The Annals of the Heechee

2 ON THE WHEEL

So now we have to go back a little bit in time. Not very far, actually. At least, it isn’t far in meat terms; not nearly as far as we’ll have to go for some other things, I’m afraid. Just a few months.

I have to tell about Sneezy.

Sneezy was eight years old-in his personal counting of time, which was not the same as any other time we’ve been talking about. His real name was Sternutator. That was a Heechee name, which is not surprising, because he was a Heechee child. He was unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to be the son of two Heechee specialists in useful disciplines who happened to be on standby when the Heechee found out that they couldn’t go on hiding from the universe anymore. There were a whole lot of Heechee personnel waiting for just that emergency. The massed minds of the Heechee Ancient Ancestors recognized the need, and so the standby crews were dispatched at once to the outside galaxy. Little Sternutator went with them.

“Sternutator” was not a fortunate name for a kid in school, at least not when most of his classmates were human beings. In the Heechee language the word meant a kind of particle accelerator, vaguely akin to a laser, in which particles were “tickled” (or, more accurately, stimulated) until they were emitted in one huge, high-powered burst. The boy made the mistake of translating his name literally for his classmates, and naturally they called him Sneezy after that.

Or most of them did. Harold, the smart-ass human nine-year-old who sat behind him in Concepts, said he was one of the Seven Dwarfs, all right, but his parents had picked the wrong dwarf to name him after:

“You’re too dumb to be Sneezy,” said Harold during recess in the play pit after young Sternutator had beaten him out in a pattern-recognition bee. “What you really are is Dopey.” And he bounced across the trampoline and gave Sneezy a push that sent him flying into the tai-chi instructor robot. Which was fortunate for both of them. The games-thing reacted instantly, catching the Heechee boy in its padded arms safely. Sneezy didn’t get hurt, and Harold didn’t lose his recess time.

The schoolthing at the far end of the pit didn’t even see what had happened. So the tai-chi robot dusted Sneezy off and politely adjusted the pod that hung between his legs, and then whispered in his ear-in Heechee-“He’s only a child, Sternutator. When he’s older he’ll be sorry.”

“But I don’t want them to call me Dopey!” he sobbed.

“They won’t. Nobody will. Except Harold, and he’ll apologize for it some day.” And, as a matter of fact, that part of what the gamesthing said was true. Or almost true. Few of the other eleven children in the class liked Harold. None followed his example except five-year-old Soft-Stick, and that only briefly. Soft-Stick was also a Heechee, and a very young one. Usually she tried her very best to be accepted by the human children. When she found Out that they didn’t follow Harold’s lead she reversed herself.

So no harm came to young Sneezy, except that when he told his parents about it that night they were, respectively, angry and amused.

The angry one was his father, Bremsstrahlung, who took his skeletal son on his bony knee and hissed, “This is sickening! I am going to request a work order on the schoolthing for letting this fat-bodied bully hurt our son!”

The amused one was Sneezy’s mother. “Worse happened to me in school, Bremmy,” she said, “and that was back Home. Let the boy fight his own battles.”

“Heechee do not fight, Femtowave.”

“Human beings do, Bremmy, and I speculate that we will have to learn this from them-oh, in a nondamaging way, to be sure.” She put down the shiny, light-emitting instrument she had been studying be-cause she had brought some work home from the office. She stepped-it was a motion more like skating than walking, because of the light gravity on the Wheel-across the room to lift Sneezy from his father’s lap. “Feed the boy, my dear,” she said good-humoredly, “and he will forget the whole matter. You are taking it more seriously than he.”

So Femtowave scored fifty percent on that exchange. She was quite right in that her mate was far more upset than their son. (In fact, Bremsstrahlung was reprimanded the next day in his Dream Seat, be-cause he was still irritated. That caused him to allow his mind to drift toward the smart-ass human kid when it should have been kept vacant. That was a no-no. It meant Bremsstrahlung was broadcasting more remanent irritation than he should be letting himself feel-after all, the very purpose of Dream-Seat specialists like himself was to feel nothing, but only be wholly receptive to whatever sensations might come through the Seat.)

However, Femtowave was wrong in her other assertion. Sneezy never forgot it.

Perhaps he did not remember it properly. What stuck with him was not just that human beings did indeed fight sometimes, but that their fighting did not take place only with those grossly bulging fists or grossly swollen feet. They could hurt someone simply by calling a name.

Did I do it wrong again? Should I have started by explaining the purpose of the Watch Wheel?

Well, better late than never. Let’s back up again to get the loose ends reraveled.

When the first Heechee who could not control his own destiny (his name was Captain) met the first human being who could (his name was Robinette Broadhead, because he was me), the Heechee child named Sternutator was on that standby ship in the core with his parents. He was homesick. “Home” was a cozy little city of eight or ten million on a planet of an orangey-yellowy little star inside the great black hole that was the core of the Galaxy. Even at three, Sneezy knew what that meant. He knew that the reason his family was on the ship was that there might come a time when they would all have to drop everything and plunge through the Schwarzschild barrier, and rejoin the outside stars.

He didn’t expect it to happen to him, of course. No one ever does.

Then, when he and his family were assigned to the Watch Wheel, Sneezy found out what real homesickness was.

The purpose of the Wheel was simple.

It was a place to put Dream Seats.

The Dream Seats were a Heechee invention that we’d come across before we ever met a living Heechee. What the Heechee used them for (among other things) was to keep tabs on planets where intelligent life might someday evolve but hadn’t yet-like our own planet, a few hundred thousand years ago, when the Heechee last came to Earth.

The “dream” signals weren’t dreams. Basically, they were emotions. A Heechee (or a human being), encased in the Dream-Seat web of glittering antenna-metal, could feel what others were feeling-even when the others were far away. “Far away” in planetary terms, at least. They didn’t work in any useful way in galactic terms. This was because the Dream-Seat signals unfortunately came by simple EMF. They were limited by the speed of light and obeyed the law of inverse squares, so the effective range of the Dream Seats was only in the billions of kilometers, not the trillions of trillions that separated star from star.

The job of Bremsstrahlung and the other Dream-Seat operators, both human and Heechee, was to be the eyes and ears of the Wheel. Their assignment was to monitor the most important object in either Heechee or human cosmology, the kugelblitz that hung outside the galactic halo. There wasn’t any point in the galaxy itself close enough for the purpose. So the Wheel had been built and flown to a position only six AU from the kugelblitz, in its lonely position in near-intergalactic space.

That was, everyone agreed, a reasonable way to do it. It was true that in the event that something at last did transpire around the kugelblitz, and the watchers did finally receive the signals they feared, it would be some forty-odd minutes after the actual event, because that was how long it would take light-speed signals to cross six times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (which is what 6 AU means, dummy).

There was also just a tiny bit of uncertainty over whether the Dream Seats would catch anything at all in that event.

After all, some argued, the model of the Dream Seat the Heechee had originally used did not have any sensitivity for, say, machine-stored intelligences like my very own Albert Einstein; it was only after people like Essie tinkered with them that they could handle that chore. What reason was there to believe it would be able to detect the wholly unknown signatures of the basically theoretical Assassins?

But there wasn’t anything they could do about the second problem.

And as to the first, as nothing had happened around the kugelblitz for, almost certainly, some millions of years, it did not seem that three quarters of an hour one way or another would make any difference.

The next morning Sneezy was awakened by the voice of the house-thing in the wall, saying in the Heechee language, “Drill Day, Sternutator. Drill Day. Wake up now for Drill Day!” It kept repeating its message until Sneezy had slid out of the warm hug of his pouchy hammock, and then it relented: “Drill Day, Sternutator-but it is only a aass Two Drill. There will be no school.”

That was a case of bad news turned good for Sneezy! He slung his pod between his skinny thighs and pulled on the rest of his clothes and put a call through to Harold-for they did not always fight-while he oiled his teeth. “Shall we watch the ship come in?” Sneezy proposed, and Harold, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, yawned and said, “You bet your tiny ass, Dopey. Meet you in ten minutes at the schoolhall corner.”

Since it was a Drill Day, even a Class Two Drill, both Sneezy’s parents were already gone to their posts, but the housething parented for both of them. It pleaded with Sneezy to eat some breakfast (not this morning! but he let it make him a sandwich to eat on the run) and urged him to take an airbath (but he’d had one the night before, and even his father was not that strict about hygiene). Sneezy closed the apartment door on the housething’s entreaties and hurried through the quiet Drill-Day passages of the Wheel toward the schoolhall.

When Harold was not being overbearing, and Sneezy not sullenly resentful, they were friends.

That hadn’t happened right away. Harold was nearly the first human being Sneezy ever saw, and Sneezy was definitely Harold’s first Heechee. The looks of each appalled the other. To Sneezy, Harold looked fat, bloated, grossly swollen-about like a corpse that’s been in the water for a week, maybe. To Harold, Sneezy looked worse than that.

The thing a Heechee looks most like is a human being who has died in the desert and dried out to rope and leather. Sneezy had arms and legs like a person, but he didn’t have any flesh to speak of on them. And, of course, he had that funny pod. Not to mention that faint ammonia smell that hovers around all Heechee all the time.

So friendship wasn’t instinctive at first. On the other hand, they didn’t have much choice. There were fewer than fifty children on the whole Watch Wheel, and two-thirds of those were in the other schools spaced around the rim. So their choice of peers was limited. The babies, six-year-olds and younger, of course didn’t count. The near-adult teenagers counted a lot, to be sure-either Sneezy or Harold would have been thrilled to be allowed to hang out with any of them-but they also, of course, didn’t want to be bothered with kids.

They could have gone to one of the other sectors. Even eight-year-old Sneezy had done it many times, alone or with classmates. But there was nothing in either of the other sectors that was not duplicated in their own, and the children there were strangers.

There was no rule against Sneezy going almost anywhere he liked, in fact, with companions or without-at least, if you didn’t count the forbidden cubicles on the outer perimeter where the Dream Seats were constantly manned. Sneezy wasn’t forbidden to play in dangerous areas. There weren’t any dangerous areas. In the huge Watch Wheel there were certainly places where truly dangerous amounts of energy were deployed without warning-for signal bursts, for spin regulation, for mass shifting-but there was no employment of energy anywhere on the Wheel that was not constantly monitored by unflagging machine inteffigences, and often enough by stored dead human or Heechee intelligences as well. And of course there was no danger from people. There were no kidnapers or rapists on the Wheel. There were no uncapped wells to fall into or forests to get lost in. There were groves of trees here and there, sure, but none that even an eight-year-old could not see his way out of from its very center. If any child got lost even for a moment, he had but to ask the nearest workthing for directions and be set at once on his way. That is, a human child would do that. A Heechee child like Sneezy didn’t even need to find a workthing, because he could simply inquire of the Ancient Ancestors in his pod.

The Watch Wheel was so safe, . in fact, that most of the children, and even some of the grown-ups that served it, sometimes forgot what supreme danger they were watching for.

So they had to be reminded. Even for the children there were the frequent Drills-especially for the children, because when and if the watchers in the Dream Seats ever found what they were watching for, as some day they surely would, the children would have to take care of themselves. No adult would then be able to take care of them. Even the workthings would be busy, their programs instantly switched to analysis and communication and data storage. The children would have to find an approved place to hide-to stay out of the way, really-and cower in it until they were told they could come out again.

There were precedents for this sort of thing. In the middle of the twentieth century, schoolkids in America and the Soviet Union had had to learn to leap under their desks, lie prone, clasp their hands over the backs of their necks, and sweat with fear-if they failed in any of this, their teachers told them, the nuclear bombs would French-fry them.

For the children on the Watch Wheel the stakes were higher. It was not only their own lives that might be lost. If they caused trouble, what might be lost was, perhaps, everything.

So when there was a Drill they, too, sweated with fear.

At least, they usually did. But now and then there was a Class Two Drill.

“Class Two” meant only that routine precautions were to be taken because a supply ship was coming in. Class Two Drills were not scary at all-at least, they were not if you didn’t think the thing through. (If you did, it was frightening to realize that the Watch Wheel had to shut down all its normal activities, while even the off-duty Watchers hurried into the extra Dream Seats, to make sure that some undesired thing was not showing up under cover of that very desired thing, a supply ship.)

There was no school on the days when a supply ship came in. There was no work done anywhere on the Wheel (always excepting the Dream Seats), because everybody wduld be too busy with the ship docking. Those families who had served their time and were ready to be rotated would be packing, and gathering at the dock to get their first sight of the ship that would take them back to the warmly inviting huddle of stars that was the Galaxy. And everybody else would be getting ready to oversee offloading the supplies and the new personnel.

By the time Sneezy got to the schoolhall corner he had already eaten his sandwich, and Harold was waiting. “You’re late, Dopey!” the human boy snapped.

“They didn’t sound the sighting signal yet,” Sneezy pointed out, “so we aren’t late for anything.”

“Don’t argue! That’s a baby thing to do. Come on.”

Harold led the way. He assumed that was his right. He was not only older than Sneezy (at least in personal time, though actually, in terms of the great, ever-expanding clock of the universe, Sneezy had been born several weeks before Harold’s great-great-grandfather), but he out-massed Sneezy three to one, forty kilograms of Harold to not much more than fifteen for the youthful, skeletally skinny Heechee boy. Harold Wroczek was a tall child with pale hair and blueberry-colored eyes. But he was not much taller than Sneezy, whose people were all emaciated and elongated by human standards.

To Harold’s annoyance, the other thing he was not more of than Sneezy was strong. Under that dry, leathery Heechee skin were powerful tendons and muscles. Though Harold tried to climb the handholds to the docking levels faster than Sneezy, the Heechee boy kept up easily. He was off the top of the ladder before Harold was, so Harold panted up to him: “You watch it, Dopey! Don’t get in the way of the work-things!”

Sneezy didn’t bother to answer. Not even a two-year-old on the Wheel would have been stupid enough to get in the way on such an occasion. The ships came only four or five times in a standard year. They didn’t linger. They didn’t dare to, and no one dared delay them.

So as soon as the boys were in the huge spindle-shaped space of Bay 2, they retreated as close to a wall as they could, well away from the scurrying carrythings and the grown-ups arriving to watch the ship come in.

All the landing docks, Bay 2 included, were on the inside of the Wheel. Its external shell was transparent at that point, but there wasn’t anything to be seen through it yet except the inside curve of the Wheel itsell with the other two landing docks, identical to the one they were in but empty, peering in at them.

“I can’t see the ship,” Harold complained.

Sneezy didn’t answer. The only answer was to say that of course Harold could not, since the ship was still approaching faster than the speed of light, but Harold had explained often enough to Sneezy that he didn’t enjoy the dumb Heechee habit of giving answers everybody knew to questions that weren’t really meant to be answered.

Traffic to the Wheel was almost all one-way, except for people. The human and Heechee complement were sent back when their tours of duty were over, usually roughly the equivalent of three standard Earth years. Then they went back to the Galaxy and their homes, wherever those might be. Most went to Earth, quite a few to Peggys Planet, others to one of the habitats. (Even the Heechee usually went to some human planet or place rather than back to their real homes in the core, because of time dilation and mostly because there was too much need for Heechee in one capacity or another outside it.) But supplies never went back. Machinery, instruments, parts, recreational materials, medical outfits, food-they stayed. When the items were consumed or broken or outmoded (or when the food supplies passed through the bodies of Wheel inhabitants to become excrement), they were recycled or simply retained as extra mass for the Wheel. Extra mass was a good thing. The more mass the Watch Wheel had, the less it would be affected by movements inside it, and so the less energy would have to be expended to keep it spinning straight and true.

So the cargo-handling carrythings had little to do while the ship was coming in, only to stack the personal possessions of returning personnel. There wasn’t much of that; there were only eight families to be rotated.

A mellow note sounded; the ship was in normal space.

The dockmaster stood over his screens and boards, checked the readings, and called, “Lights!” It wasn’t an order. It was a courtesy for the audience, just to let them know what was happening; the actual extinguishing of the lights, like almost everything else that happened, was controlled by the sensors and the docking programs.

The lights in Bay 2 went out. So, in the same moment, did all the lights on the rest of the Wheel visible through the shell.

And then Sneezy could see the sky.

There was not much to see. There weren’t any stars. The only stars bright enough to be seen from the Watch Wheel were those from their own galaxy, and their eyes didn’t happen to be pointed that way. There were other galaxies by the hundreds of millions in their line of sight, but only a few dozen of them were naked-eye objects, and those only pale, tiny smudges of firefly light.

Then, as the Wheel slowly ~pun through its endless round, the westernmost of the smudges dipped out of sight, and the onlookers murmured.

A pale colorless ificker of light, hard to see, painful to the eyes when seen . . . and then, abruptly, like a slide projected without warning on a screen, there was the ship.

The supply ship was immense, itself a spindle 800 meters long. The shape meant that this time it was an original-Heechee ship, not one of the new human-built ones. Sneezy felt a special glow. He didn’t have anything against the human ships, which were usually either torpedo-shaped or simple cylinders. As everybody knew, the shape made no difference at all in interstellar travel. They could just as easily have been spheres or cubes or chrysanthemums; the shape was only a matter of the whims of the designers. Most of the supply ships that visited the Watch Wheel were human-made and human-crewed-and generally loaded with human recruits, too, so that that minor fraction of the Wheel’s complement that was Heechee was still further outnumbered.

A Heechee ship might mean more Heechee to redress the balance! So thought Sneezy.

But not this time.

The great spindle settled inside the embrace of the Wheel. Its approach course was a corkscrew turn, beginning to twirl to match the Wheel’s own slow spin, so that by the time its teat was touching the hatch of Bay 2 they were synchronized. Rings meshed. Seals locked. From the aft quarters of the ship, cables spun out to the capstans at Bays I and 3, securing themselves and tightening to make the ship an integral part of the structure of the Wheel. The mass shifters in the utility conduits shuddered and chugged, adjusting the balance of the Wheel to match the new increments. Harold stumbled, off balance, as the floor twitched beneath them. Sneezy caught him, and Harold shoved him away. “You take care of yourself, Dopey,” he instructed.

But then the ship was securely locked in, and its wonders began to pour out.

The carrythings were the first to spring into action, hurrying into the cargo hatches and emerging with crates and bales and articles of furnishings and machines. Most could not be identified by sight, but the cargo bay was suddenly brightened with lovely smells as the handlers offloaded crates of fresh fruit, peaches and oranges and berries. “Wow! Gosh! Look at those bananas!” cried Harold as a handler came off the ramp with all four limbs upraised, each one holding a stalk of unripe fruit. “I wish I had one right now!”

“You aren’t supposed to eat them until they turn yellow,” Sneezy pointed out with pride in his knowledge of strange human foods. He got a withering glare from Harold.

“I know that. I mean I wish I had one ripe one now. Or some of those what-do-you-call-them berries.”

Sneezy bent to whisper to his pod for help, then straightened up. “They are strawberries,” he stated. “I wish I had some, too.”

“Strawberries,” Harold whispered. It had been a long time since he had seen a strawberry. The Wheel grew or manufactured most of its own food, but no one had yet got around to a berry patch. It was easy enough to make food with strawberry flavor-or any other flavor imaginable for that matter; CHON-food was endlessly variable. But the crispness, the texture, the smell-no, there was always a difference between CHON-food and the real stuff, and the difference was that the real stuff was wonderful. The boys slid carefully closer to the stacked crates of fruit, inhaling deeply. There was space between the crates and the wall of the bay, out of the way of the carrythings, and the boys fit into that space as no adult could. “I think those are raspberries,” said Harold, peering across stacks of lettuce and carrots and scarlet-ripe tomatoes. “And look, cherries!”

“I would like to have some strawberries best,” said Sneezy wistfully, and a carrything, gently setting down a box marked “Instruments—Fragile,” paused as though listening. It was. It heard. Two of its long handling arms extended themselves to the crates of strawberries, opened one of the crates, extricated a little basket of fruit, resealed the end of the crate, and reached over the other crates to hand the basket to Sneezy. “Why, thank you!” said Sneezy, surprised but polite.

“You are welcome, Sternutator,” said the carrything in Heechee. Sneezy jumped.

“Oh! Do I know you?”

“I was your tai-chi teacher,” the carrything announced. “Give some to Harold.” Then it turned and raced off for the next load.

Harold looked resentful for a moment, then dismissed the emotion as unworthy-who would be jealous of the attentions of a low-grade machine intelligence? The two boys divided the fruit, nipping each berry between fingertips by its short green stem and nibbling it away. The strawberries were perfect. Fully ripe, sugar-sweet, taste fuffilling all the promise of look and smell.

“The people will be out in a minute,” Harold announced, chewing blissfully-and was surprised to see Sneezy suddenly stop eating. The Heechee boy’s eyes were staring at the ship.

Following the direction of Sneezy’s eyes, Harold saw the first of the passengers at last emerging. ~. There were fifteen or twenty of them, adults and children.

That was always interesting, of course. It was the biggest reason the boys were there, to see what new companions or rivals the ship might be bringing them. But the expression on Sneezy’s face was not just curiosity. It was either anger or fear-astonishment, at least, Harold decided, annoyed as he always was because Heechee expressions were hard for a human to read. The newcomers looked human enough to Harold, though there was something about the way they walked, hard to see at this distance, that was odd.

Harold looked again, and saw something else.

The Wheel had turned a bit farther.

Now, just past the bulk of the ship, out in the emptiness of intergalactic space, was the cluster of patches of dirty-yellow light the Wheel was there to watch.

The light was not really yellow to begin with, of course. Spectroscopy showed that far more than ninety percent of the radiation from the kugelblitz was in the violet end of the optical spectrum and beyond; but those frequencies were bad for human or Heechee eyes. The transparent shell had been doped to exclude them. Only the yellow came through.

Harold grinned in satisfaction. “What’s the matter, Dopey?” he said patronizingly. “You suddenly scared about the kugelblitz?”

Sneezy blinked those great, pink, odd-looking Heechee eyes at him. “Scared of the kugelblitz? No. What are you talking about?”

“You look so funny,” Harold explained.

“I’m not funny. I’m mad. Look at that!” Sneezy waved a skinny arm at the dock. “That’s a Heechee ship! And the people are all wearing Ancestor pods! But every one of those people is human.”

If Harold had been a Heechee boy instead of a very human one, he wouldn’t have laughed about the kugelblitz.

The kugelblitz was not a laughing matter. The kugelblitz was where the Foe lived-the beings the Heechee called “the Assassins.” The Heechee had not given them that name as a jest. To the Heechee there was nothing jestable about the Foe. Heechee didn’t laugh at dangerous things. They ran away from them.

That was another significant difference between Sneezy and Harold. And then there was Oniko, who was different still.

Oniko Bakin was one of the new arrivals. Her contingent of replacements included twenty-two humans and no Heechee at all. Four of them were children, and the one who turned up in Sneezy’s school was Oniko. When she appeared for classes on her first day, the other children clustered around her. “But you’re human,” one said. “So why do you wear a Heechee pod?”

“We always have,” she explained. Then she courteously shushed them to pay attention to the teacherthing.

Oniko was indeed human. She was also female, and just about Sneezy’s age. Her skin was pale olive. Her eyes were black and hooded with an epicanthic fold. Her hair was straight and black, and Sneezy was proud to be able to identify her by these signs as one of that sub-genre of human beings called “Oriental.” She spoke colloquial English, though. To Sneezy’s surprise, she spoke colloquial Heechee, too. Lots of humans spoke a little Heechee, more or less, but Oniko was the first in Sneezy’s experience who was equally at home in both the language of Do and the language of Feel.

That did not lessen his astonishment at seeing a human child wearing a pod.

In eurhythmics, that first day she was in school with him, Oniko became his partner for stretch-and-bend movements. Sneezy got a closeup look at her. Although he still thought that her flesh was distressingly flabby and her mass worrisomely large, he liked the sweet smell of her breath and the gentle way she spoke his name-not “Dopey,” not even “Sneezy,” but “Sternutator,” in the Heechee tongue. He was disappointed when their housething called early to take her out of school for some formality with her parents, because he wanted to know her better.

At home that night he tried asking his father why a human being should wear a pod. “Very simple, Sterny,” Bremsstrahlung said wearily. “They were a lost catch.”

The reason Bremsstrahlung was tired was that he had been doing double duty. All the watchers had. The times when a ship was docked at the Wheel were thought to be specially vulnerable, since a certain amount of confusion was inevitable. At such times every Dream Seat was manned and all the watchers kept on duty until the ship had departed and the Wheel was secure once more. It had been a very long shift for Bremsstrahlung. “A lost catch,” he explained, “is a group of human beings who flew one of our ships to a one-way destination. As to this one, ask your mother; she talked to the ship’s crew.”

“Only for a moment,” Femtowave protested. “I was hoping for news from Home.”

Bremsstrahlung patted her fondly. “What news could there be when they left only-what was it, three or four hours after we did?”

Femtowave acknowledged the correctness of his observation with a flexion of her throat. She said in amusement, “The poor crew still was in shock. They were all Heecjiee. They left the core with specialists and materials to go to Earth, stopped there, were loaded with supplies for us, stopped on the way to pick up the new people from the lost catch—oh, how confusing it all must be for them!”

“Exactly,” said Bremsstrahlung. “Anyway, once the original humans reached the artifact, they couldn’t leave. So then they were stuck there forever.”

“If it were forever—” Femtowave smiled “—they would not be here now, Bremmy.” She did not smile in the human way, since Heechee musculature is not the same. What happened was that a knot of muscle gathered below her cheekbones. The taut flesh itself did not move.

“You know what I mean,” her husband said. “Anyway, Sternutator, this little group of less than one hundred humans turned out to be very rich in sensitives.” He said it demurely. To be a sensitive meant that one was particularly good at using the Dream Seat to “listen” for signs of external intelligence, and of course Bremsstrahlung himself was among the most sensitive beings ever found. That was why he was on the Wheel.

“Will Oniko work in the Dream Seat?” Sneezy asked.

“Of course not! At least, not until she grows up. You know that it is not only important to be able to receive any impressions that may come. A particularly gifted child might be able to do that, but it is just as important to be able to refrain from broadcasting one’s own feelings.”

“More important,” Femtowave corrected. There was no smiley knot of muscle on her cheek now. That was nothing to smile about.

“More important, I agree,” said her husband. “As to whether this child is a sensitive or not, well, there’s no way for me to know that. She will be tested. Probably she already has been, as you were, since surely one of her own parents must be a sensitive, and there is quite a strong genetic component involved.”

“Does that mean that I wifi work in the Dream Seat when I grow up?” Sneezy asked eagerly.

“We don’t know that yet,” his father said. He thought for a moment, and then added somberly, “For that matter, we don’t know if the Wheel will still be here—”

“Bremsstrahlung!” his wife cried. “That is nothing to joke about!”

Bremsstrahlung nodded but didn’t say anything. He was really quite tired. Perhaps, he told himself, that was why he hadn’t been joking.

Actually, Sneezy’s best witness about the human girl was Oniko herself. She was assigned to his schoolhall, and of course the schoolthing introduced her at once to the other students. “Oniko,” it said, “was born on a Food Factory, and hasn’t had much chance to know much about the world. So please help her when you can.”

Sneezy was willing. The chances didn’t come very often, though. He was not the only child curious about the newcomer, and most of the others, being human, were far more forward than he.

Sneezy’s school was almost like the storied one-room red schoolhouse of American antiquity. There really was only one room. It was different from the antique, though, in that it didn’t have just one teacher, or not exactly. Each student got quite individual instruction, with his or her own custom-tailored battery of learning programs. The schoolthing was a mobile unit. It cruised around the room as needed, mostly to keep discipline and to see that none of the students was still eating his lunch when he should have been parsing sentences. It did not teach. For that purpose each student had his own carrel.

When the schoolthing had finished counting heads and checking on the reasons for any absences, it bustled around, making sure of clean hands and freedom from symptoms of illness-and, in the case of the youngest pupils, fastening the seat belts that kept them in their carrels. Not to mention escorting them to the toilet as needed, not to mention all the other functions required for children who, a few of them, were still quite tiny.

For all of this the schoolthing was quite adequate. It even looked reassuring. It had a face. When it was wearing its normal schoolthing equipage, it appeared to be a little old woman in a shapeless gown. The gown was cosmetic, of course. So was the smiling face. So were all of its physical attributes, for when school was not in session the schoolthing did quite other jobs and wore quite other appearances. And, of course, when more help was needed-when the children needed more supervision at exercise time or if any special problem should arise-the school-thing coopted as many other artificial inteffigences as needed from the Wheel pool.

Sneezy noticed subconsciously that the schoolthing was hovering around Oniko much of the time, but he was too busy trying to prove to the satisfaction of his number-theory program that 53 was congruent to 1421 to the base 6 to pay much attention. It wasn’t that number theory was difficult for Sneezy. Far from it. Like all Heechee children, he had absorbed most of its principles at about the same time he learned to read. What made mathematics challenging for Sneezy was the silly human system of counting-to the base 10, imagine! With positional notation, so that if you got two digits in the wrong order, the number was hopelessly wrong!

Then, “Exercise time!” the schoolthing chirped cheerily, and Sneezy found out why the schoolthi~g was paying particular attention to Oniko Bakin.

All the individual teaching programs logged off. The restraining straps slid away from the small ones. The children stood up and stretched and, laughing and shoving, trooped out to the safe area out-side the schoolhall. Except Oniko. She remained behind.

Sneezy didn’t notice that at first, because he was busy, as all the children were busy, with the vigorous muscle-against-muscle tuggings and shovings and bendings and pressings that all of them had to perform twenty times a day. That was mandatory all over the Wheel, and not just for children. The light pull of the Watch Wheel was enervating. It didn’t encourage children to develop strong muscles, or adults to keep them. In any practical sense, as long as they stayed on the Wheel, that wouldn’t matter, because what did a human or Heechee need muscles for there?

But no one would stay on the Wheel forever, and once they got back to normal gravity, they would regret the flab accumulated on the Wheel.

Sneezy, being Heechee, was more methodical and purposeful in his exercising than most of the human students. He finished early and looked around. When he saw that Oniko wasn’t in the play pit, he peered into the schoolhall. There she was. The girl was strapped into a sort of jointed metal casing that followed the shape of her body. An exoskeleton! And the contraption was writhing and twisting and bending with the girl inside it.

“Oh,” said Sneezy, understanding at once. “You’re being acclimated to gravity.”

Oniko opened her eyes and looked at him levelly without answering. She was gasping for breath. Heechee are no better at reading human expressions than humans are with those of the Heechee, but Sneezy could see the strain lines on her face and the sweat on her brow.

“It’s good that you’re doing that,” he said. Then it occurred to him to be tactful. “Do you mind my being here?” he asked, because the girl was certainly being twisted and shaped into some rather extraordinary positions.

“No,” she panted.

Sneezy tarried indecisively. As he looked more closely he could see that it was not only exercise she was given. A stinger needle was in the vein of her arm, gently seeping some sort of fluid into her bloodstream. She saw his eye and managed to say, “I’m being recalcified. To make my bones stronger.”

“Yes, of course,” Sneezy said encouragingly. “I guess your habitat didn’t have much surface gravity? But this will help, I’m sure.” He thought for a moment, and then said in charity, “I guess you can’t do the real exercises yet, Oniko.”

She took a deep breath. “Not yet,” she said. “But I will!”

When the next half-holiday came around, Sneezy and Harold planned to visit the coconut grove. Oniko was just outside the schoolhail door as they left, and on impulse Sneezy said to her, “We’re going to get some coconuts. Do you want to come along?”

Harold grunted annoyance from behind him, but Sneezy paid no attention. Oniko pursed her lips, considering the invitation. Her poise and manner were very nearly adult as she said, “Yes, thank you very much. I wOuld enjoy that.”

“Sure,” Harold put in, “but what about lunch? I only brought enough for myself”

“I already have my lunch,” said the girl, patting her school bag, “since I was planning to explore the Wheel today, anyhow. It’s quite interesting, I think.”

Harold was indignant. “Interesting! Look, kid, it’s not just interesting. It’s the most important thing in the whole universe. It’s the only thing that keeps the whole human race safe!—Heechee too,” he added as an afterthought. “I mean, if we weren’t on guard every minute who knows what would happen?”

“Of course,” Oniko said politely. “I know that it is our task to monitor the kugelblitz. That is why we are all here, certainly.” The look she gave Harold was almost maternal. “Both my parents are watchers,” she said, with that self-deprecatory tone that announces great pride, “and my uncle Tashi as well. Nearly everyone where I come from is good at that sort of thing. Probably when I grow up I will be too.”

If there was one thing Harold couldn’t stand when he was condescending to someone, it was to be condescended to. He glowered. “Are we going to get some coconuts,” he demanded, “or are we going to stand around talking all day? Let’s get going!”

He turned, leading the way. His expression said that he personally had had no part in inviting this funny new human kid with the pod, and expected nothing good to come of it.

In a moment it seemed he was right.

The coconut grove was not far from the schoolhall in the curved geometry of the Wheel. In fact, it was directly “above” the school. There was a lift chain just a few dozen meters away, at the intersection of two main corridors, but in the light gravity of the Wheel active children seldom bothered with such things. Harold pushed a door open to reveal the vertical shaft with handholds just next to the schoolhall. He scuttled up out of sighi~ Sneezy nodded encouragingly to the girl she hesitated.

“I don’t think I can manage that yet,” she said.

“Naturally,” sneered Harold from above.

“No problem,” said Sneezy at once, embarrassed at his lack of thoughtfulness. “We’ll take the lift,” he called up the shaft, and didn’t wait to listen for Harold’s answer.

They got it, all the same, when they stepped carefully off the lift chain and found Harold waiting. “Oh, God,” he said, “if she can’t handle the ladders, how’s she going to climb a tree?”

“I’ll climb for her,” Sneezy said. “You go ahead.”

Ungraciously Harold turned away to pick the best tree for himself.

He went up, hands and feet, like a monkey. The coconut trees were a dozen meters tall before you got to the crown, but they were no trouble for an agile child to climb with only Wheel weight. Harold, vain of the muscles he religiously cultivated, had naturally chosen the tallest and richest-laden, and Oniko looked up at him with some fear.

“Just stand clear,” Sneezy encouraged, “in case he drops one.”

“I won’t damn well drop one!” snapped Harold from above, sawing away at one of the husks.

“It probably wouldn’t hurt even if he did,” said Sneezy, “but all the same—”

“All the same you think I’ll break,” said Oniko with dignity. “Don’t worry about me. Climb a tree. I’ll watch.”

Sneezy glanced around and chose a shorter tree with fewer fruits, but, he thought, larger ones. “We’re only allowed two each,” he explained, “or else the guardthing will report us. I’ll be right back.”

And he swarmed up his tree even faster than Harold and made his choice among the triangular green fruits. He carefully tossed three good ones to the ground a few meters away from Oniko, and when he was down again she was studying them in surprise. “But these aren’t coconuts!” she exclaimed. “I’ve seen pictures of coconuts. They’re brown and hairy and hard.”

“Those are inside the green stuff,” Sneezy explained. “Take that big one. Tap it with your knuckles to make sure it’s ripe—”

But she didn’t know how to do that, either. Sneezy did it for her and handed the nut back to her. Oniko took it in her hand and hefted it thoughtfully.

Although it weighed nothing much on the Wheel, its mass was the same as it would have been anywhere else in the universe, and it looked formidably hard to penetrate.

“How do we get the green stuff off?” she asked.

“Tell her to give it to me, Dopey,” Harold ordered from behind them, his own coconuts already on the ground. He snatched it, and with two quick strokes of his knife he had the stem end open and handed it back to her. “Drink it,” he commanded. “It’s good.”

The girl looked at it suspiciously, then at Sneezy. He nodded encouragement. Hesitatingly she lifted it to her lips. Tasted. Made a face. Rummaged around the inside of her mouth with her tongue, exploring the flavor of the coconut juice. Tried a larger sip-and reported in surprise, “Why, yes, it is good!”

“We’ll open them up and get the meat later,” Sneezy said, working on his own coconut. “Maybe we should eat our lunches now; the juice is good to drink with the sandwiches.”

But though Sneezy’s family had adopted the human habit of sandwiches, Oniko’s had not. What she pulled out of her bag was a collection of lumpy little objects in gaily colored paper. In the red, a pickled plum. In the golden, a hard, brown piece of something she said was fish, although neither Sneezy nor Harold was willing to taste it to find out. Nor was Oniko interested in Harold’s extra deviled egg, nor in the ham sandwiches Sneezy had persuaded his father to let him take. Ham was enough of an adventure for Sneezy; he had only in the last year begun to accept human food-or as close to real human food as the Wheel’s synthesizers created.

“But you should try these,” Oniko scolded.

“Thank you, no,” said Sneezy. Harold was less diplomatic; he made throwing-up noises.

“But I try your food,” Oniko pointed out. “These coconuts, for in-stance, are quite good.” She took another deep sip, found the nut empty. Silently Sneezy opened another and passed it over to her. “I think,” she said judiciously, “that when I grow up and return to Earth I will buy an island where these grow, and then I too will be able to climb the trees.”

Both boys stared at her. They were almost equally astonished, though for different reasons. Harold because he was deeply impressed at the girl’s casual assumption of such wealth-buy an island? Return to earth? One must be very rich to contemplate either! And Sneezy was simply baffled by the entire concept of owning land at all. “I have been told of such nice islands,” Oniko went on. “There is one called Tahiti, which is said to be very pretty. Or perhaps one nearer the islands of Japan, so I can visit my relatives whom I have never met.”

“You have relatives in Japan, Earth?” asked Harold, suddenly respectful. His own family were descendants of early settlers on Peggys Planet. Earth was not muchmore than a myth to him. “But I thought you were born on a Heechee artifact.”

“I was, and my parents before me,” Oniko said, taking another sip of the coconut milk and settling down to repeat once again an often-told story. “But my father’s father, Aritsune Bakin, married in the great temple at Nara. Then he took his bride to Gateway and sought their fortune. His father’s father had himself been a Gateway prospector, but was badly injured and confined to the asteroid. He had some money. When he died, that money paid for my father’s father’s trip, with his wife along. They took only one trip. The first time out they found their destination was the artifact. There were eighteen large Heechee ships there, none of which could be made to fly by them, and their own ship would no longer respond to the controls.”

“That was so that the information from the artifact would be kept secret until the proper time,” Sneezy put in in some embarrassment. He had already heard a fair amount of criticism of Heechee practices with their abandoned ships and stations.

“Yes, of course,” said Oniko forgivingly. “Six other Gateway ships arrived at the same destination and were all, of course, marooned there. There were four Threes, a One, and another Five, like my grandfather’s, so in all there were twenty-three original prospectors. Fortunately, eight of them were women of childbearing age, so the colony survived. When finally we were—” For the first time, she hesitated.

“When you were rescued?” Harold offered.

“We were not rescued. We were never lost, merely detained. So when finally we were visited again, just four years ago, the population of the artifact was eighty-five. I was just a small child then, of course. Some of us went directly to Earth or other places, but because I was little my parents remained so that I could begin to be prepared for these horrible heavy places.”

“You think this is heavy!” Harold snickered. “Wow. Wait’ll you try Peggys Planet! Or Earth!”

“I shall,” Oniko said firmly.

“Sure you will,” Harold said skeptically. “What about the money?”

“Of course, original Gateway rules applied,” Oniko explained. “There were earned bonuses and royalties for the prospectors and their descendants. According to the rules, the value of the artifact and its contents was estimated at two biffion eight hundred million and some odd dollars, divided by the number of prospectors who reached there alive, twenty-three.”

“Wow!” said Harold, goggle-eyed as he did arithmetic in his head.

“Of course,” Oniko added apologetically, “my parents are the only descendants of four out of the original twenty-three, so I will inherit all four shares-about one-sixth of the total-if they die without having any other children-I hope they will not,” she finished.

“Wow.” Harold was speechless. Even Sneezy was impressed, though not with the money this child possessed-avarice was not a Heechee vice. But he admired her for the lucid, cogent way she told her story.

“Really,” she said, “it was quite nice there when the new people came. Many new experiences! Much to talk about! Not that it wasn’t very nice before-oh, what is happening?” she finished in distress, gazing around.

It was getting dark. The overhead light dimmed swiftly, replaced by a much fainter red glow. In a moment it was as dark as it ever got in the coconut grove-dark enough so that the palms, evolved to thrive in the circadian rhythm of the Earth’s tropical climates, had their period of rest before the lights came on again and photosynthesis resumed. “It’s so the trees won’t get sick,” Sneezy explained. “But they’ll leave the red lights on so we can see; the trees don’t mind that.”

Sneezy didn’t mind that either, as Harold well knew. The older boy chortled, “Dopey’s afraid of the dark, you know.”

Sneezy looked away. It was untrue, but it was not wholly false. In the densely packed star cluster at the Heechee core there was seldom a time on the surface of any planet without one degree or another of sunlight. Darkness was not exactly frightening, but it was at least discoxnfiting. He said, “You were telling us about where you came from?”

“Oh, yes, Sternutator. It was so nice! Even the original prospectors came to love it, I think, though of course they wished they could see their families again. But there was plenty of food and water, and much to do. We had a great many Heechee books, and more than one hundred Heechee Ancient Ancestors stored there to talk to. They taught us how to use the pods,” she said proudly, patting hers.

Sneezy reached out a finger to touch hers and felt the warm stirrings of the presence within. “Your Ancestor seems very nice,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she said gravely.

“Your pod is much smaller than mine, though,” he offered.

“Oh, yes. We don’t need the microwave, you see. We only have them for the Ancestors. My father says we had much to learn from the Heechee-once we learned the language, of course.”

“Thank you,” said Sneezy in return. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for, but it seemed polite.

Harold was not in a polite mood. “What we had to learn from the Heechee,” he said, “was how to be cowards. And we just wouldn’t learn that!”

Sneezy felt the knots of muscles at his shoulders gather. Heechee emotions aren’t the same as human emotions, but even the Heechee can feel annoyance. He said unsteadily, “I do not want you to call me a coward, Harold.”

Doggedly, Harold said, “Oh, I’m not talking about you personally, Dopey, but you know as well as I do what the Heechee did. They just ran away and hid.”

“I do not want you to call me Dopey, either, anymore.”

Harold jumped to his feet. “And what are you going to do about it?” he sneered.

Sneezy rose more slowly, wondering at himself He was ill at ease in the gloomy palm grove, but he was also beginning to shake for other reasons. “I am going to tell you that it is wrong for you to call me that. No one else does.”

“No one else knows you as well as I do,” Harold said stubbornly. Sneezy perceived that the human boy’s feelings had been hurt in some way-it did not occur to Sneezy to use the word “jealousy.” Harold’s forearms were raised, his fists were clenching; why, Sneezy marveled, it looked as though he wanted to fight.

Perhaps he would have. Perhaps Sneezy would have fought him back. Heechee did not usually practice violence on each other, but Sneezy was a very young Heechee, not as civilized as he would be in another decade or so.

What stopped them had nothing to do with civilization. It was Oniko. She made a gagging sound, glared at the coconut in her hand in revulsion, then suddenly flung it away.

“Oh, my God,” she said in strangled tones, and began to vomit profusely.

When the two boys got her down to the classroom, the schoolthing, which possessed paramedical skills among all its others, reproached them bitterly for letting the poor child drink so much of an unfamiliar juice. As penance they had to escort her to her apartment and stay there with her until a parent returned.

So both Harold and Sneezy were late for dinner. “Hurry it up, can’t you?” Harold complained, just behind him in the downshaft. “I’m going to get smacked!”

Sneezy was already hurrying as much as he could, swinging down from one handhold to another on the descending cable. He was not afraid of being smacked. Neither of his parents would strike a child, but he was impatient to see them. There were questions he wanted to ask. As they hurried down the long passageway to the crossway where both their homes were, Sneezy right, Harold left, he was framing the questions in his mind.

And then they stopped short. Sneezy hissed in surprise. Harold groaned, “Aw, shit.”

They both heard the piercing metallic-electronic squeal that seemed to go right through bone into brain. To make sure they noticed, the ceiling lights flashed on and off three measured times. And all the voices of all the workthings awoke at once: “Drill!” the nearest ones called to the boys. “Take rest positions at once! Empty your minds! Lie still! This is a Drill!”

I wish I had a better way of talking to meat people.

I wish it were possible for me to tell about Sneezy and Oniko and the Wheel as I experienced them. I don’t mean that I experienced them directly. I didn’t; I wasn’t there. But I just as well might have been, because everything that happened on the Wheel, like everything that happened anywhere in the Galaxy, was recorded somewhere in gigabit space, and thus available to those who had been vastened. Like me.

So, in a certain sense, I was there. (Or “was” there.) But while I was accessing that particular store I was also doing forty-eleven other things, some of them interesting, some of them important, some of them just a lot more of that poking around among the yearnings and sorrows inside my head that I seem to keep on doing all the time. I don’t know how to convey all that.

I don’t mean that I wasn’t paying attention to the story of the kids. I was. They touched me. There is something infinitely heart-melting, for me anyway, about the courage of kids.

I don’t mean the physical, fistfight and name-calling kind of courage, like when Sneezy stood up to Harold, though that was very brave (if not actually sociopathic) behavior for a Heechee boy to exhibit. I mean the way a child can stand up to a real danger, maybe even an irresistible and undefeatable danger. It’s futile and hopeless and heartbreaking, like a two-week kitten mewing defiance to an escaped pit bull. It melts me.

Albert isn’t always tolerant of the way I feel about kids. He tells me sometimes that Essie and I probably should have had children of our own, and then maybe I wouldn’t idealize them the way I do. Maybe so. But regardless of whatever I maybe should have done or possibly wouldn’t be, I do have this sudden rush of liquefaction around the region of the heart (well, the analog, at least, of the physical heart I once had but don’t have anymore) when I see kids doing what they must do in the face of the overwhelming fear.

Actually, neither Harold nor Sneezy was that frightened at first. A Drill was a Drill. They’d had plenty of Drills before. They flopped where they were. They closed their eyes. They waited.

This was no Class Two Drill, like the landing of a ship. It was an all-out alert, the kind that happened at random times and had to be carried out perfectly. As soon as the warning whistle quieted down, the rest of the Wheel did, too. The workthings that had no duties turned themselves to standby and stood frozen. The lights dimmed themselves to murk, just enough to make things out. The inertial sensors that monitored the spin of the Wheel gave their mass shifters one more pat into place and shut down; so did the vertical lift cables; so did all the other nonessential inorganic (or no longer organic) machines and intelligences of the Wheel.

Sneezy and Harold were shut down too, or as close to it as active children can get. Among the required courses for every child in the Wheel’s schoolhalls was practice in what some people used to call “satori,” the blanking of the mind. They were quite good at it. Lying curled like a fetus next to the equally curled Harold, Sneezy’s mind was emptied of everything but the gray-gold, not-warm-not-cold, not-bright not-dark haze of abandonment of self.

Or almost.

Of course, you could never achieve perfection at satori. An attempt to be perfect was itself an imperfection. There were thoughts stirring in Sneezy’s fog. Questions. Questions about Oniko that Sneezy still wanted very much to ask his parents. Questions about whether-by some ternble chance-this Drill might just possibly be no Drill at all but reality.

The deck of the Wheel felt dead under his cheek. No buzz of air pumps or whine of cable motors. No voices. No rustle or footstep of anyone moving. No irregular, satisfying thump and rumble as the mass shifters worked to keep the Wheel turning true.

Sneezy waited. As the questions tried to form themselves in his mind, he separated himself from them, letting them dwindle away half formed. Until one question began to recur insistently:

Why was this particular Drill lasting so long?

In fact, it was over an hour before the nearest cleanerthing suddenly jerked itself erect again. It pointed its sensor toward the two boys and said, “The Drill is over. You can get up now.”

They didn’t need to be told, of course. Even before the cleanerthing’s words were spoken the Wheel began to come back to life. Lights sprang up. Distant whines and thumps and shudders said that all the caretaking machinery was turning itself on again. Harold jumped up, grinning. “I guess my dad had to go on duty,” he cried happily; the translation of that remark was, So he won’t remember I was late . . .

“Mine too,” said Sneezy; then, struck by a thought: “And probably both of Oniko’s parents had to go on, so probably—”

“So probably they had to leave her alone anyway.” Harold nodded. “So what was the use of making us stay there? Dumb things!” he said, kicking the cleanerthing as they passed. “See you tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Sneezy said politely, and hurried home.

As expected, neither parent was there. The housething told him that his father had been called to the Dream Seats and his mother had been caught by the Drill far into the third sector of the Wheel. Both were on their way home.

His father arrived first, looking again tired. “Where’s your mother?” he asked. It was the housething that answered for Sneezy:

“Femtowave has been delayed by a slight problem; one of the maintenance circuits was sluggish in coming back on line after the Drill. Shall I prepare dinner?”

“Of course,” Bremsstrahlung grumbled, tired and irritable. “Why is this, Sternutator? Why haven’t you told the cookthing to start already? And besides,” he said, remembering, “why weren’t you here two hours ago?”

“Oniko was sick,” Sneezy explained.

Bremsstrahlung paused, his memory pouch half unslung, on his way to the airbath. “And is that now something that you must worry about? Are you now a mediething?”

Sneezy explained about the coconut juice. “We had to take her home.

I wanted to leave, Father,” he protested, “but her housethings told us to stay with her, and her Ancestor agreed.”

Ironically, Bremsstrahlung repeated, “Her ancestor?”

“No, of course I mean not really hers, Father, but she carries the Ancestor in her pod. Her name is Ophiolite, the Ancestor, I mean.”

“For a human,” Bremsstrahlung said approvingly, “this Oniko shows considerable intelligence. I have wondered why more humans don’t carry memory pouches. Of course, they don’t require the radiation as we do, but still, the pods are so convenient in other ways.”

“Yes, but she has an Ancestor in hers.”

Weary as he was, Bremsstrahlung was a good father. He sank down on a forkrest, his pod loose beneath him, to explain things to his son. “You must remember, Sternutator, that if a group of Ancestors were inadvertently left behind during the Removal, it must have been very lonely for them. Of course, they would have formed attachments to the first intelligent beings who appeared there, even if they were human.”

“Yes, but,” said Sneezy, ~’I don’t have an Ancestor in my pod yet.”

“Children don’t have Ancestors in their pods,” Bremsstrahlung explained. “Even many adults do not, because the Ancestors are very busy with important work, but when you grow up—”

“Yes, but,” said Sneezy, “she does.”

Bremsstrahlung groaned and stood up. Neatly hanging his memory pouch beside the bath door, he begged, “Later, son, please! I’m really tired.”

It wasn’t just intellectual curiosity with Sneezy. It wasn’t even the jealousy of one kid toward another with a better toy. There were almost moral questions involved, perhaps almost religious ones.

Both Heechee and humans had learned how to supplement their own brains with machine-stored intelligences, but they went by different routes. Human beings had gone the way of calculators and computers and servo-mechanisms, all the way to the supple and enormous gigabit webs that nurtured such Artificial Intelligences as Albert Einstein. (And, for that matter, me.) The Heechee had never developed A. !. They hadn’t had to. They had learned early on how to store the minds of their dead in machine form. Few Heechee truly, permanently died. They wound up as Ancient Ancestors.

A human astronomer who desired to calculate the orbital elements of the planets of a double-star system would as a matter of course turn the problem over to a computation facility. A Heechee would employ a battery of dead Ancestors. As a practical matter, one system worked as well as another.

But it was not entirely a practical matter. Humans didn’t revere their computers. Heechee Ancient Ancestors, on the other hand, deserved—and demanded-a kind of respect.

Sneezy’s mother came in while his father was still bathing. She listened to his questions and said, rubbing the back of his neck, “Mter dinner, Sterny, all right? It takes a lot out of your father when he’s on extra shifts in the Dream Seat. And, then, of course, he’s worried.”

Sneezy gaped. Worried? Fatigued, yes; Sneezy expected that. That was the price a watcher paid, sitting in the Dream Seat for hours on end, trying to sense some alien presence, always fearing that he might some day succeed-as some day, surely, someone would, with consequences no one could guess.

But worried?

When at last the cookthing had dinner on the table and his parents were restored and almost relaxed, Bremsstrahlung said heavily, “It was not a planned Drill, Sternutator. Two shift watchers thought they detected something, so the emergency was called.” He writhed his forearms, like a shrug. “What they felt is very uncertain~ It was not clear, not strong-but they are good watchers. Of course there had to be a shutdown.”

Sneezy stopped eating, knife halfway to his mouth. His father said quickly, “But I felt nothing at all when I came on. I am sure of that. No one else did then, either.”

“There have been false alarms before,” Femtowave said hopefully.

“To be sure. That’s why there are so many of us: to make sure such alarms are false. It may be a million years before the Assassins come out, you know. Who can tell?” Bremsstrahlung finished his meal quickly, then sat back on his pouch. “Now, Sternutator, what are your questions about your human friend, Oniko?”

Sneezy rolled his eyes slowly. Oh, yes, he had had a million questions, but the thought that maybe there had been a real signal of emerging Assassins had driven all of them out of his mind. False alarm, all right, but how did any watcher know for certain that any alarm was false?

But those were the questions his father obviously did not want to discuss. Sneezy searched and came up with one of the things that had been troubling. “Father? It is not just the pod. Oniko has so much ‘money.’ Why are they so ‘rich’?” He used the English words, although they had been speaking Heechee, since their own tongue had no such concepts.

Bremsstrahlung shrugged his wide, wiry shoulders-it was the Heechee equivalent of a frown. “Human beings,” he said, as though it explained everything.

It did not. “Yes, Father,” Sneezy said, “but not all human beings have so much ‘wealth’.”

“No, of course they do not,” his father said. “These particular humans chanced to acquire some Heechee devices. Some of our ‘property,’ Sterny. They didn’t even seek it out. They simply discovered it by chance, and in human practice that gave them ‘ownership,’ which they then traded for ‘money.’”

Femtowave said pacifyingly, “As far as they knew, the devices were abandoned, of course.” She ticked her tongue to the cookthing, which removed the used utensils and served up their “dessert.” It wasn’t pie or ice cream; it was one of a variety of ropy vines the Heechee ate which both cleared their palates and lubricated their teeth antiseptically after a meal. “The concept of ‘money’ isn’t without value,” Femtowave added, “since it functions as a sort ot rough servo-mechanism for social priority-setting.”

Bremsstrahlung picked a fiber out of his teech and said indignantly, “Are you proposing that Heechee should take up the same system?”

“No, no, Bremmy! All the same, it is interesting.”

“Interesting!” he groaned. “Foolish, I would say. What’s the use of ‘money’? Don’t we have everything we need without it?”

“Not as much as Oniko has,” Sneezy put in wistfully.

Bremsstrahlung put down his eating knife and gazed at the boy in despair. When he spoke, it was not to his son but to his wife.

“Do you see?” he demanded. “Do you see what is happening to our son here? The next thing you know he’ll be asking for an ‘allowance.’ And the ‘crying shame,’” he said, unconsciously using the English expression, since Heechee didn’t cry, “is that we are older and wiser than they! How did we get ourselves into a position where we accommodate our ways to theirs?”

Femtowave glanced from her husband to her son. Both were upset—in the boy’s case, she was sure, mostly because Bremsstrahlung was; in her husband’s case the reasons were graver.

“Bremmy dear,” she said patiently, “what’s the use of worrying about these things? We knew what exposing our son to human values meant; we talked it over before we left the core.”

“Yes, in five minutes altogether,” said her husband moodily.

“Five minutes was all the time we had.” Femtowave leaned down to whisper to her pod. Obediently it caused the housething to rearrange the wall images of their room. The pleasing monochrome traceries faded, and the nostalgic mural of Home, with its pavilions and terraces overlooking the bays and majestic hills, surrounded them. “Sneezy won’t forget,” she said reassuringly.

“Really I won’t, Father,” the boy said, his voice tremulous.

“No. No, of course,” Bremsstrahlung said heavily.

They finished their dessert-weed in silence. Then, when the house-thing had cleared everything away, they communed with the Ancestors for a while, letting the weary old dead ones talk, complain, advise. It was a very Heechee thing to do. Slowly Bremsstrahlung calmed down. By Sneezy’s bedtime he felt quite restored. “Sleep now, my son,” he said affectionately.

“Yes, Father,” said Sneezy. Then, “Father?”

“What is it?”

“Do I have to keep on sleeping in a cocoon? Can’t I have a real bed, with blankets and pillows?”

His father looked at him with puzzlement, before he began to look at him with outrage. “A ‘bed’?” he began, and Femtowave moved to cut off the explosion before it could get started.

“Now, please, Sternutator,” she said, “not one more word. Go!”

Sneezy, injured, went off to his room to glower at the cocoon and its dense, soft litter. It was embarrassing to sleep in something like that when all the other boys had beds. He climbed in, pulled the cocoon closed over him, turned around ten or twelve times to mold the litter to his liking, and fell asleep.

His parents were unslinging the hammocks in the other room, preparing for their own sleep. Bremsstrahlung was silent, his belly tendons rippling in displeasure. Femtowave, seeing, changed the murals again. The lovely pastels disappeared. On every wall there was now blackness with a few objects visible. To one side, the great sprinkled sprawl of the Galaxy. To the other, the cluster of fuzzy, sulfur-colored objects that were their reason for being there.

“Don’t you see, my dear?” she said. “None of this matters in comparison with the great purpose we serve. We must never forget why our people Removed to the core in the first place-and why we have come out again.”

Bremsstrahlung gazed unhappily at the smoky, roiling mass. “Some things do matter,” he answered stubbornly. “Fairness always matters!”

His wife said gently, “Yes, Bremmy, fairness always matters. But in comparison with the Assassins, it doesn’t matter very much.”

There’s not a great deal more to say about the children just now. They had an interesting and happy life on the Wheel-for a while.

Being much of an age, the three of them spent much time together.

They did interesting things. They explored the lungs of the Wheel, where tangles of leafy vines grew on the wastes from the sinks and toilets of the Wheel, and sopped up the carbon dioxide both human and Heechee bodies exhaled. They toured the workshops where anything at all could be fixed, from a toy to the Wheel’s tiny fleet of spacecraft—Femtowave worked there, and fondly showed the children around. They poked into the spacecraft themselves, hanging in their docking teats like puppies nursing. They peered into the library, with its tens of millions of socketed and indexed data fans: There on those racks were all the stories humans had ever told, and all the memories of the Heechee Ancestors, and all the dictionaries and compilations and texts of either race-well, not really all, but enough to overwhelm Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko. They visited the zoo, where cats and cows and monkeys and Heechee pets and exotics grazed or hung from bars or rested, chin on paw, to stare back at the staring children. There were only a few dozen organisms represented, but for most of the children they were the only nonsentient beings they had ever seen.

They even visited the Dream Seats.

Children were rarely allowed there, but Sneezy’s father guaranteed their behavior. So one day, on Bremsstrahlung’s time off, they were permitted to gaze at the emplacements from a safe distance.

It was a thrilling experience. The Seats were sited in clusters of four, every three hundred meters or so around the external perimeter of the Wheel. Each cluster was in a little bubble of crystal, made of a substance that was transparent not only to light but to every other form of electromagnetic radiation. Was that necessary? No one could say for sure, but perhaps it would help-anything that could make the task of the watchers more sure was worth doing, even if there was only a remote chance it mattered.

As was normal when there was no Drill, only one seat in each group of four was occupied. “Hold hands,” Bremsstrahlung instructed, “and you can come just a little closer.”

Warily the children tiptoed within a meter of the on-duty watcher, a human female from another sector, her eyes closed, her ears stopped. She almost looked asleep as they peered at her through the interstices of the glittering web of antenna-metal that surrounded her. Through the crystal they could see below them-“below” by the geometry of the slowly spinning Wheel-space itself, including the distant muddy blob of the kugelblitz. Sneezy’s hand tightened watchfully on Oniko’s. He no longer was repelled by the touch of human flesh-so lardy, so springy, so fat. In fact, he rather enjoyed holding her hand. What surprised him was that she seemed rather to enjoy holding his, since Harold had not failed to let him know, long since, that to a human being the feel of hot, hard, writhing Heechee flesh was equally distasteful. Perhaps Oniko did not find it so. Or perhaps she was simply too polite to show it.

Bremsstrahlung escorted them back to the public parts of the Wheel when they had looked their fill. Then he returned to get ready for his own shift. On the way back to their home area the children gabbled excitedly about what they had seen, pausing only to be diverted by a class trip of tiny ones, going to the aquarium for the first time.

The aquarium wasn’t just a sort of museum. Much of the Heechee diet was seafood, and so was some of the human. Many of the animals in the tanks were sooner or later going to wind up on a table. Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko followed the little kids, tolerant of their chatter, amused by their reactions to the weird, widemouthed seasnakes that Heechee loved, or the squid that were for human tables. One of the squid was near the tank wall, and as a three-year-old came close it flashed from white to mottled and ejected a plume of ink as it rocketed away. The child jumped and gasped. Harold laughed. Oniko laughed. And, after a moment, Sneezy laughed, too, although of course the Heechee laugh was not quite the same sound or rictus as the human.

“Silly little kid,” Oniko said with maternal fondness. “I remember the first time I—”

She did not finish.

There was a sudden squeal of warning from all over, and the lights began to flash. “Drill! Drill!” cried the schoolthings.

As everyone dropped at once to the floor, Harold managed a quick question. “Why do we have a Drill now?” he demanded of the nearest schoolthing.

“Lie still! Empty your mind!” it ordered, but then it relented for just one second. “It is only a Class Two,” it said. “An unscheduled ship is approaching-now take your position!”

And so they did, all of them, even the tiies. But Sneezy had trouble emptying his mind, because there was a question. Yes, of course, when a ship came in there was always a Class Two Drill, that was not very frightening . . . but never before in his experience bad a ship come in unscheduled.

And this ship was from JAWS.

By the time the Drill was over and Sneezy was back in his parents’ home, the unscheduled ship was secured and silent, but it was still there. And the rumors had flown like fire.

Bremsstrahlung confirmed them. “Yes, Sternutator,” he said with worry, “you must leave. All children must. The Wheel is being evacuated of everyone not an adult, because we can’t risk a child radiating at the wrong time.”

“I am second in my class in satori, Father!”

“Of course you are! But the Joint Assassin Watch has ordered that you must go with the others. Please, my son. There is nothing we can do about it.”

“They’ll take very good care of you,” Femtowave put in, but her voice was even hoarser with worry than his father’s.

“But where will I go?” Sneezy begged.

His parents looked to each other. “To a good place,” his mother said at last. “We don’t know where, yet. You children all come from different places, and I don’t think they will get all of you to your proper homes at once. But truly, Sterny, you will be taken care of. And it is only for a while, until this false alarm is cleared up. You will be back with us soon.”

“I hope that is true,” said his father.

And there was no time, no time for any last visits to the zoo or the coconut grove or anywhere, just one short session at the schoolhall so that each could pick up possessions and say good-bye to the school-thing.

The schoolthing couldn’t keep order that day. It didn’t try. It only dealt with each student separately, bidding a farewell, making sure the lockers were emptied, while all the other children chattered excitedly in anticipation and fear. None of them knew where they were going yet. Harold, of course, was praying for his own home.

Sneezy listened wistfully. He wondered if he envied Harold. Was Peggys Planet really the way Harold pictured it? Summer all the time? and no school? and millions of hectares of wild fruits and berries to pick any time, any day?

“But it’s a long way,” Harold was saying. “I bet I’ll have to change ships. That means I’ll be a month getting home.”

“It would take me nearly three months,” Sneezy said wistfully.

“Oh, but that’s because of your stupid Schwarzschild barrier,” Harold explained, quite unnecessarily to a boy who had already penetrated it once. “You don’t think you’re going to go there, do you, Dopey? Good heavens, they’re not going to run a whole ship for a couple of Heechee kids. That would be just inefficient. They wouldn’t do that!”

In that, Harold was right. There were not that many children on the Wheel, and so the great Earth-built ship that received them was going to only one place. To Earth.

Harold was crushed. Oniko was fearful. Sneezy was-well, Sneezy did not know from one moment to the next what he was, because the excitement and the pangs of leaving his parents and the nagging worry about what this sudden and unprecedented move meant all fought for dominance in his mind. The result was only confusion.

They had less than twelve hours to board. That was a good thing. The less time for the excitement to melt away and the fears and miseries to grow, the better.

At last they trooped one by one into the great interstellar vehicle as soon as the hundred new Watchers and their gear had been taken off. Oniko’s parents were there, hugging their daughter without words. So were Mr. and Mrs. Wroczek, and Sneezy politely looked away as Harold began to cry at the parting.

“Good-bye, Father. Good-bye, Mother,” said Sneezy.

“Good-bye, dear Sternutator,” said his father, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. Sneezy’s mother didn’t even try.

“It will be a nice place, Sterny, dear,” she promised, hugging him. “We won’t be able to hear from you normally, because they’ve blacked out transmissions to the Wheel-but—oh, Sterny!” She hugged him hard. Heechee can’t cry, but there is nothing in their physiology or minds that keeps them from feeling loss as keenly as any human.

Sneezy turned away.

It was not a Heechee custom to kiss on parting, but as Sneezy entered the ship he wished that, in this case, an exception had been made.