was no hope in any of it.
Not even when at last a new picture suddenly began to build on the screen,
then another, then another. For half a dozen frames there was nothing that
made  sense,  perhaps  a fist over the lens, maybe a shot of a bare floor.
Then,  in  one  corner of the last frame, something that looked like-what?
Like  a  Sturmkampfwagen  from his earliest boyhood? But then it was gone,
and the camera had once again been put where it showed nothing at all, and
stayed that way through fifty frames.
   What  it  noticeably  did  not  show  was  any  sign  of  either of his
daughters,  or  of  Wan.  And as to Paul, the old man did not have a clue;
after his last frantic message he was gone.
   In  some  unwanted corner of his mind he found the realization that now
he  might  be,  probably  was,  the  sole  survivor of the mission, and so
whatever bonus might come to all was now his alone.
   He held the thought where he could look at it. But it meant nothing. He
was  now  hopelessly  alone, more alone than ever, as alone as Trish Bover
frozen  into  her  eternal  ragged orbit that would go nowhere. Perhaps he
could  get  back  to Earth to claim his reward. Perhaps he could keep from
dying. But how was he to keep from going insane?

   It  took  Peter  a  long  time  to  fall  asleep.  He was not afraid of
sleeping. What he dreaded was waking up afterward, and when it came it was
as  bad  as he had feared. In the first moment it was a day like any other
day,  and  it  was only after a peaceable moment of stretching and yawning
that  he  remembered what had happened. "Peter Hester," he said to himself
out loud, "you are alone in this very damned place, and you will die here,
still alone." He noted that he was talking to himself. Already.
   Through  the  habits  of all those years he washed himself, cleaned his
mouth,  brushed  his  hair  and  then took time to snip off the loose ends
around  his  ears  and  at the nape of his neck. It did not matter what he
did,  in  any  case.  Having  left  his  private, he opened two packets of
CHON-food  and  ate them methodically before asking Vera if there were any
messages  from  Heechee Heaven. "No," she said, "... Mr. Hester, but there
are a number of downlink action relays."
   "Later," he said. They did not matter. They would tell him to do things
he  had  already done, perhaps. Or they would tell him to do things he had
no  intention  of  doing,  perhaps  to force himself outside, to rerig the
thrusters,  to  try  again.  But  the Food Factory would of course counter
every thrust with an equal and opposite thrust of its own and continue its
slow  acceleration  toward God, He knew what, for God, He knew why. In any
event,  nothing  that  came  from  Earth  for the next fifty days would be
relevant to the new realities.
   And  in  less than fifty days. In less than fifty days, what? "You talk
as though you had a choice of options, Peter Hester!" he scolded himself.
   Well,  perhaps  he had, he thought, if only he could perceive what they
were.  Meanwhile the best thing for him to do was to do what he had always
done.  To  keep  himself  fastidiously  neat.  To  do  such  tasks as were
reasonable  for him to do. To maintain his well established habits. He had
learned  through  all  those decades of life that the best time for him to
move his bowels was some forty-five minutes after eating breakfast; it was
now about that time; it was appropriate to do that. While he was squatting
on  the  sanitary he felt a tiny, almost imperceptible lurch once more and
scowled.  It  was  an annoyance to have things happen when he did not know
their  cause,  and  it  was an interruption in what he was doing, with his
customary  efficiency. Of course, one could not claim much personal credit
for  the  functioning  of sphincters that had been bought and transplanted
from some hapless (or hungry) donor, or for a stomach inserted intact from
another. Nevertheless, it pleased Peter that he functioned so well.
   You  are  morbidly interested in your bowel movements, he told himself,
but silently.
   Also  silently-it did not seem so bad to talk to oneself, as long as it
was  not aloud-he defended himself. It was not unjustified, he thought. It
was  only  because  the  example  of  the bio-assay unit in the toilet was
always before him. For three and a half years it had been monitoring every
waste  product  of  their  bodies. Of course, so it must! How else to keep
tabs  on  their  health?  And  if it was proper for a machine to weigh and
evaluate one's excrement, why not for the excrement's author?
   He said aloud, grinning, "Du bist verruckt, Peter Hester!"
   He  nodded in agreement with himself as he cleaned himself and fastened
his coverall, because he had summed it all up. Yes. He was crazy.
   By the standards of ordinary men.
   But  what  ordinary  man had ever been in the present position of Peter
Hester?
   So when one had said that he was crazy, after all, one had said nothing
that  was  relevant.  What did the standards of ordinary men signify as to
Schwarze  Peter?  It  was  only against extraordinary men that he could be
judged-and  what  a  motley  crew  they  were! Drug addicts and drunkards.
Adulterers  and  traitors. Tycho Brahe had a gutta-percha nose, and no one
thought  him  the  less.  The  Reichsfuhrer  ate  no meat. Great Frederick
himself spent many hours that could have been devoted to the management of
an empire in composing music for tinkle-tanide chamber groups. He strolled
across to the computer and called, "Vera, what was that little thump a few
minutes ago?"
   The  computer paused to match the description against her telemetry. "I
cannot be sure... Mr. Hester. But the moment of inertia is consistent with
either  the  launching or docking of one of the cargo ships that have been
observed."
   He stood for a moment gripping the edge of the console seat. "Fool!" he
shouted. "Why was I not told that that was possible?"
   "I'm  sorry...  Mr.  Hester,"  she apologized. "The analysis suggesting
this  possibility  has  been  read  out  for you as hard copy. Perhaps you
overlooked it."
   "Fool," he said again, but this time he was not sure who he was talking
to.  The  ships,  of  course!  It  had  been  implicit  all along that the
production  of  the Food Factory had to go somewhere. And it had also been
implicit  that  the  ships  had  to return empty to be reloaded. For what?
Where?
   That did not matter. What mattered was the perception that perhaps they
would not always come empty.
   And, following on that, the perception that one ship at least, known to
come  to  the  Food  Factory, was now in Heechee Heaven. If it should come
back, who or what might be in it?
   Peter  rubbed his arm, which had begun to ache. Pains or none, he could
perhaps  do something about that! He had some weeks before that ship could
possibly  return. He could-what? Yes! He could barricade that corridor. He
could somehow move machines, stores-anything that had mass-to block it, so
that when it did return, if it did, whoever was in it would be stopped, or
at least delayed. And the time to begin that was now.
   He delayed no further, but set off to find materials for a barricade.
   It  was  not hard to move even quite massive objects, in the low thrust
of  the  Food  Factory. But it was tiring. And his arms continued to ache.
And in a little while, as he was shoving a blue metal object like a short,
fat  canoe  down  toward  the dock, he became aware of a strange sensation
that seemed to come from the roots of his teeth, almost like the beginning
of a toothache; and saliva began to flow from under his tongue.
   Peter  stopped and breathed deeply, forcing himself to relax. It did no
good.  He  had known it would do no good. In a few moments the pain in the
chest  began, first tentative, as though someone were pressing against him
with  a  sled  runner along his breastbone, then painful, a hard, bruising
thrust,  as  though  the  runner were on top of him and a hundred-kilo man
standing on it.
   He was too far from Vera to get medicine. He would have to wait it out.
If  it was false angina, he would live. If it was cardiac arrest, he would
not.  He  sat  patient  and still, waiting to see which it would be, while
anger built up and built up inside him. How unfair it was!
   How  unfair it all was! Five thousand astronomical units away, serenely
and untroubled, the people of the world went about their business, neither
knowing  nor  caring  that  the  person  who  could bring them so much-who
already had! -might be dying, alone and in pain.
   Could  they  be  grateful?  Could they show respect, appreciation, even
common decency?
   Perhaps  he  would  give  them  a  chance. If they responded with these
things,  yes,  he would bring them such gifts as they had never known. But
if  they were wicked and disobedient. Then Schwarze Peter would bring them
such  terrible gifts that all the world would shudder and quake with fear!
In  either  case,  they would never forget him... if only he survived what
was happening to him now.


        9 Brasilia

   The  main  thing was Essie. I sat by her bed every time she came out of
surgery-fourteen  times in six weeks-and every time her voice was a little
weaker  and she looked a little more gaunt. Everybody was after me all the
time,  the  suit against me in Brasilia was going badly, reports poured in
from  the Food Factory, the fire in the food mines still would not go out.
But  Essie was up front. Harriet had her orders. Wherever I was, asleep or
awake,  if  Essie asked for me she was put through at once. "Oh, yes, Mrs.
Broadhead,  Robin will be with you right away. No, you won't be disturbing
him.  He  just  woke up from a nap." Or he's just between appointments, or
he's  just  coming up the lawn from the Tappan Sea, or anything that would
not  deter  Essie from speaking to me right away. And then I would go into
the  darkened  room, all sun-tanned and grinning and relaxed, and tell her
how  well  she  was  looking.  They had taken my billiard room and moved a
whole  operating theater into it, and cleared the books out of the library
next  door to make it a bedroom for her. She was pretty comfortable there.
Or said she was.
   And actually, she didn't look bad at all. They had done the splints and
the  bone  grafts,  and  plugged  in two or three kilos of spare parts and
tissues. They had even put the skin back, or I guess transplanted new skin
from  somebody  else.  Her face looked fine, except for a light bandage on
one  side,  and  she  brushed her streaky blonde hair down over that. "So,
stud," she would greet me. "How you hanging?"
   "Just  fine, just fine. A little horny," I would say, nuzzling her neck
with my nose. "And you?"
   "Just  fine."  So  we  reassured  each other; and we weren't lying, you
know.  She  was  getting better every day, the doctors told me that. And I
was  getting-I  don't know what I was getting. But I was all atremble with
eagerness  for every morning. Operating on five hours sleep a night. Never
tired. Never felt better in my life.
   But  still  she  kept  getting skinnier every time. The doctors told me
what I must do, and I told Harriet and Harriet reprogrammed the cook So we
stopped  having  salads  and  bare  broiled  steaks.  no  coffee and juice
breakfasts,  but tvoroznyikyi, cream-cheese pancakes, and mugs of steaming
cocoa.  Caucasian  lamb pilaff for lunch. Roast grouse in sour-cream sauce
for dinner. "You're spoiling me, dear Robin," she accused, and I said:
   "Only fattening you up. I can't stand skinny women."
   "Yes,  very  well.  But  there  is such a thing as being too ethnic. Is
there nothing fattening that is not Russian?"
   "Wait for dessert," I grinned. "Strawberry shortcake." And whipped with
double  Devonshire  cream.  As  a  matter  of  psychology,  the  nurse had
persuaded  me to start with small portions on large plates. Essie doggedly
ate  them  all  the way through, and as we gradually increased the size of
the  portions  she  gradually  ate  more  each day. She didn't stop losing
weight.  But  she  slowed  it  down a lot, and by the end of six weeks the
doctors  opined  that  her  condition,  cautiously,  might  be regarded as
stable. Nearly.
   When  I told her the good news she was actually standing up tethered to
the plumbing under her bed, but able to walk about the room. "About time,"
she  said,  reaching out to kiss me. "Now. You have been spending too much
time at home."
   "It's a pleasure," I said.
   "It is a kindness," she said soberly. "Is very dear to me that you have
always  been  here,  Robin.  But  now  that I am almost well you must have
affairs to attend to."
   "Not  really.  I  get  along fine with the comm facilities in the brain
room.  Of  course,  it  would be nice for the two of us to go somewhere. I
don't think you've ever seen Brasilia. Maybe in a few weeks..."
   "No.  Not  in few weeks. Not with me. If you have need to go, please do
it, Robin."
   I hesitated. "Well, Morton thinks it might be useful."
   She  nodded briskly and called, "Harriet? Mr. Broadhead will be leaving
for Brasilia tomorrow morning. Make reservations et cetera."
   "Certainly,  Mrs. Broadhead," Harriet said from the console at the head
of  Essie's  bed.  Her image sputtered into blackness as quickly as it had
appeared, and Essie put her arms around me.
   "I  will  see  that  you have complete communications in Brasilia," she
promised,  "and  Harriet  will  be  instructed  to  keep  you posted on my
condition  at all times. Square count, Robin. If I need you, you will know
at once."
   I said into her ear, "Well..."
   She  said  into  my  shoulder, "Is no 'well'. Is settled, and, Robin? I
love you very much."

   Albert  tells  me  that  every radio message I send is actually a long,
skinny  string of photons, like a spear thrown into space. A thirty-second
burst  communication is a column nine million kilometers long, each photon
zipping along at the speed of light, in perfect step all the way. But even
that  long,  fast,  skinny spear takes forever to go 5,000 A. U. The fever
that  had  wounded  my  wife  had  taken twenty-five days to get here. The
orders  to stop fooling with the couch had gone only a fraction of the way
before  they  passed the second fever, the one the girl Janine had laid on
us.  Lightly,  to  be sure. Our message congratulating the Herter-Halls on
arriving at the Food Factory, out somewhere past Pluto's orbit, had passed
the  one  to  tell us that most of them had gone skylarking off to Heechee
Heaven.  By  now  they were there; and our message telling them what to do
about  it was long since at the Food Factory for relay-for once two events
had occurred at times close enough to have some meaning for each other.
   But  by  the  time  we  knew what meaning they had had, the event would
again  be  twenty-five  days in the past. What an annoyance! I wanted many
things  on  the Food Factory, but what I wanted most of all at that moment
was that faster-than-light radio. Astonishing that such a thing should be!
But  when  I  charged  Albert  with being caught flat-footed by it, he had
smiled  that  gentle,  humble  smile and poked his pipestem at his ear and
said,  "Sure thing, Robin, if you mean the sort of surprise that one feels
when  an  unlikely  contingency  turns out to be real. But it was always a
contingency.  Remember.  The  Heechee  ships were able to navigate without
error to moving targets. That suggests the possibility of communication at
nearly   instantaneous   speeds   over   astronomical   distances-ergo,  a
faster-than-light radio."
   "Then why didn't you tell me about it?" I demanded.
   He  scratched  one sneakered foot against the other sockless ankle. "It
was  only  a  possibility,  Robin, estimated no more than point oh five. A
sufficient  condition,  but  not  a  necessary  one. We simply didn't have
enough evidence, until now."
   I could have been chatting with Albert on the way down to Brasilia. But
I  was  traveling  commercial-the  company aircraft aren't fast enough for
those distances-and I like having Albert where I can see him when we talk,
so  I  spent  my  time voice-only with company business and Morton. And of
course with Harriet, who was under orders to check in once an hour, except
when I was asleep, with a quick status report on Essie.
   Even  hypersonic,  a ten-thousand-kilometer flight takes a while, and I
had  time  for  a lot of business. Morton wanted as much of it as he could
get, mostly to try to talk me out of meeting with Bover. "You have to take
him  seriously,  Robin,"  be  whined  through the plug in my ear. "Bover's
represented  by  Anjelos,  Carpenter and Gutmann, and they're high-powered
people, with really good legal programs."
   "Better than you?"
   Hesitation. "Well-I hope not, Robin."
   "Tell  me  something,  Morton.  If  Bover didn't have much of a case to
begin with, why are these high-powered people bothering with him?"
   Although  I  couldn't see him, I knew that Morton would be assuming his
defensive  look, partly apologetic, partly you-laymen-wouldn't-understand.
"It's not all that weak, Robin. And it hasn't gone well for us so far. And
it's  takking on some larger dimension than we originally estimated. And I
assume that they thought their connections would patch up the weak spots-I
also  assume  that they're in for a son-of-a-bitching big contingency fee.
You'd be better advised to patch up some of our own weak spots than take a
chance  with  Bover,  Robin.  Your pal Senator Praggler is on this month's
oversight committee. Go see him first."
   "I'll  go see him, but not first," I told Morton, and cut him off as we
circled  in  for  a  landing.  I could see the big Gateway Authority tower
overshadowing the silly flat saucer over the House of Representatives, and
off  up  the  lake the bright reflections of tin roofs in the Free Town. I
had  cut  it pretty close. My date with Trish Bover's widower (or husband,
depending  on how you looked at it) was in less than an hour, and I didn't
really want to keep him waiting.
   I  didn't  have  to.  I was already sitting at a table in the courtyard
dining  room  of  the Brasilia Palace hotel when he came in. Skinny. Tall.
Balding.  He  sat  down  nervously, as if he were in a desperate hurry, or
desperately  eager  to  be somewhere else. But when I offered him lunch he
took  ten minutes to study the menu and wound up ordering all of it. Fresh
hearts of palm salad, little fresh-water shrimp from the lake, all the way
down  to  that  wonderful  raw  pineapple  flown  up from Rio. "This is my
favorite  hotel  in  Brasilia,"  I informed him genially, hostfully, as he
poured  dressing  on  the hearts of palm. "Old. But good. I suppose you've
seen all the sights?"
   "I've lived here for eight years, Mr. Broadhead."
   "Oh, I see." I hadn't known where the hell the son of a bitch lived, he
was  just  a  name  and  a  nuisance. So much for travelog. I tried common
interests.  "I  got a flash synoptic from the Food Factory on the way down
here.  The  Herter-Hall  party  is  doing well, finding out some marvelous
things.  Did you know that we've identified four of the Dead Men as actual
Gateway prospectors?"
   "I  saw  something about that on the PV, yes, Mr. Broadhead. It's quite
exciting."
   "More  than that, Bover. It can change this whole world around-and make
us  all  filthy rich, too." He nodded, his mouth full of salad. He kept on
keeping  his  mouth full, too; I wasn't doing much good trying to draw him
out.  "All  right," I said, "why don't we get down to business? I want you
to drop that injunction."
   He  chewed and swallowed. With the next forkful of shrimp poised at his
mouth he said, "I know you do, Mr. Broadhead," and refilled the mouth.
   I  took a long, slow sip of my wine and seltzer and said, with complete
control  of  my voice and manner, "Mr. Bover, I don't think you understand
what  the  issues  are. I don't mean to put you down. I just can't believe
you  have  all  the  facts.  We're  both  going  to  lose if you keep that
injunction  in  force."  I  went  over the whole case with him, with care,
exactly  as  Morton had spelled it out to me: Gateway Corp's intervention,
eminent  domain,  the  problem  of  complying with a court order when your
compliance  doesn't  get to the people it affects until a month and a half
after  they've  gone  and  done  whatever  they  were  going  to  do,  the
opportunity for a negotiated settlement. "What I'm trying to say," I said,
"is that this is really big. Too big for us to be divided. They won't fuck
around with us, Bover. They'll just go ahead and expropriate us."
   He  didn't  stop  chewing,  just listened, and then when he had nothing
more  to  chew he took a sip from his demitasse and said, "We really don't
have anything to discuss, Mr. Broadhead."
   "Of course we do!"
   "Not  unless  we both think so," he pointed out, "and I don't. You're a
little  mistaken in some of the things you say. I don't have an injunction
any more. I have a judgment."
   "Which I can get reversed in a hot..."
   "Yes,  maybe  you can. But not in a hot anything. The law will take its
course,  and  it  will  take  time.  I  won't make any deal Trish paid for
whatever comes out of this. Since she isn't around to protect her rights I
guess I have to."
   "But it's going to cost both of us!"
   "That's  as  may  be.  As  my  lawyer  says. He advised me against this
meeting."
   "Then why did you come?"
   He looked at the remains of his lunch, then out at the fountains in the
courtyard.  Three returned Gateway prospectors were sitting on the edge of
a  reflecting  pool  with  a  slightly drunk Varig stewardess, singing and
tossing  crumbs of French pastry to the goldfish. They had struck it rich.
"It makes a nice change for me, Mr. Broadhead," he said.
   Out of the window of my suite, high up in the new Palace Tower, I could
see  the  crown-of-thorns  of  the  cathedral  glinting in the sun. It was
better  than  looking  at  my  legal  program on the full-service monitor,
because  he  was  eating  me out. "You may have prejudiced our whole case,
Robin. I don't think you understand how big this is getting."
   "That's what I told Bover."
   "No,  really,  Robin. Not just Robin Broadhead, Inc., not even just the
Gateway  Corporation.  Government's  getting  into  it.  And  not just the
signatories  to  the  Gateway  Convention either. This may wind up a U. N.
matter."
   "Oh, come on, Morton! Can they do that?"
   "Of  course  they  can,  Robin. Eminent domain. Your friend Bover isn't
helping  things  any,  either.  He's petitioning for a conservator to take
over  your  personal  and  corporate  holdings in this matter, in order to
administer the exploration properly."
   The son of a bitch. He must have known that was happening while we were
eating  the  lunch  I  bought him. "What's this word 'proper'? What have I
done that was improper?"
   "Short list, Robin?" He ticked off his fingers. "One, you exceeded your
authority  by giving the Hester-Hall party more freedom of action than was
contemplated,  which,  two, led to their expedition to Heechee Heaven with
all  of  its  potential  consequences  and  thus,  three,  brought about a
situation of grave national peril. Strike that. Grave human peril."
   "That's crap, Morton!"
   "That's  the  way  he put it in the petition," he nodded, "and, yes, we
may persuade somebody it's crap. Sooner or later. But right now it's up to
the Gateway Corp to act or not."
   "Which  means I better see the Senator." I got rid of Morton and called
Harriet to ask about my appointment.
   "I can give you the Senator's secretarial program now," she smiled, and
faded  to  show a rather sketchy animation of a handsome young black girl.
It  was  quite poor simulation, nothing like the programs Essie writes for
me. But then Praggler was only a United States senator.
   "Good afternoon," she greeted me. "The Senator asks me to say that he's
in Rio de Janeiro on committee business this evening, but will be happy to
see you whenever convenient tomorrow morning. Shall we say ten o'clock?"
   "Let's  say  nine,"  I told her, somewhat relieved. I had been a little
worried  about  Praggler's failure to get back to me right away. But now I
perceived  he had a good reason: the fleshpots of Ipanema. "Harriet?" When
she came back I asked, "How's Mrs. Broadhead?"
   "No  change,  Robin,"  she  smiled.  "She's awake and available now, if
you'd like to speak to her."
   "Bet  your sweet little electronic tooshy I do," I told her. She nodded
and  drifted  away.  Harriet  is a really good program; she doesn't always
understand  the words, but she can make a yes-no decision from the tone of
my  voice,  and  so  when Essie appeared I said, "S. Ya. Lavorovna, you do
nice work."
   "To  be  sure,  dear Robin," she agreed, preening herself. She stood up
and turned slowly around. "As do our doctors, you will observe."
   It  took  a  moment for it to hit me. There were no life-support tubes!
She  wore  flesh-form  casts  on  her  left  side, but she was free of the
machines! "My God, woman, what happened?"
   "Perhaps healing has happened," she said serenely. "Although it is only
an  experiment.  The  doctors have just left, and I am to try this for six
hours. Then they will examine me again."
   "You look bloody marvelous." We chatted fill-in talk for a few minutes;
she  told me about the doctors, I told her about Brasilia, while I studied
her  as  carefully  as  I  could  in  a  PV  tank. She kept getting up and
stretching, delighting in her freedom, until she worried me. "Are you sure
you're supposed to do all that?"
   "I  have been told that I must not think of water skiing or dancing for
a while. But perhaps not everything that is fun is prohibited."
   "Essie,  you  lewd  lady, is that a lustful look I see in your eye? Are
you feeling well enough for that?"
   "Quite  well,  yes.  Well.  Not  well,"  she amplified, "but perhaps as
though  you  and I had enjoyed a hard night's drinking a day or two ago. A
little fragile. But I do not think I would be harmed by a gentle lover."
   "I'll be back tomorrow morning."
   "You  will not be back tomorrow morning," she said firmly. "You will be
back  when you are entirely through with your business in Brasilia and not
one  moment  before or else, my boy, you will not find any willing partner
for your debauched intentions here."
   I said good-bye in a rosy glow.
   Which  lasted  all  of  twenty-five  minutes,  until  I  got  around to
double-checking with the doctor.
   It  took  a little while, because she was just getting back to Columbia
Medical  when  I  called.  "I'm  sorry  to  be rushed, Mr. Broadhead," she
apologized,  shrugging  out of her gray tweed suit-coat. "I've got to show
students how to suture nerve tissue in about ten minutes."
   "You usually call me Robin, Dr. Liederman," I said, cooling off quickly.
   "Yes,  I do-Robin. Don't get worried. I don't have bad news." While she
was  talking  she was continuing to strip down, as far as brassiere level,
before putting on a turtleneck and an operating-room gown. Wilma Liederman
is  a good-looking woman of a certain age, but I was not there to ogle her
charms.
   "But you don't have good news, either?"
   "Not  yet.  You've  talked  to  Essie, so you know we're trying her out
without  the  machines. We have to know how far she can go on her own, and
we won't know that for twenty-four hours. At least I hope we won't."
   "Essie said six."
   "Six  hours  to  readouts, twenty-four to full workup. Unless she shows
bad  signs before that and has to go back on the machines right away." She
was talking to me over her shoulder, scrubbing up at her little washstand.
Holding  her  dripping  hands  in the air she came back closer to the comm
set.  "I  don't want you worrying, Robin," she said. "All this is routine.
She's  got  about a hundred transplants in her, and we have to find out if
they've  taken  hold. I wouldn't let her go this far if I didn't think the
chances were at least reasonable, Robin."
   "'Reasonable' doesn't sound real good to me, Wilma!"
   "Better  than  reasonable,  but don't push me. And don't worry, either.
You're getting regular bulletins, and you can call my program any time you
want  more-me  too, if you have to. You want odds? Two to one everything's
going  to work. A hundred to one that if something fails it's something we
can  fix.  Now I've got to transplant a complete lower genital for a young
lady who wants to be sure she still has fun afterwards."
   "I think I ought to get back there," I said.
   "For  what?  There's  nothing  you  can do but get in the way. Robin, I
promise I won't let her die before you get back." In the background the P.
A. system was chiming gently. "They're playing my song, Robin, talk to you
later."

   There  are times when I sit at the center of the world, and when I know
that  I  can reach out to any of the programs my good wife has written for
me and pull back any fact, absorb any explanation or command any event.
   There  are also times when I sit with a full console and a head full of
burning questions and learn nothing, because I do not know what to ask.
   And  there  are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing
that  the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I
am  floating  in  slack  water  beside a current, and the world is sliding
speedily  by.  There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert
was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him
purge  himself.  But  the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a
question   or   even  a  ripple;  when  he  was  through  reporting  about
architectural  deductions  and  interpretations of maunderings of the Dead
Men  I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I
was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with
everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another
time.  I  stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the
weird  Brasilia  skyline,  and  wished that it were that couch in the Food
Factory, connected to someone I loved.
   Wouldn't that be great? To be able to reach out to someone far away, as
Wan  had reached out to the whole Earth, and feel with them what they were
feeling,  let  them  feel  the  inside  of you? What a wonderful thing for
lovers!
   And  to  that  thought I reacted by calling up Morton on my console and
telling  him to look into the possibility of patenting that application of
the couch.
   It  was  not a very romantic response to a pretty romantic thought. The
difficulty  was  that  I  was not quite sure which someone I wished I were
connected  to.  My dear wife, so loved, so needful right now? Or someone a
lot farther away and much harder to reach?
   So I stagnated through the long Brazilian afternoon, with a soak in the
pool,  and  a  lounge  in the setting sun, and a lavish dinner in my suite
with  a  bottle  of  wine, and then I called Albert back to ask him what I
really wanted to know. "Albert? Where, exactly, is Kiara now?"
   He  paused,  tamping  tobacco  into his pipe and frowning. "Gelle-Kiara
Moynlin," he said at last, "is in a black hole."
   "Yes. And what does that mean?"
   He said apologetically, "That's hard to say. I mean it's hard to put in
simple terms, and also hard to say because I really don't know. Not enough
data."
   "Do your best,"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin.  I  would  say  that she is in the section of the
exploration craft which remained in orbit, just under the event horizon of
the   singularity  you  encountered-which,"  he  waved  carelessly  and  a
blackboard  appeared  behind  him, "is of course just at the Schwarzschild
radius."
   He  stood  up,  jamming the unlit pipe into the hip pocket of his baggy
cotton slacks, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:

2GM
C2

   "At  that  boundary,  light  can't go any farther. It is what you might
think  of  as  a standing wave-front where light has gone as far as it can
go.  You  can't  see into the black hole past it. Nothing can come up from
behind  it. The symbols, of course, stand for gravity and mass-and I don't
have  to  tell  an old faster-than-light person like you what c2 is, do I?
From  the  instrumentation  you  brought  back,  it would appear that this
particular  hole  was maybe sixty kilometers in diameter, which would give
it  a mass of maybe ten times the sun. Am I telling you more than you want
to know?"
   "A   little  bit,  Albert,"  I  said,  shifting  uncomfortably  on  the
Watercouch. I wasn't really sure just what I was asking for.
   "Perhaps what you want to know is whether she is dead, Bobby," he said.
"Oh,  no.  I  don't  think  so. There's a lot of radiation around, and God
knows  what  shear  forces.  But  she hasn't had much time to be dead yet.
Depends  on her angular velocity. She might not yet even know you're gone.
Time dilation, you see. That is a consequence of..."
   "I understand about time dilation," I interrupted. And I did, because I
was  feeling  almost as though I were living through some of it. "Is there
any way we can find that out."
   "'A  black  hole has no hair,' Bobby," he quoted solemnly. "That's what
we  call the Carter-Werner-Robinson-Hawking Law, and what it means is that
the  only  information  you  get  out  of a black hole is mass, charge and
angular momentum. Nothing else."
   "Unless you get inside it, the way she did."
   "Well,  yes,  Robby,"  he  admitted,  sitting down and attending to his
pipe. Long pause. Puff, puff. Then, "Robin?"
   "Yes, Albert?"
   He  looked  abashed,  or  as abashed as a holographic construct can. "I
haven't  been entirely fair with you," he said. "There is some information
that  comes  out  of black holes. But that gets us into quantum mechanics.
And it doesn't do you any good, either. Not for your purposes."
   I  didn't  really  like  having  a  computer  program  tell  me what my
"purposes"  were. Especially since I wasn't all that sure myself. "Tell me
about it!" I ordered.
   "Well-we  don't really know a lot. Goes back to Stephen Hawking's first
principles.  He  pointed out that, in a sense, a black hole can be said to
have  a  'temperature'-which implies some kind of radiation. Some kinds of
particles  do  escape. But not from the kinds of black holes that interest
you, Robby."
   "What kind do they escape from?"
   "Well, mostly from the tiny ones, the ones with the mass of, say, Mount
Everest.  Submicroscopic ones. No bigger than a nuclear particle. They get
real  hot,  a  hundred  billion  Kelvin  and up. The smaller they get, the
faster  the quantum tunneling goes on, the hotter they get-so they keep on
getting  smaller and hotter until they just blow up. Big ones, no. It goes
the  other way. The bigger they are, the more infall they get to replenish
their  mass,  and  the harder it is for a particle to tunnel out. One like
Kiara's  has  a  temperature probably down around a hundred millionth of a
Kelvin, which is really cold, Robin. And getting colder all the time."
   "So you don't get out of one of those."
   "Not any way I know about, no, Robin. Does that answer your questions?"
   "For  now," I said, dismissing him. And it did, all but one: Why was it
that when he was talking to me about Kiara he called me "Robby"?
   Essie wrote good programs, but it seemed to me that they were beginning
to  overlap. I used to have a program that addressed me by childhood names
from  time to time. But it was a psychiatric program. I reminded myself to
speak  to  Essie  about  straightening  out  her  programming,  because  I
certainly  did  not  feel  I  had any need for the services of Sigfrid von
Shrink now.

   Senator Praggler's temporary office wasn't in the Gateway tower, but on
the  96th  floor  of the legislators' office building. A courtesy from the
Brazilian  Congress  to  a colleague, and a flattering one, because it was
only  two  stories  below the top. In spite of the fact that I got up with
the  dawn,  I  got  there  a  couple  minutes  late.  I had spent the time
wandering  around  the  early  morning  city,  ducking  under the overhead
roadways,  coming out in the parking lot. Strolling. I was still in a sort
of temporary stasis of time.
   But  Praggler  shook  me  out  of it, all charged-up and beaming. "It's
wonderful  news, Robin!" he cried, pulling me into his office and ordering
coffee. "Jesus! How stupid we've all been!"
   For  a  moment I thought he meant that Bover had dropped his suit. That
only  showed how stupid I was still being; what he was talking about was a
late  flash from the Food Factory relay. The long-sought Heechee books had
turned  out  to  be  the  prayer fans that we had all seen for decades. "I
thought  you'd  have  known  all  about  it,"  he  apologized, when he had
finished filling me in.
   "I've been out walking," I said. It was pretty disconcerting for him to
be  telling  me  about  something  as big as that on my own project. But I
recover  fast.  "Seems  to  me,  Senator,"  I said, "that's a big plus for
vacating that injunction."
   He  grinned.  "You  know, I could have guessed it would strike you that
way. Anything would. Mind telling me how you figure that?"
   "Well,  it  looks  clear  to  me.  What's  the  biggest  purpose of the
expedition?  Knowledge about the Heechee. And now we find out that there's
a lot of it lying around, just waiting for us to pick it up."
   He frowned. "We don't know how to decode the damn things."
   "We  will.  Now  that  we know what they are, we'll figure out a way to
make  them work. We've got the revelation. All we need is the engineering.
We  ought to..." I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence. I was going
to  say that it was a good idea to start buying up every prayer fan on the
market,  but  that  was too good an idea to give even a friend. I switched
to,  "We  ought  to get results pretty fast. The point is, the Herter-Hall
expedition isn't our only iron in the fire any more, so any argument about
national interests loses a lot of weight."
   He  accepted a cup of coffee from his secretary, the real-live one that
didn't  look a bit like his program, and then shrugged. "It's an argument.
I'll tell it to the committee."
   "I was hoping you'd do more than that, Senator."
   "If you mean you want the whole thing dropped, Robin, I don't have that
authority. I'm only here to oversee the committee. For one month. I can go
home  and raise hell in the Senate, and maybe I will, but that's the limit
of it."
   "And what's the committee going to do? Will they uphold Bover's claim?"
   He hesitated. "I think it's worse than that. I think the sentiment's to
expropriate  you  all. Then it's a Gateway Corporation matter, which means
it sticks there until the signatories to the treaty unstick it. Of course,
in the long run, you'll all get reimbursed..."
   I slammed the cup back into its saucer. "Fuck the reimbursement! Do you
think I'm in this for the money?"
   Praggler is a pretty close friend. I know he likes me, and I even think
he trusts me, but there wasn't any friendly look on his face when he said,
"Sometimes  I wonder just why you are in it, Robin." He looked at me for a
moment  without  expression. I knew he knew about me and Kiara, and I also
knew  he'd  been a guest at Essie's table at Tappan. "I'm sorry about your
wife's illness," he said at last. "I hope she's all better real soon."

   I stopped in his outer office to make a quick coded call to Harriet, to
tell  her  to get my people started buying every prayer fan they could get
their  hands  on.  She had about a million messages, but I would only take
one-and all that said was that Essie had passed a quiet night and would be
seeing  the  doctors  in  about  an hour. I didn't have time for the rest,
because I had somewhere to go.
   It  is  not  easy to get a taxi in front of the Brazilian Congress; the
doormen  have  their  orders,  and  they know who rates priority. I had to
climb  up  on  the roadway and flag one down. Then, when I gave the driver
the  address,  he made me repeat it twice, and then show it to him written
down.  It  wasn't  my  bad Portuguese. He didn't really want to go to Free
Town.
   So  we  drove  out  past  the  old cathedral, under the immense Gateway
tower,  along  the congested boulevard and out into the open planalto. Two
kilometers  of  it.  That  was  the  green space, the cordon sanitaire the
Brazilians  defended around their capital city; but just beyond it was the
shantytown.  As soon as we entered it I rolled the window up. I grew up in
the  Wyoming  food mines and I am used to twenty-four-hour stink, but this
was  a  different  stink.  Not  just  the stench of oil. This was open-air
toilets  and  rotting  garbage-two million people without running water in
their  homes.  The  shanties  had  sprung  up  in  the first place to give
construction  workers a place to live while they built the beautiful dream
city.  They  were  supposed  to  disappear  when  the  city  was finished.
Shantytowns never disappear. They only become institutionalized.
   The  taxi-driver  pushed  his  cab through nearly a kilometer of narrow
alleys,  muttering to himself, never faster than a crawl. Goats and people
moved  slowly out of our way. Little kids jabbered at me as they ran along
beside  us.  I  made  him  take me to the exact place, and get out and ask
where  Senhor  Hanson  Bover  lived,  but  before he found out I saw Bover
himself sitting on cinder-block steps attached to a rusty old mobile home.
As  soon  as  I  paid him, the driver backed around and left, a lot faster
than we had come, and by then he was swearing out loud.
   Bover  did  not  stand  up as I came toward him. He was chewing on some
kind  of  sweet  roll, and didn't stop doing that, either. He just watched
me.
   By  the  standards  of  the  barrio,  he  lived in a mansion. Those old
trailers  had two or three rooms inside, and he even had a little patch of
something  or  other green growing alongside the step. The top of his head
was  bare  and  sunburned,  and  he was wearing dirty denim cut-offs and a
tee-shirt  printed  with something in Portuguese that I didn't understand,
but  looked  dirty  too.  He swallowed and said, "I would offer you lunch,
Broadhead, but I'm just finishing eating it."
   "I  don't  want  lunch.  I want to make a deal. I'll give you fifty per
cent  of  my interest in the expedition plus a million dollars cash if you
drop your suit."
   He  stroked  the top of his head gingerly. It struck me strange that he
got  burned  so  fast, because I hadn't noticed sunburn the day before-but
then  I  realized I hadn't noticed baldness, either. He had been wearing a
toupee. All dressed up for his mingling with class society. No difference.
I  didn't like the man's manners, and I didn't like the growing cluster of
audience around us, either. "Can we talk this over inside?" I asked.
   He  didn't  answer.  He  just pushed the last bite of the roll into his
mouth and chewed it while he looked at me.
   That was enough of that. I squeezed past him and climbed the steps into
the house.
   The  first  thing  that  hit me was the stink-worse than outside, oh, a
hundred  times worse. Three walls of the room were taken up with stacks of
cages, and breeding rabbits in every cage. What I smelled was rabbit shit,
kilos  of  it.  And  not just from rabbits. There was a baby with a soiled
diaper  being  nursed in the arms of a skinny young woman. No. A girl; she
looked fifteen at the most. She stared up worriedly at me, but didn't stop
nursing.
   So  this  was the dedicated worshipper at his wife's shrine! I couldn't
help it. I laughed out loud.
   Coming  inside  had  not  been  such a good idea. Bover followed me in,
pulling  the  door  shut,  and the stink intensified. He was not impassive
now, he was angry. "I see you don't approve of my living arrangements," he
said.
   I shrugged. "I didn't come here to talk about your sex life."
   "No. Nor do you have any right to. You wouldn't understand."
   I  tried  to  keep the conversation where I wanted it to be. "Bover," I
said,  "I  made  you  an  offer  which is better than you'll ever get in a
court,  and  a lot more than you had any reason to hope for. Please accept
it, so I can go ahead with what I'm doing."
   He  didn't answer me directly that time, either, just said something to
the  girl  in  Portuguese. She got up silently, wrapped a cloth around the
baby's  bottom,  and  went out on the steps, closing the door again behind
her.  Bover  said,  as though he hadn't heard me, "Trish has been gone for
more  than eight years, Mr. Broadhead. I still love her. But I've only got
one  life to live and I know what the odds are against ever sharing any of
it with Trish again."
   "If we can figure out how to run the Heechee ships properly we might be
able  to  go out and find Trish," I said. I didn't pursue that; all it was
doing  was  making  him  look  at  me  with active hostility, as though he
thought I were trying to con him. I said,
   "A  million  dollars,  Bover.  You  can  be  out of this place tonight.
Forever.  With your lady and your baby and your rabbits, too. Full Medical
for all of them. A future for the kid."
   "I told you you wouldn't understand, Broadhead."
   I  checked myself and only said, "Then make me understand. Tell me what
I don't know."
   He  picked  a  soiled baby dress and a couple of pins off the chair the
girl  had  been  sitting  on.  For a moment I thought he had relapsed into
hospitality, but he sat there himself and said, "Broadhead, I've lived for
eight  years on welfare. Brazilian welfare. If we hadn't raised rabbits we
wouldn't  have  had  meat. If we didn't sell the skins I wouldn't have bus
fare  to  meet  you  for  lunch, or to go to my lawyer's office. A million
dollars won't pay me for that, or for Trish."
   I  was still trying to keep my temper, but the stink was getting to me,
and  so was his attitude. I switched strategies. "Do you have any sympathy
for your neighbors, Bover? Do you want to see them helped? We can end this
kind  of  poverty  forever, Bover, with Heechee technology. Plenty of food
for everybody! Decent places to live!"
   He said patiently, "You know as well as I do that the first things that
come  from  Heechee  technology-any  technology  don't go to people in the
barrio.  They  go to make rich people like you richer. Oh, maybe sooner or
later  it might all happen, but when? In time to make any difference to my
neighbors?"
   "Yes! If I can make it happen faster I will!"
   He nodded judgmatically. "You say you will do that. I know I will, if I
get control. Why should I trust you?"
   "Because  I  give  you  my  word, you stupid shit! Why do you think I'm
cutting corners?"
   He leaned back and looked up at me. "As to that," he said, "why, yes, I
think  I  know why you're in such a hurry. It doesn't have much to do with
my  neighbors  or  me.  My  lawyers  have  researched you quite carefully,
Broadhead, and I know all about your girl on Gateway."
   I  couldn't  help  it.  I  exploded. "If you know that much," I yelled,
"then you know I want to get her out of where I put her! And I'll tell you
this, Bover, I'm not going to let you and your jailbait whore keep me from
trying!"
   His  face  was  suddenly  as red as the top of his head. "And what does
your wife think about what you're doing?" he asked nastily.
   "Why  don't  you  ask her yourself? If she lives long enough for you to
hassle  her.  Fuck  you,  Bover,  I'm going. How do I get a taxi?" He only
grinned  at  me.  Meanly.  I  brushed past the woman on the stoop and left
without looking back.

   By  the time I got back to the hotel I knew what he was grinning about.
It had been explained to me by two hours of waiting for a bus, in a square
next  to  an open latrine. I won't even say what riding that bus was like.
I've  traveled  in  worse  ways,  but not since I left Gateway. There were
knots  of  people in the hotel lobby, and they looked at me strangely as I
walked  across  the  floor.  Of course, they all knew who I was. Everybody
knew  about the Herter-Halls, and my picture had been on the PV along with
theirs. I had no doubt that I looked peculiar, sweated, and still furious.
   My  console was a fireworks display of attention signals when I slammed
myself  into my suite. The first thing I had to do was go to the bathroom,
but  over my shoulder, through the open door, I called: "Harriet! Hold all
messages  for  a  minute  and  give  me  Morton.  One  way. I don't want a
response,  I just want to give an order." Morton's little face appeared in
the  corner  of the display, looking antsy but ready. "Morton, I just came
from  Bover. I said everything I could think of to him and it did no good,
so  I  want  you to get me private detectives. I want to search his record
like  it's  never  been searched before. The son of a bitch must have done
something  wrong.  I want to blackmail him. If it's a ten-year-old parking
ticket,  I  want  to  extradite  him  for it. Get busy on that." He nodded
silently,  but  didn't  go away, meaning that he was doing what I had said
but wanted to say something himself, if only I would let him. Over him was
the  larger,  waiting face of Harriet, counting out the minute's silence I
had  imposed  on  her.  I  came  back  into the room and said, "All right,
Harriet, let's have it. Top priority first, one at a time."
   "Yes,  Robin,  but..."  She hesitated, making swift evaluations. "Their
are  two  immediate  ones, Robin. First, Albert Einstein wishes to discuss
with you the capture of the Herter-Hall party, apparently by the Heechee."
   "Captured!  Why  the  hell  didn't  you..."  I  stopped;  obviously she
couldn't  have  told  me,  because I was out of communication entirely for
most  of the afternoon. She didn't wait for me to figure that out but went
on:
   "However,  I  think  you would prefer to receive Dr. Liederman's report
first, Robin. I've been putting through a call, and she's ready to talk to
you now, live."
   That stopped me.
   "Do it," I said, but I knew it couldn't be anything good, to make Wilma
Liederman  report live and in person. "What's the matter?" I asked as soon
as she appeared.
   She was wearing an evening dress, with an orchid on her shoulder, first
time I had seen her like that since she came to our wedding. "Don't panic,
Robin,"  she  said,  "but  Essie's  had  a  slight  setback.  She's on the
life-support machines again."
   "What?"
   "It's  not  as  bad as it sounds. She's awake, and coherent, feeling no
pain, her condition is stable. We can keep her like that forever..."
   "Get to the 'but'!"
   "But  she's  rejecting  the  kidney,  and  the tissues around it aren't
regenerating.  She  needs a whole new batch of transplants. She had uremic
failure about two hours ago and now she's on fulltime dialysis. That's not
the  worst  part.  She's  had so many bits and pieces stuck in her from so
many sources that her auto-immune system is all screwed up. We're going to
have to scrounge to get a tissue match, and even so we're going to have to
dope her with anti-immunes for a long time."
   "Shit! That's right out of the Dark Ages!"
   She  nodded.  "Usually we can get a four-four match, but not for Essie.
Not  this time. She's a rare-blood to begin with, you know. She's Russian,
and her types are uncommon in this part of the world, so..."
   "Get some from Leningrad, for Christ's sake!"
   "So,  I was about to say, I've checked tissue banks all over the world.
We can come close. Real close. But in her present state there's still some
risk."
   I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out her tone. "Of having to
do  it over, you mean?" She shook her head gently. "You mean, of-of dying?
I don't believe you! What the hell is Full Medical for?"
   "Robin-she already has died of this, you know. We had to reanimate her.
There's a limit to the shock she can survive."
   "Then  the  hell  with the operation! You said she's stable the way she
is!"
   Wilma  looked  at the hands clasped in her lap for a moment, then up at
me. "She's the patient, Robin, not you."
   "What's that supposed to mean?"
   "It's her decision. She has already decided she doesn't want to be tied
down to a life-support system forever. We're going to go in again tomorrow
morning."
   I  sat  there  staring  at  the  tank,  long after Wilma Liedermari had
disappeared  and  my  patient  secretarial  program  had  formed, silently
waiting  for  orders. "Uh, Harriet," I said at last, "I want a flight back
tonight."
   "Yes,  Robin,"  she  said.  "I've already booked you. There's no direct
flight tonight, but there's one that you can transfer at Caracas, gets you
in to New York about five AM. The surgery is not scheduled until eight."
   "Thank  you."  She went back to silent waiting. Morton's silly face was
still  there  in  the  tank,  too,  tiny and reproachful down in the lower
right-hand  corner. He did not speak, but every once in a while he cleared
his  throat  or swallowed to let me know he was waiting. "Morton," I said,
"didn't I tell you to get lost?"
   "I  can't  do  that, Robin. Not while I have an unresolved dilemma. You
gave orders about Mr. Bover..."
   "Damn  right  I did. If I can't handle him that way maybe I'll just get
him killed."
   "You  don't  have  to  bother," Morton said quickly. "There's a message
from his lawyers for you. He has decided to accept your offer."
   I  goggled  at  him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. "I don't understand it
either,  Robin,  and  neither  do his lawyers," he said quickly. "They are
quite  upset  But  there  is  a  personal  message for you, if it explains
anything."
   "What's that?"
   "Quote, 'Maybe he does understand after all.' Close quote."

   In  a  somewhat confusing life, and one that is rapidly becoming a long
one,  I've  had a lot of confusing days, but that one was special. I ran a
hot  tub  and soaked in it for half an hour, trying to make my mind empty.
The effort didn't bring calm.
   I  had three hours before the Caracas plane left. I didn't know what to
do with it. It was not that there wasn't plenty for me to do. Harriet kept
trying  to  get  my  attention-Morton  to firm up the contract with Bover,
Albert  to  discuss  the bioanalysis of the Heechee droppings somebody had
collected,  everybody to talk to me, about everything. I didn't want to do
any  of  them.  I  was  stuck in my dilated time, watching the world flash
past. But it didn't flash, it crept. I didn't know what to do about it. It
was nice that Bover thought I understood so well. I wondered what he would
take to explain what I understood to me.
   After  a  while  I  managed to work up enough energy to let Harriet put
through  some  of  the  decision-needed  calls  for  me,  and  I made what
decisions  seemed necessary; and a while after that, toying with a bowl of
crackers and milk, I listened to a news summary. It was full of talk about
the  Herter-Hall capture, all of which I could get better from Albert than
from the PV newscasters.
   And  at  that  point I remembered that Albert had wanted to talk to me,
and  for a moment I felt better. It gave me a point and purpose in living.
I  had someone to yell at. "Halfwit," I snapped at him as he materialized,
"magnetic tapes are a century old. How come you can't read them?"
   He  looked  at me calmly under his bushy white brows. "You're referring
to  the  so-called  'prayer fans', aren't you, Robin? Of course we did try
that,  many times. We even suspected that there might be a synergy, and so
we tried several kinds of magnetic fields at once, steady and oscillating,
oscillating  at  different  rates  of  speed.  We  even tried simultaneous
microwave radiation, though, as it turned out, the wrong kind..."
   I  was  still  bemused, but not so much so that I didn't pick up on the
implication. "You mean there's a right kind?"
   "Sure  thing,  Robin,"  he  grinned. "Once we got a good trace from the
Herter-Hall  instrumentation  we  just  duplicated  it. The same microwave
radiation  that's  ambient in the Food Factory, a flux of a few microwatts
of  elliptically  polarized  million-A  microwave.  And  then  we  get the
signal."
   "Bloody marvelous, Albert! And what is it you got?"
   "Uh,  well,"  he said, reaching for his pipe, "actually not a lot, yet.
It's  hologram-stored  and  time-dependent,  so  what  we get is a kind of
choppy cloud of symbols. And, of course, we can't read any of the symbols.
It's  Heechee language, you know. But now it's just straight cryptography,
so to speak. All we need is a Rosetta stone."
   "How long?"
   He shrugged, and spread his hands, and twinkled.
   I  thought for a moment. "Well, stay with it. Another thing. I want you
to read into my lawyer program the whole thing, the microwave frequencies,
schematics, everything. There ought to be a patent in there somewhere, and
I want it."
   "Sure thing, Robin. Uh. Would you like to hear about the Dead Men?"
   "What about the Dead Men?"
   "Well,"  he  said,  "not  all  of them are human. There are some pretty
strange  little minds in those storage circuits, Robin. I think they might
be what you call the Old Ones."
   The back of my neck prickled. "Heechee?"
   "No,  no,  Robin!  Almost human. But not. They don't use language well,
especially  what seem to be the earliest of them, and I bet you can't even
guess  the computer-time bill you're going to get for analysis and mapping
to make any sense of them at all."
   "My God! Essie'll be thrilled when..."
   I stopped. For a moment I had forgotten about Essie.
   "Well,"  I said, "that's-interesting. What else is there to tell?" But,
really,  I  didn't care. I had used up my own last jolt of adrenaline, and
there wasn't any more.
   I  let  him tell me the rest of his budget of conversation, but most of
it  rolled right off me. Three members of the Herter-Hall party were known
to  be  captured.  The  Heechee had brought them to a spindle-shaped place
where  some  old machinery was lying about. The cameras were continuing to
return  frames  of  nothing  very exciting. The Dead Men had gone haywire,
were making no sense at all. Paul Hall's whereabouts were unknown; perhaps
he  was  still  at  liberty.  Perhaps he was still alive. The haywire link
between  the  Dead Men's radio and the Food Factory was still functioning,
but  it  was  not  clear how long it would last-even if it had anything to
tell  us.  The  organic  chemistry of the Heechee was quite surprising, in
that it was less unlike human biochemistry than one might guess. I let him
talk until he ran down, not prompting him to continue, then turned back to
the  commercial  PV. It bad two rapid-fire comedians delivering bellylaugh
lines  to  each  other.  Unfortunately,  it  was  in Portuguese. It didn't
matter.  I still had an hour to kill, and I let it run. If nothing else, I
could  admire  the  pretty  Carioca, fruit salad in her hair, whose scanty
costume the comedians were tweaking off as they passed her back and forth,
giggling.
   Harriet's attention signal lighted up, bright red.
   Before  I  could  make  up my mind to respond, the picture slid off the
commercial   PV  channel  and  a  man's  voice  said  something  stern  in
Portuguese.  I  couldn't  understand  a  word  of it, but I understood the
picture that showed almost at once.
   It  was  the  Food  Factory,  taken  out  of  stock,  a  shot  from the
Herter-Halls  as  they  were  approaching  it  to  dock.  And in the short
sentence  the  announcer  had  spoken  were two words that could have been
"Peter Herter".
   Could have been.
   Were.
   The  picture  didn't change, but a voice began, and it was old Herter's
voice,  angry  and firm. "This message," it said, "is to be broadcast over
all networks at once. It is a two-hour warning. In two hours I am going to
cause  a  one-minute  attack  of  the  fever  by  entering  the  couch and
projecting  the  necessary,  uh,  projections.  I  tell  you  all  to take
precautions.  If  you  do  not,  it  is your responsibility, not mine." It
paused  for  a  moment, then resumed. "Remember, you have two hours from a
count  which  I  will  give  you. no more. Shortly after that I will speak
again  to  tell  you  the  reason for this, and what I demand as my proper
right  if  you  do  not  wish  this  to  happen  many  times.  Two  hours.
Beginning... now."
   And the voice stopped.
   The  announcer came back on, babbling in Portuguese, looking scared. It
didn't matter that I couldn't understand what he was saying.
   I had understood what Peter Herter had said, very well. He had repaired
the  dreaming  couch  and  was going to use it. Not out of ignorance, like
Wan. Not as a quick experiment, like the girl, Janine. He was going to use
it  as  a  weapon.  He  had a gun pointed at the heads of the entire human
race.
   And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp
was sure to take over now, and I couldn't blame them.


        10 The Oldest One

   The  Oldest  One  bestirred  himself slowly, one organ at a time. First
came  the  piezophonic  external  receptors.  Call  them "ears". They were
always  "on", in the sense that sounds always reached them. Their tiny rag
crystals  were squeezed by vibrations in the air and, when the patterns of
sound  corresponded  to the name the children of the Oldest One called him
by,  they  passed  a gate and went on to activate what corresponded to his
peripheral nervous system.
   At  that  point the Oldest One was not yet awake, but knew he was being
wakened.  His  true  ears,  the  inner  ones that analyzed and interpreted
sound,  came  to  life.  His  cognitive  circuits sampled the signals. The
Oldest  One heard the voices of his children and understood what they were
saying.  But  only  in an offhand and inattentive way, like a drowsy human
aware of the buzzing of a fly. He had not yet "opened his eyes".
   Some  decision-making  took  place  at  that stage. If the interruption
seemed  worthwhile,  the  Oldest One woke further circuits. If not, not. A
human  sleeper  may  awaken  enough to swat a fly. When the Oldest One was
awakened  for trivial reasons he had ways to "swat" his children. They did
not  wake him lightly. But if he decided to wake further, either to act or
to punish the interruption to his sleep, the Oldest One then activated his
major   external   optics,   and   with   them   a   whole   congeries  of
information-processing  systems and short-term memories. He was then fully
awake, like a man looking up at the ceiling after a nap.
   The Oldest One's internal clocks told him that this nap had been rather
short.  Less  than  ten  years.  Unless  there  was a good reason for this
awakening, someone would have to be swatted.
   By  then  the  Oldest  One  was fully aware of his surroundings, all of
them.  His internal telemetry was receiving status reports from all of its
remote  sensors,  all through the ten million ton mass in which he and his
children  lived.  A  hundred  inputs  recirculated  through his short-term
memory:  the  words  that had wakened him; the image of the three captives
his children had just brought him; a breakdown in repair facilities in the
4700 A sections; the fact that there was unusual activity among the stored
intelligences; temperatures; inventories; moments of thrust. His long-term
storage, though dormant, was accessible at need.
   The wisest of his children was standing before him, with beads of sweat
trickling  through  the sparse hairs on his cheeks and lip. The Oldest One
perceived  that this was a new leader, shorter and younger than the one he
remembered  from  ten  years  before,  but he wore the necklace of reading
scrolls  that  symbolized the office as he waited for judgment. The Oldest
One turned his major external lenses on him as a signal to speak. "We have
captured  intruders  and brought them to you," the leader said, and added,
trembling, "Have we done well?"
   The  Oldest  One  turned his attention to observe the captives. One was
not  an  intruder,  but  the  pup  he had allowed to be born fifteen years
before, now nearly grown. The other two, however, were strangers, and both
female. That presented an option worth pondering. When the other intruders
had presented themselves, he had failed to take advantage of the chance to
establish  new  breeding  stock  until  it  was  too  late  for any of the
available specimens. And then they had stopped coming.
   That  was  a  chance  the  Oldest One had missed, and one which, on the
basis  of  past  terrifying experience, he should not have failed to take.
The  Oldest  One  was aware that for some thousands of years his judgments
had  not  been  always  right,  his  opinions  no longer confident. He was
slowing  down.  He  was subject to error. The Oldest One did not know what
personal  penalty  he would have to pay for error and did not want to find
out.
   He  began  to  make decisions. He reached into his long-term memory for
precedents  and  prospects,  and  found that he had a satisfying number of
alternatives.  He  activated  mobility  and  handling effectors. His great
metal  body  rose  on  its  supports and moved past the leader, toward the
chamber  where  the  intruders  were being kept He heard the gasp from his
children  as  he  moved. All were startled. A few of the younger ones, who
had  never  seen him move as adults, were terrified. "You have done well,"
he judged, and there was a long sigh of relief.
   The  Oldest  One  could  not enter the chamber because of his size, but
with  long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives.
It  did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at
that  moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory:
two  of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for
many  years  of  use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All
seemed in good health.
   As  far  as  communicating  with them went, there was the nuisance that
their  yells  and  imprecations  were in one of those unpleasant languages
their  predecessors  had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word.
That  was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through
the  intervention  of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even
his  own  children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so
that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or
two  of  them  every  dozen  generations  as  translators-as  nothing  but
translators, because the Oldest One's children regrettably did not seem to
be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile
the  facts  were  favorable.  Fact:  The specimens were in good condition.
Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact:
They were his to employ as he saw fit.
   "Feed  them.  Keep  them  secure.  Wait  for  further instructions," he
commanded  the  children  clustered  behind  him.  He then turned down his
external  receptors  so  that  he  could consider just how to employ these
intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core
of his very long life.
   As  a  personality  stored  in  a machine, the Oldest One's normal life
expectancy  was  very  great-perhaps as much as several thousand years-but
not  great  enough  to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting
it.  In  standby  mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time
powered-down,  motionless.  He  was  not  resting  at such times, not even
dreaming.  He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and
carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly
forward.
   From  time  to  time  he  woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to
check  and  correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They
were  instructed  to do so at need, and very often (though not really very
by any standard other than his own) the need arose.
   Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an
animal  as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That
time  had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he
was expelled from his mother's sweated and straining loins to the terrible
time  at  its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his
veins  and  the  whirling  knives  waited  to  trepan  his skull. He could
remember  that  time  quite  clearly  when  he  chose.  He  could remember
anything,  in  that  short  life  or  in  the  long,  long pseudolife that
followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his
stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much
stored.
   The  Oldest  One  had  no  clear conception of how many memories he had
available  to  him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or
even  of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was
"Here".  That  certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts
was "There". Everything else in the universe was merely "Everywhere else",
and  he  did  not trouble to locate points as they related to one another.
Where  did  the  intruders  come from? From somewhere or other. It did not
matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some
other  somewhere.  Where had his people come from, in the long ages before
he  himself  had been born? It didn't matter. The central Here had existed
for  a  long,  long  time-longer  than  one could comprehend, even for the
Oldest  One  himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and
outfitted  and  launched; Here had seen many births and deaths-nearly five
million  of them-though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred
living  things,  and  seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant
slow  changes  through  all  that  time. The newborns were larger, softer,
fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower,
less  hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the
children were well advised to wake the Oldest One.
   Sometimes  the  changes  were  political,  for Here had held a thousand
different  social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation
or  two,  or  even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and
hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or
a  divinity,  or  when none rose above any other at all. There was never a
democratic republic like those Earth had tried-Here was not big enough for
representative government-and only once a racially stratified society. (It
ended  when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers
and  wiped  them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a
various  collection  of moralities, but only one religion-at least, in the
last  many  millennia.  There  was  only room for one, when its living god
rested  among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite
or favor when it chose.
   For  many  eons  Here  held no true people at all, only a collection of
puzzled  semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered
to  make  them  wise.  The  process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred
thousand  years  before the first of them comprehended even the concept of
writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough
to  be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One
himself. It had not been welcome. no other had earned it since.
   And  that,  too,  was  a  failing,  the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had
failed, what had he done wrong?
   Surely  he  had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first
few  centuries  of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful
in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished.
When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs.
   But  perhaps  that  was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time,
long  and  long  ago,  when  he had awakened with a terrible "pain" in the
metal  carapace  he  dwelt  within.  It was not the pain of flesh, but the
sensors'  report  of  unacceptable  physical  damage;  but it was quite as
alarming.  His  children  were  gathered around in terror, all shouting at
once  as  they  displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female.
"She was insane!" they cried, quaking. "She tried to destroy you!"
   The  Oldest  One's  quick check of systems revealed that the damage was
trivial.  It  had  been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him
was  a  few  effectors  and some destruction of control nets, nothing that
could  not  be  repaired.  He  asked  to know why she had done this. Their
answers  came  only  slowly,  for they were terrified, but they came: "She
wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could
not  grow  without  you.  We  beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not
killing her sooner!"
   "You  did  wrong,"  the  Oldest  One said justly, "but that was not the
reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at
once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed."
   And  then-was  it  a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an
eye.  And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon
enough.  For  a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and
the  reproductive  budgets  had  not been met, and the total census of his
living  children  was  down to four individuals before they dared risk his
displeasure  by  waking  him. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the
end  of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near
the  end  of  child-bearing.  He  had used a dozen years of his life then,
waking  fretfully  every few months, disciplining, teaching-worrying. With
the  help  of  biological  lore  stored deep in his oldest memories he had
insured  that  the two babies the female managed to bear were also female.
With  stored  sperm  from  the  terrified  males  he kept the gene pool as
diverse  as  he  could.  But it was a near thing. And some things had been
forever  lost.  no  other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If
only one would! no other like himself had ever appeared.
   The  Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be
another  from  his  children. If it could happen, it would have. There had
been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died
since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years.

   When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew
he would act. They did not know what the actions would be.
   "The  repair mechanisms in the 4700 A corridors are to be replaced," he
said.  "Three  artificers  see to it" There was a stilled murmur of relief
from the seventy-odd adults-punishment always came first, and if his first
orders  were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three
artificers  the  leader  pointed to were less relieved, because that meant
some  days  of  very  hard  work  in manhandling new machines to the green
corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to
get  away  from  the  awful  presence  of  the  Oldest One. They seized it
immediately.
   "The  male intruder and the older female are to be penned together," he
said.  If  they  were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to
start  with  the  older  female.  "Do  any  of  you  survive  who have had
experience  with  the  rapporter?"  Three  of  the  children  were  pushed
reluctantly  forward.  "One  of  you  will educate the younger female," he
instructed. "Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders
for storage?"
   "I prepared the last two," the leader said. "Also there are persons who
assisted me still alive."
   "See  that  the skills are maintained," the Oldest One ordered. "If one
of  you  should  die,  he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons
must  be  taught"  That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost-and
the  lives  of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost
while he was powered down-it would have been necessary to set some of them
to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that
these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority
list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be
replaced.  All  permitted  areas of Here should be visited at least once a
month.  And,  as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least
five babies should be born each year for the next ten years.
   The  Oldest  One  then powered down his external receptors, resumed his
place  at  the  central communications terminals and plugged himself in to
his  long-term  memories.  All about the central spindle his children were
hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a
dozen  left  to  dig  up  berryfruit  bushes  and  airvines to replace the
defective  plants,  others  went  to  deal with the captives and attend to
housekeeping  chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to
breed.  If  they  had  had  other  plans,  they were now deferred. At this
particular  awakening  the  Oldest  One  was  not  dissatisfied  with  his
children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him
to wonder.
   His concerns were elsewhere.
   With  his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode,
the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into
his  reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also
opportunity,  if  approached  right.  Change  might be used to advance his
purposes,  and  could  not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt
with  the  immediate  and  the  tactical.  Now  his  attention went to the
strategic and the ultimate.
   He  reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events
very  far  away  in  space  and  in time, and were frightening even to the
Oldest  One.  (How  had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and
not  frightening  at  all, for example those stored intruder intelligences
the  boy  called  "the  Dead  Men".  There  was  nothing  in  them  to  be
frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be.

   When  the  intruders first blundered Here, shattered castaways in their
tiny  ships,  the  Oldest  One  had  had  a  moment  of  terror. They were
unexplained.  Who  were  they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve,
come to reproach his presumption?
   He  quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of
servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They
were  not  that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance,
in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their
ships'  course  directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do
on arriving Here, they were terrified.
   They  were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up
many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone
adventurer,  then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of
them,  in  nine  ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and
none  of  them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had
had  his  children  sacrifice  at  once,  in  order  to  put  their stored
intelligence  into  the  machine  form  that  he could best deal with. The
others  he  had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when
it  appeared  they might be more interesting in an independent life in the
unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might
need.  He  had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been
made immortal-as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever
were.  It  was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they
were  more  trouble  than  they  were  worth. They brought diseases to his
children,  and  some  of  them  had  died.  They  caught diseases from the
children,  and  some  of  the  intruders died, too. And they did not store
well.   Properly   programmed   into   his   long-term  memories,  by  the
machine-directed  techniques  that  had  been  used  on  him  thousands of
centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly.
Their  time  sense  was  deficient.  Their response to interrogatories was
erratic.  Large  sections  of their memories were gone. Some of them could
not  be  read  at  all.  The  fault  was  not in the techniques; they were
defective to begin with.
   When  the  Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of
his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had
ever  had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when
at  random  intervals  he  chose  one  to  store.  So  even with his flesh
ancestors,  so  far  back  that  even  his  own  immense  age  dwindled in
comparison.  So with those other stored memories that he did not like even
to consult.
   Not  so  with  the  intruders.  There  was  something  wrong with their
chemistry.  They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there
were  times  when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little
storage spheres and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here,
and  his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at
the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them.
   Perhaps that time was now.
   With  a  sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer
to  retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked
him to the stored intruder minds.
   And recoiled.
   Three  of  the  children,  hurrying  Janine around the curvature of the
spindle  from  her.  pen  to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One's effectors
quiver  and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting
fearfully for what would come next
   Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down
to  standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged
Janine to the waiting metallic couch.
   But  inside  the  Oldest One's metal shell he had received his greatest
shock  in  many  awakenings.  Someone had been interfering with his stored
memories!  It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad;
worse,  they  were  in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as
though  something  had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he
had  never  given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These
were  not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They
were  new.  They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even
his  own.  Spaceships  and  machines.  Living intelligences by the tens of
billions.  Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by
his  standards,  but  possessed  incredible  stores  to draw on. It was no
wonder  that  he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie
might start and twitch.
   Somehow his stored intruders had made contact with the culture they had
come from.
   It was easy for the Oldest One to learn how that contact had been made.
From Here to the food facility, by means of the long-unused communications
net.  Interpreted  and  processed  on  the food facility by a pathetically
crude machine. Transmitted the long light-days to the planets that circled
that  nearest  star,  by means of the creeping electromagnetic impulses of
lightspeed  radio. Contemptible! Until one considered how much information
had  been  transmitted  each  way.  The  Oldest  One  was like a hydraulic
engineer  transfixed  at  the base of a hydroelectric dam, watching a thin
needle  of  water  spurt hundreds of meters into the air, out of an almost
invisible  pinhole.  The  quantity  was  trivial.  But that so much poured
through  so tiny an opening bespoke the pressure of a vast body behind the
dam.
   And the leak went both ways.
   The Oldest One acknowledged that he had been careless. In interrogating
the stored intruders to find out what they knew, he had let them know much
about himself. About Here. About the technology that guided it.
   About his consecration, and about the lords his life was meant to serve.
   At  least the leak had been tiny, and the transmissions confused by the
imperfections of the stored intelligences themselves. There was no part of
that  storage inaccessible to the Oldest One. He opened them up for study,
and  traced  every bit. He did not "speak" to them. He allowed their minds
to  flow  into his own. The Dead Men could not resist him, any more than a
prepared frog on a dissecting table could resist a surgeon's scalpel.
   When he was done, he withdrew to ponder.
   Were his plans in jeopardy?
   He  activated  his  internal  scanning systems, and a three-dimensional
tank  of  the  Galaxy  sprang  up in his "mind". It had no real existence.
There  was  no  vantage point from which any person could have seen it. He
himself  did  not  "see" it, he simply knew it was there. It was a sort of
trompe-l'oeil. An optical illusion, except that it was not optical. On it,
very  far  away,  an  object  appeared,  haloed in light. It had been many
centuries since the Oldest One had allowed himself to observe that object.
It was time to look at it again.
   The  Oldest One reached down into and activated long undisturbed memory
stores.
   It  was  not  an  easy  experience.  It  was almost the equivalent of a
session  on  the  analyst's  couch  for  a  human,  for  he was uncovering
thoughts,   memories,   guilts,   worries,   and  uncertainties  that  his
"conscious" mind-the reasoning and problem-solving circuits-had long since
decided  to  lay  away.  Those memories were not gone. They had not become
impotent.  They  still  held  "shame" and "fear" for him. Was he doing the
right  thing?  Did he dare act on his own responsibility? The old circular
arguments  raced  through  his  mind as they had done two hundred thousand
years  before,  and  were no closer to resolution. It was not possible for
the  Oldest One to fugue into hysteria or depression. His circuits did not
allow it.
   It was, however, possible for him to be terrified.
   After  a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still
afraid. But he was committed. He had to act.
   The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more.
   His  forward  effectors  quivered,  straightened and pointed at a young
female,  caught  in  midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well.
"Come with me," he ordered.
   She  sobbed,  but  followed.  Her  mate  took  a step after her as they
hurried  toward  a  gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with
them,  and  so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they
had  been  mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would
ever see her again.
   The Oldest One's cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid
walk,  but  the  little  difference  kept  the weeping female trotting and
panting  to  keep  up.  He glided on, past machines that had not been used
even in his memories-wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little
six-screwed  thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest
One  did  not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with
its  angels.  The  gold  skeins  changed  to radiant silver, the silver to
purest  white.  A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood
waiting  open  for  them,  the  heavy  door  fanned wide as the Oldest One
approached.  By  the  time they reached a place where the female had never
been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of
a  dozen  colors  and  strange  patterns  flickered in panels all around a
great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. no rest. "Go there," the Oldest
One  commanded. "Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do." At opposite
sides  of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate
them,  were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench,
very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench,
a  sort  of  hummock  of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow
lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and
touched  an  effector  to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights
shivered  and  rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a
triple  row  of  ochre  lines  in the middle of it "Match my pattern!" The
young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though
it  had  not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors
merged  and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of
the  controls  before  the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He
merely  waited.  He knew she was doing her best By the time all ten wheels
were  showing  the  pattern  he  had  chosen tears were gone and sweat was
stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard.
   The  colors  were  not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant,
safed  controls,  the  rosette of screens that should have displayed their
course  coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might
have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at
all.
   But they did work.
   The  Oldest  One  touched  something under his own bank of controls and
quickly,  wonderfully,  the  lights  developed  a  life of their own. They
blurred  and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took
over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into
life  with  a  pattern  of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered
fearfully  at  the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field
of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one.
   She felt what happened next.
   So  did  everyone  else  Here.  The  intruders  in their pens, the near
hundred  children  all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest
One  himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died
and   was   replaced   by   tweaks   of   pseudoacceleration   punctuating
weightlessness.
   After  more  than  three-quarters  of a million years of rolling slowly
around  Earth's  very  distant  sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new
orbit and surged away.


        11 S. Ya. Lavorovna

   At  precisely  five-fifteen  AM  a  gentle  green  glow appeared in the
bedside  monitor  of 5. Ya. Lavorosrna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough
to  disturb  deep  slumber,  but she had been less than half asleep. "Very
well,"  she  called, "I am already awake, you do not have to continue this
program. But give me a moment."
   "Da,   gospozha,"  her  secretary  acknowledged,  but  the  green  glow
remained.  If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary
would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do;
that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program.
   In  this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind.
There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because
old  Peter  Herter  had given warning before he invaded the world's minds,
there  had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real
damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and
rearranging, and in the course of it Robin's flights had been inextricably
confused.
   Pity.  Worse  than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not
tried.  Essie  accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know
that he had tried.
   "Am I allowed to eat?" she called.
   "No,  gospozha  Broadhead.  Nothing at all, not even a drink of water,"
her secretary responded at once. "Do you wish your messages?"
   "Perhaps.  What  messages?"  If  they were of interest at all she would
take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the
indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed.
   "There  is  a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I
believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there."
   "Do so." Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while
she  was  waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for
her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She
carefully  kept  the  dozen  tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart
from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But
there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had
hurt  more,  and  perhaps  that  would  have  been  good.  These months of
demeaning  annoyance  were  only  an  irritation; there was enough of Anna
Karenina  in  Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come
to  be!  Her  life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her
private parts.
   "Gospozha Broadhead?"
   "Yes?"
   The  visual  program appeared, looking apologetic. "Your husband cannot
be  reached  at present. He is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has
just  taken off; all the aircraft's communications are at present required
for navigation."
   "Mexico  City?  Dallas?" The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the
Earth  to  get  to  her! "Then at least give me the recorded message," she
ordered.
   "Da,  gospozha."  Face  and  greenish  glow shrank away, and out of the
sound-circuits her husband's voice addressed her:
   "Honey, I'm having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter
to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight.
Now  I'm hoping to make a connection to Dallas and-Anyway, I'm on my way."
Pause.  He  sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost
see  him  casting  around  for  something  cheerful to say. But it was all
rambling.  Something  about  the  great  news about prayer fans. Something
about  the  Heechee  who  weren't  Heechee,  and-and  just  a babble. Poor
creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of
his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said,
"Oh,  hell,  Essie.  I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the
meantime.  Take care of yourself. If you've got any spare time before you,
uh,  before  Wilma  gets going, I've told Albert to tape all the essential
stuff  for  you. He's a good old program...." Long pause. "I love you," he
said, and was gone.

   S.  Ya.  lay  back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with
the  next  (and  perhaps  last?)  hour of her life. She missed her husband
quite  a  lot,  especially  in  view  of  the  fact  that in some ways she
considered  him  quite a silly man. "Good old program"! How foolish of him
to  anthropomorphize  computer  programs! His Albert Einstein program was,
she  had  no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the
bio-assay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! "Squiffy." It was like
giving  a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were
done by someone one cared for... in which case it was instead endearing.
   But  machines  were machines. At the graduate institute at Akademogorsk
young   S.   Ya.  Lavorovna  had  learned  very  completely  that  machine
intelligence  was  not "personal". You built them up, from adding machines
to  number-crunchers.  You  packed  them full of data. You constructed for
them  a store of appropriate responses to stimuli and provided them with a
hierarchical  scale  of appropriateness; and that was all there was to it.
Now and then, to be sure, you were surprised by what came out of a program
you  had written. Of course you were; that was the nature of the exercise.
None  of  that  implied  the  existence  of  free  will on the part of the
machine, or of personal identity.
   All  the same, it was rather touching to watch him crack jokes with his
programs.  He  was  a touching man. He touched her in places where she was
most  open and vulnerable, because in some ways he was very like that only
other man in her life who had ever really mattered to her, her father.
   When  Semya  Yagrodna  was a small girl her father had been the central
person  in  the  world-tall, skinny old man who played the ukulele and the
mandolin  and  taught biology at the gymnasium. He was delighted to have a
bright  and  inquiring  child.  It might have pleased him even more if her
talents  had  seemed to go toward the life sciences rather than to physics
and  engineering, but he cherished her as she was. He taught her about the
world  when  he  could  no  longer  teach her mathematics, because she had
surpassed  him. "You must be aware of what you will have to deal with," he
explained  to  her.  "Even  here. Even now. Even when I was a young boy in
Stalin's  time,  and  the  women's  movements were promoting girls to lead
machine-gun squads and run tractors. This is always the same, Semya. It is
a  fact of history that mathematics is for the young, and that girls excel
equally  with  boys  until the age of fifteen, perhaps, or at most twenty.
And  then,  just  when the boys are turning into Lobachewskis and Fermats,
the  girls  stop.  Why?  For  childbearing. For marriage. For heaven knows
what.  We  will  not let it happen to you, small dove. Study! Read! Learn!
Comprehend!  Every  day,  for as many hours as you must! And I will assist
you  in  all  the  ways  I can." And he did; and from the ages of eight to
eighteen  young  Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna came home from school every day,
deposited  one  book  bag  in  their  apartment and picked up another, and
trotted  away to the old yellow building off the Nevsky Prospekt where her
tutor  lived.  She  had never dropped out of mathematics, and for this she
had  her father to thank. She had never learned to dance, either-or to try
a thousand sorts of scent and makeup, or to date-not until she was away at
Akademogorsk,  and  for  that  also she had her father to thank. Where the
world  tried to force her into a female role he defended her like a tiger.
But  at  home, to be sure, there was a need to cook and sew, and to polish
the rosewood chairs; and none of those things were done by him. Her father
in physical appearance had not looked in the least like Robin Broadhead...
but in other ways, so like!
   Robin  had  asked  her to marry him when they had known each other less
than  a  year.  It  had taken her a full year beyond that to decide to say
yes.  She  talked to everyone she knew about it. Her roommate. The dean of
her  department. Her former love; who had married the girl next door. Stay
away  from  this  one, S. Ya., they all advised her. On the face of it the
advice was sound, for who was he? A feckless millionaire, still mourning a
woman  he had loved and shatteringly lost, guilt-ridden, just out of years
of  intensive  psychoanalysis-what a perfect description of the completely
hopeless  marriage  risk!  But...  On  the  other  hand... Nevertheless...
Nevertheless  he  touched her. They had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras
in  stinging  cold  weather,  sitting  most of the days inside the Cafe du
Monde,  never  even seeing the parade. The rest of the time they stayed in
their hotel, out of the sleet and the crowds, and made love, emerging only
for  fried  sweet  dough  with clouds of powdered sugar, and sweet, milky,
chicory-laced  coffee  in  the  mornings.  Robin  bestirred  himself to be
gallant.  "Shall  we  go  for  a  cruise  on the river today? Visit an art
gallery? Dance at a night club?" But she could see that he did not want to
do  any  of  these  things, this man twice her age who wanted to marry he;
sitting  with  his hands cupped around his coffee as though merely getting
warm  were  formidable  enough  a task to contemplate for one day. And she
made her decision.
   She said, "I think instead we might get married, after all."
   And  so they had. Not that day, but as soon as they could. S. Ya. never
regretted  it; it was not a thing to regret. After the first few weeks she
had not even worried about how it would turn out. He was not a jealous man
or a mean one. If he was often absorbed in his work, well, so was she.
   There  was  only  this question of the woman, Gelle-Kiara Moyrilin, the
lost love.
   She  might  well be dead. Was as good as dead, in any case, because she
was hopelessly out of human reach forever. It was well known that this was
so,  from  the  fundamental laws of physics... but there were times, Essie
was sure, when her husband did not believe it to be so.
   And then she wondered: If there was any possibility of a choice between
them, how would Robin choose?
   And  what  if  the  laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an
exception now and then?
   There  was  the  matter  of  the Heechee ships, and how could one apply
known  physical  law  to  them? As with every other thinking person in the
world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long
time.  The  Gateway  asteroid  had  been  discovered while she was still a
schoolgirl.  The  headlines  announcing  new  findings  had come every few
weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the
plunge  and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were
on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned.
   The  Heechee  ships  were  not  uncontrollable.  T