her I can't imagine.) The surviving Herter-Halls are also filthy with
money. That's a good thing, especially for Wan and Janine, who have a
complicated relationship to sort out, in a complicatedly unwelcoming
world. My wife, Essie, is in the best of health. I love her. When I die,
that is, when even Full Medical can't patch me up any more, I have a
little plan about how to deal with someone else I love, and that satisfies
me. Almost everything satisfies me. The only exception is my science
advisor, Albert, who keeps trying to explain Mach's Principle to me.
When we took over Heechee Heaven, we got it all. The way to control
Heechee ships. The way to build Heechee ships, including the theory that
makes it possible to go faster than light. No, it doesn't involve
"hyperspace" or the "fourth dimension". It is very simple. Acceleration
multiplies mass, so says Einstein-the real one, not Albert. But if the
rest mass is zero it does not matter how many times you multiply it. It
remains zero. Albert says that mass can be created, and proves it by basic
logical principles: it exists, therefore it can be created. Therefore it
can be eliminated, since what can be made to be can also be made to stop
being. That is the Heechee secret, and with Albert's help to set up the
experiment, and Morton's help to coerce the Gateway Corp into making ships
available, we tried it out. It didn't cost me a cent; one of the
advantages of great wealth is that you don't have to spend it. All you
have to do is get other people to spend it for you, and that's what law
programs are for.
So we sent two Fives out at once from Gateway. One was on lander power
only, and it contained two people and a cylinder of solid aluminum with
strain detectors attached. The other held a full crew, ready for an actual
mission. The instrument ship had a live camera pickup with an image split
three ways: one on the gravity meter, one on the second ship, one on a
cesium-atom digital clock.
To my eyes the experiment didn't show a thing. The second ship began to
disappear, and the gravity meter recorded its disappearance. Big deal! But
Albert was elated. "Its mass began to disappear before it did, Robin! My
God. Anyone could have tried that experiment any time in the last dozen
years! There's going to be at least a ten-million-dollar science bonus for
this!"
"Put it in petty cash," I said, and stretched, and rolled over to kiss
Essie, because we happened to be in bed at the time.
"Is very interesting, dear Robin," she said drowsily, and kissed me
back. Albert grinned and averted his eyes, partly because Essie has been
tinkering with his program and partly because he knew as well as I did
that what she said was politely untrue. Astrophysics did not much interest
my Essie. What interested her was the chance to play with working Heechee
machine intelligences, and that interested her very much. Eighteen hours a
day much, until she had tracked down all the major systems in what was
left of the Oldest One, and the Dead Men, and the Dead Non-Men whose
memories went back to an African savannah the better part of a million
years ago. Not that she cared a lot about what was in the memories; but
how it was there was her very business, at which she was very good.
Reshuffling my Albert program was the least of what Essie got out of
Heechee Heaven. What we all got was a very great deal indeed. The grand
charts of the Galaxy, showing everywhere the Heechee had been. The grand
charts of black holes, showing where they are now. Even where Kiara is. As
one tiny fringe benefit, I even got the answer to one question that on a
purely subjective level had been interesting me very much: why was I still
alive? The ship that carried me to Heechee Heaven had flipped over into
deceleration mode after nineteen days. By all the laws of parity and
common sense, that meant it would not arrive for another nineteen, by
which time I should have been surely dead; but in fact it docked in five.
And I wasn't dead at all, or not quite; but why?
Albert gave me the answer. Every flight ever successfully completed in
a Heechee ship had been between two bodies that, relatively, were more or
less at rest-a few tens or at most a few hundreds of kilometers a second
difference in their relative velocities. no more. Not enough to make a
difference. But my flight had been pursuing an object itself in very rapid
motion. It had been almost all acceleration. The slowdown had taken only a
tiny fraction of the speedup. And so I lived.
And all that was very satisfying, and yet... And yet there is always a
price.
There always has been. Every big jump forward has carried a hidden
cost, all through history. Man invented agriculture. That meant someone
had to plant de cotton and someone had to hoe de corn. And dat's how
slavery was born. Man invented the automobile, and got a dividend of
pollution and highway death. Man got curious about the way the sun shines,
and out of his curiosity came the H-bomb. Man found the Heechee artifacts
and tracked down some of their secrets. And what did we get? For one
thing, we got Payter, almost killing a world, with a power no one had ever
had before him. For another we got some brand-new questions, the answers
to which I have not yet quite nerved myself up to face. Questions that
Albert wants to try to answer, about Mach's Principle; and that Henrietta
raised, with her talk about Point X and the "missing mass". And a very big
question in my own mind. When the Oldest One broke Heechee Heaven out of
its orbit and sent it flying through space toward the core of the Galaxy
what, exactly, was he heading toward?
The scariest, I guess, and also the most satisfying, I know, moment of
my life was when we had burned the feelers off the Oldest One and, armed
with Henrietta's instructions, sat down before the control board of
Heechee Heaven. It took two to make it move. Lurvy Herter-Hall and I were
the two most experienced pilots present-if you didn't count Wan, who was
off with Janine, rounding up the waking Old Ones to tell them there had
been a change in government. Lurvy took the right-hand seat and I took the
left (wondering a lot just what strange-shaped butt had first sat in it).
And there we went. It took more than a month to get back to orbiting the
Moon, which was the point I had picked out. It wasn't a wasted month,
there was plenty to do on Heechee Heaven; but it went pretty slowly,
because I was in a very big hurry to get home.
It took all the nerve I had to squeeze that teat, but, you know, it
wasn't all that hard. Once we understood that the main bank of controls
carried the codes for all the preset objectives-there are more than
fifteen thousand of them, all over the Galaxy and some outside-it was just
a matter of knowing which code was which. Then, all of us really delighted
with ourselves, we decided to show off. We got a squawk from the
radio-astronomers on the far side because our circumlunar orbit was
getting in the way of their dishes every time we came around. So we moved.
You do that with the secondary boards, the ones no one has ever dared to
touch in midflight and that don't seem to do much on the original launch.
Main boards, preprogrammed objectives; secondary boards, any point you
want, provided you can spell out its galactic coordinates. But the joker
is that you can't use the secondary boards until you've nulled the
primaries by setting them all down to zero-that translates to a clear deep
red color on each-and if any prospector ever happened to do that on his
own, he lost his programming to get back to Gateway. How simple everything
is once you know. And so we put that big son-of-a-bitching artifact, half
a million metric tons of it, in close Earth orbit, and invited company.
The company I wanted most was my wife. What I wanted next was my
science program, Albert Einstein-that's not really a reflection on Essie,
you know, because she wrote him. It was a tossup whether I went down to
her or she came up to me, but not in her mind. She wanted to get her hands
On the machine intelligences in Heechee Heaven, I would judge, at least as
much as I wanted to get mine on her. In a 100-minute Earth orbit the
transmission time isn't bad, anyway. As soon as we were in range the
machine Albert had programmed for me was talking to him, pumping
everything it had learned into him, and by the time I was ready to talk to
him he was ready to talk back.
Of course it wasn't the same. Albert in full three-dimensional color in
the tank at home was a lot more fun to chat with than black-and-white
Albert on a flat plate in Heechee Heaven. But until some new equipment
came up from Earth that was all I had, and anyway it was the same Albert.
"Good to see you again, Robin," he said benevolently, poking the stem of
his pipe toward me. "I guess you know you have about a million messages
waiting for you?"
"They'll wait." Anyway, I had already had about a million, or it seemed
that way. What they mostly said was that everybody was annoyed but, in the
long run, delighted; and I was once again very rich. "What I want to hear
first," I said, "is what you want to tell me."
"Sure thing, Robin." He tapped out his pipe, regarding me. "Well," he
said, "technology first. We know the general theory of the Heechee drive,
and we're getting a handle on the faster-than-light radio. As to the
information-handling circuits in the Dead Men and so on-as I am sure you
know," he twinkled, "Cospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead is on her way to join
you. I think we may confidently expect considerable progress there, very
quickly. In a few days a volunteer crew will go to the Food Factory. We
are pretty sure it, too, can be controlled, and if so it will be brought
into some nearby orbit for study and, I think I can promise, duplication.
I don't suppose you want to hear about minor technology in detail just
now?"
"Not really," I said. "Or not right at this minute."
"Then," he said, nodding as he filled the pipe again, "let me get to
some theoretical considerations. First there is the question of black
holes. We have unequivocally located the one your friend, Gelle-Klara
Moynlin, is in. I believe it would be possible to send a ship there with
reasonable assurance that it would arrive without serious damage. Return,
however, is another question. There appears to be nothing in the Heechee
stores that gives us a cookbook recipe for getting anything out of a black
hole. Theory, yes. But if one should desire to convert the theory into
practice that will require R&D. A lot of it. I would hesitate to promise
results in less than, say, a matter of years. More likely decades. I
know," he said, leaning forward earnestly, "that this is a matter of
personal importance to you, Robin. It also may be a matter of grave
importance to all of us, by which I mean not only the human race but
machine intelligences as well." I had never seen him look so serious. "You
see," he said, "the destination of the artifact, Heechee Heaven, has also
been unequivocally identified. May I show you a picture?"
That was rhetoric, of course. I didn't reply, and he didn't wait. He
shrank down into a corner of the flatplate screen while the main picture
appeared. It was a wash of white, shaped like a very amateurishly drawn
Turkish crescent. It was not symmetrical. The crescent was off to one
side, and the rest of the picture was black except for an irregular
sprinkle of light that completed the horns of the crescent and protracted
them into a hazy ellipse.
"It is too bad you cannot see this in color, Robin," said Albert,
squinting up from his corner of the screen. "It is blue rather than white.
Shall I tell you what you are seeing? It is orbiting matter around some
very large object. The matter to your left, which is coming toward us,
travels fast enough to emit light. The matter to the right, which is going
away, travels more slowly relative to us. What we are seeing is matter
turning into radiation as it is drawn into an extremely large black hole,
which is located at the center of our Galaxy."
"I thought the speed of light was not relative!" I snapped.
He expanded to fill the screen again. "It is not, Robin, but the orbit
velocity of the matter which produces it is. That picture is from the
Gateway file, and until just recently it was not located in space. But now
it is clear that it is at, indeed that in a sense it forms, the galactic
core."
He paused while he lit his pipe, looking at me steadily. Well, that's
not quite true. There was the split-second lag, and even Albert's circuits
couldn't do anything about it; if I moved his gaze lingered where I had
been for just long enough to be disconcerting. I didn't rush him, and when
he had finished puffing the pipe alight he said:
"Robin, I am often unsure of what information to volunteer to you. If
you ask me a question, that's different. About any subject you suggest, I
will tell you as much of what I know as you will listen to. I will also
tell you what may be so, if you ask for a hypothesis; and I will volunteer
hypotheses when, according to the constraints written into my program,
that seems appropriate. Gospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead has written quite
complex normative instructions for this sort of decision-making, but, to
simplify, they come down to an equation. Let V represent the 'value' of a
hypothesis. Let P represent its probability of being true. If I can
complete the sum of VP so that it equals at least one, then I should, and
do, volunteer the hypothesis. But, oh, Robin, how hard it is to assign the
correct numerical values to P and V/In the specific case now at issue I
cannot be in any way sure of any value I can give its probability. But its
importance is very high. To all intents, it might as well be regarded as
infinite."
By then he had me sweating. What I know for sure about Albert's
programming is that the longer he takes to tell me something, the less he
thinks I am going to like hearing it. "Albert," I said, "get the hell on
with it."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding, but unwilling to be rushed, "but
let me first say that this conjecture satisfies not only known
astrophysics, although on a rather complex level, but also some other
questions, e. g., where Heechee Heaven was going when you turned it around
and why the Heechee themselves disappeared. Before I can give you the
conjecture I must review four main points, as follows.
"One. The quantities Tiny Jim referred to as 'gosh numbers'. These are
numerical quantities, mostly of the sort called 'dimensionless' because
they are the same in any units you measure. The mass ratio between the
electron and the proton. The Dirac number to express the difference
between electromagnetic and gravitational force. The Eddington
fine-structure constant. And so forth. We know these numbers to great
precision. What we do not know is why they are what they are. Why
shouldn't the fine-structure constant be, say, 150 instead of 137-plus? If
we understood astrophysics-if we had a complete theory-we should be able
to deduce these numbers from the theory. We do have a good theory, but we
can't deduce the gosh numbers from it. Why? Is it possible," he asked
gravely, "that these numbers are in some way accidental?"
He paused, puffing on his pipe, and then held up two fingers. "Two.
Mach's Principle. This also turns Out to be a question, but perhaps a
somewhat easier one. My late predecessor," he said, twinkling a little-I
think to reassure me that this was, indeed, easier to handle-"my late
predecessor gave us the theory of relativity, which is commonly understood
to mean that everything is relative to something else excepting only the
velocity of light. When you are at home on Tappan Sea, Robin, you weigh
about eighty-five kilograms. That is to say, that is a measure of how much
you and the planet Earth attract each other; it is your weight, in a
sense, relative to the Earth. We also have a quality called 'mass'. The
best measure of 'mass' is the force necessary to accelerate an object, say
you, from a state of rest. We usually consider 'mass' and 'weight' to be
about the same, and on the surface of the Earth they are, but mass is
supposed to be an intrinsic quality of matter, while weight is always
relative to something else. But," he twinkled again, "let's do a
gedanke-experiment, Robin. Let's suppose that you're the only thing in the
universe. There's no other matter. What would you weigh? Nothing. What
would your mass be? Ah, that's the question. Let's suppose you have a
little rocket-belt and you decided to accelerate yourself. You then
measure the acceleration and compute the force to move you, and you come
out with your mass-do you? No, Robin, you do not. Because there is nothing
to measure movement against! 'Moving', as a concept, is meaningless. So
mass itself-according to Mach's Principle-depends on some external system,
Mach thought it might be what he called 'the entire background of the
universe', to be meaningful. And according to Mach's Principle, as my
predecessor and others extended it, so do all the other 'intrinsic'
characteristics of matter, energy and space... including the 'gosh
numbers'. Robin, am I wearying you?"
"You bet your ass you are, Albert," I snarled, "but go ahead!" He
smiled and held up three fingers. "Three. What Henrietta called Point X'.
As you remember, Henrietta failed her doctoral defense, but I have made a
study of her dissertation and I am able to say what she meant by it. For
the first three seconds after the Big Bang, which is to say the beginning
of the universe as we now know it, the entire universe was relatively
compact, exceedingly hot, and entirely symmetrical. Henrietta's
dissertation quoted at length from an old Cambridge mathematician named
Tong B. Tang and others; the point they made was that after that time,
after what Henrietta called 'Point X', the symmetry became 'frozen'. All
the constants we now observe became fixed at that point. All the gosh
numbers. They did not exist before 'Point X'. They have existed, and are
unchangeable, ever since.
"So at Point X in time, three seconds after the beginning of the Big
Bang, something happened. It may have been some quite random event-some
turbulence in the exploding cloud.
"Or it may have been deliberate."
He stopped and smoked for a while, watching me. When I did not react he
sighed and held up four fingers. "Four, Robin, and the last. I do
apologize for this long preamble. The final point in Henrietta's
conjecture had to do with 'missing mass'. There simply does not appear to
be enough mass in the universe to fit the otherwise very successful
theories of the Big Bang. Here Henrietta made an immense leap in her
doctoral dissertation. She suggested that the Heechee had learned how to
create mass and destroy it-and in this, as we now know, she was correct,
although it was only a guess on her part, and the seniors before whom she
conducted the defense of her dissertation were very quick to challenge it.
She then made a further leap. She suggested that the Heechee had, in fact,
caused some mass to disappear. Not on a ship, although if she had guessed
that she would have been correct. On a very large scale. On a
universe-wide scale, in fact. She conjectured that they had studied the
'gosh numbers' as we have, and come to certain conclusions which seem to
be true. Here, Robin, it gets a little tricky, so pay close attention-but
we are almost home.
"You see, these fundamental constants like the 'gosh numbers' determine
whether or not life can exist in the universe. Among very many other
things, to be sure. But if some of them were a little higher or a little
lower, life could not exist. Do you see the logical consequence of that
statement? Yes, I think you do. It is a simple syllogism. Major premise,
the 'gosh numbers' are not fixed by natural law but could have been
different if certain different events had taken place at 'Point X'. Minor
premise, if they were different in certain directions, the universe would
be less hospitable to life. Conclusion? Ah, that's the heart of it.
Conclusion: If they were different in certain other directions, the
universe might be more hospitable to life."
And he stopped talking, and sat regarding me, reaching down into a
carpet slipper with one hand to scratch the sole of his foot.
I don't know which of us would have out-waited the other then. I was
trying to digest a lot of very indigestible ideas, and old Albert, he was
determined to give me time to digest them. Before either of those could
happen Paul Hall came trotting into the cubicle I had made my own yelling,
"Company! Hey, Robin! We've got visitors!"
Well, my first thought was Essie, of course; we'd talked; I knew she
was on her way to the Kennedy launchport at least, even if not actually
waiting there for our orbit to settle down and get off. I stared at Paul
and then at my watch. "There hasn't been time," I said, because there
hadn't.
He was grinning. "Come and see the poor bastards," he chortled.
And that's what they were, all right. Six of them, crammed into a Five.
Launched from Gateway less than twenty-four hours after I had taken off
from the Moon, carrying enough armament to wipe out a whole division of
Oldest Ones, ready to save and profit. They had flown all the way out
after Heechee Heaven, reversed course and flown all the way back.
Somewhere en route we must have passed them without knowing it. Poor
bastards! But they were pretty decent guys, volunteers, taking off on a
mission that must have seemed insecure even by Gateway standards. I
promised them that they would get a share of the profits there was plenty
to go around. It wasn't their fault that we didn't need them, especially
considering how much we might have needed them if we had.
So we made them welcome. Janine proudly showed them around. Wan,
grinning and waving his sleep-gun around, introduced them to the gentle
Old Ones, placid in the face of this new invasion. And by the time all
that settled down I realized that what I needed most was food and sleep,
and I took both.
When I woke up the first news I got was that Essie was on her way, but
not due for a while yet. I fidgeted around for a while, trying to remember
everything Albert had said, trying to make a mental picture of the Big
Bang and that critical third-second instant when everything got frozen...
and not really succeeding. So I called Albert again and said, "More
hospitable how?"
"Ah, Robin," he said-nothing ever takes him by surprise "that's a
question I can't answer. We don't even know what all the Machian features
of the universe are, but maybe... Maybe," he said, showing by the crinide
at the corners of his eyes that he was only guessing to humor me, "maybe
immortality? Maybe a faster synaptic speed of an organic brain, i. e.,
higher intelligence? Maybe only more planets that are suitable for life to
evolve? Any of the above. Or all of them. The important thing is that we
can theorize that such 'more hospitable' features could exist, and that it
should be possible to deduce them from a proper theoretical basis.
Henrietta went that far. Then she went a little further. Suppose the
Heechee (she suggested) learned a little more astrophysics than we,
decided what the right features would be-and set out to produce them! How
would they go about it? Well, one way would be to shrink the universe back
to the primordial state, and start over again with a new Big Bang! How
could that happen? If you can create and destroy mass-easy! Juggle it
around. Stop the expansion. Start it contracting again. Then somehow stay
outside of the point concentration, wait for it to explode again-and then,
from outside the monobloc, do whatever had to be done to change the
fundamental dimensionless numbers of the universe, so that a new one was
born that would be-well, call it heaven."
My eyes were popping. "Is that possible?"
"To you or me? Now? No. Absolutely impossible. Wouldn't have a clue
where to begin."
"Not to you or me, dummy! To the Heechee!"
"Ah, Robin," he said mournfully, "who can say? I don't see how, but
that doesn't mean they wouldn't. I can't even guess how to manipulate the
universe to make it come out right. But that might not be necessary. You
have to assume they would have some way of existing, essentially, forever.
That's necessary even to do it once. And if forever, why, then you could
simply make random changes and see what happened, until you got the
universe you wanted."
He took time to look at his cold pipe thoughtfully for a moment, and
then put it in his sweatshirt pocket unlit. "That's as far as Henrietta
got with her dissertation before they really fell in on her. Because then
she said that the 'missing mass' might in fact prove that the Heechee had
really begun to interfere with the orderly development of the universe-she
said they were removing mass from the outer galaxies to make them fall
back more rapidly. Perhaps, she thought, they were also adding mass at the
center-if there is one. And she said that that might explain why the
Heechee had run away. They started the process, she guessed, and then went
off to hide somewhere, in some sort of timeless stasis, maybe like a big
black hole, until it ran its course and they were ready to come out and
start things over again. That's when it really bit the fan! no wonder. Can
you imagine a bunch of physics professors trying to cope with something
like that? They said she should try for a degree in Heechee psychology
instead of astrophysics. They said she had nothing to offer but conjecture
and assumption-no way to test the theory, just a guess. And they thought
it was a bad one. So they refused her dissertation, and she didn't get her
doctorate, and so she went off to Gateway to be a prospector and wound up
where she is. Dead. And," he said thoughtfully, pulling the pipe out
again, "I do actually, Robin, think she was wrong, or at least sloppy. We
have very little evidence that the Heechee had any possible way of
affecting matters in any galaxy but our own, and she was talking about the
entire universe."
"But you're not sure?"
"Not a bit sure, Robin."
I yelled, "Don't you at least have a fucking guess?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said gloomily, "but no more than that. Please
calm yourself. See, the scale is wrong. The universe is too big, from
anything we know. And the time is too short. The Heechee were here less
than a million years ago, and the expansion time of the universe to date
is something like twenty thousand times that long-recoil time could hardly
be less. It's mathematically bad odds that they would have picked that
particular time to show up."
"Show up?"
He coughed. "I left out a step, Robin. There's another guess in there,
and I'm afraid it's my own. Suppose this is the universe the Heechee
built. Suppose they somehow evolved in a less hospitable one, but didn't
like it, and caused it to contract to make a new one, which is the one
we're in. That doesn't fit badly, you know. They could have come Out to
look around, maybe found it just the way they wanted it. And now maybe the
ones who did the exploring have gone back to get the rest of them."
"Albert! For Christ's sake!"
He said gently, "Robin, I wouldn't be saying these things if I could
help it. It's only a conjecture. I don't think you have any idea how
difficult it is for me to conjecture in this way, and I wouldn't be able
to do it except for-well, here's the thing. There is one possible way for
something to survive a contraction and a new Big Bang, and that is to be
in a place where time effectively stops. What kind of place is that? Why,
a black hole. A big one. One big enough so that it is not losing mass by
quantum tunneling, and therefore can survive indefinitely. I know where
there's a black hole like that, Robin. Mass, about fifteen thousand times
the sun. Location, the center of our Galaxy." He glanced at his watch and
changed expression. "If my calculations are close, Robin," he said, "your
wife should be arriving about now."
"Einstein! The first damn thing she's going to do is rewrite you!"
He twinkled. "She already has, Robin," he pointed out, "and one of the
things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by
some comical or personally rewarding comment."
"You're telling me I ought to be all tensed up?"
"Well, not really, Robin," he said. "All this is quite theoretical-if
that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps
not. That black hole in the center of our Galaxy is at least one
possibility for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight
time in a Heechee ship, not all that distant. And-I said that we had
determined the objective of the Oldest One's course? That was it, Robin.
It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around."
I was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was
having the time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn't
tired of Essie, so I stayed around until she at last admitted she had
everything she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we
were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman
was there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last
crumb under her toenail. I wasn't worried. I could see that Essie was all
right, and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then
she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep
Wan in shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had
set up a million-dollar research and development company-with Wilma as
president-to see what could be done with it, and that's how easy it was.
That's how easy it all is, when everything's going your way.
Or almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when
I thought about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the
middle of the Galaxy (if that's where they were). That is very unsettling,
you know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out
breathing fire and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next
year, why, sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he'd said
ten years or even a hundred I could have worked up pensiveness as a
minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical
times-well, hell! How easy is it to worry about something that might not
happen for another billion years?
And yet the notion just would not go away.
It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought
in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her
stretch pants, brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said,
"Will probably not happen, you know, Robin."
"How can you be so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets
programmed into those ships. We've checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred
and fifty of them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages
says there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who's to say one
of them isn't racing in to tell the Heechee what we're doing right now?"
"Dear Robin," she said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a
friendly way, "drink your coffee. You know nothing about statistical
mathematics and, anyway, who's to say they would mean to do us harm?"
"They wouldn't have to mean to! I know what would happen, for God's
sake. It's obvious. It's what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians,
the Eskimos, the American Indians-it's what has always happened, all
through history. A people that comes up against a superior culture is
destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can't survive!"
"Always, Robin?"
"Oh, come on!"
"No, mean it," she insisted. "Counterexample: What happened when Romans
discovered Gauls?"
"They conquered the shit out of them, that's what!"
"True. No, nearly true. But then, a couple of hundred years later, who
conquered who, Robin? The barbarians conquered Rome, Robin."
"I'm not talking about conquest! I'm talking about a racial inferiority
complex. What happens to any race that lives in contact with a race
smarter than they are?"
"Why, different things under different circumstances, Robin. Greeks
were smarter than Romans, Robin. Romans never had a new idea in their
lives, except to build with or kill people with. Romans didn't mind. They
even took Greeks right into their homes, to teach them all about poetry
and history and science. As slaves. Dear Robin," she said, putting down
her coffee cup and coming up to sit next to me, "wisdom is a kind of
resource. Tell me. When you want information, who do you ask?"
I thought it over for a minute. "Well, Albert, mostly," I admitted. "I
see what you're saying, but that's different. It's a computer's job to
know more and think faster than I do, in certain ways. That's what they're
for."
"Exactly, dear Robin. As far as can tell, you have not been destroyed."
She rubbed her cheek against mine and then sat up straight. "You are
restless," she decided. "What would you like to do?"
"What are my options?" I asked, reaching for her, but she shook her
head.
"Don't mean that, anyway not this minute. Want to watch PV? I have a
taped section from tonight's news, when you and Wilma were scheming, which
shows your good friends visiting their ancestral home."
"The Old Ones in Africa? Saw it this afternoon." Some local promoter
had thought it would be good publicity to show Olduvai Gorge to the Old
Ones. He was right. The Old Ones didn't like it a lot-hated the heat,
chirped grumpily at each other about the shots they had had to take,
didn't care much for the air flight. But they were news. So were Paul and
Lurvy, at the moment in Dortmund to arrange for a mausoleum for Lurvy's
father as soon as his remains got back from the Food Factory. So was Wan,
getting rich on PV appearances as The Boy from Heechee Heaven; so was
Janine, having a marvelous time meeting her singing-star pen-pals at last
in the flesh. So was I. We were all rich in money and fame. What they
would make of it, after all, I could not guess. But what I wanted at last
became clear. "Get a sweater, Essie," I said. "Let's go for a walk."
We strolled down to the edge of the icy water, holding hands. "Why, is
snowing," Essie announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters
over our heads. Usually you can't see it very clearly, but tonight,
edge-lighted from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it
was a milky dome, broken with reflections from lights on the ground,
stretching from horizon to horizon.
"Is it too cold for you?"
"Perhaps just here, near the water," she acknowledged. We climbed back
up the slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench
to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never
gets really cold under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running
naked through seven or eight hundred kilometers before it hits the
Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob
under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.
"Essie," I said, "I've been thinking."
"Know that, dear Robin," she said.
"About the Oldest One. The machine."
"Oh, really?" She pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp
from vagrant drifts from the fountain. "Very fine machine," she said.
"Quite tame, since you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external
effectors, or mobility, or access to control circuits of any kind-yes,
quite tame."
"What I want to know," I said, "is whether you could build one like it
for a human being."
"Ah!" she said. "Hum. Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of
course, large sums of money, but yes."
"And you could store a human personality in it-after the person died, I
mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?"
"Quite a good bit better, would say. Some difficulties. Mostly
biochemical, not my department." She leaned back, looking upward at the
iridescent bubble overhead and said consideringly: "When I write computer
program, Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it
what it is and what it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same.
Rests on direct chemical readout of brain. Old Ones brain is not
chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage
is very far from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual
Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee man-aged to convert
process without any apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes.
When you die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine,
then put machine in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black
hole, where it can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode
was not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die
for, say, five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will
you promise that for me, please."
There are times when something catches me so by surprise that I don't
know whether to cry, or get angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up
quickly and stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do,
and laughed. "Sometimes you startle me, Essie," I said.
"But why, Robin?" She reached out and took my hand. "Suppose it was the
other way around, hey? Suppose it was I who, many years ago, had been
through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which
someone I loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I
could never see that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not
think I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way,
to tell her how I felt?"
I started to answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips.
"Was rhetorical question, Robin. We both know answer. If your Kiara is
still alive, she will want very much to hear from you. This is beyond
doubt. So," she said, "here is plan. You will die-not soon, I hope. Brain
will go into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But
one copy flies off to black hole to look for Kiara, and finds her, and
says to her, 'Kiara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you
to know I would have given life itself to save you.' And then, Robin, do
you know what Kiara will answer to this strange machine that appears out
of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?"
I didn't! The whole point was that I didn't! But I didn't say so,
because Essie didn't give me a chance. She said, "Then Kiara will answer,
'Why, Robin dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are
the one whom I most trust and respect and love.' I know she would say
this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me."
At six o'clock on Robin Broadhead's tenth birthday, he had a party. The
woman next door gave him socks, a board game and, as a sort of joke
present, a book entitled Everything We Know About the Heechee. Their
tunnels had only recently been discovered on Venus, and there was much
conjecture about the location of the place where the Heechee went, their
physical appearance and their purposes. The joke part of the book was
that, although it contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were
blank.
At that same time on that same day-or at any rate, at its equivalent in
local time, which was a great deal different-a person was taking a turn
under the stars before retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an
anniversary of a sort, but not a party. He was a long way from Robin
Broadhead's birthday cake and candles, more than forty thousand
light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a
name, but out of respect and because of the work he had done, he was
usually called something which translates as "Captain". Over his
squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close.
When he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully
designed glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his
entire planet. Sullen red type-Ms. brighter than the Moon as seen from
Earth. Three golden Cs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at.
There were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all.
Captain could identify every star he saw, because there were only ten
thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest
clearly visible to the naked eye. And beyond those familiar
thousands-well, he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled,
but he knew from his many spaceflights that past them all was the
turbulent, almost invisible, bluetinged shell that surrounded everything
he and his people owned of the universe. It was a sky that would have
terrified a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would
happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.
Wide of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as
he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It
was a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand
light-years away Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked
his first dope, broke a bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on
nearly ten kilos before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said
good-night to his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time,
his sexual mates as well), removed the necklaces of rank from his
shoulders, unstrapped the life-support and communications unit from
between his wide spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped
inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft,
spongy, dense sleeping litter. The captain's people had come from
burrowers rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their
prehistoric ancestors had slept. When the captain had made himself
comfortable, he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the
top of the cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his
people had done to sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves
over to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and
worrisome sleep for all of them.
The joke of Robin's birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was
not quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it
was evident that they were very unlike human beings, but in very
significant ways-the same! In curiosity. Only curiosity could have led
them to visit so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology.
Heechee science was not the same as human, but it rested on the same
thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stretch of the mind into
tininess and immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In
basic chemistry of the body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate
quite compatible food.
What was central to what everyone knew about the Heechee or hoped, or
guessed-was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all
that different from human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in
civilization and science. Maybe not even that much. And in that what
everyone guessed (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years
passed between the time the first crude Heechee ship ventured to try
mass-cancellation as a means of transport and the time when their
expeditions had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of
Squint's ancestors puzzled over what to do with the antelope bone his
mother had given him.)
Eight hundred years-but what years!
The Heechee exploded. There were a billion of them. Then ten. Then a
hundred. They built wheeled and rollered vehicles to conquer the
unfamiliar surface of their planet, and in no more than a couple of
generations were off into space on rockets; a few generations more, and
they were searching the planets of nearby stars. They learned as they
went. They deployed instruments of immense size and great subtlety-a
neutron star for a gravity detector; an interferometer a light-year across
money. That's a good thing, especially for Wan and Janine, who have a
complicated relationship to sort out, in a complicatedly unwelcoming
world. My wife, Essie, is in the best of health. I love her. When I die,
that is, when even Full Medical can't patch me up any more, I have a
little plan about how to deal with someone else I love, and that satisfies
me. Almost everything satisfies me. The only exception is my science
advisor, Albert, who keeps trying to explain Mach's Principle to me.
When we took over Heechee Heaven, we got it all. The way to control
Heechee ships. The way to build Heechee ships, including the theory that
makes it possible to go faster than light. No, it doesn't involve
"hyperspace" or the "fourth dimension". It is very simple. Acceleration
multiplies mass, so says Einstein-the real one, not Albert. But if the
rest mass is zero it does not matter how many times you multiply it. It
remains zero. Albert says that mass can be created, and proves it by basic
logical principles: it exists, therefore it can be created. Therefore it
can be eliminated, since what can be made to be can also be made to stop
being. That is the Heechee secret, and with Albert's help to set up the
experiment, and Morton's help to coerce the Gateway Corp into making ships
available, we tried it out. It didn't cost me a cent; one of the
advantages of great wealth is that you don't have to spend it. All you
have to do is get other people to spend it for you, and that's what law
programs are for.
So we sent two Fives out at once from Gateway. One was on lander power
only, and it contained two people and a cylinder of solid aluminum with
strain detectors attached. The other held a full crew, ready for an actual
mission. The instrument ship had a live camera pickup with an image split
three ways: one on the gravity meter, one on the second ship, one on a
cesium-atom digital clock.
To my eyes the experiment didn't show a thing. The second ship began to
disappear, and the gravity meter recorded its disappearance. Big deal! But
Albert was elated. "Its mass began to disappear before it did, Robin! My
God. Anyone could have tried that experiment any time in the last dozen
years! There's going to be at least a ten-million-dollar science bonus for
this!"
"Put it in petty cash," I said, and stretched, and rolled over to kiss
Essie, because we happened to be in bed at the time.
"Is very interesting, dear Robin," she said drowsily, and kissed me
back. Albert grinned and averted his eyes, partly because Essie has been
tinkering with his program and partly because he knew as well as I did
that what she said was politely untrue. Astrophysics did not much interest
my Essie. What interested her was the chance to play with working Heechee
machine intelligences, and that interested her very much. Eighteen hours a
day much, until she had tracked down all the major systems in what was
left of the Oldest One, and the Dead Men, and the Dead Non-Men whose
memories went back to an African savannah the better part of a million
years ago. Not that she cared a lot about what was in the memories; but
how it was there was her very business, at which she was very good.
Reshuffling my Albert program was the least of what Essie got out of
Heechee Heaven. What we all got was a very great deal indeed. The grand
charts of the Galaxy, showing everywhere the Heechee had been. The grand
charts of black holes, showing where they are now. Even where Kiara is. As
one tiny fringe benefit, I even got the answer to one question that on a
purely subjective level had been interesting me very much: why was I still
alive? The ship that carried me to Heechee Heaven had flipped over into
deceleration mode after nineteen days. By all the laws of parity and
common sense, that meant it would not arrive for another nineteen, by
which time I should have been surely dead; but in fact it docked in five.
And I wasn't dead at all, or not quite; but why?
Albert gave me the answer. Every flight ever successfully completed in
a Heechee ship had been between two bodies that, relatively, were more or
less at rest-a few tens or at most a few hundreds of kilometers a second
difference in their relative velocities. no more. Not enough to make a
difference. But my flight had been pursuing an object itself in very rapid
motion. It had been almost all acceleration. The slowdown had taken only a
tiny fraction of the speedup. And so I lived.
And all that was very satisfying, and yet... And yet there is always a
price.
There always has been. Every big jump forward has carried a hidden
cost, all through history. Man invented agriculture. That meant someone
had to plant de cotton and someone had to hoe de corn. And dat's how
slavery was born. Man invented the automobile, and got a dividend of
pollution and highway death. Man got curious about the way the sun shines,
and out of his curiosity came the H-bomb. Man found the Heechee artifacts
and tracked down some of their secrets. And what did we get? For one
thing, we got Payter, almost killing a world, with a power no one had ever
had before him. For another we got some brand-new questions, the answers
to which I have not yet quite nerved myself up to face. Questions that
Albert wants to try to answer, about Mach's Principle; and that Henrietta
raised, with her talk about Point X and the "missing mass". And a very big
question in my own mind. When the Oldest One broke Heechee Heaven out of
its orbit and sent it flying through space toward the core of the Galaxy
what, exactly, was he heading toward?
The scariest, I guess, and also the most satisfying, I know, moment of
my life was when we had burned the feelers off the Oldest One and, armed
with Henrietta's instructions, sat down before the control board of
Heechee Heaven. It took two to make it move. Lurvy Herter-Hall and I were
the two most experienced pilots present-if you didn't count Wan, who was
off with Janine, rounding up the waking Old Ones to tell them there had
been a change in government. Lurvy took the right-hand seat and I took the
left (wondering a lot just what strange-shaped butt had first sat in it).
And there we went. It took more than a month to get back to orbiting the
Moon, which was the point I had picked out. It wasn't a wasted month,
there was plenty to do on Heechee Heaven; but it went pretty slowly,
because I was in a very big hurry to get home.
It took all the nerve I had to squeeze that teat, but, you know, it
wasn't all that hard. Once we understood that the main bank of controls
carried the codes for all the preset objectives-there are more than
fifteen thousand of them, all over the Galaxy and some outside-it was just
a matter of knowing which code was which. Then, all of us really delighted
with ourselves, we decided to show off. We got a squawk from the
radio-astronomers on the far side because our circumlunar orbit was
getting in the way of their dishes every time we came around. So we moved.
You do that with the secondary boards, the ones no one has ever dared to
touch in midflight and that don't seem to do much on the original launch.
Main boards, preprogrammed objectives; secondary boards, any point you
want, provided you can spell out its galactic coordinates. But the joker
is that you can't use the secondary boards until you've nulled the
primaries by setting them all down to zero-that translates to a clear deep
red color on each-and if any prospector ever happened to do that on his
own, he lost his programming to get back to Gateway. How simple everything
is once you know. And so we put that big son-of-a-bitching artifact, half
a million metric tons of it, in close Earth orbit, and invited company.
The company I wanted most was my wife. What I wanted next was my
science program, Albert Einstein-that's not really a reflection on Essie,
you know, because she wrote him. It was a tossup whether I went down to
her or she came up to me, but not in her mind. She wanted to get her hands
On the machine intelligences in Heechee Heaven, I would judge, at least as
much as I wanted to get mine on her. In a 100-minute Earth orbit the
transmission time isn't bad, anyway. As soon as we were in range the
machine Albert had programmed for me was talking to him, pumping
everything it had learned into him, and by the time I was ready to talk to
him he was ready to talk back.
Of course it wasn't the same. Albert in full three-dimensional color in
the tank at home was a lot more fun to chat with than black-and-white
Albert on a flat plate in Heechee Heaven. But until some new equipment
came up from Earth that was all I had, and anyway it was the same Albert.
"Good to see you again, Robin," he said benevolently, poking the stem of
his pipe toward me. "I guess you know you have about a million messages
waiting for you?"
"They'll wait." Anyway, I had already had about a million, or it seemed
that way. What they mostly said was that everybody was annoyed but, in the
long run, delighted; and I was once again very rich. "What I want to hear
first," I said, "is what you want to tell me."
"Sure thing, Robin." He tapped out his pipe, regarding me. "Well," he
said, "technology first. We know the general theory of the Heechee drive,
and we're getting a handle on the faster-than-light radio. As to the
information-handling circuits in the Dead Men and so on-as I am sure you
know," he twinkled, "Cospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead is on her way to join
you. I think we may confidently expect considerable progress there, very
quickly. In a few days a volunteer crew will go to the Food Factory. We
are pretty sure it, too, can be controlled, and if so it will be brought
into some nearby orbit for study and, I think I can promise, duplication.
I don't suppose you want to hear about minor technology in detail just
now?"
"Not really," I said. "Or not right at this minute."
"Then," he said, nodding as he filled the pipe again, "let me get to
some theoretical considerations. First there is the question of black
holes. We have unequivocally located the one your friend, Gelle-Klara
Moynlin, is in. I believe it would be possible to send a ship there with
reasonable assurance that it would arrive without serious damage. Return,
however, is another question. There appears to be nothing in the Heechee
stores that gives us a cookbook recipe for getting anything out of a black
hole. Theory, yes. But if one should desire to convert the theory into
practice that will require R&D. A lot of it. I would hesitate to promise
results in less than, say, a matter of years. More likely decades. I
know," he said, leaning forward earnestly, "that this is a matter of
personal importance to you, Robin. It also may be a matter of grave
importance to all of us, by which I mean not only the human race but
machine intelligences as well." I had never seen him look so serious. "You
see," he said, "the destination of the artifact, Heechee Heaven, has also
been unequivocally identified. May I show you a picture?"
That was rhetoric, of course. I didn't reply, and he didn't wait. He
shrank down into a corner of the flatplate screen while the main picture
appeared. It was a wash of white, shaped like a very amateurishly drawn
Turkish crescent. It was not symmetrical. The crescent was off to one
side, and the rest of the picture was black except for an irregular
sprinkle of light that completed the horns of the crescent and protracted
them into a hazy ellipse.
"It is too bad you cannot see this in color, Robin," said Albert,
squinting up from his corner of the screen. "It is blue rather than white.
Shall I tell you what you are seeing? It is orbiting matter around some
very large object. The matter to your left, which is coming toward us,
travels fast enough to emit light. The matter to the right, which is going
away, travels more slowly relative to us. What we are seeing is matter
turning into radiation as it is drawn into an extremely large black hole,
which is located at the center of our Galaxy."
"I thought the speed of light was not relative!" I snapped.
He expanded to fill the screen again. "It is not, Robin, but the orbit
velocity of the matter which produces it is. That picture is from the
Gateway file, and until just recently it was not located in space. But now
it is clear that it is at, indeed that in a sense it forms, the galactic
core."
He paused while he lit his pipe, looking at me steadily. Well, that's
not quite true. There was the split-second lag, and even Albert's circuits
couldn't do anything about it; if I moved his gaze lingered where I had
been for just long enough to be disconcerting. I didn't rush him, and when
he had finished puffing the pipe alight he said:
"Robin, I am often unsure of what information to volunteer to you. If
you ask me a question, that's different. About any subject you suggest, I
will tell you as much of what I know as you will listen to. I will also
tell you what may be so, if you ask for a hypothesis; and I will volunteer
hypotheses when, according to the constraints written into my program,
that seems appropriate. Gospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead has written quite
complex normative instructions for this sort of decision-making, but, to
simplify, they come down to an equation. Let V represent the 'value' of a
hypothesis. Let P represent its probability of being true. If I can
complete the sum of VP so that it equals at least one, then I should, and
do, volunteer the hypothesis. But, oh, Robin, how hard it is to assign the
correct numerical values to P and V/In the specific case now at issue I
cannot be in any way sure of any value I can give its probability. But its
importance is very high. To all intents, it might as well be regarded as
infinite."
By then he had me sweating. What I know for sure about Albert's
programming is that the longer he takes to tell me something, the less he
thinks I am going to like hearing it. "Albert," I said, "get the hell on
with it."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding, but unwilling to be rushed, "but
let me first say that this conjecture satisfies not only known
astrophysics, although on a rather complex level, but also some other
questions, e. g., where Heechee Heaven was going when you turned it around
and why the Heechee themselves disappeared. Before I can give you the
conjecture I must review four main points, as follows.
"One. The quantities Tiny Jim referred to as 'gosh numbers'. These are
numerical quantities, mostly of the sort called 'dimensionless' because
they are the same in any units you measure. The mass ratio between the
electron and the proton. The Dirac number to express the difference
between electromagnetic and gravitational force. The Eddington
fine-structure constant. And so forth. We know these numbers to great
precision. What we do not know is why they are what they are. Why
shouldn't the fine-structure constant be, say, 150 instead of 137-plus? If
we understood astrophysics-if we had a complete theory-we should be able
to deduce these numbers from the theory. We do have a good theory, but we
can't deduce the gosh numbers from it. Why? Is it possible," he asked
gravely, "that these numbers are in some way accidental?"
He paused, puffing on his pipe, and then held up two fingers. "Two.
Mach's Principle. This also turns Out to be a question, but perhaps a
somewhat easier one. My late predecessor," he said, twinkling a little-I
think to reassure me that this was, indeed, easier to handle-"my late
predecessor gave us the theory of relativity, which is commonly understood
to mean that everything is relative to something else excepting only the
velocity of light. When you are at home on Tappan Sea, Robin, you weigh
about eighty-five kilograms. That is to say, that is a measure of how much
you and the planet Earth attract each other; it is your weight, in a
sense, relative to the Earth. We also have a quality called 'mass'. The
best measure of 'mass' is the force necessary to accelerate an object, say
you, from a state of rest. We usually consider 'mass' and 'weight' to be
about the same, and on the surface of the Earth they are, but mass is
supposed to be an intrinsic quality of matter, while weight is always
relative to something else. But," he twinkled again, "let's do a
gedanke-experiment, Robin. Let's suppose that you're the only thing in the
universe. There's no other matter. What would you weigh? Nothing. What
would your mass be? Ah, that's the question. Let's suppose you have a
little rocket-belt and you decided to accelerate yourself. You then
measure the acceleration and compute the force to move you, and you come
out with your mass-do you? No, Robin, you do not. Because there is nothing
to measure movement against! 'Moving', as a concept, is meaningless. So
mass itself-according to Mach's Principle-depends on some external system,
Mach thought it might be what he called 'the entire background of the
universe', to be meaningful. And according to Mach's Principle, as my
predecessor and others extended it, so do all the other 'intrinsic'
characteristics of matter, energy and space... including the 'gosh
numbers'. Robin, am I wearying you?"
"You bet your ass you are, Albert," I snarled, "but go ahead!" He
smiled and held up three fingers. "Three. What Henrietta called Point X'.
As you remember, Henrietta failed her doctoral defense, but I have made a
study of her dissertation and I am able to say what she meant by it. For
the first three seconds after the Big Bang, which is to say the beginning
of the universe as we now know it, the entire universe was relatively
compact, exceedingly hot, and entirely symmetrical. Henrietta's
dissertation quoted at length from an old Cambridge mathematician named
Tong B. Tang and others; the point they made was that after that time,
after what Henrietta called 'Point X', the symmetry became 'frozen'. All
the constants we now observe became fixed at that point. All the gosh
numbers. They did not exist before 'Point X'. They have existed, and are
unchangeable, ever since.
"So at Point X in time, three seconds after the beginning of the Big
Bang, something happened. It may have been some quite random event-some
turbulence in the exploding cloud.
"Or it may have been deliberate."
He stopped and smoked for a while, watching me. When I did not react he
sighed and held up four fingers. "Four, Robin, and the last. I do
apologize for this long preamble. The final point in Henrietta's
conjecture had to do with 'missing mass'. There simply does not appear to
be enough mass in the universe to fit the otherwise very successful
theories of the Big Bang. Here Henrietta made an immense leap in her
doctoral dissertation. She suggested that the Heechee had learned how to
create mass and destroy it-and in this, as we now know, she was correct,
although it was only a guess on her part, and the seniors before whom she
conducted the defense of her dissertation were very quick to challenge it.
She then made a further leap. She suggested that the Heechee had, in fact,
caused some mass to disappear. Not on a ship, although if she had guessed
that she would have been correct. On a very large scale. On a
universe-wide scale, in fact. She conjectured that they had studied the
'gosh numbers' as we have, and come to certain conclusions which seem to
be true. Here, Robin, it gets a little tricky, so pay close attention-but
we are almost home.
"You see, these fundamental constants like the 'gosh numbers' determine
whether or not life can exist in the universe. Among very many other
things, to be sure. But if some of them were a little higher or a little
lower, life could not exist. Do you see the logical consequence of that
statement? Yes, I think you do. It is a simple syllogism. Major premise,
the 'gosh numbers' are not fixed by natural law but could have been
different if certain different events had taken place at 'Point X'. Minor
premise, if they were different in certain directions, the universe would
be less hospitable to life. Conclusion? Ah, that's the heart of it.
Conclusion: If they were different in certain other directions, the
universe might be more hospitable to life."
And he stopped talking, and sat regarding me, reaching down into a
carpet slipper with one hand to scratch the sole of his foot.
I don't know which of us would have out-waited the other then. I was
trying to digest a lot of very indigestible ideas, and old Albert, he was
determined to give me time to digest them. Before either of those could
happen Paul Hall came trotting into the cubicle I had made my own yelling,
"Company! Hey, Robin! We've got visitors!"
Well, my first thought was Essie, of course; we'd talked; I knew she
was on her way to the Kennedy launchport at least, even if not actually
waiting there for our orbit to settle down and get off. I stared at Paul
and then at my watch. "There hasn't been time," I said, because there
hadn't.
He was grinning. "Come and see the poor bastards," he chortled.
And that's what they were, all right. Six of them, crammed into a Five.
Launched from Gateway less than twenty-four hours after I had taken off
from the Moon, carrying enough armament to wipe out a whole division of
Oldest Ones, ready to save and profit. They had flown all the way out
after Heechee Heaven, reversed course and flown all the way back.
Somewhere en route we must have passed them without knowing it. Poor
bastards! But they were pretty decent guys, volunteers, taking off on a
mission that must have seemed insecure even by Gateway standards. I
promised them that they would get a share of the profits there was plenty
to go around. It wasn't their fault that we didn't need them, especially
considering how much we might have needed them if we had.
So we made them welcome. Janine proudly showed them around. Wan,
grinning and waving his sleep-gun around, introduced them to the gentle
Old Ones, placid in the face of this new invasion. And by the time all
that settled down I realized that what I needed most was food and sleep,
and I took both.
When I woke up the first news I got was that Essie was on her way, but
not due for a while yet. I fidgeted around for a while, trying to remember
everything Albert had said, trying to make a mental picture of the Big
Bang and that critical third-second instant when everything got frozen...
and not really succeeding. So I called Albert again and said, "More
hospitable how?"
"Ah, Robin," he said-nothing ever takes him by surprise "that's a
question I can't answer. We don't even know what all the Machian features
of the universe are, but maybe... Maybe," he said, showing by the crinide
at the corners of his eyes that he was only guessing to humor me, "maybe
immortality? Maybe a faster synaptic speed of an organic brain, i. e.,
higher intelligence? Maybe only more planets that are suitable for life to
evolve? Any of the above. Or all of them. The important thing is that we
can theorize that such 'more hospitable' features could exist, and that it
should be possible to deduce them from a proper theoretical basis.
Henrietta went that far. Then she went a little further. Suppose the
Heechee (she suggested) learned a little more astrophysics than we,
decided what the right features would be-and set out to produce them! How
would they go about it? Well, one way would be to shrink the universe back
to the primordial state, and start over again with a new Big Bang! How
could that happen? If you can create and destroy mass-easy! Juggle it
around. Stop the expansion. Start it contracting again. Then somehow stay
outside of the point concentration, wait for it to explode again-and then,
from outside the monobloc, do whatever had to be done to change the
fundamental dimensionless numbers of the universe, so that a new one was
born that would be-well, call it heaven."
My eyes were popping. "Is that possible?"
"To you or me? Now? No. Absolutely impossible. Wouldn't have a clue
where to begin."
"Not to you or me, dummy! To the Heechee!"
"Ah, Robin," he said mournfully, "who can say? I don't see how, but
that doesn't mean they wouldn't. I can't even guess how to manipulate the
universe to make it come out right. But that might not be necessary. You
have to assume they would have some way of existing, essentially, forever.
That's necessary even to do it once. And if forever, why, then you could
simply make random changes and see what happened, until you got the
universe you wanted."
He took time to look at his cold pipe thoughtfully for a moment, and
then put it in his sweatshirt pocket unlit. "That's as far as Henrietta
got with her dissertation before they really fell in on her. Because then
she said that the 'missing mass' might in fact prove that the Heechee had
really begun to interfere with the orderly development of the universe-she
said they were removing mass from the outer galaxies to make them fall
back more rapidly. Perhaps, she thought, they were also adding mass at the
center-if there is one. And she said that that might explain why the
Heechee had run away. They started the process, she guessed, and then went
off to hide somewhere, in some sort of timeless stasis, maybe like a big
black hole, until it ran its course and they were ready to come out and
start things over again. That's when it really bit the fan! no wonder. Can
you imagine a bunch of physics professors trying to cope with something
like that? They said she should try for a degree in Heechee psychology
instead of astrophysics. They said she had nothing to offer but conjecture
and assumption-no way to test the theory, just a guess. And they thought
it was a bad one. So they refused her dissertation, and she didn't get her
doctorate, and so she went off to Gateway to be a prospector and wound up
where she is. Dead. And," he said thoughtfully, pulling the pipe out
again, "I do actually, Robin, think she was wrong, or at least sloppy. We
have very little evidence that the Heechee had any possible way of
affecting matters in any galaxy but our own, and she was talking about the
entire universe."
"But you're not sure?"
"Not a bit sure, Robin."
I yelled, "Don't you at least have a fucking guess?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said gloomily, "but no more than that. Please
calm yourself. See, the scale is wrong. The universe is too big, from
anything we know. And the time is too short. The Heechee were here less
than a million years ago, and the expansion time of the universe to date
is something like twenty thousand times that long-recoil time could hardly
be less. It's mathematically bad odds that they would have picked that
particular time to show up."
"Show up?"
He coughed. "I left out a step, Robin. There's another guess in there,
and I'm afraid it's my own. Suppose this is the universe the Heechee
built. Suppose they somehow evolved in a less hospitable one, but didn't
like it, and caused it to contract to make a new one, which is the one
we're in. That doesn't fit badly, you know. They could have come Out to
look around, maybe found it just the way they wanted it. And now maybe the
ones who did the exploring have gone back to get the rest of them."
"Albert! For Christ's sake!"
He said gently, "Robin, I wouldn't be saying these things if I could
help it. It's only a conjecture. I don't think you have any idea how
difficult it is for me to conjecture in this way, and I wouldn't be able
to do it except for-well, here's the thing. There is one possible way for
something to survive a contraction and a new Big Bang, and that is to be
in a place where time effectively stops. What kind of place is that? Why,
a black hole. A big one. One big enough so that it is not losing mass by
quantum tunneling, and therefore can survive indefinitely. I know where
there's a black hole like that, Robin. Mass, about fifteen thousand times
the sun. Location, the center of our Galaxy." He glanced at his watch and
changed expression. "If my calculations are close, Robin," he said, "your
wife should be arriving about now."
"Einstein! The first damn thing she's going to do is rewrite you!"
He twinkled. "She already has, Robin," he pointed out, "and one of the
things she has taught me to do is to relieve tension, when appropriate, by
some comical or personally rewarding comment."
"You're telling me I ought to be all tensed up?"
"Well, not really, Robin," he said. "All this is quite theoretical-if
that much. And in terms of human life, perhaps a long way off. But perhaps
not. That black hole in the center of our Galaxy is at least one
possibility for the place where the Heechee went, and, in terms of flight
time in a Heechee ship, not all that distant. And-I said that we had
determined the objective of the Oldest One's course? That was it, Robin.
It was heading straight for that black hole when you turned it around."
I was tired of being on Heechee Heaven weeks before Essie was. She was
having the time of her life with the machine intelligences. But I wasn't
tired of Essie, so I stayed around until she at last admitted she had
everything she could use on rag-flop tape, and forty-eight hours later we
were back at the Tappan Sea. And ninety minutes after that Wilma Liederman
was there with all the tools of her trade, checking Essie out to the last
crumb under her toenail. I wasn't worried. I could see that Essie was all
right, and when Wilma agreed to stay on for a drink she admitted it. Then
she wanted to talk about the medical machine the Dead Men had used to keep
Wan in shape, all the time he was growing up, and before she left we had
set up a million-dollar research and development company-with Wilma as
president-to see what could be done with it, and that's how easy it was.
That's how easy it all is, when everything's going your way.
Or almost everything. There was still that sort of uneasy feeling when
I thought about the Heechee (if it was the Heechee) at that place at the
middle of the Galaxy (if that's where they were). That is very unsettling,
you know. If Albert had suggested that the Heechee were going to come out
breathing fire and destruction (or just come out at all) within the next
year, why, sure, I could have worried the hell out of that. If he'd said
ten years or even a hundred I could have worked up pensiveness as a
minimum, and probably full-scale fright. But when you come to astronomical
times-well, hell! How easy is it to worry about something that might not
happen for another billion years?
And yet the notion just would not go away.
It made me fidgety through dinner, after Wilma left, and when I brought
in the coffee Essie was curled in front of the fireplace, very trim in her
stretch pants, brushing her long hair, and she looked up at me and said,
"Will probably not happen, you know, Robin."
"How can you be so sure? There are fifteen thousand Heechee targets
programmed into those ships. We've checked out, what? Fewer than a hundred
and fifty of them, and one of those was Heechee Heaven. Law of averages
says there are a hundred others like that somewhere, and who's to say one
of them isn't racing in to tell the Heechee what we're doing right now?"
"Dear Robin," she said, turning to rub her nose against my knee in a
friendly way, "drink your coffee. You know nothing about statistical
mathematics and, anyway, who's to say they would mean to do us harm?"
"They wouldn't have to mean to! I know what would happen, for God's
sake. It's obvious. It's what happened to the Tahitians, the Tasmanians,
the Eskimos, the American Indians-it's what has always happened, all
through history. A people that comes up against a superior culture is
destroyed. Nobody means it. They just can't survive!"
"Always, Robin?"
"Oh, come on!"
"No, mean it," she insisted. "Counterexample: What happened when Romans
discovered Gauls?"
"They conquered the shit out of them, that's what!"
"True. No, nearly true. But then, a couple of hundred years later, who
conquered who, Robin? The barbarians conquered Rome, Robin."
"I'm not talking about conquest! I'm talking about a racial inferiority
complex. What happens to any race that lives in contact with a race
smarter than they are?"
"Why, different things under different circumstances, Robin. Greeks
were smarter than Romans, Robin. Romans never had a new idea in their
lives, except to build with or kill people with. Romans didn't mind. They
even took Greeks right into their homes, to teach them all about poetry
and history and science. As slaves. Dear Robin," she said, putting down
her coffee cup and coming up to sit next to me, "wisdom is a kind of
resource. Tell me. When you want information, who do you ask?"
I thought it over for a minute. "Well, Albert, mostly," I admitted. "I
see what you're saying, but that's different. It's a computer's job to
know more and think faster than I do, in certain ways. That's what they're
for."
"Exactly, dear Robin. As far as can tell, you have not been destroyed."
She rubbed her cheek against mine and then sat up straight. "You are
restless," she decided. "What would you like to do?"
"What are my options?" I asked, reaching for her, but she shook her
head.
"Don't mean that, anyway not this minute. Want to watch PV? I have a
taped section from tonight's news, when you and Wilma were scheming, which
shows your good friends visiting their ancestral home."
"The Old Ones in Africa? Saw it this afternoon." Some local promoter
had thought it would be good publicity to show Olduvai Gorge to the Old
Ones. He was right. The Old Ones didn't like it a lot-hated the heat,
chirped grumpily at each other about the shots they had had to take,
didn't care much for the air flight. But they were news. So were Paul and
Lurvy, at the moment in Dortmund to arrange for a mausoleum for Lurvy's
father as soon as his remains got back from the Food Factory. So was Wan,
getting rich on PV appearances as The Boy from Heechee Heaven; so was
Janine, having a marvelous time meeting her singing-star pen-pals at last
in the flesh. So was I. We were all rich in money and fame. What they
would make of it, after all, I could not guess. But what I wanted at last
became clear. "Get a sweater, Essie," I said. "Let's go for a walk."
We strolled down to the edge of the icy water, holding hands. "Why, is
snowing," Essie announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters
over our heads. Usually you can't see it very clearly, but tonight,
edge-lighted from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it
was a milky dome, broken with reflections from lights on the ground,
stretching from horizon to horizon.
"Is it too cold for you?"
"Perhaps just here, near the water," she acknowledged. We climbed back
up the slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench
to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never
gets really cold under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running
naked through seven or eight hundred kilometers before it hits the
Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob
under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.
"Essie," I said, "I've been thinking."
"Know that, dear Robin," she said.
"About the Oldest One. The machine."
"Oh, really?" She pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp
from vagrant drifts from the fountain. "Very fine machine," she said.
"Quite tame, since you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external
effectors, or mobility, or access to control circuits of any kind-yes,
quite tame."
"What I want to know," I said, "is whether you could build one like it
for a human being."
"Ah!" she said. "Hum. Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of
course, large sums of money, but yes."
"And you could store a human personality in it-after the person died, I
mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?"
"Quite a good bit better, would say. Some difficulties. Mostly
biochemical, not my department." She leaned back, looking upward at the
iridescent bubble overhead and said consideringly: "When I write computer
program, Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it
what it is and what it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same.
Rests on direct chemical readout of brain. Old Ones brain is not
chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage
is very far from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual
Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee man-aged to convert
process without any apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes.
When you die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine,
then put machine in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black
hole, where it can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode
was not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die
for, say, five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will
you promise that for me, please."
There are times when something catches me so by surprise that I don't
know whether to cry, or get angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up
quickly and stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do,
and laughed. "Sometimes you startle me, Essie," I said.
"But why, Robin?" She reached out and took my hand. "Suppose it was the
other way around, hey? Suppose it was I who, many years ago, had been
through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which
someone I loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I
could never see that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not
think I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way,
to tell her how I felt?"
I started to answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips.
"Was rhetorical question, Robin. We both know answer. If your Kiara is
still alive, she will want very much to hear from you. This is beyond
doubt. So," she said, "here is plan. You will die-not soon, I hope. Brain
will go into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But
one copy flies off to black hole to look for Kiara, and finds her, and
says to her, 'Kiara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you
to know I would have given life itself to save you.' And then, Robin, do
you know what Kiara will answer to this strange machine that appears out
of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?"
I didn't! The whole point was that I didn't! But I didn't say so,
because Essie didn't give me a chance. She said, "Then Kiara will answer,
'Why, Robin dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are
the one whom I most trust and respect and love.' I know she would say
this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me."
At six o'clock on Robin Broadhead's tenth birthday, he had a party. The
woman next door gave him socks, a board game and, as a sort of joke
present, a book entitled Everything We Know About the Heechee. Their
tunnels had only recently been discovered on Venus, and there was much
conjecture about the location of the place where the Heechee went, their
physical appearance and their purposes. The joke part of the book was
that, although it contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were
blank.
At that same time on that same day-or at any rate, at its equivalent in
local time, which was a great deal different-a person was taking a turn
under the stars before retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an
anniversary of a sort, but not a party. He was a long way from Robin
Broadhead's birthday cake and candles, more than forty thousand
light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a
name, but out of respect and because of the work he had done, he was
usually called something which translates as "Captain". Over his
squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close.
When he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully
designed glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his
entire planet. Sullen red type-Ms. brighter than the Moon as seen from
Earth. Three golden Cs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at.
There were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all.
Captain could identify every star he saw, because there were only ten
thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest
clearly visible to the naked eye. And beyond those familiar
thousands-well, he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled,
but he knew from his many spaceflights that past them all was the
turbulent, almost invisible, bluetinged shell that surrounded everything
he and his people owned of the universe. It was a sky that would have
terrified a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would
happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.
Wide of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as
he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It
was a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand
light-years away Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked
his first dope, broke a bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on
nearly ten kilos before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said
good-night to his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time,
his sexual mates as well), removed the necklaces of rank from his
shoulders, unstrapped the life-support and communications unit from
between his wide spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped
inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft,
spongy, dense sleeping litter. The captain's people had come from
burrowers rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their
prehistoric ancestors had slept. When the captain had made himself
comfortable, he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the
top of the cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his
people had done to sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves
over to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and
worrisome sleep for all of them.
The joke of Robin's birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was
not quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it
was evident that they were very unlike human beings, but in very
significant ways-the same! In curiosity. Only curiosity could have led
them to visit so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology.
Heechee science was not the same as human, but it rested on the same
thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stretch of the mind into
tininess and immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In
basic chemistry of the body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate
quite compatible food.
What was central to what everyone knew about the Heechee or hoped, or
guessed-was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all
that different from human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in
civilization and science. Maybe not even that much. And in that what
everyone guessed (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years
passed between the time the first crude Heechee ship ventured to try
mass-cancellation as a means of transport and the time when their
expeditions had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of
Squint's ancestors puzzled over what to do with the antelope bone his
mother had given him.)
Eight hundred years-but what years!
The Heechee exploded. There were a billion of them. Then ten. Then a
hundred. They built wheeled and rollered vehicles to conquer the
unfamiliar surface of their planet, and in no more than a couple of
generations were off into space on rockets; a few generations more, and
they were searching the planets of nearby stars. They learned as they
went. They deployed instruments of immense size and great subtlety-a
neutron star for a gravity detector; an interferometer a light-year across