it as a weapon. He had a gun pointed at the heads of the entire human
race.
And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp
was sure to take over now, and I couldn't blame them.
The Oldest One bestirred himself slowly, one organ at a time. First
came the piezophonic external receptors. Call them "ears". They were
always "on", in the sense that sounds always reached them. Their tiny rag
crystals were squeezed by vibrations in the air and, when the patterns of
sound corresponded to the name the children of the Oldest One called him
by, they passed a gate and went on to activate what corresponded to his
peripheral nervous system.
At that point the Oldest One was not yet awake, but knew he was being
wakened. His true ears, the inner ones that analyzed and interpreted
sound, came to life. His cognitive circuits sampled the signals. The
Oldest One heard the voices of his children and understood what they were
saying. But only in an offhand and inattentive way, like a drowsy human
aware of the buzzing of a fly. He had not yet "opened his eyes".
Some decision-making took place at that stage. If the interruption
seemed worthwhile, the Oldest One woke further circuits. If not, not. A
human sleeper may awaken enough to swat a fly. When the Oldest One was
awakened for trivial reasons he had ways to "swat" his children. They did
not wake him lightly. But if he decided to wake further, either to act or
to punish the interruption to his sleep, the Oldest One then activated his
major external optics, and with them a whole congeries of
information-processing systems and short-term memories. He was then fully
awake, like a man looking up at the ceiling after a nap.
The Oldest One's internal clocks told him that this nap had been rather
short. Less than ten years. Unless there was a good reason for this
awakening, someone would have to be swatted.
By then the Oldest One was fully aware of his surroundings, all of
them. His internal telemetry was receiving status reports from all of its
remote sensors, all through the ten million ton mass in which he and his
children lived. A hundred inputs recirculated through his short-term
memory: the words that had wakened him; the image of the three captives
his children had just brought him; a breakdown in repair facilities in the
4700 A sections; the fact that there was unusual activity among the stored
intelligences; temperatures; inventories; moments of thrust. His long-term
storage, though dormant, was accessible at need.
The wisest of his children was standing before him, with beads of sweat
trickling through the sparse hairs on his cheeks and lip. The Oldest One
perceived that this was a new leader, shorter and younger than the one he
remembered from ten years before, but he wore the necklace of reading
scrolls that symbolized the office as he waited for judgment. The Oldest
One turned his major external lenses on him as a signal to speak. "We have
captured intruders and brought them to you," the leader said, and added,
trembling, "Have we done well?"
The Oldest One turned his attention to observe the captives. One was
not an intruder, but the pup he had allowed to be born fifteen years
before, now nearly grown. The other two, however, were strangers, and both
female. That presented an option worth pondering. When the other intruders
had presented themselves, he had failed to take advantage of the chance to
establish new breeding stock until it was too late for any of the
available specimens. And then they had stopped coming.
That was a chance the Oldest One had missed, and one which, on the
basis of past terrifying experience, he should not have failed to take.
The Oldest One was aware that for some thousands of years his judgments
had not been always right, his opinions no longer confident. He was
slowing down. He was subject to error. The Oldest One did not know what
personal penalty he would have to pay for error and did not want to find
out.
He began to make decisions. He reached into his long-term memory for
precedents and prospects, and found that he had a satisfying number of
alternatives. He activated mobility and handling effectors. His great
metal body rose on its supports and moved past the leader, toward the
chamber where the intruders were being kept He heard the gasp from his
children as he moved. All were startled. A few of the younger ones, who
had never seen him move as adults, were terrified. "You have done well,"
he judged, and there was a long sigh of relief.
The Oldest One could not enter the chamber because of his size, but
with long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives.
It did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at
that moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory:
two of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for
many years of use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All
seemed in good health.
As far as communicating with them went, there was the nuisance that
their yells and imprecations were in one of those unpleasant languages
their predecessors had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word.
That was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through
the intervention of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even
his own children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so
that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or
two of them every dozen generations as translators-as nothing but
translators, because the Oldest One's children regrettably did not seem to
be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile
the facts were favorable. Fact: The specimens were in good condition.
Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact:
They were his to employ as he saw fit.
"Feed them. Keep them secure. Wait for further instructions," he
commanded the children clustered behind him. He then turned down his
external receptors so that he could consider just how to employ these
intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core
of his very long life.
As a personality stored in a machine, the Oldest One's normal life
expectancy was very great-perhaps as much as several thousand years-but
not great enough to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting
it. In standby mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time
powered-down, motionless. He was not resting at such times, not even
dreaming. He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and
carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly
forward.
From time to time he woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to
check and correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They
were instructed to do so at need, and very often (though not really very
by any standard other than his own) the need arose.
Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an
animal as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That
time had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he
was expelled from his mother's sweated and straining loins to the terrible
time at its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his
veins and the whirling knives waited to trepan his skull. He could
remember that time quite clearly when he chose. He could remember
anything, in that short life or in the long, long pseudolife that
followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his
stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much
stored.
The Oldest One had no clear conception of how many memories he had
available to him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or
even of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was
"Here". That certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts
was "There". Everything else in the universe was merely "Everywhere else",
and he did not trouble to locate points as they related to one another.
Where did the intruders come from? From somewhere or other. It did not
matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some
other somewhere. Where had his people come from, in the long ages before
he himself had been born? It didn't matter. The central Here had existed
for a long, long time-longer than one could comprehend, even for the
Oldest One himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and
outfitted and launched; Here had seen many births and deaths-nearly five
million of them-though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred
living things, and seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant
slow changes through all that time. The newborns were larger, softer,
fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower,
less hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the
children were well advised to wake the Oldest One.
Sometimes the changes were political, for Here had held a thousand
different social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation
or two, or even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and
hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or
a divinity, or when none rose above any other at all. There was never a
democratic republic like those Earth had tried-Here was not big enough for
representative government-and only once a racially stratified society. (It
ended when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers
and wiped them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a
various collection of moralities, but only one religion-at least, in the
last many millennia. There was only room for one, when its living god
rested among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite
or favor when it chose.
For many eons Here held no true people at all, only a collection of
puzzled semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered
to make them wise. The process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred
thousand years before the first of them comprehended even the concept of
writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough
to be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One
himself. It had not been welcome. no other had earned it since.
And that, too, was a failing, the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had
failed, what had he done wrong?
Surely he had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first
few centuries of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful
in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished.
When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs.
But perhaps that was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time,
long and long ago, when he had awakened with a terrible "pain" in the
metal carapace he dwelt within. It was not the pain of flesh, but the
sensors' report of unacceptable physical damage; but it was quite as
alarming. His children were gathered around in terror, all shouting at
once as they displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female.
"She was insane!" they cried, quaking. "She tried to destroy you!"
The Oldest One's quick check of systems revealed that the damage was
trivial. It had been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him
was a few effectors and some destruction of control nets, nothing that
could not be repaired. He asked to know why she had done this. Their
answers came only slowly, for they were terrified, but they came: "She
wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could
not grow without you. We beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not
killing her sooner!"
"You did wrong," the Oldest One said justly, "but that was not the
reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at
once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed."
And then-was it a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an
eye. And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon
enough. For a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and
the reproductive budgets had not been met, and the total census of his
living children was down to four individuals before they dared risk his
displeasure by waking him. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the
end of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near
the end of child-bearing. He had used a dozen years of his life then,
waking fretfully every few months, disciplining, teaching-worrying. With
the help of biological lore stored deep in his oldest memories he had
insured that the two babies the female managed to bear were also female.
With stored sperm from the terrified males he kept the gene pool as
diverse as he could. But it was a near thing. And some things had been
forever lost. no other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If
only one would! no other like himself had ever appeared.
The Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be
another from his children. If it could happen, it would have. There had
been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died
since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years.
When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew
he would act. They did not know what the actions would be.
"The repair mechanisms in the 4700 A corridors are to be replaced," he
said. "Three artificers see to it" There was a stilled murmur of relief
from the seventy-odd adults-punishment always came first, and if his first
orders were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three
artificers the leader pointed to were less relieved, because that meant
some days of very hard work in manhandling new machines to the green
corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to
get away from the awful presence of the Oldest One. They seized it
immediately.
"The male intruder and the older female are to be penned together," he
said. If they were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to
start with the older female. "Do any of you survive who have had
experience with the rapporter?" Three of the children were pushed
reluctantly forward. "One of you will educate the younger female," he
instructed. "Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders
for storage?"
"I prepared the last two," the leader said. "Also there are persons who
assisted me still alive."
"See that the skills are maintained," the Oldest One ordered. "If one
of you should die, he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons
must be taught" That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost-and
the lives of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost
while he was powered down-it would have been necessary to set some of them
to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that
these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority
list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be
replaced. All permitted areas of Here should be visited at least once a
month. And, as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least
five babies should be born each year for the next ten years.
The Oldest One then powered down his external receptors, resumed his
place at the central communications terminals and plugged himself in to
his long-term memories. All about the central spindle his children were
hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a
dozen left to dig up berryfruit bushes and airvines to replace the
defective plants, others went to deal with the captives and attend to
housekeeping chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to
breed. If they had had other plans, they were now deferred. At this
particular awakening the Oldest One was not dissatisfied with his
children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him
to wonder.
His concerns were elsewhere.
With his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode,
the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into
his reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also
opportunity, if approached right. Change might be used to advance his
purposes, and could not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt
with the immediate and the tactical. Now his attention went to the
strategic and the ultimate.
He reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events
very far away in space and in time, and were frightening even to the
Oldest One. (How had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and
not frightening at all, for example those stored intruder intelligences
the boy called "the Dead Men". There was nothing in them to be
frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be.
When the intruders first blundered Here, shattered castaways in their
tiny ships, the Oldest One had had a moment of terror. They were
unexplained. Who were they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve,
come to reproach his presumption?
He quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of
servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They
were not that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance,
in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their
ships' course directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do
on arriving Here, they were terrified.
They were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up
many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone
adventurer, then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of
them, in nine ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and
none of them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had
had his children sacrifice at once, in order to put their stored
intelligence into the machine form that he could best deal with. The
others he had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when
it appeared they might be more interesting in an independent life in the
unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might
need. He had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been
made immortal-as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever
were. It was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they
were more trouble than they were worth. They brought diseases to his
children, and some of them had died. They caught diseases from the
children, and some of the intruders died, too. And they did not store
well. Properly programmed into his long-term memories, by the
machine-directed techniques that had been used on him thousands of
centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly.
Their time sense was deficient. Their response to interrogatories was
erratic. Large sections of their memories were gone. Some of them could
not be read at all. The fault was not in the techniques; they were
defective to begin with.
When the Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of
his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had
ever had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when
at random intervals he chose one to store. So even with his flesh
ancestors, so far back that even his own immense age dwindled in
comparison. So with those other stored memories that he did not like even
to consult.
Not so with the intruders. There was something wrong with their
chemistry. They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there
were times when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little
storage spheres and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here,
and his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at
the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them.
Perhaps that time was now.
With a sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer
to retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked
him to the stored intruder minds.
And recoiled.
Three of the children, hurrying Janine around the curvature of the
spindle from her. pen to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One's effectors
quiver and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting
fearfully for what would come next
Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down
to standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged
Janine to the waiting metallic couch.
But inside the Oldest One's metal shell he had received his greatest
shock in many awakenings. Someone had been interfering with his stored
memories! It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad;
worse, they were in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as
though something had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he
had never given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These
were not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They
were new. They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even
his own. Spaceships and machines. Living intelligences by the tens of
billions. Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by
his standards, but possessed incredible stores to draw on. It was no
wonder that he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie
might start and twitch.
Somehow his stored intruders had made contact with the culture they had
come from.
It was easy for the Oldest One to learn how that contact had been made.
From Here to the food facility, by means of the long-unused communications
net. Interpreted and processed on the food facility by a pathetically
crude machine. Transmitted the long light-days to the planets that circled
that nearest star, by means of the creeping electromagnetic impulses of
lightspeed radio. Contemptible! Until one considered how much information
had been transmitted each way. The Oldest One was like a hydraulic
engineer transfixed at the base of a hydroelectric dam, watching a thin
needle of water spurt hundreds of meters into the air, out of an almost
invisible pinhole. The quantity was trivial. But that so much poured
through so tiny an opening bespoke the pressure of a vast body behind the
dam.
And the leak went both ways.
The Oldest One acknowledged that he had been careless. In interrogating
the stored intruders to find out what they knew, he had let them know much
about himself. About Here. About the technology that guided it.
About his consecration, and about the lords his life was meant to serve.
At least the leak had been tiny, and the transmissions confused by the
imperfections of the stored intelligences themselves. There was no part of
that storage inaccessible to the Oldest One. He opened them up for study,
and traced every bit. He did not "speak" to them. He allowed their minds
to flow into his own. The Dead Men could not resist him, any more than a
prepared frog on a dissecting table could resist a surgeon's scalpel.
When he was done, he withdrew to ponder.
Were his plans in jeopardy?
He activated his internal scanning systems, and a three-dimensional
tank of the Galaxy sprang up in his "mind". It had no real existence.
There was no vantage point from which any person could have seen it. He
himself did not "see" it, he simply knew it was there. It was a sort of
trompe-l'oeil. An optical illusion, except that it was not optical. On it,
very far away, an object appeared, haloed in light. It had been many
centuries since the Oldest One had allowed himself to observe that object.
It was time to look at it again.
The Oldest One reached down into and activated long undisturbed memory
stores.
It was not an easy experience. It was almost the equivalent of a
session on the analyst's couch for a human, for he was uncovering
thoughts, memories, guilts, worries, and uncertainties that his
"conscious" mind-the reasoning and problem-solving circuits-had long since
decided to lay away. Those memories were not gone. They had not become
impotent. They still held "shame" and "fear" for him. Was he doing the
right thing? Did he dare act on his own responsibility? The old circular
arguments raced through his mind as they had done two hundred thousand
years before, and were no closer to resolution. It was not possible for
the Oldest One to fugue into hysteria or depression. His circuits did not
allow it.
It was, however, possible for him to be terrified.
After a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still
afraid. But he was committed. He had to act.
The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more.
His forward effectors quivered, straightened and pointed at a young
female, caught in midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well.
"Come with me," he ordered.
She sobbed, but followed. Her mate took a step after her as they
hurried toward a gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with
them, and so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they
had been mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would
ever see her again.
The Oldest One's cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid
walk, but the little difference kept the weeping female trotting and
panting to keep up. He glided on, past machines that had not been used
even in his memories-wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little
six-screwed thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest
One did not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with
its angels. The gold skeins changed to radiant silver, the silver to
purest white. A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood
waiting open for them, the heavy door fanned wide as the Oldest One
approached. By the time they reached a place where the female had never
been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of
a dozen colors and strange patterns flickered in panels all around a
great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. no rest. "Go there," the Oldest
One commanded. "Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do." At opposite
sides of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate
them, were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench,
very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench,
a sort of hummock of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow
lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and
touched an effector to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights
shivered and rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a
triple row of ochre lines in the middle of it "Match my pattern!" The
young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though
it had not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors
merged and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of
the controls before the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He
merely waited. He knew she was doing her best By the time all ten wheels
were showing the pattern he had chosen tears were gone and sweat was
stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard.
The colors were not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant,
safed controls, the rosette of screens that should have displayed their
course coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might
have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at
all.
But they did work.
The Oldest One touched something under his own bank of controls and
quickly, wonderfully, the lights developed a life of their own. They
blurred and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took
over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into
life with a pattern of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered
fearfully at the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field
of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one.
She felt what happened next.
So did everyone else Here. The intruders in their pens, the near
hundred children all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest
One himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died
and was replaced by tweaks of pseudoacceleration punctuating
weightlessness.
After more than three-quarters of a million years of rolling slowly
around Earth's very distant sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new
orbit and surged away.
At precisely five-fifteen AM a gentle green glow appeared in the
bedside monitor of 5. Ya. Lavorosrna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough
to disturb deep slumber, but she had been less than half asleep. "Very
well," she called, "I am already awake, you do not have to continue this
program. But give me a moment."
"Da, gospozha," her secretary acknowledged, but the green glow
remained. If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary
would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do;
that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program.
In this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind.
There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because
old Peter Herter had given warning before he invaded the world's minds,
there had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real
damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and
rearranging, and in the course of it Robin's flights had been inextricably
confused.
Pity. Worse than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not
tried. Essie accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know
that he had tried.
"Am I allowed to eat?" she called.
"No, gospozha Broadhead. Nothing at all, not even a drink of water,"
her secretary responded at once. "Do you wish your messages?"
"Perhaps. What messages?" If they were of interest at all she would
take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the
indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed.
"There is a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I
believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there."
"Do so." Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while
she was waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for
her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She
carefully kept the dozen tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart
from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But
there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had
hurt more, and perhaps that would have been good. These months of
demeaning annoyance were only an irritation; there was enough of Anna
Karenina in Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come
to be! Her life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her
private parts.
"Gospozha Broadhead?"
"Yes?"
The visual program appeared, looking apologetic. "Your husband cannot
be reached at present. He is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has
just taken off; all the aircraft's communications are at present required
for navigation."
"Mexico City? Dallas?" The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the
Earth to get to her! "Then at least give me the recorded message," she
ordered.
"Da, gospozha." Face and greenish glow shrank away, and out of the
sound-circuits her husband's voice addressed her:
"Honey, I'm having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter
to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight.
Now I'm hoping to make a connection to Dallas and-Anyway, I'm on my way."
Pause. He sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost
see him casting around for something cheerful to say. But it was all
rambling. Something about the great news about prayer fans. Something
about the Heechee who weren't Heechee, and-and just a babble. Poor
creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of
his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said,
"Oh, hell, Essie. I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the
meantime. Take care of yourself. If you've got any spare time before you,
uh, before Wilma gets going, I've told Albert to tape all the essential
stuff for you. He's a good old program...." Long pause. "I love you," he
said, and was gone.
S. Ya. lay back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with
the next (and perhaps last?) hour of her life. She missed her husband
quite a lot, especially in view of the fact that in some ways she
considered him quite a silly man. "Good old program"! How foolish of him
to anthropomorphize computer programs! His Albert Einstein program was,
she had no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the
bio-assay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! "Squiffy." It was like
giving a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were
done by someone one cared for... in which case it was instead endearing.
But machines were machines. At the graduate institute at Akademogorsk
young S. Ya. Lavorovna had learned very completely that machine
intelligence was not "personal". You built them up, from adding machines
to number-crunchers. You packed them full of data. You constructed for
them a store of appropriate responses to stimuli and provided them with a
hierarchical scale of appropriateness; and that was all there was to it.
Now and then, to be sure, you were surprised by what came out of a program
you had written. Of course you were; that was the nature of the exercise.
None of that implied the existence of free will on the part of the
machine, or of personal identity.
All the same, it was rather touching to watch him crack jokes with his
programs. He was a touching man. He touched her in places where she was
most open and vulnerable, because in some ways he was very like that only
other man in her life who had ever really mattered to her, her father.
When Semya Yagrodna was a small girl her father had been the central
person in the world-tall, skinny old man who played the ukulele and the
mandolin and taught biology at the gymnasium. He was delighted to have a
bright and inquiring child. It might have pleased him even more if her
talents had seemed to go toward the life sciences rather than to physics
and engineering, but he cherished her as she was. He taught her about the
world when he could no longer teach her mathematics, because she had
surpassed him. "You must be aware of what you will have to deal with," he
explained to her. "Even here. Even now. Even when I was a young boy in
Stalin's time, and the women's movements were promoting girls to lead
machine-gun squads and run tractors. This is always the same, Semya. It is
a fact of history that mathematics is for the young, and that girls excel
equally with boys until the age of fifteen, perhaps, or at most twenty.
And then, just when the boys are turning into Lobachewskis and Fermats,
the girls stop. Why? For childbearing. For marriage. For heaven knows
what. We will not let it happen to you, small dove. Study! Read! Learn!
Comprehend! Every day, for as many hours as you must! And I will assist
you in all the ways I can." And he did; and from the ages of eight to
eighteen young Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna came home from school every day,
deposited one book bag in their apartment and picked up another, and
trotted away to the old yellow building off the Nevsky Prospekt where her
tutor lived. She had never dropped out of mathematics, and for this she
had her father to thank. She had never learned to dance, either-or to try
a thousand sorts of scent and makeup, or to date-not until she was away at
Akademogorsk, and for that also she had her father to thank. Where the
world tried to force her into a female role he defended her like a tiger.
But at home, to be sure, there was a need to cook and sew, and to polish
the rosewood chairs; and none of those things were done by him. Her father
in physical appearance had not looked in the least like Robin Broadhead...
but in other ways, so like!
Robin had asked her to marry him when they had known each other less
than a year. It had taken her a full year beyond that to decide to say
yes. She talked to everyone she knew about it. Her roommate. The dean of
her department. Her former love; who had married the girl next door. Stay
away from this one, S. Ya., they all advised her. On the face of it the
advice was sound, for who was he? A feckless millionaire, still mourning a
woman he had loved and shatteringly lost, guilt-ridden, just out of years
of intensive psychoanalysis-what a perfect description of the completely
hopeless marriage risk! But... On the other hand... Nevertheless...
Nevertheless he touched her. They had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras
in stinging cold weather, sitting most of the days inside the Cafe du
Monde, never even seeing the parade. The rest of the time they stayed in
their hotel, out of the sleet and the crowds, and made love, emerging only
for fried sweet dough with clouds of powdered sugar, and sweet, milky,
chicory-laced coffee in the mornings. Robin bestirred himself to be
gallant. "Shall we go for a cruise on the river today? Visit an art
gallery? Dance at a night club?" But she could see that he did not want to
do any of these things, this man twice her age who wanted to marry he;
sitting with his hands cupped around his coffee as though merely getting
warm were formidable enough a task to contemplate for one day. And she
made her decision.
She said, "I think instead we might get married, after all."
And so they had. Not that day, but as soon as they could. S. Ya. never
regretted it; it was not a thing to regret. After the first few weeks she
had not even worried about how it would turn out. He was not a jealous man
or a mean one. If he was often absorbed in his work, well, so was she.
There was only this question of the woman, Gelle-Kiara Moyrilin, the
lost love.
She might well be dead. Was as good as dead, in any case, because she
was hopelessly out of human reach forever. It was well known that this was
so, from the fundamental laws of physics... but there were times, Essie
was sure, when her husband did not believe it to be so.
And then she wondered: If there was any possibility of a choice between
them, how would Robin choose?
And what if the laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an
exception now and then?
There was the matter of the Heechee ships, and how could one apply
known physical law to them? As with every other thinking person in the
world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long
time. The Gateway asteroid had been discovered while she was still a
schoolgirl. The headlines announcing new findings had come every few
weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the
plunge and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were
on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned.
The Heechee ships were not uncontrollable. They could in fact be
controlled precisely. The superficial mechanics of the process were known.
Each ship possessed five main-drive verfliers, and five auxiliaries. They
located coordinates in space (how?), and, once set, the ship went there.
Again, how? It then returned unerringly to its place of origin, or usually
did, if it did not run out of fuel or encounter a mischance-a triumph of
cybernetics that S. Ya. knew no human agency could reproduce. The
difficulty was that until this very second no human being knew quite how
to read the controls.
But what about the next second, or the one after that? With information
pouring in, from the Food Factory and Heechee Heaven; with Dead Men
talking; with at least one semicompetent human pilot, the boy, Wan-with
all this, and especially with the flood of new knowledge that might be
unlocked from the prayer fans...
How long before some of the mysteries were solved? Perhaps not very
long at all.
S. Ya. wished she could be a part of it all, as her classmates had
become. As her husband had become. She wished even more that she did not
suspect what part he most wanted to play. But the suspicion remained. If
Robin could make a Heechee ship fly him to any destination he chose in all
the universe, she thought she knew what that destination would be.
Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna-Broadhead called to her secretary, "How much
time do I have?"
The program appeared and said, "It is now five twenty-two. Dr.
Liederman is expected at six forty-five. You will then be prepared for the
procedure, which will occur at eight o'clock. You have a little more than
an hour and a quarter. Perhaps you would like to rest?"
S. Ya. chuckled. It always amused her when her own programs offered her
advice. She did not, however, feel any need to respond to it. "Have menus
been prepared for today and tomorrow?" she asked.
"Nyet, gospozha."
That was both a relief and a disappointment. At least Robin had not
prescribed more fattening foods for today-or perhaps his prescription had
been overruled, because of the operation? "Select something," she ordered.
The program was quite capable of preparing menus. It was only because of
Robin himself that either of them ever gave a thought to such routine
chores. But Robin was Robin, and there were times when cooking was a hobby
for him, cutting onions paper-thin for a salad and standing to stir a stew
for hours. Sometimes what he produced was awful, sometimes not; Essie was
not critical, because she was not very interested in what she ate. And
also because she was grateful that she felt no need to concern herself
with such matters; in this respect, at least, Robin surpassed her father.
"No, wait," she added, struck with a thought. "When Robin comes home he
will be hungry. Serve him a snack-those crullers, and the New Orleans
coffee. As at the Cafe du Monde."
"Da, gospozha." How devious you are, thought Essie, smiling to herself.
One hour and twelve minutes left.
It would do no harm to rest.
On the other hand, she was not sleepy.
She could, she thought, interrogate her medical program again. But she
had no real wish to hear about the procedures she faced an additional
time. Such large pieces to take from someone else's body for the sake of
her own! The kidney, yes. One might well sell that and still have
something left. As a student, Essie had known comrades who had done that,
might even have done it herself if she had been just a shade poorer than
she actually was. But, although she knew very little more of anatomy than
her father had taught her at his knee, she knew enough to be sure that the
person, or persons, who had given her all those other tissues would not
have enough left to go on living with. It was a queasy feeling.
Almost as queasy as that other feeling that came with knowing that,
even with Full Medical, from this particular invasion of her person by
Wilma Liederman's knives she might not return.
Still an hour and eleven minutes.
Essie sat up once more. Whether she was to live or not, she was as
dutiful a wife as she had been a daughter, and if Robin wished her to
concern herself with prayer fans and Heechee she would. She addressed the
computer terminal. "I wish the Albert Einstein program."
When Essie Broadhead said, "I wish the Albert Einstein program," she
set a large number of events in motion. Very few of these events were
visible to the unaided senses. They did not take place in the macroscopic
physical world, but in a universe composed largely of charges and pathways
operating on the scale of the electron. The individual units were tiny.
race.
And my first thought was: So much for the deal with Bover. Gateway Corp
was sure to take over now, and I couldn't blame them.
The Oldest One bestirred himself slowly, one organ at a time. First
came the piezophonic external receptors. Call them "ears". They were
always "on", in the sense that sounds always reached them. Their tiny rag
crystals were squeezed by vibrations in the air and, when the patterns of
sound corresponded to the name the children of the Oldest One called him
by, they passed a gate and went on to activate what corresponded to his
peripheral nervous system.
At that point the Oldest One was not yet awake, but knew he was being
wakened. His true ears, the inner ones that analyzed and interpreted
sound, came to life. His cognitive circuits sampled the signals. The
Oldest One heard the voices of his children and understood what they were
saying. But only in an offhand and inattentive way, like a drowsy human
aware of the buzzing of a fly. He had not yet "opened his eyes".
Some decision-making took place at that stage. If the interruption
seemed worthwhile, the Oldest One woke further circuits. If not, not. A
human sleeper may awaken enough to swat a fly. When the Oldest One was
awakened for trivial reasons he had ways to "swat" his children. They did
not wake him lightly. But if he decided to wake further, either to act or
to punish the interruption to his sleep, the Oldest One then activated his
major external optics, and with them a whole congeries of
information-processing systems and short-term memories. He was then fully
awake, like a man looking up at the ceiling after a nap.
The Oldest One's internal clocks told him that this nap had been rather
short. Less than ten years. Unless there was a good reason for this
awakening, someone would have to be swatted.
By then the Oldest One was fully aware of his surroundings, all of
them. His internal telemetry was receiving status reports from all of its
remote sensors, all through the ten million ton mass in which he and his
children lived. A hundred inputs recirculated through his short-term
memory: the words that had wakened him; the image of the three captives
his children had just brought him; a breakdown in repair facilities in the
4700 A sections; the fact that there was unusual activity among the stored
intelligences; temperatures; inventories; moments of thrust. His long-term
storage, though dormant, was accessible at need.
The wisest of his children was standing before him, with beads of sweat
trickling through the sparse hairs on his cheeks and lip. The Oldest One
perceived that this was a new leader, shorter and younger than the one he
remembered from ten years before, but he wore the necklace of reading
scrolls that symbolized the office as he waited for judgment. The Oldest
One turned his major external lenses on him as a signal to speak. "We have
captured intruders and brought them to you," the leader said, and added,
trembling, "Have we done well?"
The Oldest One turned his attention to observe the captives. One was
not an intruder, but the pup he had allowed to be born fifteen years
before, now nearly grown. The other two, however, were strangers, and both
female. That presented an option worth pondering. When the other intruders
had presented themselves, he had failed to take advantage of the chance to
establish new breeding stock until it was too late for any of the
available specimens. And then they had stopped coming.
That was a chance the Oldest One had missed, and one which, on the
basis of past terrifying experience, he should not have failed to take.
The Oldest One was aware that for some thousands of years his judgments
had not been always right, his opinions no longer confident. He was
slowing down. He was subject to error. The Oldest One did not know what
personal penalty he would have to pay for error and did not want to find
out.
He began to make decisions. He reached into his long-term memory for
precedents and prospects, and found that he had a satisfying number of
alternatives. He activated mobility and handling effectors. His great
metal body rose on its supports and moved past the leader, toward the
chamber where the intruders were being kept He heard the gasp from his
children as he moved. All were startled. A few of the younger ones, who
had never seen him move as adults, were terrified. "You have done well,"
he judged, and there was a long sigh of relief.
The Oldest One could not enter the chamber because of his size, but
with long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives.
It did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at
that moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory:
two of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for
many years of use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All
seemed in good health.
As far as communicating with them went, there was the nuisance that
their yells and imprecations were in one of those unpleasant languages
their predecessors had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word.
That was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through
the intervention of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even
his own children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so
that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or
two of them every dozen generations as translators-as nothing but
translators, because the Oldest One's children regrettably did not seem to
be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile
the facts were favorable. Fact: The specimens were in good condition.
Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact:
They were his to employ as he saw fit.
"Feed them. Keep them secure. Wait for further instructions," he
commanded the children clustered behind him. He then turned down his
external receptors so that he could consider just how to employ these
intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core
of his very long life.
As a personality stored in a machine, the Oldest One's normal life
expectancy was very great-perhaps as much as several thousand years-but
not great enough to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting
it. In standby mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time
powered-down, motionless. He was not resting at such times, not even
dreaming. He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and
carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly
forward.
From time to time he woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to
check and correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They
were instructed to do so at need, and very often (though not really very
by any standard other than his own) the need arose.
Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an
animal as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That
time had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he
was expelled from his mother's sweated and straining loins to the terrible
time at its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his
veins and the whirling knives waited to trepan his skull. He could
remember that time quite clearly when he chose. He could remember
anything, in that short life or in the long, long pseudolife that
followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his
stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much
stored.
The Oldest One had no clear conception of how many memories he had
available to him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or
even of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was
"Here". That certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts
was "There". Everything else in the universe was merely "Everywhere else",
and he did not trouble to locate points as they related to one another.
Where did the intruders come from? From somewhere or other. It did not
matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some
other somewhere. Where had his people come from, in the long ages before
he himself had been born? It didn't matter. The central Here had existed
for a long, long time-longer than one could comprehend, even for the
Oldest One himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and
outfitted and launched; Here had seen many births and deaths-nearly five
million of them-though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred
living things, and seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant
slow changes through all that time. The newborns were larger, softer,
fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower,
less hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the
children were well advised to wake the Oldest One.
Sometimes the changes were political, for Here had held a thousand
different social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation
or two, or even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and
hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or
a divinity, or when none rose above any other at all. There was never a
democratic republic like those Earth had tried-Here was not big enough for
representative government-and only once a racially stratified society. (It
ended when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers
and wiped them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a
various collection of moralities, but only one religion-at least, in the
last many millennia. There was only room for one, when its living god
rested among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite
or favor when it chose.
For many eons Here held no true people at all, only a collection of
puzzled semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered
to make them wise. The process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred
thousand years before the first of them comprehended even the concept of
writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough
to be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One
himself. It had not been welcome. no other had earned it since.
And that, too, was a failing, the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had
failed, what had he done wrong?
Surely he had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first
few centuries of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful
in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished.
When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs.
But perhaps that was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time,
long and long ago, when he had awakened with a terrible "pain" in the
metal carapace he dwelt within. It was not the pain of flesh, but the
sensors' report of unacceptable physical damage; but it was quite as
alarming. His children were gathered around in terror, all shouting at
once as they displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female.
"She was insane!" they cried, quaking. "She tried to destroy you!"
The Oldest One's quick check of systems revealed that the damage was
trivial. It had been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him
was a few effectors and some destruction of control nets, nothing that
could not be repaired. He asked to know why she had done this. Their
answers came only slowly, for they were terrified, but they came: "She
wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could
not grow without you. We beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not
killing her sooner!"
"You did wrong," the Oldest One said justly, "but that was not the
reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at
once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed."
And then-was it a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an
eye. And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon
enough. For a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and
the reproductive budgets had not been met, and the total census of his
living children was down to four individuals before they dared risk his
displeasure by waking him. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the
end of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near
the end of child-bearing. He had used a dozen years of his life then,
waking fretfully every few months, disciplining, teaching-worrying. With
the help of biological lore stored deep in his oldest memories he had
insured that the two babies the female managed to bear were also female.
With stored sperm from the terrified males he kept the gene pool as
diverse as he could. But it was a near thing. And some things had been
forever lost. no other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If
only one would! no other like himself had ever appeared.
The Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be
another from his children. If it could happen, it would have. There had
been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died
since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years.
When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew
he would act. They did not know what the actions would be.
"The repair mechanisms in the 4700 A corridors are to be replaced," he
said. "Three artificers see to it" There was a stilled murmur of relief
from the seventy-odd adults-punishment always came first, and if his first
orders were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three
artificers the leader pointed to were less relieved, because that meant
some days of very hard work in manhandling new machines to the green
corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to
get away from the awful presence of the Oldest One. They seized it
immediately.
"The male intruder and the older female are to be penned together," he
said. If they were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to
start with the older female. "Do any of you survive who have had
experience with the rapporter?" Three of the children were pushed
reluctantly forward. "One of you will educate the younger female," he
instructed. "Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders
for storage?"
"I prepared the last two," the leader said. "Also there are persons who
assisted me still alive."
"See that the skills are maintained," the Oldest One ordered. "If one
of you should die, he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons
must be taught" That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost-and
the lives of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost
while he was powered down-it would have been necessary to set some of them
to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that
these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority
list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be
replaced. All permitted areas of Here should be visited at least once a
month. And, as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least
five babies should be born each year for the next ten years.
The Oldest One then powered down his external receptors, resumed his
place at the central communications terminals and plugged himself in to
his long-term memories. All about the central spindle his children were
hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a
dozen left to dig up berryfruit bushes and airvines to replace the
defective plants, others went to deal with the captives and attend to
housekeeping chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to
breed. If they had had other plans, they were now deferred. At this
particular awakening the Oldest One was not dissatisfied with his
children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him
to wonder.
His concerns were elsewhere.
With his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode,
the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into
his reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also
opportunity, if approached right. Change might be used to advance his
purposes, and could not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt
with the immediate and the tactical. Now his attention went to the
strategic and the ultimate.
He reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events
very far away in space and in time, and were frightening even to the
Oldest One. (How had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and
not frightening at all, for example those stored intruder intelligences
the boy called "the Dead Men". There was nothing in them to be
frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be.
When the intruders first blundered Here, shattered castaways in their
tiny ships, the Oldest One had had a moment of terror. They were
unexplained. Who were they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve,
come to reproach his presumption?
He quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of
servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They
were not that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance,
in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their
ships' course directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do
on arriving Here, they were terrified.
They were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up
many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone
adventurer, then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of
them, in nine ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and
none of them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had
had his children sacrifice at once, in order to put their stored
intelligence into the machine form that he could best deal with. The
others he had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when
it appeared they might be more interesting in an independent life in the
unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might
need. He had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been
made immortal-as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever
were. It was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they
were more trouble than they were worth. They brought diseases to his
children, and some of them had died. They caught diseases from the
children, and some of the intruders died, too. And they did not store
well. Properly programmed into his long-term memories, by the
machine-directed techniques that had been used on him thousands of
centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly.
Their time sense was deficient. Their response to interrogatories was
erratic. Large sections of their memories were gone. Some of them could
not be read at all. The fault was not in the techniques; they were
defective to begin with.
When the Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of
his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had
ever had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when
at random intervals he chose one to store. So even with his flesh
ancestors, so far back that even his own immense age dwindled in
comparison. So with those other stored memories that he did not like even
to consult.
Not so with the intruders. There was something wrong with their
chemistry. They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there
were times when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little
storage spheres and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here,
and his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at
the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them.
Perhaps that time was now.
With a sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer
to retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked
him to the stored intruder minds.
And recoiled.
Three of the children, hurrying Janine around the curvature of the
spindle from her. pen to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One's effectors
quiver and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting
fearfully for what would come next
Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down
to standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged
Janine to the waiting metallic couch.
But inside the Oldest One's metal shell he had received his greatest
shock in many awakenings. Someone had been interfering with his stored
memories! It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad;
worse, they were in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as
though something had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he
had never given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These
were not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They
were new. They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even
his own. Spaceships and machines. Living intelligences by the tens of
billions. Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by
his standards, but possessed incredible stores to draw on. It was no
wonder that he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie
might start and twitch.
Somehow his stored intruders had made contact with the culture they had
come from.
It was easy for the Oldest One to learn how that contact had been made.
From Here to the food facility, by means of the long-unused communications
net. Interpreted and processed on the food facility by a pathetically
crude machine. Transmitted the long light-days to the planets that circled
that nearest star, by means of the creeping electromagnetic impulses of
lightspeed radio. Contemptible! Until one considered how much information
had been transmitted each way. The Oldest One was like a hydraulic
engineer transfixed at the base of a hydroelectric dam, watching a thin
needle of water spurt hundreds of meters into the air, out of an almost
invisible pinhole. The quantity was trivial. But that so much poured
through so tiny an opening bespoke the pressure of a vast body behind the
dam.
And the leak went both ways.
The Oldest One acknowledged that he had been careless. In interrogating
the stored intruders to find out what they knew, he had let them know much
about himself. About Here. About the technology that guided it.
About his consecration, and about the lords his life was meant to serve.
At least the leak had been tiny, and the transmissions confused by the
imperfections of the stored intelligences themselves. There was no part of
that storage inaccessible to the Oldest One. He opened them up for study,
and traced every bit. He did not "speak" to them. He allowed their minds
to flow into his own. The Dead Men could not resist him, any more than a
prepared frog on a dissecting table could resist a surgeon's scalpel.
When he was done, he withdrew to ponder.
Were his plans in jeopardy?
He activated his internal scanning systems, and a three-dimensional
tank of the Galaxy sprang up in his "mind". It had no real existence.
There was no vantage point from which any person could have seen it. He
himself did not "see" it, he simply knew it was there. It was a sort of
trompe-l'oeil. An optical illusion, except that it was not optical. On it,
very far away, an object appeared, haloed in light. It had been many
centuries since the Oldest One had allowed himself to observe that object.
It was time to look at it again.
The Oldest One reached down into and activated long undisturbed memory
stores.
It was not an easy experience. It was almost the equivalent of a
session on the analyst's couch for a human, for he was uncovering
thoughts, memories, guilts, worries, and uncertainties that his
"conscious" mind-the reasoning and problem-solving circuits-had long since
decided to lay away. Those memories were not gone. They had not become
impotent. They still held "shame" and "fear" for him. Was he doing the
right thing? Did he dare act on his own responsibility? The old circular
arguments raced through his mind as they had done two hundred thousand
years before, and were no closer to resolution. It was not possible for
the Oldest One to fugue into hysteria or depression. His circuits did not
allow it.
It was, however, possible for him to be terrified.
After a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still
afraid. But he was committed. He had to act.
The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more.
His forward effectors quivered, straightened and pointed at a young
female, caught in midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well.
"Come with me," he ordered.
She sobbed, but followed. Her mate took a step after her as they
hurried toward a gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with
them, and so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they
had been mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would
ever see her again.
The Oldest One's cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid
walk, but the little difference kept the weeping female trotting and
panting to keep up. He glided on, past machines that had not been used
even in his memories-wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little
six-screwed thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest
One did not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with
its angels. The gold skeins changed to radiant silver, the silver to
purest white. A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood
waiting open for them, the heavy door fanned wide as the Oldest One
approached. By the time they reached a place where the female had never
been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of
a dozen colors and strange patterns flickered in panels all around a
great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. no rest. "Go there," the Oldest
One commanded. "Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do." At opposite
sides of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate
them, were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench,
very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench,
a sort of hummock of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow
lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and
touched an effector to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights
shivered and rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a
triple row of ochre lines in the middle of it "Match my pattern!" The
young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though
it had not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors
merged and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of
the controls before the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He
merely waited. He knew she was doing her best By the time all ten wheels
were showing the pattern he had chosen tears were gone and sweat was
stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard.
The colors were not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant,
safed controls, the rosette of screens that should have displayed their
course coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might
have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at
all.
But they did work.
The Oldest One touched something under his own bank of controls and
quickly, wonderfully, the lights developed a life of their own. They
blurred and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took
over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into
life with a pattern of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered
fearfully at the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field
of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one.
She felt what happened next.
So did everyone else Here. The intruders in their pens, the near
hundred children all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest
One himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died
and was replaced by tweaks of pseudoacceleration punctuating
weightlessness.
After more than three-quarters of a million years of rolling slowly
around Earth's very distant sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new
orbit and surged away.
At precisely five-fifteen AM a gentle green glow appeared in the
bedside monitor of 5. Ya. Lavorosrna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough
to disturb deep slumber, but she had been less than half asleep. "Very
well," she called, "I am already awake, you do not have to continue this
program. But give me a moment."
"Da, gospozha," her secretary acknowledged, but the green glow
remained. If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary
would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do;
that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program.
In this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind.
There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because
old Peter Herter had given warning before he invaded the world's minds,
there had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real
damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and
rearranging, and in the course of it Robin's flights had been inextricably
confused.
Pity. Worse than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not
tried. Essie accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know
that he had tried.
"Am I allowed to eat?" she called.
"No, gospozha Broadhead. Nothing at all, not even a drink of water,"
her secretary responded at once. "Do you wish your messages?"
"Perhaps. What messages?" If they were of interest at all she would
take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the
indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed.
"There is a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I
believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there."
"Do so." Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while
she was waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for
her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She
carefully kept the dozen tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart
from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But
there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had
hurt more, and perhaps that would have been good. These months of
demeaning annoyance were only an irritation; there was enough of Anna
Karenina in Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come
to be! Her life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her
private parts.
"Gospozha Broadhead?"
"Yes?"
The visual program appeared, looking apologetic. "Your husband cannot
be reached at present. He is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has
just taken off; all the aircraft's communications are at present required
for navigation."
"Mexico City? Dallas?" The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the
Earth to get to her! "Then at least give me the recorded message," she
ordered.
"Da, gospozha." Face and greenish glow shrank away, and out of the
sound-circuits her husband's voice addressed her:
"Honey, I'm having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter
to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight.
Now I'm hoping to make a connection to Dallas and-Anyway, I'm on my way."
Pause. He sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost
see him casting around for something cheerful to say. But it was all
rambling. Something about the great news about prayer fans. Something
about the Heechee who weren't Heechee, and-and just a babble. Poor
creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of
his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said,
"Oh, hell, Essie. I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the
meantime. Take care of yourself. If you've got any spare time before you,
uh, before Wilma gets going, I've told Albert to tape all the essential
stuff for you. He's a good old program...." Long pause. "I love you," he
said, and was gone.
S. Ya. lay back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with
the next (and perhaps last?) hour of her life. She missed her husband
quite a lot, especially in view of the fact that in some ways she
considered him quite a silly man. "Good old program"! How foolish of him
to anthropomorphize computer programs! His Albert Einstein program was,
she had no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the
bio-assay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! "Squiffy." It was like
giving a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were
done by someone one cared for... in which case it was instead endearing.
But machines were machines. At the graduate institute at Akademogorsk
young S. Ya. Lavorovna had learned very completely that machine
intelligence was not "personal". You built them up, from adding machines
to number-crunchers. You packed them full of data. You constructed for
them a store of appropriate responses to stimuli and provided them with a
hierarchical scale of appropriateness; and that was all there was to it.
Now and then, to be sure, you were surprised by what came out of a program
you had written. Of course you were; that was the nature of the exercise.
None of that implied the existence of free will on the part of the
machine, or of personal identity.
All the same, it was rather touching to watch him crack jokes with his
programs. He was a touching man. He touched her in places where she was
most open and vulnerable, because in some ways he was very like that only
other man in her life who had ever really mattered to her, her father.
When Semya Yagrodna was a small girl her father had been the central
person in the world-tall, skinny old man who played the ukulele and the
mandolin and taught biology at the gymnasium. He was delighted to have a
bright and inquiring child. It might have pleased him even more if her
talents had seemed to go toward the life sciences rather than to physics
and engineering, but he cherished her as she was. He taught her about the
world when he could no longer teach her mathematics, because she had
surpassed him. "You must be aware of what you will have to deal with," he
explained to her. "Even here. Even now. Even when I was a young boy in
Stalin's time, and the women's movements were promoting girls to lead
machine-gun squads and run tractors. This is always the same, Semya. It is
a fact of history that mathematics is for the young, and that girls excel
equally with boys until the age of fifteen, perhaps, or at most twenty.
And then, just when the boys are turning into Lobachewskis and Fermats,
the girls stop. Why? For childbearing. For marriage. For heaven knows
what. We will not let it happen to you, small dove. Study! Read! Learn!
Comprehend! Every day, for as many hours as you must! And I will assist
you in all the ways I can." And he did; and from the ages of eight to
eighteen young Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna came home from school every day,
deposited one book bag in their apartment and picked up another, and
trotted away to the old yellow building off the Nevsky Prospekt where her
tutor lived. She had never dropped out of mathematics, and for this she
had her father to thank. She had never learned to dance, either-or to try
a thousand sorts of scent and makeup, or to date-not until she was away at
Akademogorsk, and for that also she had her father to thank. Where the
world tried to force her into a female role he defended her like a tiger.
But at home, to be sure, there was a need to cook and sew, and to polish
the rosewood chairs; and none of those things were done by him. Her father
in physical appearance had not looked in the least like Robin Broadhead...
but in other ways, so like!
Robin had asked her to marry him when they had known each other less
than a year. It had taken her a full year beyond that to decide to say
yes. She talked to everyone she knew about it. Her roommate. The dean of
her department. Her former love; who had married the girl next door. Stay
away from this one, S. Ya., they all advised her. On the face of it the
advice was sound, for who was he? A feckless millionaire, still mourning a
woman he had loved and shatteringly lost, guilt-ridden, just out of years
of intensive psychoanalysis-what a perfect description of the completely
hopeless marriage risk! But... On the other hand... Nevertheless...
Nevertheless he touched her. They had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras
in stinging cold weather, sitting most of the days inside the Cafe du
Monde, never even seeing the parade. The rest of the time they stayed in
their hotel, out of the sleet and the crowds, and made love, emerging only
for fried sweet dough with clouds of powdered sugar, and sweet, milky,
chicory-laced coffee in the mornings. Robin bestirred himself to be
gallant. "Shall we go for a cruise on the river today? Visit an art
gallery? Dance at a night club?" But she could see that he did not want to
do any of these things, this man twice her age who wanted to marry he;
sitting with his hands cupped around his coffee as though merely getting
warm were formidable enough a task to contemplate for one day. And she
made her decision.
She said, "I think instead we might get married, after all."
And so they had. Not that day, but as soon as they could. S. Ya. never
regretted it; it was not a thing to regret. After the first few weeks she
had not even worried about how it would turn out. He was not a jealous man
or a mean one. If he was often absorbed in his work, well, so was she.
There was only this question of the woman, Gelle-Kiara Moyrilin, the
lost love.
She might well be dead. Was as good as dead, in any case, because she
was hopelessly out of human reach forever. It was well known that this was
so, from the fundamental laws of physics... but there were times, Essie
was sure, when her husband did not believe it to be so.
And then she wondered: If there was any possibility of a choice between
them, how would Robin choose?
And what if the laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an
exception now and then?
There was the matter of the Heechee ships, and how could one apply
known physical law to them? As with every other thinking person in the
world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long
time. The Gateway asteroid had been discovered while she was still a
schoolgirl. The headlines announcing new findings had come every few
weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the
plunge and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were
on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned.
The Heechee ships were not uncontrollable. They could in fact be
controlled precisely. The superficial mechanics of the process were known.
Each ship possessed five main-drive verfliers, and five auxiliaries. They
located coordinates in space (how?), and, once set, the ship went there.
Again, how? It then returned unerringly to its place of origin, or usually
did, if it did not run out of fuel or encounter a mischance-a triumph of
cybernetics that S. Ya. knew no human agency could reproduce. The
difficulty was that until this very second no human being knew quite how
to read the controls.
But what about the next second, or the one after that? With information
pouring in, from the Food Factory and Heechee Heaven; with Dead Men
talking; with at least one semicompetent human pilot, the boy, Wan-with
all this, and especially with the flood of new knowledge that might be
unlocked from the prayer fans...
How long before some of the mysteries were solved? Perhaps not very
long at all.
S. Ya. wished she could be a part of it all, as her classmates had
become. As her husband had become. She wished even more that she did not
suspect what part he most wanted to play. But the suspicion remained. If
Robin could make a Heechee ship fly him to any destination he chose in all
the universe, she thought she knew what that destination would be.
Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna-Broadhead called to her secretary, "How much
time do I have?"
The program appeared and said, "It is now five twenty-two. Dr.
Liederman is expected at six forty-five. You will then be prepared for the
procedure, which will occur at eight o'clock. You have a little more than
an hour and a quarter. Perhaps you would like to rest?"
S. Ya. chuckled. It always amused her when her own programs offered her
advice. She did not, however, feel any need to respond to it. "Have menus
been prepared for today and tomorrow?" she asked.
"Nyet, gospozha."
That was both a relief and a disappointment. At least Robin had not
prescribed more fattening foods for today-or perhaps his prescription had
been overruled, because of the operation? "Select something," she ordered.
The program was quite capable of preparing menus. It was only because of
Robin himself that either of them ever gave a thought to such routine
chores. But Robin was Robin, and there were times when cooking was a hobby
for him, cutting onions paper-thin for a salad and standing to stir a stew
for hours. Sometimes what he produced was awful, sometimes not; Essie was
not critical, because she was not very interested in what she ate. And
also because she was grateful that she felt no need to concern herself
with such matters; in this respect, at least, Robin surpassed her father.
"No, wait," she added, struck with a thought. "When Robin comes home he
will be hungry. Serve him a snack-those crullers, and the New Orleans
coffee. As at the Cafe du Monde."
"Da, gospozha." How devious you are, thought Essie, smiling to herself.
One hour and twelve minutes left.
It would do no harm to rest.
On the other hand, she was not sleepy.
She could, she thought, interrogate her medical program again. But she
had no real wish to hear about the procedures she faced an additional
time. Such large pieces to take from someone else's body for the sake of
her own! The kidney, yes. One might well sell that and still have
something left. As a student, Essie had known comrades who had done that,
might even have done it herself if she had been just a shade poorer than
she actually was. But, although she knew very little more of anatomy than
her father had taught her at his knee, she knew enough to be sure that the
person, or persons, who had given her all those other tissues would not
have enough left to go on living with. It was a queasy feeling.
Almost as queasy as that other feeling that came with knowing that,
even with Full Medical, from this particular invasion of her person by
Wilma Liederman's knives she might not return.
Still an hour and eleven minutes.
Essie sat up once more. Whether she was to live or not, she was as
dutiful a wife as she had been a daughter, and if Robin wished her to
concern herself with prayer fans and Heechee she would. She addressed the
computer terminal. "I wish the Albert Einstein program."
When Essie Broadhead said, "I wish the Albert Einstein program," she
set a large number of events in motion. Very few of these events were
visible to the unaided senses. They did not take place in the macroscopic
physical world, but in a universe composed largely of charges and pathways
operating on the scale of the electron. The individual units were tiny.