He paused there, as though he hadn’t quite made up his mind what to say next, so I prompted him. “You said the two of them went back to the black hole where I’d dumped them all.”
He shook his head. “Oh, Robin,” he sighed, but thankfully did not start telling me about my guilt trips again. He just said, “Yes, that’s right. He and Klara went there together to rescue them, only they rescued the whole crew: the two Dannys, Susie Hereira, the girls from Sierra Leone—”
“I know who was on the mission,” I interrupted. “My God! They’re all back!”
“They all are, yes, Robin.” He nodded. “And they are all, in some sense, entitled to full shares. That is what Dane Metchnikov saw a lawyer about. Now,” he said thoughtfully, reaching into a pocket and pulling out his pipe—his complexion had unobtrusively returned to normal, his hair was white and unruly again—“there are certainly some unusual ethical and legal questions here. As you remember from previous litigation, there is the principle that lawyers refer to as ‘the calf follows the cow,’ which means that all your subsequently accumulated fortune can be considered to be in some sense the consequence of that original Science Bonus from that mission. In which, of course, they would all have shared if they had returned with you.”
“So I have to give them money?”
“‘Have to’ is putting it too strongly, but that’s the general idea, Robin. As you did with Klara when she first showed up; one hundred million dollars was the amount you settled on her for a quitclaim. Since I perceived this question would arise, I’ve taken the liberty of having your legal program contact Mr. Metchnikov’s. That figure seemed acceptable. Some sort of settlement of the same order of magnitude would be appropriate for each of the others, I believe. Of course, they could ask for more. But I don’t think they would get it; there is also a statute of limitations, naturally.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. I never have any real idea how “rich” I am within several dozen billion dollars, but a billion one way or another wouldn’t make much difference. “I thought you said you had bad news.”
He lit the pipe. “I haven’t given you the bad news yet, Robin,” he said.
I looked at him. He was puffing at the pipe, peering at me through the smoke. “Damn it, do it!”
He said, “That other man, Harbin Eskladar.”
“What about him, damn you?”
“Klara met him after leaving us on the True Love. He was a pilot too. The two of them decided to go back to the black hole, so Klara rented Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz’s ship, which was capable of the mission. And before they left—well—the thing is, Robin, Klara and Eskladar were married.”
There are surprises that, as soon as you hear them, you know instinctively you should have been prepared for. This one came out of nowhere.
“Thank you, Albert,” I said hollowly, dismissing him. He was sighing as he left, but he left.
I didn’t have the heart to go on talking to Klara. I instructed my doppel on what to say next to her, and to Metchnikov, and even to this Harbin Eskladar person. But I didn’t stay around while it happened. I retreated into gigabit space and wrapped it around me.
I know that Albert thinks I spend too much time in my own head. I won’t deny any of the things he says. I don’t mean I agree with them. I don’t. I’m not any smarter than he thinks I am, but I’m not as weird, either. What I am, basically, is, I’m human. I may really be only the digital transcription of a human being, but when I was transcribed, all the human parts were transcribed, too, and I still feel all the things that go with being meat. Both the good and the bad.
I do the best I can—mostly—and that’s about all I can do.
I know what’s important. I understood as well as Albert did that the Foe were scary. I would have had nightmares if I had slept (I did have, when I pretended to, but that’s another subject) about the universe crashing down on our ears, and I had a lot more fits of agitation and depression when I thought of the gang of them, out there in their kugelblitz, ready at any time to come out and do to us what they had done to the Sluggards and the starwisp people and the ones buried under the ice.
But there’s important and there’s also important. I am still human enough to think interpersonal relationships are important. Even when they’re past tense, and all that’s left is the need to make absolutely sure there are no longer any hard feelings.
After Albert had gone away to wherever Albert goes when I don’t have a use for him, I floated in gigabit space for a long time, doing nothing. A long time. Long enough so that when I peeked once more at the scene in Central Park, Klara had just got as far as, “Robin, I’d like you to meet my—”
It was funny. I didn’t want to hear the word “husband.” So I ran away.
What I just said isn’t exactly true. I didn’t run away. I ran to, and the person I ran to was Essie. She was on the dance floor at the Blue Hell, wildly polkaing with somebody with a beard, and when I cut in she caroled, “Oh, good to see you, dear Robin! Have you heard news? Embargo is lifted!”
“That’s nice,” I said, stumbling over my own feet. She took a good look at my face, sighed, and led me off the dance floor.
“Went badly with Gelle-Klara Moynlin,” she guessed.
I shrugged. “It’s still going. I left my doppel there.” I let her shove me into a seat and sit herself across from me, elbows on table, chin propped on elbows, looking me over with great care.
“Ah,” she said, nodding as she completed her diagnosis. “Gloopy stuff again. Angst. Anomie. All that good stuff, right? And most of all Gelle-Klara Moynlin?”
I said judiciously, “Not most of all, no, because it would take forever to tell you all the things that bother me, but, yes, that’s one of them. She’s married, you know.”
“Uh.” She didn’t add, So are you, so I had to do it myself.
“It’s not just that she’s married, because so am I, of course—and I wouldn’t want it to be any other way, honestly, Essie—”
She scowled at me. “Oh, Robin! Never thought it would be possible to find hearing that a bore, but how often you do say it!”
“I only say it because it’s true,” I protested, my feelings having suffered a minor flesh wound.
“Already know is true.”
“Well, I guess you do, at that,” I admitted. I didn’t know what to say next. I discovered a drink in my hand and took a pull at it.
Essie sighed. “Sure are one big party-pooper, Robin. Was feeling grand when you were not nearby.”
“I’m sorry, but, honest, Essie, I don’t feel like partying.”
“Comes more gloopy business,” she said, martyred. “Okay. Spit out what is now on poor, tortured mind. What is worst thing of all?”
I said promptly, “Everything.” And when she didn’t look as though that had explained it clearly enough for her, I added: “It’s just one damn thing after another, isn’t it?”
“Ah,” she said, and thought for a while. Then she sighed. “What gloomy creature you are, dear Robin. Should perhaps talk again with headshrinker program, Sigfrid von Shrink?”
“No!”
“Ah,” she said again, and thought some more. Then she said, “Tell you what, dear old gloom person. How about we skip this party a while and look at some home movies, okay?”
I had not expected that from her. “What kind of home movies?” I demanded, surprised. But she didn’t answer. She didn’t wait for me to agree, either. She began showing them.
The sounds of the Spindle and the sights of the partying Gateway prospectors faded away. We weren’t there anymore. We were in a different place, and we were looking at a bench with a child on it.
Now, they weren’t real movies, of course, any more than anything else in gigabit space is “real.” They were simply computer simulations. Like everything else either one of us chose to imagine, they were quite compellingly “real” in all appearances—sight, sound, even smell, even the chill of cold air and the congestion of soo
ty air to our (nonexistent) breathing.
It was all very familiar. We were looking at me—the child me—many, many decades ago.
I felt myself shivering, not relevant to the temperature of the air. The child Robinette Broadhead was sitting hunched up against the cold air on a park bench. It was called a park, anyway. Really, it was a pretty lousy excuse for one. If things had been different, it could have been quite spectacular, for the Wyoming hills were behind the child-me. Beautiful they were not. They were smoggy gray lumps in the dingy air. You could actually see hydrocarbon particulates floating in it, and the limbs of every scrawny tree were coated with soot and smear. I—the child who had been me—was dressed for the climate, which was vile: It took three sweaters, a scarf, gloves, and a knitted cap pulled down over my ears. My nose was running. I was reading a book. I was—what? Oh, maybe I was ten years old; and I was coughing as I read.
“Remember, dear Robin? Is good old days for you,” said Essie from her invisible place beside me.
“Good old days,” I snorted. “You’ve been snooping around in my memories again,” I accused—without any real anger, because of course both of us had invaded all of each other’s memory stores often and completely before that.
“But just look, dear Robin,” she said. “Look how things were.”
I didn’t need to be ordered to look. I couldn’t have stopped. I had no trouble in recognizing the scene, either. It was the Food Mines, where all of my childhood was spent: the shale mines of Wyoming, where rock was quarried and baked into keratogens, and then the oil was fed to yeasts and bacteria to make the single-cell protein that fed most of the too-numerous and too-hungry human race. In those mining towns you never got the smell of oil off you as long as you lived, and as long as you lived was generally not very long.
“Anyway,” I added, “I never said the old days were any good.”
“Correct, Robin!” Essie cried triumphantly. “Good old days were distinctly bad. Much worse than now, no? Are now no children compelled to grow up breathing nasty hydrocarbon air, dying because cannot afford proper medical treatment.”
“Oh, sure, that’s true enough,” I said, “but still—”
“Wait to argue, Robin! Is more to see. What book do you read there? Is not Huckly-berry Finn or Little Mermaid, I think.”
I looked closer to oblige Essie, and then, with a shock, I saw the title.
She was right. It was no children’s book. It was The User’s Guide to Medical Insurance Programs, and I remembered exactly when I had sneaked that copy out of the house when my mother wasn’t looking, so that I might try to understand just what catastrophe we were facing.
“My mother was sick,” I groaned. “We didn’t have enough coverage for both of us, and she—she—”
“She put off her own surgery so that you might have therapy, Robin,” Essie said softly. “Yes, but that was later. Not this time. This time was only that you needed better food and supplements, and could not afford them.”
I was finding this pretty painful. “Look at my buck teeth,” I said.
“No money fix them either, Robin. Was bad time for children, correct?”
“So you’re playing the Ghost of Christmas Past,” I snapped, trying to relieve the pressure by confusing her with a reference she wouldn’t understand.
But when you have gigabit resources, you can understand a lot. “No, nor are you Scrooge,” she said, “but consider. In these times, not so very far behind us, whole Earth was overpopulated. Hungry. Full of strife and anger. Terrorists, Robin. Remember violence and stupid murdering?”
“I remember all that.”
“Of course. Now, what happened, Robin? I will tell. You happened. You and hundreds other crazy, desperate Heechee-ship prospectors from Gateway. Found technology of Heechee and brought it back to Earth. Found fine new planets to live on—like discovery of America, only one thousand times greater—and found ways for people to move there. Are now no more overcrowded places on Earth, Robin. People have gone to newer places, built better cities. Have not even damaged Earth to do so! Air is not destroyed by gasoline engines or rocket exhausts; use loop to get into orbit, then anywhere! No one so poor cannot have medicine now, Robin. Even organ transplants—and make organs out of CHON material, so need not even wait for other person to die to snatch secondhand bits out of corpse. Correct, Robin? Heechee Food Factory makes organs now; developments you have played large part in bringing about. Have extended meat life, always in good health, many decades; then transcribe mind like us to live very much longer—in, again, development you have partly financed and I have partly helped develop, so that not even dying is fatal. You see no progress? Is not because no progress is there! Is because old gloomy Robinette Broadhead looks hard at delicious feast of everything now on plate of everyone alive and sees only what will later become, namely, shit.”
“But,” I said obstinately, “there are still the Foe.”
Essie laughed. She seemed actually to find it funny. The picture disappeared. We were back in the Spindle, and she leaned forward to kiss my cheek.
“Foe?” she said fondly. “Oh, yes, dear Robin. Foe are one more damn thing after another, as you say. But will deal with as have always dealt. Taking one damn thing at a time. And now get back to important earlier business; we dance!”
She is a wonderful woman, my Essie. Real or not.
She was also quite right, in every way that one could logically argue, so I succumbed to logic. I can’t say that I really felt cheerful, but the novocaine had, at least, dulled the pain—whatever that real pain was—enough so that I could go through the motions of having a good time. I did. I danced. I partied. I went whooping from one cluster of old machine-stored friends to another, and I joined Essie and half a dozen others in the Blue Hell. A bunch of people were dancing slowly to music that the rest of us didn’t hear—Julio Cassata was one of them, moving zombielike around the floor with a pretty little Oriental girl in his arms. It didn’t seem to bother the dancers when we began singing old songs. I sang right along with the rest, even when they switched to ancient Russian ballads about trolleybuses and the road to Smolensk—it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known the words because, as I say, when you’re operating in gigabit space you know just about anything you want to, at the moment you want to know about it…and if in my case I didn’t, Albert Einstein would be sure to come and tell me.
I felt his tap on my shoulder as we were leaning on the old piano, and looked up to see his smiling face. “Very good voice, Robin,” he complimented, “and your Russian language has become quite fluent.”
“Join us,” I invited.
“I think not,” he said. “Robin? Something has happened. All of the main broadcasting circuits went off the air about fifteen hundred milliseconds ago.”
“Oh?” It took me a moment to understand what he was telling me. Then I swallowed and said, “Oh! They’ve never done that before!”
“No, Robin. I came here because I thought General Cassata might know something about it.” He glanced over at where Cassata and his lady were shuffling aimlessly around.
“Shall we ask him?”
Albert frowned thoughtfully at that, and before he could answer, Essie had abandoned the singing to come over. “What?” she said sharply, and when Albert had told her, said in shock, “Is not possible to break down! Many independent circuits, all multiply redundant!”
“I don’t think it was a breakdown, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert.
“Then what?” she demanded. “More silly JAWS nonsense?”
“It is certainly a JAWS order, of course, but what caused the order is, I think, something that happened on Earth. I cannot guess what it might have been.”
9
On Moorea
The passengers on the refugee flight from the Watch Wheel were almost all children, and it was a weepy journey. They perked up a little when they reached Earth Orbit, but not very much. Loop shuttles swarmed up to meet them, attaching themselves t
o the transport ship like sucklings to a sow.
It was the children’s hard luck that the first ship to reach them was from JAWS. It was full of intelligence analysts.
So the next hours were no fun for the children. The JAWS analysts “debriefed” them, stubbornly asking the same questions over and over in the hope of getting some new datum that might be somehow of use in determining just how false the “false alarm” had been.
Of course, none of the children had any such information to give. It took a long time before the JAWS agents were convinced of that, but ultimately, and reluctantly, they allowed kinder people and programs to take over.
The new shift was in charge of finding places for the children to stay on Earth. For some of the children it was easy, because they had families there. The remainder went to schools all over the planet.
Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko were almost the last to find places. They stuck together out of friendship, and even more because none of them spoke French or Russian, which ruled out the schools in Paris and Leningrad, and besides, none of them was quite ready to face the confusion of a big city. That ruled out Sydney, New York, and Chicago, and when the billeting program had found places for all the other children, they three were left.
“I wish it could be some warm place, not too far from Japan,” said Oniko. Sneezy, having given up hope of finding a Heechee colony to take him, added his vote to the request.
The billeting program was a schoolmarmy woman, middle-aged, bright-eyed, soft-spoken. Although she was human in form, Sneezy felt kindness emanating from her. She peered at her screen—which did not exist, any more than she did—puzzled over the readout for a moment, then gave Sneezy a pleased smile.
“I’ve got three vacancies on Moorea, Sternutator. That’s very near Tahiti.”
“Thank you,” said Sneezy politely, looking without recognition at the map she displayed. The name of the island meant nothing to him. One human place sounded very much like any other human place, for they were all equally, wildly exotic to a Heechee boy. But Harold, glumly reconciled to the fact that he wouldn’t be taken to Peggys Planet right away, shouted from behind: