Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

by Frederik Pohl

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “Not a bit sure, Robin.”

  I yelled, “Don’t you at least have a fucking guess?”

  “Sure thing, Robin,” he said gloomily, “but no more than that. Please calm yourself. See, the scale is wrong. The universe is too big, from anything we know. And the time is too short. The Heechee were here less than a million years ago, and the expansion time of the universe to date is something like twenty thousand times that long—recoil time could hardly be less. It’s mathematically bad odds that they would have picked that particular time to show up.”

  “Show up?”

  He coughed. “I left out a step, Robin. There’s another guess in there, and I’m afraid it’s my own. Suppose this is the universe the Heechee built. Suppose they somehow evolved in a less hospitable one, but didn’t like it, and caused it to contract to make a new one, which is the one we’re in. That doesn’t fit badly, you know. They could have come out to look around, maybe found it just the way they wanted it. And now maybe the ones who did the exploring have gone back to get the rest of them.”

  “Albert! For Christ’s sake!”

  He said gently, “Robin, I wouldn’t be saying these things if I could help it. It’s only a conjecture. I don’t think you have any idea how difficult it is for me to conjecture in this way, and I wouldn’t be able to do it except for—well, here’s the thing. There is one possible way for something to survive a contraction and a new Big Bang, and that is to be in a place where time effectively stops. What kind of place is that? Why, a black hole. A big one. One big enough so that it is not losing mass by quantum tunneling, and therefore can survive indefinitely. I know where there’s a black hole like that, Robin. Mass, about fifteen thousand times the sun. Location, the center of our Galaxy.” He glanced at his watch and changed expression. “If my calculations are close, Robin,” he said, “your wife should be arriving about now.”

  “Einstein! The first damn thing she’s going to do is rewrite you!”

  He twinkled. “She already has, Robin,” he pointed out, “and one of the things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by some comical or personally rewarding comment.”

  “You’re telling me I ought to be all tensed up?”

  “Well, not really, Robin,” he said. “All this is quite theoretical—if that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps not. That black hole in the center of our Galaxy is at least one possibility for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight time in a Heechee ship, not all that distant. And—I said that we had determined the objective of the Oldest One’s course? That was it, Robin. It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around.”

  I was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was having the time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn’t tired of Essie, so I stayed around until she at last admitted she had everything she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman was there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last crumb under her toenail. I wasn’t worried. I could see that Essie was all right, and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep Wan in shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had set up a million-dollar research and development company—with Wilma as president—to see what could be done with it, and that’s how easy it was. That’s how easy it all is, when everything’s going your way.

  Or almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when I thought about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the middle of the Galaxy (if that’s where they were). That is very unsettling, you know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out breathing fire and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next year, why, sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he’d said ten years or even a hundred I could have worked up pensiveness as a minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical times—well, hell! How easy is it to worry about something that might not happen for another billion years?

  And yet the notion just would not go away.

  It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her stretch pants, brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said, “Will probably not happen, you know, Robin.”

  “How can you be so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets programmed into those ships. We’ve checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred and fifty of them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages says there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who’s to say one of them isn’t racing in to tell the Heechee what we’re doing right now?”

  “Dear Robin,” she said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a friendly way, “drink your coffee. You know nothing about statistical mathematics and, anyway, who’s to say they would mean to do us harm?”

  “They wouldn’t have to mean to! I know what would happen, for God’s sake. It’s obvious. It’s what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians, the Eskimos, the American Indians—it’s what has always happened, all through history. A people that comes up against a superior culture is destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can’t survive!”

  “Always, Robin?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “No, mean it,” she insisted. “Counterexample: What happened when Romans discovered Gauls?”

  “They conquered the shit out of them, that’s what!”

  “True. No, nearly true. But then, a couple of hundred years later, who conquered who, Robin? The barbarians conquered Rome, Robin.”

  “I’m not talking about conquest! I’m talking about a racial inferiority complex. What happens to any race that lives in contact with a race smarter than they are?”

  “Why, different things under different circumstances, Robin. Greeks were smarter than Romans, Robin. Romans never had a new idea in their lives, except to build with or kill people with. Romans didn’t mind. They even took Greeks right into their homes, teach them all about poetry and history and science. As slaves. Dear Robin,” she said, putting down her coffee cup and coming up to sit next to me, “wisdom is a kind of resource. Tell me. When you want information, who do you ask?”

  I thought it over for a minute. “Well, Albert, mostly,” I admitted. “I see what you’re saying, but that’s different. It’s a computer’s job to know more and think faster than I do, in certain ways. That’s what they’re for.”

  “Exactly, dear Robin. As far as can tell, you have not been destroyed.” She rubbed her cheek against mine and then sat up straight. “You are restless,” she decided. “What would you like to do?”

  “What are my options?” I asked, reaching for her, but she shook her head.

  “Don’t mean that, anyway not this minute. Want to watch PV? I have a taped section from tonight’s news, when you and Wilma were scheming, which shows your good friends visiting their ancestral home.”

  “The Old Ones in Africa? Saw it this afternoon.” Some local promoter had thought it would be good publicity to show Olduvai Gorge to the Old Ones. He was right. The Old Ones didn’t like it a lot—hated the heat, chirped grumpily at each other about the shots they had had to take, didn’t care much for the air flight. But they were news. So were Paul and Lurvy, at the moment in Dortmund to arrange for a mausoleum for Lurvy’s father as soon as his remains got back from the Food Factory. So was Wan, getting rich on PV appearances as The Boy from Heechee Heaven; so was Janine, having a marvelous time meeting her singing-star pen pals at last in the flesh. So was I. We were all rich in money and fame. What they would make of it, after all, I could not guess. But what I wanted at last became clear. “Get a sweater, Essie,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We strolled down t
o the edge of the icy water, holding hands. “Why, is snowing,” Essie announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters over our heads. Usually you can’t see it very clearly, but tonight, edge-lighted from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it was a milky dome, broken with reflections from lights on the ground, stretching from horizon to horizon.

  “Is it too cold for you?”

  “Perhaps just here, near the water,” she acknowledged. We climbed back up the slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never gets really cold under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running naked through seven or eight hundred kilometers before it hits the Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.

  “Essie,” I said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Know that, dear Robin,” she said.

  “About the Oldest One. The machine.”

  “Oh, really?” She pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp from vagrant drifts from the fountain. “Very fine machine,” she said. “Quite tame, since you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external effectors, or mobility, or access to control circuits of any kind—yes, quite tame.”

  “What I want to know,” I said, “is whether you could build one like it for a human being.”

  “Ah!” she said. “Hum. Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of course, large sums of money, but yes.”

  “And you could store a human personality in it—after the person died, I mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?”

  “Quite a good bit better, would say. Some difficulties. Mostly biochemical, not my department.” She leaned back, looking upward at the iridescent bubble overhead and said consideringly: “When I write computer program, Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it what it is and what it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same. Rests on direct chemical readout of brain. Old Ones’ brain is not chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage is very far from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee managed to convert process without any apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes. When you die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine, then put machine in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black hole, where it can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode was not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die for, say, five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will you promise that for me, please?”

  There are times when something catches me so by surprise that I don’t know whether to cry, or get angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up quickly and stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do, and laughed. “Sometimes you startle me, Essie,” I said.

  “But why, Robin?” She reached out and took my hand. “Suppose it was the other way around, hey? Suppose it was I who, many years ago, had been through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which someone I loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I could never see that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not think I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way, to tell her how I felt?”

  I started to answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips. “Was rhetorical question, Robin. We both know answer. If your Klara is still alive, she will want very much to hear from you. This is beyond doubt. So,” she said, “here is plan. You will die—not soon, I hope. Brain will go into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But one copy flies off to black hole to look for Klara, and finds her, and says to her, ‘Klara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you to know I would have given life itself to save you.’ And then, Robin, do you know what Klara will answer to this strange machine that appears out of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?”

  I didn’t! The whole point was that I didn’t! But I didn’t say so, because Essie didn’t give me a chance. She said, “Then Klara will answer, ‘Why, Robin dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are the one whom I most trust and respect and love.’ I know she would say this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me.”

  17

  The Place Where the Heechee Went

  At six o’clock on Robin Broadhead’s tenth birthday, he had a party. The woman next door gave him socks, a board game and, as a sort of joke present, a book entitled Everything We Know About the Heechee. Their tunnels had only recently been discovered on Venus, and there was much conjecture about the location of the place where the Heechee went, their physical appearance and their purposes. The joke part of the book was that, although it contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were blank.

  At that same time on that same day—or at any rate, at its equivalent in local time, which was a great deal different—a person was taking a turn under the stars before retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an anniversary of a sort, but not a party. He was a long way from Robin Broadhead’s birthday cake and candles, more than forty thousand light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a name, but out of respect and because of the work he had done, he was usually called something which translates as “Captain.” Over his squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close. When he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully designed glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his entire planet. Sullen red type-Ms, brighter than the Moon as seen from Earth. Three golden Gs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at. There were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all. Captain could identify every star he saw, because there were only ten thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest clearly visible to the naked eye. And beyond those familiar thousands—well, he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled, but he knew from his many spaceflights that past them all was the turbulent, almost invisible, blue-tinged shell that surrounded everything he and his people owned of the universe. It was a sky that would have terrified a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.

  Wide of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It was a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand light-years away Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked his first dope, broke a bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on nearly ten kilos before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said good-night to his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time, his sexual mates as well), removed the necklaces of rank from his shoulders, unstrapped the life-support and communications unit from between his wide-spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft, spongy, dense sleeping litter. The captain’s people had come from burrowers rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their prehistoric ancestors had slept. When the captain had made himself comfortable, he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the top of the cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his people had done to sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves over to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and worrisome sleep for all of them.

  The joke of Robin’s birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was not quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it was evident that they were very unlike human beings, but in very significant ways—the same! In curiosity. Only curiosity could have led them to visit so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology. Heechee science was not the same as human, but it rested on the same thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stret
ch of the mind into tininess and immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In basic chemistry of the body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate quite compatible food.

  What was central to what everyone knew about the Heechee—or hoped, or guessed—was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all that different from human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in civilization and science. Maybe not even that much. And in that what everyone guessed (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years passed between the time the first crude Heechee ship ventured to try mass-cancellation as a means of transport and the time when their expeditions had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of Squint’s ancestors puzzled over what to do with the antelope bone his mother had given him.)