The Gateway Trip

PART TEN: IN THE CORE

The place where the Heechee hid was in the core of the galaxy, within an immense black hole—a black hole so enormous that it contained thousands of stars and planets and satellites and asteroids, all orbiting together in a space so small that their combined mass had pulled space in around them. The Heechee were all there—several billion of them, living on some 350 roofed-over planets inside their Core.

To create their immense hidey-hole, the Heechee had tugged together 9,733 individual stars, together with their appurtenant planets and other orbiting objects. That gave them, among other things, some really spectacular nighttime skies. From the surface of the Earth, human beings can see at most maybe four thousand stars with the naked eye, ranging from fiery blue-white Sirius all the way down to the sixth-magnitude ones that lie on the squinting border of visibility. The Heechee had more than twice that many to look at, and they were easier to see because they were a whole hell of a lot closer—blue ones far brighter than that familiar Sirius, ruby ones almost as bright as Earth’s Moon, asterisms of a hundred stars in a bunch and all wondrously bright.

Of course, that same stellar population density kept the Heechee from having much in the way of nights. Except when the clouds were thick they just weren’t used to much darkness. On their planets inside the Core there was seldom a time when the collective stellar effulgence didn’t give them light enough at least to read by.

With all those stars, they had plenty of planets to live on. The Heechee only occupied a fraction of the available planets, but they had made the ones they chose to live on very homey. Naturally, a very high proportion of those planets were temperately warm, benign in atmosphere, and right-sized for the kind of surface gravity the Heechee enjoyed (not all that different from Earth’s, as it happened). That wasn’t any accident. They had naturally chosen the cream of the crop to shift into their Core colony so they could inhabit them. There they built their cities and their factories, and laid out their farms and cultivated their oceanic fish ponds—none of those things looked exactly like the human equivalents, but they all worked just as well. Generally they worked a lot better. All of this building and making and growing was so thriftily done that the Heechee avoided pollution and everything unsightly. They were as snug as bugs in a rug.

It wasn’t quite perfect. But then, nothing is. Jamaica has hurricanes, Southern California has its Santa Ana winds, even Tahiti has its rainy seasons. The most nearly ideal of climates generally has a few unpleasant kinds of weather. The Heechee had their own weather problems in their Core hideaway. For them, it wasn’t rain or wind, it was the built-in nastiness of any black hole. Black holes pull whatever happens to be nearby into themselves. They do so with great force, producing high velocities and a lot of turmoil. This expresses itself in radiation. It was only from this production of radiation that black holes were first detected by human astronomers, and it is deadly, ionizing stuff.

So everywhere in the Core there was a permanent shower of damaging charged particles, which meant that the Heechee usually had to roof over their worlds. The crystal spheres that surrounded every planet kept out the more dangerous radiation from all those nasty sources. Meanwhile, the Schwarzschild radius of their immense black hole kept out something they feared even more.

That was why they had retreated the way they had. Now they were waiting.

Of course, the Heechee needed a way in and out of their great black hole, and, of course, they had one. Human beings had the same thing, too, in some of those abandoned Heechee ships they had found, but it didn’t do them much good because they didn’t know they had it.

That was a general problem with Heechee technology. When human beings found pieces of it they also found a lot of confusion. The Heechee had not been kind enough to leave operating manuals for the humans to pore over. They hadn’t even put labels on the machines—at least, not in any way that human beings could read. The best way for human beings to find out what all those gizmos and gadgets were for was what used to be called reverse engineering, which basically meant taking them apart to see how they worked.

The trouble with that was that when engineers tried it, the damned things often blew up. So they tended to treat the machinery with caution, and if they didn’t know what it was for, and couldn’t figure out any way of trying it out, they tended to leave it alone. Take that crystally, twisty rod sort of thing that was part of the furnishings of some, but not all, Heechee ships. They knew it had a purpose. They didn’t know what it was.

If anyone on Earth had known where the Heechee lived, they might have guessed that one a lot sooner . . . but no one did, and so the human race had in its hands an instrument for penetrating black holes long before anyone knew what it could do.

It was a while before any human being knew exactly what a Heechee looked like, for that matter. Still, they are easy enough to describe.

A male Heechee is about five feet tall, on average. His head is the Aryan ideal Nordic squared-off block, only a little more so, though his skin color isn’t Nordic at all. If he is male it is probably a sort of oak-bark brown; if female, she is generally somewhat paler. The Heechee skin looks as though it were carved out of shiny plastic. A dense, fine growth of hair covers his scalp, or would if he didn’t keep it cropped very short. He smells ammoniacal to human beings—the Heechee themselves don’t notice it. There is no iris to his eyes. There isn’t really even a pupil, just a vaguely X-shaped dark blotch in the middle of a pinkish eyeball. His tongue is forked. And his general build . . . well, what you would think of a Heechee’s bodily build would depend on whether you were looking at him from the front or from the side.

If a human being were squeezed flat, he would come out of it looking like a Heechee. Viewed from the front, your Heechee would look formidable; from the side (except for a rather potbellied, globular abdomen), quite frail. What he would most look like (though not so exaggerated) would be the cardboard-cutout skeletons children decorate their schoolrooms with at Halloween. This was especially true around the hip and leg joints, because the Heechee pelvis was structurally rather different from the human. The legs attached directly to the ends of the pelvis, like a crocodile’s, so there was a considerable space between the legs as a Heechee stood erect.

The Heechee didn’t waste that space. It was the most convenient place for a Heechee to carry anything, so the sorts of loads human beings would be likely to lug in their arms or on their shoulders the Heechee carried slung between their legs. In fact, all civilized Heechee carried a large, tapering pouch there. In it they kept two main items—the microwave generators they needed for their comfort, and the storage facilities for the “ancient ancestors” whose minds they carried around with them, as a human being might carry a pocket calculator—as well as their equivalents of fountain pens and credit cards and photos of their near and dear. And when the Heechee sat down, what they sat on was the pouch.

(Thus at one blow ended a half century of speculation on why the seats in the Heechee spacecraft were so user-unfriendly for human users.)

Although hard and shiny, the Heechee integument was not thick. You could see the movement of the bones through it; you could even see the muscles and tendons working, especially when the Heechee was excited—it was a kind of bodylanguage, something like a human’s grinding his teeth. Their speech was somewhat hissy. Their gestures were not at all like those of Earthmen. They didn’t shake their heads in negation; they flapped their wrists instead.

The Heechee had descended from a race of burrowers like prairie dogs rather than arboreal tree climbers moved to the plains, as people had. Therefore the Heechee possessed several traits that their heredity had laid on them. No Heechee ever suffered from claustrophobia. They liked being in enclosed spaces. (That may have been why they enjoyed tunnels so much. It certainly was why they preferred to sleep in things like gunnysacks filled with wood shavings. )

Their family lives were not exactly like those of humans; nor were their occupations; nor were their equivalents of politics, fashion, and religion. They had two sexes, like people, and sex was sometimes obsessive in their minds—as with people—but for long periods they hardly thought about the subject. (Not very like most people at all. ) Strangely, they had never evolved equivalents of such human institutions as a government bureaucracy (they hardly had a government) or a financial economy (they didn’t even use money in any important sense). Humans didn’t understand how they could operate without these things, but the Heechee thought that in those respects human ways were pretty repulsive, too. Since, by the time human beings got far enough out into space to have some chance of encountering Heechee, most employed human persons were in these “white-collar” occupations, they were startled to find that most Heechee were, in their view, unemployed.

It wasn’t just that the human poli-sci and sociology professors wondered how the Heechee managed to get along without kings, presidents, or maximum leaders. Even on Earth, generations of anarchists, libertarians, and small-is-beautiful philosophers had been claiming that human beings didn’t need such things, either. The real puzzle was how the Heechee had escaped having them anyway.

It took a number of anthropologists and cultural behaviorists a long time to come up with an explanatory theory. That phenomenon, too, seemed to have an evolutionary basis. It came from the fact that the pre-Heechee nonsapients—the primitive species they labeled “Heecheeids"—had burrowed in the ground like prairie dogs or trapdoor spiders. They did not form tribes. They staked out territories. Therefore Heecheeids did not conduct tribal wars or struggle for succession to a throne; there wasn’t any throne to succeed to. No Heecheeid ever had any need or desire that conflicted with any other Heechee—as long as the other guy stayed out of his territory.

Of course, you can’t build a high-tech, spacefaring civilization out of solitary, noninterfering individuals. But by the time the primitive Heechee had reached the point of projects so ambitious that they required the cooperation of many their habits were set. They had never formed the custom of patriotism. They didn’t have nations to be patriotic to. They did have a code of behavior—"laws"—and institutions to codify and enforce them (“councils,” “courts,” “police”), but that was about it. Earthly governments spent most of their energies defending themselves against the attacks of—or waging their own attacks against—the governments of other nations. When the reciprocal threat was physical, the method of doing so was military. When the threat was economic, the effort was expressed in subsidies, tariffs, and embargoes. The Heechee didn’t need such national enterprises, having no nations to compete with each other.

And so the Heechees lived in their crowded Core, contentedly enough, while they waited to be discovered.

Their lives within the Core were not entirely normal by human standards, however.

There was one significant divergence from normality. The Heechee had been living there for some half a million years—since not long after they visited the early Earth and carried away a handful of australopithecines to see what the stupid little beasts might develop into, given a chance—but it didn’t seem that long to them.

Albert Einstein would have immediately understood why that was. In fact, he had predicted something like it. The Heechee were within a black hole. Therefore they obeyed the cosmological rules governing black holes, including the phenomenon of time dilation. Time that sped along in the outer galaxy passed with glacial slowness inside the Core; the ratio was something like 40,000 to 1. That was a very great difference—so great that many of the Heechees who had left their ships on Gateway were still alive inside the Core. Oh, they had grown a bit older, yes. Time hadn’t stopped. But for them only a few decades had passed, not half a million years.

And when the Heechee ran away and hid they left sentinels behind them. They had a plan.

There was an unfortunate element of risk to their plan. The Heechee could not be certain that some other intelligent, spacefaring race would evolve and find the artifacts they had left and use them; and if those things didn’t happen, the plan was wasted. Still, that was the way to bet it. They counted on it, in fact; and so the Heechee had set robot sentinels in concealed places in the galaxy to find these new races when they showed up.

When the human race began to make noise in the galaxy, the Heechee’s watchmen heard it.

The Heechee then employed that twisted crystal and ebon rod that they called the Heechee equivalent of “can opener” to come out and check their “collection traps,” to see just what had begun to happen in the galaxy in the last few centuries (or, from their viewpoint, couple of days). As a normal precaution, the Heechee sent a routine scouting party out to investigate.

But that is, really, quite another story.