First, the Heechee. The Heechee in Heechee Heaven were not Heechee! Or at least those Old Ones were not. It was proved by the bioassay of the DNA, Albert was earnestly assuring her husband, punctuating his arguments with pipe thrusts. The bioassay had produced not an answer but a puzzle, a basic chemistry that was neither human, nor yet inhuman enough to come from creatures evolved around some other star. “Also,” said Albert, puffing, “there is the question of the Heechee seat. It does not fit a human being. But neither does it fit the Old Ones. So for whom was it designed? Alas, Robin. We do not know.”
A quick flicker, the socks now gone, the pipe out and being filled, and Albert was talking about prayer fans. He had not, Albert apologized, unriddled the fans. The literature was vast but he had searched it all. There was no imaginable application of energy and no instrumentation that had not been applied to them. Yet they had stayed mute. “One can speculate,” Albert said, striking a match to his pipe, “that all of the fans left for us by the Heechee are garbled, perhaps to tantalize us. I do not believe this. Raffiniert ist der Herr Hietschie, aber Boshaft ist er nicht.” In spite of everything, Essie laughed out loud. Der Herr Hietschie indeed! Had she written this sense of comedy into her program? She thought of interrupting him to command that he display this section of his instructions, but already that replay had ended and a slightly less rumpled Albert was talking about astrophysics. Here Essie almost closed her ears, for she quickly had enough of curious cosmologies. Was the universe open-ended or closed? She did not strongly care. Was some large quantity of mass “missing,” in the sense that not enough could be observed to account for known gravitational effects? Very well, then let it stay missing. Essie felt no need to go looking for it. Someone’s fantasy of storms of indetectible pions, and someone else—someone named Klube’s—notion that mass might be created from nothing, interested her very little. But when the conversation switched to black holes, she paid close attention. She was not really concerned with the subject. She was concerned with Robin’s concern for it.
And that, she told herself justly as Albert rambled on, was petty of her. Robin had kept no mean secrets. He had told her at once of the love of his life, the woman named Gelle-Klara Moynlin whom he had abandoned in a black hole—had told her, actually, far more than she wanted to know.
She said, “Stop.”
Instantly the three-dimensional figure in the tank abandoned the word it had been speaking in midsyllable. It gazed politely at her, awaiting orders.
“Albert,” she said carefully, “why did you tell me Robin was studying question of black holes?”
The figure coughed. “Why, Mrs. Broadhead,” Albert said, “I have been playing a recording prepared especially for you.”
“Not this time. Why did you volunteer this information other time?”
Albert’s expression cleared and he said humbly, “That directive did not come from my program, gospozha.”
“I thought not! You have been interacting with the psychoanalytic program!”
“Yes, gospozha, as you programmed me to do.”
“And what was the purpose of this intervention from the Sigfrid von Shrink program?”
“I cannot say for sure—but,” he added hastily, “perhaps I can offer a guess. Perhaps it is that the Sigfrid estimates your husband should be more open with you.”
“That program is not charged with care of my mental health!”
“No, gospozha, not with yours, but with your husband’s. Gospozha, if you wish more information, let me suggest that you consult that program, not me.”
“I can do more than that!” she blazed. And so she could. She could speak three words—Daite gorod Polymat—and Albert, Harriet, Sigfrid von Shrink, every one of Robin’s programs would be subsumed into the powerful program of her own, Polymath, the one she had used to write them in the first place, the overriding program that contained every instruction they owned. And then let them try cunning evasions on her! Then let them see if they could maintain the confidentiality of their memories! Then—
“God,” Essie said aloud, “am actually planning to teach lesson to my own programs!”
“Gospozha?”
She caught her breath. It was almost a laugh, nearly a sob. “No,” she said, “cancel above. I find no fault with your programming, Albert, nor with shrink’s. If shrink program judges Robin should release internal tensions, I cannot overrule and will not pry. Further,” she corrected herself fairly.
The curious thing about Essie Lavorovna-Broadhead was that “fairness” meant something to her, even in dealing with her constructs. A program like Albert Einstein was large, complex, subtle, and powerful. Not even S. Ya. Lavorovna could write such a program alone; for that she needed Polymath. A program like Albert Einstein learned, and grew, and redefined its tasks as it went along. Not even its author could say why it gave one bit of information and not another. One could only observe that it was working, and judge it by how it carried out its orders. It was unfair to the program to “blame” it, and Essie could not be so unfair.
But, as she moved restlessly among her pillows (twenty-two minutes left!) it came to her that the world was not entirely fair to her. Not fair at all! It was not fair that all these fairytale wonders should be pouring in upon the world—not now. It was not fair that these perils and perplexities should manifest themselves, not now, not while she might not live to see how they came out. Could Peter Herter be dealt with? Would the others of his party be saved? Could the lessons of the prayer fans and the explorers make it possible to do all the things Robin promised, feed the world, make all men well and happy, allow the human race to explore the universe? All these questions, and before this day’s sun had set she might be dead and never know the answers! It was not fair, any of it. And least fair was that if she died of this operation she would never know, truly, which way Robin would have chosen, if somehow his lost love could be found again.
She became aware that time was passing. Albert sat patiently in the tank, moving only occasionally to suck his pipe or scratch under the hem of his floppy sweater—to remind her, that is, that he was still in standby mode.
Essie’s thrifty cybernetician’s soul was indignantly ordering her to use the program or turn it off—what a shocking waste of machine time! But she hesitated. There were questions still to ask.
At the door the nurse was looking in. “Good morning, Mrs. Broadhead,” she said when she saw that Essie was wide awake.
“Is it time?” Essie asked, her voice suddenly unsteady.
“Oh, not for a few minutes yet. You can go on with your machine if you want to.”
Essie shook her head. “Is no point,” she said and dismissed the program. It was a decision lightly taken. It did not occur to her that some of the unasked questions might be consequential.
And when Albert Einstein was dismissed he did not allow himself to disintegrate at once.
“The whole of anything is never told,” said Henry James. Albert knew “Henry James” only as an address, the information behind which he had never had occasion to seek. But he understood the meaning of that law. He could never tell the whole of anything even to his master. He would fail in his programming if he tried.
But what parts of the whole to select?
At its lowest structural level, Albert’s program was gated to pass items of a certain measured “importance” and reject others. Simple enough. But the program was redundant. Some items came to it through several gates, sometimes as many as hundreds of gates; and when some of the gates said “go” and others said “no go,” what was a program to do? There were algorithms to test importance, but at some levels of complexity the algorithms taxed even the resources of sixty billion gigabits—or of a universe full of bits; Meyer and Stockmeyer had proved, long ago, that, regardless of computer power, problems existed which could not be solved in the life of the universe. Albert’s problems were not quite that immense. But he could not find an algorithm to decide for him, for instance, whethe
r he should bring up the puzzling implications of Mach’s Principle as applied to Heechee history. Worse. He was a proprietary program. It would have been interesting to pass on his conjectures on the subject to a pure science research program. But that his basic programming did not permit.
So Albert held himself together for nearly a millisecond, reconsidering his options. Should he, next time Robin summoned him, volunteer his misgivings about the potentially terrifying truth that lay behind Heechee Heaven?
He reached no conclusion in all that long one thousandth of a second, and his parts were needed elsewhere.
So Albert allowed himself to come apart.
This part he poured into slow memory, that part into ongoing problems as needed, until all of Albert Einstein had soaked into the 6×1019 bits, like water into sand, until not even a stain was left. Some of his routines joined with others in a simulated war game, in which Key West was invaded from Grand Cayman. Some turned up to assist the traffic-controller program at Dallas-Fort Worth, as Robin Broadhead’s plane entered its landing pattern. Much, much later, some of him helped to monitor Essie’s vital functions as Dr. Wilma Liederman began to cut. One little bit, hours after, helped to solve the mystery of the prayer fans. And the simplest, crudest, tiniest part of all stayed on to supervise the program that prepared Cajun coffee and beignets for Robin when he arrived, and to see that the house was clean for him. Sixty billion gigabits can do much. They even do windows.
13
At the Halfway Point
To love someone is a grace. To marry someone is a contract. The part of me that loved Essie, was loving her wholeheartedly, sank in pain and terror when she relapsed, surged in fearful joy when she showed signs of recovering. I had plenty of occasion for both. Essie died twice in surgery before I could get home, and again, twelve days later, when they had to go in again. That last time they made her clinically dead on purpose. Stopped heart and breath, kept only the brain alive. And every time they reanimated her I was frightened to think she would live—because if she lived it meant she might die one more time, and I could not stand it. But slowly, painfully, she began to gain weight, and Wilma told me the tide had turned, as when the spiral begins to glow in a Heechee ship at the halfway point and you know you’re going to live through the trip. I spent all that time, weeks and weeks of it, hanging around the house, so that when Essie could see me I would be there.
And all that time the part of me that had contracted to be married to her was resenting the bond, and wishing I were free.
How do you account for that? That was a good occasion for guilt, and guilt is a feeling that comes readily to me—as my old psychoanalytic program used to tell me all the time. And when I went in to see Essie, looking like a mummy of herself, the joy and worry filled my heart and the guilt and resentment clogged my tongue. I would have given my life to make her well. But that did not seem a practical strategy, or at least I could not see any way to make that deal, and the other guilty and hostile part of me wanted to be free to dwell on lost Klara, and whether somehow I might find her again.
But she mended, Essie did. She mended fast. The sunken bags of flesh under her eyes filled to be only bruises. The tubes came out of her nostrils. She ate like a pig. Before my very eyes she was filling out, the bust beginning to swell, the hips regaining their power to startle. “My compliments to the doctor,” I told Wilma Liederman when I caught her on her way in to see her patient.
She said sourly, “Yes, she’s doing fine.”
“I don’t like the way you said that,” I told her. “What’s the matter?”
She relented. “Nothing, really, Robin. All her tests are fine. She’s in such a hurry, though!”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Up to a point it is. And now,” she added, “I have to get in to see my patient. Who will be up and about any day now and, maybe, back to normal in a week or two.” What good news that was! And how reluctantly I received it.
I went through all those weeks with something hanging over me. Sometimes it seemed like doom, like old Peter Herter blackmailing the world and nothing the world could do to resist it, or like the Heechee stirring into anger as we invaded their complex and private worlds. Sometimes it seemed like golden gifts of opportunity, new technologies, new hopes, new wonders to explore and exploit. You would think that I would distinguish between hopes and worries, right? Wrong. Both scared the hell out of me. As good old Sigfrid used to tell me, I have a great talent not only for guilt but also for worry.
And when you came right down to it, I had some fairly real things to worry about. Not just Essie. When you reach a certain age you have, it seems to me, a right to expect some parts of your life to stay stable. Like what, for instance? Like money, for instance. I was used to a lot of it, and now here was my lawyer program telling me that I had to watch my pennies. “But I promised Hanson Bover a million cash,” I said, “and I’m going to pay it. Sell some stock.”
“I’ve sold stock, Robin!” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t programmed to be able to be really angry, but he could be wretched and he was.
“So sell some more. What’s the best to get rid of?”
“None of it is ‘best,’ Robin. The food mines’re down because of the fire. The fish farms still haven’t recovered from losing the fingerlings. A month or two from now—”
“A month or two from now isn’t when I want the money. Sell.” And when I signed him off and called Bover up to find out where to send his million, he actually seemed surprised.
“In view of Gateway Corp’s action,” he said, “I thought you’d call our arrangement off.”
“A deal is a deal,” I said. “We can let the legalities hang. They don’t mean much while Gateway has preempted me.”
He was suspicious immediately. What is it that I do that makes people suspicious of me when I am going miles out of my way to be fair? “Why do you want to hold off on the legalities?” he demanded, rubbing the top of his head agitatedly—was it sunburned again?
“I don’t ‘want’ to,” I said. “It just doesn’t make any difference. As soon as you lift your injunction Gateway will drop theirs on me.”
Alongside Bover’s scowling face, my secretary program’s appeared. She looked like a cartoon of the Good Angel whispering into Bover’s ear, but actually what she was saying was for me: “Sixty seconds until Mr. Herter’s reminder,” she said.
I had forgotten that old Peter had given us another of his four-hour notices. I said to Bover, “It’s time to button up for Peter Herter’s next jab,” and hung up—I didn’t really care if he remembered, I only wanted to terminate the conversation. Not much buttoning up was involved. It was thoughtful—no, it was orderly—of old Peter to warn us each time, and then to perform so punctually. But it mattered more to airline pilots and automobilists than to stay-at-homes like me.
There was Essie, however. I looked in to make sure she was not actually being perfused or catheterized or fed. She wasn’t. She was asleep—quite normally asleep, with her dark-gold hair spilling all around her, and gently snoring. And on the way back to my comfortable console chair I felt Peter in my mind.
I had become quite a connoisseur of invasions of the mind. It wasn’t any special skill. The whole human race had, over a dozen years, ever since the fool kid, Wan, began his trips to the Food Factory. His were the worst, because they lasted so long and because he shared his dreams with us. Dreams have power; dreams are a kind of released insanity. By contrast, the one light touch we’d had from Janine Herter was nothing, and Peter Herter’s precise two-minute doses no worse than a traffic light—you stop a minute, and wait impatiently until it is over, and then you go on your way. All I ever felt from Peter was the way he felt—sometimes the gut-griping of age, sometimes hunger or thirst, once the fading, angry sexual lust of an old man all by himself. As I sat down I remember telling myself that this time was nothing at all. More than anything else, it was like having a little dizzy spell, too much crouching in one pos
ition; when you stand up you have to pause a moment until it goes away. But it didn’t go away. I felt the blurriness of seeing things with two sets of eyes at once, and the inarticulate anger and unhappiness of the old man—no words; just a sort of tone, as though someone were whispering what I could not quite hear.
It kept on not going away. The blurriness increased. I began to feel detached and almost delirious. That second vision, that is never sharp and clear, began to show things I had never seen before. Not real things. Fantasy things. Women with beaks like birds of prey. Great glittering metal monsters rolling across the inside of my eyelids. Fantasies. Dreams.
The two-minute measured dose of reminder had gone off track. The son of a bitch had fallen asleep in the cocoon.
Thank God for the insomnia of old men! It didn’t last eight hours, not much more than one.
But they were sixty-odd unpleasant minutes. When I felt the unwanted dreams slide tracelessly out of my mind, and was sure they were gone, I ran to Essie’s room. She was wide awake, leaning back against the pillows. “Am all right, Robin,” she said at once. “Was an interesting dream. Nice change from my own.”