“I prepared the last two,” the leader said. “Also there are persons who assisted me still alive.”
“See that the skills are maintained,” the Oldest One ordered. “If one of you should die, he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons must be taught.” That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost—and the lives of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost while he was powered down—it would have been necessary to set some of them to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be replaced. All permitted areas of Here should be visited at least once a month. And, as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least five babies should be born each year for the next ten years.
The Oldest One then powered down his external receptors, resumed his place at the central communications terminals and plugged himself in to his long-term memories. All about the central spindle his children were hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a dozen left to dig up berryfruit bushes and airvines to replace the defective plants, others went to deal with the captives and attend to housekeeping chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to breed. If they had had other plans, they were now deferred. At this particular awakening the Oldest One was not dissatisfied with his children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him to wonder.
His concerns were elsewhere.
With his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode, the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into his reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also opportunity, if approached right. Change might be used to advance his purposes, and could not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt with the immediate and the tactical. Now his attention went to the strategic and the ultimate.
He reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events very far away in space and in time, and were frightening even to the Oldest One. (How had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and not frightening at all, for example those stored intruder intelligences the boy called “the Dead Men.” There was nothing in them to be frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be.
When the intruders first blundered into Here, shattered castaways in their tiny ships, the Oldest One had had a moment of terror. They were unexplained. Who were they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve, come to reproach his presumption?
He quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They were not that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance, in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their ships’ course directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do on arriving Here, they were terrified.
They were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone adventurer, then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of them, in nine ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and none of them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had had his children sacrifice at once, in order to put their stored intelligence into the machine form that he could best deal with. The others he had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when it appeared they might be more interesting in an independent life in the unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might need. He had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been made immortal—as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever were. It was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they were more trouble than they were worth. They brought diseases to his children, and some of them had died. They caught diseases from the children, and some of the intruders died, too. And they did not store well. Properly programmed into his long-term memories, by the machine-directed techniques that had been used on him thousands of centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly. Their time sense was deficient. Their response to interrogatories was erratic. Large sections of their memories were gone. Some of them could not be read at all. The fault was not in the techniques; they were defective to begin with.
When the Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had ever had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when at random intervals he chose one to store. So even with his flesh ancestors, so far back that even his own immense age dwindled in comparison. So with those other stored memories that he did not like even to consult.
Not so with the intruders. There was something wrong with their chemistry. They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there were times when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little storage devices and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here, and his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them.
Perhaps that time was now.
With a sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer to retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked him to the stored intruder minds.
And recoiled.
Three of the children, hurrying Janine around the curvature of the spindle from her pen to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One’s effectors quiver and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting fearfully for what would come next.
Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down to standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged Janine to the waiting metallic couch.
But inside the Oldest One’s metal shell he had received his greatest shock in many awakenings. Someone had been interfering with his stored memories! It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad; worse, they were in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as though something had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he had never given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These were not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They were new. They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even his own. Spaceships and machines. Living intelligences by the tens of billions. Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by his standards, but possessed incredible stores to draw on. It was no wonder that he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie might start and twitch.
Somehow his stored intruders had made contact with the culture they had come from.
It was easy for the Oldest One to learn how that contact had been made. From Here to the food facility, by means of the long-unused communications net. Interpreted and processed on the food facility by a pathetically crude machine. Transmitted the long light-days to the planets that circled that nearest star, by means of the creeping electromagnetic impulses of light-speed radio. Contemptible! Until one considered how much information had been transmitted each way. The Oldest One was like a hydraulic engineer transfixed at the base of a hydroelectric dam, watching a thin needle of water spurt hundreds of meters into the air, out of an almost invisible pinhole. The quantity was trivial. But that so much poured through so tiny an opening bespoke the pressure of a vast body behind the dam.
And the leak went both ways.
The Oldest One acknowledged that he had been careless. In interrogating the stored intruders to find out what they knew, he had let them know much about himself. About Here. About the technology that guided it.
About his consecration, and about the lords his life was meant to serve.
At least the leak had been tiny, and the transmissions confused by the imperfections of the stored intelligences themselves. There was no part of that storage inaccessible to the Oldest One. He ope
ned them up for study, and traced every bit. He did not “speak” to them. He allowed their minds to flow into his own. The Dead Men could not resist him, any more than a prepared frog on a dissecting table could resist a surgeon’s scalpel.
When he was done, he withdrew to ponder.
Were his plans in jeopardy?
He activated his internal scanning systems, and a three-dimensional tank of the Galaxy sprang up in his “mind.” It had no real existence. There was no vantage point from which any person could have seen it. He himself did not “see” it, he simply knew it was there. It was a sort of trompe-l’oeil. An optical illusion, except that it was not optical. On it, very far away, an object appeared, haloed in light. It had been many centuries since the Oldest One had allowed himself to observe that object. It was time to look at it again.
The Oldest One reached down into and activated long undisturbed memory stores.
It was not an easy experience. It was almost the equivalent of a session on the analyst’s couch for a human, for he was uncovering thoughts, memories, guilts, worries, and uncertainties that his “conscious” mind—the reasoning and problem-solving circuits—had long since decided to lay away. Those memories were not gone. They had not become impotent. They still held “shame” and “fear” for him. Was he doing the right thing? Did he dare act on his own responsibility? The old circular arguments raced through his mind as they had done two hundred thousand years before, and were no closer to resolution. It was not possible for the Oldest One to fugue into hysteria or depression. His circuits did not allow it.
It was, however, possible for him to be terrified.
After a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still afraid. But he was committed. He had to act.
The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more.
His forward effectors quivered, straightened and pointed at a young female, caught in midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well. “Come with me,” he ordered.
She sobbed, but followed. Her mate took a step after her as they hurried toward a gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with them, and so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they had been mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would ever see her again.
The Oldest One’s cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid walk, but the little difference kept the weeping female trotting and panting to keep up. He glided on, past machines that had not been used even in his memories—wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little six-screwed thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest One did not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with its angels. The gold skeins changed to radiant silver, the silver to purest white. A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood waiting open for them, the heavy door fanned wide as the Oldest One approached. By the time they reached a place where the female had never been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of a dozen colors and strange patterns flickered in panels all around a great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. No rest. “Go there,” the Oldest One commanded. “Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do.” At opposite sides of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate them, were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench, very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench, a sort of hummock of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and touched an effector to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights shivered and rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a triple row of ochre lines in the middle of it. “Match my pattern!” The young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though it had not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors merged and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of the controls before the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He merely waited. He knew she was doing her best. By the time all ten wheels were showing the pattern he had chosen tears were gone and sweat was stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard.
The colors were not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant, safed controls, the rosette of screens that should have displayed their course coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at all.
But they did work.
The Oldest One touched something under his own bank of controls and quickly, wonderfully, the lights developed a life of their own. They blurred and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into life with a pattern of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered fearfully at the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one.
She felt what happened next.
So did everyone else Here. The intruders in their pens, the near hundred children all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest One himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died and was replaced by tweaks of pseudo-acceleration punctuating weightlessness.
After more than three-quarters of a million years of rolling slowly around Earth’s very distant sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new orbit and surged away.
11
S. Ya. Lavorovna
At precisely five-fifteen AM a gentle green glow appeared in the bedside monitor of S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough to disturb deep slumber, but she had been less than half asleep. “Very well,” she called, “I am already awake, you do not have to continue this program. But give me a moment.”
“Da, gospozha,” her secretary acknowledged, but the green glow remained. If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do; that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program.
In this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind. There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because old Peter Herter had given warning before he invaded the world’s minds, there had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and rearranging, and in the course of it Robin’s flights had been inextricably confused.
Pity. Worse than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not tried. Essie accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know that he had tried.
“Am I allowed to eat?” she called.
“No, gospozha Broadhead. Nothing at all, not even a drink of water,” her secretary responded at once. “Do you wish your messages?”
“Perhaps. What messages?” If they were of interest at all she would take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed.
“There is a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there.”
“Do so.” Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while she was waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She carefully kept the dozen tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had hurt more, and perhaps that would have been good. These months of demeaning annoyance were only an irritation; there was enough of Anna Karenina in Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come to be! Her life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her private parts.
“Gospozha Broadhead?”
“Yes?”
The visual program appeared, looking apologetic. “Your husband cannot be reached at present. H
e is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has just taken off; all the aircraft’s communications are at present required for navigation.”
“Mexico City? Dallas?” The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the Earth to get to her! “Then at least give me the recorded message,” she ordered.
“Da, gospozha.” Face and greenish glow shrank away, and out of the sound-circuits her husband’s voice addressed her:
“Honey, I’m having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight. Now I’m hoping to make a connection to Dallas and—Anyway, I’m on my way.” Pause. He sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost see him casting around for something cheerful to say. But it was all rambling. Something about the great news about prayer fans. Something about the Heechee who weren’t Heechee, and—and just a babble. Poor creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said, “Oh, hell, Essie. I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the meantime—Take care of yourself. If you’ve got any spare time before you, uh, before Wilma gets going, I’ve told Albert to tape all the essential stuff for you. He’s a good old program…” Long pause. “I love you,” he said, and was gone.
S. Ya. lay back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with the next (and perhaps last?) hour of her life. She missed her husband quite a lot, especially in view of the fact that in some ways she considered him quite a silly man. “Good old program!” How foolish of him to anthropomorphize computer programs! His Albert Einstein program was, she had no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the bioassay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! “Squiffy.” It was like giving a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were done by someone one cared for…in which case it was instead endearing.