The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  Cassata recovered fast. “The hell I don’t have the clout! That’s an order.”

  I studied him thoughtfully. Then I called, “Albert?” He popped into existence, blinking at me over his pipe. “Transmit a message for me,” I ordered. “Instruct all branches of the Institute that, effective at once, they are to cease cooperation with the Joint Assassin Watch Service and deny any JAWS personnel access to our premises or our data. Reason given: a direct order from Julio Cassata, Major General, JAWS.”

  Cassata’s eyes began to pop. “Now, wait a minute, Broadhead!” he rumbled.

  I turned back to him politely. “You have some comment to make about this?”

  He was perspiring. “You wouldn’t do that,” he said. His tone was funny, half wheedle and half snarl. “We’re all in this together! The Foe is everybody’s enemy!”

  “Why, Julio,” I said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. I thought you were under the impression they were your private property. Don’t worry. I won’t stop the Institute from functioning. It’ll go on with its studies; the scout ships will keep on surveying; we’ll go right on accumulating data about the Foe. We just won’t bother sharing any of this with JAWS anymore. Now. Does Albert send the message or not?”

  He tapped the ash off the end of his cigar for a moment, looking stricken. “No,” he muttered.

  “Sorry? I couldn’t quite hear what you said.”

  “No!” Then he shook his head despairingly. “He’ll blow his stack,” he said.

  But he said “he,” and the only “he” he could have meant was the meat-General Cassata. Who was, of course, himself.

  “He said ‘he,’” I said to Essie when Cassata had gone glumly away.

  She said soberly, “Is interesting, I agree. Doppel-Julio comes to consider meat-Julio separate individual.”

  “He’s turning schizo?”

  “Is turning scared,” she corrected. “Realizes has only limited time to live. Sad little man.” Then she said diffidently, “Dear Robin? Realize thoughts are elsewhere at this moment—”

  I didn’t agree, because it wouldn’t have been polite; nor did I deny it, because it was true. Even while I was quarreling with Julio Cassata I was stealing peeks at the scene in Central Park. My doppel had finally reached Klara and said hello to her, and she was just beginning to say, “Robin! It’s ni—”

  “—but can I make suggestion?”

  “Well, of course you can,” I said, embarrassed. If I’d had blood vessels to redden my face (and a real face to be reddened), I probably would have blushed. Perhaps I did anyway.

  “Suggestion,” she said, “is, go easy.”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding. I would have said “of course” to almost anything she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to, uh—”

  “Know what you would like to do. Only have problem with discrepancy in time scales, right? So really is no hurry at all for you, dear Robin. Can talk a little first?”

  I sat still a moment. (Klara had just got out the “—ce to,” and was parting her lips to begin, “see you again!”) I was by then quite embarrassed. It isn’t easy to be telling one woman that you want very much to talk to another, when you have as uneasy a conscience as I always seem to have about my wife, Essie, and my long-lost love, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

  On the other hand, Essie was absolutely right. There was no hurry at all. She was watching me with love and concern on her face. “Is tough situation for you, eh, dear Robin?” she put in.

  The only useful thing I could think of to say was, “I love you a lot, Essie.”

  She didn’t look loving in return, she looked exasperated. “Yes, of course.” She shrugged. “Don’t change subject. You love me, I love you, both have no doubt of this; is not relevant to present discussion. Discussion is how you feel about very nice lady whom you also love, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, and complications arising therefrom.”

  It sounded worse when she spelled it out. It did not make me any more comfortable. “We’ve had that discussion a million times!” I groaned.

  “So why not one million times more? Get comfortable, dear Robin. Have at least fifteen, maybe eighteen hundred milliseconds before Klara finishes saying what nice surprise is to see you again. So we talk, you and I, unless you don’t want?”

  I thought it over and gave up. I said, “Why not?” And indeed there was no reason.

  There was also no reason not to get comfortable. As Essie said, we had talked this out many times before, all one night and edging up on most of the next day once. That had been a long time ago—oh, billions of seconds—and I had been talking to the real Essie, the flesh-and-blood meat one. (Of course, I was flesh and blood at the time myself.) We were newly married at the time. We had been sitting on the veranda of our house, sipping iced tea and watching the sailboats on the Tappan Sea, and it had really been an easing, loving talk.

  Obviously Essie remembered that long-ago meat-person conversation as well as I did, because when she got us comfortable, that was where she got us. Oh, not “really” in the sense that we were physically there—but, really, what does “really” mean? I could see the sailboats, and the evening summer breeze was warm.

  “This is nice,” I said appreciatively, feeling myself beginning to relax. “Being a disembodied datastring does have its advantages.”

  Essie grunted complacent agreement. She gazed affectionately around our old home and said: “Last time did this were drinking tea. Want something stronger this time, Robin?”

  “Brandy and ginger,” I said, and a moment later our faithful old maid, Marchesa, appeared with a tray. I took a long sip, thinking.

  I thought too long for Essie’s patience. She said, “So get on with it, dear Robin. What is frying your head? Afraid to talk to Klara?”

  “No! I mean,” I said, swallowing my quick indignation, “no. That’s not it. We already did talk, back when she and Wan showed up with the Heechee ship.”

  “True,” Essie agreed noncommittally.

  “No, really! That part’s all right. We got straightened out on the bad things. I’m not worrying that she’ll blame me for dumping her in the hole, if that’s what you mean.”

  Essie sat back and regarded me seriously. “What I mean, Robin,” she said patiently, “is not important at all. Is what you mean that we wish to uncover. If not confrontation between Klara and you, what? Are worried she and I will scratch eyes out? Wouldn’t happen, Robin!—apart from technical difficulties arising from fact that she is meat, I am only soul.”

  “No, of course not. I’m not worrying about her meeting you…exactly.”

  “Ah! And inexactly?”

  “Well…what if real-Essie runs into her?”

  Portable-Essie looked at me in silence for a moment, then took a thoughtful pull at her own drink. “Real-Essie, hah?”

  “It was only a thought,” I apologized.

  “Understand that. Wish to understand more precisely. Are asking me if meat-me is likely to show up on Wrinkle Rock?” she inquired.

  I thought that over. I wasn’t sure exactly what I did mean. I hadn’t meant to say anything at all about it…of course, as old Sigfrid von Shrink used to tell me, it’s the things I say that I didn’t mean to say that say the most.

  And it was true that there was a real touchy, delicate bit here. Portable-Essie is only a doppelganger. Real-Essie, meat-Essie, is still alive and well.

  She’s also human. What with Full Medical and all, although she is getting along in years she is not just a woman, she is a really handsome, sexy, normal one.

  She is also my wife. (Or was.)

  She is also a wife whose husband is in no shape to provide her with, as they say, the benefits of consort.

  All of that is already a nagging kind of worry that adds to all the other nagging worries Sigfrid (and Albert, and Portable-Essie, and just about everybody else I know) is always telling me I shouldn’t beat my breast about. Their advice doesn’t do much good; I guess I can’t help it. But there
’s more. Meat-Essie is also an exact duplicate of Portable-Essie—or, to put it more accurately, she is the original of that exact duplicate who is Portable-Essie, my faithful wife, lover, advisor, friend, confidante, and co-construct in gigabit space.

  So I know her very well. Worse than that, she knows me—even better—because she’s not only all those things I just mentioned, she is also my, well, my creator.

  Since Essie is better known in some circles as Dr. S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead, one of the world’s great authorities on data processing of any kind, she herself wrote most of our programs. When I say the copy is exact I mean exact. Essie even updates herself—I mean, meat-Essie revises Portable-Essie from time to time, to make sure the exactness is always up to the moment. So my Portable-Essie is in no way different, in any way that I can detect, from meat, or real, Essie…

  But I never see meat-Essie. I couldn’t handle it.

  Call the reason for that whatever you like. Tact. Jealousy. Loopiness. Whatever it is, I am willing to accept as a fact of life that it is better that I don’t see the meat original of my dear wife. I have a very clear idea of what I would learn if I did. Under the circumstances, either she takes a lover now and then or she is crazier than I believe possible.

  I am willing to accept that this happens. I will even concede that it is fair. But I don’t want to know about it.

  So I said to Portable-Essie, “No. I don’t think meat-Essie would be jealous enough to matter if she were here, and I don’t think Klara would, and anyway I don’t want to know where Essie is or what she’s doing—not even negatively,” I added swiftly as Portable-Essie opened her mouth, “so don’t tell me what she is doing, even if it’s something I would like to hear. It’s not that at all.”

  Essie looked doubtful. She took another pull at her drink, with that look she gets when she is trying to work out the wiring architecture of the labyrinthine processes of my mind.

  Then she shrugged. “Fine, accept what you say,” she said decisively. “Is not that which is making you gloopy this time. So what then is reason? Is curiosity about Klara Moynlin, where has been all these years, why is Dane Metchnikov with her?”

  I looked up. “Well, I did wonder—”

  “No need to wonder! Is quite simple. After encounter with you, Klara wished to go away somewhere. Went very many places for long time. Ultimately went very far. Went back into black hole had just escaped from, rescued others in party—Metchnikov included.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  For some reason that didn’t seem to satisfy Essie. She gave me an irritated look. Then she said slowly, “Think you are telling truth, Robin. Is not Klara is on your mind. Yet is clear you have been quite moody lately. Will say, if you can, what it is?”

  “If you don’t know, how can I?” I said, suddenly angry.

  “Meaning,” she sighed, “that as original writer I am in better position to overhaul your program, pick out bugs, make happy again?”

  “No!”

  “No,” she agreed, “of course not. Have long agreed to leave old Robinette Broadhead program alone, bugginess and all. So then is only old-fashioned method of debugging. Talk. Talk it out, Robin. Say first word that comes into mind, just like for old Sigfrid von Shrink!”

  And I took a deep breath and confronted the subject I had been spending a lot of time avoiding. I sighed:

  “Mortality!”

  Several thousand milliseconds later I was back in Central Park, watching Gelle-Klara Moynlin let go of her companions and move toward doppel-me, and wondering just why I had said that.

  I hadn’t intended to. I don’t intend to describe the long, circular conversation I had with Essie after that, either, because although I do these things, I don’t take much pleasure in talking about them. It got nowhere. It had nowhere to go. I had no reason to worry about mortality because, as Essie had wisely pointed out, how can you die when you’re already dead?

  Funnily, that didn’t cheer me up at all.

  Watching Klara didn’t, either, so I sought other entertainment while I waited for either Klara or doppel-me to say something interesting in their glacier-slow way. It had been news to me that Audee Walthers III was on the Rock, and I sought him out.

  That wasn’t much better.

  He was there, all right, or almost. Being meat, he was just getting there. He was in the process of disembarking, and it was not very entertaining to observe him slowly, g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y, pulling himself up out of the docking hatch onto the floor of the bay.

  To make conversation, I said to Essie, “He doesn’t look a bit different.” He didn’t. Froggy faced, with solid, trustworthy eyes, he was exactly the same man he had been thirty and more years before when I saw him last.

  “Has been in core, naturally,” said Essie. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me—to see if I was going to do anything gloopy again, I supposed. So I wasn’t sure, for a second, which of us she meant when she added, “Poor guy.”

  I gave her a noncommittal grunt. We weren’t the only persons present; there were even meat people there, curious to see the ship that had been where few ships containing humans had ever boldly gone. Watching them, and Audee, was about as exciting as watching moss grow, and I began to fidget. Audee wasn’t on my mind. Klara was on my mind. Essie was on my mind. Julio Cassata was on my mind and, most of all, my own slippery, uneasy internal worries were on my mind. What I wanted very badly was something to take my mind off all the things that were on my mind. Standing around among the statues wasn’t doing the trick. “I wish,” I said, “I could hear his story.”

  “Go ahead, then,” Essie invited.

  “What? Oh, you mean start a doppel so when he comes out—”

  “No doppel, dummy,” said Essie. “See? Audee is wearing pod. Pod contains Ancient Ancestor, no doubt. Ancient Ancestor is not meat but stored intelligence, almost as good as you and me. So ask Ancestor, why don’t you?”

  I gazed with love at my love. “What a highly intelligent person you are, Essie,” I said fondly, “and adorable, too.” And I reached out to the pod. Because I really did want to hear what had happened to Audee while he was gone. Almost as much as I wanted—wanted—wanted to know, really, just what it was that I did want.

  7

  Out of the Core

  There was a real good reason why I wanted to hear about Audee’s trip to the core right then.

  Maybe from the strictly linear view of a meat person, it seems that, shoot, this is just one more damn digression. Linearly, maybe it is. I’m not linear. I do parallel processing, maybe a dozen things at a time in an average millisecond, and there was a really marked parallel going on here.

  I’m sure Audee knew about the parallel when he volunteered to ride a Heechee ship back into the core. He probably hadn’t thought it all out. He could have had only a tentative idea of what he was letting himself in for. But there’s the parallel: Whatever it was going to turn out to be, he no doubt figured it would be better than trying to straighten out his life. Audee’s life was as tangled, almost, as my own, for he had two loves, too.

  So Audee took his chances, and his departure. He also took along with him our friend Janie Yee-xing, who was one of his loves. But that, as you will see, didn’t last.

  Audee was a pilot by profession. A hot pilot. Audee had flown airbodies on Venus, superlights on Earth, shuttles to the Gateway asteroid, private-party jet charters on Peggys Planet, and long-lines interstellar spacecraft to everywhere. In Audee’s view, one Heechee ship was like any other Heechee ship, and he had no doubt he could fly anything. “Can I set course?” he asked the Heechee, Captain, because he wanted to start out on the right foot as a willing worker.

  Captain wanted to start out on the right foot, too, so he obligingly waved the ship’s pilot out of the way, and Audee took his seat.

  Heechee seats are made for people wearing pods between their legs. Human beings don’t usually do that, so most Heechee ships converted to human use have webbing stretched ac
ross the wings of the seat. This one, of course, had none.

  Audee did not intend to start out by complaining. He made the best of it. He rested his bottom on the V-shaped seat, read off the course settings, and gave the control wheels the customary muscular shove into position. It took strength. It had been a while since Audee had had to do that; the new Earth-built ships were made easier to pilot. To make conversation, he panted, “A lot of the old-timers wondered about these wheels.”

  “Yes?” said Captain politely. “What about them, please?”

  “Well, why are they so hard to turn?”

  Captain glanced at his crewmates in puzzlement, then back at Audee. He reached out a negligent fingertip to touch the wheel. It moved easily. “What is hard?” he asked, hissing in the Heechee manner that expressed either annoyance or concern.

  Audee looked at the slight, slim figure of the Heechee. He coaxed the wheel back until the right-on vertical markers flashed shocking pink. It took as much muscle as ever.

  As he reached for the starter-teat, he swallowed hard. It had become clear to him that the trip was going to be full of surprises.

  The ship shuddered slightly, and the viewscreen blurred into the mottled gray that showed they were already going faster than light. No further action of the pilot would be necessary for some time, but Audee was reluctant to get up, for as long as he sat in the pilot’s seat he felt some sense of being in control of what was going on. He tried making a little more conversation.

  “We always wondered about those controls,” he offered. “You know, because there are five of them? Some of the big brains thought you Heechee believed in five-dimensional space.”