The Annals of the Heechee

3 ALBERT SPEAKS

I’m Albert Einstein, or at least Robinette Broadhead calls me that, and I think I should clarify some matters.

With all his cutesy false starts, Robin has still failed to convey a good deal of data which I believe to be essential. Among others, who the Foe were. I will help out. That’s what I do; I help Robinette Broadhead.

I should explain my own situation.

To begin with, I’m not the “real” Albert Einstein. He’s dead. He died quite a good many years before it was possible, at least for human beings, to store a person as a database after the meat part wore out. As a result, we don’t even have a real copy of that Albert Einstein around.

I am at most a rough approximation of what he might have been if he had been me.

What I really am is something quite different from any sort of reconstruction of a human being. Basically I am a simple data-retrieval system, dressed up with some fancy touches for pretty’s sake. (The way people used to conceal a bedside communications phone inside a teddy bear.) In order to make me more user-friendly, my user, Robinette, requested that I should look like and act like a person. So my programmer gave him me. She was glad to do it. She liked humoring Robinette, since she was not only his programmer but his wife, S. Ya. LavorovnaBroadhead.

So the way I look and act is really only a whim of Robin’s.

I think it is fair to say that Robin is a man of many whims, and many moods, too. I’m not disparaging him. He can’t help it. Robin started out organic.

For that reason, he suffered the handicaps of all meat beings. His intelligence was only what could be produced by sloppy biochemical means. His mind was not precise, and certainly not mathematical. It was the product of a meat brain, bathed in constant floods of hormones, biased by sensory inputs like pain and pleasure, and quite capable of screwing itself up over programming elements beyond my personal experience, like “doubt” and “guilt” and “jealousy” and “fear.” Imagine living like that! Actually, it’s a wonder to me that he functions as well as he does. I don’t see how I could, myself. But then I can’t say I really understand these things, since I have never felt them, except in an analog sense.

That doesn’t mean I can’t deal with them. Essie Broadhead’s programs can do damn near anything. “Understanding” is quite unnecessary-you don’t have to understand how a spacecraft works to get into it and push the buttons. I can project how given stimuli will affect Robin’s behavior at least as well as he can, and I don’t have to “understand” to do it.

After all, I don’t understand the square root of minus one, either, but that doesn’t keep me from finding useful ways of employing it in equations. It works. e to the i times pi power equals—1. It does not in the least matter that all the quantities involved are irrational, transcendental, imaginary, or negative.

It doesn’t matter that Robin himself is all these things, either. He is. All of them. Especially he is negative a good part of the time, in ways that keep him from being that other irrational, not to say transcendental, state, “happy.”

This is silly of him. By every objective standard, Robinette Broadhead has it made. He has everything human beings desire. He has vast wealth-well, it is true that he does not now personally have the wealth, since he is now machine-stored and there are fussy human legal problems over ownership by dead people; but the actual wealth is vested in his real wife (or “widow”), and there is so much of it that if Robin wants to spend a few hundred million here or there, he has but to say the word. He even uses the wealth wisely. Most of it he spends on the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research, with its facilities in places like London, Brasilia, Johore, Peggys Planet, and a dozen locations in the old United States, not to mention its fleet of exploration ships always busy poking around the Galaxy. Because of this his life has “purpose” and he has a lot of “power.” What’s left? “Health”? Of course he has that; if anything went wrong, it would simply be corrected at once. “Love”? Certainly! He has the best of all possible wives in S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead-at least, he has the machine-stored simulation of her and the simulation is essentially perfect, since S. Ya. wrote her doppel’s program herself.

In short, if ever a meat person, or anyway former meat person, had reason to be happy, Robin is that person.

This just shows that “reason” is not dominant in his psyche. All too often he isn’t happy at all. His endless concerns and confusions about who he loved, and what he nIeant by “love,” and whether he was being “fair” or “faithful” to his various love partners, are typical examples.

For instance: Robin loved Gelle-Klara Moynlin, both being meat people at the time. They had a fight. They made up. Then, through an accident neither of them had any opportunity to prevent, he abandoned her in a black hole for thirty years.

Well, that was a bad thing, of course. But it wasn’t his fault. Yet it took him endless hours of couch time with my colleague, the computer psychoanalyst Sigfrid von Shrink, to “relieve” his mind of the “guilt” that had caused him so much “pain.”

Irrational? You bet. But there’s more.

Meanwhile, while Klara was hopelessly out of reach-as far as he knew, forever-he met and fell “in love” with and married my basic creator, S. Ya. Lavorovna. By any figure of merit I can find to assess such matters, that was a fine thing. But then Klara reappeared. When Robin had to confront the fact that he “loved” both of them, he simply went into fugue.

What made it worse was that he happened to die around the same time. (At least, his meat body wore out and he had to be machine-stored in gigabit space.) One would think that would simplify things. It is obvious that these biological matters really should not have caused him any further concern. He didn’t have any biology anymore. But no, not Robin Broadhead!

Robin is not hopelessly stupid, either. (I mean, for a former meat person.) He is as aware as I that, anthropologically speaking, questions of “fidelity” and “jealousy” and “sexual guilt” have only to do with the biological fact that “love” implies “intercourse” which implies “reproduction”—jealousy is at root only a question of ensuring that the child one raises is genetically one’s own. He knows that. Unfortunately, he can’t feel that. Even the fact that he never biologically fathered any children in the first place doesn’t change anything.

What strange things meat people worry about!—and go on worrying about, even when they have been promoted to nonmaterial existence, like me.

But Robin did worry, a lot, and when Robin worried, I worried too. About him. Because that’s one of the other things I was programmed to do.

I observe that I am becoming nearly as discursive as Robin.

Well, that can’t be helped. “Like master, like man,” as the old meat-person proverb says-even when the “man” is a purely synthetic artifact of subroutines and databases, like me.

We come now to the Foe.

They were the race of intelligent beings, nonmeat (in fact nonmaterial) that the Heechee had learned of. The Foe (the Heechee called them “the Assassins” and so did many humans, but I never liked that term) had wiped out at least four civilizations and damaged a couple of others.

It was apparent that they didn’t like meat people of any kind.

It even appeared that they didn’t like matter of any kind. Somehow—even I did not know how-they had added so much mass to the universe that it was slowing its rate of expansion. At some time in the future it would collapse back on itself and rebound; the only logical inference was that then the Foe would somehow so tamper with it that the next universe would be more hospitable to them.

Viewed objectively, this was an impressive and elegant project. I was never able to make Robin see that, though; he remained matter-oriented because of his unfortunate background.

And the Foe were still around, locked away in their own black hole—that atypical black hole that contained no matter but was a sink of energy. (The energy that composed its mass was, of course, the Foe themselves.) There was a name for such a black hole. It was called a “kugelblitz.”

When Robin and I first met the Heechee named Captain and his crew, it was traumatic for the Heechee.

Their way of dealing with the “Assassins” had been to run away and hide. They could not believe that human beings were so reckless as to choose any other course. They told us what was going on and were shocked when we refused to follow their example.

When Captain was at last convinced that humanity (including the likes of me in that category for the moment) was going to keep our Galaxy, he recognized the inevitable. He didn’t like it. But he accepted it. He hightailed it back to the place where the Heechee had run to when they perceived what a threat the Foe were: the great black hole at the core of the Galaxy. His errand was to tell the rest of the Heechee that all their plans were ruined by this impudent race of human beings, and to get them to help us.

This was a pretty urgent matter. The Heechee possessed enormous resources. Even though we had spent decades learning their technology and adding it to our own, before ever living human laid eyes on living Heechee, there was bound to be much we didn’t know about. So Captain promised to mobilize Heechee help for us-immediately-to help prepare for the day when the Foe might come out to destroy a few more races of meat people.

Unfortunately, what “immediately” meant to the Heechee was nothing like what “immediately” meant to us-even if we include the pitifully slow-motion meat human beings as part of “us.” The clocks in black holes run slow. The time-dilation factor at the core made them slower than human, by a factor of about forty thousand to one.

Fortunately, “immediately” at least meant as soon as ever they possibly could, and in fact they responded astonishingly fast-everything considered. The first Heechee vessel to pop out of their ergosphere turned up practically instantly-that is, in only eighteen years! The second came along only nine years after that.

The reason they could be so prompt was that they had maintained a number of ships on permanent standby alert. And those first Heechee to reach us were invaluable. They were the ones who helped us build the Watch Wheel, to stand on sentry duty at the kugelblitz, and helped us locate all the caches and centers of mothballed Heechee apparatus all over the Galaxy . . . including, often enough, mothballed human Gateway prospectors who had got that far and couldn’t get back.

I should, I think, tell you a little more about the annals of the Heechee, to explain just why they were so fearful.

As a matter of routine, hundreds of Heechee ships were constantly being deployed on voyages of exploration and discovery. The Heechee were as inquisitive as human beings, and as stubbornly determined to find out everything that could be found.

There were a good many theoretical problems in science that made them itch to learn the answers. What was the truth, they wanted to know, behind the “missing mass”—the fact that all the observable matter in the universe did not seem to weigh enough to account for the observed motion of galaxies? Did protons really decay? Was there something before the Big Bang, and if so, what?

Human scientists worried about all these questions, too, in the days before we met the Heechee. The Heechee had a big advantage over those early humans (my meat progenitor included). They could go out and take a look.

So they did. They sent out expeditions to study novae and supernovae and neutron stars and white dwarfs and pulsars. They measured the flow of matter between pairs of close binaries, and they metered the flux of radiation from the infall of gas around black holes. They even learned to look inside the Schwarzschild barrier around black holes, a trick which led to some useful technology later on; and I do not even speak of their equally great curiosity about the ways particles fit together to make atoms, atoms joined into molecules, and molecules became living things like themselves.

I can easily summarize exactly what it was that the Heechee wanted in the way of knowledge. They wanted it all.

But of all their quests none was more urgent, or more assiduously pursued, than the search for inteffigent life in the universe other than their own.

Over time, the Heechee found a couple of examples-or almost did. The first was a chance discovery that brought quick joy and almost instant disappointment. A small, icy planet, hardly worth a second look in the normal course of events, surprised them by showing some curious anomalies in its magnetic field. No one was greatly interested at first. Then, on a routine sweep, a Heechee-manned exploration ship checked out the reports from the instrument-only robot investigators. The planet was more than 200 AU from its parent not-very-bright K-3 star, certainly not the sort of place where you would expect life to develop. Its surface temperature was only about 200 K and nothing stirred on its glacial surface. But when the Heechee investigators sounded the ice, they found great masses of metal buried in it. Echoes showed the metal to be in regular shapes. When, excitedly, the crew called for thermal borers and sent them down to investigate, they found buildings! Factories! Machines!

And nothing living at all.

They faced the disheartening fact that once there had been intelligent life on that planet, well up to early industrial standards by the remnants they disinterred, but it was there no longer.

Dating the ice cores showed that they were half a million years too late to find anyone alive, and that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was a finding by the geologists and geochemists that said, inarguably, that that particular planet could not have evolved in that particular orbit; its composition was like that of Venus, the Earth, and Mars, the kind found only close to a primary.

Something had hurled it so far from its sun that it froze.

Of course, it could have been some astronomical accident like the (however statistically unlikely) near passage of another star. But none of the Heechee could believe that (though they wanted to).

Then they found the second heartbreak.

It wasn’t a heartbreak at once. It was a bright hope that persisted for a long time-more than a century! It began when a Heechee vessel caught the scent of a radio transmission, tracked it down, and found a genuine, incontestable artifact of a highly technological civilization traveling through interstellar space.

It did not have a living crew. It couldn’t have, except perhaps for microbes. The object was a vast, gossamer, metal spiderweb, a thousand kilometers across but so fairy-silk flimsy that the whole thing weighed less than a fingernail.

It did not take the Heechee long to realize what they had. Where the wires joined were transistor-like things and strips of piezoelectric materials. The object was a calculator. It was also a computer, a camera, a radio transmitter, all wonderfully crafted into a gauzy web you could crush into the palm of your hand.

It was a robot sailship, propelled by light.

The proof was certain: There was intelligent life in the universe like the Heechee themselves! Not just intelligent life; it was technological life, starfaring life. They understood at once that this was an ultralight interstellar probe, a starwisp, drifting out to explore the Galaxy by radiation pressure, surveying other stars and reporting back by radio to its makers on their home planet.

But where was the home planet?

The Heechee ship had unfortunately failed to measure the precise alignment of the web when they captured it. Though they knew within a few degrees of where it had pointed, those few degrees encompassed some hundred million stars, far and near.

So for the next century, every Heechee ship that went into space, wherever bound, carried a dedicated radio receiver. It was always on, and it did nothing but listen for the song of another of those starwisps.

And they found them.

The first one was damaged, its orientation no longer perfect-but even that limited the choices to only about a million stars, an improvement of two orders of magnitude. And then they found a fine new one, in perfect working order, zeroed in precisely.

Swarms of Heechee explorers pounced on that corner of the Galaxy. There were still a lot of stars to search, but now only hundreds instead of millions. They searched them all. This one had no planets. Those two were close binaries where no planets could possibly support life, even if planets had existed. These others were too new and bright, too young to have given life a chance to evolve—And then there was this other one.

It wasn’t prepossessing. It was a cinder, too small and dull to be even a neutron star. True, it was in the right place. True, it did have planets . . . but it had been a nova hundreds of thousands of years before. All its planets were scorched bare. There was nothing left that could be called a living thing.

But on the fourth planet . . . there was a line of rubble across a valley that had once been a dam, a tunnel buried inside the collapsed sides of a mountain-yes, this had been the place the starwisps had come from.

And once again the Heechee had got there too late.

It was almost as though, the Heechee thought, someone had been going around the Galaxy wiping out civilizations before the Heechee could get to them.

Or before those civilizations could get living representatives of themselves into interstellar space.

And then the Heechee made one final, terrifying discovery. They sent out an expedition under a wonderful Heechee female named Tangent, and the whole nightmare picture came together for them.

I won’t tell you about Tangent.

The reason for that is that sooner or later Robin will. He doesn’t know that yet. He doesn’t know that he himself wifi hear it shortly from someone who knew it at first hand. He would know that if he would let me tell him about this person-or, indeed, about some other persons whose presence on Gateway will matter greatly to him. But Robin can be quite obstinate when I try to tell him things he really ought to know.

That is the story; I apologize for the discursions. Let me just add one thing. It is not, exactly, irrelevant.

I implied, a while ago, that although I “knew” that e to the i times pi power equaled—1, I didn’t understand “why.” I mean, there is no intuitive reason why (the base of the natural logarithms) raised to the power of ((the square root of minus one) times (the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle)) should equal anything in particular at all, much less a simple negative integer like minus one.

I wasn’t quite open about that.

I don’t exactly know why that is, but I do have suspicions. Unfortunately they have to do with phenomena like the “missing mass” and the perplexing question of why we have only three perceptible dimensions in space instead of nine, and Robin simply won’t listen to me when I talk about that, either.