Pohl, Frederik - Heechee 3 - Heechee Rendevous

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A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a

division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in

Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Betty Anne Hull with all the love I have

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

Prologue: A Chat with My Subset 1

1 Just like Old Times 9

2 What Happened on Peggys Planet 19

3 Senseless Violence 42

4 Aboard the S. Ya. 49

5 A Day in a Tycoon's Life 63

6 Out Where the Black Holes Spin 67

7 Homecoming 74

8 The Nervous Crew of the Sailboat 80

9 Audee and Me 84

10 The Place Where the Heechee Dwelt 90

11 Meeting in Rotterdam 101

12 God and the Heechee 122

13 The Penalties of Love 128

14 The New Albert 142

15 Back from the Schwarzschild Discontinuity 154

16 Gateway Revisited 169

17 Picking Up the Pieces 190

18 In the High Pentagon 196

19 The Permutations of Love 207

20 Unwanted Encounter 221

21 Abandoned by Albert 229

22 Is There Life after Death? 241

23 Out of the Heechee Hideaway 251

24 The Geography of Heaven 258

25 Return to Earth 266

26 The Thing the Heechee Feared 270

Prologue: A Chat with My Subset

I am no Hamlet. I'm an attendant lord, though, or at least I would be if I

were human. I'm not. I'm a computer program. That is an honorable estate and I

am not at all ashamed of it, especially since (as you can see) I am a very

sophisticated program, not only fit to swell a progression or start a scene or

two but to quote from obscure twentieth-century poets as I tell you about it.

It is to start the scene that I am speaking now. Albert's my name, and

introductions are my game. I start by introducing myself.

I'm a friend of Robinette Broadhead's. Well, that's not precisely right; I'm

not sure I can claim to be a friend of Robin's, though I try hard to be a

friend to him. It is the purpose for which I (this particular "I") was

created. Basically I am a simple computer information-retrieval con-

struct who (or that) has been programed with many of the late Albert

Einstein's traits. That's why Robin calls me Albert. There's another area of

ambiguity. Whether it is indeed Robinette Broadhead who is the object of my

friendship has lately become arguable, too, since it rests on the question of

who (or what) Robinette Broadhead now is-but that's a long and hard problem

that we'll have to take up a little bit at a time.

I know this is all confusing, and I can't help feeling that I'm not doing my

job very well, since my job (as I construe it) is to set the scene for what

Robin himself has to say. It's possible I don't have to do this at all, since

you may already know what I have to say. If so, I don't mind repeating it. We

machines are patient. But you might prefer just to skip over and go on to

Robin himself-as Robin himself, no doubt, would much prefer.

Let's do it in the form of questions and answers. I will construct a subset

within my program to interview me:

Q.-Who is Robinette Broadhead?

A.-Robin Broadhead is a human being who went to the Gateway asteroid and, by

enduring great risks and trauma, won for himself the beginnings of an immense

fortune and an even greater load of guilt.

Q.-Don't throw in those teasers, Albert, just stick to the facts. What is the

Gateway asteroid?

A.-It is an artifact left by the Heechee. They abandoned, half a million years

or so ago, a sort of orbital parking garage full of working spaceships. They

would take you all over the Galaxy, but you couldn't control where you were

going. (For further details see sidebar; I put this in to show you what a

truly sophisticated data-retrieval program I really am.)

Q.-Watch that, Albert! Just the facts, please. Who are these Heechee?

A.-Look, let's get something straight! If "you" are going to ask "me"

questions-even if "you" are only a subset of the same program as "me"

-you have to let me answer them in the best way possible. "Facts" are not

enough. "Facts" are what very primitive data-retrieval systems produce. I'm

too good to waste on that; I have to give you the background and the surround.

For instance, to tell you who the Heechee are the best way, I must tell you

the story of how they first appeared on Earth. It goes like this:

The time was about half a million years ago, in the late Pleistocene. The

first living terrestrial creature who became aware of their existence was a

female saber-toothed tiger. She gave birth to a pair of cubs, licked them

over, growled to drive her inquisitive mate away, went to sleep, woke up and

found that one was missing. Carnivores don't-

This is one of the easier kinds of information for me to retrieve:

• . The con flict over the island of Dominica, terrible though it was, was

over in seven weeks with both Haiti and the Dominican Republic anxious for

peace and a chance to rebuild their shattered economies. The next crisis to

confront the Secretariat was one of great hope for everyone in the world, but

at the same time fraught with far more risk to the world's peace. I refer, of

course, to the discovery of the so-called Heechee Asteroid. Although it was

known that long ago, technologically advanced aliens had visited the solar

system and left some valuable artifacts, the chance finding of this body with

its scores of functioning spaceships was wholly unexpected. Their value was

incalculable, of course, and nearly every space faring member state of the UN

registered some claim to them. I will not speak of the delicate and

confidential negotiations that brought about the five-power Gateway

Corporation trusteeship, but with its formation, a new era opened for

humankind."

-Memoirs, Marie-Clémentine Benhabbouche, Secrétaire-générale des Nations-Unis.

Q.-Albert, please! This is Robinette's story, not yours, so get on to where he

starts talking.

A.-I told you once and I told you twice. If you interrupt again I'll simply

turn you off, subset! We're doing this my way, and my way is like this:

Carnivores don't count well, but she was smart enough to know the difference

between one and two. Unfortunately for her cub, carnivores have hair-trigger

tempers, too. The loss of one cub enraged her, and in her paroxysm of fury she

destroyed the other. It is instructive to observe that that was the only

fatality among large mammals to result from the first visit of the Heechee to

Earth.

A decade later the Heechee came back. They replaced some of the samples they

had taken, including a male tiger now elderly and plump, and took a new batch.

These were not four-legged. The Heechee had learned to distinguish between one

predator and another, and the species they selected this time was a group of

shambling, slant-browed, four-foot-high creatures with furry faces and no

chins. Their very remote collateral descendants, namely you humans, would call

them Australopithecus afarensis~ These the Heechee did not return. From their

point of view, these creatures were the terrestrial species most likely to

evolve toward intelligence. The Heechee had a use for this sort of animal, and

so they began subjecting them to a program designed to force their evolution

toward that goal.

Of course, the Heechee did not limit themselves to the planet Earth in their

explorations, but none of the rest of the solar system had the sort of

treasure that interested them. They looked. They explored Mars and Mercury,

skimmed the cloud cover of the gas giants beyond the asteroid ring, observed

that Pluto was there but never troubled to visit it, tunneled out an eccentric

asteroid to make a sort of hangar for their spacecraft, and honeycombed the

planet Venus with well-insulated tunnels. They did not concentrate on Venus

because they preferred its climate to that of Earth. Actually they detested

the surface of Venus as much as humans do; that was why all their construction

was underground. But they built there because there was nothing alive on Venus

to be harmed, and the Heechee never, never harmed any evolved living things-

except when necessary.

The Heechee did not limit themselves to the Earth's solar system, either.

Their vessels spanned the Galaxy and went beyond it. Of all the Galaxy's two

hundred billion astronomical objects larger than a planet, they charted every

one; and many of the smaller ones, too. Not every object was visited by a

Heechee ship. But not one failed of at least a drone

flyby and an instrumented search for signatures, and some became what can only

be called tourist attractions.

And some-a bare handful-contained that peculiar treasure the Heechee sought

called life.

Life was rare in the Galaxy. Intelligent life, however inclusively the Heechee

defined it, was even rarer . . . but not absent. There were Earth's

australopithecines, already tool users, beginning to develop social

institutions. There was a promising winged race in what human beings would

call the constellation Ophiuchus; a soft-bodied one on a dense, huge planet

that circled an F-9 star in Eridanus; four or five miscellaneous sorts of

beings that orbited stars on the far side of the Galaxy's core, hidden by gas

clouds, dust, and dense starry clusters from any human observation. All

together there were fifteen species of beings, from fifteen different planets

thousands of light-years away from each other, that might be expected to

develop enough intelligence to write books and build machines fairly soon.

(The Heechee defined "fairly soon" as any time within a million years or so.)

And there was more. There were three actual existing technological societies,

besides the Heechees' own, and the artifacts of two others now extinct.

So the australopithecmes were not unique. They were still very precious.

Therefore the Heechee who was charged with ferrying a colony of them from the

dry-bones plains of their native home to the new habitat the Heechee had

provided for them in space was accorded much honor for his work.

It was hard work, and prolonged. That particular Heechee was the descendant of

three generations who had explored, mapped, and organized the solar system

project. He expected that his own descendants would continue the work. In that

he was wrong.

All in all, the tenancy of the Heechee in Earth's solar system lasted just

over one hundred years; and then it ended, in less than a month.

A decision was made to withdraw-hurriedly.

All through the rabbit warrens of Venus, all over the small outpost

installations on Dione and Mars' South Polar Cap, in every orbiting artifact,

the packing-up began. Hurried but thorough. The Heechee were the neatest of

housekeepers. They removed more than ninety-nine percent of the tools,

machines, artifacts, knickknacks, and trinkets that had supported their life

in Earth's solar system, even the trash. Especially the trash. Nothing was

left by accident. And nothing at all, not even the Heechee equivalent of an

empty Coke bottle or a used Kleenex, was left on the surface of the Earth.

They did not make it impossible for the

collateral descendants of their australopithecines to learn that the Heechee

had visited their area. They only made sure that they would first have to

learn to go into space to do so. Much of what the Heechee removed was useless

and was jettisoned in far interstellar space or into the Sun. Much was shipped

to places very far away, for special purposes. And all this was done not just

in Earth's solar system, but everywhere. The Heechee vacuumed the Galaxy of

almost every trace. No newly bereft Pennsylvania Dutch widow, preparing to

turn the farmhouse over to the family of the eldest son, ever left premises

more neat.

They left almost nothing, and nothing at all without a purpose. On Venus they

left only the basic tunnels and foundation structures themselves, and a

carefully selected bare taste of artifacts; in the outposts, only a minimum

number of signposts; and one other thing.

In every solar system where intelligence was expected they left one great and

cryptic gift. In Earth's system it was in the right-angle asteroid that they

had used for a terminus for their spacecraft. Here and there, in remote and

carefully chosen places in other systems, they left other major installations.

Each contained the very large gift of an operating selection of whole,

functional, almost indestructible Heechee faster-than-light spacecraft.

The solar troves stayed there for a very long time, four hundred thousand

years and more, while the Heechee hid in their core hole. The

australopithecines on Earth turned out an evolutionary failure, though the

Heechee did not find that out; but the cousins of the australopithecines

became Neanderthalers, or Cro-Magnards, then that latest evolutionary fad,

Modern Man. Meanwhile the winged creatures developed and learned and

discovered the Promethean challenge, and killed themselves. Meanwhile two of

the existing technological societies met each other and destroyed each other.

Meanwhile six of the other promising species idled in evolutionary backwaters;

meanwhile the Heechee hid, and peeped fearfully through their Schwarzschild

shell every few weeks of their time-every few millennia of the time speeding

outside-.

And meanwhile the troves waited, and human beings found them at last.

So human beings borrowed the Heechee ships. In them they crisscrossed the

Galaxy. Those first explorers were scared, desperate people whose only hope of

escaping grimy human misery was to risk their lives on a blind-date voyage to

a destiny that might make them rich and was a whole lot more likely to make

them dead.

I have now surveyed the entire history of the Heechee in their relation-

ship with the human race up to the time when Robin will start telling his

story. Are there any questions, subset?

Q.-Z-z-z-z-z-z-z

A.-Subset, don't be a smartass. I know you're not asleep.

Q.-I am only trying to convey that you are taking a hell of a long time to get

offstage, scene-starter. And you've only told us about the past of the

Heechee. You haven't told us about their present.

A.-I was just about to. In fact, I will now tell you about a particular

Heechee whose name is Captain (well, that is not his name, for Heechee naming

customs are not the same as human, but it will do to identif~r him) who, at

just about the time when Robin will begin to tell you his story- Q.-If you

ever let him get to it.

A.-Subset! Quiet. This Captain is rather important to Robin's story, because

in time they will interact drastically, but as we see Captain now, he is

wholly unaware that Robin exists. He, along with the members of his crew, is

getting ready to squeeze out of the place where the Heechee had hidden into

the wider Galaxy that is home for all the rest of us.

Now, I have played a little trick on you. You have already-shut up, subset!-.-

-you have already met Captain, since he was one of the very crew of Heechee

who abducted the tiger cub and built the warrens on Venus. He is much older

now.

He is not, however, half a million years older, because the place where the

Heechee went to hide is in a black hole at the core of our Galaxy.

Now, subset, I don't want you to interrupt again, but I do want to take time

to mention something strange. This black hole where the Heechee lived,

curiously, was known to the human race long before they ever heard of the

Heechee. In fact, way back in the year 1932, it was the first interstellar

radio source ever detected. By the end of the twentieth century interferometry

had mapped it as a definite black hole and a very large one, with a mass of

thousands of suns and a diameter of some thirty light-years. By then they knew

that it was about thirty thousand light-years from Earth, in the direction of

the constellation Sagittarius, that it was surrounded by a haze of silicate

dust, and that it was an intense source of 51 l-keV gamma-ray photons. By the

time they found the Gateway asteroid they knew much more. They knew, in fact,

every important datum about it except one. They had no idea that it was full

of Heechee. They didn't find that out until they-actually, I can fairly say

that it was mostly I-began to decipher the old Heechee star charts.

Q.-Z-z-z

A.-Quiet, subset, I take your point.

The ship Captain was in was a lot like the ones human beings found in

the Gateway asteroid. There had not been time for a lot of improvement in ship

design. That's why Captain was not really haifa million years old:

Time went slowly in their black hole. The major difference between Captain's

ship and any other was that it possessed an accessory.

In Heechee speech the accessory was known familiarly as the disruptor of order

in aligned systems. An English-speaking pilot might have called it a can

opener. It was what permitted them to pass through the Schwarzschild barrier

around a black hole. It didn't look like much, only a twisted rod of crystal

emerging from an ebon-black base, but when Captain energized it, it glowed

like a cascade of diamonds. The diamond glitter spread, and surrounded the

ship, and opened a way through the barrier, and they slipped through into the

wider universe outside. It didn't take long. By Captain's standard, less than

an hour. By the clocks of the outside universe, nearly two months.

Captain didn't look human, being a Heechee. More than anything else he

resembled an animated cartoon skeleton. But one might as well think of him as

human because he had most of the human traits-inquisitiveness, intelligence,

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ADelReyBookPublishedbyBallantineBooksCopyright(c)1984byFrederikPohiAllrightsreservedunderInternationalandPan-AmericanCopyrightConventions.PublishedintheUnitedStatesbyBallantineBooks,adivisionofRandomHouse,Inc.,NewYork,andsimultaneouslyinCanadabyRandomHouseofCanadaLimited,Toronto.ManufacturedintheUni...

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Pohl, Frederik - Heechee 3 - Heechee Rendevous

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