The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

“They’re on Level Jane, Robin, in the old gymnasium; it’s a recreation room now. But mayn’t I also tell you about the others? Eskladar you know about, and I suppose you know about Dane Metchnikov, too, and—”

  “First things first, Albert,” I commanded. “Right now I want to see somebody who actually knew Tangent!”

  He looked stricken. “Please? At least the message from Mrs. Broadhead?”

  He hadn’t mentioned a message before. “Well, sure,” I said. “What are you waiting for?”

  He looked indignant, but what he said—in exactly Essie’s tone, with exactly Essie’s inflections—was: “Tell old gloopy Robin is okay see old sweetheart but only look, don’t touch.”

  I think I may have started to flush. I don’t think Albert could have seen it, though, because I waved him away as he finished speaking, and I was on my way to Level Jane.

  So conscience doth make cowards of us all…and make us deaf, too, even to things we really ought to hear.

  I’ll put a girdle round the Earth in forty milliseconds whenever I want to, so to get from Level Babe down to Level Jane took, basically, no time at all. Especially since (as I keep on reminding) I wasn’t really on Level Babe in the first place, and wasn’t on Level Jane when I got there.

  But what seems like no time at all to a meat person can be quite a stretch for somebody like me. I had time to wonder about a couple of things.

  Had I heard right? Was my wife Essie actually with Harbin Eskladar? True, the time of terrorism was long over. All of those monstrous people who burned and bombed and destroyed were long irretrievably dead, or in prison, or reformed, and the reformed ones like Harbin Eskladar were, after all, back in the population. They’d paid their debt to society.

  The thing was, I couldn’t believe that Essie would have thought they had paid their debt to her. Never mind that their fooling around had very nearly killed her twice, and had had every intention of killing us both a third time but had missed. It wasn’t a personal matter with Essie. It was (I thought) exactly the same as with me: The terrorists that had blighted the already miserable Earth, back in the days when there wasn’t enough of anything to go around and thousands of twisted people tried to redress the situation by making sure there was less of everything for everybody, were not mere criminals. They were filth. It was true that Eskladar (I vaguely remembered) had finally come over to the side of the good guys in the white hats. Had even turned in some of the biggest and rottenest of the leaders, thus saving a lot more lives and property than he himself had ever damaged.

  But still…

  When I saw the three Heechee, I forgot about Eskladar. Fortunately they weren’t meat (if those skeletal Heechee could ever be called “meat”). They were Ancient Ancestors, and that was good, because it meant I could talk to them.

  I would not have known the place they were in if Albert hadn’t mentioned that once it had been the Gateway gymnasium. It didn’t look like a gymnasium anymore. It was a sunny little room (sunlight cooked out of electronic tubes, of course), with tables and chairs, and there were people all over it. The human people had drinks in their hands. The Heechee don’t drink. They nibble things in the same manner, and for the same reasons; what they like are sort of mushroomy growths with a high intoxication index, and these Heechee had flat bowls of the nibble-stuff in front of them. “Hello,” I said breezily, sliding up close. “I’m Robinette Broadhead.”

  I do get a certain amount of deference. The people around made room for me ungrudgingly, and the female of them flexed her wrists in courteous greeting. “We had hoped to meet you, of course,” she said. “We know your name, for every Heechee does.”

  They had learned the custom of shaking hands, and we did it. These Ancient Ancestors were fresh out of the core—had started nearly eleven years ago, by our clocks, but only a matter of weeks by theirs. Most of that time had been spent crossing deep space from the core to Earth. I intimated my surprise at seeing Heechee on what I had always considered private property of the human race, and one of the machine-stored humans said: “Oh, but they’ve got every right to be here, Mr. Broadhead. Every person who ever served on Gateway was included in the invitation to this party, and each one of them did serve here, once.”

  Now, that was a creepy feeling. Because the last previous time a living (or even machine-stored) Heechee had been on Gateway was something like 400,000 years in the past.

  “So you’re the ones who left us the ships,” I said, smiling as I lifted a glass to them. They responded by holding bits of mushrooms between fingertips, aimed generally in my direction, and the female said:

  “Muon left what you call the Food Factory out in your what you call the Oort Cloud, yes. Barrow actually left the ship on your planet Venus that your Sylvester Macklen discovered. I left nothing; I only visited this system once.”

  “But you were with Tangent,” I began, and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and there was my dear Portable-Essie.

  “Robin, dear?” she began.

  “Tore yourself away from Harbin Eskladar, have you?” I said genially. “I’m glad you’re here. This is Glare—”

  She was shaking her head in puzzlement. “Have not been with this Harbin Eskladar. Is no matter. Wish to make sure you are aware—”

  “You didn’t understand,” I said, all excited. “This is Tangent we’re talking about. Could you tell us about that trip, Glare?”

  “If you wish—”

  And Essie said, “But please, Robin, is certain matters to be considered in this matter. Dane Metchnikov has requested lawyer.”

  That halted me for a moment, because I had put Dane Metchnikov so far out of my mind that I hadn’t thought of the reasons why he might want to talk to a lawyer. About me. It was a downer, but I shrugged. “Later, my darling, please.”

  Essie sighed, and I prepared myself for the story.

  You can’t blame me, really. The story of Tangent was important. If it hadn’t been for her expedition, everything would have been very different. Not just Heechee history. All history. In fact, human history might have been so different that there might well never have been any. So I put everything aside to hear Glare’s story of that famous voyage, and I didn’t give another thought to whose presence on the asteroid the presence of Dane Metchnikov implied.

  5

  The Tide at Its Crest

  The Heechee were great explorers, and in all the annals of the Heechee the most famous voyage of all was Tangent’s.

  It was a well-planned trip, and it had a wonderful leader. Tangent was very wise. It was her wisdom, as a matter of fact, that caused the Heechee to run away from the Gateway asteroid and nearly everything else.

  It wasn’t hard for Tangent to be wise. She had her own considerable knowledge and experience, plus those of the living members of her crew, like Glare. And best of all, she had twelve or thirteen dead people to contribute their smarts to her own. To all this she added an awful lot of courage, enterprise, and compassion. You would have liked her—not counting that she did look pretty funny to human eyes. She couldn’t help that, of course, being a Heechee.

  When I say Tangent was an explorer, I don’t mean that she went hunting for new bits of geography, like Magellan or Captain Cook. Tangent’s explorations didn’t involve geography at all. Long before Tangent was born, the Heechee’s huge spacegoing telescopes had done all the geography the Heechee would ever need. They had spied out every star, and nearly every planet, in all the Galaxy—several hundred billion pieces of geography in all, every one photographed and spectroscoped and catalogued in the central datastores.

  So Tangent didn’t have to trouble herself with maps and surveys. She had more interesting things to think about.

  What Tangent explored was creatures. Living beings. Tangent’s mission was to study the organic things that inhabited some of that geography.

  The other thing to remember about Tangent is that, by Heechee standards, she was breathtakingly beautiful.

  I don’t persona
lly happen to share Heechee standards. Heechee look like Heechee to me, and I wouldn’t marry one on a bet. To me Tangent would have looked like something out of my childhood in the Food Mines in Wyoming. The way we celebrated Halloween in my childhood was with pumpkins and goblins; and one of the most popular figures, pulled out of the closet every October by every grade-school teacher, was a cardboard skeleton, arms and legs jointed, skull-faced, every bone articulated.

  Tangent looked a lot like one of those figures, except that she was real. She actually lived. You couldn’t see between her bones. Like all the Heechee, her bones were covered by a tough, dense, muscled skin about as voluptuous to the touch as an acorn squash. Because she was female, she was bald—males sometimes had a little fur on their scalps, females almost never. She had eyes that no popular songwriter would ever find rhymes for, because, basically, they looked terrible; the pupils were blotchy blue, and the overall color of the eyes was more or less pink. Her limbs were about as thick as a six-year-old famine victim’s, though nowhere near that sexy—to a human being, anyway. Her pelvis was wide. Her legs came down off the ends of it, and between those pipestem legs she wore the typical Heechee survival kit. That was a pear-shaped pod that generated the microwave flux that they needed to stay healthy, as terrestrial plants need sunlight, and in addition contained all sorts of useful or merely enjoyable tools and sundries. Including the stored minds of dead ancestors, which the Heechee used instead of computers.

  Sounds ravishing, doesn’t it?

  No, it doesn’t. But beauty is in the eyes of the cultural norm. To Heechee eyes (those glittery, pink, reptilian things!), especially to male Heechee eyes, Tangent was a knockout.

  To Heechee ears, even her name was kind of sexy. She had taken the name “Tangent,” as all Heechee got their adult names, as soon as she was old enough to show an interest in any abstract thing. In her case the interest was in geometry. But the Heechee language provided many opportunities for puns and plays on words, and she was quickly called by a nickname, a word very much like “tangent” which can roughly (and politely) be translated as “that-which-causes-drooping-things-to-straighten.”

  None of this had anything to do with her qualifications as a leader of exploration parties, but those were equally impressive. She was a credit to the Heechee race.

  This made the fact that she had a large part to play in their downfall even more traumatic.

  On Tangent’s historic trip, her command was a huge Heechee ship. It carried instruments and devices of a thousand kinds, and a crew of ninety-one. That included Glare, who was the penetration pilot. It wasn’t just a very large ship, it was a very special one. Tangent’s ship was purpose-designed, and its purpose was tailored to her special needs.

  It could land on a planet.

  Hardly any Heechee interstellar ships could do that, or ever needed to. They were designed to go into orbit around a planet and leave the problems of reentry and takeoff to specialized landing craft. Tangent’s was an exception. It would not exactly “land,” because the planet she was investigating hardly had a solid core to land on, apart from a lump of metallic hydrogen 2,000 kilometers inside its freezing, crushing, slushy atmosphere. But it had something more important to the Heechee:

  It had life.

  There was life on Tangent’s ship, too. Every member of the crew of ninety-one was a specialist in one of the many varied kinds of operations that would be required. My new friend Glare, for instance, the penetration pilot, was the one who would guide the ship down into the frigid, sludgy, dense “atmosphere” of the Sluggard planet. It was a skill few Heechee had, and her training had been extensive. So there was a lot of life on that ship, and lusty, roaring life at that. The Heechee weren’t emotionless machines. In their own peculiar Heechee way, they were as horny and as temperamental as human beings. This occasionally made problems for them, just as it does for humans.

  The three male Heechee who constituted Tangent’s particular problem in that respect were named Quark, Angstrom 3754, and Search-and-Say.

  I don’t mean you to believe that these were their precise names, even if you were to translate them literally from the Heechee. Those are just as close as I know how to come. Quark was named after a subatomic particle; Angstrom 3754 was named after a color of that wavelength; and Search-and-Say was a command given to their ancestral databases when they wanted to find out what was available.

  Tangent thought they were a neat bunch of guys. Among the three of them they embodied all the Heechee manly virtues. Quark was brave, Angstrom was strong, and Search-and-Say was gentle. Any one of them would have made a fine mate. Since Tangent’s mating time was coming up, it was good that a male was available who would make a perfect mate.

  The Heechee race was at the crest of its flood tide. There is nothing in human history that approaches the vastness and majesty of the Heechee epic. Dutch merchants, Spanish dons, and English queens, centuries ago, sent adventurers out to capture slaves, collect spices, mine gold—to discover and to loot all of the unexplored world. But that was only one single world.

  The Heechee conquered billions of worlds.

  Now, that has a cruel sound. The Heechee were not cruel. They deprived no natives of anything they valued, not even clay tablets or cowrie shells.

  For one thing, it wasn’t necessary. The Heechee never had to enslave a native population to extract precious ores. It was much easier to locate an asteroid of the proper composition, then tow it to a factory that would swallow it whole and excrete finished products. They didn’t even need to grow exotic foods, or rare spices, or pharmaceuticals. Heechee chemistry could sample any organic matter and duplicate it from its elements.

  The other reason they weren’t ruthless toward natives is that there almost never were any natives.

  In all the Galaxy, the Heechee found fewer than 80,000 worlds with life anywhere above the prokaryote stage. And, of planets inhabited by civilized sentients comparable to themselves, none at all.

  There were a few near misses.

  One of the near misses was the good old planet Earth. They missed because the time was out of joint; they were about half a million years too early. On Earth, the closest thing to intelligence at that time was inside the hairy, sloped skull of a stooped and smelly little primate we now call Australopithecus. Too soon, the Heechee mused regretfully when they found them; so they took a few samples and went away. Another near miss was a handless, tubby creature that lived in a swill on the planet of an F-9 star not far from Canopus. If they weren’t exactly intelligent, they had evolved, at least, as far as superstition. (And stayed there; when human beings found them, they christened them the “Voodoo Pigs.”) There were vanished traces of extinct civilizations here and there, some of them puzzlingly fragmentary. There were a number of potentially interesting ones that might be expected to reach the point of social institutions some time in the next million years…

  And then there were the ones Tangent was investigating now. They called them “the Sluggards.”

  The Sluggards were really quite intelligent. They had machines! They had governments. They had a language—they even had poetry. The Sluggards were not the only race the Heechee had found with some of such things, but they were by all odds the most promising.

  If only one could talk to them!

  So Tangent’s ship settled itself in orbit, and the explorers gazed down at the turbulent planet below. Said Angstrom to Tangent, “Ugly-looking planet. It reminds me of the place where the Voodoo Pigs lived, remember?”

  “I remember,” Tangent said fondly. In fact, she remembered well enough that she let herself lean against Angstrom’s exploring hand, which was delicately tweaking the ropy tendons of her back in the way she knew well.

  Said Search-and-Say jealously, “It is not in the least like that planet! That one was hot; this one freezes gases. On this one we couldn’t breathe even if it were warm enough, because the methane would poison us, while among the Voodoo Pigs we could walk about even
without masks—except for the smell, anyway.”

  Tangent touched Angstrom affectionately. “But we didn’t mind the smell, did we?” she asked. Then, considering, she stroked Search-and-Say as well. Although she was missing nothing of the view of the planet and was quite aware of the clicks and wheeps of the ship’s sensors, which were busy drinking in data from the instruments that had been left on the planet many years before, she also missed nothing of the sexual innuendos.

  Tangent said kindly, “Both of you have work to do—Quark too, and so do I. Let’s do it.”

  Actually (Glare said, rubbing her abdomen nostalgically), the eighty-seven crew members not directly involved were rather touched by Tangent’s romance. They liked her. They wished her well. Besides, all the Heechee world loved lovers, just like ours.

  By the end of the second day of the voyage, Search-and-Say reported peevishly that the Ancestors were not only ready but positively clamorous to talk to Tangent. She sighed and took her seat in the control cabin. What she was sitting on mostly was her pod; her seat was so constructed that her pod was plugged in directly to all the Ancestral pods on the ship. It was a useful arrangement. It wasn’t always a comfortable one.

  The Ancient Ancestors had neither sight nor hearing, being only stored intelligences in a databank, just like me. But the brightest and most experienced of them learned to read the electron-flow of optics or instrumentation almost as well as with ears and eyes. The most senior Ancestor aboard was a long-dead male named Flocculence. Flocculence was a VIP. He was the most valuable person aboard—perhaps even more valuable than Tangent herself—because before his death Flocculence had actually visited this planet.

  Tangent opened her ears to the Ancestors. There was an immediate babble of voices. Every Ancestor in the ship’s store wanted to talk. The only one of them that had the right to talk just then, though, was Flocculence. He quickly hushed the others.

  “I have been monitoring the recordings,” he said at once. “Nine of the recording channels we left in place have no data—I don’t yet know if they malfunctioned, or if the Sluggards simply never visited those locations. The other fifty-one, however, are full; they average nearly three hundred thousand morphemes each.”