Heechee Rendezvous Part 15

He rasped, "That is a military matter and none of your business, Broadhead. Come on! You don't belong here!"

There was no point in arguing with a man who had made up his mind. I didn't ask him again. I just walked over to the line and asked Janie. The other prisoners were all female, all military personnel, no doubt in for overstaying a furlough or punching somebody like the ensign in the mouth-all good people, I was sure. They were quiet, listening. "Audee wanted to come up here because they had his wife, "she said, with a look on her face as though she were saying "his case of tertiary syphilis." "So we took a shuttle up, and as soon as we got here they stuck us in. the brig."

"Now, Broadhead," the ensign shouted, "that's the last straw. You come on out of there or you're under arrest yourself!" And his hand was on the holster that once more contained a sidearm. Essie sailed by, smiling politely.

"Is now no more need for concern, Ensign," she said, "for there is True Love waiting for us. So we are out of hair now. Remains only to fetch brigadier here to settle remaining questions."

The ensign goggled. "Ma'am," he stuttered, "ma'am, you can't get the brigadier here!"

"Of course can! Husband requires medical treatment, therefore must be here to receive. Brigadier Ca.s.sata is courteous man, right? West Point? Many courses in deportment, courtesy, covering coughs and sneezes?

And also please tell brigadier is excellent bourbon here which poor sick husband requires a.s.sistance to dispose of."

The ensign stumbled away hopelessly. Essie looked at me and I looked at Essie. "Now what?" I asked.

She smiled and patted my head. "First I instruct Albert about bourbon and other things," she said, turning to deliver a couple of quick sentences in Russian, "and then we wait for brigadier to show up."

It didn't take long for the brigadier to arrive, but by the time he had gotten there I had almost forgotten him. Essie was engaged in a lively chat with the guard the ensign had left, and I was thinking. What I was thinking about mostly, for a change, was not Klara but the mad African woman and her almost as mad a.s.sociates. They scared me. Terrorists scared me. In the old days there was a PLO and an IRA and Puerto Rican nationalists and Serbian secessionists and German and Italian and American rich kids a.s.serting their contempt for their daddies-oh, lots of terrorists, all sizes, all kinds-but they were all separate. The fact that they had got together scared me. The poor and the furious had learned to join their rages and resources, and there was no question at all that they could make the world listen. Capturing one s.h.i.+p would not stop them; it would only make their efforts bearable for a while-or almost bearable. But to solve their problem-to ease their rage and supply their needs- more was needed. The colonization of worlds like Peggy's Planet was the best and maybe the only answer, but it was slow. The transport could take three thousand eight hundred poor people to a better life each month. But each month something like a quarter of a million new poor people were being born, and the fatal arithmetic was easy to do: 250,000.

3,800.

246,200.

new poor people to deal with each month. The only hope was new and bigger transports, hundreds or thousands of them. A hundred would keep us even with the present level of misery. A thousand would cure it once and for all-but where were the thousand big s.h.i.+ps to come from? It had taken eight months to build the True Love, and a lot more of my money than I had really intended. What would it cost to build something a thousand times as big?

The brigadier's voice took my mind off these reflections. "It is," he was saying, "flatly impossible! I let you see her because I was asked to. To take her away with you is out of the question!" He glowered at me as I joined them, taking Essie's hand.

"Also," she said, "is question of male Walthers and Chinese woman. We wish them also."

"We do?" I asked, but the brigadier wasn't listening to me.

"What else, for G.o.d's sake?" he demanded. "You wouldn't like me to turn over my section of the Pentagon? Or give you a cruiser or two?"

Essie shook her head politely. "Our s.h.i.+p is more comfortable, thank you."

"Jesus!" Ca.s.sata wiped his brow and allowed Essie to lead him into the main lounge for the promised bourbon. "Well," he said, "there's no real charge against Walthers and Yee-xing. They had no right coming up here without clearance, but if you take them away again we can forget that one."

"Splendid!" Essie cried. "Remains now only other Walthers!"

"I could not possibly take the responsibility," he began, and Essie did not let him finish.

"Certainly not! One understands that, of course. So we will refer to higher authority, right? Robin! Call General Manzbergen. Do here, so will be no annoying record to possibly embarra.s.s, all right?"

There is no use arguing with Essie when she is in such a mood, and besides, I was curious to see what she was up to. "Albert," I called. "Do it, please."

"Sure, Robin," he said obligingly, voice only; and in a moment the screen lit up, and there was General Manzbergen at his desk. "Morning, Robin, Essie," he said genially. "I see you've got Perry Ca.s.sata there- congratulations to all of you!"

"Thank you, Jimmy," said Essie, looking sidewise at the brigadier, "but is not what we called about, please."

"Oh?" He frowned. "Whatever it is, do it fast, all right? I've got a top meeting coming up in ninety seconds."

"Take less than that, General dear. Merely please instruct Brigadier Ca.s.sata to turn over Dolly Walthers to us."

Manzbergen looked puzzled. "For what?"

"So can use her to locate missing Wan, General dear. Has TPT, you know. Much in everyone's interest to make him give it back."

He grinned fondly at her. "Minute, honey," he said, and bent to a hushphone.

The brigadier might have been rushed, but he was on his toes. "There's a lag," he pointed out. "Isn't this zero-speed radio?"

"Is burst transmission," Essie lyingly explained. "Have only small vessel here, not much power"-another lie-"so must conserve communications energy-ah, here is general again!"

The general pointed toward Ca.s.sata. "It's authorized," he barked. "They're trustworthy, we owe them a favor-and they might be able to save us a pack of future trouble. Give them whoever they want, on my authority. Now, for G.o.d's sake, let me get to my meeting-and don't call me again unless it's World War Four!"

So the brigadier went away, shaking his head, and pretty soon the MPs brought Janie Yee-xing to us, and a minute later Audee Walthers, and quite a while after that Dolly Walthers. "Nice to see you all again," said Essie, welcoming them aboard. "Am sure you have much to talk over among you, but first let us get away from this wicked place. Albert! Move it, please?"

"Right, Mrs. Broadhead," sang Albert's voice. He didn't bother with materializing in the pilot seat; he simply walked in a door and leaned against the lintel, smiling at the company.

"Will introduce later," said Essie. "This is good friend who is computer program. Albert? Are now safely away from Pentagon?"

He nodded, twinkling. Then before my eyes he turned from elderly man in pipe and baggy sweater to the leaner, taller, uniformed, and medaled Chief of Staff General James P. Manzbergen. "Right you are, honey," he cried. "Now let's get our a.s.ses into FTL before they find out we foxed them!" ...

19 The Permutations of Love

Who sleeps with whom? Ah, that was the question! We had five pa.s.sengers, and only three staterooms to put them in. The True Love had not been planned for very many guests, and especially when the guests did not come presorted in pairs. Should we put Audee in with his wedded wife, Dolly? Or with his most recent bedmate, Janie Yee-xing? Put Audee by himself and the two women together?-and what would they do to each other if we did? It was not that Janie and Dolly were hostile to each other so much as that Audee seemed unaccountably hostile to both of them. "He cannot make up his mind which he should be true to," said Essie wisely, "and is a man who wishes to be true to a woman, is Audee."

Well, I understood that well enough, and even understood that more of our pa.s.sengers than one suffered that problem.

But there is a word in that statement that did not apply to me, and it is the word suffered. You see, I wasn't suffering. I was enjoying myself. I was enjoying Essie, too, because the way we solved the problem of a.s.signing accommodations was to walk away from it. Essie and I retired to Captain's Quarters and locked the door. We told ourselves that the reason we did was to let our three guests sort things out among themselves. That was a good reason. G.o.d knows they needed time to do that, because the interpersonal dynamics latent among the three of them were enough to explode a star; but we had other reasons, too, and the biggest of them was so that we could make love.

And so we did. Enthusiastically. With great joy. You would think that after a quarter of a century-at our advanced ages; and making allowances for familiarity and boredom and the fact that there are, after all, just so many mucous surfaces to rub against and a finite number of appurtenances to rub them with-there would be very little incentive for us to do that. Wrong. We were motivated as h.e.l.l.

Perhaps because it was because of the relatively cramped quarters on the True Love. Locking ourselves into our private cabin with its anisokinetic bed gave the affair a spice of teenage fooling around on the porch, with Daddy and Mommy only a window screen away. We giggled a lot as the bed pushed us about in ingenious ways-and suffer? Not a bit of it. I hadn't forgotten Klara. She popped into my mind over and over, often at very personal times.

But Essie was there on the bed with me, and Klara was not.

So I lay back on the bed, twitching a little now and then to feel how the bed would twitch back, and how it would twitch Essie, cuddled close into my side, and she would twitch a little-it was a little like playing three-cus.h.i.+on billiards, but with more interesting pieces-and thought, calmly and sweetly, about Klara.

At that moment I felt quite certain that everything would work out. What after all was wrong? Only love. Only that two people loved each other. There was nothing wrong in that! It was a complication, to be sure, that one of that particular two, e.g., me, might be also a part of another two who loved each other. But complications could be resolved-somehow or other-couldn't they? Love was what made the universe go around. Love made Essie and me linger in Captain's Quarters. Love was what made Audee follow Dolly to the High Pentagon; and a kind of love was what made Janie go with him; and another kind of love, or maybe the same kind, made Dolly marry him in the first place, because one of the functions of love is surely to give a person another person to organize his or her life around. And off in one stretch of the great, ga.s.sy, starry wastes (though at that moment I did not yet know it) Captain was mourning for a love; and even Wan, who had never loved anyone but himself, was in fact scouring that universe for someone to aim his love at. You see how it works? It is love that is the motivator.

"Robin?" said Essie drowsily to my collarbone. "Did that very well. My compliments."

And, of course, she too was talking about love, although in this case I chose to accept it as a compliment to my skills in the demonstration of it. "Thank you," I said.

"Makes me ask question, though," she went on, drawing back to peer at me. "Are fully recovered? Gut in good shape? Two point three meters new tubing working well with old? Has Albert reported all well?"

"I feel just fine," I reported, as indeed I did, and leaned over to kiss her ear. "I only hope the rest of the world is going as well."

She yawned and stretched. "If you refer to vessel, Albert is quite capable of handling pilotage."

"Ah, yes, but is he capable of handling the pa.s.sengers?"

She rolled over sleepily. "Ask him," she said.

So I called, "Albert? Come and talk to us." I turned to look at the door, curious to see how he would manage his appearance this time, through a tangible, real door that happened to be closed. He fooled me. There was a sound of Albert apologetically clearing his throat, and when I turned back he was sitting on Essie's dressing bench again, eyes bashfully averted.

Essie gasped and grabbed for the covers to s.h.i.+eld her neat, modest b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Now, that was a funny thing. Essie had never bothered to cover herself in front of one of her programs before. The funniest thing about it was that it did not seem strange at the time. "Sorry to intrude, my dear friends," said Albert, "but you did call."

"Yes, fine," said Essie, sitting up to look at him better-but with the bedspread still clutched to her. Perhaps by then her own reaction had struck her as odd, but all she said was "So. Our guests, how are they?"

"Very well, I should say," Albert said gravely. "They are having a three-sided conversation in the galley. Captain Walthers is preparing sandwiches, and the two young women are helping."

"No fights? No eyes scratched out?" I asked.

"Not at all. To be sure, they are rather formal, with many 'excuse mes' and 'pleases' and 'thank yous.' However," he added, looking pleased with himself, "I do have a report for you on the sails.h.i.+p. Would you like to have it now? Or-it occurs to me-perhaps you would like to join your guests, so that you may all hear it at once."

All my instincts were to get it right away, but Essie looked at me. "Is only polite, Robin," she said, and I agreed.

"Splendid," said Albert. "You will find it extremely interesting, I am sure. As do I. Of course, I have always been interested in sailing, you know," he went on chattily. "When I was fifty the Berliner Handeisgesellschaft gave me such a fine sailboat-lost, unfortunately, when I must leave Germany because of those wicked n.a.z.is. My dear Mrs. Broadhead, I owe you so much! Now I have all these fine memories that I did not have before! I remember my little house near Ostend, where I used to walk along the beach with Albert-that"-he twinkled-"was King Albert, of Belgium. And we would speak of sailing, and then in the evenings his wife would accompany me on the piano while I played my violin- and all this I now remember, dear Mrs. Broadhead, only because of you!"

Through the whole speech Essie had been sitting rigid beside me, staring at her creation with a face like a stone. Now she began to sputter and then she broke out in guffaws. "Oh, Albert!" she cried, reaching behind her for a pillow. She took aim and threw it right through him, to bounce harmlessly against the cosmetics beyond him. "Great funny program, you are welcome! Now get out, please. Since are so human, with memories and tedious anecdotes, cannot permit to observe me unclothed!" And he allowed himself, this time, to simply wink away, while Essie and I hugged each other and laughed. "So get dressed now," she ordered at last, "so we can find out about sails.h.i.+p in mode satisfactory to computer program. Laughter is sovereign medicine, right? In that case have no further fears for your health, dear Robin, so well rejoiced a body will surely last forever!"

We headed for the shower, still chuckling-unaware that, in my case, "forever" at that moment amounted to eleven days, nine hours, and twenty-one minutes.

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

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

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

"Not really stop. He's much more interesting now, but if you could just turn down the gain on the personalized-ident.i.ty database, or twist the potentiometer on the nostalgia circuits-"

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

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

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

"Of course they were accurate," Albert soothed, "but, you see, by the time the scout s.h.i.+p arrived there the sails.h.i.+p was gone."

"It couldn't have gone very far if its only drive was from stars.h.i.+ne!"

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

"Great clever egotistical program," Essie said fondly. "That was some smart pilot you hired for scout s.h.i.+p, right?"

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

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

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

It was Albert, sitting now on the edge of his desk and wiping away a tear of amus.e.m.e.nt. "I do beg your pardon," he said, "but if you could see your faces."

"d.a.m.n great egotistical program," Essie grated, no longer fondly, "stop c.r.a.p immediately. What is going on here?"

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

"Follow instructions!" Essie barked, looking baffled.

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

But there was something behind it.

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

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

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

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

He looked at me politely, tapping his pipestem against his teeth. "In what way 'funny,' Robin?" he asked.

"d.a.m.n it, come off it! The way you act! Don't you-" I hesitated, trying to put it politely. "Don't you know you're just a computer program?"

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

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

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

"Albert!"

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

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

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