7 Homecoming
In the Lofstrom Loop in Lagos, Nigeria, Audee Walthers debated the measure of his responsibility toward Janie Yee-xing as the magnetic ribbon caught their descending pod, and slowed it, and dropped it off at the Customs and Immigration terminal. For playing with the forbidden toys he had lost the hope of a job, but for helping him do it Yee-xing had lost a whole career. “I have an idea,” he whispered to her as they lined up in the anteroom. “I’ll tell you about it outside.”
He did indeed have an idea, and it was a pretty good one, at that. The idea was me.
Before Walthers could tell her about his idea, he had to tell her about what he had felt in that terrifying moment at the TPT. So they checked into a transit lodge near the base of the landing loop. A bare room, and a hot one; there was one medium-sized bed, a washstand in the corner, a PV set to stare at while the traveler waited for his launch capsule, windows that opened on the hot, muggy African coastal air. The windows were open, though the screens were tight against the myriad African bugs, but Walthers hugged himself against the chill as he told her about that cold, slow being whose mind he had felt on the £ Ya.
And Janie Yee-xing shivered, too. “But you never said anything, Audee!” she said, her voice a little shrill because her throat was tight. He shook his head. “No. But why didn’t you? Isn’t there-“ She paused. “Yes, I’m sure there’s a Gateway bonus you could get for that!”
“We could get, Janie!” he said strongly, and she looked at him, then accepted the partnership with a nod. “There sure is, and it’s a million dollars. I checked it out on the ship’s standing orders, same time I copied the ship’s log.” And he reached into his scanty luggage and pulled out a datafan to show her.
She didn’t take it from him. She just said, “Why?”
“Well, figure it out,” he said. “A million dollars. There’s two of us, so cut it in half. Then I got it on the S. Ya., with the S. Ya.‘s equipment, so the ship and its owners and the whole damn crew might get a share- we’d be lucky if it was only half. More likely three-quarters. Then-well, we broke the rules, you know. Maybe they’d overlook that, considering everything. But maybe they wouldn’t, and we’d get nothing at all.”
Yee-xing nodded, taking it in. There was a lot to take in. She reached out and touched the datafan. “You copied the ship’s log?”
“No problem,” he said, and indeed it hadn’t been. During one of his tours at the controls, frosty silence from the First Officer at the other seat, Walthers had simply called up the data for the moment he had made contact from the automatic flight recorder, recorded the information as though it was part of his normal duty, and pocketed the copy.
“All right,” she said. “Now what?”
So he told her about this known eccentric zillionaire (who happened to be me), notorious for his willingness to spend largely for Heechee data, and as Walthers knew him personally- She looked at him with a different kind of interest. “You know Robinette Broadhead?”
“He owes me a favor,” he said simply. “All I have to do is find him.” For the first time since they had entered the little room Yee-xing smiled. She gestured toward the P-phone on the wall. “Go to it, tiger.”
So Walthers invested some of his not very impressive remaining bankroll in long-distance calls while Yee-xing gazed thoughtfully out at the bright tracery of lights around the Lofstrom loop, like a kilometers-long roller-coaster, its magnetic cables singing and the capsules landing on it choofing while the ones taking off were chuffing as they respectively gave up and took on escape velocity. She wasn’t thinking about their customer. She was thinking about the goods they had to sell, and when Walthers hung up the phone, his face dour, she hardly listened to what he had to say. Which was:
“The bastard’s not home,” he said. “I guess I got the butler at Tappan Sea. All he’d tell me was that Mr. Broadhead was on his way to Rotterdam. Rotterdam, for God’s sake! But I checked it out. We can get a cheap flight to Paris and then a slow-jet the rest of the way-we’ve got enough money for that-“
“I want to see the log,” said Yee-xing.
“The log?” he repeated.
“You heard me,” she said impatiently. “It’ll play on the PV. And I want to see.”
He licked his lips, thought for a moment, shrugged, and slipped it into the PV scanner.
Because the ship’s instruments were holographic, recording every photon of energy that struck them, all that data concerning the source of the chill emanations was on the fan. But the PV showed only a tiny and featureless white blob, along with the location coordinates.
It was not very interesting to look at in itself-which was, no doubt, why the ship’s sensors themselves had paid no attention to it. High magnification would perhaps show details, but that was beyond the capacities of the cheap hotel room set.
But even so- As Walthers looked at it, he felt a crawling sensation. From the bed
Yee-xing whispered, “You never said, Audee. Are they Heechee?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the still white blur. “I wish I knew-“ But it was not likely, was it? unless the Heechee were far unlike anything anyone had suspected. Heechee were intelligent. Had to be. They had conquered interstellar space half a million years ago. And the minds that Walthers had perceived were-were-What would you call it? Petrified, maybe. Present. But not active.
“Turn it off,” said Yee-xing. “It gives me the creeps.” She swatted one of the bugs that had penetrated the screen and added gloomily, “I hate this place.”
“Well, we’ll be off to Rotterdam in the morning.”
“Not this place. I hate being on the Earth,” she said. She waved at the sky past the lights of the landing loop. “You know what’s up there?
There’s the High Pentagon and Orbit-Tyuratam and about a million zappers and nukes floating around, and they’re all crazy here, Audee. You never know when the damn things are going to go off.”
Whether she intended a rebuke or not was unclear, but Walthers felt it anyway. He pulled the fan out of the PV scanner resentfully. It wasn’t his fault that the world was crazy! But it was his fault, no doubt of that, that Yee-xing was condemned to be on it. So she had every right to reproach him.
He started to hand her the datafan, his motives not certain, perhaps to demonstrate trust, perhaps to reinforce her status as his accomplice.
But in midreach he discovered just how crazy the world was. The gesture converted itself into a blow, aimed wickedly at her unsmiling, desolate face.
For the half of a breath it was not Janie there; it was Dolly, faithless, runaway Dolly, with the grinning, contemptuous shadow of Wan behind her-or neither of them, in fact not a person at all but a symbol. A target. An evil and threatening thing that had no identity but only a description. It was THE ENEMY, and the most certainly sure thing about it was that it needed to be destroyed. Violently. By him.
For otherwise Walthers himself would be destroyed, wrecked, disintegrated, by the maddest, most hating, most pervertedly destructive emotions he had ever felt, forced into his mind in an act of sickening, violent, devastating rape.
What Audee Walthers felt at that moment I knew very well because I felt it, too-as did Janie-as did my own wife, Essie-as did every human being within a dozen AU of a point a couple of hundred million kilometers from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Auriga. It was most lucky for me that I was not indulging my habit of piloting myself. I don’t know if I would have crashed. The touch from space only lasted half a minute, and I might not have had time to kill myself, but I surely would have tried. Rage, sick hatred, an obsessive need to wreck and ravish-that was the gift from the sky that the terrorists offered us all. But for once I had the computer doing the piloting so that I could spend my time on the P-phone, and computer programs were not infected by the terrorists’ TPT.
It wasn’t the first time. Not even the first time lately, for in the previous eighteen months the terrorists had dodged into solar space in their stolen Heechee ship and broadcast their pet lunatic’s most horrid fantasies to the world. It was more than the world could stand. It was, in fact, why I was on my way to Rotterdam, but this particular episode was the reason I turned around in midflight on the way there. I tried at once to call Essie, as soon as it was over, to make sure she was all right. No luck. Everybody in the world was trying to call everybody else, for the same reasons, and the relay points were jammed.