It was, however, possible for him to be terrified.
After a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still afraid. But he was committed. He had to act.
The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more.
His forward effectors quivered, straightened and pointed at a young female, caught in midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well. “Come with me,” he ordered.
She sobbed, but followed. Her mate took a step after her as they hurried toward a gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with them, and so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they had been mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would ever see her again.
The Oldest One’s cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid walk, but the little difference kept the weeping female trotting and panting to keep up. He glided on, past machines that had not been used even in his memories-wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little six-screwed thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest One did not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with its angels. The gold skeins changed to radiant silver, the silver to purest white. A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood waiting open for them, the heavy door fanned wide as the Oldest One approached. By the time they reached a place where the female had never been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of a dozen colors and strange patterns flickered in panels all around a great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. No rest. “Go there,” the Oldest One commanded. “Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do.” At opposite sides of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate them, were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench, very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench, a sort of hummock of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and touched an effector to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights shivered and rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a triple row of ochre lines in the middle of it “Match my pattern!” The young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though it had not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors merged and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of the controls before the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He merely waited. He knew she was doing her best By the time all ten wheels were showing the pattern he had chosen tears were gone and sweat was stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard.
The colors were not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant, safed controls, the rosette of screens that should have displayed their course coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at all.
But they did work.
The Oldest One touched something under his own bank of controls and quickly, wonderfully, the lights developed a life of their own. They blurred and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into life with a pattern of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered fearfully at the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one.
She felt what happened next.
So did everyone else Here. The intruders in their pens, the near hundred children all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest One himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died and was replaced by tweaks of pseudoacceleration punctuating weightlessness.
After more than three-quarters of a million years of rolling slowly around Earth’s very distant sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new orbit and surged away.
11 S. Ya. Lavorovna
At precisely five-fifteen AM a gentle green glow appeared in the bedside monitor of 5. Ya. Lavorosrna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough to disturb deep slumber, but she had been less than half asleep. “Very well,” she called, “I am already awake, you do not have to continue this program. But give me a moment.”
“Da, gospozha,” her secretary acknowledged, but the green glow remained. If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do; that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program.
In this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind. There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because old Peter Herter had given warning before he invaded the world’s minds, there had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and rearranging, and in the course of it Robin’s flights had been inextricably confused.
Pity. Worse than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not tried. Essie accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know that he had tried.
“Am I allowed to eat?” she called.
“No, gospozha Broadhead. Nothing at all, not even a drink of water,” her secretary responded at once. “Do you wish your messages?”
“Perhaps. What messages?” If they were of interest at all she would take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed.
“There is a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there.”
“Do so.” Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while she was waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She carefully kept the dozen tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had hurt more, and perhaps that would have been good. These months of demeaning annoyance were only an irritation; there was enough of Anna Karenina in Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come to be! Her life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her private parts.
“Gospozha Broadhead?”
“Yes?”
The visual program appeared, looking apologetic. “Your husband cannot be reached at present. He is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has just taken off; all the aircraft’s communications are at present required for navigation.”
“Mexico City? Dallas?” The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the Earth to get to her! “Then at least give me the recorded message,” she ordered.
“Da, gospozha.” Face and greenish glow shrank away, and out of the sound-circuits her husband’s voice addressed her:
“Honey, I’m having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight. Now I’m hoping to make a connection to Dallas and- Anyway, I’m on my way.” Pause. He sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost see him casting around for something cheerful to say. But it was all rambling. Something about the great news about prayer fans. Something about the Heechee who weren’t Heechee, and-and just a babble. Poor creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said, “Oh, hell, Essie. I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the meantime- Take care of yourself. If you’ve got any spare time before you, uh, before Wilma gets going, I’ve told Albert to tape all the essential stuff for you. He’s a good old program. . . .” Long pause. “I love you,” he said, and was gone.
S. Ya. lay back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with the next (and perhaps last?) hour of her life. She missed her husband quite a lot, especially in view of the fact that in some ways she considered him quite a silly man. “Good old program”! How foolish of him to anthropomorphize computer programs! His Albert Einstein program was, she had no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the bio-assay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! “Squiffy.” It was like giving a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were done by someone one cared for. . . in which case it was instead endearing.