Heechee rendezvous (2 page)

They left almost nothing, and nothing at all without a purpose. On Venus they left only the basic tunnels and foundation structures themselves, and a carefully selected bare taste of artifacts; in the outposts, only a minimum number of signposts; and one other thing.

In every solar system where intelligence was expected they left one great and cryptic gift. In Earth’s system it was in the right-angle asteroid that they had used for a terminus for their spacecraft. Here and there, in remote and carefully chosen places in other systems, they left other major installations. Each contained the very large gift of an operating selection of whole, functional, almost indestructible Heechee faster-than-light spacecraft.

The solar troves stayed there for a very long time, four hundred thousand years and more, while the Heechee hid in their core hole. The australopithecines on Earth turned out an evolutionary failure, though the Heechee did not find that out; but the cousins of the australopithecines became Neanderthalers, or Cro-Magnards, then that latest evolutionary fad, Modern Man. Meanwhile the winged creatures developed and learned and discovered the Promethean challenge, and killed themselves. Meanwhile two of the existing technological societies met each other and destroyed each other. Meanwhile six of the other promising species idled in evolutionary backwaters; meanwhile the Heechee hid, and peeped fearfully through their Schwarzschild shell every few weeks of their time-every few millennia of the time speeding outside-.

And meanwhile the troves waited, and human beings found them at last.

So human beings borrowed the Heechee ships. In them they crisscrossed the Galaxy. Those first explorers were scared, desperate people whose only hope of escaping grimy human misery was to risk their lives on a blind-date voyage to a destiny that might make them rich and was a whole lot more likely to make them dead.

I have now surveyed the entire history of the Heechee in their relationship with the human race up to the time when Robin will start telling his story. Are there any questions, subset?

Q.-Z-z-z-z-z-z-z

A.-Subset, don’t be a smartass. I know you’re not asleep.

Q.-I am only trying to convey that you are taking a hell of a long time to get offstage, scene-starter. And you’ve only told us about the past of the Heechee. You haven’t told us about their present.

A.-I was just about to. In fact, I will now tell you about a particular Heechee whose name is Captain (well, that is not his name, for Heechee naming customs are not the same as human, but it will do to identify him) who, at just about the time when Robin will begin to tell you his story-

Q.-If you ever let him get to it.

A.-Subset! Quiet. This Captain is rather important to Robin’s story, because in time they will interact drastically, but as we see Captain now, he is wholly unaware that Robin exists. He, along with the members of his crew, is getting ready to squeeze out of the place where the Heechee had hidden into the wider Galaxy that is home for all the rest of us.

Now, I have played a little trick on you. You have already-shut up, subset!-.—you have already met Captain, since he was one of the very crew of Heechee who abducted the tiger cub and built the warrens on Venus. He is much older now.

He is not, however, half a million years older, because the place where the Heechee went to hide is in a black hole at the core of our Galaxy.

Now, subset, I don’t want you to interrupt again, but I do want to take time to mention something strange. This black hole where the Heechee lived, curiously, was known to the human race long before they ever heard of the Heechee. In fact, way back in the year 1932, it was the first interstellar radio source ever detected. By the end of the twentieth century interferometry had mapped it as a definite black hole and a very large one, with a mass of thousands of suns and a diameter of some thirty light-years. By then they knew that it was about thirty thousand light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, that it was surrounded by a haze of silicate dust, and that it was an intense source of 51 l-keV gamma-ray photons. By the time they found the Gateway asteroid they knew much more. They knew, in fact, every important datum about it except one. They had no idea that it was full of Heechee. They didn’t find that out until they-actually, I can fairly say that it was mostly I-began to decipher the old Heechee star charts.

Q.-Z-z-z

A.-Quiet, subset, I take your point.

The ship Captain was in was a lot like the ones human beings found in the Gateway asteroid. There had not been time for a lot of improvement in ship design. That’s why Captain was not really half a million years old:

Time went slowly in their black hole. The major difference between Captain’s ship and any other was that it possessed an accessory.

In Heechee speech the accessory was known familiarly as the disruptor of order in aligned systems. An English-speaking pilot might have called it a can opener. It was what permitted them to pass through the Schwarzschild barrier around a black hole. It didn’t look like much, only a twisted rod of crystal emerging from an ebon-black base, but when Captain energized it, it glowed like a cascade of diamonds. The diamond glitter spread, and surrounded the ship, and opened a way through the barrier, and they slipped through into the wider universe outside. It didn’t take long. By Captain’s standard, less than an hour. By the clocks of the outside universe, nearly two months.

Captain didn’t look human, being a Heechee. More than anything else he resembled an animated cartoon skeleton. But one might as well think of him as human because he had most of the human traits-inquisitiveness, intelligence, amorousness, and all those other qualities that I know about but have never experienced. For example: He was in a good mood because the assignment permitted him to take along as part of his crew a female who was also a prospective love partner. (Humans do this, too, on what are called business trips.) The assignment itself~ however, was distinctly unenjoyable if one stopped to think about it. Captain didn’t. He worried about it no more than an average human worries about whether war will be declared of an afternoon if it happens it is the end of everything, but time has gone on monotonously long without it happening, and so ... The biggest difference is that Captain’s assignment did not refer to anything as inoffensive as a nuclear war but to the very reasons that had caused the Heechee to retreat to their black hole in the first place. He was checking on the artifacts the Heechee had left behind. Those troves were not accidents. They were part of a well-considered plan. One might even call them bait.

As to Robinette Broadhead’s feelings of guilt- Q.-I wondered when you would get back to that. Let me make a suggestion. Why not let Robin Broadhead tell about that himself?

A.-Excellent ideal-since, heaven knows, he is expert on the subject.

And so the scene is started, the procession is swelled ... and I give you Robinette Broadhead!

Before they vastened me I felt a need I hadn’t felt for thirty years and more, and so I did what I hadn’t thought I would ever do again. I practiced a solitary vice. I sent my wife, Essie, off to the city to make a sneak raid on a couple of her franchises. I put a “Do Not Disturb” override on all the communications systems in the house. I called up my data-retrieval system (and friend) Albert Einstein and gave him orders that made him scowl and suck his pipe. And presently-when the house was still and Albert bad reluctantly but obediently turned himself off, and I was lying comfortably on the couch in my study with a little Mozart coming faintly from the next room and the scent of mimosa in the air system and the lights not too bright—presently, I say, I spoke the name I hadn’t spoken in decades. “Sigfrid von Shrink, please, I would like to talk to you.”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to come. Then, in the corner of the room by the wet bar, there was a sudden fog of light and a flash, and there he sat.

He had not changed in thirty years. He wore a dark and heavy suit, of the cut you see on portraits of Sigmund Freud. His elderly, nondescript face had not gained a wrinkle and his bright eyes sparkled no less. He held a prop pad in one hand and a prop pencil in the other-as if he had any need to take notes! And he said politely, “Good morning, Rob. I see that you are looking very well.”

“You always did start out by trying to reassure me,” I told him, and he flashed a small smile.

Sigfrid von Shrink does not really exist. He is nothing more than a psychoanalytic computer program. He has no physical existence; what I saw was only a hologram and what I heard was only synthesized speech. He doesn’t even have a name, really, since “Sigfrid von Shrink” is only what I called him because I could not talk about the things that paralyzed me, decades ago, to a machine that didn’t even have a name. “I suppose,” he said meditatively, “that the reason you called for me is that something is troubling you.”

“That’s true.”

He gazed at me with patient curiosity, and that also had not changed. I had a lot better programs to serve me these days-well, one particular program, Albert Einstein, who is so good that I hardly bother with any of the others-but Sigfrid was still pretty good. He waits me out. He knows that what is curdling in my mind takes time to form itself into words, and so he doesn’t rush me.

On the other hand, he doesn’t let me just daydream away the time, either. “Can you say what you are disturbed about right at this moment?”

“A lot of things. Different things,” I said.

“Pick one,” he said patiently, and I shrugged.

“It’s a troublesome world, Sigfrid. With all the good things that have happened, why are people-Oh, shit. I’m doing it again, right?”

He twinkled at me. “Doing what?” he encouraged.

“Saying a thing that’s worrying me, not the thing. Dodging away from the real issue.”

“That sounds like a good insight, Robin. Do you want to try now to tell me what the real issue is?”

I said, “I want to. I want to so much that actually, I almost think I’m going to cry. I haven’t done that for a hell of a long time.”

“You haven’t felt the need to see me for quite a long time,” he pointed out, and I nodded.

“Yes. Exactly.”

He waited for a while, slowly turning his pencil between his fingers now and then, keeping that expression of polite and friendly interest, that non-judging expression that was really about all I could remember of his face between sessions, and then he said, “The things that really trouble you, Robin, deep down, are by definition hard to say. You know that. We saw that together, years ago. It’s not surprising that you haven’t needed to see me all these years, because obviously your life has been going well for you.”

“Really very well,” I agreed. “Probably a hell of a lot better than I deserve-wait a minute, am I expressing hidden guilt by saying that? Feelings of inadequacy?”

He sighed but was still smiling. “You know I prefer that you don’t try to talk like an analyst, Robin.” I grinned back. He waited for a moment, then went on: “Let’s look at the present situation objectively. You have made sure that no one is here to interrupt us-or to eavesdrop? To hear something you don’t want your nearest and dearest friend to hear? You’ve even instructed Albert Einstein, your data-retrieval system, to withdraw and to seal off this interview from all datastores. What you have to say must be very private. Perhaps it is something that you feel but are ashamed to be heard feeling. Does that suggest anything to you, Robin?”

I cleared my throat. “You’ve put your finger right on it, Sigfrid.”

“And? The thing you want to say? Can you say it?”

I plunged in. “You’re God-damned right I can! It’s simple! It’s obvious! I’m getting very God-damned flicking old!”

That’s the best way. When it’s hard to say, just say it. That was one of the things I had learned from those long-ago days when I was pouring out my pain to Sigfrid three times a week, and it always works. As soon as I had said it I felt purged-not well, not happy, not as though a problem had been solved, but that glob of badness had been excreted. Sigfrid nodded slightly. He looked down at the pencil he was rolling between his fingers, waiting for me to go on. And I knew that now I could. I’d got past the worst part. I knew the feeling. I remembered it well, from those old and stormy sessions.

Now, I’m not the same person I was then. That Robin Broadhead had been raw with guilt because he’d left a woman he loved to die. Now those guilt feelings were long eased-because Sigfnd had helped me ease them. That Robin Broadhead thought so little of himself that he couldn’t believe anyone else would think well of him, so he had few friends. Now I have-I don’t know. Dozens. Hundreds! (Some of them I am going to tell you about.) That Robin Broadhead could not accept love, and since then I had had a quarter of a century of the best marriage there ever was. So I was a quite different Robin Broadhead.

But some of the things had not changed at all. “Sigfrid,” I said, “I’m old, I’m going to die one of these days, and do you know what pulls my cork?”

He looked up from his pencil. “What’s that, Robin?”

“I’m not grown-up enough to be so old!”

He pursed his lips. “Would you care to explain that, Robin?”

“Yes,” I said, “I would.” And as a matter of fact the next part came easily, because, you can be sure, I had done a lot of thinking on the subject before I went so far as to call Sigfrid up. “I think it has to do with the Heechee,” I said. “Let me finish before you tell me I’m crazy, all right? As you may remember, I was part of the Heechee generation; we kids grew up hearing about the Heechee, which had everything human beings didn’t have and knew everything human beings didn’t know-“