The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  Looking at three decent little kids held hostage by two ancient thugs, you almost forgot where the real terror lay. Heimat and Basingstoke were amateurs! Between the two of them they had murdered a few tens of thousands, maybe, of innocent men, women, and children, wrecked some billions of dollars worth of property, upset the lives of tens of millions of people…why, how trivial they were, when you compared them with the race that shifted stars, annihilated whole planets, dared disturb the immense universe itself! Terror? No human terrorist was more than a naughty pipsqueak brat compared with the Foe—not these two, no, nor Hitler, nor Jenghiz Khan, nor Assurbanipal.

  And there were Foe there in that room, and I was proposing to try to confront them…

  My doppel finally finished its reassurance to the children. Cyril Basingstoke opened his mouth to say something. Through my doppel I could see his expression. His eyes were on me, with curiosity and a kind a respect. It was the sort of respect one gladiator might give another when they met in the arena—a gladiator who recognized the difference in weapons between his opponent’s and his own, but still thought there was a pretty good chance that his trident could prevail over the other guy’s net.

  It was not at all the kind of look you would expect from someone ready to concede defeat.

  Measured by the slow tick of meat-person clocks, what happened next must have seemed to happen very fast. The two ancient outlaws were way past their prime, but there were a lot of new parts in their organs and musculature, and the wicked old brains were still alert. “Beaupre!” Basingstoke snapped. “Cover the girl!” And he himself made a dash for the table where the spring-loaded spear gun had been sitting all this while.

  From the screen I called anxiously: “Hold everything! We can make a deal with you!”

  Heimat, already with one hand wrapped in Oniko’s hair and the other pressing the fish-killer gun against her temple, snarled triumphantly, “You damn well will! You want to hear our terms? Freedom! Complete freedom, transportation to a planet of our choice, and—and—a million dollars each!”

  “And more guns, man,” added Cyril Basingstoke practically. He was always the shrewder of the two, I thought with a certain amount of admiration. And I really admired the quick thinking and precise actions of the two old monsters. I mean, consider! They must have been startled considerably by my sudden appearance on the commset screen; it had taken them no more than ten seconds to answer, make a plan, and carry it out, so that now they had the children covered and their demands stated.

  Ten seconds, however, are ten thousand milliseconds.

  I said from the screen, “Freedom you can have, both of you. That is, you can be out of prison, and you can be set free on another planet—not Earth, not Peggys, but a rather nice one. The only thing is, you’ll be the only two people there.” It was a sound and fair offer. I even had a specific planet in mind, because Albert had found a good one. True, it was inside the core, one of the extras the Heechee had prudently included for expansion purposes, but it was certainly a livable place. They could do what they liked there—especially since, being in the core, they would be doing it forty thousand times slower than on the Earth.

  “The hell you say!” snapped Heimat. “We’ll pick the planet, and don’t forget the money!”

  “I’ll give you the money,” I said politely. “A million each; you can use it to buy programs for yourselves for company. Think it over, you guys. You know we really can’t let you kill off any more cities.” And then I saw Heimat’s eyes narrow as he heard sounds from the other room, so I added quickly: “You don’t have any other choice, because otherwise you’ll both be dead. Look at what we have for you,” I invited, and displayed on the screen some of Nash’s orbital particle-beam weapons.

  They looked. It took them only a second or two (but more than a thousand milliseconds!) to register what was on the screen, but by then it was too late. For Albert had found something else for me out of the contents of the house. The workthing he had located and I had taken over came through the door, its cleaner hoses elevated. A workthing isn’t a weapon. When designed as a houseboy it can scrub and mend and tidy up, it can even do windows and take out the garbage, but it doesn’t kill. It does, however, have jets that can blast detergent into cracks, and pumps that can put extra muscle behind the jets; and when it has pumped up its charge to maximum and slipped paring knives into the nozzles of the jets, as I had commanded this one to do while I was talking, it can then project the knives with great force and considerable accuracy.

  I didn’t kill the old men, or at least not permanently. But before they could look around Heimat had a knife in his throat and Basingstoke one in his heart, and they were no longer a problem for the children, just for the technicians who would pump what remained of their minds into storage for the Dead Files. “I wonder,” I said, watching the second slow knife gradually bury itself in Basingstoke’s chest, “if we shouldn’t have done that in the first place, Albert. They’ll be a lot less trouble as machine-stored intelligences, won’t they?”

  “Why should they be?” Albert smiled. “You aren’t, you know. But now take care of the children, please.”

  “Children!” Cassata cried. “You’ve got Foe there! They’re the ones you have to pay attention to!”

  “But in this case,” said Albert politely, “it is the same thing, you see.”

  I didn’t need to be reminded of that. I was sufficiently scared already.

  A workthing isn’t any better at untying knots than at overcoming criminals, but it has its scrapers and cutters; it simply chewed through the ropes. It freed Oniko first, then Sneezy and Harold, and I talked to them while it was still doing it.

  I said soothingly, “You’re all right now, kids, except for one important thing. I want you two to take your pods off, without any argument or discussion, because it is very important. And I want you to do it right away.”

  They were good kids. It wasn’t easy for them. Nothing would have been easy for them after what they’d been through—especially for Oniko, exhausted as she was and terrified as she had been—harder still for Sneezy, I guess, because a Heechee is almost never without his pod from the age of three up. They did it, all the same, and they did it without any argument or discussion. But, oh, how many milliseconds it took for them to do it, while I waited on tenterhooks for the next step. That was the one I feared!

  But there was no choice.

  I said, “Now, I want the two of you to bring the pods to the commset and plug them in to the data receptors.”

  It wasn’t that easy; pod terminals weren’t meant for any such use, but Albert had already been figuring out ways and means. So Sneezy saw how an adapter could fit, and Harold rummaged something that would do out of the beach house’s junk drawers, and with the help of the workthing they manhandled and wrestled it into shape, stepping carefully around the two grisly things on the floor…

  And all that time, millisecond after millisecond, I watched them doing the thing that would make it possible for me to do what I dreaded, and wanted, most of anything in the world:

  To come face to face—however metaphorically, since I had no real face and didn’t suppose the Foe had ever had any—with the creatures who had upset the tranquillity of the never very tranquil universe I lived in.

  And then Oniko touched the terminals of her pod to the terminals of the commset, and there they were.

  I can’t really tell you what the Foe looked like. How do you describe in terms of physical attributes what has none?

  I could not tell you how big the Foe were, or what color, or what shape; they didn’t have any of those things. If they had gender, or anything at all that distinguished one of them from another, I wasn’t aware of it. I was not even sure there were two of them. More than one, yes. Less than many, I suppose. My assumption was that there were two, because in the time (quite a long time, by my standards and theirs) between Oniko putting her pod against the terminals of the commset and Sneezy following with his, I t
hought there was only a single being sharing gigabit space with me, and after that I thought there were more.

  I tried to speak to them.

  It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know how to go about it.

  First I tried a question:

  Who are you?

  That wasn’t precisely what I said, because I didn’t say anything in words. It was more like a vast, soundless, Hmmm?

  There wasn’t any answer.

  I tried again, this time in pictures. I recalled a picture of the kugelblitz, the dozen turd-colored smears turning restlessly by themselves in intergalactic space.

  Nothing came back.

  I made a picture of the Wheel and put it in the frame with the kugelblitz. I wiped that, and showed Sneezy and Oniko, and then their pods.

  Then I tried another Hmmm?

  No answer. Nothing. Just the knowledge that somebody, somehow was sharing that space with me—

  No! There was an answer! Because I had shown the pods as they were, opaque, dull, top-shaped metal things; and in my own picture they were luminous. They were radiating.

  Although all my attention was focused tightly on my doppel, there was still the other me, half a second away, in the True Love with Essie and Albert and General Cassata. I was aware of stirrings there, even questions, even comment; but the “real” me was always a couple of seconds behind the doppel, and by the time Albert cried sharply, “They’re telling you they were in the pods!” I had already been told.

  It was, after all, an answer of sorts. Communication had begun.

  I tried a hard picture. I tried to show the entire universe—from outside; from the place that had never existed, because there was no “outside” of what was, by definition, everywhere. The only picture that conveyed any of that to me was simply a great, glowing, featureless blob; whether it would mean anything to the Foe I could not say, but it was the best I could approximate of the things Albert had showed me in Deep Time. Then, as Albert had, I zoomed in on it. The blob approached and spread out and displayed one section of the universe, a few thousand galaxies, ellipticals and spirals and odd pairs crashing through each other and singles spewing out arms of starlets and gas.

  Was that right? Something was nagging at me that said I was doing something wrong.

  Right, I thought; I was. I had been making an assumption I had no right to make. I was showing the universe as it appeared to human eyes, in the optical frequencies of light. Bad assumption! I had no reason to assume the Foe had eyes. Even if they did, in some sense, what right had I to assume that they saw only the familiar, human rainbow frequencies from violet to red?

  So I added to the picture the halos and gas clouds that showed up only in infrared or microwave, and even the clouds of particles that, we supposed, were the Foe’s own contribution to the universe we lived in.

  Actually, that is to say, I showed my unseen (and, I had to fear, perhaps wholly uncaring) audience the pictures Albert had showed me in Deep Time. I let it hang there for a moment, and then I made it move.

  In reverse. Just as Albert had done for me.

  I shrank the picture. Galaxies came closer together. As they approached, they spread out, so that I was showing less structure and less, more and more tightly compacted together.

  I shrank it still farther. Catastrophically. I crushed the universe down to a single terrible point of light.

  And then I reenacted the Big Bang, and froze the whole scene at that moment in time when all options were open. And then I tried another of those wordless questioning feelings: Hmmm?

  And then I had my answer.

  Of course, the answer didn’t come in words.

  Of course, the answer seemed hardly like an answer at all. I had not expected that it would. I hadn’t expected anything, really, or at least I had had no idea what to expect.

  What I had was a picture, and of all the possible responses I might have thought likely, this was the least. The picture was me. Grinning at the other me. My own face, angular, ugly, but recognizable, perhaps as I had looked to Oniko and Sneezy as I peered out of the commset.

  It did not seem an appropriate response to the burning question I had tried to ask.

  Probably the reason for that, I told myself, was that I had failed to ask a proper question. Perhaps my picture of what the Foe were trying to do—at least, what we thought the Foe were trying to do—lacked some essential feature in their eyes. (“Eyes!”) I didn’t know how to remedy that. All our assumptions about the Foe were based on the conjecture that, as pure energy beings, they found our present universe less hospitable than they liked, and so they had resolved to create enough “missing mass” to cause it to fall back together into the primeval atom…from which it would explode in a second or a third or an nth Big Bang, to create a new one more to their liking. Reshaping the universe. “Foeforming” it, as you might say, in the same way that both the Heechee and ourselves had terraformed planets.

  That was the sense of what I wanted to convey, but I didn’t know how to picture it in their terms.

  Except that, it seemed, I just had.

  How long I hung in there, staring at the caricature of my own face and wondering what to try next, I cannot guess.

  It was a long time. Even by meat standards it was long enough to matter, because I was aware that the glacial movements of the people in the room were actually making changes. There were more people there now. There were other human beings in the room, and a lot of machines. When I took time to flash a question to Albert and Essie, through the other me back on the True Love, Albert said reassuringly, “It’s the police, Robin, and the physics people to make sure confinement is still working, and the death-reversal teams for Basingstoke and General Heimat; don’t worry; you’re doing fine.”

  Fine?

  And yes, perhaps I was. Because the pictures changed.

  I didn’t know what I was seeing at first, an odd ball of nasty-looking fire that opened up to show stars and planets crowded close together, and zoomed in on one of the planets to show stick figures bounding about that were recognizably meant to be Heechee. Their hideaway in the core? Of course.

  And as soon as I recognized that, there was another picture. It was almost like a documentary, or a travelogue: Life Among the Heechee. I saw Heechee world-ships hanging near the Schwarzschild barrier, and Heechee cities under their glassed-in domes; I saw Heechee factories producing Heechee consumer goods, and Heechee persons working and marrying and giving birth and growing; I saw more about the Heechee in that long gigabit-time display than I had known about them before in all my long life.

  I will put it mildly: I was astonished, and I was horribly, hopelessly confused. I had no idea why I was seeing what I saw; and then the picture changed again.

  It was another travelogue. It wasn’t the Heechee anymore. It was us.

  I don’t know, perhaps I saw every human being there ever was in that eternal-brief display. Some of them I recognized. I saw Oniko being born on the Heechee artifact, and the death of her grandparents. I saw her rescued with all her little colony, and I saw her brought to the Watch Wheel. I saw the human race, maybe all the hundred billion members of it there were on all the twenty inhabited planets and in ships between. I even saw history. I saw armies, and space navies, and weapons practice, and ships being launched that were armed to kill a world if they chose to. I saw cities bombed and obliterated. I saw a Gateway prospector in a Five, stealthily slitting the throats of his four companions. I saw my dear wife, Essie, with the tubes in her throat and nose and the life-support machines chugging all around her—a picture I remembered, because once she had been just like that.

  I saw Basingstoke in tights and air mask, swimming through lucid tropical waters to fix a limpet bomb to the hull of a cruise ship. I saw General Beaupre Heimat press a button that destroyed a spacecraft, and I saw him again doing—oh, doing vile and terrible things to a tiny female child—it was only a minuscule relief from the stomach-twisting sight to realize that the “child�
� was only a robot.

  The flood of pictures went on forever.

  And then they forever ended.

  I saw nothing. I did not even see the room, or Oniko and the other children, or the newcomers who were going about their business in it. I saw nothing at all; my senses had been blacked out.

  And then I realized that I was indeed getting answers to my questions, only they were not the questions I had asked. I was not being told “what.” I was only being told “why.”

  The other “I” back on the True Love was watching it all, but I couldn’t see him (me). I couldn’t see anything at all.

  And then I saw everything, all at once. All the pictures I had seen before, floating before me at once like a storm of confetti. They danced around and blended; Heechee became half human, humans began to look like Heechee, and they blurred into computer constructs and Sluggards and Voodoo Pigs and into things that bore no resemblance at all to anything the universe had ever known…and then it all began to dissolve in a torrent of multicolored sparks, all of it.

  Even me.

  I felt myself dissolving. I felt my very own person melting and coruscating into nothingness.

  It took quite a long time for me to understand what was happening. “I’m dying, for God’s sake!” I shouted into empty gigabit space—

  Just as I did.

  “I died!” I screamed in terror to Albert and my dear Portable-Essie and the officers of JAWS, gathered solicitously around me in the True Love.

  I felt Essie’s warm (if only virtual) arms around me. “Oh, shoo, shoo, dear Robin,” she soothed. “Is all right now. Are not dead anymore, not here.”

  Cassata cried exultantly, “But you did the job, Robin! You talked to them! Now we can go out to the Watch Wheel and—”

  “General Cassata,” said Albert politely, “please shut up. How do you feel, Robin? It is true that in a sense, yes, you did die. At least that copy of you is gone forever, and maybe the Foe with it; I think they neutralized you, Robin, even though it cost them themselves. I’m sorry it was so traumatic for you.”