It was not the Heechee custom to salute on receiving an order. It was also not the Heechee custom to argue about it, and it was a measure of the confusion in the ship that White-Noise asked, “Are you sure that’s what we should do?”
“Do it,” said Captain, shrugging irritably.
Actually, it was not a shrug but a quick, violent contraction of his hard, globular abdomen. Twice found herself staring admiringly at that fetching little bulge and at the way the tough, long strings of tendon from shoulder to wrist stood out from the arm itself. Why, your fingers would almost meet as you clung to it!
With a start she realized that her time of loving was closer than she had thought. What an inconvenience! Captain would be as annoyed as she, since they had had plans for a very special day and a half. Twice opened her mouth to tell him, then closed it again. It was no time to trouble him with that; he was completing the thought processes that ridged his cheek muscles and made him scowl, and beginning to give orders.
Captain had plenty of resources to draw on. There were more than a thousand cleverly cached Heechee artifacts scattered around the Galaxy. Not the ones that were meant to be found sooner or later, like Gateway; these were concealed under the exterior appearance of unpromising asteroids in inaccessible orbits, or between stars, or among clusters of other objects in dust swarms and gas clouds. “Twice,” he ordered without looking at her, “activate a command ship. We will rendezvous with it at the sailship point.”
She was upset, he observed. He was sorry but not surprised—come down to that, he was upset himself! He returned to the command seat and lowered the bones of his pelvis onto the projecting Y-flanges, his life-support pouch fitting neatly into the angle they enclosed.
And became aware that his communications officer was standing over him, face working worriedly. “Yes, Shoe? What is it?”
Shoe’s biceps flexed deferentially. “The—” he stammered. “They—The Assassins—”
Captain felt an electric shock of fear. “The Assassins?”
“I think there is a danger that they will be disturbed,” said Shoe dismally. “The aboriginals are conversing by zero-speed radio.”
“Conversing? You mean transmitting messages? Who are you talking about—massed minds!” Captain shouted, leaping out of the seat again. “You mean the aboriginals are sending messages at galactic distances?”
Shoe hung his head. “I am afraid so, Captain. Of course, I do not yet know what they are saying—but there is a great volume of communication.”
Captain shook his wrists feebly to signal that he wanted to hear no more. Sending messages! Across the Galaxy! Where anyone might hear!—where, especially, the certain parties the Heechee hoped would not be disturbed at all might well hear. And react to. “Establish translation matrices with the minds,” he ordered, and dismally returned to his seat.
The mission was jinxed. Captain no longer had hopes of an idle pleasure cruise, or even of the satisfaction of a minor task well accomplished. The big question in his mind was whether he could get through the next few days.
Still, soon they would transship into the shark-shaped command vessel, fastest of the Heechee fleet, filled with technology. Then his options would increase. Not only was it larger and faster; it carried a number of devices not present on his little penetrator-ship. A TPT. Hole cutters like the ones his ancestors had used to scoop out the Gateway asteroid and the warrens under the surface of Venus. A device to reach into black holes to see what could be plucked out—he shuddered. Please the massed minds of the ancestors, that one they would not have to use! But he would have it. And he would have a thousand other useful bits of equipment—
Assuming, that was, that the ship was still functioning and would meet them at the rendezvous.
The artifacts the Heechee had left behind were powerful, strong, and long-lasting. Bar accidents, they were built to last for at least ten million years.
But you could not bar all accidents. A nearby supernova, a malfunctioning part, even a chance collision with some other object—you could harden the artifacts against almost all hazards, but in infinite astronomical time “almost all” is little better than “none.”
And if the command ship happened to have failed? And if there were no other that Twice could locate and bring to the rendezvous?
The Heechee learned fairly early in their technological phase to store the intelligences of dead or dying Heechee in inorganic systems. That was how the Dead Men came to be stored to provide company for the boy Wan, and it was an application of that technology that produced Robin’s Here After company. For the Heechee (if I may venture a possibly not unbiased opinion) it may have been a mistake. Since they were able to use the dead minds of Heechee ancestors to store and process data, they were not very good at true artificial-intelligence systems, capable of far greater power and flexibility. Like—well—like me.
Captain allowed himself to let the depression sink into his mind. There were too many ifs. And the consequences of each of them too unpleasant to face.
It was not unusual for Captain, or any other Heechee, to be depressed. They had earned it fairly.
When Napoleon’s Grand Army crawled back from Moscow their enemies were small harassing cavalry bands, the Russian winter—and despair.
When Hitler’s Wehrmacht repeated the same trek thirteen decades later, the main threats were the Soviet tanks and artillery, the Russian winter—and, again, despair. They retreated in better order and with more destruction to their foes. But not with more despair, or less.
Every retreat is a kind of funeral cortege, and the thing that has died is confidence. The Heechee had confidently expected to win a galaxy. When they found they must lose, and began their immense, star-spanning retreat to the core, the magnitude of their defeat was huger than any that humans had ever known, and the despair seeped into all of their souls.
The Heechee were playing a most complicated game. One could call it a team sport, except that few of the players were allowed to be aware that they were on a team at all. The strategies were limited, but the final goal of the game was certain. If they managed to survive as a race, they would win.
But so many pieces moved on that board! And the Heechee had so little control. They could start the game. After that, if they interfered directly they exposed themselves. That was when the game became perilous.
It was now Captain’s turn to play, and he knew the risks he ran. He could be the player who lost the game for the Heechee once and for all.
His first task was to preserve the Heechee hiding place as long as possible, which meant doing something about the sailship people.
That was the least of his worries, for the second task was the one that counted. The stolen ship carried equipment that could penetrate even the skin around the Heechee hidey-hole. It could not enter. But it could peer within, and that was bad. Worse, the same equipment could penetrate almost any event discontinuity, even the one that the Heechee themselves dared not enter. The one that they prayed would never be breached, since within it rested the thing they most terribly feared.
So Captain sat there at the controls of his ship, while the glowing silicate cloud that surrounded the core dwindled behind them. Meanwhile, Twice was beginning to show signs of the strain that would shortly press her to her limits; and meanwhile, the cold, sludgy sailship people crept through their long, slow lives; and meanwhile, the one human-manned craft in the universe that could do anything about it approached yet another black hole…
And meanwhile, those other players on the great board, Audee Walthers and Janie Yee-xing, watched their stack of chips slowly disappearing as they waited to make their own private gamble.
11
Meeting in Rotterdam
There he stood, this fellow with a face like a tan avocado, blocking my way. I identified the expression before I recognized the face. The expression was obstinacy, irritation, fatigue. The face that displayed them belonged to Audee Walthers, Jr., who (my secretarial prog
ram had not failed to tell me) had been trying to get in touch with me for several days. “Hello, Audee,” I said, really very cordially, shaking his hand and nodding to the pretty Oriental-looking young woman beside him, “it’s great to see you again! Are you staying at this hotel? Wonderful! Listen, I’ve got to run, but let’s have dinner—set it up with the concierge, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” And I smiled at him, and smiled at the young woman, and left them standing there.
Now I don’t pretend that was really good manners, but as it happens I actually was in a hurry, and besides, my gut was giving me fits. I put Essie in a cab going one way and caught another to take me to the court. Of course, if I had known then what he was waiting to tell me, I might have been more forthcoming with Walthers. But I didn’t know what I was walking away from.
Or what I was walking toward, for that matter.
For the last little bit I actually did walk, because traffic was more than normally snarled. There was a parade getting ready to march, as well as the normal congestion around the International Palace of Justice. The Palace is a forty-story skyscraper, sunk on caissons into the soapy soil of Rotterdam. On the outside it dominates half the city. On the inside it’s all scarlet drapes and one-way glass, the very model of a modern international tribunal. It is not a place where you go to to plead to a parking ticket.
It is not a place where individual human beings are considered very much at all, in fact, and if I had any vanity, which I do, I would preen myself on the fact that the lawsuit in which I was technically one of the defendants actually had fourteen different parties at interest, and four of them were sovereign states. I even had a suite of offices reserved for my private use in the Palace itself, because all parties at interest did. But I didn’t go there right away. It was nearly eleven o’clock and therefore at least an even chance that the court would have started its session for the day, so I smiled and pushed my way right into the hearing room. It was crowded. It was always crowded, because there were celebrities to be seen at the hearings. In my vanity I had thought I was one of them, and I expected heads to turn when I came in. No heads. No turning. Everybody was watching half a dozen skinny, bearded persons in dashikis and sandals, sitting in a corral at the plaintiffs’ end of the room, drinking Cokes and giggling among themselves. The Old Ones. You didn’t see them every day. I gawked at them like everybody else, until there was a touch on my arm and I turned to see Maitre Ijsinger, my flesh-and-blood lawyer, gazing reprovingly at me. “You are late, Mijnheer Broadhead,” he whispered. “The Court will have noticed your absence.”
Since the Court was busy whispering and arguing among themselves over, I gathered, the question of whether the diary of the first prospector to locate a Heechee tunnel on Venus should be admitted as evidence, I doubted that. But you don’t pay a lawyer as much as I was paying Maitre Ijsinger to argue with him.
The Heechee, thinking that the australopithecines they discovered when they first visited the Earth would ultimately evolve a technological civilization, decided to preserve a colony of them in a sort of zoo. Their descendants were “the Old Ones.” Of course, that was a wrong guess on the part of the Heechee. Australopithecus never achieved intelligence, only extinction. It was a sobering reflection for human beings to realize that the so-called Heechee Heaven, later rechristened the S. Ya. Broadhead—far the largest and most sophisticated starship the human race had ever seen—was in fact only a sort of monkey cage.
Of course, there was no legal reason for me to pay him at all. As much as the case was about anything, it was about a motion on the part of the Empire of Japan to dissolve the Gateway Corporation. I came into it, as a major stockholder in the S. Ya.’s charter business, because the Bolivians had brought suit to have the charter revoked on the grounds that the financing of the colonists amounted to a “return to slavery.” The colonists were called indentured servants, and I, among others, had been called a wicked exploiter of human misery. What were the Old Ones doing there? Why, they were parties at interest, too, because they claimed that the S. Ya. was their property—they and their ancestors had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. Their position in the court was a little complicated. They were wards of the government of Tanzania, because that’s where their ancestral Earth home had been decreed to be, but Tanzania wasn’t represented in the courtroom. Tanzania was boycotting the Palace of Justice because of an unfavorable decision over their sea-bottom missiles the year before, so its affairs were being handled by Paraguay—which was actually taking an interest mostly because of a border dispute with Brazil, which in turn was present as host to the headquarters of the Gateway Corp. You follow all this? Well, I didn’t, but that was why I hired Maitre Ijsinger.
If I let myself get personally involved in every lousy multimillion dollar lawsuit, I’d spend all my time in court. I’ve got too much to do with the remainder of my life for that, so in the normal course of events I would have let the lawyers fight it out and spent my time more profitably, chatting with Albert Einstein or wading along the Tappan Sea with my wife. However, there were special reasons for being here. I saw one of them, half asleep, on a leather chair near the Old Ones. “I think I’ll see if Joe Kwiatkowski wants a cup of coffee,” I told Ijsinger.
Kwiatkowski was a Pole, representing the East Europe Economic Community, and one of the plaintiffs in the case. Ijsinger turned pale. “He’s an adversary!” he hissed.
“He’s also an old friend,” I told him, exaggerating the facts of the case only slightly—he had been a Gateway prospector, too, and we’d had drinks over old times before.
“There are no friends in a court action of this magnitude,” Ijsinger informed me, but I only smiled at him and leaned forward to hiss at Kwiatkowski, who came along willingly enough once he was awake.
“I should not be here with you, Robin,” he rumbled once we were in my fifteenth-floor suite. “Especially for coffee! Don’t you got something to put in it?”
Well, I had—slivovitz, and from his favorite Cracow distillery, too. And Kampuchean cigars, the brand he liked, and salt herring and biscuits to go with them all.
The court was built over a little canal off the Maas River, and you could smell the water. Because I had managed to get a window open, you could hear the boats going through under the building’s arch and traffic from the tunnel under the Maas a quarter kilometer away. I opened the window a little wider because of Kwiatkowski’s cigar, and saw the flags and bands in the side streets. “What are they parading for today?” I asked.
He brushed the question aside. “Because armies like parades,” he grunted. “Now, no fooling around, Robin. I know what you want and it is impossible.”
“What I want,” I said, “is for the Eeek to help wipe out the terrorists with the spaceship, which is obviously in the interest of everybody. You tell me that’s impossible. Fine, I accept that, but why is it impossible?”
“Because you know nothing of politics. You think the E.E.E.C. can go to the Paraguayans and say, ‘Listen, go and make a deal with Brazil, say you will be more flexible on this border dispute if they will pool their information with the Americans so the terrorist spaceship can be trapped.’”
“Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I think.”
“And you are wrong. They will not listen.”
“The Eeek,” I said patiently, having been well briefed for this purpose by my data-retrieval system, Albert, “is Paraguay’s biggest trading partner. If you whistle they jump.”
“In most cases, yes. In this case, no. The key to the situation is the Republic of Kampuchea. They have with Paraguay private arrangements. About these I will say nothing, except that they have been approved at the highest level. More coffee,” he added, holding out his coffee cup, “and this time, please, not so much coffee in it.”
I did not ask Kwiatkowski what the “private arrangements” were because, if he had been willing to tell me, he would not have called them private. I didn’t have to. They were mi
litary. All the “private arrangements” governments were making with each other these days were military, and if I had not been sweating about the terrorists I would have been sweating about the crazy way the world’s duly ordained governments were behaving. But one thing at a time.
So, on Albert’s advice, I got a lawyer from Malaysia into my private parlor next, and after her a missionary from Canada, and then a general in the Albanian Air Force, and for each one I had some bait to dangle. Albert told me what levers to pull and what glass beads to offer the natives—an extra allotment of colonization passages here, a “charitable” contribution there. Sometimes all it took was a smile. Rotterdam was the place to do it, because ever since the Palace was moved from The Hague, The Hague having been pretty well messed up in the troubles the last time some joker was fooling with a TPT, you could find anyone you wanted in Rotterdam. All kinds of people. All colors, all sexes, in all kinds of costumes, from Ecuadorian lawyers in miniskirts to Marshall Islands thermal-energy barons in sarongs and shark’s-teeth necklaces. Whether I was making progress or not was hard to say, but at half-past twelve, my belly telling me that it was going to hurt in a serious way if I didn’t put some food in it, I knocked off for the morning. I thought longingly of our nice quiet hotel suite with a nice lukewarm steak from room service and my shoes off, but I had promised to meet Essie at her place of business. So I told Albert to prepare an estimate of what I had accomplished and recommendations about what I should do next, and fought my way to a cab.
You can’t miss one of Essie’s fast-food franchises. The glowing blue Heechee-metal arches are in just about every country of the world. As the Boss she had a roped-off section on the balcony reserved for us, and she met me coming up the stairs with a kiss, a frown, and a dilemma. “Robin! Listen! They want here to serve mayonnaise with the French fries. Should I allow?”