Sights and sounds and smells-these were terrifying! There was a stink she had never smelled before, sharp in her nose and scary. It was the smell of something alive, but she never saw the creature that owned it. There was an absence of normal smells almost as bad. No smell of deer. No smell of antelope. No smell of cat (that one a blessing). No smell even of their own dung, or not very much, because they had no rushes to tramp into a home, and the places where they huddled together to sleep were sluiced clean every time they left them. Her baby was born there, while the rest of the tribe complained at her grunts because they wanted to sleep. When she woke to lift it to her, to relieve the hot pressure in her teats, it was gone. She never saw it again.
Squint’s newborn was the first to disappear immediately after birth. It was not the last. For fifteen years the little australopithecine family continued to eat and copulate and bear and grow old, its numbers dwindling because the infants were taken away as soon as born. One of the females would squat and strain and whimper and give birth. Then they would all go to sleep, and awaken with the little one gone. From time to time an adult would die, or come close enough to it to lie curled and moaning so that they knew it would not rise again. Then too they would all go to sleep; and that adult, or that adult’s body, would be gone when they woke. There were thirty of them, then twenty, then ten-then only one. Squint was the last, a very, very old female at twenty-nine. She knew she was old. She did not know she was dying, only that there was a terrible crushing pain in her belly that made her gasp and sob. She did not know when she was dead. She only knew that that particular pain stopped, and then she was conscious of another sort of pain. Not really pain. Strangeness. Numbness. She saw, but she saw queerly flatly, queerly flickeringly, in a queerly distorted range of colors. She was not used to her new vision, and did not recognize what she saw. She tried to move her eyes and they did not move. She tried to move head, or arms, or legs, and could not because she did not have any. She remained in that condition for some considerable time.
Squint was not a preparation, in the sense that the live but exposed nervous system of a biologist’s brittle star is a preparation. She was an experiment.
She was not a very great success. The attempt to preserve her identity in machine storage did not fail for the reasons that had terminated the earlier trials, with the other members of her tribe: poor match of chemistry to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding. One by one the Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and solved them. Her experiment failed, or succeeded only in part, for a different reason. There was not enough of an identity in the being that could be recognized as “Squint” to preserve. She was not a biography, not even a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain and illustrated with fear.
But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.
In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth’s sun from half a light-year out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They were leading lives quite different from Squint’s-lives marked by automatic care, heuristic tests and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized that, although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent, they contained the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the process along.
Not much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal of the colony from its prehistoric African home and Squint’s death. The Heechee were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much. They had much longer-range plans than that.
As their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else long before any true intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of Squint’s descendants, they built accordingly. They so constructed and programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for it to be supplied with CHONfood from a convenient processor of cometary material, which they had already set operating to serve other of their installations, and which was potentially equally long-lived. They constructed machines to sample the skills of the descendants of the newborns from time to time, and to repeat, as often as necessary, the attempt to file their identities in machine storage for later review- if any of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.
Still, their plans encompassed very many alternatives, all going simultaneously; because the object of their plans was of great concern to them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.
Since Squint could not communicate, or act, in any useful way, the Heechee experimenters thriftily wiped the effective sections of her storage and kept her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for consultation by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was this that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived all those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data for use by whatever generations might be able to understand them. They tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed the rest of that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to run.
For eight hundred thousand years.
“Danine,” Hooay was moaning, “Danine, are you dead?”
She looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet’s tail wagging below. “Help me up, Hooay,” she sobbed. “Take me back.” Of them all, this had been the worst. She felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world would never be the same again. Janine did not know the word “australopithecine,” but she knew that the life she had just shared had been an animal’s. Worse than an animal’s, because somewhere in Squint had been the spark of the invention of thinking, and thus the unwanted capacity to fear.
Janine was exhausted and she felt older than the Oldest One. At just-turned fifteen, she was not a child any more. That account had been overdrawn. There was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled chamber that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively, “Danine? What’s wrong?”
“There is a joke to tell you,” she said.
“You do not look like joking,” he said.
“It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with my sister to breed them. But my sister cannot breed. She has had an operation so that she can never again bear a child.”
“That is not a good joke,” he protested. “No one would do a thing like that!”
“She did it, Hooay.” She added quickly, “Do not be frightened. You will not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me.”
Her soft eyes were brimming with tears. “How can I not be frightened? Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him-“ Then the tears spilled over; he was terrified.
She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door. When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.
“Wan,” she said, “I want you to put your aims around me.”
He looked at her grumpily. No one had told him what this was about, and Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible. He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested, had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes. “Are you afraid you will fall down?” he shrilled.
“I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly. Don’t squeak.”
He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she had tried to teach him. “Then why?”
“Oh, Wan.” She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do. His arms went around her automatically- both at the same height, as though she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades. She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away. “Do you remember what this is, Wan?”