The Annals of the Heechee

8 UP IN CENTRAL PARK

And while I was listening, and speaking, and doing, and being in all those other places engaged in all those other things-hearing Audee’s story, fretting about General Julio Cassata, wandering, partying-this was what was happening in slow time between Klara and me:

I marched up to Gelle-Klara Moynlin with a wide, fond smile on my (doppel’s) face. “Hello, Klara,” I said.

She looked up in astonishment. “Robin! How nice to see you again!” She disengaged herself from the men she was with and came toward me. As she reached up to kiss me, I had to back away. There are disadvantages to being a machine-stored person who is trying to be affectionate with a meat person, and insubstantiality is one of them. You can love ‘em. You can’t kiss ‘em.

“Sorry,” I started to say, and at the same moment she looked repentant and said, “Oh, hell, I forgot. We can’t do that, can we? But you’re looking really well,, Robin.”

I said, “I look any way I want to look. I’m dead, you know.”

It took her a minute to grin back at my grin, but she did it. “Then you’ve got good taste. I hope I do that well when they can me.” And up from behind her was coming Dane Metclmikov.

He said, “Hello, Robin.” He said it neutrally. Not thrilled to see me again, not furious, either. He looked about the way Dane Metchnikov had always looked at everybody and everything-not very interested, or interested only to the extent that that person or thing might help or hinder whatever Dane was planning on.

I said, “Sorry we can’t shake hands.” “Sorry” seemed to be my favorite word, so I used it again: “Sorry you got stuck in the black hole. I’m glad you got out.” And to set the record straight, because Metchnikov was always a guy who liked to keep the record straight, he said:

“I didn’t get out. Klara came and rescued us.”

It was only then that I recalled what Albert had said about Metchnikov seeking legal advice.

You have to remember that I wasn’t actually saying any of this. My doppel was.

When you’re speaking through a doppel, there are two ways to do it. One is to start the doppel off and let it carry on the conversation all by itself-it will do that as well as you can. The other way is when you’re fidgety, nervous, and impatient and want to hear what’s going on as soon as you can. That was the way I was, and what you do then is you prompt the doppel. That meant I was feeding lines to my doppel in a fraction of a millisecond or so, and the doppel was saying them at meat speed. You get the picture? It was something like a singalong, where the bunch doesn’t know the words and somebody has to line them out:

“In a cavern, in a canyon—”

“IN A CAVERN, IN A CANYON—”

“—excavating for a mine—”

“—EXCAVATING FOR A MINE—”

“—lived a miner, forty-niner—”

and so on, only I wasn’t leading a crowd of boozers around a piano, I was feeding sentences to my doppel.

In between the sentences I had plenty of time to think and observe. What I mostly observed was Klara, but I spared attention for the two men she was with, too.

Although their movements were slower than snails, I had seen that Metchnikov was putting his hand out to be shaken. That was a good sign, in itself. I would have taken it to mean that he was not going to hold it against me that I had abandoned him, as well as Klara and the others, in that black hole . . . if it weren’t for the fact that he had been talking to lawyers.

The other man with Klara was a total stranger. When I took his measure, I didn’t like the measurements much. The son of a bitch was good-looking. He was tall. He was bronzed and smiling and paunchless, and he was in the process of resting a hand in a familiar way on Klara’s shoulders again, even as she was talking to me.

I explained to myself that that wasn’t important. Klara had been holding hands with Dane Metchnikov, too, and why not? They’d been old friends-unfortunately, once a little more than friends. It was only natural. This other guy put his hand on her shoulder? Well, that didn’t mean anything at all, really. It was only a friendly gesture. He could have been a relative, or even, I don’t know, a psychoanalyst or something, there to help her over the shock of encountering me again.

Looking at Klara’s face didn’t clear any of the questions up, although I did enjoy looking at it and remembering all the other times I’d looked at it, in love.

She hadn’t changed. She still looked exactly like my eternal and deeply loved One (or at least one of not very many) True Love. The present Gelle-Kiara Moynlin was indistinguishable from the Kiara I had left in the space near the kugelblitz, just after I died-who in turn had been hardly a hair different from the one I had dumped in the black hole decades earlier.

It wasn’t just Full Medical that accounted for the way she looked. Meat-Essie was an example of what Full Medical could do. She looked really youthful and adorable, too. But although they can do marvelous things with meat, the clock doesn’t stop entirely. It just gets set back every once in a while. And, for most people, as long as you’re getting restored, you might as well get improved a little at the same time-a perkier nose or a natural (natural!) wave in the hair; even Essie did that, a little.

Klara had not. The black eyebrows were still just a smidgen too thick, the figure stockier than (I remembered) she herself had wished it. She hadn’t been kept young. She had stayed young, and there was only one way to do that.

She had been back in the black hole. She had voluntarily returned to the place where I had marooned her, where time slowed to a crawl, and all the decades that had passed for me had been only weeks or months for her.

I could hardly take my eyes off her. Although it had been the better part of a century since Klara and I had been lovers, I had no trouble at all in seeing-in memory only; I did nothing rude-the texture of Kiara’s skin, and the dimples at the base of her spine, and the touch and taste of her. It was a funny sensation. I wasn’t exactly lusting for her bod. I wasn’t on the point of ripping her clothes off and bedding her right there on the turf of Central Park, with the cherry tree in full blossom overhead and Metchnikov and the paunchless, good-looking other guy gazing on. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t really want to make love to her at all, at least not in any urgent or tangible sense. The reason wasn’t just because it was (of course) impossible. Impossibility doesn’t matter to hominess.

The thing was, whatever I myself wanted or didn’t want to do with Klara, I certainly didn’t want either Metchnikov or the other guy doing any of it.

I know what that is. The name for it is “jealousy,” and I have to concede I’ve had a lot of it in my time.

Dane Metchnikov had managed to get a whole sentence out: “You look a lot different to me,” he had said.

He wasn’t smiling. That didn’t mean much, because even in the old days on Gateway Metchnikov had never been a smiley sort of guy. And, of course, I looked different to him, because he hadn’t seen me in a lot longer time than Klara-not since Gateway itself.

I could see that it was just about time to explore this question of lawyers, so I did what I always did when I needed advice and information fast. I yelled for it: “Albert!”

Of course, I didn’t speak “out loud”—I mean, in any way Klara or the two men could hear. And when Albert showed up, he was no more visible to them than was the real, not doppel, me.

That was a good thing. Albert was obviously in a playful mood.

He was a rare old spectacle. He had one of those tacky, worn-out sweaters he affects wrapped around his head like a turban. He had been taking liberties with his physical specifications, too. His eyes were narrower, and they seemed to be rimmed with black makeup. His features were darker. His hair was jet black. “I hear and obey, 0 Master,” he chanted in a reverent singsong. “Why have you summoned your genie out of his nice warm bottle?”

When you have a faithful data-retrieval program like Albert Einstein, you don’t need a court jester. “Clown,” I said, “I’ll summon Essie to have you reprogrammed if you don’t straighten out. What’s the idea of the comedy?”

“O Master,” he said, bowing his head, “your humble messenger fears the just wrath of your noble self when he hears evil tidings.”

I said, “Shit.” But I had to admit he had made me laugh, and that was one way of making evil tidings easier to bear. “All right,” I said, nodding to show that I knew what the evil tidings were going to be. “Tell me about Metchnikov. He was on the mission to the black hole, and now he’s back. I just figured out that that means he’s entitled to a share of the science bonus I got for the mission, right?”

Albert looked at me curiously. Then he said, unwinding the sweater from his head, “That’s right, Robin. It’s not just him, either. When Klara went back to the black hole with Harbin Eskladar—”

“Hold it! Who?”

“That’s Harbin Eskladar,” he said, pointing to the other man. “You told me you knew about him.”

“Albert,” I sighed, rearranging the conjectures and misunderstandings inside my mind to fit the new pattern, “you should know by now that when I tell you I know anything, I’m lying.”

He looked at me seriously. “So I feared,” he said. “That’s the bad news, I’m afraid.”—

He paused there, as though he hadn’t quite made up his mind what to say next, so I prompted him. “You said the two of them went back to the black hole where I’d dumped them all.”

He shook his head. “Oh, Robin,” he sighed, but thankfully did not start telling me about my guilt trips again. He just said, “Yes, that’s right. He and Klara went there together to rescue them, only they rescued the whole crew: the two Dannys, Susie Hereira, the girls from Sierra Leone—”

“I know who was on the mission,” I interrupted. “My God! They’re all back!”

“They all are, yes, Robin.” He nodded. “And they are all, in some sense, entitled to full shares. That is what Dane Metchnikov saw a lawyer about. Now,” he said thoughtfully, reaching into a pocket and pulling out his pipe-his complexion had unobtrusively returned to normal, his hair was white and unruly again-“there are certainly some unusual ethical and legal questions here. As you remember from previous litigaton, there is the principle that lawyers refer to as ‘the calf follows the cow,’ which means that all your subsequently accumulated fortune can be considered to be in some sense the consequence of that original Science Bonus from that mission. In which, of course, they would all have shared if they had returned with you.”

“So I have to give them money?”

“’Have to’ is putting it too strongly, but that’s the general idea, Robin. As you did with Klara when she first showed up; one hundred million dollars was the amount you settled on her for a quitclaim. Since I perceived this question would arise, I’ve taken the liberty of having your legal program contact Mr. Metchnikov’s. That figure seemed acceptable. Some sort of settlement of the same order of magnitude would be appropriate for each of the others, I believe. Of course, they could ask for more. But I don’t think they would get it; there is also a statute of limitations, naturally.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved. I never have any real idea how “rich” I am within several dozen billion dollars, but a billion one way or another wouldn’t make much difference. “I thought you said you had bad news.”

He lit the pipe. “I haven’t given you the bad news yet, Robin,” he said.

I looked at him. He was puffing at the pipe, peering at me through the smoke. “Danm it, do it!”

He said, “That other man, Harbin Eskladar.”

“What about him, damn you?”

“Kiara met him after leaving us on the True Love. He was a pilot too. The two of them decided to go back to the black hole, so Klara rented Juan Henriquette Santos-Schmitz’s ship, which was capable of the mission. And before they left-well-the thing is, Robin, Klara and Eskladar were married.”

There are surprises that, as soon as you hear them, you know instinctively you should have been prepared for. This one came out of nowhere.

“Thank you, Albert,” I said hollowly, dismissing him. He was sighing as he left, but he left.

I didn’t have the heart to go on talldng to Klara. I instructed my doppel on what to say next to her, and to Metchnikov, and even to this Harbin Eskladar person. But I didn’t stay around while it happened. I retreated into gigabit space and wrapped it around me.

I know that Albert thinks I spend too much time in my own head. I won’t deny any of the things he says. I don’t mean I agree with them. I don’t. I’m not any smarter than he thinks I am, but I’m not as weird, either. What I am, basically, is, I’m human. I may really be only the digital transcription of a human being, but when I was transcribed, all the human parts were transcribed, too, and I still feel all the things that go with being meat. Both the good and the bad.

I do the best I can-mostly-and that’s about all I can do.

I know what’s important. I understood as well as Albert did that the Foe were scary. I would have had nightmares if I had slept (I did have, when I pretended to, but that’s another subject) about the universe crashing down on our ears, and I had a lot more fits of agitation and depression when I thought of the gang of them, out there in their kugelblitz, ready at any time to come out and do to us what they had done to the Sluggards and the starwisp people and the ones buried under the ice.

But there’s important and there’s also important. I am still human enough to think interpersonal relationships are important. Even when they’re past tense, and all that’s left is the need to make absolutely sure there are no longer any hard feelings.

After Albert had gone away to wherever Albert goes when I don’t have a use for him, I floated in gigabit space for a long time, doing nothing. A long time. Long enough so that when I peeked once more at the scene in Central Park, Klara had just got as far as, “Robin, I’d like you to meet my—”

It was funny. I didn’t want to hear the word “husband.” So I ran away.

What I just said isn’t exactly true. I didn’t run away. I ran to, and the person I ran to was Essie. She was on the dance floor at the Blue Hell, wildly polkaing with somebody with a beard, and when I cut in she caroled, “Oh, good to see you, dear Robin! Have you heard news? Embargo is lifted!”

“That’s nice,” I said, stumbling over my own feet. She took a good look at my face, sighed, and led me off the dance floor.

“Went badly with Gelle-Kiara Moynlin,” she guessed.

I shrugged. “It’s still going. I left my doppel there.” I let her shove me into a seat and sit herself across from me, elbows on table, chin propped on elbows, looking me over with great care.

“Ah,” she said, nodding as she completed her diagnosis. “Gloopy stuff again. Angst. Anomie. All that good stuff, right? And most of all Gelle-Klara Moynlin?”

I said judiciously, “Not most of all, no, because it would take forever to tell you all the things that bother me, but, yes, that’s one of them. She’s married, you know.”

“Uh.” She didn’t add, So are you, so I had to do it myself.

“It’s not just that she’s married, because so am I, of course-and I wouldn’t want it to be any other way, honestly, Essie—”

She scowled at me. “Oh, Robin! Never thought it would be possible to find hearing that a bore, but how often you do say it!”

“I only say it because it’s true,” I protested, my feelings having suffered a minor flesh wound.

“Already know is true.”

“Well, I guess you do, at that,” I admitted. I didn’t know what to say next. I discovered a drink in my hand and took a pull at it.

Essie sighed. “Sure are one big party-pooper, Robin. Was feeling grand when you were not nearby.”

“I’m sorry, but, honest, Essie, I don’t feel like partying.”

“Comes more gloopy business,” she said, martyred. “Okay. Spit out what is now on poor, tortured mind. What is worst thing of all?”

I said promptly, “Everything.” And when she didn’t look as though that had explained it clearly enough for her, I added: “It’s just one damn thing after another, isn’t it?”

“Ah,” she said, and thought for a while. Then she sighed. “What gloomy creature you are, dear Robin. Should perhaps talk again with headshrinker program, Sigfnd von Shrink?”

“No!”

“Ah,” she said again, and thought some more. Then she said, “Tell you what, dear old gloom person. How about we skip this party a while and look at some home movies, okay?”

I had not expected that from her. “What kind of home movies?” I demanded, surprised. But she didn’t answer. She didn’t wait for me to agree, either. She began showing them.

The sounds of the Spindle and the sights of the partying Gateway prospectors faded away. We weren’t there anymore. We were in a different place, and we were looking at a bench with a child on it.

Now, they weren’t real movies, of course, any more than anything else in gigabit space is “real.” They were simply computer simulations. Like everything else either one of us chose to imagine, they were quite compellingly “real” in all appearances-sight, sound, even smell, even the chill of cold air and the congestion of sooty air to our (nonexistent) breathing.

It was all very familiar. We were looking at me-the child me—many, many decades ago.

I felt myself shivering, not relevant to the temperature of the air. The child Robinette Broadhead was sitting hunched up against the cold air on a park bench. It was called a park, anyway. Really, it was a pretty lousy excuse for one. If things had been different, it could have been quite spectacular, for the Wyoming hills were behind the child-me. Beautiful they were not. They were smoggy gray lumps in the dingy air. You could actually see hydrocarbon particulates floating in it, and the limbs of every scrawny tree were coated with soot and smear. I-the child who had been me-was dressed for the climate, which was vile: It took three sweaters, a scarf, gloves, and a knitted cap pulled down over my ears. My nose was running. I was reading a book. I was-what? Oh, maybe I was ten years old; and I was coughing as I read.

“Remember, dear Robin? Is good old days for you,” said Essie from her invisible place beside me.

“Good old days,” I snorted. “You’ve been snooping around in my memories again,” I accused-without any real anger, because of course both of us had invaded all of each other’s memory stores often and completely before that.

“But just look, dear Robin,” she said. “Look how things were.” I didn’t need to be ordered to look. I couldn’t have stopped. I had no trouble in recognizing the scene, either. It was the Food Mines, where all of my childhood was spent: the shale mines of Wyoming, where rock was quarried and baked into keratogens, and then the oil was fed to yeasts and bacteria to make the single-cell protein that fed most of the too-numerous and too-hungry human race. In those mining towns you never got the smell of oil off you as long as you lived, and as long as you lived was generally not very long.

“Anyway,” I added, “I never said the old days were any good.”

“Correct, Robin!” Essie cried triumphantly. “Good old days were distinctly bad. Much worse than now, no? Are now no children compelled to grow up breathing nasty hydrocarbon air, dying because cannot afford proper medical treatment.”

“Oh, sure, that’s true enough,” I said, “but still—”

“Wait to argue, Robin! Is more to see. What book do you read there? Is not Huckly-berry Finn or Little Mermaid, I think.”

I looked closer to oblige Essie, and then, with a shock, I saw the title.

She was right. It was no children’s book. It was The User’s Guide to Medical Insurance Programs, and I remembered exactly when I had sneaked that copy out of the house when my mother wasn’t looking, so that I might try to understand just what catastrophe we were facing.

“My mother was sick,” I groaned. “We didn’t have enough coverage for both of us, and she-she—”

“She put off her own surgery so that you might have therapy, Robin,” Essie said softly. “Yes, but that was later. Not this time. This time was only that you needed better food and supplements, and could not afford them.”

I was finding this pretty painful. “Look at my buck teeth,” I said. “No money fix them either, Robin. Was bad time for children, correct?”

“So you’re playing the Ghost of Christmas Past,” I snapped, trying to relieve the pressure by confusing her with a reference she wouldn’t understand.

But when you have gigabit resources, you can understand a lot. “No, nor are you Scrooge,” she said, “but consider. In these times, not so very far behind us, whole Earth was overpopulated. Hungry. Full of strife and anger. Terrorists, Robin. Remember violence and stupid murdering?”

“I remember all that.”

“Of course. Now, what happened, Robin? I will tell. You happened. You and hundreds other crazy, desperate Heechee-ship prospectors from Gateway. Found technology of Heechee and brought it back to Earth. Found fine new planets to live on-like discovery of America, only one thousand times greater-and found ways for people to move there. Are now no more overcrowded places on Earth, Robin. People have gone to newer places, built better cities. Have not even damaged Earth to do so! Air is not destroyed by gasoline engines or rocket exhausts; use loop to get into orbit, then anywhere! No one so poor cannot have medicine now, Robin. Even organ transplants-and make organs out of CHON material, so need not even wait for other person to die to snatch secondhand bits out of corpse. Correct, Robin? Heechee Food Factory makes organs now; developments you have played large part in bringing about. Have extended meat life, always in good health, many decades; then transcribe mind like us to live very much longer-in, again, development you have partly financed and I have partly helped develop, so that not even dying is fatal. You see no progress? Is not because no progress is there! Is because old gloomy Robinette Broadhead looks hard at delicious feast of everything now on plate of everyone alive and sees only what will later become, namely, shit.”

“But,” I said obstinately, “there are still the Foe.”

Essie laughed. She seemed actually to find it funny. The picture disappeared. We were back in the Spindle, and she leaned forward to kiss my cheek.

“Foe?” she said fondly. “Oh, yes, dear Robin. Foe are one more damn thing after another, as you say. But will deal with as have always dealt. Taking one damn thing at a time. And now get back to important earlier business; we dance!”

She is a wonderful woman, my Essie. Real or not.

She was also quite right, in every way that one could logically argue, so I succumbed to logic. I can’t say that I really felt cheerful, but the novocaine had, at least, dulled the pain-whatever that real pain was—enough so that I could go through the motions of having a good time. I did. I danced. I partied. I went whooping from one cluster of old machine-stored friends to another, and I joined Essie and half a dozen others in the Blue Hell. A bunch of people were dancing slowly to music that the rest of us didn’t hear-Julio Cassata was one of them, moving zombielike around the floor with a pretty little Oriental girl in his arms. It didn’t seem to bother the dancers when we began singing old songs. I sang right along with the rest, even when they switched to ancient Russian ballads about trolleybuses and the road to Smolensk—it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known the words because, as I say, when you’re operating in gigabit space you know just about anything you want to, at the moment you want to know about it . . . and if in my case I didn’t, Albert Einstein would be sure to come and tell me.

I felt his tap on my shoulder as we were leaning on the old piano, and looked up to see his smiling face. “Very good voice, Robin,” he complimented, “and your Russian language has become quite fluent.”

“Join us,” I invited.

“I think not,” he said. “Robin? Something has happened. All of the main broadcasting circuits went off the air about fifteen hundred milliseconds ago.”—

“Oh?” It took me a moment to understand what he was telling me. Then I swallowed and said, “Oh! They’ve never done that before!”

“No, Robin. I came here because I thought General Cassata might know something about it.” He glanced over at where Cassata and his lady were shuffling aimlessly around.

“Shall we ask him?”

Albert frowned thoughtfully at that, and before he could answer, Essie had abandoned the singing to come over. “What?” she said sharply, and when Albert had told her, said in shock, “Is not possible to break down! Many independent circuits, all multiply redundant!”

“I don’t think it was a breakdown, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert.

“Then what?” she demanded. “More silly JAWS nonsense?”

“It is certainly a JAWS order, of course, but what caused the order is, I think, something that happened on Earth. I cannot guess what it might have been.”