He sighed and turned to the next problem. “Well, Shoe?”
The communications officer looked almost as distraught as Twice. “A few conceptual correspondences have been established, Captain,” he reported. “But the translation program is very far from complete.”
Captain twitched his cheek muscles. Was there any unexpected, illogical thing that could go wrong that had not gone wrong already? These communications.-not only was it dangerous that they could exist in the first place, but they were in several languages! Several! Not just two, as was right and proper in the Heechee scheme of things. Not just The Language of Do and The Language of Feel, as the Heechee themselves spoke, but in literally scores of mutually incomprehensible tongues. It might have eased the pain of hearing this endless blab of chatter i1 at least, he had been able to find out what they were saying.
So many worries and problems! Not just the visible sight of Twice getting weaker and more erratic every hour, not just the terrible shock of knowing that some non-Heechee creature was activating the mechanisms that could pierce a black hole; the biggest worry for Captain was whether or not he was capable of dealing with all these consequential challenges. Meanwhile, there was a job to be done. They located the sailship and homed in on it, no problem. They dispatched a message to its crew but, wisely, did not wait for an answer. The command ship, wakened out of its millennia-long powered-down sleep, turned up on schedule. They transferred themselves, lock to lock, to the bigger, more powerful vessel. That, too, was almost no problem, though Twice, gasping and whimpering as she raced from board to board, was slow in taking over her remote-command functions in the new ship. No harm done, though. And the lumbering cargo bubble also appeared where it was supposed to, and even when.
The whole process took nearly twelve hours. For Twice, they were hours of unremitting toil. Captain had less to do, which left him plenty of time to keep an eye on her. He watched her coppery skin turn purple with unfulfilled amorousness even while it was darkening with fatigue. It worried him. They had been so unready for all these challenges! If they had known there was going to be an emergency, he could easily have shipped an extra drone operator to share Twice’s burden. If they had dreamed it would be necessary, they could have taken a command vessel in the first place and spared the strain of changing ships. If they had thought-if they had suspected-If they had had any intimation at all- But they hadn’t. Really, how could they? Even by galactic time it had been only a few decades since the last peek outside the hiding place at the core-only a wink in astronomical time, and how could anyone have believed that so much could happen in it?
Captain rummaged through food packets until he found the tastiest and easiest to digest, and fed them affectionately to Twice at her board. She had little appetite. Her movements were slower, less sure, more difficult for her every hour. But she was getting the job done. When at last the photon ship’s sails had been furled, the great maw of the bubble vessel was open, the mothlike capsule that carried the sailship passengers slipping slowly into the bubble, Captain began to breathe freely again. For Twice, at least, that was the hardest part of what they would have to do. Now she would have a chance to rest-maybe even a chance to do, with him, what her body and soul were overready to do.
Because the sailship people had responded to his message instantly- for them it was instantly-their reply came before the great gleaming sphere had closed on them. The communications officer, Shoe, keyed his screen and the message appeared:
We accept that we must not complete our voyage.
We request that you convey us to a place where we will be safe.
We query: Are the Assassins returning?
The Heechee left only small scout ships for human beings to discover; they were careful not to leave their special-purpose spacecraft where they were easily located. For example, the bubble transport. This was nothing more than a hollow metal sphere fitted with faster-than-light drive and navigation equipment. The Heechee apparently used it to move bulk materials from place to place; the human race could have used it very well indeed. Each bubble transport could hold the equivalent of a thousand S. Ya.-class transports. Ten of them could have solved Earth’s population problem in a decade.
Captain shrugged with sympathy. To Shoe he said, “Transmit to them:
‘We are returning you to your home system for the time being. If possible, we will bring you back here later.’”
Shoe’s expression was strained, with a mixture of emotions. “What about their query about the Assassins?”
Captain felt a quick shudder in his abdomen. “Tell them not yet,” he said.
But it was not the fear of the other ones that was uppermost in Captain’s mind, not even his concern for Twice. The Heechee shared with the human race an astonishing number of traits: curiosity, male-female love, family solidarity, devotion to children, a pleasure in the manipulation of symbols. The magnitude of the shared traits was not always the same, however. There was one psychological characteristic that the Heechee possessed in a far stronger degree than most humans:
Conscience.
The Heechee were almost physically incapable of repudiating an obligation or letting a wrong ~go unrighted. For the Heechee, the sailship people were a special case. The Heechee owed them. It was from them that they had learned the most frightening fact the Heechee had ever had to face.
The Heechee and the sailship people had known each other well, but not recently, and not for very long. The relationship had begun badly for the sailship people. For the Heechee, it had ended even worse. It was not possible for either of them ever to forget the other.
In the slow, gurgling eddas the sailship people sang it was told how the cone-shaped landing vessels of the Heechee had suddenly appeared, terribly hard and terribly swift, in the sweet slush of their home. The Heechee ships had flashed about the floating arcologies of the people with much cavitation and significant local temperature rises. Many had died. Much damage had been done before the Heechee understood that these were sentient and even civilized beings, if slow ones.
The Heechee were terribly shocked at what they had done. They tried to make amends. The first step was communication, and that was difficult. The task took a very long time-long, at least, for the Heechee, though the time for the sludge dwellers was bewilderingly short before a hard, hot octahedral prism slid itself cautiously into the middle of an arcology. Almost at once it began to speak to them in a recognizable, though laughably ungrammatical, form of their own language.
After that events moved with blinding speed-for the slush dwellers. For the Heechee, watching them in their daily lives was a lot like watching lichens grow. Captain himself had visited their great gas-giant planet, not a captain then, almost what could have been called a cabin boy; young; yeasty; adventurous, with that considerable, if cautious, Heechee optimism for the boundless future that had collapsed on them so terrifyingly. The gas giant was not the only marvelously exciting place the young Heechee visited. He visited Earth and met the australopithecines, he helped chart gas clouds and quasars, he ferried crews to outposts and construction projects. Years passed. Decades passed. The slow work of translating the sludge dwellers’ communications inched forward. It could have gone a little faster if the Heechee had thought it particularly important; but they did not. It couldn’t have gone very much faster in any case, because the sludge dwellers couldn’t.
But it was interesting, in an antiquarian, touristy sort of way, because the sludge dwellers had been around for a long, long time. Their chill biochemistry was something like three hundred times slower than a Heechee’s, or a human’s. Heechee recorded history went back five or six millennia-more or less the same as humanity’s, at the same stage in technological evolution. The recorded history of the sludge dwellers went back three hundred times as far. There were nearly two million years of consecutive, dated historical data. The earliest folk tales and legends and eddas were ten times earlier still. They were no harder to translate than the later ones, because the slush dwellers did not move very fast even in the evolution of their language, but the massed minds who translated them judged them not very interesting. They put the work of translating them off… until they discovered that two of them spoke of visitations from space.
When I think of all those years the human race labored under the galling knowledge of inferiority-because the Heechee had done so much more than we had, and done it so much earlier-I have many regrets. I think I regret most that we didn’t know about the Two Eddas. I don’t mean just knowing the eddas themselves, for they would only have given us one more thing to worry about, though a reassuringly remote one. I mean mostly what they did to the Heechee morale.