But machines were machines. At the graduate institute at Akademogorsk young S. Ya. Lavorovna had learned very completely that machine intelligence was not “personal”. You built them up, from adding machines to number-crunchers. You packed them full of data. You constructed for them a store of appropriate responses to stimuli and provided them with a hierarchical scale of appropriateness; and that was all there was to it. Now and then, to be sure, you were surprised by what came out of a program you had written. Of course you were; that was the nature of the exercise. None of that implied the existence of free will on the part of the machine, or of personal identity.
All the same, it was rather touching to watch him crack jokes with his programs. He was a touching man. He touched her in places where she was most open and vulnerable, because in some ways he was very like that only other man in her life who had ever really mattered to her, her father.
When Semya Yagrodna was a small girl her father had been the central person in the world-tall, skinny old man who played the ukulele and the mandolin and taught biology at the gymnasium. He was delighted to have a bright and inquiring child. It might have pleased him even more if her talents had seemed to go toward the life sciences rather than to physics and engineering, but he cherished her as she was. He taught her about the world when he could no longer teach her mathematics, because she had surpassed him. “You must be aware of what you will have to deal with,” he explained to her. “Even here. Even now. Even when I was a young boy in Stalin’s time, and the women’s movements were promoting girls to lead machine-gun squads and run tractors. This is always the same, Semya. It is a fact of history that mathematics is for the young, and that girls excel equally with boys until the age of fifteen, perhaps, or at most twenty. And then, just when the boys are turning into Lobachewskis and Fermats, the girls stop. Why? For childbearing. For marriage. For heaven knows what. We will not let it happen to you, small dove. Study! Read! Learn! Comprehend! Every day, for as many hours as you must! And I will assist you in all the ways I can.” And he did; and from the ages of eight to eighteen young Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna came home from school every day, deposited one book bag in their apartment and picked up another, and trotted away to the old yellow building off the Nevsky Prospekt where her tutor lived. She had never dropped out of mathematics, and for this she had her father to thank. She had never learned to dance, either-or to try a thousand sorts of scent and makeup, or to date-not until she was away at Akademogorsk, and for that also she had her father to thank. Where the world tried to force her into a female role he defended her like a tiger. But at home, to be sure, there was a need to cook and sew, and to polish the rosewood chairs; and none of those things were done by him. Her father in physical appearance had not looked in the least like Robin Broadhead. . . but in other ways, so like!
Robin had asked her to marry him when they had known each other less than a year. It had taken her a full year beyond that to decide to say yes. She talked to everyone she knew about it. Her roommate. The dean of her department. Her former love; who had married the girl next door. Stay away from this one, S. Ya., they all advised her. On the face of it the advice was sound, for who was he? A feckless millionaire, still mourning a woman he had loved and shatteringly lost, guilt-ridden, just out of years of intensive psychoanalysis-what a perfect description of the completely hopeless marriage risk! But- On the other hand- Nevertheless- Nevertheless he touched her. They had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in stinging cold weather, sitting most of the days inside the Cafe du Monde, never even seeing the parade. The rest of the time they stayed in their hotel, out of the sleet and the crowds, and made love, emerging only for fried sweet dough with clouds of powdered sugar, and sweet, milky, chicory-laced coffee in the mornings. Robin bestirred himself to be gallant. “Shall we go for a cruise on the river today? Visit an art gallery? Dance at a night club?” But she could see that he did not want to do any of these things, this man twice her age who wanted to marry he; sitting with his hands cupped around his coffee as though merely getting warm were formidable enough a task to contemplate for one day. And she made her decision.
She said, “I think instead we might get married, after all.”
And so they had. Not that day, but as soon as they could. S. Ya. never regretted it; it was not a thing to regret. After the first few weeks she had not even worried about how it would turn out. He was not a jealous man or a mean one. If he was often absorbed in his work, well, so was she.
There was only this question of the woman, Gelle-Kiara Moyrilin, the lost love.
She might well be dead. Was as good as dead, in any case, because she was hopelessly out of human reach forever. It was well known that this was so, from the fundamental laws of physics. . . but there were times, Essie was sure, when her husband did not believe it to be so.
And then she wondered: If there was any possibility of a choice between them, how would Robin choose?
And what if the laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an exception now and then?
There was the matter of the Heechee ships, and how could one apply known physical law to them? As with every other thinking person in the world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long time. The Gateway asteroid had been discovered while she was still a schoolgirl. The headlines announcing new findings had come every few weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the plunge and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned.
The Heechee ships were not uncontrollable. They could in fact be controlled precisely. The superficial mechanics of the process were known. Each ship possessed five main-drive verfliers, and five auxiliaries. They located coordinates in space (how?), and, once set, the ship went there. Again, how? It then returned unerringly to its place of origin, or usually did, if it did not run out of fuel or encounter a mischance-a triumph of cybernetics that S. Ya. knew no human agency could reproduce. The difficulty was that until this very second no human being knew quite how to read the controls.
But what about the next second, or the one after that? With information pouring in, from the Food Factory and Heechee Heaven; with Dead Men talking; with at least one semicompetent human pilot, the boy, Wan-with all this, and especially with the flood of new knowledge that might be unlocked from the prayer fans. . .
How long before some of the mysteries were solved? Perhaps not very long at all.
S. Ya. wished she could be a part of it all, as her classmates had become. As her husband had become. She wished even more that she did not suspect what part he most wanted to play. But the suspicion remained. If Robin could make a Heechee ship fly him to any destination he chose in all the universe, she thought she knew what that destination would be.
Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna-Broadhead called to her secretary, “How much time do I have?”
The program appeared and said, “It is now five twenty-two. Dr. Liederman is expected at six forty-five. You will then be prepared for the procedure, which will occur at eight o’clock. You have a little more than an hour and a quarter. Perhaps you would like to rest?”
S. Ya. chuckled. It always amused her when her own programs offered her advice. She did not, however, feel any need to respond to it. “Have menus been prepared for today and tomorrow?” she asked.
“Nyet, gospozha.”
That was both a relief and a disappointment. At least Robin had not prescribed more fattening foods for today-or perhaps his prescription had been overruled, because of the operation? “Select something,” she ordered. The program was quite capable of preparing menus. It was only because of Robin himself that either of them ever gave a thought to such routine chores. But Robin was Robin, and there were times when cooking was a hobby for him, cutting onions paper-thin for a salad and standing to stir a stew for hours. Sometimes what he produced was awful, sometimes not; Essie was not critical, because she was not very interested in what she ate. And also because she was grateful that she felt no need to concern herself with such matters; in this respect, at least, Robin surpassed her father. “No, wait,” she added, struck with a thought. “When Robin comes home he will be hungry. Serve him a snack-those crullers, and the New Orleans coffee. As at the Cafe du Monde.”