain sighed and watched gloomily as the communicator rattled instructions to the other captains and controllers. The shape of the armada reformed itself slowly as the great cargo vessels, capable of biting a thousand-meter spherical chunk out of anything and carrying it anywhere, dropped back behind the transports and the smaller ships. “Human woman Klara,” he called. “Why do they not answer?”
She shrugged rebelliously. “They’re probably talking it over,” she said.
“Talking it over!”
“I’ve tried to tell you,” she said resentfully. “There are a dozen different major powers that have to get together, not counting a hundred little countries.”
“A hundred countries.” Captain groaned, trying to imagine such a thing. He failed…
Well. That was long and long ago, especially if you measure time in femtoseconds. So very much has happened since! So much that, vastened as I am, it is hard for me to take it all in. It is even harder to remember (whether with my own memory or some borrowed other) every detail of every event of that time, although, as you have seen, I can recall quite a lot when I want to. But that picture stays with me. There was Klara, her black brows scowling as she watched the Heechee jitter and mope; there was Wan, all but comatose and forgotten in a corner of the cabin. There were the Heechee crew, twitching and hissing to one another, and there was Captain, gazing with pride and fear at the resurrected armada on the mission he had ordered. He was gambling for the highest of stakes. He did not know what would happen next—expected anything—feared almost everything—could not be surprised, he thought, by whatever occurred…until something did occur that surprised him very much.
“Captain!” cried Mongrel, the integrator. “There are other ships!”
And
Captain brightened. “Ah!” he applauded. “At last they respond!” It was curious of the humans to do so physically rather than by means of radio, but then they were strange to begin with. “Are the ships speaking to us, Shoe?” he asked, and the communicator twitched his cheek muscles no. Captain sighed. “We must be patient, then,” he said, studying the display. The human vessels were certainly not approaching in any sensible order. It seemed, in fact, as though they had been detached from whatever errands they were on and thrown in to meet the Heechee fleet hurriedly, carelessly—almost frantically. One was in easy range of ship communication; two others farther away, and one of those battling an existing velocity that went the wrong way.
Then Captain hissed in surprise. “Human female!” he commanded. “Come here and inzdruct them to be careful! Zee what is happening!” From the nearest ship a smaller object had launched, a primitive thing that was chemically propelled, much too tiny to contain even a single person. It was accelerating directly toward the heart of the Heechee fleet, and Captain nodded to White-Noise, who instantly ordered a nudge into FTL velocity that removed the nearest cargo vessels from danger. “They muzt not be zo zlipzhod!” he cried sternly. “A collizion could occur!”
“Not by accident,” said Klara grimly.
“What? I do not underzdand!”
“Those are missiles,” she said, “and they’ve got nuclear warheads. That’s your answer. They’re not waiting for you to attack. They’re shooting first!”
Do you have the picture now? Can you see Captain standing there with his tendons shocked still and his jaw dropping, staring at Klara? He chews at his tough, thin lower lip and glances at the screen. There’s his fleet, the huge caravan of cargo transports resurrected from half a million years of hiding so that he can—with grave doubt; at great risk to himself—offer the human race, a couple of million at a time, free transportation and safe refuge from the Assassins, in the core where the Heechee themselves hid. “Shooting?” he repeated numbly. “To hurt us? Pozzibly to kill?”
Heechee Rendezvous Page 30