Heechee Rendezvous
Page 31
“Exactly,” flared Klara. “What did you expect? If it’s war you want, you’ll get it.”
And Captain closed his eyes, hardly hearing the horrified hiss and buzz that went around his crew as White-Noise translated. “War,” he muttered, unbelieving, and for the first time ever he thought of joining the massed minds not with fear but almost with longing; however bad it might be, how could it be worse than this?
And meanwhile…
Meanwhile, it almost went too far—but, fortunately for everyone, not quite. The Brazilian scoutship’s missile was far too slow to catch the Heechee as they dodged. By the time they were in position to fire again—long before any other human ship could come close—Captain had managed to explain to Klara, and Klara was on the communication circuits again, and the word was out. Not an invasion fleet. Not even a commando raid. A rescue mission—and a warning of what made the Heechee run and hide, and was now for us to worry about.
26
The Thing the Heechee Feared
Vastened as I am I can smile at those pitiful old fears and apprehensions. Not at the time, maybe. But now, ah, yes. The scales are all bigger, and a lot more exciting. There are ten thousand stored Heechee dead ones outside the core alone, and I can read them all. Have read them, nearly all. Go on reading them as I choose, whenever there is something I want to study more closely. Books on a library shelf?
They are more than that. I don’t exactly “read” them, either. It is much more like remembering them. When I “open” one of them, I open it all the way; I read it from the inside out, as though it were part of me. It was not easy to do that, and for that matter hardly anything I have learned to do since I was vastened has come easily. But with Albert to help me and simple texts to practice on, I learned. The first datastores I accessed were only that—just data, no worse than consulting a table of logarithms. Then I had old Heechee-stored Dead Men and some of Essie’s first cases for her Here After franchises, and they were really not very well done. I was never in doubt about which part of what I was thinking was me.
But after we had straightened out the misunderstanding with Captain and I got to consult their own records, then it got hairy. There was Captain’s late love, the female Heechee named Twice. To “access” her was like waking up in the dark and putting on a whole suit of clothes that you couldn’t see—and that didn’t fit you anyway. It was not just that she was female, although that was an immense incongruity. It was not even that she was Heechee and I was human. It was what she knew, and always had known, that neither I nor any other human had guessed. Perhaps Albert had—perhaps that was what had driven him mad. But even Albert’s conjectures had not shown him a race of starfaring Assassins who stored themselves in a kugelblitz to wait for the birth of a new—and for them better—universe.
But once the shock was over, Twice became a friend. She’s really a nice person, once you get past the weirdness, and we have a lot of interests in common. The Heechee library of stored intelligences is not merely Heechee, or even human. There are musty old querulous voices that once belonged to winged creatures from an Antares planet, and slugs from a globular cluster. And, of course, there are the slush dwellers. Twice and I spent a lot of time studying them and their eddas. Time, you see, is what I have plenty of, with my femtosecond synapses.
I have enough time, almost, to want to visit the core itself, and perhaps someday I will. Not for some long time, though. Meanwhile and meanwhile, Audee and Janie Yee-xing have gone there, helping to pilot a mission that will be there for six or seven months—or, as we measure time out here, a few centuries; by the time they come back, Dolly’s presence should no longer be a problem, while Dolly herself is happy enough with her PV career. And Essie has the grace not to be too happy, lacking the sweet physical presence of myself, but seems all the same to have made a good adjustment. What she likes best (next to me) is her work, and she’s got plenty of it—improving the Here After; using the same processes that make CHON-food to make more important organic items…such as, she hopes before very long, spare parts for people who need them, so that nobody need ever steal another person’s organs again…And, when you come right down to it, most people are happy. Now that we’ve borrowed the Heechee fleet and can lift a million people a month with all their effects to any of fifty fine planets waiting to be used. It’s the pioneers and the covered wagons all over again, and a bright career for anyone…
Especially for me.
And then there was Klara.
We met at last, of course. I would have insisted, and anyway in the long run she couldn’t have been kept away. Essie took a launch loop to meet her in orbit and escort her personally, in our own aircraft, down to the Tappan Sea. It made for a little problem in etiquette, I’m sure. But otherwise Klara would have been swamped in media people trying to find out what it was like to be a “captive of the Heechee” or “kidnapped by the wolf-child Wan” or whatever other phrases they chose to bandy…and, actually, I guess she and Essie got along pretty well. It wasn’t as though they had to fight over me. I didn’t exist to fight over, in that sense.
So I practiced my best holographic smiles and designed my best holographic surroundings and waited for her to get there. She came in by herself to the big atrium room where I was waiting—Essie must have had the tact to show her the way and disappear. And when Klara came through the door I could tell by the way she stopped, and gasped, that she had expected me to look a lot more dead.
“Hello, Klara,” I said. It wasn’t much of a speech, but what’s the right thing to say in those circumstances? And she said:
“Hello, Robin.” She didn’t seem to be able to think of anything to add to it, either. She stood looking at me until I thought to ask her to sit down. And I, of course, did a lot of looking at her, in all the multiphased ways we electronically stored intelligences have; but in all those ways she looked pretty damned good. Tired, yes. She’d had some hard times. And dear Klara was not a classic beauty, not with those dark and thick eyebrows and that strong, muscular body—but, yes, she looked fine. I guess the staring session made her nervous, because she cleared her throat and said, “I understand you’re going to make me rich.”
“Not me, Klara. Just giving back to you your share of what we earned together.”
“Seems to have multiplied a lot.” She grinned. “Your, uh—Your wife says I can have fifty million dollars in cash.”
“You can have more than that.”
“No, no. Anyway, there is more—it seems I get shares in a lot of companies, too. Thanks, Robin.”
“You’re welcome.”
And then there was another silence, and then—would you believe it?—the next words out of my mouth were: “Klara, I’ve got to know! Have you been hating me all this time?”
It was the question, after all, that had been on my mind for thirty years.
Even then, the question struck me as incongruous. How it struck Klara I can’t say, but she sat there with her mouth open for a moment, and then she swallowed and shook her head.
And then she began to laugh. She laughed loud and full-bodied, and when she had finished laughing she knuckled the corner of her eye, still chuckling as she said, “Thank God, Robin! At least something hasn’t changed. You’ve died. You’ve got a mourning widow. The world’s on the brink of the biggest changes ever. Some scary creatures are likely out to screw up just everything, and…and…and you’re dead. And what you’re worried about is your own damn feelings of guilt!”
And I laughed, too.
For the first time in, my God, half my life, the last little vestige of guilt was gone. It was hard to identify what it felt like; it had been a long time since I’d known that liberation. I said, still laughing myself, “I know I sound stupid, Klara. But it’s been a long time for me, and I knew you were out there in that black hole with time slowed down—and I didn’t know what you were thinking. I thought maybe you were, I don’t know—blaming me for deserting you—”
“But how coul
d I, Robin? I didn’t know what happened to you. Do you want to know what I was really feeling? I was feeling terrified and numb, because I knew you were gone, and I thought you were dead.”
“And”—I grinned—“you finally get back here and I am!” I could see that she was more sensitive about jokes in that area than I was. “It’s all right,” I said. “Really all right. I’m just fine, and so’s the whole world!”
I really was. I wished I could touch her, of course, but that was beginning to seem part of a remote childhood past; what was present was that she was here, and safe, and the universe was open before us. And when I said so her jaw dropped again. “You’re so damned optimistic!” she blazed.
I was honestly surprised. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“The Assassins! They’re going to come out sometime, and what are we going to do? If they can scare the Heechee, they scare the hell out of me.”
“Ah, Klara,” I said, understanding at last. “I see what you mean. You mean it’s like it used to be for us when we knew the Heechee had been somewhere and might come back, and knew they’d been able to do things we couldn’t hope to do—”
“Exactly! We’re no match for the Assassins!”
“No,” I said, grinning, “we’re not. And we weren’t any match for the Heechee, either—then. But by the time they did come out—we were. With any luck at all we’ll have time before we have to face the Assassins.”
“So what? They’ll still be an enemy!”
I shook my head. “Not an enemy, Klara,” I said. “Just another resource.”
Frederik Pohl has been everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurians), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of Galaxy in the 1950s, he helped set the tone for a decade of SF—including his own memorable stories such as The Space Merchants (in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth). His latest novel is The Cool War. He has also written The Way the Future Was, a memoir of his forty-five years in science fiction. Frederik Pohl was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, and now lives in New York City.