“What?”
He affected to misunderstand me. “I was saying that the hypothesis that the source is in a black hole is not consistent with the total absence of gamma or X-radiation from that region, as would presumably occur from infall of dust and gas.”
“Albert,” I said, “sometimes you go too far!”
He gazed at me with hooded-eyed concern. I know that those calm stares of Albert’s, and his pretenses of forgetting things, are only contrivances for effect. They do not reflect any appropriate reality-especially the times when he looks right into my eyes. The imaged eyes in Albert’s holopics see no more than the eyes in a photograph. If he senses me, and he surely did sense me good, it was through camera lenses and hypersound pulses and capacitance probes and thermal imagers, none of which are located anywhere near the eyes of the image of Albert. But there are, all the same, moments when those eyes seem to be looking right into my soul. “You want to believe they are Heechee, don’t you, Robin?” he asked softly.
“None of your business! Show me this enhanced image!”
“Very well.”
The image mottled … marbled … cleared; and I was looking at an immense dragonfly. It more than filled the screen in Albert’s little peepshow. Most of its gauzy wings could be made out only by the stars they obscured. But where all the wings came together there was a cylindrical object with points of light gleaming on its surface, and some of that light glittered off the wings themselves.
“It’s a sailship!” I gasped.
“Yes. A sailship,” Albert agreed. “A photonic spacecraft. Its only propulsion is from light pressure against the array of sails.”
“But Albert-But Albert, that must take forever.”
He nodded. “In human terms, yes, that is a good description. At its estimated velocity the trip from, say, the Earth to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take approximately six hundred years.”
“My God. Six hundred years in that little thing?”
“It isn’t little, Robin,” he corrected me. “It is more distant than you perhaps realize. My ranging data is only approximate, but my best estimate is that the distance from sailtip to sailtip is not less than one hundred thousand kilometers.”
On the damask couch Essie snorted, changed position, opened her eyes to look at me, said accusingly, “Still up, eh!” and closed her eyes again- all without waking up.
I sat back, and fatigue and pain swarmed over me. “I wish I were sleepy,” I said. “I need to let all this simmer awhile before I can take it in.”
“Of course, Robin. I’ll tell you what I suggest,” Albert said cunningly. “You didn’t have much for dinner, so why don’t I make you up some nice split-pea soup, or maybe some fish chowder-“
“You know what puts me to sleep, don’t you?” I said, almost laughing, glad to have my thoughts brought back to the mundane. “Why not?”
So I moved back to the dining alcove. I let Albert’s bartender subroutine fix me a nice hot buttered rum, and Albert himself appeared in the
PV-frame over the sideboard to keep me company. “Very nice,” I said, finishing it. “Let’s have another before I eat, all right?”
“Certainly, Robin,” he said, fiddling with his pipestem. “Robin?”
“Yes?” I said, reaching for the new drink.
“Robin”-bashfully-“I’ve got an idea.”
I was in a good mood to hear ideas, so I cocked an eyebrow at him as permission to go on. “Walthers gave me the notion: Institutionalize what you did for him. Set up annual awards. Like to Nobel prizes, or the Gateway science bonuses. Six prizes a year, a hundred thousand dollars each, each one for someone in a particular field of science and discovery. I have prepared a budget”-he moved to one side, turning his head to glance toward a corner of the viewing frame; a neatly printed prospectus appeared there-“showing that for a nominal outlay of six hundred thousand a year, nearly all of which would be recouped through tax savings and third-party participation-“
“Hold it, Albert. Don’t be my accountant. Be my science advisor. Prizes for what?”
He said simply, “For helping to solve the riddles of the universe.”
I sat back and stretched, feeling very relaxed and warm. And benign, even to a computer program. “Oh, hell, Albert, sure. Go ahead. Isn’t the soup ready yet?”
“Right this minute,” he said obligingly, and so it was. I dipped a spoon into it, and it was fish chowder. Thick. White, with lots of cream.
“I don’t see the point, though,” I said.
“Information, Robin,” he said.
“But I thought you got all that sort of information anyway.”
“Of course I do-after it’s published. I have a conceptually keyed search program going all the time, with more than forty-three thousand subject flags, and as soon as something on, say, Heechee language transcription appears anywhere it automatically goes into my store. But I want it before it’s published, and even if it isn’t published. Like Audee’s discovery, do you see? Winners each year chosen by a jury-I would be glad”-he twinkled-“to help you select the juries. And I have proposed six areas of inquiry.” He nodded toward the display; the budget disappeared, replaced by a neat tabulation:
1. Heechee communications translation.
2. Observations and interpretation of the missing mass.
3. Analysis of Heechee technology.
4. Amelioration of terrorism.
5. Amelioration of international tensions.
6. Nonexploitive life extension.
“They all sound very commendable,” I said approvingly. “The soup’s fine, too.”
“Yes,” he said, “the chefs are very good at following instructions.” I glanced up at him drowsily. His voice seemed gentler-.no, perhaps the word is sweeter-than before. I yawned, trying to focus my eyes.
“Do you know, Albert,” I said, “I never noticed it before, but you look a little like my mother.”
He put down his pipe and regarded me sympathetically. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”
I regarded my faithful hologram with drowsy pleasure. “I guess that’s right,” I conceded. “Maybe it’s not my mother you look like, though. Those big eyebrows-“
“It doesn’t matter, Robin,” he said gently.
“It doesn’t, does it?” I agreed.
“So you might just as well go to sleep,” he finished.
And that seemed like such a good idea that I did. Not right away. Not abruptly. Just slowly, gently; I lingered half awake and I was absolutely comfortable and absolutely relaxed, so I didn’t quite know where half awake ended and all-asleep began. I was in a dream or a reverie, that in-between state when you suspect you are sleeping but don’t care much, and the mind wanders. Oh, yes, my mind wandered. Very far. I was chasing around the universe with Wan, reaching into one black hole after another in search of something very important to him, and also very important to me, though I didn’t know why. There was a face involved, not Albert’s, not my mother’s, not even Essie’s, a woman’s face with great dark eyebrows . .
Why, I thought, with pleased surprise, the son of a bitch has doped me! And meanwhile, the great Galaxy turned and tiny particles of organic matter pushed slightly less tiny particles of metal and crystal across the spaces between the stars; and the organic bits experienced pain and desolation and terror and joy in all their various ways; but I was all the way asleep and it did not matter to me a bit. Then.
13 The Penalties of Love
One small bit of organic matter named Dolly Walthers was busy experiencing all of those feelings-or all but joy-and a great deal of such other feelings as resentment and boredom. In particular boredom, except at those moments when the dominant feeling in her sorry small heart was terror. As much as anything, the inside of Wan’s ship was like a chamber in some complicated, wholly automatic factory in which a small space had been left for human beings to crawl in to make repairs. Even the flickering golden coil that was part of the Heechee drive system was only partly visible; Wan had surrounded it with cupboarding to store food. Dolly’s own personal possessions-they consisted mostly of her puppets and a six-month supply of tampons-were jammed into a cabinet in the tiny toilet. All the other space was Wan’s. There was not much to do, and no room to do it in. Reading was one possible way to pass the time. The only datafans Wan owned that were readable, really, were mostly children’s stories, recorded for him, he said, when he was tiny. They were extremely boring to Dolly, though not quite as boring as doing nothing at all. Even cooking and cleaning were not as boring as nothing at all, but the opportunities were limited. Some cooking smells drove Wan to take refuge in the lander-or more often to stamp and rage at her. Laundry was easy, involving only putting their garments in a sort of pressure cooker that forced hot steam through them, but then as they dried they raised the humidity of the air and that, too, was cause for stamping and raging. He never really hit her-well, not counting what he probably thought of as amorous play-but he scared her a lot.