The Annals of the Heechee

4 SOME PARTIES AT THE PARTY

There was one place on Gateway I absolutely had to see again.

After I got tired of brooding over all the things I had to brood over and hearing people say, “Hey, Robinette, you’re looking great!” I went there. It was called Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel 8, Room 51, and for several sick and scary months it had been my home.

I went there all by myself I didn’t want to take Essie away from her old Leningrad buddy, and anyway, the part of my life that was wrapped up in that dirty little hole was not a part she had shared. I stood gazing at it, taking it all in. I even actuated perceptors I don’t usually bother with, because I didn’t want to just see it. I wanted to smell and feel it.

It looked, smelled, and felt crummy, and I almost drowned in the huge, hot flood of nostalgia that washed over me.

Room 51 was the cubicle I had been assigned to when I first came to Gateway-Jesus! Decades and decades ago!

It had been cleaned out some, and redecorated a lot. It wasn’t a hole for a scared Gateway prospector to hide himself and his funk in anymore. Now it belonged to some feeble old geriatric case who had come to Wrinide Rock because that was where he had the best chance of clinging to his worn-out meat body a while longer. It looked different. They’d fixed it up with a real bed, if a narrow one, instead of my old hammock. There was a shiny new PV comxnset mounted on the wall, and a foldaway sink with actual running water, and about a million other luxuries I hadn’t had. The geriatrics case had tottered off somewhere else to join the party, no doubt. Anyway, he wasn’t there. I had it all to myself, all the closet-sized claustrophobic luxury of it.

I took a deep “breath.”

That was another big difference. The smell was gone. They’d got rid of the old Gateway lug that soaked into your clothes and skin, the well-used air that everybody else had been breathing-and sweating into, and farting into-for years and years. Now it only smelled a little of green, growing things, no doubt from the plantings that helped the oxygen-replenishment system along. The wails still glimmered with the Heechee-metal shine-blu~ only; Gateway had never had any of the other colors.

Changes? Sure there had been changes. But it was the same room. And what a world of misery and worriment I had crammed into it.

I’d lived the way every Gateway prospector lived-counting up the minutes until I would have to take a ifight, any flight, or be kicked off the asteroid because my money was gone. Poring over the lists of expeditions that were seeking crew members, trying to guess which one might make me rich-or, really, trying to decide which one might at least not make me dead. I had bedded GelleKlara Moynlin in that room, when we weren’t doing it in her own. I had cried myself crazy in it when I came back from the last mission I had shared with her without her.

It seemed to me that I had lived a longer life right there, in those few lousy months I had spent on Gateway, than in all the decades since.

I don’t know how many milliseconds I spent there, in maudlin nostalgia time, before I heard a voice behind me say, “Well, Robin! You know, I had an idea I might find you mooning around here.”

Her name was Sheri Loffat.

I have to confess that, glad as I was to see Sheri again, I was also glad that Essie was busy hoisting a few with her old drinking buddy just then. Essie is not a jealous woman at all. But she might have made an exception for Sheri Loffat.

Sheri was peering in at me through the narrow doorway. She looked not a minute older than the last time I’d seen her, more than half a century back. She was looking a whole lot better than she had then, in fact, because then she was just out of the hospital after a mission that had gone sour in every way but financial. Now she was looking one other thing besides “good.” She was looking extremely appetizing because what she was wearing, apart from a broad grin, was nothing but a knitted shirt and a pair of underwear panties.

I recognized the outfit immediately. “Like it?” she asked, leaning in to kiss me. “I put it on just for you. Remember?”

I answered indirectly. I said, “I’m a married man now.” That was to set the record straight, but it didn’t keep me from kissing her back as I said it.

“Well, who isn’t married?” she asked reasonably. “I’ve got four kids, you know. Not to mention three grandchildren and a great-grand.”

I said, “My God.”

I leaned back to look at her. She wriggled her way in the doorway and hooked herself by the scruff of her tee shirt to a hook on the wail. That was just what we used to do sometimes, when we were still meat and Gateway was the doorway to the universe, because the asteroid’s rotational “gravity” was so light that hanging was more comfortable than sitting. I did like the outfit. I was not likely to forget it. It was exactly what Sheri had been wearing the first time she came into my bed.

“I didn’t even know you were dead,” I said, to welcome her.

She looked uncomfortable with the subject, as though she hadn’t quite got used to it. “It only happened last year. Of course, I didn’t look quite this young then. So being dead isn’t a total loss.” She put her fingers on her chin, studying me up and down. She commented, “I keep seeing you on the news, Robin. You’ve done well.”

“So did you,” I said, remembering. “You went home with five or six million dollars, didn’t you? From that Heechee toolbox you found?”

“More like ten million, when you counted in the royalties.” She smiled.

“Rich lady!”

She shrugged. “I had a lot of fun with it. Bought myself a couple of counties of ranchland on Peggys Planet, got married, raised a family, died . . . it was pretty nice, all right. Not counting the last part. But I wasn’t just talking about money, though you’ve obviously got plenty of that. What do they say” ‘The richest man in the universe’? I should have hung on to you while I had the chance.”

I had realized she’d come down off the hook to get closer. Now I discovered I was holding her hand—“Sorry,” I said, letting go.

“Sorry for what?”

The answer to that was that if she needed to ask the question she wouldn’t understand the answer, but I didn’t have to say so. She sighed. “I guess I’m not the lady you’ve got on your mind right now.”

“Well—”

“Oh, that’s all right, Robin. Honest. It was just a kind of for-old-time’s-sake thought. Stifi,” she went on, “honestly, I’m a little surprised you aren’t with her and that guy-what’s his name—”

“Sergei Borbosnoy?”

But she shook her head impatiently. “No, nothing like that. It’s—wait a minute-yes, Eskladar. Harbin Eskladar.”

I blinked at her, because I knew who Harbin Eskladar was. He’d been pretty famous once. Not that I’d ever met him. Certainly I hadn’t wanted to, at least not at first, because Harbin Eskladar had been a terrorist, and what would my dear PortableEssie be doing with an exterrorist?

But Sheri was going right on: “Of course, I guess you move in pretty high society these days. I know you knew Audee Walthers. And I guess you’re tight with Glare and all those others—”

“Glare?” I was having trouble keeping up with Sheri, but that stopped me cold. Although she’d said it in English, it was a Heechee name.

She looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t know? Gosh, Robin, maybe one time I’m ahead of you! Didn’t you see the Heechee ship dock?”

And suddenly the party began to seem as though it might be fun again. I’d seen the Heechee ship, all right, but it had never occurred to me that there might be Heechee on it.

I don’t think it was polite of me to duck out like that. By the look on her face Sheri didn’t think so either, but I was glad of the excuse. I don’t like to put too much of a strain on Essie’s wonderful absence of jealousy; and, although I said, “See you soon,” when I kissed Sheri good-bye, I didn’t mean it.

In gigabit space and alone again I hollered for Albert. He was there before I knew it. “Yes?”

I said with annoyance, “You didn’t tell me there were Heechee on the Rock. What are they doing here?”

He smiled placidly at me, scratching his ankle. “As to the second question, they have every right to be here, Robin. This party is a reunion for people who were on Gateway long ago, after all. All three of these Heechee have. Very long ago. As to the first part—” he let himself look put-upon “—I’ve been trying to tell you about some of the persons you would be interested in for quite some time, Robin. I didn’t think it would be tactful of me to interrupt. If I may now—”

“You may now tell me about these Heechee! I already know about Eskladar.”

“Oh?” For a moment Albert looked nonplussed. It is not an expression I often see on him. Then he said obediently, “The Heechee ship came direct from the core, and the three particular Heechee who I think would interest you are named Muon, Barrow, and Glare. It is especially Glare who is of interest, for she was a shipmate of Tangent on the expedition to the Sluggard planet.”

That woke me right up. “Tangent!”

“Exactly yes, Robin.” He beamed. “In addition—”

“I want to see them,” I said, waving him quiet. “Where are they?”

“They’re on Level Jane, Robin, in the old gymnasium; it’s a recreation room now. But mayn’t I also tell you about the others? Eskladar you know about, and I suppose you know about Dane Metchnikov, too, and—”

“First things first, Albert,” I commanded. “Rightnow I want to see somebody who actually knew Tangent!”

He looked stricken. “Please? At least the message from Mrs. Broadhead?”

He hadn’t mentioned a message before. “Well, sure,” I said. “What are you waiting for?”

He looked indignant, but what he said-in exactly Essie’s tone, with exactly Essie’s inflections-was: “Tell old gloopy Robin is okay see old sweetheart but only look, don’t touch.”

I think I may have started to flush. I don’t think Albert could have seen it, though, because I waved him away as he finished speaking, and I was on my way to Level Jane.

So conscience doth make cowards of us all . . . and make us deaf, too, even to things we really ought to hear.

I’ll put a girdle round the Earth in forty milliseconds whenever I want to, so to get from Level Babe down to Level Jane took, basically, no time at all. Especially since (as I keep on reminding) I wasn’t really on Level Babe in the first place, and wasn’t on Level Jane when I got there.

But what seems like no time at all to a meat person can be quite a stretch for somebody like me. I had time to wonder about a couple of things.

Had I heard right? Was my wife Essie actually with Harbin Eskladar? True, the time of terrorism was long over. All of those monstrous peo pie who burned and bombed and destroyed were long irretrievably dead, or in prison, or reformed, and the reformed ones like Harbin Esldadar were, after all, back in the population. They’d paid their debt to society.

The thing was, I couldn’t believe that Essie would have thought they had paid their debt to her. Never mind that their fooling around had very nearly killed her twice, and had had every intention of killing us both a third time but had missed. It wasn’t a personal matter with Essie. It was (I thought) exactly the same as with me: The terrorists that had blighted the already miserable Earth, back in the days when there wasn’t enough of anything to go around and thousands of twisted people tried to redress the situation by making sure there was less of everything for everybody, were not mere criminals. They were filth. It was true that Eskladar (I vaguely remembered) had finally come over to the side of the good guys in the white hats. Had even turned in some of the biggest and rottenest of th~ leaders, thus saving a lot more lives and property than he himself had ever damaged.

But still .

When I saw the three Heechee, I forgot about Eskladar. Fortunately they weren’t meat (if those skeletal Heechee could ever be called “meat”). They were Ancient Ancestors, and that was good, because it meant I could talk to them.

I would not have known the place they were in if Albert hadn’t mentioned that once it had been the Gateway gymnasium. It didn’t look like a gymnasium anymore. It was a sunny little room (sunlight cooked out of electronic tubes, of course), with tables and chairs, and there were people all over it. The human people had drinks in their hands. The Heechee don’t drink. They nibble things in the same manner, and for the same reasons; what they like are sort of mushroomy growths with a high intoxication index, and these Heechee had fiat bowls of the nibble-stuff in front of them. “Hello,” I said breezily, sliding up close. “I’m Robinette Broadhead.”

I do get a certain amount of deference. The people around made room for me ungrudgingly, and the female of them flexed her wrists in courteous greeting. “We had hoped to meet you, of course,” she said. “We know your name, for every Heechee does.”

They had learned the custom of shaking hands, and we did it. These Ancient Ancestors were fresh out of the core-had started nearly eleven years ago, by our clocks, but only a matter of weeks by theirs. Most of that time had been spent crossing deep space from the core to Earth. I intimated my surprise at seeing Heechee on what I had always considered private property of the human race, and one of the machine-stored humans said: “Oh, but they’ve got every right to be here, Mr. Broadhead. Every person who ever served on Gateway was included in the invitation to this party, and each one of them did serve here, once.”

Now, that was a creepy feeling. Because the last previous time a living (or even machine-stored) Heechee had been on Gateway was something like 400,000 years in the past.

“So you’re the ones who left us the ships,” I said, smiling as I lifted a glass to them. They responded by holding bits of mushrooms between fingertips, aimed generally in my direction, and the female said:

“Muon left what you call the Food Factory out in your what you call the Oort Cloud, yes. Barrow actually left the ship on your planet Venus that your Sylvester Macklen discovered. I left nothing; I only visited this system once.”

“But you were with Tangent,” I began, and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and there was my dear Portable-Essie.

“Robin, dear?” she began.

“Tore yourself away from Harbin Eskladar, have you?” I said genially. “I’m glad you’re here. This is Glare—”

She was shaking her head in puzzlement. “Have not been with this Harbin Eskladar. Is no matter. Wish to make sure you are aware—”

“You didn’t understand,” I said, all excited. “This is Tangent we’re talking about. Could you tell us about that trip, Glare?”

“If you wish—”

And Essie said, “But please, Robin, is certain matters to be considered in this matter. Dane Metchnikov has requested lawyer.”

That halted me for a moment, because I had put Dane Metchnikov so far out of my mind that I hadn’t thought of the reasons why he might want to talk to a lawyer. About me. It was a downer, but I shrugged. “Later, my darling, please.”

Essie sighed, and I prepared myself for the story.

You can’t blame me, really. The story of Tangent was important. If it hadn’t been for her expedition, everything would have been very different. Not just Heechee history. All history. In fact, human history might have been so different that there might well never have been any. So I put everything aside to hear Glare’s story of that famous voyage, and I didn’t give another thought to whose presence on the asteroid the presence of Dane Metchnikov implied.