“Oh, boy! I’m with you on that one, okay? And if it’s nice, maybe you can buy it like you said, Oniko!”
The shuttle took them down through the buffeting air to a loop on New Guinea. Then came the longest leg of the trip, stratospheric jet to Faa-Faa-Faa Airport in Papeete. As a special treat for the newcomers, the human principal of the school met them and took them across to the neighbor island by boat. “Look there,” she said, holding Oniko’s hand as the children clung to the seats of the open inertial-drive whaler. “Just around the point, inside the lagoon, you see those white buildings on the beach? With the taro patch on one side, on the side of the mountain, and the papaya plantation on the other? That’s your school.”
She didn’t mention the other, grimmer buildings farther up the side of the mountain. Harold was too busy being sick over the side of the boat to ask about them, and Sneezy too consumed with tearless homesickness for the distant core, and Oniko too bludgeoned by Earth’s harsh gravity to respond to anything at all.
For Oniko it was all painful, if not indeed threatening to her health. She was crushed. On Earth her slim body did not weigh more than thirty kilos, but that was twenty-odd more than her unpracticed bones and muscles had ever been required to carry before.
All of the refugee children had needed preparation for Earth’s gravity after spending time on the Watch Wheel. For the whole long flight to Earth they had been made to drink calcium-laden things like milk, and hot chocolate, and, weirdest of all, “cheese soup,” as well as having to exercise three hours each day in the spinning treadmills and with the springy machines. For most of the children it was simply a wise precaution. For Oniko it was the only alternative to snapping bones. The doctor programs had special plans for her, and she had spent hours on end on a table while humming sonar coaxed her bones to grow stronger and electric pulses made each muscle twitch and jump. As they neared Earth orbit, the doctorthing assured her that she had recalcified quite a lot. She should be safe against fractures if she exercised reasonable care, and used a walker, and did not jump from any height. But if the bones had been propped up for their ordeal, not nearly enough had been done for her muscles. Every step tired her. Every time she stood up she ached. So the exotic thing that gave her most pleasure in her first days at Western Polynesian Preparatory School was the lagoon.
The water was scary as well as joyous, to be sure. There were living creatures under those pretty green wavelets! But she accepted the schoolthing’s promise that none of them could hurt her, and when she immersed herself in the tepid, briny lagoon, there was hardly any weight at all on her bones. She floated around in it blissfully every chance she got. In the morning before class, during recess, even after dark when the (also wondrous, also scary) “Moon” lit the ripples for her.
For Sneezy the sea was neither greatly exciting nor any fun at all. He had seen seas on his own planet, inside the core. Why not? They were not considered particularly recreational, because Heechee couldn’t swim. Bone and muscle don’t float well without a sizable wrapping of fat, and there were no fat Heechee. So, to keep Oniko company, he allowed himself to be tempted into a rubber boat sometimes. But only rarely would he let himself drift into waters deeper than his own height.
Harold, at first, found a home on Moorea.
Earth was very much like Peggys Planet, he explained to their classmates. No, said some of the classmates, he had it the wrong way around: Peggys Planet was very much like Earth. Indeed it was, actually. That was what had made human beings so anxious to colonize it in those early days when the fecundity of human bodies outran the carrying capacity of the planet. Well, maybe, said Harold reasonably, but any half-wit could see at once that Peggys Planet was better.
Harold found it disappointing, not to say outrageous, that other children showed so little interest in hearing that from him.
The three children from the Wheel shared one special handicap. They were outsiders. They were the newest kids in school, entered well after the beginning of the term. Friendships and alliances had long since formed. Of course, the human principal had invited every student in the school to show special courtesy and consideration to the waifs from intergalactic space. The students did, for a while. It didn’t last. Once the questions had been asked (“Did you see any of the Foe? When are they going to come out?”) and the lack of satisfying answers had been noted, the powerful lines of roommateship and fellow-soccer-player status tightened up and squeezed them out. Not meanly or violently. But out.
It was worse for Sneezy and Oniko. Sneezy was the only Heechee in the school and Oniko the only child who had been raised in Heechee ways. They were simply too alien to easily be best friends with anyone else. Harold had no such problem at first. Harold had only the problem of himself. He gazed up at Moorea’s startling central peak and said, “You call that a mountain? Why, on Peggys Planet there’s a peak fourteen kilometers tall!” He watched scenes from New York City and Brasilia and said disdainfully that on Peggys Planet people kept their cities clean. After the antiquities class discussed Pompeii and the Great Wall of China, Harold was heard to say in recess that on Peggys Planet, thank heaven, people knew enough to throw old junk away. Since there were students in the school from Khatmandu, New York, Brasilia, Beijing, and Naples, Harold’s disparagement of their local tourist attractions did nothing to endear him. The schoolthings pleaded benignly, but the students were under no obligation to respect their wishes.
In the long run, Harold was more of an outsider than either Oniko or Sneezy. Those two studied hard. When they had spare time, they used it at the datamachines, learning even things they were not required to learn. Both were quickly at the top of their classes, and Harold, straining to maintain a respectable + average, was jealous. Ultimately he was furious. When the schoolthing handed out test results one day, the light bulb went on over Harold’s head, and he leaped from his seat and cried, “Schoolmaster! It isn’t fair. Naturally those two get better marks, because they’re cheating!”
“Now, Harold.” The schoolthing smiled patiently—it was the end of the day’s lessons, and all the students were getting restless, if not irritable. “Certainly Sternutator and Oniko do not cheat.”
“Well, what do you call it? They’ve got those A.I. databases with them all the time, and they use them. I’ve seen them do it!”
The schoolthing said firmly, “Really, Harold, you know that Sternutator, like all Heechee, requires a constant source of low-level microwave for his health—”
“Oniko doesn’t!”
The schoolthing shook its head. “There’s no grounds for using words like ‘cheating’ simply because a student carries his own data-retrieval system on his person. You have your own desk console, don’t you? Now, please go back to your seat so we can discuss this evening’s conceptualization assignment.”
And that afternoon, down at the lagoon, Harold sat rigidly on the shelly beach while Oniko splashed in the shallows and Sneezy dug for bits of coral. “I am sorry you don’t like us,” Sneezy said.
“What are you talking about? We’re friends! Of course I like you,” Harold lied.
“No, I think not,” Oniko called from two meters away. “Why is that, Harold? Have I ever harmed you?”
“No, but you’re a human being. Why do you act like a Heechee?”
“What’s wrong with acting like a Heechee?” Sneezy asked, hissing in annoyance.
“Well,” said Harold reasonably, “you can’t help what you are, but you’re such cowards, you know. You ran off and hid from the Foe. I don’t blame you,” he added, looking as though he blamed them very much, “because my father says it’s natural for a Heechee to be yellow.”
“I am actually rather tan,” Sneezy said proudly; his color had been changing, a sign that he was growing up.
“I don’t mean color. I mean chicken. It’s because you’re not as sexy as people.”
Oniko splashed closer to hear better, squatting in the wavelets. “I have never heard such a strange thi
ng!” she complained.
“It’s a matter of biology,” Harold explained. “My father told me all about it. Human beings are the sexiest creatures in the Galaxy, that’s why they’re so brave and smart. If you look at some lower animal, say a lion or a gorilla or a wolf—”
“I’ve never seen any of those.”
“No, but you’ve seen pictures, haven’t you? And Sneezy has, too? Well. Did you ever see a gorilla with boobs like a girl’s?” He caught Sneezy’s eye going to Oniko’s flat chest and said irritably, “Oh, God, I don’t mean now. I mean when she grows up. Human women have big breasts all the time, not just when they’re feeding a baby like some dumb animal. Human women can do, you know, can do sex all the time, not just once a year or something. That explains it, do you see? It’s evolution’s way of making us better, because human women can get men to hang around them all the time. So that’s how civilization started, like hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
Oniko painfully waded out of the water, frowning. Trying to follow Harold’s line of reasoning, she asked, “What does that have to do with being brave?”
“That’s how human beings worked out so well! My father told me the whole thing. The human fathers stayed around all the time because they wanted to, like, make love, you know? So they got the food and stuff, and the mothers could do a better job taking care of the kids. Heechee don’t have that going for them.”
“My parents stay together,” Sneezy said forcefully. He wasn’t angry. He hadn’t decided yet whether there was something to get angry with Harold about, but he found the argument confusing.
“They do because they copied us, probably,” Harold said doubtfully, and Sneezy looked thoughtful, because he suspected that part might be almost true. In the core, he knew, Heechee lived in communes, not nuclear families. “Anyway, they don’t, uh, do sex all the time, the way my mom and dad do, do they?”
“Certainly not!” cried Sneezy, scandalized. Heechee women made love only when it was the biologically right time for them to do so. His father had explained that to him long before. The woman’s body told her when it was time, and then she told the man—somehow or other—it didn’t seem to need words, but Bremsstrahlung had been vague about that part of it.
“So you see?” Harold cried in triumph. “That makes human men, like, show off for their girlfriends all the time! In the old days they maybe hunted, or fought some other tribe. Now they do different kinds of things, like they play football or make scientific discoveries—or go exploring, don’t you see? It makes us braver.”
Oniko, toweling herself, said doubtfully, “My father told me my grandfather was terribly frightened when he went out from Gateway.”
Harold shrugged. “There are individual exceptions.”
“And women went out, too. There were almost as many women as men on the artifact.”
“Oh, Oniko,” said Harold, exasperated, “I’m talking about a general law, not about individuals. See, you just don’t know what it’s like in a human world, because you never got to live on a good one, like Peggys Planet.”
Oniko dragged herself erect on her walker. “I don’t think it’s really that way on Earth either, Harold.”
“Sure it is. Didn’t I just tell you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I did some research after we came here. Sneezy? Hand me my pod; I think I have it in my diary.”
She put her pod on and bent down to it. Then, laboriously straightening, she said, “Yes, that’s it. Listen: ‘The old-fashioned “nuclear family” is less frequent on Earth now. Childless couples are frequent. When couples have children it is usual for both parents to work; there is also a large proportion of single-parent families.’ So it’s not exactly the way you say, Harold.”
Harold sniffed disdainfully. “Keeping a diary is a baby thing to do,” he said. “When did you start it?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “I don’t remember exactly. When we were on the Wheel.”
“Why, I keep one too,” cried Sneezy. “I guess when you told me you were doing it, I decided it sounded like a good idea.”
Oniko frowned. “I thought you were the one who told me,” she said. Then she grimaced. “But right now I want to get back to my dorm so I can lie down for a while before dinner, please.”
I feel a little apologetic, because I’ve jerked us around in time so much (though not by a long shot, I’m sorry to say, as much as I will a little later on). I think I should pin this time frame down a little more accurately. This didn’t happen while Essie and I were on the Wheel, not by many millions of milliseconds. It happened earlier, at a time when Essie and I were just beginning to debate whether we were really going to go to the one hundredth reunion on Wrinkle Rock and my life, almost, seemed placid. I didn’t know what was coming.
Of course, the kids didn’t know what was coming either. They were going about their business, which was the business of being children. When, in the normal course of school practice, Sneezy went for his twice-monthly examination, the docthing was pleased to see him; it didn’t often get a chance to examine a healthy Heechee, with his double heart, almost fatless internal organs, and ropy musculature. “Everything is normative,” it said, scanning the test monitors approvingly. “Only you don’t seem to be sleeping well, Sneezy.”
Sneezy said reluctantly, “Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep. Then I dream—”
“Oh?” The docthing had taken the form of a young human male; it smiled reassuringly and said, “Tell me about it.”
Sneezy hesitated. Then, unwillingly, he said, “I do not have a cocoon, you know.”
“Ah,” said the program. Sneezy waited. He did not want to have to tell this mechanical program what it was like for a young Heechee to have to sleep on a bed, with nothing but sheets to pull over his head. Heechee slept enclosed, preferably with some sort of warm, soft clumps of material to burrow down into; that was the right and proper way to sleep, and blankets and sheets were no substitute. How right his father had been to forbid him a bed, he thought wistfully.
He did not have to elaborate; the docthing’s databases provided the explanation. “I have ordered you a cocoon,” said the program benignly. “Now. About those dreams…”
“Yes?” said Sneezy dismally. He did not want to talk about the dreams. He never had, not even to Oniko; he didn’t even like to remember them when he was awake.
“Well? What do you dream?”
Sneezy hesitated. What did he dream? What did he not! “I dream about my parents,” he began, “and about Home. I mean my real home, in the core—”
“Of course you do,” said the docthing, smiling.
“And then there are the other dreams. They’re—different.” Sneezy paused for a moment, thinking. “They’re scary. They’re—well, sometimes there are these bugs. Clouds of them. Swarming, floating, flickering—” They swooped around him and crept into his clothing, into his mouth, into his skin, stinging without pain…“They’re like fireflies,” he finished, trembling.
“Have you ever seen a firefly?” the program asked patiently.
“No. Only in pictures, I mean.”
“Fireflies do not sting, Sneezy,” the docthing pointed out. “And the sort of insects which do sting cause itching and pain. Do you have any of that?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that—At least, not exactly,” Sneezy corrected himself. “But there is a kind of, I don’t know how to say it, an itch in the head. I mean, it makes me—I don’t know—it makes me want to learn things.”
“What sort of things, Sneezy?”
“Things,” the boy said unhappily. Sneezy knew that he was describing the dreams poorly. What else could you do when you tried to put a dream into words? Dreams were soft and fuzzy and shapeless. Words were hard and exact. The Heechee language of Feel would have been a little better for the purpose, but the program had chosen to speak in English, and Sneezy was too polite to complain.
But the program nodded understandingly. “Yes, yes, Sneezy,
” it said kindly, “such dreams are symbols. Perhaps they represent your perfectly normal child’s interest in the sexuality of your parents. Perhaps they refer to the traumas you have experienced. You may not realize it, Sneezy, but you have gone through more stress in the past few weeks than most adults experience in years.”
“Oh,” said Sneezy. He did actually realize it very well.
“And also,” the program sighed, “there is the general apprehension everyone feels these days. Not just children. Adults of both races, and even machine intelligences; no one is exempt. You understand that I am referring to the Foe.”
“They are frightening,” Sneezy agreed.
“And particularly for an impressionable child, who has even had some personal experience of the scare, apparently baseless though it was, on the Watch Wheel.” The docthing cleared its throat, announcing a change of subject. “Now, what about these diaries of yours?” It beamed.
Sneezy hissed faintly, then accommodated himself to the new course. “They keep me from being homesick,” he said, not because that was true—they didn’t—but because Sneezy had learned what every child learns, human or Heechee: When adults ask hard questions, you can satisfy them with the easy answers they expect.
“Very good therapy.” The docthing nodded, “But such detail, Sneezy! So many pages of data! One would think you were trying to compile an encyclopedia. Don’t you think you should spend less time on that sort of thing and more playing with your classmates?”
“I’ll try,” Sneezy promised, and when he was released at last, he rehearsed entries for his diary all the way back to his dormitory. They mostly began with a single observation: “Human programs don’t know much about Heechee kids.”
But when he did begin writing in his diary again, that was not what he wrote at all.
I don’t care what Albert says, I can’t help feeling sorry for Sneezy. And for Oniko. And—oh, hell, yes, even for Harold Wroczek. Harold wasn’t really bad. He simply hadn’t had much practice at being nice.
The Annals of the Heechee Page 16