7
Homecoming
In the Lofstrom Loop in Lagos, Nigeria, Audee Walthers debated the measure of his responsibility toward Janie Yee-xing as the magnetic ribbon caught their descending pod, and slowed it, and dropped it off at the Customs and Immigration terminal. For playing with the forbidden toys he had lost the hope of a job, but for helping him do it Yee-xing had lost a whole career. “I have an idea,” he whispered to her as they lined up in the anteroom. “I’ll tell you about it outside.”
He did indeed have an idea, and it was a pretty good one, at that. The idea was me.
Before Walthers could tell her about his idea, he had to tell her about what he had felt in that terrifying moment at the TPT. So they checked into a transit lodge near the base of the landing loop. A bare room, and a hot one; there was one medium-sized bed, a washstand in the corner, a PV set to stare at while the traveler waited for his launch capsule, windows that opened on the hot, muggy African coastal air. The windows were open, though the screens were tight against the myriad African bugs, but Walthers hugged himself against the chill as he told her about that cold, slow being whose mind he had felt on the S. Ya.
And Janie Yee-xing shivered, too. “But you never said anything, Audee!” she said, her voice a little shrill because her throat was tight. He shook his head. “No. But why didn’t you? Isn’t there—” She paused. “Yes, I’m sure there’s a Gateway bonus you could get for that!”
“We could get, Janie!” he said strongly, and she looked at him, then accepted the partnership with a nod. “There sure is, and it’s a million dollars. I checked it out on the ship’s standing orders, same time I copied the ship’s log.” And he reached into his scanty luggage and pulled out a datafan to show her.
She didn’t take it from him. She just said, “Why?”
“Well, figure it out,” he said. “A million dollars. There’s two of us, so cut it in half. Then—I got it on the S. Ya., with the S. Ya.’s equipment, so the ship and its owners and the whole damn crew might get a share—we’d be lucky if it was only half. More likely three-quarters. Then—well, we broke the rules, you know. Maybe they’d overlook that, considering everything. But maybe they wouldn’t, and we’d get nothing at all.”
Yee-xing nodded, taking it in. There was a lot to take in. She reached out and touched the datafan. “You copied the ship’s log?”
“No problem,” he said, and indeed it hadn’t been. During one of his tours at the controls, frosty silence from the First Officer at the other seat, Walthers had simply called up the data for the moment he had made contact from the automatic flight recorder, recorded the information as though it was part of his normal duty, and pocketed the copy.
“All right,” she said. “Now what?”
So he told her about this known eccentric zillionaire (who happened to be me), notorious for his willingness to spend largely for Heechee data, and as Walthers knew him personally—
She looked at him with a different kind of interest. “You know Robinette Broadhead?”
“He owes me a favor,” he said simply. “All I have to do is find him.”
For the first time since they had entered the little room Yee-xing smiled. She gestured toward the P-phone on the wall. “Go to it, tiger.”
So Walthers invested some of his not very impressive remaining bankroll in long-distance calls while Yee-xing gazed thoughtfully out at the bright tracery of lights around the Lofstrom loop, like a kilometers-long roller-coaster, its magnetic cables singing and the capsules landing on it choofing while the ones taking off were chuffing as they respectively gave up and took on escape velocity. She wasn’t thinking about their customer. She was thinking about the goods they had to sell, and when Walthers hung up the phone, his face dour, she hardly listened to what he had to say. Which was:
“The bastard’s not home,” he said. “I guess I got the butler at Tappan Sea. All he’d tell me was that Mr. Broadhead was on his way to Rotterdam. Rotterdam, for God’s sake! But I checked it out. We can get a cheap flight to Paris and then a slow-jet the rest of the way—we’ve got enough money for that—”
“I want to see the log,” said Yee-xing.
“The log?” he repeated.
“You heard me,” she said impatiently. “It’ll play on the PV. And I want to see.”
He licked his lips, thought for a moment, shrugged, and slipped it into the PV scanner.
Because the ship’s instruments were holographic, recording every photon of energy that struck them, all that data concerning the source of the chill emanations was on the fan. But the PV showed only a tiny and featureless white blob, along with the location coordinates.
It was not very interesting to look at in itself—which was, no doubt, why the ship’s sensors themselves had paid no attention to it. High magnification would perhaps show details, but that was beyond the capacities of the cheap hotel room set.
But even so—
As Walthers looked at it, he felt a crawling sensation. From the bed Yee-xing whispered, “You never said, Audee. Are they Heechee?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the still white blur. “I wish I knew—” But it was not likely, was it? unless the Heechee were far unlike anything anyone had suspected. Heechee were intelligent. Had to be. They had conquered interstellar space half a million years ago. And the minds that Walthers had perceived were—were—What would you call it? Petrified, maybe. Present. But not active.
“Turn it off,” said Yee-xing. “It gives me the creeps.” She swatted one of the bugs that had penetrated the screen and added gloomily, “I hate this place.”
“Well, we’ll be off to Rotterdam in the morning.”
“Not this place. I hate being on the Earth,” she said. She waved at the sky past the lights of the landing loop. “You know what’s up there? There’s the High Pentagon and Orbit-Tyuratam and about a million zappers and nukes floating around, and they’re all crazy here, Audee. You never know when the damn things are going to go off.”
Whether she intended a rebuke or not was unclear, but Walthers felt it anyway. He pulled the fan out of the PV scanner resentfully. It wasn’t his fault that the world was crazy! But it was his fault, no doubt of that, that Yee-xing was condemned to be on it. So she had every right to reproach him.
He started to hand her the datafan, his motives not certain, perhaps to demonstrate trust, perhaps to reinforce her status as his accomplice.
But in midreach he discovered just how crazy the world was. The gesture converted itself into a blow, aimed wickedly at her unsmiling, desolate face.
For the half of a breath it was not Janie there; it was Dolly, faithless, runaway Dolly, with the grinning, contemptuous shadow of Wan behind her—or neither of them, in fact not a person at all but a symbol. A target. An evil and threatening thing that had no identity but only a description. It was THE ENEMY, and the most certainly sure thing about it was that it needed to be destroyed. Violently. By him.
For otherwise Walthers himself would be destroyed, wrecked, disintegrated, by the maddest, most hating, most pervertedly destructive emotions he had ever felt, forced into his mind in an act of sickening, violent, devastating rape.
What Audee Walthers felt at that moment I knew very well because I felt it, too—as did Janie—as did my own wife, Essie—as did every human being within a dozen AU of a point a couple of hundred million kilometers from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Auriga. It was most lucky for me that I was not indulging my habit of piloting myself. I don’t know if I would have crashed. The touch from space only lasted half a minute, and I might not have had time to kill myself, but I surely would have tried. Rage, sick hatred, an obsessive need to wreck and ravish—that was the gift from the sky that the terrorists offered us all. But for once I had the computer doing the piloting so that I could spend my time on the P-phone, and computer programs were not infected by the terrorists’ TPT.
It wasn’t the first time. Not even the first time lately, for in th
e previous eighteen months the terrorists had dodged into solar space in their stolen Heechee ship and broadcast their pet lunatic’s most horrid fantasies to the world. It was more than the world could stand. It was, in fact, why I was on my way to Rotterdam, but this particular episode was the reason I turned around in midflight on the way there. I tried at once to call Essie, as soon as it was over, to make sure she was all right. No luck. Everybody in the world was trying to call everybody else, for the same reasons, and the relay points were jammed.
There was also the fact that my gut felt as though armadillos were engaging in sexual intercourse in it and, everything considered, I wanted Essie with me instead of taking a later commercial flight as planned. So I ordered the pilot to reverse course; and so when Walthers got to Rotterdam I wasn’t there. He could easily have caught me at Tappan Sea if he had taken a straight-through New York flight, and so he was wrong about that.
He was also wrong—quite wrong—forgivably wrong, for he had no way of knowing—about just what sort of mind he had tuned in on on the S. Ya.
And he had made one other error, quite serious. He had forgotten that the TPT worked both ways.
So the secret he had kept at one end of that fleeting mind-touch was no secret at all at the other.
I regret, or almost regret, that I know nothing about this “instant madness” from firsthand experience. I regretted it most when it first happened, a decade earlier. No one knew anything about a “telempathic psychokinetic transceiver” at that time. What it looked like, and was, was periodic, worldwide epidemics of insanity. A lot of the world’s best minds, including mine, had spent their best efforts trying to find a virus, a toxic chemical, a variation in the Sun’s radiation—anything—anything that would account for the shared madness that swept the human race every year or so. However, some of the world’s best minds—like mine—were handicapped. Computer programs like myself simply did not feel the maddening impulses. If we had, I daresay, the problem would have been solved much earlier.
8
The Nervous Crew of the Sailboat
A lavender squid—well, not really a squid, but looking about as squidlike as anything else in human experience—was in the middle of an exhausting, long-term project when Audee Walthers had his little accident with the TPT. Because the TPT goes in both directions it makes a great weapon but a lousy surveillance tool. It is sort of like calling up the person you’re spying on and saying, “Hey, look, I’ve got my eye on you.” So when Walthers bumped his head the sting was felt elsewhere. A where that was, in fact, very else. It was nearly a thousand light-years from the Earth, not far from the geodesic flight-line from Peggys Planet home—which was, of course, the reason Walthers was close enough for the touch to register.
My friend Robin has several faults, and one of them is a kind of cutesy coyness that is not as amusing as he thinks it is. The way he knew about the sailship folk, like the way he knew about most of the other things he was not present to see, is simply explained. He just doesn’t want to explain it. The explanation is that I told him. That simplifies things a lot, but it’s almost true.
Is it possible that cutesy coyness is contagious?
Happens I know quite a lot about this particular lavender squid—or almost squid; you could have said that he looked like a wriggly, fat orchid, and been almost as close. I hadn’t met him at the time, of course, but now I know him well enough to know his name, and where he came from, and why he was there, and, most complicated of all, what he was doing. The best way to think of what he was doing was to say that he was painting a landscape. The reason that is complicated is that there was no one to see it for light-years in every direction, least of all my squid friend. He did not have the proper kind of eyes to perceive it with.
Still, he had his reasons. It was a sort of religious observance. It went back to the oldest traditions of his race, which was old indeed, and it had to do with that theologically crucial moment in their history when they, living among the clathrates and frozen gases of their home environment, with visibility minute in any direction, for the first time became aware that “seeing” could become the receiving end of a significant art form.
It mattered very much to him that the painting should be perfect. And so, when he suddenly felt himself being observed by a stranger, and the startling shock caused him to spray some of the finely divided powders he painted with in the wrong place, and in the wrong mixture of colors, he was deeply upset. Now a whole quarter hectare was spoiled! An Earthly priest would have understood his feelings, if not his reasons for them; it was quite as though in the observance of a mass the Host had been dropped and crushed underfoot.
The creature’s name was LaDzhaRi. The canvas he was working on was an elliptical sail of monomolecular film nearly thirty thousand kilometers long. The work was less than a quarter completed, and it had taken him fifteen years to get that far. LaDzhaRi did not care how long it took. He had plenty of time. His spacecraft would not arrive at its destination for another eight hundred years.
Or at least he thought he had plenty of time…until he felt the stranger staring at him.
Then he felt the need to hurry. He stayed in normal eigenmode while he swiftly collected his painting materials—by then it was August 21—lashed them secure—August 22—pushed himself away from the butterfly-wing sail and floated free until he was well clear. By the first of September he was far enough away to switch on his jet thrust and, in high eigenmode, return to the little cylindrical tin can that rode at the center of the cluster of butterfly wings. Although it was a terribly expensive drain on him, he remained in high mode as he plunged through the entering caves and into the salty slush that was his home environment. He was shouting to his companions at the top of his voice.
By human standards that voice was extraordinarily loud. Terrestrial great whales have such loud voices that their songs can be recognized and responded to by other whales an ocean away. So had LaDzhaRi’s people, and in the tiny confines of the spacecraft his roaring shook the walls. Instruments quivered. Furniture rocked. The females fled in panic, fearing that they were about to be eaten or impregnated.
It was almost as bad for the seven other males, and as fast as he could, one of them struggled up to high eigenmode to shout back at LaDzhaRi. They knew what had happened. They too had felt the touch of the interloper, and of course they had done what was necessary. The whole crew had switched into high, transmitted the signal they owed their ancestors, and returned to normal mode…and would LaDzhaRi please do the same at once, and stop frightening the females?
So LaDzhaRi slowed himself down and allowed himself to “catch his breath”—although that was not an expression in use among his people. It did not do to thrash around in the slush in high for very long. He had already caused several troublesome cavitation pockets, and the whole slurpy environment they lived in was troubled. Apologetically he worked with the others until everything was lashed firm again, and the females had been coaxed out of their hiding places, one of them serving for dinner, and the whole crew settled down to discuss the lunatic touch, madly rapid and quite terrifying, that had invaded all their minds. That took all of September and the first part of October.
By then the ship had settled back into some sort of normal existence and LaDzhaRi returned to his painting. He neutralized the charges on the spoiled section of the great photon-trap wing. He laboriously collected the pigmented dust that had floated away, for one could not waste so much mass.
He was a thrifty soul, was LaDzhaRi. I have to admit that I found him rather admirable. He was loyal to the traditions of his people, under circumstances that human beings might have thought a little too menacing to be tolerated. For, although LaDzhaRi was not a Heechee, he knew where the Heechee could be reached, and he knew that sooner or later the message his shipmates had sent would have an answer.
So then, just as he was beginning to repaint the blanked-out section of his work, he felt another touch, and this time an expected one. Clo
ser. Stronger. Far more insistent, and much, much more frightening.
9
Audee and Me
All the fragments of life stories of these friends—or almost friends, or in some cases nonfriends—of mine were beginning to fall together. Not very rapidly. Not much faster, in fact, than the fragments of the universe were beginning to fall together in that great crunch back toward the cyclic primordial-atom state that (Albert kept telling me) was about to happen for reasons I never quite understood at the time. (But I didn’t feel badly about that, because at the time neither did Albert.) There were the sailship people, uneasily accepting the consequences of doing their duty. There were Dolly and Wan on their way to yet one more black hole, Dolly sobbing in her sleep, Wan scowling furiously in his. And there were Audee Walthers and Janie sitting disconsolate in their very much too expensive Rotterdam hotel room, because they had just found out I wasn’t there yet. Janie squatted on the huge anisokinetic bed while Audee harangued my secretary. Janie had a bruise on her cheek, souvenir of that moment’s madness in Lagos, but Audee had his arm in a cast—sprained wrist. He had not known until that moment that Janie was a black belt in karate.
Wincing, Walthers broke the connection and rested his wrist in his lap. “She says he’ll be here tomorrow,” he grumbled. “I wonder if she’ll give him the message.”
“Of course she will. She wasn’t human, you know.”