The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

Before Estrella and Stan ever got to the Core—indeed, when you factor that enormous 40,000-to-l time difference into your calculations, long before they had even been born—a Heechee space pilot named Achiever was there already. That was because he lived there. He had lived in the Core all his life and had no desire ever to leave it. Achiever knew that there were a lot of highly interesting things Outside. However, he also knew how dangerous those interesting things might be, and so he had no more desire to see them for himself than did any other Heechee. (Not that Achiever thought of himself as a "Heechee." That was a human word. Achiever at that point had never heard it, and was not going to like it when he did.)

The flight for which Achiever was preparing certainly was not intended to take him Outside—though, curiously, his ship happened to be one of the few in the Heechee fleet that could actually have made the journey. It was also one of the larger Heechee ships, and so it would have flabbergasted any of those early Gateway prospectors if they had ever seen it. Any one of the Ones and Threes and Fives those early adventurers flew could have fit easily into one of its cargo holds.

Cargo was what Achiever's mission was all about. He was preparing to ferry essential supplies from the factories of the planet he was orbiting to the free-floating space station called Door. It was a run that ho had made more than thirty times already, without a single accident of any kind and with no serious delays. For this reason Achiever had just been promoted. His new title might be translated as "Pilot Who Is Sufficiently Capable and Cautious to Be Both Permitted and Required to Instruct Others," and the physical evidence of his new status was standing there before him. Her name was Breeze. She was the very first student pilot he had had assigned to him for training.

Although Achiever had never had a trainee before, he knew what was expected of him. "Tell me, Breeze," he addressed her, his voice kindly but in the tone of one who had the right to ask, "what would you do if you were approaching an object such as Door and your lookplate flipped from nearspace to a panoramic view?"

She didn't hesitate. "First I would check the bias on the lookplate and correct it if needed. If that didn't work I would activate the standby plate. If that too was inoperative, I would abort the docking, enter a holding orbit and disassemble the lookplate for repair. Do you want me to tell you how I would go about troubleshooting the system?"

He flapped his wrists, the equivalent of a shake of a human head. "Not just yet. First I want to know why you didn't simply allow the automatic systems to land you."

"That is of course what I would do for a planet landing, provided we had already passed the planet's radiation shield, Achiever, but you specified a destination like Door. Even a small excess of velocity at docking might breach Door's hull integrity, with loss of interior pressure. I would not take that risk. Now would you like me to describe the troubleshooting?"

Indeed he would. He listened attentively to her reply, and to her answers to the other technical problems he posed for her. They were all satisfactory. He could have complimented her. He didn't. He simply said, "Let's finish getting the cargo on board, shall we?"

By that time the human female Estrella had been born on her parents' New Mexican ranch, a very long distance away. As Breeze activated the handlers and the cargo began to move out of the landers into the ship itself, the male human, Stan, also was born in the American embassy hospital in Ankara, and a youth named Robinette Broadhead was dismally wondering if there was any possible way for him to escape a lifetime of drudgery in the Wyoming food mines.

These particular persons were all human beings. Of course Achiever had never heard of any of them, yet.

By the time loading was complete, Achiever had decided that he liked Breeze—liked her not in any sexual way but simply because she was smart and diligent and willing.

This might have been thought curious by any young human male in the presence of a good-looking young female. To Achiever there was nothing curious about it. He was hardly even aware that Breeze was pleasingly broad in the shoulders and slim in the waist, with her soft, gray neck fuzz decorously brushed flat. All those things were true enough, but what was also true was that Breeze's female genital organs were not in their mating configuration. That being so, her attractive features hardly mattered.

It is a known fact that the Heechee were reasonably like humans in that, now and then, some of them liked sorts of sexual practices that others might conceivably describe as "kinky." Not that kinky, though. Very few Heechee males were perverted enough to desire intercourse with a female who wasn't in estrus.

Achiever waved Breeze to the seat beside his own. "You may perch here," he informed her in the language of Do, but then, less formally, he added in the language of Feel, "At this point I think I should begin the voyage, but probably at some later time I will allow you to run the controls."

"Thank you, Achiever," she said gratefully, stowing her pod in the space between the leaves of the perch and watching attentively—although, in truth, she had experienced the setting of a course many times in her previous training. As he perfectly well knew.

Achiever put his splayed fingers on the knurled control wheel. That produced an immediate display of colored light that would have baffled any human—that had indeed baffled thousands of humans in the ancient Gateway days when every new prospector had to confront the fact that those incomprehensible settings could make the difference between life and death for him.

With quick competency Achiever set the course, paused and asked, "What about temperature, humidity, trace gases, all those parameters? I usually let the settings go to default, but if you have any special preferences?"

"Default is acceptable," she assured him. "I generally do that, too. I wonder sometimes why we bother with those settings."

Achiever made a woofling sort of sound, partly of sympathy, partly of good-humored reproach. "Yes. One might wonder so. But if someday you have a passenger with a medical problem, or a cargo that can be damaged if the settings are wrong, then you will know why."

Abashed, Breeze watched in silence as he squeezed the start control. All the subsidiary wheels crawled to their default settings, and they were off.

Unlike the largest vessels in the Heechee fleet, Achiever's craft did not require a hand on the controls after launch. He sat back and regarded his charge. "I could not help but notice," he said mildly, "that you have shown interest in this craft's special feature." He gestured toward the twisted crystal rod that rose in the center of the control chamber.

"I paid close attention to your teaching, Achiever!"

"Of course you did," he said, "but you could hardly fail to notice it, could you? You may have thought it was a penetrator, to let us through planetary radiation screens?"

"It does not look like one, Achiever."

"No," he agreed. "It does not. You've probably never seen one before. It is an order disruptor."

He expected a reaction to that. It took a moment, but then it came. "Oh," she said, and then, "Oh!"

"Yes," he said, with the shoulder shrug that was the Heechee equivalent of a human nod of sympathy. "It is the instrument that the generation of our parents used to transit into aligned systems." (Which is to say, in human terms, black holes. The Heechee didn't see them as holes, though. To be fair, even a human would have had to admit that, with all the radiation from infalling material, they were hardly ever black, either.) "You need not be alarmed," he added. "Naturally we are not going to be using it for that purpose. It is an interesting fact, however, that it is fully functional."

She was looking at it now with full attention. "There was nothing like that on any of the spacecraft I learned on," she said, sounding almost apprehensive.

"Of course there wasn't. There is no need for such things here, because there are no aligned systems here in the Core—other, of course, than the Core itself. None were brought in from the external galaxy at the time of the Withdrawal. For that reason, none of our newer spacecraft have anything of this sort, except for the very few scoutcraft that patrol the outside galaxy from time to time. This particular spacecraft is quite old, you know. It is in excellent condition, certainly, or else it would not have been given the important task of supplying Door, but it happens to have been built before our ancestors migrated here. There is much history in this spacecraft, Breeze. It is likely that when it was new this order disrupter you see before you penetrated many a Schwarzschild"—he didn't use the word "Schwarzschild," of course, but what he was talking about was the light-trapping shell around a black hole that humans called by that term— "penetrated many a Schwarzschild barrier in the days before the Withdrawal. The system was left intact, as you see it there, simply because there was no reason to remove it. In any case," he went on, "I'm glad our ship still has it installed. Every student pilot should learn how this model of the order disrupter works—in case, you know, a time when it might be of value should ever come."

He watched her expression approvingly. There was no further sign of nervousness, though the mere thought of breaking through the perimeters of the enormous black hole they lived in was still scary for any Heechee. Then, practically, "Now let us recheck the stowage of our cargo."

She shrugged assent and touched the viewer controls. The first icons that appeared represented tanks of liquid atmospheric gases— replenishments for Door's air supply; the station was nearly gas-tight but there was always some leakage. Other icons represented personal effects for Door's permanent party, still others water and fuel. Breeze reported: "They are all secure, Achiever. Do you want anything else checked?"

Achiever touched his fingertips to his thin lips—it was the equivalent of a yawn. "I think not, not right now. However, since there are two of us, I suggest that one of us should remain in the control chamber at all times."

Breeze looked perplexed. "Is that necessary, Achiever?"

"Necessary? Perhaps not, but it is what I wish." He was pleased to see that that settled the matter for her; she would be a credit to him as his first student. He went on, "I will take the first shift, Breeze. You may wish to sleep, or to make yourself a meal—our food manufactury is quite good. Or perhaps you would like to avail yourself of the ship's library. I have chosen the library's fans personally, and I think you will find enjoyable reading there. Which would you prefer?"

Breeze considered for a moment, then said, "I would like best, Achiever, simply to stay here and watch you for a time. How else am I to learn?"

She could not have chosen a better response. Achiever was once again well pleased with his trainee, and remained so throughout his shift. There was little enough for her to watch, of course. The ship flew itself. But while Achiever himself was reading, or eating, or chatting with his student, he always kept one eye on the screen, just in case, and Breeze was suitably impressed.

Later on, when it was Achiever's resting time, he crawled into his bundle of sleeping grasses—they weren't real grasses, of course, because real vegetation might release pollens that would pollute the spacecraft's air, but they were manufactured to look and feel as much like grass as anything the primitive forebears of the Heechee race had plucked and wrapped around themselves when they found a moment to rest. Achiever didn't let the grasses cover his face, though. He kept his eyes on Breeze. She was doing well, he thought with satisfaction.

And continued to think so through the next shift, and the next.

It wasn't until they were almost at their destination that anything happened to worry him. He was in his sleeping bundle, this time really asleep, when the urgent-message bell rang.

Well, it wasn't a bell and it didn't ring, it growled. But no matter. Its sound meant that something somewhere was very amiss. It had never sounded before in Achiever's experience, and he was fighting his way out of his sleep bundle almost before it stopped. Even so, Breeze was before him. The communicator had begun to flicker, rapidly and frighteningly, in the bright green that announced an urgent message, as did every other communicator in the Core at the same moment.

Breeze was scanning the message screen with an expression somewhere between stupefaction and horror. "What is it?" Achiever demanded, and she looked at him in bewilderment.

"There have been visitors," she said, every muscle writhing under her skin at once. "They are on Door now, but they are not Heechee. They are visitors who have come from Outside, and they are of another species, not our own."

II

Achiever didn't go back to sleep. Neither did Breeze. Nor did any other Heechee on the night-time sides of any of the hundreds of inhabited planets of the Core's thousands of captive suns. Visitors? From Outside? No, there wasn't much sleep for any Heechee after that news had spread. What there was instead was something close to terror. When the view screens displayed the actual images of these actual intruders the terror was mixed with gut-wrenching revulsion. The alien creatures were sickening to look upon. They were horrible travesties of the Heechee form, bloated, hairy, altogether hideous.

The rest of Breeze and Achiever's flight was brief. When their ship docked at Door, they discovered that the situation had become even worse. The people of Door's permanent party were running about in confusion, and alarming fresh news was arriving, it seemed, every minute. Another ship had come in from outside! No, now there were two of the alien ships—no, three! And one of those ships had not only brought more of these "humans," as they called themselves, but even a couple of Heechee who had been Outside on a scout patrol ship.

The resulting wild confusion was un-Heecheeishly total. There were no handlers at the landing dock to arrange the unloading of Achiever's cargo. Worse, there weren't any instructions from the dispatch officer about their return flight, either. So Achiever left Breeze with the ship and went looking for the dispatcher, but when he reached the dispatcher's quarters the man wasn't there—wasn't where anyone could say, because who knew where anybody was in this madhouse? A madhouse it was. The orderly calm that usually marked the activities of the outpost—indeed, that had always marked almost all of the transactions of the Heechee race, from the beginning of time to this moment—had vanished, destroyed by the news that had taken the whole Heechee race unaware. News of any kind from Outside was rare. But this news was terrifying!

On the other hand, Achiever told himself as he fought his way through the disorderly throng; perhaps they should have been less surprised. After all, you always knew that someday someone might suddenly appear from Outside. You knew it in the same way that you knew that someday you would die and join the Massed Minds, or that, someday, that ill-chosen F-type star the Heechee had brought with them into the Core might grow unstable, and if it did do that, then great damage could be done for a considerable volume of space around it. But you certainly didn't expect such a thing to happen now. Never now!

The good part, of course, was that the news could have been much, much worse. These hideous and unexpected creatures from Outside were quite horrible, with their bloated bodies and flabby faces. But they definitely were not, indeed were not anything like, the ones who were called "the Assassins" or "the Foe," those disembodied energy creatures who had decimated the living population of the galaxy before the Withdrawal. The appearance of these new aliens was revolting, yes, but they were not destroying anything.

Achiever did the best he could to reassure himself. He had one never-failing resource for such problems. It was time for him to consult it.

He found a corner to huddle in and called for help from the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. "Ancestral Mind," he said, trying to keep the turmoil out of his voice, "awaken and help me, please. What are these creatures?"

The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then it—it was actually a she—sounded grumpy. "One moment, Achiever," she said.

Achiever expected no more from that particular ancestor. She had been stored for a long time, and, Achiever thought, was beginning to show it. It took a perceptible couple of seconds before there was a response. The ancestor's tired voice said, "Forgive me, Achiever. I have been resting. I am now querying other Stored Minds about the nature of your question—" Then, with a sort of hiccough, the voice abruptly changed tone. "Achiever!" she said more strongly. "They are indeed from Outside! There is much confusion among the Stored Minds on this question! I am attempting to find a consensus." The voice sounded startled, even worried—though Stored Minds never sounded startled, and especially not worried, since they no longer had anything to worry about.

When she spoke again the voice was less worried, but no less confused. "This is quite puzzling, Achiever," she said. "These new aliens appear to be the remote descendants of some kind of presentient being from the time before the retreat—perhaps, it is said, descendants of the race of hairy bipeds one of our survey ships had turned up on one not very interesting planet before the Withdrawal."

"They aren't all that hairy," Achiever objected.

"It has been a long time for them, Outside. They have evolved. Now they appear to be civilized, at least to a degree." Then the tone changed again. "Achiever, should you not be helping to deal with this matter instead of spending your time in idle curiosity?"

Achiever accepted the rebuke and terminated the linkup. He could not, however, stop thinking about the aliens, even as he continued on his quest for the dispatcher. Civilized? Yes, they could be called civilized, he thought. In fact, they seemed to be even technologically sophisticated enough to have mastered interstellar flight on their own....

Well, no, not exactly that, he corrected himself. They hadn't done it on their own. The word was that their first ships were clearly Heechee-made, undoubtedly some of the handful of ships that the Heechee themselves had left behind long ago.

That made Achiever wonder. Had it been a mistake? Would it not have been better to let the primitives do their own inventing?

Achiever didn't want to think such thoughts. That was coming close to accusing the ancestral Stored Minds of committing an error. That was not only unfair, but, by every lesson he had ever been taught, quite impossible. The Massed Minds were never wrong.

Achiever was glad when the dispatcher at last appeared, emerging from a knot of supplicants with throe of his subordinates hanging on his arm and demanding answers to urgent questions. He shook them all off when he saw Achiever. "You," he said. "Your ship is in the third amber-gold dock. It is being offloaded to prepare it for your expedition."

Expedition? Achiever opened his mouth to ask what expedition the dispatcher was talking about, but he was hurrying on. "See that the offloading is finished, and that your own stores are put on board as quickly as possible. You have a copilot to relieve you when necessary, do you not? Good. Once your ship is ready, you are to wait for a passenger, who will have additional equipment to be stowed. Then you are to launch at once."

"Yes, certainly," Achiever said, his abdominal muscles twisting in eager assent. "But where am I to launch to?"

The dispatcher gave him an incredulous stare, then shook his head. "Where do you think we are sending you? Outside, of course. Why else would we have chosen your ship?"

Quickly they went, straight up and out, out through the shell that enclosed the Core, the ship shuddering wildly, throwing them against their restraints, and the twisted crystal rod firing off its showers of sparks that didn't burn, didn't last, didn't seem to do anything at all except mark the fact that they were going Outside. It was like nothing Achiever had ever experienced before. A faint sound from Breeze, almost a whimper, told him that she was hit as hard as himself. Her face was dark with—not with fright, no, but at least with a severe case of worry. And when the fat sparks sputtered and died away, and the jolting stopped, and they all three were staring at the lookplate, Breeze was the first to speak. "How very ... many stars there are," she said.

Indeed there were countless stars out there, so many that they seemed to coalesce into one vast milky mist of starshine. Even their passenger was held to the plate. "I did not expect to see this spectacle again in my life," he said softly, more to himself than to the pilots.

Achiever turned away from the lookplate to gaze at him. The passenger, whose name was Burnish, was old, older than almost anyone Achiever had ever met, his scalp fuzz no longer gray but turned a muddy white. But he was a long way from frail. He returned Achiever's stare, then flapped his hands. "Perhaps you would like to see for yourself," he offered. "One moment and I will show you."

He gestured Achiever away from his pilot's perch and took his place. Carefully he set the control wheels to a new position. On the lookplate a colorful overlay sprang into existence, first a line of tiny orange course-marking bubbles, with the fishheads and arrowheads that marked navigational features. Burnish pointed with one bony hand.

"We will proceed on this course that I have set until we are farther from the Core," he said. "Then, you will see, the stars will be much more sparse and it will be easy to observe them optically. Do you have any other questions?"

He was looking at Breeze, but it was Achiever who answered. "One question, yes," he said. "We are Outside now. Isn't there more you should tell us?"

The old one looked him over carefully, his mouth widening with thought. Then he reached a decision. "Of course," he said. "It is your right to know. The reason we have come into the Outside galaxy is that we are conducting a search which is of great importance to all our race—indeed to all intelligent living things everywhere. What we are searching for is the present location of the Foe."

III

When they grew hungry, they ate. When they grew tired, they slept—both pilots at the same time, although in their separate nests, and neither mentioned Achiever's preference for having someone always at the controls. And Burnish did not reappear.

Which left them plenty of time to consider the meaning of what he had said, and to contemplate its consequences.

If the thought of pursuing those creatures called the Assassins, or sometimes simply the Foe, terrified Achiever, it was no discredit to him. He was as brave as any other Heechee in the Core—which is to say, not very, except in such exceedingly rare times when bravery was absolutely necessary.

This seemed to be one of those times. If it was true that they were going to track down the Foe, that faceless, formless embodiment of evil that had haunted every Heechee's nightmares, then Achiever was going to have to use up quite a lot of bravery. He would also have to have more information about the nature of this horror they were trying to track down. Since he couldn't ask Burnish, he sought other sources, pulling down from the shelves of the ship's library one after another of the crystalline fans that were the Heechee equivalent of books. As he fed them, one by one, into the reading machines, the first thing he was looking for was the record of those intelligent galactic races that had been found by Heechee explorers to have gone suddenly and violently extinct, thus leading to the discovery of the source of those extinctions and thus, very soon afterward, to the Heechee's Withdrawal to the Core.

But after Achiever had scanned every document on the subject he still had not found answers for all the questions in his mind, so he turned to the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. As he tapped the pod's medallion, "Ancestral Mind," he said to the air, but knowing the mind would hear, "is there no additional information on this race?"

The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then she still sounded annoyed at being disturbed. "One moment, Achiever," she said. And then: "The file you were just accessing dealt with the race of amphibious lizard-like creatures who had managed to send person-carrying rockets into their nearby space before their whole population was wiped out overnight. Is it additional material on them that you seek?"

"Exactly," Achiever said.

"There isn't any," said the Stored Mind, and went silent.

Gloomily Achiever checked the time. It was the period when it would be appropriate to sleep again, and still no sign of Burnish. As he burrowed into his nest he thought sourly that he probably would have insomnia, and if he did get to sleep his dreams would be unpleasant.

They weren't, though. He dropped off at once, and if he had any dreams at all he was not aware of them.

When Achiever awoke, he did what any Heechee did upon arising: he removed the pod that held his Ancient Ancestor in order to void his wastes; he replaced it when through and brushed himself clean; he put on a fresh tunic and tossed the old one into the laundering machine; he snipped off a few shoots of the vine that grew over the door and chewed them for a moment before discarding them, his teeth now satisfactorily oiled; he ordered a morning-menu selection from the food machine and consumed it. Its textures and flavors were of the sorts he was on record as preferring, and he ate it with as much pleasure as on any normal day. In fact, nothing in his actions suggested this day was anything out of the way at all.

Achiever had not suddenly stopped being afraid. He had simply reached a state of acceptance. Since he could not rid himself of the fear, he had done the next best thing; he had made up his mind to live with it, and get on with his life.

When he entered the control chamber, Breeze was perched on the pilot's rest, a couple of reading fans in her hands, gazing glumly at the lookplate. He greeted her in the language of Feel, and added: "You have been reading up on the Foe, haven't you?"

She looked at him almost angrily. "I have done that, of course," she told him, "but there wasn't much to learn, was there? They killed off sentient races; our ancestors thought they would kill us if they found us; so we ran into the Core to hide. Is there anything else?"

"Not much," Achiever admitted.

"That's what I thought. So then I decided to do something more useful, so I checked out the course Burnish laid for us, so at least I would have some idea of where we were going."

Achiever could feel the dense fur at the back of his head bristle in the startlement reflex. Why, of course! Clearly that was the most sensible thing to do, and why had he not thought of it himself? "And what did you find?" he asked.

She shrugged her belly muscles irritably and touched the control console. A 3-D plot of the galaxy sprang up at once. "There," she said. "But it means nothing to me."

Achiever studied it. It was a model to scale, which meant it could show almost no detail. What there was was a bright string of orange course-marking bubbles, like the beads on a child's toy necklace that began among the thick wash of starlight at the Galaxy's center. The first quarter or so of it was unremarkable, arrowing straight out of the dense galactic center. Then it looped around three or four of the dozen snakey galactic arms and the relatively barren spaces between them, until it ended partway out one of the arms.

"If that line is our course," Achiever said slowly, "we seem to be getting to our destination in a pretty roundabout way." And from behind him another voice said:

"So it is, Achiever. Would you care to try to guess why?"

Both the pilots turned to see Burnish entering the control chamber. He seemed rested and at ease. "Well, Achiever?" he said. "Or you, Breeze?"

"We're looking for something that will lead us to the Foe," she said, a beat before Achiever was about to make the same guess.

"I hope it will not actually lead to a confrontation," Burnish said wryly, "but, yes, that is the general plan. However, before we can even begin we must go out some distance from the Core. That is where the living things are. It is only out where the stars are farther apart that life can evolve, Breeze. Here in the center of the galaxy nothing organic exists. The radiation is far too intense for organic life to survive."

Breeze looked puzzled. "I didn't think the Foe were organic life, exactly."

"No, they are not. But their prey is."

He glanced at Achiever, who had just straightened up with a baffled expression on his leathery face. "Do you have a problem?" Burnish asked.

"No. That is, yes. I mean I just remembered, didn't the explorers find that the Foe had holed up in a sort of aligned system that was actually outside the galaxy?"

"They did. We did, that is, since I was one of those explorers. The Foe were found to be in a cluster of such systems just outside the galactic halo."

"Then what are we looking for?" Achiever demanded.

"We are looking to make sure that they are still there," Burnish said somberly. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then his belly muscles rippled in the equivalent of a shrug. "Come into my chamber, both of you. Let me show you what I have been doing."

The small chunks of unidentifiable instrumentation that Burnish had brought aboard had now been assembled into larger masses of unidentifiable instrumentation. A pile of blue-glowing boxes were stacked against one wall, the one at the top displaying a lookplate like the lookplate over the piloting module, but blank. Against another wall was a lustrous silvery cage, and within it a jagged diamond. Burnish touched a knurled wheel and the wall lookplate lit up, displaying a pebbly gray field. "It might be better if I had some help here," he said, "so perhaps I had best teach you two how to do this. Watch." As he adjusted the wheel the gray dissolved, and they were looking at the same exterior scene of the central galaxy. No, Achiever corrected himself, not quite the same. This lookplate narrowed the field and increased the magnification; now individual stars were visible, and many showed actual disks.

"You know," Burnish said professorially, "that each voyage of a highspeed ship like ours leaves a sort of ripple in space behind it?"

"I have been taught this, yes," Achiever said, and Breeze nodded.

"Then let me show you what these ripples look like." He made other adjustments. The magnification increased again, while the stars themselves faded slightly. Breeze gasped, and then Achiever saw it too. Images like bundles of pinkly luminous straws showed among the stars. What they resembled most of all was what human scientists would have called Feynman diagrams. As no one in the ship had ever heard of Richard Feynman nor his graphic displays of the summation of probabilities, they only called them "representations of potential loci."

"Those are signatures of such faster-than-light travel," Burnish went on. "As it happens, our ships leave a particular identifiable signature, like those you are looking at; those are the ripples left by the transit of known ships, all of them our own. The tracks of the Assassins' ships are quite different. If," he corrected himself, "the Assassins have ships of any kind at all; it is not clear what means they employed to travel through space. Those artifactual signatures, however, do exist. Or at least they did, because they were observed and identified at the time of the Withdrawal. Some of them I observed myself. Such artifacts may take thousands of years to dissipate, and it is for those that I seek."

"I see," Achiever said, and then it was his turn to correct himself. "That is, there is one point that is unclear to me. You spoke of some thousands of years, but we were inside the Core for much longer than that. Is it not likely that they will all have dissipated by now?"

"Oh, I hope not," Burnish said gloomily. "Because if the traces are gone we will have to start looking in places I do not wish to visit."

IV

As the days passed the lookplate displays thinned out. What had been an undistinguishable fog of white now became a sprinkle of countless single stars—white ones or golden, bright-hot blue or darkly smoldering red. It became possible to isolate individual stars among them and even to see which ones had planets, though none of the orbiting worlds Achiever detected seemed likely to have borne life. "Planets are common enough," Burnish assured his crew, "but life is not." Which, Achiever thought, made those ancient crimes of the Foe even worse; if life was rare, how much more horrid was its violent extinction?

At the beginning of each watch he made sure to display the plot of their ship's course in order to keep track of their progress; on the display the portion of their course they had already traveled was pale pink, the part yet to come in that shocking orange. But how slowly the pink line lengthened, and how depressingly long the orange remained!

When, in the old days, Achiever had found himself thinking about what might be Outside of the Core—which was not all that often, because he had had more than enough to think about in his everyday life on Three-Moon Largely Wet Planet, and in his regular job of flying back and forth to the other planets of other stars that were his usual destinations—when, that is to say, Achiever had thought about the matter at all, perhaps stimulated by those lessons that he had thought would never he put to use, on running the order disrupter—when, anyway, he had thought about what it would he like to really be Outside, the single thing that had seemed oddest to him was the incredibly rapid pace of events as they went on Outside the Core.

Now, however, he actually was Outside, and it did not seem that way at all. His fellow passengers did not flit rapidly about. They moved, as Heechee generally moved, sedately and not really very fast by any standard. Neither did those planets their instruments detected as they passed by spin dizzyingly around their primaries. Nor did the stars themselves wink when they were variables, nor visibly bloat and decay when they were supergiants.

But the difference in the rate of time was real enough on the personal level, and it made Achiever glum. Sometimes, as he burrowed into his sleep nest at the end of a shift, it occurred to him that he would sleep and wake and work and sleep again a dozen times in a time that, back on his own planet, would be measured by a single beat in either of his hearts.

Not only was time not passing faster than was normal. Sometimes it seemed to have stagnated entirely. Those were the times when Achiever woke to a work day that was different in no respect from the day that had gone before it. And when at last something did happen that hadn't happened a dozen times before, it was a development of an unanticipated kind.

Breeze had just brought him a meal. She reported that Burnish had once again refused his own food. "He is quite obsessed," she told Achiever as they shared their own spicy protein and sweet carbohydrates in the pretty pastel colors Breeze herself had chosen. "I think he wishes he could find that the Assassins are still roaming the galaxy somewhere. If it were me, I would have no such feelings. I would hope they had never stirred from their hideaway."

Achiever considered that, then gave the belly-writhing that was the Heechee equivalent of a shrug. "I suppose he knows what he is doing."

"I suppose," she agreed. "He seemed pretty worried, though." She chewed for a moment, then said reflectively, "Do I imagine this or is this food unusually tasty?"

"How surprising!" Achiever exclaimed. "I was on the point of making the same observation to you." And what was most surprising about that, to both of them, was that taste in CHON-food was not a variable. Unless the specifications were changed, which Breeze denied, the flavor of any particular form of CHON-food remained identically the same year in and year out. Amused at the thought, Achiever widened his mouth in the Heechee equivalent of a smile. He noticed that Breeze was smiling back at him. Charmingly. Almost enticingly....

Enticingly?

The muscles under Achiever's cheek skin suddenly stilled. Realization came; of course! The food wasn't unusually tasty, Breeze's smile no different from any other time. What colored everything for him—for both of them—was simply pheromones.

As soon as that thought crossed his mind he saw what he had not noticed before. The color of Breeze's skin had perceptibly darkened. In some places—the hollow of her throat, the eyelids—it had become almost purplish.

She was, without warning, coming into sexual season.

The mating customs of the Heechee were thoroughly civilized. When an available male and a sexually receptive female were proximate, they did not at once spring into copulation. The process took time. From the first signs of approaching receptivity to the culminating act seldom took less than a full day, sometimes—particularly when the female was young—as much as ten days, or even more. And Breeze was still quite young. So at this early stage nothing sexual passed between Achiever and Breeze. Well, nothing overt. Covert, however, you bet. When Breeze had finished eating the pale blue and crunchy part of the meal it was Achiever who unwrapped and handed her the sweet, gummy next course. When Breeze accepted it she allowed her skinny forefinger to rest for a moment on the back of his wrist.

Things might have progressed farther—a little—but that was the moment when Burnish chose to join them. He wore an expression Achiever could not read—sorrowful? Yes, probably that was one description, but also he looked even more worn and worried than usual. The muscles of his cheek working agitatedly, but he brought up short in the doorway, sniffing curiously.

Although jealousy is not a very marked Heechee trait, it would be untrue to suggest that Achiever failed to take note of Burnish's actions. But Burnish's evident worry was considerable—not to mention, Achiever thought to himself, that old Burnish must have been nearly past the maximally sexual phase of life. His worries overrode Breeze's pheromones. "I have made a decision," he said sternly. "We must accept the fact that there are no recent traces of the Assassins."

Achiever was not wholly distracted from his new concerns, but he gave Burnish a puzzled look. "But surely," he said, "that is welcome news?"

The old one paused, seeming to weigh the question in his mind, and, Achiever thought, Liking a lot longer to do it than seemed reasonable. At length he exhaled through his nose. "It is better news, perhaps, than if we had found evidence they had come out," he said meditatively, "but it means that you and I must do certain things that I would have preferred to avoid. Two of us must inspect the place where the Foe have hidden themselves, and make sure that they are still there."

He crossed the room to the lookplate and touched its knurled knob. At once it displayed the assorted blobs that marked the Foe's hiding place. "There is the Kugelblitz," he said—well, of course "Kugelblitz" is not the word he used; it was simply the word that humans would come to use once they had learned that such things existed. But Burnish's explanation was very much how a human physicist would have described it: "The Assassins are creatures of energy, not matter. Energy, however, also has mass. Consequently the nature of the locus into which they have withdrawn is an aligned system"—a "black hole," we would say—"of their own, one in which the density of the energy it contains has created it."

Breeze seemed more exhilarated than frightened by the news, even after Burnish added, "Our visit will not be a simple look-and-depart. No," he said somberly, "the two of us who do this must remain for a significant period of time, perhaps a year, perhaps more, so that we can make as sure as we can that the Foe are staying inside their hole. Achiever, you have a question?"

"You said two of us. What about the third?"

Burnish looked away. "As you may know," he said, "at the time of the Withdrawal we left a number of small ships in various places around the galaxy. One particular cache of them was discovered, and those ships have been used, by that other species which has just visited us. Each ship, of course, records all its flights. Each of those records must be checked to see if they have any data regarding the Assassins. So one of us will need to go there and access all available records, while the other two go to observe the place of the Foe." He glanced at Achiever, who knew before the words were spoken what they were going to be. "That one person remaining there, Achiever," he said, "will be you."