The Annals of the Heechee

21 ENDINGS

I didn’t know how to begin this, and now I find I don’t know how to end it, either.

You see, that was the ending. There’s nothing else to tell except what happened.

I know that to linear meat ears that must sound odd (not to say revoltingly cute), just as so many of the other things I have said sounded odd (or worse). I can’t help that. The odd cannot be expressed nonoddly, and I have to tell it like it is. What “happened” next didn’t really matter, because what happened had done so already.

Of course, even vastened folks like myself are somewhat linear and so it took us a while to find that out.

What Essie and I wanted more than anything else, we agreed, was breathing space-to rest up; to try to find out just what was going on; above all to collect our awry thoughts. We actually had our physical datastores taken to the old house on the Tappan Sea, the first time we had done that in a fairish number of years, and we settled down to get our heads straight.

Albert’s datastore came with us.

Albert himself was another question. Albert no longer responded to my call. If Albert was still in the datastore, he did not show himself.

Essie was not about to admit defeat from one of her own programs. The first thing she did was to busy herself with program checks and debugging routines. Then Essie gave up.

“Can find nothing wrong with Albert Einstein program,” she said, “except does not work.” She looked angrily at the datafan that had held Albert Einstein. “Is only corpse!” she said fretfully. “Is body whence the life has died, you know?”

“What can we do?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. I just was not used to having my machines fail me.

Essie shrugged. She offered a consolation prize: “Can write new Al-bert program for you,” she said. I shook my head. I didn’t want a new program. I wanted Albert. “Then,” she said practically, “can rest and cultivate our gardens. How about nice swim and then scrumptious huge fattening lunch?”

“Who can eat? Essie, help me! I want to know,” I complained. “I want to know what the hell he was talking about when he told us not to worry-what do you and Cassata and Alicia Lo have to do with it? What do the three of you have in common?”

She pursed her lips. Then she brightened. “How about ask them?”

“Ask them what?”

“Ask them all about selves. Invite them here-then can all have nice lunch!”

It didn’t happen quite that fast.

In the first place, neither of them was physically (I mean, their data-stores were physically) on Earth. Both were still in orbit. I didn’t want to settle for doppels, because I didn’t want even that infuriating quarter-second delay in the actual conversation, so they had to be shipped to the Tappan Sea, and that took a long time. It took longer than that, because for some reason Cassata couldn’t get away at first.

I didn’t waste the time.

Without Albert life was a little harder for me. That didn’t make it really difficult because, after all, there was not much that Albert could do (other than answer the riddle that he himself proposed, I mean) that I couldn’t do for myself if I had to. Now I had to. So it was I, not Albert, who roamed the world to see what was going on.

A lot was, though not much of it seemed helpful to me.

There had been a flurry of panic at first. JAWS issued alarming tight-lipped bulletins about the damage to its fleet, and then even more alarming urgent demands to build a new fleet, bigger and better than ever, on the principle that if you try something that doesn’t work, you should keep on trying it forever.

But that in itself had a reassuringly normal sound. The populace at large, after that first shock of terror, realized that, after all, no one was dead. Foe spaceships did not appear in the skies over San Francisco and Beijing to blast them to cinders. Our planet was not hurled into the sun.

Nothing seemed to be happening at all, in fact, and slowly the panic trickled away. People went back to their lives, like any peasants on a volcano slope. The mountain had erupted; no one had been hurt. It would erupt again, to be sure-but not yet a while, pray God.

The Institute scheduled a hundred new workshops, pondering the events at the Watch Wheel. Half of them spent all their time analyzing and reanalyzing the “battle” between the Foe ships and JAWS. There was not much to analyze. What we had seen was what we knew. There wasn’t anything else. There was nothing in any of the other sensory records to contradict, or even to embellish, what we had seen with our eyes. The Foe ships had come out and neutralized our cruisers; then the Foe had temperately picked us up and put us back in the playpen we belonged in. That was all.

The workshops on the Foe themselves argued and discussed, but added nothing new. Panels of eminent scientists agreed that what they had thought all along was probably what they should go on thinking:

The Foe had been born shortly after the Big Bang. They had found the climate congenial. When the weather got worse-when matter intruded into their cosy soup of space and energy-they resolved to change it. They set the change in motion, then returned to their kugelblitzes to wait patiently for a nicer day.

As to the brief engagement around the Watch Wheel-well, if you woke a bear from hibernation, he would probably swat at you out of irritation. But then he would go back to hibernate; and the swat of this particular disturbed bear had been really quite gentle.

Oh, yes, there were plenty of speculations-God, were there ever speculations. Facts, no. There were not even any plausible theories, or at least none that offered any useful prospects for experiments to test them out or that suggested any worthwhile steps to be taken. Everyone (everyone outside of JAWS, anyway) agreed that JAWS’s plan for building a huger and fiercer fleet was probably a silly idea, but, as no one had a better one, it looked as though that were likely to happen.

And, when Cassata and Alicia Lo were due to arrive, I went into the datastore files and put my hand (that is, my “hand”) on Albert’s store and said, “Please, Albert, as a personal favor to me, won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Albert didn’t answer.

But when I went into the drawing room to greet our guests there was a scrap of paper on my favorite chair. It said:

Robin, I’m really sorry about all this, but I can’t interrupt what I’m doing just now. You’re doing the best you can, aren’t you?

Just carry on. With love, Albert.

Julio Cassata was out of uniform again-shirt, shorts, sandals-and he looked positively pleased to see me. When I asked him about it, he said, “Oh, it’s not you, Broadhead,”—he hadn’t totally changed-“it’s just that that bastard was finally getting around to terminating me. Which bastard? Me, naturally-the meat me. Doesn’t like having copies of himself around. Would’ve done it long ago, but he was busy with the rebuilding program. Hated to let me come down here, because he was afraid you’d get the Institute to declare me essential or something.”

I know a hint when I hear one, so I said, with some reservations, “Right, the Institute does.” After all, the Institute could change its mind later on if it wanted to . . . but after I had said that, it did make him seem more human.

“Thanks,” he said; and Essie said, “Let’s go out on lanai, is beautiful,” and I said, “What would you like to drink?” and, all in all, it was more like a little party than a workshop on just-what-the-hell-is-fundamentally-going-on.

Then I got down to it. “According to Albert Einstein, the reason the Foe aren’t going to kill us is because they encountered the three of you, plus me and Albert Einstein. Not any other machine-stored person, just you three.” Cassata and Lo looked surprised, then slightly flattered. “Any idea why?” I asked. Then they only looked blank.

Essie started out. “Have been thinking about this,” she announced. “Question is, what do we three have in common? To begin with, are all machine-stored, but as Robin points out, so are umpteen zillion others not mentioned. Second thing. Am personally machine duplicate of still surving meat person. So is Julio.”

“I’m not,” said Alicia Lo.

“Yes,” said Essie regretfully, “already know this. Checked first thing. Your meat body died of peritonitis eight years ago, so that’s not it. Third thing. Are all quite bright by standard measurements; have all certain skills, piotage, navigation, et cetera-but so here, too, have many many others. Have long since ruled out all obvious linkages, so must dig deeper. For instance. Am personally of Russian heritage.”

“I’m American-Hispanic black,” said Cassata, shaking his head, “and Alicia’s Chinese; no good. And I’m male, but you two are female.”

“Julio and I both used to play handball a lot,” Alicia Lo offered, but it was Essie’s turn to shake her head.

“Did not play such games in Leningrad. Don’t think athletic prowess would be of interest to Foe, anyway.”

I said, “The trouble is, we don’t know what would interest them.”

“You are as so often right, dear Robin,” sighed Essie. “Hell. Wait. Can do this in less boring way, you know.”

“I’m not in any real big hurry,” said Cassata quickly, thinking of what he would be when he was no longer essential.

“Did not say faster, only less boring. You people? Have more drinks, maybe windsurf a little? I will run up quick cross-check program on all three stores, matching subroutines. Is easy enough and will not interfere with other activities.” She grinned. “Might tickle a little,” she added, and was gone to her programming office.

And left me to be the host.

That’s a congenial enough occupation for me. I made them drinks. I offered them the facilities of the house for entertainment, which were considerable-including a private bedroom, which was what I had had at the back of my mind, but which they didn’t seem to require just then. They were content just to sit and talk. It was pleasant to be there and do that, out on the lanai with the broad sea and the hills on the other shore in front of us, and that’s what we did.

I verified the fact that Essie had once again made a shrewd character diagnosis. Doppel-Cassata was so much more tolerable than his meat original that I actually found myself listening with interest to his anecdotes and laughing at his jokes. Alicia Lo was a doll. I had not failed to notice that she was pretty, slim and small and quick, or that she had a naturally sweet personality. I discovered that she was very well informed, too. As one of the last of the Gateway prospectors, she had taken her chances on four hairy science missions, and after she was vastened she wandered all over the Galaxy. She had seen places I had explored only at second hand, and a few I hadn’t even heard of. I was only beginning to have an idea of what she saw in Julio Cassata, but I could easily see why Cassata had fallen for her.

He was even beginning to be jealous. When she talked about some of the shipmates she’d gone out with from Gateway, he paid particular attention to the talk about the men. “I bet you made a big hit with them,” he said dourly.

Alicia laughed. “Didn’t I wish!”

That surprised me. “Were they gays? Or maybe blind?”

She said, thanking me demurely for the implied compliment, “You don’t know what I looked like then. Before my appendix burst I was tall and gawky and-well, what they called me was ‘the Human Heechee.’ What you see isn’t what I was born with, Mr. Broadhead,” she said, speaking to me, but looking at Cassata to see how he would take it.

He took it well. “You look grand,” he said. “How come you died of appendicitis? No doctors around?”

“There was Full Medical around, and naturally they wanted to fix me up. They even wanted to do cosmetic work-take out some of the excess bone in the spine and the limbs, make some changes in the face-I didn’t want it, Julio. I wanted to be really good-looking, not just the closest approximation they could manage. There was only one way. They had machine storage available. I took that.”

And from the corner of the lanai, where it had been bending over to sniff at Essie’s flowers, a figure rose up and beamed at us. “Now you know the reason,” it said.

“Essie!” I yelled. “Come quick!” Because the figure was Albert Einstein.

“My God, Albert,” I said, “where have you been?”

“Oh, Robin,” he said pleasantly, “have we come to metaphysics again?”

“Not on purpose.” I sank down in a chair, looking at him. He had not changed. The pipe was still unlit, the socks down around his ankles, the mop of hair flying in all directions.

And his manner was still oblique. He came sedately up to take a seat on the rocker facing us. “But, you see, Robin, there are metaphysical answers to that question. I was not any ‘where.’ And it is not merely ‘I’ who is here.”

“I don’t think I understand,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true. I just hoped I didn’t understand.

He said patiently, “I have accessed the Foe, Robin. More accurately, they accessed me. More precisely still,” he said apologetically, “the ‘I’ who is now speaking to you is not your data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein.”

“Then who?” I demanded.

He smiled, and by the smile I knew that I had, after all, understood him very well.