Pohl, Frederik - Heechee 4 - Annals of the Heechee

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THE ANNALS

OF THE

HEECHEE

Frederik Pohl

A Del Rey Book

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Conventions. Published in the United States of America 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

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

1 On Wrinkle Rock

2 On the Wheel

3 Albert Speaks

4 Some Parties at the Party

5 The Tide at Its Crest

6 Loves

7 Out of the Core

8 Up in Central Park

9 On Moorea

10 In Deep Time

11 Heimat

12 JAWS

13 Kids in Captivity

14 Stowaways

15 Scared Rats Running

16 The Long Voyage

17 At the Throne

18 Journey's End

19 The Last Spacefight

20 Back Home

21 Endings

22 And Not Endings

On Wrinkle Rock

It isn't easy to begin. I thought of a whole bunch of different ways to

do it, like cute:

You don't know about me without you have read some books that was made

by Mr. Fred Pohi. He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he

stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

-but my friendly data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein, says I'm too

prone to obscure literary references anyway, so the Huckleberry Finn gambit

was out. And I thought of starting with a searing expression of the soul-

searching, cosmic angst that's always (as Albert also reminds me) so much a

part of my normal conversation:

To be immortal and yet dead; to be almost omniscient and nearly

omnipotent, and yet no more real than the phosphor flicker on a screen-that's

how I exist. When people ask what I do with

my time (so much time! so much of it crammed into each second, and with

an eternity of seconds), I give them an honest answer. I tell them that I

study, I play, I plan, I work. Indeed, that is all true. I do all these

things. But during and between them I do one other thing. I hurt.

Or I could just start with a typical day. Like they do in the PV

interviews. "A candid look at one moment in the life of the celebrated

Robinette Broadhead, titan of finance, political powerhouse, maker and shaker

of events on all the myriad worlds." Maybe including a glimpse of me wheeling

and dealing-for example, a table-pounding conference with the brass hats at

the Joint Assassin Watch or, better still, a session at the Robinette

Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research:

I stepped up to the podium in a storm of serious applause. Smiling, I

raised my arms to quell it. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "I thank each of

you for making time in your busy schedules to join us here. You are a

distinguished group of astrophysicists and cosmologists, famed theorists and

Nobel laureates, and I welcome you to the Institute. I declare this workshop

on the fine physical structure of the early universe to be in session."

I really do say that kind of thing, or at least I send down a doppel to

do it and my doppel does. I have to. It's expected of me. I'm not a scientist,

but through my Institute I supply the cash that pays the bills that lets

science get done. So they want me to show up to greet them at the opening

sessions. Then they want me to go away so they can work, and I do.

Anyway, I could not decide which of those tracks to begin on, and so

I won't use any of them. They're all characteristic enough, though. I

admit it. Sometimes I'm a little too cute. Sometimes, maybe even often,

I am unattractively burdened with my own interior pain, which never

seems to go away. Often I'm just a touch pompous; but at the same

time, honestly, I am frequently quite effective in ways that matter a

lot. The place where I'm actually going to start is with the party on

Wrinkle Rock. Please bear with me. You have to put up with me only for a

little while, and I have to do it always.

I would go almost anywhere for a really good party. Why not? It's easy

enough for me, and some parties happen only once. I even flew my own spaceship

there; that was easy, too, and didn't really take any time from the eighteen

or twenty other things I was doing at the time.

Even before we got there I could feel the beginning of that nice party

tingle, because they had the old asteroid dressed up for the occasion. Left to

itself, Wrinide Rock wasn't much to look at. It was patchy black, spotted with

blue, ten kilometers long. It was shaped more or less like a badly planned

pear that the birds had been pecking at. Of course, those pockmarks weren't

from pecking birds. They were landing sockets for ships like ours. And, just

for the party, the Rock had been prettied up with big, twinidy starburst

letters- Our Galaxy

The First 100 Years Are the Hardest

-revolving around the rock like a belt of trained fireflies. The first

part of what it said wasn't diplomatic. The second part wasn't true. But it

was pretty to look at, anyway.

I said as much to my dear portable wife, and she grunted comfortably,

settling herself in my arm, "Is garish. Real lights! Could have used

holograms."

"Essie," I said, turning my head to nibble her ear, "you have the soul

of a cybernetician."

"Ho!" she said, twisting around to nibble back-only she nibbled a lot

harder-"Am nothing but soul of cybernetician, as are you, dear Robin, and

kindly pay attention to controls of ship instead of fooling around."

That was just a joke, naturally. We were right on course, sliding into a

dock with that agonizing slowness of all material objects; I had hundreds of

milliseconds to spare when I gave the True Love its final nudge. So I gave

Essie a kiss .

Well, I didn't exactly give her a kiss, but let me leave it that way for

now, all right?

and she added, "Are making a big deal of this, you agree?"

"It is a big deal," I told her, and kissed her a little harder, and,

since we had plenty of time, she kissed me back.

We spent the long quarter of a second or so while True Love drifted

through the intangible glitter of the party sign in as pleasant and leisurely

a fashion as one could wish. That's to say, we made love.

Since I am no longer "real" (but neither is my Essie)-since neither of

us is still really meat-one may ask, "How do you do that?" I have an answer

for that question. The answer is, "Beautifully." Also "layishly," "lovingly,"

and, above all, "expeditiously." I don't mean we shirk our work. I just mean

that it doesn't take long to do it; and so, after we had pleased each other

powerfully, and lounged around for a

while afterwards languidly, and even showered sharingly (a wholly

unnecessary ritual that, like most of our rituals, we do just for fun), we

still had plenty of time out of that quarter of a second to study the other

docking sockets on the Rock.

We had some interesting company ahead of us. I noted that one of the

ships docked ahead of us was a big old original-Heechee vessel, the kind that

we would have called a "Twenty" if we'd known that so huge a ship existed,

back in the old days. We didn't just spend that time rubbernecking. We're

shared-time programs, you know. We can easily do a dozen things at once. So I

also kept in touch with Albert, to check on whether there were any new

transmissions from the core, and make sure there was nothing from the Wheel,

and keep in touch with a dozen other interests of one kind or another; while

Essie ran her own search-and-merge scans. So by the time our locking ring

mated with one of those bird-pecked holes that were actually the berthing

ports for the asteroid, we were both in a pretty good mood and ready to party.

One of the (many) advantages of being what dear Portable-Essie and I are

is that we didn't have to unfasten seat belts and check seals and open locks.

We don't have to do anything much. We don't have to move our storage fans

around-they stay right where they are, and we go where we like through the

electrical circuits of whatever kind of place we happen to be plugged into.

(Usually that's the True Love when we're traveling, which we usually are.) If

we want to go farther than that, we can go by radio, but then we're up against

that tiresome lag in round-trip communications.

So we docked. We plugged in to Wrinkle Rock's systems. We were there.

Specifically, we were on Level Tango, Bay Forty-something of the tired

old asteroid, and we were not by any means alone. The party had begun. The

joint was jumping. There were a dozen people gathered to greet us-people like

us, I mean-wearing party hats or holding party drinks, singing, laughing.

(There were even a couple of meat people in sight, but they wouldn't even

discern that we had arrived for many milliseconds yet.) "Janie!" I shouted at

one, hugging her; and "Sergei, golubka!" Essie cried, hugging another; and

right then, while we were in the first moment of greeting and hugging and

being happy, a nasty new voice snapped, "Hey, Broadhead."

I knew the voice.

I even knew what would come next. What bad manners! Flicker, flash, pop,

and there was General Julio Cassata, looking at me with the (barely)

controlled sneer of soldier-to-civilian contempt, across a broad,

bare desktop that hadn't been there a moment before. "I want to talk to

you," he said.

I said, "Oh, shit."

I didn't like General Julio Cassata. I never had, though we kept running

into each other's lives.

That wasn't because I wanted it that way. Cassata was always bad news.

He didn't like civilians (like me) messing in what he still called "military

affairs," and he didn't much like machine-stored people of any kind. Cassata

was not only a soldier, he was still meat.

Only this time he wasn't meat. He was a doppel.

That was an interesting fact in itself, because meat people don't make

doppels of themselves lightly.

I would have pursued that odd fact farther, except that I was too busy

thinking about all the things I didn't like about Julio Cassata. His manners

are lousy. He had just demonstrated that. There is an etiquette to the gigabit

space that we machine-stored people inhabit. Polite machine-stored people

don't just dump themselves on each other without warning. They approach

politely when they want to talk to you. Maybe they even "knock" on a "door"

and wait outside politely until you say, "Come in." And they certainly do not

impose their private surrounds on each other. That's the kind of behavior that

Essie calls nekulturny, meaning it stinks. Just what I would expect from Julio

Cassata: He'd overridden the physical bay we were in and the gigabit-space

simulation of it that we were jointly occupying. There he was with his desk

and his medals and his cigars and all; and that was just plain rude.

Of course, I could have pushed all that out and got back to my own

surround. Guys do that sort of thing when they're stubborn. It's like two

secretaries one-upping each other about whose boss gets put on the PV-phone

first. I didn't choose to do that. It wasn't because I have any hang-up about

being rude to rude people. It was something else.

I had finally got around to wondering why the real, or meat, Cassata had

made a machine duplicate of himself.

What was before us was a machine simulation in gigabit space, just as my

own beloved Portable-Essie was a doppel of my also beloved (but, these days,

beloved only at second hand) real-Essie. The original meatCassata was no doubt

chomping a real cigar several hundred thousand kilometers away, on the JAWS

satellite.

When I figured out the implications of that, I actually almost felt

sorry for the doppel. So I suppressed all the instinctive words that suggested

themselves. I only said, "What the hell do you want from me?"

Bullies respond well to being bullied. He let a little of the fire go

out of the steely-eyed glare. He even smiled-I think he meant it to be

friendly. His eyes slid from my face over to Essie, who had popped herself

into Cassata's surround to see what was going on, and said, in what could have

been intended as a light tone, "Now, now, Mrs. Broadhead, is that any way for

old friends to talk to each other?"

"Is very poor way for old friends to talk," she said noncommittally.

I pressed: "What are you doing here, Cassata?"

"I came to the party." He smiled-oily smile, fake smile; he had very

little to smile about, considering. "When we came off maneuvers, most of the

old ex-prospectors got leave to come here for the reunion. I hitched a ride. I

mean," he explained, as though, of all people, Essie and I needed explaining

to, "I doppeled myself and put the store on the ship that was coming here."

"Maneuvers!" Essie sniffed. "Maneuvers against what? When Foe come out,

are going to pull out six-shooters and fill skunks with holes like Swiss

cheese, blam-blam-blam?"

"We have better than six-shooters on our cruisers these days, Mrs.

Broadhead," Cassata said genially; but I had had enough small talk.

I asked again, "What do you want?"

Cassata abandoned the smile and got back to his natural state of nasty.

"Nothing," said Cassata. "By that I mean nothing, Broadhead. I want you to

butt out." He wasn't even trying to be genial anymore.

I kept my temper. "I'm not even butting in."

"Wrong! You're butting in right now in your damn Institute. You've got

workshops going on. One in New Jersey, one in Des Moines. One on Assassin

signatures. One on early cosmology."

Since those statements were perfectly true, I only said, "The Broadhead

Institute is in business to do that kind of thing. That's our charter. It's

what we founded it for, and it's why JAWS gives me exofficio status so I have

a right to sit in on JAWS planning sessions."

"Well, old buddy," Cassata said happily, "see, you're wrong about that,

too. You don't have a right. You have that privilege. Sometimes. A privilege

isn't a right, and I'm warning you not to put it on the line. We don't want

you getting in the way."

I really hate those guys sometimes. "Now, look, Cassata," I began, but

Essie stopped me before I'd even picked up speed.

"Boys, boys! Cannot save this for another time? Came here to party, not

to fight."

Cassata hesitated, looking belligerent. Then he nodded slowly, looking

thoughtful. "Well, Mrs. Broadhead," he said, "that's not a bad idea. It can

keep a while; after all, I don't have to report back for five or six

meat hours yet." Then he turned to me. "Don't leave the Rock," he

ordered. And vanished.

Essie and I looked at each other. "Nekulturny," she said, wrinkling up

her nose as though she still smelled his cigar.

What I said was worse than that, and Essie put her arm around me.

"Robin? Is pig, that man. Forget him, okay? Aren't going to let him make you

all gloopy and sour again, please?"

"Not a chance!" I said bravely. "Party time! I'll race you to the Blue

Hell!"

It was, actually, one hell of a fine party.

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THEANNALSOFTHEHEECHEEFrederikPohlADelReyBookBALLANTINEBOOKS•NEWYORKADelReyBookPublishedbyBallantineBooksCopyright(c)1987byFrederikPohlAllrightsreservedunderInternationalandPan-AmericanCopyrightConventions.PublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmericabyBallantineBooks,adivisionofRandomHouse,Inc.,NewYork,andsim...

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