“I suppose you’d do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct.”
“Sure thing, Bob. And I am about to request such a hookup through the Herter-Hall shipboard computer, but it needs careful programming beforehand. It is not a very good computer, Robin.” He hesitated. “Uh, Robin? There is one other interesting thing.”
“What’s that?”
“As you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when it was discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the number of ships remained the same—not counting the Herter-Hall ship and the one in which Wan arrived two days ago, of course. But it is not certain they are the same ships.”
“What?”
“It isn’t certain, Robin,” he emphasized. “One Heechee ship looks very much like another. But careful scan of the approach photos seems to show a different orientation on the part of at least one of the large ones. Possibly all three. As though the ships that were there had left, and new ones had docked.”
A cold feeling went up and down my spine. “Albert,” I said, finding it hard to get the words out, “do you know what that suggests to me?”
“Sure thing, Robin,” he said solemnly. “It suggests that the Food Factory is still in operation. That it is converting the cometary gases to CHON-food. And sending them somewhere.”
I swallowed hard, but Albert was still talking. “Also,” he said, “there is quite a lot of ionizing radiation in the environment. I have to admit I don’t know where it comes from.”
“Is that dangerous to the Herter-Halls?”
“No, Robin, I would say not. No more than, say, piezovision broadcasts are to you. It is not the risk, it is that I am puzzled about the source.”
“Can’t you ask the Herter-Halls to check?”
“Sure thing, Robin. I already have. But it’ll take fifty days to get the answer.”
I dismissed him and leaned back in my chair to think about the Heechee and their queer ways…
And then it hit.
My desk chairs are all built to maximum comfort and stability, but this time I almost tipped it over. In a split second, I was in pain. Not just in pain; I was dizzy, disoriented, even hallucinating. My head felt as though it were about to burst, and my lungs seared like flame. I had never felt so sick, in both mind and body, and at the same time I found myself fantasizing incredible feats of sexual athletics.
I tried to get up, and couldn’t. I flopped back in the chair, absolutely helpless. “Harriet!” I croaked. “Get a doctor!”
It took her a full three seconds to respond, and then her image wavered worse than Morton. “Mr. Broadhead,” she said, looking queerly worried, “I cannot account for it, but the circuits are all busy. I—I—I—” It was not just her voice repeating; her head and body looked like a short loop of video tape, over and over shaping the same beginning of a word and snapping back to begin it again.
I fell off the chair onto the floor, and my last coherent thought was:
The fever.
It was back. Worse than I had ever felt it before. Worse, perhaps, than I could live through, and so bad, so painful, so terrifyingly, psychotically strange that I was not sure I wanted to.
5
Janine
The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After three and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort cloud, Janine was no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped being a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do. Janine was not in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to hand.
When she left the others, on the day when she met Wan, she was not particularly searching for anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she was tired of her family. What she wanted was something of her own, an experience not shared, an evaluation not helped by always-present grownups; she wanted the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
So she pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time to time at a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be “coffee” to her. It was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
All of her senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most fabulously exciting, delightfully scary thing that had ever happened to her. More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than the stained shorts that had announced she had become a woman. More than anything. Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle blue light their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen by that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to chamber, only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room were walls of rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a huge truncated sphere, top and bottom sliced off, mirror chrome in appearance, queerly powdery to the touch—what was it for? Some of the things she could guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly was a table. (The lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from skittering off it in the Food Factory’s gentle gravity.) Some of the objects had been identified for them by Vera, accessing the information stores of Heechee artifacts cataloged by the big data sources back on Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera was right? No matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the presence of space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they reached the Food Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life, had the chance to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure. Especially as the quite adult part of her fourteen-year-old brain was always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was not large enough for her to stay lost.
So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
Until she found herself trapped by the farside docks, as something—Heechee? Space monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife?—came shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
Of course, she didn’t know his name. “Don’t you come any closer!” she whimpered, heart in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new breasts. He didn’t. He stopped. He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth open, tongue almost hanging out. He was tall, skinny. His face was triangular, with a long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a skirt and what looked like a tank top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was shaking as he sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she had seen in years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and began to do what Janine had never seen any other person do she moaned while she giggled—amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at what he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
For the next few days Janine could not bear to let Wan out of her sight. She felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his wife. “No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it’s hot!” “Wan, do you mean to say you’ve been all alone since you were three?” “You have really beautiful eyes, Wan.” She didn’t mind that he was not sophisticated enough to respond by telling her that she had beautiful eyes, too, because she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in all her parts.
The others could tell that, too, of course. Janine did not mind. Wan had plenty of senses-sharp, eyes-bright, obsessed adoration to share around. He slept even less than she. She appreciated that, at first, because it meant there was more of Wan to share, but then she could see that he was becoming exhausted. Even ill. When he began to sweat and tremble, in
the room with the glittering silver-blue cocoon, she was the one who cried, “Lurvy! I think he’s going to be sick!” When he lurched toward the couch she flew to his side, fingers stretched to test his dry and burning forehead. The closing cover of the cocoon almost trapped her arm, gouging a long, deep slash from wrist to knuckles on her hand. “Paul,” she shouted, drawing back, “we’ve got to—”
And then the 130-day madness hit them all. Worst of any time. Different from any time. Between one heartbeat and the next Janine was sick.
Janine had never been sick. Now and then a bruise, a cramp, a sniffle. Nothing more. For most of her life she had been under Full Medical and sickness simply did not occur. She did not comprehend what was happening to her. Her body raged with fever and pain. She hallucinated monstrous strange figures, in some of whom she recognized her caricatured family; others were simply terrifying and strange. She even saw herself—hugely bosomed and grossly hipped, but herself—and in her belly rumbled a frenzy to thrust and thrust into all the seen and imagined cavities of that fantasy something that, even in fantasy, she did not have. None of this was clear. Nothing was clear. The agonies and the insanities came in waves. Between them, for a second or two now and then, she caught glimpses of reality. The steely blue glow from the walls. Lurvy, crouched and whimpering beside her. Her father, vomiting in the passage. The chrome and blue cocoon, with Wan writhing and babbling inside the mesh. It was not reason or will that made her claw at the lid and, on the hundredth, or thousandth, try get it open; but she did it, at last, and dragged him whimpering and shaking out.
The hallucinations stopped at once.
Not quite as quickly, the pain, the nausea and the terror. But they stopped. They were all shuddering and reeling still, all but the boy, who was unconscious and breathing in a way that terrified Janine, great, hoarse, snoring gasps. “Help, Lurvy!” she screamed. “He’s dying!” Her sister was already beside her, thumb on the boy’s pulse, shaking her head to clear it as she peered dizzily at his eyes.
“Dehydrated. Fever. Come on,” she cried, struggling with Wan’s arms. “Help me get him back to the ship. He needs saline, antibiotics, a febrifuge, maybe some gamma globulin—”
It took them nearly twenty minutes to tow Wan to the ship, and Janine was in terror that he would die at every bounding, slow-motion step. Lurvy raced ahead the last hundred meters, and by the time Paul and Janine had struggled him through the airlock she had already unsealed the medic kit and was shouting orders. “Put him down. Make him swallow this. Take a blood sample and check virus and antibody titers. Send a priority to base, tell them we need medical instructions—if he lives long enough to get them!”
Paul helped them get Wan’s clothes off and the boy wrapped in one of Payter’s blankets. Then he sent the message. But he knew, they all knew, that the problem of whether Wan lived or died would not be solved from Earth. Not with a round-trip time of seven weeks before they could get an answer. Payter was swearing over the bioassay mobile unit. Lurvy and Janine were working on the boy. Paul, without saying a word to anyone, struggled into his EVA suit and exited into space, where he spent an exhausting hour and a half redirecting the transmitter dishes—the main one to the bright double star that was the planet Neptune and its moon, the other to the point in space occupied by the Garfeld mission. Then, clinging to the hull, he radio-commanded Vera to repeat the SOS to each of them at max power. They might be monitoring. They might not. When Vera signaled that the messages were sent he reoriented the big dish to Earth. It took them three hours, first to last, and whether either of them would receive his message was doubtful. It was no less doubtful that either would have much help to offer. The Garfeld ship was smaller and less well equipped than their own, and the people at the Triton base were short-timers. But if either did, they could hope for a message of aid—or at least sympathy—a lot faster than from Earth.
In an hour Wan’s fever began to recede. In twelve the twitchings and babblings diminished and he slept normally. But he was still very sick.
Mother and playmate, teacher and at-least-fantasy wife, now Janine became Wan’s nurse as well. After the first round of medication, she would not even let Lurvy give him his shots. She went without sleep to sponge his brow. When he soiled himself in his coma she cleaned him fastidiously. She had no concentration left for anything else. The amused or concerned looks and words from her family left her untouched, until she brushed Wan’s unkempt hair off his face, and Paul made a patronizing comment. Janine heard the jealousy in the tone and flared, “Paul, you’re sickening! Wan needs me to take care of him!”
“And you do enjoy it, don’t you?” he snapped. He was really angry. Of course, that sparked more anger in Janine; but her father put in, gently enough, “Let the girl be a girl, Paul. Were you not yourself once young? Come, let us examine this Träumeplatz again—”
Janine surprised herself by letting the peacemaker succeed; it had been a marvelous chance for a furious spat, but that was not where her interests lay. She took time for a tight, small grin about Paul’s jealousy, because that was a new service stripe to sew on her sleeve, and then back to Wan.
As he mended he became even more interesting. From time to time he woke, and spoke to her. When he was asleep she studied him. Face so dark, body olive; but from waist to thigh he had the palest skin, the color of bread dough, taut over his sharp bones. Scant body hair. None on his face except a soft, almost invisible strand or two—more lip-lashes than mustache.
Janine knew that Lurvy and her father made a joke of her, and that Paul was actually jealous of the attentions he had avoided so long. It made a nice change. She had status. For the first time in her life, what she was doing was the most significant activity of the group. The others came to her to sue for permission to question Wan, and when she thought he was tiring they accepted her command to stop.
Besides, Wan fascinated her. She mapped him against all her previous experience of Men, to his advantage. Even against her pen-pals, Wan was better looking than the ice-skater, smarter than the actors, almost as tall as the basketball player. And against all of them, especially against the only two males she had been within tens of millions of kilometers of in years, Wan was so marvelously young. And Paul and her father, not. The backs of old Peter’s hands bore irregular blotches of caramel-colored pigment, which was gross. But at least the old man kept himself neat. Even dainty, in the continental way—even clipped the hairs that grew inside his ears with tiny silver scissors, because Janine had caught him at it. While Paul—In one of her skirmishes with Lurvy, Janine had snarled, “That’s what you go to bed with? An ape with hairy ears? I’d puke.”
So she fed Wan, and read to him, and drowsed over him while he slept. She shampooed his hair, and trimmed it to a soup-bowl mop, allowing Lurvy to help her get it even, and blow-dried it smooth. She washed his clothes and, spurning Lurvy for this, patched them and even cut down some of Paul’s to fit him. He accepted it all, every bit, and enjoyed it as much as she.
As he grew stronger, he no longer needed her as much, and she was less able to protect him from the questions of the others. But they were protective, too. Even old Peter. The computer, Vera, burrowed into its medical programs and prepared a long list of tests to be performed on the boy. “Assassin!” raged Peter. “Has it no understanding of a young man who has been so close to death that it wishes to finish it?” It was not entirely consideration. Peter had questions of his own, and he had been asking them when Janine would allow it, sulking and fidgeting when she would not. “That bed of yours, Wan, tell me again what you feel when you are in it? As though you are somehow a part of millions of people? And also they of you, isn’t that so?” But when Janine accused him of interfering with Wan’s recovery, the old man desisted. Though never for long.
Then Wan was well enough for Janine to allow herself a full night’s sleep in her own private, and when she woke her sister was at Vera’s console. Wan was holding to the back of her chair, grinning and frowning at the u
nfamiliar machine, and Lurvy was reading off to him his medical report. “Your vital signs are normal, your weight is picking up, your antibody levels are in the normal range—I think you’re going to be all right now, Wan.”
“So now,” cried her father, “at last we can talk? About this faster-than-light radio, the machines, the place he comes from, the dreaming room?” Janine hurled herself into the group.
“Leave him alone!” she snarled. But Wan shook his head.
“Let them ask what they like, Janine,” he said in his shrill, breathy voice.
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” stormed her father. “Now, this minute! Paul, come you here and tell this boy what we must know.”
They had planned this, Janine realized, the three of them; but Wan did not object, and she could not pretend he was unfit for questioning any longer. She marched over and sat beside him. If she could not prevent this interrogation, at least she would be there to protect him. She gave formal permission, coldly: “Go ahead, Paul. Say what you want to say, but don’t tire him out.”
Paul looked at her ironically, but spoke to Wan. “For more than a dozen years,” he said, “every hundred and thirty days or so, the whole Earth has gone crazy. It looks like it’s your fault, Wan.”
The boy frowned, but said nothing. His public defender spoke for him. “Why are you picking on him?” she demanded.
“No one is ‘picking,’ Janine. But what we experienced was the fever. It can’t be a coincidence. When Wan gets into that contraption he broadcasts to the world.” Paul shook his head. “Dear lad, do you have any idea of how much trouble you’ve caused? Ever since you began coming here, your dreams have been shared by millions of people. Billions! Sometimes you were peaceful, and your dreams were peaceful, and that wasn’t so bad. Sometimes you weren’t. I don’t want you to blame yourself,” he added kindly, forestalling Janine, “but thousands and thousands of people have died. And the property damage—Wan, you just can’t imagine.”