The Annals of the Heechee

18 JOURNEY’S END

Even the loneliest river winds somewhen to the sea, and at last-at long last-at long, long last-Albert appeared on the deck of the cruise ship simulation where Essie and I were playing shuffleboard (missing even the easiest of shots, because the cliffs and the unexpected waterfalls from the glaciers and the ice floes in the water were so spectacular) and pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say: “One minute to arrival. I thought you’d like to know.”

We did like to know. “Let’s look at once!” Essie cried, and disappeared. I took a little longer, studying Albert. He was wearing a brass-buttoned blue blazer and a yachting cap, and he smiled at me.

“I still have a lot of questions, you know,” I told him.

“And unfortunately I have not nearly that many answers, Robin,” he said kindly. “That’s good, though.”

“What’s good?”

“To have many questions. As long as you know there are questions, there is some hope of answering them.” He nodded approval, in that way he has that would drive me right up the wall if it didn’t make me feel so good. He paused for a moment to see if we were going to get into metaphysics again and then added, “Shall we join Mrs. Broadhead and the general and his lady and the others?”

“There’s plenty of time!”

“There’s no doubt of that, Robin. Indeed there is plenty of time.” He smiled; and I shrugged permission, and the Alaskan fjord disappeared. We were back in the control cabin of the True Love. Albert’s jaunty cap was gone, along with his natty blue blazer. His slicked-down hair was flying in all directions again, and he was back in his sweater and baggy pants, and we were alone.

“Where’d everybody go?” I demanded, and then answered for myself: “They couldn’t wait? They’re scanning through the ship’s instruments? But there’s nothing to see yet.”

He shrugged amiable agreement, watching me as he puffed on his pipe.

Albert knows that I don’t really like looking directly through the ship’s skin sensors. The good old viewscreen over the controls is usually good enough for me. When you slide into the instrumentation of the True Love and look in all directions at once, it is a disorienting experience-especially for people who still cling to their meat-person habits, like me. So I don’t do it often. What Albert says is that it’s just one of my old meat-person hang-ups. That’s true. I grew up as a meat person, and meat people can only see in one direction at a time, unless they’re cross-eyed. Albert says I should get over it, but I usually don’t want to.

This time I did, but not just yet. A minute is, after all, quite a long stretch in gigabit time . . . and there was still something I wanted to ask him.

Albert told me a story once.

The story was about one of his old meat-time buddies, a mathematician named Bertrand Russell, a lifelong atheist like Albert himself.

Of course, my Albert was not really that Albert, and so they weren’t actual buddies, but Albert (my Albert) often talked as though they were. He said that once some religious person had cornered Russell at a party and said, “Professor Russell, don’t you realize what a grave risk you are taking with your immortal soul? Suppose you have guessed wrong? What will you do if, when you die, you find there really is a God, and He really does call you to judgment? And when you arrive at the Throne of Judgment He looks down on you and asks, ‘Bertrand Russell, why did you not believe in Me?’ What will you say?”

According to Albert, Russell didn’t turn a hair. He simply replied, “I would say, ‘God, You should have given me better evidence. ‘

So when I said to Albert, “Do you really think you’ve given me enough evidence?” he simply nodded, understanding the reference, and leaned down to scratch his ankle, and said, “I thought you’d come back to that, Robin. No. I haven’t given you any evidence at all. The only evidence, one way or the other, is in the universe itself”

“Then you’re not God?” I burst out, finally daring.

He said gravely, “I wondered when you were going to ask me that.”

“And I wonder when you’re going to answer!”

“Why, right now, Robin,” he said patiently. “If you are asking if the display you interacted with came from the same datastores as the simulation I generally display, why, yes. In that limited sense. But if you are asking a larger question, that’s harder. What’s God? More specifically, what is your God, Robin?”

“No, no,” I snarled. “I’m the one who’s asking the questions here.”

“Then I must try to answer for you, mustn’t I? Very well.” He pointed the pipestem at me. “I would take God, in your sense, to be a sort of vector sum of all the qualities you believe to be ‘just’ and ‘moral’ and ‘loving.’ And I suppose that among all sentient beings, humans and Heechee and machine intelligences and all, there is a sort of consensus of what these virtuous things are, and that a mutually shared ‘God’ would be a sum of all the vectors. Does that answer your question?”

“Not a bit!”

He smiled again, glancing at the viewscreen. All it showed was the usual pebbly gray nothing of a ship in faster-than-light travel. “I didn’t think it would, Robin. It doesn’t satisfy me, either, but then the universe is not necessarily in business to make us happy. Now.”

I opened my mouth to ask him the next question, but it took me a moment to formulate it and by then he was ahead of me. “With your permission, Robin,” he said. “We are really almost back into normal space now, and I am sure we would both like to look.”

And he didn’t wait for that permission. He was gone; but first he gave me one of those sweet, sad, compassionate smiles that, like so much else about my very dear friend Albert Einstein, drives me ape.

But of course he was right.

I showed him who was boss, though. I didn’t follow right away. I took, oh, maybe eight or nine milliseconds to-well, to do what Essie would have called “be gloopy,” but what I thought of as pondering what he had said.

There wasn’t all that much to ponder. Or, more accurately, there was one hell of a huge lot to ponder, but not enough detail to make pondering on it satisfactory. Maddening old Albert! If he made up his mind to play God-even an admitted imitation God-he could at least have been specific. I mean, that was what the rules called for! When Jehovah spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, when the Angel Morom handed over graven tablets-they said what they expected.

I had, I felt with aggravation, a right to specifics from my very own source of all wisdom.

But I obviously wasn’t going to get any, so I sulkily followed . just about in time.

The pebbly gray nothing was splotching and curdling even as I slid into the ship’s sensors, and in only another millisecond or two the splotches froze up into sharp detail.

I could feel Essie’s hand steal into mine as we looked in all directions at once. The old vertigo hit me, but I put it behind me.

There was too much to see. More spectacular than the Alaskan fjords, more awe-inspiring than anything I had ever perceived.

We were well out beyond the good old Galaxy itself-not just the fried-egg galactic disk, with its pearly lump of yolk in the middle, but way out past even the tenuous halo. “Below” us was a thin scattering of halo stars, like sparse little bubbles popping out of the galactic wine. “Above” was black velvet that someone had spilled tiny, faint curls of luminous paint on. Very near to us were the bright lights of the Watch Wheel, and off to one side were the dozen sulfur-yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.

They didn’t look dangerous. They just looked nasty, like some unattractive little mess left on a living-room floor that somebody should get busy and clean up.

I wished I knew how to do that.

Cried Essie triumphantly: “Look, dear Robin! No hooligan JAWS ships on Wheel! Have beat them here!”

And when I looked at the Wheel, it seemed she was right. The Wheel rolled silently in solitude, not a single ship in its dock, not a JAWS cruiser anywhere around it. But Albert sighed, “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cassata demanded. I couldn’t see him-none of us were bothering with visual simulations-but I could feel him bristling.

“Only that we have not beat them here, General Cassata,” said Albert. “We really could not, you know. The True Love is an admirable spacecraft, but it does not have the speed of a JAWS vessel. If they are not here, it is not that they have not yet arrived; it is that they have been here and left already.”

“Left where?” I barked.

He was silent for a moment. Then the vista before us began to swell. Albert was readjusting the ship’s sensors. The “below” grew shadowy. The “above”—the direction toward the kugelblitz itself-grew closer. “Tell me,” said Albert thoughtfully, “have you ever formed a visual impression of what it might be like when the Foe came out? I don’t mean a rational conjecture. I mean the sort of half-dozing fantasy a person might have, imagining that moment.”

“Albert!”

He disregarded me. “I think,” he said, “that somewhere in everybody lurks a kind of primitive notion that they might suddenly erupt from the kugelblitz in a fleet of immense, invulnerable space battleships, conquering everything before them. Irresistible. Rays blazing. Missiles pouring out—”

“Damn you, Albert!” I yelled.

He said somberly, “But Robin. See for yourself.”

And as the magnification increased . . . we did.