And there was more. There were three actual existing technological societies, besides the Heechees’ own, and the artifacts of two others now extinct.
So the australopithecines were not unique. They were still very precious. Therefore the Heechee who was charged with ferrying a colony of them from the dry-bones plains of their native home to the new habitat the Heechee had provided for them in space was accorded much honor for his work.
It was hard work, and prolonged. That particular Heechee was the descendant of three generations who had explored, mapped, and organized the solar system project. He expected that his own descendants would continue the work. In that he was wrong.
All in all, the tenancy of the Heechee in Earth’s solar system lasted just over one hundred years; and then it ended, in less than a month.
A decision was made to withdraw-hurriedly.
All through the rabbit warrens of Venus, all over the small outpost installations on Dione and Mars’ South Polar Cap, in every orbiting artifact, the packing-up began. Hurried but thorough. The Heechee were the neatest of housekeepers. They removed more than ninety-nine percent of the tools, machines, artifacts, knickknacks, and trinkets that had supported their life in Earth’s solar system, even the trash. Especially the trash. Nothing was left by accident. And nothing at all, not even the Heechee equivalent of an empty Coke bottle or a used Kleenex, was left on the surface of the Earth. They did not make it impossible for the collateral descendants of their australopithecines to learn that the Heechee had visited their area. They only made sure that they would first have to learn to go into space to do so. Much of what the Heechee removed was useless and was jettisoned in far interstellar space or into the Sun. Much was shipped to places very far away, for special purposes. And all this was done not just in Earth’s solar system, but everywhere. The Heechee vacuumed the Galaxy of almost every trace. No newly bereft Pennsylvania Dutch widow, preparing to turn the farmhouse over to the family of the eldest son, ever left premises more neat.
They left almost nothing, and nothing at all without a purpose. On Venus they left only the basic tunnels and foundation structures themselves, and a carefully selected bare taste of artifacts; in the outposts, only a minimum number of signposts; and one other thing.
In every solar system where intelligence was expected they left one great and cryptic gift. In Earth’s system it was in the right-angle asteroid that they had used for a terminus for their spacecraft. Here and there, in remote and carefully chosen places in other systems, they left other major installations. Each contained the very large gift of an operating selection of whole, functional, almost indestructible Heechee faster-than-light spacecraft.
The solar troves stayed there for a very long time, four hundred thousand years and more, while the Heechee hid in their core hole. The australopithecines on Earth turned out an evolutionary failure, though the Heechee did not find that out; but the cousins of the australopithecines became Neanderthalers, or Cro-Magnards, then that latest evolutionary fad, Modern Man. Meanwhile the winged creatures developed and learned and discovered the Promethean challenge, and killed themselves. Meanwhile two of the existing technological societies met each other and destroyed each other. Meanwhile six of the other promising species idled in evolutionary backwaters; meanwhile the Heechee hid, and peeped fearfully through their Schwarzschild shell every few weeks of their time-every few millennia of the time speeding outside-.
And meanwhile the troves waited, and human beings found them at last.
So human beings borrowed the Heechee ships. In them they crisscrossed the Galaxy. Those first explorers were scared, desperate people whose only hope of escaping grimy human misery was to risk their lives on a blind-date voyage to a destiny that might make them rich and was a whole lot more likely to make them dead.
I have now surveyed the entire history of the Heechee in their relationship with the human race up to the time when Robin will start telling his story. Are there any questions, subset?
Q.-Z-z-z-z-z-z-z
A.-Subset, don’t be a smartass. I know you’re not asleep.
Q.-I am only trying to convey that you are taking a hell of a long time to get offstage, scene-starter. And you’ve only told us about the past of the Heechee. You haven’t told us about their present.
A.-I was just about to. In fact, I will now tell you about a particular Heechee whose name is Captain (well, that is not his name, for Heechee naming customs are not the same as human, but it will do to identify him) who, at just about the time when Robin will begin to tell you his story-
Q.-If you ever let him get to it.
A.-Subset! Quiet. This Captain is rather important to Robin’s story, because in time they will interact drastically, but as we see Captain now, he is wholly unaware that Robin exists. He, along with the members of his crew, is getting ready to squeeze out of the place where the Heechee had hidden into the wider Galaxy that is home for all the rest of us.
Now, I have played a little trick on you. You have already-shut up, subset!-.—you have already met Captain, since he was one of the very crew of Heechee who abducted the tiger cub and built the warrens on Venus. He is much older now.
He is not, however, half a million years older, because the place where the Heechee went to hide is in a black hole at the core of our Galaxy.
Now, subset, I don’t want you to interrupt again, but I do want to take time to mention something strange. This black hole where the Heechee lived, curiously, was known to the human race long before they ever heard of the Heechee. In fact, way back in the year 1932, it was the first interstellar radio source ever detected. By the end of the twentieth century interferometry had mapped it as a definite black hole and a very large one, with a mass of thousands of suns and a diameter of some thirty light-years. By then they knew that it was about thirty thousand light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, that it was surrounded by a haze of silicate dust, and that it was an intense source of 51 l-keV gamma-ray photons. By the time they found the Gateway asteroid they knew much more. They knew, in fact, every important datum about it except one. They had no idea that it was full of Heechee. They didn’t find that out until they-actually, I can fairly say that it was mostly I-began to decipher the old Heechee star charts.
Q.-Z-z-z
A.-Quiet, subset, I take your point.
The ship Captain was in was a lot like the ones human beings found in the Gateway asteroid. There had not been time for a lot of improvement in ship design. That’s why Captain was not really half a million years old:
Time went slowly in their black hole. The major difference between Captain’s ship and any other was that it possessed an accessory.
In Heechee speech the accessory was known familiarly as the disruptor of order in aligned systems. An English-speaking pilot might have called it a can opener. It was what permitted them to pass through the Schwarzschild barrier around a black hole. It didn’t look like much, only a twisted rod of crystal emerging from an ebon-black base, but when Captain energized it, it glowed like a cascade of diamonds. The diamond glitter spread, and surrounded the ship, and opened a way through the barrier, and they slipped through into the wider universe outside. It didn’t take long. By Captain’s standard, less than an hour. By the clocks of the outside universe, nearly two months.
Captain didn’t look human, being a Heechee. More than anything else he resembled an animated cartoon skeleton. But one might as well think of him as human because he had most of the human traits-inquisitiveness, intelligence, amorousness, and all those other qualities that I know about but have never experienced. For example: He was in a good mood because the assignment permitted him to take along as part of his crew a female who was also a prospective love partner. (Humans do this, too, on what are called business trips.) The assignment itself~ however, was distinctly unenjoyable if one stopped to think about it. Captain didn’t. He worried about it no more than an average human worries about whether war will be declared of an afternoon if it happens it is the end of everything, but time has gone on monotonously long without it happening, and so … The biggest difference is that Captain’s assignment did not refer to anything as inoffensive as a nuclear war but to the very reasons that had caused the Heechee to retreat to their black hole in the first place. He was checking on the artifacts the Heechee had left behind. Those troves were not accidents. They were part of a well-considered plan. One might even call them bait.