The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  “Oh, my God,” she said in strangled tones, and began to vomit profusely.

  When the two boys got her down to the classroom, the schoolthing, which possessed paramedical skills among all its others, reproached them bitterly for letting the poor child drink so much of an unfamiliar juice. As penance they had to escort her to her apartment and stay there with her until a parent returned.

  So both Harold and Sneezy were late for dinner. “Hurry it up, can’t you?” Harold complained, just behind him in the downshaft. “I’m going to get smacked!”

  Sneezy was already hurrying as much as he could, swinging down from one handhold to another on the descending cable. He was not afraid of being smacked. Neither of his parents would strike a child, but he was impatient to see them. There were questions he wanted to ask. As they hurried down the long passageway to the crossway where both their homes were, Sneezy right, Harold left, he was framing the questions in his mind.

  And then they stopped short. Sneezy hissed in surprise. Harold groaned, “Aw, shit.”

  They both heard the piercing metallic-electronic squeal that seemed to go right through bone into brain. To make sure they noticed, the ceiling lights flashed on and off three measured times. And all the voices of all the workthings awoke at once: “Drill!” the nearest ones called to the boys. “Take rest positions at once! Empty your minds! Lie still! This is a Drill!”

  I wish I had a better way of talking to meat people.

  I wish it were possible for me to tell about Sneezy and Oniko and the Wheel as I experienced them. I don’t mean that I experienced them directly. I didn’t; I wasn’t there. But I just as well might have been, because everything that happened on the Wheel, like everything that happened anywhere in the Galaxy, was recorded somewhere in gigabit space, and thus available to those who had been vastened. Like me.

  So, in a certain sense, I was there. (Or “was” there.) But while I was accessing that particular store I was also doing forty-eleven other things, some of them interesting, some of them important, some of them just a lot more of that poking around among the yearnings and sorrows inside my head that I seem to keep on doing all the time. I don’t know how to convey all that.

  I don’t mean that I wasn’t paying attention to the story of the kids. I was. They touched me. There is something infinitely heart-melting, for me anyway, about the courage of kids.

  I don’t mean the physical, fistfight and name-calling kind of courage, like when Sneezy stood up to Harold, though that was very brave (if not actually sociopathic) behavior for a Heechee boy to exhibit. I mean the way a child can stand up to a real danger, maybe even an irresistible and undefeatable danger. It’s futile and hopeless and heartbreaking, like a two-week kitten mewing defiance to an escaped pit bull. It melts me.

  Albert isn’t always tolerant of the way I feel about kids. He tells me sometimes that Essie and I probably should have had children of our own, and then maybe I wouldn’t idealize them the way I do. Maybe so. But regardless of whatever I maybe should have done or possibly wouldn’t be, I do have this sudden rush of liquefaction around the region of the heart (well, the analog, at least, of the physical heart I once had but don’t have anymore) when I see kids doing what they must do in the face of the overwhelming fear.

  Actually, neither Harold nor Sneezy was that frightened at first. A Drill was a Drill. They’d had plenty of Drills before. They flopped where they were. They closed their eyes. They waited.

  This was no Class Two Drill, like the landing of a ship. It was an all-out alert, the kind that happened at random times and had to be carried out perfectly. As soon as the warning whistle quieted down, the rest of the Wheel did, too. The workthings that had no duties turned themselves to standby and stood frozen. The lights dimmed themselves to murk, just enough to make things out. The inertial sensors that monitored the spin of the Wheel gave their mass shifters one more pat into place and shut down; so did the vertical lift cables; so did all the other nonessential inorganic (or no longer organic) machines and intelligences of the Wheel.

  Sneezy and Harold were shut down too, or as close to it as active children can get. Among the required courses for every child in the Wheel’s schoolhalls was practice in what some people used to call “satori,” the blanking of the mind. They were quite good at it. Lying curled like a fetus next to the equally curled Harold, Sneezy’s mind was emptied of everything but the gray-gold, not-warm-not-cold, not-bright-not-dark haze of abandonment of self.

  Or almost.

  Of course, you could never achieve perfection at satori. An attempt to be perfect was itself an imperfection. There were thoughts stirring in Sneezy’s fog. Questions. Questions about Oniko that Sneezy still wanted very much to ask his parents. Questions about whether—by some terrible chance—this Drill might just possibly be no Drill at all but reality.

  The deck of the Wheel felt dead under his cheek. No buzz of air pumps or whine of cable motors. No voices. No rustle or footstep of anyone moving. No irregular, satisfying thump and rumble as the mass shifters worked to keep the Wheel turning true.

  Sneezy waited. As the questions tried to form themselves in his mind, he separated himself from them, letting them dwindle away half formed. Until one question began to recur insistently:

  Why was this particular Drill lasting so long?

  In fact, it was over an hour before the nearest cleanerthing suddenly jerked itself erect again. It pointed its sensor toward the two boys and said, “The Drill is over. You can get up now.”

  They didn’t need to be told, of course. Even before the cleanerthing’s words were spoken the Wheel began to come back to life. Lights sprang up. Distant whines and thumps and shudders said that all the caretaking machinery was turning itself on again. Harold jumped up, grinning. “I guess my dad had to go on duty,” he cried happily; the translation of that remark was, So he won’t remember I was late.

  “Mine too,” said Sneezy; then, struck by a thought: “And probably both of Oniko’s parents had to go on, so probably—”

  “So probably they had to leave her alone anyway.” Harold nodded. “So what was the use of making us stay there? Dumb things!” he said, kicking the cleanerthing as they passed. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” Sneezy said politely, and hurried home.

  As expected, neither parent was there. The housething told him that his father had been called to the Dream Seats and his mother had been caught by the Drill far into the third sector of the Wheel. Both were on their way home.

  His father arrived first, looking again tired. “Where’s your mother?” he asked. It was the housething that answered for Sneezy:

  “Femtowave has been delayed by a slight problem; one of the maintenance circuits was sluggish in coming back on line after the Drill. Shall I prepare dinner?”

  “Of course,” Bremsstrahlung grumbled, tired and irritable. “Why is this, Sternutator? Why haven’t you told the cookthing to start already? And besides,” he said, remembering, “why weren’t you here two hours ago?”

  “Oniko was sick,” Sneezy explained.

  Bremsstrahlung paused, his memory pouch half unslung, on his way to the airbath. “And is that now something that you must worry about? Are you now a medicthing?”

  Sneezy explained about the coconut juice. “We had to take her home. I wanted to leave, Father,” he protested, “but her housethings told us to stay with her, and her Ancestor agreed.”

  Ironically, Bremsstrahlung repeated, “Her ancestor?”

  “No, of course I mean not really hers, Father, but she carries the Ancestor in her pod. Her name is Ophiolite, the Ancestor, I mean.”

  “For a human,” Bremsstrahlung said approvingly, “this Oniko shows considerable intelligence. I have wondered why more humans don’t carry memory pouches. Of course, they don’t require the radiation as we do, but still, the pods are so convenient in other ways.”

  “Yes, but she has an Ancestor in hers.”

  Weary as he was, Bremsstra
hlung was a good father. He sank down on a forkrest, his pod loose beneath him, to explain things to his son. “You must remember, Sternutator, that if a group of Ancestors were inadvertently left behind during the Removal, it must have been very lonely for them. Of course, they would have formed attachments to the first intelligent beings who appeared there, even if they were human.”

  “Yes, but,” said Sneezy, “I don’t have an Ancestor in my pod yet.”

  “Children don’t have Ancestors in their pods,” Bremsstrahlung explained. “Even many adults do not, because the Ancestors are very busy with important work, but when you grow up—”

  “Yes, but,” said Sneezy, “she does.”

  Bremsstrahlung groaned and stood up. Neatly hanging his memory pouch beside the bath door, he begged, “Later, son, please! I’m really tired.”

  It wasn’t just intellectual curiosity with Sneezy. It wasn’t even the jealousy of one kid toward another with a better toy. There were almost moral questions involved, perhaps almost religious ones.

  Both Heechee and humans had learned how to supplement their own brains with machine-stored intelligences, but they went by different routes. Human beings had gone the way of calculators and computers and servo-mechanisms, all the way to the supple and enormous gigabit webs that nurtured such Artificial Intelligences as Albert Einstein. (And, for that matter, me.) The Heechee had never developed A.I. They hadn’t had to. They had learned early on how to store the minds of their dead in machine form. Few Heechee truly, permanently died. They wound up as Ancient Ancestors.

  A human astronomer who desired to calculate the orbital elements of the planets of a double-star system would as a matter of course turn the problem over to a computation facility. A Heechee would employ a battery of dead Ancestors. As a practical matter, one system worked as well as another.

  But it was not entirely a practical matter. Humans didn’t revere their computers. Heechee Ancient Ancestors, on the other hand, deserved—and demanded—a kind of respect.

  Sneezy’s mother came in while his father was still bathing. She listened to his questions and said, rubbing the back of his neck, “After dinner, Sterny, all right? It takes a lot out of your father when he’s on extra shifts in the Dream Seat. And, then, of course, he’s worried.”

  Sneezy gaped. Worried? Fatigued, yes; Sneezy expected that. That was the price a watcher paid, sitting in the Dream Seat for hours on end, trying to sense some alien presence, always fearing that he might some day succeed—as some day, surely, someone would, with consequences no one could guess.

  But worried?

  When at last the cookthing had dinner on the table and his parents were restored and almost relaxed, Bremsstrahlung said heavily, “It was not a planned Drill, Sternutator. Two shift watchers thought they detected something, so the emergency was called.” He writhed his forearms, like a shrug. “What they felt is very uncertain. It was not clear, not strong—but they are good watchers. Of course there had to be a shutdown.”

  Sneezy stopped eating, knife halfway to his mouth. His father said quickly, “But I felt nothing at all when I came on. I am sure of that. No one else did then, either.”

  “There have been false alarms before,” Femtowave said hopefully.

  “To be sure. That’s why there are so many of us: to make sure such alarms are false. It may be a million years before the Assassins come out, you know. Who can tell?” Bremsstrahlung finished his meal quickly, then sat back on his pouch. “Now, Sternutator, what are your questions about your human friend, Oniko?”

  Sneezy rolled his eyes slowly. Oh, yes, he had had a million questions, but the thought that maybe there had been a real signal of emerging Assassins had driven all of them out of his mind. False alarm, all right, but how did any watcher know for certain that any alarm was false?

  But those were the questions his father obviously did not want to discuss. Sneezy searched and came up with one of the things that had been troubling. “Father? It is not just the pod. Oniko has so much ‘money.’ Why are they so ‘rich’?” He used the English words, although they had been speaking Heechee, since their own tongue had no such concepts.

  Bremsstrahlung shrugged his wide, wiry shoulders—it was the Heechee equivalent of a frown. “Human beings,” he said, as though it explained everything.

  It did not. “Yes, Father,” Sneezy said, “but not all human beings have so much ‘wealth.’”

  “No, of course they do not,” his father said. “These particular humans chanced to acquire some Heechee devices. Some of our ‘property,’ Sterny. They didn’t even seek it out. They simply discovered it by chance, and in human practice that gave them ‘ownership,’ which they then traded for ‘money.’”

  Femtowave said pacifyingly, “As far as they knew, the devices were abandoned, of course.” She ticked her tongue to the cookthing, which removed the used utensils and served up their “dessert.” It wasn’t pie or ice cream; it was one of a variety of ropy vines the Heechee ate which both cleared their palates and lubricated their teeth antiseptically after a meal. “The concept of ‘money’ isn’t without value,” Femtowave added, “since it functions as a sort of rough servo-mechanism for social priority-setting.”

  Bremsstrahlung picked a fiber out of his teeth and said indignantly, “Are you proposing that Heechee should take up the same system?”

  “No, no, Bremmy! All the same, it is interesting.”

  “Interesting!” he groaned. “Foolish, I would say. What’s the use of ‘money’? Don’t we have everything we need without it?”

  “Not as much as Oniko has,” Sneezy put in wistfully.

  Bremsstrahlung put down his eating knife and gazed at the boy in despair. When he spoke, it was not to his son but to his wife.

  “Do you see?” he demanded. “Do you see what is happening to our son here? The next thing you know he’ll be asking for an ‘allowance.’ And the ‘crying shame,’” he said, unconsciously using the English expression, since Heechee didn’t cry, “is that we are older and wiser than they! How did we get ourselves into a position where we accommodate our ways to theirs?”

  Femtowave glanced from her husband to her son. Both were upset—in the boy’s case, she was sure, mostly because Bremsstrahlung was; in her husband’s case the reasons were graver.

  “Bremmy dear,” she said patiently, “what’s the use of worrying about these things? We knew what exposing our son to human values meant; we talked it over before we left the core.”

  “Yes, in five minutes altogether,” said her husband moodily.

  “Five minutes was all the time we had.” Femtowave leaned down to whisper to her pod. Obediently it caused the housething to rearrange the wall images of their room. The pleasing monochrome traceries faded, and the nostalgic mural of Home, with its pavilions and terraces overlooking the bays and majestic hills, surrounded them. “Sneezy won’t forget,” she said reassuringly.

  “Really I won’t, Father,” the boy said, his voice tremulous.

  “No. No, of course,” Bremsstrahlung said heavily.

  They finished their dessert-weed in silence. Then, when the housething had cleared everything away, they communed with the Ancestors for a while, letting the weary old dead ones talk, complain, advise. It was a very Heechee thing to do. Slowly Bremsstrahlung calmed down. By Sneezy’s bedtime he felt quite restored. “Sleep now, my son,” he said affectionately.

  “Yes, Father,” said Sneezy. Then, “Father?”

  “What is it?”

  “Do I have to keep on sleeping in a cocoon? Can’t I have a real bed, with blankets and pillows?”

  His father looked at him with puzzlement, before he began to look at him with outrage. “A ‘bed’?” he began, and Femtowave moved to cut off the explosion before it could get started.

  “Now, please, Sternutator,” she said, “not one more word. Go!”

  Sneezy, injured, went off to his room to glower at the cocoon and its dense, soft litter. It was embarrassing to sleep in somethin
g like that when all the other boys had beds. He climbed in, pulled the cocoon closed over him, turned around ten or twelve times to mold the litter to his liking, and fell asleep.

  His parents were unslinging the hammocks in the other room, preparing for their own sleep. Bremsstrahlung was silent, his belly tendons rippling in displeasure. Femtowave, seeing, changed the murals again. The lovely pastels disappeared. On every wall there was now blackness with a few objects visible. To one side, the great sprinkled sprawl of the Galaxy. To the other, the cluster of fuzzy, sulfur-colored objects that were their reason for being there.

  “Don’t you see, my dear?” she said. “None of this matters in comparison with the great purpose we serve. We must never forget why our people Removed to the core in the first place—and why we have come out again.”

  Bremsstrahlung gazed unhappily at the smoky, roiling mass. “Some things do matter,” he answered stubbornly. “Fairness always matters!”

  His wife said gently, “Yes, Bremmy, fairness always matters. But in comparison with the Assassins, it doesn’t matter very much.”

  There’s not a great deal more to say about the children just now. They had an interesting and happy life on the Wheel—for a while.

  Being much of an age, the three of them spent much time together. They did interesting things. They explored the lungs of the Wheel, where tangles of leafy vines grew on the wastes from the sinks and toilets of the Wheel, and sopped up the carbon dioxide both human and Heechee bodies exhaled. They toured the workshops where anything at all could be fixed, from a toy to the Wheel’s tiny fleet of spacecraft—Femtowave worked there, and fondly showed the children around. They poked into the spacecraft themselves, hanging in their docking teats like puppies nursing. They peered into the library, with its tens of millions of socketed and indexed data fans: There on those racks were all the stories humans had ever told, and all the memories of the Heechee Ancestors, and all the dictionaries and compilations and texts of either race—well, not really all, but enough to overwhelm Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko. They visited the zoo, where cats and cows and monkeys and Heechee pets and exotics grazed or hung from bars or rested, chin on paw, to stare back at the staring children. There were only a few dozen organisms represented, but for most of the children they were the only nonsentient beings they had ever seen.