“Einstein! The first damn thing she’s going to do is rewrite you!”
He twinkled. “She already has, Robin,” he pointed out, “and one of the things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by some comical or personally rewarding comment.”
“You’re telling me I ought to be all tensed up?”
“Well, not really, Robin,” he said. “All this is quite theoretical-if that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps not. That black hole in the center of our Galaxy is at least one possibility for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight time in a Heechee ship, not all that distant. And-I said that we had determined the objective of the Oldest One’s course? That was it, Robin. It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around.”
I was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was having the time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn’t tired of Essie, so I stayed around until she at last admitted she had everything she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman was there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last crumb under her toenail. I wasn’t worried. I could see that Essie was all right, and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep Wan in shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had set up a million-dollar research and development company-with Wilma as president-to see what could be done with it, and that’s how easy it was. That’s how easy it all is, when everything’s going your way.
Or almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when I thought about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the middle of the Galaxy (if that’s where they were). That is very unsettling, you know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out breathing fire and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next year, why, sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he’d said ten years or even a hundred I could have worked up pensiveness as a minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical times-well, hell! How easy is it to worry about something that might not happen for another billion years?
And yet the notion just would not go away.
It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her stretch pants, brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said, “Will probably not happen, you know, Robin.”
“How can you be so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets programmed into those ships. We’ve checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred and fifty of them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages says there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who’s to say one of them isn’t racing in to tell the Heechee what we’re doing right now?”
“Dear Robin,” she said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a friendly way, “drink your coffee. You know nothing about statistical mathematics and, anyway, who’s to say they would mean to do us harm?”
“They wouldn’t have to mean to! I know what would happen, for God’s sake. It’s obvious. It’s what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians, the Eskimos, the American Indians-it’s what has always happened, all through history. A people that comes up against a superior culture is destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can’t survive!”
“Always, Robin?”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, mean it,” she insisted. “Counterexample: What happened when Romans discovered Gauls?”
“They conquered the shit out of them, that’s what!”
“True. No, nearly true. But then, a couple of hundred years later, who conquered who, Robin? The barbarians conquered Rome, Robin.”
“I’m not talking about conquest! I’m talking about a racial inferiority complex. What happens to any race that lives in contact with a race smarter than they are?”
“Why, different things under different circumstances, Robin. Greeks were smarter than Romans, Robin. Romans never had a new idea in their lives, except to build with or kill people with. Romans didn’t mind. They even took Greeks right into their homes, to teach them all about poetry and history and science. As slaves. Dear Robin,” she said, putting down her coffee cup and coming up to sit next to me, “wisdom is a kind of resource. Tell me. When you want information, who do you ask?”
I thought it over for a minute. “Well, Albert, mostly,” I admitted. “I see what you’re saying, but that’s different. It’s a computer’s job to know more and think faster than I do, in certain ways. That’s what they’re for.”
“Exactly, dear Robin. As far as can tell, you have not been destroyed.” She rubbed her cheek against mine and then sat up straight. “You are restless,” she decided. “What would you like to do?”
“What are my options?” I asked, reaching for her, but she shook her head.
“Don’t mean that, anyway not this minute. Want to watch PV? I have a taped section from tonight’s news, when you and Wilma were scheming, which shows your good friends visiting their ancestral home.”
“The Old Ones in Africa? Saw it this afternoon.” Some local promoter had thought it would be good publicity to show Olduvai Gorge to the Old Ones. He was right. The Old Ones didn’t like it a lot-hated the heat, chirped grumpily at each other about the shots they had had to take, didn’t care much for the air flight. But they were news. So were Paul and Lurvy, at the moment in Dortmund to arrange for a mausoleum for Lurvy’s father as soon as his remains got back from the Food Factory. So was Wan, getting rich on PV appearances as The Boy from Heechee Heaven; so was Janine, having a marvelous time meeting her singing-star pen-pals at last in the flesh. So was I. We were all rich in money and fame. What they would make of it, after all, I could not guess. But what I wanted at last became clear. “Get a sweater, Essie,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We strolled down to the edge of the icy water, holding hands. “Why, is snowing,” Essie announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters over our heads. Usually you can’t see it very clearly, but tonight, edge-lighted from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it was a milky dome, broken with reflections from lights on the ground, stretching from horizon to horizon.
“Is it too cold for you?”
“Perhaps just here, near the water,” she acknowledged. We climbed back up the slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never gets really cold under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running naked through seven or eight hundred kilometers before it hits the Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.
“Essie,” I said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Know that, dear Robin,” she said.
“About the Oldest One. The machine.”
“Oh, really?” She pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp from vagrant drifts from the fountain. “Very fine machine,” she said. “Quite tame, since you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external effectors, or mobility, or access to control circuits of any kind-yes, quite tame.”
“What I want to know,” I said, “is whether you could build one like it for a human being.”
“Ah!” she said. “Hum. Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of course, large sums of money, but yes.”
“And you could store a human personality in it-after the person died, I mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?”
“Quite a good bit better, would say. Some difficulties. Mostly biochemical, not my department.” She leaned back, looking upward at the iridescent bubble overhead and said consideringly: “When I write computer program, Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it what it is and what it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same. Rests on direct chemical readout of brain. Old Ones brain is not chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage is very far from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee man-aged to convert process without any apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes. When you die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine, then put machine in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black hole, where it can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode was not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die for, say, five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will you promise that for me, please.”