Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

by Frederik Pohl

  Not even the Oldest One.

  And who was the Oldest One? Her lessons had not taught her that. Tar and Hooay explained, as best they could, that the Oldest One was God. That was not a satisfying answer. He was a god too much like his worshipers to have built Heechee Heaven or any part of it, including his own body. No. The Heaven was Heechee-built, for what purpose only the Heechee knew, and the Oldest One was not a Heechee.

  Through all this the great machine was immobile again, motionless, almost dead, conserving its dwindling remnant of life. When Janine crossed the central spindle she saw it there, still as a statue. Occasionally there was a sluggish flicker of pale color around its external sensors, as though it were on the verge of awakening, perhaps following them through half-closed eyes. When that happened, Hooay and Tar would quicken their step. There was no touch-tickle or joking then. Mostly it was absolutely still. She passed Wan in its very shadow one day, she going to the cocoon, he coming away, and Hooay dared to let them talk for a moment. “It looks scary,” Janine said.

  “I could destroy it for you, if you like,” Wan boasted, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the machine. But he had said it in English, and had the wisdom not to translate it for their guards. But even the tone of his voice made Hooay uneasy, and he hustled Janine away.

  Janine was becoming almost fond of her captors, as one might be of a great, gentle Malemute that could talk. It took her a long time to think of a young female like Tar as either young or female. They all had the same scraggly facial hair and the heavy supraorbital lobes characteristic of the mature male primate. But they began to become individuals, rather than specimens of the class “jailer.” The heavier and darker of the two males was called “Tor,” but that was only one syllable out of a long and subtle name from which Janine could only understand the word “dark.” It did not refer to his coloring. If anything, he was fairer than his fellows. It had something to do with an adventure of his childhood, in a part of the Heaven so strange and so seldom visited that there was little light from even the eternal Heechee-metal walls. Tor trimmed his beard so that it jutted down from his jaw in two inverted horns. Tor made the most jokes, and tried to share them with his prisoner. Tor was the one who jested with Janine, saying that if her male, Wan, was as infertile as he seemed to be while penned with Lurvy, he would ask the Oldest One for permission to impregnate her himself. Janine, cherishing her secret joke about their infertility, was not frightened. She was not repelled, either, because Tor was a kindly sort of satyr, and she believed she could recognize the jest. All the same, she began to think of herself as no longer a snotty kid. Each long dream aged her. In them she experienced the sexual intercourse she had never known in life—sometimes as a woman, sometimes not—and often pain, and always, at the end, death. The records could not be made from a living person, Hooay explained in a nonplayful moment; and his manner was not playful at all as he described the way in which the brain was opened and fed into the machine that made the records. She grew a little older while he was telling her.

  As the dreams went on, they became stranger and more remote. “You are going to very old times,” Tor told her. “This one now”—he was leading her toward the cocoon—“is the very oldest, and therefore the last. Perhaps.”

  She paused beside the gleaming couch. “Is this another joke, Tor, or a riddle?”

  “No.” He tugged soberly at the forks of his beard with both hands. “You will not like this one, Danine.”

  “Thanks.”

  He grinned, to crinkle the corners of his sad, soft eyes. “But it is the last I can give you. Perhaps—perhaps the Oldest One will then give you a dream out of his own. It is said that he has sometimes done that, but I do not know when. Not in any person’s memory.”

  Janine swallowed. “It sounds scary,” she said.

  He said kindly, “It frightened me very much when I had it, Danine, but remember that it is only a dream, for you.” And he closed the cocoon over her, and Janine fought for a moment against the sleep, and failed as always…and was someone else.

  Once there was a creature. It was female; but it was not an “it,” if Descartes is to be believed, because it was aware of its own existence, and therefore it was a “she.”

  She had no name. But she was marked among her fellows by a great scar from ear to nose, where the hoof of a dying prey-beast had nearly killed her. Her eye on that side had healed with the lid pulled out of shape, and so she might be called “Squint.”

  Squint had a home. It was not elaborate. It was no more than a trampled-out nest in a clump of something like papyrus, partly sheltered by a hummock of earth. But Squint and her relatives returned to those nests every day and in this they were unlike any of the other living things that resembled them. In one other respect they were quite unlike anything else they grew up with, and that was that they used objects that were not parts of their bodies to do work for them. Squint was not beautiful. She stood not much over a meter tall. She had no eyebrows—the hair on her scalp merged with them, and only her nose and cheekbones were bare—and she had no chin to speak of. Her hands had fingers, but they were usually clenched so that the backs of them were scarred and calloused, and the fingers did not separate well—not much better than the fingers of her feet, which were almost as good at grasping things, and better at gouging out the vulnerable parts of a creature unfortunate enough to find her arms wrapped around its neck as it tried to run away. Squint was pregnant, although she did not know that this was so. Squint was full grown and fully fertile by her fifth rainy season. In the thirteen years she had been alive she had been pregnant nine or ten times, and had never known it until she was forced to note that she could no longer run quite as fast, that the bulge in her belly made it more difficult to rake the guts out of a prey-animal and that her dugs began to swell again with milk. Of the fifty members of her community at least four were her children. More than a dozen of the males were, or might have been, the children’s fathers. Squint was aware of the former relationship, but not of the latter. At least one of the young males she knew to be a child of hers might well have been the father of another—a notion which would not have disturbed Squint, even if she had been capable of entertaining it. The thing she did with the males when the flesh beneath her skinny buttocks swelled and reddened was not in her mind related to childbirth. It was not related to pleasure, either. It was an itch that she suffered to be scratched whenever it happened. Squint had no way of defining “pleasure,” except perhaps as the absence of pain. Even in those terms, she knew little of it throughout her life.

  When the Heechee lander bellowed and flamed above the clouds, Squint and all her community ran to hide. None of them saw it come to earth.

  If a trawl scoops a starfish from the bottom of a sea, a spade lifts it from the bucket of ooze and dumps it in a tank, a biologist pins it down and dissects out its nervous system—does the starfish know what is happening to it?

  Squint had more self-awareness than a starfish. But she had little more background of experience to inform her. Nothing that happened to her from the moment she saw a bright light shining in her eyes made sense. She did not feel the point of the anesthetic lance that put her to sleep. She did not know she was carried into the lander and dumped into a pen of twelve of her fellows. She did not feel the crushing acceleration when she took off, or the weightlessness for the long time they floated in transit. She did not know anything at all until she was allowed to waken again, and did not understand what she then experienced.

  Nothing was familiar!

  Water. The water Squint drank did not any longer come from the muddy brink of the river. It came in a shiny, hard trough. When she bent to lap it up nothing lurked beneath its surface to lunge at her.

  Sun and sky. There was no sun! There were no clouds, and there was no rain. There were hard, blue-gleaming walls, and a blue-gleaming roof overhead.

  Food. There was no live thing to catch and dismember. There were flat, tough, tasteless clods of
chewy matter. They filled her stomach, and they were always available. No matter how much she and her fellows ate, there was always more.

  Sights and sounds and smells—these were terrifying! There was a stink she had never smelled before, sharp in her nose and scary. It was the smell of something alive, but she never saw the creature that owned it. There was an absence of normal smells almost as bad. No smell of deer. No smell of antelope. No smell of cat (that one a blessing). No smell even of their own dung, or not very much, because they had no rushes to tramp into a home, and the places where they huddled together to sleep were sluiced clean every time they left them. Her baby was born there, while the rest of the tribe complained at her grunts because they wanted to sleep. When she woke to lift it to her, to relieve the hot pressure in her teats, it was gone. She never saw it again.

  Squint’s newborn was the first to disappear immediately after birth. It was not the last. For fifteen years the little australopithecine family continued to eat and copulate and bear and grow old, its numbers dwindling because the infants were taken away as soon as born. One of the females would squat and strain and whimper and give birth. Then they would all go to sleep, and awaken with the little one gone. From time to time an adult would die, or come close enough to it to lie curled and moaning so that they knew it would not rise again. Then too they would all go to sleep; and that adult, or that adult’s body, would be gone when they woke. There were thirty of them, then twenty, then ten—then only one. Squint was the last, a very, very old female at twenty-nine. She knew she was old. She did not know she was dying, only that there was a terrible crushing pain in her belly that made her gasp and sob. She did not know when she was dead. She only knew that that particular pain stopped, and then she was conscious of another sort of pain. Not really pain. Strangeness. Numbness. She saw, but she saw queerly flatly, queerly flickeringly, in a queerly distorted range of colors. She was not used to her new vision, and did not recognize what she saw. She tried to move her eyes and they did not move. She tried to move head, or arms, or legs, and could not because she did not have any. She remained in that condition for some considerable time.

  Squint was not a preparation, in the sense that the live but exposed nervous system of a biologist’s brittle star is a preparation. She was an experiment.

  She was not a very great success. The attempt to preserve her identity in machine storage did not fail for the reasons that had terminated the earlier trials, with the other members of her tribe: poor match of chemistry to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding. One by one the Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and solved them. Her experiment failed, or succeeded only in part, for a different reason. There was not enough of an identity in the being that could be recognized as “Squint” to preserve. She was not a biography, not even a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain and illustrated with fear.

  But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.

  In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth’s sun from half a light-year out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They were leading lives quite different from Squint’s—lives marked by automatic care, heuristic tests and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized that, although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent, they contained the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the process along.

  Not much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal of the colony from its prehistoric African home and Squint’s death. The Heechee were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much. They had much longer-range plans than that.

  As their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else long before any true intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of Squint’s descendants, they built accordingly. They so constructed and programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for it to be supplied with CHON-food from a convenient processor of cometary material, which they had already set operating to serve other of their installations, and which was potentially equally long-lived. They constructed machines to sample the skills of the descendants of the newborns from time to time, and to repeat, as often as necessary, the attempt to file their identities in machine storage for later review—if any of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.

  Still, their plans encompassed very many alternatives, all going simultaneously; because the object of their plans was of great concern to them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.

  Since Squint could not communicate, or act, in any useful way, the Heechee experimenters thriftily wiped the affective sections of her storage and kept her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for consultation by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was this that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived all those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data for use by whatever generations might be able to understand them. They tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed the rest of that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to run.

  For eight hundred thousand years.

  “Danine,” Hooay was moaning, “Danine, are you dead?”

  She looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet’s tail wagging below. “Help me up, Hooay,” she sobbed. “Take me back.” Of them all, this had been the worst. She felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world would never be the same again. Janine did not know the word “australopithecine”, but she knew that the life she had just shared had been an animal’s. Worse than an animal’s, because somewhere in Squint had been the spark of the invention of thinking, and thus the unwanted capacity to fear.

  Janine was exhausted and she felt older than the Oldest One. At just-turned fifteen, she was not a child any more. That account had been overdrawn. There was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled chamber that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively, “Danine? What’s wrong?”

  “There is a joke to tell you,” she said.

  “You do not look like joking,” he said.

  “It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with my sister to breed them. But my sister cannot breed. She has had an operation so that she can never again bear a child.”

  “That is not a good joke,” he protested. “No one would do a thing like that!”

  “She did it, Hooay.” She added quickly, “Do not be frightened. You will not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me.”

  His soft eyes were brimming with tears. “How can I not be frightened? Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him—” Then the tears spilled over; he was terrified.

  She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door. When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.

  “Wan,” she said, “I want you to put your arms around me.”

  He looked at her grumpily. No one had told him what this was about, and Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible. He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested, had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes. “Are you afraid you will fall down?” he shrilled.

  “I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly. Don’t squeak.”

  He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she had tried to teach him. “Then why?”

  “Oh, Wan.” She sho
ok her head impatiently and stepped forward into his personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do. His arms went around her automatically—both at the same height, as though she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades. She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away. “Do you remember what this is, Wan?”

  “Of course! It is ‘kissing.’”

  “But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this.” She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it back and forth across his closed ones. “I think,” she said, moving her head away, “that that is a better way, don’t you? It makes me feel—it makes me feel—I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up.”

  Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. “Not really throw up, just real funny.”

  He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, “Tiny Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes to see if the other person is in heat.”

  “In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say ‘in love.’”

  “I think that ‘in love’ is different,” he said stubbornly, “but anyway to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says—”

  She put her hands on his shoulders. “Tiny Jim isn’t here.”

  “No, but Paul doesn’t want us to—”

  “Paul isn’t here,” she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of her fingers to see what that felt like. “Lurvy isn’t here either. Anyway, none of what they think matters.” The way it felt, she decided, was quite strange. It wasn’t really as though she were going to throw up, but as though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all unpleasant. “Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off mine.”