The Annals of the Heechee

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By the time Glare finished her story there was quite a crowd gathered around. Every one of them had questions, but it took a moment for them to get the questions together. Glare sat silent, rubbing her rib cage. The movement made a faint grating noise, like someone running a finger across a washboard.

A short black man I didn’t know said, “Excuse me, but I don’t understand. How did Tangent know that was the Foe?” He was speaking in English, and I realized that someone had been translating Glare’s story all along. The someone was Albert.

While he was translating the short man’s question into Heechee for Glare, I gave him a look. He shrugged in response, meaning (I assumed), well, I wanted to hear the story, too.

Glare was shrugging, too, in response to the question-at least, she was giving her abdomen that quick contraction that is the Heechee equivalent. “We didn’t know,” she said. “That came later, after Binding Force had performed deep-structure analysis on the Sluggard eddas.

Then it became clear that these intruding Assassins were not from that planet. Of course, there was much other data.”

“Of course,” Albert chimed in. “The missing mass, for one thing.”

“Yes.” said Glare. “The missing mass. This had been a great puzzle for our astrophysicists for some time, as I believe it had been for yours.” She reached thoughtfully for another of the little fungus caps, while Albert explained to the others how the “missing mass” had turned out to be no natural cosmic phenomenon, but an artifact of the Foe; and at that point I stopped listening. I hear plenty of that kind of thing from Albert all the time. I stop listening a lot then, too. Hearing Glare tell us the story of Tangent’s terrible trip was one thing. That was a story I could listen to with full attention. But when Albert gets into the why of things, my mind wanders. Next thing he would be getting into nine-dimensional space and Mach’s Hypothesis.

He did. Glare seemed quite interested. I wasn’t. I leaned back, waved to the waitress for another shot of “rocket juice”—the damn near lethal white whiskey that Gateway prospectors had drowned their worries in in the old days-and let him talk.

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about poor horny Tangent, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago, and her ill-fated trip.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Tangent-well, that’s not exactly true, either. There are those words again. How inaccurately they convey meaning! I don’t have a heart, so of course there are not any soft spots in it. (Essie says I can’t be “soft” in any sense but “—ware,” which is a cybernetic joke.) And “always” isn’t exact, either, because I’ve only known about Tangent for about thirty, or perhaps I should say thirty million, years. But I do think of her often, and with sympathy, because I’d been shot down, too, and I knew how it felt.

I took a pull of my rocket juice, gazing benevolently at the group around the table. The rest of the audience was a lot more fascinated than I had been by the way Albert and Glare exchanged cosmological quips, but then they hadn’t had Albert living in their pockets for the last fifty (or fifty million) years. In that time you get to know a program pretty well. I reflected that, generally speaking, I knew what Albert was going to say before he said it. I even knew the significance of the way he looked at me sidelong, now and then, as he talked. He was reproaching me, in a subliminal way, for not letting him tell me something he had wanted to tell me very much.

I gave him a tolerant smile to let him know I understood him . . . and, a little bit, to remind him that I was the one who decided who got told what when.

Then I felt a gentle hand on the back of my neck. It was Essie’s hand.

I leaned back against it pleasurably, just as Albert took another of those looks at me and said to Glare, “I suppose you had a chance to get to know Audee Walthers III on your trip here?”

That woke me up. I turned to Essie and whispered, “I didn’t know Audee was here.”

Said Essie in my ear, “Appear to be many things you are unwilling to know about meat persons present.” Her tone made the back of my neck tingle; it was a mixture of love and severity. It is the tone Essie uses when she thinks I have been unusually gloopy, or silly, or obstinate.

“Oh, my God,” I said, remembering. “Dane Metchnikov.”

“Dane Metchnikov,” she agreed. “Is also present here on Rock as meat. Along with person who rescued him.”

“Oh, my God,” I said again. Dane Metchnikov! He had been along on that black-hole expedition that had burdened my conscience for half a century. I had left him and the others there, and among the others had been—“Gelle-Klara Moynlin, yes,” whispered Essie. “Are presently in Central Park.”

Central Park isn’t much of a park. When Klara and I were prospectors together, it was about a dozen mulberry and orange trees and not many more than that bushes.

It still wasn’t much different. The little pond we called Lake Superior was still curving up around the shape of the asteroid. Now the park was much more densely grown, but I had no trouble at all spotting a dozen or more human beings in among the shrubbery. Eight or ten of them were the elderly veterans who lived on Wrinkle Rock, all meat, posed like statues under the trees. A few were partygoers like myself, only meat, and among them I had no difficulty in recognizing that other motionless meat-person statue who was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

She hadn’t changed a bit, at least physically.

In another way, she had changed almost terminally. She wasn’t alone. She was, in fact, between two men; worse, she was holding hands with one of them, and the other had an arm draped around her shoulder.

That was a nasty blow all by itself, because the last I had known of Klara, the only person she was likely to be holding hands with or being held by was me.

It took me a moment to realize that the hand-holding man was Dane Metchnikov-it had, after all, been a long time since I had seen him last. The other one I didn’t know at all. He was tall, slim, and goodlooking, and, if those things hadn’t been enough to damn him, he was resting his hand on Klara’s shoulder in a fond and habitual way.

Sometimes, when I was young and enamored of some person or other, I had this burning desire to know her perfectly. Utterly. In every way; and one of the ways was a fantasy. The fantasy was that I would find her (whoever she was at the moment) so sound asleep that nothing I could do would wake her; and so I would steal up on the dear loved one, all asleep, and investigate all those secret things without her knowing. To see if there was stubble in her armpit. To check on how recently she had cleaned out the glop under her toenails. To peer up her nostrils, and into her ears-and to do all of this, see, when she didn’t know I was doing it, because, although we conducted many a mutual exploration, it was a whole other thing when it was observed. As with most of my fantasies, it was the kind of thing that my former analyst program, Sigfrid von Shrink, looked on with toleration and not much approval; he read meanings into it that I didn’t enjoy. And, as with most fantasies, it wasn’t all that much fun when I had the chance to do it.

I could do it now. There was Kiara, as though carved in eternal stone.

There was also Essie, right there with me, to dampen the urge to explore, but she would have gone away if I had asked her to. She didn’t say a word, Essie didn’t. She just hovered silently behind me as I stood there, invisible in gigabit space, staring at the woman I had mourned for most of my life.

Klara looked very good. It was hard to believe that she was actually older than I was-which is to say, about six months older than God. My birthday was almost the same as the discovery of Gateway, whose hundredth anniversary we were celebrating. Klara had been born some fifteen years earlier.

She didn’t look it. She didn’t look a day older.

Part of that, of course, was simply Full Medical. Klara was quite a rich woman, and she’d been able to afford all the tissue restoration and replacement around even before it became basically free for anyone. What’s more, she had spent thirty years in the time trap of a black hole, where I had abandoned her to save myself-it had taken me all those thirty years to get over the guilt of that-and so in those long years she had aged only minutes, because of time dilation. In terms of elapsed time since her birth, she was well over a hundred. In terms of time counted by her own body clock, certainly in her sixties. In terms of the way she looked—The way she looked was the way she had always looked to me. She looked really good.

She was standing there with her fingers interlaced with those of Dane Metchnikov. Her head was turned to the man who had his arm around her. Her eyebrows were dark and bold as ever, and her face was Klara’s face, the one I had wept over for thirty years.

“Don’t startle her, damn Robin,” commanded Essie from behind me. Just in time. I had been about to display myself right in front of them, not thinking that this encounter would not be a whole lot easier for her than it was for me, and that she would need more time, an awful lot more time, to handle it.

“So then what?” I demanded, not taking my eyes off Klara.

“So then,” said Essie, scowling, “you act like normal decent human being, you know? You give woman chance! You show up at edge of woods, maybe, and you walk toward her. Give her little chance to see you coming, get ready for quite traumatic encounter, before you speak.”

“But that will take forever!”

“Have forever, dummy,” said Essie firmly. “Anyway, have other thing to do. Aren’t paying attention, right? Aren’t aware doppel-Cassata is looking for you?”

“Hell with him,” I said absently. I was so busy studying the face and form of my long-lost love that I had no patience for anything else-or brains for anything else, either; it took me a good many microseconds to remember that the longer I put off starting the conversation, the longer it would be before I could hear her voice.

“You’re right,” I said reluctantly. “Might as well see the bastard. Just let me get started here.”

I calved off a doppel of me behind a drooping lime tree, rich with golden fruit, and started the doppel walking toward the pair. And then I followed Essie meekly enough back to the Spindle, where she said Cassata was waiting.

It would take a long time for my doppel to reach Kiara, speak to her, wait for her to respond-many, many miffiseconds. I wished desperately that I could shorten the time, because how could I wait?

And I also wished desperately that I could make it longer. Because what was I going to say?

Julio Cassata took my mind off these-what’s Essie’s word?—these gloopy maunderings. He’s good at that. He’s like the mosquito bite that takes your mind off the toothache for a moment. He’s never a welcome distraction, but at least he is a distraction.

When we found him, he was in the Blue Hell. Essie squeezed my arm, grinning. Cassata was sitting at one of the little tables with a drink in front of him, reminiscently pawing a young woman I had never seen before.

I didn’t see much of her then, either, because as soon as Cassata perceived we were there he changed it all. Partygoers, girl, and Blue Hell vanished; we were in his office on the JAWS satellite. His hair had got combed, his tunic collar had buttoned itself, and he was gazing at us frostily over his steel desk. He pointed to two metal chairs. “Sit down,” he ordered.

Essie said dispassionately, “Cut crap, Julio. You want talk to us, fine, we talk. Not here. Is too ugly.”

He gave her the kind of a look a major general gives a second lieutenant. Then he decided to be a good fellow. “Whatever you like, my dear. You pick.”

Essie sniffed. She glanced at me, hesitated, then abolished the military office. Instead we were in our familiar True Love, complete with couches, bar, and gentle music playing.

“Yes.” Cassata nodded agreeably, looking around appreciatively. “That’s much better. Nice place you’ve got here, Mind if I help myself?” He didn’t wait for permission but headed for the bar.

“Mind all this crap,” said Essie. “Spit it out, Julio. Embargoed our ship, right? Why?”

“Only a temporary inconvenience, my dear.” Cassata twinkled as he made himself a Chivas and nothing. “I only wanted to be sure I got a chance to talk to you.”

Even a counterirritant can be too damn irritating. I said, “So talk.” Essie gave me a quick, warning look, because she heard my tone. I was keeping myself under control. I wasn’t in any good mood to talk to Julio Cassata.

Some people think that machine-stored people never get all wound up and flustered, because we’re just bits of data arranged in a program. It isn’t true. At least, it isn’t true for me, and especially not just then. I’d been up and down in an emotional carnival ride-keyed up in the first place by the party; exalted and somber while I listened to the story of Tangent’s terrible trip; torn with a hundred emotions by running into Kiara. I wasn’t about to enjoy talking to Cassata.

Of course, I seldom do enjoy talking to Cassata. I don’t see why anyone would. His main conversational gambits are orders and insults; he doesn’t talk, he issues statements. He hadn’t changed. He took a long pull on his Scotch, looked me in the eye and said:

“You’re a pest, Broadhead.”

It wasn’t a promising remark. Essie, halfway through making me a Mai Tai, twitched and almost spilled it. She looked at me worriedly. It’s Essie’s policy to do all the fighting herself when we’re in a situation that calls for it. She thinks I get too excited when I’m the one that yells.

But I fooled her this time. I said politely, “I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience, Julio. Would you be good enough to tell me why you say that?”

What remarkable self-control I displayed! It was a lot more than the lout deserved. A lot more than I would have given him if I hadn’t, at the last moment, realized that I ought to feel sorry for him.

What I had realized was that, after all, he was under sentence of death.

Major General Julio Cassata and I go back a long way-there’s no use adding up the years; arithmetic gets all mixed up when you’re in gigabit time. We had had many contacts, and I hadn’t enjoyed any of them.

He wasn’t a stored personality himself, though. That is, usually he wasn’t. Like many meat people who have to deal with us stored souls on an urgent basis, he makes a doppel of himself and sends it out to talk to us. It isn’t quite the same as a face-to-face in real time, but the difference is only psychological. Well, painfully psychological. He inputs himself as a machine-stored intelligence and comes looking for us—whichever of us he wants to talk to, sometimes me. Then he says whatever he has to say, listens to what we have to say in return, carries on a conversation just as well, in the form of a disembodied bundle of bits in gigabit space, as he would if he and we were meat people around a table-no, not just as well; a hell of a lot better, at least in that we are that much faster. Then meat-Julio calls his doppelganger-Juio back and listens while it tells him what happened.

All that is straightforward, and certainly not painful at all. It is also very efficient. The pain comes later.

The doppel asks just what meat-Cassata would have asked, objects to what he would have objected to, says just what he would have said-as of course it must, being him. And it isn’t like sending an ambassador out and waiting for a response, because even the best of ambassadors, assuming that any ambassador could do the job as well as a doppel does, would certainly take time to do it. The doppels take at most a matter of seconds, if the conference is to take place at planetary distances-longer, of course, if the person the meat man wants to talk to happens to be at the other end of the Galaxy. Before the meat person has a chance to wonder how the conference is going to go, the doppel is back and tells him.

That’s the good part.

Then comes the only part that’s not so good, because what do you do with the doppel after it’s done its job?

You could just leave it in storage, of course. There’s plenty of capacity in gigabit space, and one more stored personality wouldn’t matter much. But it bothers some people to have duplicates of themselves around. It especially bothers someone like Cassata. Being military, he’s got the military mind. A stored duplicate of him, knowing everything he knows, isn’t just an annoying loose end. It’s a security risk. Someone might find it and ask it questions! Threaten it! (With what?) Torture it! (How?) Hold its feet to the fire (if it had feet)-well, I don’t know exactly what goes on in Julio Cassata’s mind, and I thank God I don’t every day.

All of that is quite foolish, of course, but the doppels are Cassata’s own, and if he thinks some imaginary enemy might sometime find out from them the secrets of his service, no one else can interfere. He’s a shift commander for JAWS, the Joint Assassin Watch. That means he’s in charge of a large part of the defense programs against the eventual coming out of the Assassins from their kugelblitz. So if he wants conferences with parties at a distance, which he does, he has to do this sort of thing almost daily, which means that if he left his doppels in storage, there would be hundreds and thousands of Major General Julio Cassatas around.

So he doesn’t just store them. He kills them.

That’s what it feels like to Cassata himself, anyway. When he terminates his doppel, it feels as though he’s assassinated a twin.

And the other bad thing about that is that the doppel itself-himself, damn it-knows that’s what’s going to happen.

Sometimes it makes our conversations sort of gloomy.

That’s why I didn’t rip Julio Cassata to simulated bloody shreds for his impudence. He was as surprised as Essie. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, staring at me. “You all right?” he demanded.

“All right” wasn’t anywhere near a correct diagnosis, because I was wondering just how close my doppel had got to Klara and how she would react when she saw it, but I had no intention of telling Julio Cassata any of that. So I just said:

“I’ll be fine when you tell me what all this is about.”

I was quite polite, but Cassata had never subscribed to the theory that politeness should go both ways. He worried off the end of the cigar with his teeth and spat the nasty little plug of tobacco on the floor, watching me carefully. Then he said: “You aren’t as important as you think you are, Broadhead.” I managed to keep the smile on my face, though the temperature was going up inside. “You think the embargo is just for you. Wrong. That Heechee ship came right here from the core, you know.”

I hadn’t known. I didn’t see what difference it made, either, and said so.

“Classified material, Broadhead,” Cassata rumbled. “Those Heechee Ancient Ancestors, they’ve been blabbing their heads off. They should’ve been debriefed at JAWS first!”

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “That makes sense, because naturally things that happened half a million years ago or so are pretty important military secrets.”

“Not just half a million years ago! They know all about the present state of readiness in the core! And there are meat Heechee there, plus this Waithers guy who’s actually been there and seen it for himself.”

I took a deep breath. What I wanted to do was to ask him all over again whom he possibly was trying to keep all these secrets from. But that would have meant prolonging an old argument, and I was tired of being with Cassata anyway. I just said, still politely, “You said I was a pest, and I don’t see what the Heechee ship has to do with that.”

He had the cigar well lit by then. He blew smoke at me and said, “Nothing. That’s a separate thing. I came here because of the ship, but I also wanted to tell you to stay out of the way.”

“Stay out of what way why?” I asked, and felt Essie stirring restlessly, because she had got tired of marveling at my self-control and was beginning to have trouble retaining her own.

“Because you’re a civilian,” he explained. “You mess around in JAWS affairs. You get in the way, and things are getting to a point where we can’t afford civilian meddling anymore.”

I began to get a glimmering of what was bugging him. I smiled at Essie to reassure her that I wasn’t going to kill this impudent general. I really wasn’t-at least, not yet. “The maneuvers didn’t go well,” I guessed.

Cassata choked and sputtered cigar smoke. “Who told you that?”

I shrugged. “It’s obvious. If they’d been a success, your PR people would have had pictures on every newscast. You aren’t bragging; therefore you’ve got nothing to brag about. So the people you want to keep secrets from are the ones who’re paying your bills. Like me.”

“Wise ass,” he snarled. “If you say any of that, I’ll take care of you personally.”

“How are you going to do that?”

He was back in control now, all military, all brass, including the brain. “For openers,” he said, “I’m withdrawing your JAWS clearance, effective immediately.”

That was too much for Essie. “Julio,” she rasped, “you gone crazy or what?”

I put a restraining hand on her arm. I said seriously, “Julio, I’ve got a lot of things on my mind right now and JAWS isn’t one of them. Not right up top, anyway. I had no intention of bothering any of the people at JAWS anytime in the near future-until you came along with your arrogant orders. Now, of course, I’ll make it my business to check up on everything JAWS does.”

He bellowed, “I’ll have you arrested!”

I was beginning to enjoy myself. I said, “No, you won’t. You don’t have the authority. And you don’t have the clout. Because I’ve got the Institute.”

That took him back for a moment. The Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. I’d endowed it a long, long time ago for quite different reasons-well, to tell the truth, about half of the reasons were tax reasons. But I’d endowed it well. I had given it a charter that let it do just about anything it wanted to outside of our solar system, and I’d taken the precaution of loading the board of directors with people who would do what I wanted them to.

Cassata recovered fast. “The hell I don’t have the clout! That’s an order.”

I studied him thoughtfully. Then I called, “Albert?” He popped into existence, blinking at me over his pipe. “Transmit a message for me,” I ordered. “Instruct all branches of the Institute that, effective at once, they are to cease cooperation with the Joint Assassin Watch Service and deny any JAWS personnel access to our premises or our data. Reason given: a direct order from Julio Cassata, Major General, JAWS.”

Cassata’s eyes began to pop. “Now, wait a minute, Broadhead!” he rumbled.

I turned back to him politely. “You have some comment to make about this?”

He was perspiring. “You wouldn’t do that,” he said. His tone was funny, half wheedle and half snarl. “We’re all in this together! The Foe is everybody’s enemy!”

“Why, Julio,” I said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. I thought you were under the impression they were your private property. Don’t worry. I won’t stop the Institute from functioning. It’ll go on with its studies; the scout ships will keep on surveying; we’ll go right on accumulating data about the Foe. We just won’t bother sharing any of this with JAWS anymore. Now. Does Albert send the message or not?”

He tapped the ash off the end of his cigar for a moment, looking stricken. “No,” he muttered.

“Sorry? I couldn’t quite hear what you said.”

“No!” Then he shook his head despairingly. “He’ll blow his stack,” he said.

But he said “he,” and the only “he” he could have meant was the meat-General Cassata. Who was, of course, himself.

“He said ‘he,’” I said to Essie when Cassata had gone glumly away. She said soberly, “Is interesting, I agree. Doppel-Julio comes to consider meat-Julio separate individual.”

“He’s turning schizo?”

“Is turning scared,” she corrected. “Realizes has only limited time to live. Sad little man.” Then she said diffidently, “Dear Robin? Realize thoughts are elsewhere at this moment—”

I didn’t agree, because it wouldn’t have been polite; nor did I deny it, because it was true. Even while I was quarreling with Julio Cassata I was stealing peeks at the scene in Central Park. My doppel had finally reached Klara and said hello to her, and she was just beginning to say, “Robin! It’s ni—”

“—but can I make suggestion?”

“Well, of course you can,” I said, embarrassed. If I’d had blood vessels to redden my face (and a real face to be reddened), I probably would have blushed. Perhaps I did anyway.

“Suggestion,” she said, “is, go easy.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding. I would have said “of course” to almost anything she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to, uh—”

“Know what you would like to do. Only have problem with discrepancy in time scales, right? So really is no hurry at all for you, dear Robin. Can talk a little first?”

I sat still a moment. (Klara had just got out the “—ce to,” and was parting her lips to begin, “see you again!”) I was by then quite embarrassed. It isn’t easy to be telling one woman that you want very much to talk to another, when you have as uneasy a conscience as I always seem to have about my wife, Essie, and my long-lost love, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

On the other hand, Essie was absolutely right. There was no hurry at all. She was watching me with love and concern on her face. “Is tough situation for you, eh, dear Robin?” she put in.

The only useful thing I could think of to say was, “I love you a lot, Essie.”

She didn’t look loving in return, she looked exasperated. “Yes, of course.” She shrugged. “Don’t change subject. You love me, I love you, both have no doubt of this; is not relevant to present discussion. Discussion is how you feel about very nice lady whom you also love, GelleKlara Moynlin, and complications arising therefrom.”

It sounded worse when she spelled it out. It did not make me any more comfortable. “We’ve had that discussion a million times!” I groaned.

“So why not one million times more? Get comfortable, dear Robin. Have at least fifteen, maybe eighteen hundred milliseconds before Klara finishes saying what nice surprise is to see you again. So we talk, you and I, unless you don’t want?”

I thought it over and gave up. I said, “Why not?” And indeed there was no reason.

There was also no reason not to get comfortable. As Essie said, we had talked this out many times before, all one night and edging up on most of the next day once. That had been a long time ago-oh, billions of seconds-and I had been talking to the real Essie, the flesh-and-blood meat one. (Of course, I was flesh and blood at the time myself.) We were newly married at the time. We had been sitting on the veranda of our house, sipping iced tea and watching the sailboats on the Tappan Sea, and it had really been an easing, loving talk.

Obviously Essie remembered that long-ago meat-person conversation as well as I did, because when she got us comfortable, that was where she got us. Oh, not “really” in the sense that we were physically there—but, really, what does “really” mean? I could see the sailboats, and the evening summer breeze was warm.

“This is nice,” I said appreciatively, feeling myself beginning to relax. “Being a disembodied datastring does have its advantages.”

Essie grunted complacent agreement. She gazed affectionately around our old home and said: “Last time did this were drinking tea. Want something stronger this time, Robin?”

“Brandy and ginger,” I said, and a moment later our faithful old maid, Marchesa, appeared with a tray. I took a long sip, thinking.

I thought too long for Essie’s patience. She said, “So get on with it, dear Robin. What is frying your head? Afraid to talk to Klara?”

“No! I mean,” I said, swallowing my quick indignation, “no. That’s not it. We already did talk, back when she and Wan showed up with the Heechee ship.”

“True,” Essie agreed noncommittally.

“No, really! That part’s all right. We got straightened out on the bad things. I’m not worrying that she’ll blame me for dumping her in the hole, if that’s what you mean.”

Essie sat back and regarded me seriously. “What I mean, Robin,” she said patiently, “is not important at all. Is what you mean that we wish to uncover. If not confrontation between Klara and you, what? Are worried she and I will scratch eyes out? Wouldn’t happen, Robin!—apart from technical difficulties arising from fact that she is meat, I am only soul.”

“No, of course not. I’m not worrying about her meeting you . exactly.”

“Ah! And inexactly?”

“Well . . . what if real-Essie runs into her?”

Portable-Essie looked at me in silence for a moment, then took a thoughtful pull at her own drink. “Real-Essie, hah?”

“It was only a thought,” I apologized.

“Understand that. Wish to understand more precisely. Are asking me if meat-me is likely to show up on Wrinkle Rock?” she inquired.

I thought that over. I wasn’t sure exactly what I did mean. I hadn’t meant to say anything at all about it . . . of course, as old Sigfrid von Shrink used to tell me, it’s the things I say that I didn’t mean to say that say the most.

And it was true that there was a real touchy, delicate bit here. Portable-Essie is only a doppelganger. Real-Essie, meat-Essie, is still alive and well.

She’s also human. What with Full Medical and all, although she is getting along in years she is not just a woman, she is a really handsome, sexy, normal one.

She is also my wife. (Or was.)

She is also a wife whose husband is in no shape to provide her with, as they say, the benefits of consort.

All of that is already a nagging kind of worry that adds to all the other nagging worries Sigfrid (and Albert, and Portable-Essie, and just about everybody else I know) is always telling me I shouldn’t beat my breast about. Their advice doesn’t do much good; I guess I can’t help it. ~ But there’s more. Meat-Essie is also an exact duplicate of Portable-Essie—or, to put it more accurately, she is the original of that exact duplicate who is Portable-Essie, my faithful wife, lover, advisor, friend, confidante, and co-construct in gigabit space.

So I know her very well. Worse than that, she knows me-even better-because she’s not only all those things I just mentioned, she is also my, well, my creator.

Since Essie is better known in some circles as Dr. S. Ya. LavorovnaBroadhead, one of the world’s great authorities on data processing of any kind, she herself wrote most of our programs. When I say the copy is exact I mean exact. Essie even updates herself-I mean, meat-Essie revises Portable-Essie from time to time, to make sure the exactness is always up to the moment. So my Portable-Essie is in no way different, in any way that I can detect, from meat, or real, Essie .

But I never see meat-Essie. I couldn’t handle it.

Call the reason for that whatever you like. Tact. Jealousy. Loopiness. Whatever it is, I am willing to accept as a fact of life that it is better that I don’t see the meat original of my dear wife. I have a very clear idea of what I would learn if I did. Under the circumstances, either she takes a lover now and then or she is crazier than I believe possible.

I am willing to accept that this happens. I will even concede that it is fair. But I don’t want to know about it.

So I said to Portable-Essie, “No. I don’t think meat-Essie would be jealous enough to matter if she were here, and I don’t think Klara would, and anyway I don’t want to know where Essie is or what she’s doing-not even negatively,” I added swiftly as Portable-Essie opened her mouth, “so don’t tell me what she is doing, even if it’s something I would like to hear. It’s not that at all.”

Essie looked doubtful. She took another pull at her drink, with that look she gets when she is trying to work out the wiring architecture of the labyrinthine processes of my mind.

Then she shrugged. “Fine, accept what you say,” she said decisively. “Is not that which is making you gloopy this time. So what then is reason? Is curiosity about Klara Moynlin, where has been all these years, why is Dane Metchnikov with her?”

I looked up. “Well, I did wonder—”

“No need to wonder! Is quite simple. After encounter with you, Kiara wished to go away somewhere. Went very many places for long time. Ultimately went very far. Went back into black hole had just escaped from, rescued others in party-Metchnikov included.”

I said, “Oh.”

For some reason that didn’t seem to satisf~’ Essie. She gave me an irritated look. Then she said slowly, “Think you are telling truth, Robin. Is not Klara is on your mind. Yet is clear you have been quite moody lately. Will say, if you can, what it is?”

“If you don’t know, how can I?” I said, suddenly angry.

“Meaning,” she sighed, “that as original writer I am in better position to overhaul your program, pick out bugs, make happy again?”

“No!”

“No,” she agreed, “of course not. Have long agreed to leave old Robinette Broadhead program alone, bugginess and all. So then is only old-fashioned method of debugging. Talk. Talk it out, Robin. Say first word that comes into mind, just like for old Sigfrid von Shrink!”

And I took a deep breath and confronted the subject I had been spending a lot of time avoiding. I sighed:

“Mortality!”

Several thousand milliseconds later I was back in Central Park, watching Gelle-Klara Moynlin let go of her companions and move toward doppel-me, and wondering just why I had said that.

I hadn’t intended to. I don’t intend to describe the long, circular conversation I had with Essie after that, either, because although I do these things, I don’t take much pleasure in talking about them. It got nowhere. It had nowhere to go. I had no reason to worry about mortality because, as Essie had wisely pointed out, how can you die when you’re already dead?

Funnily, that didn’t cheer me up at all.

Watching Klara didn’t, either, so I sought other entertainment while I waited for either Klara or doppel-me to say something interesting in their glacier-slow way. It had been news to me that Audee Walthers III was on the Rock, and I sought him out.

That wasn’t much better.

He was there, all right, or almost. Being meat, he was just getting there. He was in the process of disembarking, and it was not very entertaining to observe him slowly, g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y, pulling himself up out of the docking hatch onto the floor of the bay.

To make conversation, I said to Essie, “He doesn’t look a bit different.” He didn’t. Froggy faced, with solid, trustworthy eyes, he was exactly the same man he had been thirty and more years before when I saw him last.

“Has been in core, naturally,” said Essie. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me-to see if I was going to do anything gloopy again, I supposed. So I wasn’t sure, for a second, which of us she meant when she added, “Poor guy.”

I gave her a noncommittal grunt. We weren’t the only persons present; there were even meat people there, curious to see the ship that had been where few ships containing humans had ever boldly gone. Watching them, and Audee, was about as exciting as watching moss grow, and I began to fidget. Audee wasn’t on my mind. Klara was on my mind. Essie was on my mind. Julio Cassata was on my mind and, most of all, my own slippery, uneasy internal worries were on my mind. What I wanted very badly was something to take my mind off all the things that were on my mind. Standing around among the statues wasn’t doing the trick. “I wish,” I said, “I could hear his story.”

“Go ahead, then,” Essie invited.

“What? Oh, you mean start a doppel so when he comes out—”

“No doppel, dummy,” said Essie. “See? Audee is wearing pod. Pod contains Ancient Ancestor, no doubt. Ancient Ancestor is not meat but stored intelligence, almost as good as you and me. So ask Ancestor, why don’t you?”

I gazed with love at my love. “What a highly intelligent person you are, Essie,” I said fondly, “and adorable, too.” And I reached out to the pod. Because I really did want to hear what had happened to Audee while he was gone. Almost as much as I wanted—wanted—wanted to know, really, just what it was that I did want.