Essie’s thrifty cybernetician’s soul was indignantly ordering her to use the program or turn it off-what a shocking waste of machine time! But she hesitated. There were questions still to ask.
At the door the nurse was looking in. “Good morning, Mrs. Broadhead,” she said when she saw that Essie was wide awake.
“Is it time?” Essie asked, her voice suddenly unsteady.
“Oh, not for a few minutes yet. You can go on with your machine if you want to.”
Essie shook her head. “Is no point,” she said and dismissed the program. It was a decision lightly taken. It did not occur to her that some of the unasked questions might be consequential.
And when Albert Einstein was dismissed he did not allow himself to disintegrate at once.
“The whole of anything is never told,” said Henry James. Albert knew “Henry James” only as an address, the information behind which he had never had occasion to seek. But he understood the meaning of that law. He could never tell the whole of anything even to his master. He would fail in his programming if he tried.
But what parts of the whole to select?
At its lowest structural level, Albert’s program was gated to pass items of a certain measured “importance” and reject others. Simple enough. But the program was redundant. Some items came to it through several gates, sometimes as many as hundreds of gates; and when some of the gates said “go’ and others said “no go,” what was a program to do? There were algorithms to test importance, but at some levels of complexity the algorithms taxed even the resources of sixty billion gigabits-or of a universe full of bits; Meyer and Stockmeyer had proved, long ago, that, regardless of computer power, problems existed which could not be solved in the life of the universe. Albert’s problems were not quite that immense. But he could not find an algorithm to decide for him, for instance, whether he should bring up the puzzling implications of Mach’s Principle as applied to Heechee history. Worse. He was a proprietary program. It would have been interesting to pass on his conjectures on the subject to a pure science research program. But that his basic programming did not permit.
So Albert held himself together for nearly a millisecond, reconsidering his options. Should he, next time Robin summoned him, volunteer his misgivings about the potentially terrifying truth that lay behind Heechee Heaven?
He reached no conclusion in all that long one thousandth of a second, and his parts were needed elsewhere.
So Albert allowed himself to come apart.
This part he poured into slow memory, that part into ongoing problems as needed, until all of Albert Einstein had soaked into the 6 x 10 bits, like water into sand, until not even a stain was left. Some of his routines joined with others in a simulated war game, in which Key West was invaded from Grand Cayman. Some turned up to assist the traffic-controller program at Dallas-Fort Worth, as Robin Broadhead’s plane entered its landing pattern. Much, much later, some of him helped to monitor Essie’s vital functions as Dr. Wilma Liederman began to cut. One little bit, hours after, helped to solve the mystery of the prayer fans. And the simplest, crudest, tiniest part of all stayed on to supervise the program that prepared Cajun coffee and beignets for Robin when he arrived, and to see that the house was clean for him. Sixty billion gigabits can do much. They even do windows.
13 At the Halfway Point
To love someone is a grace. To marry someone is a contract. The part of me that loved Essie, was loving her wholeheartedly, sank in pain and terror when she relapsed, surged in fearful joy when she showed signs of recovering. I had plenty of occasion for both. Essie died twice in surgery before I could get home, and again, twelve days later, when they had to go in again. That last time they made her clinically dead on purpose. Stopped heart and breath, kept only the brain alive. And every time they reanimated her I was frightened to think she would live- because if she lived it meant she might die one more time, and I could not stand it. But slowly, painfully, she began to gain weight, and Wilma told me the tide had turned, as when the spiral begins to glow in a Heechee ship at the halfway point and you know you’re going to live through the trip. I spent all that time, weeks and weeks of it, hanging around the house, so that when Essie could see me I would be there.
And all that time the part of me that had contracted to be married to her was resenting the bond, and wishing I were free. How do you account for that? That was a good occasion for guilt, and guilt is a feeling that comes readily to me-as my old psychoanalytic program used to tell me all the time. And when I went in to see Essie, looking like a mummy of herself, the joy and worry filled my heart and the guilt and resentment clogged my tongue. I would have given my life to make her well. But that did not seem a practical strategy, or at least I could not see any way to make that deal, and the other guilty and hostile part of me wanted to be free to dwell on lost Kiara, and whether somehow I might find her again.
But she mended, Essie did. She mended fast. The sunken bags of flesh under her eyes filled to be only bruises. The tubes came out of her nostrils. She ate like a pig. Before my very eyes she was filling out, the bust beginning to swell, the hips regaining their power to startle. “My compliments to the doctor,” I told Wilma Liederman when I caught her on her way in to see her patient.
She said sourly, “Yes, she’s doing fine.”
“I don’t like the way you said that,” I told her. “What’s the matter?”
She relented. “Nothing, really, Robin. All her tests are fine. She’s in such a hurry, though!”
“That’s good, isn’t it?’”
“Up to a point it is. And now,” she added, “I have to get in to see my patient. Who will be up and about any day now and, maybe, back to normal in a week or two.” What good news that was! And how reluctantly I received it.
I went through all those weeks with something hanging over me. Sometimes it seemed like doom, like old Peter Herter blackmailing the world and nothing the world could do to resist it, or like the Heechee stirring into anger as we invaded their complex and private worlds. Sometimes it seemed like golden gifts of opportunity, new technologies, new hopes, new wonders to explore and exploit. You would think that I would distinguish between hopes and worries, right? Wrong. Both scared the hell out of me. As good old Sigfrid used to tell me, I have a great talent not only for guilt but also for worry.
And when you came right down to it, I had some fairly real things to worry about. Not just Essie. When you reach a certain age you have, it seems to me, a right to expect some parts of your life to stay stable. Like what, for instance? Like money, for instance. I was used to a lot of it, and now here was my lawyer program telling me that I had to watch my pennies. “But I promised Hanson Bover a million cash,” I said, “and I’m going to pay it. Sell some stock.”
“I’ve sold stock, Robin!” He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t programmed to be able to be really angry, but he could be wretched and he was.
“So sell some more. What’s the best to get rid of?”
“None of it is ‘best,’ Robin. The food mines’re down because of the fire. The fish farms still haven’t recovered from losing the fingerlings. A month or two from now-“
“A month or two from now isn’t when I want the money. Sell.” And when I signed him off and called Bover up to find out where to send his million, he actually seemed surprised.
“In view of Gateway Corp’s action,” he said, “I thought you’d call our arrangement off.”
“A deal is a deal,” I said. “We can let the legalities hang. They don’t mean much while Gateway has preempted me.”
He was suspicious immediately. What is it that I do that makes people suspicious of me when I am going miles out of my way to be fair?’ “Why do you want to hold off on the legalities?” he demanded, rubbing the top of his head agitatedly-was it sunburned again?
“I don’t ‘want’ to,” I said, “it just doesn’t make any difference. As soon as you lift your injunction Gateway will drop theirs on me.”