“Go on,” I growled. “You don’t have to worry about reminding me that I died. I haven’t forgotten.”
He shrugged. “At any rate,” he finished, “as to whether some of them are watching us right now, we simply have no evidence at all.”
“So we search the ship!” shouted General Cassata, who had been listening without talking for a long time. “Mrs. Broadhead, most of these programs are yours, aren’t they? Fine! You tell us what to do, and—”
She was looking at Albert as she said, “Moment, please, General. Tricky weird program has not finished its fooling-around report, I think.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Broadhead.” Albert beamed. “Perhaps you have forgotten the other main heading in my brief synoptic report. ‘The dog did not bark.’”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, hell, Albert,” I said, “you’ll be the death of me, with your silly literary references. What’s that, Sherlock Holmes? Meaning the important thing is that something did not happen? And what something is that?”
“Why, simply that we’re still here, Robin,” he said, smiling approvingly at me for my sagacity.
I stopped laughing. I did not think I understood him exactly, and was afraid that perhaps I did.
“That is to say,” he amplified, comfortably sucking on his pipe, “although we must assume that the Foe have been able to roam more or less at will around the Galaxy for some time, and although they certainly have the capacity to wipe out entire civilizations at will, since they have done so in the past, and although we have no effective way known to me of interfering with this if they should choose to do it—we have not been wiped out.”
I was sitting straight up by then, and laughter was nowhere in my feelings. “Go on!” I barked.
He looked mildly surprised. “Why, Robin,” he said peaceably, “I think the conclusion follows rather inescapably from all of that.”
“Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it,” I said—or whimpered, because, to be truthful, I was no longer feeling even as good as I had when the discussion began.
“Yes, that’s possible,” he said solemnly, sucking on his pipe.
“Then, for God’s sake,” I yelled, “what the hell have you got to look cheerful about?”
He said gently, “Robin, I know this is upsetting to you, but do try to think it out logically. If they have the intention of wiping us out and we have no way of preventing it, then what is there for us to do? Nothing at all; it is a fruitless hypothesis, because it does not lead to any useful course of action. I prefer the opposite assumption.”
“Which is what?”
“That they have, at least, reserved decision,” he said. “That at some future point we may be able to take some action we don’t yet know about. Until then, I think we might as well just relax and enjoy ourselves, don’t you, Mrs. Broadhead?”
“Wait a God-damned minute,” I yelled. “What kind of future action are we talking about? Why are we going out to the kugelblitz, anyway? You don’t for one moment think that one of us is going to try to get into the kugelblitz and talk to these—”
I stopped. They were all looking at me with an expression I recognized.
I had seen it a long, long time ago, on the Gateway asteroid. It was the kind of look the other prospectors gave you after you had signed up for a mission that might make you rich and was a lot more likely to kill you dead. But I didn’t even remember volunteering.
We had at that point, I guess, been on the way for maybe an hour or so, meat time; and already it had been a long, long trip.
See, although all this was—was—I guess the only way I can say it is, was a great pain in the ass, it wasn’t unique in human history.
Human beings had gotten out of the habit of long travel times, that’s all. We had to learn about them all over again.
Our ancestors of a couple of centuries back wouldn’t have had that problem. They knew all about the relationship between space and time long before Albert Einstein. Go a long space, take a long time. That was the rule. It wasn’t until jet airplanes came in that people began to forget it. (And had to remember again when they started into space.) Think of Admiral Nelson playing one last game of bowls before getting into his ship to meet the Spanish Armada. Napoleon invading Russia like a package tour, with a dinner, a ball, and an entertainment at every night’s stop—oh, that was the way to fight a war! Old ways were best. When Alexander the Great came out of Macedonia to conquer the world, it wasn’t any blitzkrieg. He took his time. He stopped off here to sit out the winter, there to set up a puppet government, this other place to get some lovely local lady pregnant—often enough, hanging around until the baby was born. If you’ve been in a battle and then are sitting around your troop transport to dawdle toward the next one, you’ve got a weird, unreal time in between.
We weren’t fighting a war, exactly. At least, we hoped we weren’t. But we were on our way to something just as decisive and dangerous, and, oh!, did we have time! Do you know how long fifty days is? It is roughly 4,000,000,000 milliseconds, and we spent them the way our distinguished predecessors did. We feasted, feted, and fucked our way across the Galaxy.
We did it in all the style of any Napoleon or Alexander, too, because Albert Einstein has great resources. He provided us with some of the neatest surrounds I have ever seen. For hours Essie and I hid away from our traveling companions, sunbathing and snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. We dragged ourselves out of the soft, salt shallows onto a quarter-hectare sand island, where we made love in a shady silk tent with its skirts raised to let the breezes through. There was a bar and a picnic table and a hot freshwater Jacuzzi, and that’s how we passed the first “day.”
Then we could face our traveling companions and reality—for a while. And when that began to get stale, Albert came up with a grape arbor in an oasis in the Big Sandy of Peggys Planet. It was on the side of a fault escarpment. Ice-cold springs trickled down the rock face. White grapes, black grapes and red, plums and berries, melons and peaches grew all around. We lay talking and touching under the leafy shade of the vines overhead, Essie and I, and so passed another fine “day.”
We hardly thought of where we were going at all…for moments at a time.
Albert’s infinite variety kept turning up wonderful surrounds. A tree house in an African forest, with lions and elephants sliding silently among the trees below at night. A houseboat on an Indian lake, with turbaned servants bringing us flowery-fresh sherbets and spicy tidbits of lamb and pastry, among the water lilies. A penthouse a hundred stories over Chicago, looking out at thunderclouds strobing the wide lake with lightning. A night in Rio at Carnival time, and another in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. A hoverplatform vibrating restlessly on the crater rim of the planet Persephone’s Mount Hell, with boiling lava fountains reaching up almost to where we sat. Albert had a million of them, and they were all good.
What wasn’t quite so good was me.
Said Essie, panting and regarding me critically as she hoisted herself up the last half-meter to sit on a ledge over the Grand Canyon, “Is all right everything, my Robin?”
“Everything is fine,” I said, voice as firm as it was false.
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Ha,” she added, studying me closely. “Is enough sightseeing for now, I think. All play, no work has made Robin dull boy. Albert! Where are you?”
“I’m right here, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert, leaning over the lip of the canyon to look down on us.
Essie squinted up at his friendly face, outlined against the bright, simulated Arizona sky. “Do you think,” she said, “can find us setting less, ah, epicene and, uh, sybaritic for dear husband who is capable of doing anything but nothing at all?”
“I certainly can,” said Albert. “In fact, I was about to suggest that we give up the simulated surrounds for a while. I think it might be interesting to spend a little more time with our guests on the True Love. After all, I’m afraid they’re getting a little bored by now, too.”
>
Over all the millions of milliseconds I have experienced, I’ve spent time with a lot of people and some of them were Heechee. This time with Double-Bond was special.
What was special about this time was that there was so much of it. Soothed by all those long days of beachcombing (and mountain-climbing and scuba-diving and even dirt-car racing) with Essie, I was ready to get serious.
So was Double-Bond. “I hope,” he said courteously, the muscles on the backs of his skinny hands rippling in apology, “that you will forgive me for stowing away on your ship, Robinette Broadhead. It was Thermocline’s suggestion. He is very wise.”
“I’m sure he is,” I said, repaying courtesy with courtesy, “but who’s Thermocline, exactly?”
“He is one of the other Heechee representatives on the Joint Assassin Watch System council,” said Double-Bond, and Julio Cassata put in:
“And a royal pain in the ass he is, too.” He was smiling as he said it, and I looked at him curiously. That had been a very Cassata thing to say, but he hadn’t said it in a Cassata way. Not only that, but he wasn’t even behaving in a Cassata fashion. He was sitting next to Alicia Lo, and they were holding hands.
Double-Bond took the remark in a friendly spirit. “We have had differences, yes. Very often with you, General Cassata, or at least with your organic original.”
“Old Blood-and-Slaughter Cassata,” said his copy, grinning. “You Heechee don’t like it when we talk about blowing up the kugelblitz.”
Indeed they didn’t. Double-Bond’s neck tendons tensed; it was the equivalent of a human shudder. Albert cleared his throat and said peaceably, “Double-Bond, there is something I have had on my mind for some time. Perhaps you can help clear it up.”
“With great pleasure,” said the Heechee.
“While you were still organic, you were one of the great authorities on the Sluggard planet. I wonder. Do you remember well enough to be able to show us some of the Sluggard material visually?”
“No, I do not remember,” said Double-Bond, smiling (it was a Heechee smile, the cheek muscles squeezing up against the huge, pink eyeballs). “However, we have incorporated some of your own storage systems into our fans and, yes, I do have a selection of such material available.”
“I thought you did,” said Albert, meaning, of course, that he had known that was so all along. “Let me show you something first. When we were on the JAWS satellite, we visited the Voodoo Pigs. Mrs. Broadhead and I had a similar notion. Do you remember?” he asked, looking at me.
“Sure,” I said, because Albert had displayed the Voodoo Pig muck before us, all but the smell. One of the pigs was nibbling away industriously at one of their voodoo dolls, or whatever they were, and in the foreground was one of the little figures itself, washed clean of filth and slop. “Essie said something funny. Alicia Lo said she thought they were dolls, just to play with, and then you said—what was it you said, Essie?”
She said, “Visitors.”
She said it in a voice that was half argumentative, as though she thought she would be challenged, and half—well—scared. Albert nodded. “Exactly, Mrs. Broadhead. Visitors. Aliens to the planet. This was a logical deduction, since all the figures were the same, and quite detailed, and there was nothing like that ever on that planet to use as a model.”
“They’re probably extinct,” I said offhandedly. “Maybe the Voodoo Pigs ate them all.”
Albert gave me one of those tolerant fatherly looks. “It would be more likely, to judge from their appearance, that they would have eaten the Voodoo Pigs. Indeed, I suspect perhaps they may have, but that’s not what I am driving at. Trust me, Robin, those creatures were never indigenous to the planet of the Voodoo Pigs. I believe Double-Bond will agree.”
“That is true,” said Double-Bond politely. “We made extensive paleontological investigations. They were not native.”
“Therefore,” Albert began.
Essie finished for him. “Therefore was right! Visitors! Creatures from another planet, left such an impression on pigs, have been carving voodoo dolls to keep them away ever since.”
“Yes,” said Albert, nodding, “something like that, I think. Now, Double-Bond—”
But the Heechee was ahead of him, too. “I believe you now wish to see the creatures that attacked the Sluggards.” He waited politely for Albert to dismiss his own construct, then substituted a new one. It was a Sluggard arcology, and it was being destroyed. Creatures the size of great blue whales, but with squidlike tentacles that held weapons, were systematically blowing it apart.
“The simulation,” said Double-Bond regretfully, “is only very approximate, but it is probably correct in its gross features. The weapons are quite well documented. The lack of limbs, other than the tentacles, is highly probable; the Sluggards would not have failed to note arms or legs, since their own anatomy has neither.”
“And the size?” said Albert.
“Oh, yes,” said Double-Bond, shaking his wrists affirmatively, “that is quite definite. The relative sizes of the Assassins and the Sluggards are well established.”
“And they are much bigger than the Voodoo Pigs,” said Albert. “Assuming the dolls they made are of creatures about their own size, they could not be the same creatures.”
Alicia Lo stirred. “But I thought—” She hesitated. “I thought the Foe were the only other space-traveling race there was.”
“Yes,” said Albert, nodding.
I looked at him, waiting. He stopped there. I said, “Come on, Albert! Yes, they were, or yes, everybody thought so because everybody else was dumber than you are?”
He said, “I don’t really know, Robin. I’ll tell you what I think, though. I think neither the creatures that nearly destroyed the Sluggards nor the creatures that the Voodoo Pigs keep depicting were actually space travelers. I think they were brought there.”
Said Double-Bond, “I also think that, Albert. I believe that the Assassins were not actually Assassins. That is, they themselves did not physically attack other races, though perhaps they transported the beings who did. For this reason I like better the name you call them by: the Foe. It is more accurate, I think,” he said, looking at Albert.
But Albert did not respond.
Guests are no trouble at all when they don’t have to be fed and their bed linen doesn’t have to be changed. I discovered, to my surprise, that I actually liked having Alicia Lo around, besotted though she seemed to be with a man I had little use for. What was even more surprising was that Cassata himself seemed to be coming almost close to being nearly tolerable. For one thing, he hardly ever wore the uniform anymore. That is, I didn’t think he did. Most of the time I had no idea what he wore, doubted actually that he was wearing much at all, because he and Alicia were off in some private surround of their own. But when we were all together he was generally wearing something casual, shorts and a tank top, a safari suit, once elegant in white tie and tails. (Alicia was wearing a shimmery, sequiny evening dress at the time, so I assumed it was some private joke between them—but, you know, that was a little surprising, too, because I’d never thought of Cassata as being the kind of man who bothered with tender, private jokes.)
But, as Albert might have said, thermal equilibrium was maintained. Because as Julio Cassata became more bearable, I became more restless, itchy, ill at ease…yes, gloopy.
I tried to hide it. Waste of time; who can hide anything from my dear Portable-Essie? Finally she confronted me. “You want to talk about it?” she demanded. I tried to give her a bright smile. It turned itself into a morose shrug. “Not to me, dammit. To Albert.”
“Ah, honey,” I objected, “what about?”
“I don’t know what about. Maybe Albert will know what about. Have nothing to lose, you know.”
“Nothing at all,” I said, meaning to agree—meaning also to give a sort of sardonic agreement, maybe with a twitch of the eyebrows; but the look I got back discouraged me. I said hastily, “I’ll do it. Albert!”
> And when Albert appeared, I just sat and looked at him.
He patiently looked back, puffing on his pipe, waiting for me to speak. Essie had taken herself away out of courtesy—I wanted to think it was courtesy, and not contempt or boredom. So we just sat for a while, and then it occurred to me that, indeed, there was something I wanted to talk to him about. “Albert,” I said, pleased to have a topic of conversation, “what’s it like?”
“What’s what like, Robin?”
“To be where you were before you were here, I mean,” I said. “What’s it like to, you know, dissolve? When I tell you to go away for a while. When you’re not doing anything. When you go back to being part of the gigabit store. When you stop being, well, you, and just be a bunch of distributed bits and pieces floating around in the great electronic bin of building-block parts.”
Albert didn’t groan. He only looked as though he wanted to. He said with patience sticking out all over him, “I have told you, I think, that when I am not actively programmed to be your data-retrieval source, the various bits of memory that the ‘Albert Einstein’ program employs exist in the common store. Of course, the common store in the True Love is much smaller than that in the world’s gigabit net, though still quite large and performing many functions. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“That’s it, Albert. What does it feel like?”
He pulled out his pipe, which was the sign that he was thinking it over. “I don’t know if I can tell you that, Robin.”
“Why not?”
“Because the question is wrongly put. You presuppose that there is a ‘me’ who can ‘feel’ what it is like. There isn’t a ‘me’ when my parts are distributed to other tasks. For that matter, there isn’t a ‘me’ now.”
“But I see you,” I said.
“Oh, Robin,” he sighed, “we’ve had these discussions so many times before, haven’t we? You’re simply dodging around some real issue that concerns you. If I were your psychoanalytic program, I would ask you to—”
“You’re not,” I said, smiling but feeling the smile grow tight, “so don’t. Let’s do it over again. This time I’ll try to stay with you. You know. Go back to where I say, ‘But I see you,’ and then you tell me about Niagara Falls again.”