The Annals of the Heechee

16 THE LONG VOYAGE

All the time I was messing around with the kids and their captors on the island of Tahiti was meat time. There had been time for meat people to do things. Meat people had.

The meat people who ran JAWS had decided the threat on Earth was nothing they needed a fleet there for, so they had sent the cruisers off to the Watch Wheel. Meat-Cassata hadn’t bothered to terminate doppelCassata, whose datastore was still on True Love along with the store for Alicia Lo. Albert was the one who had insisted on taking along the “prayer fan” that was the store for the Heechee Ancient Ancestor, Double-Bond. It wasn’t the only store he had put aboard, and he had his reasons; when I realized what they were, I could only approve.

And, of course, doppel-Cassata approved very much. He hadn’t been terminated! Not only that, he couldn’t be terminated as long as he was aboard True Love in transit, because there was no one there to terminate him. For Cassata it was not only a reprieve, it was practically an eternity-weeks and weeks of travel-the equivalent, for him, of decades and decades of added life!

That’s what is was for Julio Cassata.

For me it was something quite different.

The first thing I had to do was get over the terrible shocks that had come from my mind mingling with the Foe and the Foe entering into my mind, as well as that other shock of feeling myself die yet once again.

One of the (many) advantages of being a stored intelligence is that you can edit the stores if you want to. If something hurts, you can just take it out, seal it up, put it on a shelf marked “Warning. Not to be opened unless necessary,” and go about your business pain-free.

Like many of those many advantages, it carries a penalty with it.

I know this, because I’d tried it. Long and long ago-oh, something like ten-to-the-eleventh milliseconds ago-I was really, really screwed up. I had just died then, too, only that time it was my real meat body that had died, and Albert and Essie had just poured me into machine storage. That is a real jolt. There was more. I had just encountered Klara, the woman I loved before I loved the woman who was my wife, Essie, and there were the two of them in my life; not only that, but I had actually thought I had murdered that other woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin; and, oh, yes, I had just met a live Heechee for the first time.

Put them all together, it was bloody shattering.

So to get me through the worst of it, Albert and Essie had restructured the program that was all that remained of me. They had isolated the datastores that had to do with Klara and the terrible crush of guilt that had cost me years of psychoanalysis to ease, and they had encapsulated them in a read-only file and given it back to me, with a seal on it so I wouldn’t open it until I was ready.

I don’t think I ever was ready, but after a while I opened it anyway. See, the way you remember things is associative. I had lost some associations. I could remember that something else had been on my mind, but I couldn’t remember what. I could say, “Gee, sure, at that time I was really shaken up because—”

But I couldn’t remember what the “because” was.

And that, I finally decided, was worse than having the whole thing right in front of me all the time, because if I had to stew and fret and worry, at least I could know what I was worrying about.

To give you an idea of how I felt after my little adventure with the Foe on Moorea, I seriously considered asking Essie to put that one away for me in mothballs, too.

But I couldn’t.

I had to face it and live with it, and, oh, my God, it was scary.

I kept going over and over that long wordless meeting of minds, and the more I thought about it, the huger and more terrifying it was. I, little Robinette Broadhead, had been in the presence of the things-the creatures, the monsters, maybe one might even say the people-who were busy turning the entire universe upside down for their own pleasure.

What was a feckless, fragile little kid like me doing in the same league as superstars like them?

I need to try to put something into perspective.

It isn’t going to be easy. It isn’t even going to be possible, in any real sense, because the perspective is too immense-Albert would probably say “incommensurable,” meaning that you can’t measure the things involved on the same scale. It’s like-like-well, suppose you were talking to one of those early australopithecines of half a miffion years ago or so. You could probably find a way to explain to him that where you had come from (say, somewhere in Europe) was a hell of a long way from where he was born-say, somewhere in Africa. You might even be able to tell him that Alaska and Australia were a hell of a lot farther still. That much he might understand.

But is there any conceivable way in which you could tell him how much farther away were, say, the core of the Galaxy of the Magellanic Clouds? Impossible! After a certain point-for australopithecine or modern-day human or even machine-stored intelligence like me-big is simply indistinguishably big.

For that reason, I don’t know how to describe just how long it took for me to experience that long, tedious faster-than-light trip from JAWS to the Watch Wheel.

It was forever. I can put the numbers in. Measured by gigabit time, it was well over ten-to-the-ninth milliseconds, which is about as much time, by meat standards, as my whole meat life had been before I was vastened.

But that doesn’t really convey the slow, draggy way the time passed. On the “long” trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS I had made Albert show me the entire history of the universe.

Now I had begun a trip that was a good thousand times longer, and what could he do for an encore?

I needed a whole lot of things to do to keep busy. I had no trouble finding the first one.

Albert had persuaded General Cassata to persuade JAWS to let us access every bit of data they had on the Foe. There was a hell of a lot of it. The trouble was that, as far as what was going on right now was concerned, it was all negative. It didn’t answer the questions I really wanted answered, which were mostly questions I didn’t have enough background knowledge to ask.

Optimistic old Albert denied that. “We have learned much, Robin,” he lectured, chalk in hand before his blackboard. “For example, we now know that the Galaxy is a horse, the dog did not bark, and the cat is among the pigeons.”

“Albert,” said Essie levelly. She was speaking to him, but she was looking at me. I supposed I had been looking confused at Albert’s undesired playfulness, but that was not odd. I was confused, not to mention stressed, worried, and generally unhappy.

Albert got his stubborn look. “Yes, Mrs. Broadhead?”

“Have thought for some time program may need routine overhaul, Albert. Is this now necessary?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, looking uncomfortable.

“Whimsy,” she said, “is useful and even desirable in Albert Einstein program, for Robin wishes it so. However.”

He said uncomfortably, “I take your meaning, Mrs. Broadhead. What you want is a simple and lucid synoptic report. Very well. The data is as follows. First, we have no evidence that any other bits, pieces, pseudopods, or extrusions of the Foe other than the ones Robin encountered on Tahiti exist anywhere else in the Galaxy. Second, we have no evidence that they still exist. Third, as to those units themselves, we have no evidence that they are in any significant way different from ourselves, which is to say patterned, organized, and stored electromagnetic charges in some suitable substrate, specifically in this case the pods of Oniko and Sneezy.” He looked directly at me. “Are you following this, Robin?”

“Not a lot,” I said, making an effort. “You mean they’re just electrons, like you and me? Just some other kind of Dead Men? Not some subnuclear particles, like?”

Albert winced. “Robin,” he complained, “I know you know better than that. Not only as to particle physics but as to grammar.”

“You know what I mean,” I flared, trying not to be on edge and making myself more so by the effort.

Albert sighed. “Indeed I do. Very well, I will spell it out. With all of the instrumentation we were able to bring to bear, which was probably all that would have been of use, we were able to detect no field, ray, energy emission, or other physical effect associated with the Foe which was not compatible with the assumption that they are, yes, composed of electromagnetic energy just like us.”

“No gamma rays, even?”

“Definitely no gamma rays,” he said, looking irritated. “Also no x-rays, cosmic rays, quark flows, or neutrinos; also, in another category, no poltergeists, N-rays, psychic auras, fairies at the bottom of the garden, or indications of the adeledicnander force.”

“Albert!” cried Essie.

“You’re patronizing me, Albert,” I complained.

He gazed at me for a long moment.

Then he stood up. His hair had turned woolly, and his complexion had darkened. Straw hat in hand (I could not remember seeing him with the hat before), he strutted a few steps in a cakewalk and chanted, “’deedy Ah is, suh, yassuh, yassuh, yuk, yuk, yuk.”

“Damn it, Albert!” I shouted.

He resumed his normal appearance. “You have no sense of fun in your heart anymore, Robin,” he complained.

Essie opened her mouth to speak. Then she closed it again, looking at me in an inquiring way. Then she shook her head, and, to my surprise, said only, “Go on, Albert.”

“Thank you,” he said, as though it had been no more than he expected, in spite of her earlier threats. “To put it all more prosaically, since you are determined to be a wet blanket, let me return to my previous points which, if you remember, I put in semihumorous fashion to make them more palatable, and as a mnemonic device. ‘The Galaxy is a horse.’ Yes. A Trojan horse. Every external appearance indicates that it is just as it always has been in our lifetimes, but I infer that it is full of enemy troops. Or, to put it more simply, there are a whole lot of those Foe emissaries around, Robin, and we can’t detect them.”

“But there’s been no evidence,” I cried, and then, as he gazed at me, “Well, yeah, I see what you’re saying. If we don’t see them, it’s because they’re hiding. Right. I follow that. But how do you know they are hiding? There has been only one single transmission that we can blame on the Foe-what?”

He was shaking his head. “No, Robin. We have detected one. The only reason we did is that the Foe used the standard Earth communications facilities, and so that particular burst transmission, which the children on Moorea originated, turned up on the logs as an anomaly. But we don’t monitor everything, Robin. If there were Foe on, say, Peggys Planet, where things are a lot looser, would anyone have noticed one more transmission? Or from a ship in space? Or, for that matter, from the Watch Wheel itself, say a few months ago, before we tightened everything up? I don’t think so, Robin. I think we have to assume that all the ‘false alarms’ on the Wheel were not false; that the Foe penetrated it some time ago; that they have gone wherever they wanted to go in our space and seen everything they wanted to see, and no doubt reported back to the kugelblitz. That,” he said, smiling cheerfully, “is what I meant by ‘The cat is among the pigeons.’ Why,” he finished, looking around in mild curiosity, “it would not surprise me a bit if there were a few of them right here with us on the True Love.”

I jumped.

I couldn’t help it. I was still bruised and shaken from that terrible, hurtful experience. I looked around wildly, and Albert chided, “Oh, you wouldn’t see them, Robin.”

“I don’t expect to see them,” I snarled. “But where could they hide?” He shrugged. “If I were forced to speculate,” he said, “why, I would try to put myself in their place. Where could I hide if I wanted to stow away on the True Love without being seen? It would not be difficult. We have a great deal of stored data here. There are thousands of files that we haven’t opened. Any one of them might have a couple of stowaways—or a thousand of them. I mean, assuming the concept of ‘number’ of individuals has any meaning to what may well be a collective intelligence. Robin,” he said seriously, “I do not think that creatures capable of reversing the expansion of the universe can be discounted lightly. If I can think of one place to hide-in the programs for penetrating black holes, for example, or in some of the subroutines for translating, say, Polish into Heechee-believe me, they will no doubt be able to think of thousands. I would not even assume they were destroyed on Tahiti simply because you—” He stopped and cleared his throat, glancing apologetically at me.

“Go on,” I growled. “You don’t have to worry about reminding me that I died. I haven’t forgotten.”

He shrugged. “At any rate,” he finished, “as to whether some of them are watching us right now, we simply have no evidence at all.”

“So we search the ship!” shouted General Cassata, who had been listening without talking for a long time. “Mrs. Broadhead, most of these programs are yours, aren’t they? Fine! You tell us what to do, and—”

She was looking at Albert as she said, “Moment, please, General. Tricky weird program has not finished its fooling-around report, I think.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Broadhead.” Albert beamed. “Perhaps you have forgotten the other main heading in my brief synoptic report. ‘The dog did not bark.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, hell, Albert,” I said, “you’ll be the death of me, with your silly literary references. What’s that, Sherlock Holmes? Meaning the important thing is that something did not happen? And what something is that?”

“Why, simply that we’re still here, Robin,” he said, smiling approvingly at me for my sagacity.

I stopped laughing. I did not think I understood him exactly, and was afraid that perhaps I did.

“That is to say,” he amplified, comfortably sucking on his pipe, “although we must assume that the Foe have been able to roam more or less at will around the Galaxy for some time, and although they certainly have the capacity to wipe out entire civilizations at will, since they have done so in the past, and although we have no effective way known to me of interfering with this if they should choose to do it-we have not been wiped out.”

I was sitting straight up by then, and laughter was nowhere in my feelings. “Go on!” I barked.

He looked mildly surprised. “Why, Robin,” he said peaceably, “I think the conclusion follows rather inescapably from all of that.”

“Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it,” I said-or whimpered, because, to be truthful, I was no longer feeling even as good as I had when the discussion began.

“Yes, that’s possible,” he said solemnly, sucking on his pipe.

“Then, for God’s sake,” I yelled, “what the hell have you got to look cheerful about?”

He said gently, “Robin, I know this is upsetting to you, but do try to think it out logically. If they have the intention of wiping us out and we have no way of preventing it, then what is there for us to do? Nothing at all; it is a fruitless hypothesis, because it does not lead to any useful course of action. I prefer the opposite assumption.”

“Which is what?”

“That they have, at least, reserved decision,” he said. “That at some future point we may be able to take some action we don’t yet know about. Until then, I think we might as well just relax and enjoy ourselves, don’t you, Mrs. Broadhead?”

“Wait a God-damned minute,” I yelled. “What kind of future action are we talking about? Why are we going out to the kugelblitz, anyway? You don’t for one moment think that one of us is going to try to get into the kugelblitz and talk to these—”

I stopped. They were all looking at me with an expression I recognized.

I had seen it a long, long time ago, on the Gateway asteroid. It was the kind of look the other prospectors gave you after you had signed up for a mission that might make you rich and was a lot more likely to kill you dead. But I didn’t even remember volunteering.

We had at that point, I guess, been on the way for maybe an hour or so, meat time; and already it had been a long, long trip.

See, although all this was—was—I guess the only way I can say it is, was a great pain in the ass, it wasn’t unique in human history.

Human beings had gotten out of the habit of long travel times, that’s all. We had to learn about them all over again.

Our ancestors of a couple of centuries back wouldn’t have had that problem. They knew all about the relationship between space and time long before Albert Einstein. Go a long space, take a long time. That was the rule. It wasn’t until jet airplanes came in that people began to forget it. (And had to remember again when they started into space.) Think of Admiral Nelson playing one last game of bowls before getting into his ship to meet the Spanish Armada. Napoleon invading Russia like a package tour, with a dinner, a ball, and an entertainment at every night’s stop-oh, that was the way to fight a war! Old ways were best. When Alexander the Great came out of Macedonia to conquer the world, it wasn’t any blitzkrieg. He took his time. He stopped off here to sit out the winter, there to set up a puppet government, this other place to get some lovely local lady pregnant-often enough, hanging around until the baby was born. If you’ve been in a battle and then are sitting around your troop transport to dawdle toward the next one, you’ve got a weird, unreal time in between.

We weren’t fighting a war, exactly. At least, we hoped we weren’t. But we were on our way to something just as decisive and dangerous, and, oh!, did we have time! Do you know how long fifty days is? It is roughly 4,000,000,000 milliseconds, and we spent them the way our distinguished predecessors did. We feasted, feted, and fucked our way across the Galaxy.

We did it in all the style of any Napoleon or Alexander, too, because Albert Einstein has great resources. He provided us with some of the neatest surrounds I have ever seen. For hours Essie and I hid away from our traveling companions, sunbathing and snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. We dragged ourselves out of the soft, salt shallows onto a quarter-hectare sand island, where we made love in a shady silk tent with its skirts raised to let the breezes through. There was a bar and a picnic table and a hot freshwater Jacuzzi, and that’s how we passed the first “day.”

Then we could face our traveling companions and reality-for a while. And when that began to get stale, Albert came up with a grape arbor in an oasis in the Big Sandy of Peggys Planet. It was on the side of a fault escarpment. Ice-cold springs trickled down the rock face. White grapes, black grapes and red, plums and berries, melons and peaches grew all around. We lay talking and touching under the leafy shade of the vines overhead, Essie and I, and so passed another fine “day.”

We hardly thought of where we were going at all . . . for moments at a time.

Albert’s infinite variety kept turning up wonderful surrounds. A tree house in an African forest, with lions and elephants sliding silently among the trees below at night. A houseboat on an Indian lake, with turbaned servants bringing us flowery-fresh sherbets and spicy tidbits of lamb and pastry, among the water lilies. A penthouse a hundred stories over Chicago, looking out at thunderclouds strobing the wide lake with lightning. A night in Rio at Carnival time, and another in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. A hoverplatform vibrating restlessly on the crater rim of the planet Persephone’s Mount Hell, with boiling lava fountains reaching up almost to where we sat. Albert had a million of them, and they were all good.

What wasn’t quite so good was me.

Said Essie, panting and regarding me critically as she hoisted herself up the last half-meter to sit on a ledge over the Grand Canyon, “Is all right everything, my Robin?”

“Everything is fine,” I said, voice as firm as it was false.

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Ha,” she added, studying me closely. “Is enough sightseeing for now, I think. All play, no work has made Robin dull boy. Albert! Where are you?”

“I’m right here, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert, leaning over the lip of the canyon to look down on us.

Essie squinted up at his friendly face, outlined against the bright, simulated Arizona sky. “Do you think,” she said, “can find us setting less, ah, epicene and, uh, sybaritic for dear husband who is capable of doing anything but nothing at all?”

“I certainly can,” said Albert. “In fact, I was about to suggest that we give up the simulated surrounds for a while. I think it might be interesting to spend a little more time with our guests on the True Love. After all, I’m afraid they’re getting a little bored by now, too.”

Over all the millions of milliseconds I have experienced, I’ve spent time with a lot of people and some of them were Heechee. This time with Double-Bond was special.

What was special about this time was that there was so much of it.

Soothed by all those long days of beachcombing (and mountain-climbing and scuba-diving and even dirt-car racing) with Essie, I was ready to get serious.

So was Double-Bond. “I hope,” he said courteously, the muscles on the backs of his skinny hands rippling in apology, “that you will forgive me for stowing away on your ship, Robinette Broadhead. It was Thermocline’s suggestion. He is very wise.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said, repaying courtesy with courtesy, “but who’s Thermocline, exactly?”

“He is one of the other Heechee representatives on the Joint Assassin Watch System council,” said Double-Bond, and Julio Cassata put in:

“And a royal pain in the ass he is, too.” He was smiling as he said it, and I looked at him curiously. That had been a very Cassata thing to say, but he hadn’t said it in a Cassata way. Not only that, but he wasn’t even behaving in a Cassata fashion. He was sitting next to Alicia Lo, and they were holding hands.

Double-Bond took the remark in a friendly spirit. “We have had differences, yes. Very often with you, General Cassata, or at least with your organic original.”

“Old Blood-and-Slaughter Cassata,” said his copy, grinning. “You Heechee don’t like it when we talk about blowing up the kugelblitz.”

Indeed they didn’t. Double-Bond’s neck tendons tensed; it was the equivalent of a human shudder. Albert cleared his throat and said peaceably, “Double-Bond, there is something I have had on my mind for some time. Perhaps you can help clear it up.”

“With great pleasure,” said the Heechee.

“While you were still organic, you were one of the great authorities on the Sluggard planet. I wonder. Do you remember well enough to be able to show us some of the Sluggard material visually?”

“No, I do not remember,” said Double-Bond, smiling (it was a Heechee smile, the cheek muscles squeezing up against the huge, pink eyeballs). “However, we have incorporated some of your own storage systems into our fans and, yes, I do have a selection of such material available.”

“I thought you did,” said Albert, meaning, of course, that he had known that was so all along. “Let me show you something first. When we were on the JAWS satellite, we visited the Voodoo Pigs. Mrs. Broadhead and I had a similar notion. Do you remember?” he asked, looking at me.

“Sure,” I said, because Albert had displayed the Voodoo Pig muck before us, all but the smell. One of the pigs was nibbling away industriously at one of their voodoo dolls, or whatever they were, and in the foreground was one of the little figures itself, washed clean of ifith and slop. “Essie said something funny. Alicia Lo said she thought they were dolls, just to play with, and then you said-what was it you said, Essie?”

She said, “Visitors.”

She said it in a voice that was half argumentative, as though she thought she would be challenged, and half-well-scared. Albert nodded. “Exactly, Mrs. Broadhead. Visitors. Aliens to the planet. This was a logical deduction, since all the figures were the same, and quite detailed, and there was nothing like that ever on that planet to use as a model.”

“They’re probably extinct,” I said offhandedly. “Maybe the Voodoo Pigs ate them all.”

Albert gave me one of those tolerant fatherly looks. “It would be more likely, to judge from their appearance, that they would have eaten the Voodoo Pigs. Indeed, I suspect perhaps they may have, but that’s not what I am driving at. Trust me, Robin, those creatures were never indigenous to the planet of the Voodoo Pigs. I believe Double-Bond will agree.”

“That is true,” said Double-Bond politely. “We made extensive paleontological investigations. They were not native.”

“Therefore,” Albert began.

Essie finished for him. “Therefore was right! Visitors! Creatures from another planet, left such an impression on pigs, have been carving voodoo dolls to keep them away ever since.”

“Yes,” said Albert, nodding, “something like that, I think. Now, Double-Bond—”

But the Heechee was ahead of him, too. “I believe you now wish to see the creatures that attacked the Sluggards.” He waited politely for Albert to dismiss his own construct, then substituted a new one. It was a Sluggard arcology, and it was being destroyed. Creatures the size of great blue whales, but with squidlike tentacles that held weapons, were systematically blowing it apart.

“The simulation,” said Double-Bond regretfully, “is only very approximate, but it is probably correct in its gross features. The weapons are quite well documented. The lack of limbs, other than the tentacles, is highly probable; the Sluggards would not have failed to note arms or legs, since their own anatomy has neither.”

“And the size?” said Albert.

“Oh, yes,” said Double-Bond, shaking his wrists affirmatively, “that is quite definite. The relative sizes of the Assassins and the Sluggards are well established.”

“And they are much bigger than the Voodoo Pigs,” said Albert. “Assuming the dolls they made are of creatures about their own size, they could not be the same creatures.”

Alicia Lo stirred. “But I thought—” She hesitated. “I thought the Foe were the only other space-traveling race there was.”

“Yes,” said Albert, nodding.

I looked at him, waiting. He stopped there. I said, “Come on, Albert! Yes, they were, or yes, everybody thought so because everybody else was dumber than you are?”

He said, “I don’t really know, Robin. I’ll tell you what I think, though. I think neither the creatures that nearly destroyed the Sluggards nor the creatures that the Voodoo Pigs keep depicting were actually space travelers. I think they were brought there.”

Said Double-Bond, “I also think that, Albert. I believe that the Assassins were not actually Assassins. That is, they themselves did not physically attack other races, though perhaps they transported the beings who did. For this reason I like better the name you call them by: the Foe. It is more accurate, I think,” he said, looking at Albert. But Albert did not respond.

Guests are no trouble at all when they don’t have to be fed and their bed linen doesn’t have to be changed. I discovered, to my surprise, that I actually liked having Alicia Lo around, besotted though she seemed to be with a man I had little use for. What was even more surprising was that Cassata himself seemed to be coming almost close to being nearly tolerable. For one thing, he hardly ever wore the uniform anymore. That is, I didn’t think he did. Most of the time I had no idea what he wore, doubted actually that he was wearing much at all, because he and Alicia were off in some private surround of their own. But when we were all together he was generally wearing something casual, shorts and a tank top, a safari suit, once elegant in white tie and tails. (Alicia was wearing a shimmery, sequiny evening dress at the time, so I assumed it was some private joke between them-but, you know, that was a little surprising, too, because I’d never thought of Cassata as being the kind of man who bothered with tender, private jokes.)

But, as Albert might have said, thermal equilibrium was maintained. Because as Julio Cassata became more bearable, I became more restless, itchy, ill at ease . . . yes, gboopy.

I tried to hide it. Waste of time; who can hide anything from my dear Portable-Essie? Finally she confronted me. “You want to talk about it?” she demanded. I tried to give her a bright smile. It turned itself into a morose shrug. “Not to me, dammit. To Albert.”

“Ah, honey,” I objected, “what about?”

“I don’t know what about. Maybe Albert will know what about. Have nothing to lose, you know.”

“Nothing at all,” I said, meaning to agree-meaning also to give a sort of sardonic agreement, maybe with a twitch of the eyebrows; but the look I got back discouraged me. I said hastily, “I’ll do it. Albert!”

And when Albert appeared, I just sat and looked at him.

He patiently looked back, puffing on his pipe, waiting for me to speak. Essie had taken herself away out of courtesy-I wanted to think it was courtesy, and not contempt or boredom. So we just sat for a while, and then it occurred to me that, indeed, there was something I wanted to talk to him about. “Albert,” I said, pleased to have a topic of conversation, “what’s it like?”

“What’s what like, Robin?”

“To be where you were before you were here, I mean,” I said. “What’s it like to, you know, dissolve? When I tell you to go away for a while. When you’re not doing anything. When you go back to being part of the gigabit store. When you stop being, well, you, and just be a bunch of distributed bits and pieces floating around in the great electronic bin of building-block parts.”

Albert didn’t groan. He only looked as though he wanted to. He said with patience sticking out all over him, “I have told you, I think, that when I am not actively programmed to be your data-retrieval source, the various bits of memory that the ‘Albert Einstein’ program employs exist in the common store. Of course, the common store in the True Love is much smaller than that in the world’s gigabit net, though still quite large and performing many functions. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“That’s it, Albert. What does it feel like?”

He pulled out his pipe, which was the sign that he was thinking it over. “I don’t know if I can tell you that, Robin.”

“Why not?”

“Because the question is wrongly put. You presuppose that there is a ‘me’ who can ‘feel’ what it is like. There isn’t a ‘me’ when my parts are distributed to other tasks. For that matter, there isn’t a ‘me’ now.”

“But I see you,” I said.

“Oh, Robin,” he sighed, “we’ve had these discussions so many times before, haven’t we? You’re simply dodging around some real issue that concerns you. If I were your psychoanalytic program, 1 would ask you to—”

“You’re not,” I said, smiling but feeling the smile grow tight, “so don’t. Let’s do it over again. This time I’ll try to stay with you. You know. Go back to where I say, ‘But I see you,’ and then you tell me about Niagara Falls again.”

He gave me a look that was part exasperation and part concern. I understood both very clearly. I know Albert is often exasperated with me, but I know even better that he cares a lot about me. He said, “Very well, we’ll play your game again. You see ‘me’ in the sense that you see a waterfall. If you look at Niagara Falls today, and come back a week later and look at it again, you will think you’re seeing the same waterfall. In fact, not one atom of the waterfall is the same. The waterfall exists only because it is constrained to do so by the laws of hydraulics, surface tension, and Newton’s laws, as they bear on the fact that one body of water is at a higher elevation than another. I appear to you only because I am constrained to do so by the rules of the ‘Albert Einstein’ program written for you by your wife, S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead. The water molecules are not Niagara Falls. They are only what Niagara Falls is made of. The bytes and bits that allow me to function when my program is activated are not me. Have you understood that? Because, if so, you will then see that it is pointless to ask how I feel when I am not ‘me,’ because then there is no ‘me’ to feel anything. Now,” he said, leaning forward earnestly, “suppose you tell me what you yourself are feeling that brings this on, Robin.”

I thought it over. Listening to him talk in that soft, sweet accent of his had been soothing, and so it took me a moment to remember what the answer was.

Then I remembered, and I was lulled no more. I said:

“Scared.”

He pursed his lips as he regarded me. “Scared. I see. Robin, can you tell me what frightens you?”

“Well, which of the four or five hundred—”

“No, no, Robin. The top thing.”

I said, “I’m just a program, too.”

“Ah,” he said, “I see.” He dumped his pipe, regarding me. “I think I understand,” he qualified. “Because you too are machine-stored, you think whatever happens to me might happen to you.”

“Or worse.”

“Oh, Robin,” he said, shaking his head, “you worry about so many things. You are afraid, I think, that somehow you will forget and turn yourself off. Is that it? And then you can never get yourself together again? But, Robin, that can’t happen.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

That stopped him, at least for a moment.

Methodically and slowly, Albert refilled his pipe, struck a match on the sole of his foot, lit it, and puffed thoughtfully, never taking his eyes off me. He didn’t answer.

Then he shrugged.

Albert almost never leaves me until I let him know I want him to, but it looked to me as though he had that in mind. “Don’t go away,” I said.

“All right, Robin,” he said, looking surprised.

“Talk to me some more. It’s been a long trip, and I’m getting kind of irritable, I guess.”

“Oh, are you?” he asked, arching his brows; it was as close to judgmental as Albert usually gets. Then he said, “You know, Robin, you don’t have to remain awake for all of it. Would you like to power down until we get there?”

“No!”

“But Robin, it’s nothing to worry about. When you’re in standby mode it’s just as though no time at all were passing. Ask your wife.”

“No!” I said again. I didn’t even want to discuss it; standby mode sounded very much like that other mode they call “dead.” “No, I just want to talk for a while. I think-I really think,” I said, full of the new idea that had just occurred to me, “that this would be a good time for me to let you tell me about nine-dimensional space.”

For the second time in a few milliseconds Albert gave me that look—not astonished, exactly, but at least skeptical

“You want me to explain nine-dimensional space to you,” he repeated.

“You bet, Albert.”

He studied me carefully through the pipe smoke. “Well,” he said, “I can see that just the idea perks you up a little. Probably you figure you’ll have some pleasure out of making fun of me—”

“Who, me, Albert?” I grinned.

“Oh, I don’t mind if you do. I’m just trying to understand what the ground rules will be.”

“The ground rules,” I said, “is that you tell me all about it. If I get tired of it, I’ll let you know. So start, please. ‘Nine-dimensional space is

??? and then you fill in the blanks.”

He looked pleased, if still skeptical. “We should take these long trips more often,” he commented. “Anyway, that’s not the way to start. This is the way: First we consider normal three-dimensional space, the kind you grew up in, or thought you were growing up in, when you were still meat-what, already?”

I had my hand up. I said, “I thought that was four-dimensional. What about the dimension of time?”

“That’s four-dimensional space-time, Robin. I’m trying to make it simple for you, so let’s stick to three dimensions at first. I’ll give you an illustration. Suppose, for instance, that when you were a young man sitting with your girlfriend watching a PV show, you just happened to put your arm around her. The first thing you do is stretch your arm across the back of the couch-that’s the first dimension, call it breadth. Then you crook your elbow at a right angle, so your forearm is pointing forward and resting on her shoulder-that’s the second dimension, which we will call length. Then you drop your hand onto her breast. That’s depth. The third dimension.”

“That’s depth, all right, because I’m getting in pretty deep by then.” I grinned.

He sighed and ignored the remark. “You comprehend the image. You have so far demonstrated the three spatial dimensions. There is also, as you pointed out, the dimension of time: Five minutes ago your hand was not there, now it is, at some time in the future it will be elsewhere again. So if you want to specify the coordinates of any familiar system, you must add that dimension in, too. The three-dimensional ‘where’ and the fourth-dimensional ‘when’; that’s space-time.”

I said patiently, “I’m waiting for you to get to the part where it turns out that all this stuff that I already know is wrong.”

“I will, Robin, but to get to the hard part I have to make sure you have the easy part under control. Now we get to the hard part. It involves supersymmetry.”

“Oh, good. Are my eyes beginning to glaze over?”

He peered inquiringly into my face, just as solemnly as though I really had eyes and he had something to peer at them with. He’s a good sport, Albert is. “Not yet,” he said, pleased. “I’ll try not to glaze them. ’supersymmetry’ sounds terrible, I know, but it is just the name given to a mathematical model which fairly satisfactorily describes the main features of the universe. It includes or is related to things like ’super-gravity’ and ’string theory’ and ‘archeocosmology. ‘” He peered at me again. “Still not glazed? All right. Now we start to understand the implications of those words. The implications are easier than the words are. These are pretty good fields of study. Taken together, they explain the behavior of both matter and energy in all their manifestations. More than that. They don’t just explain them. The laws of supersymmetry and the others actually drive the behavior of all things. By that I mean that, from these laws, the observed behavior of everything that makes up the universe follows logically. Even inevitably.”

“But—”

He was in full course; he waved me down. “Stay with it,” he commanded. “These are basic. If the early Greeks had understood supersymmetry and its related subjects, they could have deduced Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation, and Planck and Heisenberg’s quantum rules, and even—” he twinkled “—my own relativity theory, both special and general. They would not have had to experiment and observe. They could have known that all these other things must be true, because they followed, just as Euclid knew that his geometry must be true because everything followed from the general laws.”

“But it didn’t!” I cried, surprised. “Did it? I mean, you’ve told me about non-Eudidean geometry—”

He paused, looking thoughtful. “That’s the catch,” he admitted. He looked at his pipe and discovered that it was out, so methodically he began tapping it empty again while he talked. “Eudidean geometry is not untrue, it is simply true only in the special case of a flat, twodimensional surface. There aren’t any of those in the real world. There’s a catch in supersymmetry, too. The catch there is that it, too, is untrue in the real world-or at least the world of three-dimensional space we perceive. For supersymmetry to work, nine dimensions are required, and we can only observe three. What happened to the other six?”

I said with pleasure, “I don’t have the faintest idea, but you’re doing this a lot better than usual. I’m not lost yet.”

“I’ve had a lot a practice,” he said dryly. “I’ve got good news for you, too. I could demonstrate to you mathematically why nine dimensions are necessary—”

“Oh, no.”

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “The good news is that I don’t have to in order to let you understand the rest of it.”

“I’m grateful.”

“I’m sure.” He lit his pipe again. “Now, about the missing six dimensions . . .” He puffed for a while, thoughtfully. “If nine spatial dimensions had to exist in order for the universe to be formed as it is in the first place, why can we find only three now?”

“Does it have something to do with entropy?” I hazarded.

Albert looked aghast. “Entropy? Certainly not. How could it?”

“Well, with Mach’s Hypothesis, then? Or some of the other things you were talking about in Deep Time?”

He said reprovingly, “Don’t guess, Robin. You’re just making it harder than it is. What happened to the other dimensions? They just disappeared.”

Albert gazed at me happily, puffing his pipe with as much satisfaction as though he had explained something significant.

I waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, I began to feel nettled. “Albert, I know you like to tweak me every now and then just to keep my interest up, but what the hell is ‘they just disappeared’ supposed to mean?”

He chuckled. He was having a good time, I could see that. He said, “They disappeared from our perception, at least. That doesn’t mean they were extinguished. It probably just means that they got very small. They shriveled up to where they just weren’t visible anymore.”

I looked at him with outrage. “Can you explain how a dimension can just shrivel up?”

He smiled at me. “Fortunately not,” he said. “I say ‘fortunately’ because, if I could, it would probably get very mathematical, and then you’d be cutting me off right here. However, I can shed a little bit of light on what probably happened, anyway. By ’shrivel up,’ I mean they just don’t register anymore. Let me give you an illustration. Think of a point-say, the tip of your nose—”

“Oh, come on, Albert! We already did three-dimensional space!”

“The tip of your nose,” he repeated. “Relate that point to some other point, say your Adam’s apple. Your nose is so many millimeters up, and so many millimeters out, and so many millimeters across-that is to say, you specify its location on the x, y, and z axes. When we talk about nine-dimensional space instead of three, you can also say that it is at a specific point on the p, d, q, r, w, and k axes-or whatever letters you want to use to specify them-but.” He took a deep breath. “But you don’t have to specify those coordinates for any normal purpose, because the distances are so small they don’t signify. That’s it, Robin! Got it so far?”

I said happily, “I almost think so.”

“Fine,” he said, “because that’s almost right. It isn’t quite as simple as that. Those missing six dimensions-they’re not only small, they’re curved. They’re like little circles. Like little coiled-up spirals. They don’t go anywhere. They just go around.”

He stopped there, sucking his pipe and gazing approvingly at me.

He was twinkling again. There was something about the look in those guileless eyes that made me ask, “Albert, one question. Is all this stuff you’ve been telling me true?”

He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “’Truth,’” he said weightily, “is a really heavy word. I’m not ready to talk about reality yet, and that’s what you mean by ‘true.’ This is a model that explains things very, very well. It may as well be taken as ‘true,’ at least until a better model comes along. But, unfortunately, if you remember,” he said, perking up the way he always does when he gets a chance to quote from himself, “as my meat original said long ago, mathematics is most ‘true’ when it is least ’real,’ and vice versa. There are many elements I have not characterized here. We have not yet considered the implications of string theory, or of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or—”

“Give it a rest, please,” I begged.

“I gladly will, Robin,” he said, “because you’ve been very good about all this. I appreciate your listening. Now there is some hope of your understanding the Foe and, more important, the basic structure of the universe.”

“More important!” I repeated.

He smiled. “In an objective sense, oh, yes, Robin. It is much more important to know than to do, and it doesn’t much matter who does the knowing.”

I got up and walked around. It seemed we’d been talking for a very long time, and then it occurred to me that that was good, because that was exactly what I wanted. I said, “Albert? How long did this little lecture of yours take?”

“You mean in galactic time? Let me see, yes, a little under four minutes.” And he saw my face and hurriedly added, “But we’re nearly a third of the way, Robin! Only a couple more weeks and we’ll be at the Watch Wheel!”

“A couple of weeks.”

He looked at me with concern. “There is still the option of powering down . . . No, of course not,” he said, watching my face. He looked irresolute for a moment, then he made up his mind. In a different tone he said, “Robin? When we were talking about what it is like for ‘me’ when I am not in being as your program, you said you didn’t believe me. I’m afraid you were justified. I have not beez~i entirely truthful with you.”

Nothing he ever said shocked me more. “Albert!” I yelped. “You haven’t lied to me? You can’t!”

He said apologetically, “That’s correct, Robin, I have never lied to you. But there are truths I haven’t said.”

“You mean you do feel something when you’re turned oft?”

“No. I told you that. There’s no ‘me’ to feel.”

“Then what, for God’s sake?”

“There are things I do-experience-that you never have, Robin. When I am merged into another program, I am that program. Or him. Or her.” He twinkled. “Or they.”

“But you’re not the same you anymore?”

“No, that’s true. Not the same. But perhaps . something better.”