Deep inside a nearly solid ball of energy called the kugelblitz, just outside the halo of the Milky Way, lurked the would-be destroyers of the universe.
Humans called them the Foe. Heechee called them the Assassins. No creature that had ever seen them had lived to tell the tale. But ancient ruins scattered about the galaxy, and the shattered remnants of races such as the Sluggards and the Voodoo Pigs, were evidence of the Foe’s devastating power—and their cold-blooded determination to destroy all intelligent life. For eons now, the Foe had been strangely silent, but galactic history made clear that they could strike again at any time. So Heechee and human had joined in a constant vigil at the edge of the kugelblitz.
Advanced Heechee technology had enabled Robinette Broadhead to live after death as a machine-stored personality. But even he, virtually immortal and with unlimited access to millennia of accumulated data, could not discover what the Foe were—or how to stop them.
Now it looked as if the Foe had ventured out again. As humans and Heechee rallied their forces to defend against an alien race that had never met defeat, Robin Broadhead found himself the only one able to deal with the Foe face to face—a meeting which would determine the future of the entire universe…
By Frederik Pohl
Published by Ballantine Books
THE HEECHEE SAGA
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
BLACK STAR RISING
THE COOL WAR
STARBURST
THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS
BIPOHL
POHLSTARS
With Jack Williamson
UNDERSEA CITY
UNDERSEA QUEST
UNDERSEA FLEET
WALL AROUND A STAR
THE FARTHEST STAR
PREFERRED RISK (with Lester del Rey)
THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL
(edited by Lester del Rey)
THE BEST OF C.M. KORNBLUTH
(edited by Frederik Pohl)
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1987 by Frederik Pohl
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
On Wrinkle Rock
On the Wheel
Albert Speaks
Some Parties at the Party
The Tide at Its Crest
Loves
Out of the Core
Up in Central Park
On Moorea
In Deep Time
Heimat
JAWS
Kids in Captivity
Stowaways
Scared Rats Running
The Long Voyage
At the Throne
Journey’s End
The Last Spacefight
Back Home
Endings
And Not Endings
1
On Wrinkle Rock
It isn’t easy to begin. I thought of a whole bunch of different ways to do it, like cute:
You don’t know about me without you have read some books that was made by Mr. Fred Pohl. He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
—but my friendly data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein, says I’m too prone to obscure literary references anyway, so the Huckleberry Finn gambit was out. And I thought of starting with a searing expression of the soul-searching, cosmic angst that’s always (as Albert also reminds me) so much a part of my normal conversation:
To be immortal and yet dead; to be almost omniscient and nearly omnipotent, and yet no more real than the phosphor flicker on a screen—that’s how I exist. When people ask what I do with my time (so much time! so much of it crammed into each second, and with an eternity of seconds), I give them an honest answer. I tell them that I study, I play, I plan, I work. Indeed, that is all true. I do all these things. But during and between them I do one other thing. I hurt.
Or I could just start with a typical day. Like they do in the PV interviews. “A candid look at one moment in the life of the celebrated Robinette Broadhead, titan of finance, political powerhouse, maker and shaker of events on all the myriad worlds.” Maybe including a glimpse of me wheeling and dealing—for example, a table-pounding conference with the brass hats at the Joint Assassin Watch or, better still, a session at the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research:
I stepped up to the podium in a storm of serious applause. Smiling, I raised my arms to quell it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I thank each of you for making time in your busy schedules to join us here. You are a distinguished group of astrophysicists and cosmologists, famed theorists and Nobel laureates, and I welcome you to the Institute. I declare this workshop on the fine physical structure of the early universe to be in session.”
I really do say that kind of thing, or at least I send down a doppel to do it and my doppel does. I have to. It’s expected of me. I’m not a scientist, but through my Institute I supply the cash that pays the bills that lets science get done. So they want me to show up to greet them at the opening sessions. Then they want me to go away so they can work, and I do.
Anyway, I could not decide which of those tracks to begin on, and so I won’t use any of them. They’re all characteristic enough, though. I admit it. Sometimes I’m a little too cute. Sometimes, maybe even often, I am unattractively burdened with my own interior pain, which never seems to go away. Often I’m just a touch pompous; but at the same time, honestly, I am frequently quite effective in ways that matter a lot.
The place where I’m actually going to start is with the party on Wrinkle Rock. Please bear with me. You have to put up with me only for a little while, and I have to do it always.
I would go almost anywhere for a really good party. Why not? It’s easy enough for me, and some parties happen only once. I even flew my own spaceship there; that was easy, too, and didn’t really take any time from the eighteen or twenty other things I was doing at the time.
Even before we got there I could feel the beginning of that nice party tingle, because they had the old asteroid dressed up for the occasion. Left to itself, Wrinkle Rock wasn’t much to look at. It was patchy black, spotted with blue, ten kilometers long. It was shaped more or less like a badly planned pear that the birds had been pecking at. Of course, those pockmarks weren’t from pecking birds. They were landing sockets for ships like ours. And, just for the party, the Rock had been prettied up with big, twinkly starburst letters—
Our Galaxy
The First 100 Years Are the Hardest
—revolving around the rock like a belt of trained fireflies. The first part of what it said wasn’t diplomatic. The second part wasn’t true. But it was pretty to look at, anyway.
I said as much to my dear portable wife, and she grunted comfortably, settling herself in my arm, “Is garish. Real lights! Could have used holograms.”
“Essie,” I said, turning my head to nibble her ear, “you have the soul of a cybernetician.”
“Ho!” she said, twisting around to nibble back—only she nibbled a lot harder—“Am nothing but soul of cybernetician, as are you, dear Robin, and kindly pay attention to controls of ship instead of fooling around.”
That was just a joke, naturally. We were right on course, sliding into a dock with that agonizing slowness of all material objects; I had hundreds of milliseconds to spare when I gave the Tr
ue Love its final nudge. So I gave Essie a kiss…
Well, I didn’t exactly give her a kiss, but let me leave it that way for now, all right?
…and she added, “Are making a big deal of this, you agree?”
“It is a big deal,” I told her, and kissed her a little harder, and, since we had plenty of time, she kissed me back.
We spent the long quarter of a second or so while True Love drifted through the intangible glitter of the party sign in as pleasant and leisurely a fashion as one could wish. That’s to say, we made love.
Since I am no longer “real” (but neither is my Essie)—since neither of us is still really meat—one may ask, “How do you do that?” I have an answer for that question. The answer is, “Beautifully.” Also “lavishly,” “lovingly,” and, above all, “expeditiously.” I don’t mean we shirk our work. I just mean that it doesn’t take long to do it; and so, after we had pleased each other powerfully, and lounged around for a while afterwards languidly, and even showered sharingly (a wholly unnecessary ritual that, like most of our rituals, we do just for fun), we still had plenty of time out of that quarter of a second to study the other docking sockets on the Rock.
We had some interesting company ahead of us. I noted that one of the ships docked ahead of us was a big old original-Heechee vessel, the kind that we would have called a “Twenty” if we’d known that so huge a ship existed, back in the old days. We didn’t just spend that time rubbernecking. We’re shared-time programs, you know. We can easily do a dozen things at once. So I also kept in touch with Albert, to check on whether there were any new transmissions from the core, and make sure there was nothing from the Wheel, and keep in touch with a dozen other interests of one kind or another; while Essie ran her own search-and-merge scans. So by the time our locking ring mated with one of those bird-pecked holes that were actually the berthing ports for the asteroid, we were both in a pretty good mood and ready to party.
One of the (many) advantages of being what dear Portable-Essie and I are is that we didn’t have to unfasten seat belts and check seals and open locks. We don’t have to do anything much. We don’t have to move our storage fans around—they stay right where they are, and we go where we like through the electrical circuits of whatever kind of place we happen to be plugged into. (Usually that’s the True Love when we’re traveling, which we usually are.) If we want to go farther than that, we can go by radio, but then we’re up against that tiresome lag in round-trip communications.
So we docked. We plugged in to Wrinkle Rock’s systems. We were there.
Specifically, we were on Level Tango, Bay Forty-something of the tired old asteroid, and we were not by any means alone. The party had begun. The joint was jumping. There were a dozen people gathered to greet us—people like us, I mean—wearing party hats or holding party drinks, singing, laughing. (There were even a couple of meat people in sight, but they wouldn’t even discern that we had arrived for many milliseconds yet.) “Janie!” I shouted at one, hugging her; and “Sergei, golubka!” Essie cried, hugging another; and right then, while we were in the first moment of greeting and hugging and being happy, a nasty new voice snapped, “Hey, Broadhead.”
I knew the voice.
I even knew what would come next. What bad manners! Flicker, flash, pop, and there was General Julio Cassata, looking at me with the (barely) controlled sneer of soldier-to-civilian contempt, across a broad, bare desktop that hadn’t been there a moment before. “I want to talk to you,” he said.
I said, “Oh, shit.”
I didn’t like General Julio Cassata. I never had, though we kept running into each other’s lives.
That wasn’t because I wanted it that way. Cassata was always bad news. He didn’t like civilians (like me) messing in what he still called “military affairs,” and he didn’t much like machine-stored people of any kind. Cassata was not only a soldier, he was still meat.
Only this time he wasn’t meat. He was a doppel.
That was an interesting fact in itself, because meat people don’t make doppels of themselves lightly.
I would have pursued that odd fact farther, except that I was too busy thinking about all the things I didn’t like about Julio Cassata. His manners are lousy. He had just demonstrated that. There is an etiquette to the gigabit space that we machine-stored people inhabit. Polite machine-stored people don’t just dump themselves on each other without warning. They approach politely when they want to talk to you. Maybe they even “knock” on a “door” and wait outside politely until you say, “Come in.” And they certainly do not impose their private surrounds on each other. That’s the kind of behavior that Essie calls nekulturny, meaning it stinks. Just what I would expect from Julio Cassata: He’d overridden the physical bay we were in and the gigabit-space simulation of it that we were jointly occupying. There he was with his desk and his medals and his cigars and all; and that was just plain rude.
Of course, I could have pushed all that out and got back to my own surround. Guys do that sort of thing when they’re stubborn. It’s like two secretaries one-upping each other about whose boss gets put on the PV-phone first. I didn’t choose to do that. It wasn’t because I have any hang-up about being rude to rude people. It was something else.
I had finally got around to wondering why the real, or meat, Cassata had made a machine duplicate of himself.
What was before us was a machine simulation in gigabit space, just as my own beloved Portable-Essie was a doppel of my also beloved (but, these days, beloved only at second hand) real-Essie. The original meat Cassata was no doubt chomping a real cigar several hundred thousand kilometers away, on the JAWS satellite.
When I figured out the implications of that, I actually almost felt sorry for the doppel. So I suppressed all the instinctive words that suggested themselves. I only said, “What the hell do you want from me?”
Bullies respond well to being bullied. He let a little of the fire go out of the steely-eyed glare. He even smiled—I think he meant it to be friendly. His eyes slid from my face over to Essie, who had popped herself into Cassata’s surround to see what was going on, and said, in what could have been intended as a light tone, “Now, now, Mrs. Broadhead, is that any way for old friends to talk to each other?”
“Is very poor way for old friends to talk,” she said noncommittally.
I pressed: “What are you doing here, Cassata?”
“I came to the party.” He smiled—oily smile, fake smile; he had very little to smile about, considering. “When we came off maneuvers, most of the old ex-prospectors got leave to come here for the reunion. I hitched a ride. I mean,” he explained, as though, of all people, Essie and I needed explaining to, “I doppeled myself and put the store on the ship that was coming here.”
“Maneuvers!” Essie sniffed. “Maneuvers against what? When Foe come out, are going to pull out six-shooters and fill skunks with holes like Swiss cheese, blam-blam-blam?”
“We have better than six-shooters on our cruisers these days, Mrs. Broadhead,” Cassata said genially; but I had had enough small talk.
I asked again, “What do you want?”
Cassata abandoned the smile and got back to his natural state of nasty. “Nothing,” said Cassata. “By that I mean nothing, Broadhead. I want you to butt out.” He wasn’t even trying to be genial anymore.
I kept my temper. “I’m not even butting in.”
“Wrong! You’re butting in right now in your damn Institute. You’ve got workshops going on. One in New Jersey, one in Des Moines. One on Assassin signatures. One on early cosmology.”
Since those statements were perfectly true, I only said, “The Broadhead Institute is in business to do that kind of thing. That’s our charter. It’s what we founded it for, and it’s why JAWS gives me ex-officio status so I have a right to sit in on JAWS planning sessions.”
“Well, old buddy,” Cassata said happily, “see, you’re wrong about that, too. You don’t have a right. You have that privilege. Sometimes.
A privilege isn’t a right, and I’m warning you not to put it on the line. We don’t want you getting in the way.”
I really hate those guys sometimes. “Now, look, Cassata,” I began, but Essie stopped me before I’d even picked up speed.
“Boys, boys! Cannot save this for another time? Came here to party, not to fight.”
Cassata hesitated, looking belligerent. Then he nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “Well, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea. It can keep a while; after all, I don’t have to report back for five or six meat hours yet.” Then he turned to me. “Don’t leave the Rock,” he ordered. And vanished.
Essie and I looked at each other. “Nekulturny,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as though she still smelled his cigar.
What I said was worse than that, and Essie put her arm around me. “Robin? Is pig, that man. Forget him, okay? Aren’t going to let him make you all gloopy and sour again, please?”
“Not a chance!” I said bravely. “Party time! I’ll race you to the Blue Hell!”
It was, actually, one hell of a fine party.
I hadn’t taken Essie seriously when she asked if I thought the party was too much of a big deal. I knew she didn’t mean it. Essie had never been a prospector herself; but every human being alive knew what this party was.
It was to celebrate nothing less than the centennial of the finding of the Gateway asteroid, and if there was ever a bigger deal in the history of the human race, I don’t know what it could have been.
There were two reasons why Wrinkle Rock was chosen for the site of the hundredth anniversary party. One was that, basically, the asteroid had been converted into an old folks’ home. It was perfect for the geriatric cases. When the treatment for atherosclerosis made the osteoporosis worse, and the antitumor phages brought on Ménière’s syndrome or Alzheimer’s, Wrinkle Rock was the place to be. Old hearts didn’t have to pump so hard. Old limbs didn’t have to struggle to keep a hundred kilos of meat and bone erect. The maximum gravity anywhere was about one percent of Earth-normal. Totterers could trot and skip; they could turn cartwheels if they wanted to. They couldn’t be caught by slow, uncertain reflexes in front of a speeding car; there weren’t any cars. Oh, they could die, of course. But that didn’t have to be fatal, because Wrinkle Rock had the very best (and most heavily used) personality-storage facilities in the universe. When the old meat carcass passed the point of repair, the ancient put himself in the hands of the Here After people, and the next thing he knew he was seeing the world with unflawed vision, hearing the tiniest sound, forgetting nothing, learning fast. He was bloody well reborn!—only without the mess and nastiness of the first time. Life—maybe I should say “life”—as a machine-stored intelligence was not the same as being in your own body. But it wasn’t bad. In some ways it was better.