“Bloody marvelous, Albert! And what is it you got?”
“Uh, well,” he said, reaching for his pipe, “actually not a lot, yet. It’s hologram-stored and time-dependent, so what we get is a kind of choppy cloud of symbols. And, of course, we can’t read any of the symbols. It’s Heechee language, you know. But now it’s just straight cryptography, so to speak. All we need is a Rosetta stone.”
“How long?”
He shrugged, and spread his hands, and twinkled.
I thought for a moment. “Well, stay with it. Another thing. I want you to read into my lawyer program the whole thing, the microwave frequencies, schematics, everything. There ought to be a patent in there somewhere, and I want it.”
“Sure thing, Robin. Uh. Would you like to hear about the Dead Men?”
“What about the Dead Men?”
“Well,” he said, “not all of them are human. There are some pretty strange little minds in those storage circuits, Robin. I think they might be what you call the Old Ones.”
The back of my neck prickled. “Heechee?”
“No, no, Robin! Almost human. But not. They don’t use language well, especially what seem to be the earliest of them, and I bet you can’t even guess the computer-time bill you’re going to get for analysis and mapping to make any sense of them at all.”
“My God! Essie’ll be thrilled when—”
I stopped. For a moment I had forgotten about Essie.
“Well,” I said, “that’s—interesting. What else is there to tell?”
But, really, I didn’t care. I had used up my own last jolt of adrenaline, and there wasn’t any more.
I let him tell me the rest of his budget of conversation, but most of it rolled right off me. Three members of the Herter-Hall party were known to be captured. The Heechee had brought them to a spindle-shaped place where some old machinery was lying about. The cameras were continuing to return frames of nothing very exciting. The Dead Men had gone haywire, were making no sense at all. Paul Hall’s whereabouts were unknown; perhaps he was still at liberty. Perhaps he was still alive. The haywire link between the Dead Men’s radio and the Food Factory was still functioning, but it was not clear how long it would last—even if it had anything to tell us. The organic chemistry of the Heechee was quite surprising, in that it was less unlike human biochemistry than one might guess. I let him talk until he ran down, not prompting him to continue, then turned back to the commercial PV. It had two rapid-fire comedians delivering bellylaugh lines to each other. Unfortunately, it was in Portuguese. It didn’t matter. I still had an hour to kill, and I let it run. If nothing else, I could admire the pretty Carioca, fruit salad in her hair, whose scanty costume the comedians were tweaking off as they passed her back and forth, giggling.
Harriet’s attention signal lighted up, bright red.
Before I could make up my mind to respond, the picture slid off the commercial PV channel and a man’s voice said something stern in Portuguese. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I understood the picture that showed almost at once.
It was the Food Factory, taken out of stock, a shot from the Herter-Halls as they were approaching it to dock. And in the short sentence the announcer had spoken were two words that could have been “Peter Herter.”
Could have been.
Were.
The picture didn’t change, but a voice began, and it was old Herter’s voice, angry and firm. “This message,” it said, “is to be broadcast over all networks at once. It is a two-hour warning. In two hours I am going to cause a one-minute attack of the fever by entering the couch and projecting the necessary, uh, projections. I tell you all to take precautions. If you do not, it is your responsibility, not mine.” It paused for a moment, then resumed. “Remember, you have two hours from a count which I will give you. No more. Shortly after that I will speak again to tell you the reason for this, and what I demand as my proper right if you do not wish this to happen many times. Two hours. Beginning…now.”
And the voice stopped.
The announcer came back on, babbling in Portuguese, looking scared. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
I had understood what Peter Herter had said, very well. He had repaired the dreaming couch and was going to use it. Not out of ignorance, like Wan. Not as a quick experiment, like the girl, Janine. He was going to use it as a weapon. He had a gun pointed at the heads of the entire human race.
And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp was sure to take over now, and I couldn’t blame them.
10
The Oldest One
The Oldest One bestirred himself slowly, one organ at a time.
First came the piezophonic external receptors. Call them “ears.” They were always “on,” in the sense that sounds always reached them. Their tiny rag crystals were squeezed by vibrations in the air and, when the patterns of sound corresponded to the name the children of the Oldest One called him by, they passed a gate and went on to activate what corresponded to his peripheral nervous system.
At that point the Oldest One was not yet awake, but knew he was being wakened. His true ears, the inner ones that analyzed and interpreted sound, came to life. His cognitive circuits sampled the signals. The Oldest One heard the voices of his children and understood what they were saying. But only in an offhand and inattentive way, like a drowsy human aware of the buzzing of a fly. He had not yet “opened his eyes.”
Some decision-making took place at that stage. If the interruption seemed worthwhile, the Oldest One woke further circuits. If not, not. A human sleeper may awaken enough to swat a fly. When the Oldest One was awakened for trivial reasons he had ways to “swat” his children. They did not wake him lightly. But if he decided to wake further, either to act or to punish the interruption to his sleep, the Oldest One then activated his major external optics, and with them a whole congeries of information-processing systems and short-term memories. He was then fully awake, like a man looking up at the ceiling after a nap.
The Oldest One’s internal clocks told him that this nap had been rather short. Less than ten years. Unless there was a good reason for this awakening, someone would have to be swatted.
By then the Oldest One was fully aware of his surroundings, all of them. His internal telemetry was receiving status reports from all of its remote sensors, all through the ten-million-ton mass in which he and his children lived. A hundred inputs recirculated through his short-term memory: the words that had wakened him; the image of the three captives his children had just brought him; a breakdown in repair facilities in the 4700 Ä sections; the fact that there was unusual activity among the stored intelligences; temperatures; inventories; moments of thrust. His long-term storage, though dormant, was accessible at need.
The wisest of his children was standing before him, with beads of sweat trickling through the sparse hairs on his cheeks and lip. The Oldest One perceived that this was a new leader, shorter and younger than the one he remembered from ten years before, but he wore the necklace of reading scrolls that symbolized the office as he waited for judgment. The Oldest One turned his major external lenses on him as a signal to speak. “We have captured intruders and brought them to you,” the leader said, and added, trembling, “Have we done well?”
The Oldest One turned his attention to observe the captives. One was not an intruder, but the pup he had allowed to be born fifteen years before, now nearly grown. The other two, however, were strangers, and both female. That presented an option worth pondering. When the other intruders had presented themselves, he had failed to take advantage of the chance to establish new breeding stock until it was too late for any of the available specimens. And then they had stopped coming.
That was a chance the Oldest One had missed, and one which, on the basis of past terrifying experience, he should not have failed to take. The Oldest One was aware that for some thousands of years his judgments had not been always right, his opinions no longer
confident. He was slowing down. He was subject to error. The Oldest One did not know what personal penalty he would have to pay for error and did not want to find out.
He began to make decisions. He reached into his long-term memory for precedents and prospects, and found that he had a satisfying number of alternatives. He activated mobility and handling effectors. His great metal body rose on its supports and moved past the leader, toward the chamber where the intruders were being kept. He heard the gasp from his children as he moved. All were startled. A few of the younger ones, who had never seen him move as adults, were terrified. “You have done well,” he judged, and there was a long sigh of relief.
The Oldest One could not enter the chamber because of his size, but with long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives. It did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at that moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory: two of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for many years of use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All seemed in good health.
As far as communicating with them went, there was the nuisance that their yells and imprecations were in one of those unpleasant languages their predecessors had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word. That was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through the intervention of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even his own children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or two of them every dozen generations as translators—as nothing but translators, because the Oldest One’s children regrettably did not seem to be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile the facts were favorable. Fact: The specimens were in good condition. Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact: They were his to employ as he saw fit.
“Feed them. Keep them secure. Wait for further instructions,” he commanded the children clustered behind him. He then turned down his external receptors so that he could consider just how to employ these intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core of his very long life.
As a personality stored in a machine, the Oldest One’s normal life expectancy was very great—perhaps as much as several thousand years—but not great enough to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting it. In standby mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time powered-down, motionless. He was not resting at such times, not even dreaming. He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly forward.
From time to time he woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to check and correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They were instructed to do so at need, and very often (though not really very by any standard other than his own) the need arose.
Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an animal as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That time had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he was expelled from his mother’s sweated and straining loins to the terrible time at its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his veins and the whirling knives waited to trepan his skull. He could remember that time quite clearly when he chose. He could remember anything, in that short life or in the long, long pseudolife that followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much stored.
The Oldest One had no clear conception of how many memories he had available to him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or even of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was “Here.” That certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts was “There.” Everything else in the universe was merely “Everywhere else,” and he did not trouble to locate points as they related to one another. Where did the intruders come from? From somewhere or other. It did not matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some other somewhere. Where had his people come from, in the long ages before he himself had been born? It didn’t matter. The central Here had existed for a long, long time—longer than one could comprehend, even for the Oldest One himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and outfitted and launched; Here had seen many births and deaths—nearly five million of them—though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred living things, and seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant slow changes through all that time. The newborns were larger, softer, fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower, less hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the children were well advised to wake the Oldest One.
Sometimes the changes were political, for Here had held a thousand different social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation or two, or even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or a divinity, or when none rose above any other at all. There was never a democratic republic like those Earth had tried—Here was not big enough for representative government—and only once a racially stratified society. (It ended when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers and wiped them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a various collection of moralities, but only one religion—at least, in the last many millennia. There was only room for one, when its living god rested among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite or favor when it chose.
For many eons Here held no true people at all, only a collection of puzzled semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered to make them wise. The process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred thousand years before the first of them comprehended even the concept of writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough to be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One himself. It had not been welcome. No other had earned it since.
And that, too, was a failing, the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had failed. What had he done wrong?
Surely he had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first few centuries of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished. When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs.
But perhaps that was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time, long and long ago, when he had awakened with a terrible “pain” in the metal carapace he dwelt within. It was not the pain of flesh, but the sensors’ report of unacceptable physical damage; but it was quite as alarming. His children were gathered around in terror, all shouting at once as they displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female. “She was insane!” they cried, quaking. “She tried to destroy you!”
The Oldest One’s quick check of systems revealed that the damage was trivial. It had been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him was a few effectors and some destruction of control nets, nothing that could not be repaired. He asked to know why she had done this. Their answers came only slowly, for they were terrified, but they came: “She wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could not grow without you. We beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not killing her sooner!”
“You did wrong,” the Oldest One said justly, “but that was not the reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed.”
And then—was it a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an eye. And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon enough. For a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and the reproductive budgets had not been met, and the total census of his living children was down to four individuals before they dared risk his displeasure by waking him
. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the end of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near the end of child-bearing. He had used a dozen years of his life then, waking fretfully every few months, disciplining, teaching—worrying. With the help of biological lore stored deep in his oldest memories he had ensured that the two babies the female managed to bear were also female. With stored sperm from the terrified males he kept the gene pool as diverse as he could. But it was a near thing. And some things had been forever lost. No other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If only one would! No other like himself had ever appeared.
The Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be another from his children. If it could happen, it would have. There had been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years.
When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew he would act. They did not know what the actions would be.
“The repair mechanisms in the 4700 Ä corridors are to be replaced,” he said. “Three artificers see to it.” There was a stilled murmur of relief from the seventy-odd adults—punishment always came first, and if his first orders were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three artificers the leader pointed to were less relieved, because that meant some days of very hard work in manhandling new machines to the green corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to get away from the awful presence of the Oldest One. They seized it immediately.
“The male intruder and the older female are to be penned together,” he said. If they were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to start with the older female. “Do any of you survive who have had experience with the rapporter?” Three of the children were pushed reluctantly forward. “One of you will educate the younger female,” he instructed. “Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders for storage?”