The Annals of the Heechee

7 OUT OF THE CORE

There was a real good reason why I wanted to hear about Audee’s trip to the core right then.

Maybe from the strictly linear view of a meat person, it seems that, shoot, this is just one more damn digression. Linearly, maybe it is. I’m not linear. I do parallel processing, maybe a dozen things at a time in an average millisecond, and there was a really marked parallel going on here.

I’m sure Audee knew about the parallel when he volunteered to ride a Heechee ship back into the core. He probably hadn’t thought it all out. He could have had only a tentative idea of what he was letting himself in for. But there’s the parallel: Whatever it was going to turn out to be, he no doubt figured it would be better than trying to straighten out his life. Audee’s life was as tangled, almost, as my own, for he had two loves, too.

So Audee took his chances, and his departure. He also took along with him our friend Janie Yee-xing, who was one of his loves. But that, as you will see, didn’t last.

Audee was a pilot by profession. A hot pilot. Audee had flown airbodies on Venus, superlights on Earth, shuttles to the Gateway asteroid, private-party jet charters on Peggys Planet, and long-lines interstellar spacecraft to everywhere. In Audee’s view, one Heechee ship was like any other Heechee ship, and he had no doubt he could fly anything. “Can I set course?” he asked the Heechee, Captain, because he wanted to start out on the right foot as a willing worker.

Captain wanted to start out on the right foot, too, so he obligingly waved the ship’s pilot out of the way, and Audee took his seat.

Heechee seats are made for people wearing pods between their legs. Human beings don’t usually do that, so most Heechee ships converted to human use have webbing stretched across the wings of the seat. This one, of course, had none.

Audee did not intend to start out by complaining. He made the best of it. He rested his bottom on the V-shaped seat, read off the course settings, and gave the control wheels the customary muscular shove into position. It took strength. It had been a while since Audee had had to do that; the new Earth-built ships were made easier to pilot. To make conversation, he panted, “A lot of the old-timers wondered about these wheels.

“Yes?” said Captain politely. “What about them, please?”

“Well, why are they so hard to turn?”

Captain glanced at his crewmates in puzzlement, then back at Audee. He reached out a negligent fingertip to touch the wheel. It moved easily. “What is hard?” he asked, hissing in the Heechee manner that expressed either annoyance or concern.

Audee looked at the slight, slim figure of the Heechee. He coaxed the wheel back until the right-on vertical markers flashed shocking pink. It took as much muscle as ever.

As he reached for the starter-teat, he swallowed hard. It had become clear to him that the trip was going to be full of surprises.

The ship shuddered slightly, and the viewscreen blurred into the mottled gray that showed they were already going faster than light. No further action of the pilot would be necessary for some time, but Audee was reluctant to get up, for as long as he sat in the pilot’s seat he felt some sense of being in control of what was going on. He tried making a little more conversation.

“We always wondered about those controls,” he offered. “You know, because there are five of them? Some of the big brains thought you Heechee believed in five-dimensional space.”

Captain hissed loudly for a moment, and the tendons that stood out from his flat chest writhed in the attempt to understand. His English had become quite good, but nuances of expression sometimes avoided him. “’Believe,’ Audee Walthers? But there is no question of belief There is no faith required, as in that concept you have of religion.”

“Well, sure,” said Audee grimly. “But do you believe that?”

“No, of course not,” said Captain in surprise. “Space doesn’t have five dimensions.”

Audee grinned. “That’s a relief, because I was having trouble trying to visualize—”

“It has nine,” Captain explained.

They stopped, briefly, in their race to the core because Captain had left some of the stored Heechee craft in unstable orbits. That would not do, he explained. In the years they would be in the core the machines could drift to destruction, and Heechee did not like useful things destroyed. But Audee had stopped listening. “Years?” he said. “I thought this trip would be only a few months! How many years?”

“Quite a few, I think,” said Captain. “To us it will be only months. But Home, you know, is in a black hole.” And so when Captain left one of his crew to deal with the unmanned ships, Janie Yee-xing elected to go with him. She would, she said, fly one of them back to Earth, if Captain didn’t mind; she really hadn’t planned on years.

Captain didn’t mind. Neither did Audee, oddly enough. He was quite confused enough about whom he loved to welcome a few months (or years) in which the question need not be faced.

A situation not unfamiliar to me.

It must have been a weird and wonderful trip for Audee, suddenly thrust into a Heechee ship with Heechee shipmates. For that matter, the Heechee didn’t have any easy time of it, either, though at least they had previously had the experience of encountering bipeds that were markedly fat and hairy, while Audee had never before shared a ship with living skeletons.

But those problems were not unique to Audee or his hosts. We’ve all had them since, many times over, and that story is old. There’s not much point in recounting Audee’s difficulties with nine-dimensional space (no worse than my own with Albert Einstein) and with trying to make sense of Heechee arithmetic. Naturally everything in the ship was weird and strange to him-“chairs” designed to accommodate the Heechee pod, a “bed” that was a sack filled with dry, rustly stuff to burrow into . . . and we won’t even mention the toilets.

It helped when, as time passed, he began to think of his shipmates as individual “persons,” instead of as merely five examples of the category “Heechee.”

Captain was the easiest to recognize. He was the darkest, the one with the fuzziest approximation of hair on his scalp, the one who spoke pretty good English. White-Noise was the little female, almost pale gold in color, approaching nubility and worried about it. Mongrel had great difficulty with the few English words he tried; Burst had a great sense of humor and loved trading dirty jokes with the others-even, now and then with Audee, through Captain as interpreter.

It helped still more when Captain had the bright idea of giving Audee a Heechee pod-a modified one, of course. As Captain told Audee, one part of the Heechee pod was useless to Audee, if not indeed dangerous to his health. That was the tiny microwave-radiation generator. The Heechee race had evolved on an otherwise pleasant planet of a star that happened to be near a large and active gas cloud; Bremsstrahlung radiation in the microwave frequencies had drenched that world from prebiotic times, and the Heechee had evolved to tolel-ate it-indeed, to need it, as human beings need the sun. So when they began venturing to places where the radiation could not follow, they had to bring their own source of microwave along.

Then, when a little later on in their history they discovered how to preserve the essentials of a deceased Heechee, they found another use for the pods. Each one contained the stored transcription of an Ancient Ancestor.

They even gave Audee an Ancient Ancestor of his own.

To his surprise, she wasn’t really Ancient at all. She had been dead only a matter of weeks; she had been Captain’s own lover, and her name was Twice.

That was the final step in Audee’s assimilation of the notion that the Heechee were “people.”

It’s a small universe, isn’t it?

As Audee began to get used to Captain, Captain got used to Audee—enough to open a discussion that had been very much on his mind. He got his chance when Audee asked about the Foe.

It was, after all, the central problem the universe posed to both Heechee and humans. The Foe. The Assassins. The race of inimical, death-dealing beings whose existence had caused the Heechee to pack up and flee to a safe hideout in the galactic core.

Audee made Captain go over and over the story, often with the other Heechee in the crew chiming in; it still wasn’t easy to grasp. “I understand about Tangent’s trip,” he said, “and I understand that you knew a lot of civilized races had been wiped out, but how did you get from there to this idea of crumpling up the universe?”

The Heechee looked at each other. “I think first it was the deceleration parameter,” said Shoe.

Captain writhed his biceps in agreement. “Yes, the deceleration parameter. Of course, it was only a question for theoretical astrophysicists at first, you understand.”

“I would understand better if I knew what a deceleration parameter was,” Audee groaned.

“It could also be called an anomalous braking effect,” White-Noise offered from the other side of the room.

Captain flexed his twisty biceps in agreement. He went on: “It means only that our astronomers had observed that the universe was expanding less rapidly, by a power law, than it should have. Something was slowing it down.”

“And you figured out it was the Foe?”

Captain said somberly, “In conjunction with the other evidence, and after ruling out every other possibility, it became clear that it could be nothing else but some artificial intervention on a cosmic scale. And there just were no other candidates.”

“I can see that that would be disconcerting,” said Audee.

“Disconcerting,” Captain rasped. “It changed everything.” He gazed thoughtfully at Audee out of those pink eyes with the blotch of pupil in the middle. He glanced at the other Heechee swiftly, then made the snuffling sound that was the Heechee equivalent of clearing one’s throat to announce a change to a serious subject. “It is not too late,” he announced.

Audee blinked. “Not too late for what?”

“It is not too late for your people to join ours in the core,” Captain said precisely, speaking slowly to make sure that Audee understood. “It would be quite congenial for your human race inside the core if you were to come there.”

“It sounds,” said Audee politely, trying to lighten the conversation, “as though it might be a little crowded.”

“Crowded? Why crowded?” asked Captain, cheek twitching-it was the equivalent of a frown. “We have mapped this Galaxy quite carefully, and when we retreated to the core, we chose the best planets to take there with us. There are not too many left outside that are congenial to your race-or to ours.”

Audee saw a chance to do a little justified boasting on behalf of the human race. “Ah, but we make them congenial,” he explained proudly.

“There are six planets already mapped and explored, for example, that would be perfect for human beings except that the temperature range is a bit low. We can fix that. We’re seeding those planets’ atmospheres with chlorofluorocarbons. They trap heat-like carbon dioxide-which causes a greenhouse effect, which will—”

“I understand carbon dioxide,” Captain gritted. “I also understand chiorofluorocarbons and, yes, it is true that certain of these compounds will in fact persist in an atmosphere for many centuries once put there. I agree that this may in certain cases raise the mean temperature of a planet by a few degrees.”

“Well, a few degrees is all you need for some of them,” Audee said reasonably. “And there’s Venus. It’s too hot by far. But before long we’ll probably spread reflective dust particles in its upper atmosphere. This will cut down the insulation and make Venus habitable. Then we can do the same thing on other planets-there are two or three already identified. We can seed life where life never existed to make its own Gaea effect. We will move planets, if we must, to better orbits—”

Captain was growing testy. “But we have already done all of that inside the core,” he urged. “Do you know how many habitable planets we already have in place? More than eight hundred fifty, most of them not yet occupied even by advance parties. As you see, we planned for a long stay.”

“Yes,” said Audee neutrally. “I see that.”

Captain hissed faintly in puzzlement. He was aware that there was something in Audee’s tone but couldn’t tell what it was. He snuffled again and went on: “So you can join us! Some planets are prettier than others, to be sure, and I am certain you could have some of the very finest. Your entire race could fit on one of them!—two or three at the most,” he corrected himself, thinking it over.

“And do what?” asked Audee.

Captain blinked at him. “Why-wait, of course,” he said. “It is possible we would be safe there, Audee Walthers. Especially if we stop all transmissions at once and begin the transfer of all human beings and energy-using devices into the core as soon as possible.”

“Energy-using devices?”

“Devices that radiate detectable energy. That would give away our presence,” Captain explained.

“Ah,” said Audee, nodding, having spotted the flaw. “But you people posted automatic sensors,” he pointed out. “Why wouldn’t the Foe have done the same?”

“Perhaps they have,” Captain said glumly. “I didn’t say it was certhin we would be safe. I only said it was possible. And if they have not in fact detected this-outbreak-then we can stay inside there, for millions and billions of years, if necessary, waiting.”

“But waiting for what, Captain?”

“Why-of course, waiting until some other race, perhaps, evolves to challenge them!”

Audee studied the Heechee carefully, wonderingly. It was clear that more than language differences lay between them.

“One has,” he said gently. “Us.”

For some time after that Audee worried that he might have hurt Captain’s feelings. He had, after all, implied against the entire Heechee race an accusation of cowardice. What Audee didn’t know was that Captain took it as a compliment.

If there is one part of Audee’s trip that I envy him more than any other, it is his penetration of the black hole itself. Not that Audee enjoyed it. No one would; it was scary.

As they approached that glowing, boiling, violently radiating furnace of infalling gases that marked the approach to the Heechee hideout, Captain ordered everyone strapped into their hanunock sacks. WhiteNoise applied power to the crystal helix the Heechee called a “disruptor of order.” It glowed diamond-bright. The temperature rose. The ship began to shake.

Captain had learned to read human body language about as well as Audee had learned Heechee—that is, not very well-but he did not miss the whitening around Audee’s jaw. “You seem afraid,” he commented.

By Heechee standards it was not an impolite remark. Audee took it without offense. “Yes,” he said, gazing at the eye-wrenching surface of infalling gases, “I am terribly, terribly afraid of entering a black hole.”

“That is curious,” Captain said thoughtfully. “We have done this many times, and there is no peril to this ship. Tell me. Which are you more afraid of, this penetration or the Foe?”

Audee thought it over. The two kinds of fear were not at all the same. “I guess,” he said slowly, “the Foe.”

Captain’s cheek muscles writhed approvingly. “That is not in any way nonrational,” he said. “That is wise. Now we go in.”

The diamond corkscrew erupted in showers of sparks; thousands of them struck Audee, and all the others aboard, but they did not burn; they did nothing at all, but seemed to pass right through the bodies and come out the other side. The lurching of the ship threw Audee violently against the harnesses of his safety cocoon; it had been built for Heechee mass, not that of the larger human body, and it creaked alarmingly.

The process went on for a long time. Audee had no way to measure it; many minutes, surely; perhaps an hour or more; and it didn’t get less violent. He could hear the Heechee crew croaking comments and orders back and forth among themselves, and wondered dazedly how they were able to function when their gizzards were being jolted out of them . . . and wondered if Heechee had gizzards . . . and wondered if he were going to die .

And then, without warning it was over.

The Heechee began to unstrap themselves. Captain glanced curiously at Audee and called, “Would you like to see our core?” He waved a skinny arm at the viewscreen . . . and there it was.

What appeared on the ship’s viewing plates was a dazzle of light.

The Heechee core was packed with suns-ten thousand suns-more suns than there are in a thousand light-years from Earth, packed into a sphere of space only twenty light-years across. There were golden stars and dull crimson stars and blindingly blue-white stars. There was a whole rainbow Hertzsprung-Russell spectrum of stars that made the night sky a flood of color on any planet in the core-that made the term “night” an exotic abstraction, in fact, because there was no place in the core that was ever dark.

I wish I could have seen it.

I don’t envy very many people very many things, but I envied Audee Walthers that when I heard what he had seen. A dense compaction of stars-more than in any cluster-well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Or else any globular cluster would itself have become a black hole. And constellations like Christmas trees! I mean, colors. Even from Earth the stars are different colors, everyone knows that, but hardly anyone ever sees what the colors are. They’re all so far and so faint that the colors wash out, and mostly they look like various impure versions of white. But in the core—In the core red is ruby and green is emerald and blue is sapphire and yellow is gleaming gold and white is, by God, blinding. And there isn’t any gradation of first-magnitude down to faint or invisible. The bright ones are far brighter than first-magnitude. And there are hardly any stars on the borderline of visibility, because there aren’t any faraway stars at all.

I did envy Audee for what he saw—But, really, what he saw was only the viewscreen of the Heechee ship.

He never set foot on a Heechee planet. He didn’t have time.

First to last, Audee’s elapsed time inside the core was about equal to the span of a normal night’s sleep. He didn’t do any sleeping, of course.

He certainly didn’t have time for that. He hardly had time to breathe, as a matter of fact, because there was so hopelessly much to see and do.

If it hadn’t been for the Ancient Ancestors, things would have taken so ponderously long that it might hardly have mattered whether Audee got to the core or not. But Captain’s messages had been received-only moments before, by Heechee standards. Their relay machines worked in machine-storage time, and the Ancient Ancestors nearly could, too.

With only minutes of warning, the Heechee had had time to do almost nothing but bleat and shake, but they rallied fast. They had always kept a full flotilla of standby crews and ships available for just this situation. They were dispatched at once. By the time Audee had been inside the core for four local hours, he had seen six large Heechee ships sent off with hastily drafted, often bewildered ship-handlers, historians, Dream-Seat sensitives, and diplomats-at least, what passed among the Heechee for diplomats. (Relations with foreign powers had never been much of a Heechee concern, since they hadn’t been able to find any foreign powers to have relations with.)

Those first shiploads of Heechee specialists had been standing by, waiting for just that summons.

Probably none of them had actually expected to get it-“Not on my shift, anyway!” each one of them might have prayed, if Heechee had prayed, or at least asked of massed ancestral minds. Those crews had been standing by for a good long while-thousands of centuries, by galactic time. Even by the clocks in the core it had been a matter of decades.

No one crew stayed on standby for that long. They rotated at intervals of what local time measured as the equivalent of eight or nine months, then returned to their normal homes and habits. It was a lot like National Guard service in the old days in the United States. Like National Guardsmen, too, the surprise was ugly when the emergency they were standing by for turned out to be real, and immediate.

Half the Heechee had families. Half the ones with families had been allowed to bring mate and offspring with them, just as peacetime American soldiers had carried along wives and kids. The similarities ended there. Peacetime soldiers suddenly called on to fight usually had the chance to send their families out of the way. The Heechee didn’t. The places they were stationed in were the ships they set out in, and so in those first half dozen ships the crews included pregnant females, infants, and a fair number of school-age Heechee children. Most of these were terrified. Few wanted to go on this mystery-bus excursion into the unknown . . . but then, much of the same was true of the crews themselves.

None of this Audee saw with his own eyes, only in the communications screens of Captain’s spaceship. That was what he arrived in, and there he stayed.

By the beginning of the fifth hour of his visit to the core, another spaceship had had time to reach them.

The two ships docked. The second ship was much larger than Captain’s. It had a complement of nearly thirty, and all of them slid as rapidly as they could through the mated hatches to observe this queer animal, this “human,” at first hand.

The first thing that happened was that three of the new Heechee, gently and carefully, took Audee’s pod away from him. So he was deprived at once of the comforting presence of Twice. He understood the necessity; none of the new Heechee spoke English, and anyway, they could get from the stored mind of the Ancient Ancestor all the information she had been getting from him over weeks, in far less time than he could say any of it. That was an explanation; it didn’t make the loss less acute.

The second thing was that all his familiar Heechee shipmates were dragged away into the roil of newcomers, standing packed against each other in knots around each of the Heechee from the ship, talking and gesticulating and, yes, smelling. The typical, ammomacal Heechee reek was overpowering, with so many of them squeezed into the ship. Audee had almost forgotten the smell existed, through custom; and besides, the Heechee who produced it were friends. The new ones were all strangers.

The third thing was that half a dozen of the new Heechee clustered around him, twittering and jabbering so fast that he could not make out the words. Finally he understood that they were asking him to hold still. He gave the best imitation he could of the Heechee upper-arm shrug of assent, wondering what he was being asked to hold still for.

It turned out to be a complete physical examination. They had his clothes off in no time, and in less time still they were poking, prodding, peering. Slipping tiny, soft probes into ears and nostrils and anus. Nicking off imperceptibly tiny specimens of skin and hair and toenails and mucus. None of it was painful, but it was so damn undignified.

And already, Audee knew, a lot of time had passed back on Earth. The clock that ticked so slowly in the core was spinning away days and months at a click in the outside Galaxy.

The last thing that happened, or almost the last, was the most surprising of all.

When they had finished giving him the most complete physical examination any human being had ever had in so short a time, they allowed him to dress again. Then a short, pale female Heechee touched his shoulder reassuringly. Speaking slowly and carefully, as to a cat, she said, “We have finished with your Ancient Ancestor. You may have it back now.”

“Thank you,” Audee growled, snatching the pod away from her.

“Twice will tell you what you must do next.” The female Heechee smiled-the cheek-writhing that was the Heechee smile, of course.

“I bet she will,” Audee said bitterly, strapping on the pod and bending down.

Twice sounded exhausted. She had been drained dry, and it had been an ordeal for her; then she had been pumped full of instructions, and that wasn’t easy, either. “You are to make a speech,” she announced at once. “Don’t try to speak our tongue; you don’t do it well enough—”

“Why not?” demanded Audee, surprised; actually, he thought he had a pretty good accent by now, for a human.

“You only know the language of Do, not the language of Feel,” Twice explained, “and this is a matter of great emotional importance to all of us. So speak in English; I’ll translate for the audience.”

Audee scowled. “What audience?”

“Why, all the Heechee, of course. You must tell them in your own words that humans are going to help the Heechee deal with the problem of the Foe.”

“Oh, hell,” Audee exploded, cursing his undignified position, bent double to be near the pod; cursing the Foe; cursing the stupid impulse that had made him volunteer in the first place. “I hate making speeches! Anyway, what can I tell them that you don’t all already know?”

“Nothing, of course,” Twice agreed. “But it will be good if they hear it from you.”

So for the next ten minutes or so (while months and years were speeding by), Audee made his speech.

In a way it was a relief, because all the dozens of Heechee backed away from him to make a space; he saw several of them pointing objects at him and deduced that the objects were some sort of cameras. In another way, that time was worst of all, because as he was talking it occurred to him that Heechee were literal and when Twice said “all the Heechee” she undoubtedly meant all the Heechee. Billions of them! All looking with terror and fascination at, and making critical judgments on, this frightening alien, him!

They were indeed looking at him. All of them. All of the billions upon billions of them inside the core. Children in their schoolhalls and nurseries, workers stopped at their tasks, old ones, young ones-dead ones, too, for the massed minds of the Ancient Ancestors would not miss an experience like this. On the domed-in surface of planets, in the habitats in space, from the departing ships climbing up to their ordeal of passage through the Schwarzschild barrier . . . all of them were watching.

Audee had stage fright beyond belief.

He did it, though. He said, “I, uh, I—” And then he took a deep breath and started again. “I’m, ah, that is-I’m just one person, see, and I can’t speak for everybody. But I know what people are like—human people, I mean. And we’re not going to run away and hide like you guys. No offense. I mean, I know you can’t help it—”

He shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting your feelings,” he said, forgetting the cameras, forgetting the billions and billions in the audience. “I just want to tell it like it is. We’re used to struggling, you see. We thrive on it. We catch on quick-look at the way we’ve learned how to do everything you can do, a lot of the time better. Maybe we can’t do anything about the Foe, but we’re sure going to try. I don’t mean I’m promising that-I don’t have any right to promise anything for anybody but me. All I mean is, I know that. That’s all, and,” he finished, “thanks a lot for listening.”

He stood there, obstinately smiling in silence, until the Heechee with the cameras at last, reluctantly, began to put them down.

A buzz of conversation broke out; Audee could not tell what they were saying, because none of them were saying it to him. But then the female Heechee who had given Twice back to him bent down to her pod for a moment and then approached. She said:

“I have this to say, Audee Walthers Third. I have consulted the Ancient Ancestors about the translation and I have it right, so I will say it in English.”

She took a breath, moved her razor-thin lips silently for a second in rehearsal, and then, shaking her wrists at him as she spoke, she said:

“Courage is not wisdom.

“Wisdom is appropriate behavior.

“Courage is sometimes suicide.

“That is how the Ancestors told me to say to you what I want to say.”

Audee waited for a second, but there didn’t seem to be any more. So he said, “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”

Audee took his time about it, too. He had been a long time being poked and prodded and put on display, and besides the fact that his bladder was full, he wanted to be by himself for a minute. He took off his pod and left it outside the door, because he didn’t even want Twice with him just then.

As he was filling the tulip-shaped toilet receptacle with urine, as he was washing his hands, as he was peering at his face in the rotating mirror, he was thinking. There was a current beating time in his head to a different tempo. It had taken him ten seconds to get inside and close the door-outside nearly half a million seconds had passed, at the ratio of something like forty thousand to one. Five seconds to open his fly. A minute, maybe, to urinate. Two more minutes to wash his hands and look at his face in the mirror.

He tried to calculate: What did all that add up to? The numbers eluded him; out of weeks of habit he kept trying to convert them into Heechee arithmetic and failing; but surely, he thought, something like eight or nine months on the outside had gone by just while he was having a pee.

It added a curious dimension to the act of relieving his bladder to reflect that, while he was doing it, a child could have been conceived and born in the outside world.

He opened the door and announced, “I want to go home.”

Captain burrowed his way through the crowd to confront him. “Yes, Audee?” he asked, shaking his wrists in the negative; in this case it meant failure to understand, but Audee took it as refusal.

“No, I mean it,” Audee said firmly. “I want to go back before everybody I know is a candidate for a retirement home.”

“Yes, Audee?” said Captain again. Then he reflected. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You have been thinldng that we wanted you to remain here for an extended period. That won’t be necessary. You have been seen. The information has been spread. Other human beings will be coming before long, prepared for a longer stay.”

“You mean I can go?” Audee demanded.

“Of course you can go. There is a ship already en route to us here, part of a flotilla of supplies, personnel, and Ancient Ancestors, on their way outside. You can join them. By the time they transit the ergosphere, the elapsed time in the outside Galaxy will have been—” he ducked his head to communicate with his Ancient Ancestor “—in terms of the rotation of your planet around its primary, forty-four and one-half years.