“Bastard!”
“Probably he is.” Albert smiled. “I’ve taken the liberty of notifying the Institute of this development, and undoubtedly they will respond—unfortunately, that will be at organic speeds, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Is there anything else? Or should I go on with my investigations?”
“Go, damn it!”
I stewed around in gigabit space for a while, trying to cool off. When I thought I was at least marginally fit to talk to again, I rejoined Essie and Sergei Borbosnoy in their simulation of the Blue Hell drinking parlor. Essie glanced up amiably in the middle of a long anecdote, then fixed her eyes on me. “Ho,” she said. “Something is upsetting you once more, Robin.”
I told her what Albert had told me. “Bastard,” she said, concurring with my own diagnosis, and Sergei chimed in, “Nekulturny, that one.” Then Essie took my hand fondly. “After all, dear Robin,” she said, “is not important at this time, you agree? Had no intention of leaving party for quite some considerable time, even meat time.”
“Yes, but, damn his soul—”
“That soul is well damned already, dear Robin. Drink a little. Will cheer you up.”
So I gave it a try.
It didn’t work very well. Nor was I having a lot of fun listening to Essie and Sergei talk.
Understand that I liked Sergei. Not because he was handsome. He wasn’t. Sergei Borbosnoy was tall, cadaverous, balding. He had soulful Russian eyes and a sincere, systematic Russian way of swallowing vast quantities of ice-cold vodka, a tumblerful at a time. Since he, too, was dead, he could keep that up indefinitely without getting any drunker than he wanted to be. However, according to Essie, he had had the same capacity when they were students together in Leningrad and both were still meat. That kind of thing is a lot of fun, sure, if you’re a student—especially if you’re Russian. It wasn’t that much fun for me.
“So how’s it going?” I said genially, when I noticed that they had stopped talking and were gazing at me.
Essie reached over, smoothed my hair affectionately, and said, “Hey, old Robin. Is not so interesting for you, all this old-times stuff, right? Why not go look around?”
“I’m fine,” I said untruthfully, and she just sighed and said, “Go.” So I went. I had some private thinking to do, anyway.
It isn’t easy for me to say just what I needed to think about because, no offense, meat people can’t quite take in the large number of assorted topics a shared-time, machine-stored personality like me can keep in my head—that is, my “head”—all at once.
Which leads me to realize that I’ve already made a mistake.
Meat people can’t juggle that many thoughts. Meat people are hardly any good at all at parallel processing. Meat people are linear. What I have to keep in mind is that when communicating with meat people I must make allowances for these lacks.
So, having tried three times to figure out how to start, I now perceive that I should have started in a fourth and wholly different way.
I should have started by telling about the kids who lived on the Watch Wheel.
2
On the Wheel
So now we have to go back a little bit in time. Not very far, actually. At least, it isn’t far in meat terms; not nearly as far as we’ll have to go for some other things, I’m afraid. Just a few months.
I have to tell about Sneezy.
Sneezy was eight years old—in his personal counting of time, which was not the same as any other time we’ve been talking about. His real name was Sternutator. That was a Heechee name, which is not surprising, because he was a Heechee child. He was unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to be the son of two Heechee specialists in useful disciplines who happened to be on standby when the Heechee found out that they couldn’t go on hiding from the universe anymore. There were a whole lot of Heechee personnel waiting for just that emergency. The massed minds of the Heechee Ancient Ancestors recognized the need, and so the standby crews were dispatched at once to the outside galaxy. Little Sternutator went with them.
“Sternutator” was not a fortunate name for a kid in school, at least not when most of his classmates were human beings. In the Heechee language the word meant a kind of particle accelerator, vaguely akin to a laser, in which particles were “tickled” (or, more accurately, stimulated) until they were emitted in one huge, high-powered burst. The boy made the mistake of translating his name literally for his classmates, and naturally they called him Sneezy after that.
Or most of them did. Harold, the smart-ass human nine-year-old who sat behind him in Concepts, said he was one of the Seven Dwarfs, all right, but his parents had picked the wrong dwarf to name him after: “You’re too dumb to be Sneezy,” said Harold during recess in the play pit after young Sternutator had beaten him out in a pattern-recognition bee. “What you really are is Dopey.” And he bounced across the trampoline and gave Sneezy a push that sent him flying into the tai-chi instructor robot. Which was fortunate for both of them. The gamesthing reacted instantly, catching the Heechee boy in its padded arms safely. Sneezy didn’t get hurt, and Harold didn’t lose his recess time.
The schoolthing at the far end of the pit didn’t even see what had happened. So the tai-chi robot dusted Sneezy off and politely adjusted the pod that hung between his legs, and then whispered in his ear—in Heechee—“He’s only a child, Sternutator. When he’s older he’ll be sorry.”
“But I don’t want them to call me Dopey!” he sobbed.
“They won’t. Nobody will. Except Harold, and he’ll apologize for it some day.” And, as a matter of fact, that part of what the gamesthing said was true. Or almost true. Few of the other eleven children in the class liked Harold. None followed his example except five-year-old Soft-Stick, and that only briefly. Soft-Stick was also a Heechee, and a very young one. Usually she tried her very best to be accepted by the human children. When she found out that they didn’t follow Harold’s lead she reversed herself.
So no harm came to young Sneezy, except that when he told his parents about it that night they were, respectively, angry and amused.
The angry one was his father, Bremsstrahlung, who took his skeletal son on his bony knee and hissed, “This is sickening! I am going to request a work order on the schoolthing for letting this fat-bodied bully hurt our son!”
The amused one was Sneezy’s mother. “Worse happened to me in school, Bremmy,” she said, “and that was back Home. Let the boy fight his own battles.”
“Heechee do not fight, Femtowave.”
“Human beings do, Bremmy, and I speculate that we will have to learn this from them—oh, in a nondamaging way, to be sure.” She put down the shiny, light-emitting instrument she had been studying because she had brought some work home from the office. She stepped—it was a motion more like skating than walking, because of the light gravity on the Wheel—across the room to lift Sneezy from his father’s lap. “Feed the boy, my dear,” she said good-humoredly, “and he will forget the whole matter. You are taking it more seriously than he.”
So Femtowave scored fifty percent on that exchange. She was quite right in that her mate was far more upset than their son. (In fact, Bremsstrahlung was reprimanded the next day in his Dream Seat, because he was still irritated. That caused him to allow his mind to drift toward the smart-ass human kid when it should have been kept vacant. That was a no-no. It meant Bremsstrahlung was broadcasting more remanent irritation than he should be letting himself feel—after all, the very purpose of Dream-Seat specialists like himself was to feel nothing, but only be wholly receptive to whatever sensations might come through the Seat.)
However, Femtowave was wrong in her other assertion. Sneezy never forgot it.
Perhaps he did not remember it properly. What stuck with him was not just that human beings did indeed fight sometimes, but that their fighting did not take place only with those grossly bulging fists or grossly swollen feet. They could hurt someone simply by calling a name.
Did I do it wrong again? Sh
ould I have started by explaining the purpose of the Watch Wheel?
Well, better late than never. Let’s back up again to get the loose ends reraveled.
When the first Heechee who could not control his own destiny (his name was Captain) met the first human being who could (his name was Robinette Broadhead, because he was me), the Heechee child named Sternutator was on that standby ship in the core with his parents. He was homesick. “Home” was a cozy little city of eight or ten million on a planet of an orangey-yellowy little star inside the great black hole that was the core of the Galaxy. Even at three, Sneezy knew what that meant. He knew that the reason his family was on the ship was that there might come a time when they would all have to drop everything and plunge through the Schwarzschild barrier, and rejoin the outside stars.
He didn’t expect it to happen to him, of course. No one ever does. Then, when he and his family were assigned to the Watch Wheel, Sneezy found out what real homesickness was.
The purpose of the Wheel was simple.
It was a place to put Dream Seats.
The Dream Seats were a Heechee invention that we’d come across before we ever met a living Heechee. What the Heechee used them for (among other things) was to keep tabs on planets where intelligent life might someday evolve but hadn’t yet—like our own planet, a few hundred thousand years ago, when the Heechee last came to Earth.
The “dream” signals weren’t dreams. Basically, they were emotions. A Heechee (or a human being), encased in the Dream-Seat web of glittering antenna-metal, could feel what others were feeling—even when the others were far away. “Far away” in planetary terms, at least. They didn’t work in any useful way in galactic terms. This was because the Dream-Seat signals unfortunately came by simple EMF. They were limited by the speed of light and obeyed the law of inverse squares, so the effective range of the Dream Seats was only in the billions of kilometers, not the trillions of trillions that separated star from star.
The job of Bremsstrahlung and the other Dream-Seat operators, both human and Heechee, was to be the eyes and ears of the Wheel. Their assignment was to monitor the most important object in either Heechee or human cosmology, the kugelblitz that hung outside the galactic halo. There wasn’t any point in the galaxy itself close enough for the purpose. So the Wheel had been built and flown to a position only six AU from the kugelblitz, in its lonely position in near-intergalactic space.
That was, everyone agreed, a reasonable way to do it. It was true that in the event that something at last did transpire around the kugelblitz, and the watchers did finally receive the signals they feared, it would be some forty-odd minutes after the actual event, because that was how long it would take light-speed signals to cross six times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (which is what 6 AU means, dummy).
There was also just a tiny bit of uncertainty over whether the Dream Seats would catch anything at all in that event.
After all, some argued, the model of the Dream Seat the Heechee had originally used did not have any sensitivity for, say, machine-stored intelligences like my very own Albert Einstein; it was only after people like Essie tinkered with them that they could handle that chore. What reason was there to believe it would be able to detect the wholly unknown signatures of the basically theoretical Assassins?
But there wasn’t anything they could do about the second problem.
And as to the first, as nothing had happened around the kugelblitz for, almost certainly, some millions of years, it did not seem that three quarters of an hour one way or another would make any difference.
The next morning Sneezy was awakened by the voice of the housething in the wall, saying in the Heechee language, “Drill Day, Sternutator. Drill Day. Wake up now for Drill Day!” It kept repeating its message until Sneezy had slid out of the warm hug of his pouchy hammock, and then it relented: “Drill Day, Sternutator—but it is only a Class Two Drill. There will be no school.”
That was a case of bad news turned good for Sneezy! He slung his pod between his skinny thighs and pulled on the rest of his clothes and put a call through to Harold—for they did not always fight—while he oiled his teeth. “Shall we watch the ship come in?” Sneezy proposed, and Harold, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, yawned and said, “You bet your tiny ass, Dopey. Meet you in ten minutes at the schoolhall corner.”
Since it was a Drill Day, even a Class Two Drill, both Sneezy’s parents were already gone to their posts, but the housething parented for both of them. It pleaded with Sneezy to eat some breakfast (not this morning! but he let it make him a sandwich to eat on the run) and urged him to take an airbath (but he’d had one the night before, and even his father was not that strict about hygiene). Sneezy closed the apartment door on the housething’s entreaties and hurried through the quiet Drill-Day passages of the Wheel toward the schoolhall.
When Harold was not being overbearing, and Sneezy not sullenly resentful, they were friends.
That hadn’t happened right away. Harold was nearly the first human being Sneezy ever saw, and Sneezy was definitely Harold’s first Heechee. The looks of each appalled the other. To Sneezy, Harold looked fat, bloated, grossly swollen—about like a corpse that’s been in the water for a week, maybe. To Harold, Sneezy looked worse than that.
The thing a Heechee looks most like is a human being who has died in the desert and dried out to rope and leather. Sneezy had arms and legs like a person, but he didn’t have any flesh to speak of on them. And, of course, he had that funny pod. Not to mention that faint ammonia smell that hovers around all Heechee all the time.
So friendship wasn’t instinctive at first. On the other hand, they didn’t have much choice. There were fewer than fifty children on the whole Watch Wheel, and two-thirds of those were in the other schools spaced around the rim. So their choice of peers was limited. The babies, six-year-olds and younger, of course didn’t count. The near-adult teenagers counted a lot, to be sure—either Sneezy or Harold would have been thrilled to be allowed to hang out with any of them—but they also, of course, didn’t want to be bothered with kids.
They could have gone to one of the other sectors. Even eight-year-old Sneezy had done it many times, alone or with classmates. But there was nothing in either of the other sectors that was not duplicated in their own, and the children there were strangers.
There was no rule against Sneezy going almost anywhere he liked, in fact, with companions or without—at least, if you didn’t count the forbidden cubicles on the outer perimeter where the Dream Seats were constantly manned. Sneezy wasn’t forbidden to play in dangerous areas. There weren’t any dangerous areas. In the huge Watch Wheel there were certainly places where truly dangerous amounts of energy were deployed without warning—for signal bursts, for spin regulation, for mass shifting—but there was no employment of energy anywhere on the Wheel that was not constantly monitored by unflagging machine intelligences, and often enough by stored dead human or Heechee intelligences as well. And of course there was no danger from people. There were no kidnapers or rapists on the Wheel. There were no uncapped wells to fall into or forests to get lost in. There were groves of trees here and there, sure, but none that even an eight-year-old could not see his way out of from its very center. If any child got lost even for a moment, he had but to ask the nearest workthing for directions and be set at once on his way. That is, a human child would do that. A Heechee child like Sneezy didn’t even need to find a workthing, because he could simply inquire of the Ancient Ancestors in his pod.
The Watch Wheel was so safe, in fact, that most of the children, and even some of the grown-ups that served it, sometimes forgot what supreme danger they were watching for.
So they had to be reminded. Even for the children there were the frequent Drills—especially for the children, because when and if the watchers in the Dream Seats ever found what they were watching for, as some day they surely would, the children would have to take care of themselves. No adult would then be able to take care of them. Even the wo
rkthings would be busy, their programs instantly switched to analysis and communication and data storage. The children would have to find an approved place to hide—to stay out of the way, really—and cower in it until they were told they could come out again.
There were precedents for this sort of thing. In the middle of the twentieth century, schoolkids in America and the Soviet Union had had to learn to leap under their desks, lie prone, clasp their hands over the backs of their necks, and sweat with fear—if they failed in any of this, their teachers told them, the nuclear bombs would French-fry them. For the children on the Watch Wheel the stakes were higher. It was not only their own lives that might be lost. If they caused trouble, what might be lost was, perhaps, everything.
So when there was a Drill they, too, sweated with fear.
At least, they usually did. But now and then there was a Class Two Drill.
“Class Two” meant only that routine precautions were to be taken because a supply ship was coming in. Class Two Drills were not scary at all—at least, they were not if you didn’t think the thing through. (If you did, it was frightening to realize that the Watch Wheel had to shut down all its normal activities, while even the off-duty Watchers hurried into the extra Dream Seats, to make sure that some undesired thing was not showing up under cover of that very desired thing, a supply ship.)
There was no school on the days when a supply ship came in. There was no work done anywhere on the Wheel (always excepting the Dream Seats), because everybody would be too busy with the ship docking. Those families who had served their time and were ready to be rotated would be packing, and gathering at the dock to get their first sight of the ship that would take them back to the warmly inviting huddle of stars that was the Galaxy. And everybody else would be getting ready to oversee offloading the supplies and the new personnel.