The reason they could be so prompt was that they had maintained a number of ships on permanent standby alert. And those first Heechee to reach us were invaluable. They were the ones who helped us build the Watch Wheel, to stand on sentry duty at the kugelblitz, and helped us locate all the caches and centers of mothballed Heechee apparatus all over the Galaxy…including, often enough, mothballed human Gateway prospectors who had got that far and couldn’t get back.
I should, I think, tell you a little more about the annals of the Heechee, to explain just why they were so fearful.
As a matter of routine, hundreds of Heechee ships were constantly being deployed on voyages of exploration and discovery. The Heechee were as inquisitive as human beings, and as stubbornly determined to find out everything that could be found.
There were a good many theoretical problems in science that made them itch to learn the answers. What was the truth, they wanted to know, behind the “missing mass”—the fact that all the observable matter in the universe did not seem to weigh enough to account for the observed motion of galaxies? Did protons really decay? Was there something before the Big Bang, and if so, what?
Human scientists worried about all these questions, too, in the days before we met the Heechee. The Heechee had a big advantage over those early humans (my meat progenitor included). They could go out and take a look.
So they did. They sent out expeditions to study novae and supernovae and neutron stars and white dwarfs and pulsars. They measured the flow of matter between pairs of close binaries, and they metered the flux of radiation from the infall of gas around black holes. They even learned to look inside the Schwarzschild barrier around black holes, a trick which led to some useful technology later on; and I do not even speak of their equally great curiosity about the ways particles fit together to make atoms, atoms joined into molecules, and molecules became living things like themselves.
I can easily summarize exactly what it was that the Heechee wanted in the way of knowledge. They wanted it all.
But of all their quests none was more urgent, or more assiduously pursued, than the search for intelligent life in the universe other than their own.
Over time, the Heechee found a couple of examples—or almost did.
The first was a chance discovery that brought quick joy and almost instant disappointment. A small, icy planet, hardly worth a second look in the normal course of events, surprised them by showing some curious anomalies in its magnetic field. No one was greatly interested at first. Then, on a routine sweep, a Heechee-manned exploration ship checked out the reports from the instrument-only robot investigators. The planet was more than 200 AU from its parent not-very-bright K-3 star, certainly not the sort of place where you would expect life to develop. Its surface temperature was only about 200 K and nothing stirred on its glacial surface. But when the Heechee investigators sounded the ice, they found great masses of metal buried in it. Echoes showed the metal to be in regular shapes. When, excitedly, the crew called for thermal borers and sent them down to investigate, they found buildings! Factories! Machines!
And nothing living at all.
They faced the disheartening fact that once there had been intelligent life on that planet, well up to early industrial standards by the remnants they disinterred, but it was there no longer.
Dating the ice cores showed that they were half a million years too late to find anyone alive, and that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was a finding by the geologists and geochemists that said, inarguably, that that particular planet could not have evolved in that particular orbit; its composition was like that of Venus, the Earth, and Mars, the kind found only close to a primary.
Something had hurled it so far from its sun that it froze.
Of course, it could have been some astronomical accident like the (however statistically unlikely) near passage of another star. But none of the Heechee could believe that (though they wanted to).
Then they found the second heartbreak.
It wasn’t a heartbreak at once. It was a bright hope that persisted for a long time—more than a century! It began when a Heechee vessel caught the scent of a radio transmission, tracked it down, and found a genuine, incontestable artifact of a highly technological civilization traveling through interstellar space.
It did not have a living crew. It couldn’t have, except perhaps for microbes. The object was a vast, gossamer, metal spiderweb, a thousand kilometers across but so fairy-silk flimsy that the whole thing weighed less than a fingernail.
It did not take the Heechee long to realize what they had. Where the wires joined were transistor-like things and strips of piezoelectric materials. The object was a calculator. It was also a computer, a camera, a radio transmitter, all wonderfully crafted into a gauzy web you could crush into the palm of your hand.
It was a robot sailship, propelled by light.
The proof was certain: There was intelligent life in the universe like the Heechee themselves! Not just intelligent life; it was technological life, starfaring life. They understood at once that this was an ultralight interstellar probe, a starwisp, drifting out to explore the Galaxy by radiation pressure, surveying other stars and reporting back by radio to its makers on their home planet.
But where was the home planet?
The Heechee ship had unfortunately failed to measure the precise alignment of the web when they captured it. Though they knew within a few degrees of where it had pointed, those few degrees encompassed some hundred million stars, far and near.
So for the next century, every Heechee ship that went into space, wherever bound, carried a dedicated radio receiver. It was always on, and it did nothing but listen for the song of another of those starwisps.
And they found them.
The first one was damaged, its orientation no longer perfect—but even that limited the choices to only about a million stars, an improvement of two orders of magnitude. And then they found a fine new one, in perfect working order, zeroed in precisely.
Swarms of Heechee explorers pounced on that corner of the Galaxy. There were still a lot of stars to search, but now only hundreds instead of millions. They searched them all. This one had no planets. Those two were close binaries where no planets could possibly support life, even if planets had existed. These others were too new and bright, too young to have given life a chance to evolve—
And then there was this other one.
It wasn’t prepossessing. It was a cinder, too small and dull to be even a neutron star. True, it was in the right place. True, it did have planets…but it had been a nova hundreds of thousands of years before. All its planets were scorched bare. There was nothing left that could be called a living thing.
But on the fourth planet…there was a line of rubble across a valley that had once been a dam, a tunnel buried inside the collapsed sides of a mountain—yes, this had been the place the starwisps had come from.
And once again the Heechee had got there too late.
It was almost as though, the Heechee thought, someone had been going around the Galaxy wiping out civilizations before the Heechee could get to them.
Or before those civilizations could get living representatives of themselves into interstellar space.
And then the Heechee made one final, terrifying discovery. They sent out an expedition under a wonderful Heechee female named Tangent, and the whole nightmare picture came together for them.
I won’t tell you about Tangent.
The reason for that is that sooner or later Robin will. He doesn’t know that yet. He doesn’t know that he himself will hear it shortly from someone who knew it at first hand. He would know that if he would let me tell him about this person—or, indeed, about some other persons whose presence on Gateway will matter greatly to him. But Robin can be quite obstinate when I try to tell him things he really ought to know.
That is the story; I apologize for the discursions. Let me just add one thing. It is not, exactly, irrelevant.
I
implied, a while ago, that although I “knew” that e to the i times pi power equaled -1, I didn’t understand “why.” I mean, there is no intuitive reason why (the base of the natural logarithms) raised to the power of ((the square root of minus one) times (the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle)) should equal anything in particular at all, much less a simple negative integer like minus one.
I wasn’t quite open about that.
I don’t exactly know why that is, but I do have suspicions. Unfortunately they have to do with phenomena like the “missing mass” and the perplexing question of why we have only three perceptible dimensions in space instead of nine, and Robin simply won’t listen to me when I talk about that, either.
4
Some Parties at the Party
There was one place on Gateway I absolutely had to see again.
After I got tired of brooding over all the things I had to brood over and hearing people say, “Hey, Robinette, you’re looking great!” I went there. It was called Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel 8, Room 51, and for several sick and scary months it had been my home.
I went there all by myself I didn’t want to take Essie away from her old Leningrad buddy, and anyway, the part of my life that was wrapped up in that dirty little hole was not a part she had shared. I stood gazing at it, taking it all in. I even actuated perceptors I don’t usually bother with, because I didn’t want to just see it. I wanted to smell and feel it.
It looked, smelled, and felt crummy, and I almost drowned in the huge, hot flood of nostalgia that washed over me.
Room 51 was the cubicle I had been assigned to when I first came to Gateway—Jesus! Decades and decades ago!
It had been cleaned out some, and redecorated a lot. It wasn’t a hole for a scared Gateway prospector to hide himself and his funk in anymore. Now it belonged to some feeble old geriatric case who had come to Wrinkle Rock because that was where he had the best chance of clinging to his worn-out meat body a while longer. It looked different. They’d fixed it up with a real bed, if a narrow one, instead of my old hammock. There was a shiny new PV commset mounted on the wall, and a foldaway sink with actual running water, and about a million other luxuries I hadn’t had. The geriatrics case had tottered off somewhere else to join the party, no doubt. Anyway, he wasn’t there. I had it all to myself, all the closet-sized claustrophobic luxury of it.
I took a deep “breath.”
That was another big difference. The smell was gone. They’d got rid of the old Gateway fug that soaked into your clothes and skin, the well-used air that everybody else had been breathing—and sweating into, and farting into—for years and years. Now it only smelled a little of green, growing things, no doubt from the plantings that helped the oxygen-replenishment system along. The walls still glimmered with the Heechee-metal shine—blue, only; Gateway had never had any of the other colors.
Changes? Sure there had been changes. But it was the same room. And what a world of misery and worriment I had crammed into it.
I’d lived the way every Gateway prospector lived—counting up the minutes until I would have to take a flight, any flight, or be kicked off the asteroid because my money was gone. Poring over the lists of expeditions that were seeking crew members, trying to guess which one might make me rich—or, really, trying to decide which one might at least not make me dead. I had bedded Gelle-Klara Moynlin in that room, when we weren’t doing it in her own. I had cried myself crazy in it when I came back from the last mission I had shared with her…without her.
It seemed to me that I had lived a longer life right there, in those few lousy months I had spent on Gateway, than in all the decades since.
I don’t know how many milliseconds I spent there, in maudlin nostalgia time, before I heard a voice behind me say, “Well, Robin! You know, I had an idea I might find you mooning around here.”
Her name was Sheri Loffat.
I have to confess that, glad as I was to see Sheri again, I was also glad that Essie was busy hoisting a few with her old drinking buddy just then. Essie is not a jealous woman at all. But she might have made an exception for Sheri Loffat.
Sheri was peering in at me through the narrow doorway. She looked not a minute older than the last time I’d seen her, more than half a century back. She was looking a whole lot better than she had then, in fact, because then she was just out of the hospital after a mission that had gone sour in every way but financial. Now she was looking one other thing besides “good.” She was looking extremely appetizing because what she was wearing, apart from a broad grin, was nothing but a knitted shirt and a pair of underwear panties.
I recognized the outfit immediately. “Like it?” she asked, leaning in to kiss me. “I put it on just for you. Remember?”
I answered indirectly. I said, “I’m a married man now.” That was to set the record straight, but it didn’t keep me from kissing her back as I said it.
“Well, who isn’t married?” she asked reasonably. “I’ve got four kids, you know. Not to mention three grandchildren and a great-grand.”
I said, “My God.”
I leaned back to look at her. She wriggled her way in the doorway and hooked herself by the scruff of her tee shirt to a hook on the wall. That was just what we used to do sometimes, when we were still meat and Gateway was the doorway to the universe, because the asteroid’s rotational “gravity” was so light that hanging was more comfortable than sitting. I did like the outfit. I was not likely to forget it. It was exactly what Sheri had been wearing the first time she came into my bed.
“I didn’t even know you were dead,” I said, to welcome her.
She looked uncomfortable with the subject, as though she hadn’t quite got used to it. “It only happened last year. Of course, I didn’t look quite this young then. So being dead isn’t a total loss.” She put her fingers on her chin, studying me up and down. She commented, “I keep seeing you on the news, Robin. You’ve done well.”
“So did you,” I said, remembering. “You went home with five or six million dollars, didn’t you? From that Heechee toolbox you found?”
“More like ten million, when you counted in the royalties.” She smiled.
“Rich lady!”
She shrugged. “I had a lot of fun with it. Bought myself a couple of counties of ranchland on Peggys Planet, got married, raised a family, died…it was pretty nice, all right. Not counting the last part. But I wasn’t just talking about money, though you’ve obviously got plenty of that. What do they say? ‘The richest man in the universe’? I should have hung on to you while I had the chance.”
I had realized she’d come down off the hook to get closer. Now I discovered I was holding her hand. “Sorry,” I said, letting go.
“Sorry for what?”
The answer to that was that if she needed to ask the question she wouldn’t understand the answer, but I didn’t have to say so. She sighed. “I guess I’m not the lady you’ve got on your mind right now.”
“Well—”
“Oh, that’s all right, Robin. Honest. It was just a kind of for-old-time’s-sake thought. Still,” she went on, “honestly, I’m a little surprised you aren’t with her and that guy—what’s his name—”
“Sergei Borbosnoy?”
But she shook her head impatiently. “No, nothing like that. It’s—wait a minute—yes, Eskladar. Harbin Eskladar.”
I blinked at her, because I knew who Harbin Eskladar was. He’d been pretty famous once. Not that I’d ever met him. Certainly I hadn’t wanted to, at least not at first, because Harbin Eskladar had been a terrorist, and what would my dear Portable-Essie be doing with an ex-terrorist?
But Sheri was going right on: “Of course, I guess you move in pretty high society these days. I know you knew Audee Walthers. And I guess you’re tight with Glare and all those others—”
“Glare?” I was having trouble keeping up with Sheri, but that stopped me cold. Although she’d said it in English, it was a Heechee name.
And suddenly the party began to seem as though it might be fun again. I’d seen the Heechee ship, all right, but it had never occurred to me that there might be Heechee on it.
I don’t think it was polite of me to duck out like that. By the look on her face Sheri didn’t think so either, but I was glad of the excuse. I don’t like to put too much of a strain on Essie’s wonderful absence of jealousy; and, although I said, “See you soon,” when I kissed Sheri good-bye, I didn’t mean it.
In gigabit space and alone again I hollered for Albert. He was there before I knew it. “Yes?”
I said with annoyance, “You didn’t tell me there were Heechee on the Rock. What are they doing here?”
He smiled placidly at me, scratching his ankle. “As to the second question, they have every right to be here, Robin. This party is a reunion for people who were on Gateway long ago, after all. All three of these Heechee have. Very long ago. As to the first part—” he let himself look put-upon “—I’ve been trying to tell you about some of the persons you would be interested in for quite some time, Robin. I didn’t think it would be tactful of me to interrupt. If I may now—”
“You may now tell me about these Heechee! I already know about Eskladar.”
“Oh?” For a moment Albert looked nonplussed. It is not an expression I often see on him. Then he said obediently, “The Heechee ship came direct from the core, and the three particular Heechee who I think would interest you are named Muon, Barrow, and Glare. It is especially Glare who is of interest, for she was a shipmate of Tangent on the expedition to the Sluggard planet.”
That woke me right up. “Tangent!”
“Exactly yes, Robin.” He beamed. “In addition—”
“I want to see them,” I said, waving him quiet. “Where are they?”
The Annals of the Heechee Page 8