And no me. Not really. I was not operatively godlike, because I did not have any tangible existence. I could not create the heavens and the earth, nor destroy them. I could not affect even the least part of them in any physical way at all.
But I could behold them most splendidly. From outside or in. I could stand at the center of my home system and see, peering past Masei 1 and 2, the millions and zillions of other groups and galaxies stretching out in speckled immensity to the optical ends of the universe, where fleeing star clusters run away faster than light can return to display them … and beyond that, too, though what I could “see” beyond the optical limit was not really much different-and not really, Albert tells me, any more than a hypothesis in the Heechee memory stores I was tapping.
For, of course, that’s all it was. Old Robin hadn’t suddenly swelled immense. It was just the paltry remains of Robinette Broadhead, who at that point was no more than a clutter of chained memory bits swimming around in the sea of datastores in the library of the True Love.
A voice broke into my immense and eternal reverie: Albert’s voice. “Robin, are you all right?”
I did not want to lie to him. “No. Nowhere near all right.”
“It will get better, Robin.”
“I hope so,” I said. “… Albert?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t blame you for going crazy,” I said, “if this is what you were going through.”
Silence for a moment, then the ghost of a chuckle. “Robin,” he said, “you haven’t seen yet what drove me crazy.”
I cannot say how long all of this took. I don’t know that the concept of “time” meant anything, for at the electronic level, which is where I was dwelling, the time scale does not map well against anything “real.” Much time is wasted. The stored electronic intelligence does not operate as efficiently as the machinery we are all born with; an algorithm is not a good substitute for a synapse. On the other hand, things move a lot faster down in subparticle land, where the femtosecond is a unit that can be felt. If you multiply the pluses and factor in the minuses, you’d have to say that I was living somewhere between ten and ten thousand times as fast as I was used to.
Of course, there are objective measures of real time-by which I mean Thee Love time. Essie marked the minutes very carefully. To prepare a corpse for the queasy semistorage of her Here After chain took many hours. To prepare that particular stiff which happened to be me for the somewhat better storage she was able to arrange in the datafan, exactly like Albert’s own datafan, took a great deal longer. When her part in it was done she sat and waited, with a drink in her hand that she didn’t drink and attempts at conversation from Audee and Janie and Dolly that she didn’t hear, although sometimes she answered something that they didn’t hear either. It was not a jolly party on the True Love while they waited to see if anything at all remained to access of the late Robinette Broadhead, and it took all in all more than three days and a half.
For me, in that world of spin and charm and color and forbidden orbits where I was now transported to exist, it was-well, call it forever. It seemed that way.
“What you must do,” Albert commanded, “is learn how to use your inputs and outputs.”
“Oh, swell,” I cried gratefully, “is that all? Gosh! Sounds like nothing at all!”
Sigh. “I am glad you retain your sense of humor,” he said, and what I heard was, because you’ll damn well need it “You’ve got to work now, I’m afraid. It is not easy for me to go on encapsulating you this way-“
“Enwhat?”
“Protecting you, Robin,” he said impatiently. “Limiting your access so that you won’t suffer from too much confusion and disorientation.”
“Albert,” I said, “are you out of your mind? I’ve seen the whole universe!”
“You’ve only seen what I was accessing myself, Robin. That’s not good enough. I can’t control access for you forever. You have to learn to do it for yourself. So I’m going to lower my guard a little for you, when you’re ready.”
I braced myself. “I’m ready.”
But I hadn’t braced myself enough.
You would not believe how much it hurt. The chirping, chittering, bitching, demanding voices of all the inputs assaulted my-well, assaulted those loci in a nonspatial geometry that I still persisted in thinking of as my ears. It was torture. Was it as bad as that first naked exposure to everything at once? No. It was worse. In that terrible first blast of sensation I had had one thing going for me. I had not then learned to identify noise as sound, or pain as pain. Now I knew. I knew pain when I felt it. “Please, Albert,” I screamed. “What is it?”
“These are only the datastores accessible to you, Robin,” he said soothingly. “Only the fans on board the True Love, plus telemetry, plus some inputs from the sensors to the ship and crew itself.”
“Make them stop.”
“I can’t.” There was real compassion in his voice, though really no voice existed. “You have to do it, Robin. You have to select what stores you wish to access. Pick out just one of them and block out the others.”
“Do what?” I begged, more confused than ever.
“Select just one, Robin,” he said patiently. “Some are our own data-stores, some are Heechee fans, some are other things. You have to learn how to interface with them.”
“Interface?”
“To consult them, Robin. As though they were reference volumes in a library. As though they were books on shelves.”
“Books don’t yell at you! And these are all yelling!”
“Surely. It is how they make themselves evident-just as books on shelves are evident to your eyes. But you need only to look at the one you want. There is one in particular that, I think, will ease this for you. See if you can find that one.”
“Find it? How do I look for it?”
There was a sound like a sigh. “Well,” he said, “there’s a stratagem that might be tried, Robin. I can’t tell you up, down, or sideways, because I don’t suppose there’s any frame of reference for you yet-“
“Damn right!”
“No. But there’s an old animal trainer’s trick, used to cause an animal to perform complicated maneuvers it does not understand. There was a stage magician who used it to get a dog to go into an audience, select a particular person, take from it a particular object-“
“Albert,” I begged, “this is not the time for you to tell me those long, rambling anecdotes!”
“No, this is not an anecdote. It’s a psychological experiment. It works well on dogs-I do not know that it has ever been tried on an adult human, but let’s see. This is what you do. Begin to move in any direction. if it is a good direction I will tell you to go on. When I stop telling you that, you stop doing that particular thing. Cast about. Try different things. When the new thing you do, or the new direction, is a useful one I will tell you to keep going. Can you do that?”
I said, “Will you give me a piece of bread when it’s over, Albert?”
Faint chuckle. “At least the electronic analog of one, Robin. Now, start casting about.”
Start casting about! How? But there was no use asking that question, because if Albert had been able to give me a “how” in words we wouldn’t have had to try a dog handler’s trick. So I began-doing things.
I can’t tell you what things I was doing, exactly. I can give you an analogy, maybe. When I was in school in science class they showed us an electroencephalogram scanner, and showed how all our brains generated alpha waves. It was possible, they said, to make the waves go faster or get larger-to increase the frequency or the amplitude-but there was no way to tell us how to do it. We all took turns, all of us kids, and every one of us did in fact manage to speed up the sine trace on the screen, and no two of us described what we did in the same way. One said he held his breath, another that he sort of tensed his muscles; one thought of eating, and another sort of tried to yawn without opening his mouth. None of them were real. All of them worked; and what I did now was not real, either, because I had nothing real to do it with.
But I moved. Somehow, I moved. And all the time Albert’s voice was saying, “No. No. No. No, that’s not it. No. No-“