There are times when something catches me so by surprise that I don’t know whether to cry, or get angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up quickly and stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do, and laughed. “Sometimes you startle me, Essie,” I said.
“But why, Robin?” She reached out and took my hand. “Suppose it was the other way around, hey? Suppose it was I who, many years ago, had been through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which someone I loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I could never see that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not think I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way, to tell her how I felt?”
I started to answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips. “Was rhetorical question, Robin. We both know answer. If your Kiara is still alive, she will want very much to hear from you. This is beyond doubt. So,” she said, “here is plan. You will die-not soon, I hope. Brain will go into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But one copy flies off to black hole to look for Kiara, and finds her, and says to her, ‘Kiara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you to know I would have given life itself to save you.’ And then, Robin, do you know what Kiara will answer to this strange machine that appears out of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?”
I didn’t! The whole point was that I didn’t! But I didn’t say so, because Essie didn’t give me a chance. She said, “Then Kiara will answer, ‘Why, Robin dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are the one whom I most trust and respect and love.’ I know she would say this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me.”
17 The Place Where the Heechee Went
At six o’clock on Robin Broadhead’s tenth birthday, he had a party. The woman next door gave him socks, a board game and, as a sort of joke present, a book entitled Everything We Know About the Heechee. Their tunnels had only recently been discovered on Venus, and there was much conjecture about the location of the place where the Heechee went, their physical appearance and their purposes. The joke part of the book was that, although it contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were blank.
At that same time on that same day-or at any rate, at its equivalent in local time, which was a great deal different-a person was taking a turn under the stars before retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an anniversary of a sort, but not a party. He was a long way from Robin Broadhead’s birthday cake and candles, more than forty thousand light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a name, but out of respect and because of the work he had done, he was usually called something which translates as “Captain”. Over his squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close. When he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully designed glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his entire planet. Sullen red type-Ms. brighter than the Moon as seen from Earth. Three golden Cs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at. There were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all. Captain could identify every star he saw, because there were only ten thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest clearly visible to the naked eye. And beyond those familiar thousands-well, he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled, but he knew from his many spaceflights that past them all was the turbulent, almost invisible, bluetinged shell that surrounded everything he and his people owned of the universe. It was a sky that would have terrified a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.
Wide of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It was a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand light-years away Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked his first dope, broke a bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on nearly ten kilos before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said good-night to his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time, his sexual mates as well), removed the necklaces of rank from his shoulders, unstrapped the life-support and communications unit from between his wide spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft, spongy, dense sleeping litter. The captain’s people had come from burrowers rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their prehistoric ancestors had slept. When the captain had made himself comfortable, he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the top of the cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his people had done to sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves over to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and worrisome sleep for all of them.
The joke of Robin’s birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was not quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it was evident that they were very unlike human beings, but in very significant ways-the same! In curiosity. Only curiosity could have led them to visit so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology. Heechee science was not the same as human, but it rested on the same thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stretch of the mind into tininess and immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In basic chemistry of the body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate quite compatible food.
What was central to what everyone knew about the Heechee- or hoped, or guessed-was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all that different from human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in civilization and science. Maybe not even that much. And in that what everyone guessed (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years passed between the time the first crude Heechee ship ventured to try mass-cancellation as a means of transport and the time when their expeditions had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of Squint’s ancestors puzzled over what to do with the antelope bone his mother had given him.)
Eight hundred years-but what years!
The Heechee exploded. There were a billion of them. Then ten. Then a hundred. They built wheeled and rollered vehicles to conquer the unfamiliar surface of their planet, and in no more than a couple of generations were off into space on rockets; a few generations more, and they were searching the planets of nearby stars. They learned as they went. They deployed instruments of immense size and great subtlety-a neutron star for a gravity detector; an interferometer a light-year across to catch and measure the radio waves from galaxies whose red-shifts approached the limit. The stars they visited and the galaxies they gazed at were almost identical with those seen from Earth-astronomical time does not trouble with a few hundred thousand years-but they saw more keenly and understood more thoroughly.
And what they saw and understood was, at the end, of surpassing importance to them. For Albert’s conjecture was true-nearly true-true in every detail up to the point at which it became terribly false.
As a result of their understanding, the Heechee did what seemed to them best.
They recalled all their far-flung expeditions, tidying behind them to carry away everything that might be useful and could be moved.
They studied some million stars and from those chose a few thousand-some to cast away, because they were dangerous, some to bring together. It was not hard for them to do. The ability to cancel mass or create meant that the forces of gravity were their servants. They selected a population of stable stars and long-lived, winnowed out the dangerous ones, and brought them together, or near enough together to do what they wanted off them. Black holes come in all sizes. A certain concentration of matter in a certain volume of space and gravity wraps it closed. A black hole can be as big as a galaxy, with its component stars hardly closer than in our own. The Heechee’s plans were not so grand. They sought a volume of space a few dozen light-years across, filled it with stars, entered it in their ships. .