The first song was from the very dawn of the slush dwellers’ civilization, and quite ambiguous. It was a visitation of the gods. They came, shining so brightly that even the slushers’ rudimentary optics could perceive them-shining with such a turbulence of energy that they caused the soupy gases to seethe and boil, and many died. They did no more than that, and when they went away they never returned. The song itself didn’t mean much. It had no details that the Heechee found believable,
Robin doesn’t tell much about the sailship people, mostly because he didn’t then know much. But that’s a pity. They’re interesting. Their language was made up of words of one syllable- one consonant, one vowel. They had some fifty distinguishable consonants, and fourteen vowels and diphthongs to play with- therefore they had for three-syllable units, such as names, 3.43 x 108 combinations. That was plenty, especially for names, because that was orders of magnitude more males than they had ever had to give names to, and they didn’t name the females.
When a male impregnated a female, he produced a male child. He only did it rarely, because it cost him a great investment of energy. Unfertilized females produced females, more or less routinely. Bearing males, however, cost them their lives. They didn’t know that-or anything else, really. There are no love stories in the eddas of the sailship people.
and most of it was about a certain ur-slusher hero who dared defy the visitors and came to rule a whole soggy sector of their planet as a reward.
But the second song was more specific. It dated from millions of years later-almost within the historical period. It sang once more of visitors from outside the dense home world, but this time they were not mere tourists. They weren’t conquerors, either. They were refugees. They plunged down to the soggy surface, one shipload of them, it seemed, poorly equipped to survive in an environment that was cold, dense poison for them.
They hid there. They stayed for a long time, by their standards-more than a hundred years. Long enough for the slush dwellers to discover them and even to establish a kind of communication. They had been attacked by alien assassins that flamed like fire, wielding weapons that crushed and burned. Their home planet had been flamed clean. Every vessel they owned in space had been pursued and destroyed.
And then, when generations of the refugees had managed to survive and even multiply, it all came to an end. The flaming Assassins found them and boiled a whole huge shallow of the sludgy methane sea dry to destroy them.
When the Heechee heard this song they might have taken it for fable, except for one term. The term was not easy to translate, for it had had to survive both the incomplete communications with the refugees and the lapse of two million years. But it had survived.
It was what caused the Heechee to stop everything they did so that they could concentrate on a single task: the verification of the old edda. They sought out the home of the fugitives and found it-a planet scorched bare by a sun that had exploded. They sought for, and found, artifacts of previous spacegoing civilizations. Not many. None in good condition. But nearly forty separate bits and pieces of half-melted machines, and they isotope-dated them to two separate epochs. One of them coincided in time with the fugitives who fled to the slush planet. The other was many millions of years older.
They concluded that the stories were true: There had been such a race of Assassins; they had wiped out every spacefaring civilization they had discovered, for more than twenty million years.
And the Heechee came to believe that they were still somewhere around. For the term that had been so hard to translate described the expansion of the heavens and the reversal by the flame-wielders so that all the stars and galaxies would crush together again. For a purpose. And it was impossible to believe that these titans, whoever they were, would not linger to see the results of the process they had begun.
And the bright Heechee dream crumbled, and the slush dwellers sang a new edda: the song of the Heechee, who visited, learned to be afraid, and ran away.
So the Heechee set their booby-traps, hid most of the other evidence of their existence, and retreated to their hidey-hole at the core of the Galaxy.
In one sense, the sludge dwellers were just one of the booby-traps. LaDzhaRi knew that; they all did; that was why he had followed the ancestral commandment and reported that first touch of another mind on his. He expected an answer, though it had been years, even in LaDzhaRi’s time, since there had been a Heechee manifestation of any kind, and then only the quick touch of a routine TPT survey. He had also expected that when the answer came he would not like it. The whole epic struggle of building and launching the interstellar ship, the centuries already invested in their millennium-long journey-wasted! It was true that a flight of a thousand years to LaDzhaRi was no more than an ordinary whaling voyage for a Nantucket captain; but a whaler would not have liked being picked up in mid-Pacific and taken home empty, either. The whole crew had been upset. The excitement in the sailship had been so great that some of the crew involuntarily went into fast mode; the sludgy liquid was so churned that cavitation bubbles formed. One of the females was dead. One of the males, TsuTsuNga, was so demoralized that he was pawing over the surviving females, and not for dinner, either. “Please don’t be foolish,” LaDzhaRi pleaded. For a male to impregnate a female, as TsuTsuNga seemed about to do, involved so large an investment of energy that sometimes it threatened his life. For the females there was no threat-their lives were simply forfeited in order to bear a fertilized child-but they didn’t know that, of course, or much of anything else, really. But TsulsuNga said steadily:
“If I cannot become immortal by voyaging to another star, then at least I will father a son.”
“No! Please! Think, my friend,” begged LaDzhaRi, “we can be home if we wish. Can return as heroes to our arcologies, can sing our eddas so the entire world will hear.“ For the sludge of their homes carried sound as well as a sea, and their songs reached as far as a great whale’s.
TsuTsuNga touched LaDzhaRi briefly, almost contemptuously, at least dismissively. “We’re not heroes!” he said. “Go away and let me do this female.”
And LaDzhaRi reluctantly released him, and listened to the dwindling sounds as he moved away. It was true. They were failed heroes at best.
Robin does not explain very well what the Heechee were afraid of. They had deduced that the purpose of causing the universe to contract again was to return it to the primordial atom after which it would burst in another Big Bang and start a new universe. They further deduced that in that case, the physical laws that govern the universe might develop in a different way.
What scared them most was the thought of beings who thought they would be happier in a universe with different physical laws.
The sailship people were not without such human traits as pride. It did not please them to be the Heechees’-what? Slaves? Not exactly, for the only service they were required to perform was to report, via sealed-beam communicator, any evidence of other spacefaring intelligence. They were very glad to do that for their own sakes, more than for the Heechees’. If not slaves, then what?
There was only one word that was right: pets.
So the racial psyche of the slush dwellers contained a patch of tarnish they could never burnish away, with whatever feats of interstellar venturing they might accomplish in their vast, slow starjammers. They knew they were pets. It was not the first time for them. Long before the Heechee came they had been chattels, in almost the same way, to beings quite unlike the Heechee, or humans, or themselves; and when, generations before, their sooth-singers had roared the ancient eddas about those others into the Heechee listening machine, the slush dwellers had not failed to notice that the Heechee ran away. A pet was not the worst thing one could be.
So love and fear were abroad in the universe. For love (what passed among the slush dwellers for love) TsuTsuNga damaged his health and risked his life. Dreaming of love, I lay in my hospice, waking less than an hour every day, while my store-bought innards reconciled themselves to the rest of me. Terrified by love, Captain saw Twice grow thinner and darker.
For Twice had not got better once the cargo bubble was en route. The surcease had come too late. The closest thing they had to a medical specialist was Burst, the black-hole operator, but even at home, even with the finest care, few females could survive unrequited love combined with terrible strain.