The Annals of the Heechee

12 JAWS

What you must remember at all times is that all things end-so Albert keeps telling me. I think he thinks it is some kind of consolation.

It’s true, though. Even the interminable trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS ended at last.

JAWS lives in a geostationary satellite, or actually it’s five satellites tumbling around each other in parasitic orbits, a few tens of thousands of kilometers over Conakry in Africa. It used to be in a different place—just about over the Galapagos islands-but then it was for a different purpose. It was called the High Pentagon then.

When we came out of orbit I wasn’t looking at it. I was looking down at the Earth, big and broad below us. Sunrise had passed the Gulf of Guinea, but the western bulge of Africa was still all dark. I took pleasure in the sight. I still think the Earth is about the prettiest planet there is. I could see sunlight hitting the tops of mountains off to the west, and that wonderfully blue Atlantic just below, and I was feeling quite affectionate toward the troublesome old place when I heard Essie cry, “Have ruined it!”

It took a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the planet. “Sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t looking at the screen.” She hadn’t been, either, as a matter of fact. Generally we only use the screen out of habit. When we really want a good look at something, it’s just as easy for us to use the True Love’s own external sensors direct. So I switched and saw what Essie saw.

There were a lot more than five objects in common orbit now, not even counting the flotilla of JAWS cruisers moving restlessly about in formation. People had been flocking to JAWS, and their spacecraft were in mooring orbits. There must have been a dozen of those shuttle ships, but the thing that Essie was talking about was a huge, crumpled mass of film. It took a moment to recognize it.

It had once been the main propulsive power for an interstellar photon-sailship. I had seen it once before, when it was in its glory, and then it had carried a crew of Sluggards on an exploration trip to some other star. “Why is it such a mess?” I demanded of Julio Cassata.

He gave me an irritated look. He was busy on the communications channels, and the person he was irritated with wasn’t me. It was the Watch Officer on JAWS, and there wasn’t much use in being irritated with him, or it, because it wasn’t a him. He said, “I say again, this is Major General Julio Cassata’s doppel, and I request immediate landing clearance. Effing machines,” he snarled, looking at Albert before he looked at me. Then, “You mean the sailship? But it was your damn Institute that brought it here for study. What did you think we were going to do with the sail? Keep pulling it back when the sun was pushing it out of orbit? . . . Yes, thank you,” he said to the commset, and nodded to Alicia Lo to take us in.

It wasn’t that easy.

The particular section of JAWS we were headed for was Delta, a soup can that weighed forty thousand tons. You could tell it was the command satellite. For the convenience of the high brass, or anyway the meat portions of it, it rotated more rapidly than the others. That gave them a little better up-and-down orientation for their comfort, but it wasn’t a convenience for Alicia Lo.

Still, she corkscrewed us neatly into the dock. It was a virtuoso performance, and she deserved a better audience than Essie and me. We weren’t watching her. We were looking at that shark-ship fleet of JAWS cruisers, obviously ready for action-any kind of action. I murmured, “I hope they aren’t going to do anything foolish.”

“If do anything at all,” Essie said soberly, “will be foolish. Is no nonfoolish thing to do.”

And then we were aboard the JAWS satellite.

The way people like Essie and me come aboard a spacecraft or satellite is to bridge in to the internal communications facilities; after that, we can go anywhere the cables go, and maybe a little bit beyond. On Delta-JAWS we went as far as the hatch chamber and stopped. There were no comm facilities, or at least none we were allowed to use. The Watch Officer, a machine program in the form of a callow young lieutenant, said with military courtesy but no give, “General Cassata may proceed, sirs and madams, but the rest of you must remain in the secure lounge.”

Of course, we didn’t want to do that, not at all. It wasn’t what I had come to JAWS for.

If Cassata had lingered a moment, I would have asked him to explain all this. As he hadn’t, I explained it myself. The lieutenant listened politely and then took appropriate action. He bucked it to higher authority.

Higher authority was a short, stocky woman named Mohandan Dar Havandhi. When she appeared she stared at us silently for so long that I had the sudden conviction she was a meat person, but it was only her manner. When she opened her mouth she revealed herself to be as machine-stored as the rest of it, but all she opened her mouth to say was, “No.”

“But, Commandant Havandhi,” Essie purred soothingly, “is Mr. Robinette Broadhead.”

“I am aware of that,” said the commandant.

“Then must also be aware that Mr. Robinette Broadhead is executive of Broadhead Foundation, with full clearance for all extra-solar matters.”

“That is true,” the commandant said, “but we are under Condition Red. Peacetime clearances are suspended. Of course,” she said, with a smile that showed gold teeth-how faithful some of us are to our meat originals!—“you need not be confined to the secure lounge if you prefer.”

“Well,” I said, smiling forgivingly, “in that case we’ll just—”

“You may alternatively return to your ship,” she said, and would not be budged.

Military minds! You can’t reason with them. We tried, of course. We pointed out that “security” was a laughable anachronism, Condition Red or no Condition Red, because the only enemy who might need keeping out was fifty thousand light-years away, in the kugelblitz. She didn’t bother telling us that wasn’t true, since the message had come from much nearer. She just shook her head. We tried threatening to call marshals and heads of state. She just said we certainly could do that, all right, if we wanted to, as soon as the embargo on civilian radio messages was lifted. She did not offer any guess as to when that might be. We tried to be chummy with her. We asked what all those spaceships were doing at JAWS. She didn’t answer at all; no, we weren’t going to get any military secrets out of her.

It really wasn’t as interminable as it seemed-a few thousand milliseconds at most-because Julio Cassata, or anyway his doppel, came back. Surprisingly, Cassata was looking faintly pleased. “My meat guy is in conference,” he told us, “so it will be a little while before I can, uh, see him.” He favored us with a smile-not favoring us all equally; the young woman named Alicia Lo got most of the smile. “So what would you like to do while we wait? Take a look around JAWS?”

“We can’t,” I said, pointing to the commandant.

“Of course you can,” he said, secure in rank. He addressed her. “Commandant Havandhi, I relieve you of these guests. I will personally escort them around the base.”

The five satellites of JAWS make up nearly two hundred thousand tons mass and are inhabited by something like thirty thousand people, meat and machine-stored. Two of the satellites are nothing but communications and data-processing centers. There’s nothing to see there. Gamma is all hardware, military hardware; it’s full of buster bombs and Heechee tunneling machines, converted to dig holes in ships or fortresses rather than rock. We didn’t expect to be allowed there, either, apart from the fact that Albert already knew all about every last piece of ordnance anyway. Alpha is crew quarters and R&R facilities, and there wasn’t any reason for us to go there-we didn’t need any of their ideas of rest and recreation.

All the same, when the electronic barriers that kept unauthorized machine intelligences out of JAWS were let down for us, the fact that we were confined to Delta annoyed me. Cassata tried to soothe. “Forgive the old lady,” he said, grinning. “She was an exchange officer here when this was the High Pentagon, and she thinks everything has gone downhill since.” He glanced at his watch-as nonexistent as my own. “We’ve got at least ten thousand milliseconds and there’s a lot of interesting stuff-Sluggards, Quancies, Voodoo Pigs, besides all the other stuff-I mean the parts of the other stuff I can let you into. What do you want to see?”

I said, “I don’t want to see anything. I didn’t come here to take the two-dollar tour. I want to talk to people! I want to find out what’s going on—”

“And then,” said Cassata, “you want to get in on the action yourself, right?”

I shrugged angrily. I had had plenty of time in the “secure lounge” to build up a head of steam, and Julio Cassata wasn’t making it go away. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but I held myself to one word:

“’Yes.”

Cassata was still edgy himself. He’d been given a reprieve from termination by his meat original, but that was all. He said, “You make trouble, Broadhead.”

“I’ve got the power to make a lot of it,” I agreed.

He looked at me narrowly, then shrugged. “It isn’t up to me,” he said. “It isn’t even up to me. The Combined Chiefs make the rules around here. So what’s it to be? The two-dollar tour? Or the secure lounge?”

Essie and I had seen JAWS before, back when the Combined Chiefs were a little more respectful to the guy who controlled the Broadhead Foundation. So had Albert. Alicia Lo was a lot more interested. To her it was one of those secret places that you hear about but never expect to see, like the inside of Fort Knox or the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.

You understand, we didn’t actually “go” anywhere. We didn’t have to. Cassata fed us into JAWS-Delta’s communications system, and we saw what he wanted us to see. He was a polite host, so he did better than that; he created a sort of officer’s club lounge for us to sit in, with a fire blazing at one end of the room and a table laid out with drinks and snacks. The other end of the room was-whatever we were being shown.

When Cassata offhandedly proposed a look at a nest of Sluggards, Alicia was thrilled-as, of course, he had intended she should be.

The Sluggards were a historic “first” for human beings, because they were the first alien intelligent race any member of the human race had ever seen. Or not “seen,” exactly. FelL Audee Walthers, fooling around with a Dream Couch, had detected their pathetic, huge, lumbering sail-ship in interstellar space decades before.

That was a most important event, but what it led to was more important by a whole lot, because the Slugs detected Audee, too. And that was what told the Heechee that people like us were abroad in the Galaxy, and that was what brought the Heechee, kicking and screaming, Out of their hidey-hole in the core.

“I thought the Heechee kidnaped this Sluggard ship back to its own planet,” Alicia offered.

“They did,” Cassata agreed, “but old Broadhead here kidnaped them back here for study. Or his Institute did. The Slugs don’t mind. They were expecting another thousand years or so on their trip. Their sail is still in orbit just outside JAWS—”

“Saw. Looks seriously mashed,” Essie said severely.

“Well, what else were we going to do? Spread out, the damn thing’s forty thousand kilometers long. Anyway, they won’t need it again. Do you want to see them or not?”

“Oh, yes,” said Alicia Lo, cutting through the argument. Cassata waved a hand, and there they were.

Sluggards aren’t pretty. Some people say they sort of look like some kind of tropical flower. Others think they look like one of those deep-sea things with a lot of tentacles; it’s hard to say what they resemble, because they don’t very much resemble anything on Earth. The males are considerably bigger than the females, but that isn’t the females’ only problem. The females have nothing but problems, because there’s no such thing as women’s rights among Sluggards. A female Sluggard may not worry about this much, though, since they are not intellectual. Their lives are entirely taken up with birthing. One infant comes out every cycle-the cycle runs a little less than four months. If the lucky lady has been visited by a male at the right time, the infant is male. If not, it’s female. Sluggard males do not seem to be particularly horny (considering the Sluggard females, who can blame them?), and so usually the female has not been sexually favored lately.

So there are endless numbers of female Sluggards being born all the time.

They don’t go to waste, though. From time to time one of the males picks out a particularly fat and appealing female. Then he eats her.

One supposes the females don’t like that. No female Sluggard has ever complained, though. They can’t. They don’t talk at all.

Males, on the other hand, talk incessantly-or sing-or anyway make some sort of sounds continuously throughout their lives. You might not know that, though, if you happened to be sitting right next to a Sluggard in full cry-assuming you could, since what they live in is both cold and heavy and poisonous to meat people. You might be aware of a faint pulsing, like a heavy truck going by outside your house. The Slugs are slow. So are their voices; the shrillest coloratura soprano among the Slugs might get way up to twenty or twenty-five hertz. So you couldn’t hear what they were singing.

There were several dozen of the creatures, male and female, floating around in the slush of their spaceship. One male was in a small compartment by himself. The rest were in a common tank, surrounded by all sorts of curious Slug devices that floated with them: the furnishings and gadgets, I supposed, that made up a comfortable Sluggard home, and the only way I could tell the people from the furniture was that I had seen pictures of Slugs before. I couldn’t see anything move. They looked funny in another way, too. I didn’t remember exactly what the natural hues of a Sluggard should be, but they looked as though they had been colored by someone who didn’t remember even as well as I did.

“One is moving!” cried Essie.

It was clever of her to have noticed it. The one in the separate chamber was, barely, extending a tentacle. It was terribly slow even by meat-human standards (not to mention my own!). In the Slugs’ own terms, however, he was writhing in great agitation and high speed; you could see little ripply lines in the sludge all around him, where he had made pressure waves.

“That’s one of the new ones,” said Cassata. “They finished debriefing the original crew, so they imported six more males from the Slug planet a few weeks ago.”

“Why is he off by himself?” asked Alicia Lo.

“He’s in high-speed mode so he can be interviewed. They thrash around so, you know? If he were in with the others in high mode, he’d mess up their living quarters.”

Albert said professorially, “I observe we are not viewing them by visible light.”

“No, right. It’s tomography, because you couldn’t see in visible light in that slush they live in. Want to hear what he’s singing?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but cut in an audio feed. It wasn’t the Sluggard we heard, but a machine translator. It declaimed:

Great blinding blistering brutes

Thrashed and harmed with much cavitation

And many deaths and highly painful injuries—“That’s just the latest stanza,” Cassata explained. “He’s only been going for about an hour this time. We have to let them rest up between sessions. They can’t stand high mode very long, and we can’t deal with them at all when they’re in normal. Want to keep on watching them for a while?”

I said, “What I want, General Cassata, is to talk to somebody in authority around here. How the hell much longer do we have to stall around?”

But Essie put her soft, sweet hand on my lips. “General will let us know soonest possible, is that not so, Julio? So have nothing better to do.”—also to females the Sluggard’s translation finished, and I began to think of causing some death and highly painful injuries myself.

See, there we were again, caught in the disparity between gigabit time and meat.

I don’t think that I am basically a very patient man, but, oh, how much patience this machine-stored analog of me has had to learn! Especially in dealing with meat people. Not to mention with that particularly infuriating and exceptionally immovable section of the meat population, the military.

I stated my views on this matter for Julio Cassata’s benefit. He only grinned some more. He was enjoying it. Of course, from his point of view, the longer we waited here, the longer he had left to “live”—that is to say, the longer his doppel had, and his doppel was obviously reluctant to get itself terminated. I was a little surprised that he didn’t suggest that he take pretty Alicia Lo off for another little private sightseeing trip-I could well imagine what sights he had in mind-and perhaps he would have if Albert hadn’t come up with an idea.

He coughed politely and said, “I believe, General Cassata, that the Sluggards are not the only aliens of whom specimens are present here.”

Cassata raised his eyebrows. “You don’t mean the Voodoo Pigs?”

“The Voodoo Pigs, yes. Also the Quancies. The Institute has provided colonies of both for study. Might we see them as well?”

If there is anything less interesting to look at than the Quancies, it is the Voodoo Pigs, but of course you don’t know that until you try. “Oh, Julio,” cried Alicia Lo, “could we?” And then of course it was certain that we would.

Cassata shrugged and changed the scene. We were looking at a rocky pool of gray-green water, where half a dozen fishy-looking creatures were basking under a pale orange light. We got sound, too, the honking of Quancies chatting among themselves.

Since I had seen all the Quancies I ever wanted to see, I turned to the table of snacks. It wasn’t that I was hungry-or even “hungry.” I just wished we would get on with it.

I called on all my long training in patience. I didn’t like it, but I had no alternative that I could see. Real-Cassata was still in his meeting, and doppel-Cassata was just being a good host to us-if, I thought, mostly to his new girl. But the sky was falling, and it was no time for a trip to the zoo!

While the white-jacketed waiterthing was handing me a sandwich of chopped chicken liver and onion-all, of course, as simulated as the waiterthing itself-Albert wandered over to join me. “A good German bock, please,” he said to the waiter, and smiled at me. “You don’t care to hear what the Quancies are saying to each other, Rob?”

“Quancies never have anything to say.” I took a sullen bite of my sandwich. It was delicious, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

“It is probably futile to interview them,” Albert agreed, accepting the stein of dark beer. You have to admit that Quancies are intelligent, more or less, because at least they have language. What they don’t have is hands. They live in the sea, and their tiny flippers are no more use than a seal’s. If they weren’t air-breathing we probably never would have known they existed, because they don’t have cities, or tools, or, what is most important, writing. Therefore they have no written history. Neither do the Sluggards; but their life span is so long (if so slow) that their bards remember eddas that are as trustworthy, at least, as Homer’s songs. “I do have some news that may interest you,” said Albert when he had finished his first deep swallow of the beer.

Good old Albert! “Finish that up and I’ll buy you another,” I cried. “And tell me!”

“It is nothing much,” he said, “but of course I still have access to the datastore facilities on the True Love. There were a number of ifies that I thought might have some bearing on the present situation. It took quite a while to access them all, and there was very little useful data in the first few thousand. Then I checked out the immigration records for the past few months.”

“You found something,” I said to help him along. It isn’t only meat people who have taught me patience.

“I did, yes,” he said. “Most of the children who were evacuated from the Watch Wheel, you remember, were relocated on Earth. According to the immigration records, at least seven of them are presently in the area served by the western-Pacific communications net. Of course, it is from that net that the communication to the kugelblitz originated.”

I gave him a shocked and unbelieving stare. “Why would human children work for the Assassins?” I demanded.

“I don’t think they did,” said Albert, thoughtfully accepting his second stein, “although the possibility cannot be ruled Out. But we do know that they were present on the Wheel when the Watchers suspected they had detected something, and are now on Earth; it is at least possible that the Assassins have traveled with them.”

I felt myself shiver. “We have to tell JAWS!”

“Yes, of course.” Albert nodded. “I have already done so. I fear, though, that this will have the result of prolonging the meeting the original General Cassata has been conducting.”

I said, “Shit.”

“However—” Albert smiled “—I do not think it will be by very much, as I had already summed the data and presented it to Commandant Havandhi for transmittal to the meeting.”

“So what am I supposed to do now? Gape at the Quancies some more?”

“I think,” said Albert, “that the others are also losing interest in the Quancies and ready to go on to the Voodoo Pigs.”

“I’ve seen Voodoo Pigs!”

“There is nothing better to do, is there?” He hesitated and then added, “Also, I would like you to observe the carvings of the Voodoo Pigs. They are, I think, of some special interest.”

I could not tell, looking at the Voodoo Pigs, just what it was about them that Albert thought might be of interest. All I felt was disgust-I mean, not counting the impatience I worked so hard to quell. The Voodoo Pigs lived in slop. I had never understood why they didn’t drown in their own filth, but they didn’t seem to mind it.

That was the piggishness of the Voodoo Pigs. They didn’t really look porcine. More than anything else, they looked like blue-skinned anteaters; they tapered to a point, fore and aft. They really were piggy, though. What they lived in couldn’t be called a cage. It was a sty.

They lived in their own waste. The mud was not merely mud plus pigshit. It was stuck full of little garnishes, like raisins in a pudding of rotten fruit and excrement, and the garnishes were the carvings Albert had mentioned.

Since Albert had made a point of it, I took a careful look at the Voodoo Pig carvings. I didn’t see what had interested him. The carvings weren’t anything new. The museums all had them. I’d even once held one in my hand-gingerly, because the smell of the sty had survived even boiling and polishing. They were just carved bits of woody plant matter, or of tooth or bone. They ran about ten or twelve centimeters long, and when they were carved out of teeth, the teeth were not the Voodoo Pigs’ own. The pigs didn’t have any teeth. All they had were abrasive and very hard rasping surfaces at the skinny ends of their noses—or trunks, or mouths, depending on how you chose to describe them. The teeth came from their food animals, several dozen of which had been imported along with the pigs when the colony was established. The fact that they used the teeth of other animals for their carvings didn’t prove any delicate sensibilities on the part of the pigs, though, because when they used bones, the bone was as likely as not to have come from their deceased nearest and dearest, once they had passed on and been eaten. “Carvings” isn’t exactly the right word, either. The pigs nibbled the pieces into shape, because they didn’t have tools to carve anything with. They didn’t have any language, either.

In fact, take them all in all, they had about the IQ of a gopher—Only they created, and obsessively went on creating, these works of art.

“Art,” too, may be too strong a word, because they had only one subject. The carvings were like dolls. They resembled, as close as I can describe it, a six-limbed creature with the body of a lion and the head and torso of a gorilla, and there was nothing remotely resembling it anywhere on the planet they came from.

“So what’s special about them?” I asked Albert.

He countered, “Why do you think the pigs carve them?”

The rest of the party got into the guessing game. “Religious objects,” said Cassata.

“Dolls,” said Alicia Lo. “They need something to cuddle.”

And, “Visitors,” said my dear Portable-Essie.

And Albert beamed at her approvingly.

As is so often the case between Albert and me, I had no idea what was on his mind. It would have been interesting to follow that up just then, but Cassata jerked upright. “Message,” he said. “Excuse me,” and vanished.

He didn’t exactly come back. What happened was that we lost the sight and sound of the little nook he had created for us. We just heard a voice. Not his, at first. At first we got what I recognized as a pickup from the Sluggards’ translator:

Huge they were and harmfully hot

And the people lashed each other in fear.

And then Cassata’s voice, full of excitement:

“Come on! You can come into the staff meeting!” And then Cassata himself appeared, glowing with the happiness of a soldier who sees a chance to do some fighting. “They’ve done it, folks!” he cried. “They’ve tracked down the source of the message to the Assassins. They’re shutting that whole sector down, and we’ll be moving in!”