The ship was big indeed. Stan was sure of that, although all he could see of the spacecraft’s outside was the metal snout that protruded into its docking bay, like the lander on a Gateway ship. This one didn’t seem to be a lander, though. When they got into it they found themselves in a spindle-shaped chamber with Heechee resting-props scattered about, three separate control carrels with knurled boards and viewscreens and two two-meter tall pillars stuffed with racks of, of all things, those rolled-up crystalline things the Gateway people called prayer fans. A young male Heechee was perched before one of the control boards. He looked up as Salt led them in, and spoke briskly to her. She replied in more placating tones, but without apparent success. She turned to Stan and Estrella. “He, whose name is called by Dark Smoke, wants that you two go away,” she said.
“Why?” asked Stan, but Estrella took his hand.
“Come on,” she whispered softly. “We don’t want to make trouble.” Sulkily he let her lead him back toward the outer bay, but the Heechee female, who had turned back to the male, caught sight of what they were doing.
“Stop at once,” she said. “Where do you wish to go?” And then, when Estrella tried to explain that they were leaving the ship, as ordered, “No, do not do that. It is not the needed thing at this time. Dark Smoke has no adequate authority of this sort to deny you passage. You will wait while I discuss.”
Discuss the two Heechee did, for rather longer than seemed reasonable to Stan. A third Heechee appeared from the entrance and immediately joined in the debate. They weren’t shouting at each other, as Stan would have expected from humans trying to settle a controversial point, but all three of them sounded quite insistent as they gestured toward each other, toward the human pair and toward one of the doors at the end of the chamber.
Then the argument stopped, as though cut off by some invisible stage director, and Salt came back to the humans. “I will direct you to place of privacy chamber now,” she said. “You will follow.”
Estrella tarried. “What was the problem, Salt?”
“No problem. No problem now,” the Heechee corrected herself. “You go to chamber. We start spacecraft. You come out later, if you so want. One thing only. If during trip to Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four you see male dressed in peculiar clothing who also is passenger you do not speak to him. He extremely tired of your kind.”
5
* * *
A Home for the Old Ones
I
Let me tell you what really happened with this annoying young guy. He came into the reservation while we were busy, bold as brass. He didn’t belong there, and as soon as I had a moment I was going to tell him so. But just then we were too busy to pay him much attention. We were aversion-training a leopard cub.
That always takes all the attention we have. This particular cub was a healthy little male, no more than a week old. That’s a little bit young to begin the aversion training, but we’d been tracking the mother, looking for a good opportunity, since she began showing the signs that she was about to give birth. When we spotted the mother this day she had dropped off to sleep in a convenient place, at the edge of a patch of brush that wasn’t large enough to conceal any other leopards. So we jumped the gun a little. We doped the mother with an airgun and borrowed her cub while she slept.
That is a job that takes all three of us. Shelly was the one who picked up the baby. Shelly was completely covered, and sweating, in a gas-proof isolation suit so the cub wouldn’t get any memories of a friendly human smell. Brudy kept an eye on the mother so we wouldn’t have any unpleasant surprises from her—the mother had had her own aversion training long before, but if she had awakened and seen us messing with her cub she might have broken through it.
I was the head ranger. That was because I had the best “resume” when they were hiring. In fact I had a D.V.M. Although the Old Ones weren’t exactly animals, they weren’t exactly people either, so a veterinarian seemed like the right person for the job. As boss, I was the one who manipulated the aversion-training images. These were 3-D simulations of an Old One, a human and a Heechee, one after another, along with a cocktail of smells of each that was released as we displayed the images. There was also a sharp little electric shock each time that made the kit yowl and struggle feebly in Shelly’s arms.
Aversion training isn’t actually a hard job. We do it four or five times for each cub, just to make sure, but long before we’re through with the training the animals’ll do their best to run away as fast as they can from any one of the images or smells, whether they’re simulations or the real thing. Which is what they’re supposed to do.
I don’t mind handling leopard cubs. They’re pretty clean, because the mother licks them all day long. So are cheetahs. The ones that really stink are the baby hyenas; that’s when whoever holds the animal is glad that the gas-proof suit works in both directions. As far as other predators are concerned, lions and wild dogs are long extinct in this part of the Rift Valley, so the leopards, hyenas and cheetahs are the only carnivores the Old Ones have to worry about on their reservation. Well, and snakes. But the Old Ones are smart enough to stay away from snakes, which aren’t likely to chase them, anyway, since the Old Ones are a lot too big for them to eat. Oh, and I should mention the crocs, too. But we can’t train crocodiles very reliably, not so you could count on their running the other way if an Old One wandered near. So what we do is train the Old Ones themselves to stay away.
What helps us there is that the Old Ones are sort of genetically scared of open water, never having experienced any until they were taken out of the big old spacecraft where the Heechee had left them and brought here. The only reason the Old Ones would ever go near water would be that they were tormented by thirst and just had to get a drink. We never let it come to that. We’ve taken care of that problem by digging boreholes and setting up little solar-powered drinking fountains all over their reservation. The fountains don’t produce a huge gush of water, but there’s a steady flow from each fountain, a deciliter a second year in and year out, and anyway the Old Ones don’t need much water. They’re not very interested in bathing, for instance. You catch a really gamy Old One, which we sometimes have to do when one of them is seriously sick or injured, and you might wish you could trade it for a hyena cub.
The first indication we got that we had a visitor was when we’d given the baby leopard four or five aversion shocks, and he suddenly began to struggle frantically in Shelly’s arms, nipping at her gas-proof clothing, even when he wasn’t being shocked. That wasn’t normal. “Let him go,” I ordered. When a cub gets really antsy we don’t have any choice but to call it off for the day. It isn’t that they’ll hurt whoever’s holding them, because the gas-proof coveralls are pretty nearly bite-proof as well. But it’s bad for the cubs themselves. Wild animals can have heart attacks, too.
We backed away, keeping an eye on the mom as her baby, whining, scooted over to creep under her belly and begin to suckle. What I didn’t know was what had set the cub off. Then I heard it: motor and fan noises from afar, and a moment later a hovercar appeared around a copse of acacias. Leopard cubs had better hearing than people, was all. The vehicle charged right up to us and skidded to a halt, the driver digging its braking skids into the ground for a quick stop and never mind how much dust it raised or how much damage it did to the roadway.
The man who got out when the bubble top popped open was skinny, tall, dark-complected and quite young looking—for what that’s worth, since young looking is pretty much what everybody is these days. He was quite peculiar looking, too, because he was wearing full city clothing, long pants and long sleeves, with little ruffs of some kind of fur at the cuffs and collar. (A fur collar! In equatorial Africa!) He gave Brudy a quick, dismissive glance, looked Shelly and me over more thoroughly and ordered, “Take me to the Old Ones.”
That was pure arrogance. When I sneaked a look at my indicator, it did not show a pass for his vehicle, so he had no right to be on the reservatio
n in the first place, whoever he was. Brudy moved toward him warningly, and the newcomer stepped back a pace. The expression on Brudy’s face wasn’t particularly threatening, but he is a big man. We’re all pretty tall, being mostly Maasai; Brudy is special. He boxes for fun whenever he can get anybody to go six rounds with him, and he looks it. “How did you get in?” Brudy demanded, his voice the gravelly baritone of a leopard’s growl. What made me think of that was that just about then the mother leopard herself did give a ragged, unfocused little coming-awake growl.
“She’s waking up,” Shelly warned.
Brudy has a lot of confidence in our aversion training. He didn’t even look around at the animals. “I asked you a question,” he said.
The man from the hover craned his neck to see where the leopard was. He sounded a lot less self-assured when he said, “How I got in is none of your business. I want to be taken to the Old Ones as soon as possible.” Then he squinted at the leopard, now trying, but failing, to get to her feet. “Is that animal dangerous?”
“You bet she is. She could tear you to shreds in a minute,” I told him—not lying, either, because she certainly theoretically could, if she hadn’t had her own aversion training. “You’d better get out of here, mister.”
“Especially since you don’t have a pass in the first place,” Shelly added.
That made him look confused. “What’s a ‘pass’?” he asked.
“It’s a radio tag for your hover. You get them at the headquarters in Nairobi. If you don’t have one, you’re not allowed on the reservation.”
“‘Allowed,’” he sneered. “Who are you to ‘allow’ me anything?”
Brudy cleared his throat. “We’re the rangers for this reservation, and what we say goes. You want to give me an argument?”
Brudy can be really convincing when he wants to be. The stranger decided to be law-abiding. “Oh, all right,” he said, turning back to his hover; he’d left the air-conditioning going and I could hear it whine as it valiantly tried to cool off the whole veldt. “This petty bureaucracy crap stinks, but I’ll go back to Nairobi and get the damn pass.”
“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” Shelly said. “We don’t want the Old Ones disturbed any more than we can help, so you’ll need to give them a pretty good reason.”
He was already climbing into the vehicle, but he paused long enough to give her a contemptuous look. “Reason? To visit the Old Ones? What reason do I need, since I own them?”
II
The next morning all us rangers had to pitch in, because the food truck had arrived. Brudy and Carlo were unloading little packets of rations from the Food Factory in the Mombasa delta while the rest of us kept the Old Ones in order.
I don’t know why the Old Ones needed to be kept orderly in the first place. For most people that Food Factory stuff is the meal of last resort—that is, it is unless it’s been doctored up, when you can hardly tell it from the real thing. The Old Ones chomp the untreated stuff right down, though. That’s natural. CHON-food is what they grew up on, back when they were floating around out in the Oort cloud. The Old Ones had come running in from all over the reservation when they heard the truck’s food bell. Now they were all pressing close to the vehicle, all fifty-four of them, chattering “Gimme, gimme!” at the top of their voices as they competed for the choicest bits.
When I came to work at the reservation I had only seen the Old Ones in pictures. I knew they all had beards, males and females alike. I hadn’t known then that even the babies did, or did as soon as they were old enough to grow any hair at all, and I hadn’t known about the way they smelled.
The ancient female we called “Spot” was pretty nearly the smelliest of the lot, but she was also about the smartest, and about as close as they had to a leader. And, well, she was kind of a friend. When she saw me she gave me an imploring look. I knew what she wanted. I helped her scoop up half a dozen of the pink and white packets she liked best, then escorted her out of the crowd. I waited until she had scarfed down the first couple of packets, then tapped her on the shoulder and said, “I want you to come with me, please.”
Well, I didn’t say it like that, of course. All of the Old Ones have picked up a few words of English, but even Spot was a little shaky on things like grammar. What I said was, “You,” pointing at her, “come,” beckoning her toward me, “me” tapping my own chest.
She went on chewing, crumbs of greasy-looking pale stuff spilling out of the corners of her mouth, looking suspicious. Then she said, “Is for?”
I said, “Is because today’s the day for your crocodile-aversion refresher.” I said it just like that, too. I knew that she wasn’t going to understand every word but headquarters wanted us to talk to them in complete sentences as much as we could, in the hope they might learn. To reinforce the process I took her by one skinny wrist and tugged her away.
She had definitely understood the word “crocodile,” because she whimpered and tried to get free. That did her no good. I had twenty kilos and fifteen centimeters on her. I let her dally long enough to pick up a couple of extra food packets. Then I put her in our Old Ones van, the one that never stops smelling of the Old Ones, so we never use it for anything else. I picked five more Old Ones pretty much at random and waved them in. They got in, all right. That is, they followed Spot, because she was the leader. They didn’t like it, though, and all of them were cackling at once in their own hopelessly incomprehensible language as I drove the van to the river.
It was a pretty day. Hot, of course, and without a cloud in the sky. When I turned off the motor it was dead silent, too, not a sound except the occasional craaack of a pod coming in from Low Earth Orbit to be caught in the distant Nairobi Lofstrom Loop. I took a deep breath. Even the air smelled pretty, a dry scent of spiky grass and acacias. Times like that are when I’m glad I decided to take my park-ranger job instead of lawyering or doctoring, the way my parents wanted me to go.
The place in the river where the hippos hang out is what we call the Big Bend. The stream makes pretty nearly a right-angle turn there, with a beach on the far side that gets scoured out every rainy season. There are almost always fifteen or twenty hippos doing whatever they feel like doing in the slack water at the bend—basically just swimming around, sometimes underwater, sometimes surfacing to breathe. And there’s almost always a croc or two squatting patiently on the beach, waiting for one of the babies to stray far enough away from the big hippos to become lunch.
This time there were three crocs, motionless in the hot African sun. They lay there with those long, toothy jaws wide open, showing the yellowish inside of their mouths—I guess that’s how they keep from being overheated, like a pet dog in hot weather. What it looks like is that they’re just waiting for something edible to come within range. Which I guess is also true, and why I can’t help getting sort of shivery inside whenever I see one. So did the Old Ones. They were whimpering inside the van, and I nearly had to kick them out of it. Then they all huddled together, as far from the river bank as I would let them get, shaking and muttering fearfully to each other.
Fortunately they didn’t have long to wait, because Geoffrey was right behind us in the truck with the goat projector.
That was Geoffrey’s own invention. Before I came, he used to use live goats, but I put a stop to that. We raise the goats for food and I’m not sentimental about slaughtering them, but I made sure the ones we used for aversion training were dead already.
While he was setting up I gave myself a minute to enjoy the hippos. They’re always fun, big ones the size of our van and little ones no bigger than a pig. They look to me like they’re enjoying themselves, and how often do you see a really happy extended family? I’m sure the big ones were aware of our presence, and undoubtedly even more aware of the crocs on the bank, but they seemed carefree. They aren’t particularly violent, either, unless you get in their way. Given a chance, I would have liked to swim with them someday—except for the crocs.
“Okay,
Grace,” Geoffrey called, hand already on the trigger of the launcher.
“You may fire when ready,” I said to him, and to the Old Ones, “Watch!” They did, scared but fascinated, as the goat carcass soared out of the launcher and into the water, well downstream from the hippo families so there wouldn’t be any accidents.
You wouldn’t think a crocodile could run very fast, with those sprawly little legs and huge tail. You’d be wrong. Before the goat hit the water all three of the crocs were doing their high-speed waddle down to the river’s edge. When they hit the water they disappeared; a moment later all around the floating goat there were half a dozen little whirlpools of water, with an occasional lashing tail to show what was going on under the reddening surface. The show didn’t last long. In a minute that goat was history.
I glanced at the hippos. They hadn’t seemed to pay any attention, but I noticed that now all the big ones were on the downstream side of the herd and the babies were on the other side, away from the crocs.
“Show’s over,” I told the Old Ones. “Back in the van!”—pointing to make sure they understood what I said. They didn’t delay. They were all shivering as they lined up to climb back in, one by one. I was just about to follow them in when I heard Geoffrey calling my name. I turned around, half in the van, and called, “What’s the problem?”
He pointed to his communicator. “Shelly just called. You know that guy who claims he owns the Old Ones? He’s back!”
All the way back I had one hand on the wheel and my other hand on my own communicator, checking with Shelly—yes, the son of a bitch did have a pass this time—and then with Nairobi to see why they’d allowed it. The headquarters guy who answered the call was Bertie ap Dora. He’s my boss and he sounded really embarrassed. “Sure, Grace,” he said, “we gave him a pass. We didn’t have any choice, did we? He’s Wan.”