"I'll have to think, dear," she said, feeling the hand that had killed
Stratos kneading the back of her neck.
So Lurvy was not unhappy when the trip was over and Janine called her
out of her private room, all thrilled and excited; the great glassy spiral
was filling with hot specks of darting golden light, the ship was lurching
tentatively in one direction and another; the mottled gray mud was gone
from the viewscreen and there were stars. More than stars. There was an
object that glowed blue in patches amid featureless gray. It was
lemonshaped and spun slowly, and Lurvy could form no idea of its size
until she perceived that the surface of the object was not featureless.
There were tiny projections jutting out here and there, and she recognized
the tiniest of them as Gateway-type ships, Ones and Threes, and there a
Five; the lemon had to be more than a kilometer long! Wan, grinning with
pride, settled himself in the central pilot seat (they had stuffed it with
extra clothing, a device that had never occurred to Wan), and grasped the
lander control levers. It was all Lurvy could do to keep her hands off.
But Wan had been performing this particular maneuver all his life. With
coarse competence he banged and slammed the ship into a downward spiral
that matched the slow spin of the blueeyed gray lemon, intersected one of
the waiting pits, docked, locked, and looked up for applause. They were on
Heechee Heaven.
The Food Factory had been the size of a skyscraper, but this was a
world. Perhaps, like Gateway, it had once been an asteroid; but, if so, it
had been so tooled and sculpted that there was no trace of original
structure. It was cubic kilometers of mass. It was a rotating mountain. So
much to explore! So much to learn!
And so much to fear. They skulked, or strutted, through the old halls,
and Lurvy realized she was clinging to her husband's hand. And Paul was
clinging back. She forced herself to observe and comment. The sides of the
walls were veined with luminous tracing of scarlet; the overhead was the
familiar blue Heecheemetal glow. On the floor-and it was really a floor;
they had weight here, though not more than a tenth of Earth-normal
diamond-shaped mounds contained what looked like soil and grew plants.
"Berryfruit," said Wan proudly over his shoulder, shrugging toward a
waist-high bush with fuzzed objects hanging among its emerald leaves. "We
can stop and eat some if you like."
"Not right now," said Lurvy. A dozen paces farther along the corridor
was another planted lozenge, this one with slate-green tendrils and soft,
squashed cauliflower-shaped buds. "What's that?"
He paused and looked at her. It was clear he thought it was a silly
question. "They are not good to eat," he shrilled scornfully. "Try the
berryfruit. They are quite tasty."
So the party paused, where two of the red-lined corridors came together
and one of them changed to blue. They peeled brown-green furry skins from
the berryfruit and nibbled at the juicy insides-first tentatively, then
with pleasure-while Wan explained the geography of Heechee Heaven. These
were the red sections, and they were the best to be in. There was food
here, and good places to sleep; and the ship was here, and here the Old
Ones never came. But didn't they sometimes wander out of their usual
places to pick the berryfruit? Yes, of course they did! But never (his
voice rising half an octave) here. It had never happened. Over there the
blue. His voice sank, in volume as well as pitch. The Old Ones came there
quite often, or to some parts of the blue. But it was all dead. If it were
not that the Dead Men's room was in the blue he would never go there. And
Lurvy, peering down the corridor he pointed to, felt a chill of incredible
age. It had the look of a Stonehenge or Gizeh or Angkor Wat. Even the
ceilings were dimmer, and the plantings there were sparse and puny. The
green, he went on, was all very well, but it was not working properly. The
water jets did not function. The plantings died. And the gold-
His pleasure faded when he talked about the gold. That was where the
Old Ones lived. If it were not for needing books, and sometimes clothes,
he would never go to the gold, though the Dead Men were always urging him
to. He did not want to see the Old Ones.
Paul cleared his throat to say: "But I think we have to do that, Wan."
"Why?" the boy shrilled. "They are not interesting!"
Lurvy put her hand on his arm. "What's the matter, Wan?" she asked
kindly, observing his expression. What Wan felt always showed on his face.
He had never had the need to develop the skills of dissembling.
"He looks scared," Paul commented.
"He is not scared!" Wan retorted. "You do not understand this place! it
is not interesting to go to the gold!"
"Wan, dear," Lurvy said, "the thing is, it's worth taking chances to
find out more about the Heechee. I don't know if I can explain what it
means to us, but the least part of it is that we would get money for it. A
lot of money."
"He doesn't know what money is," Paul interrupted impatiently. "Wan.
Pay attention. We are going to do this. Tell us how the four of us can
safely explore the gold corridors."
"The four of us can not! One person can. I can," he boasted. He was
angry now, and showed it. Paul! Wan's feelings about him were mixed, but
most of the mixture were unfavorable. Speaking to Wan, Paul shaped his
words so carefully-so contemptuously. As though he did not think Wan were
smart enough to understand. When Wan and Janine were together, Paul was
always near. If Paul was a sample of human males, Wan was not proud to be
one. "I have gone to the gold many times," he boasted, "for books, or for
berryfruit, or just to watch the silly things they do. They are so funny!
But they are not entirely stupid, you know. I can go there safely. One
person can. Perhaps two people can, but if we all go they will surely see
us."
"And then?" Lurvy asked.
Wan shrugged defensively. He didn't really know the answer to that,
only that it had frightened his father. "They are not interesting," he
repeated, contradicting himself.
Janine licked her fingers and tossed the empty berryfruit skins to the
base of the bush. "You people," she sighed, "are unreal. Wan? Where do
these Old Ones come?"
"To the edge of the gold, always. Sometimes into the blue or the green."
"Well, if they like these berryfruits, and if you know a place where
they come to pick them, why don't we just leave a camera there? We can see
them. They can't see us."
Wan shrilled triumphantly, "Of course! You see, Lurvy, it is not
necessary to go there! Janine is right, only..." he hesitated "Janine?
What is a camera?"
As they went, Lurvy had to nerve herself to pass every intersection,
could not help staring down each corridor. But they heard nothing, and saw
nothing that moved. It was as quiet as the Food Factory when they first
set foot in it, and just as queer. Queerer. The traceries of light on
every wall, the patches of growing things-above all, the terrifying
thought that there were Heechee alive somewhere near. When they had
dropped off a camera by a berryfruit bush in a space where green, blue,
and gold came together, Wan bustled them away, directly to the room where
the Dead Men lived. That was first priority: to get to the radio that
would once again put them in touch with the rest of the world. Even if the
rest of the world was only old Payter, fidgeting resentfully around the
Food Factory. If they could not do that much, Lurvy reasoned, they had no
business being here at all, and they should return to the ship and head
for home; it was no good exploring if they could not report what they
found!
So Wan, courage returning in direct proportion to his increasing
distance from the Old Ones, marched them through a stretch of green, up
several levels in blue, to a wide blue door. "Let us see if it is working
right," he said importantly, and stepped on a ridge of metal before the
door. The door hesitated, sighed and then creakily opened for them, and,
satisfied, Wan led them inside.
This place at least seemed human. If strange. It even smelled human, no
doubt because Wan had spent so much time there over his short life. Lurvy
took one of the minicameras from Paul and settled it on her shoulder. The
little machine hissed tape past its lens, recording an octagonal chamber
with three of the forked Heechee seats, two of them broken, and a stained
wall bearing the Heechee version of instrumentation-ridges of colored
lights. There was a tiny sound of clicks and hums, barely perceptible,
behind the wall. Wan waved at it "In there," he said, "is where the Dead
Men live. If 'live' is the right word for what they do." He tittered.
Lurvy pointed the camera at the seats and the knurled knobs before
them, then at a domed, clawed object under the smeared wall. It stood
chest high, and it was mounted on soft, squashed cylinders to roll on.
"What's that, Wan?"
"It is what the Dead Men catch me with sometimes," he muttered. "They
don't use it very often. it is very old. When it breaks, it takes forever
to mend itself."
Paul eyed the machine warily, and moved away from it. "Turn on your
friends, Wan," he ordered.
"Of course. It is not very difficult," Wan boasted. "Watch me
carefully, and you will see how to do it." He sat himself with careless
ease on the one unbroken seat, and frowned at the controls. "I will bring
you Tiny Jim," he decided, and thumbed the controls before him. The lights
on the stained wall flickered and flowed, and Wan said, "Wake up, Tiny
Jim. There is someone here for you to meet."
Silence.
Wan scowled, glanced over his shoulder at the others and then ordered:
"Tiny Jim! Speak to me at once!" He pursed his lips and spat a gobbet at
the wall. Lurvy recognized the source of the stains, but said nothing.
A weary voice over their heads said, "Hello, Wan."
"That is better," Wan shrilled, grinning at the others. "Now, Tiny Jim!
Tell my friends something interesting, or I will spit on you again."
"I wish you would be more respectful," sighed the voice, "but very
well. Let me see. On the ninth planet of the star Saiph there is an old
civilization. Their rulers are a class of shit-handlers, who exercise
power by removing the excrement only from the homes of those citizens who
are honest, industrious, clever, and unfailing in the payment of their
taxes. On their principal holiday, which they call the Feast of St.
Gautama, the youngest maiden in each family bathes herself in sunflower
oil, takes a hazelnut between her teeth, and ritually..."
"Tiny Jim," Wan interrupted, "is this a true story?"
Pause. "Metaphorically it is," Tiny Jim said sullenly.
"You are very foolish," Wan reproved the Dead Man, "and I am shamed
before my friends. Pay attention. Here are Dorema Herter-Hall, who you
will call Lurvy, and her sister Janine Herter. And Paul. Say hello to
them."
Long pause. "Are there other living human beings here?" the voice asked
doubtfully.
"I have just told you there are!"
Another long pause. Then, "Good-bye, Wan," the voice said sadly, and
would not speak again, no matter how loudly Wan commanded or how furiously
he spat at the wall.
"Christ," grumbled Paul. "Is he always like that?"
"No, not always," Wan shrilled. "But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try
one of the others for you?"
"Are they any better?"
"Well, no," Wan admitted. "Tiny Jim is the best."
Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at
Lurvy. "How simply bloody wonderful," he said. "Do you know what I'm
beginning to think? I'm beginning to think your father was right. We
should have stayed on the Food Factory."
Lurvy took a deep breath. "Well, we didn't," she pointed out. "We're
here. Let's give it forty-eight hours, and then... And then we'll make up
our minds."
Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds
to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven
to abandon it.
The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. no
one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the
Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned
out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had
never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help
her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression
and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant.
They had made contact. "How is he?" Lurvy demanded at once.
"Oh, you mean your father? He's all right," Paul said. "He sounded
grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a
million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I've
got them on tape-but it'll take us a week to play them all." He rummaged
through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he
had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter,
to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. "We can only transmit single
frames," he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. "But if we're going to
be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system
from here. Meanwhile, we've got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to
kiss you for him."
"Then I guess we're going to stay for a while," said Janine.
"Then I guess we'd better bring more stuff out of the ship," her sister
agreed. "Wan? Where should we sleep?"
So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women
hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled
corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger
than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul
to sleep in, if he didn't mind bending his knees. There was a place for
toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human
design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like
the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It
was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a
shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When
you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they all began to smell
much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes
beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped
water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had
told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had
perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both,
remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long
flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the
expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with
her father on the Food Factory, with Wan's help in dealing with the Dead
Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan's, to housekeeping
tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with
anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven,
photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually
Wan's compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two
young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the
preliminary thrill of Wan's companionship and was in no hurry to move to a
further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at
her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her
fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least
for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit,
brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up
a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy's rule, since she had taken
care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which
left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands
and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not
appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She
could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them
out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed
one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she
replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no
confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but
limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift
attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for
which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been
designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as
expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they
were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get
Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and
once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on
the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. "Go
to the gold," whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny
Jim's thick tenor would override: "They'll kill you! They don't like
castaways!"
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had
always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she
was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and
terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled,
too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul
had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: "Report all
control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old
Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme
caution." Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was
lonesome; he didn't feel well; he was not receiving proper medical
attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was
being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from
Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for
them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond
counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to
cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and
Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not
know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them.
They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and
their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to
find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They
should... They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it
was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional
message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine's
pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come
across from Trish Bover's relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from
Robinette Broadhead:
"Dorema, I know you're being swamped. Your whole mission was important
and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times
more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don't
have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can't change your
assigned objectives. But I want you to know I'm on your side. Find out all
you can. Try not to get into a spot you can't retreat from. And I'll do
everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you
can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word."
It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to
Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been
intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory
assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had
been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal
friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and
amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner,
but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every
project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a
capricious Titan of finance.
And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice.
She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in
her own life. In Lurvy's own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its
ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman
who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy
had heard the story of Broadhead's last mission, the one that made him a
multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people
had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the
casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said)
Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy's own experience with a
mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But
they were there.
The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe "died" was
not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been
trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps
still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours
older after all the years.
So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead's message to Lurvy? Was he
urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin's
prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time
she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching.
It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone.
When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men's
room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to
put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.
When Janine returned to the Dead Men's room from an exploration with
Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being
heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a
wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting
desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and
led Wan away. "I think they want to be alone," she explained. "Anyway, I'm
tired. Let's take a break."
Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of
corridors a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside
the girl. "Are they conjugating?" he asked.
"Cripes, Wan. You've only got the one thing on your mind all the time."
But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand
approached her breast. "Knock it off," she said mildly.
He withdrew his hand. "You are being very disturbed, Janine," he said,
pouting.
"Oh, get off my back." But when he moved millimeters away, she let
herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want
her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as
"anything" sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to
happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust
him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
Even when he was grouchy. "You are not competing properly," he
complained.
"Competing at what, for the Lord's sake?"
"You should talk to Tiny Jim," he said severely. "He will teach you
better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the
male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course,
yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to
copulate with you."
"Yes, you've said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much."
He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself
against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of
his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed
all of Tiny Jim's teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared.
"I see. You want to kiss first," he said.
"No! I don't want to kiss 'first', and get your knee off my bladder."
He released her unwillingly. "Janine," he explained, "close contact is
essential to 'love'. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us.
Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose
shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does
not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the
reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine."
She giggled. "To what? Old dead Henrietta?" But he was scowling and she
took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, "You've got
some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if
we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a
place like this."
"Caught'?"
"Pregnant," she explained. "Winning the goddam reproductive race.
Knocked up. Oh, Wan," she said, nuzzling the top of his head, "you just
don't know where it's all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the
hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we'll even get
married, or something, and we'll just win that old reproductive race a
whole bunch. But right now you're just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I.
You don't want to reproduce. You just want to make love."
"Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim..."
"Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?" She stood up and regarded him for a
moment, and said affectionately, "Tell you what. I'm going back to the
Dead Men's room. Why don't you go read a book for a while to cool off?"
"You are silly!" he scolded. "I have no book here, or reader."
"Oh, for the Lord's sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you
feel better."
Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge
was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. "I
guess I don't need to any more," he said.
By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily
nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace
than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less
tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had
been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in
what they had just discovered. He said, "Hey, kids, listen to this." He
dialed Henrietta's number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative
hello and then asked: "Who are you?"
The voice strengthened. "I am a computer analog," it said firmly. "When
I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day
Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master's from Tulane and the
Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is
astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were
subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was
thirty-eight years old, two years younger than..." the voice hesitated,
"than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who..." it hesitated again, "who-who my
husband seemed to-who had an affair with... who..." The voice was sobbing
now, and Paul turned it off.
"Well, it doesn't last," he said, "but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera
has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not
just for her. Do you want to know your mother's name, Wan?"
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. "My mother's name?" he shrilled.
"Or anybody else's. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody
pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James
Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the
students' fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn't get much out of it, of
course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an
interrogation program for Vera, and she's been working at it all along,
and-what's the matter, Wan?"
The boy licked his lips. "My mother's name?" he repeated.
"Oh. Sorry," Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred
to him that Wan's emotions would be involved. "Her name was Elfega
Zamorra. But she doesn't seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don't know
why. And your father-well, that's a funny thing. Your real father was dead
before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else,
but I don't know who. Any idea why that is?" Wan shrugged. "I mean, why
your mother or, I guess you'd call him, your step-father doesn't seem to
be stored?" Wan spread his hands.
Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress,
she put her arm around him and said, "I guess this is a shock to you, Wan.
I'm sure we'll find out a lot more." She gestured at the mare's nest of
recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room.
"Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth," she said. He
looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired
to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth,
and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted
every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every
other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.
"Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough," she said wisely. "Just
let him live with it for a while." She rummaged through the case of
rations for one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, "By
the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?"
Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor
slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep.
He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently
to record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected
movement.
It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. "Heechee," she breathed.
But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could
colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at
the camera, and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had
no chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on
the face than on the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it
would have looked like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from
the shipboard computer's reconstruction of Wan's description, but on a
cruder, more animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved
to one side Lurvy saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit
bush, wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed.
There were even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color
sewn to their tunics, what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a
string of sharp-edged beads around the neck of one of the males. "I
suppose," Lurvy said shakily, "that even the Heechee might degenerate in
time. And they've had lots of time."
The view in the camera spun dizzily. "Damn him," Paul snapped. "He's
not so degenerate he doesn't notice the camera. He's picked the damn thing
up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we're here?"
The boy shrugged disinterestedly. "Of course they do. They always have,
you know. They simply do not care."
Lurvy's heart caught. "What do you mean, Wan? How do you know they
won't come after us?"
The view in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was
handing it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, "I have told you, they
almost never come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and
there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the
food chutes or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless
they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more."
There was a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the
view whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones,
sucking a finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun
and then went blank. "Paul! What did they do?" Lurvy demanded.
"Broke it, I suppose," he said, failing to get the picture back after
manipulating the controls. "Question is, what do we do? Haven't we got
enough here? Shouldn't we think about going back?"
And think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they
questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The
Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of
light. He had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom
went there himself. Rarely in the blue. And, yes, of course they knew
there were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines
that listened, and sometimes watched, everywhere when they were not
broken, of course. They simply did not care very much. "If we don't go
into the gold they will not trouble us," he said positively. "Except, of
course, if they come out."
"Wan," Paul snarled, "I can't tell you how confident you make me feel."
But it developed that that was only the boy's way of saying that the
odds were very good. "I go to the gold for excitement often," he boasted.
"Also for books. I have never been caught, you know."
"And what if the Heechee come here for excitement, or books?" Paul
demanded.
"Books! What would they do with books? For berryfruit, maybe. Sometimes
they go with the machines-Tiny Jim says they are for repairing things that
break. But not always. And the machines do not work very well, or very
often. Besides, you can hear them far away!"
They all sat silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Lurvy
said, "Here's what I think. Let's give ourselves one week here. I don't
think that's stretching our luck too much. We have, what is it, Paul?
-five cameras left. We'll plant them around, slave them to the monitor
here and leave them. If we take care, maybe we can conceal them so the
Heechee won't find them. We'll explore all the red corridors, because
they're safe, and as many of the blue and green as we can. Collect
samples. Take pictures-I want to get a look at those repair machines. And
when we've done as much of that as we can, we'll-we'll see how much time
we have. And then we'll make a decision about going into the gold."
"But no more than one week. From now," Paul repeated. He was not
insisting. He was only making sure he understood.
"No more," Lurvy agreed, and Janine and Wan nodded.
But forty-eight hours later they were in the gold, all the same. They
had decided to replace the broken camera, and so, all four of them
together, they retraced their steps to the three-way intersection where
the berryfruit bush rose, bare of ripe fruit. Wan was first, hand in hand
with Janine, and she detached herself to swoop down on the wreck of the
camera. "They really bashed it," she marveled. "You didn't tell us they
were so strong, Wan. Look, is that blood?"
Paul snatched it from her hand, turning it over, frowning at the crust
of black along one edge. "It looks like they were trying to get it open,"
he said. "I don't think I could do that with my bare hands. He must have
slipped and cut himself."
"Oh, yes," shrilled Wan absently, "they are quite strong." His
attention was not on the camera. He was peering down the long gold
corridor, sniffing the air, listening more for distant sounds than to the
others.
"You're making me nervous," Lurvy said. "Do you hear anything?"
He shrugged irritably. "You smell them before you hear them but, no, I
do not smell anything. They are not very near. And I am not afraid! I come
here often, to get books or to watch the funny things they do."
"I bet," said Janine, taking the old camera from Paul while he hunted a
place to conceal the new one. There were not many places. Heechee decor
was stark.
Wan bristled. "I have gone down that corridor as far as you can see!"
he boasted. "Even the place where the books is is far down-do you see?
Some of them are in the corridor."
Lurvy looked, but was not sure what Wan meant. A few dozen meters away
was a heap of glittering trash, but no books. Paul, peeling tape from a
sticky bracket to mount it as high as he could on the wall, said, "The way
you carry on about those books of yours. I've seen them, you know, Moby
Dick and The Adventures of Don Quixote. What would the Heechee be doing
with them?"
Wan shrilled with dignity, "You are stupid, Paul. Those are only what
the Dead Men gave me, they are not the real books. Those are the real
books."
Janine looked at him curiously, then moved a few step down the
corridor. "They're not books," she called over her shoulder.
"Of course they are! I have told you they are!"
"No, they aren't. Come and look." Lurvy opened her mouth to call her
back, hesitated, then followed. The corridor was empty, and Wan did not
seem more than usually agitated. When she was halfway to the glittering
scatter she recognized what she was looking at, and quickly joined Janine
to pick one up.
"Wan," she said, "I've seen these before. They're Heechee prayer fans.
There are hundreds of them on Earth."
"No, no!" He was getting angry. "Why do you say that I lie?"
"I'm not saying you lie, Wan." She unrolled the thing in her hands. It
was like a tapering scroll of plastic; it opened easily in her hand, but
as soon as she released it it closed again. It was the commonest artifact
of Heechee culture, found by the scores in the abandoned tunnels on Venus,
brought back by Gateway prospectors from every successful mission. no one
had ever found what the Heechee did with them, and whether the name that
they had been given was appropriate only the Heechee knew. "They're called
'prayer fans', Wan."
"No, no," he shrilled crossly, taking it away from her and marching
into the chamber. "You do not pray with them. You read them. Like this."
He started to put the scroll into one of the tulip-shaped fixtures on the
wall, glanced at it, threw it down. "That is not a good one," he said,
rummaging in the heaps of fans on the floor. "Wait. Yes. This is not good,
either, but it is at least something one can recognize." He slipped it
into the tulip. There was a quick tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and
then the tulip and scroll disappeared. A lemon-shaped cloud of color
enveloped them, and shaped itself to display a sewn book, opened at a page
of vertical lines of ideographs. A tinny voice-a human voice! -began to
declaim something in a staccato, highly tonal language.
Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made
her cosmopolitan. She gasped, "I-I think that's Japanese! And those look
like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?"
He said in a superior tone, "These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy,
they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny
Jim says that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men,
even the ones that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them
all the time."
"My God," said Lurvy. "And how many times have I had one of those in my
hands and not known what it was for?"
Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and
pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished
and voice stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his
hands. "That beats me," he said. "Every scientist in the world has had a
go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?"
Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of
showing these people how much more than they he knew. "Perhaps they are
stupid too," he shrilled. Then, charitably, "Or perhaps they merely have
only the ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If
they ever bothered to read them."
"Have you got one of those handy, Wan?" Lurvy asked.
He shrugged petulantly. "I never bother with those," he explained.
"Still, if you do not believe me..." He rummaged around in the heaps, his
expression making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had
already explored and found without interest. "Yes. I think this is one of
the worthless ones."
When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was
bright-and baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the
controls of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that
twined around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew
together again. If it was written language, it was as remote from any
Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly languages had
characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all represented
by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three
dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of
sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket
radio. All in all, it was unnerving.
"I did not think you would enjoy it," Wan observed spitefully. "Turn it
off, Wan," Lurvy said; and then, energetically, "We want to take as many
of these things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as
you can and take them back to the Dead Men's room. And take that old
camera, too; give it to the bio-assay unit, and see if it can make
anything out of the Heechee blood."
"And what are you going to do?" Paul asked. But he had already slipped
off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery "books".
"We'll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are
which-I mean, which are the ones you don't bother with?"
"Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little
chipped-you can see."
"All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need
to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We'll be modest some other time,"
she said, slipping out of her coverall. She stood in bra and panties,
tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least
fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan's tunic and
Janine's dress they could carry at least half of the objects away. And
that would be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on
the Food Factory, anyway-although probably they were the ones Wan had
brought there, and thus only the ones he had found he could understand.
"Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?"
"Of course," he said. "Why else would I bring books there?" He was
sorting irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the
oldest, "useless" ones to Janine and Lurvy. "I am cold," he complained.
"We all are. I wish you'd worn a bra, Janine," she said, frowning at
her sister.
Janine said indignantly, "I wasn't planning to take my clothes off.
Wan's right. I'm cold, too."
"It's only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let's
see how fast we can pick out the Heechee ones." They had her coverall
nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to
stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a
few dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But
they were really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty
or forty. Her coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in
any event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they
chose,
Lurvy did not think she would choose to do that. Enough was enough.
Whatever else they might do in Heechee Heaven, they had already acquired
one priceless fact. The prayer fans were books! Knowing that that was so
was half the battle; with that certainty before them, scientists would
surely be able to unlock the secret of reading them. If they could not do
it from scratch, there were the readers on the Food Factory; if worst came
to worst they could read every fan before one of Vera's remotes, encode
Stratos kneading the back of her neck.
So Lurvy was not unhappy when the trip was over and Janine called her
out of her private room, all thrilled and excited; the great glassy spiral
was filling with hot specks of darting golden light, the ship was lurching
tentatively in one direction and another; the mottled gray mud was gone
from the viewscreen and there were stars. More than stars. There was an
object that glowed blue in patches amid featureless gray. It was
lemonshaped and spun slowly, and Lurvy could form no idea of its size
until she perceived that the surface of the object was not featureless.
There were tiny projections jutting out here and there, and she recognized
the tiniest of them as Gateway-type ships, Ones and Threes, and there a
Five; the lemon had to be more than a kilometer long! Wan, grinning with
pride, settled himself in the central pilot seat (they had stuffed it with
extra clothing, a device that had never occurred to Wan), and grasped the
lander control levers. It was all Lurvy could do to keep her hands off.
But Wan had been performing this particular maneuver all his life. With
coarse competence he banged and slammed the ship into a downward spiral
that matched the slow spin of the blueeyed gray lemon, intersected one of
the waiting pits, docked, locked, and looked up for applause. They were on
Heechee Heaven.
The Food Factory had been the size of a skyscraper, but this was a
world. Perhaps, like Gateway, it had once been an asteroid; but, if so, it
had been so tooled and sculpted that there was no trace of original
structure. It was cubic kilometers of mass. It was a rotating mountain. So
much to explore! So much to learn!
And so much to fear. They skulked, or strutted, through the old halls,
and Lurvy realized she was clinging to her husband's hand. And Paul was
clinging back. She forced herself to observe and comment. The sides of the
walls were veined with luminous tracing of scarlet; the overhead was the
familiar blue Heecheemetal glow. On the floor-and it was really a floor;
they had weight here, though not more than a tenth of Earth-normal
diamond-shaped mounds contained what looked like soil and grew plants.
"Berryfruit," said Wan proudly over his shoulder, shrugging toward a
waist-high bush with fuzzed objects hanging among its emerald leaves. "We
can stop and eat some if you like."
"Not right now," said Lurvy. A dozen paces farther along the corridor
was another planted lozenge, this one with slate-green tendrils and soft,
squashed cauliflower-shaped buds. "What's that?"
He paused and looked at her. It was clear he thought it was a silly
question. "They are not good to eat," he shrilled scornfully. "Try the
berryfruit. They are quite tasty."
So the party paused, where two of the red-lined corridors came together
and one of them changed to blue. They peeled brown-green furry skins from
the berryfruit and nibbled at the juicy insides-first tentatively, then
with pleasure-while Wan explained the geography of Heechee Heaven. These
were the red sections, and they were the best to be in. There was food
here, and good places to sleep; and the ship was here, and here the Old
Ones never came. But didn't they sometimes wander out of their usual
places to pick the berryfruit? Yes, of course they did! But never (his
voice rising half an octave) here. It had never happened. Over there the
blue. His voice sank, in volume as well as pitch. The Old Ones came there
quite often, or to some parts of the blue. But it was all dead. If it were
not that the Dead Men's room was in the blue he would never go there. And
Lurvy, peering down the corridor he pointed to, felt a chill of incredible
age. It had the look of a Stonehenge or Gizeh or Angkor Wat. Even the
ceilings were dimmer, and the plantings there were sparse and puny. The
green, he went on, was all very well, but it was not working properly. The
water jets did not function. The plantings died. And the gold-
His pleasure faded when he talked about the gold. That was where the
Old Ones lived. If it were not for needing books, and sometimes clothes,
he would never go to the gold, though the Dead Men were always urging him
to. He did not want to see the Old Ones.
Paul cleared his throat to say: "But I think we have to do that, Wan."
"Why?" the boy shrilled. "They are not interesting!"
Lurvy put her hand on his arm. "What's the matter, Wan?" she asked
kindly, observing his expression. What Wan felt always showed on his face.
He had never had the need to develop the skills of dissembling.
"He looks scared," Paul commented.
"He is not scared!" Wan retorted. "You do not understand this place! it
is not interesting to go to the gold!"
"Wan, dear," Lurvy said, "the thing is, it's worth taking chances to
find out more about the Heechee. I don't know if I can explain what it
means to us, but the least part of it is that we would get money for it. A
lot of money."
"He doesn't know what money is," Paul interrupted impatiently. "Wan.
Pay attention. We are going to do this. Tell us how the four of us can
safely explore the gold corridors."
"The four of us can not! One person can. I can," he boasted. He was
angry now, and showed it. Paul! Wan's feelings about him were mixed, but
most of the mixture were unfavorable. Speaking to Wan, Paul shaped his
words so carefully-so contemptuously. As though he did not think Wan were
smart enough to understand. When Wan and Janine were together, Paul was
always near. If Paul was a sample of human males, Wan was not proud to be
one. "I have gone to the gold many times," he boasted, "for books, or for
berryfruit, or just to watch the silly things they do. They are so funny!
But they are not entirely stupid, you know. I can go there safely. One
person can. Perhaps two people can, but if we all go they will surely see
us."
"And then?" Lurvy asked.
Wan shrugged defensively. He didn't really know the answer to that,
only that it had frightened his father. "They are not interesting," he
repeated, contradicting himself.
Janine licked her fingers and tossed the empty berryfruit skins to the
base of the bush. "You people," she sighed, "are unreal. Wan? Where do
these Old Ones come?"
"To the edge of the gold, always. Sometimes into the blue or the green."
"Well, if they like these berryfruits, and if you know a place where
they come to pick them, why don't we just leave a camera there? We can see
them. They can't see us."
Wan shrilled triumphantly, "Of course! You see, Lurvy, it is not
necessary to go there! Janine is right, only..." he hesitated "Janine?
What is a camera?"
As they went, Lurvy had to nerve herself to pass every intersection,
could not help staring down each corridor. But they heard nothing, and saw
nothing that moved. It was as quiet as the Food Factory when they first
set foot in it, and just as queer. Queerer. The traceries of light on
every wall, the patches of growing things-above all, the terrifying
thought that there were Heechee alive somewhere near. When they had
dropped off a camera by a berryfruit bush in a space where green, blue,
and gold came together, Wan bustled them away, directly to the room where
the Dead Men lived. That was first priority: to get to the radio that
would once again put them in touch with the rest of the world. Even if the
rest of the world was only old Payter, fidgeting resentfully around the
Food Factory. If they could not do that much, Lurvy reasoned, they had no
business being here at all, and they should return to the ship and head
for home; it was no good exploring if they could not report what they
found!
So Wan, courage returning in direct proportion to his increasing
distance from the Old Ones, marched them through a stretch of green, up
several levels in blue, to a wide blue door. "Let us see if it is working
right," he said importantly, and stepped on a ridge of metal before the
door. The door hesitated, sighed and then creakily opened for them, and,
satisfied, Wan led them inside.
This place at least seemed human. If strange. It even smelled human, no
doubt because Wan had spent so much time there over his short life. Lurvy
took one of the minicameras from Paul and settled it on her shoulder. The
little machine hissed tape past its lens, recording an octagonal chamber
with three of the forked Heechee seats, two of them broken, and a stained
wall bearing the Heechee version of instrumentation-ridges of colored
lights. There was a tiny sound of clicks and hums, barely perceptible,
behind the wall. Wan waved at it "In there," he said, "is where the Dead
Men live. If 'live' is the right word for what they do." He tittered.
Lurvy pointed the camera at the seats and the knurled knobs before
them, then at a domed, clawed object under the smeared wall. It stood
chest high, and it was mounted on soft, squashed cylinders to roll on.
"What's that, Wan?"
"It is what the Dead Men catch me with sometimes," he muttered. "They
don't use it very often. it is very old. When it breaks, it takes forever
to mend itself."
Paul eyed the machine warily, and moved away from it. "Turn on your
friends, Wan," he ordered.
"Of course. It is not very difficult," Wan boasted. "Watch me
carefully, and you will see how to do it." He sat himself with careless
ease on the one unbroken seat, and frowned at the controls. "I will bring
you Tiny Jim," he decided, and thumbed the controls before him. The lights
on the stained wall flickered and flowed, and Wan said, "Wake up, Tiny
Jim. There is someone here for you to meet."
Silence.
Wan scowled, glanced over his shoulder at the others and then ordered:
"Tiny Jim! Speak to me at once!" He pursed his lips and spat a gobbet at
the wall. Lurvy recognized the source of the stains, but said nothing.
A weary voice over their heads said, "Hello, Wan."
"That is better," Wan shrilled, grinning at the others. "Now, Tiny Jim!
Tell my friends something interesting, or I will spit on you again."
"I wish you would be more respectful," sighed the voice, "but very
well. Let me see. On the ninth planet of the star Saiph there is an old
civilization. Their rulers are a class of shit-handlers, who exercise
power by removing the excrement only from the homes of those citizens who
are honest, industrious, clever, and unfailing in the payment of their
taxes. On their principal holiday, which they call the Feast of St.
Gautama, the youngest maiden in each family bathes herself in sunflower
oil, takes a hazelnut between her teeth, and ritually..."
"Tiny Jim," Wan interrupted, "is this a true story?"
Pause. "Metaphorically it is," Tiny Jim said sullenly.
"You are very foolish," Wan reproved the Dead Man, "and I am shamed
before my friends. Pay attention. Here are Dorema Herter-Hall, who you
will call Lurvy, and her sister Janine Herter. And Paul. Say hello to
them."
Long pause. "Are there other living human beings here?" the voice asked
doubtfully.
"I have just told you there are!"
Another long pause. Then, "Good-bye, Wan," the voice said sadly, and
would not speak again, no matter how loudly Wan commanded or how furiously
he spat at the wall.
"Christ," grumbled Paul. "Is he always like that?"
"No, not always," Wan shrilled. "But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try
one of the others for you?"
"Are they any better?"
"Well, no," Wan admitted. "Tiny Jim is the best."
Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at
Lurvy. "How simply bloody wonderful," he said. "Do you know what I'm
beginning to think? I'm beginning to think your father was right. We
should have stayed on the Food Factory."
Lurvy took a deep breath. "Well, we didn't," she pointed out. "We're
here. Let's give it forty-eight hours, and then... And then we'll make up
our minds."
Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds
to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven
to abandon it.
The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. no
one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the
Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned
out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had
never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help
her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression
and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant.
They had made contact. "How is he?" Lurvy demanded at once.
"Oh, you mean your father? He's all right," Paul said. "He sounded
grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a
million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I've
got them on tape-but it'll take us a week to play them all." He rummaged
through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he
had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter,
to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. "We can only transmit single
frames," he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. "But if we're going to
be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system
from here. Meanwhile, we've got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to
kiss you for him."
"Then I guess we're going to stay for a while," said Janine.
"Then I guess we'd better bring more stuff out of the ship," her sister
agreed. "Wan? Where should we sleep?"
So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women
hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled
corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger
than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul
to sleep in, if he didn't mind bending his knees. There was a place for
toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human
design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like
the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It
was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a
shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When
you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they all began to smell
much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes
beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped
water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had
told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had
perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both,
remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long
flight up from Earth, and did not comment.
As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the
expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with
her father on the Food Factory, with Wan's help in dealing with the Dead
Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan's, to housekeeping
tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with
anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven,
photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually
Wan's compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two
young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.
Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the
preliminary thrill of Wan's companionship and was in no hurry to move to a
further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at
her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her
fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least
for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit,
brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up
a little more.
There were not many objections to Lurvy's rule, since she had taken
care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which
left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands
and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.
The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not
appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She
could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them
out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed
one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she
replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no
confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.
The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but
limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift
attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for
which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been
designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as
expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they
were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get
Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and
once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on
the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. "Go
to the gold," whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny
Jim's thick tenor would override: "They'll kill you! They don't like
castaways!"
That was frightening. Especially as Wan assured them that Tiny Jim had
always been the most sensible of the Dead Men. It puzzled Lurvy that she
was not more terrified than she was, but there had been so many alarms and
terrors that she had become used to them. Her circuits were scrambled,
too.
And the messages! In one five-minute burst of clear transmission Paul
had recorded fourteen hours of them. Commands from downlink: "Report all
control settings shuttle ship. Attempt secure tissue samples Heechee/Old
Ones. Freeze and store berryfruit leaves, fruits, stems. Exercise extreme
caution." Half a dozen separate communications from her father; he was
lonesome; he didn't feel well; he was not receiving proper medical
attention because they had taken the mobile bio-assay unit away; he was
being barraged by peremptory orders from Earth. Information messages from
Earth: their first reports had been received, analyzed and interpreted for
them, and now there were suggestions for follow-up programs beyond
counting. They should interrogate Henrietta about her references to
cosmological phenomena-Shipboard-Vera was making a hash of it, and
Downlink-Vera could not communicate in real time, and old Payter did not
know enough astrophysics to ask the right questions, so it was up to them.
They should interrogate all the Dead Men on their memories of Gateway and
their missions-assuming they remembered anything. They should attempt to
find out how living prospectors became stored computer programs. They
should... They should do everything. All at once. And almost none of it
was possible; tissue samples of the Heechee, forsooth! When an occasional
message was clear and personal and undemanding, Lurvy treasured it.
And some of those were surprises. Besides the fan letters from Janine's
pen-pals and the continuing plea for any information they might come
across from Trish Bover's relict, there was one for Lurvy personally, from
Robinette Broadhead:
"Dorema, I know you're being swamped. Your whole mission was important
and hazardous to begin with, and now it turns out about a million times
more so. All I expect from you is that you do the best you can. I don't
have the authority to override Gateway Corp orders. I can't change your
assigned objectives. But I want you to know I'm on your side. Find out all
you can. Try not to get into a spot you can't retreat from. And I'll do
everything I can to see that you get rewarded as fully and lavishly as you
can hope for. I mean it, Lurvy. I give you my word."
It was a strange message, and oddly touching. It was also a surprise to
Lurvy that Broadhead even knew her nickname. They had not exactly been
intimates. When she and her family were interviewing for the Food Factory
assignment they had met Broadhead several times. But the relationship had
been of suppliant and monarch, and there was not much close interpersonal
friendship involved. Nor had she particularly liked him. He was candid and
amiable enough-high-rolling multimillionaire with an easy-going manner,
but sharply on top of every dollar he spent and every development in every
project he was involved in. She did not like being a client to a
capricious Titan of finance.
And, to be fair, she had come to their meetings with a faint prejudice.
She had heard about Robinette Broadhead long before he played any part in
her own life. In Lurvy's own time on the Gateway asteroid and in its
ships, she had once gone out in a three-person ship with an elderly woman
who had once been shipmate with Gelle-Kiara Moynlim. From the woman Lurvy
had heard the story of Broadhead's last mission, the one that made him a
multimillionaire. There was something questionable about it. Nine people
had died on that mission. Broadhead was the only survivor. And one of the
casualties had been Kiara Moynlin, with whom (the old woman said)
Broadhead had been in love. Maybe it was Lurvy's own experience with a
mission in which most of the crew had died that colored her feelings. But
they were there.
The curious thing about the Broadhead mission was that maybe "died" was
not the right word for the casualties. This Kiara and the rest had been
trapped in a black hole, and perhaps they were still there, and perhaps
still alive-prisoners of slowed-down time, maybe no more than a few hours
older after all the years.
So what was the hidden agenda in Broadhead's message to Lurvy? Was he
urging them on to try to find a way to penetrate Gelle-Kiara Moynlin's
prison? Did he know himself? Lurvy could not tell, but for the first time
she thought of their employer as a human being. The thought was touching.
It did not make Lurvy feel less afraid, but perhaps a little less alone.
When she brought her latest batch of tapes to Paul, in the Dead Men's
room, to record at high speed and transmit when he could, she tarried to
put her arms around him and cling, which surprised him very much.
When Janine returned to the Dead Men's room from an exploration with
Wan, something told her to move quietly. She looked in without being
heard, and saw her sister and brother-in-law sitting comfortably against a
wall, half listening to the maniac chatter of the Dead Men, half chatting
desultorily with each other. She turned, put her finger to her lips and
led Wan away. "I think they want to be alone," she explained. "Anyway, I'm
tired. Let's take a break."
Wan shrugged. They found a convenient spot at an intersection of
corridors a few dozen meters away and he settled himself pensively beside
the girl. "Are they conjugating?" he asked.
"Cripes, Wan. You've only got the one thing on your mind all the time."
But she was not annoyed, and let him move close to her, until one hand
approached her breast. "Knock it off," she said mildly.
He withdrew his hand. "You are being very disturbed, Janine," he said,
pouting.
"Oh, get off my back." But when he moved millimeters away, she let
herself move a little closer again. She was quite content to have him want
her and quite serene in believing that when anything happened, as
"anything" sooner or later surely would, it would be when she wanted it to
happen. Nearly two months with Wan had made her like him, and even trust
him, and the rest could wait. She enjoyed his presence.
Even when he was grouchy. "You are not competing properly," he
complained.
"Competing at what, for the Lord's sake?"
"You should talk to Tiny Jim," he said severely. "He will teach you
better strategies in the reproduction race. He has fully explained the
male role to me, so that I am sure I can compete successfully. Of course,
yours is different. Basically, your best choice would be to allow me to
copulate with you."
"Yes, you've said that. You know what, Wan? You talk too much."
He was silent for a moment, perplexed. He could not defend himself
against that charge. He did not even know why it was a charge. In most of
his life the only mode of interaction he had had was talk. He rehearsed
all of Tiny Jim's teachings in his mind, and then his expression cleared.
"I see. You want to kiss first," he said.
"No! I don't want to kiss 'first', and get your knee off my bladder."
He released her unwillingly. "Janine," he explained, "close contact is
essential to 'love'. This is true of the lower orders as well as of us.
Dogs sniff. Primates groom. Reptiles coil around each other. Even rose
shoots nestle close to the mature plant, Tiny Jim says, although he does
not believe that is a sexual manifestation. But you will lose the
reproductive race if you are not careful, Janine."
She giggled. "To what? Old dead Henrietta?" But he was scowling and she
took pity on him. She sat up and announced, kindly enough, "You've got
some really wrong ideas, do you know that? The last thing I want, even if
we ever do get around to your goddam conjugation, is to get caught in a
place like this."
"Caught'?"
"Pregnant," she explained. "Winning the goddam reproductive race.
Knocked up. Oh, Wan," she said, nuzzling the top of his head, "you just
don't know where it's all at. I bet you and I are going to conjugate the
hell out of each other, some time or other, and maybe we'll even get
married, or something, and we'll just win that old reproductive race a
whole bunch. But right now you're just a snotty-nosed kid, and so am I.
You don't want to reproduce. You just want to make love."
"Well, that is true, yes, but Tiny Jim..."
"Will you shut up about Tiny Jim?" She stood up and regarded him for a
moment, and said affectionately, "Tell you what. I'm going back to the
Dead Men's room. Why don't you go read a book for a while to cool off?"
"You are silly!" he scolded. "I have no book here, or reader."
"Oh, for the Lord's sake! Then go somewhere and whack off until you
feel better."
Wan looked up at her, then down at his freshly laundered kilt. No bulge
was visible, but there was a pale, spreading spot of damp. He grinned. "I
guess I don't need to any more," he said.
By the time they got back, Paul and Lurvy were no longer cozily
nestling each other, but Janine could detect that they were more at peace
than usual. What Lurvy could detect about Wan and Janine was less
tangible. She looked at them thoughtfully, considered asking what they had
been up to, decided against it. Paul was, in any event, more interested in
what they had just discovered. He said, "Hey, kids, listen to this." He
dialed Henrietta's number, waited until her weepy voice said a tentative
hello and then asked: "Who are you?"
The voice strengthened. "I am a computer analog," it said firmly. "When
I was alive I was Mrs. Arnold Meacham of mission Orbit Seventy-four, Day
Nineteen. I have a bachelor of science and master's from Tulane and the
Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and my special discipline is
astrophysics. After twenty-two days we docked at an artifact and were
subsequently captured by its occupants. At the time of my death I was
thirty-eight years old, two years younger than..." the voice hesitated,
"than Doris Filgren, our pilot, who..." it hesitated again, "who-who my
husband seemed to-who had an affair with... who..." The voice was sobbing
now, and Paul turned it off.
"Well, it doesn't last," he said, "but there it is. Poor dumb old Vera
has sorted out some kind of a connection with reality for her. And not
just for her. Do you want to know your mother's name, Wan?"
The boy was staring at him, pop-eyed. "My mother's name?" he shrilled.
"Or anybody else's. Tiny Jim, for instance. He was actually an airbody
pilot from Venus who got to Gateway, and then here. His name is James
Cornwell. Willard was an English teacher. He embezzled money from the
students' fund to pay his way to Gateway-didn't get much out of it, of
course. His first flight brought him here. The downlink computers wrote an
interrogation program for Vera, and she's been working at it all along,
and-what's the matter, Wan?"
The boy licked his lips. "My mother's name?" he repeated.
"Oh. Sorry," Paul apologized, reminded to be kind. It had not occurred
to him that Wan's emotions would be involved. "Her name was Elfega
Zamorra. But she doesn't seem to be one of the Dead Men, Wan. I don't know
why. And your father-well, that's a funny thing. Your real father was dead
before she came here. The man you talk about must have been somebody else,
but I don't know who. Any idea why that is?" Wan shrugged. "I mean, why
your mother or, I guess you'd call him, your step-father doesn't seem to
be stored?" Wan spread his hands.
Lurvy moved closer to him. The poor kid! Responding to his distress,
she put her arm around him and said, "I guess this is a shock to you, Wan.
I'm sure we'll find out a lot more." She gestured at the mare's nest of
recorders, encoders and processors that littered the once bare room.
"Everything we find out gets transmitted back to Earth," she said. He
looked up at her politely, but not entirely comprehendingly, as she tired
to explain the vast complex of information-handling machinery on Earth,
and how it systematically analyzed, compared, collated, and interpreted
every scrap from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory-not to mention every
other bit of data, wherever derived. Until Janine intervened.
"Oh, leave him alone. He understands enough," she said wisely. "Just
let him live with it for a while." She rummaged through the case of
rations for one of the slate-green packages, and then said casually, "By
the way. Why is that thing beeping at us?"
Paul listened, then sprang to his clutter of gadgets. The monitor
slaved to their portable cameras was emitting a faint Queep. Queep. Queep.
He spun it around so they could all see, swearing to himself.
It was the camera they had left by the berryfruit bush, set patiently
to record the unchanging scene and to sound an alarm whenever it detected
movement.
It had. There was a face scowling out at them.
Lurvy felt a thrill of terror. "Heechee," she breathed.
But if so, the face showed no evidence of concealing a mind that could
colonize a galaxy. It seemed to be down on all fours, peering worriedly at
the camera, and behind it were four or five others like it. The face had
no chin. The brow slanted down from a fuzzy scalp; there was more hair on
the face than on the head. If the skull had had an occipital ridge, it
would have looked like a gorilla. Taken all in all, it was not far from
the shipboard computer's reconstruction of Wan's description, but on a
cruder, more animal design. Yet they were not animals. As the face moved
to one side Lurvy saw that the others, clustered around the berryfruit
bush, wore what no animal had ever spontaneously worn. They were clothed.
There were even evidences of fashion in what they wore, patches of color
sewn to their tunics, what looked like tattoos on exposed skin, even a
string of sharp-edged beads around the neck of one of the males. "I
suppose," Lurvy said shakily, "that even the Heechee might degenerate in
time. And they've had lots of time."
The view in the camera spun dizzily. "Damn him," Paul snapped. "He's
not so degenerate he doesn't notice the camera. He's picked the damn thing
up. Wan! Do you suppose they know we're here?"
The boy shrugged disinterestedly. "Of course they do. They always have,
you know. They simply do not care."
Lurvy's heart caught. "What do you mean, Wan? How do you know they
won't come after us?"
The view in the camera steadied; the Old One who had picked it up was
handing it to another. Wan glanced at it and said, "I have told you, they
almost never come into this part of the blue. Or ever, into the red; and
there is no reason to go into the green. Nothing works there, not even the
food chutes or the readers. Almost always, they stay in the gold. Unless
they have eaten all the berryfruit there, and want more."
There was a mewling cry from the sound system of the monitor, and the
view whirled again. It stopped momentarily on one of the female Old Ones,
sucking a finger; then she reached out balefully for the camera. It spun
and then went blank. "Paul! What did they do?" Lurvy demanded.
"Broke it, I suppose," he said, failing to get the picture back after
manipulating the controls. "Question is, what do we do? Haven't we got
enough here? Shouldn't we think about going back?"
And think about it Lurvy did. They all did. But however carefully they
questioned Wan, the boy stubbornly insisted there was nothing to fear. The
Old Ones had never troubled him in the corridors walled with red skeins of
light. He had never seen them in the green-though, to be sure, he seldom
went there himself. Rarely in the blue. And, yes, of course they knew
there were people here-the Dead Men assured him the Old Ones had machines
that listened, and sometimes watched, everywhere when they were not
broken, of course. They simply did not care very much. "If we don't go
into the gold they will not trouble us," he said positively. "Except, of
course, if they come out."
"Wan," Paul snarled, "I can't tell you how confident you make me feel."
But it developed that that was only the boy's way of saying that the
odds were very good. "I go to the gold for excitement often," he boasted.
"Also for books. I have never been caught, you know."
"And what if the Heechee come here for excitement, or books?" Paul
demanded.
"Books! What would they do with books? For berryfruit, maybe. Sometimes
they go with the machines-Tiny Jim says they are for repairing things that
break. But not always. And the machines do not work very well, or very
often. Besides, you can hear them far away!"
They all sat silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Lurvy
said, "Here's what I think. Let's give ourselves one week here. I don't
think that's stretching our luck too much. We have, what is it, Paul?
-five cameras left. We'll plant them around, slave them to the monitor
here and leave them. If we take care, maybe we can conceal them so the
Heechee won't find them. We'll explore all the red corridors, because
they're safe, and as many of the blue and green as we can. Collect
samples. Take pictures-I want to get a look at those repair machines. And
when we've done as much of that as we can, we'll-we'll see how much time
we have. And then we'll make a decision about going into the gold."
"But no more than one week. From now," Paul repeated. He was not
insisting. He was only making sure he understood.
"No more," Lurvy agreed, and Janine and Wan nodded.
But forty-eight hours later they were in the gold, all the same. They
had decided to replace the broken camera, and so, all four of them
together, they retraced their steps to the three-way intersection where
the berryfruit bush rose, bare of ripe fruit. Wan was first, hand in hand
with Janine, and she detached herself to swoop down on the wreck of the
camera. "They really bashed it," she marveled. "You didn't tell us they
were so strong, Wan. Look, is that blood?"
Paul snatched it from her hand, turning it over, frowning at the crust
of black along one edge. "It looks like they were trying to get it open,"
he said. "I don't think I could do that with my bare hands. He must have
slipped and cut himself."
"Oh, yes," shrilled Wan absently, "they are quite strong." His
attention was not on the camera. He was peering down the long gold
corridor, sniffing the air, listening more for distant sounds than to the
others.
"You're making me nervous," Lurvy said. "Do you hear anything?"
He shrugged irritably. "You smell them before you hear them but, no, I
do not smell anything. They are not very near. And I am not afraid! I come
here often, to get books or to watch the funny things they do."
"I bet," said Janine, taking the old camera from Paul while he hunted a
place to conceal the new one. There were not many places. Heechee decor
was stark.
Wan bristled. "I have gone down that corridor as far as you can see!"
he boasted. "Even the place where the books is is far down-do you see?
Some of them are in the corridor."
Lurvy looked, but was not sure what Wan meant. A few dozen meters away
was a heap of glittering trash, but no books. Paul, peeling tape from a
sticky bracket to mount it as high as he could on the wall, said, "The way
you carry on about those books of yours. I've seen them, you know, Moby
Dick and The Adventures of Don Quixote. What would the Heechee be doing
with them?"
Wan shrilled with dignity, "You are stupid, Paul. Those are only what
the Dead Men gave me, they are not the real books. Those are the real
books."
Janine looked at him curiously, then moved a few step down the
corridor. "They're not books," she called over her shoulder.
"Of course they are! I have told you they are!"
"No, they aren't. Come and look." Lurvy opened her mouth to call her
back, hesitated, then followed. The corridor was empty, and Wan did not
seem more than usually agitated. When she was halfway to the glittering
scatter she recognized what she was looking at, and quickly joined Janine
to pick one up.
"Wan," she said, "I've seen these before. They're Heechee prayer fans.
There are hundreds of them on Earth."
"No, no!" He was getting angry. "Why do you say that I lie?"
"I'm not saying you lie, Wan." She unrolled the thing in her hands. It
was like a tapering scroll of plastic; it opened easily in her hand, but
as soon as she released it it closed again. It was the commonest artifact
of Heechee culture, found by the scores in the abandoned tunnels on Venus,
brought back by Gateway prospectors from every successful mission. no one
had ever found what the Heechee did with them, and whether the name that
they had been given was appropriate only the Heechee knew. "They're called
'prayer fans', Wan."
"No, no," he shrilled crossly, taking it away from her and marching
into the chamber. "You do not pray with them. You read them. Like this."
He started to put the scroll into one of the tulip-shaped fixtures on the
wall, glanced at it, threw it down. "That is not a good one," he said,
rummaging in the heaps of fans on the floor. "Wait. Yes. This is not good,
either, but it is at least something one can recognize." He slipped it
into the tulip. There was a quick tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and
then the tulip and scroll disappeared. A lemon-shaped cloud of color
enveloped them, and shaped itself to display a sewn book, opened at a page
of vertical lines of ideographs. A tinny voice-a human voice! -began to
declaim something in a staccato, highly tonal language.
Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made
her cosmopolitan. She gasped, "I-I think that's Japanese! And those look
like haiku! Wan, what are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?"
He said in a superior tone, "These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy,
they are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny
Jim says that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men,
even the ones that are no longer here, are stored in these. I read them
all the time."
"My God," said Lurvy. "And how many times have I had one of those in my
hands and not known what it was for?"
Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and
pulled the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished
and voice stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his
hands. "That beats me," he said. "Every scientist in the world has had a
go at these things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?"
Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of
showing these people how much more than they he knew. "Perhaps they are
stupid too," he shrilled. Then, charitably, "Or perhaps they merely have
only the ones that no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If
they ever bothered to read them."
"Have you got one of those handy, Wan?" Lurvy asked.
He shrugged petulantly. "I never bother with those," he explained.
"Still, if you do not believe me..." He rummaged around in the heaps, his
expression making it clear that they were wasting time with things he had
already explored and found without interest. "Yes. I think this is one of
the worthless ones."
When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was
bright-and baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the
controls of a Heechee spacecraft. Harder. Strange, oscillating lines that
twined around each other, leaped apart in a spray of color, and then drew
together again. If it was written language, it was as remote from any
Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly languages had
characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all represented
by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived in three
dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of
sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket
radio. All in all, it was unnerving.
"I did not think you would enjoy it," Wan observed spitefully. "Turn it
off, Wan," Lurvy said; and then, energetically, "We want to take as many
of these things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as
you can and take them back to the Dead Men's room. And take that old
camera, too; give it to the bio-assay unit, and see if it can make
anything out of the Heechee blood."
"And what are you going to do?" Paul asked. But he had already slipped
off his blouse and was filling it with the glittery "books".
"We'll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are
which-I mean, which are the ones you don't bother with?"
"Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little
chipped-you can see."
"All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need
to make a carrying-bag out of. Go ahead. We'll be modest some other time,"
she said, slipping out of her coverall. She stood in bra and panties,
tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment. She could fit at least
fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with Wan's tunic and
Janine's dress they could carry at least half of the objects away. And
that would be enough. She would not be greedy. There were plenty more on
the Food Factory, anyway-although probably they were the ones Wan had
brought there, and thus only the ones he had found he could understand.
"Are there readers on the Food Factory, Wan?"
"Of course," he said. "Why else would I bring books there?" He was
sorting irritably through the fans, muttering to himself as he tossed the
oldest, "useless" ones to Janine and Lurvy. "I am cold," he complained.
"We all are. I wish you'd worn a bra, Janine," she said, frowning at
her sister.
Janine said indignantly, "I wasn't planning to take my clothes off.
Wan's right. I'm cold, too."
"It's only for a little while. Hurry it up, Wan. You too, Janine, let's
see how fast we can pick out the Heechee ones." They had her coverall
nearly full, and Wan, scowling and dignified in his kilt, was beginning to
stuff the fans into his. It would be possible, Lurvy calculated, to wrap a
few dozen more in the kilt. After all, he had a breechcloth under it. But
they were really doing very well. Paul had already taken at least thirty
or forty. Her coverall seemed able to hold nearly seventy-five. And, in
any event, they could always come back another time for the rest, if they
chose,
Lurvy did not think she would choose to do that. Enough was enough.
Whatever else they might do in Heechee Heaven, they had already acquired
one priceless fact. The prayer fans were books! Knowing that that was so
was half the battle; with that certainty before them, scientists would
surely be able to unlock the secret of reading them. If they could not do
it from scratch, there were the readers on the Food Factory; if worst came
to worst they could read every fan before one of Vera's remotes, encode