Compromised! He had done much more than compromise it! All on his own authority, with no higher powers to approve or forbid, Captain had awakened the sleeping fleets and summoned reinforcements from inside the event horizon. The secret was no secret anymore. After half a million years, the Heechee were coming out.
24 The Geography of Heaven
Where was I, really? It took me a long time to answer that question for myself, not least because my mentor, Albert, dismissed it as silly. “The question of ‘where’ is a foolish human preoccupation, Robin,” he grumped. “Concentrate! Learn how to do and how to feel! Reserve the philosophy and the metaphysics for those long evenings of leisure with a pipe and a stein of good beer.”
“Beer, Albert?”
He sighed. “The electronic analog of beer,” he said testily, “is quite ‘real’ enough for the electronic analog of a person. Now pay attention, please, to the inputs I am now offering you, which are video scans of the interior of the control cabin of the True Love.
I did as he said, of course. I was at least as eager as Albert to complete my training course so that I could go on to do-whatever it was possible for me to do in this new and scary state. But in my odd femtoseconds I could not help turning over that question in my mind, and I finally found an answer. Where was I, really?
I was in heaven.
Think about it. It meets most of the specifications, you know. My belly didn’t hurt anymore-I didn’t have a belly. My enslavement to mortality was over, for if I had owed a death I had paid it, and was quit for the morrow. If it was not quite eternity that waited for me, it was something pretty close. Data storage in the Heechee fans we already knew was good for at least half a million years without significant degradation-because we had the original Heechee fans still working-and that’s a lot of femtoseconds. No more earthly cares; no cares at all, except those I chose to take on for myself~
Yes. Heaven.
You probably don’t believe that, because you won’t accept that an existence as a disembodied ~clutter of databits in fan storage can have anything really “heavenly” about it. I know that because I had trouble accepting it myself. Yet “reality” is-is “really”-a subjective matter. We flesh-and-blood creatures “really” perceived reality only at second or third hand, as an analog painted by our sensory systems on the synapses of our brains. So Albert had always said. It was true-or almost true-no, it was more than true, in some ways, because we disembodied clutters have a wider choice of realities than you.
But if you still don’t believe me I can’t complain. However many times I told myself it was so, I didn’t find it very heavenly either. It had never occurred to me before how terribly inconvenient it was-financially, legally, and in many otherlies, not least maritally-to be dead.
So, coming back to the question, where was I really? Why, really I was at home. As soon as I had-well-died, Albert in remorse had turned the ship around. It took quite a while to get there, but I wasn’t doing anything special. Just learning how to pretend to be alive when in fact I wasn’t. It took the whole flight back just to make a start on that, for it was a lot harder to be born into fan storage than into the world in the old biological way-I had to actively do it, you see. Everything about me was a great deal vaster. In one sense I was limited to a Heechee-model datafan with a cubic content of not much more than a thousand cc, and in that sense I was detached from my plug-in and carried through customs and brought back to the old place on the Tappan Sea with no more trouble than you’d carry an extra pair of shoes. In another sense I was
vaster than galaxies, for I had all the accumulated datafans in the world to play in. Faster than a silver bullet, quick as quicksilver, swift as the shining lightning-I could go anywhere that any of the stored Heechee and human datastores had ever gone, and that was everywhere I had ever heard of. I heard the eddas of the slush dwellers from the sailship and hunted with the first exploring Heechee party that captured the australopithecines; I chatted with the Dead Men from Heechee Heaven (poor inarticulate wrecks, so badly stored in such haste by such inexpert help, but still remembering what it was to be alive). Well. Never mind where all I went; you don’t have time to hear. And that was all easy.
Human affairs were harder…
By the time we were back on the Tappan Sea Essie had had a chance to rest up and I had had the time and practice to recognize what I saw, and both of us had got over some of the trauma of my death. I don’t say we’d got over it all, but at least we could talk.
At first it was only talk, for I was shy of trying to display myself to my dear wife as a hologram. Then said Essie commandingly, “You, Robin! Is no longer tolerable, this talking to you on voice-only phone. Come where I can see!”
“Yes, do!” ordered the other Essie, stored with me, and Albert chimed in:
“Simply relax and let it happen. Robin. The subroutines are well in place.” In spite of them all, it took all my courage to show myself, and when I did my dear wife looked me up and down and said:
“Oh, Robin. How lousy you look!”
Now, that might sound less than loving, but I knew what Essie meant. She wasn’t criticizing; she was sympathizing, and trying to keep from tears. “I’ll do better later, darling,” I said, wishing I could touch her.
“Indeed he will, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert earnestly, which made me realize that he was sitting by my side. “At present I am helping him, and the attempt to project two images at once is difficult. I am afraid they are both degraded.”
“Then you disappear!” she suggested, but he shook his head. “There is also the need for Robin to practice-and, I think, you yourself may wish to make some programming amendments. For example, surround. I cannot give Robin a background unless I share it with him. Improvements are also needed in full animation, real-time reaction, consistency between frames-“
“Yes, yes,” groaned Essie, and set about doing things in her workshop. So did we all. There was much to do, especially for me.
I have worried about many things in my time, and almost always about the wrong ones. Worrying about dying hovered in the edges of my concerns for most of my physical life-just as it does in yours. What I feared was extinction. I didn’t get extinction. I got a whole new set of problems. A dead man, you see, no longer has any rights. He can’t own property. He can’t dispose of property. He can’t vote-not only can’t he vote in an election to a government office; he cannot even vote the large majority of shares he owns in the hundred corporations he himself has set up. When he is only a minority interest-even a very powerful one, as I was in, for example, the transport system that sent new colonists to Peggy’s Planet- he won’t even be heard. As you could say, he might as well be dead.
I was unwilling to be that dead.
It wasn’t avarice. As a stored intelligence I had very few needs; there was no risk of my being turned off because I couldn’t pay the utility bills. It was an urgency more pressing than that. The terrorists had not disappeared because the Pentagon captured their spaceship. Every day there were bombings and kidnappings and shootings. Two other launch loops were attacked and one of them damaged; a tanker of pesticide was deliberately scuttled off the coast of Queensland and so a hundred kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef was dying. There were actual battles being fought in Africa and Central America and the Near East; the lid was barely being kept on the pressure cooker. What we needed was a thousand more transports like the S. Ya., and who was going to build them if I were silent?
So we lied.
The story went out that Robin Broadhead had suffered a cerebrovascular accident, all right, but the lie that was tacked on said I was showing steady improvement. Well, I was. Not in the exact sense implied, of course. But almost as soon as we were back home I was able to talk, voice-only, with General Manzbergen and some of the people in Rotterdam; in a week I was showing myself, from time to time-swathed in lap robes supplied courtesy of Albert’s fertile imagination; after a month I allowed a PV crew to film me, tanned and fit, if thin, sailing our little catboat on the sea. Of course, the PY crew was my very own and the clips that appeared on the newscasts were more art than reportage, but it was very good art. I could not handle face-to-face confrontations. But I didn’t need to.