Heechee rendezvous (32 page)

We had never built into the True Love a desk for Albert Einstein, particularly not one with his pipe marking his place in a book, a bottle of Skrip next to a leather tobacco jar, and a blackboard behind him half covered with equations. But there it was, and there he was, entertaining our guests with stories about himself. “When I was at Princeton,” he declared, “they hired a man to follow me around with a notebook so that if I wrote something on a blackboard he would copy it down. It was not for my benefit but for theirs-otherwise, you see, they were afraid to erase the blackboards!” He beamed at our guests and nodded genially to Essie and me, standing hand in hand at the doorway to the main lounge. “I was explaining, Mr. and Mrs. Broadhead, something of my history to these people, who perhaps have not really heard of me although I was, I must say, quite famous. Did you know, for example, that since I disliked rain, the administration at Princeton built a covered passage which you can still see, so that I could visit my friends without going outdoors?”

At least he wasn’t wearing his general’s face and Red Baron silk scarf; but he made me just a little uncomfortable. I felt like apologizing to Audee and his two women; instead, I said, “Essie? Don’t you think these reminiscences are getting a bit thick?”

“Is possible,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you wish him to stop?”

“Not really stop. He’s much more interesting now, but if you could just turn down the gain on the personalized-identity database, or twist the potentiometer on the nostalgia circuits-“

“How silly you are, dear Robin,” she said, smiling with forgiveness. Then she commanded: “Albert! Cut out so much gossip. Robin doesn’t like it.”

“Of course, my dear Semya,” he said politely. “No doubt you wish to hear about the sailship, in any case.” He stood up behind his desk-that is, his holographic but physically nonexistent image rose behind his equally nonexistent hologram of a desk; I had to keep reminding myself of that. He picked up a blackboard eraser and began to wipe away the chalk, then recollected himself. With an apologetic glance at Essie, he reached for a switch on the desk instead. The blackboard vanished. It was replaced by the familiar pebbly greeny-gray surface of a Heechee ship’s viewscreen. Then he pressed another switch, and the pebbly gray disappeared, replaced this time by a view of a star chart. That was realistic, too-all it took to convert any Gateway ship’s screen to a usable picture was a simple bias applied to the circuits (though a thousand explorers had died without finding that out). “What you see,” he said genially, “is the place where Captain Walthers located the sailship, and as you see, there is nothing there.”

Walthers had been sitting quietly on a hassock before the imitation fireplace, as far as possible from either Dolly or Janie-and each of them was as far as possible from the other, and also very quiet. But now Walthers spoke out, stung. “Impossible! The records were accurate! You have the data!”

“Of course they were accurate,” Albert soothed, “but, you see, by the time the scout ship arrived there the sailship was gone.”

“It couldn’t have gone very far if its only drive was from starshine!”

“No, it could not. But it was absent. However,” Albert said, beaming cheerfully, “I had provided for some such contingency. If you remember, my reputation-in my former self I mean-rested on the assumption that the speed of light was a fundamental constant, subject,” he added, blinking tolerantly around the room, “to certain broadenings of context that we have learned from the Heechee. But the speed, yes, is always the same-nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second. So I instructed the drone, in the event that the sailship was not found, to remove itself a distance of three hundred thousand kilometers times the number of seconds since the sighting.”

“Great clever egotistical program,” Essie said fondly. “That was some smart pilot you hired for scout ship, right?”

Albert coughed. “It was an unusual ship, as well,” he said, “since I did foresee that there might be special needs. I fear the expense was rather high. However, when the ship had reached the proper distance, this is what it saw.” And he waved a hand, and the screen showed that multi-winged gossamer shape. No longer perfect, it was folding and contracting before our eyes. Albert had speeded up the action as seen from the scout, and we watched the great wings roll themselves up ... and disappear.

Well. What we saw, you have already seen. The way in which you were advantaged over us was that you knew what you were seeing. There we were, Walthers and his harem, Essie and me. We had left a troublesome human world to chase after a troublesome puzzle, and there we saw the thing we were aiming at being-being eaten by something else! It looked exactly that way to our shocked and unprepared eyes. We sat there frozen, staring at the crumpled wings and the great glistening blue sphere that appeared from nowhere to swallow them.

I became aware that someone was chuckling gently, and was shocked for the second time when I realized who it was.

It was Albert, sitting now on the edge of his desk and wiping away a tear of amusement. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but if you could see your faces.”

“Damn great egotistical program,” Essie grated, no longer fondly, “stop crap immediately. What is going on here?”

Albert gazed at my wife. I could not quite decipher his expression: The look was fond, and tolerant, and a great many other things that I did not associate with a computer-generated image, even Albert’s. But it was also uneasy. “Dear Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “if you did not wish me to have a sense of humor you should not have programmed me so. If I have embarrassed you I apologize.”

“Follow instructions!” Essie barked, looking baffled.

“Oh, very well. What you have seen,” he explained, turning pointedly away from Essie to lecture to the group, “is what I believe to be the first known example of an actual Heechee-manned operation in real time. That is, the sailship has been abducted. Observe this smaller vessel.” He waved a negligent hand, and the image spun and flowed, magnifying the scene. The magnification was more than the resolution of the scout ship’s optics were good for, and so the edge of the sphere became pebbly and fuzzy.

But there was something behind it.

There was something that moved slowly into eclipse behind the sphere. Just as it was about to disappear Albert froze the picture, and we were looking at a blurry, fish-shaped object, quite tiny, very poorly imaged. “A Heechee ship,” said Albert. “At least, I have no other explanation.”

Janie Yee-xing gave a choking sound. “Are you sure?”

“No, of course not,” said Albert. “It is only a theory as yet. One never says ‘yes’ to a theory, Miss Yee-xing, only ‘maybe,’ for some better theory will surely come along and the one that has seemed best until then will get its ‘no.’ But my theory is that the Heechee have decided to abduct the sailship.”

Now, get the picture. Heechee! Real ones, attested to by the smartest data-retrieval system anyone had ever encountered. I had been looking for Heechee, one way or another, for two-thirds of a century, desperate to find them and terrified that I might. And when it happened the thing uppermost in my mind was not the Heechee but the data-retrieval system. I said, “Albert, why are you acting so funny?”

He looked at me politely, tapping his pipestem against his teeth. “In what way ‘funny,’ Robin?” he asked.

“Damn it, come off it! The way you act! Don’t you-“ I hesitated, trying to put it politely. “Don’t you know you’re just a computer program?”

He smiled sadly. “I do not need to be reminded of that, Robin. I am not real, am I? And yet the reality that you are immersed in is one for which I do not care.”

“Albert!” I cried, but he put up his hand to quiet me.

“Allow me to say this,” he said. “For me reality is, I know, a certain large quantity of parallel-processed on-off switches in heuristic conformations. If one analyzes it, it becomes only a sort of trick one plays on the viewer. But for you, Robin? Is reality for an organic intelligence very different? Or is it merely certain chemical transactions that take place in a kilogram of fatty matter that has no eyes, no ears, no sexual organs? Everything that it knows it knows by hearsay, because some perceptual system has told it so. Every feeling it has comes to it by wire from some nerve. Is it so different between us, Robin?”

“Albert!”

He shook his head. “Ah,” he said bitterly, “I know. You cannot be deceived by my trick, because you know the trickster-she is here among us. But aren’t you deceived by your own? Should I not be granted the same esteem and tolerance? I was quite an important man, Robin. Held in high regard by some very fine persons! Kings. Queens. Great scientists, and such good fellows they were. On my seventieth birthday they gave me a party-Robertson and Wigner, Kurt Goedel, Rabi, Oppenheimer-“ He actually wiped away an actual tear ... and that was about as far as Essie was willing to let him go.

She stood up. “My friends and husband,” she said, “is obviously some severe malfunction here. Apologize for this. Must pull out of circuit for complete downcheck, you will excuse, please?”

“It isn’t your fault, Essie,” I said, as kindly as I could, but she didn’t take it kindly. She looked at me in a way I hadn’t seen from her since we first began dating and I told her about all the funny jokes I used to play on my psychoanalysis program, Sigfrid von Shrink. “Robin,” she said coldly, “is all too much talk about fault and guilt. Will discuss later. Guests, must borrow my workroom for a time. Albert! Present yourself there at once for debugging!”

One of the penalties of being rich and famous is that a lot of people invite you to be their guests, and almost all of them expect to be invited back. Hosting is not one of my skills. Essie, on the other hand, really likes it, so over the years we worked out a good way to handle guests. It’s very simple. I hang around them as long as I am enjoying it-that can be several hours, sometimes five minutes. Then I disappear to my study and leave the hosting to Essie. I am particularly likely to do this when, for any reason, there is tension among the guests. It works fine-for me.

But then it stops working sometimes, and then I’m stuck. This was one of the times. I couldn’t leave them to Essie, because Essie was busy. I didn’t want to leave them alone, because we had already done that for a goodish long period. And of tension there was plenty. So there I was, trying to remember how to be gracious when I didn’t have a fallback position: “Would you like a drink?” I asked jovially. “Something to eat? There are some good programs to watch, if Essie hasn’t killed the circuits so she can deal with Albert-“

Janie Yee-xing interrupted me with a question. “Where are we going, Mr. Broadhead?”

“Well,” I said, beaming-jovial; good host; try to make the guests feel at ease, even when they ask you a perfectly good question that you haven’t thought of an answer for because you’ve been thinking about a lot of more urgent things. “I guess the question is, where would you like to go? I mean, it looks like there’s no point in chasing after the sailship.”

“No,” Yee-xing agreed.

“Then I suppose it’s up to you. I didn’t think you’d want to stay in the guardhouse-“ reminding them that I’d done them all a favor, after all.

“No,” Yee-xing said again.

“Back to the Earth, then? We could drop you at one of the loop points. Or Gateway, if you like. Or-let’s see, Audee, you’re from Venus in the first place, right? Do you want to go back there?”

It was Walthers’ turn to say, “No.” He left it at that. I thought it was very inconsiderate of my guests to give me nothing but negatives when I was trying to be hospitable to them.

Dolly Walthers bailed me out. She raised her right hand, and it had one of those hand puppets pf hers on it, the one that was supposed to look like a Heechee. “The trouble is, Mr. Broadhead,” she said, not moving her lips, in a syrupy, snaky kind of voice, “none of us have any place much to go to.”

Since that was obviously true, nobody seemed to have anything to say to it. Then Audee stood up. “I’ll take that drink now, Broadhead,” he growled. “Dolly? Janie?”

It was obviously the best idea any of us had had in some time. We all agreed, like guests arriving too early at a party, finding something to do so we would not obviously be doing nothing.

There were things to do, to be sure, and the biggest of them in my mind was not to be cordial to my company. That biggest thing wasn’t even trying to assimilate the fact that we had (perhaps) seen an actual, operating Heechee vessel with Heechee inside it. It was my gut again. The doctors said I could lead a normal life. They hadn’t said anything about one as abnormal as this, so I was feeling my age and frailty. I was glad to take my gin and water and sit down, next to the make-believe fireplace with its make-believe flames, and wait for someone else to carry the ball.

Which turned out to be Audee Walthers. “Broadhead, I appreciate your getting us out of stir, and I know you’ve got things of your own to do. I suppose the best thing is for you to set all three of us down in the handiest place you can find and go about your business.”

“Well, there are lots of places, Audee. Isn’t there one you’d like better than another?”

“What I would like,” he said, “-what I think we would all like, is to have a chance to figure out what we want to do by ourselves. I guess you’ve noticed we’ve got some personal problems that need to get worked out.” That is not the kind of statement you want to agree to, and I certainly couldn’t deny it, so I just smiled. “So what we need is a chance to get off by ourselves and talk about them.”